Character for Sicpuppy's "Retrovertigo" mischief. I have a lot of respect for her as an intelligent person and a talented artist and I'm excited she's giving me a chance!

Yorua as a rat. I admit to using Kyuss's "text ref" as a guide in laying this out--it might be more honest to say I ripped it and used it as a form for lack of anything better to do. I also went through some of the other mischief members (selected randomly or because they had interesting names) to get a feel for who she'd be interacting with. That said, this rat and backstory are in fact based heavily off a character I made a long time ago, after reading Watership Down. I am (surprisingly) extremely comfortable with this as an "animal" representation of Yorua--it just feels right somehow. Anyway.

Sic-Puppy is free to kick me out after reviewing my character, of course. Especially now that I look at the make and see the colours are pretty damn near Schism's. And Warlock's. Fuck it all.

On with it now... I talk too much.


Name: Yorua
Species: Norway rat, Black self
Age: 9 months
Weight: 812 grams? Something like that? In the U.S. rats are weighed in ounces so I'm a bit confused.
Birthplace: Somewhere in the southern United States.
Eye colour: Black
Markings: Yorua is... more notable for her unusual appearance as a doe than for any special markings. She's a black self with typical grey hands/ears/tail, although she has a "pinked" tailtip. A good general rule of thumb (ignoring my nice and sanely toned ref) is to make her as black as black's possible without making her an inkblot. She's not very fantastical in design because I'm boring. However, she is much bigger and bulkier than the average doe, having bucklike proportions and attitude. This will be explained in about three seconds. She also has a slight "catch" in her back right leg, which causes her problems once in a while when running. I'm not sure what injured it. The fact is that Yorua was designed to be pretty generic looking, both as a human and as a rat. It's her personality and attitudes that make her...uh, unique. Although I guess in this case it's also her build. But markingswise, she's still pretty generic. That earring is pretty much just a weight hanging from her ear. Tsukino-Hikaru did this marvellous icon of her a while ago--it shows her actual colour very nicely: [link]

General: Look, the explanation! Okay. Yorua was part of one of several litters of rats that were used in a sex-hormone study at a university, with male hormones injected in some of the pregnant does and so on. It's pretty common as far as research goes and usually it's part of some larger project to study something else. Anyway, Yorua was born female but quite bucklike in size and personality, although she had some of the less thrilling traits of hormonal buckdom--aggression, bullying other rats, hyperdominance, etc. (The damage to Yorua's ears is entirely her own fault, from an instigator standpoint.) This wasn't really unexpected, even though she was unpleasant by rat standards--the professors and students conducting the study weren't really concerned about making sure all the rats loved each other. They just had to get along well enough in a tank together. Which they more or less did. But when the time came to end the study and anaesthetise all the rats, one of the students (perhaps due to an attack of stupidity and guilty conscience) took a couple of the rats and let them free outside to "live happily in the wild." Of course, that's not really what happened and they died hungry and confused. Except Yorua, who lucked out.

Yorua hates humans. Hates them. I'm really kind of unsure why the college student chose her to let go, except that I think s/he grabbed them randomly. If said student hadn't been wearing gloves (because rats are still gross, of course) I think s/he would have had a few lacerations on his/her fingers. It makes Yorua effectively wary, though, and she lumps other predators in with humans in terms of danger. I'd like to say she's retained some (aggressive) interest in politics but I dunno how that would be possible so I'll just not talk about it. Umm.

As far as other rats go, she's rude and pretty rough with them, and in fact she could be said to have an impaired sense of social 'consciousness.' On the luckier side, she has a pretty good nose, even for a rat, which I guess could be said to theoretically keep her capable of being maintained within a mischief. Yorua isn't a terrible awful monster rat, something I feel I should emphasise. She grooms when she's dirty, ratpiles with other rats when it's time to sleep (although generally she tends to be near the top of the pile), and bruxes when satisfies her. She enjoys fighting (play and non), but only when she wins. I'm not sure she's got a normal lordosis response, though, so breeding is out--probably just as well.

And... hooooooly cow, look at all this text. Maybe I'll just cut it off there. ... yep.


SUPER AWESOME CREDIT TO DING, who cleaned up SicPuppy's Lineart enough for me to work with it on my exciting laptop touchpad of no reliability. Also Ceci, who was a big help and even listened to me whine.