eleanor zimmerman

Thu May 23, 2019 11:43 pm

eleanor zimmerman Tumblr_peq5ffVmHR1uq44zbo4_400

Name: Eleanor Anne Zimmerman.
Nickname(s): Elle, Ellie, and Nora are all commonly heard, though you hear your real name more often. EZ is also heard, cause supposedly you’re easy to get with. You don’t like that one as much.
Gender: Female
Age: 17. You’re nearing the end of your camp journey, though you have a feeling you’ll probably have to stay longer, just cause you’re a hopeless cause out there in the real world.
Birthday: May 20th, 2002. You were born at 2am in Manhattan. That’s about all you know when it comes to your birth. You do know your astrology chart pretty well though.
Sexuality: You’re bisexual and you find yourself pretty centered in terms of affection.

Personality: People always call you dependable, and you’re not sure if that’s supposed to be a compliment. You follow things by the book, sure, but does that also mean you’re boring? You don’t like surprises that’s for sure, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be fun. You like to hang out and laugh with your friends. You like movie nights. You like smores and walking around barefoot.
People never seem to believe you’re a kid of poseidon. You can’t blame them, really, but you know you’re not what they expect. You’re not relaxed and a ‘go with the flow’ type of person. You also don’t have a strong personality like every other big three kid you’ve met. You’re just you.
You’re known to be practical to your very core. You don’t bend rules, you don’t mouth off, you do what you’re told. That’s how you were raised and it’s hard to strip away all you’ve ever known.
At the same time you so desperately want people to like you. You bend and bend until your back breaks just to make others happy. You avoid confrontation like the plague, instead choosing to be the mediator. So you find yourself in a catch-22, stuck between your morals and your desire to be likeable.
Every day you wonder if you’ll ever be enough. Every day you know that you aren’t safe outside of the walls of camp. While others can go and face danger and come back safe, you know you don’t have the skills. Your fighting is abysmal, your powers are non-existent, you’re so gangly you trip over your own feet, the only camp activity you do well in is arts and crafts. Even then, you’re not artistically gifted it’s just an easy A. So, you resign yourself to working at the camp store until the day you can go to New Rome and then never leave there either.
Flaws (five or more): Would you like a list? You’re terrible at fighting, you’re so clumsy you fall up stairs, you can’t stand up for yourself, all you worry about is what other people think, you cry when an animal dies, whether it be in fiction or real life, your self confidence is seriously lacking, sometimes you just need to get a grip. Honestly, its easy to list the bad things about yourself.
Eye color: Blue
Hair description: Somewhere between blonde and brunette, long and straight.
Height: 5’9”. You weren’t kidding when you said you were gangly.
Skin tone: Fair.
Ethnicity: Caucasian.
Body structure: Like you said, gangly.
Personal Appearance: You always like to stay perfectly groomed. Your hair is always brushed, you always wear makeup no matter the occasion, you have a pretty good skincare regimen.
Scars/tattoos/piercings/etc: Your ears are pierced, that’s about it.
Clothing Style: You like florals and shorts. You wear sundresses occasionally. You try to find a nice center between fashion and practicality. So you’re usually wearing toms or vans or some other flat shoe. In the colder month you wear jeans and sweaters. Simple and classy.
Other details?:

Place of Birth (city, state, country): Manhattan, Kansas, USA.
Mortal Parent: You don’t know who your birth mother is, despite your efforts of trying to find out. All you know is that her name was Catherine, she was young when she gave birth to you, and she didn’t want you to find her. Still, you couldn’t help but look, maybe because you were hoping that she’d be better than your adoptive parents.
Speaking of which, their names are Megan and Stephen Zimmerman. They own a large wheat farm outside of Jewell, Kansas. You were the second youngest of five adopted siblings. The oldest was Josiah, he’s 23 and married with a child on the way. Then it’s Matthew, he’s 21 and working on your parent’s farm. Then Mary, she’s 19 and attending Wheaton College studying Theology. Finally, your younger sister, Abigail. She’s 15 and still in high school.
God Parent: Poseidon. Yeah, the god of the seas and all that jazz. You don’t know what brought him to Kansas, but you have to question his taste.
Relationship with God Parent: You’ve never met him. You’ve thought about going up and visiting him, but you’re scared to meet him.
Abilities (doesn't use energy to do): None. That’s right. Absolutely nothing. You can’t even swim. You tried to breathe underwater when you first were claimed, but all you managed to do was almost drown.
Powers (uses energy to do): Zilch. Nada. You’ve tried just about everything.
Weapon: celestial bronze xiphos. Nothing special. You got it from the camp’s weapon stock. It has the initials KR carved into the grip from the last person who used it. You sincerely hoped they just got a new weapon.
Pets (if any): you had a chicken named Priscilla when you lived at home but since then nothing.

History (four sentences or more): You, Eleanor Ann Zimmerman, are convinced that the world is playing some cruel trick on you. You didn’t ask for it to be this way, nor do you think you deserve it, as far as you’re aware. So, what happened?

This is what you know. You were born at two am on May 20th, 2002 at Manhattan Evangelical Hospital. Your mother’s name was Mary. She signed you away twelve hours after you were born, right into the arms of your parents. She agreed to a semi-open adoption, which gave you her first name and medical history, but that’s it.

You grew up in a large farmhouse that has held four generations of Zimmermans. Your house was always full of family, which was helpful because there was work to be done. Your father hired plenty of people to work the wheat, but the day to day life of the Zimmerman household was a hectic one. On top of growing wheat, your mother also had a vegetable garden, a coop of chickens, and three cows. You had an endless list of chores to accomplish, which you spent half the day on. Then your mother would sit you down in the school room she decorated herself and she’d teach you and your siblings. Though, you only learned things she found important to teach you, which usually meant bible study with enough peppering of the other subjects for you to pass the state tests. As your siblings got older, they went off to highschool, while you stayed in that little room, waiting for the day you could go to actual school.

Of course, like any sensible woman, your mother made sure you got enough socialization to ensure that none of you ended up too strange. There were other children in the farms surrounding yours, and three times a week, including every sunday after church, you would all be shuttled to someone’s house, and you’d play for the rest of the afternoon, while the mother’s sat around the table and gossiped about the women who weren’t there. There were you and your siblings, plus the four Jacobson kids, the two Miller kids, the three Peterson kids. Occasionally you’d be graced by the presence of the three Walker kids, if their mother was willing to leave the house.

When you were six you got a crush on the Miller girl, and when you told your mother this, she freaked out. You spent the next year in counseling with the pastor. After that you learned to keep your mouth shut.

Jewell is a tiny town in northern Kansas, forty minutes away from the center of the United States. There’s four hundred people, five stores (you can purchase a gun in three of them), a terrible country music festival, a shitty motel reserved for truckers and visiting family members that were not tolerable enough to be allowed to stay in the house, and a museum that’s open by appointment only. It’s charming to those who are able to ignore the billboards that are meant to put the fear of god into passersby.

When you were eight, trouble started finding you like good christian women found sales on shin length denim skirts. At night you would see pairs of eyes staring at you from the wheat fields, glowing just enough so that you could see them. Salesmen would come to your door with too many teeth and occasionally, too many heads. Nobody could see the things you saw, so you were convinced you were going insane. Maybe it was a test from God, to see if you had faith in Him. Regardless, you tried to ignore the things you saw out of the corner of your eye, until the day one of them decided to approach you.

It was a satyr. He told you it wasn’t safe for you here, and you thought he was just a creep coming to kidnap you. So, you retreated back to your home and bolted the door shut. He would find you in town, when your mom was in another grocery isle, or you were sitting on the church steps waiting for your family to finish talking to the Millers. You told him to go away, threatened to scream until fifty men who all believed in the right to open carry came running. He begged you to believe him, but you didn’t. Who would?

Then, trouble found you again. You’re not sure what it was that ran out of the field of barley and rye, chasing you and your sister as the two of you pedaled your bikes as fast as you could back home. All you know is that it was big and hairy. When you get home your sister says its a wolf, maybe a bear, except the only predators that existed in Jewell were the truckers and the coyotes. You knew it was not a wolf or a bear.

When the satyr, who says his name is Dagwood, finds you again, you listen to what he has to say. When you broach the subject with your parents, they think you’re going crazy. They say satan got into your mind. Except it makes sense to you, it explains everything. So, when you see Dagwood outside of the hardware store, you tell him that you’ll go with him.

You sneak out in the dead of night at the age of eleven years old. You take your bike and ride the entire five miles it takes to get to town from your farm. You never stop, because you don’t want to see figures standing in the wheat, or notice lights down roads that go to nowhere. When you reach the church he’s waiting for you, and the two of you leave together. You leave everything you’ve ever known, for a chance that maybe you’re special. In a predicable world, this story would end with you dead by the hands of a stranger who lured you with false promises. Except, you head east. You make it to New York three weeks later. By then your parents have sounded the alarm, and all of Kansas is looking for you. They’ll never find you. You’ll never set foot in Kansas again.

The first thing you notice about camp is the fact that everything is green. The grass is healthy, the trees are tall, you feel safer than you ever did in the empty expanse of wheat and sky.

You’re put in the hermes cabin with the other unclaimed kids. When you first arrive they told you that you’d probably be claimed that night, but then you aren’t. Thirteen, they told you, you’d be claimed by the time you were thirteen.

So, two years pass with you living in anonymity. You’re just another unclaimed kid whose parent is waiting until the last minute. You start to compose a list of possible parents. Demeter is at the top, followed by plenty of agriculture gods. It makes sense to you, after all Kansas is known for its agriculture.

You’re never really good at being a demigod. You suck at fighting, no matter how hard you try. You’re captured in the first five minutes in capture the flag. Though, at some point you just give up and just march over to the other side so you can sit in the jail and read a book. Still, you do fine because nobody expects anything.

Then, you turn thirteen. It actually happens a day before, because apparently your father didn’t want to wait until the last possible minute. It catches everyone off guard, especially you. It doesn’t sit right in your brain, that he could be your father. Suddenly everyone is interested in you, and you have nothing to show for it.

Nobody really wanted to believe that you didn’t have powers. They called you a late bloomer, nervous, blocked, they didn’t want to admit that you were a hopeless cause. So, they try to get the powers out of you like someone would try to get rid of hiccups: nonsensical methods that yield no results.

Eventually they give in with a shrug. You’re a big three kid without powers, had to happen someday. It’s a cruel trick, they say, to play on someone with no survival skills. You have to agree with them.

A Memory: You have to admit, you like the way light filters through water. The way the world above turns into patches of colors and beams of light. You think you would appreciate it more if your lungs didn’t feel like they were about to burst. You can hear Stephanie’s voice warbled through the water, urging you to just relax and let it happen.

You resist for as long as you can, you’re afraid of what would happen if everyone was wrong. You know that it’s silly, you should be able to breathe underwater. It’s a textbook ability given to every single one of her half siblings. So, you relax, and you try to breathe.

You feel the water enter your throat, and suddenly you realize its not supposed to be there. You start to panic, trying to cough it out, except your still underwater and your attempts only make it worse. For a split second you think you’re going to die, and what a stupid way to die at that. For the next decade people will only think of you of the kid of Poseidon that managed to drown.

Then someone is grabbing you and pulling you upwards. When you break the surface, the world is still a blur, and all you can hear is Stephanie’s frantic words.

“Shit, shit, shit, I didn’t think she’d actually drown! Oh my gods, I’ve killed her.”

Someone else is there turning you onto your side as you cough up the lakewater. The dirt sticks to your skin and gets into your hair, and you feel like your insides are on fire.
You spend the rest of the day in the infirmary, and after that you never try to swim again.
Notes: fc is kristine froseth, wc is 2628.

Fri May 24, 2019 12:11 am

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It’s not a sad frown, but an oof frown. Hopefully your soakie can avoid getting soaked.

eleanor zimmerman

eleanor zimmerman

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