OOC: 20 Things meme
1. He plays the acoustic guitar.
Considering Zell’s noise level, you might expect him to play something louder, such as the electric guitar or drums. But no, he plays the acoustic guitar. Starting when he was about nine, his grandfather gave him lessons up until his death when Zell was 12. He’s quite good, and takes requests. Currently he doesn’t have one, but he’s thinking about remedying that.
2. He eats very well.
For an 18-year-old picking out his own diet, Zell eats amazingly well. True, he does eat everything that’s not nailed down, but he also eats a lot of fresh fruit and vegetables, yogurt, and whole grains. Part of this comes from his adoptive mother making sure he ate healthily, and another part comes from the fact that he considers his body a weapon. And you take good care of your weapons, right?
3. He spent a year on the streets.
Zell is a war orphan, his parents civilian casualties. Partly due to trauma, and partly due to his Guardian Forces robbing him of his early memories, he doesn’t remember a lot about it. He does know he was about four when it started, and around five when he was finally sent to Edea’s orphanage.
4. He doesn’t remember his original last name.
While he does remember his birthday, he has no idea of his last name. For that matter, he’s not even sure “Zell” is his given name. He doesn’t know why exactly-most four-year-olds know their name-but Edea has hazarded a guess that he may have had some kind of head injury in his time alone. All he knows is when he was finally taken in by child services, he identified himself as Zell, and has been called that ever since.
5. He’s at University-level in most subjects-Mathematics, Biology, English, etc.
Balamb Garden didn’t only train in combat, they had rigorous academic schooling as well. Zell knows lower-level calculus, the basics of his world’s biology, and is at least college-level reading and writing-probably beyond.
6. He has a photographic memory.
What he remembers, he remembers extremely clearly. Let him read an article, he can quote large portions of it nearly word-for-word back at you. Show him a picture of something, even symbols he’s not familiar with, and he’ll probably be able to draw it back with surprising accuracy.
However, this talent isn’t always on. He has to be concentrating on the material he wants to remember. Even when he’s not, though, he has an exceptional memory.
7. His adoptive family was very well-to-do.
Taken from a translation of Zell’s Japanese bio in Final Fantasy VIII, which describes him as “an undisciplined rich boy”. After his adoption, Zell never wanted for anything. However, he’s not at all spoiled, and very generous.
After he made SeeD, he only got richer. SeeD’s are very well-paid, and since he live(ed) rent-free at Garden, he had no rent or mortgage to worry about. Personally, Zell has a lot of money to his name. Of course, he has no access to it in Template. The sudden reduction of living standards doesn’t seem to bother him much.
8. He loves water.
Lakes, oceans, rivers, pools, it doesn’t matter-he’s in it. He’s spent the majority of his life on a coast, and is a strong swimmer. Surfing, wading, diving, lap swimming, splash wars-he does it all, and very happily.
9. He’s had two girlfriends-really!
Both relationships ended amicably after about six months. The first, the object of his affections was transferred to a boarding school at her request-she had no interest in joining the mercenary group of SeeD and had qualified for a full scholarship. They tried to keep it up, but like most teenage romances, the long-distance thing didn’t really work. They mutually agreed to let it end, and eventually drifted out of contact.
The second relationship he had drifted calmly (well, as calm as Zell gets) along until they realized they were now more friends then significant others. To the date of his disappearance into Template, they remained friends.
10. He was popular at Garden, and in his hometown.
He’s never quite realized it, but he was indeed popular. Zell makes friends and good acquaintances sometimes, it seems, by just breathing. He’s very nice and very social, if a little hard to keep up with sometimes.
However, it wasn’t always like that. His first year or two at Garden was difficult for him-he was extremely homesick and Seifer loved to pick on him, and people seldom flock to the bullied kid. He persisted, though, and eventually things got better for him. Seifer continued to harass him right up until he made SeeD, but that generally was the only blemish on his social life.
11. Karate didn’t come naturally to him at first.
Zell started training in karate when he was eight-his grandfather thought it might boost his self-esteem. At first, he wasn’t very good at it. He was afraid of sparring, flinched away from getting hit even in non-contact sessions, and on top of all of that had trouble concentrating on things for very long. It took forever for him to learn his first two katas.
But Zell wanted to be good at something for once in his life, and he also didn’t want to disappoint his venerated grandfather. So, for the first time in his life, he grit his teeth against the taunts of his classmates and bruises, and worked. And worked. And worked even more. It took him a year, but fought his way to the equivalent, and then beyond, of his classmates. And something funny happened along the way. As he gained confidence, more and more talent began to show.
After that first year, he’s never looked back. When he came to Template, Zell was widely regarded as one of the best, if not THE best, martial artist in the entire organization of SeeD.
12. He’s crosstrained in more then one style.
Watch him fight and you’ll see moves from Judo, boxing, and Aikido mixed in there. He’s gotten to the point where he habitually mixes styles and comes out with something unique. His first style is still his primary, though. And he’s not so good at wrestling, though he is good at breaking holds, courtesy of far too many headlocks from Seifer.
13. He has trouble thinking people might find him attractive.
Seifer and Squall were the attractive ones, in Zell’s opinion, and later Irvine. He’s never seen anything special when he looks in the mirror, and he’s never had girls exactly running after him either. It doesn’t bother him much, but when anybody flirts with him it contributes to his immediate “WTF?” reaction.
14. He’s not telling the full story about his coming to Template.
If you ask him, he’ll say he was being chased by a couple of big nasty monsters, tripped, and fell down. Next thing he knew, he was in Template. And this is all true-he’s just leaving out some big details. Zell was actually on a monster-extermination mission, in which he was his team leader. The other two were newly-qualified SeeD’s, and there was one other junior team accompanying them, six people in all. But the monster they were supposed to eliminate turned out to have a mate and three half-grown monsterlets, and was way beyond the capacity of his team to handle. So Zell broke off from the group and ran interference, leading the monsters after him so the rest could have a chance to get away. In running, he tripped over something, and thus came to Template.
15. He likes heights.
He finds them soothing. When Zell wants to relax, he’ll generally climb up the nearest available roof/cliff/whatever and grab an hour or so for himself. He learned long ago that when people are looking for you, for some reason most don’t think to look up.
16. He’s a good mechanic.
Zell loves machines-taking them apart, putting them back together, anything. He started learning about them when he was a child, hanging curiously around the town mechanic’s shop and trying to see what was going on in there. By the time of his departure for Balamb Garden at 13, Zell was competent with most car engines, and instantly signed up for mechanics as an elective. Old, new, enchanted, electric, steam-powered-it hardly matters, for he probably knows quite a bit about how it works, how it’s put together, and perhaps most importantly, what it does.
17. He has a mildish case of PTSD.
So he says, anyway. Zell has had trouble sleeping for months now, since almost immediately after Ultimecia was defeated. It mostly manifests itself with insomnia and severe nightmares. He tries to handle it on his own, and matters do seem to be slowly getting better. Very slowly.
18. He sleepwalks.
The more stressed he is, the more he does it. Selphie is an old pro at handling this-if you’re camped out on the field with monsters everywhere, it won’t do for one of your sleeping teammates to wander off. He doesn’t do anything too elaborate, like eating, but it can be pretty disconcerting, since his eyes will be open.
19. He has an accent.
Although Zell isn’t originally from there, he picked up the local accent of his town quickly, although occasionally he’ll deviate from the local pronunciation or slang since Balamb Garden houses students from all over the world. Generally, however, his speech is closest to a light Australian accent.
20. He can make his tattoo invisible.
The ink that it’s made with will turn clear if exposed to a certain degree of the light spectrum--obviously, not one often found in nature. Since it makes him highly distinctive, he took the precaution of using this type of ink in case he was ever assigned to an undercover or otherwise appearance-sensitive mission, although he belongs to the combat branch of SeeD.