[PXFIRE] [SU/DS] PXFIRE Roleplay - A Game of Storms

[VeloJello]

Reserving a slot for this fantastic fool!

Name: Jones Sandstrider.
Species: Heliolisk.
Gender: Female.
Age: Twenty-three.
Team: Prankster Platoon.
Description: Among Heliolisks, Jones is quite attractive. Her scales are neat and brightly colored, she's 3’7” - tall for a desert lizard - and her frill is broad. She has a few scars, the largest being an old, ugly gouge across the neck that her frill covers when it lies flat. Her markings seem to change often, which is because she wears face and frill paint most of the time. She always makes sure to give herself natural-looking markings, though, so this doesn’t seem too conspicuous. Rarely seen without her backpack, a somewhat weatherbeaten brown bag which holds her face paints and weaponry. She is sometimes seen with a walking stick, something that she can use as a weapon in a pinch.

Personality: The first and only impression that most people get of Jones is “that is one jumpy lizard”. Jones is restless, erratic, and easily startled, with quick feet and a massive dearth of social skills, to the point where she forgets niceties like ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and has been known to walk away in the middle of a conversation without a word. She tends to try not to get involved in others’ business, varying between thinking that other people aren’t worth her time and fearing that they’ll hurt her. She’s very selfish, thinking of her own safety and self-preservation above absolutely everything - to the point where she’s been known to flee from or attack people who act like they might harm her. She’s also not very charismatic - she’s abrasive and smart-mouthed. Over the years, she’s learned how to lie extremely well, though. She also has very poor impulse control; she never seems to learn how to think things through, and often rushes into foolish plans without thinking - though if someone she thinks has half a brain offers advice, she almost always listens.

That said, she does have a few redeeming qualities. Her wits are ridiculously quick, and she’s a brilliant short-term planner, which is something she's learned from a multitude of poorly-thought out plans forcing her to improvise on the fly. She tends to use a bit more etiquette with people who she believes deserve her respect - people who are strong, smart, and/or genuinely kind to her or people who are similar to her. She doesn’t have much empathy, but she has a strong moral compass and if she sees someone committing evil, she’ll find a way to get them - usually by electrocuting them to death in their sleep, but hey, you don’t get anywhere good in Liao by shouting “Die, villain!” and charging in. Her loyalty is hard to earn, but anyone who manages it has it until the day either they or Jones die.

It’s worth noting that Jones suffers from PTSD related to her upbringing. Much of her anxiety stems from it, particularly her overactive startle and flight responses. Combat with opponents that look or fight like Haxorus can give her flashbacks, and she suffers from intrusive memories and thoughts. It takes her a lot of energy to talk to people, and she’s been known to straight-up dissociate in conversation. That said, she often leverages the disorder - for instance, passing off not listening to a boring person as the result of a dissociative episode, or “accidentally” zapping someone she dislikes because “she was having a flashback”.

Background: While the Black Lotus is powerful on the continent of Liao, everyone knows that the empire has had its fair share of challengers. One of them was a Haxorus from the Southwind Savannah, who specialized in finding - or producing - orphans, adopting them at a young age, and raising them to form his personal army to one day challenge the Black Lotus. One of the children he took was a Helioptile, too young to remember him killing her parents and taking her from her home. Jones - then Samantha - was raised with a lot of other young Pokemon of various ages but all loyal to their warlord “father”, and trained in combat. By the time she was eleven years old, she had killed her fair share of Pokemon, murdering anyone who dared attack her father or her siblings.

However, Jones’s training never completely took. Years of schooling in the ways of destruction hardened her heart, but not enough to prevent her from feeling sympathy for the people her father and siblings targeted. Shortly after her evolution at the age of sixteen, she began to show signs of what her father called “weakness” - a lack of will to kill unless it was necessary. Jones had seen other siblings of hers go down this path; they were pushed to their breaking point, where they either followed their father’s teachings or died, crushed by the pressure. She’d also seen others try to take a third option and escape, but they were all quickly hunted down and slaughtered. Unwilling to die and unable to think of another way out, Jones ended things the one way she knew would work - she murdered her Haxorus “father” in his sleep and ran; no one followed her.

However, unbeknownst to Jones’s father or any of his children, an enforcer of the Onyx Circle had caught wind of the Haxorus’s plot, and had been waiting for the right time at which to swoop in, slaughter the Haxorus to make an example of him for other potential insurgents, and recruit the children for the Black Lotus Empire. This enforcer approached Jones with a small group of Black Lotus footsoldiers; Jones, having been raised to hate the Black Lotus, shocked the officers and fled under the cover of a self-made sandstorm, not knowing or caring that her electric attacks had killed several of their grunts.

Starting Blaze Jewel: Ice. Jones keeps it in her bag; she doesn't use it terribly often, but it's never far from her.

Other:
- Has the ability Sand Veil, if that's applicable to the setting.
- Has used a number of aliases over the years. The one before Jones Sandstrider was Heather “Heath” Elektra. Most of the surnames she’s used are ridiculous and cliche, if quite varied. The oldest name she can remember having is “Samantha”, but given that this was the name her father gave her, she never uses it and will pounce on anyone who does.
- Weapons that she owns include a collapsible metal spear with an edge specialized for cutting through almost anything, a plain knife, and a pistol that’s a bit big for her size bracket - it’s a good gun, though larger opponents will take less damage given that the gun has to be sized down for a ‘mon of her height. She also carries a couple of backup clips for the weapon.
- Her siblings are still around, for the most part, and while Jones doesn’t know it, many of them have been recruited by the Black Lotus Empire. Those who have are aware of Jones’s role in their father’s death and are less than thrilled with that - though there are a select few who escaped with their freedom, who’ve had a chance to form more open-minded perspectives of events.
- Please do not judge actual people with PTSD based on Jones. She's a trash lizard and I found her in a dumpster.