Herrmann, Alexis

Alexis G. Herrmann

26

Female

United States of America

In real life, Alexis is of fair skin with amber eyes and shoulder length red hair. Calloused fingers and strong muscles, she also has prosthetic legs, due to both her legs being amputated above the knee. That though doesn't slow her down. Usually.

[In-Game]

Alexis stands at a good 5'6" feet tall, has boyishly short brown hair, and also has her amber colored eyes. Her in-game avatar wears a blue riding suit with thigh-high riding boots, with leather gauntlets. A white cape flows freely from behind her, as her coattails would often give the impression she wears a dress.

Alexis first starts off in a half kneeling position, her halberd's counterweight/bottom of the shaft pointed at the enemy. She would be holding her halberd to her left side for the start of this maneuver. Once charged, her eyes redden and glow while her blade glows red as well, whereupon she would stand and sweep her halberd to the right, slashing at up to three (3) enemies within her Halberd's range to damage her enemies as they get cut by the axe-head of the halberd or hit by the blunt edged side of the halberd's pike while at the same time knocking them away from her.

Her range of motion would have the Halberd sweep clockwise in a full 360* circle, raising her hands up above her head to transition the halberd around, while she shuffle her hands to allow her to maintain a constant grip on the Halberd before ending with her halberd pointed forward, and her in her 'ready' stance of knees slightly bent, halberd pike pointed forward with the axehead down and hook up, left hand above the right on the shaft with elbows bent, ready to respond to the situation.

Activation starts when Alexis kneels after dashing or maneuvering towards her enemy to be within an optimum range for her strike. Once charged, her eyes redden and glow while her blade glows red as well. At this point she would raise her halberd, slashing diagonally to either strike her enemy with the axe head or the blunted corners of her halberd's spoke. Utilizing the force of her first strike, she woud let the momentum carry on and have her pirouette in place, where finishing her little turn she would slash horizontally at her enemy.

Her last strike would consist her stopping the halberd and bringing it back and close to her side, before thrusting forcibly outwards in something akin to a bayonet strike, seeking to impale her enemy on the halberd's spike. After possibly driving not only the pike but the upper part of the axe-head of her halberd at her enemy, she would wrench herself free from him, twisting the weapon just a smudge to cause more damage as the pike is extracted from her enemy, from which point she would take up a ready stance once again.

Positive
[+]Reliability: Alexis, is quite reliable as a person. As long as it's doable, she will get it done. Never to leave her friends behind, this sense of duty was imposed on her by her family, and then by her nation and heritage.

[+] Loyalty: Goes with being reliable. She is loyal to a fault and would not abandon anyone, and will be often the first to volunteer, either to lead a charge or cook, she is often there to assist.

[+]Industrious: She can never seem to be sitting still. When not in battle, she is often doing the most mundane of things like upkeep. If on a given task she will rarely deviate from it, unless something of greater importance arises or a task is required of her to complete the one she's on.

Negative
[-]Stubborn: Comes with the territory. She can sometimes ignore offers of food or drink until the task is completed, spending hours in the library until it closes and she unfortunately has to call campus police to get out, or continue fighting until she is extracted from the situation, yelling at her opponent that she'd attack him still even with her arms and legs immobilized.

[-]Foolhardy: Again, part of her. She is the first to rush into a fight with little to no information. Tackling a challenge in which she normally learns her mistakes the hard way. She's just gotten lucky at times to be able to allow her to live through it. Her brashness often means she would end up isolated very fast.

[-]Despondent: Events in her life had brought out the bottomless pit in her. She is quite susceptible to bouts of depression, especially if left alone to her own thoughts. A reason she is quite industrious and seemingly carefree and friendly, is to hide the scars she carries. Regardless if in a digital world, she carries her cross in her heart.

Other:

In real life, she is an avid video gamer, and her first MMO game was an old arcade simulator called World of Tanks (ended 2021) while also playing First Person Shooters and Roleplaying Games. Athletic to a certain degree, she entered college and joined the ROTC program at age 18. She's also a bit of an otaku.

She loves nature, and loves it when it rains. Her life as an Army brat did leave her with some impression and she took up marksmanship while in College, where she started to make a name for herself in local IDPA tournaments before SAO.

She loves to cook, is quite scared of deep or open water (she can swim, but she can get quite panicked) and also participated in some LARP activities when in her teens and college years and participated in cosplay and whatnot.

Alexis was born to a German-American father and a Japanese-American mother, she was raised on various military bases in Europe due to her father's posting in the US Army, but particularly in Regensburg where she would spend most of her childhood. Her Grandfather settled there, who often talked about his days fighting for the US Army in Korea and Vietnam, before meeting his wife in a USO event and eventually retiring in Regensberg after Alexis's father graduated from college as a 2nd Lieutenant.

Due to both her parents either working for the military or the Federal government (her mother worked for the Department of Homeland Security as a Federal Air Marshall), she was often left to care for the home, and eventually, her two younger siblings. Living with her grandparents in Regensberg, she attended the Regensberg International School and also learned how to cook, clean, and do menial household chores from her grandmother, and also carpentry and craftsmanship from her grandfather.

Her first present (or rather, shared present) was a PlayStation 3 console when she was 10 years old, and managed to become infatuated with video games from then on, at the apparent disapproval of her grandparents.

At around age fifteen, Alexis was in full bloom in the whole anime and video game craze. Her parents, rather distant due to their work, did little to stifle it, and even encouraged it by buying her items and Japanese language tutors, which culminated in a family trip to Japan to visit Mrs. Herrmann's family and give the teenager a chance to make a pilgrimage to Akihabara.

The trip was a very exciting time for her, blowing through the 3000USD she had been saving up several years for and necessitating her grandparents to mail everything back to her. The trip was also held a second meaning for her father, who had retired from the Army as a Colonel from the prestigious 82nd Airborne and was picked up as a consultant.

Her family as well moved back to the United States, settling in the Appalachian foot hills of Virginia where she would attend Randolph-Macon Academy. She was quite a busy girl, and rumors spread about her aloofness and status as a teacher's pet. Lots of girls were quite annoyed at her distaste to join their social cliques, and many guys lusted over her only to be turned down, so such rumors spread. Quite to the point after one disastrous school dance, she didn't attend any others and started to recede into her own world.

College brought some changes to that, having applied for and getting into the Army ROTC program, she would find more kindred souls and eventually graduate with a Bachelor's degree and a commission into the United States Army as a 2nd Lieutenant to a Logistics unit.

It seemed everything went wrong for Alexis when she turned 21. Her father was a consultant for the State Department, when he was kidnapped and found on youtube...beheaded. Her mother didn't take the news quite well, especially when the project her father was working on was then revealed, leading to massive unrest the likes never before seen since the 2011 Arab Spring incidents.

Her mother retired from the Federal Air Marshals program shortly thereafter and would end up being an instructor at the FBI Academy, while Alexis would be deployed to the Middle East as part of the continuing presence of NATO and UN forces in the war-torn region.

While not a combatant, her unit was conducting a patrol when her convoy was stopped. Disgorging from her MRAP to set up a perimeter, all she remembered was flying through the air, her hand gripping onto her M4 as she struck the side of her vehicle, and landed face down.

She would awake a few weeks later at Walter Reed National Military Hospital, her legs mangled from the IED that terrorists had exploded mere feet from her, and were soon forced to amputate them.

Her life afterwards was a spiraling mess, being forced to a wheelchair and artificial legs, she didn't have the range of motion she used to have, and often went to sleep weeping. She turned to alcohol and would often be found sleeping beside her computer with several crushed cans of beer.

Her family and few close friends attempted to bring her out of her spiral, and it took a bit of an intervention before she finally got back up on her feet, so to say. That went to shit the winter of 2020, right before the New Year, where she got involved in a car accident. Caused by a drunkard hitting a patch of black ice on the road and jumping the median, his car slammed headfirst into her truck. It killed her youngest brother instantly and also left her now fully paralyzed from the waist down.

Now with nothing to live for, and ignoring the protests of her family and old war buddies, she nearly killed herself. Saved from rolling herself into an icy death in the waters of the Shenandoah, she was recommended for being a subject in a new Veterans Affair's program to let soldiers try on the new NerveGear system to help with their recovery. For once, while in the digitized environment, Alexis could walk normally again.

While advances in the medical field slowly repaired her paralysis, her therapist helped heal her scars by NerveGear simulations, and declared her 'fit' by 2022. By this time she had preordered a copy of the new Sword Art Online game, and after yet another lengthy procedure to return her mobility and fitting for new cybernetic legs, she logged on the game on the opening hour.

"The fuck."

It seemed that was the common thought in her mind and many others. They were trapped in the game by the designer. many didn't believe it, and went on to play the game, only to disappear forever as deaths were made real.

The heads at Walter Reed National Military Hospital had gotten reports that forcibly removing the NerveGear would kill the patient, and just narrowly stopped the doctors at the recovery unit from removing the NerveGears of several servicemen and women.

With no way out, Alexis at first was alone, hiding, waiting, before meeting up with other patients from the Hospital who she had traded IGNs in, and attempted to survive in the world. The core group of five grew into twenty as other servicemen and women from other nations and the US joined in, and slowly each would forge a path for themselves in the coming hours and days, although promising to keep in contact. She last waved goodbye to her bedside partner and ventured out, bitterly resigning herself to her fate and going along with the game to eventually join in the front line to free everyone from this madness.