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 Posted: Thu Aug 18, 2011 5:50 pm
—This is a pet trade!
flora gandy | green | three-leaf clover | long handled doloire
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Posted: Thu Aug 18, 2011 6:40 pm
YOUNG GIRL  Name: Flora Gandy
Color: Green
Age: 12
Nationality: American
Home/Financial Status: Upper middle class
School: Teufel Town Middle School
Personality: Flora is perennially shy and worried, with a bad habit of biting her lip and a worse habit of hunching her already small frame. Mentally, she opens up to people very quickly, and her love and affection is very easy to win. However, she's worried about putting people off being her friend, as she has a habit of suffocating people that has hurt her very badly in the past. Thus, outwardly, she is quieter than she wants to be and will let other people carry the weight of a conversation, answering with mostly short replies, hesitant smiles, and emphatic nods or head shakes.
Because of her inability to trust herself to make friends, Flora is attention starved, so she clings very jealously to those acquaintances she does trust to like her no matter what, her father especially. She is very conscious of what her friends say about other people and how much time they spend with other people as opposed to her, and how much certain people make them laugh, and if she sees a difference in the other person's favour, she will stew in her own insecurities. She has a reputation in her class for being a crybaby, as she used to cry in public, but now she usually saves her tears and frustration for when she is alone or talking to the exhibits at the museum.
Flora's at the age where she's starting to want to look pretty and get attention from boys, but she doesn't have the slightest idea how to get it. Because she was raised by her father and he was barely in touch with his feminine side, she doesn't really understand typically girly things. She likes looking at girly fashion but feels uncomfortable in it and doesn't really know how to dress herself in it. She doesn't know what kind of makeup goes where on her face, and she can't flirt to save her life. She speaks and acts in a slightly more mature way than most of her class, as her father raised her like a tiny adult, but is less canny about pop culture and the world around her than most of her classmates, making it difficult for her to communicate with them. However, she has little ill-will towards them or anybody at all. She has a very strong sense of fair and unfair, and if things seem unfair to her, she will cry very hard over them, but is usually unable to bring herself to do anything to even the scales, for fear they may end up inadvertently tipping in the wrong direction. It's incredibly difficult for her to carry a grudge no matter what someone does to her though, because more often than not, she'll blame herself even if she's not at fault.
Flora accepts other people easily no matter how different they are, and she cares a lot about everyone, especially people she considers to be her friends, though she's often afraid of expressing her feelings. She'll always be available if you need a favour, and will often put her own feelings and needs aside for others. She's always thinking of others and how to please them, even changing herself in an attempt to suit peoples' expectations of her. The fact of the matter is simply that though she accepts everyone, she has great difficulty with getting others to accept her as wholly as she wants them to. Because of this, she makes up her own friends, naming and anthropomorphizing the objects around her. Everything she owns has a name, all the exhibits at the UMA she's seen have been given stories and personalities. Because Flora has difficulty making friends, she has learned to amuse herself over the years, so she is imaginative, if not a little scattered, like her father. She reads voraciously and projects her own stories and hopes and desires onto the statues and paintings and galleries at the UMA as both a hobby and a way of dealing with her biggest shortcoming, her lack of social skills.
Flora is desperately sincere, and takes things to heart very easily, which makes her an easy target for Kyubey and a simply terrible Puella Magi. She's easily pleased, and if she was just better at making friends, she would have no desire to make a wish at all, but as it is, she anthropomorphizes things to make up for her lack of companions, naming everything she owns and talking to the exhibits at the museum about things on her mind like they'll answer. She has a loving father and a comfortable home life, making the only thing she needs someone to talk to her in earnest.
Appearance: Small, pale, and unassuming. The only thing that really stands out about Flora is her bottle-green eyes. She's usually dressed primly, but in boyish clothes, and feels uncomfortable in skirts and dresses, though she likes looking at them. Her hair is short, pale blonde, and sensibly cut, obviously by a parent rather than a professional. She is often hunched over or looking at the ground, and moves very quickly from place to place unless something has caught her attention. She has more of a nervous scurry than a walk, and when she talks, she loses her train of thought half way through sometimes.
History: Born to Isidor and Melissa Gandy in Boston, Massachusetts, Flora's life had a rocky start. She was a healthy child, but her mother was emotionally and mentally troubled, and her father was too busy with completing his education to be anything but distant. The first three years of Flora's childhood were often interspersed with tears and arguments between her parents, and then one day, her mother packed up all her belongings, stuck a note on the refrigerator, and left for good. Flora's father didn't contest it or pursue her, but did finish his education and moved as far away from the east coast as he could, to Teufel Town, where he took odd jobs before he finally found employment within his field at the UMA. At first he mostly worked at the Priories, but Flora began to seem unhappy, and so he requested to work at the main branch so he could be close enough to pick Flora up after school and bring her back to work with him until the day ended. At first when they moved, she was invited over to friends' houses some days, but she soon gained a reputation as a suffocating friend and a crybaby, something she now tries to stifle, but something that successfully ensured that she very rarely had social engagements to fill. Slowly it went from her father picking her up some days, to most days, to every day, and then when she was old enough to ride the train alone, it was she that went to him after school, rarely deviating except to go to the library or work on school-mandated partner projects. Flora is very much in the same schedule now, though her father has tried to convince her to take extracurriculars, she never stays in them very long, and her attempts almost always end in frustration on her behalf. She doesn't like large groups because she feels she must compete for attention, and clubs where everyone else is a stranger to her are an even more frightening prospect. She spends most of her free time at the museum, where she is at least well-liked by the guards and can be in an environment she feels is safe and familiar.
Family: Flora lives with her father, Isidor Gandy, a medieval history expert working at the Utopian Museum of Art. Her mother and father married young and had an unstable relationship, especially since her father was too busy with his schooling for much family time, and her mother was prone to rapid mood swings and deep depressions. Her mother packed up and left with nothing but a note shortly after Flora turned three, but Isidor proved himself to be a responsible and caring, if not often preoccupied parent. Flora doesn't really remember her mother and Isidor doesn't bring her up. She doesn't quite know what happened to her, and only vaguely misses her in that she feels most girls her age should have a mother. At first Isidor tried to provide this by starting to date other women, but Flora became afraid of her father's attention being split between her and someone else and reacted very negatively to it. Nowadays Isidor rarely dates and spends most of his precious free time keeping his darling daughter occupied. Isidor is a meticulous, friendly, and patient man, if not a bit scattered at times, and he does his best to be both a father and mother to Flora. However, Flora is still awkward and boyishly dressed, and he doesn't really encourage her to be feminine though she's expressed an interest in it. As Isidor moved from the east coast to the west for the job opportunity, none of Flora's relatives live in Teufel Town. She sometimes goes with her father to visit them for holidays, but hasn't seen them more than three or four times in her life. PUELLA MAGI Language: Gaelic
Desires: I wish my friends would talk to me!
Flora wishes for her real, human friends to talk to her, but she fails to specify so the wish backfires on her. Since she often exaggerates relationships in her mind, most of her 'friends' are more acquaintances than anything else, if that. The friends that she has interacted with most often are the exhibits she talks to in the museum while she waits for her father after school, so the wish causes those to come to life and interact with her- but only she can see and hear them do it.
Emblem: Three leaf clover
Weapon: Long-handled doloire- Typically used for woodwork, but could be used in self-defense, referencing the fact that most of Flora's friends are man-made.
Type of Magic: Flora is especially good at being able to transmit information to other Puella Magi- She can send out a distress signal that any image or sculpture with a mouth near another Puella Magi will start to shout in a voice that only Puellae Magicae can hear. An accidental side-power is that as long as she's in the Utopian Museum of Art, the exhibits can relay information about each part of the Museum to her, but only the ones that count as her friends, so this is only really effective in and around the sections she's been in frequently. The artifacts in non-European wings of the museum very infrequently speak to her, as she had relatively little interaction with them before making her wish. She's got the most allies in the Medieval section, and even then, they can only aid her by telling her what's going on around them, and not all of them were built to be able to see. The Priories are less easy for her to work in this way, as her father attempts to work at the UMA on days she has school so she can go from school to the museum, then home with him. However, she's been to the Priories on weekends and does have friends there, it's just that she's not as well acquainted with them as even some of the later European works at the UMA and they're often uncooperative because of this.
Outfit: concept sketch from roo
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Posted: Mon Aug 22, 2011 12:31 pm
Okay, done! Looking for crit! * u *b
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Posted: Tue Aug 23, 2011 1:01 am
My goodness, Flora is adorable. ; ; Her history and family life, even with the upheaval she has experienced, are still very realistic, with divorce as common as it is nowadays. Her neediness and quest for friends is actually very endearing to me, even her little quirk of "creating" her own friends from the exhibits. <3 I do have a few questions for you, though!
What would qualify as "whole acceptance" to Flora? Is this basically the Holy Grail of friends - the one who will never leave her and always provide the support she needs?
Would she ever share any of her stories or museum "friends" with another person, should she make a good enough connection with them?
How would she handle any kind of romantic feelings?
On the note of handling, has anybody ever tried to use her (such as a manipulative "friend")? How would she deal with something like that?
As a Puella Magi, what kind of barrier would she have (i.e. how Homura had chains, Mami had her ribbon, etc.)~?
But overall she is adorbs. I can't wait to see her in the shop!
Also a present drop-off for you!
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Friendly Conversationalist
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Posted: Tue Aug 23, 2011 9:53 am
Thank you, I'm glad you like her! Q u Q <3
• Basically that, with one important qualifier- They would have to consider Flora their best friend and be willing to call her their best friend.
• She has never shared her stories of museum friends with anyone because she's rather self conscious about it. For her, her museum friends needing to exist at all represents a lack of something she dearly wants, so as much as she cares for her museum friends, if she had an opportunity to tell a real friend about them, she would pass up that opportunity for fear of scaring that real friend off. After her wish, this may change somewhat, but pre-wish, it is absolute.
• Flora simply wouldn't handle them. If she got strong feelings, she would sigh sometimes, cry other times, but would neither confess, nor act upon them, although she might hover around the recipient of her feelings more frequently, and might even try to sign up for an extracurricular they're in. However, Flora is the queen of social-situation-avoidance, and feelings of attraction are no exception.
• Flora has not had to deal with a really truly manipulative friend yet, though she has been used before. Every time something like that happens, she blames herself, so if she was to be truly, thoroughly used, she'd probably be really broken up about it for a long time, especially if that person tried to pass themselves off as her 'best friend'. She would probably end up avoiding them, but for their sake, as she would think she was the one who caused them to act that way.
• Her magical power, so to speak, is that she can send an SOS through to any piece of art with a mouth near any Puella Magi in the vicinity. However, an unexpected side power of her wish is that so long as she is in the museum, her exhibit friends can relay information to her about her surroundings.
BAWWWWW, thank you so much for the crit and the present, that's so adorable! Q __________ Q <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 The questions were really helpful to think about, I owe you a present for this for sure. ):< <3
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Posted: Tue Mar 13, 2012 6:50 pm
APPROVED!
Your journal will be made shortly. Halie has highlighted any questions we have about Flora. Thank you for making such a lovely quest!
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Messenger of Magic Captain
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