Connel, Rose

[Guest]

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CASE FILE: Alchemist/Amestrian Militant

”Dying is easy; living and trust are earned.”
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FULL NAME:
→ Rose Sinead Connel

AGE:
→ 29

SEX:
→ Female

BIRTH PLACE:
→ Carryduff, Carraig

RACE:
→ Creig

DATE OF BIRTH:
→ March 23

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HEIGHT:
→ 170cm

WEIGHT:
→ 68kg

PICTURE:
→

Spoiler:

DESCRIPTION:
→ Rose is of average female height, with light skin, red/auburn shoulder-length hair and brown eyes. Her face is lightly dusted with reddish freckles, which also appear on her shoulders. She is neither fat nor thin, but somewhat firmly curvy with a solid build right up to her slightly broad shoulders. Much to her relief she is not excessively busty, nor is she boyish in the chest, and her hips are only slightly wider than the top measurements. Some consider her to be of a “Plain Jane” variety and easily overlook her for more feminine bodies and minds.

Despite this, she walks with her shoulders squared and chin up as if she were unconsciously being belligerent. She never shies away from people and never fails to make direct eye-contact with others. Her voice has a slight gravel quality, and her accent is often the object of some (usually) good-natured ridicule at times. Be that as it may, she’s very direct and scarcely minces words for the sake of sparing another’s feelings.

Rose is not without marring, and her back is wracked with jagged shrapnel scarring, two old bullet wounds, and one circular scar that looks like something had bitten a small chunk from her waist at the side. The few who have seen her scars rarely get more than a shrug in answer as to where/how she got them. Rose sees them as the culmination of effort and that each pocked or pale mark was one more bit of proof that she was alive and had overcome triumphantly.

Style, however, is not Rose’s forte. On duty she wears the standard-issue military uniforms, though she rarely buttons the jacket except in the presence of those of high rank. She keeps a combat field knife strapped to her belt at all times, as well as a small dirk in each boot. Off duty, she’s scarcely seen out of fatigue pants or nigh worn-out jeans and t-shirts. In warmer weather and climes she will opt to wear tank tops, though. She’s not without some sliver of feminine charm and can pull off long skirts quite nicely, and her peers have made note of all three times that she has done so. Her only accessories are her wire-rimmed squared glasses needed for her sensitivity to light, military-issue boots, and an old pendent with an embossed intricate knot pattern which she keeps around her neck at all times. Her mid-length hair is never out of a ponytail, though she sometimes likes a bit of change and wears it in pigtails.

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PERSONALITY:
→ Rose is as genuine a personality as they tend to come. She has a wry wit and matching sense of humor. Her tendency to crack a smartass joke in the face of even the worst conditions has served her well more than once. Few tend to ask her opinion or thoughts on things, as her plain-spoken views are often not ones people want to hear, even though her level of honesty is greatly respected.

It’s herself that Rose lies to, denying how jaded she’s felt since the horrible end to the Borneo incident. She never forgets the events of that mission and suffers a powerful sense of survivor’s guilt, though she never lets it show. Indeed she never shows any signs of emotional weakness, whether it is fear or sorrow. She will defend a friend to the death, but will also not hesitate to do what she must to survive—hard lessons ingrained in her from childhood as one of the nomadic traveling folk in her homeland of Carraig.

In spite of her trustworthiness and sense of loyalty, she doesn’t let anyone any closer to her than strictly necessary. She trusts few and is suspicious of everyone of some sort of duplicity to the point that she won’t even believe a casual compliment even if it were given by a saintly priest. She is always so on guard against letting anyone in that it became part of the source of her nickname “Iron Thorn.” The other reason being that, since the failed Operation Borneo, she has taken to questioning others’ authority over her time and again. Oh, not in outright direct challenge, but in subtle ways that make it nearly impossible to divine her intentions behind it other than simple battle fatigue and the touchiness born of stress. She set herself the task of buggering all of the higher ups, becoming the metaphoric “thorn” in their side till she divined why she had to sell out her very humanity to live in that bloody and benighted sandbox. When Rose wanted answers, she never stopped till her curiosity’s thirst was slaked.

LOVE:
→ Rain.
→ Plants.
→ Beer.
→ Reading.
→ Traveling.
→ People with similar tastes in humor.

HATE:
→ The desert.
→ People who look down on others.
→ Mind games.
→ The word “tinker.”
→ Sheep.
→ Coffee.

DEEPEST SECRET:
→ During Operation Borneo her small unit was captured and forced into a deadly game of survival. Unbeknownst to the other members of her group, she had slit the throats of two of her soldiers after they had gone mad with desperation in an attempt to keep the others safe. However, one by one they dropped off and at each death she had to enforce a code of cannibalism so that the rest of the team could survive. Only she and one other managed to survive and the records of the operation were sealed.

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HISTORY:
→ Born into a troop of nomadic travelers in Carraig, Rose spent much of her childhood roving the countryside from Carraig to neighboring Creta and learning from her clan all she’d need to know to make it in the world on her own without the aid of outsiders. She also learned harsh truths about human interactions and prejudices as time and again her family and kin were given the back of the hand and waved on, never being allowed to stop traveling for longer than a few days in any one place. Adults would jeer and stare suspiciously at their camps, while children would clearly taunt and mock them from the safety of their yards as they traveled. More than once Rose’s parents had punished her with having to stand the dog watch on the edge of camp for scrapping with local kids in the name of foolish pride. She had never in her young life understood why it was foolish to fight over blood insult till much later on; it only made sense at the time.

It was her grandmother who saw in that stubborn, steely-eyed girl the resolve and dedication it took to hone a useful ability—alchemy. So, vexed and at the end of patience for the girl’s fractiousness, Rose’s parents put her tutelage in her grandmother’s hands for the duration. Under this patient guidance Rose learned to read, reckon, and began the study of basic alchemy at age 6. For a long time she could only manage the most basic elemental manipulations of pushing stone or sparking a small campfire, but her grandmother noted that she had a true knack with water. So, rather than beat a dead horse, her studies became hyper focused on that one element. It became quite useful for the family on longer travels that took them away from easy access to waterways as she had practiced manipulating the moisture in the air around her to form in pools. It was this added structure to her daily life that gave the growing girl a tenacious focus.

As well it did, for when she was thirteen, her mother fell gravely ill when her clan was traveling eastward from Creta on their way to the Eastern Deserts. Her father had to waylay the caravan in West City, Amestris to tend to his wife’s illness. After several weeks with no change in her condition, Rose’s father sent his extended family onward, since there would be little persecution for them in the Desert as they had endured in their home territories. Only Rose and he stayed behind with her mother. Taking it upon herself, Rose decided to enter school in West City by day and take a job washing linens for the hospital that was caring for her mother. This served to add to the income that her father was making as an automail mechanic’s assistant to pay for their meager living and her mother’s healthcare. Utilizing her characteristic tenacity to survive in hard conditions, Rose accomplished all that was asked of her without complaint and quickly picked up the Amestrian language thanks to having to be fully immersed in it rather than passing through and on as she had so many other places. She continued the lessons her grandmother had taught her, and found as many resources as she could on alchemy to further this.

Her mother managed to hold on to life till Rose’s sixteenth birthday. She told her husband and daughter how proud she was in them both and that Rose had grown into a fine young woman and worthy to bear her mother’s precious family heirloom—a battered and aged silver pendant with delicate knotwork as a symbol of her heritage. Rose promised her mother that she would do whatever it took to uphold their family’s name and take care of her father. It was with that purpose firmly in mind that Rose joined the Amestrian military after her seventeenth birthday. It was one of the quickest ways she could think of to earn enough money to get her father back on his feet after years of being financially strained by medical bills and rising costs of living. However, while she was in formal training to become a military alchemist, her father had left Amestris on his own and disappeared into the deserts. Seeing as she hadn’t had any real goals for her own life, Rose decided that being a state alchemist might not be a bad future to aim for.

She followed every order given, usually without question, in her earlier years. But over time her missions became increasingly difficult, both in the effort it took to simply survive and in the base human behaviors she had to witness from both her fellow soldiers and “the enemies.” But she always pushed that jaded inner voice to the back of her mind, firmly reminding herself that this was the life she had chosen. It wasn’t till the atrocities she had to commit and condone in her first position as a commanding officer of a small unit in Operation Borneo that she was no longer able to ignore what was happening around her. Captured by the enemy and forced into a sadistic game of survival, Rose’s unit was forced on the run in a labyrinthine series of tunnels and caves in the desert. After weeks of being trapped in the earth, her second in command and his crony had given into the frenzy and panic that they had all been fending off and tried to initiate a mutiny. They were making so much noise that Rose, fearing their loud voices would echo back and give their location, slit her second’s throat till her combat knife had grated his neck bone and stabbed the other man in the mouth to silence them. No one dared question her orders after that, recognizing that every action she took was to keep them all alive till they either escaped or help arrived. But rations were scarce, so Rose knew that they would all starve and dehydrate if drastic action wasn’t taken. She swore to herself that she would not die and wouldn’t let her men die if she could help it. So, she began to secretly butcher the bodies of the fallen and use her alchemy to draw out the moister of their bodies into drinking water, beginning with the two insubordinates, claiming to the others when she would slip away that she was hunting desert rats for food and dowsing for hidden springs.

Eventually her newest unit member had discovered what she was doing. So, she made it quite plain that if they didn’t cannibalize their fallen then the living would die a slow, painful death of starvation. The boy had seemed to have as much will to live as herself, so she put him to work helping her cut fresh meat and preserve the rest for rations till they were the last one’s left. She had made Brighton swear his loyalty that he would not hesitate to do what was necessary if she died because she would not if he died first. Fortunately, neither of them had to put their words to the test when they were finally relieved by forces from Central. Rose gave only the vaguest of details on how they had survived and, while it was always suspected, she never admitted the grisly truth and all records of the Borneo operation were sealed.

Since then, she has taken postings and missions in the west. It kept her nearer to her mother’s grave and out of the hair of those at Central who had little tolerance for her cynicism and smartassed attitude. In spite of it, she carries on like nothing had happened at all and never speaks of the incident. She cajoles with her fellows on duty, drinks in the evenings, and goes home at night to relive the guilt completely alone in tortured nightmares. No one dares ask her why she stopped caring whether she ascended the ranks of State Alchemy or not.


UPDATE:
→ Those of West City hadn't expected just what had hit them, and Rose certainly hadn't expected that wall to fall. Just as she would have yanked him by the arm to fling him out of the impact zone, her erstwhile battle partner, Aaron Brighton, had reversed her hold on him and pulled her and shoved her forward. He had been pinned from the legs down beneath the rubble as a result. It took everything she had, but Rose finally managed to free Brighton from the rubble and, through a feat of sheer nerve and adrenalin, managed to carry him to the nearest infirmary she could find. Brighton's legs had been such a shambles that, rather let him live the rest of his life in pain, Rose had the doctors amputate both limbs just above the knees. It was a small blessing that the boy had been unconscious throughout from the trauma to his neck and head, because the doctors weren't able to give him any anesthesia for fear of killing him. She stayed by him night and day, feeling utterly responsible for his condition. It tore her apart inside when he had awakened and remembered nothing before his new surroundings. She would only tell him her name, that they were friends and that she'd see that nothing would happen to him. That had seemed to ease the boy's querulousness, at least. Not long after that, West fell to Cretan forces and Rose and Aaron had been transported to a POW camp across the border.

With Brighton still wheelchair-bound and slowly recovering from the heavy wounds and an unexpected case of amnesia, Rose kept watch over him since the Cretan militants were at least understanding that the young man needed a nurse and a cleaner cell space than the general population. That was how Rose had managed to keep Aaron from rediscovering that they were Amestrian alchemists and she effectively kept him sequestered. She, however, had to periodically go into general population for her own meals and bathing...Cretans had known instantly her traveling linage from her mannerisms and the fact that she popped the first person to utter the word tinker and gave him a colored eye in return for the insult. After that, it had all been downhill. She had made sure to keep the bruises well hidden from her patient and acted as broodingly confident that they would not remain in the prison for long when she would return with his food plates at mealtimes. But the Cretans hated her from the depths of many generations worth of ethnic prejudice and she hated them in kind, and every day was a new form of mental and physical abuse from the guards from shouting hoots of derision as she moved by or landing sudden punches to her vital points as she tried to ignore them. But she put up with it to keep Aaron safely sequestered because she'd already been warned what would happen to the both of them if she decked another Cretan soldier again. But when the abuse became more serious (one had nicked her thigh with his boot knife), she began to secretly devise their escape. She waited for the night when the lewdest of the guards was on duty, and she bought their freedom and the blind eyes of the guard captain and his partner. After all, she considered the price of her virginity a small one in the grand scheme of things.

Months had passed since those terrible weeks, and Rose had gotten them both back into Amestris. She kept Aaron hidden in a small flat in a town on the outskirts of the borders and worked more than full time as a waitress to keep them both fed and sheltered. He'd begun to ask questions again, and Rose maintained silence. She feared that if he knew who he had been, or what they had hidden from, that he'd only get upset. She had decided in her own conceit that a boy like that didn't deserve to be a dog of war and wanted to give him a chance at some semblance of normalcy. But her plan went to hell when some punks cornered her on her way home from the market one evening. How or why Aaron had been out and there at that moment, she didn't know at first, and when she saw him in trouble she snapped and used her alchemy to subdue the thugs that his aim had missed. After the incident, she knew their feigned times of peace were drawing to a close.

Connel used all her charm and skills of barter to find a connection in the town that could get her automail. She couldn't go through proper channels to have the legs installed, so she serviced Brighton herself from a comprehensive manual she had also bargained for. Again, the price had been high, but it was for the best possible cause. Once she had the boy's new legs functional, she began retraining him in the fine art of doing for himself again. The time was coming when she wouldn't be able to dodge his questions and they would have to return to Central to account for themselves and their absence. She at least wanted to do so with as clear a conscience as she could muster.

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TRIVIA:
→ Rose suffers from a severe form of survivor’s guilt and PTSD that she internalizes and leaves virtually untreated and unknown to others. It usually manifests in insomnia and chronic nightmares. As a result, she drinks enough strong black coffee in a day to give an elephant the jitters just to keep herself awake at night.

→ Despite the lessons in self-control and the costs of foolish pride, Rose is still highly proud of her family’s background and reacts strongly if she even thinks someone is calling her a “Tinker” or gypsy, either with scathing words or fists depending on how much she’s had to drink at the time.

→ She secretly enjoys knitting, but never lets anyone catch her in the act.

→ She is fluent in Creig, Cretan and Amestrian.

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ALIAS:
→ Thorn.

OTHER CHARACTERS:
→ None.

CREATOR'S COMMENTS:
→ Re-posting my character now that things seem to be lively again.

FACE CLAIM:

Code:

[b]Kara no Kyoukai[/b]/[i]Touko Aozaki[/i]

CUSTOM RANK:
→ The Iron Thorn.

OFFICIAL TITLE:
→ “Siphon.”

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[Shula Brighton]

{REVISE}

First, WELCOME BACK!!! *HUGS* <3 The revisions are nothing major, just some things that changed out since you were here last.

You'll want to change your race to Creig instead of Irish. There's a new country off the coast of Creta called Carraig, and they're essentially Ireland with a few interesting additions. And, there are other characters who are Travelers from Carraig. <3 So thought you should know that.

Love that you read what happened to fill in the gap, and the additions were a good read. //_^ Tell my brother to hurry up! hahaha

[Guest]

~Hug!~ Good to be back. Made the changes, and also revised the language to include Creig since it's logical.

[Guest]

Solid app! We haven't met yet, I'm Ross, a new guy ^_^; All looks good here, though, and your alchemy's approved too. Thus, I stamp this app...

APPROVED

Post in the Classifieds to grab yourself a position. ^_^ We'll have to RP sometime.

[Guest]

Rollan rollan rollan rollan

[Dai]

The member 'Ayden Derocha' has done the following action : Rank Roll

'Lieutenant Roll' : 2

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