Profile
Your Name: Valerie
Age: 24
Email: valerie dot davis at gmail dot com
Messager(s): valerbees
Timezone: KST
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Arcana: Death
Time Period: 1934
Name: Avalon Spade
Gender: Female
Blood Type: O
Birthday/Sign: 13 November, Scorpio
Age: 16
Occupation/Grade: Sophomore
Room: 303
PB: Yomi Takanashi- Black Rock Shooter
Appearance: Avalon is half Japanese, although it's rather ambiguously blended with her German genetics. Small statured, her uniform is an ill-fitting hand-me-down from her older step-sister in attempts to cut costs. She tries to maintain a neat appearance, but due to her clumsy nature and streak of bad luck she's often covered in some sort of stain: paint, food, or dirt by the end of the day.
Her loosely curled hair is dull black, thick and unfrizzy but lacking much shine and she rarely does more with it than keep it clean. She cuts her own bangs straight across the forehead, although she's often lazy about maintaining them. She has a soft and curvy figure that gets lost under her oversized clothing. Avalon has dry skin and always smells of floral lotion.
With more effort, Avalon could be passably pretty, but she's rather unremarkably plain without any makeup or attempt to style herself more fashionably. Her most noticeable feature are her bright green eyes, which are often hidden away behind her reading glasses as she's helplessly farsighted. Pale and unblemished, she burns easily if she spends too much time outside, which she mostly avoids. Too much sunlight has her squinting and shielding her eyes.
Personality: Despite frequent insistence she should be, Avalon isn't somebody that's necessarily ashamed of herself. She's not ashamed of her mother's past because they always got by just fine, she's not ashamed to not have a legitimate father because that was never a problem growing up, and she's not ashamed that she's half-Japanese despite her fully white family. She doesn't even identify as Japanese, lacking any knowledge of Japanese culture and no connection to the heritage, but she knows from experience nobody sees her as Caucasian though she's been raised as such. She's not quite sure how to deal with the racial prejudice she faces nor really understands it, and has no community to turn to for support. And though she doesn't fully want to acknowledge the reality of her future yet, Avalon knows her chances of marriage are severely lacking. She knows her future is something she cannot avoid forever, but cannot imagine any stable outcome and refuses to set any long-term goals for herself believing they'll only result in failure- not because she isn't personally capable but because the world won't allow her a chance. Things are hard for her now, and they're only going to get harder, and that defeatist mentality has been ingrained into Avalon's every action.
She tried for a long time to do everything right, eager to make her mother proud and to be accepted by society when she became aware how others viewed them, wanting to prove that her background didn't define or limit her. Avalon learned piano, proper etiquette even though she thought it a bit silly at times, practiced reading poetry and popular literature and spent many hours perfecting embroidery. Avalon spoke politely, smiled kindly, studied hard, and yet was repeatedly shunned and humiliated for everything outside of her control. Avalon's spirit cracked and then eventually shattered, and she grew to resent her situation and the whispering that followed wherever she went. Many Asian students had been segragated out of schools and confined to Chinatown, and some believed she had no place at Adessi Hall which they didn't bother to keep a secret.
While she knows her mother deserves happiness, Avalon selfishly wishes they could return to how things were before she got married. Because her mother built a new life that Avalon doesn't feel she can ever be fully apart of, can never take her step-father's name, she feels rejected by the one person she ever felt was there for her. At least before they were surrounded by other outcasts and undesirables that treated her fairly, but now Avalon has to constantly face the sneering well-to-do that will never see her as an equal. It's not shame she feels, but bitterness and frustration and a knowledge she'll always fail before she even tries. Her mother and father always tell her to do her best, but the mantra has since gone stale.
And so the girl that never wanted too much out of life, was easily pleased and always willing to help, no longer sees reason to do things right and is on the path of a downward spiral of self-destruction and will take anybody in her way down with her. She's prone to anonymous acts of spite, openly taking an unfulfilling joy of watching others suffer. Feeling emotions rather intensely, Avalon has never managed to learn to cope with such high levels of anger or distress, and if pushed too far Avalon can become dangerously unstable and irrational.
A little bit of kindness goes a long way with Avalon, as she's incredibly lonely and she doesn't like to be so angry, but she's skeptical of any gestures being genuine and hates pity just as much as she hates the criticism. She can no longer see the best in people, even those that mean no harm, and prefers those that are open with their faults than try to hide behind a hypocritical facade of perfection.
Avalon spends a lot of her freetime tending to the plants on the roof and haunting the library for poetry and existentialist literature. She recently got kicked out of book club and banned from checking out books after a breakdown where she ripped several pages from a book and attempted to shove them down another member's throat. Any borrowing she does from the library now is unofficial, and borrowing may be used loosely as it's doubtful she has any intentions of giving them back.
History: Brunhilde Spade was the youngest of a slew of daughters (and never any sons) in a first-generation German family, who changed their family name from Spaeth upon immigration. Because her family struggled with supporting so many daughters as the small family business plummeted, Brunhilde and her sister Gerda were sent to a covenant to become nuns to relieve the financial burden on the family, which was seen as a positive alternative to sending them to an orphanage. Gerda took to the new lifestyle quite well, but Brunhilde did not despite her efforts and constant prayers for guidance. She was too energetic, too social, and too curious about the outside world to successfully adjust to such a strict and segregated routine. Especially not for the rest of her life! Easily seduced by a young priest, an ongoing affair that lasted several months before discovering she was pregnant, Brunhilde was rejected from the convnant and consequently disowned from her family.
Brunhilde gave birth, but the baby did not survive more than a few hours. With no means of supporting herself, Brunhilde turned to a life of prostitution. It wasn't glamourous, but eventually Brunhilde made quite a lot of money to live a comfortably independent lifestyle. She had a second child, the father officially listed as unknown, although Brunhilde was paid quite a lot of money to keep the birth secret when she went to the wealthy Japanese political ambassador who of course didn't want his reputation ruined by the incident. Her daughter's name was Avalon, and she sheltered her daughter as much as she could from her occupation and never allowed clients home. Even if others thought badly of her, she was an involved mother and provided everything she could.
Avalon was a happy child who rarely had anything to complain about, curious and always asking a lot of questions, and seemed to have a surprising amount of awareness of what was going on around her. This resulted in her noticing that she didn't quite look like her mother or any of the other children she knew, who had begun to tease her for her eyes. And while she had no real interest in seeking out her father, though she always figured she must have had one, she learned the truth about his ethnicity after asking far too many questions that Brunhilde had wanted to postpone until Avalon was older. She was homeschooled in a small group of children of prostitutes and other outcast women, and rarely had any interaction with men, though she never missed the presence of a father figure in her life. As she grew older, she liked to help teach the younger children how to read and do math. While she enjoyed sports and playing games, Avalon was helplessly uncoordinated and prone to injury. Nobody ever wanted her on their team, and eventually Avalon realized it was best to stick to other activities.
When she was eleven, her mother started bringing a man home, and frequently enough for Avalon to catch on that something was up. Albert Bishop was a recent widow with a fortune in the tobacco industry. He was new money, a flagrant spender and gambler, and developed a fondness for Brunhilde that eventually escalated into a scandalous marriage proposal. Brunhilde and Avalon moved into their new home in Abaton City, and Avalon was greeted with an older sister named Dorothy. Dorothy was three years older than Avalon and didn't like her new family members much at all and liked to remind Avalon that while her mother took her father's name, Avalon would never be a Bishop. At every turn she was snubbed and criticized by her sister, and spent most of her time alone playing with dolls and wishing things would go back to how they were before. But her Albert was kind to her and her mother, who seemed happier than she'd ever been, so it was difficult for Avalon to feel justified in her resentment.
Luckily Dorothy was sent to Adessi Hall for school a year later, granting Avalon much more freedom in the home, although the stares and whispers followed no matter where she went. Upon entering Adessi Hall her freshman year, despite wearing her step-sister's outgrown uniform, Dorothy refused to acknowledge Avalon and threatened her to never tell that they were related. After all, they didn't even have the same name or look alike, so it was never questioned by other students. It was just as well for Avalon, preferring to be ignored than outright harassed.
Avalon's now in her second year at Adessi Hall, and Dorothy has since graduated and left. She likes her classes and is a good student, but her teachers have a very good reason to be concerned. There's something a bit off, a bit repressed, and it's only a matter of time before the girl snaps.
Weapon: Chains
Stats: Vitality, Strength, Magic, Agility, Luck
Persona: Phantom of the Opera (Ophelia)
Strength: Water
Weakness: Wind
Primary Skillset: Strike physical
Secondary Skillset: Scanning
Other: (Anything else?)