Post by Eileen Paulsen on Jun 26, 2014 17:18:54 GMT -5
Eileen paulsen
NAME: Eileen Mignonette Paulsen
ALIAS: last.cosmonaut
AGE: Twenty-two
GENDER: Female
ORIENTATION: Heteromantic Asexual
REGION: Orre
CLASS: Civilian
OCCUPATION: Interpol Consultant, Hacker
THEME: Come On Eileen
ALIAS: last.cosmonaut
AGE: Twenty-two
GENDER: Female
ORIENTATION: Heteromantic Asexual
REGION: Orre
CLASS: Civilian
OCCUPATION: Interpol Consultant, Hacker
THEME: Come On Eileen
APPEARANCE
As Richard Paulsen will quickly tell you, Eileen got all her good looks from her mother. The soft, shoulder-length rose hair she wears in a choppy, artless cut she maintains herself, and baby blues eyes are pure Bellamy heritage, as a few older residents in Lumiose City would be able to point out. She also possesses her mother's fair complexion, which isn't from hours indoors as many would expect. A fair amount of her computing is actually done via her cell phone or trusty old laptop, so that she is free to wander around and find unusual perches to do her work outdoors. She manages to maintain a lithe, fit frame mostly by accident, running around the desert on alien hunts or hefting bulky computer equipment around. She stands an average five foot six, but a habit of slumping often makes her appear smaller.
When it comes to clothes, it simply depends on when you catch her. Perhaps her default is the slew of blue jeans and oversized sweatshirts and t-shirts, punctuated by the random smock-style dresses she wears flopping around her airstream. She has also, however, picked up some more durable travel clothes - though less out of their utility and more out of the fact that they looked really cool. This fact being emphasized in that she sometimes mixes and matches them so that much of their practicality is lost - but, they still look really cool.This collection of clothing includes an assortment of army boots, weather and tear resistant shirts and jackets, and untold numbers of random pouches, bags, and holsters that she often fills with spare earphones or candy for lack of more useful items.
She owns makeup, but mostly only to play with when bored or for some reason going incognito in costume, and has to use video tutorials to figure out where most of it is supposed to go. Her jewelry, if you can call it that, are trinkets and keychain fobs she's picked up as souvenirs or bought online.
When it comes to clothes, it simply depends on when you catch her. Perhaps her default is the slew of blue jeans and oversized sweatshirts and t-shirts, punctuated by the random smock-style dresses she wears flopping around her airstream. She has also, however, picked up some more durable travel clothes - though less out of their utility and more out of the fact that they looked really cool. This fact being emphasized in that she sometimes mixes and matches them so that much of their practicality is lost - but, they still look really cool.This collection of clothing includes an assortment of army boots, weather and tear resistant shirts and jackets, and untold numbers of random pouches, bags, and holsters that she often fills with spare earphones or candy for lack of more useful items.
She owns makeup, but mostly only to play with when bored or for some reason going incognito in costume, and has to use video tutorials to figure out where most of it is supposed to go. Her jewelry, if you can call it that, are trinkets and keychain fobs she's picked up as souvenirs or bought online.
PERSONALITY
Eileen's disposition can be hard to grasp. She has an innate suspicion of those around her, so it isn't uncommon for her to come off as aloof and closed-off at first. She did spend the early years of her life expecting nearly everyone around her to be felons, after all - add to that the caution her father instilled in her and a vague, lingering fear of body snatchers, and the sometimes shifty looks she gives people aren't that much of surprise. This can clear up rather quickly if she is approached, however. Speaking to her will at least mostly snap her out of her bodysnatcher-or-not mindset, and being a decent human being will have her reluctantly giving you a chance. Almost like a small child, having a cute Pokemon or some other conversation starter usually helps. Act suspiciously, or irritatingly, or upset her sensibilities in some other manner, though, and she will snap shut once more and probably give you the evil eye before leaving in a moderate to severe huff.
At heart she's the cheerful, even peppy sort, even with the aloof side often resurfacing when she is sent into one of her moods. When allowed to let loose she will bounce off the walls and chatter at you, allow herself to be awed by stories, trinkets, and all things mysterious or unexplained. She is sharp and ever-questioning, sometimes rather blunt, and a bit hypocritical in that she absolutely despises rudeness while not always recognizing it in herself. She's very quick to apologize if some kind of fault is brought to her attention, though, assuming she has reason to agree that it was a fault. She can be very empathetic, but she's also been known to harbor quiet, stubborn grudges. And she can throw quite the fit when she wants to.
She is deathly afraid of UFOs. Not necessarily the aliens that may or may not be inside them, but something about objects in the sky that can't be explained makes her extremely uneasy. This rarely stops her from chasing after sightings of them, of course. In fact she has a plethora of fears that often seem to directly contradict things she has particular interest in.
Likes: 80's music, 80's movies, etc, cute stuff and action figures, popcorn, drive-in movies, cute aliens, cool aliens, alien movies, generally anything having to do with space, fast vehicles, conspiracy theories
Dislikes: UFOs, creepy aliens, body-snatching aliens, the dark, widespread power outages, that guy who lived in the ground floor room of the halfway house, Mr. Mime, big-eyed deep ocean fish (sometimes), and strangers
Ambitions
At heart she's the cheerful, even peppy sort, even with the aloof side often resurfacing when she is sent into one of her moods. When allowed to let loose she will bounce off the walls and chatter at you, allow herself to be awed by stories, trinkets, and all things mysterious or unexplained. She is sharp and ever-questioning, sometimes rather blunt, and a bit hypocritical in that she absolutely despises rudeness while not always recognizing it in herself. She's very quick to apologize if some kind of fault is brought to her attention, though, assuming she has reason to agree that it was a fault. She can be very empathetic, but she's also been known to harbor quiet, stubborn grudges. And she can throw quite the fit when she wants to.
She is deathly afraid of UFOs. Not necessarily the aliens that may or may not be inside them, but something about objects in the sky that can't be explained makes her extremely uneasy. This rarely stops her from chasing after sightings of them, of course. In fact she has a plethora of fears that often seem to directly contradict things she has particular interest in.
Likes: 80's music, 80's movies, etc, cute stuff and action figures, popcorn, drive-in movies, cute aliens, cool aliens, alien movies, generally anything having to do with space, fast vehicles, conspiracy theories
Dislikes: UFOs, creepy aliens, body-snatching aliens, the dark, widespread power outages, that guy who lived in the ground floor room of the halfway house, Mr. Mime, big-eyed deep ocean fish (sometimes), and strangers
Ambitions
- Meet and capture the Pokemon on her "Alien" list.
- Gather all the items on Franco's alien survival checklist.
- Encounter a friendly alien.
- Prevent encounters with unfriendly aliens.
- Start a business
POKEMON
WHIMSICOTT
Tuff
Female
Prankster
Giga Drain | Charm | Leech Seed | Stun Spore
*June Evo Event
STARYU
Tauri
Genderless
Illuminate
Swift | Recover | Power Gem | Cosmic Power
HISTORY
Eileen grew up at Madeline Perrington's School for Young Ladies. The previous statement may be somewhat misleading, however, as by the time Eileen came to live there it was less a school for young ladies and more a halfway house for ex-cons.
Let's backtrack a bit.
Eileen's father, Richard Paulsen, was an Interpol special agent from Unova on temporary reassignment to Lumiose City. There he met Eileen's mother, Cerise Bellamy, a cafe owner's daughter and universally acknowledged to be a woman that one was doomed to fall for upon meeting her. Charming, beautiful, equal parts spontaneous and practical - and very Kalosian. Rick was doomed. The whirlwind ensued and they were married in four months, much to the displeasure of Unovan ex-pat and would-have-been suitor to Cerise, Joss Tearning, who was at the time, you guessed it, a struggling artist. We'll come back to him later. The honeymoon lasted for six years as Eileen was born, Rick shuffled back and forth from Castelia to Lumiose, and Cerise tried her hand at being a housewife and convincing herself, successfully for a long while, that she didn't mind Rick's job. Being a housewife was satisfying. The long family trips to Castelia were grand. By the time Eileen was five, though, Rick's commitment to his work was starting to become rather unattractive.
The marriage ended just as quickly as it began - there were the heated discussions and some tears and a goodbye scene worthy of a black-and-white film, and that was that. Little Eileen went back with her maman to Lumiose, and Cerise went back to Joss, who by that time had moved on from struggling artist to professional humanitarian, whatever that meant. This new life mission involved, evidently, opening a halfway house for convicted felons, and Cerise was enamoured enough with her new husband, or rather his passion, to have no issue with complying. With Cerise's father's money they purchased the defunct boarding house for young ladies out in the Kalosian countryside. A stately place laden with classrooms with dozens of unattended desks, large fogged-over windows and a creaky doors. Eileen, at five-and-a-half, was highly skeptical. And if Rick had been informed he probably would have been too, but when Cerise told him about the moving plans she somehow omitted that they involved a dozen or so recovering convicts.
Life at the boarding house, surprisingly, wasn't that bad. Eileen was mostly left to her own devices while her mother ran the household and her step father attempted to host a variety of classes geared toward preparing their guests for reentry into society. Eileen's relationship with her mother was reasonably good, though the young girl came to view her as though she were this beautiful and unreachable being, a serene and perfect ideal that she had no hope of reaching. She had always gotten on better with her father, who while being a very competent Interpol agent was also very affable, loving, and generally a huge dork. Approachable, all in all. Most of her contact with the outside world would come from his phone calls several times a week. He was her best friend, and the original source of her 80's obsession. Her Cottonee was a present from him on her sixth birthday.
When it came to Joss, Eileen was at best indifferent. She didn't particularly hate him, but he had little to recommend himself with. He was kind to her, of course, though it seemed not much more than necessary. It was clear from the start that the bulk of his attention had been and would always be centered on her mother, and Eileen picked up on and accepted that early. As if he could have ever competed with Rick in her eyes, anyway. She picked up her father's habit of referring to Joss solely by his full name, even when addressing him directly, and would often subtly rearrange his desk and finish off the last of the raspberry tarts when she knew he would want one.
There were several notable "guests" that were important to her over the years.
Leon "Tank" Darby did time for a botched armed robbery his step-sister roped him into. Only four inches short of seven feet and built like his nickname would suggest, he had zero tolerance for most of his fellow ex-cons but was always respectable and unfailingly kind to Eileen and her mother, often doing more than his share of yardwork and telling Eileen stories about his childhood in Orre, which eventually led her to vow to head out there someday. Even if her mother would sometimes, in good fun, refer to it as a wasteland. Darby was more of a father figure to her than Joss could have ever hoped to be, and she considered him her best friend at the boarding house. She would often bounce up out of nowhere to chatter at him incessantly about some new issue or curiosity, or to make veiled complaints about Joss, for lack of any other sounding board, and he taught her random little skills like a handful of self-defense moves and how to make banana bread.
"The King" Raime Delmathis was caught on something mob-related, and no one ever quite figured out what, besides that he was high up in one of the families and things had not gone well for him. He was friendly enough in a crazy uncle sort of way, or an eccentric recently bankrupt millionaire sort of way, but didn't do much besides lounge in a lawn chair with his recently adopted Mime Jr., Boo (actually Boozy but he just called him Boo around Eileen), in the backyard and probably reminisce about his glory days. He'd tell heavily censored stories to Eileen if she brought him lemonade. Sometimes he would even elude to the "family" of his past and complain lightly of how the bunch at the boarding house was better than the whole lot of them. Eileen would nod solemnly and cluelessly. After he had been living there for three and a half years Eileen awoke one night to tapping on her window, The King standing out there with a duffel bag thrown over his shoulder - he was leaving and wanted her to take care of Boo for him, if she pleased. They heard back a couple of weeks later that some old mob contacts had finally caught up with him on one of the backroads and his end had been explosive, but Eileen likes to believe that he got away, or that the reports of his death were rumors he started himself. The story was certainly flashy enough to be one of his.
Walt Johnson kept to himself and his two old computers most of the time, yet another fellow whose offense was never revealed, but with his gentle demeanor it couldn't have been anything violent. He talked to few of the other guests and when he did it was only those necessary, short, and on his end unfailingly polite exchanges. And unlike most, he seemed to be staying there simply because he liked the country atmosphere. He woke early and was up late into the night, keeping a set-up in one of the empty classrooms. At some point Darby struck up an odd sort of friendship with him, bantering quietly back-and-forth while going about everyday tasks and with Darby spending time with the strange gentleman, Eileen followed soon after. Having had little access to computers in the past, Eileen was soon glowing with curiosity, and reluctantly Walt started letting her use one of his computers. First to start emailing her father (which he believed to be done from a cafe in town) and to look up things like black holes and how cotton candy was made, and as her curiosity marched steadily on, and against what he believed to be his better judgement, started her on the path to programming and hacking. Finally, there was something new to sink her endless hours into, and if she wasn't careening around the grounds keeping an eagle eye on the guests or making up super secret missions in her head, she was bunkered down in the classroom in front of the computer.
The fourth significant character lurking within the walls of Madeline Perrington's School for Young Ladies was one with much less of a benevolent impact. His name was generally known, but Eileen never referred to him as anything. Literally. Whenever he came up in a conversation she would shut her mouth and make a strange little side-nod with her head in the direction of his room near the stairwell on the ground floor. As though mentioning him out loud might alert him to the conversation. In childhood people often have that one specific bogeyman, the singular figure that features in all their nightmares, and he was hers. A tall, thin, quiet man - not quiet like Walt, but a conspiratorial quiet. A quiet that suggested an ulterior motive, and Eileen's imagination was quick to come up with plenty for him. He rarely left his room, and there seemed to be an unspoken understanding that he wasn't precisely supposed to. In fact Eileen never got a good look at him beside some glimpses as she would skirt down the hall and out of site whenever coming across him. He had a darker air than the other guests, his crime not known to Eileen but not out of some curious little mystery, only because there was agreement across the board that it was better off if some things were kept from the youngest resident. Sometimes, when her imagination was running away from her, she would be kept awake at night thinking she could hear his breathing from down in his room. A harsh, labored sound. She would press her head into her pillow, and then think she heard footsteps in the hall, and would sit up in bed stock-still hugging Tuff until finally falling asleep again. It's hard to say when she started believing he was an alien, but it's an absolute certainty that it had something to do with Franco.
Franco Swartz (apparently not his real name) also went by Jules Carter, Lester Murrow, and Owen Aldawana, though not all at the same time and occasionally with varying combinations. This was meant to be some kind of security measure, and the exact protocols for what he was to be referred to on which day were somewhat ambiguous and half the time Eileen just went with, "Hey, you." He was one of the youngest residents of the boarding house, with an unruly mop of auburn hair, and spent much of his time as Eileen spent hers - lurking around the grounds watching people and conducting unfathomable operations. His apparently dedicated to public safety. Apparently he had been convicted on several counts of trespassing, presumably on Interpol property, while in search of aliens. Who he had apparently been eavesdropping on, and eventually communicating with, via radio transmissions in which he apparently learned of an invasion attempt by nefarious forces from outside the galaxy. Or something to that effect - people tended to think he was crazy when he talked about it at length, so at some point during his prison stay he had stopped talking about it. He didn't catch Eileen's attention much besides to occasionally spy on him, until a fateful hallway encounter during some ill-advised listening in at the door of - that guy's - room. There was no one else in the house at the time and the guy had not been in his room, but would have inevitably found Eileen standing outside the door with her ear pressed to it had Franco-Jules-Lester-Owen not come along and ushered her away just in the nick of time. Eileen was more or less eternally grateful, and despite some of Walt's misgivings would share her computer with him so he could visit alien conspiracy web sites and Alien Survival Checklist he once frequented and authored. At which point Eileen picked up the conspiracy hobby herself, and managed to pull Walt and Darby along into her string of fantasies - which were only fueled by Franco's intimation that he had come out to this particular halfway house on suspicion of alien activity in the area.
What followed the creation of this motley quartet was a stretch of what felt like an endless summer scenario - an existence that felt strangely idyllic given the setting and the characters. Darby and Walt reluctantly humored Eileen and Franco in their search for aliens, and it was all very much just fun and games until what Franco's internet forum clique would have labeled as a close encounter of the second kind - what might have been lights in the sky spotted by Franco one night that strangely coincided with a brief malfunction of Walt's computer equipment. This event only intensified their chase, as long night were spent watching the sky or scanning online reports. During trips into town Eileen would steal of to the bookstore and sink her allowance in books on extraterrestrials and how to survive in disasters. It was a blind, enjoyable spiral down into a stormy night when another proposed sighting of lights behind the clouds sent the eleven-year-old running out into the rain with a camera. She was only missing for an hour. Darby found her laying at the bottom of a hill, dazed with a broken arm and a fried camera abandoned several yards away. She couldn't say what had happened exactly, though it was likely that she had simply tripped and the rain had sparked something into the old camera.
Her father found out about the halfway house after that. Besides the broken arm, Eileen came down with a rather bad cold from her foray in the storm, and while at the hospital, with Darby and Walt present no less, the whole story finally came out, and too about as warm a reception as one would expect. Cerise couldn't even deny the absurdity of the situation, raising a child amongst so many criminals, nor her fault for lying about it for so long. Joss wanted a custody battle but Cerise didn't have the heart. When Eileen left the hospital, she left with her father back to Unova after being allowed a proper, supervised goodbye to her friends.
It wasn't a very permanent goodbye, however, since Walt still had internet access and Eileen received a new computer from her father on her very next birthday.
Her teen years were in many ways much less exciting than her time at Madeline Perrington's. She attended school. She spent countless hours on the computer honing her coding skills through means both innocuous and somewhat less than so. Though being rather sure that she had in fact tripped and fallen down that wet hill without outside influence, the haziness of the memory inspired her to continue her search for aliens. The two pursuits sent her into rather unorthodox sects of the web, where were skills were beginning to attract unwanted attention. It only took a brief brush with an extremist forum to eventually get the attention of Interpol - not a difficult feat seeing as Interpol lived right there in the apartment with her.
The following is a transcript of that particular revelation.
A brief display of skills and a coding history stretching back to her time at the halfway house was more than enough to convince the agency that Eileen was better off as a consultant and asset then floating around with no distinct loyalties. Plus, it eased Richard's mind to know that his daughter would be pulling it a decent paycheck from the right people, since with her interests and her skillset, a steady, legitimate job was not exactly a sure-thing. That is, if diving into the deep web for shady information, or digitally "breaking a window when the door can't be unlocked" can truly be counted as legitimate. At any rate she was helping justice in some form or fashion, and that suited her just fine. Justice was cool, she had seen all those Saturday morning superhero cartoons. Though despite Interpol loyalty she also maintains a spot in a small but dedicated hacker network.
So, by the age of twenty-two, Eileen was somewhat set. She had the occasional, generous-enough paycheck from Interpol, and enough support from her father to set off to do her own thing. Buying an old airstream for a song, and retrofitting it with gear her online contacts helped instruct her on preparing, she set off on the sort of adventure she had always described at length to Darby. She would travel around the regions, following her whims and perhaps reports of UFO sightings, free to explore the world and find the Pokemon she had long heard about online. Her Staryu being one of the first - an online purchase on the premise that the Pokemon were possibly transmitting radio waves. She also wanted to see the Orre that Darby had described, and maybe even reunite in person with some of her old friends from Madeline Perrington's.
Let's backtrack a bit.
Eileen's father, Richard Paulsen, was an Interpol special agent from Unova on temporary reassignment to Lumiose City. There he met Eileen's mother, Cerise Bellamy, a cafe owner's daughter and universally acknowledged to be a woman that one was doomed to fall for upon meeting her. Charming, beautiful, equal parts spontaneous and practical - and very Kalosian. Rick was doomed. The whirlwind ensued and they were married in four months, much to the displeasure of Unovan ex-pat and would-have-been suitor to Cerise, Joss Tearning, who was at the time, you guessed it, a struggling artist. We'll come back to him later. The honeymoon lasted for six years as Eileen was born, Rick shuffled back and forth from Castelia to Lumiose, and Cerise tried her hand at being a housewife and convincing herself, successfully for a long while, that she didn't mind Rick's job. Being a housewife was satisfying. The long family trips to Castelia were grand. By the time Eileen was five, though, Rick's commitment to his work was starting to become rather unattractive.
The marriage ended just as quickly as it began - there were the heated discussions and some tears and a goodbye scene worthy of a black-and-white film, and that was that. Little Eileen went back with her maman to Lumiose, and Cerise went back to Joss, who by that time had moved on from struggling artist to professional humanitarian, whatever that meant. This new life mission involved, evidently, opening a halfway house for convicted felons, and Cerise was enamoured enough with her new husband, or rather his passion, to have no issue with complying. With Cerise's father's money they purchased the defunct boarding house for young ladies out in the Kalosian countryside. A stately place laden with classrooms with dozens of unattended desks, large fogged-over windows and a creaky doors. Eileen, at five-and-a-half, was highly skeptical. And if Rick had been informed he probably would have been too, but when Cerise told him about the moving plans she somehow omitted that they involved a dozen or so recovering convicts.
Life at the boarding house, surprisingly, wasn't that bad. Eileen was mostly left to her own devices while her mother ran the household and her step father attempted to host a variety of classes geared toward preparing their guests for reentry into society. Eileen's relationship with her mother was reasonably good, though the young girl came to view her as though she were this beautiful and unreachable being, a serene and perfect ideal that she had no hope of reaching. She had always gotten on better with her father, who while being a very competent Interpol agent was also very affable, loving, and generally a huge dork. Approachable, all in all. Most of her contact with the outside world would come from his phone calls several times a week. He was her best friend, and the original source of her 80's obsession. Her Cottonee was a present from him on her sixth birthday.
When it came to Joss, Eileen was at best indifferent. She didn't particularly hate him, but he had little to recommend himself with. He was kind to her, of course, though it seemed not much more than necessary. It was clear from the start that the bulk of his attention had been and would always be centered on her mother, and Eileen picked up on and accepted that early. As if he could have ever competed with Rick in her eyes, anyway. She picked up her father's habit of referring to Joss solely by his full name, even when addressing him directly, and would often subtly rearrange his desk and finish off the last of the raspberry tarts when she knew he would want one.
There were several notable "guests" that were important to her over the years.
Leon "Tank" Darby did time for a botched armed robbery his step-sister roped him into. Only four inches short of seven feet and built like his nickname would suggest, he had zero tolerance for most of his fellow ex-cons but was always respectable and unfailingly kind to Eileen and her mother, often doing more than his share of yardwork and telling Eileen stories about his childhood in Orre, which eventually led her to vow to head out there someday. Even if her mother would sometimes, in good fun, refer to it as a wasteland. Darby was more of a father figure to her than Joss could have ever hoped to be, and she considered him her best friend at the boarding house. She would often bounce up out of nowhere to chatter at him incessantly about some new issue or curiosity, or to make veiled complaints about Joss, for lack of any other sounding board, and he taught her random little skills like a handful of self-defense moves and how to make banana bread.
"The King" Raime Delmathis was caught on something mob-related, and no one ever quite figured out what, besides that he was high up in one of the families and things had not gone well for him. He was friendly enough in a crazy uncle sort of way, or an eccentric recently bankrupt millionaire sort of way, but didn't do much besides lounge in a lawn chair with his recently adopted Mime Jr., Boo (actually Boozy but he just called him Boo around Eileen), in the backyard and probably reminisce about his glory days. He'd tell heavily censored stories to Eileen if she brought him lemonade. Sometimes he would even elude to the "family" of his past and complain lightly of how the bunch at the boarding house was better than the whole lot of them. Eileen would nod solemnly and cluelessly. After he had been living there for three and a half years Eileen awoke one night to tapping on her window, The King standing out there with a duffel bag thrown over his shoulder - he was leaving and wanted her to take care of Boo for him, if she pleased. They heard back a couple of weeks later that some old mob contacts had finally caught up with him on one of the backroads and his end had been explosive, but Eileen likes to believe that he got away, or that the reports of his death were rumors he started himself. The story was certainly flashy enough to be one of his.
Walt Johnson kept to himself and his two old computers most of the time, yet another fellow whose offense was never revealed, but with his gentle demeanor it couldn't have been anything violent. He talked to few of the other guests and when he did it was only those necessary, short, and on his end unfailingly polite exchanges. And unlike most, he seemed to be staying there simply because he liked the country atmosphere. He woke early and was up late into the night, keeping a set-up in one of the empty classrooms. At some point Darby struck up an odd sort of friendship with him, bantering quietly back-and-forth while going about everyday tasks and with Darby spending time with the strange gentleman, Eileen followed soon after. Having had little access to computers in the past, Eileen was soon glowing with curiosity, and reluctantly Walt started letting her use one of his computers. First to start emailing her father (which he believed to be done from a cafe in town) and to look up things like black holes and how cotton candy was made, and as her curiosity marched steadily on, and against what he believed to be his better judgement, started her on the path to programming and hacking. Finally, there was something new to sink her endless hours into, and if she wasn't careening around the grounds keeping an eagle eye on the guests or making up super secret missions in her head, she was bunkered down in the classroom in front of the computer.
The fourth significant character lurking within the walls of Madeline Perrington's School for Young Ladies was one with much less of a benevolent impact. His name was generally known, but Eileen never referred to him as anything. Literally. Whenever he came up in a conversation she would shut her mouth and make a strange little side-nod with her head in the direction of his room near the stairwell on the ground floor. As though mentioning him out loud might alert him to the conversation. In childhood people often have that one specific bogeyman, the singular figure that features in all their nightmares, and he was hers. A tall, thin, quiet man - not quiet like Walt, but a conspiratorial quiet. A quiet that suggested an ulterior motive, and Eileen's imagination was quick to come up with plenty for him. He rarely left his room, and there seemed to be an unspoken understanding that he wasn't precisely supposed to. In fact Eileen never got a good look at him beside some glimpses as she would skirt down the hall and out of site whenever coming across him. He had a darker air than the other guests, his crime not known to Eileen but not out of some curious little mystery, only because there was agreement across the board that it was better off if some things were kept from the youngest resident. Sometimes, when her imagination was running away from her, she would be kept awake at night thinking she could hear his breathing from down in his room. A harsh, labored sound. She would press her head into her pillow, and then think she heard footsteps in the hall, and would sit up in bed stock-still hugging Tuff until finally falling asleep again. It's hard to say when she started believing he was an alien, but it's an absolute certainty that it had something to do with Franco.
Franco Swartz (apparently not his real name) also went by Jules Carter, Lester Murrow, and Owen Aldawana, though not all at the same time and occasionally with varying combinations. This was meant to be some kind of security measure, and the exact protocols for what he was to be referred to on which day were somewhat ambiguous and half the time Eileen just went with, "Hey, you." He was one of the youngest residents of the boarding house, with an unruly mop of auburn hair, and spent much of his time as Eileen spent hers - lurking around the grounds watching people and conducting unfathomable operations. His apparently dedicated to public safety. Apparently he had been convicted on several counts of trespassing, presumably on Interpol property, while in search of aliens. Who he had apparently been eavesdropping on, and eventually communicating with, via radio transmissions in which he apparently learned of an invasion attempt by nefarious forces from outside the galaxy. Or something to that effect - people tended to think he was crazy when he talked about it at length, so at some point during his prison stay he had stopped talking about it. He didn't catch Eileen's attention much besides to occasionally spy on him, until a fateful hallway encounter during some ill-advised listening in at the door of - that guy's - room. There was no one else in the house at the time and the guy had not been in his room, but would have inevitably found Eileen standing outside the door with her ear pressed to it had Franco-Jules-Lester-Owen not come along and ushered her away just in the nick of time. Eileen was more or less eternally grateful, and despite some of Walt's misgivings would share her computer with him so he could visit alien conspiracy web sites and Alien Survival Checklist he once frequented and authored. At which point Eileen picked up the conspiracy hobby herself, and managed to pull Walt and Darby along into her string of fantasies - which were only fueled by Franco's intimation that he had come out to this particular halfway house on suspicion of alien activity in the area.
What followed the creation of this motley quartet was a stretch of what felt like an endless summer scenario - an existence that felt strangely idyllic given the setting and the characters. Darby and Walt reluctantly humored Eileen and Franco in their search for aliens, and it was all very much just fun and games until what Franco's internet forum clique would have labeled as a close encounter of the second kind - what might have been lights in the sky spotted by Franco one night that strangely coincided with a brief malfunction of Walt's computer equipment. This event only intensified their chase, as long night were spent watching the sky or scanning online reports. During trips into town Eileen would steal of to the bookstore and sink her allowance in books on extraterrestrials and how to survive in disasters. It was a blind, enjoyable spiral down into a stormy night when another proposed sighting of lights behind the clouds sent the eleven-year-old running out into the rain with a camera. She was only missing for an hour. Darby found her laying at the bottom of a hill, dazed with a broken arm and a fried camera abandoned several yards away. She couldn't say what had happened exactly, though it was likely that she had simply tripped and the rain had sparked something into the old camera.
Her father found out about the halfway house after that. Besides the broken arm, Eileen came down with a rather bad cold from her foray in the storm, and while at the hospital, with Darby and Walt present no less, the whole story finally came out, and too about as warm a reception as one would expect. Cerise couldn't even deny the absurdity of the situation, raising a child amongst so many criminals, nor her fault for lying about it for so long. Joss wanted a custody battle but Cerise didn't have the heart. When Eileen left the hospital, she left with her father back to Unova after being allowed a proper, supervised goodbye to her friends.
It wasn't a very permanent goodbye, however, since Walt still had internet access and Eileen received a new computer from her father on her very next birthday.
Her teen years were in many ways much less exciting than her time at Madeline Perrington's. She attended school. She spent countless hours on the computer honing her coding skills through means both innocuous and somewhat less than so. Though being rather sure that she had in fact tripped and fallen down that wet hill without outside influence, the haziness of the memory inspired her to continue her search for aliens. The two pursuits sent her into rather unorthodox sects of the web, where were skills were beginning to attract unwanted attention. It only took a brief brush with an extremist forum to eventually get the attention of Interpol - not a difficult feat seeing as Interpol lived right there in the apartment with her.
The following is a transcript of that particular revelation.
{Spoiler}{Show Transcript}
Interpol Tech: [REDACTED] first made contact with them on . . . Paulsen?
Agent Paulsen squints at the screen for twenty seconds.
R. Paulsen: . . . That's . . .
Paulsen points in the general vicinity of the username on the screen.
R. Paulsen: . . . That handle is . . .
Paulsen cups his chin in his hand, and appears to be under some degree of duress.
R. Paulsen: . . .That's Eileen.
Interpol Tech: . . . Your daughter?
Paulsen rubs receding hairline and nods.
A brief display of skills and a coding history stretching back to her time at the halfway house was more than enough to convince the agency that Eileen was better off as a consultant and asset then floating around with no distinct loyalties. Plus, it eased Richard's mind to know that his daughter would be pulling it a decent paycheck from the right people, since with her interests and her skillset, a steady, legitimate job was not exactly a sure-thing. That is, if diving into the deep web for shady information, or digitally "breaking a window when the door can't be unlocked" can truly be counted as legitimate. At any rate she was helping justice in some form or fashion, and that suited her just fine. Justice was cool, she had seen all those Saturday morning superhero cartoons. Though despite Interpol loyalty she also maintains a spot in a small but dedicated hacker network.
So, by the age of twenty-two, Eileen was somewhat set. She had the occasional, generous-enough paycheck from Interpol, and enough support from her father to set off to do her own thing. Buying an old airstream for a song, and retrofitting it with gear her online contacts helped instruct her on preparing, she set off on the sort of adventure she had always described at length to Darby. She would travel around the regions, following her whims and perhaps reports of UFO sightings, free to explore the world and find the Pokemon she had long heard about online. Her Staryu being one of the first - an online purchase on the premise that the Pokemon were possibly transmitting radio waves. She also wanted to see the Orre that Darby had described, and maybe even reunite in person with some of her old friends from Madeline Perrington's.
OOC INFORMATION
Directory Info: [size=3][b]SYLVIE[/b][/size]
[url=link to accepted application will be added by staff][b]Eileen Paulsen[/b][/url]
Face claim: [b]Final Fantasy XIII[/b] - Lightning Farron, [i]Paulsen, Eileen[/i]
Continuity: Original
Other Characters: Etta Rassul, Lucas Courtwater
Temporarily Archiving: Elliot Daniels, Piper O'Leary
Role play Sample: See Etta Rassul
[url=link to accepted application will be added by staff][b]Eileen Paulsen[/b][/url]
Face claim: [b]Final Fantasy XIII[/b] - Lightning Farron, [i]Paulsen, Eileen[/i]
Continuity: Original
Other Characters: Etta Rassul, Lucas Courtwater
Temporarily Archiving: Elliot Daniels, Piper O'Leary
Role play Sample: See Etta Rassul
CODED BY SYLVIE
