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Actions speak louder than words, and Julia is a woman of action. If there is any issue that needs to be solved or a lead that needs to be taken, Julia will be there, at the forefront of the storm. Or, most likely, she will be the storm herself. Controlling, forceful and with the sort of all-consuming passion that demands attention and obedience, Julia isn't someone whose patience you want to try. Julia's fearlessness and ferocity inspire both admiration and intimidation so her default mode of the ruthless executive can come as a double-edged sword. [break][break]

Despite being able to act so quickly, Julia's plans are far from shortsighted. Experience and logic have gotten her far in life, and she loves more than anything planning and organization. She's far-sighted and ambitious and gives off the sort of premeditated aura. When not engrossing in high volume and high paced conversation with just about anyone about just about anything, then Julia can spend hours alone engrossed in books and her own ideas, or speaking excitedly about abstract themes those closest to her are allowed to hear. She's eloquent and loves conversation, especially the kind that drags on for hours over a few glasses of wine. Basically, she's the kind of person that doesn't sleep much, if at all. [break][break]

Of course, that's only under the assumption that there's a situation that needs addressing or a plot that needs scheming. If not, Julia's mostly relaxed, and can actually be quite spontaneous when the situation calls for it. She's always excited to meet new people and discuss new things, and she's entirely fine with allowing herself to jump along and do whatever captures her interest at the moment. As long as it fits in her schedule.[break][break]

Julia's quite particular, organized and is sometimes seen as a machine that is optimized for efficiency. As a result, she has little patience for whatever isn't on that wavelength. She doesn't care much for children or people who aren't put-together. She can't stand being idle, is easily irritated and extremely vocal on all her opinions regarding everything. She demands attention and obedience, and yet gets frustrated when things aren't a challenge (and even more frustrated if she loses the challenge, although the years are wearing away at that particular vice). She's passionate about her beliefs and dogmatic in her methods of having them realized.[break][break]

Yet, despite her overbearing and intense personality, she can't really understand other people at all. She's never all that intune with her emotions, and can't understand other people. Emotions frustrate her, and she'd rather reschedule whenever they pop up in her life. Though insecure is definitely never a word you'd hear anyone use to describe her, Julia does sometimes feel like she's missing a piece.

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the eyes

All five siblings had red hair, but Julia was the only one with their mother's ice blue eyes. And, if anything their father said was to be believed, she was the only one with her mother's fire, too. But their father was drunk half the time and the other half of the time he was just nowhere to be found. He was never violent, only sorrowed, and no one knew why. But with five siblings and an annoyingly goodnatured older brother to look after them all, they never felt like a broken family-- just a really odd one, with too much red hair and too little guidance.
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Julia, born the perfectionist, both thrived in the chaos and resented it. She was the second oldest and far closer to her older brother than to any of the other siblings, which was good considering they hated her right back. If Calum was their kind fatherly figure, then Julia was their witch of a stepmother. And they made a good team, too, but both of them wanted something so much more than life under a roof that always needed repairs, dinners half burned and half too cold. Their home would never have a mother's touch, but somehow the two kids were the only thing that kept it from falling apart.
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And they both spend the days with too much tasks at hand and too little (and too few) hands to catch them all; and they spend the nights catching their breaths and staring at the stars. Even though they both dreamt of change, Julia was the only one to act. From her daily rows with their shell of a father, and her scathing words that brought tears around the dinner table, to her pathetic attempts at rearranging the shards of a fast fading dream, Calum knew. He knew he'd have to give her his strenght as well if she was going to go on. So when they were staring at the stars one night in middle of a scorching summer, Calum thrust a small pokeball into her hands and told her to go.
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So she did, and never looked back.

the journey

Thirteen years old and with a vulpix hot on her heels, Julia made her way through Old Veherena, one block at a time and one day at a time. She was so happy to finally escape the maddening group of people that called her out on having her mother's eyes and jumped right into the crowd that didn't know her from the next challenger. So she traveled through Lyeant, collecting her team and blasting her way through whatever obstacle came at her.
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But she'd never be happy in Lyeant, so she left to make her way to Kanto, and completed the gym challenge there at the ripe age of fifteen. Once she had all eight badges in her hands, she found that it was her worth in the world, and for the moment she was satisfied. For three years she trained with the hopes of challenging the Kanto Elite Four, and only a year before the quartet would tear through the land, Julia was called to Lyeant. When she returned, she did so in time only for her father's funeral. The siblings' reunion was far from a happy one, and she could hardly recognize the people they'd grown to become. She had never quite been the person to be close to others, but at this point even the sentiments were fading, and she wondered if it was foolish to try.
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She left home within three days, hungry for another challenge.

the paradise

Kalos, now free from team flare, was as close to foreign paradise as she could get. An eighteen-year-old entrepreneur with a life dancing around the edges poverty and a hand reaching out towards the infinite luxury Lumiose City seemed to promise. In ten years, she made more mistakes and raise the stakes to places she wasn't sure she could stand on. But she kept pushing the bar. Her life had little room for failure or inconsistencies, and to be in control of her world again after the way her father's death and swept the rug from beneath her was...revitalizing.
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Julia didn't make many friends in the corporate world, but that was okay because it wasn't the kind of world where you needed friends. Lumioise City was the kind of city that welcomed you in and threatened simultaneously to swallow you whole-- ambition and life, all in one gulp. To stay steady, Julia was strict. Ruthless, sometimes evil. She went through personal assistants like she went through clothes: seeking the next to trump the other.
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Ten long years of struggle bred success, and Julia had never been more lively. In the afternoons she'd train her pokemon and follow simpler hobbies like gardening while in the mornings she'd climb further the shortening road to success. But the satisfaction did not come without the sudden fear that she'd be brought back to earth again by an event so out of her control. Determined to be the determiner of her own fate, Julia left for Lyeant again, hoping that this reunion would be on her own terms.
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the war

It hadn't been a more than a week since lodging at her hotel in Old Veherena with her secretary-- team Imum's grand and bloodied entrance tore through the region like a nightmare in the flesh. Her hotel went from four stars to four separate pillars of debris on the ground, and she wasn't quite sure what happened after that. Everything had been forgotten in the heat of the moment-- Kalos, her family, everything else faded to ashes as she was forced to run from one corner of the region to the next with nothing but a torn dress and her newest employee.
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Julia had told her to leave-- said that this wasn't her home and it wasn't her fight. As good of a leader she was, she didn't know if she could lead someone else to their death quite yet. And besides, she was used to pushing people out when things got dark-- she was used to people that said forever but never truly meant it. But the blonde would have nothing of it, and Julia was too tired and too starved to really argue further.
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It wasn't long until Lyeant retaliated. And when it did, Julia found herself at the forefront of the chaos. Just like all those years ago, except this time attempting to spearhead a family of five chaotic siblings had somehow turned to launching a counterstrike against a well-armed terrorist organization. Petty things like mercy and love long since behind her, Julia rose from the ashes: the ashes of her home, of her heart, and the world that could have been.
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She had lost count of the names her enemies called her by. She appeared everywhere and anywhere to beat away at the virus called Imum. And the rage and pain she had experienced upon watching her country's glory fade exploded out at every opportunity. Ruthlessness and cruelty were but other names for justice, and justice was just another name for vengeance after all. When the war ended, so did her revenge. For for the longest time, she didn't know what to do with herself without it.
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It was hard to imagine peace. But in the end, there wasn't any peace at all.

the present

Kalos beckoned to her. Her vice president's missed calls, her company's standstill. The beautiful, peaceful lights of Lumioise City at night. But how could she leave her home again so soon? Peace would not last. It never did. Something else and far sinister would tear it apart again. And abandoning Lyeant was not something she could do, despite all the things the war had made her.
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So she cut her ties with her company, and went to find the one woman that had aided her in rise and fall. Maybe, two or three years ago, Julia Shephard would have simply told the other person that their formal relations had ended, and they could do as they liked ad it was all up to them. Maybe, she had been planning to say those very words. But as the words tumbled out of her mouth, they came to be something else and instead she found herself asking if Lucy would like to stay here in Lyeant, with her. For her.
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She had never been so uplifted upon hearing what someone else had to say.
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Only days after, the Pokemon Association invited her to become a member of their elite four. She accepted without much hesitation, although the war has made her call to question almost everything she knows.

[attr="class","tbeapponebot2"]PLAYED BY PAPRIKA

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