[center][img]https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/659178548620451840/RQynt4Mn.jpg[/img]
[i]“There’s no happy ending, so they say,”[/i] [/center]

[b]Basic Info[/b]
Name: Liliya. 
Age: Twenty two. 
Inspiration: Fallout Four Settler. 

[b]Appearance[/b] 
Height: Five foot seven. 
Weight: One hundred and five pounds. 
Build: Willowy, if malnourished. 
Short Description: Liliya is leggier than most in the colony, with a look about her suggesting she may have been several inches taller had the diet of her people contained a higher nutritional content, possessed of thick, even bushy eyebrows, full lips, a slightly upturned nose and striking sea green eyes. She is noticeably too thin for her height, though not any more so than most of the other colonists eking out a living in the wastes, with high cheekbones and a strong jaw overemphasized by her spare figure. Possessed of a naturally pale skin tone befitting her auburn hair, the near constant pallor cast by the cloud cover has produced a pallid, near reticulant complexion which serves only to further her somewhat unhealthy appearance. 

[b]History[/b] 
The eldest of three children, if only by a few minutes, born to a rare couple who actually cared for one another beyond the desire for the occasional, casual distraction and a warm body to aid in passing the frigid nights slightly more comfortably found all too commonly among the colonists who call the wastes home. An idyllic moment frozen in time, serene against the backdrop of the falling sky just beyond the little spot on which the burgeoning family had made a home for themselves, or so they say. Life went on like this for several years, and the twins, a boy and a girl, grew as children do, with never quite enough to eat but never so little as to risk starvation. After a time another was born, a boy, and for two more years their happy little family held together in relative harmony despite the acid rain, boiling heat and scathing cold. As the years passed the joyous mother developed a cough, nothing at first, then everything all at once. A simple illness, easily treated in the time before, now fatal, and with the death of her mother the wistful bliss faded away like smoke and ashes caught in the breeze. 

Liliya and Mykola, her twin brother, would come to remember little of their mother and Olexiy, the youngest, nothing at all. Those that knew their father would tell the children of the dreamer he had been before and during his time with their mother, of the places he wished to visit one day and the wonders he would show the people of the colony. He was a reader, perhaps even a philosopher by the standards of the wastes, and had always claimed that just beyond the edges of their little part of the world there were places unaffected by the changes which had irreparably damaged their region. In these places trees grew tall and lush with foliage, and people lived as they had before. The rain which fell there was fresh and cool, petrichor a scent not only something the old, grey, and blind could recall but a common, in some places near daily occurrence. The colonists would laugh his fanciful claims away, some rather insultingly, even the most gracious remarks their mother Larysa could manage always coming out at best sounding chiding and insincere. Wastelanders as a whole tend not to believe in some mystical better place, and their colony after all had water, some food, and most valuable of all, relative peace. Still, he believed. 

After Larysa’s death, he stopped believing. He had in his spare time taught the children of the colony to read, and they were the only ones who didn’t ridicule his fanciful notions of the beauty that was the world outside the wastes. After her death, he never again touched the books that had been his life. He stopped reading to the children just as he stopped in life, seemingly frozen in an endless rut thereafter. He had never become hostile or cruel as many who have lost their loved ones do, but he never again smiled, laughed, joked. The wonder of the world that could have been vanished along with Larysa. This was the man Liliya, Mykola, and Olexiy would come to remember as their father, only hearing the rest eight years after their mother’s death when their father, too, fell ill and shortly thereafter went to join their mother. With little in the way of skill or position Liliya and Mykola took up the mantle of caring for Olexiy, and after learning of their father’s once pastime of reading to the children of the colony and in turn teaching them to read renewed the practice, having themselves continued to read all the while, the only escape from the drudgery of their little lives offered them. 

As a child Liliya had dreamed of seeing a world like that in the fantasy book she had read a thousand times, where children rode in mechanized cubes called, “lifts,” and played tag across vast buildings of brick and stone which towered into the sky and had more than a single floor contained within them upon which to walk, even though the ground might be forty feet below the level upon which you stood. A world in which something called a steam engine propelled things called trains, hollow metal boxes that moved horizontally rather than vertically as did lifts from what she could gather, and you could run from an elevated place and jump down onto the tops of these things and ride to faraway places until you came to where you wanted to be and jumped back down to solid earth. A world in which vast wooden things called, “ships,” carried many people across a body of water so vast you couldn’t see the other side called, “seas,” and heroic figures did battle with swords and cannon against evildoers who tried to take their boats by force. Supposedly the water was salt and not fit for drinking, but it didn’t matter to her. She would even have settled for a world in which there were actually places you might happen to want to go beyond where you slept, where you cooked, and where you gathered water. 

As time passed, however, these dreams faded from the forefront of Liliya’s mind. A local boy, the son of a man with position and relative wealth in the colony, had taken an interest in her and, though not overly fond of him, she had taken the advice of Mykola and what few friends she had in the colony and started to spend more and more time with him. He hadn’t grown on her yet even after seven years, but the extra bits of food had done wonders to keep Olexiy fit and healthy, he would grow be the tallest in the colony at this rate and had already been offered an apprenticeship with a tinsmith, and the fanciful tales of youth were increasingly relegated to the time she spent reading with the children of the colony. The life of a wastelander had never quite felt right to her, however, the complacency to live day to day without purpose beyond simple survival commonplace among colonists never having taken hold over her. She yearned for something more, something different, perhaps not the worlds of fantasy from her youth, but something greater than just scraping by while the world devoured itself and everyone in it right in front of her eyes. Of course, there isn’t anything out there to find, nothing more than warlords, slavery and a slow, painful death in the sand. In this world there are no happy endings. 

[b]Personality[/b] 
A born introvert, Liliya is slow to make friends, and often seems distant to those she has made. Despite this she is zealously loyal to those who few who have gained her trust, even displaying the occasional moment of friendly cheer in their company, though it should be expected that she will often need time to be alone, even while in the company of close friends. Anxious by nature, and quick to question the motives of those she doesn’t trust completely she can come off as hostile at inappropriate times, and she is keenly aware and rather sensitive of this aspect of her personality. Despite this, she is rather hopeful for the world that is and that could be, never having quite lost the curiosity and wanderlust of youth, and is willing to risk everything to see the world change, grow, and become something altogether different, -- whatever that might happen to look like. 

[b]Equipment[/b] 
Clothing: As with many in the colonies who don’t fill some sort of specialist, high demand role Liliya wears the one or two ragged sets of clothing someone of her status can afford to upkeep. Whether they were denim, leather, or wool in the beginning everything anymore mostly looks like a patchwork quilt of the three materials and more, shaped and crudely fashioned to be worn over legs and hips, torso and arms, the colors faded and stained from bits of off color lizard blood, the ruddy mud from gathering water at the stream, and anything else that happens to get on them, never quite coming out without the quality soaps and chemical abrasives of the days before the world burned away. Liliya never knew that world, of course, and the stains and shoddy quality of her dress rarely catch her attention, or that of her fellow colonists. Notably she owns what was once a burgundy leather jacket and a wide brimmed charcoal wool hat, both now patchwork as with the rest of her attire, though in noticeably better repair than the rest, as well as a thick woolen shawl patterned with what were once geometric patterns for the frigid nights left to her by her father, all understandably oversized for her person despite her attempts to refit them. 

Other: As a colonist, Liliya’s most treasured possessions were a torn and battered book of poetry and spoken verse meant for children, a political treatise rendered irrelevant by the end of civilization, and a fictional novel about youthful adventurers in a fantastical world, the third of six in its series, left to her father by her maternal grandmother, and then to her and her brothers. She knows each by heart, and used to read to the children in the colony from them, though their ownership now lies with her brothers, keeping only the memories with her. Existing reading material is rare in the colony, the majority long since burned as fuel for a fire by the colonists or abandoned as excess weight somewhere along the way, and she would be the last to deprive her brothers and the colony of any such remaining writings. 

[b]Events[/b]