B A L L - H O O T :

GENERAL

Name: Emma Lane Lilywhite
Nickname(s): Em.
Gender/Pronouns: Female, she/her/hers
Birthdate/Age: December 25/17
Grade: Senior.
Sexuality: Don't worry about it.

Major Arcana: The Hierophant. (While the upright Hierophant stands for conformity, tradition, convention, the reverse focuses on challenging the status quo and feeling restricted by rules and structure. Both the upright and reverse readings are very focused on doing the "right" thing, but the reversed Hierophant is a little more confused about what the "right" thing is and how to get there.)
Minor Arcana: Wands.

Concept: Reckless redneck knows aliens are real, could take one in a fight.

Height:	5'7"	Hair Color:	Black.
Build:	Soft but sturdy.	Eye Color:	Brown.

Your girl Emma here doesn't look like she cleans up too nice. Her hair is a half-brushed mess on a daily basis, thrown into the sloppiest bun she thinks she can get away with. In uniform, she always seems to be forgetting something, and she switches to shorts way too early in the year. Out of uniform, her stained flannels and t-shirts, boots and boxy cargo shorts give her a strong "forest lesbian" aesthetic, and she carries herself with a swagger that does not match her incredibly average size.

When it does come time to get fancy, though, Emma goes d r a m a t i c. This is about standing out, not looking good, and she slaps on that winged eyeliner and glitter lipstick, contours the hell out of those fucking cheekbones and climbs on top of ridiculous heels. This is no country girl cleans up cute kind of deal; Emma looks like a drag queen, and then she doesn't clean herself up after. She inevitably passes out with the makeup still on, smearing it all over her pillow, while the smell of hairspray and fresh nail polish linger for days.

Emma's accent is a fuckin' hoot. Having grown up in isolated West Virginia, raised by proud, self-identified mountain folk, Emma talks fast, and she talks hillbilly.

PB: Geraldine Viswanathan.

Likes: Smashing the patriarchy, challenging the status quo, fucking with the FCC, fast trucks, aggressively over the top makeup, cargo shorts, big slobbery dogs, cats that are total assholes, climbing trees, hunting, fishing, bad jokes, whiskey.

Dislikes: The FCC, the FCC's lacking sense of humor, reading, writing, tests, gin hangovers, an unsmashed patriarchy, unsalted popcorn.
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Let's get one thing out of the way up front: there is no secret soft side to Emma. It's not that she's spiky and spoiling for a fight, it's more that she's a brick wall: hard, blunt, inflexible. She does not acknowledge emotions, she is not swayed by appeals to her humanity or guilt, and anyone experiencing an honest to god breakdown near her is going to get a punch in the arm before anything else. If, god forbid, Emma ever does feel an emotion, she more or less dissociates from it. That weird pang she feels when someone tells her she looks just like her father? That belongs to someone else, and boy is that someone else a total pussy.

Emma is a very physical, tactile person in general. Interacting with her means you're about to get punched, your hair's gonna get tugged, or someone's about to put you in a headlock so hopefully you know how to wrestle. Hers is not a mind that deals with the abstract terribly well, and the nuances of words and body language are part of that abstract. The only way to get something stuck in her head is by letting her physically experience it. If you don't like her, punch her in the face. If you do like her, I guess also punch her in the face. It's a complicated system, and it's one that makes classes, like, really goddamn hard.

Emma has never succeeded in a traditional school environment. She was never going to. It's always been a struggle to get her to sit down and focus, reading gives her headaches, tests give her anxiety, and grades make her feel dumb. But Emma is a hard worker. It doesn't look like it when she's trying to prop up her book so you don't see her napping in class, and it may not seem like it when she's trying to get an extension on a paper and googling tips on how to make her essay longer, but Emma isn't afraid of hard work. She'll work herself to the bone if that's what she's gotta do, she just doesn't see why she should do extra work if it's not, like, absolutely necessary.

This extends to all areas of her life, even the ones where she kills it. Emma will go hard in things like training or sports or drinking, unafraid to burn out or die awesomely. But if there's some trick that'll give her an extra advantage, ain't no shame in taking a shortcut. Hell, integrity's a four-letter word, and why would you care how you achieved your goal as long as you got there in the end? As far as your girl is concerned, the ends will always justify the means.

Emma has a LOT of confidence in most of her abilities. Outside of school, she can't really think of a single flaw she might have, so y'all're welcome for the gift that is Emma Lilywhite. It should be annoying. It probably is annoying, and you would expect her to be one of those obnoxious assholes that always has to poke the bear, one that winds up the prickly kids just to pass the time. And it's not like she'll back down from a fight; even in a school full of kids literally trained to fight monsters, Emma's about 98% sure she can kick all y'all's asses and she ain't too worried about it. She just doesn't feel like she's gotta get in the middle of some schoolwide dick measuring contest just to prove it.

Emma is undoubtedly intense, but she has a pretty chill sense of humor. She likes to laugh, and she likes to make other people laugh. She's a bullshit artist who's gonna tell all o' you about that badass new hollow earth conspiracy she saw when she spent eight straight hours scrolling through Reddit last night. Most of this shit ain't that serious y'all, it's fine. Very few things seem to be worth taking seriously, and she'll joke and bullshit through the tensest situations. If you think Emma doesn't even take her own life very seriously, you'd be justified in thinking so, and you're probably kind of right. Fear and concern for one's own life is one of those emotions that belong to the dissociated Emma, who's a little bitch I tell you what, because THIS Emma will run straight into certain death if that's what's needed.

But ONLY if that's what's been deemed the most strategically viable option, and her leader isn't being all insistent that they all stay alive or whatever. Emma comes across as needlessly reckless or as a hothead, but she's very cool under pressure. Her choices, while not always objectively the SMARTEST or BEST, are not borne out of panic. Emma took a breath, she thought about it, and she still decided this was the best course of action. And she has been known to make smart decisions; she's very resourceful, she's quick on her feet and with her hands, strong and steady and aware of her surroundings. Being smart is just not what she's, like, known for.

Ham Radio: Who needs Instagram anyways? Ham radios are allowed in Green Bank, the GBT employees just ask that you let them know about it. Maybe work with them and don't operate while the scientists are working. The Lilywhites are notorious for being hard as hell to work with. But, hey, Emma's met some real weird ass folks on this old radio, and that's worth the fines and headaches.

Morse Code: Sometimes people use Morse code on ham radios. Those people say the weirdest shit of all.

Hunting and fishing: There's a grocery store in town, but they overcharge and there's a lot of mouths to feed over here. The girls spent much of their youth hunting and fishing for both sport and sustenance, and Emma's a hell of a shot. She maybe don't got the patience to be some great fisherman or whatever, but she ain't gotta be ""great"" to bring food home.

Survival First Aid: It's not like she's got a license, but if you get in shit while in the woods, it can be hard to get word out without a cell phone or radio or anything. Emma knows the basics of where to pinch to stem the bleeding and when to worry about a snake bite, or how long a human can survive without water, but maybe not so much about disinfecting the wound and how long you need to ice that.

Sewing: Emma's normally a very utilitarian sewer; she can mend most of her clothes in a blink of an eye or slap a patch on something and call it fashion. Sometimes she'll do a bitchy cross-stitch, though.

Cooking: Meat and potatoes kind of cooking. Emma doesn't know any fancy recipes and she's not getting creative with it, so don't ask. If you want a plate of pancakes or a leftovers casserole, though, y'all're in for a treat.

Makeup: It's really more about the confidence than anything. Emma tried to learn how to do makeup from YouTube tutorials, and after managing to get about three of them to load she just kind of ran with it from there.

Family:

Hometown: Green Bank, WV.

Green Bank is home to the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, the world’s largest fully steerable radio telescope, and the very heart of the U.S. National Radio Quiet Zone. Radio transmissions are strictly controlled in the area, and especially so in their little pocket, meaning there’s no WiFi, no cell service, and if you want to use a microwave, hopefully you know how to build a Faraday cage.

If there’s one thing you can say about Emma, it’s that she grew up under a 485-foot-tall telescope that listens to space. It’s a very specific thing to say. But it was a very specific upbringing.

Green Bank is a strange place to live. Sabeen soon-to-be-Lilywhite certainly thought so when she got stationed at the nearby Sugar Grove Naval Station, long before finding reliable 4G became a regular concern. It was the remoteness that got her; before joining the Air Force she had been a New Yorker, and driving out to this town with just one radio station and a truck patrolling the streets looking for rogue transmissions was very, very far from New York. The idea of anyone wanting to stay there was incomprehensible, but she had to admit there was a certain appeal to the people. The Lilywhites, for example, who owned a family logging outfit in town.

Well, maybe not all the Lilywhites. Maybe just Wyatt, who worked for his uncle and was the only reason Sabeen ever visited Green Bank a second time. He was why she came back time and time again, and why, after she left the Air Force, she came back one last time. She'd tried traveling the big wide world, maybe now it was time to settle into a small town, live the family life.

Emma was the third of four girls born to Sabeen and Wyatt. It was probably a happy home. Not that Emma can remember, but all evidence suggested it was. Sabeen took up driving delivery trucks for the county, Wyatt cut down trees all day, and the four rowdy young girls were loved unconditionally as they caused untold amounts of trouble. Emma sometimes wishes she could remember more about this time in her life. Mostly, she wishes she could remember her dad.

It was a logging accident that took Wyatt’s life when Emma was just six years old. Something that happens. Sometimes a logging accident totals a truck or takes a limb, like it did to Emma’s Gramps, and sometimes one takes a father of four, suddenly and senselessly. Emma has flashes of her father (his mischievous laugh, teaching one of the girls to swing a bat), and there are hints that he was, at one point, a real person involved in her creation (she has his nose, people say, and his bad sense of humor), but when pressed, all she can truly remember is his funeral. A plain urn, placed on a pedestal in their small town church, and her holding her Gram’s hand and asking if she could see him before they take him away.

All five of the Lilywhite girls moved out to Gram and Gramps’ place not too long after the accident. Sabeen never liked to ask for help, but she also never liked to see her children go hungry or raise themselves, so she had to make a compromise there.

To most people, Sabeen included, Green Bank is already pretty far out in the sticks. Those people are fools. Gram and Gramps’ place is a ways out, hidden in the trees, butted up against a creek, at the end of a road that was never meant for regular use. They pride themselves on their self-sufficiency, as Gram hunts and fishes, keeps the truck running and the fences standing, and Gramps cooks and cleans, takes care of the animals and bullshits with no less than half the damn ham radio operator community from their basement. Folks in town either see them as colorful local characters, or local menaces.

Alma Lilywhite, aka Gram, is a terrifying woman, 6-something feet tall, with a loud voice and a firm handshake, and when her granddaughters came out to the camp she put them straight to work. Even little Gilly at three years old got to feed the chickens and help pluck ‘em after they’d been done in. There was no grace period; Gram wanted her granddaughters to be well-rounded, self-sufficient, tough young women, who could gut a fish, patch a radiator, and knit a quilt. When Sabeen made the switch to long-haul trucking for higher pay, longer hours, and the freedom to run from too many suffocating memories of her late husband, Gram kept the girls too busy to wallow.

In a small town, with no cell phones, no internet, and just the one truck between ‘em, the Lilywhite girls tended to flock together when looking for fun. They spanned ten years from Shayna to Gilly, but they were close, and they were Trouble. Sometimes that Trouble meant trying to break into restricted areas for the telescopes around town, or trying to rig up a contraption to tap into the extremely limited cell signal from the ski resort a couple towns over. Sometimes it meant taking that truck with the busted shocks and patched up radiator for a good redneck ride on some downright unusable roads. Sometimes it just meant lying in a field, fiddling with a portable radio in the hopes of intercepting those transmissions from space those scientists are always looking for, and falling asleep to whatever’s on Allegheny Mountain Radio instead. While Gram was hard on the girls when it came to chipping in and getting their work done, she would never control their free time. Girls will be girls, after all.

It wasn’t a bad upbringing, all things considered. A little weird, a little isolated, but not bad. As the rest of the world sprinted into the 21st century, life in Green Bank lagged behind. The family shared a single cell phone for whenever they might need to leave town, but almost none of them ever did; Green Bank was isolated, but familiar, and leaving meant learning how to integrate with this tech savvy world. It’s why Shayna stayed put, why Livvy didn’t go off to college, it’s why Gilly didn’t even want to try and get into Finchwood. It’s why Wyatt never left.

But Emma’s always had her mother’s spirit. The idea that the world was lapping them and she was missing out, with a dialup connection and a ham radio as her only connections to the world beyond the Quiet Zone, was agonizing. She wanted to run, and the Finchwood brochure on the guidance counselor’s desk was her way out.

No one tried to talk Emma out of applying for Finchwood. Trying to talk a Lilywhite out of anything is just asking for trouble anyways. But no one really thought she'd make it. A free boarding school? Shit, all the poor kids from Bumfuck Nowhere are gonna be trying to get in on that shit, and Emma's over here with her shit grades and just absolute terror of a disciplinary record. And let's be real, when Emma realized there was a test involved to get in? She wasn't gonna get her hopes up too much. She studied real ass hard for it, she got up crazy early on a Saturday to take the truck to school, where they had incrementally faster internet, but she didn't have expectations for it. She didn't expect them to actually invite her out to Maine after she definitely just entered into a fugue state toward the end of that test.

But, you know, guess they know a real badass when they see one. Or maybe the school or the folks running the observatory rigged it to lessen the concentration of Lilywhites in town. Don't matter, because Emma was invited to make that trip all the way up to Maine, and there was no looking back now. The entire trip up there, in the cab of a borrowed truck with just her mom, telling her how excited she was for her to get out and see the world now, Emma sure as hell wasn't scared. That other being that sits next to Emma and feels her emotions might have been a little scared, but Emma sure as hell wasn't. It was kind of a damn relief to hear this was some monster hunting school, because it made the choice to bounce on Green Bank so much easier. Seems like she's got some demons to slay here, y'all have fun throwing rocks at radio trucks and lookin' at stars.

Finchwood would never be home. First off, because ain't no one wears ties back home except to get married, but for a whole host of other reasons too. The smell was wrong and the people were different and the internet was so fast??? And what did you just do with your phone??? Holy shit. Still, Emma kind of liked it. The structure was simultaneously suffocating and constructive, directing Emma's energies into something at least useful, like training. When it came time for summer break, Emma wasn't ready to lose this momentum she'd built up, and just about elbowed half the junior class out of the way to volunteer to stick around.

She also wasn't ready to give up reading Reddit on her phone at 3:00 AM. She's got a lot of internet catching up to do, Gram, hang on.

Persona: Daniel.
Element: Fire.
>> Battle stats here! <<

Core Classes: English, Mathematics, Science, Social Studies, Training.

Elective Classes: Shop, Leadership.

Clubs: Gaming, Gardening, Drama, Athletics.

General Performance: Look, not great. It's not that Emma doesn't try, no matter how much she pretends she's coasting into these thoroughly unimpressive Cs. She works hard for every passing grade she manages to eke out. She's generally an engaged student when she enjoys a class and participates in most discussions, but struggles to communicate on paper, and tests make her brain go completely blank.

Emma's found that her powers of bullshit can help keep her afloat in classes like Social Studies and English, but it's Shop where Emma feels the most at home. She knows how to work with her hands, and her mind has never gone blank when trying to make a badass birdhouse. But Physics and Calculus? God, she can feel half of every class just sloughing off her brain by the end of the day.

Player: Alex
Email: heydudeshutup at gmail
CDJ: thisisalex
Other Contact: 24601, Dropbox
Time Zone: Pacific