Epsiloa Verlei

This is a new RP character of mine. Meet Epsiloa Verlei! Loa or Verlei for short. Loa is a sweetheart, and always wants to please, but her problem is that she has had a terrible life. In her adolesence a farmer caught her sniffing around his cattle. It was a case of her being in the wrong place at the wrong time. When a pack of Dholes (wild dogs that live in Asia, where clouded leopards are found) had attacked a calf and fled the scene as she got there. The calf died just as she found it and the farmer found her there not a few moments later. He shot her, the bullet just catching in the neck, a few centimeters from her wind pipe and vital bloodlines. And the farmer knowing that it was illegal to kill and Clouded Leopard due to the fact that they are on the endagered species list, took her to a friend of his that had a small traveling zoo/circus type thing.

Loa went through a year of abuse in that, where she was fed very little, poked and prodded at, and abused by her caretaker. The leader of this traveling circus finally died (he was a gambler in great debt and met with some...old friends...) so Loa and the rest of the animals were either set free or given away. Loa was given to a man, a bad man that put her through a terrible ordeal of animal extortion. she was starved, beaten, used in dog fights, and given a cage far to small to live in. There would come a day at one dog fight that she manage to escape by bolting out a window and shattering the glass. She took to the nearest forest where she hid in what seemed an abandoned fishermans shed. There she tended to her wounds and her broken spirit, and was now a very deeply terrified and untrusting leopardine. Too weak to care for herself, much less live much longer. But luck happened upon her the next day as she had drifted into unconciousness, an elderly fisherman stumbled upon her as he headed into the shed for his poles and a net. Pittying the poor creature he put her in the bag of his horse-drawn wagon and took her home. He was a poor man that lived off the lands, and had a unique connection with the animals. He had quite a myriad of pets, though they were wild but came and went as they pleased. He placed Loa in his backyard which was fenced off, left her a good meal of fish he had caught earlier that day, and left his pet Dhole, Berkuso, to watch over her.

Over a span of a few weeks, Loa lived out back and began to heal, in both body, mind, and spirit. Though she was deathly afraid of the old man, she trusted him enough to eat the food he gave her, and even after he opened the fence, she returned, for he was the only kindness she had ever known. Berkuso stuck near Loa as protection and to serve as company when the jungle became dead quiet at night. Loa is highly suspicious of him since she had been beaten greatly by many canines, including dholes, in the dog fights.

As one could have guessed, Epsiloa Verlei is forever scarred by her hideous past. She trusts no one and nothing, save the old man and Berkuso. She is extremely skittish and terrified easily, dodging and running from the least little thing. She's overly paranoid of other wild cats and dogs, and suspicious of them all. She does not start fights, and will not fight, though if backed into a corner, she will do whatever neccessary to get away. When she talkes she stutters, as if afraid to say anything to anger whatever it is she's talking to, and she shakes in fear almost constantly, she gets little sleep anymore.

Wow! didn't think her BG would be so long, I'm planning on actually writing the story out instead of just an overveiw like this. In this picture she's stumbled upon something she doesn't want to get close to, and you can see her back is hunched up as she goes to back away with the look of fright in her eyes.

I sketched this out, inked it, and scanned it. I then used my new technique to color it in PSP, and added some lighting effects. I love how it turned out. ^_^