#nohopeintro

BASICS.

Elijah prided himself in being one of the lucky few to have escaped from New Hope. Despite his childhood challenges – incarcerated father, dead mother, and a grandmother left to raise him even though she struggled to keep herself afloat. Grandma Rosie always said: “My house, my diner, and my shoes are the only things I will forever have in my name.” Elijah and Rosie were thick as thieves; she was the only person he could consistently count on.

So when Elijah told her that he was going to follow through with the almost-full scholarship to UC Berkeley’s pre-law program, it broke her heart. How could the boy she raised as her own son abandon her like that?

Berkeley was a culture shock to him – a more diverse population than he had ever seen in Kansas, and the accessibility to culture and arts were incomparable.

He finished out his JD at Hastings, School of the Law and immediately was offered a junior position at a prestigious law firm in the Bay Area. But with prestige came large shoes to fill. Despite his position, he rarely saw his day in court and found most of his days filing and typing out legal documents for his superiors to use. It’s not what he signed up for. He wanted to help people, and he couldn’t do that behind a desk.

But the pay was good, and he loved the city. So he kept his mouth shut and kept his head down.

Twelve years after his departure, he received a call from his grandmother’s neighbor with the news: Rosie had passed.

Shock, anger, guilt. With the hustle and bustle of a city living legal professional, he’d probably spoken to his grandmother a handful of times since his moving. Was it that he didn’t have the time? Or he had built too much of an ego? Or was it that he aimed for the disconnection between himself and New Hope that he knew speaking to his grandmother will just bring him back to rural living. And living in poverty.

But he knew what he had to do. He put in his two weeks at the firm, sold any unnecessary possessions (if he returned to New Hope with a Tesla, he would never hear the end of it), ended his lease early and made the cross-country trek back home to clear up his grandmother’s estate.

Despite everything, Rosie left the diner in Elijah’s name as well as her 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom home.

Biography:

trigger warning for family death and parental death

When considering Yona, it helps to touch on the pleasure principle. More than anything else, she wanted to have fun and escape consequences. For example, when she and her friends went out for drinks, she would carefully sip on the same drink or two all night in hopes of not losing too much control of her facilities. Unfortunately for Yona, with or without alcohol in her, she had a poor brain-to-mouth filter. It also didn't help that one of her favorite activities to do was pull pranks. On her own or with friends, she enjoyed seeing how a little scheme played out. One of Yona's recent favorite pranks (although she called it a "side-gig") was to get into the business of weed sales, but actually just give unwitting customers oregano. The scheme didn't usually last long, but some people really didn't catch on... It also didn't help that Yona was an absolutely terrible liar.

Yona considered New Hope to be a great place. Her adoptive family was amazing, and she had the best friends a girl could ask for. Sure, the mystery gang had its share of drama (she went radio silent for a solid month once while she was seventeen over something they didn't even do wrong... something about them not telling her that she was gay before she knew), but that was what happened when you had interesting friends. Living in her tiny hometown didn't mean that she wanted to be stuck there forever, but that was what road trips and vacations were for. The one thing she didn't want to do was get stuck working on a farm, but that was avoidable. She went to college in-state (KU, Computer Science major), but she was more than happy to head back home and set up a haphazard freelance web dev and graphic design business. Some of the jobs, she could do locally, but more often than not her customers were located nowhere near to her.

Now that she has moved back home, Yona is starting to get over the plague of her college years when she became at least temporarily infatuated with just about anyone she met that appeared to be a woman up to around forty. She did have a healthy appreciation for the older MILF type, but didn't particularly want it reciprocated. In her opinion, love was painful and tragic by design: beautiful if one was fortuitous enough to find love, but always dramatic, painful, and so often tragic. She didn't necessarily think that it will work out happily for herself even though she wanted to be loved very much. This just meant that she can devote excessive energy into analyzing her friends' love lives. And also acquaintances' love lives. She found it all fulfilling enough, even if she couldn't help but flirt for herself when she was feeling vulnerable.

Regarding family, Yona is happily adopted and usually still uses her legal name (which was her birth mother's last name). She readily responds to her family's last name, though. Connecting her past to her present is a bit of an ordeal.

She doesn't remember much of what happened before she was around six apart from her mom loving her a lot and then getting sick. She literally has no idea who her dad is, and is torn between not thinking that's important considering how much she appreciates her adoptive family, and wanting to know because it's a great conspiracy to delve into. And Yona loves nothing more than a good conspiracy. It's probably nothing suspicious, but her own history is a little bit too personal to delve into lightly.

Her (birth) uncle Joey considered taking her in, but it wasn't a good fit. He and his wife Gen weren't great with kids, and they definitely didn't want a precocious little thing. Joey and Gen keep in touch occasionally, typically by sending their niece wildly inappropriate gifts to accompany postcards detailing their travels. For example, on her tenth birthday, she received a vibrator with absolutely no explanation on what it was further than "we hope you like this as much as we did." On her thirteenth birthday she received a box of condoms. Eighteenth birthday was dental dams in assorted flavors. Yona's glad that they're so... accepting and sex-positive, but she learned not to open their presents in front of other people.

Miscellaneous Info:

She doesn’t really like any nicknames based on her first name, but accepts other nicknames if they aren’t awful. “Yones” is the only one that’s close to okay if you’re her dear friend, but even that’s on thin ice.

For having such a bubbly personality, she’s very interested in dark topics. A bit of a perky goth, if you will, who wears waaaay too much eyeliner sometimes.

Yona thinks of herself as the secondary character in a gothic romance novel... or even just a straight-up romance novel. Sometimes she can get a little girl-crazy, but it used to be much worse up until a couple short years back.

She got very into thrifting and vintage in college, and has some slight hoarding tendencies.

She has no idea that she is a terrible liar and isn’t quite aware that she’s kind of a poser.

Someone should probably stop her from drinking so much Red Bull.

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Character About Sheet

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