Name: Alicia Signe Nilsson
Age: 23
Gender: Female
Sexuality: Heterosexual
Appearance: Standing a modest 5'6 and weighing 120 pounds, Alicia is a classic Nordic beauty, with clear pale skin, light blonde hair and a pair of water-blue eyes. She's slim and willowy, but not
entirely shapeless; she doesn't have a whole lot going on in the hips or bust, but manages a feminine figure well enough.
When it comes to clothes, Alicia can dress it up or down depending on the circumstances, but always likes to keep it classy. She likes to look polished, nothing forgotten or overlooked. She keeps her nails neatly manicured and painted, wears just enough makeup not to look sloppy, and is never one to just let her hair do any old thing. She's not huge on trends, and instead likes to stick to tried-and-true classics, though she's not beyond at least looking at the latest styles. When she dresses down she still keeps everything coordinated, and when she dresses up, look out for a bombshell.
Personality: Alicia is an overall upbeat individual. She loves to be around people, especially family, and loves to fill in whichever niche needs filling in a group. Mom friend? Sure! Party animal? If you need one, she's got you. Typically, though, she falls into the category of the glass-half-full type of girl who won't let you get yourself down, just as likely to sit and talk with you over a cup of something warm as she is to pull you out onto the dance floor so you'll lighten up a little. In a family gathering, she's usually the one trying to make her relatives smile and catching up as she stirs a pot of hot cocoa made the
right way.
For all her social aptitude, though, Alicia has a hard time being alone. She's been able to cope with it fairly well with the help of her therapy dog Balder, but she will always do her best to find company with friends or strangers alike. She sometimes worries about coming off as needy, but her friends and family members understand her issues with being alone; it's with new people that she gets a little nervous that she'll scare them away.
Biography: Alicia was born in Stockholm, Sweden, every bit an upper-class urban child. Her parents divorced shortly after she was born, and she was left with her mother, a narcissistic woman with high expectations and a talent for pushing whichever buttons were necessary to get the result she wanted. Alicia grew up in the sort of home that looked like something out of a magazine, with the caveat that it was cold and eerily clean and you weren't supposed to speak too loudly. Her mother was harshly critical of everything, from the cut of her clothes to the packaging on her coffee, and nothing, not even Alicia, was safe from her cold, analyzing gaze.
Growing up, Alicia was expected to behave more or less like a small adult. Errors were met with swift and severe corrections, and nowhere was this more evident than in her study of the violin. Alicia's mother had been a violin player in her day, but had never been able to rise to the higher echelons of her craft; in an effort to experience that success again, she started Alicia on the violin as soon as she could hold one, and made sure her daughter would have the skill and opportunity she had been lacking. Alicia did become a skilled violinist over the years, but not from passion. Her mother made her practice until her fingers bled and sucked all the joy out of the violin; no, her drive was to earn some modicum of approval from her mother. She was becoming a recognized talent in her field, finally earning some pride from her mother, until it all came crashing down around her.
When she was thirteen, Alicia came down with meningitis. It was touch and go for a while, but she did pull through; unfortunately, not exactly in one piece. As a result of the infection, Alicia lost almost all of her hearing in both ears, and she was declared legally deaf. Her mother, thinking her dreams of having a renowned violinist for a daughter had been dashed, never got over it. She visited Alicia less and less as she recovered, and when the day came that Alicia was to be released from the hospital, her mother didn't come for her. The hospital tried to contact her, but they found all of her phone numbers disconnected; when they called her place of work, they were told she'd never worked there.
With no other family to reach out to, the hospital contacted child services, and after a few stressful days a very distraught Alicia was placed in a foster home for disabled children. Fortunately the home was pleasant; the children were taken care of and treated well, and given education that would cater to their individual disabilities. Still, Alicia floated through like a ghost, just barely learning sign language but falling behind in her other studies. She developed severe separation anxiety and showed a great fear of being left alone, so much so that they had to move her into a shared room with another girl just so she could sleep.
Unbeknownst to her, a kind foreign couple had shown interest in adopting from the home, and she was fifteen when everything was settled and arrangements were made for her to join a new family in the suburban sprawl of Ottawa. By and large it was a miracle, a disabled teenager with such anxieties being adopted, but Mr. and Mrs. Smith took every challenge in stride and enthusiastically pursued a more comfortable life for their new daughter.
It did take time, but Alicia warmed up to her new parents fairly quickly, thriving with their love and support. They got her therapy and education, and before long she had caught up with her age group in the field of general education; by some miracle and a lot of hard work, she graduated high school right on time.
Her separation anxiety and fear of abandonment did improve, but never quite went away; she was still never comfortable being home alone or going places on her own. Luckily the Smiths were a large family (an environment in which Alicia thrived) with many siblings and hardly ever an empty house, but when the time came for her to go away to university, she struggled. In an effort to make the transition more tolerable, she was put on a list for a service animal and was eventually paired with a young Dalmatian trained as a therapy dog. She named him Balder and he quickly became a constant companion. With his help, she has been able to do her undergrad and even continue on to law school, with hopes of becoming a tax lawyer.
When it came to being Fragmented, Alicia didn't really think about it much. Throughout her life there always seemed to be something more pressing to worry about; impressing her birth mother, coping with her abandonment, keeping up with her education; it was all much more immediately important to her than sating that longing in her gut. The threat of becoming Lost always seemed distant, like news of a tragedy in a faraway country; sad to think about, sure, but detached and disconnected, and hard to
really care about. But when a letter arrived inviting her to a week in luxury to find her other half, she took it as a sign that it was finally time to address that pull in her chest, and get that aspect of her life figured out so she could leave the troubles of her past behind for good and craft a bright, successful future.
★ Other: - Alicia communicates mainly in American Sign Language; she can speak verbally, but her words come out muffled and odd and she doesn't like to do it often. She does, however, love to laugh. She can read lips to some extent in Swedish, but it's a huge pain and she prefers sign language.
- Alicia speaks and reads fluent Swedish and understands fluent English; she can speak a little bit of English verbally (namely "thank you", "medium double-double", and "hospital"), but it's especially warped. She's also, of course, fluent in ASL.
- To communicate with hearing people who don't know sign language, Alicia has a text-to-speech app on her phone. It isn't perfect, but she uses it to transcribe what people say to her, and then types out her response. As a result, she's gotten very quick at typing with her thumbs.
- If one wants Alicia's attention, she usually prefers them to come into her range of vision and flag her down that way, but in a crowd she doesn't mind a gentle tap on the shoulder. She doesn't like to be startled, though, so the people who know her have taken to stepping heavily as they approach so she can feel their footsteps, or even texting her before approaching so she's not caught off-guard.
- Alicia's family is made up entirely of adopted siblings. Her parents couldn't have children of their own, but had the money and the will to adopt a whopping ten children at varying ages, many with disabilities or behavioural issues that other prospective families often found too much to bear. Every year around Christmas, the entire family (including Alicia's siblings' many children) gathers at a large cottage in Northern Ontario for two weeks, and Alicia wouldn't miss it for the world.
- Alicia can play piano, which she particularly enjoys because she can feel the vibrations when she really clangs away at it. She hasn't even looked at a violin since her illness.
- Colour code baa7c7
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