Nine
Nine
Appearance: Nine is average height, thin and angular. She has one outfit - a modest white silk dress shirt with silk pants and wooden clogs. The clothes fit loosely on her thin frame, like they're half a size too big. Her eyes are mostly light green but often reflect yellow specks in sunlight and gain a blueish-gray tint in low light, and her hair is dark and curly, contrasting her pasty skin despite spending years on a boat. If make-up were to exist in the game, she'd likely not use more than a bit of black eyeliner and mascara.
Personality: Nine is a mellow, melancholic soul. Her default emotional aura is somewhere between neutral and melancholy with a strong dose of timidity. Happiness usually appears more often than not to be relief, and when she laughs she sounds nervous even if she isn't. While she speaks two-and-a-half languages, she struggles still to understand spoken language and for that she is often timid, fearful that she will say the wrong thing because she doesn't understand what they're trying to tell her. Similarly, she becomes stressed when exposed to too much noise. She has been known to stand her ground and be assertive, but only as a last resort and when push came to shove. She lives with her travel companion, an older woman, on her boat, making land every so often to gather resources to feed themselves or make something new, to engage in social contact, and occasionally to go learn new languages. She likes making new friends but is often too shy to say much beyond her name.
Wants: Nine wants peace for herself and for the people around her. Conflict makes her very uncomfortable and that's why she enjoys travelling with her one friend. She wants to be able to communicate clearly with the people around her. Beyond that, she defers most of her wants to what her companion wants.
Likes: She likes rice cakes, spinach, the occasional fruit, and, if she had the chance to try them, would probably also like the various meats that Cantr has to offer (she's not vegetarian). Travelling on a boat all the time means she gives preference to foods (and other resources) that are economical, that is to say, they have low consumption rates so they last over long voyages. She likes peace and quiet, but not so quiet that nobody speaks for days at a time. While she enjoys the sounds of nature, she's not particularly attached to it.
Fears: Misunderstanding and threats to hers or her companion's personal safety. However, there isn't much in the way of traumatizing things that she hasn't seen. While she was once trapped in a food pantry during a town raid, someone dragged in a man and killed him in front of her. She spent days in there with the body before someone discovered her whereabouts and broke through the lock to free her. Another time she was on her ship, her companion was comatose inside (player was away on a long trip), and she had several other people on the boat, two men. One of the men picked up all of the food from the floor while fighting with the other about where to go. She ended up attacking the second man with a sabre and, once she made it to port, dragged him out and into the harbor and sailed off. The first man returned the food. Since then there have been no incidents to threaten her safety and she has backed into a haze of... not complacency, but more... her fears are not immediate, other than the miscommunication.
Lessons she needs to learn: It’s okay to misunderstand, as long as you work toward understanding. Which she does. Also, Nine needs to learn to open up to people and express herself more freely.
