[center][h1][/h1][/center] [center][img]https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/6a/a0/ef/6aa0ef8a0845fe36a917ebbba40637c1.jpg[/img][/center] [center][quote=Alice][i]“Let’s see you talk shit with your teeth in your stomach!”[/i][/quote][/center] [b]Name:[/b] Alice Volkov [b]Code Name:[/b] “Wild Card” [b]Age:[/b] 19 [b]Gender:[/b] Female [b]Appearance: [/b] [list] [*]Long, side-swept sandy blonde hair spills down Alice’s back in layers. A choppy fringe falls across her forehead, occasionally tumbling in front of her eyes. Alice absolutely refuses to pin it up or crop it functionally short; she hasn’t quite grasped the concept of professionalism or maturity. Or not looking like some scruffy vagrant that just stumbled in off the street. [*]Biracial; born to a Russian father and Chinese mother. [*]Rarely found without some sort of bandage or gauze plastered to her cheek or across the bridge of her nose. She may be a “professional” now (and that term is used both very, very loosely and with great caution) but still can’t resist getting into the occasional scrap. (The term “occasional” is also used quite hesitantly.) [*]Her features are soft and youthful, granting her the unique ability to be carded for alcohol until age 42. Small, delicate lips twist into a cocky, cyanide sneer that tries to smother all the hurt and remorse wide, expressive eyes betray. Those eyes are the textbook example of natural selection; the brown hue is so intense, so dark, it devours any and all flecks of other colors that might try to poke through. [*]Collarbones that could open letters and hipbones that could cut glass emphasize Alice’s slender physique. While narrow, she’s still relatively toned, though geared more towards deft, agile maneuvers than anything dwelling even in the same realm as bodybuilding. She’s lithe, not ridiculously scrawny but not desirably full-figured, either, and she has that tense sort of slouch one adopts after years of acting on the “fight” side of the “fight or flight” instinct. She’s got the posture of someone who’s just trying to get through life; the skulky, tentative sort of swagger that implies Alice’s cocky, arrogant disposition runs a little shallower than first glance might suggest. [*]A flippant, devil-may care shrug here and a sharp, brash laugh there try their damndest to compensate for nights spent staring at the ceiling, eyes burning and throat tight and lips aching from the weight of unspoken worries. Her voice is low and somewhat husky, elevating into a harsh, aggressive shout when she’s either flustered or angry. [*]Despite not striking a very imposing figure, she’s moderately tall, in comparison to the statistical average, at least, clocking in at approximately 5’6”. [*]The day Alice shows up to an event without scraped knuckles and bruised fists is probably the day the world will break in half. [/list] [b]Psychological Profile:[/b] The art of battle is a delicate one, and has, contrary to popular assumption, little basis in physical ability. It isn’t quite about who can hit the hardest. It’s about who’s absolutely batshit stupid enough to keep clawing and flailing and punching and screaming long after the upper hand’s been ripped from one’s grasp. Alice is indeed that special brand of batshit stupid. Prancing through life with an infuriatingly cocky grin and enough cheerful arrogance to power a small regiment, it’s little wonder this kid makes enemies nearly everywhere she goes. She’s quick to judge and even quicker to dismiss; it’s this flippant sort of insouciance, especially regarding serious situations, that makes those enemies turn to nemeses. (She’s keeping a running tally of how many people have publicly declared her their eternal archenemy. It’s rather hefty. Again with the outright lack of caring for others’ opinions.) Could this arrogance be some sort of defense mechanism protecting a soft, fragile inside? Not quite, but not entirely false, either. She’s truly afraid of being hurt or abandoned, especially by someone she considers a comrade, so she preemptively tries to scare them all off to eliminate that increasingly real possibility. A rapier wit and sharp tongue deftly craft unique insults, and as Alice is quite the wordsmith - albeit not in the conventional sense - also bestow inventive, if not a tad bit vulgar, nicknames on most of those with whom she’s acquainted. Things such as “joyless shitpail” or “ass-for-brains” number amongst her favorites. Further expanding on Alice’s list of negative qualities is her love for the profane; she speaks in a crass, disrespectful, gruff sort of manner unbefitting of someone in her position. She’s also hopelessly naive, interpreting everything at face value. She’ll rarely pick up on a hidden meaning or double entendre, leaving her rather oblivious to the subtleties of human nature. She’s still not convinced that the worst monsters out there aren’t the ones with fur and fangs and wings. Alice tends to tackle life with the sort of naive, enthusiastic optimism only a child could procure. Despite her truly rotten personality, she does tend to look on the bright side of things. Or, at least views everything as a challenge she will overcome. Nothing’s insurmountable in her mind, not even the strongest person with the biggest army. (She practically subsists on defiance and determination alone; her willpower is truly staggering.) As such, she tackles life with a cheerful sort of zeal - whether it’s true bravery or simply idiocy is a matter of heated debate. She’s also quite excitable, particularly when the prospect of anything she considers “cool” - such as explosions, or train heists, or hostage recovery - rears its tantalizing head. Yet another one of Alice’s downfalls - this erring more on the side of a fatal flaw than any of the prior - is her aggressive disposition. Governed almost completely by the side-effects of her bloodline, she absolutely loves to fight - loves the dizzying, intoxicating rush she gets whenever the adrenaline starts coursing through her veins, loves the flutter she gets in her heart when she thinks she’s about to die, loves the thrill of the danger - of the possibility she might lose. Nothing gets that infuriating grin of hers going more than a proper brawl. She’s an adrenaline junkie born and bred, and she’s yet to realize that just because no one’s died doesn’t mean it can be considered a victory. She’s a stupid kid playing pretend in the world of adults, and one day, that eagerness to fight and lack of maturity is going to get her killed. [b]Specialty:[/b] [i]Assault - Melee[/i] Alice has a soft spot in her heart for beating people into the ground, and it’s something she’s rather good at. Tactics and strategies crumble in the face of improvisation - it’s why she’s only got one small, flimsy little weapon. The element of surprise, raw determination, and a good offense are the only defense she boasts she needs. [b]Skill Appraisal:[/b] [i] [/i] [b]Bloodline:[/b] [i][/i] - With each blow Alice endures that spills her blood (as in a cut, contusion that splits open, or particularly nasty break), her strength and agility magnify. In layman’s terms, with every lacerating hit, she grows stronger, going from struggling to shove someone back to being able to punch a hole through someone’s chest. Her constitution is relatively sturdy, enabling her to absorb damage without flinching or faltering up to a certain point. The more serious the injury, the quicker the “strength” regeneration, making her difficult to overpower and kill - but not impossible. However, it’s not like the increase in power is infinite; there’s a cap, and it’s lower than one might think. It’s directly linked to the amount of damage she can take without dying. The longer this bloodline is evoked, the more exhausted she’ll become - there’s a very real possibility she’ll collapse mid-hit, fall comatose after a grueling battle, or simply bleed out in the middle of a fight and die. Because of her unusual bloodline, and because even she’s not stupid enough (or bound by a code of honor) to wait for the enemy to inflict some sort of wound on her to “power up”, she’ll often bite at the side of her hand or drag the blade of her weapon across her palm before things get heated. [hider=Personal History] Rarely do the bloodlines of a warlord mix with the bloodlines of someone wholly unremarkable, but such was the case of Alice’s father and mother. No one is quite sure what made the renowned (in the world of illicit street fights, at least), austere, terrifying incarnation of death itself fall for the silver-tongued librarian with little more than a dusty old corner shop to his name. It could have been the books. It could have been the smiles. It could have been the normalcy, something someone of a warrior bloodline had never known beyond a few fleeting glimpses. Whatever the cause, they soon fell in hopeless, irrevocable love. It’s said they were like a firework - strong and dazzling while it lasted, but fizzled out and faded just as deftly as it’d begun. They wed quickly and discreetly with a back-alley preacher presiding over the ceremony, and soon found themselves with a little bundle of sleep-deprivation and responsibility all of their own. Alice’s mother, despite letting her father have sole responsibility for naming her (a smart move, given that she’d made a few enemies of her own, and didn’t want anyone tracing her connection with her husband or daughter to hurt them), leapt into motherhood with reckless abandon. It was sort of scary, seeing someone normally so icy and composed suddenly launch into cooing and crooning whenever her kid took a proper step. Crooning led to encouragement, and encouragement led to training. Alice was purchased her first human anatomy diagram at age 9, but not for any sort of medical purposes. Her mother wanted her to be able to defend herself, and so an in-depth course on where the best, most tender place to punch someone began. (She wasn’t the most morally sound parent, yes, but no one could deny she didn’t love her daughter with all her heart. She gave her the only thing she had: the ability to forge a place in the world with her bare hands.) As for Alice’s father, he gave his daughter the next best thing: the ability to be human. Probably, he was a bit more lenient than he should have been, but the man was a pushover. A total sweetheart. He had two wild dogs in his life and yet he somehow was the domesticated one. (But that was quite all right, because at least he taught his little girl how to cook - at the very least, he thought, if she was going to die young, it wouldn’t be from starvation.) In between training her little menace and beating the absolute shit out of her routine opponents (she accepted payment in the form of lots and lots of dollars), Alice’s mother adopted a second, side profession. While she didn’t expressly call it “paid shake-downs and also lots of intimidating because damn it Barbara you have to pay your debt to Susan”, she probably wouldn’t have referred to it differently while under oath. It was a dangerous job, especially for someone with an ability like hers. (Alice would later discover she’d inherited it almost entirely, save for a few crucial failsafes.) Much like her marriage, Alice’s mother was a firework, and one brutal, surly drunken man with a wicked choke-hold was all it took to fizzle out her flame. She died fast, and she died fighting, much as she’d lived. By this point, Alice’s father’s book rental store had all but crumbled under the staggering weight of a horrible economy, and that, combined with the sudden loss of someone whom they’d both cared so dearly loved, sent the entire family spiraling down into the pits of despair. While they weren’t quite impoverished, nor were they close to starving, it was painfully clear that Alice’s mother’s fights had been the only true source of income for quite some time now. The mournful, pained, almost self-loathing looks her father shot the piles of books lying around the house were more than enough of an indicator. Alice knows she’s not a hero; she knew that even from childhood. She’s not cut out for gleaming wreaths of laurels or gold metals. Someone like her simply doesn’t deserve that kind of happiness. But something inside her twisted every time she saw her father grow to hate what he once loved, gripping her heart like a rope of icy thorns. She’d grown up fighting, play-sparring and learning to defend herself, so it wasn’t that much of a stretch to take her bloodlust to the big leagues. She lied to her father, told him she was going to get an honest job at some convenience store. Instead of coming home with hard-earned paychecks, she’d stalk into the house at unreasonably late hours, a crumpled wad of fifties clutched firmly in her bruised grip. Street fighting wasn’t that hard. Sure, she broke a few bones, paid the hospital a few trips for abrasions that bordered on open holes, and in one scary instance stumbled home with a knife in her shoulder, but it paid the bills. Besides, it made her father - she didn’t know how to call it, it wasn’t true happiness, but maybe it was pride. Maybe he felt like even if he were a useless failure, his offspring wasn’t. But it wasn’t enough. The payouts became more and more meagre, the spectators began to grumble - began to question the whole arrangement’s integrity. If someone swept in, waving around something like Alice’s bloodline, they could conceivably have the entire tournament in the bag without so much as an iota of effort. And so, Alice decided that perhaps she ought to up her game. Perhaps she ought to use all her talent for beating people up for a better cause - or, rather, a better-paying cause. As such, she found herself applying for the training academy. Not out of any loyalty to her country, mind you. She was just really, really desperate for a stable source of income, and at any rate, law enforcement seemed like a pretty reasonable bet. The entrance exams were fairly difficult - save for the combat portion, of course - but by nothing short of a miracle, Alice was accepted. She spent a few months drifting about the various squadrons, causing trouble and raising hell like the hellion she is, and eventually, a transfer was filed, shuffling her off to Division Six where hopefully, the others might keep her in line.[/hider] [b]Weaponry:[/b] Ever the fan of all things showy, needlessly brutal, and wholly unnecessary, Alice’s weapon of choice is a set of spiked brass knuckles. That are mounted on a knife. Certainly not quite the armaments one might expect a member of a branch of law enforcement to carry, but they get the job done nonetheless. [img]http://cdn3.volusion.com/xgvnc.rgmke/v/vspfiles/photos/knuckles-aoknuckleknife-2.jpg[/img] [b]Other relevant information: [/b] [list] [*]Her hobbies include sleeping during case briefings, heckling her enemies, heckling her crushes, heckling her friends, spontaneous, wanton destruction, violent video games, laughing at whiny twelve-year-olds on aforementioned violent video games, picking fights, and overcompensating for an alarmingly small sense of self-worth. [*]In terms of attire, Alice’s clothing preferences are decidedly conventionally “masculine”. When told to dress up formally, she would go for a dress shirt and slacks before the thought of wearing a skirt would even begin crossing her mind. Typical garb, especially while on the job, consists of a button-down shirt, fitted pants, with some kind of hooded sweatshirt thrown over the entire ensemble. [*]Surprisingly enough, Alice can cook like a fiend. Culinary prowess is the only aspect of her life that she’s willing to invest actual time and effort. [/list]