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Name: Odile Renoire

Nicknames: Ugly Duckling, Odd Odile, Oddy, Odd One Out, Cygnet (only to her brother)

Gender: Female

Age: 16

Birthday: July 1st

Sign: Cancer

Blood Type: O

Fav. Food: Citrus sorbet - sadly, she cannot eat it very often, only for special treats.

Hated Food: Duck, in any form. She will not touch fast food and cannot stand the smell of it.

School: Crystal


Hobbies:
* Ballet -- One of the few things Odile is any good at. She would live, breathe and eat ballet if only she could. On stage or off stage, when she is dancing she can lose herself in the role, becoming someone else, someone better and happier and stronger than plain old Odile. Dancing is also the only time anyone would consider Odile beautiful - she's plain and she knows it, but when she dances, she is graceful and shines from within. Too bad that disappears as soon as she stops.


* Tarot -- A hobby that developed from Odile's fascination with having her own fortune told. When she was younger, she hoped things would take a better turn for her and was naive enough to think fortune telling might be real. She racked up quite a phone bill calling psychic hotlines (usually only getting tragic or far-too-generic-to-be-useful results) before her parents caught on and banned her. Ever obedient, Odile stopped calling. In an effort to placate her, her elder brother bought her a deck of tarot cards so she could indulge the fascination herself (and for free).

Odile now performs tarot readings for others. Whether it's accurate or not is anyone's guess, but it's good entertainment for others. Sadly, any attempts to read her own fortune turn out bleak and full of despair. Maybe Odile is destined for tragedy... or maybe she's just jinxing her own readings. Who knows?


* Reading -- Tragic romances and the kind of plays where everyone dies at the end are Odile's version of Mills & Boon. She devours them in the spare time she has from ballet. What she wouldn't give for a happy ending for these stories - but you simply can't trust those other tales where they all live happily ever after. They're just lies, everyone knows real life isn't like that. So Odile will just stick with her depressing heart-wrenchers, thank you very much.


* Massage -- Having received her fair share of them to work out kinks and relax after her dancing, Odile has picked up the amateur basics of giving a good massage. She hasn't got much strength behind her, so she's better at finding pressure points, like Chinese acupressure massage. If you seem tense or worried, Odile is always ready to volunteer a free shoulder massage!


Gemstone: Pearl


Virtues:
Obedient-- Every parent and teacher's dream, Odile will follow all orders from authority figures. Her homework is done on time, she never skips her ballet practice or cuts it short, if her help is needed for school chores she's there. You can trust that Odile will do what she has been told to, that she won't act up or go off on her own. It makes her a wonderful team player. There's a good chance she'll follow other students, as well, so perhaps she'll even do the lion's share of your group project. This does work against her [see flaws].

The need to be obedient was ingrained into a young Odile in order to please her parents. Social butterflies of high society, her parents were rarely around. When they were, Odile desperately wanted their praise (and love, but she soon realised that was a lost cause) so she tried to be the perfect daughter, performing whatever was asked of her. This carried over to other authority figures in her young life, and then into school.


Dedicated-- Ballet is a hard and demanding study, so Odile knows all about dedication. She practices for hours outside classes, she studies ballet through old movie reels and videos, and keeps to the strictest of diets. Odile has great self-restraint in the face of temptation, as long as she has a prized goal in mind. She doesn't slack off, she always gives 110% to her goals.


Helpful-- Odile really, really, REALLY wants to be of some use to you. Actually, what she really wants to is to feel accepted and loved, but being helpful seems to get the best results. Or at least means that others are happy enough to have her around, which is good enough for Odile. This is one of the reasons Odile doesn't mind being a stepping stone [see flaws]. And even if you treat her so badly that you make her cry, she'll convince herself that there is some deeper reason for your bad mood that isn't your fault and you didn't really mean it and you SURELY need help fixing whatever caused that bad mood in the first place.


Organiser-- Odile is used to scheduling her days, weeks, and hours to fit in ballet classes, school, homework, ballet practice, social situations (the rare ones she's invited to)... She's a busy girl and it takes effort to fit everything in. Luckily Odile is very good at creating schedules. No PDAs or electronic methods for her, though. Paper or cardboard, colourful pens and pencils, colour-coded sticky notes, and good-old binders or diaries - these are the tools Odile works with. Having trouble finding the time for all your homework? Need to fit your study in around your busy social schedule? Odile can manage to fit it all into a schedule for you! A senshi team needs a roster for nightly and weekend patrols? Odile can make that! (And if you pike out of your turn, she can also cover that shift for you so the team doesn't fail the assignment let the Negaverse win.)



Flaws:
Resigned-- To put it bluntly, Odile is a person who has become used to the life she is living and the way she is treated. Perhaps it can be blamed on being named after a tragic figure from a famous ballet, which might have doomed her since birth. But apart from the times she is transformed into someone else through dance, Odile does not feel that anything in her life is going to change or become better than this. She is plain. She is not particularly graceful when not dancing. She doesn't believe in love. She doesn't believe in happily ever after or fairy tale endings. There is no prince coming for her, no great romance that will change her life forever. She doesn't believe she deserves any better than what she currently has. There is a quiet dignity to her resignation, though, she's certainly not emo or overly dramatic about it.

This is not to say Odile is completely without hope. Of course she hopes that things will improve for her someday. She just doesn't expect it, and won't waste time waiting for it. And may not believe it at first, if the unexpected arrives/occurs.


Anxious-- Odile has been diagnosed with mild anxiety disorder. It is brought on by social situations, usually acute bullying or fear of failure/disobeying and therefore disappointing people and losing their approval. If Odile cannot get away and calm herself down, it escalates into making her physically sick and throwing up - which has started rumours that she is bulimic or anorexic, and that's how she stays so thin for ballet.

This anxiety is Odile's secondary weakness. It can be exploited in battle by enemies, if they can convince Celaeno that she's disobeyed an order or that she has conflicting orders.


Stepping Stone -- Overly obedient, Odile is the type whose 'friends' pick on her. Almost a servant of sorts, she'll carry your bags, fetch things for you, and she doesn't mind at all. It's not like she has any hope of better treatment, after all, and at least this way she is included. And if one of those so-called friends is cruel to her today, she'll still be back tomorrow as long as she isn't told to stay away (which only makes them laugh harder at her behind her back).

There are a few limits: She will not disobey a rule from an Authority Figure on a student's say-so. She will not do anything obviously stupid like follow dares to jump off cliffs, into a lake, etc. She will not do YOUR homework - but if it is a group project and therefore also HER homework, you can convince her to do most of it because SHE has that deadline and if it isn't completed on time (because you have MORE IMPORTANT things to do) it reflects badly on HER as not obeying the teacher.

Being a stepping stone is Odile's main weakness. It highly affects her civilian life, and can be used against her in battle by her fellow senshi. She'll do their patrols (what would Astraea say if no one patrolled and the Negaverse attacked and it could have been prevented and this is all Celaeno's fault?!?!), follow their orders in battle, let them have the limelight if they so desire...


Passive Aggressive-- Odile could never confront the people who treat her badly or make her angry. She has, however, mastered the art of guilt-tripping people. If she's in a bad mood, she can make you feel guilty over the fact you got such a good tarot reading from her ("I never get dark, handsome men showing up in my own readings... must be nice..."), tell in great detail about how she caught this cold waiting for you to show up even though you were several hours late ("don't worry... *coughcough* ... I'm not mad *coughcough* ... I'm sure you had a very important reason to leave me all alone to get sick, too bad this will ruin my chances in ballet tryouts today *siiigh*"). She can make you feel bad over the fact that you're happy and she isn't, heaving sighs and looking depressed.

Of course, this isn't something she does to everyone. Only to the people who make her mad. It's her only way of being able to retaliate.

FAMILY

Father: Jean Renoire (49)
A banking mogul, Jean made his own way from middle class to upper class. He has a taste for the finer things in life, dividing his time between work and treading the social circle with his wife on his arm. He loves to take her to parties, charity galas, ballet, opera... He has never seen anything wrong with letting nannies or staff raise his children instead of doing it himself. Besides, he's far too busy with work, or keeping his wife happy.


Mother: Valeria Renoire (45)
Originally a secretary, Valeria became the perfect trophy wife. She didn't work after marrying, but still had little time for her children, trying to help her husband pave his way through the upper class echelon that neither of them were born to.

Way back in the beginning, she meant to be there for them, but never knew the right thing to do. Babies were noisy, fragile and took up so much time. It was easier to pass the children off to their nanny. Valeria got used to not mothering her children and it only continued as they grew. Occasionally they received her undivided attention, such as when she enrolled a young Odile in ballet lessons, feeding Valeria's own love of the dance, but her attention and love is fleeting. All too soon, Valeria is back in her own world, being a social butterfly. It's busy work, and much more fun.


Elder brother: Siegfried Renoire (19)
The majority of love that Odile received growing up was from her brother, Siegfried. Despite a three year age gap, they are very close. Siegfried was more involved with his baby sister than most siblings would be, getting into the 'protective older brother' role and never really leaving it, even during teenage years when normal siblings would be fighting or growing apart.

Siegfreid gave Odile the nickname "Cygnet" after learning that some kids at school were calling Odile "Ugly Duckling". He read the full tale to Odile, and began reinforcing that the duckling turned into a swan, and that one day the not-so-pretty cygnet would grow into her beauty.

Sadly, Siegfried left home to board at university in another city. He and Odile don't see each other often, but they keep in touch through letters and phone calls. He worried about leaving his baby sister alone in a house where their parents didn't pay them much attention, but in the end, he had to live his own life and hoped that Odile would learn how to live hers.



* Yes, Siegfried and Odile were both named after the Swan Lake characters. Valeria may have been a little obsessed during those several years of, and between, pregnancies.

PHOTOGRAPHS

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