Post by krispini on Jul 4, 2018 23:50:56 GMT -6
“How interesting.”
NAME
Maxine Lucero
AGE
25
GENDER
Female
BIRTH DATE
11 - 05 - 1993 (Scorpio)
OCCUPATION
Electronic repair technician / Betrayer
LIKES
- Video games. Strategy ones and platformers are her favorite- carefully planning to achieve a goal in the least amount of moves possible is immensely satisfying to her. In the same vein, breaking video games is so fun. She does speedruns purely for personal satisfaction and sometimes posts the notable ones online. Her best runs are in Super Monkey Ball and Super Mario 64.
- Earbuds... small, sensible, satisfying, and the easiest way to avoid unwanted social interaction on the street.
- Being right, which she usually is, but some people just don't like to admit it.
- Vintage technology. Fixing peoples' infected, crumb-ridden laptops and tablets may be her day job, but there's nothing she loves more than repairing something old and making it usable again. The owner of the electronics shop she works at is kind enough to allow her to advertise her restoration business in-store.
- Turtles and tortoises. Look at those slow, magnificent creatures. They get so old and massive. She loves them.
- Heavy rain. A fantastic excuse to stay inside! The relaxing effect is an added bonus.
- Underground music. Post-rock is her favorite genre.
- Living far from other people and deep within nature. So many of her problems are solved as soon as she goes back home.
- Being nice to old people, especially old people who are a little behind on the technology curve. It's annoying. And frustrating. And it sucks when they yell at you. But it's important to respect your elders. She enjoys the rush of satisfaction when the process she's been trying to teach her grandma for 50 minutes finally sticks.
- Anything with a flavor that's blue colored. Blue ice cream? Loves it. Blue gatorade? Give it to her now. Blue shaved ice? She doesn't even know what flavor it's supposed to be but give it to her anyway.
DISLIKES
- Annoying people. Don't bother her while she's in the middle of something. Don't interrupt her work. Don't get her attention for something completely useless. Do not do ANYTHING to disrupt her learning environment. IF YOU SPAM HER TEXTS, she will BLOCK you.
- Not being able to "read the mood." What "mood." There is no "mood." No "mood" can stop her from telling you how your joke makes no sense.
- Tidying up... organizing... what's the point of rearranging her only slightly messy home if she already knows where everything is?
- Animal enclosures that are obviously too small. Ugh. If she sees your goldfish in a legitimately tiny fish bowl, she's going to steal it and put it in a better aquarium herself.
- Dogs. They're... not... horrible. Just very scary. And furry. And messy. And now there's hair all over her clothes.
- Salad. What's the point. What's the point. They're crunchy, tasteless vessels for dressings that are mere slurries of oil and generic spices, excuses for eating healthy when what you truly want are the croutons on top. Ditch the middle man and simple eat croutons straight out the bag.
- Video game references. Please, spare her the second-hand embarrassment.
- Looking at her face. That's her? She sure hopes not.
- Swearing. It’s not an issue if other people do it— she just doesn’t prefer it, herself. Seems crude, like a cop-out for how you really feel. Excessive cursing will tick her off, though. It's also a habit born from years of seeing her siblings get scolded for swearing
- Social events. Please, please, please never take her to a party. All she’ll do is drink punch and alcohol in the corner while judging everyone's outfits.
- Being physically inept. Nothing enrages her more than stubbing her toe on the leg of a table, yet she manages to do it every single day.
- Corn fields. They’re hardly bearable during the day and make her incredibly itchy, and you just don't go into them at night. (She learned that the hard way.)
- Forgetting to get something crucial whenever she goes into town. Max likes driving her reliable old pickup truck, but she doesn't like having to use up so much gas.
PERSONALITY
"Still waters run deep."
+ { Analytical, Resourceful, Dependable, Innovative, Straightforward, Open-minded, Perceptive
- { Clueless, Cynical, Arrogant, Condescending, Contentious, Secretive, Awkward, Perfectionist
Maxine is, first and foremost, a private person. In addition to living a solid 30 minutes away from the nearest living person, she lives primarily in her own head. While Max does appreciate good company and the occasional hang-out session, she does not appreciate aimless, idle chit chat that only distracts her from her work. She always prefers to work alone and do things herself rather than pick up someone else’s slack. It’s fairly tough for her to work with other people in general; in a group where agreeing on something is more important than making a fully qualified decision, she is often the one to rock the boat and play devil’s advocate. Maxine is scrutinizing to a fault and will often sideline her personal beliefs for the sake of posing contending viewpoints and considering every single possibility available, no matter how horrible or inane. Her real struggle comes in neglecting to establish what her true views actually are.
Additionally, Maxine isn’t used to being... open with people. She doesn’t speak often, but when she does, she says exactly what’s on her mind, usually comes off as tactless, and is completely unaware of this. Whether accidental or purposeful, she tends to forget to express the kind of person she really is— like, she really does care about the people in her life, values knowledge more than most people could ever realize, and loves teaching people new things, but instead of expressing these sentiments in a clear manner, she purposely instigates other people into debates and arguments in an attempt to get them to learn something on their own instead of outright telling them. It gets very complicated. Maxine herself is legitimately unaware of how condescending this makes her and genuinely believes she's helping the people she's talking down to.
But, beyond her lack of social awareness and oblivious condescension, Maxine may become a close, albeit distant, fixture in certain peoples' lives. She does sometimes seem to drop off the grid for days at a time, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the people she hangs around— sometimes she just needs a little time to herself. Accepting that she will float in and out of your life is, strangely, the first step to her becoming more permanent in said life. Maxine greatly values her independence and values people who respect that. After getting past the quirks and strange passion for hobbies that may make her personality hard to swallow, Max is a wise, responsible, dependable friend to have. She can read people like a book and immediately tell if someone she’s close to is feeling off, but won’t immediately point it out; she is a patient person when it comes to her friends. Her listening ear, accommodating nature, and unique outlook on life makes her a great source of support and advice for near everyone in her life. Maxine can be hard to deal with sometimes. She knows that. But, hey— she’s learning, too.
BIOGRAPHY
- Filipino-American.
- Born in Printy, lives in Printy, has never left Printy, and, unfortunately, will probably die in Printy.
- Attended the Wolfe public school chain and hated it. She was the nerd playing Pokemon and Yugioh in the corner of the lunch room with the other nerds.
- Went to PC3 to be certified as an electronic repair technician.
- The middle child of 5 siblings: Samantha (31), Fay (29), Shane (21), and Adora (19). She also has several cousins and family friends that are essentially cousins scattered throughout the county.
- Maxine lives alone in a small house that's a good 30 minute drive out from the edge of Phlox, inherited from her grandparents. It’s located in the forests that surround the county roads, and is easy to miss if you don't see the small sign and the dirt road that veers off the main highway— she often treks through the forest to the secluded prairie outside it to stargaze with her telescope and a radio.
- Was going through a mid-life crisis and thinking of going back to school to get credentials as a psychologist. It's been put on hold for favor of the whole alien invasion thing.
- Works at an electronic repairs shop in Phlox Town.
- Runs a restoration business on the side out of her garage, mainly through online transactions. Even people who inquire in-person are usually redirected to her website. Maxine can repair and restore old watches, record players, radios, arcade machines, extremely old game systems and controllers... there are few vintage items of sentimental value she can't fix.
- Owns a rather large yellow-foot tortoise named Turtle. She has to wear thermal wraps and sweaters during colder months and Max often dresses her up in knitted food costumes, courtesy of her grandmother. Turtle wanders around the house frequently and Maxine takes her to the park on weekends. Also owns a calico cat named Lion, who is strictly an indoor cat. However, she does bring him with her on trips into town. Lion enjoys being in the pickup truck.
PERSONAL HISTORY
Here are the things Maxine Lucero knows to be true:
1. She was born in Phlox Town, Printy County, USA, otherwise known as the middle of absolutely nowhere.
2. Aliens are real, and she was right all along.
3. Corn is terrifying.
4. Her earliest memory is of crop circles in her aunt’s backyard.
Maxine and her older siblings spent the majority of their childhood under the care of their many relatives around town— supporting a family of 5 and growing was already enough for both their parents to work full-time jobs. The arrival of two more younger siblings after herself did nothing to alleviate this, and, thus, Max’s earliest memories were with her favorite person to be babysitted by: an aunt who owned a sprawling corn farm that stretched as far as her eyes could see, but more importantly, let Maxine roam the fields and laughed instead of yelling at her when she got dirt all over her clothes.
While her siblings “did their homework” (messed around on the GameCube) inside the house, Maxine rampaged through the open fields, catching bugs and crying when she crushed them, menacingly watching farm hands from afar, getting itchy from the corn stalks, and making it better by rolling around in the mud. While she loved her family, nature was her solitary refuge from noisy homes with no real privacy and public school, where no one understood her and she made no effort to understand others.
Maxine grew up with both a distinct aptitude for academics and an equally distinct absence of social skills. She hated school and hated the people who were there— the only thing she enjoyed was learning things in class, and even then, her classmates usually ruined the atmosphere by messing around and disturbing the learning environment, pissing her off to no end. She did not make very many friends. She did not want to make very many friends, especially with the idiots that everyone around her seemed to be. This inability to make friends morphing into not wanting to make friends left Maxine with a off-putting, condescending attitude that kept most people away, just like she wanted. Good. The only people who weren’t subject to this was her family, who already knew how to break down her barriers and push all her buttons, no matter how much she hated it.
One day, when she was 11, Maxine got sick of having to listen to her aunt and snuck out to the corn fields at night, intending to stargaze and fulfill her need for pre-teen rebellion in one fell swoop.
Things began to go wrong very quickly.
Her flashlight broke, she lost a shoelace, her watch got scratched, and… she felt like something was watching her.
At 12:34 AM, Maxine saw a bright light shine over her and subsequently passed out.
At 2:13 AM, Maxine awoke in a circle of flattened corn with a scar on her neck.
A statement is given to the police, her mother smacks her upside the head, and the police rule the event in the cornfield an act of vandalism done by local teens, and that Maxine simply tripped and fell and scratched her neck on something before passing out from sleepiness.
Maxine was busy trying to tear off the bandage around her neck, ignoring everything the police officers said, and listening to the crowd of nosy neighbors whisper something sounding like “crop circle” when she saw two similar-looking kids her age lurking around the outskirts, prodding each other and trying to push past the police tape. There weren’t many people her age that live all the way out where the farm is.
They say:
“Yeah, the police say it’s teenagers, but it was really aliens.”
“Aliens?”
“Yeah, aliens. Our mom who use to work at NASA said so.”
(“She doesn’t look like your mom.”
“Your mom doesn’t have to look like you to be your mom!”
“Whatever. ... It’s unfair that you get three moms.”)
Vivian and Vance singlehandedly jump-start Maxine’s lifetime obsession with the extraterrestrial.
Maxine questioned everyone she knew about aliens, got nothing except more strange looks than usual from her classmates, and teachers, and family, and turned to the internet for information and learned about UFOs, extraterrestrials, conspiracy theories, and aliens, and suddenly everything made sense. Of course they’re not alone. Of course there’s something out there. Of course she’s the only person who realized this (besides the twins, who she regularly told her theories to. Her fixation on aliens began to take up the majority of her free time, never skimping on homework, but spending less and less time with nature, with her family, but she doesn’t notice. Who would?
Her aunt sells her farm and moves to Florida to retire with her new, wealthy husband.
The loss struck deep in Maxine’s heart and made her realize just how lonely she was. 15 years old, only 2 close friends, distant from her family for no reason other than to be distant and brooding… She tried to get people to believe her, but no one ever did. This was no passing childhood fad— this was hours and days and months of research and parsing through information, fake and plausible, creating her own theories. There was always a degree of childish foolishness, of course… thinking about her earliest exploration of the subject makes Max cringe so much she feels like folding into herself. But Maxine took it seriously while no one else ever did, and she submitted herself to never being understood, delving into different hobbies for the sake of having more than 2 friends to talk to at school. She picked up different interests, pushed her social circle out just the slightest bit, and one day, when the buttons get jammed on someone’s Gameboy Advance during Gamer’s Club, Maxine stepped in among the huddle of blubbering nerds and fixed it her own damn self. She’s hailed as some queen of electronic repairs when in reality all she really did was google stuff and do whatever felt right. It baffled her. But it did make her money.
Max never truly gave up her fervent curiosity about aliens, running a blog about her findings on the side and actually managing to get a small but regular following. The social skills she (should’ve acquired long ago) now had from actually getting out of her comfort zone allowed her to expand her circle online as well as in real life, and never before had the oppressive nowhere-ness of Printy County felt so confining.
Maxine spent the tail end of her high school years fantasizing about going to college somewhere on the coast, somewhere in the mountains, somewhere in New Mexico, Roswell, somewhere that was anywhere but home. She saved up the money she got from various jobs and repairs over the years, applying, then getting into universities all over the country on account of her wildly high GPA (courtesy of her nerdiness and lack of social life). And yes, her family may not have a whole lot of money to support her, but finally, she's going to get out, she's going to escape this town and meet new people and maybe, maybe she’ll find someone who gets her—
But Maxine would do anything for her family and a lump grows in her mother’s neck during the dawn of the new year. She uses her savings to help pay for her mother’s surgery to remove her thyroid cancer.
Without the money to move out of the county, Max continued to live at home and instead attends the community college in Phlox, not wanting to make the commute to KBU and seeing no reason to. She studied electronic repairs to have an actual accredited job and spent the majority of her time in college keeping her social circle small but enjoyable, continually playing on her old game consoles because new ones were too expensive, and doing increasingly deep alien research on the side. Now an adult, she was able to do more plausible research, cross-referencing with different areas of study, actually creating theories with sufficient evidence, but, well. The fact that she had very little people to talk to this about to was stifling, even after getting used to keeping most of her matters to herself. The room in Maxine’s room and her home grew smaller every day, and when her grandpa passed away and she graduated and got her degree, Max’s grandma moved in as she moved out.
The inherited house was old, decrepit, and forced Maxine to call Vivian to help her repair its deplorable structure, but it wasn’t a horribly long drive from her place of work and it gave Max room to spread out. She relished in the newfound privacy and silence, a stark contrast to living in extremely close quarters with other people for nearly 2 decades, and became a hermit in earnest, driving her old pickup truck into Phlox only for work, groceries, and assorted family visits, and going to Acacia and Larkspur even less often. Maxine indulged wholeheartedly in her interests, buying a pet tortoise, a cat, having an entire room devoted to her extraterrestrial research, converting the garage into a workshop for her online restoration business, getting back in touch with nature.
And she grew out of her ego, just a little bit. There was no reason she was involved in that close encounter of the third kind of her childhood except for pure random chance— there is nothing that makes her different from any other human. But they’re out there. She just has to try her best to make people realize that
For a brief moment, Maxine worries that there is all there is.
Is this what the rest of her life is going to look like? Fixing broken tech, vaping for moments of solitude her already-reclusive ass doesn't need, playing the same games over and over hoping for a different outcome, chasing a dream she fears she might not ever reach? Maxine rethinks her life. Her telescope needs a new coat of paint. The stars are getting dimmer. She hasn’t dated anyone for 3 years. Her home is far and lonely. She might go back to school. Max drops off the face of the Earth for a year, barring her time at work.
…
......
The ship touches down. The aliens come.
Her first non-work related text to anyone in 10 months is an image of the ufo through the window of her cluttered research room, captioned
“I told you so.”
EXTRAS
- Tumblr
- Playlist
- 5'9". Yeah, she doesn't know how, either.
- Will info dump on you.
- Wears her scarf to cover her scarf and attempt to contain the constant smoke emitting from her neck.
- Self-published a series of books about her extraterrestrial research online from ages 18 to 23, not out of financial want or desire for fame, but literally because all other readings she could find were complete garbage.
- Collects old game systems! If you can think of it, she's got it, no matter how old it may be. Maxine loves her NES to death.
- Has an innate knack for puzzles: sudoku, riddles, jigsaws, social media posting habits, escape rooms... She does prefer more hands-on types of brain teasers, though, like puzzle cubes and interlocked metal rings.
- Vapes occasionally.
- Smells like algae, burnt electronics, and the prairie.
- She lives rather close to Viv's mom's farm and often visits to help out with the chickens in exchange for fresh eggs and vegetables.
COMPLICATIONS
PVP: Yes.
Injury: Yes.
Death: Nevermind I love her too much now
