PLAYER: Pace Mahmoud	CHARACTER: Ibis
PRONOUNS: He/Him AGE: 28 ORIENTATION: Bi LOCATION: Michigan, America OCCUPATION: Streamer	GENDER: M AGE: Adult ENABLE PKMN SPEECH? No PAIN THRESHOLD: Reduced TRAINER CLASS: Kindler

OUT OF THE GAME Raised academically-uninclined to a mother who wanted him to be the best at everything, Pace grew very used to disappointing people from an early age. She played music, had attended college, went to a variety of different groups and clubs and classes at which she showed off in front of the other moms. Pace had never understood how she’d met his dad, or why she ever decided to marry him. On top of the fact that she generally didn’t seem to like him, he was a high-school drop-out, a construction worker, he watched sports on the weekends. The kinds of things that Pace loved, and that his mother saw as useless. His dad raised him well - they would play baseball in the park, Pace would swing his legs in the building site office while his dad finished his shift, then they’d go out for pancakes. Any time spent away from home was the best time of both of their lives. A building site is a dangerous place, even with hard hats and everything else that OSHA requests. Accidents happen, sudden and awful - at eleven years old, Pace lost his opportunities to spend so much time away from home, and things became just him and his mother for the foreseeable future. Them and his mom’s new boyfriend, that was, just a few months later. He had a big house and a fast, shiny car that didn’t have room for Pace to sit in the back, so Pace spent weekends alone in his mom’s empty house while the new guy took her on cruises. Life happens fast and slow - mom got pregnant, moved in with the boyfriend, boyfriend became step-dad, baby sister is spoilt, all the kinds of things that are sudden and painfully steady. Elementary school and high school came and went, and with them came baseball, more evolved now than before. He played hard and good, and he had real talent - his coaches would let him know, his fellow players would love and hate him for it. It wasn’t a surprise to anyone when he got a scholarship. Pace had been living at home during college, but arguments were becoming more and more frequent, and the way Pace wanted to live his life was different from the way his mom wanted him to, and after a big enough bust-up, he was kicked out. Too easy-going for his own good, Pace didn’t want to reach out for help or act like this was all, really, quite frightening - instead he settled for working everything out himself, on top of the other daily stresses. A job to pay for a hostel, with hours that crossed over with his classes - everything would be fine. A little bit of weed to ease the evenings. It’s fine. Cut to later, when Pace loses his scholarship and has to drop out of college. Videogames were cheap on the crappy laptop he got to work from home in customer service - it only took a few seconds to download an emulator and a whole host of shit he’d missed out on from the Gameboy. He’d work through Pokémon games while taking customer complaints and snapping thirst traps for Instagram in his spare time. He’d posted something referencing gaming between a few ab-shots, and a handful of comments had suggested streaming. Huh… making money from playing videogames? Pace’s twitch streams took off disgustingly fast - a Pokimane for the girls and gays, playing all manner of things with the camera set right enough to catch the cleavage of his pecs. A delicate mastery of the “Just Chatting!” theme so he can have an excuse to do push-ups on camera and talk about nothing at all while stood looking pretty in grey sweatpants. Not baseball, not his dream nor his father’s, but it was making money and it was stroking his ego and introducing him to the kinds of people who liked to talk to him and didn’t care about his background or his life. A few minutes, an hour, and he’d never speak to them again. It was all delightfully, disgustingly simple. From a widowed mother who moved on in weeks, a family unit that threw him out, to strangers on the weekends that knew his body from his streams and barely cared about his face. It was all building a picture - love doesn’t exist. A shocking conclusion, maybe, but one that Pace came to all by himself and so, quietly, believed it without doubt. Outside of that inner belief, Pace was altogether outgoing - kind, a little jock-stupid, cheeky, a good laugh, patient, understanding; consistently and constantly flirtatious but in a way that was moderate and superficial - nothing had to mean anything. UNOVR was interesting. A world within a world - something from his job, but now as life. VR hadn’t been something he’d dipped his toes into outside of the very simple things, a little Beat Saber here and there, but this was a bigger fish. Living, breathing, brand new. Obviously, he’d joked around on it on-stream, but there was also a need for something else. Maybe, here, he could be someone else. Someone with a family history he looked into, a culture he had never met but intensely researched, a face just different enough that it wasn’t known from the internet, judged for being that one slutty guy who flexed on stream. Something about UNOVR plucked at him, just gently, and he was pulled in deep.

INSIDE THE GAME As Ibis, Pace has made an effort to be "real". If he was streaming, he'd probably be a big-tiddy milf with a name like Ms Thunder Melonz, but this is a bit more of a personal thing. Ibis looks as similar to himself as he could get before getting bored with character creation, and he doesn't put on a particular persona when playing. ibis is Pace is Ibis - the same dumb, extroverted Labrador personality; the same ability to flirt with everything that moves. However, there is a slight difference - Ibis isn't being played out to thousands of viewers to be consumed as a joke or a piece of flesh. He's something more "real", despite being locked up in UNOVR. Pace is a little less of his streamer persona, way less of a airheaded jock-type who sings drinking songs and games in the tightest muscle tee he could find. Ibis allows Pace to bring forward the parts of him that go less viral - the Pace that has houseplants, and makes himself pancakes on the weekends with cream and syrup, and makes sure to get his five daily prayers in because he knows it would make his dad proud. Funny how he feels far more like a person when he's online.

FACE CLAIMS Simeon from Obey Me! Ozymandias from Fate Series

STARTER PKMN Do you want to receive your starter in-character at the Starter Lab? YES, AND RANDOMIZE MY STARTER!