Krystal Johannson

[Krystal]

Name: Krystal Johansson
Concept: Graphic Novelist
Nature: Architect/Survivor
Allegiance: Self (currently)
Theme:
HT:  157.5 cm / 5' 2"
WT:  53.5 kg/  118 lbs
Hair: Deep Auburn
Eyes: Green
Age: 27

STR: 2                    PER: 3                     APP: 4 [Stunning]
Brawl: 0(2)               Artillery: 0(3)            Disguise: 0 (4)
Might: 0(2)               Awareness: 1(4)            Intimidation: 0 (4)
Throwing: 0(2)            Investigation: 1(4)        Style: 1 (5)
                          Kenning: 0(3)
                          Navigation: 0(3)                         

DEX: 3                    INT: 3                     MAN: 2
Archery: 0(3)             Academics: 2(5)            Diplomacy: 0(2)
Athletics: 1 [Dance](4)   Analysis: 0(3)             Hypnosis: 0(2)
Firearms: 0(3)            Bureaucracy: 0(3)          Interrogation: 0(2)
Gunnery: 0(3)             Computer: 3(6)             Seduction: 0(2)
Heavy Weapons: 0(3)       Demolitions: 0(3)          Streetwise: 0(2)
Legerdemain: 0(3)         Engineering: 2 [Repair](5) Subterfuge: 0(2)
Martial Arts: 1(4)        Gambling: 0(3)
Melee: 0(3)               Intrusion: 0(3) 
Pilot: 0(3)               Linguistics: 0(3)
Ride: 0(3)                Medicine: 0(3) 
Stealth: 0(3)             Science: 1(5)
                          Survival: 0(3)
                          Tradecraft: 0(3)

STA: 2                    WIT: 4 [Creative]          CHA: 3
Channeling: 0(2)          Arts: 4 [Illustration](8)  Animal Training: 0(3)
Endurance: 2(4)           Biz: 2(5)                  Carousing: 0(3)
Resistance: 0(2)          Drive: 1(5)                Command: 0(3)
                          Meditation: 0(4)           Etiquette: 0(3)
                          Modulate: 0(4)             Instruction: 0(3)
                          Rapport: 1(5)              Perform: 0(3)
                          Savvy: 0(4)
                          Shadowing: 0(4)
                          Tactics: 0(4)
                          Weave: 0(4)

Backgrounds
Menagerie: 3 (Fraz - large Akita/Malamute/Wolf mix)
Reputation (Comic Artist): 1
Resources: 3

Willpower: 6
Initiative: 7

Merits & Flaws
Low Pain Threshhold
Nightmares

Known Languages
Native: English
Others: None (Beyond using Google translate)

Movements
Walk: 5m, Run: 15m, Sprint: 29m

Soaks
Base Soak: 2B/1L

Healing Rate: Normal

Health Levels:
Unhurt (OK)
Bruised (OK)
Hurt (-1)
Injured (-1)
Wounded (-2)
Maimed (-3)
Crippled (-4)
Incapacitated
Dead

Bonus Points:
+2 Attributes (10bp), +3 Willpower (6bp), +3 Specialties (3bp),
Low Pain Threshold (+3bp), Nightmares (+1bp)

Menagerie 3 - Dog Companion - FRAZ

Strength 4, Dexterity 4, Stamina 4, Perception 2
Abilities: Athletics 3(7), Awareness 3(5), Brawl 3(7), Endurance 2(5), 
Might 2(6), Resistance 2(6), Stealth 2(6), Survival 2(4)
Willpower: 5
Health Levels: OK, OK, -1, -1, -2, -2, -3, -3, -4, Incapacitated
Attacks: Bite 5L, Claws 3L

Experience (100/100): Strength 4(16xp), Dexterity 4(16xp), Stamina 4(16xp), 
Willpower 4-5(9xp), Survival 1-2(7xp), Brawl 3(6xp), Extra Bruised Level(3xp), 
2 Extra Maimed Levels(3xp), Endurance 2(7xp), Might 2(7xp), Perception 2(10xp)

Name: Krystal Johansson

Gender: Female

Ethnic Background: Swedish, Irish, Germanic

Nationality: American

Age: 27

Height: 5'2''

Weight: 118 lbs

Eyes: Green

Hair: Deep Auburn

Handedness: Left

Description: Krystal is a gorgeous graduate student, short and slender, yet buxom. She has stunning green eyes that at times take on a blue or grey hue. Her silky hair is a deep auburn and hangs straight to her shoulder blades, though she has dyed it blond on several occasions. She usually dresses very casually, with loose, frayed jeans or cargo pants and a variety of oversized college sweaters, worn vintage or band shirts, and tank tops, but can dress up for business if required. She always has a number of pens and pencils on her, and a sketch pad covered in surprisingly detailed doodles.

She is often accompanied by her faithful friend, Fraz, short for Frazetta. Fraz is Krystal's beloved dog and possibly her best friend. She is a playful, well trained, and loyal mutt, an unusually huge and hardy - but not overweight or clumbsy - Akita-Malamute-Wolf crossbreed, with a few other bits rolled in. Krystal got her as a puppy three years ago when her previous dog, Fawkes, died. Protective of her mistress.

Personality: Krystal is a vibrant and confident woman with a stubborn resolve to make her own way on her own merits and talents rather than her looks. She's been told more than once she could be a model - bikini and lingerie mainly, with her figure - but she has absolutely no interest in it and refuses to work in a field in which she could be compared to her mother. She works very hard and is very reluctant to accept any charity or help. Though when she first struck out on her own she had rough luck and a tough time and at time considered trading on her looks, finally things have begun going her way and she has made a career off her artwork.

Despite her mother telling her of their family's supposed psychic abilities and alien abductions, and meeting the rest of her mother's family back in the mid-west on several trips, Krystal thinks of all that supernatural stuff as pure hogwash - same with aliens. Much to her annoyance, she seems to be a weirdness magnet, and meets far more than her share of similar freaks, even for a place like Vegas.

Which is how she ended up meeting her long-term boyfriend.

She is quite devoted to her boyfriend of six years, Ian Goldberg, and cares for him deeply, despite his issues and belief in conspiracies and aliens. Lately, she has been dropping hints that she would like them to 'formalize' their commitment to each other. Her steadfastness has been a great boon to him as well.

In high-school, she was quite into cheerleading, gymnastics, and dancing, at least for a short while, before her breasts fully blossomed. Still, she stays active and long nights at work followed by homework then school the next day has helped her learn to push herself to her utmost limits.

She is a good student, and studies hard. Surprising to her, she actually enjoys her Occult Sciences and Myth and Symbols classes - she eyes the subject matter with a skeptical eye, but the occult and religious iconography give her great ideas for her artwork, and the history helps with her writing.

Many of her other studies also help her contribute details to her artwork. Due to her self-reliance, Krystal has also developed some definite skill maintaining and fixing things around the house. She even ended taking enough shop class electives to be more than halfway to an degree to develop them further and has a slew of _____ for Dummies books that she had practically memorized.

Krystal is a very gifted artist, with a love of the comic book medium, if not for superheroes. She prefers fantasy concepts and has a style somewhat reminiscent to Brom, Royo, and Frazetta, polished with digital techniques. Despite her intentions, many of her pieces end up darker than she had originally envisioned.

She was extremely disappointed that the graphic novel she spent a year slaving over - A Thousand Broken Dreams - and that she self-published, barely sold. It also meant that she couldn't afford to go to college out of state as she wanted, instead ending up going to a local community college.

Since puberty, Krystal has suffered terrible nightmares, indistinctly baroque, Lovecraftian, and spiritual, then leave her waking up sweaty and trembling. She blames it on all the fantastical bullshit her mother and family believes in and spoke about freely in front of her. Jolene believes her daughter is a Dreamer and Clairsentient, possibly even able to channel spirits. She tried taking medication for it, but it usually leaves her feeling worse than the nightmares, so she suffers privately as best she can.

Background: Krystal was born to Jolene Johansson, a small town girl from Maine who ran away to Vegas with her boyfriend when she was fifteen. By sixteen, Jolene was pregnant and single, her boyfriend ditching her when he found her in bed with another man.

Krystal was born and raised in Las Vegas, her mother raising her by herself, working as a showgirl and stripper. Krystal grew up well aware of what her mother did, Jolene never hid what she did from her daughter. Krystal also knew that the men that her mother brought home for a few days or weeks, or rarely months, wasn't her father, or even a replacement for him. She never felt the need to find a replacement for him either.

Once Krystal was a little older, and Jolene was making a decent living dancing on various stages, they began to make regular visits back to Jolene's family in Maine. Her mother always enjoyed the visits, and her family never held anything against the lifestyle she chose. Krystal on the other hand, hated the small town after after the bright lights of Vegas, the cold, and their weird belief in the uncanny. The visits were never short enough for her.

When she was sixteen, Krystal moved out of her mother's home to find her own place. Though Jolene tried to convince her not to, Krystal was tired of her mother's beliefs and the way her boyfriends would look at her - Krystal also felt guilty about the one boyfriend of her mother's that she had slept with, even if Jared was closer to her age than her mother's, and she was sure her mother didn't know about it.

Krystal found a tiny studio apartment and paid her way waitressing and selling art commissions online. While finishing high-school, she slaved her nights away frenetically working on her graphic novel. A year later, A Thousand Broken Dreams was finished, Krystal had graduated high-school, and thought she'd be on her way to college in California.

Instead, her graphic novel flopped - she only managed to sell twenty-one copies, and seventeen of those were to family members and only one person bought it as a PDF. The money she lost self-publishing meant she couldn't afford to move out of state or the tuition, so she had to enroll in a local community college. Further, due to all the time she her graphic novel, she had lagged behind on her commissions, so even that as a source of income was drying up.

But she persevered, gaining her Bachelor of Arts degree, and even better making a name for herself with her artwork, through commissions and a webcomic she wrote and drew. After rewriting and redeveloping A Thousand Broken Dreams for a final year project, people took notice, and the Vertigo imprint of DC comics picked it up. As the sole writer and artist for the series, she makes a fair bit from it and associated merchandising.

Through work on other comics (mostly covers and mini-arcs) and networking at various Cons - she's very well received at ComiCon, though she's quite aware a part of that is her appearance - Krystal has landed several other projects. She's now the lead artist for the comic adaption of the Dresden files, and how done concept work for a number of movies and video games. Recently, she and Neil Gaiman developed an idea for a digitally released graphic novel that they will collaborate on.

After attending several Cons in Kansas City and surrounding areas, and talking to several Universities and colleges in the area, Krystal and Ian moved to Kansas City, buying an older house in the Brookside neighborhood. While working on her graphic novel series and other projects, Krystal is now working part-time on her Master of Fine Arts degree and a degree in Digital Animation at the Art Institute Internation - Kansas City. Too bad UMKC didn't have the program she wanted, it was only a few blocks away from her home on Walnut street..

With many comics moving to digital distribution, Krystal is looking to capitalize on the idea. Along with working toward making Graphic Novels a full-fledged format, rather than just a number of individual issues bound together, she is also looking at adding subtle animations, digital lighting and shading effects, links/pop-ups to additional content, audio and similar effects to take advantage of the digital format of comics. This is the main focus of the project she is developing with Neil Gaiman.

In addition, she's interested in the idea of developing an interactive novel/video game, in the image of Alan Wake.

It was a lot of hard work, but it has finally paid off. She's making a good living working in a field she loves, and is at the forefront of an emerging new way of blending visual art and storytelling. She has a boyfriend who likes sex every bit as much as she does, and if he came with some rough edges, she had made a good job of polishing them. She was even getting along better with her mother, now that they didn't live in the same city.

It's about all she wants and needs, and she doesn't intend on letting it go.

A Thousand Broken Dreams: A lengthy graphic novel that Krystal wrote, penciled, and coloured all by herself. The novel is structured similarly to Pulp Fiction, with many interweaving plotlines and points of view. The setting is a noir-ish urban fantasy, with a mild retro-steampunk aesthetic that is very emotive and eye-catching. The tone is gothic and darkly cynical, despite what Krystal had intended, though one of the plot threads is very light-hearted and brightly coloured by contrast with the rest of the series.

Krystal keeps a battered, dog-eared copy of the original version with her, and is often surprised by some detail she didn't remember adding, while leafing through the pages. She doesn't remember drawing/writing half the things in the graphic novel... but she was very stressed by all the hard work she put into it, only to see it fail.

Ian Goldberg: Ian used to be rude and condescending to women, treating them like baby-makers and didn't believe in the fidelity of people; they cant be trusted, best to not get attached to them. And the government is even worse, a morass of conspiracies and hiding the truth about aliens. But with the steadfastness of his girlfriend Krystal, and medication to ameliorate his paranoid delusions and bipolar disorder, he's gotten much better and is even happy. He has a hot girlfriend with the sweetest tits, an amazing dog, and a nice house in the suburbs (something he never imagined).

It's about all he wants and need, and he doesn't intend on letting go. He's bought a ring, and is working up the courage to ask Krystal to marry him.

Though he still maintains his AlienHunter.org site, he puts more effort in being an investigator for In The Shadows Securities and Investigations, LLC and being a freelance writer for the local paper, criticizing and reporting on City Hall and the government.

At the time of the Event, Ian was out of town for business. Krystal is very worried about him, especially if he can't get his meds - the mass disappearances will just feed his delusions.

Fraz: An Akita-Malamute-Wolf crossbreed, with some other bits rolled in. Fraz is freakishly huge and hardy, yet still agile and not overweight, with a gleaming white, grey, and brown coat. Well trained and loyal, she is playful and friendly, yet fiercely protective of her mistress. Has in full the typical Akita fastidiousness. Initially standoffish towards other dogs, until she gets to know them

,,

Home: A nice three story home, nearly a century old, but well maintained and updated. It's a corner lot at Walnut St. and 61st St (This house, but on the corner, and somewhat different decor). Krystal converted the 3rd floor loft into her personal study/studio. The basement is still being finished - some of it painted, but the rest is at least is drywalled and mudded.