Application

[insurancebusiness]

PLAYER
» Journal: insurancebusiness
» Birthdate/Age: August 1974
» Characters Played: N/A
CHARACTER FACTS
» Name: Sara Ellis
» Canon: "White Collar" TV series
» Reference: http://whitecollar.wikia.com/wiki/Sara_Ellis
» Canon Point: Season 3, episode 8 - "As You Were"
» Gender: Female
» Age: 29 (not specified in canon, but she is younger than Neal who is in his early thirties).
CHARACTER INTERPRETATION
» Appearance: PB is Hilarie Burton (canon)
» Suitability: N/A
» Orientation: Heterosexual. Throughout the canon of the TV series, Sara has been attracted to men. She probably did the typical thing of "experimenting" in college and decided that a female relationship wasn't for her, but there is no evidence in her canon that she has had anything but heterosexual relationships, her main two being Neal and her ex-fiancee.

» Personality: Sara is smart, headstrong, driven, and independent - she doesn't have very many female friends (Peter's wife is probably the closest thing she has to one). Her relationship with her ex has caused her to shut down a lot of her emotions and focus solely on her line of work. She is the best there is at "bounty hunting", and this is because it's almost the only thing in her life at the moment. When she discovered that Neal had lied to her, she broke up with him immediately, closing herself off once again (episode 3x8). Her loner nature extends from her workplace to her home life. Sara likes to read, relax alone, and order food in as she is a terrible cook.

Sara comes across as a bitch to most people when they first meet her because that's the mask she puts on for them to see. At heart, she's just a little girl lost who longs for a family that isn't broken. She smiles, laughs, and dishes out sarcasm and flippant remarks around people who she is afraid will hurt her -- namely, Neal. To others, like Peter Burke, she is polite and businesslike but less sassy. Elizabeth, Peter's wife, has tried to see the "real" Sara when she gave her love life advice, and Diana Berrigan has been able to get Sara to lighten up during a double date. Romance is her weakness, and it seems that when Sara lets her emotions loose she has more fun instead of letting it always be about the latest assignment she's on.

If you were to ask Sara what her goals would be, she would tell you it's to get the job done right and quickly. Because of this, most people think she is someone whose sole focus is on her career over a family or romance. They would be mostly right; Sara has changed since meeting Peter and Neal, and definitely since breaking up with Bryan. She hides her heart as much as possible while wielding her baton to get her bounty, but in the end she is a romantic at heart -- not just of romantic love, but of romantic notions as well. Sara wants a family, she wants her sister, she wants to believe in happily ever after and redemptions.

Her family life also helped change her into the person she is today and was the most defining moment in her life. Her older sister Emily went missing when Sara was thirteen and she felt abandoned. These abandonment issues have left a large mark on her and her ability to trust people. Most importantly, however, it also became a mystery to her that she needed to solve -- where was Emily? Why had she left? All questions she made up answers to, but never quite found the closure she needed. This lack of closure is, most likely, what led to her becoming a kind of a "White Collar Bounty Hunter"; a job where she could bend the rules to find answers and solutions for other people while making money. It did, however, have one other effect on her. Sara decided to help Neal Caffrey, the man she testified against and chased for years for allegedly stealing a Raphael from one of her clients. As the two ended up on the same side of the law, Sara chose to help Neal find out who murdered Kate, his ex-girlfriend and seemingly true love. Sara wanted to give Neal what she had never found from the loss of Emily -- closure. A sense of peace and comfort.

She has a dry sense of humor and a sarcastic streak that she uses to mask her feelings. Neal Caffrey was probably the love of her life, but to be betrayed by him after she had put her trust into him hurt her deeply. Sara hates to cry and appear weak in front of people, but Neal is one of the few people who has seen her get upset.

Sara was engaged to Bryan McKenzie, her boss at Sterling Bosch. After she broke off her engagement with Bryan when she realized they wanted two very different things in their lives, she threw herself into her work. Bryan McKenzie wanted something very different from Sterling Bosch than Sara did, and she refused to be part of it so she could continue to seek out the mysteries of stolen art and valuables instead. She decided to focus on work instead of focusing on anything romantic, and it helped her cope with the break-up. She never caught Neal Caffrey, though her determination and attention to detail led her to come close to finding him once. After she became involved with Neal, she never told him about her ex-fiancée as she felt it was unimportant to her new life with Neal (although in a later episode, she claimed it was a “rebound relationship” – a lie, most likely, to cover how hurt Neal had made her feel).

She is distrustful of Mozzie initially due to his nature as the "imp on Neal's shoulder" and feels more at home working with Peter Burke considering they are both, supposedly, on the same side of the law. Neal originally fell into the conman only side of things for Sara, which made it simple for her to categorize things into black and white. Recently, she's been seeing things more in terms of varying shades of grey due to Neal's influence as a convicted felon who seems, on the outside at least, to be on a mission to reform himself.

Sara doesn't trust anyone right off the bat unless it's someone from law enforcement and even then it's only because she has to work with them at times. Everyone else is fair game to her considering how many different thieves and conmen she's had to deal with in her line of business. Trust is something that is earned, not given (at least in Sara's mind), though she makes a few exceptions. Oddly enough, she trusts Alex Hunter, one of Neal's exes, when they talk about him. She trusted her ex-fiancée Bryan, who turned out to be a conman. Sara eventually puts quite a bit of trust into Neal, as well, proving that she seems to have a "type" of person she goes for (and trusts) but shouldn't -- someone working on the wrong side of the law.

Sara has actually bent the rules several times in order to get items returned to her company, as she tells Neal, but never in a way that would hurt someone permanently. She could never live the life that Kate or Alex had wanted to live with him -- that of the felon, alone on an island, with money that didn't belong to them. Neal pushes her boundaries on this when the pair of them tries to draw out a computer hacker by concocting a scam of spending millions of dollars in one day; Sara admits to Neal that she loves it and his "life in the clouds" but that she has to eventually return to earth sometime. She hopes that he would want the same thing with her, as their relationship seems to mature (and Neal does as well, in her mind at least) until she finds out about the Nazi treasure that he had hidden. (1,220 words)

SAMPLES
At least one sample MUST demonstrate your character's feelings about or reactions to sex!
» First Person Sample Choice: (Prompt Three)

Okay, so this is new. Clearly not New York anymore. Maybe there’s someone who can help me out with… excuse me? Mister? I’m looking for…
All right, then. Not helpful. Let’s forget talking to these people and figure out how the hell we’re going to get home, Sara. Think. Some weird collar on your neck, check. Maybe there’s some trigger to get it off. Forget about why it’s on you, figure a way to get it off first and then you’ll go from there. Find some food. Maybe local law enforcement. Right. All perfectly logical, reasonable, rational ideas.

With, perhaps, the exception of the collar on the neck. Is it white? Because that could be some sick joke. (118 words)

» Third Person Sample Choice: (Prompt One)

As she opened her eyes slowly, Sara blinked and figured she had woken up in Neal’s stash. It was too beautiful to be true, and everything in the room screamed “expensive” and “waiting to be stolen” to her. She slipped her legs out of the bed only to see that she was, in fact, naked. Sighing, she placed a hand to her forehead to see if maybe there was a fever or bad hangover. She hadn’t gone off and done something stupid like a drunken one-night-stand just to cheer herself up, had she? God, she hoped not.

Sara stretched and walked around the room, lightly brushing her fingers against the columns and furniture but ignoring anything that looked like it could be stolen artwork. Old habits die hard, they say. It was absolutely beautiful, the whole place and she felt oddly at home in the room.

Later on, she’d lie to herself about why exactly that was the case.

Grabbing the silk sheet on the bed, she wrapped it around herself and frowned at her makeshift clothes. This really was getting to be a bad habit of hers, although usually it was with the guy’s robe in the morning after a particularly fantastic bout of mind-blowing sex. No one else was there at the moment, though, so she wondered just what the hell had happened last night after she’d broken up with Neal. It didn’t feel like a hangover to her, but one could never be too sure.

She looked out the window on her tiptoes, since she felt too short without her trademark heels on at the moment. It was beautiful outside, with a slight breeze and gorgeous blue water that seemed to call to her. Sara smiled for the first time since she’d woken up which was when she placed a hand to her neck and realized she had a collar on.

Blinking, she tried to get it off her neck but it was fairly stuck and she didn’t see any handy-dandy lock picks from Mozzie or Neal around… which meant she probably had some bizarre drunken sex with a guy at a bar who had flown her to a private island to make her his sex slave. It was the only thing that made sense to her. She’d been reading up on all those popular books lately, after all.

Resigned for the moment, Sara went back to the bed and pulled the covers back over her head, shutting her eyes. Maybe if she went back to bed she’d wake up somewhere else and things would go back to normal.

Yeah, right. (434 words)