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Oct. 6th, 2012 08:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
firecracker_hoppingPlayer info:
Name: Gabe
Pronoun: Him
E-Mail: texside@gmail.com
Other Contact: The Tex Side on AIM
Character Basics
Name: Lera Savinkov
City: Fall City
Age: 24
Gender: Female
Biological Sex: Female
Birthdate: April 1, 2026
Birthplace: St. Petersburg, Russia
PB: Karen Gillan
Appearance
Natural Hair/Eye Color: Red hair and green eyes. She is, in fact, a natural redhead and does not wear contacts or some such.
Height: 5' 11"
Body Type: In short: tall and pretty. Lera had a career in the United States Army as a geographic information systems specialist, which left her in reasonably good shape if not epically so -- she got in the habit of exercising daily, though she is far from a Special Forces badass. Maybe a Kinda Different Than Average Forces Badass.
Noticeable Scars/Tattoos/Piercings and Location: She has pierced ears. She did not get any tattoos, but she has periodically chickened out after getting a design for one and not managing to get through the door. The courage of men failed them that day, Aragorn.
Clothing Style: She likes pants and jackets. She wears her fair share of sleeveless shorts and the like, especially with pretty bright and colorful looks, but she thinks a jacket looks oh so sharp. She dresses overly casual, though. Shorts in warm weather, sandals whenever she can get away with it and sometimes when she can't.
Background
Summary: Lera was born to Dmitri and Alena Savinkov in the Russian city of St. Petersburg. She barely remembers her time in Russia; she moved to Fall City just after she turned four, when her mother -- an engineer -- got a job and a worker's visa. They left after the shocks from the Russian pipeline closing, which caused her mother to lose her job, but have the education to get one in the States. Her father followed after and the family settled down in Fall City, living in the northeastern part of the city.
Her parents took the citizenship tests, which gave her US citizenship. She grew up in Fall City's posh area, helped by her mother's rather good job. She went to one of the city's high schools and was a productive member of the girls' baseball team. They went to state one time. She also developed a head for numbers, doing well in math and science classes. Because the world is cruel and unfair, she decided on a career using these skills instead of the creative hobbies she sometimes engaged in. Her father told her something about "blame Gorbachev if you wanted to be novelist."
She did not get the joke. However, she did listen to her father's stories about -- and occasionally directly from the mouth of, when he visited -- her grandfather, Ivan. Ivan was really just a lowly bureaucrat that oversaw train schedules into East Germany (and later Europe in general), but he claimed that he was a KGB agent. Lera internalized his legend, turned it into myth, and decided to go on a hero's journey: into the local US Army recruiting office! Because she did better with math and science, she did not become a rifle-toting soldier, but instead learned to use geographic information systems.
She spent the next four years in the army. She left with a marketable skill, which they sent her to community college for while she was training in Fort Hood, Texas: knowing how to use geographic information systems to take spatial areas (IE, maps) and store critical information. In the army, she used this to map out information in foreign countries and generally contribute to long-range planning by people she never met. She got a job pretty quickly, with a local surveying company that outlines areas to regrow forests cut down in decades past.
This was not exactly the glorious life she saw for herself. It paid well, of course, but it was boring. She moved into an apartment in the northwestern neighborhood, which she can afford easily enough, but she wishes she lived in the southeastern area (it seems way cooler!). She has spent the last year in a sort of blur: having a good job that is too boring to even give her a reason to complain. Her main source of entertainment was a little writing group she participated in with several of her Army buddies. One of them, Seiji Klein, played Zenderael, which is how she heard of it. Seiji Klein went missing two months ago. Lera started looking into what happened and found out some of the mystery surrounds Zenderael. This made her decide to start playing the game -- to find out what happened to her old friend (and maybe alleviate boredom).
Tell me two important memories. One of Lera's earliest memories was when she left Russia, at the age of four, standing in the terminal of Pulkovo Airport in St. Petersburg. She remembered her mother and father tearfully saying goodbye to a collection of aunts, uncles, and cousins, many of whom she had never met before, and getting hugged by all of them. She never really understood what it meant at the time or why they were so sad.
The memory is important because she feels guilty about it: she later realized that she failed to understanding the feelings of her parents and relatives at all. She feels like she somehow messed up, getting impatient at their long goodbyes. Of course, she was four, and she realizes intellectually that she had no way of knowing the signfiicance. She still felt guilty about it, which made her nicer to her parents when she grew older -- and influenced her decision to join the Army (and helped her stick with it, when it wasn't what she expected).
It was a way to do something her grandfather did (or so she thought, anyways). He had been in a similar job with the KGB (as far as she knew), and she did it not only because those stories sounded cool, but because she thought it would make them proud. A lot of her desire to do so comes from guilt about this memory (and decisions it influenced later).
Another important memory is from her junior year of high school. She was in both the science club and a writer's group. Her writer's group was giving her an award for a story she wrote, which she was inordinately proud of. Lera, however, also had to make a presentation on a science project for a science fair at the same time. Her parents told her to do the latter because it was (in her mother's words) "more important."
She went along with it and skipped the award ceremony with her friends. It distracted her; when it was her turn to make a presentation to the science committee, Lera stumbled through her presentation and made it such that they did not get into the top projects of the science fair. She took it hard; the lesson she took away from it, after the botched presentation, was that she needed to be serious and focus on the "important" things -- like job-related things. This helped Lera make a lot of her career decisions.
Family members: Lera's mother and father are both alive. Alena Sakinov is the family's authority in the United States; she is an engineer and fifty-two years old. She is a senior engineer at a firm in Fall City, who is looking forward to retirement. Her father, Dmitri, conversely, is a bit more of a flake. He toyed with being a musician and a writer at points, but was never very talented. He tends to be a homemaker, with periods of working jobs that never seem to last long. He is fifty years old.
She has two younger brothers who were born in the United States, Boris and Vladimir, who are both in high school. Neither of them play Zenderael.
She also has a number of family members back in Russia. Her paternal grandfather, Ivan, is the most notable. He is presently 92 years old and remembers the Cold War. He worked as a bureaucrat on the Soviet railroads. There are aunts and uncles on both sides, as well as cousins her age and older. Some might be involved with the Russian government's response to Zenderael.
This seems like a good place to note that she speaks fluent Russian. Her accent is barely perceptible, but she can switch between Russian and English without trouble. Her family speaks Russian in the home.
Pets: She has a four year-old cat named Nigel. His full name is Dr. Nigel Whiskersworth, Esquire. He is smarter than she is. She has let him play Zenderael, by walking him back and forth across the keyboard. This will end in tears.
Character Details
Favorite Food? Grilled pineapple. She thinks it goes with everything. She knows how to core a pineapple and grill it up. She serves it at parties. She likes steak and hamburgers and stuff otherwise -- which is a little weird with her vegetarian friends -- and really does not like fish at all. She thinks it tastes gross and flaky.
Favorite Color? Green. She owns a lot of green clothes and stuff. She especially likes dark green clothing.
Favorite Season? Winter. She thinks snow and the like is pretty, and prefers bundling up and wearing layers to trying to keep warm over feeling hot and unpleasant all of the time. She also likes dry weather over wet weather, but the Pacific Northwest is not exactly a great place for that sort of environment.
Favorite Animal? Cats. Lera loves every cat. She especially loves her cat. She isn't too wild about birds -- thinks they're too noisy -- and likes dogs okay. More exotic pets are cute, but they belong in zoos. She doesn't get rodents as housepets at all, but she has to admit a house bunny is sort of amazing.
Do they like television? A little bit. She has a few favorite TV shoes, but she was always more interested in physical activities -- take a jog, listen to an audiobook -- and written stuff. It's not too hard to get her to watch a TV show, especially something kinda science fiction or fantasy like, but she doesn't leave it running all day.
What's their favorite style of music? Heavy metal. No joke, she picked up a taste for heavy metal in the military. She likes music that is loud, angry, and makes your ears bleed. It's fast, gets her heart pounding, and the lyrics are totally ridiculous. Rock and roll is okay; she is not really a fan of electronica, techno, and club stuff, and can take or leave hip hop.
Have they considered being the gender/sexuality they're not? Lera has experienced some confusion on her sexuality and been attracted to people of different genders over time. She definitely gave this some thought when she was younger and never totally made her mind up just where she falls on the Kinsey Scale and the like. She currently tells herself she is too busy to worry about it, thanks to her job. She feels more secure in her gender identity, though.
Would you say they're "picky"? Definitely. She likes her food a certain way, she gets frustrated when life doesn't turn out the way she planned for, and she really hates it when something gets messed up when she's cooking. But she'd tell you otherwise!
Do they alphabetize/color-coordinate their things? If so, which things? She learned to pack and organize quickly and efficiently in the army. Her closet is a monument to simple organization. She doesn't care for the way it's so rigid, but gets annoyed every time she does something more freeform.
Internet Presence: She acts like herself: cheery, pleasant, and alternating between pleasantly aloof and way too friendly. The one difference is that she tends to be a little private, especially inside and related to playing Zenderael -- she wants to hide that she is looking into her friend Seiji's disappearance, or that she has suspicions about the nature of the game (which seem just a little too insane to be true).
Programs/Services and Screennames: AIM: Firecracker Hopping
E-mail: dosvidaniya@gmail.com (for her friends), фейерверк@mail.ru (for her family, it's firecracker in Russian), l.a.savinkov@geosurveysinc.co.us (for business purposes)
Net Handle: Firecracker (when she was younger; she does sometimes just use her first name online now)
Play Style: Lera plays a lot of PVP in Zenderael. It appeals to a basic competitive drive that she has and is a good way to pass the time. She likes big numbers, so she does a lot of damage as her play style. She likes "fair fights," which are really nebulously defined, but definitely don't include tricks like stun locking people. She loves a knockdown, dragout fight.
To RP or not to RP?: She RPs. She tells herself that she RPs because she wants to infiltrate that community and find out the truth about her friend Seiji (and what's going on). RPing tickles that old desire to do creative stuff and she found herself getting really, really invested in it really fast. She keeps most of her RP to her one alt, Acher, who she is inordinately proud of (and who, incidentally, starred in the story she won an award with!). She RPs pretty well, but she has a bad habit of not reading up on the lore enough and getting little details wrong (especially when she starts improvising).
Personality
General Overview: Lera's personality is a constant tug-of-war between self-restraint and overindulgence. She has difficulties doing things by half-measures: whether it is working eighty hours a week or playing Zenderael until four in the morning, she never seems to be able to strike that balance that would probably be healthier for her. In a sense, she is painfully consistent: whether she feels she should do something or wants to do something, she dives right in.
She cares a little too much about what people think of her, though. She hates feeling like she seems lazy, incompetent, or boring to somebody else. She makes an effort to be cheerful and pleasant in social situations, come across as serious and studious at work, and earnest and determined at whatever she does. She often feels these things, but she tends to force them even when she doesn't (and then tries to hide it when she feels cranky or just simply tired).
Conversely, though, when she decides it's time to have fun, she cuts loose without a second thought. She can become boisterous, outgoing, and outright self-indulgent, letting herself have fun after she didn't for a month. Of course, she feels guilty about this... after it's all said and done. Her temper tends to be the same way: she keeps her negative opinions stored up until one day she starts shouting them at the person who pissed her off.
She places a strong value on duty and doing what you should, though. She takes this seriously -- it's why she's playing Zenderael (even if she started to like it for more selfish reasons after the fact), because Seiji was one of her best friends -- and thinks others should, too. She passes judgment on people she perceives as not doing their jobs and might even call them out (though it tends to come out all at once).
Altogether, Lera is essentially a repressed hothead. She wishes she was super forthright, immediately jumped based on what she feels in her gut, and would speak out the moment she sees something wrong -- or tell someone when they earned her respect. She feels too self-conscious to do this, though, so she tends to bottle those impulses up, and try to be calm, rational, and reserved because she thinks she should be. Inevitably, though, it all comes out.
Flaws: The biggest flaw is the way Lera shifts between fits of energy, anger, and happiness and a calmer, reserved, if pleasant persona. She has ran off a few friends because they never realized she was angry at them, until she was abruptly shouting at them about a few weeks' worth of problems -- or pissing them off because she needed a break, didn't take it, and at the worst possible time, she stops to vegetate with a book for two days straight when a project is due in four days. She never really found much balance in her life.
She also isn't honest with herself. If she thinks something is frivolous -- usually because someone told her as much (or she thinks they did) -- she writes it off. See the incident with the story she won an award for: she was really proud of something she did, and because of something her mother told her, decided it was a critical character flaw, and started focusing on the "useful" hobby at the expense of the one she enjoyed. She has a bad habit of lying to herself about what she likes, thinks, and wants, which makes her flip flop later.
She also reads too much into what people say. Lera will take small criticism or an off-hand remark or even a bad memory of an event as something huge. She will think a small slight is a massive insult to someone. Memories of a not understanding her family's goodbyes when she was four years old left her feeling guilty enough to do things to please her parents a decade or more later, when they had never been insulted in the first place.
Quirks: Lera is energetic as hell. She keeps it contained out in public, but by herself or with friends (or if she gets worked up a lot in public), she tends to fidget and even hop up and down. If someone spends any time at all with her, it would be impossible to miss this.
Her way of switching between reserved and excited (or angry) also shows itself in how she talks and her cadence of speaking. When she's being more reserved and cautious, she's polite and cheerful, but she tends to be just slightly formal. When she gets agitated or excited, she gets louder, more expressive, and when she is angry, foul-mouthed. She also gets more playful and teasing with people she knows better. Basically, she suddenly gets to be more of a motormouth.
She tends to tilt her head when she's confused or thinks someone is doing something weird. This is even when she's being more restrained!
Finally, she plays with her hair a lot.
Three Complimentary Words: Good-humored, honorable, and cheerful.
Three True-But-Hard-To-Hear Words: Oversensitive, quick-tempered, unfair.
Name: Gabe
Pronoun: Him
E-Mail: texside@gmail.com
Other Contact: The Tex Side on AIM
Character Basics
Name: Lera Savinkov
City: Fall City
Age: 24
Gender: Female
Biological Sex: Female
Birthdate: April 1, 2026
Birthplace: St. Petersburg, Russia
PB: Karen Gillan
Appearance
Natural Hair/Eye Color: Red hair and green eyes. She is, in fact, a natural redhead and does not wear contacts or some such.
Height: 5' 11"
Body Type: In short: tall and pretty. Lera had a career in the United States Army as a geographic information systems specialist, which left her in reasonably good shape if not epically so -- she got in the habit of exercising daily, though she is far from a Special Forces badass. Maybe a Kinda Different Than Average Forces Badass.
Noticeable Scars/Tattoos/Piercings and Location: She has pierced ears. She did not get any tattoos, but she has periodically chickened out after getting a design for one and not managing to get through the door. The courage of men failed them that day, Aragorn.
Clothing Style: She likes pants and jackets. She wears her fair share of sleeveless shorts and the like, especially with pretty bright and colorful looks, but she thinks a jacket looks oh so sharp. She dresses overly casual, though. Shorts in warm weather, sandals whenever she can get away with it and sometimes when she can't.
Background
Summary: Lera was born to Dmitri and Alena Savinkov in the Russian city of St. Petersburg. She barely remembers her time in Russia; she moved to Fall City just after she turned four, when her mother -- an engineer -- got a job and a worker's visa. They left after the shocks from the Russian pipeline closing, which caused her mother to lose her job, but have the education to get one in the States. Her father followed after and the family settled down in Fall City, living in the northeastern part of the city.
Her parents took the citizenship tests, which gave her US citizenship. She grew up in Fall City's posh area, helped by her mother's rather good job. She went to one of the city's high schools and was a productive member of the girls' baseball team. They went to state one time. She also developed a head for numbers, doing well in math and science classes. Because the world is cruel and unfair, she decided on a career using these skills instead of the creative hobbies she sometimes engaged in. Her father told her something about "blame Gorbachev if you wanted to be novelist."
She did not get the joke. However, she did listen to her father's stories about -- and occasionally directly from the mouth of, when he visited -- her grandfather, Ivan. Ivan was really just a lowly bureaucrat that oversaw train schedules into East Germany (and later Europe in general), but he claimed that he was a KGB agent. Lera internalized his legend, turned it into myth, and decided to go on a hero's journey: into the local US Army recruiting office! Because she did better with math and science, she did not become a rifle-toting soldier, but instead learned to use geographic information systems.
She spent the next four years in the army. She left with a marketable skill, which they sent her to community college for while she was training in Fort Hood, Texas: knowing how to use geographic information systems to take spatial areas (IE, maps) and store critical information. In the army, she used this to map out information in foreign countries and generally contribute to long-range planning by people she never met. She got a job pretty quickly, with a local surveying company that outlines areas to regrow forests cut down in decades past.
This was not exactly the glorious life she saw for herself. It paid well, of course, but it was boring. She moved into an apartment in the northwestern neighborhood, which she can afford easily enough, but she wishes she lived in the southeastern area (it seems way cooler!). She has spent the last year in a sort of blur: having a good job that is too boring to even give her a reason to complain. Her main source of entertainment was a little writing group she participated in with several of her Army buddies. One of them, Seiji Klein, played Zenderael, which is how she heard of it. Seiji Klein went missing two months ago. Lera started looking into what happened and found out some of the mystery surrounds Zenderael. This made her decide to start playing the game -- to find out what happened to her old friend (and maybe alleviate boredom).
Tell me two important memories. One of Lera's earliest memories was when she left Russia, at the age of four, standing in the terminal of Pulkovo Airport in St. Petersburg. She remembered her mother and father tearfully saying goodbye to a collection of aunts, uncles, and cousins, many of whom she had never met before, and getting hugged by all of them. She never really understood what it meant at the time or why they were so sad.
The memory is important because she feels guilty about it: she later realized that she failed to understanding the feelings of her parents and relatives at all. She feels like she somehow messed up, getting impatient at their long goodbyes. Of course, she was four, and she realizes intellectually that she had no way of knowing the signfiicance. She still felt guilty about it, which made her nicer to her parents when she grew older -- and influenced her decision to join the Army (and helped her stick with it, when it wasn't what she expected).
It was a way to do something her grandfather did (or so she thought, anyways). He had been in a similar job with the KGB (as far as she knew), and she did it not only because those stories sounded cool, but because she thought it would make them proud. A lot of her desire to do so comes from guilt about this memory (and decisions it influenced later).
Another important memory is from her junior year of high school. She was in both the science club and a writer's group. Her writer's group was giving her an award for a story she wrote, which she was inordinately proud of. Lera, however, also had to make a presentation on a science project for a science fair at the same time. Her parents told her to do the latter because it was (in her mother's words) "more important."
She went along with it and skipped the award ceremony with her friends. It distracted her; when it was her turn to make a presentation to the science committee, Lera stumbled through her presentation and made it such that they did not get into the top projects of the science fair. She took it hard; the lesson she took away from it, after the botched presentation, was that she needed to be serious and focus on the "important" things -- like job-related things. This helped Lera make a lot of her career decisions.
Family members: Lera's mother and father are both alive. Alena Sakinov is the family's authority in the United States; she is an engineer and fifty-two years old. She is a senior engineer at a firm in Fall City, who is looking forward to retirement. Her father, Dmitri, conversely, is a bit more of a flake. He toyed with being a musician and a writer at points, but was never very talented. He tends to be a homemaker, with periods of working jobs that never seem to last long. He is fifty years old.
She has two younger brothers who were born in the United States, Boris and Vladimir, who are both in high school. Neither of them play Zenderael.
She also has a number of family members back in Russia. Her paternal grandfather, Ivan, is the most notable. He is presently 92 years old and remembers the Cold War. He worked as a bureaucrat on the Soviet railroads. There are aunts and uncles on both sides, as well as cousins her age and older. Some might be involved with the Russian government's response to Zenderael.
This seems like a good place to note that she speaks fluent Russian. Her accent is barely perceptible, but she can switch between Russian and English without trouble. Her family speaks Russian in the home.
Pets: She has a four year-old cat named Nigel. His full name is Dr. Nigel Whiskersworth, Esquire. He is smarter than she is. She has let him play Zenderael, by walking him back and forth across the keyboard. This will end in tears.
Character Details
Favorite Food? Grilled pineapple. She thinks it goes with everything. She knows how to core a pineapple and grill it up. She serves it at parties. She likes steak and hamburgers and stuff otherwise -- which is a little weird with her vegetarian friends -- and really does not like fish at all. She thinks it tastes gross and flaky.
Favorite Color? Green. She owns a lot of green clothes and stuff. She especially likes dark green clothing.
Favorite Season? Winter. She thinks snow and the like is pretty, and prefers bundling up and wearing layers to trying to keep warm over feeling hot and unpleasant all of the time. She also likes dry weather over wet weather, but the Pacific Northwest is not exactly a great place for that sort of environment.
Favorite Animal? Cats. Lera loves every cat. She especially loves her cat. She isn't too wild about birds -- thinks they're too noisy -- and likes dogs okay. More exotic pets are cute, but they belong in zoos. She doesn't get rodents as housepets at all, but she has to admit a house bunny is sort of amazing.
Do they like television? A little bit. She has a few favorite TV shoes, but she was always more interested in physical activities -- take a jog, listen to an audiobook -- and written stuff. It's not too hard to get her to watch a TV show, especially something kinda science fiction or fantasy like, but she doesn't leave it running all day.
What's their favorite style of music? Heavy metal. No joke, she picked up a taste for heavy metal in the military. She likes music that is loud, angry, and makes your ears bleed. It's fast, gets her heart pounding, and the lyrics are totally ridiculous. Rock and roll is okay; she is not really a fan of electronica, techno, and club stuff, and can take or leave hip hop.
Have they considered being the gender/sexuality they're not? Lera has experienced some confusion on her sexuality and been attracted to people of different genders over time. She definitely gave this some thought when she was younger and never totally made her mind up just where she falls on the Kinsey Scale and the like. She currently tells herself she is too busy to worry about it, thanks to her job. She feels more secure in her gender identity, though.
Would you say they're "picky"? Definitely. She likes her food a certain way, she gets frustrated when life doesn't turn out the way she planned for, and she really hates it when something gets messed up when she's cooking. But she'd tell you otherwise!
Do they alphabetize/color-coordinate their things? If so, which things? She learned to pack and organize quickly and efficiently in the army. Her closet is a monument to simple organization. She doesn't care for the way it's so rigid, but gets annoyed every time she does something more freeform.
Internet Presence: She acts like herself: cheery, pleasant, and alternating between pleasantly aloof and way too friendly. The one difference is that she tends to be a little private, especially inside and related to playing Zenderael -- she wants to hide that she is looking into her friend Seiji's disappearance, or that she has suspicions about the nature of the game (which seem just a little too insane to be true).
Programs/Services and Screennames: AIM: Firecracker Hopping
E-mail: dosvidaniya@gmail.com (for her friends), фейерверк@mail.ru (for her family, it's firecracker in Russian), l.a.savinkov@geosurveysinc.co.us (for business purposes)
Net Handle: Firecracker (when she was younger; she does sometimes just use her first name online now)
Play Style: Lera plays a lot of PVP in Zenderael. It appeals to a basic competitive drive that she has and is a good way to pass the time. She likes big numbers, so she does a lot of damage as her play style. She likes "fair fights," which are really nebulously defined, but definitely don't include tricks like stun locking people. She loves a knockdown, dragout fight.
To RP or not to RP?: She RPs. She tells herself that she RPs because she wants to infiltrate that community and find out the truth about her friend Seiji (and what's going on). RPing tickles that old desire to do creative stuff and she found herself getting really, really invested in it really fast. She keeps most of her RP to her one alt, Acher, who she is inordinately proud of (and who, incidentally, starred in the story she won an award with!). She RPs pretty well, but she has a bad habit of not reading up on the lore enough and getting little details wrong (especially when she starts improvising).
Personality
General Overview: Lera's personality is a constant tug-of-war between self-restraint and overindulgence. She has difficulties doing things by half-measures: whether it is working eighty hours a week or playing Zenderael until four in the morning, she never seems to be able to strike that balance that would probably be healthier for her. In a sense, she is painfully consistent: whether she feels she should do something or wants to do something, she dives right in.
She cares a little too much about what people think of her, though. She hates feeling like she seems lazy, incompetent, or boring to somebody else. She makes an effort to be cheerful and pleasant in social situations, come across as serious and studious at work, and earnest and determined at whatever she does. She often feels these things, but she tends to force them even when she doesn't (and then tries to hide it when she feels cranky or just simply tired).
Conversely, though, when she decides it's time to have fun, she cuts loose without a second thought. She can become boisterous, outgoing, and outright self-indulgent, letting herself have fun after she didn't for a month. Of course, she feels guilty about this... after it's all said and done. Her temper tends to be the same way: she keeps her negative opinions stored up until one day she starts shouting them at the person who pissed her off.
She places a strong value on duty and doing what you should, though. She takes this seriously -- it's why she's playing Zenderael (even if she started to like it for more selfish reasons after the fact), because Seiji was one of her best friends -- and thinks others should, too. She passes judgment on people she perceives as not doing their jobs and might even call them out (though it tends to come out all at once).
Altogether, Lera is essentially a repressed hothead. She wishes she was super forthright, immediately jumped based on what she feels in her gut, and would speak out the moment she sees something wrong -- or tell someone when they earned her respect. She feels too self-conscious to do this, though, so she tends to bottle those impulses up, and try to be calm, rational, and reserved because she thinks she should be. Inevitably, though, it all comes out.
Flaws: The biggest flaw is the way Lera shifts between fits of energy, anger, and happiness and a calmer, reserved, if pleasant persona. She has ran off a few friends because they never realized she was angry at them, until she was abruptly shouting at them about a few weeks' worth of problems -- or pissing them off because she needed a break, didn't take it, and at the worst possible time, she stops to vegetate with a book for two days straight when a project is due in four days. She never really found much balance in her life.
She also isn't honest with herself. If she thinks something is frivolous -- usually because someone told her as much (or she thinks they did) -- she writes it off. See the incident with the story she won an award for: she was really proud of something she did, and because of something her mother told her, decided it was a critical character flaw, and started focusing on the "useful" hobby at the expense of the one she enjoyed. She has a bad habit of lying to herself about what she likes, thinks, and wants, which makes her flip flop later.
She also reads too much into what people say. Lera will take small criticism or an off-hand remark or even a bad memory of an event as something huge. She will think a small slight is a massive insult to someone. Memories of a not understanding her family's goodbyes when she was four years old left her feeling guilty enough to do things to please her parents a decade or more later, when they had never been insulted in the first place.
Quirks: Lera is energetic as hell. She keeps it contained out in public, but by herself or with friends (or if she gets worked up a lot in public), she tends to fidget and even hop up and down. If someone spends any time at all with her, it would be impossible to miss this.
Her way of switching between reserved and excited (or angry) also shows itself in how she talks and her cadence of speaking. When she's being more reserved and cautious, she's polite and cheerful, but she tends to be just slightly formal. When she gets agitated or excited, she gets louder, more expressive, and when she is angry, foul-mouthed. She also gets more playful and teasing with people she knows better. Basically, she suddenly gets to be more of a motormouth.
She tends to tilt her head when she's confused or thinks someone is doing something weird. This is even when she's being more restrained!
Finally, she plays with her hair a lot.
Three Complimentary Words: Good-humored, honorable, and cheerful.
Three True-But-Hard-To-Hear Words: Oversensitive, quick-tempered, unfair.