Post by emmeline on Apr 27, 2010 13:55:33 GMT -5
Emmeline Tyler
Oceanic Flight 192 Ship Manifest - - - -
Ticket purchased for EMMELINE CASEY TYLER, at the age of NINETEEN.
Her last residence was PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND
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age: nineteen
date of birth: January sixteenth
eye color: hazel
hair color: auburn
height: five feet, two and a half inches
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Born to a middle-class family in a suburb on the northern side of Chicago, the day Emmeline came into the world was the day her mother left it. Having fallen ill during her pregnancy, Mrs Cassie Tyler had been given the option of having her child prematurely to save her own life, or wait and save the life of her child, risking her own. Choosing the latter, Cassie's last act was naming her daughter, and handing the newborn to her husband. Mr Tyler did try to be a good single father, but after two years of juggling work, his two children, and dealing with his grief, he gave up and turned to his newly divorced twin sister for help. It seemed like a good situation for everyone involved--his sister had a young son of her own, and needed a place to live. Raised as siblings, Emma, her elder brother Riff, and their younger cousin Jeremy lived pretty normal lives. They went to school, they fought, and they played.
Emmeline seemed to be the epitome of the peacemaking middle child. The kind of girl who was forever getting in between her brothers and suggesting alternate solutions to pummeling each other, she would even try to break up sibling spats between her father and aunt. By the time she was ten she'd been dubbed with the pet name 'Dove' by her family, and even amongst her friends she was always the go-to girl for problem solving, compromises, or just a shoulder to cry on.
Wanting the children to be well-rounded, Elizabeth was all for them signing up for music classes, though Riff was the only one who really excelled. Emma did well enough, being able to strum out a tune on the guitar or play 'Für Elise' on the piano, while Jeremy took cello lessons for a month before flatly refusing to take any more. Riff was the one who actually took music seriously, and intended on getting college money for playing. Jeremy was all about the parties, girls and sports. And again, Emmeline was just right down the middle; she liked school, she liked music, and she liked being helpful.
An easily likable girl, she made friends in school quickly, and did well in classes. Not shy, but not an extremely outgoing girl, Emmeline wasn't the type to go party or have a huge group of 'popular' friends, and preferred more to just have her nice little group of close friends, her family, and as many average friends as wanted to be around her. High school was a pretty normal experience for Miss Tyler; she had her good times and her bad times, but as a whole, she had a decent time. Lucky enough to seem to stay out of being the center of dramatic attention, Emmeline was more of an on-the-sidelines kind of friend, always able and eager to help out, but not one to cause trouble herself.
It was after high school when things started to get interesting. Always having gotten good grades, but definitely not straight-A's, 36-on-the-ACT grades, Emmeline was thrilled to be accepted into her dream school, Brown University. Despite being far from home, Emmeline loved college life. She wasn't too far away from where Riff was at school (he had gotten a full ride at NYU), and of course with technology, she talked to her father, aunt and cousin whenever she needed to.
Brown was also where she met her boyfriend, a junior psychology major named Gavin. They met at a psychology departmental dinner, for freshman interested in the major to meet with other majors, faculty members, and get questions answered. While Gavin wasn't her first ever boyfriend, but he was the first one who she genuinely trusted and actually loved. As in not just liked a lot. Ever the protective older brother, Riff was careful to remind her to be careful and to be sure and let him know if he needed to beat Gavin up at any point. Laughing off his threats, Emmeline assured him that her boyfriend was a great guy.
And he was. Until he ended up having one too many drinks at a party in the spring and showing up at Emmeline's dorm without his keys. Since her roommate was out of town for the weekend, and she wasn't about to let him walk home in that condition (not that he would have been able to get into his apartment without keys), Emma let him in with the intention of giving him a cup of coffee and tucking him into her roommate's bed for the night. He, however, had very different drunken intentions, and despite Emma's best efforts, he raped her before stumbling back out of the room, leaving her crying on the floor.
She broke up with him the next day, even though he proceeded to apologize more times than she could count, and promised her the moon and stars if she could forgive him. She neither could nor would, and proceeded to ignore him, pretending that nothing had happened. Her roommate figured it out just before the end of the year, and urged Emma to tell someone or do something about it. Using complete denial as her coping mechanism, Emmeline replied that she didn't know what she was talking about, and that nothing had happened. Not wanting to push Emma, her roommate shrugged and suggested that she at least take a pregnancy test, since her 'flu' didn't exactly seem like it had showed up at the most opportune time.
Emmeline had, honestly, not even considered that as a possibility. However, five at-home pregnancy tests and a pint of chocolate ice cream later, she did have to accept it as reality. She had no idea what to do; it was as though her whole world had been turned upside down. Desperate to just go back to normal, she considered abortion, and actually went to a clinic before panicking, realizing she couldn't do it, and leaving. Even if she hadn't gotten pregnant in the most optimal circumstances, she'd always been pro-life, and couldn't bear the thought of killing her baby.
Too ashamed and in denial to tell anyone in her family, Emmeline leaped at the first chance to get away for a while. A summer research program near New Zealand. Far away, and where nobody would know her. It was a perfect thing to get her mind off everything.
~~
The idea I have for Emmeline is that she's sort of a peacemaker, and someone to keep things grounded in all the drama. I took inspiration for her from Lost's Claire, and Hurley, to try and make her a calm, helpful sort of character. I didn't want to make someone very dramatic or 'out there,' because looking at the other characters, and seeing how much potential drama there is, I felt like it would probably be more useful to create an argument-diffuser instead of someone who would take part in all the drama. I think Emma could serve as a good 'supporting character' for the site, instead of being another leading character, which I think will help round out the character ratio on the site. She isn't another leader, and she isn't someone who will sit around idly. She's the kind of person who will support others' ideas, and give her own input when asked for. She'd be willing to do anything to help others out, and she's the type who would volunteer herself for the 'boring' tasks on the island--sorting through luggage to see what's useful, gathering food from the bags, things that not everyone would readily enjoy.
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RP experience: six years, give or take a bit
how did you find us?: your email saying the site's open again
age: nineteen
gender: female
rp sample:
Up until the crash, the flight had been quite normal and uneventful for the auburn-haired eighteen-year-old. Traveling alone, but among people all headed to the same summer research program as herself, Emmeline had spent the flight chatting with the person seated next to her, (a boy from NYU named Paul, who happened to have ran into her brother, ironically enough) reading, and writing in her journal. (The last of which only took place when the person next her was asleep, of course.) She wasn’t a stranger to flying, since she went to college quite some ways from her hometown, and Emmeline had gotten used to making small talk with ‘single serving friends,’ as Edward Norton called them in ‘Fight Club.’ She was actually somewhat a fan of single serving friends, to be honest. It was like, you had a certain amount of time to know a person, and because of the time limit on that friendship, you tended to find out the most interesting things. Whether it was just their favorite color, or what they thought of the plane food, or something deeper than that, it never failed to be at least mildly interesting. She had been writing quietly when the first wave of turbulence hit, jolting her companion awake.
The first jolt threw Emma forward, her seatbelt catching her and keeping her in her seat, the sharp, unpleasant belt cutting into her lower torso with a discomforting squeeze. Her breath catching in her throat, she tried not to panic as her fingers tightened around her journal in a vice-grip, more for the sake of holding something than anything else. She must have failed miserably in her attempt at feigned stoicism, for Paul patted her shoulder and commented that everything would be fine, his reassuring voice quickly cut off as the plane shuddered again, and seemed to threaten to snap in pieces as though it was a twig. A flying piece of luggage struck Paul sharply in the head, and Emma let out a cry of shock.
Everything after that seemed to be a blur, and Emmeline couldn't remember how it came to be that she was standing outside of the plane on some beach, her journal still clutched in her hands as though it could only have been pried away with a crowbar. There was blood on her shirt, soaking the sleeve and spilling onto the bodice of the shirt, but Emma didn't know whose blood it was...It could have been Paul's, or some other person from the plane's, or it could have been hers, but she was too shaken to have the sense to look and see. Sea. There was the sea, they were on a beach. The broken section of the plane was right there, right in front of her. People were screaming, crying, begging for help, but Emmeline couldn't find any voice to let her join in the panicked shrieks.
So she just stood there, rooted to the spot, shaking. She couldn’t tell if she hurt all over, or if she was numb. She felt like she was going to be sick, pass out, and cry. In that order. The yells became clearer and more frantic as it seemed like the plane was going to blow up, or something equally bad. Forcing herself to move in the direction of the people urging everyone else to move, Emmeline started walking that way. As though moving was clearing away some of the shock, Emma began to feel pain as she walked across the sand. Her upper arm was throbbing, and she only had to glance down at it to see that the blood she’d assumed had belonged to someone else was actually her own. From her own very limited knowledge of wounds (that would be, first aid training for being a lifeguard in high school and one pre-veterinary class before deciding she was going to be a psych major) she didn’t think that it was too bad. Her stomach hurt, too, which was the troubling thing for her. The pain was making her dizzy, though she wasn’t sure why, because it wasn’t her head that hurt… and the damned nausea refused to go away as well. Managing to make it over to where some guy with a British accent directing people into groups of injured and ‘not so injured,’ she veered off to the ‘not so injured’ side before falling to a sitting position on the sand. There. That had to be far enough away from the wreckage not to get blown up, because she certainly didn’t have any more energy to move further away.
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