42. Is there anything in your character’s past that they regret, haunts them, or they wish they could change?
Noelle’s past before she Fell was not particularly happy. Her world was in a period of great turmoil, having been taken over by an evil team. Noelle fought to protect her region and family, but ultimately lost both when Johto was taken over and her wife and daughter were killed. Following this, Noelle simply lost her will to live, wandering in the wreckage of what was once her home. One day, she ended up targeted by a group of Ultra Beasts who were under the control of the evil team. Noelle didn’t care enough to fight back and simply let herself be attacked, but her starter and partner, Shohei the Dragonite, shielded her from the attack and attempted to escape with his trainer, which is what ultimately led to them falling through the wormhole the UBs arrived in. When Noelle awakens, her only memory is a feeling of emptiness that is quickly overridden by concern when she sees Shohei lying injured nearby. In the following months, as she travels around trying to figure out what happened and when she’s taken in by Interpol, Noelle begins to understand that something very bad must have happened to her that she’s forgotten. She struggles with depression and PTSD yet can’t recall her past enough to know why beyond that ‘something really terrible must have happened.’ Noelle generally doesn’t really want to remember though. Her past was surely awful and she’s doing so well in her new life that she doesn’t want to ruin things by remembering something so traumatic.
48. Is there anything in particular that would ignite your character’s jealousy? Or does your character not get envious?
Noelle isn’t usually the jealous or envious type, knowing she’s got it pretty lucky to have such a cool job and friends and a family despite being a Faller, but there are certain things that ignite her envy. In particular, she often gets jealous of Draco, Gal, and Carmen. Those three have years and years of family memories with each other and their parents, while Noelle only remembers the past few years. She longs for a ‘true family’, which is her subconscious remembering how she lost her entire family in her home world, but she also feels like an outsider to her family’s counterparts here. She’s not a real member of the family – the other Noelle died years ago and she can’t replace her, that’s wrong isn’t it? It’s true that Ethan, Lance, and Whitney have told her multiple times she’s always welcome in their homes, but still, Noelle can’t help but wonder if she’s intruding. Just close knit families in general make her a bit envious, even if she can’t fully explain why. When she and Basile start dating, she tends to be a bit clingy, subconsciously not wanting to lose him like she lost her loved ones before.
49. What is something that your character has nightmares about? Are these frequent? Do they heavily affect your character’s mood?
Noelle often has nightmares of her memories before she Fell. She doesn’t remember most of them, but that’s perhaps for the best as they often concern the deaths of her friends and family and all the other horrible things that happened. One of the most frequent ones is of when she came home from fighting off the creatures (both UBs and supernatural beings) under the control of the evil team to find her wife and young daughter brutally killed. Some of the beasts had managed to slip past the line of defense and targeted Blackthorn, killing the civilians there. Often in Noelle’s nightmares, the horrific scene is twisted to become even worse – seeing them die before her eyes rather than just finding the aftermath, their mangled bodies blaming her for letting them die, and any number of other horrors. Especially in the earlier months, Noelle would often wake up screaming from her nightmares, and they’d put her in a bad mood for the rest of the day, depressed and irritable. She’s the type who tries to stay positive but this can be particularly difficult if she’s had a rough night. She still gets nightmares as the years progress, though the frequency decreases from almost every night to only once in a while, for the most part. Noelle also got into the habit of taking sleep aids since they help keep her from dreaming. She doesn’t mind losing out on potentially nice dreams if it just means the nightmares go away.