Post by nala tess winston on Sept 15, 2009 0:41:23 GMT 1
alana tess winston
fourteen . student . free-spirit
fourteen . student . free-spirit
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character name - - -[/size][/color] [/blockquote] [/blockquote]alana tess winston .
character nicknames - - -[/size][/color] [/blockquote] [/blockquote]nala, nals, lala .
character age - - -[/size][/color] [/blockquote] [/blockquote]fourteen .
character personality - - -[/size][/color] [/blockquote] [/blockquote]loving, risk-taker, easily entertained, adventurous, happy, optimistic, trusting, fighter, compassionate, martyr, determined, self-sacrificing, dogged, stubborn, moral, old-fashioned, religious, patriotic, dissalusioned, guarded, idealistic, a little jaded, strict with her views, opinionated, wild, pesky .
character history - - -[/size][/color] [/blockquote] [/blockquote]Bethany Rose Winston had always been a single mother. This fact had never bothered the independent woman, in fact, she often reveled in it. After her first husband had divorced her, five months pregnant and short on cash, the woman took her unborn child and up and left. She quickly found a clerical job at West Point, her father, a retired Sergeant, approved. As she became acclimated to the environment she had her first child.
Christened Russel Elijah Winston, he was a beautiful, perfect baby. He was born on schedule with little labor, and began his tradition of being hale and healthy, which persisted all his life. Rusty, as he was lovingly dubbed, became the unofficial poster boy for families on the base, even though he was not, in any sense an army brat. His mother was not even a member of the armed forces, and his father was never in his life. None of this bothered little Russ, as he has more than enough male role-models living on an Army base. As the young boy grew into a man, he began to idolize these men, making it his goal in life to be like them. But, we will come back to that later.
Nine years later Beth had moved up in the civilian ranks of the Armed forces, and had quite a few male admirers. She did not give much credence to these men, nor did she encourage their advances. She was quite happy being a single woman, strong, intelligent, and well-off. She loved her job, and the environment little Rusty grew in. Never could she in her wildest dreams have expected to be swept off her feet.
But, that was exactly what happened. When Abel Brand, a South African by birth, walked into her life, Beth knew something was different. He was romantic and charming, a gentleman, loved her, and made her feel alive. Beth realized when she met Abel that she had never truly felt the spark of life he showed her. Their relationship was fast-paced, passionate, and breath-taking. He changed her life, and then deployed.
A month after his unit was sent overseas into Macedonia to participate in the U.N. Protection Force to help maintain stability in the area of former Yugoslavia Beth missed her period. She realized then that she was with child. The woman, now in her thirties, was elated to be carrying a little piece of Abel, the man who lit up her life. She sent him an excited letter, detailing the pregnancy. A week and a half after she mailed it the news reached West Point that Colonel Abel Brand had been killed by a remotely operated bomb. Beth was devastated, but swore that she would raise the child as she had Russ, honoring her lover’s memory.
When the baby arrived she was a beautiful baby girl, with crystalline blue-green eyes and platinum blonde hair, the spitting image of her father. Though Beth did not know it at the time Alana Tess Winston, christened at birth, would turn out much like that father. She was fiery, compassionate, fun-loving, and strong-willed. The same categories Abel had possessed, he had given by the miracle of genetics to his little daughter. She grew beautifully, eclipsing her elder brother as the base’s little darling. Not that Rusty minded, he was as much in love with the child as the men and women on the base.
Alana, given the nickname Nala by her brother, viewed the entire army base as her playground. As she was adored by the inhabitants, she was never barred entrance to any section, nor was she reprimanded for any misadventure. Her young spirit grew and grew, never broken or hindered by those around her. She possessed a beautiful singing voice, at the tender age of there could be heard singing the national anthem in the mess hall. She continued this tradition, learning the acoustic guitar, the pan pipe, the harp, and the accordion. She attempted to learn any music anyone would teach her, but these were her favorites.
Beth, living on an army base, had instilled a great amount of patriotism into her children, along with old world values, Christianity, morality, and open-mindedness. This tradition was made even stronger when Berth was diagnosed with cancer, when Nala was six. This news shattered the family, but when they picked up the pieces they were stronger than ever. Beth swore to fight, and fight she did. Nala lapped up her mother’s ideas, slowly fusing them with her own adventurous spirit and open mind. She never thought anything could sway her convictions, but she was wrong.
On September eleventh 2001 the country was shocked by the terrorist attack on the twin towers in New York City, the Pentagon in Washington DC, and the field in Pennsylvania. Like the rest of the nation, the Winston family renewed their patriotism, and touted their love of their country. Nala, six at the time, took on jobs at the barracks, as many of the soldiers deployed to Iraq. Rusty, nearly seventeen at the time decided he wanted to enlist in the Army. Beth and Nala, thinking there was no better goal for the young man, encouraged him. He enlisted and began training the next year, at the age of eighteen.
When the invasion of Iraq began in 2003 Rusty was only a few months shy of being able to ship out. When he finally did the family rejoiced, but worried. The news from the front had been less than good, bordering on bleak, and the women at home began to truly fear. They continued their work, and prayed each night. Weeks passed with no word, and then the first letters arrived. One for Beth and one for Nala. This marked the start of a tradition in the Winston household. A letter came about every month, outlining daily life, and banal things. Rusty never spoke about the fighting, or the death, but both women could tell it was there. Beth chose to ignore it, but an eight year old Nala could not be fooled.
Each time one of her brother’s letters came Nala could read the undercurrent of tension in it. His handwriting, his choice of words, even the length and stricture of his sentences gave it a way to the girl, nearly nine by the time the war got bad for Rusty. She had always been close to her brother, and hated to read his suffering. She sent him gifts, letters, and other things, which he always thanked her for. By ten and a half she was waiting anxiously for the next letter. On her eleventh birthday, she began to sense something was wrong.
Rusty’s last letter had been a month and a half ago, and he had promised her another by the time of her birthday. Something wasn’t right. Her brother had always been punctual with the monthly intervals of the correspondence, and he had never missed a birthday or other holiday before. Nala truly became worried as first two months, then three passed with no letter. She shared her fears with her mother, but Beth denied any problems. Nala took the only outlets left to her, those of prayer and song. When the two men came to the door of the small house the women shared, Nala was not surprised.
With Rusty classed a POW/MIA, presumed deceased, Nala’s world changed. She watched the war continue, with no sign of stopping, little progress, and more lives lost. She heard her mother crying, and knew her own tears, smothered by pillows, were audible as well. She threw herself into her music, remembering her brother best through notes, chords, and words crooned late at night over light acoustic guitar. She grew up quickly on the day the men in their black suits showed up on her doorstep, and the uncrushable spirit she had developed got quite a test. While the mass didn’t break, it definitely came out with a few cracks. At the age of twelve she allowed herself the first physical representation of her loss in the form of a tattoo on her inner wrist of the well known symbol of those lost. When Beth found out her daughter had gone with an enlisted man to get the ink, she was not angry, but knew the girl was only expressing her pain.
The lives continued on, at West Point for the two women. When a year later, Beth’s cancer, which had been in remission, flared back up the two went about their lives as they had always, assuming that, once again Beth would fight off the disease with new drugs and willpower. But, they were wrong. A little over a year later, in late august of 2009, Beth succumbed to the disease, dying in her sleep. Nala knew that her mother was finally free of the pain which had been so pervasive in the last few months of her life, but she was still upset. As she had no other living relatives, Nala was relegated to the children’s services bureau of the closest city.
The people, busy with abuse cases, quickly sent the girl into the foster system. Being fourteen, and not the adorable child age anymore, it was difficult to find a family interested in Nala. But, eventually she found a home in Miami, Florida with a single doctor, by the name of Draco Malone. Nala is slated to begin schooling as a freshman at Miami High School, the local High School. Nala has been home-schooled all her life, and is academically between the level of a high school senior, and a college junior. But, she is content to become a freshman, because she doesn’t want to cause a problem for her family.
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all about you - - -[/size][/color] [/blockquote] [/blockquote]
ooc name: lucky .
pb being used: annasophia robb .
years of experience: two .
membergroup: student .
The girl stumbled out of her shared apartment as the last glass figurine crashed into the door she had just closed. She moved her left arm to brush the shards of what had once been a glass angel from the front of her ill fitting men’s red and grey thin flannel shirt, threadbare at the elbows. The pain that shot through her torso and arm took her breath away. She was used to pain, Ethan had made sure of that; this pain was different from the average aches of the battered teen. It was sharp and only truly showed itself when she moved the affected arm. Taking a moment to organize her thoughts she quickly analyzed the pain into category, affected area, scale, and other problems. Quickly realizing the area hurt was not her shoulder or elbow as she had originally thought, but rather her lower arm, she sighed inwardly. She sucked in a quick breath as the affected area was again jostled by her movement. The arm was then pressed into the chest, using a small hip to keep it immobilized. A small hand, the right one this time, shaking slightly, went to brush a wisp of sandy blondish brownish hair out of her small face. The teen felt wetness and pain on her palm as she pulled away from her face.
The offending appendage, she now saw, had a deep laceration across the palm, which was welling blood. The coppery scent reached her nose and she swallowed hard. The cut was not large, but was rather deep, and was bleeding quite heavily, especially for its size and placement. She supposed she had missed this particular broken-beer-bottle injury in the episode which had ended with the teen leaving the apartment after eleven in the evening amid a shower of glass. Gritting her teeth the teen used the other hand, keeping the elbow and shoulder joint immobilized, to rip a small section of cloth off of the thin shirt. She then used both hands to tie the make-shift bandage across her palm and clenched her fist applying pressure. As she finished this task more blood dripped sluggishly into her left eye.
She took her bandaged hand and gingerly ran it over her forehead; it came away slightly bloody. The quantity was nothing compared to what the hand had been offering up, but it was definitely fresh blood from a separate source. Taking a deep breath the teen moved across the side walk to look into the window of a parked car. Small cuts covered her face, most likely from the shards which had flown when the first ornament, a glass animal of some type, had hit the wall, recoiling back to hit her face. These injuries did not seem terribly dangerous, so the teen discounted them. This time, she feared, she would have to visit a hospital. The hand needed to have the bleeding stopped, because it had already soaked through the bandage, and the young woman was having a bit of difficulty moving the fingers of that hand. She also had what she thought might be a spiral fracture in her lower arm, which needed to be looked at. Sighing, this time audibly, the girl stepped into the street and hailed a cab, asking to be delivered to... Where?
As a frequent visitor of various hospital emergency rooms who did not want anyone to see the pattern of her injuries the teen could never go to the same hospital more than twice a year, and needed several months between the visits to each. Flipping through her mental rolodex, the teen settled on Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. She had yet to visit this one, because it was in a different part of the city from her small apartment, but this would come in handy. She had not visited it for a number of reasons. But, there were a few select reasons it would do well this time. First, it was far away from her home, so she would not be recognized; the chances of meeting anyone she knew there were highly reduced. Second, it was said to be the busiest hospital in the city. That meant a teenaged girl with a few bumps and bruises could easily be forgotten. As she told the driver the name of her destination he looked back at her. She held his gaze, making his look quickly away. She did not want him to ask why she was going, or to remember her once she was gone.
Throughout the ride the teen thought about her life. She thought about Ethan, who she loved in spite of his drunken rages. She thought of the foster brother who had been even worse than her own brother, though in different ways. The cab slowed down, running through the worst parts of the town. She clutched her small messenger-bag/purse to her, feeling the small cylinder through the thin fabric. She had only had to be one gang-banger’s initiation right once, at the ripe age of twelve to learn to carry the small canister of pepper spray. As the vehical toddled onward the teen breathed a sigh of relief. She arranged her body so that she had her right arm, fist clenched around the strip of fabric, under her left, supporting the painful area which had already started to swell, and was the color of clotted blood under skin. The rest of the ride passed uneventfully, and soon they reached the hospital. She asked to be let off near the walk-in entrance, and paid the young man with bills fished from her purse.
She entered the lobby, and looked for a map. It directed her to the third floor and the "Clinic". After a breif, thankfully solitary elevator ride, she found ehrself in crowded waiting room, and lined up to be registered. After telling the woman behind the desk her name, “Geneva Tessler”, the story she had concocted to hide her injuries, “I fell funny through a glass door. I was sleep walking, I think I hurt my hand and my arm”, and the rest of her information in the least possible words, she sat down in an uncomfortable plastic chair and began the long process of waiting. As she waited she noticed she was strangely cold, though the waiting room was almost too warm and stuffy. She put the feeling down to shock, or to her adrenaline leaving her. This conclusion was supported by the fact that her various bumps and bruises were beginning to pain her more than they had, but truly the ignored fever, for that’s what it was, would soon catapult Neeva into an even more frightening battle, one she might not be able to win.
