Marla Prince

Name: Marla Prince

Gender: Female

Age: 13

Hometown: Cerulean City

Hobbies and Interests: Pokemon breeding, reading, fashion design, sewing.

Appearance: Though puberty and the hormone fluctuation that traditionally comes with it have drastically altered Marla's feelings about her personal appearance, her favorite physical feature is and always has been her long, straight brown hair. She spends a good deal of time styling and maintaining it, much to the lament of the rest of her family (especially when they wish to use the house's only bathroom). Though she likes to put her hair in a variety of styles, she tends to default to braided pigtails, or when she's in a rush, a simple ponytail. However, she refuses to ever curl or dye her hair, fearing any potential damage these processes could cause.

Marla stands at 5'1", with a comparably large head and feet that her thin body has yet to finish growing into. Her oval-shaped face sports a pair of round grey eyes, a wide, thin-lipped mouth, and a short, pointed nose. Her cheekbones are relatively high, but barely visible through her youthful cheeks. Like most girls her age, Marla occasionally suffers acne, but it is rarely very severe due to her efforts to maintain good hygiene. Marla's body is generally very thin, with a hint of stomach fat left over from her childhood, and tiny, A-cup breasts that are usually barely visible when covered by clothes. As mentioned before, her feet are quite large compared to the rest of her body, causing Marla some self-consciousness.

Marla enjoys designing and making her own clothing, but she usually doesn't wear her own creations because she is very shy about showing them off to other people. Her favorite colors are pink, yellow, and green, so she usually likes to wear clothes in those colors. She almost always wears skirts, even when it is cold outside. She particularly likes flared and pleated skirts. She absolutely never wears sandals due to her self-consciousness when it comes to her large feet; instead, she usually wears sneakers or loafers with long socks. She almost always wears a hat or at least a headband to hold back her hair. She is usually seen wearing her favorite hat, a pink newsboy-style cap. As a trainer, one of the most important staples to her outfits is a large green messenger bag that she carries over her shoulder.

Biography: Marla was born one February afternoon to a heavily relieved Adam and Nora Prince in the bathroom of their home in Cerulean City, after a pregnancy punctuated with worries about Nora's age (thirty-eight) affecting the child's development and Marla's unfortunate prenatal acrobatics. About six months into the pregnancy, Marla flipped upside down in the womb, meaning that childbirth could be far more painful and difficult for Nora. Fortunately, she seemed to realize this, and managed to move back to normal position in time for her arrival in the outside world. The childbirth itself was no less hectic- Nora was alone in the house when her water broke, and by the time Adam managed to get there it was too late to transport her anywhere. After about a minute of panicking, he spread some towels in the bathtub for Nora and called his sister, Joanne, who had already had several sons of her own. After ten hours of Adam and Joanne's coaching and quite a racket from the neighbors' point of view, Marla was safely ejected from the only home she had known at this point and into her mother's tired arms. She was named for the late Marla Connors, Adam's maternal grandmother.

After the chaotic episode of her birth, Marla's childhood went relatively peacefully- in like a lion, out like a lamb, as they say. Nora went back to her job at the Pokemon Day Care in the suburbs of Cerulean, and Adam continued his work at the nearby power plant. The Day Care also served as a clinic for abandoned and injured pokemon, and Nora often brought pokemon home to care for them until she found a good home or trainer for them. In this way, Marla was exposed to pokemon from a very early age. She was glad for the companionship too, as Adam and Nora had decided that Marla would be their only child. It was through this early exposure that Marla became interested in breeding. Nora knew just about all the secrets of breeding from having worked in a Day Care observing pokemon mating habits for so many years, and taught these secrets to an enthusiastic Marla. Marla enjoyed hanging out in the lobby of the Day Care as her mother worked, giving tips to trainers who wished to produce pokemon with specific moves and attributes. However, she usually concerned herself with the theory rather than the practice of breeding, having never raised a pokemon of her own.

While doing such extensive research on pokemon breeding, Marla discovered a passion for reading and broadened her subject material to include many other subjects. Most of her reading is nonfiction and "Do It Yourself" style books on various subjects, but she's been known to read the occasional novel (her guilty pleasure is "The Egg Sitters Club", a series of novels about teenage girls who work at a pokemon day care).

It was through this reading that she discovered sewing. She'd had minor experience mending clothes and helping her mother with her own sewing, but before this point she'd never given any thought to doing anything more with needle and thread. She tried making clothes for herself, but she was too self-conscious about her work to display it in public. Besides, her satisfaction came mostly from having made a piece at all, and she was happy to let them rest forgotten at the bottom of a drawer after completion. When she found a book about fashioning accessories for pokemon, her true passion as a seamstress emerged. However, Marla needed expensive imported fabric specially made for pokefashion (how else do you think a Ponyta could wear something without it burning to ashes instantly?), and while her parents had been supportive of her previous interests, this was where they decided Marla would have to finance her designs herself. She got a part time job at the Day Care and tried to sell her accessories there, using pokemon staying at the Day Care as models (she was much more enthusiastic about this than they were). However, Marla still had no pokemon of her own on which to display her creations.

This all changed one day at the Day Care. It was one of the more common cases- a trainer left two pokemon at the Day Care without doing enough research into egg groups and ended up with an unwanted egg. However, this time, Nora had decided that Marla was old enough to raise her own pokemon and gave her the egg for her thirteenth birthday, explaining that she would have to spend a lot of time with it before it hatched. It was during this time that Marla first became interested in training, and she caught two more pokemon with the help of her cousin, Rudolph.

Rudy, as his family and friends called him, was the youngest child of Joanne Prince, the aunt who had rushed to the family's aid when Marla was born. Though Rudy was two years older than Marla, they were closer in age than to either of his older brothers, so they tended to spend more time together than with the others. This time usually consisted of Marla following Rudy around and Rudy trying to shoo her off, but he secretly enjoyed the way she looked up to him rather than babying him like the rest of his family. As they grew older, they developed more of a friendship, and Marla considered him to be the older brother she'd never had. Rudy was already a fairly accomplished trainer himself, with a decent amount of traveling and three gym badges to his name, so he was happy to help his younger cousin with her first training experience.

While catching and training her first pokemon, Marla became curious about the world beyond Cerulean City and its surrounding routes for the first time. She listened to Rudy's stories about the sights and sounds she had only read about before and wished to experience them herself. Rudy noticed this yearning and suggested that Marla enter the Novice Tournament in Viridian City, hoping it would be the jump start she needed to begin her own adventure. She was skeptical at first- while she had read about the survival skills necessary for travel, she was certain her sheltered childhood hadn't prepared her for the life of a trainer. She wasn't sure she could live a life where her parents wouldn't be be there when she went to bed at night (if she got to sleep in a bed at all), where she didn't know where her next meal would come from and she could only keep what would fit in her bag. However, her books and Rudy's stories continued to seduce her, and one night, she enthusiastically announced to her parents that she was leaving home to participate in the Tournament. Fortunately, they too had doubts about Marla's survival skills, and they managed to persuade her to go on several week-long camping trips with Adam and Rudy so they could teach her what they had learned from their own travels.

Finally, Marla finished her crash course in basic trainer skills and prepared herself for the Tournament. She was still afraid of what the vast land of Kanto might have in store for her, but she had the confidence to face whatever might lie ahead with a smile. With a kiss from Nora, a bag full of clothes and supplies, and her pokeballs attached to her bag by a chain, Marla set out towards Viridian City and the Tournament waiting for her there.

Badges Acquired

 * None

Pokemon in Storage

 * None