Echo: Accepted. You don't strictly need to list genders, but make sure you keep them consistent.
Name: Ilene
Sex: Female
Age: 25
Temple: Lugia
Level: 45
Appearance:
Ilene is of average height and weight, with chin-length brown hair and gold-coloured eyes. Two deep, ugly scars run parallel across her face, from her left temple to the right side of her jaw, just barely missing her eye and taking out a large chunk of her nose. The rest of her body is marred with many other scars from slashing and stab wounds, though they’re covered by her clothes; the most severe of these are deep slash scars on her stomach. Though most of her body is pale, all of her visible skin is tanned when she wears her normal outfit, which hides everything but her face, neck, and hands. She wears a long-sleeved white shirt, long navy blue pants, and worn but sturdy shoes. She doesn’t carry any weapon or wear any armour, and although she’s fit, she hasn’t developed the same muscles as one trained in physical battling herself. Her arms aren’t really stronger than average, as she doesn’t use them for strenuous exercise, but constant travelling has strengthened her leg muscles significantly.
Personality:
Ilene is greedy when it comes to pokémon, always wanting to catch the rarest and strongest pokémon and have as many as she can. She hardly cares about any other kind of object, although she won’t mind getting them and won’t easily give them away. She is willing to go to almost excessive lengths to capture a certain kind of pokémon if she learns of it, although outright murder and the like are avoided. She isn’t usually very envious of another summoner’s pokémon, although she might wish it was hers; pokémon are impossible to steal and doing so would make her an enemy of the temple, which she wishes to avoid.
Ilene is also prideful and confident in herself. As such, she is also dependable when she says she will do something or receives a mission from the temple; she is confident she will succeed and would be too ashamed if she ever gave up. She’s not so proud that she wouldn’t use the resources available to her, but she won’t depend on anything but herself and her pokémon, either. She can also be condescending and snarky to summoners who are less skilled than her in pokémon, and feels superior to anyone without magic, even if she won’t admit it.
History:
The time before Ilene joined the temple holds few coherent memories, except for the fact that she lived close to the Temple of Lugia and her mother was an enthusiastic worshipper of Lugia. Vaguely, Ilene remembers her mother’s delight at finding that Ilene was capable of magic, and sent her off to learn at the temple when she was scarcely older than six years old. First she had to trace some funny glowing lines, and that was the last she saw of her mother.
Naturally, being as young as she was, Ilene was originally equipped with daggers rather than any larger weapon, although she didn’t train very much with them. Because proficiency in weapons was not a requirement to graduate, she was able to get away with it. Instead, she threw herself into the only thing that she actually needed: summoning. She learned all of the spells and rituals, although it took longer for her than most of the older summoners-in-training. Granted, she wasn’t even allowed to take the graduation exam until she was ten years old, although she would have probably failed if she tried any earlier, anyway. At the end of the graduation exam, she was told to capture the charmander the examiners presented her with. The charmander struggled, though, so her initial attempt at capturing him, with a regular pokégram, failed. She proceeded to use great pokégrams and ultra pokégrams, all still failing. It seemed to take forever, but Ilene realised how close it was to sunset. She stopped trying to capture it, instead conserving her magical energy for night. When night finally fell, she cast a dusk pokégram and finally caught the charmander. She passed out soon after. Amused, the teachers saw her off a few days later. She enthusiastically left to catch other pokémon, this time with the advantage of being able to weaken them first.
Her first few years were spent catching common to moderately rare pokémon, and beating up several pokémon so that she’d get stronger. She travelled to the forest, first, and then the desert, and then the sea, and managed to find a scyther on the plains in between. Though she’d gotten injured from pokémon before, her battle against her scyther was the first time she realised just how dangerous pokémon could be; managing to defeat all of her pokémon but her charmander, the scyther slashed her stomach and chest, tearing deep into her flesh. Charmander managed to greatly injure it, and Ilene captured the scyther – but, still afraid of it, chose not to use it except in the most serious of circumstances.
After recovering, she went to the mountains, where she found several of her pokémon. The mountain’s forests were where she found her sneasel, who initiated battle with her rather than the other way around, by leaping from the trees and slashing at her face. It was only luck that the sneasel didn’t manage to tear out her eyes, but the sneasel would regret it; several blasts of flames later, and she developed a healthy respect for and fear of Charmander, just before Ilene captured her. Though dangerous, Scyther and Sneasel were hardly the most powerful pokémon Ilene would encounter, as she would soon find out.
In the village where Ilene recovered from her newest injury, she heard of a plague-bringer prowling the mountains, and was presented with a crude sketch of what looked like a pokémon. It was one that Ilene recognised as rare and powerful: an absol. She doubted the pokémon would just come to her, or that she could just stumble upon something that rare by chance, so she searched for the absol herself, scouring the mountains for any sign of it. Instead of managing to find it, however, the absol found her while she was staying in a village; it simply ran through the streets, but the people were convinced that it was casting a curse over the village… unless she could stop it, the village would be doomed. Naturally, Ilene challenged the absol, fought it, and captured it, managing to avoid significant injuries herself this time.
Because of her success, the villagers told her about another pokémon they wanted to get rid of, a powerful monster raging in the mountains. Although it didn’t attack any villages, unlike the absol, it threw rocks from a cliff and onto the once-safest path to several of the other villages. Ilene was lead to the path below the cliff, and watched the rocks from a safe distance until she determined the place the rocks were coming from. Then, making sure to make an impressive show, she summoned a fearow and charizard, riding her fearow while the charizard battled. It was then that Ilene realised it was a metagross, and she knew she couldn’t capture it until her level was at least equal to it. And she didn’t want to defeat it, which might be possible; she wanted to catch it. But, perhaps, she could convince it to join her? She still wouldn’t be able to capture it, but she could recruit it to make it less likely that the metagross would be captured or defeated by someone else.
She went up to it again, this time showing that she didn’t wish to fight, but to help it – because surely it wasn’t blocking off a path for nothing? And she was right. It turned out that a powerful magneton was trapped inside the cliff, in a cave, and it was sending out a powerful magnetic signal for help. But it ended up trapping the metagross very close to the cliff (unable to enter the cave and help), so the metagross was trying to dig it out instead. Ilene went into the cave with the intent to capture the magneton, getting two powerful pokémon in one go, but in the midst of battling, inadvertently ordered a few too many attacks and caused it to faint. And when she returned to the metagross, she found that it had left, now free of the magnetic field.
Well, that wouldn’t do.
She went after it, chasing rumours of a metagross and not bothering to capture any pokémon along the way; she just beat them up so she could get stronger and finally capture the metagross. When she found it again, though, she wasn’t quite strong enough; she had to just continue chasing it and getting as strong as she could. The chase would take her over two years, but in the end, she finally caught up to its strength and challenged it, capturing it after a long battle. After such a feat, something as simple as confiscating a fossil someone had found in the desert and participating in the temple’s search for more fossils in a desert was hardly difficult for her. She was completely unsuccessful in finding any fossils of her own, but battled another summoner for one of the fossils; she acquired one that could still be used in the extremely complicated revival rituals, which only a few people of each temple could perform. Unlike most spells, a revival ritual required tremendous amounts of magical energy and multiple, very skilled people, as well as certain materials.
She returned to her own temple and requested that they use the fossil to revive the soul trapped inside. The head priest agreed, on the condition that she take the mission to defeat the werepokémon and poképires. Because they would revive the pokémon first, she accepted. After everything she’d done, how hard could it be?
Arsenal: n/a
Pokémon Party:
Beldum (X)
Charmander (M)
Kabuto (M)
Shroomish (M)
Spearow (F)
Stored Pokémon:
Absol (M)
Gastly (M)
Magikarp (M)
Nincada (M)
Rattata (F)
Ralts (F)
Sandshrew (F)
Scyther (M)
Sentret (F)
Sneasel (F)
Teddiursa (M)
Tentacool (M)
Trapinch (F)
Weedle (F)
TM Moves:
TM17 Protect
TM54 False Swipe