Name: Ellie Petersen
Age: 27
Gender: Female
Occupation: Tree surgeon
Location: A lay-by near Betws-y-Coed, North Wales
Stats:
Strength: 9
Dexterity: 12
Constitution: 14
Intelligence: 13
Will: 6
Charisma: 10
Skills:
Tree surgery (2)
Climbing (2)
Rope use (2)
Driving (inc Off-road driving) (2)
Bicycle riding (3)
Axe handling (2)
Survival (2)
Basic mechanics (2)
Knife handling (1)
Wood crafting (1)
Guitar playing (1)
Blade sharpening (2)
Butchery (1)
Knowledge:
Edible plants (2)
Bob Dylan lyrics (3)
Conspiracy theories (1)
Welsh language (1)
Personality Flaws:
Sucker for conspiracy theories. Slight technophobe. Isolationist. Recurring nightmares.
Biography:
Ellie’s dad was quite a practical, outdoorsy kind of man, and she was in the backseat of the car he drove into the back of a truck when she was 13. Her strongest memories are all about him: camping in Wales when she was 4, wailing along to Bob Dylan records in the kitchen at Christmas, driving through Scotland listening to Paul Simon and then dozing off in the back, crashing back to life and death and a shattered car, her shattered life. She couldn’t escape him even if she’d ever wanted to.
She’s never wanted to.
But she had a younger brother, a mother and a strong cultural inclination to just get on with things. Pretend they weren’t so bad. Try to forget. She just got on with things. Did well at school. Went to a good university. But then she spent too much time smoking dope and listening to old music, scanning through endless websites of government conspiracies like her mum and dad had used to talk about, wanted to drop out like her dad had done. She didn’t, but she changed her seemingly pointless literature studies for something that seemed like a ticket out of the world and into the wilderness. She learnt, to put it crudely, to cut up trees.
And so that’s what she’s been doing in North Wales for the last three years. Trying to get away from the reminders of what she’s not. Trying to fix what seems to her to be a deep black hole inside of her, a deep black hole that still surfaces most nights in the form of hazy memories, nightmarish destruction. Trying to stop mourning what could have been. Waking up in cold sweats in her bivvy bag halfway up a Welsh mountain. Trying to lose herself in the exhilaration and exhaustion of the outdoors.
She recently took up meditation as a way to calm her mind, but then when it’s calmest is often when the blackness floods back. She’s been breaking down more and more often recently, and the nightmares have begun to twist and change. Take on other forms. Other content.
House:
Parents’ house in the Black Country. Currently staying in a caravan on the Forestry Commission site where she works.
Current Cash:
A few ten pound notes. Lose change. Few thousand pounds in her bank account. No debt.
Items:
Hand axe, sturdy knife, sharpening stone. Mountain jacket. Boots. Rucksack with bivvy bag, portable water filter, basic camping cooking set, high powered torch with 3 sets of solar rechargeable batteries, solar charger, change of clothes, gloves, tea bags, 1kg of rice, waterproof matches, firestick. Several lighters, 4 x 50g bags of rolling tobacco, 10 packs of cigarette papers in 2 waterproof boxes, wind up music device filled with 20th century music.
Vehicle:
Forestry Commision pick up with chainsaw, pair of harnesses with various coils of rope, tarp cover for rear, spade, pickaxe, large axe, basic automobile and bicycle toolbox, jerrycan of petrol, jerrycan of water, tea, sugar, UHT milk, camping stove and spare gas, two metal cups, 1kg of rice, 1 bottle of tamari soy sauce, sleeping mat and sleeping bag. Bicycle helmet and riding gloves.
Other:
Apart from her knife her prize possession is a mountain bike which Ellie spends most of most weekends riding.