Post by Deleted on May 2, 2013 9:39:20 GMT
ANTHEA.
10 months - female - cat - domestic shorthair - loner - n/a
Personality: Smart, but not exactly focused or motivated, Anthea can have a difficult time remembering what people have taught her if she wasn't concentrating on them at the time. She tends to wander, and that, coupled with a bad sense of direction, has got her lost a few times. She tends to be slow to trust, but that is more due to the fact that she is unsure of how to behave around others: having only spent time with her litter-mates, and never having met a dog in her life. Her automatic response upon seeing either is defensive, and this has prevented her from making any kind of friend. She prefers to stick to the same, very small, area: hiding away until any other animals had disappeared before venturing out herself. Again, this behaviour makes it hard for her to meet anybody, let alone anyone who would be patient enough to get close to her.
Despite her timid nature, Anthea hates spending her time alone. She misses her human's home greatly and will tell others this often. If she feels particularly lonely, she will refer to herself as 'Toni', in the third person, as it reminds her of her human's name for her. Her collar still reads her name and address, and she treasures it.
If Anthea were to become friends with another, she would be endlessly loyal, verging onto clinginess and dependence. She behaves far younger than her age and, perhaps subconsciously, longs for a mother figure to help her survive. As a result, she will latch on to any attempt at showing that kind of attention, often to the chagrin of the receiving member.
Appearance: See above. Small in size due to inadequate food when she was very young. Her tail is almost the same length as her body. She's a dark brows/black colour all over, dotted with vague ginger patches. Her hind right leg is more ginger than the rest of her; getting gradually lighter toward the feet until her toes reach a light blonde. High on her thigh, the colour is rich gold, with pale red tabby markings. This is the only place on her body where her apparent tabby colour comes through the tortoiseshell colour of her coat. She has a small patch of sparse blonde over her right eye. A T-shape, made of interlocking white and ginger lines, is on her chest. Her eyes are soft, dull green. The hip joint of her right leg is slightly larger than the other, due to a dislocation that wasn't treated and therefore healed badly. Example of eyes and chest marking.
History: Born feral to a litter of seven, and the only female, Anthea was the weakest and smallest of all her siblings. It only took a fall from a too-high object to cause her serious harm. At the age of 3 weeks, her dislocated leg meant her mother left her behind when she moved her litter for the winter. Anthea took refuge in the relative warmth of a barn: tucking herself into the straw beneath the horse's feet. She was discovered by another queen and her litter of only two days later, who adopted her, all four of them moving into an abandoned farmhouse. Her mother had taught her to be wary of strangers, but days of growling and hissing were, apparently, ineffective, and she allowed herself to come to trust some members of her new family, who called her 'Toni'. She was content, for a while, to lounge on the farmhouse beds and eat the food her adoptive mother found for her: it was an easy life compared to what she'd lived before. After a while, however, she began to long open space, and escaped the house to explore. Straying too far, however, wasn't a good idea as she quickly became lost, unable to reach a safe place for the night due to her injured leg. After spending nearly a month roaming, trying to find her way home, she reached familiar territory. Prepared to return and embrace the inevitable attention they would lay on her, she hurried, damaging her leg further, only to find, when she returned home, that her family was gone: the house empty. In fact, everywhere was empty. Even the neighbor's homely old Siamese had disappeared, apparently gone to find home elsewhere. A day turned into a week, which turned into a month, and Anthea began to realize that her family wouldn't be coming back. It was with difficulty; mental and physical, that she ventured back out into the world, leaving the old safety of her home behind.
Season born: Winter
RP Sample: The nights were never forgiving. Even as the evenings got warmer, the risk of snow receding along with the winter months, there was only so much a small cat could bear before it got, well, unbearable. Anthea tucked herself tighter into the niche between a high-walled house and its neighbouring trashcan: tail wrapping tightly around her tucked paws, digging her head into the space allowed by her assembled limbs, and telling herself it wasn't cold enough to be shivering the way she was. Truthfully, she hadn't eaten properly in seventy-two hours now, not since finding the remains of somebody else's hunt and managing to drag it off to her hiding place before they could return. It had been risky: the trail of blood and gore left should have made for easy tracking but maybe the older cat hadn't thought the half-chewed remains of a mouse were worth chasing. The meal had been consumed quickly - prompting an unfortunate hour or so where Anthea was certain she was going to lose her meal, scolding herself again for swallowing it all to quickly, just like her mother would scold her for in the past. She allowed herself a sigh, a low breeze rifling the fur along her becoming-visible spine. Her leg ached, another unsuccessful attempt at chasing down prey that was faster and more agile than she was.
If she was completely honest with herself, she couldn't see a way out of this: she knew a lost cause when she saw one, or, in this case, was one. The short period of satisfied hope she'd felt when she'd managed to bundle enough old newspapers and scraps of paper into her alcove to make a comfortable-enough nest had dissipated, blown away by the unrelenting autumn winds, leaving her aching at the memory of her family's beds: winding around her sibling's bodies under the heavy covers, the regular meals. She visited home, often, attempting to find some way to get inside that she'd missed last time - besides the open window that was too high for her to jump, now that the trashcan her family had used had been knocked down. Her most recent visit, she'd been met by a very angry, very large tomcat, who had apparently taken advantage of a loose vent and taken the house as his own. She'd wondered, as she'd fled, why she hadn't thought of trying to pry the vent cover loose. Digging her face far enough between her tail and fore-paws that the tip of her nose touched the damp concrete, she allowed her tired olive eyes to close, desperately trying to ignore the distant sounds of growls and cat-scraps in the hope that maybe, tomorrow would be better.
Link to image of character: Here
