Doctor Records - Public Folder
Full Name: Ruby James
Nickname: Ru, Rubes, Ruby Red, RJ, Cat
Gender: Female
Date of Birth: November 15th
Age: Twenty two
Height: 5'9"
Weight: 145 lbs
Eye Color: Hazel
Hair Color: Auburn
Former Occupation: College student
Sexuality Demisexual
Nationality: American
Appearance: Reddish hair, a number of freckles, all of which she is proud of, what everyone growing up called 'cat eyes', and a snub nose. Long legs and a lean, wiry build. Random scars up and down her arms and legs, and especially concentrated on her hands. Some are from an adventurous 'tomboy' childhood, plenty are from having to climb over/under things, fences and broken glass, etc, from after the outbreak. No tattoos, though she had plans to get one before things went bad.
Nickname: Ru, Rubes, Ruby Red, RJ, Cat
Gender: Female
Date of Birth: November 15th
Age: Twenty two
Height: 5'9"
Weight: 145 lbs
Eye Color: Hazel
Hair Color: Auburn
Former Occupation: College student
Sexuality Demisexual
Nationality: American
Appearance: Reddish hair, a number of freckles, all of which she is proud of, what everyone growing up called 'cat eyes', and a snub nose. Long legs and a lean, wiry build. Random scars up and down her arms and legs, and especially concentrated on her hands. Some are from an adventurous 'tomboy' childhood, plenty are from having to climb over/under things, fences and broken glass, etc, from after the outbreak. No tattoos, though she had plans to get one before things went bad.
Military Records - Private
Weaponry:
- Bowie knife. Strapped to her thigh. She's more comfortable with it than her rifle. She trusts her knife skills better than her shooting aim.
- Hunting rifle. On a shoulder sling. To be really specific, it is a Woodland Remington 800.This was her dad's. He taught her how to shoot a bit when she was little, and she went hunting with him once or twice, but it was never something she was interested in. He tried to help her with her shooting as much as he could before he died, but generally she wasn't trusted with a gun until there was no one left but her to use it.
- Pepper spray. In her jacket pocket. This is ancient and something she had on her in college, because her parents were 'paranoid', she claimed at the time. Is it still effective? Certainly not on walkers, but she reckons it could at least buy her a few seconds to run up against any living threats, be they wild animals or people.
Equipment:
- One water bottle. Warm, stale, but drinkable while grimacing.
- First aid kit. Water damaged and a few components are missing, but still useable
- Large college sweatshirt. Has seen far, far better days, but has a hood, which is helpful when its pouring rain. Was her boyfriend's and her's.
- Dead, battered cellphone. She's had it since high school and it has a ton of pictures of her boyfriend on it, which is partly why she can't bring herself to chuck it.
- Two cans of food. She hated canned food before all this, and still hates it now. Regardless, a girl's gotta eat.
- A pack of cigarettes and a pack of gum. These are supposedly for bartering purposes. She swears she won't touch either but she's often tempted.
- Broken watch. This was her boyfriend's; she ended up carrying it in her pack for him when the strap on it broke. He wanted to chuck it, but Ruby insisted she could fix it up again. Now the strap is still broke, and it no longer tells the correct time.
- Pack of playing cards. Fairly self explanatory. Something about dealing them out reassures her, even if they're old and stained .
Biography: Ruby James was born in Jasper, Tennessee on a November evening to Sharon James, a social worker, and Gerald James, a local mechanic. She was their third born child; they already had two young sons; Harlan, aged four, and Marcel, aged three. They'd been trying for a girl after having Harlan, something Ruby would use as ammunition against Marcel in various arguments over the years. Being two only a year apart, Harlan and Marcel were regularly mistaken for twins, and were as close as twins to boot. Ruby, being the 'baby sister', was regularly left out of their play, though that never stopped her from tagging along on nearly everything they did or tried to do. She also spent a fair amount of time in her dad's garage, often riding around on a scooter, generally messing around with things she had no right to be messing around with, and annoying her father. Despite this, Ruby was always a 'daddy's girl' through and through; she and her mom tended to argue more, especially over her behavior. While not wild to extremes, Ruby was an impulsive, obstinate child who generally was not about to let any adults, even her parents, stop her from doing something she wanted to do, even if it was possibly dangerous. She earned her fair share of spankings and timeouts, is the point here.
Growing up in a small town, she knew most of the kids she went to school with from kindergarten to high school. Her best friend from third grade onward was Ashley Carter. Physically, they were opposites. Ruby was a scrawny, tall redhead who earned the unfortunate moniker of 'Scarecrow' until puberty hit. Ashley was a short and stocky blonde who prided herself on being able to beat anyone in an arm wrestle. Personality wise, they were two peas in a pod; bold and reckless and always willing to do whatever someone said they couldn't do. Ruby would tinker with anything put in front of her; Ashley loved to paint. They were inseparable throughout the rest of elementary, middle, and high school. Only college could separate them. Ruby headed to the Georgia Institute of Technology; Ashley to Virginia Commonwealth University. They grew apart, between distance and college life, and then Ashley dropped out to go live with her boyfriend in LA in some art/music scene Ruby was casually dismissive of, mostly due to hurt feelings. She'd thought they were on the same page; but they'd grown into young women who no longer quite knew each other at all.
Despite the lingering ache of a splintered friendship, Ruby had met someone who seemed to make that pain lessen a bit. Tommy Foster was baby faced with dark hair that was already graying at age eighteen, and a love of skinny jeans she enjoyed pretending to mock for a short span of time. He was slenderly built and very tall, and the first guy to never say a word about Ruby's height. His favorite colors were black and green, he was in the civil engineering program, while she was in mechanical, and by sophomore year of college he and Ruby were dating. 'TommyandRuby' was akin to one word for their other friends. They snuck into each other's dorm rooms and left notes on whiteboards and occasionally skipped class to see each other (though Ruby always had to talk Tommy into even considering it, him being the more cautious of the two). They went out for coffee and fast food and played video games and card games and studied for exams together. He was Ruby's replacement best friend, the first Serious Significant Other, the person she thought about when she went to bed and when she woke up. They had a thousand in jokes and a thousand stories and it was so easy to love Tommy Foster Ruby was almost embarrassed by it.
Naturally, she planned for him to meet her parents, who were annoyed she hadn't introduce the boy she'd been dating for a year to them yet. They planned to make the two hour drive from Georgia up to Jasper on a classes free weekend. On the way back, they planned to stop in Trenton, Georgia where Tommy was from, barely a half hour from Ruby's home, to meet his family. He was especially excited for Ruby to meet his teenage sister, who he assured her she would love. Ruby was slightly wary about her parents meeting her boyfriend. Her mom would probably pretend to like him even if she hated him, so to speak, but her dad was far blunter, and just a bit overprotective. 'I hope he doesn't get the rifle out,' she joked on the drive up. Tommy just laughed. Harlan and Marcel were out of the house; Harlan to Miami with his fiancee, Sara; they both worked in hotel management and had gotten jobs at a resort in Miami; and Marcel was in grad school in Michigan for a law degree. By the time the visit was over there were reports of all the nearby major cities being under martial law. Atlanta didn't seem like a good place to head back to, to Ruby's growing unease. There was dispute over what it was; talk of riots over police shootings but also of a disease that had people dropping like flies. Gerald and Sharon insisted Ruby and Tommy not go anywhere until things calmed down; the roads were probably blocked and jammed up with traffic anyways. They holed up in the house, anxiously listening to conflicting news reports and trying to contact Harlan and Marcel. Neither eve picked up their phones. By the end of the following week even Jasper was buckling with whatever this was. Crowded in the family car, they peeled out of town at the dead of night with 'only the necessities' though the necessities ran out soon enough. Ruby drove; Gerald shot anything on the road ahead of them. Sharon kept calling her sons, over and over again until her phone died. Tommy prayed.
Two months later Gerald and Sharon were dead; she'd been bit and turned and bit her husband. Ruby and Tommy came back from scavenging a nearby abandoned convenience store to find the two stumbling along on the dirt road outside. They got in the car and drove away. Neither discussed shooting the walkers that had once been her parents. They had no set direction in mind, but stayed around the Tennessee/Georgia border, eventually running into a small group that agreed to take them in, under the assumption that Ruby was a 'crack shot' with her father's hunting rifle. This was not the case at all; they were desperate and needed an in into what seemed like a refuge. Ruby had and still has terrible aim, despite her father's attempts to teach her how to properly shoot. She had no interest in it other than once or twice before the apocalypse, and afterwards there wasn't much time for shooting lessons. Tommy was just as bad. Since being useless was not exactly winning either many friends, he offered his skills as a scavenger; he was quick and talented at getting in and out of places in record time, and extremely prudent about what he took. Ruby tried to master the use of a bowie knife she'd found, and discovered her knife skills weren't half bad, especially when it came to ramming one through a walker's eye socket and into its brain.
Unfortunately, by the end of the year mark into the outbreak, the group had split, the leader having been killed by walkers, several others having stolen some supplies and taken off on their own, and so on. Once again, Ruby and Tommy were alone, although more hardened, no longer just traumatized college kids but possibly adults who could take care of themselves in this new world. They kept pressing south, hoping to find salvation, or something like it, at the coast. They kept to suburbs and rural areas, and then chose the wrong neighborhood to come through. A pack of bandits were on their trail before they knew it, and Ruby's boyfriend shoved her towards a car, hissing 'hide' before revealing himself, in the hopes of convincing the group he'd come alone, and that they'd just rob him, maybe rough him up a bit, and go.
The leader of said group was not convinced, and several broke off to search the area. Under a car, Ruby clutched her knife and wondered what it would be like to kill another living person who hadn't been infected. Tommy protested; several shots rang out, and she heard a thud she knew had to have been his body hitting the ground. Ruby never saw if he was shot in the head or not; she hoped he had been. An approaching horde of walkers gave her the chance to narrowly escape with her life and just a minor graze wound on her hip from a bullet, but what did she really have to live for? She was alone. Entirely alone. And the guilt was the worst of all. The guilt that while she hid her boyfriend was getting shot, the guilt that she was alive and mostly unharmed and he was dead in a driveway. And most searingly, the guilt that she hadn't been in love with him for a long time before his death. After the death of her parents she'd started to pull away, and while they'd been constantly pushed together afterwards by fear and chaos and tragedy, they'd lost what they'd had by the time their group fell apart. They'd stuck together because they still cared about one another; after all, they were all the other had had.
But she hadn't even loved the person who died for her, and that made her feel like the worst scum on Earth. Ruby simply turned around and headed in the opposite direction, almost hoping things were worse where she was going. But she started to hear rumors of a safe haven in Ohio, of all places, and Ohio was near Michigan, where Marcel had been last she heard. Chances were, she knew, two years in, that he was dead, or a walker. It was mostly an excuse to force herself to keep going. With that goal in mind she rain into Rick's group. She always wanted to see real, serious snow, anyways, she reminded herself. That was a plus.
Relatives
- Gerald James, father. Deceased.
- Sharon James, mother. Deceased.
- Harlan James, brother. Unknown.
- Marcel James, brother. Unknown.
Psychologists Records - Classified
Status: ALIVE
Personality: Ruby is first and foremost, a fairly good natured, optimistic person, though this has been tempered by her experiences. She is generally on guard with and suspicious of strangers, though she prides herself on staying calm in most situations. So long as no one's getting shot. She's a very hands on, 'I'll think of a plan as I go along' sort of person, and would rather jump right into something then sit around thinking about it. Ruby's obsessed with mechanics and building things just to take them apart again, and will generally be doing something with her hands in her downtime, like picking apart the same broken watch over and over again. While she does favor logic (she was almost an engineer, after all), she's impulsive and spontaneous, and can easily move from one thing to the next without second thought. Ruby's not actually a bad person to have around in a crisis: she can think on her feet, and she's not afraid to get her hands dirty if that's what's necessary. Part of her still gets thrills whenever she's doing something risky, though since this is generally all the time now, it's dulled a bit. She tries to take each moment as it comes and not think about the future, or the past, though it still creeps in quite often. Ruby can provoke other people through her own bluntness and refusal to apologize for any of her actions, often convinced what she did, if not right, was needed. She can be rather insensitive to the feelings of others, and would rather sit in silence than force small talk. She's easily bored, which can make her a bit of a pain in the a** when there's nothing to do. Ruby is still occasionally tempted to push boundaries, even if there aren't many left to push. She tends to overestimate her control of situations, and likes to be bold and take risks she probably shouldn't.
Hobbies: - Tinkering
- Playing cards
- Reading
Likes: - Taking risks
- Fishing
- Animals
- Machinery of any kind
- Driving
Dislikes: - Pessimists
- Rigid rules
- Walkers
- Bandits
- Having to shoot
Skills: - Using her knife
- Playing cards
- Working with machines
- Lying effectively
- Thinking on her feet
- Running
Weakness: - Her aim with her rifle
- Overestimates her control of situations
- Takes too many risks
- Generally tends to lose in physical fights
- Blunt and insensitive to others's feelings
- Pushes boundaries she shouldn't
Fears: - Random bursts of gunfire makes her freeze up in terror, ever since Tommy's death
- Dying with nothing to show for her life. She doesn't want to go like that.
- Getting bit, which she assumes is a fear of everyone's.
- Seeing one or both of her brothers as walkers. She'd rather see them permanently dead than like that, how she saw her parents.
Extras: Ruby hasn't let her hair get much further than her chin since high school. Now, especially, she makes sure it never even hits her shoulders. Long hair is more of a hindrance than anything else.
Themes: Rivers and Roads by The Head and the Heart
