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[center][img]http://twitchfilm.com/assets_c/2012/09/MiaWasikowska-thumb-300xauto-20786.jpg[/img][/center]
[center]~*~[/center]
[center][h2]HANNAH PRITCHARD[/h2][/center]

[b]AGE[/b]: 28
[b]GENDER[/b]: female 
[b]FORMER OCCUPATION[/b]: assistant store manager
[b]HEIGHT[/b]: 5’11
[b]WEIGHT[/b]: 127 lbs
[b]SCARS/TATTOOS/OTHER[/b]: N/A 

[b]PAST AFFILIATES[/b]: 
[list]
[*][u]Marcus Yap[/u]: [i]Hannah's thirty-five-year-old boyfriend of six years[/i];
[*][u]Monica Pritchard[/u]: [i]Hannah's sixty-year-old mother[/i]; 
[*][u]Alfred Pritchard[/u]: [i]Hannah’s fifty-nine-year-old father[/i];
[*][u]Jeremiah Pritchard[/u]: [i]Hannah’s thirty-eight-year-old brother[/i]; 
[*][u]Francine Coxwell[/u]: [i]Hannah’s forty-year-old sister[/i];
[*][u]Johnathan Coxwell[/u]: [i]Francine’s husband and close family friend[/i];
[*][u]Chelsea Coxwell[/u]: [i]Francine's and Johanthan’s twelve-year-old daughter[/i]; 
[*][u]Marshall White[/u]: [i]one of the survivors Hannah lived with up until The Towers until Marshall ultimately took his own life. Hannah hadn't been very close to him but still thinks of him from time-to-time[/i];[/list] 
[b]CURRENT AFFILIATES[/b]: 
[list] 
[*][u]Mary-Ellen Cooper[/u]: [i]a fifty-two-year-old woman and part of Hannah's original group[/i];
[*][u]Elliot Rice[/u]: [i]a twenty-eight-year-old man, from Hannah’s original group, and close friend to Francine[/i];
[*][u]Charles Okeke[/u]: [i]a nineteen-year-old boy, previous neighbor of Hannah’s, close friend, and from Hannah’s original group. Hannah exudes a protective, sisterly nature over Charles[/i];
[*][u]Gerry Tran[/u]: [i]a forty-five-year-old man whose English is fairly limited, from Hannah’s original group[/i][/list]; 

[b]SKILLS[/b]: When the upcycling craze bloomed on Pinterest long ago, Hannah became wrapped up in it. That, paired with her intelligence and creativity, makes Hannah a resourceful ally. She’s also got problem-solving skills down a T, able to work her way out of any situation or find a solution. Even when it’s on a topic she doesn’t yet know, Hannah’s mind will work overtime and pitch plausible ideas (or at least she thinks they are) based off what little understanding she has of it. 

It doesn’t come naturally, but having studied psychology and reading articles about body language, Hannah feels as though her ability to read others is one to not be taken too lightly. When dealing with unknown people, Hannah likes to imagine herself as a social chameleon; she gets others and, through their motives, gets a better understanding of how to act and react in certain circumstances.

In her relationship with Marcus, Hannah was, without a doubt, the handyman of the household. She knows the difference between a Phillips head, slot head and a Robertson screwdriver, or how to hold a handsaw. Maybe she can’t build a whole house, but she does now how to repair a leaky sink.

And, Hannah doesn’t like to brag, but even after the apocalypse, she can make a mean Americano. 

[b]STRENGTHS[/b]: From all the years spent studying, switching majors and always needing answers to trivial questions that keep her awake at night, Hannah is fairly intelligent and studious, having often been on the honor roll or Dean’s List. All throughout school she had been dubbed a nerd or a bookworm; she had an affinity for reading, and not the sappy YA romance novels, either. The hard sci-fi novels, space opera, thriller/mysteries, all the way up to historical non-fiction and textbooks on religion. Likewise, Hannah always has an urge to learn what she sees others doing, wanting to know how things are done or made. Easily Hannah will get the hang of something; she’s a quick learner with a refusal to stop wanting to learn everything. 

Throughout her life many people have said Hannah’s empathic nature is a valued one. She’s a caring and thoughtful person. She understands people, relates to them on a personal level, and is a good listener. It had never been a desire of hers to become a therapist or anything even remotely close, but Hannah’s ability to hear someone’s problem or pain and calm them down, make them feel better or loved is a natural trait she doesn’t think twice about. To Hannah, it’s basic human instinct to care for others so deeply, especially after there’s so very few left to care about. 

[b]WEAKNESSES[/b]: Hannah doesn’t have the toughest skin, nor a strong voice. She’s a pushover, sensitive, soft-spoken and non-confrontational. Her preferred method of dealing with upset or aggressive people is trying to talk things over while combatting overactive nervousness, but even then she won’t speak up or try to defend herself unless absolutely necessary. She's prone to crying when alone, still mourning those that were lost and dwelling on too many questions. On the outside she can appear calm when sifting through corpses, but there's always the one or two that gets to her. She's not a mentally strong nor brave person; she's a team player and will help in any way she can whenever needed, but don't expect Hannah to carry any army into battle. She may cower in the corner instead. 

Though Hannah’s gotten used to the new way of living, she tends to bottle up negative emotions in favor of appearing okay with everything. If something is bothering her, Hannah will try to ignore it or downplay it as nothing too serious. Avoiding issues at all costs is her forte. 

Francine is not a physically strong person; she’s thin, unable to lift a lot of weight and is not nearly coordinated enough to run smoothly for long periods of time.  

[b]HISTORY[/b]: [hider]In a quaint little apartment still in the process of being furnished exclusively by IKEA’s best, Francine lived with her long-term boyfriend, Marcus. Sometimes at night when neither could sleep and all the other conversational possibilities have been worn down, pillow talk of marriage would arise. It was never fully serious – not to the extent Francine wanted – but Francine was more than welcoming of the idea of settling down with Marcus for the remainder of her life.

At a small café near the downtown core’s financial district, Francine worked as the stores’ assistant manager. For months the higher-up’s had been promising Francine a promotion to managerial level and her own store, but it was something Francine doubted deep down within. She was simply too shy and timid, too much of a pushover to want to constantly ask about it for fear of coming off as annoying. Besides, the coworkers at her store were some of her best friends – a makeshift family. To leave them permanently, knowing she would have to replace them, broke her heart more than she would ever admit. She was okay with staying behind if it meant not having to lose the people she grew so close to.

Elsewhere in the city, Francine’s mother and father had officially moved in with their other daughter, Hannah, and her own family of three. Most Sundays Francine and Marcus would have dinner at their place, where sometimes her brother Jeremiah would attend, looking more and more ragged than ever, on some new drug Francine preferred to pretend never existed. It was easier to ignore Jeremiah’s lifestyle, believe they were all one happy, fully-functioning family, and that Jeremiah wasn’t as bad off as Francine knew he was. 

Playing the card of ignorance was better than facing reality. 

When the virus began circulating the news and became a serious threat, Francine and Marcus bunkered down with Hannah’s family and their parents. They stayed in the basement, stockpiled food, listened to the radio until it became too hard to keep hearing so much destruction and death daily. After so long, they shut it off for good. They sat quietly and waited, listened to gunshots and sirens and fires rage on. Very quickly on it became chaos in the streets; people didn’t want to wait for death, it seemed. 

Jeremiah never arrived, never replied to any of their text messages. Francine doubted any got through, what with the millions of other people jamming the airwaves. In some morbid, twisted way that left Francine questioning her sanity ever since, she preferred he didn’t. She wanted to believe, of all of her family, Jeremiah – the strung-out, couch-hopping lowlife – survived, and that he thrived in the new world. Even at his worst, Jeremiah was resilient. Francine liked to imagine him sobering up and rebuilding society single-handedly. 

That thought helped her cope with the images burned into her mind of how, in the cramped, damp basement with mildewed boxes pushed to the sides and enough canned food to last only a week, each and every single last one of her family let out a shudder, a groan, a wet and weak gasp. One-by-one they all went limp, and Francine didn’t know which one to try and help first. She froze, her hands reaching out for Marcus as her eyes fell on her mothers’ worn, weary face that became lifeless, motionless.  

When her body began to respond again, Francine ran to her niece Chelsea’s side, knowing it was what everyone would have wanted. But Chelsea was dead the moment Francine was next to her, frantically shaking her, trying to get any response from the young girl. 

In the end, Francine stood in a room of bodies she once loved and lived for. She was too shocked to do anything but stand stock still, wide-eyed, staring at a pockmark in the brick wall as her mind tried to process anything that had just happened. It felt like an impossible nightmare, one that Francine couldn’t grasp the reality of until it had hit her hard, like a cannonball right in her guts. 

On auto-pilot her feet carried her outside, looking for help or an escape or something to explain what really happened. Standing on her front lawn covered in crispy brown leaves, she saw the teenage boy from across the street, Charles. Without a word shared between the two, they crossed the gap of concrete and grass between them in a second and embraced one another, and for a solid day they sat on the grass and wept heavier than ether had in a long time. 

After two days of searching for help – or other living people – and finding only more bodies that further reduced the duo to tears and emotional exhaustion, they returned to their homes. It was an agreement they made that they couldn’t return home and see their families again. Instead, both gathered their belongings and left before any attachment could pull them back. Even as they walked down the road in a hurry with knapsacks on their backs, Francine wanted to run back just to make sure her family wasn’t still alive the whole time.  

Eventually Francine and Charles made their way to the EMS station a few blocks over, still hoping help would arrive. Instead, after a few days of total silence in-between sobs and fits, a small group of regular people showed up. There were three of them, making a group of five in total. It was getting colder outside, and no one from the group wanted to see any more corpses, so they remained indoors for a few months. Over that time, Francine learned to cope a bit more with the loss of her entire family through the help of total strangers that became very close to her. Calling them friends wasn’t quite right; they were more than that, and in a different way. 

Come February, the supplies had gotten lower and it began to make more sense to leave their pseudo-home. Trekking out into the cold, blistering wind, bundled up and unprepared for it, they made their way from building-to-building, becoming inner-city nomads. Through that way of surviving they found another survivor, Gerry Tran, who was unable to communicate very well but became a quick fixture of their group. English or not, Gerry was part of them, and they relied on him just as much as he did to them.

The group headed for The Emerald Towers as it was the next closest residential spot, and that day had been a particularly bad one. They walked through the front doors, set down their packs, took a moment to shake out the cold from their bones, and saw three other people – Annette, Alexander and Amina. It was a relief to see other living beings for a change, and despite the weather, that night had been the first time Francine laughed in a long while.

When one of their group, Marshall, jumped from the rooftop and committed suicide, Francine simply stared at his body half-buried under the snow from the warmth of inside. Amongst the sadness, pity and regret, Francine felt disappointment, and slight anger. She cried for him, but not in the way she had for the others. There wasn’t as much emotion or effort behind those tears shed. It just wasn’t possible to keep crying like that anymore. 

Since the beginning of The Towers, Francine learned to look at the bodies with a little less humanity and sorrow. They became a trademark of the city; they were not things she let herself think about, or feel things over. It made scavenging for supplies more bearable. It made getting through each day less depressing. 

It made it easier to not feel guilt every time she laughed or smiled or had a light-hearted conversation with someone. It also made her question her sanity and what became of her, that she felt so disconnected and unaffected. But those were thoughts she never let leave her head. 

It made life easier that way.[/hider]