Post by Lisenet on Jul 14, 2015 0:56:06 GMT
▸ COUNTESS ✗ RIMAYNE
TRAVELER | HUMAN
TRUE NEUTRAL
And if you're still breathing, you're the lucky ones.
'Cause most of us are heaving through corrupted lungs.
Setting fire to our insides for fun.
'Cause most of us are heaving through corrupted lungs.
Setting fire to our insides for fun.
▸ GENERAL INFORMATION
NICKNAME(S): N/A
AGE: thirty-two
SEX: Female
SEXUALITY: Presently asexual, previously heterosexul
APPEARANCE: Ceris has narrow features with tall cheekbones, and hair that she, these days, typically keeps short so she can wear a variety of wigs and utilize a variety of different disguises to further her wishes as she pleases. Typically she wears a blonde wig that matches her natural hair color, arranged neatly and intricately up at the back of her head, and depending on the mood she wishes to create her clothes adjust to match. She is always well-attired, but if she wishes to intimidate or garner sympathy she may wear black, or if she wishes to bestow a gift or a mystery she is more likely to don pastels. Bright colors rarely make their way into her wardrobe, as they remind her of emotions in which she feels she can no longer partake. On account of a certain stretch of her history spent in a prison all but devoid of sunlight, her complexion is now permanently wan, and she often wears a light veil to protect her skin from the sun and the breeze, and nearly always carries a small parasol which will always match her gown, to accomplish a similar purpose. To hide the bony edges she has not yet managed to return to their proper health, her clothes are all padded to give her the ‘proper’ figure of a noblewoman.
PERSONALITY: Ceris is at heart a compassionate woman, but these days she struggles to express such soft characteristics as compassion, in part because she knows it is dangerous to do so and in part because she simply struggles to interact once more with other people, people whom she will without question utilize as tools if she feels the slightest need to, not that they will be aware of their use. Capable of being seen as both incredibly generous and nebulously cruel, Ceris purposefully projects herself in such a way so as to encourage mystery, and easily uses the opinions, concerns and expectations of others to spin whatever tapestry she wishes. She is known for listening attentively to the plight or story of all who come to her, regardless of her own opinions of said person, which she frequently adjusts her portrayal of. Her greatest desire these days is to be comfortable, to provide for the few whom she has managed to love—even if she does not outwardly show it—and to destroy those who destroyed her on the day that was meant to light the rest of her life, and instead cast it in stone and broken bone.
HISTORY: Ceris was born in Jaegar to a seamstress and a fisherman, the latter of whom died soon after Ceris’s birth in a squall, and whom she no longer remembers. As Ceris grew up and her mother grew old, her mother’s struggle to support them both deepened, as her eyesight and coordination were both failing and she could no longer accomplish the fine, swift work that had once put meat on the table at least once a week. When Ceris was fourteen—having been observing the ship yards and harbors, the comings and goings of all the sailors and their masters, as well as interrogating those who were willing to stop with her for a handful of salt-breezed minutes—Ceris cut her hair to a boy’s sloppy, short style, took a neighbor’s clothes from his mother’s clothesline and, after leaving an extensive letter detailing her research for her mother to take some modicum of comfort in, Ceris departed on a fishing vessel no different from that which had become her father’s tomb.
Only the captain of the ship knew Ceris’s secret, as she had found it prudent to entrust it to at least one person so she could have one other being to rely upon should something unexpected occur, as it was bound to happen. He kept an eye on her as she, masquerading as a twelve-year-old boy, learned the ways of the sailors and quickly took to their bouts of life at sea. Being a fishing vessel they moored in some port along the coast nearly every night, that their spoils might not spoil themselves, and thus Ceris was at least spared having to relinquish the land entirely. She was unable to visit her mother more than once every one or two weeks, if she was lucky, but she earned more than her mother could at the present time, and they were able to eat and sleep comfortably again.
Being a swift learner, and having been born with an eye for maintaining a guise as well as spotting one, Ceris was able to maintain her secret for the next four years, gradually being promoted from merely a deck-boy to a proper fisherman, assisting with belaying lines and hoisting sails, even though she was continually teased for her scrawny figure. Ceris could leap through the rigging in a gale, swim beneath the ship’s ribs and arise on the other side, and hold her breath—some said—indefinitely.
Only one person besides the captain ever learned of Ceris’s disguise, and only a few years after she’d initiated it. The captain, having developed a fondness for her, accidentally let slip to his son one day of Ceris’s truth, and after the son—Gerand—wrung an irritable confirmation from her the two developed a lasting friendship which, once Ceris was eighteen, Gerand promised to secure in marriage. Ceris’s mother and the captain both were overjoyed. Her mother had been afraid the daughter would remain at sea the rest of her life, learning to love the water more than she loved the land, the way her father had.
Unfortunately Gerand was, generally, well-liked among his peers and superiors alike, and not all approved of their betrothal when word of it reached their ears. Another young woman coveted Gerand for a husband; an acquaintance of the woman wished to have Gerand’s position on the ship; and another mother resented the money Ceris brought home because she couldn’t understand—and would not be told—where the money came from, or how she could possibly have earned it herself, or by any honest means. A combination of the three’s efforts, some without the knowledge of the others, soon led to an inquiry being led into a letter Ceris had supposedly carried from one traitor to another, and city officers following Ceris from the ship to her home one evening, and revealing for themselves her subterfuge.
The next morning they appeared at the church and added their iron cuffs to the false-pearl bracelets accenting Ceris’s wedding dress, and bore her away before all her peers, Gerand being restrained opposite so he couldn’t follow her, as Ceris was imprisoned on suspicion of ~betrayal, and within twenty-four hours found guilty, then sent, with no warning or explanation, to the more heavily fortified prison that lay lashed with the foam from the harbor’s mouth, far beyond swimming distance, and utterly forbidden from visitation unless the visitor wished to reside in a cell of his own.
Ceris’s legs trembled as they bore her away in the middle of the night, trading one cell for another, and when she heard Gerand shout her name she dug in her bare heels and stretched for him, crying his back through the cool night’s fog.
It would have been better if they’d never seen each other again. For when Gerand rushed her guards they correctly interpreted his attack and reacted accordingly, killing him on site and dragging a thrashing Ceris away.
For two years Ceris knelt against the damp stone floor of her cell and wondered if the scraps of her voluminous, tattered wedding dress would be strong enough to properly hang her from the bars over the window she could barely reach. Until one day halfway through the second year when one of the stones in the wall beside her bed rattled, scraped, then groaned away from its mortar and rolled against her knee. She leaned down, palms flat to the wet floor, to peer into the darkness, and saw a weary brown eye staring back at her.
The eye belonged to a woman known as Farryth, a governess and abbess, who had been imprisoned for nine years already for similar reasons to Ceris’s own. Between the two of them they managed to open up the last of the passageway between their two rooms—Farryth had been attempting to dig her way to freedom, but had misjudged the angles of the inner walls to the outer. Ceris was overjoyed to speak to another being again, as their jailors were never much interested in conversation, and to speak to someone whose voice was not yet familiar. When Farryth realized that Ceris had as quick a mind as she, and Ceris realized that Farryth had knowledge worthy of imparting, soon the tutelage began. They began a new tunnel, and Farryth began teaching Ceris how to become anyone she wished to be.
However Farryth’s heath was not well—no one’s could be, imprisoned for so very long nearly underground. She lasted far longer than anyone would expect of a prisoner in a dungeon designed to be bleak and short-lived, and it was another five years before she lay down and realized she would not be rising again. She drew Ceris close and told her, at last, why her own family had ruined her, or attempted to.
Farryth was rich. Far more so than any individual lower than the king was intended to be. Her family had saved and invested and saved for generations, centuries, to allow this wealth to accumulate. Her cousins had wanted it. But Farryth knew her cousins’ hearts, and had buried or otherwise hidden her wealth in various places around their known world—in gold, coins, gems or land, anything that wouldn’t dissolve—and it yet awaited her. Only now they knew that Farryth would not survive long enough to partake of it. So she imparted to Ceris the knowledge of where her generations’ worth of wealth resided, entreated her to memorize it, and died before Ceris could decide whether or not she wanted to go with the only friend she’d had for the past seven, imprisoned years.
As it so happened, it turned out that Ceris did want to live. She took Farryth’s place in her shroud, moved Farryth to her own cell, and let the jailers throw her living body off the rocks and into the ocean, where they entrusted all dead of that particular prison, and over a length of more than fourteen hours of swimming managed to find some wreckage and cling to it, unable to go any further.
A day later she was hooked out of the water that clung to her like frost by the men of a passing smuggling vessel, men to whom, when she had regained the use of her faculties, she related her new life’s past: she was widowed by men who conspired against her husband, then who made off with her and kept her in isolated captivity for more than a year before she escaped when their ship floundered in the recent storm.
Being from a sailing family she was naturally well-versed in the ways of ships, ports and water, and while not physically aiding the smugglers soon they realized that she had great use in other ways. Without their knowledge, she impersonated a boy again in various ports (while they thought she met her associates and acquaintances as her recovered self) to accomplish both her ends and theirs. They came to greatly value her assistance, as well as her presence, as it was immediately evident that Ceris—Countess Rimayne, as she styled herself—treated fairly any man who fairly treated her, and held no disdain either for their places in society nor their professions. Hating—once they became fond of her—to see such a singular and helpful lady immured in their castoffs, when the men had enough combined funds they bought her a gown which began to benefit her station, and she was warmly grateful, wearing it in ports to continue her and their business and to add to her own belongings, as well as to, when given enough time, seek out the fragments of her benefactor’s fortune.
Over the course of a year, truthfully claiming hesitation in returning to the devils of society, Ceris secured the lifelong friendship of the smugglers with her continued assistance, and was seen off with great reluctance when she finally decided to brave land again. One of the younger boys on ship—an orphan picked up about a year before she—begged to be permitted to come with her as she made her new life. He’d be her strictest confidante and most loyal defense, he promised, in her life. Touched, not that she could necessarily show it, she permitted the boy to accompany her and they disembarked. She clothed and fed him well, treating him as she would her own son, and they began a new life. He trusted her implicitly, and Ceris came to trust him as much as she is capable, these days, of trusting anyone.
Over the course of the next seven years Ceris made the most important acquaintances through the most inauspicious, varied means possible, as well as investing and increasing her fortune and securing multiple loyalties across the known world and at its every level, thus drawing others’ opinions around herself in protection. She surreptitiously created or was present among many instances of chaos, as that is the best place to test, discover and assure loyalties and alliances. In imprisonment she learned everlasting patience, strategy and prudence—she was taking years to cement the stones which will allow her to stalk and destroy her enemies without ever implicating herself, allowing them to so naturally ruin themselves that no one would ever suspect anyone’s hand but their own.
AGE: thirty-two
SEX: Female
SEXUALITY: Presently asexual, previously heterosexul
▸THE SPECIFICS
ABILITIES/POWERS: Ceris has an incredibly steep learning curve, as well as the determination and ambition to learn whatever has the potential to serve her at a future date, which tends to be virtually everything. She has also developed a talent for making an individual, with a single smile, feel either like someone seeing for the first time the stars, or the shape of the noose that hangs before them. APPEARANCE: Ceris has narrow features with tall cheekbones, and hair that she, these days, typically keeps short so she can wear a variety of wigs and utilize a variety of different disguises to further her wishes as she pleases. Typically she wears a blonde wig that matches her natural hair color, arranged neatly and intricately up at the back of her head, and depending on the mood she wishes to create her clothes adjust to match. She is always well-attired, but if she wishes to intimidate or garner sympathy she may wear black, or if she wishes to bestow a gift or a mystery she is more likely to don pastels. Bright colors rarely make their way into her wardrobe, as they remind her of emotions in which she feels she can no longer partake. On account of a certain stretch of her history spent in a prison all but devoid of sunlight, her complexion is now permanently wan, and she often wears a light veil to protect her skin from the sun and the breeze, and nearly always carries a small parasol which will always match her gown, to accomplish a similar purpose. To hide the bony edges she has not yet managed to return to their proper health, her clothes are all padded to give her the ‘proper’ figure of a noblewoman.
PERSONALITY: Ceris is at heart a compassionate woman, but these days she struggles to express such soft characteristics as compassion, in part because she knows it is dangerous to do so and in part because she simply struggles to interact once more with other people, people whom she will without question utilize as tools if she feels the slightest need to, not that they will be aware of their use. Capable of being seen as both incredibly generous and nebulously cruel, Ceris purposefully projects herself in such a way so as to encourage mystery, and easily uses the opinions, concerns and expectations of others to spin whatever tapestry she wishes. She is known for listening attentively to the plight or story of all who come to her, regardless of her own opinions of said person, which she frequently adjusts her portrayal of. Her greatest desire these days is to be comfortable, to provide for the few whom she has managed to love—even if she does not outwardly show it—and to destroy those who destroyed her on the day that was meant to light the rest of her life, and instead cast it in stone and broken bone.
HISTORY: Ceris was born in Jaegar to a seamstress and a fisherman, the latter of whom died soon after Ceris’s birth in a squall, and whom she no longer remembers. As Ceris grew up and her mother grew old, her mother’s struggle to support them both deepened, as her eyesight and coordination were both failing and she could no longer accomplish the fine, swift work that had once put meat on the table at least once a week. When Ceris was fourteen—having been observing the ship yards and harbors, the comings and goings of all the sailors and their masters, as well as interrogating those who were willing to stop with her for a handful of salt-breezed minutes—Ceris cut her hair to a boy’s sloppy, short style, took a neighbor’s clothes from his mother’s clothesline and, after leaving an extensive letter detailing her research for her mother to take some modicum of comfort in, Ceris departed on a fishing vessel no different from that which had become her father’s tomb.
Only the captain of the ship knew Ceris’s secret, as she had found it prudent to entrust it to at least one person so she could have one other being to rely upon should something unexpected occur, as it was bound to happen. He kept an eye on her as she, masquerading as a twelve-year-old boy, learned the ways of the sailors and quickly took to their bouts of life at sea. Being a fishing vessel they moored in some port along the coast nearly every night, that their spoils might not spoil themselves, and thus Ceris was at least spared having to relinquish the land entirely. She was unable to visit her mother more than once every one or two weeks, if she was lucky, but she earned more than her mother could at the present time, and they were able to eat and sleep comfortably again.
Being a swift learner, and having been born with an eye for maintaining a guise as well as spotting one, Ceris was able to maintain her secret for the next four years, gradually being promoted from merely a deck-boy to a proper fisherman, assisting with belaying lines and hoisting sails, even though she was continually teased for her scrawny figure. Ceris could leap through the rigging in a gale, swim beneath the ship’s ribs and arise on the other side, and hold her breath—some said—indefinitely.
Only one person besides the captain ever learned of Ceris’s disguise, and only a few years after she’d initiated it. The captain, having developed a fondness for her, accidentally let slip to his son one day of Ceris’s truth, and after the son—Gerand—wrung an irritable confirmation from her the two developed a lasting friendship which, once Ceris was eighteen, Gerand promised to secure in marriage. Ceris’s mother and the captain both were overjoyed. Her mother had been afraid the daughter would remain at sea the rest of her life, learning to love the water more than she loved the land, the way her father had.
Unfortunately Gerand was, generally, well-liked among his peers and superiors alike, and not all approved of their betrothal when word of it reached their ears. Another young woman coveted Gerand for a husband; an acquaintance of the woman wished to have Gerand’s position on the ship; and another mother resented the money Ceris brought home because she couldn’t understand—and would not be told—where the money came from, or how she could possibly have earned it herself, or by any honest means. A combination of the three’s efforts, some without the knowledge of the others, soon led to an inquiry being led into a letter Ceris had supposedly carried from one traitor to another, and city officers following Ceris from the ship to her home one evening, and revealing for themselves her subterfuge.
The next morning they appeared at the church and added their iron cuffs to the false-pearl bracelets accenting Ceris’s wedding dress, and bore her away before all her peers, Gerand being restrained opposite so he couldn’t follow her, as Ceris was imprisoned on suspicion of ~betrayal, and within twenty-four hours found guilty, then sent, with no warning or explanation, to the more heavily fortified prison that lay lashed with the foam from the harbor’s mouth, far beyond swimming distance, and utterly forbidden from visitation unless the visitor wished to reside in a cell of his own.
Ceris’s legs trembled as they bore her away in the middle of the night, trading one cell for another, and when she heard Gerand shout her name she dug in her bare heels and stretched for him, crying his back through the cool night’s fog.
It would have been better if they’d never seen each other again. For when Gerand rushed her guards they correctly interpreted his attack and reacted accordingly, killing him on site and dragging a thrashing Ceris away.
For two years Ceris knelt against the damp stone floor of her cell and wondered if the scraps of her voluminous, tattered wedding dress would be strong enough to properly hang her from the bars over the window she could barely reach. Until one day halfway through the second year when one of the stones in the wall beside her bed rattled, scraped, then groaned away from its mortar and rolled against her knee. She leaned down, palms flat to the wet floor, to peer into the darkness, and saw a weary brown eye staring back at her.
The eye belonged to a woman known as Farryth, a governess and abbess, who had been imprisoned for nine years already for similar reasons to Ceris’s own. Between the two of them they managed to open up the last of the passageway between their two rooms—Farryth had been attempting to dig her way to freedom, but had misjudged the angles of the inner walls to the outer. Ceris was overjoyed to speak to another being again, as their jailors were never much interested in conversation, and to speak to someone whose voice was not yet familiar. When Farryth realized that Ceris had as quick a mind as she, and Ceris realized that Farryth had knowledge worthy of imparting, soon the tutelage began. They began a new tunnel, and Farryth began teaching Ceris how to become anyone she wished to be.
However Farryth’s heath was not well—no one’s could be, imprisoned for so very long nearly underground. She lasted far longer than anyone would expect of a prisoner in a dungeon designed to be bleak and short-lived, and it was another five years before she lay down and realized she would not be rising again. She drew Ceris close and told her, at last, why her own family had ruined her, or attempted to.
Farryth was rich. Far more so than any individual lower than the king was intended to be. Her family had saved and invested and saved for generations, centuries, to allow this wealth to accumulate. Her cousins had wanted it. But Farryth knew her cousins’ hearts, and had buried or otherwise hidden her wealth in various places around their known world—in gold, coins, gems or land, anything that wouldn’t dissolve—and it yet awaited her. Only now they knew that Farryth would not survive long enough to partake of it. So she imparted to Ceris the knowledge of where her generations’ worth of wealth resided, entreated her to memorize it, and died before Ceris could decide whether or not she wanted to go with the only friend she’d had for the past seven, imprisoned years.
As it so happened, it turned out that Ceris did want to live. She took Farryth’s place in her shroud, moved Farryth to her own cell, and let the jailers throw her living body off the rocks and into the ocean, where they entrusted all dead of that particular prison, and over a length of more than fourteen hours of swimming managed to find some wreckage and cling to it, unable to go any further.
A day later she was hooked out of the water that clung to her like frost by the men of a passing smuggling vessel, men to whom, when she had regained the use of her faculties, she related her new life’s past: she was widowed by men who conspired against her husband, then who made off with her and kept her in isolated captivity for more than a year before she escaped when their ship floundered in the recent storm.
Being from a sailing family she was naturally well-versed in the ways of ships, ports and water, and while not physically aiding the smugglers soon they realized that she had great use in other ways. Without their knowledge, she impersonated a boy again in various ports (while they thought she met her associates and acquaintances as her recovered self) to accomplish both her ends and theirs. They came to greatly value her assistance, as well as her presence, as it was immediately evident that Ceris—Countess Rimayne, as she styled herself—treated fairly any man who fairly treated her, and held no disdain either for their places in society nor their professions. Hating—once they became fond of her—to see such a singular and helpful lady immured in their castoffs, when the men had enough combined funds they bought her a gown which began to benefit her station, and she was warmly grateful, wearing it in ports to continue her and their business and to add to her own belongings, as well as to, when given enough time, seek out the fragments of her benefactor’s fortune.
Over the course of a year, truthfully claiming hesitation in returning to the devils of society, Ceris secured the lifelong friendship of the smugglers with her continued assistance, and was seen off with great reluctance when she finally decided to brave land again. One of the younger boys on ship—an orphan picked up about a year before she—begged to be permitted to come with her as she made her new life. He’d be her strictest confidante and most loyal defense, he promised, in her life. Touched, not that she could necessarily show it, she permitted the boy to accompany her and they disembarked. She clothed and fed him well, treating him as she would her own son, and they began a new life. He trusted her implicitly, and Ceris came to trust him as much as she is capable, these days, of trusting anyone.
Over the course of the next seven years Ceris made the most important acquaintances through the most inauspicious, varied means possible, as well as investing and increasing her fortune and securing multiple loyalties across the known world and at its every level, thus drawing others’ opinions around herself in protection. She surreptitiously created or was present among many instances of chaos, as that is the best place to test, discover and assure loyalties and alliances. In imprisonment she learned everlasting patience, strategy and prudence—she was taking years to cement the stones which will allow her to stalk and destroy her enemies without ever implicating herself, allowing them to so naturally ruin themselves that no one would ever suspect anyone’s hand but their own.
OOC NAME: Lisenet
RP SAMPLE: (A sample of you're rping ability. This is only required for your first character.
RP SAMPLE: (A sample of you're rping ability. This is only required for your first character.