Karin Norling

[Karin Norling]

Name: Karin Ronia Norling
Age: 16
Date of Birth: January 10
Birthplace: Snowpoint City, Sinnoh
Gender: Female
Sexual Orientation: Homosexual
Face Claim: Touhou Project - Renko Usami

Appearance:

Karin stands at only 5'5, with a slender build. She has very light skin, appropriate for the cold region she comes from, but dark brown hair and matching brown eyes. Her hair is usually kept fairly short, only long enough to frame her face and shoulder-length at most, save for a few locks which she ties into a ponytail on one side.

Her manner of dress is...well, odd is one way to put it. She's very frequently seen in a dress shirt or blouse with a tie and a pleated skirt, as well as knee-high socks and mary janes. Along with this, she'll usually wear an elbow-length capelet and a black hat with a white ribbon. This is by no means the only thing she every wears. In fact, little things will frequently change from day to day, like a jacket instead of a capelet, or a longer skirt or socks, or boots instead of her usual shoes. She'll even very rarely wear pants, and most of the time she does it's because she has to go through heavy snow or swampland or something of that sort. She even has different hats, although they're mostly the same kind of hat with slightly different shapes or colors. But if she's wearing enough at all to be considered fully clothed, she's almost guaranteed to also be wearing a hat.
Height: 5'5"
Distinguishing Features: None of note

Personality: Karin is a perfectly normal person who lives an ordinary life and-ahaha, no, that is not true at all. She's attracted to the weird, the unexplained, and the unfamiliar. Unsolved mysteries, ghost stories, legends, you name it, she's interested. She can be a bit difficult to get along with, because while most people (or at least many people) will stay in the light where it's safest, she'll be the first to go running off into the dark because she doesn't know what's hidden just out of sight yet. Does that make her reckless? Absolutely. Is that a desirable personality trait in the eyes of someone who isn't equally reckless? No, not really. Unless you're into that sort of thing.

Back home in Snowpoint, she was always the weird one. Just about any kid is interested in things they don't know, but Karin took it to a level that set her apart from everyone she knew. On top of that, rather than wanting to know everything she could about the unexplained, as many kids do, Karin wanted to understand them, which is a trait usually reserved for adults. And she hasn't changed at all since then. If anything, recent events have only reinforced her behavior. That said, she can be a bit capricious at times as well, making strange decisions on a whim and then sticking with them against all odds, only to make an equally whimsical decision soon after. Once she sets her mind to something, though, she will follow through to the ends of the earth.

She's friendly enough in person, if a bit snarky. Okay, a lot snarky. Somewhere along the way, she learned that the least painful way to pass the slow days that she's come to hate so much was to make fun of them, and that's exactly what she does. This sometimes applies to people too, although she means well and will usually back down if she knows she's bothering someone. And among girls, she can be very flirty. She'll flirt with just about any girl she finds attractive, although she tends to favor the ones with the most adorable reactions to her. She's very composed most of the time, and also quite patient, although that patience is most easily strained by people who scare easily. She is willing to help those people though, to the best of her...somewhat questionable ability.

Likes: Folklore, scary stories (both of the ghost variety and not), interesting stories in general, ghosts, ghost pokemon, anything unexplained or not fully understood, exploring, beautiful places, "weird" places, good music, stormy nights, the cold, coffee, seafood, the ladies

Dislikes: Slow days, uninteresting stories, dealing with freakouts, people who refuse to enjoy life, not being able to enjoy life, assholes, hotshots (especially those who can't back it up), ignorance, extreme heat, big to-dos over little things

History: Once upon a time...no, that doesn't quite work here. That's for stories that end "and they all lived happily ever after", and this one doesn't even have an ending just yet. Let's try this again. It was a dark and stormy night...no, that doesn't quite work either. While many of Karin's smaller stories may have begun on a night that was both dark and stormy, that's not the right place to start this one. The right place to start this one is...ahh, yes. "So there I was, no shit..."

Snowpoint City is known for exactly four things. Being really cold, a nearly impossible route out of town thanks to the area's many blizzards, some temple that most people quickly forget about, and hauntings. It is this last point that interests us, and has interested Karin since she was very young. Every now and then, people would get lost in the snowstorms down south, and vanish. And then, on even rarer circumstances, travelers hardy enough to brave the blizzards will run into people who are there one second and gone the next. These stories spread quickly around town, and more than once the young girl would catch wind of them. She longed to get out of town and encounter one of these ghosts in the snow herself, but as a young girl with no pokemon to protect her she could never so much as get past the first route. Complicating matters further was that, after several attempts to leave town on her own and running into the strong (and occasionally violent) pokemon of the region, she began to instinctively avoid pokemon. So, with no will to become a trainer and no way to protect herself, the young girl was unable to leave town on her own.

Until of course, one day, she did.

Which brings us to our opening line of choice. "So there I was, no shit," was exactly how she started retelling the story, carelessly swearing as many ten-year-olds who think words they're not allowed to say are "cool" are prone to doing. She recounted finding her way onto the route south, just in time for the latest snowstorm to get so intense that she could no longer see the way ahead or back. She wandered through the blinding storm for several minutes, before coming upon a house. She raised a shivering hand to knock, only for the door to swing open at the lightest touch. She stumbled into an unlit house, to find a lone woman sitting in the dark in the kitchen. Karin apologized for barging in, and explained that it was the first shelter from the storm that she could find, but the woman waved it off and, in a faint voice that Karin claimed she could barely hear over the wind outside, thanked her for visiting. Karin promised not to get in the woman's way and returned to the foyer, then left as soon as she was feeling up to braving the cold again. Of course, this being a ten-year-old in a snowstorm, she quickly decided she was wrong and ducked back inside. When she did, she returned to the kitchen to find the woman no longer there. Or, for that matter, anywhere else in the house.

Her parents would be more focused on telling her off for wandering out into a storm alone and making sure she was okay than the oddities of her story, but her friends (those who actually listened, at least) insisted that she had seen a ghost. A real ghost! Here, just outside of town!

She of course, wanted to get out more and find more places like the haunted house she had stumbled across. So it was then that she finally started gaining an interest in a pokemon trainer. Her parents slowly warmed up to the idea, an ironic choice of words for a decision that ultimately took place at the beginning of an especially cold winter, but agreed that Snowpoint City was no place to start a journey. So instead, they took her to Sandgem Town where, after some discussion with the local Pokemon Professor, she was set up with a starting pokemon and began her journey. And what a journey it was. Sinnoh is a region full of myths, stories, and mysteries, and after a few years of journeying Karin could safely say that she had seen a small fraction of them. She'd seen cave drawings of ancient legends, explored haunted houses, climbed to the site of mountaintop ruins, and even got lost in a cave where time and space didn't seem to work quite right. Along the way, she gained some skill as a pokemon trainer, although she was never particularly serious in battles.

After awhile, she decided, in her usual capricious manner, to go to a new region and try something new. Of all the regions in the world, she decided on the Aina. An odd choice, given its tropical climate, but she did have a thing for beautiful places, and Aina had that in spades. Spades of spades. Besides, if she found that she didn't like it, it didn't have to be a very long journey. But maybe, just maybe, it would be one anyway. So, bred a couple new Pokemon to start her off on the new journey, then put the rest of her current Pokemon into storage with the promise that she would return for them when she got back. With that done, she made her way by sky and sea to a new region.

Class: Battler

Starter Pokemon: Litwick, Snorunt

Additional Info: N/A

Played By: Satori

Other Characters: not yet

[Akira]

Approved!
It feels good to break this out again. I do love this image of Dan way more than I probably should, to be perfectly honest.