APPLICATION: The Borrowers - Arrietty Clock
This application has been ACCEPTED.
PLAYER INFO
NAME: Tobu
CURRENT CHARACTERS, if any: Reki/Kurayami, Yuffie/Materia
CHARACTER INFO
CHARACTER NAME: Arrietty Clock
SERIES: Ghibli's "The Borrowers"
RESERVED: N
WISHLIST: N
PERSONALITY: Arrietty is an energetic, adventurous, friendly, and curious teenaged girl, with a stubborn streak a mile wide and a bit of a temper. Her personality, at least, is far from small.
Bright, curious, and a little brash, she has a fierce appetite for life that belies her tiny frame. Although generally chatty and outgoing, she can be slightly wary when she feels threatened or on uncertain ground, particularly with big people (aka nearly everybody). She is quite good at holding a grudge if she feels she's been wronged, and will persist stubbornly in turning her nose up at you once she's decided you're a rotter. However, catch her fancy and earn her trust (it isn't /that/ difficult to do) and she'll be your loyal friend for life.
Her sheltered upbringing instilled her with both a deep love for her parents and an equally deep need to get out of their jurisdiction and find her own path in life someday. She is a natural explorer with a taste for adventure, and although she isn't an out-and-out rebel for the sake of rebellion alone, she will quite willingly flout direct commands from authority figures if her own judgment seems sounder to her than theirs.
She's a sensible sort of daredevil, and without making much fuss will undertake physical feats that would chill the blood if compared to their full-sized equivalent - but not before taking a moment to pragmatically double-check her safety rope. She loves to visit new places and try new things and is quite interested in new people, and will happily wander around a new environment for ages if left to it.
She's also immensely stubborn, which is both a virtue and a flaw. (She'll keep trying different angles to tackle a problem until she either succeeds or causes a disaster.) She can be close-mouthed to the extreme when she feels like it, but is generally chatty and friendly enough. She likes to look pretty, but doesn't like spending a lot of time on her looks - and she loves decorating the places where she lives, though she's not always that good at keeping them tidy.
TIMELINE: Taken from the journey down the river at the end of the film - pretty much the point where the credits roll.
BACKGROUND: Have you ever wondered where all those extra rubber bands, bobby pins, and thumbtacks go? You never seem to remember using them all up, and yet you keep having to buy new packets... The truth is, they're being "borrowed" by people who need them more than you do: the Borrowers, tiny people who live under the floors and inside the walls of human dwellings and fashion the tools and trinkets of their everyday lives out of your household knickknacks.
Generations ago, the ancestors of the Clock family flew to Japan on the backs of migrating birds. Their Borrowing lifestyle in Europe was getting dangerous as populations increased and people became more suspicious and less welcoming with regards to the little folk in their homes. Pragmatic as always, they decided to move to a quieter, safer nation, and Japan proved to be an excellent home for a time...but civilization marches on, and by the time Arrietty Clock was born, there were only three families living in the rambling Japanese farmhouse she called home. A few years later, after one family vanished and another was Seen by the human beans of the house and had to move to the woods nearby, the Clocks - Pod, Homily, and Arrietty - were the only Borrowers left.
For all they knew, they might have been the only Borrowers left in the world.
This worried Arrietty's aging parents deeply, and they threw their energies into teaching their daughter to look after herself, just in case. Her mother tried to teach her basic household skills, but by the age of fourteen, Arrietty's stitches were still uneven and her enthusiasm for cooking and cleaning was negligable at best. Far more exciting was tagging along with her father, being taught to Borrow things from the human beans in the house. Pod patiently taught his daughter the tricks of the Borrowing trade, from scaling a curtain with earrings for crampons, to rappelling down a cabinet on a fishhook-and-dental-floss climbing line. She loved her simple little life, although her cravings for adventure sometimes sent her out into the garden to fetch herbs for her mother and tease the household cat.
That simple life was turned upside down, however, when a human boy arrived at the house. His name was Sho, and he was very sick and recuperating in the countryside to prepare for heart surgery. He was also very observant, and it didn't take him long to notice the Borrowers at their activities. Horrified at first, Arrietty gradually settled into a wary coexistence with the boy as her parents frantically made plans to move out of the house. Bit by bit, however, she began to forge a friendship with Sho, who was as curious about her life as she was about his.
Their unlikely bond was strengthened forever when the housekeeper, suspicious of the boy's activities, discovered the Clock family home under the floorboards and caught Homily Clock in a jar. Furious with Sho at first for inadvertantly destroying her life, Arrietty forgave him when he helped her rescue her mother and cover up the signs of their old home, thus making the housekeeper's ravings about tiny people look like the results of one too many bottles of sake and saving them from further investigation.
Fortunately for the Clocks, they had a new life to move on to. In his searches for a possible home, Pod had met another, wilder Borrower, a teenaged boy named Spiller who told them that there were in fact a lot of other Borrowers living downriver in the woods. Taken with pretty Arrietty and generally a helpful, if quiet, sort, Spiller offered to guide the family to the settlement. Bidding her human friend a sad farewell, Arrietty boarded the teakettle Spiller used as a boat and set off down the river with her parents to find a new home and a new world to explore.
ABILITIES: Let's get this straight, first and foremost - Arrietty is /tiny/. About four and a half inches tall, to be precise. She otherwise looks like a completely normal Caucasian teenager,
Small she may be, but the law of squares makes her surprisingly strong and sturdy for her size. She won't be lifting any bricks or full pop cans anytime soon, but she can pull her own weight easily enough to make climbing a breeze, and she can survive proportionately longer falls than a human. This comes in handy, since her main skill is - for lack of a better word - mountaineering. Give Arrietty an earring and a bit of twine, and she'll gamely go clambering up any number of sheer inclines, pieces of furniture, plants, people...you name it.
She's also a quick thinker and keeps a reasonably cool head in dangerous situations. She is not, however, a remotely competent seamstress, and will need help putting together a wardrobe on arrival in the Sphere.
GAME INFO
EDENSPHERE NAME: Leaf
BIRTHDAY LOG: Yes, please!
DREAM: It's all green, so very green and bathed in sunlight with the grinding whir of cicadas rising and falling in the warm, steamy summer air. She takes a deep breath and smiles, leaning out from under the leaves in her hands to gaze up at the sky. They're a good size to use for an umbrella, and the smell of bay and shiso is marvelous, pleasantly stinging her nose.
She's just about to start climbing down to the ground, when she hears a huge, strange rumbling sound, and crunching gravel, and...voices. Curious, she -
- suddenly finds herself looking up at a looming face, far, far overhead, and ducks down against the stem of the plant, holding up the leaves like a shield and waiting, trembling. Finally, it moves away, loudly crushing the grass with its feet. She breathes a sigh of relief and hops down the plant from stem to stem, hitting the ground running. Somewhere, she hears a yowl and runs faster, already well aware of what that noise means, and leaps through a metal grill to safety just before a huge, furry cat slams into it. It hisses and keens, reaching its claws through the slots in the grill. She smiles and gives it a cheeky wave, before hurrying off through the cool, dark space under the house.
Home. This is home, and she lets herself in, setting the leaf in the -
- woman is scolding her, gray hair pulled up into a ponytail, wondering aloud what would happen if she were Seen. She catches a snatch of words ("The bay tree is so far away!") before the dream shifts and pushes them into another room, a cluttered kitchen. A taciturn man stands over her, and she laughs and calls him Papa.
"It's all right," she hears herself saying. "He didn't see me. I hid under the leaves!"
The man - her father - gives her a gentle look, and then takes a hook from his backpack and sets it into the - oh. Oh, my. The kitchen is larger, now, a hundred thousand times larger it seems, and dark and silent except for the massive echoing clack - clack - clack of a human clock, far away somewhere. She has just enough time to register this, when her father pays out a length of line from the hook, leans back, and hops off the counter into space.
Shocked and delighted, she runs to the edge and watches him rappeling down -
- climbing up -
- no, it's her that's climbing up -
- gathering up a lump of sugar in her pack -
- unsheathing a long, vicious pin from its place at her side, with a ringing sound of steel -
- and as she looks up at her father among the whirl of images, laughing, saying, "Borrowing is fun, isn't it?", she turns to look over her shoulder and freezes, her cheerful smile slipping away as she sees that same vast face with its enormous dark eyes, looking calmly down at her.
"Don't be afraid," the voice booms, like quiet summer thunder -
- and she wakes up.
JOURNAL SAMPLE: [A wobbly mark appears on the page, then another. Slowly, painstakingly, the following words appear, wandering awkwardly across the paper.]
THIS PEN IS TOO BIG
CAN'T WRITE QUICKLY
HELLO?
ASPIRATIONS: To move her into a birdhouse or mailbox or similar, somewhere in the Bazaar. To actually get her a job doing something useful, somehow. To make plenty of human bean friends. To end up fearlessly involved in endgame, if the opportunity arises - because Arrietty will tackle /any/ challenge.
Hi, Tobu!
After reviewing your application, we would like to request a more elaborate background section- specifically, the beginnings of her friendship with Sho as well as more about her impact on his life.
Please feel free to send your elaborations to us and we will continue processing your app.
(PLAYER RESPONSE)
PLAYER INFO
NAME: Tobu
CURRENT CHARACTERS, if any: Reki/Kurayami, Yuffie/Materia
CHARACTER INFO
CHARACTER NAME: Arrietty Clock
SERIES: Ghibli's "The Borrowers"
RESERVED: N
WISHLIST: N
PERSONALITY: Arrietty is an energetic, adventurous, friendly, and curious teenaged girl, with a stubborn streak a mile wide and a bit of a temper. Her personality, at least, is far from small.
Bright, curious, and a little brash, she has a fierce appetite for life that belies her tiny frame. Although generally chatty and outgoing, she can be slightly wary when she feels threatened or on uncertain ground, particularly with big people (aka nearly everybody). She is quite good at holding a grudge if she feels she's been wronged, and will persist stubbornly in turning her nose up at you once she's decided you're a rotter. However, catch her fancy and earn her trust (it isn't /that/ difficult to do) and she'll be your loyal friend for life.
Her sheltered upbringing instilled her with both a deep love for her parents and an equally deep need to get out of their jurisdiction and find her own path in life someday. She is a natural explorer with a taste for adventure, and although she isn't an out-and-out rebel for the sake of rebellion alone, she will quite willingly flout direct commands from authority figures if her own judgment seems sounder to her than theirs.
She's a sensible sort of daredevil, and without making much fuss will undertake physical feats that would chill the blood if compared to their full-sized equivalent - but not before taking a moment to pragmatically double-check her safety rope. She loves to visit new places and try new things and is quite interested in new people, and will happily wander around a new environment for ages if left to it.
She's also immensely stubborn, which is both a virtue and a flaw. (She'll keep trying different angles to tackle a problem until she either succeeds or causes a disaster.) She can be close-mouthed to the extreme when she feels like it, but is generally chatty and friendly enough. She likes to look pretty, but doesn't like spending a lot of time on her looks - and she loves decorating the places where she lives, though she's not always that good at keeping them tidy.
TIMELINE: Taken from the journey down the river at the end of the film - pretty much the point where the credits roll.
BACKGROUND: Have you ever wondered where all those extra rubber bands, bobby pins, and thumbtacks go? You never seem to remember using them all up, and yet you keep having to buy new packets... The truth is, they're being "borrowed" by people who need them more than you do: the Borrowers, tiny people who live under the floors and inside the walls of human dwellings and fashion the tools and trinkets of their everyday lives out of your household knickknacks.
Generations ago, the ancestors of the Clock family flew to Japan on the backs of migrating birds. Their Borrowing lifestyle in Europe was getting dangerous as populations increased and people became more suspicious and less welcoming with regards to the little folk in their homes. Pragmatic as always, they decided to move to a quieter, safer nation, and Japan proved to be an excellent home for a time...but civilization marches on, and by the time Arrietty Clock was born, there were only three families living in the rambling Japanese farmhouse she called home. A few years later, after one family vanished and another was Seen by the human beans of the house and had to move to the woods nearby, the Clocks - Pod, Homily, and Arrietty - were the only Borrowers left.
For all they knew, they might have been the only Borrowers left in the world.
This worried Arrietty's aging parents deeply, and they threw their energies into teaching their daughter to look after herself, just in case. Her mother tried to teach her basic household skills, but by the age of fourteen, Arrietty's stitches were still uneven and her enthusiasm for cooking and cleaning was negligable at best. Far more exciting was tagging along with her father, being taught to Borrow things from the human beans in the house. Pod patiently taught his daughter the tricks of the Borrowing trade, from scaling a curtain with earrings for crampons, to rappelling down a cabinet on a fishhook-and-dental-floss climbing line. She loved her simple little life, although her cravings for adventure sometimes sent her out into the garden to fetch herbs for her mother and tease the household cat.
That simple life was turned upside down, however, when a human boy arrived at the house. His name was Sho, and he was very sick and recuperating in the countryside to prepare for heart surgery. He was also very observant, and it didn't take him long to notice the Borrowers at their activities. Horrified at first, Arrietty gradually settled into a wary coexistence with the boy as her parents frantically made plans to move out of the house. Bit by bit, however, she began to forge a friendship with Sho, who was as curious about her life as she was about his.
Their unlikely bond was strengthened forever when the housekeeper, suspicious of the boy's activities, discovered the Clock family home under the floorboards and caught Homily Clock in a jar. Furious with Sho at first for inadvertantly destroying her life, Arrietty forgave him when he helped her rescue her mother and cover up the signs of their old home, thus making the housekeeper's ravings about tiny people look like the results of one too many bottles of sake and saving them from further investigation.
Fortunately for the Clocks, they had a new life to move on to. In his searches for a possible home, Pod had met another, wilder Borrower, a teenaged boy named Spiller who told them that there were in fact a lot of other Borrowers living downriver in the woods. Taken with pretty Arrietty and generally a helpful, if quiet, sort, Spiller offered to guide the family to the settlement. Bidding her human friend a sad farewell, Arrietty boarded the teakettle Spiller used as a boat and set off down the river with her parents to find a new home and a new world to explore.
ABILITIES: Let's get this straight, first and foremost - Arrietty is /tiny/. About four and a half inches tall, to be precise. She otherwise looks like a completely normal Caucasian teenager,
Small she may be, but the law of squares makes her surprisingly strong and sturdy for her size. She won't be lifting any bricks or full pop cans anytime soon, but she can pull her own weight easily enough to make climbing a breeze, and she can survive proportionately longer falls than a human. This comes in handy, since her main skill is - for lack of a better word - mountaineering. Give Arrietty an earring and a bit of twine, and she'll gamely go clambering up any number of sheer inclines, pieces of furniture, plants, people...you name it.
She's also a quick thinker and keeps a reasonably cool head in dangerous situations. She is not, however, a remotely competent seamstress, and will need help putting together a wardrobe on arrival in the Sphere.
GAME INFO
EDENSPHERE NAME: Leaf
BIRTHDAY LOG: Yes, please!
DREAM: It's all green, so very green and bathed in sunlight with the grinding whir of cicadas rising and falling in the warm, steamy summer air. She takes a deep breath and smiles, leaning out from under the leaves in her hands to gaze up at the sky. They're a good size to use for an umbrella, and the smell of bay and shiso is marvelous, pleasantly stinging her nose.
She's just about to start climbing down to the ground, when she hears a huge, strange rumbling sound, and crunching gravel, and...voices. Curious, she -
- suddenly finds herself looking up at a looming face, far, far overhead, and ducks down against the stem of the plant, holding up the leaves like a shield and waiting, trembling. Finally, it moves away, loudly crushing the grass with its feet. She breathes a sigh of relief and hops down the plant from stem to stem, hitting the ground running. Somewhere, she hears a yowl and runs faster, already well aware of what that noise means, and leaps through a metal grill to safety just before a huge, furry cat slams into it. It hisses and keens, reaching its claws through the slots in the grill. She smiles and gives it a cheeky wave, before hurrying off through the cool, dark space under the house.
Home. This is home, and she lets herself in, setting the leaf in the -
- woman is scolding her, gray hair pulled up into a ponytail, wondering aloud what would happen if she were Seen. She catches a snatch of words ("The bay tree is so far away!") before the dream shifts and pushes them into another room, a cluttered kitchen. A taciturn man stands over her, and she laughs and calls him Papa.
"It's all right," she hears herself saying. "He didn't see me. I hid under the leaves!"
The man - her father - gives her a gentle look, and then takes a hook from his backpack and sets it into the - oh. Oh, my. The kitchen is larger, now, a hundred thousand times larger it seems, and dark and silent except for the massive echoing clack - clack - clack of a human clock, far away somewhere. She has just enough time to register this, when her father pays out a length of line from the hook, leans back, and hops off the counter into space.
Shocked and delighted, she runs to the edge and watches him rappeling down -
- climbing up -
- no, it's her that's climbing up -
- gathering up a lump of sugar in her pack -
- unsheathing a long, vicious pin from its place at her side, with a ringing sound of steel -
- and as she looks up at her father among the whirl of images, laughing, saying, "Borrowing is fun, isn't it?", she turns to look over her shoulder and freezes, her cheerful smile slipping away as she sees that same vast face with its enormous dark eyes, looking calmly down at her.
"Don't be afraid," the voice booms, like quiet summer thunder -
- and she wakes up.
JOURNAL SAMPLE: [A wobbly mark appears on the page, then another. Slowly, painstakingly, the following words appear, wandering awkwardly across the paper.]
THIS PEN IS TOO BIG
CAN'T WRITE QUICKLY
HELLO?
ASPIRATIONS: To move her into a birdhouse or mailbox or similar, somewhere in the Bazaar. To actually get her a job doing something useful, somehow. To make plenty of human bean friends. To end up fearlessly involved in endgame, if the opportunity arises - because Arrietty will tackle /any/ challenge.
Hi, Tobu!
After reviewing your application, we would like to request a more elaborate background section- specifically, the beginnings of her friendship with Sho as well as more about her impact on his life.
Please feel free to send your elaborations to us and we will continue processing your app.
(PLAYER RESPONSE)