Character Details

[ladiesss]

Born from fear and tales of all manners of creatures creepy and crawly, Sluagh are dark, pale, and tragic. The waifs wander about whispering out their secrets when they see fit. Politeness is second nature to this Kith; the same holds true for secrecy. The Sluagh are masters at gathering information, but they're not too keen on releasing their secrets, not without a favour or something else in return. Due to their rigidness, deathly appearance and mysterious ways, few of the other Kiths trust the Sluagh. --- ☙ Character basics. Name: Krista Kingsley True Name: Sir (shortened from Serisabeth for safety) Age: 18 (mortal); unknown (fae) Height: 5'7" Weight: 120lbs Hair: Black, long, lanky (human); tangled and messy (fae) Eyes: Grey (human); white and creepy (fae) Status: Single and awkward. Sign: Capricorn Traits: Know-it-all, curious, creepy, sarcastic, artistic, insecure Likes: Friends, eating, studying, creativity, magic, dead things Dislikes: Making mistakes, the Seelie Court, most of highschool Curse of Silence: Towards fairies and other magical creatures, Krista cannot speak louder than a whisper, no matter how much she strains to be heard. To plain humans and other non-magical folks, she sounds a little more normal, but will still seem very soft-spoken even in times of stress. Canon: Krista was created for a Changeling: the Dreaming (oWoD) tabletop game many moons ago, but we played so fast and loose with the canon that she can basically be considered an original character inspired by the game's setting. ☙ Appearance. Human: Most of the time, she looks like your average tired teenager. She's gangly and awkward, a little on the tall side. She wears a lot of eyeshadow, which gives her this constant sleep-deprived look. She has long, lanky black hair that she'll fidget with if it's not pulled back in a braid. Her eyes are a nondescript grey. She wears a lot of dark, well-fitted clothes and silver jewelry. She stays pretty covered up, wearing long sleeves even in the summertime. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder... But that said, she looks clean and well-kept, but otherwise pretty average. Something about her makes her strangely easy to overlook. Fae: In some cases, she'll switch or be switched to her true form. When this happens, her body becomes thinner and more angular, her face becoming gaunt and almost skeletal. Her eyes are small and all-white, and her mouth is marked with lines that look like stitches (perhaps more for Sluagh humor than any genuine symbolism). A band of darkness covers her eyes and smudges down her cheeks. Her hair becomes a messy tangle, and she's always dressed as if she's got a funeral to go to. Something about her fairy form seems very old, like a dusty attic--though her actual age is hard to pick out from appearance alone. ☙ Abilities. What Krista lacks in physical strength, she makes up for with fairy powers. Primal Magic: This is the only magical art she is currently trained in. Stats-wise, she has fully-mastered this kind of magic, and can cast the following spells: Willow Whisper - This allows her to talk to anything, even things that can't talk. One catch is that she can only do so in a whisper, so it does not work well in loud places or at long distances. The other catch is that things that do not posses a sentient intelligence may not be very good at explaining anything in a way a human could understand. Eldritch Prime - She can make any of the five elements (fire, water, earth, air, wood) appear out of nowhere. They cannot appear in an unnatural or manufactured form; she can only create the raw elements themselves. Oakenshield - This allows her to imbue anything (including herself) with the solid, protective essence of oak bark. This extra "armor" works against magical and chimerical damage, but does nothing against normal physical damage. Heather Balm/Holly Strike - This power works by reaching into something's imperfections. From there, Krista can choose to either fix it, or break it further. For example, Heather Balm may heal up a gash in someone's chest, while Holly Strike could be used to rip open a wound irreparably. So long as there is a present flaw, she can exploit it. Elder Form - The most difficult of the Primal spells, she can give something another form for a varied amount of time. Turning a rock into a frog would be fairly easy. Turning a vampire into a lawn chair would be much more difficult. Turning a normal, non-magical mortal into something else is the hardest change to achieve. She can also use this on herself, but depending on what form she takes, she may have trouble turning back. Realms: These determine what her magic can affect. She's put a lot of time and effort into getting better at this, so many of these categories are maxed out (or close): Actor (5) - She can cast magic on any person, from a good friend to a dire enemy, regardless of whether or not she knows their names. Fae (5) - She can cast magic on anything magical, from monstrous beasts to little pieces of dross found out in the woods. Nature (4) - She can use her magic to affect any organic matter, including animals. She can also affect natural occurrences such as the weather, earthquakes, etc.. She cannot affect the individual base elements (such as water, earth, etc) that can be found in these things, she has to go all-or-nothing. Prop (4) - She can affect almost anything man-made with her magic; her only limit is arcane artifacts or technology so complex that she can't easily understand how their mechanisms work (examples given: TVs, computers). Scene (2) - She can only use her magic to affect an area of about 200 square feet. Increasing the area affect of a spell makes it harder to cast. Time (0) - She has no ability to delay her spells, which means that all of her magic happens the moment she casts or completes her Bunk for it. Magical Quirks: She's got some other stuff that might come up, too. Quicksilver (Artifact) - An anklet with a jeweled spider on it. When she wears this, she can move at super-speed for three seconds at a time. It has no glamour cost, but she must be wearing the anklet for this to work. (Whether or not she actually possesses this artifact is kind of based on the rules of the game she's in.) Squirm - Because she is a Sluagh, she can dislocate all of her bones and wiggle into or out of almost anything. Because this is horrifying to watch, she cannot do this around normal, banal mortals. Sharpened Senses - Another birthright of the Sluagh is their clarity while perceiving the world around them. Because of this, Krista can see through all illusion magic to varying degrees. We can talk about how this would manifest if your character relies on illusion magic. Curse of Silence - All Sluagh are quiet, but not always because they want to be. Because of her Kith, Krista cannot speak above a whisper to other Fae, no matter how much she tries. Even around normal mortals, she will always be very soft-spoken at most. Iron Stomach - She can eat food that's a bit past its expiration date without suffering ill effects. Day-old sushi? Delicious. Meat that's starting to turn a bad color? Perfect. Dead leaves from your backyard? Snacktime. The look on your face when you see her eating a wilted salad? Priceless. Glamour: All of her magic costs "glamour" to cast. Krista can have up to ten points of glamour at a time, but only seven are permanent, or "fixed". She uses up glamour by: • Casting spells without a bunk. • Using magic around non-magical mortals. • Infusing glamour into other objects. • Using glamour to bolster the effect of her spells. Krista can perform a "bunk", some kind of little ritual, to avoid paying the glamour cost for a spell. The complexity of the bunk depends on the complexity of what she's trying to do with her magic. She also can't repeat the same bunk for very long, which means she's constantly trying to think up new strange things that she can do to direct magic. She may lose glamour if she hangs out around strong "banality", or any mortal presence that doesn't believe in magic or support creativity. A cubicle-filled office building, for example, would probably slowly drain her of magic. If Krista's glamour drops to zero, she runs the risk of losing her Fae self and becoming just a normal human with no fairy memories. This can be fixed by exposing her to more glamour, but she would likely not be inclined to seek it out herself. Normally, Krista can regain glamour by: • Staying in a glade, a place where magical energy is naturally generated. • "Eating" dross, things that have been either naturally or synthetically infused with glamour. • "Ravaging", or specifically exhausting the creativity in people. • Inspiring and feeding off of people's dreams. Being a Sluagh gets her a bonus to feeding off of bad dreams and nightmares. ☙ Personality. Krista is possibly one of the most jaded teenagers anyone will ever meet. While she's not very great with initial social interactions--stumbling through words, speaking in scattered run-on sentences, fidgeting nervously if she feels it isn't going well--getting past that reveals a thick, pervasive layer of judging looks and sarcasm. She's over a lot of things before they've even started, and can come off as aloof and snotty without meaning to. She has a deep bitterness and resentment of other people that gets in the way of a lot of her interactions, because her resentment is really just a way to mask her own near-crippling insecurity. Krista is much smarter than most people in her life have given her credit for, and all she really wants is attention and validation. "Not good enough" is the curse that has followed her through her entire life, and it's the first thing she'll assume other people think of her. All she really wants is someone to push past her expectations and tell her she's good at something, or clever, or that they're happy to have her around. When people are nice to her, though, it's a whole other story. While she may be distant or a little hard to get along with in the beginning, she quickly latches onto people who give her positive feedback. She's eager to please, loyal, and will show up whenever it's asked of her. She is also deeply curious about other people, especially those with magic of any kind--and has a healthy interest in histories, cultures, and mysteries of all shapes and sizes. She cannot resist a secret, nor can she resist hoarding information away as if each and every fact she stumbles upon could be a potential trump card in the future. Her insecurities are mirrored by an equally unhealthy ego when it comes to things she thinks she's good at. Her young age (at least for Changelings) makes her rebellious, impulsive, and overconfident by default. After all, she's a fairy with godlike magical powers--why should she listen to the rules? She's had very few qualms about using less-savory methods to get needed results, and she very much believes that the ends justify the means. As a newly-awakened Kithain (and, well, a teenager), this could change as she continues to mature (or doesn't)... But for now, she sure thinks she's got it figured out. ☙ History. (I want to revise this because I wrote it like half a decade ago and it isn't very good.) Krista was an average girl born into a family of geniuses. Between her famously successful father, her prodigal older brother, her robot-building little sister, and her obsessively-sheltering mother, she's always been under a lot of pressure to follow along and find her own success (within her family's narrow, career-oriented guidelines). This pressure was incredibly destructive to her self-esteem, turning her into a quiet, reclusive, and terrified child. Her mother reacted to her child's anxieties poorly, taking her frequent crying and nervousness as a sign that she just needed to get out there more... So she signed her up for dance classes, science camps, history tours, advanced classes, and even took her out of public school and into homeschooling, just to try and help her daughter find her confidence in the world. Despite all this, Krista remained the bizarre opposite of the rest of her family--quiet, distant, and very hesitant to join the world her parents laid out for her. What her family didn't know is that Krista saw a different world than them. Her world was full of magic and monsters and "secret whispering people". She daydreamed about strange adventures instead of studying history. She doodled her visions instead of paying attention to her math lessons. She talked about imaginary friends long past the age that children should. Eventually, her mother took her to a specialist to try and sort it all out. Krista didn't really believe the things he told her, but she learned how to lie about it to make her mother happy, and so that she could stop going. The more she lied and pretended she didn't see anything, the less she saw it. Eventually, she even started forgetting about it herself, and the dreams went away, and the world became as boring and frustrating as her parents made it seem. By some miracle, by the time she was a teenager, her mother realized that some time away would probably do her daughter good, and maybe even force her to build some social skills. She sent her to a highly-acclaimed private high school on Bainbridge Island in Washington, just a ferry ride away from Seattle. While she was largely antisocial the first year, she was finally out from under the ever-scrutinizing gaze of her mother and allowed to make her own choices. She stayed in the dorms, took classes that sounded interesting, stayed up as long as she wanted, and even eventually started making friends. She became particularly good friends with meek underclassman named Anton; they bonded quickly as two like-minded social outcasts. At the start of her Junior year, things started getting weird. A few weeks before classes started, she woke up to see a completely different reflection in the mirror--that of a horrible, gaunt, bony thing that only resembled her in broad strokes. She started seeing impossible things again, started hearing whispers when no one was around. She began remembering things she hadn't actually done, and knew her name to be one she had never been called in her life. She noticed that some other people around the campus looked different too, and when she went to Anton to try and get help, she realized that he looked different too--scary and nightmarish, just like her. During the new-student orientation day, even more strange people started showing up. Their new gym teacher looked like a beautiful princess, their recently-appointed headmaster was a blue giant, and one very young boy was... Well, a pig. He walked around on his hind-legs like a person. Recognizing each other for what they were, these strangers all collected together and slowly realized that many of them had met before a long time ago, in some way or another. When strange things started happening around the school, it didn't take long for the half-dozen of them to band together and start uncovering the truth: they were all newly awakened Kithain, all with different abilities and histories and baggage to match. That's when things really started picking up. The second day in, Krista met a vampire who called himself "Harry". He seemed irrational and a little unhinged, but Krista took a liking to him anyway. Problems with him were mostly trivial and got swept under a lot of other trouble. There were several attempts on the headmaster's life, stopped short on account of his ridiculous inhuman strength. The gym teacher got frequent threats on top of her own personal side-drama, while Anton had to deal with the antics of a girl who'd fallen in love with him--with the catch being that the girl in question was actually a horrible spider monster. Between threats to their life and occasional trouble from the PTA, it was hard to pay much attention to Harry... Until he started causing trouble. They learned that Harry unfortunately shared a body with another soul named "Charles", who turned out to be one of the reasons behind all the trouble they were in. Krista was threatened, kidnapped, and even tortured by Charles to try and advance his mad plot to destroy the world, but in the end, our heroes were able to separate the two halves into different bodies. Now, Charles was on the loose and on his own, but the group decided to take a day off to recuperate, collect up what they knew, and come up with a plan of attack. Two important things happened to Krista between Harry's introduction and Harry's eventual separation from his evil counterpart. The first was that Krista's little sister showed up, claiming that she was there to save Krista from the "monsters" around her. Krista learned all at once that her sister was not being kept at a school for gifted individuals so much as a holding center for dangerous youths with mysterious abilities. Realizing that they were more alike than she thought, Krista tried to tell her sister that they weren't monsters--they were her friends. She eventually admitted that she was one of them too, but her sister didn't take it well; she was collected by her keepers, but swore that one day she'd get rid of all the monsters. Krista still doesn't want to know what her sister meant by that, but it proved one thing to her: she could not go back to her family, not after this. No human family would ever accept her for what she really was. The people who liked her and helped her at the school were her family now. The second important thing that happened was an accident. After the disaster with her younger sister and well after Harry had started showing signs that he might be dangerous, Krista's patience for all this "personal agenda" nonsense was wearing thin. She was also starting to feel a little left out and unimportant, but not for anything anyone did on purpose. Her friends were all discovering their true Fae pasts, one by one. It was revealed to them that they were either a knight or a princess or a king cursed into animal form... But there Krista was, with no knowledge of her past self save for her true name. She was just a lowly little Sluagh, tagging along behind all the Kithain with grand, important pasts and histories. And then, she found the house. She was leading the party through the Dreaming, looking for something else, when she felt a familiar pull and followed it. It led to a tunnel that ended in a door, and she immediately started remembering things--the door was trapped, so she undid the mechanism. The immediate room they entered into was filled with stacks of boxes, but she knew what was in all of them. She knew where the stairs up would lead, and she knew what she would find if she went up there. When she opened a door and saw the half-rotted, long-dead corpse slumped over in the bathroom, she remembered everything. She went downstairs to explain, but something fired at her from the door; she was shot in the shoulder, but the headmaster covered her and knocked the assailant off his feet. It was a man working for "James", the man who killed her last human incarnation--the corpse now rotting upstairs. Apparently, he'd come to kill her new form as well. After all that, after finally remembering, she didn't take it very well. She had the Troll pin him up to the wall, burned his arm to make herself feel better, and then told him to tell James that if he wanted her dead, he should come do it himself. But she wasn't done there--in a fit of rage, she picked up a nearby meat cleaver and chopped off his hand while he was still pinned. No one stopped her. She'd intended to keep some of the bones as a prize and send the rest of the hand back to James as a warning. The assassin was promptly kicked out into Boston traffic and never heard from again, and no one really doubted her conviction after that. When the dust from all that settled and she had a chance to fix her shoulder, she explained what she learned. Her true self, Sir, is very old. She'd been around almost as long as there have been fairies in the mortal realm. Being a Sluagh, she never took well to living around other living things, preferring the company of the dead. It became something of a self-appointed job of hers to go around to wherever people were dying and speak to ghosts who have not yet left the world. She spoke to those who were unloved in life, those who were rejected or abandoned or had no one around to comfort them in their last living moments. She wanted to be a final, kind memory for them before they moved on. She would listen to their stories when no one else could, and promised to remember each and every one of them. For many, especially those who died in battle or during a time of sickness, she tried to grant their final requests and lay their bodies to rest the way they would prefer, whether that be a burial, a funeral, cremation, or simply moving their corpse somewhere else. In return, she took something from their remains. Sometimes a button, some loose change, an old photograph from their wallet, a note that was in their pocket... But most often, she would take one of their bones. This is how she "kept" them and remembered them, and this is why she became known to other Kithain as the Bone Keeper. She brought all of those things to the very house they were in, and kept everything in those very boxes. While she was alive, Sir kept to herself and had a very quiet existence. But while she spoke mostly to the dead, she occasionally made a friend among the living, too. The only place she could ever be spotted in public was at funerals, because she went the funeral of each and every friend she ever made, humans and fairies alike. Sir's latest death came when Sir learned something from a dead man that she shouldn't have, and Charles wanted that secret very, very badly. To keep it from falling into Charles' hands, James had Sir killed so that she wouldn't be able to tell him. From there, Sir's soul laid dormant in Krista, awakening again on that faithful day right before the start of the school year. Learning this gave Krista a sense of purpose and a new determination to stop Charles. Unfortunately, she was brought to Accord before she and her friends could make a move against him. She spent a year or so there, made a couple friends, got bored and fed up with waiting for something to happen... Until one day, she found a way out. She passed through the Sand Dimension (spoilers: it's full of sand) and traveled to Court for a short time before moving on from that, too. She found herself in the Drift Fleet for another year or so, and briefly captained the S.S. Bishop, but was pulled away from it before the end. Now, after a couple more stops in between-places, she finds herself on Agra 10, wondering if she'll ever actually make it back home to finish their business with Charles and James.