It is good of you to have come.

Player Information

Name: Gira
Personal Journal: murkrows
Age: Sixteen
Contact Info: magiradyne@gmail.com; startropics @ plurk
Other Characters Played: Equius Zahhak (AU), Ienzo (OU)

Character Information

Character Name: Morty. 
Character Series: Pokémon! Specifically, game canon, though the anime and manga have been used for supplemental material.
Character Age: Late teens, early twenties? We just don't know. But he’s definitely not ten years old, I can tell you that much.
Character Gender: Male.
Original Canon
Canon Point: Post-BW2; by this point, he has met both the HGSS and BW2 protags, though only knows the former.
Background Link: Bam.
Personality: Ecruteak City, Johto is one of the oldest settlements in the region. It is notable for its adherence and respect for old traditions, even though it stands very close to the Region’s center of commercial development, Goldenrod. There are few individuals who exemplify this way of life better than Morty.

He is the Gym Leader of Ecruteak, a position that’s been passed down in his family for generations, and he takes his job very seriously. Over the course of his several game and anime appearances, Morty has been seen taking challengers in the Gym, looking out for the well-being of the city and inhabitants, and even teaching classes for younger children about the basics of Pokémon battling – he says that these tasks are “just part of the job,” but some other Gym Leaders have never mentioned such jobs at all, much less done any of them. He tries his best to be a model Gym Leader and person, polite to challengers and respectful of his elders (even though some of them stand below him in the Gym hierarchy). Ever since he was a child, he dedicated a lot of his time to Pokémon; not only the Ghosts who populate his gym, but also the nearby forest creatures as well.

Morty himself, for the most part, could easily be described as cheerful and almost zen – sometimes creepily so. Outwardly he doesn’t seem to be that ambitious; if you ask, he is only after the simple things in life, like comfy clothes all the time and testing his Pokémon’s mettle against traveling Trainers. Most of the time he’s seen smiling, and while he may speak politely to almost everyone who knows him, he is certainly not stiff. At the same time, however, he has an… unusual outlook on things, and doesn’t always register why other people don’t share his views. He is not at all scared or unnerved by the concept of death, for example; it’s just another Thing for him, and in fact he does find a sort of comfort in it. After all, ghosts are still living, and he has interacted with them for his entire life – though not just in the form of Pokémon – so why would he, or anyone else, be afraid? And then there’s the uncomfortable matter of spiritual possession, which he thinks is totally fun and would like to try again sometime. So yeah. Kind of skewed perception there.

Even though he seems like a nice enough guy most of the time, Morty’s social skills are also not the best. He more or less grew up choosing to socialize with either A. town elders or B. Pokémon, and almost nobody else. (In fact, he only ever had one friend his own age growing up, and even Morty acknowledges that he’s kind of a lunatic.) He tries his damnedest to be a nice and interesting for whoever he’s talking to, but unfortunately, sometimes he just… fails. It also doesn’t help that he has an unfortunate tendency to be single-minded, and can sometimes lose track of his thoughts when he has concentrated on something more interesting. Oftentimes when talking to him it seems like he is concentrated on something distant and beyond human perception. …Which may actually be true, since he does have the ability to see visions into the future and interact with the spirits of dead people. That also makes conversation difficult, because zoning out in the middle of an explanation to watch something happen three weeks from now rarely goes over well with other people. Overall, Morty finds it kind of difficult to communicate, and so he just kind of… doesn’t. It’s not that he outright avoids people or pushes them away (that would be rude!), but he’s also not the most social, and almost never attends parties. They’re for crazy people.

The exception to this rule is when he’s talking about some kind of myth or legend. These are pretty much Morty’s passion. Sure, he sees dead people. But his interest in the past is much more far-reaching than that – practically the only time where Morty seems to be truly animated during a conversation is when he’s discussing Ho-oh or Lugia or any of the other many Legendaries that had lived in and around their Region in times gone by. Once, he recounted a tale to the player (who had become one of his friends) over the Pokégear. It was a time where he met Entei face to face, a canine Legendary with power over fire and illusions; he dropped almost all of his formal speech patterns in lieu of what, for him, would be outright fanboying. Morty has also been shown to move on the other side of the spectrum when Legends come up; in the anime, he got downright angry at Ash because he mentioned that he had seen Ho-oh on the first day of his journey, whereas Morty had dedicated more or less his entire life to the golden bird and hadn’t seen more than a feather. He soon got over it once he realized that Ash was actually a trustworthy kid and was telling the truth. Likewise, in the games, over the years Morty developed a kind of swelled head over the fact that he kept seeing visions of a person obscured by fog meeting Ho-oh; he believed that person was him, but was once again proven wrong when it turned out the player was the one who would tame Ho-oh. He got over that one too in much the same way. The long and short of it is, Morty’s shows of strong emotion only tend to come when he’s talking about a subject that interests him, and most of the time that subject is Legendaries.

When on duty as Gym Leader or when the situation gets dire, however, Morty drops all of these traits completely. He knows how to get the job done and isn’t one to let his emotions get in the way of doing the Right Thing. He is not susceptible to terror, either; this may have something to do with the fact that he has an extremely powerful Ghost-type watching him most of the time, but Morty very rarely falters in the face of fear – on the rare occasions that he’s scared at all, he simply doesn’t show it. That’s the right thing for a Gym Leader to do, after all; who would want to follow someone who cowers in the face of any problem the city comes to? He can think of no one.

Other than that, though, he’s really just an extremely laidback and quiet kind of guy who really likes pretty birdies and dead things and also really likes you, honest, even though he kind of sucks at showing it.

Abilities: Morty can see the future, an ability he gained from years of training. However, according to him, his visions are sometimes foggy, to the point where he is unable to identify one human being from another standing in front of Ho-oh, a Legendary Pokémon with a distinct outline. As seen in the manga, he has the ability to sense items and people that cannot normally be seen; this manifests mostly as a natural version of the Itemfinder, but is also handy for finding invisible Ghost-types. He is also able to communicate with spirits, and may actually be able to understand his Gengar's speech... though, when asked about how he did this, Morty simply smiled and said, "Practice." The understanding may come from Morty's powers or the close relationship the two of them share, but either way, he seems to be more in-touch with nature than most other people.

Sample Entry: Here.