Ari Naftali- Adoptee

[atalanta]

ARI NAFTALI


Tomboy, Sporty, Driven

BACK TO BASICS ' '

Full Name: Ariella Chana Naftali
Significance of Name:

• Ariella- Means “Lioness of God.” After Atalanta married, she was changed into a lioness.
  
• Chana- Means “Grace.” Atalanta was a graceful huntress.
  
• Naftali- One of the tribes of Israel. Naftali means “to wrestle”, which Atalanta did with Peleus and won, and the tribe is associated with “being as swift as deer”, which Atalanta was as a hunter of Artemis

Nickname(s): Ariel. Ari.
Age: 15
Gender: Female
Orientation: Heterosexual
Grade: Freshman
Celeb you're using: Jennifer Lawrence
Deity: Atalanta - Greek
Title of your deity: Huntress of Artemis, Slayer of the Calydonian boar, and an Unrivaled Sprinter

STRIKE A POSE ' '

Physical Appearance: Ari is a skinny girl. It comes from sparse country-living, running around with ‘the boys’, and constantly spending her time in trees. She keeps her body in excellent shape but can’t seem to gain any real muscle so she’s more toned than anything. She has an olive coloring maintained by the sun, which does not usually affect her. She doesn’t mind the heat and she doesn’t burn. She has a healthy tan that comes from being outside for the majority of one’s life. There’s a few ‘battle scars’ on her body that she’s earned from being in trees and running around chasing after wild beasts, but nothing too serious. Still, they’re impressive enough that she can point out a scar on her knee and boast about being nearly gored to death by a boar. Her hands are rough from hard living and calloused from using her bow (her weapon of choice).

Ari’s hair is a fairly curly. She normally has blonde hair but dyes it an auburn color, though it still tends to bleach in the sun, making it a lighter shade of brown. Her eyes are a bluish green color and sharp. She has an nymphic look about her, keeping her body lithe, her step light and her eyes keen. Normally, she wears hunting gear. Not the orange outfits, but cargo pants, and a plain shirt or tank top. Since mosquitoes are too scared to bite her, she doesn’t usually need bug spray. She keeps her hair to about her shoulders, though as a child it was just below her ears. She ties it back if she can help it. She stays away from make-up like the plague and really hates it when the moment calls for her to use it.

Ari has the potential to be a cutie if she smiled more. Since she’s pretty intense concerning just about everything, it takes a skilled person to make her laugh. It better be a pretty damn funny joke, otherwise she’ll just stare at you blankly like you’re taking up her time.

LET'S GET TO KNOW YOU BETTER ' '

Personality Description: Dependable- Ari is used to taking orders as it meant life or death where she came from. She’s good to have in a battle. While she would never take a leadership opinion (too much to worry about), she’s a great person to have as a sniper or something similar. She never misses her target (unless it’s superhuman speed or lentation, but even then it’s close) and can be depended on to hit her mark. She could possibly be a professional assassin, but figures that would be too easy. As a friend, once you can befriend her, you have an ally for life. Even if she doesn’t necessary agree with you and fights with you all the time, she’ll be there to back you up. It’s just in her nature to be loyal because, again, it meant life or death where she came from.

Driven- Once Ari sets her mind to something, it’s hard to persuade her otherwise. She doesn’t give up and will keep pursuing a target or a project or a lover or whatever until said target/project/lover is either dead or a friend calls her off. She’s a bit like a pit-bull that way. It’s hard to change her mind once she’s made it. She’s driven to succeed and wants to be the best, especially in sports. Since she’s a woman in a man’s world, she’s constantly trying to prove her self-worth with fantastic results.

Sporty- If you need a sparring partner or someone to play an outside game with, Ari is your girl. She loves competition of the sporting variety and is more than willing to show you how to succeed if you’re messing up or need to fine tune an ability. Since her marksmanship isn’t supernatural, she can give numerous tips to people who’s abilities may not specialize in such things. She doesn’t consider her ability in marksmanship some sort of closely guarded secret and believes everyone should know how to do it. She also loves to play games that typically women don’t play like (American) football or wrestling. And she’s good too. It takes supernatural means to bring her down.

Marksman- Ari has an innate ability to throw any projectile with great unerring accuracy and deadliness that borders on the uncanny. This ability alone makes her a slightly greater threat than many students who do have superhuman powers. Although this is not technically superhuman, Ari can accomplish many feats with thrown projectiles. She is also a dangerous sharpshooter. She possesses very keen eyesight, and her accuracy is virtually unerring; she was trained in her youth with throwing blades, balls, bolas, and boomerangs. She now has near-perfect precision with any aimed or thrown weapon. She can hurl objects with extreme speed and accuracy, both in direct aim and complicated rebounds/interactions. Ari has trained herself to become a master archer specializing in the use of regular bows, longbows, compound bows, and crossbows with near-perfect accuracy. She is capable of firing multiple arrows at a single target in a few seconds, hitting multiple targets in a few quick strokes, and directly hit small targets in the greatest of distances. She practiced a minimum of two hours per day to keep her skills honed. Since all she does is stuff like this, it’s not a stretch of the imagination for a fifteen year old to be this good. Plus, being the reincarnate of one of the greatest Greek huntresses doesn’t hurt either.

Athletic- Ari possesses exceptional human strength, endurance, and stamina for her age. She is athletic, with very good reflexes and agility. This, combined with training as hunter, survivor, and unofficial acrobat, makes her capable of complex acrobatic maneuvers. As a result of her naturally perfect athletic gift for hand-eye coordination, Ari can quickly learn how to wield most weapons even if she's never seen them before. Aside from throwing projectiles, she is also skilled with knives, swords, and other weapons. He is a skilled acrobat capable of performing many difficult feats and matching the feats of the finest human acrobats. Again, since all she did was spend a childhood of messing around in the woods jumping from tree to tree, hunting down animals twice her size, it’s not a stretch of the imagination to see Ari doing any of this.

Impatient- Ari is very impatient. She’s overly eager to prove herself and sometimes forgets that she’s a child and a mortal one at that. She’ll run into a situation head on without thinking and does so so frequently that it seems almost reckless. If she wasn’t so good with her ability, she would have been dead years ago. In addition, she had trouble with school. She doesn’t like waiting, doesn’t like reading, doesn’t like sitting at a desk doing absolutely nothing important and would rather be outside running around and hanging out of trees. So, in the classroom, she’s much grumpier than she normally would be.

Cynical- Ari is extremely cynical. She looks at everything in life as if it’s a joke or if someone wants something in exchange. Her innocence has long since been lost and the weight of the world holds heavy on her shoulders to the point where she sees magic in nothing anymore. She’s very calculating when it comes to generosity, since the other generosity she’s ever experienced was that from her people thrice her age, not others like herself.

ADHD- Ari is hyperactive and it’s tough for her to stay in one place very long. She’s not the happy sort of hyperactive either. She’ll get angry and violent if she’s forced in one place too long, is forced to do something academic or otherwise. She frequently acts before thinking. If someone says something mean to her, particularly something sexist, Ari will be giving them a shiner before they know what, literally, hit them. She’s the kind to shoot first and ask questions later.

Awkward- Because she was raised as a hunter with absolutely no one her own age, Ari has trouble relating to others. She relates better to big hairy bikers and mountain men than she does to other girls her age and tends to outdo a number of the boys, alienating herself from them as well. Sometimes she comes off as being snooty but, really, it’s just that she doesn’t know how to relate to others ‘like her.’

Humorless/Strange Humor- At times, Ari can seem humorless but, really, she just has a very dry and black sense of humor. She acts a bit insane sometimes, saying outrageous things to people, and that’s just her trying to be funny. Most jokes are lost on her. Likewise, her jokes tend to be lost on others.


Likes:
- Running
- Wrestling
- Shooting
- Hunting
- Guns/bows/slingshots/swords/crossbows/staffs/spears/etc.
- Shiny Things
- Wild Animals
- Freedom
- Camping
- Trees
- Video Games

Dislikes:
- Dresses
- Her birth culture
- Make-up
- Being stuck inside all day
- Anti-gun laws
- Vegans (Vegetarians she can deal with)
- Being Tricked
- Sexism
- Chores
- Homework
- Reading

Strength:
- Marksman
- Athletic
- Sporty
- Dependable
- Driven

Weaknesses:
- Impatient
- Cynical
- ADHD
- Awkward
- Humorless/Strange Humor

Fears: Getting pigeonholed into being a “good little house-wife”
Goal: Hunt a human being… no, really.

Power/Ability:

• Superhuman Tracking- As a huntress, Atalanta was one of the best. She tracked down and got the first hit on the Calydonian boar. She ran around with Artemis, hunting and living it up. In turn, Ari can track anything. Nothing can hide from her and it’s laughable for anything to try. It’s an uncanny ability and she can track people even into other dimensions if need be (though, of course, she herself can’t go there, but she knows where they’ll pop out). Ari can find anything and she can never be lost. Even if she’s locked in a box suspended in limbo, she’ll know where she is and, once the opportunity has presented itself, can find a path out and even find who the hell put her there.
  
• Superhuman Senses- As a huntress, Atalanta needed all of her senses and used them to the best of her ability, outdoing just about all other mortals in a fair fight. She was able to slay the Calydonian boar and keep up with the big boys, all because she was keen. Ari can do the same. All of her senses are heightened to freakish levels, allowing her to enhance all her five senses and, to a degree, her sixth one though that's more an amalgam of all five together. It can be distracting, as she tends to hear things she doesn't want too or taste impurities in fast-food that make her sick.

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WELCOME TO MY LIFE ' '

Place of Origin: Born in Brooklyn, New York, raised in the Appalachian Mountain Range
History:
Ari was born to a strange, conservative Jewish family with Hasidic roots in Brooklyn, New York. She was an only child and a disappointment to her father who wanted a son. When she was three, her family went camping near the Appalachian mountain range. Ari went to bed one night and woke up without her family, who had left in the middle of the night. The only thing left behind was some graham crackers (honey flavored) and a warm bear-skin blanket that used to belong to her mother.

Instead of dying like she was supposed to do, Ari was found by an old hunter named Arthur, visiting from Vermont. He was a bear of a man, sort of a recluse. Having once had a daughter who died long ago, he picked up the squalling infant and brought her back home, immediately enlisting the help of one of his ‘neighbors’ (meaning, the closest woman he could find) to help him take care of the baby. The woman, a mountain woman of sorts named Ursa, was more than happy to help him raise the little girl. Since neither of them were very creative with names, they just used to name that Ari was able to babble out, finding it very convenient. So, she was raised amongst mountain folk and hunters, learning to live off of the land and becoming a skilled huntress. However, one day Arthur was out hunting and was wounded by a boar. The wound was nearly fatal and would have killed him if Ursa hadn’t been able to nurse him back to health. After that, Ari found that she was going to have to be the breadwinner for both Ursa and Arthur.

Ari found that she was much better than Art’s hunting buddies at hunting. She was swifter, quieter and much stealthier, hunting as if she was a seasoned hunter of forty, not a nine-year-old girl. She never hunted to just kill stuff. She hunted and used every bit of the animal. She was taught that anything she kills, she eats. She tested this once and shot a seagull. Sure enough, she was made to eat it. It was nasty. From then on, she was very careful with what she killed and never took anything for granted when she was hunting. She became proficient with most forms of hunting materials from bows to knives to guns. She had a strange innate ability to use almost anything as a projectile with uncanny aim. There was nothing supernatural about it. She was just really good at it. While she could use a gun with deadly accuracy, she found a bow was her most favorite of hunting weapons.

Her tracking skills were above normal, however. She was able to find anything and everything to a point where it was supernatural. She always managed to find the hunt and even outwit it, somehow knowing where it would be and when. She could find anything from animals to objects to people and she soon became a sort of oddity in her community. Impressed by her, the community all had a hand in raising her and teaching her hunting skills, since her own adopted parents were older and her father was infirm. Soon, she was a skilled wrestler, beating one of her adopted father’s friends named Patrick. When two men from the community wanted to put her in her place, so to speak, she easily evaded and then gave them warning shots to the leg. When she wanted to go on a major hunting trip upriver, she was denied because she was ‘too good’ and a woman.

When Ari got word that the gigantic boar that had gored her father was loose, Ari immediately joined the hunting party that was going after it. It wasn’t just any boar. It was a mix between a pig and a wild boar, making it much larger and much more vicious than the regular wild boar that roamed the area. At first, the community didn’t want Ari going, just because she as both a girl and a young one at that (she was about eleven). She was still just skin and bones and was more like the community’s pet, as opposed to a hunter they took seriously. However, a young hunter named Mordecai, who really liked Ari, insisted she come, recognizing her talents.

Due to her ability, Ari was able to find the boar no problem. She was well ahead of the other hunters and found the beast, rutting around in the dirt. As silent as a mouse, she managed to climb a tree, take aim and shoot the animal in one of the key arteries. As it began to bleed out, it was enraged. Due to the boat’s damned good sense of smell, it found Ari in the tree and began trying to knock her out of it. Despite all her hunting prowess, she was still a fifty-pound girl hiding in a flimsy tree. While she was trying to figure out the best path to getting out of her predicament, Mordecai found her and began shooting the beast willy-nilly, causing it to be even angrier. Though it would eventually bleed out from Ari’s strike, it had a lot of blood and a long way to go. The creature immediately turned on Mordecai and charged. He would have died had Ari not seen her chance and taken her second shot, hitting the spot where the spine met the skull and severing it with a well-aimed and powerful blow. It died at Mordecai’s feet.

When the rest of the hunting team showed up, they thought that Mordecai was responsible for killing it and immediately began congratulating him, saying that he should get the lion’s share of the meat. They also laughed at Ari for ‘hiding in a tree like a wussy girl’. Mordecai however insisted that Ari not only saved his ass, but killed the boar.

When all was said and done, Mordecai decided that, despite appearances, it was really was Ari that should have the credit for killing the boar since she did kill the boar and saved him all in one. No one was happy with this. The community wasn’t happy about this and none more than his mother who had always disliked Ari for being an outsider and a freak (meaning, she was upset about Ari being better at hunting than her sons). When she found out about this, she nearly beat the crap out of Mordecai. The rest of the community however was amazed at her prowess, her saving Mordecai and taking down the hog. She was accepted, finally, in the community, without question and her gender was no longer seen as an issue.

After that, Ari became a “catch.” Since women tended to hook up fairly early in her community, at about sixteen, Ari, at fourteen, suddenly found she had a whole throng of suitors fighting for her attention. She was interested in none of them. Instead, she would challenge them to little games in order to ‘prove themselves worthy’ (she’d seen something like that on a television once when they had to go into town). Of course, hormonal boys being hormonal boys, they went along with her demands. She challenged them to a foot race and they raced her. And lost horribly.

Mordecai, who was still recovering from his wounds, wanted to take part in these ‘competitions.’ Ari sort of wanted him to win, but was also extremely competitive. She’d let him compete at his own risk. Mordecai, knowing he would lose, went to his mother to ask for some help. She, wanted to see the impetuous little brat loose, agreed. She shined up three arrows to a golden polish and gave them to her son. She hoped he would throw them at Ari herself, but he decided to do something else.

So, they raced. Mordecai immediately fell behind. However, he had a mean throw and was able to successfully throw an arrow off to the side. One Ari’s weaknesses were shiny things. It didn’t take her long to veer off and grab it. Mordecai was able to run ahead. Ari took the lead. This happened with all the arrows until they hit the finish line. Mordecai won and Ari lost. Ari pretended she was upset (she did give it her all), but she happy that Mordecai won.

But then Pantheon showed up.

CONNECTION TO THE MYTH ' '

- Abandoned at birth. Ari was abandoned.
- Raised by a bear. Ari was raised by a bear-like hunter and a bear-like woman, named Arthur and Ursa (both have bear names).
- Beautiful huntress that could beat men. Ari is better at hunting than the most seasoned of hunters.
- Wrestled Peleus and won. Wrestled one of her father’s much bigger friend’s named Patrick and won.
- Killed two centaurs who tried to rape her. Some men from the community were tired of her besting them and tried to put her in her place. She shot them in the leg.
- Was denied the ability to go on the Argo. Wanted to go on a hunting trip upriver but was denied because she was too good and a woman.
- Calydonian Boar was let loose. The hogasaurus that gored Arthur turns up.
- Men didn’t want to hunt with Atalanta, but Meleager did because he loved her. The group of hunters going after hogasaurus didn’t want Ari to come, but a hunter named Mordecai (who had a crush on her) insisted that she come.
- Atalanta was the first to strike the boar. Ari was the first to strike hogasaurus.
- Meleager was almost killed by the boar, but saved by Atalanta. Mordecai tried to save Ari, but was almost killed by hogasaurus, causing Ari to have to save him and kill the boar.
- Meleager’s uncles wanted to give him the boar, but he gave it to Atalanta instead. Mordecai gave Ari the credit for killing the boar, despite what the rest of the group said.
- Meleager’s mother was angry for his killing his uncles and brothers to give the boar to Atalanta and killed him. Mordecai’s mother that he gave the credit to the “outsider” and ended up beating the crap out of him.
- As the famous killed of the Calydonian boar, her father came back in touch and welcomed her back, though she agreed only if she could remain a virgin. After she killed hogosaurus, she was truly accepted as an esteemed huntress and any prejudice against her was done away with.
- Atalanta returned but suitors wanted her and she agreed to marry the one guy who could beat her at a foot race and all others would die. After killing the hog, Ari had a whole bunch of suitors who she would challenge to a race in order to win her hand. She didn’t kill them but the ordeal sort of killed their egos.
- Melanion got three golden apples from Aphrodite. Mordecai competed and asked for help from his mother, who gave him three shiny arrows.
- Atalanta was winning but Melanion would distract her with the golden apples three times, causing her to lose. Ari was distracted by the arrows and she lost to Mordecai.

ROLEPLAYING SAMPLE ' '

Nah, it's cool.

BEHIND THE SCENE ' '

Your name: Perse (modified)
Age: Old
How long have you been RPing? Long time
Where/How did you find us? Friend