User Profile

Character Name: Zack
Series: Final Fantasy VII
Age: 22

Physical Description:
Zack is taller than average, and his body is all wiry muscle that lends him impressive strength and agility. He has rather striking blue-violet eyes, but his most notable feature is his mess of shoulder-length spiky black hair, which looks capable of swallowing combs whole never to be seen again. He's quick to laugh and is rarely seen without a grin on his face, and suffers from an utter lack of fashion sense, content to look more or less disheveled most of the time.

Personality:
Zack is generally laid-back and easygoing, virtually impossible to anger, except perhaps through betrayal or some threat to his friends. He's more observant and thoughtful than he seems, and isn't stupid by any means, but he has a tendency to act without thinking, and to shoot his mouth off without much worrying about what he's blathering on about or who he's talking to. He turns serious in a fight or on the job, however, although his usual cocky grin never quite disappears.

Zack's happy-go-lucky attitude mystifies some of his friends and associates, and half of them have decided it's an act intended to make him seem more harmless than he is, which is true, to a certain extent. But t he truth is that Zack is just really bad at being an amoral bastard, and even a few years in Azhun haven't been enough to beat his innate decency out of him. He'll blithely agree that his softness will get him in trouble some day, but it doesn't seem to concern him at all.

Strengths:
Zack is excellent at hand-to-hand combat, and a more than respectable shot, though he prefers his fists or simpler weapons. He's nice to virtually everyone, and stays cheerful even in the darkest situations, seeming to be physically incapable of angst.

Weaknesses:
More than anything, Zack is young, still brash and cocky and frequently overconfident, convinced of his own indestructibility. Proud to a fault, and although he'll laugh off insults from friends, he won't tolerate them from strangers. He's still inexperienced and naive in some ways, and remains a hopeless idealist in spite of the world's best efforts to make him otherwise, with a bit of a self-sacrificing streak. Zack likes to think the best of people, even the sort he generally associates with, and is highly reluctant to think the worst of friends. He has a tendency towards laziness, and sometimes doesn't take things seriously when he really should. While in his usual hyper-manic-cheerful mode he can be immensely annoying to anyone more serious or introverted who's had the misfortune of receiving his attention.

History:
Zack's parents were farmers in a small town on the outskirts of Azhun, but by the time he was sixteen even his own stubborn family had been bought out by a wealthy industrialist intent on establishing a factory in the area. Zack wasn't exactly disappointed by the prospect of being freed from slaving away in the dirt forever, but the lifetime of monotonous, low-paying work looming in front of him wasn't much better.

Instead, he headed off to the big city with vague intentions of making it big and coming home in triumph with a fortune, but upon his arrival he soon discovered that things were no better than back home, to say the least. Within a month in the slums of Azhun he had blown what little funds he had brought with him, and was sleeping in back alleys and scrounging what little cash he could. Reluctant to return home and be forced to admit that his brilliant plan had been an utter failure, he stuck around, optimistic that things couldn't exactly get any worse.

Some fisticuffs in a bar, where he flattered himself he was doing pretty well against the three older men he'd gone up against over some insult he couldn't remember, got him noticed by the seedier element of the city, and he ended up working protection for a local crime syndicate.

Zack hadn't realized precisely what he was getting into at first, and he kept telling himself that he would quit and find honest work as soon as he had a little money saved up. A real job never seemed to show up, though, and by the time he had enough put away to think about heading home, he had risen far enough through the ranks of the organization that just walking away wasn't an option, if it had ever been in the first place.

It's not his first choice of jobs, by far, but it's the best he can do, and he keeps telling himself that he hasn't killed that many people who hadn't done something to deserve it ('beaten half to death' is another story altogether). And at least it lets him send money to the folks back home, when otherwise he would barely be scraping up enough to pay for food and rent. He'll come up with something better to do with his life eventually.

...if doing idiotic things like crushing on the boss's girlfriend doesn't get him killed before then.

~

Player Name: Lin
Email Address: highly.chaotic@gmail.com
AIM Screen Name: highlychaotic