Anima Dix.
Character's name and age: Anima Dix, 14 years old.
Incarnation in past life: Ansem the Wise, alias of DiZ.
Physical description: Anima is of average height and has just finished growing out of that cutely-chubby stage of adolescence and into her where-the-hell-did-all-those-mammaries-come-from?! stage of adolescence, although she unfortunately seems to have missed out on the filling out part. Not that she minded it much. When her peers were standing in front of mirrors, squishing their breasts together in an attempt to find something resembling cleavage, she was laying flat on her stomach with a flashlight under a sheet writing obsessively.
Anima has distinctively high, sharp cheekbones, straw-colored hair and eyes that, in certain light, seem to glint a pale amber. She stands with her shoulders back, her spine poker-straight, her ankles together and tends to clasp her hands behind her back. Her body almost has the appearance of being a sort of shell for her--she's not prone to sudden movements unless startled, and otherwise tends to observe everything obsessively. Anima lives inside of her head.
Personality: Anima is, as many brilliant people are, utterly unbearable. Most of her peers can't handle her condescending manner, nor her daunting vocabulary. She is used to being better than everyone else and makes sure that everyone around her knows it. Whenever she does one-up someone, she smiles in an obnoxiously self-satisfied way and says nothing of it--though there are times when she can't resist reminding the other person repeatedly that "I told you so."
Being a pragmatist, Anima has found that the ends always justify the means, no matter how extreme the course of action taken. When she sets a goal, she is usually quite well-meaning in what she wishes to attain, but will be quite willing to trample over any people that might get in her way or hinder her; she would force someone to aid her if she thought that doing so would enable her to accomplish a greater goal. She is also slightly selfish, but not terminally so: just as much as could be deemed normal for a teenaged girl. When it really comes down to it, she can straighten out her priorities, but it is usually a while getting to that point.
Anima is also incredibly quirky. She has obsessive compulsive disorder and tends to do things over and over until she decides she has done them perfectly. Whenever she walks anywhere, she must arrive at the threshhold of her destination at an odd number of steps. If she doesn't, she will go back to the beginning and count again, regardless of how far. She closes any open doors she sees and frets about germs constantly. Her OCD ebbs and flows: there are times when one would never have guessed she had any sort of disorder. She was very cunning about it, and it took the people in her life years and years to learn about it because she worked very hard to carefully hide it. "I apologize, but I left something back at my locker. Would you mind if I go back there?" When she was thirteen she decided she must have been MADE for cigarettes because they gave her a rush of drugs and more vitally: something to do with her hands. After only a few months she realized how badly her lungs were going to look when she was fifty and she stopped. Anima also likes to carry around a red pen and a notebook and she obsessively records everything that happens.
One of the things she writes down are her dreams. They've been going on for years now and she almost feels like that that man was her, somehow. By day, she is Anima Dix, the snarky know-it-all, and at night Anima finds herself as DiZ, a man who has watched every thing he works for fall apart every time.
History: When Anima was a small child, they realized that she was especially brilliant. As soon as she was in first grade, she received a full scholarship to attend a local "Gifted" Academy. Her parents were thrilled--her family was comfortable enough, but no one had yet gone to college in her family. As most parents do, they hoped sincerely for her do better than they had themselves and couldn't believe it when she received the full scholarship. The school was very bohemian, in its own way, and appealed to and probably helped nurture her pragmatic nature. She had an interest in science and her teachers encouraged her to try to conduct her own experiments, create her own hypotheses to prove or disprove.
At home, her life is entirely different than one would expect it would be for a girl who attends a school full of students who can do quantum physics but can't comb their hair properly. Her mother is severely mentally ill and has difficulty keeping a job. Her father, she suspects, is having an affair. Their house is full of a diverse group of people who rent out two extra rooms. They come and go constantly. Some stay for a few months, others stay perhaps a year. They all had their own strange quirks, obsessions, histories, pathologies, and personalities. Anima slowly realized that she wanted primarily to be exposed to people and to observe their inner workings. When it came time to fill out their schedules for the next year, she opted out, deciding instead that she would prefer to go to the local public high school in Carousel City.
Anima started having strange dreams when she was younger. They weren't so strange, for dreams, necessarily, of course. They were no stranger than your normal dream except that they seemed to be more than that. They were about a man--sometimes he dressed very differently, but he was still the same man--and when he died, she died. She felt it, knew all of it and held it even when she was awake. A skinny lesbian that had rented out a room in her house for awhile suggested that they were memories from a past life. She wasn't sure what she thought about that. Her English teacher encouraged her to explore the idea, but she had almost stopped taking those teachers seriously. She could tell her science teacher she wanted to swallow a slug to see what happened to her digestive system and he would enthusiastically tell her to go for it, even go as far to give her a slug. Really, education for the "gifted" and Special Education weren't very different from each other.