Age: Fred's a mere seventeen years old-- which, in this town, is sayin' quite a bit 'cause not a lotta kids live to seventeen. But like most folks in the area, Fred had to grow up fast. Place like this, a seventeen year old's probably experienced more years than a fifty year old.
Appearance:
(Note: I don't normally use pictures, but these ones are pretty similar to what I intended. Just... not quite so drop-dead gorgeous, not nearly so perfect-looking, and not quite so skinny. :v)
As someone who tends to be so withdrawn, so introverted and so frightened of standing out and meeting new people, Fred is by no means someone you notice in a crowd-- she comes in at about 5'11 in height, which strikes her as average, so she's quite comfortable to be neither especially tall nor freakishly short. With regards to body build, on the other hand, Fred is... well, surprisingly robust. In her obsession with the possibility of being physically overpowered and thusly rendered powerless, Fred sets aside a respectable amount of time every day for working out-- lifting weights, pull-ups, crunches, the like. She's no bodybuilder, you can be damn sure of that, but people have often enough discovered that the shy girl with her nose always in a book is by no means a pushover, which you can tell if she's not wearing a jacket or something-- her biceps are built of lean, mean musculature, her abdomen a firm wall of six-pack, her entire body maintained at an impressive physical state, all spurred by her fear of being physically overpowered. Of course, she's never been in a real fight in her life (not one she couldn't use her smarts to get out of, anyway), and physical strength aside she's still much too timid to generally show her strength unless someone forces her to-- and even then, she'd rather run away than fight back. But it's also true that Fred's only really felt forced into a fight once-- and even she is pretty scared of what happens when 'sweet, quiet little Fred' turns into 'furious, violent, cornered Fred', because the one time she ever felt forced into a fight, she beat the poor man into a pulp, and the worst part was that she couldn't stop herself because she was convinced he was going to hurt her.
Fred's skin is an olive sort of hue, devoid of tattoos and piercings but dotted across with a few scars, some acne, and a few birthmarks as well. Cigarette burns dot her arms, and the faint, faded, but deep remnants of a belt slashing into the skin line her arms, her torso and back; most prominently, she has one that runs from somewhere along her forehead down, piercing through her left eyebrow, and terminating just next to her left eye. That one, kind of embarrassingly, came about from tripping headfirst into concrete, but she tends to say all her scars came about 'cause she's just a klutz. The acne's... well, typical teenage fare. Though Fred generally lives a fairly healthy lifestyle, avoiding drugs and whatnot, she has a deadly combination of a sweet tooth and a general lack of concern for hygiene-- she's often so caught up with reading, or with her physics work, or whatever else she's doing, that she often forgets to take care of hygiene. So you'll find some 'lil pimples, some blackheads-- not big enough for people to recoil in horror all 'sweet jesus what happened to that person's face', but enough for her to notice. She frets over it some, but she loves sweet things too much to fix her diet to get rid of the acne. And the birthmarks are mostly port-wine stains-- of a slightly darker tone than her natural skin, they're to be found in splotches on her arms, her back, a couple on her throat, like someone just took a paintbrush and splashed paint randomly across her body.
As far as her face goes, most will agree that Fred does not have much in the way of soft or delicate features-- instead, her face is rather angular, as though it had been formed not of flesh and blood, but sculpted of marble and bronze, with sharp, defined features. Resting at the centre is a rather small nose, slightly pointed, with a significant crook at the dorsum to indicate that it's been broken in the past, perhaps more than once. Not a very pleasant sight--in fact, if there's anything attractive about Fred's face, it's probably her mouth. Set between slight dimples, shielded on either side by vague but emergent laugh lines, her mouth is remarkably expressive-- when she smiles, her dimples come out, her face crinkles a bit, her eyes glow with the smile, and it's just a genuinely beautiful expression. Beneath a high, wide forehead are a pair of eyes afflicted with what is generally known as 'complete heterochromia': that term, however, is about ten syllables too long for most peoples taste, so the simpler term Fred tends to use would be 'mismatched'. And they are. Her left's an almost pleasant woody shade of green, the other a vastly less pleasant, kinda weird, mottled brown. Sometimes it freaks people out. She really hates that. Her hair is a dark, mahogany brown in colour, falling about as far as her collarbone-- though mostly because she forgets about taking care of it. Fred prefers to keep her hair fairly short, with the sides shaved down and the top left with barely more than an inch of hair. But like I said, hygiene... not really high on Fred's agenda. So she pretty much forgets all about cutting her hair until it's fallen in tangled brambles to her chest, whereupon she generally remembers to get it cut at last. Generally, she keeps it tied back in a very lazy ponytail-- heck, it's pretty impressive she even remembers to do that.
Clothing-wise, Fred keeps to subtle things, never one for flamboyant articles that would cause her to stand out in a crowd. A typical outfit for Fred would be a t-shirt (lately, she's started wearing band t-shirts, which is unusually bold for Fred), a pair of plain old jeans (perhaps with a tear or two, sometimes shabbily patched over because she can't afford to buy new ones), and a pair of ratty but reliable old sneakers. In colder weather, she'll throw on a denim jacket of hers, and that's about it. She does need glasses to see far away, but after somebody broke them while they were still on her face, she kinda stopped wearing them when she could afford to.
Likes: Fred's love of the written word is perhaps her greatest passion in life-- certainly the most immediately evident one, given how you can so often find her with her nose buried in a book. Yes, she's quite the voracious reader-- science-fiction, fantasy, modernism, realism, serious books, funny books, philosophical books, epics, prose, poetry, Tolkien, Wilde, Dostoyevsky, Poe, Sexton, Kerouac, Wells, Camus, Sartre, Kafka, Bukowski, Palahniuk, Marcuse, Nietzsche. The list goes on and on and on, and never stops growing. Honestly, Fred doesn't understand why everybody doesn't love reading-- to her, it's the only way she could possibly have stayed sane growing up in New York City. In fact, it's pretty much her drug. Where some people might default on drugs to deal with loneliness and pain, Fred buries herself in her books and just doesn't come out. It's an escape mechanism-- all the joyous sensation of losing yourself that drugs give, without the whole 'spiralling into addiction and eventual death' bit. That kinda rains on the whole parade.
Fred's passion for music, on the other hand, almost equals that which she bears for literature. People like to say they listen to a bit of everything, and usually they're full of shit (how many people who 'listen to a bit of everything' are into goregrind, or postminimalism?), but when Fred says it, she damn well means it, 'cause she listens to damn near everything. Grindcore, death metal, hardcore punk, crust, goregrind, blues, modal jazz, gangsta rap, trance, black ambient, Tuvan throat singing, Celtic folk, alternative, indie rock, noise music, baroque, minimalism, postminimalism, totalism, new wave, 80s synthpop, drone, goth rock, disco, post-punk, shoegaze, Oi punk, ska, you name it, Fred probably listens to it. You don't name it, Fred probably still listens to it.
One thing you're bound to notice about Fred if you know her long enough (roughly five minutes is generally as long as it takes) is that she loves to know things-- loves to learn. About anything. Her primary area of interest, and the subject she hopes to make a career out of, is theoretical physics, but she pursues virtually all other subjects of knowledge with just as much vigour. The result, of course, is that Fred is quite the intelligent woman-- and not just in the realm of 'knowing things', but also in reasoning, solving puzzles, so on and so forth. But given the opportunity to learn, Fred will take it, no matter what it actually is (with very few exceptions, of course)-- doing mechanic work on a car, deriving Feynman laws, painting, solving chemical equations, whatever it is, Fred will very quickly become dedicated to mastering it. So she's good at a lot of things. Mostly things that don't involve talking to people except to herself. Or. You know. In any way communicating with people she doesn't know. Not very good at that. Other than that, though, she gives just about everything her all.
Dislikes: Fred is not one who hates easily-- but nobody is free of things they don't like. Heck, anybody who has nothing they don't like in life is probably even weirder than Fred is.
The one thing Fred hates, above all, is to feel powerless. To feel humiliated. She knows that feeling-- is free from it now, but is still terrified of being forced to feel it again. It's why she learns absolutely everything she can so that she cannot be outsmarted-- it's why she dedicates what little time she can to working out so that she cannot be overpowered-- it's why she bought a pistol and learnt how to use it so that if worst ever comes to worst, she can defend herself. Anything to avoid feeling like she is helpless, to avoid being subjugated to the will of another. And if Fred is pushed into a corner and made to feel like she is powerless and humiliated, then she retaliates with a wrath and despair that seems almost too huge and too consuming to come from someone like Fred.
In a place where drugs are very much the law of the land, Fred hates them. Hates anything that affects her mind and body, really, and not even in the name of new experiences and learning will Fred take the risk of trying out a drug, no matter how harmless it may seem. She just doesn't make a habit of taking in substances that change the way she thinks or acts-- likes to be completely in control of herself, you see. That aside, she's also seen what alcohol can drive people to do, which is why if anybody breaks out the booze at, say, a party, or something similar, Fred seems to mysteriously disappear somewhere where she can bury her nose in a book and not come out until she's sure everybody who's drunk or drinking is far, far away.
And she sure as hell hates it when Sam gets fucked up on drugs. It torments her-- to see someone she loves drugging themselves into a stupor. She's constantly afraid that someday, a repeat of the past is gonna happen-- drugs are gonna claim the life of someone she loved, and that someone is gonna be the only person who ever loved her back. The problem is sometimes Fred is truly, genuinely afraid that Sam puts drugs before their relationship-- she's beginning to feel like it's too often that she has to skulk away when he gets drunk, beginning to feel like the drugs are beginning to subsume their relationship.
Fred also is not a big fan of domineering people-- you know the sort. They're used to getting their way, used to steamrolling anybody who gets in their way, used to being top dog in every way. She avoids such people adamantly-- she'll stand up to them if they try to put themselves over her, but such courage is taxing, and quite frankly, Fred doesn't even see it as courage, seeing as she's pretty much shaking in her boots the whole time, even when she stands up to big, scary, tough types (she's done it before, and every time, she goes right back home, locks the door, and sits in a corner with a book mumbling to herself in fear). But she'd rather avoid them altogether rather than have to stand up to them, which is why when they start bullying other people, Fred would rather just get away rather than stand up for others. She's just not that brave.
Scars/Tattoos/Piercings: Scars are detailed above. As for tattoos and piercings... Fred is too aware of the risks and the permanence to get them herself, though that doesn't mean she can't admire an aesthetically pleasing tattoo on someone else.
Addiction: Fred's addictions count more in the ranks of reading and listening to music rather than drugs, or alcohol, or smoking. As said, she rejects anything that might affect her mind-- for good reason, because Fred just as she is tends to be neurotic enough. Hell, she gets enough weird stares when she starts talking to herself without realising it-- god forbid she get high as well, because who knows what the fuck she'd start talking about then?
Theme Song: With Fred, her choice of song could be anything from Aborted to Coltrane. But for a theme song, I'm gonna go with Dark Angel's The Death of Innocence. No clue if the lyrics fit the character, but I like the tune (so too, I suppose, would Fred), and the title seems apt. Or maybe Converge's Orphaned. That also works.
Personality: Fred would seem at first glance to be a woman of contradictions-- easygoing but neurotic, timid but not without confidence, sweet and shy but absolutely unwilling to be walked over. Generally, however, you will find Fred to be a genuinely nice person, when she isn't absorbed with whatever she happens to be doing-- reading, studying, working out mind-numbingly complex physics equations, so on. Which tends to be a problem-- Fred gets very easily caught up in her thoughts and in whatever she's doing. It can be a good thing, as it helps her easily solve puzzles and problems. It's also a bad thing, as she is very easily reminded of memories she wishes she could bury, very easily reminded of all the things she fears might happen, very easily reminded of her innermost fears and anxiety.
As a result, she's quite neurotic-- talks to herself a lot, mostly because she's still not very used to talking to other people, so she just talks to herself. About anything. Even when other people are around-- she's trying to change that, but it's as much a habit as biting her lip or tapping her foot. She also tends to be incredibly distrustful of others-- though not in an aloof, cold manner so much as a quiet, timid, 'run-away-from-the-situation' manner. She's afraid that others might hurt her or humiliate her, so Fred avoids interaction with strangers as much as she can. Consequently, she gives off kind of a 'door-mat' vibe-- seems like the kinda person you can just walk all over. The reality could not be any more different. She's terrified of being abused, yes, but don't think for a second that she'll just lay down and take it if it happens. Fred swore she would never again let herself feel that powerlessness, that humiliation, never again, so she has dedicated herself to becoming someone who cannot be rendered powerless. Not intellectually, not physically-- it's why she owns a gun, which she bought off the streets for a tidy sum (unregistered, of course) as a last resort. She can be damn fearless (or at least seem like it) when she has to-- tough, scary people don't impress her, and though they scare her, they won't scare her into submission-- no, she swore she'd never let that happen.
However, in the end, she's still an emotional wreck-- does a pretty good job of remaining her quiet, amiable self, but the slightest thing can send her reeling down Memory Lane and into Haunting Flashback Alley. The mere sight of someone smoking a cigarette a certain way triggers uncontrollable memories of abuse-- being called 'kitten', or even just hearing someone say it, floods her mind with memories of cruelty and humiliation. Just talking to her a certain way, saying the wrong words in the wrong way, will cause her to regard a person with hostility and fear. At its worst, Fred once lost control so severely that she beat somebody into the hospital-- because of a combination of what they said, the way they said it, the cigarette they were smoking at the time. All of it harmless before the eyes of virtually everybody else, but to Fred, it all drove her to believe she'd been pushed into a corner by this person, that they were planning to hurt her badly, so much so that she felt the need to attack first and violently-- when all they were doing was trying to befriend her.
But if you know her well enough to navigate these uncertain waters, you will find Fred to be quite a sweet woman-- someone who, in a whirlwind of sex, drugs, and violence, has refused to succumb to it all, who still has hopes for the future. Hopes of pursuing her passion of physics and becoming the next Wolfgang Pauli, or Paul Dirac, or Richard Feynman. Hopes for making a life far from the despair and hopelessness of the city she grew up in. Hopes to pull her Sam out of the gang lifestyle he currently lives, so that they can both be free at last of the chains of their childhoods.
History: If asked about her life, Fred will chuckle awkwardly, wave it aside with a hand, say something like "Oh, you don't wanna hear about little 'ol me. My life's so cliche you'd probably just laugh at it." But everybody in the big city's got a story to tell-- and very few of them have got a particularly happy one.
As for Winifred Elise et Violaine, her folks were from the South-- she never knew where exactly. Heck, she never even knew if they'd moved up to New York after meeting one another, or if they'd moved up and then met one another there. Doesn't really care, either, 'cause she doesn't exactly reflect with a whole lot of fondness on her parents. But she was born into poverty-- to an unemployed mother who was addicted to heroin and may have continued using the drug while she was pregnant with Fred, and to a father who cycled between a variety of part-time jobs that paid a pittance whilst dealing with the stress of raising a child and caring for an addict who was the mother of his child.
She loved her father at that time-- looked up to him as a hard-working, admirable figure. Trusted him as someone she could depend on, someone who would never hurt her. But he was only human, and the stress of it all had to go somewhere. By the time Fred was four years old, he just couldn't take any more of it. The hopelessness of it all, the poverty, the stress, all of it got to him, and he took up drinking. A lot of drinking. And quite a lot of smoking to go along with it. At first, the worst of it was that their money was now going into booze and smokes. They never had much to begin with, though, so that didn't take much getting used to.
But Fred still remembers the first time her father hit her after she, in all her four year old naivete, had asked him why he was sitting at the dinner table crying. As he delved lower and lower into the miserable realms of alcoholism, Fred's father turned to abuse as another outlet for his despair and depression. He screamed at his daughter, called her worthless, called her useless, put out cigarettes on her arms, whipped her with his belt until she bled for the paltriest of reasons-- anything to express his rage and anguish, through violence. Her mother was too busy shooting herself up into blissful oblivion to do a thing about it, and the skinny little girl couldn't exactly do much to fight back against a grown man slurring profanities at her, reeking of alcohol and brandishing his belt like the whips of Satan himself.
Fred never forgot the powerlessness she endured in those eight years in which her father languished in alcoholism and violence. Never forgot what it felt like to be reduced to an object to be beaten, walked all over, and left like a broken rag doll on the floor in a mess of blood and tears. Never forgot what it felt like to be called a worthless little shit, a whore, a drain, a waste of life. She never forgot that humiliation, and she never forgot that the worst part was that she couldn't do a damn thing about it.
She turned to reading as an escape from it all. Books were incredibly rare in those days, in that place, but she came to realise that she could dive head-first into a new world, leave behind this painful, miserable existence and lose herself in someone else's story, at least for a little while. Her room was her home-- a place where she could shut herself up, alone with her books, with nobody to bother her. She never made any friends at school, and avoided the other children-- certainly she avoided making friends. After all, if the man she'd called her father, the man she'd depended on and loved, if he could so suddenly betray her and hurt her, who was to say others wouldn't do the same?
No, she contented herself with her books. She was so withdrawn, in fact, that she learnt to speak with a Southern accent-- because she'd grown up hearing her parents speak that way, and she hardly ever heard anybody else speak with another accent because she so adamantly avoided speaking to anybody else. Instead, she spoke to herself-- consoled herself when her father screamed at her, read stories to herself, laughed weakly at her own jokes, cried to herself, assured herself it'd all be okay. She got used to the only person there for her being... well, herself. So she took comfort, in herself, in her books, and later, in her music. Learning became an escape as well-- she could forget about the way her life was spiralling downwards if she threw herself head-first into learning, it didn't matter at all what it was as long as it was something Fred could learn, understand, dissect, and store for later use. Eventually, learning went from an escape to a habit-- to Fred, gathering new knowledge was like blinking, she just did it. That was how she wiled her days away, her months, her years away, shut up in her room, reading, learning obsessively, only emerging from her room when her father demanded it of her, because she knew very well she'd only get it worse if he had to come in for her.
When Winifred was twelve, however, those years of abuse came crashing down abruptly with the death of her father-- she never truly heard how, though she gathered that he was killed as he drunkenly wandered his way back home. It signalled a huge change in her life-- namely, that she would no longer be abused and subjugated to the will of another. The realisation came as a huge shock to Fred, who realised she'd actually gotten used to being abused. But those scars were still fresh-- on her body and in her mind. So when her father died, when the abuse and the humiliation finally stopped, Fred made up her mind: never again. She was never going to go through that ever again. She'd do anything to avoid it. Anything to keep it from happening again.
Those were the years when Fred began to dedicate herself to a stringent work-out regimens-- first, she was limited to anything she could do herself, push ups, crunches, squats, the like. Later, as she began working herself and some money, however slight, began to come in, she bought weights, and then a pull up bar, and then a bench press over the years, and dedicated hours of the day to relentless, punishing work outs. All so that nobody would be able to overpower her as easily and effortlessly as her father had been able to every day. So that if anybody tried to do that again, Fred could hit back, keep it from happening-- anything to keep it from happening again.
But the responsibility was now on her-- Fred worked three jobs at a time to support herself and her mother, who throughout her life had simply been a background installation, never really there. But she was also the only person Fred had ever known at home who hadn't tried to hurt her, so whatever money wasn't going towards Fred's books, her work out equipment and her music, it was all going towards her mother. She had no clue what to do about her mother's heroin addiction-- it had yet to kill her, she'd yet to overdose, but every day, she had to get a fix, and it was both draining money and turning her into a lifeless shell. It scared Fred-- both because she didn't want to lose the only person she really 'had' now, and also because the idea that drugs could do something like that to somebody caused her to be so adamantly opposed to them that throughout her life, Fred never once was tempted by drugs. Not by alcohol, not by smokes, not by any of the harder shit. She'd seen enough of all of that.
Her teenage years saw Fred, however reluctantly, emerging from her shell just a bit-- people who weren't daunted by how neurotic she was, by her tendency to hang off alone and talk to herself, people who were intrigued by her, wanted to know her. She was never one of the popular types, of course-- her only claim to fame, besides being 'that crazy chick', was consistently scoring highest at school on tests, which was mostly because she'd spent almost her entire life until that point in her room studying everything (turns out, that makes you kinda smart, who knew), and, no offence, people growing up in the kind of neighbourhood Fred grew up in don't tend to have a whole lot of respect for good grades. But there were those select few folks-- you know the type. Friendly, chatty types, always the first to approach that one kid who's always sitting by their lonesome at lunch time while everyone else is off eating with their friends, always the first to pull the loner out of their shell, etc, etc. Those kinds of people.
But Fred was too used to seeing people not as potential friends, not as people who might have shared her interests or her passions, but as potential abusers, as threats, as big, walking danger signs. She was afraid of being betrayed again, and so she reasoned that she couldn't be betrayed if she didn't let anybody get close enough to her. And to that end, Fred simply ran away. Every time somebody approached her, she shoved past them with her head bowed and scurried off. Everybody was her father, lying in wait for her to let down her guard so that he could burst back into her life and put her in her place again. But not if she didn't let that happen.
The problem is, people are naturally social creatures. It's why this bothersome little thing called loneliness exists-- because when people try to make themselves alone, when they try to cut themselves off from all human interaction, they're not happy. And Fred became lonely-- for the first time, she wasn't content with locking herself up in her room and reading, with working her back off to fuel her mother's addictions, with being alone. For the first time, she wanted other people there-- needed other people. For the first time, she let down her guard, and for the first time, she had friends. And then, when she was sixteen years old, for the first time, she fell in love.
Sam Anthony Monroe. Not the kinda guy... well, anybody saw quiet, unassuming Fred with. Cycling between sullen aloofness and aggressive ADD, addicted to pills, to hallucinogens, to cigarettes, and worst of all, to alcohol-- this here shit wasn't match-made-in-heaven materiel by any standard. But you know how it happened? Simple. 'cause that's not all Sam was. She honestly believed Sam regretted his addictions, and honestly wanted to help him put them down for good-- in a gang of unrepentant drug dealers, hustlers, thugs, in a whirlwind of domestic violence, savagery, and death, he was the only one of them that Fred ever thought she could see some genuine, honest heart in.
Who would have imagined, just a few years ago, that skinny little girl, locked in her room, afraid of the world, afraid of what lay just beyond the door, would someday have friends and fall in love-- not only fall in love, but find herself in a relationship with the man she'd fallen in love with? Well, she sure as hell wouldn't have, for one. It was still a bit hard for her to process-- and somewhere 'deep down', to venture that cliche old term, the alarms were blaring. Voices in her head hammered it in that he was just her father in another body, that her father was back and he was trying to snake his way back into her life so that he could hurt her again, but the reality was that Fred was happy with him. She never told him that there were voices, her own voices, other people's voices, telling her he was here to hurt her. After all, he never had, had he? He'd never need to know about all those things. He'd never need to know that deep down Fred was afraid of him, just like deep down she was afraid of everyone else.
She'd made huge progress in those years-- great progress in asserting herself, in becoming someone capable of finding happiness and hope. But it all was nearly wiped away when history seemed to repeat itself-- and this time, Fred would not be better off for it. Her father's death had spurred her to become a stronger person-- her mother's was only a reminder that she was never free of the possibility of pain and loss. The worst of it all was that her mother had overdosed on heroin-- the addiction that Fred had felt forced to fuel with the money she brought home. If there was anybody responsible for it, Fred convinced herself, then it was her.
She almost became withdrawn and terrified again, but this time, things were different. If she hadn't had friends there for her, if she hadn't had the man she loved there for her to support her, Fred fears she would have sunk into the same drugs her mother had felt forced to fall back on. But she didn't need them-- even in the despair, the fear and the guilt, Fred could know that she had people who cared about her. Even someone who loved her. It meant more than she could put into words to feel that way-- it meant more than she could ever say when her friends were there at her mother's funeral with her (a tiny, pitiful little ritual-- it was all she could afford)-- and it meant more than she could every say when Sam told her then that he'd always be there for her no matter what. That was the first day Fred wasn't afraid of someone just for being there.
Since then, she's been living independently-- she's used to it though, used to working for herself, so it wasn't a huge change of lifestyle. She refused to succumb to the gangs that surrounded her, even though her boyfriend, much to her own despair, had. Instead, she made up her mind that she was going to save up her money, do well in school, go to university, major in physics, and leave behind this horrible place once and for all. And while she did it, she was gonna save Sam from the gang lifestyle before it swallowed him up, and her with it. Winifred Elise et Violaine decided she was going to be happy, damn it, and she was going to drag the man she loved into happiness with her if she had to. She was going to leave it all behind-- the memories, the despair, the filth and grime of the city. Maybe, just maybe, she could leave it all behind.
Other: She's fluent in French, Spanish, and Portuguese, with some proficiency in Japanese and Mandarin Chinese. Still speaks to this day with an accent indicative of roots in the Deep South. She's essentially asexual-- she's grown to think of sex and anything related to sex as humiliation as well. Basically, in Fred's mind, sex reduces her to an object, and she's only ever thought of it as a ritual of ownership and humiliation.
Keeps a Glock 17C loaded, with two extra clips, on a drawer right next to her bed, and takes it with her if she thinks she's going to be in any kind of danger. Otherwise, however, invariably keeps a switchblade on her person, just in case. Lots of people keep knives 'round here, so it's useful to keep one herself. Just in case.