Senshi: Sailor Nerissa, Super Senshi of Whirlpools
Name: Charys Maureen Murphy
Age: 18
Birthday: February 18th
Sign: Aquarius-Pisces cusp
Blood Type: B
Fav. Food: Microwave nachos
Hated Food: Potato salad of any description. Why do that to a potato. Why do that to mayonnaise.
School: Meadowview High, for now. Charys is due to graduate from MVH this coming June, and despite her longtime mentor and English teacher Ray Gordon's desire for her to go to Sovereign Heights she is committed to becoming "barista" or "sandwich artist." Or "beachcomber."
Hobbies: Lot in Sodom, Deirdre of the Sorrows, Sweeney in the nightingales -- she lives her life through a certain biblical codex of fiction while denying she has any interest in the subject. Charys is the last person you could accuse of being literary, and yet nonetheless amongst the sprinkling of pop culture, buzzwords and bullshit she's an in-denial American Fictionaholic. She's obsessed with Heller and Nabokov as headliners with Mailer, Vonnegut and Faulkner, and would rattle off her others were she not convinced of its innate geek value. This is her best-hidden hobby, and the one she's most obsessed with -- it started when she was thirteen, the day Ray Gordon put Joseph Heller in her hands and told her to read it, and she's been a convert ever since. You will never catch her with a novel in her hands. If you catch her with a book at the bottom of her bag she will claim she's holding it for someone else. Or that it is "marijuana only the wise can see." If you've described yourself as a not-a-nerd all your life, you have to hide your habit.
She lives a lot of her life convinced that she's John Yossarian, though only .5 of anyone knows this: she's convinced that life is a shitty Catch-22. Her only mission is to come down alive. Living her life through lit is how she makes sense of her own world, especially in terms of her thoughts, beliefs, family and friends: Charys is actually pretty chronically lonely. She has a best friend who is completely boss. She has a mentor-teacher who she can't quite quit for any reason, who gave her the means to translate her life in the first place. She has a dead sort-of-ex and an alive sort-of-kinda-ex. Everyone else is a Harvest Moon acquaintance. Back to Yossarian.
There are only three people in her life who she has let in on codifying in terms of literature: Sidra Winters is Snowden, Charlie Boyle is Dunbar, and Ray Gordon is also Yossarian. This means nothing to anybody. All you need to know is this: "Charys Murphy is secretly a nerd."
Doing jackshit -- Charys spends most of her life avoiding life, senshi business, hard work, medium work or easy work, her family, friends and herself. Where this extends to in terms of hobbies, though -- Charys does a lot of
nothing, a lot of sitting around and wasting time. She flirts with any hobby that looks even slightly interesting for about five minutes, though mainly comes back to reading, the same five chords on her guitar and flicking rubber bands at things. She wastes her life reading Trivial Pursuit cards, pushing the random button on Wikipedia, looking at the same YouTube videos over and over again. She avoids two main duties in life: being a taxpaying citizen and senshi duty.
Gemstone: Demantoid garnet
Virtues: Hakuna matata -- Charys is one of those laid-back, generous, naturally chill people that are fairly fun to be around: her sense of fun is pretty widely-ranged and eclectic, but she tends to get along with most of the population. She's up for anything, rarely gets hung-up or fussy, takes life and people as they come. She's incredibly generous with her time, personal belongings and never asks anything of anyone. She's got an easy way about her, is kind in a bunch of small, unflamboyant ways, she is a little odd in an interesting way. She listens on her iPod all the time. She is the epitome of unthreatening. She serves a big function as
the person everyone knows at the party, and has a certain Rule of Cool about her. This Rule of Cool is flavoured with hipster and nautical-themed pashmina afghans, but she has Rule of Cool. And Rule of Cool just involves genuinely being the sort of person people can hang with.
My only goal is just to be -- Ties in mainly with
hakuna matata. Charys has never believed in the need for anybody to do anything or be anything at all. No pressures, no ambitions, no worries. She freely admits that she likes the unexamined life -- why not take it one day at a time? Her goals are the survival goals: enough food to eat, a roof to be over her head, enough warmth. A hundred years ago she might have taken a bindle stick and attempted to lead the hobo life. How far a teenage girl would have gotten with her bindle stick is up to question, but she really is someone who believes wholeheartedly that you don't have to
do anything. There's only us, there's only this. It is the virtue one hundred percent opposite to nagging. She'll never nag you about anything, even if you possibly should be getting nagged. It's the sin of complete self-gratification. She's easygoing. She's easygoing on you. There's nothing but today and never will be: don't you get that?
Pragmatic -- May seem slightly incongruous when compared to the fact that she'd advocate following the train track over America being an itinerant tramp, but Charys has always known the difference between castles-in-the-air and what life's actually like -- how much you need to actually do to get by the world and how much you'd actually have to do to live out your dreams. She's weighed up the world, its past histories, happenings and events, and she's got the ability to be broadly realistic. She's down-to-earth. Living life you see those empirical results, ladies and gentlemen, and here's how it's most likely going to be. She's a pragmatical theorist and can sometimes be hypocritical in practice -- her advice to people is always going to be pragmatic, and things she does of her own
accord can be incredibly stupid and nonsensical and teen dumb, but she tends to know exactly why. Charys thinks idealists are people who have not been following the world for the past a billion years. The virtue to this is that she is not a douche about it: why complain?
Jack of all trades -- Charys is one of those people who tends to naturally be good at a lot of things -- she's got a high dex score, she's incredibly adaptable, she has the ability to absorb information in a very short period of time. This crosses over into a lot of learning areas: she's got points in all of the intelligences barring the emotional ones, so she's one of those excruciatingly irritating people who can walk up to something for the first time and fluke it. She does a little of everything, knows a little of everything, speaks a little of everything. The downside to being a jack of all trades is that you're inevitably a master of none, but one of Charys' main applicable virtues is
versatile.
Upfront -- It's not entirely true to say that Charys is candid and frank about every aspect of her life, but in terms of how she relates to other people she is one hundred percent straightforward. She
believes she is one hundred percent straightforward about who she is, what she does, and what she thinks of you -- she's not quite no-social-boundaries can-I-pop-that-zit tact deficient, but she can range between refreshingly upfront and uncomfortably blunt. The mirror never lies, and neither does Charys Murphy. She is completely decent in regards to ******** she commits, her own personal character flaws, and times when she is simply wrong: Charys is willing to admit when Charys was wrong on the internet a lot of the time -- she dines out on her pride but her pride is related to how good she is at something, not how correct she is. Anyway, she was the first one who told you she was wrong on the internet, so she set you up for that. She's not brutal about truthiness one hundred percent of the time. She just thinks lying's for chumps and cons are best pulled by telling the complete truth.
Flaws: 
Failphobic -- Charys will be the first to tell you she has low standards and no expectation of anything, including herself. This is a lie. Charys is so innately afraid of the idea of not being perfect at something, so neurotic about not meeting her own standards for what life's meant to be like, that she never tries at all: as Homer told Bart, the moral of the story is
never try. Hakuna matata means no worries for the rest of your days.
In fact, Charys believes in the greater good and good people, but has relied on people in her life like Charlie Boyle to be the good person so that she doesn't see the need for herself to try. She'll fail every time. She'll never be as good as she wants to be, it's not in her. She's usually flip and carefree to most of humanity, and will only be grouchy and unrepentant if cornered by the likes of Thuban or Ray -- hasn't she proved to you and everyone else that she's a sack of s**t? Stop
wanting things from her.
She's completely convinced that the senshi battles are going to go to hell, that she'd never survive at a university, that she'd never write the way she wanted to or play the way she wanted to or love the way she wanted to. You can also accuse Charys of being melodramatically pretentious, which isn't far-off. She's a girl who's looked at her high standards and her view on things, thought about it, and then wandered back in the other direction. Charys Murphy: actually ridden by guilt every second of her life. But she doesn't care, because you knowing she cares about anything would prey on her humiliation -- she dines out on her pride. She doesn't care if you ******** up because she already expected you to, didn't she.
Yes, you live a lie; tell you why -- tbc
Slitherer-outerer -- Charys is self-centered, backhanded, lazy and a brat: for someone who loves the world so much, she does a great job at trashing her relationship with it. She doesn't
like hard work. Life is the Charys Show, starring Charys, directed by Charys, funded by Charys. She is completely concerned with her own s**t first and is unrepentant about it -- it's nice that you dropped in, but her first interest is her. I'd be the first one to agree that I'm preoccupied with me, and it's inbred, kid. If you're friends with her you're signing an unspoken contract that you accept this totally, so if you get burned it's your own fault. This releases her from having to feel any guilt regarding the subject. Lie down with a dog, you're going to get fleas.
Charys also assumes that every time she agrees to do something, whether cajoled, forced or bribed, she also has a Get Out Of Jail Free card wherein you understand she didn't actually mean it. She's Wizard Howl.
Cynical, like everyone else -- Like a lot of clever eighteen-year-olds who've lived shitty latchkey lives, Charys believes that she's about twenty years older, smarter and more jaded than everyone else can be. She can be a mental misanthrope where other people are concerned, though in her particular, good-natured, don't-give-a-s**t way. This is where her 'pragmatic' virtue turns sour -- she doesn't expect anything out of the world because she's convinced that the world works with crooked odds. The world is a fixed poker game. Like Tyler Durden pointed out, she thinks the world's been raised to believe they'd all be movie gods, rock stars and millionaires, none of which is ever going to happen. She believes she knows the score and that you don't -- she's one of those teenagers who believes she's going on forty and that you're still stuck in your miserable little land of hopes and dreams that are never going to happen, setting yourself up for a fall with your boyfriends, your parents and your grade point averages.
She believes she thinks in macro and you think in micro. It means she's rarely inclined to take anyone's advice about anything, especially advice that's not short-term advice, never regards anybody as an expert and can be frustrating as hell to manage. It also means she's never open to
changing, and gets stuck in her own rut.
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