[attr="class","explorerheader"]▸ DESCRIPTION ◂

[attr="class","explorerbox"]Prue can make quite the intimidating picture to those who've never met her before. From the tip of her nose to the tip of her tail she measures at nearly six feet long, though her hunched posture and perpetually bowed head obscures her true height somewhat, and the length doesn't necessarily equate to mass. She is thin and wiry, her body slim and her kelp-like fins lacking any real strength. Her eyes tend more toward amber than red and are almost always accompanied by dark circles underneath, betraying her restless sleep. Her voice is low, dry, and monotone, and her face rarely reflects any more emotion than bored detachment.

Despite her imposing stature, Prue has very little presence by design; she moves slowly and quietly, never drawing undue attention, and when she stands still in water she blends in nearly perfectly with the sea plant life that surrounds her home. She keeps to the shadows and travels alone, but those who catch glimpses of her may find her with a net fashioned into a bag slung over her shoulders, in which she carries the various plants and ingredients she forages for her tinctures. The scents they leave behind seem to follow her everywhere.

[attr="class","explorerheader"]▸ PERSONALITY ◂

[attr="class","explorerbox"]Where once in her youth Prue had been driven and idealistic, she is now apathetic and jaded, greeting each new day with an impassive whatever. No convictions, no ambitions — she has a nihilistic outlook on life, eschewing the future in favor of simply making it through the present. She is also a staunch realist, recognizing that the society she lives in works in specific ways and there's no sense in going against the grain or wishing for things you can't have. She is very reserved and actively avoids making herself the center of attention. She's had enough scrutiny to last a lifetime.

Prue very much knows her place in the world and has no desire to change it. She had cared, once, about making the world a better place for herself and others. But that was a long time ago. Nowadays, she has little patience for dreamers and idealists; she sees in them her younger self, and in turn sees the same disappointment and disillusionment awaiting them down the line. She can be quite petty and blunt, and she has a tendency to interject her opinions where they're not really asked for, often asserting herself as a voice of reason and dispenser of "harsh reality." Because of this, she can come off as callous and narrow-minded.

Regardless of her defeatist attitude, Prue is definitely not lazy; she's very diligent when it comes to her job and the tasks she chooses to take on, and she isn't the kind of Pokémon who doesn't finish what she starts. She takes pride in her work and her skills, and while her profession and reputation leads her to spend most of her time in less-than-savory crowds, she has no interest in causing harm or taking advantage others. She may not be as charitable as she used to be, but sometimes she can't stop herself from sticking her nose where it has no right being. She tries very hard to appear closed-off and indifferent about the lives of others, but her disaffected air is not nearly as opaque as she's tried to craft it to be... and she certainly isn't as good at lying to herself as she'd like to think.

Maybe there exists within her a whisper of the person she used to be, a ghost who still believes she can do good in this world if she just tried again. If there is, Prue has spent many years building walls around where she's buried.

[attr="class","explorerheader"]▸ FREEFORM ◂

[attr="class","explorerbox"]content warning: hospitals, medical malpractice, death

Since she was a little Skrelp, all Prue ever wanted was to become a doctor.

It was a dream she'd held for as long as she could remember. When asked what she wanted to do when she grew up, her answer never changed: I'm going to be a doctor. At the time, she hadn't quite understood the polite but understated responses she'd receive when she said that, as if she'd said something factually and wildly incorrect without knowing it. Like it was impossible, but no one had the heart to tell her that. Bless her heart, they'd say to her parents, quiet enough that they thought she wouldn't hear. She always heard.

It wouldn't take her long to discover the reason why. As Prue got older and she started pursuing medical training in earnest, she came to the realization that she didn't know a single other Poison-type in her profession. Then she become conscious of the way her peers would seem put-off when they'd meet her, the way they'd whisper to each other while stealing glances as she worked. How quickly Prue began to feel like an intruder in her field, like her touch brought with it not healing but plague itself — the other apprentices certainly avoided her as if it did.

The stereotypes and urban legends about her typing were pervasive and deeply held, she would come to find. A brutal wake-up call for sure, but Prue wasn't dissuaded. Medicine was her calling, and if assuaging prejudiced assumptions about her skill meant working twice as hard as everyone else, so be it. She threw herself into her training to the point that her life was consumed by it, every bit of her spare time sacrificed for any scrap of extra credit she could get. After many sleepless nights, when she was asked to volunteer at a local clinic, she'd jumped at the opportunity.

That decision would prove to be her greatest regret. The shifts were long, and she was already exhausted from spreading herself so thin for weeks — it didn't help that she'd been assigned to the graveyard shift. In the quiet of the night she did her rounds, checking up on the patients who were afflicted with a severe case of the seasonal flu and staying overnight for observation. A noise in the ward startled her from her sleep-deprived stupor, and her Poison Touch ability involuntarily activated on the patient she was tending to, already weak from illness.

It was only a momentary lapse of control. The patient didn't survive the night.

In the span of a moment, Prue had proven true every backwards superstition about Poison-types in medicine. She was barred from her practice and shunned from her community, becoming nothing more than an outlaw to the Pokémon she'd sworn to heal. The whispers that had plagued her for her whole life became unabashed jeers: of course it ended up like this, they said, who didn't see this coming?

Her life ruined, Prue fled to the deepest outskirts of Eve Town in shame, with her faith in herself and hope for her future shattered beyond repair. That night still haunts her nightmares.

But that was many years ago. These days Prue runs a hole-in-the-wall apothecary shop, where she uses her medical knowledge to sell her own hand-made potions and remedies to those seeking alternative avenues of medicine. It's not exactly legal, and most of her clientele is other outlaws looking to skirt the law, but it's a living. She's given up on her life amounting to anything more than this, and her childhood hopes of one day becoming a respected doctor had been abandoned long ago. The world just doesn't work that way — it was never going to happen, not for someone like her.

Some dreams weren't meant to come true.