( application | ilde decima featherstonehaugh | baedal )

[rhinemaid]

Out of Character Information
Name: Liisu!
Username: dubonnetcherry
Are you over the age of eighteen? Y, 23
Current characters in Baedal: Dominica Norrington and Martel

In Character Information
Basics
Character Name: Ilde Decima Featherstonehaugh (pronunciation: Fanshaw)
Username: inkthatrushes
Fandom: N/A, Original Character
Played By: Mia Kirshner
Icon:

4. Original Character Section
Physical Description: Ilde is 5'3", slim build with probably about a B-cup (don't underestimate the power of the push up bra), blue eyes and brunette hair, close to but not quite black. She wears her hair quite long, usually down with headbands or hats. One tattoo: a black ribbon tied around her upper left thigh, knotted with hanging ribbon at the outside (no bow). Something about Ilde appears indefinably not-quite-right to your average human - a little too real, too vivid, like someone turned up the saturation on her - and recognizably of fey heritage to anyone who does realize what they're looking at. This is particularly apparent when she's in or near fresh water (while essentially a freshwater mermaid, Ilde is...not a mermaid, the ocean doesn't do it). This more-or-less human appearance applies to how she will appear in Baedal most of the time, but it is a glamour and not her true appearance, which is as follows: her eyes (larger than the human norm) are entirely solid blue, her skin is opalescent with a green/blue sheen, she has slits where a human would have ears, and her scarring can be mistaken for peculiar markings. Her teeth are now much sharper, predatory, and are a lot like having a mouthful of needles. Her clothing tends to get damp around her feet as a matter of course. Her core temperature is noticeably lower than a human's would be; she will always feel as if she's just stepped out of cold water.

Sexuality: Ilde is more or less heterosexual; she's never experienced a same sex attraction, but I will rule nothing out there. She was sexually active from fifteen to sixteen, and had an unfortunate habit of getting involved with older men, resulting in relationships with imbalanced power dynamic. Physical strength appeals to her as an unconsciously perceived indicator of someone who is more stable than she is, who can be relied on, and ... this has ended badly for her in the past, surprise, surprise. On the other hand, she's very comfortable with her own sexuality and her own body - nudity is not a huge deal to her, she has little in the way of body-shame or self-consciousness about promiscuity (which she is occasionally prone to, when she feels like it).

In more romantic relationships, however, she's very conscious of being "difficult" as a partner and tends to accept treatment she probably shouldn't in return for someone "tolerating" the things she finds more problematic in her own personality and temperament.

World Information: Ilde comes from a contemporary world that began ending in 2006 when a series of geomagnetic storms (with a side of 'meteor showers') rocked the world, focusing on North America and decimating the population there twice over. The world as it had been before ended there, with 20% of the population transformed by the radiation into psychotic mutant versions of themselves, 3% experiencing a sudden jolting boost to existing, latent supernatural powers and a further 2% developing such powers where they had previously had none. It is what TV Tropes refers to as a Crapsack World, and I didn't link it, you're welcome. New York is the centre of all that is wrong and bad and evil, and an army is being raised to ~cleanse~ it. Kay knows all about this because she made it up.

History: Ilde was born in Calais, France on the 6th of December, 1989, the only daughter of a dissolute pianist (Emeric Featherstonehaugh) and an unimpressed socialite (Annegret Marquering), whose brief affair had long since already ended. Independent, strong-willed and being supported by a divorcée mother who sent money monthly, Anne maintained primary custody of her daughter for the next five years, permitting Emery regular visitation while she relocated from Calais to Paris, introducing François Sauvageon as Ilde's stepfather. When Anne's health began to decline with the onset of chronic illness, she and Emery discussed a renegotiation of custody, and at the end of 1994 he took her with him to a residence in Florence, Italy that he'd only recently relocated to himself (from London). It was a choice based in pragmatism of various stripes; Anne was increasingly unable to be Ilde's primary caretaker, François was fond of his stepdaughter but unprepared to abruptly become the primary caretaker to a willful five year old, and the social complications of an illegitimate child were significantly easier on Emery than they were on Anne.

As an artist, Emery walked the knife edge of 'acceptably eccentric' and Ilde reaped the benefits and suffered the consequences of this in equal measure; their family was old money, but they were the established family scandal, never veering so far out of what was 'done' to be shunned, but essentially a social novelty not to be taken very seriously. His closest friends tended toward those of a similar nature - the Beauchamp siblings, whom he'd been at school with and who were engaged in cold war with their parents, Prisca Fitzroy, who was best known for having openly declared her intention to live in sin with a man of the cloth (as soon as she found one suitable) - and this was the village that Ilde was raised by. A curious assortment of people with their own privately played out melodramas, the early months of living with her father involved a lot of being passed around like a little doll to be dressed up and trotted out, following him to his concerts, to the Beauchamps' church (Catholic; Ilde later came to believe he had her baptised in this faith expressly to impress Decima Beauchamp, their names being no accident), to sit on the laps of his friends while they argued the merits of things she was too young to understand until she had to go to bed.

In early-ish 1996, Emery's carefully managed (where 'managed' primarily meant 'concealed', a taboo that would've been a step too far out of acceptable) mental illness twisted him into a downward spiral. Already suffering from an untreated tendency to clinical depression, Emery's unhealthy on-again-off-again relationship with Decima (by this point married, and not to Emery) provided the triggers for a failed suicide attempt. Ilde was nearly seven years old; she didn't witness the attempt itself, but it was almost impossible to shield her from the ensuing fallout.

Finding a discreet private hospital somewhere in Eastern Europe, Septimus Beauchamp spread the rumour that his friend had run afoul of some woman's husband and found it prudent to absent himself from their social set while the affair blew over - and relocated temporarily with him, taking responsibility for Ilde while her father recuperated over the course of several years.

The trauma of the incident was only worsened by the secrecy of it; when they returned to Florence, Ilde went away to boarding school on the understanding that this was not something they were ever going to speak about again. With a profound lack of faith in her authority figures (such as they were), Ilde became very independent very early, choosing more often than not to sink into the background and fix her attention on understanding the dynamics of people around her. It was becoming clear to her, by this point, that she didn't think quite the same way as they tended to - and a combination of her terror at the idea of declining the way her father did (who suffered life-long damage that involved a difficulty forming new memories) and the accepted idea that mental illness was inherently unacceptable, she devoted herself to appearing as unremarkably normal as she could humanly be.

At this point several things need to be elaborated on.

Emeric Featherstonehaugh was himself born the illegitimate son of sixteen year old de Lacey heiress Allegra and eighteen year old carpentry apprentice Edmund Seward, in 1964. The above probably speaks for itself in why his grandparents made the decision to quietly have the infant (named Charles de Lacey III by his mother, after her older brother, Charles de Lacey II) adopted out. They were loosely acquainted with the Featherstonehaughs - Tristram and Annis - who were having difficulty conceiving at the time, so they killed two birds with one baby, and went their separate ways.

The de Lacey family has a history of mental illness, notably cropping up in the 1890s with Camilla de Lacey, whose untreated bipolar and frustration with her social position led to suicide by drowning - but also traced back to the 1890s is the origin of their fey heritage. Camilla was involved with a Nix by the name of Ælfræd, whose son she passed off as her husband's (after forcing Ælfræd to give his oath to leave them be), and subsequent generations of the family have carried that blood and the touch of fey with them. They aren't all the way to faerie, but they're also palpably not entirely human - and there's a fey callousness in the ability to be unconcerned by the potential consequences of giving up a child of their bloodline to humans. They were privileged humans, good enough, right? Well, not quite.

Suffering from periods of depression, terror of her own mind and related issues arising from her 'interesting' upbringing, Ilde grew into a somewhat withdrawn young woman; she attached herself to other people's social circles more than developing her own, engaging enough to justify being there without being properly engaged. She planned to skip going home to Florence full time after boarding school and instead prevailed on Septimus ('Seven') to agree to put her up in his London townhouse while she continued her studies, because exactly what every self-destructive teenage girl needs is ready access to the city and minimal, distracted supervision.

In 2006, about sixteen, Ilde was planning for an undergraduate at Guildhall (cello to start, with the intention of a joint principal study with the cello and singing), submitting her poetry to writing journals and visiting family in Boston - unfortunately for her, it was around this time that she was kidnapped and taken to a containment facility in the United States for supernaturals, where she was just one of many kept in captivity, experimented with and studied. She was being held in this facility when the world was rocked by a series of geomagnetic storms (with a meteor shower for flavour) that decimated the population of North America twice over, with radiation adversely affecting 20% of the survivors (turning them into mutated and psychotic versions of themselves) and boosting the latent supernatural abilities of a further 3%, while another 2% experienced supernatural abilities they'd never had before at all. Ilde was one of the 3% whose power was given a boost, as was discovered by the next Prometheus employee to open her cell. While he was being treated for the injuries inflicted on him by Ilde's new set of teeth and she was being punished for her impulsive escape attempt, arrangements were made to relocate her to a more secure area of the facility, reserved for the more monstrous and obvious non-human appearances.

Studying the extent of the changes in her, a tank was installed in her new cell; while they weren't stupid enough to give a naiad something she could use as a weapon, it was deemed necessary for as long as they required her alive, and the water was treated with iron to keep her weak enough to ensure she'd be unable to take advantage of what would've otherwise been a natural boost in her power. During her time in the facility, Ilde underwent extensive, intrusive testing, and was initially interesting to Prometheus as a subject to study with regard to the possibility of breeding out supernaturals; following the changes in her after the storm, she was one of the subjects forcibly sterilized.

Ilde spent roughly five years as a prisoner of Prometheus until she was one of many rescued in a jailbreak of the facility staged by Sonja Garin in 2011, during which she was given the opportunity to murder one of the guards (she chose the one she'd previously bitten, reasoning that she likes to finish what she starts, and stabbed him to death) in retribution before offered the choice between making her own way or joining Sonja's group to be part of a resistance army that would take New York and destroy Prometheus. Sonja was the first person in five years to show Ilde kindness, and having promptly imprinted on her like a murder-duckling, the decision took her approximately a split second to make; she went with them.

Powers: Ilde's baseline abilities as a naiad were mostly subtle and outside of her control until she was one of the three percent of the population whose latent supernatural powers were given a hell of a boost by the geomagnetic storms that wrecked through the world.

STRENGTHS:

1. Influence: Through voice and music, Ilde is capable of influencing the people around her - but it's relatively specific, and functions more as persuasion (or a summoning) than any kind of ability to plant suggestions. She's capable of a subtle kind of compelling (easily avoided by the strong-willed) when she speaks, a stronger variation if she's singing or playing an instrument, and it's stronger again if she does this in the water. While capable of intense control when she's focused on it, the especially strong-willed and those with psychic shielding of their own are capable of resisting. This is not an inherently sexual coercion; Ilde personally is most likely to use it to drown people.


2. Charisma: The fae are pretty magnetic, in general, and Ilde is no exception. 'Charisma' is, however, intensely subjective and in Ilde this magic edge usually presents subtly enough that maybe she's just nice to be around, who knows. Still; one on one, she's present, engaging, and there is a pull to her that's perceptible to the magically sensitive.


3. Shapeshifting: The Nix are rumoured to not have natural forms - certainly it's hard to know what they actually are when this particular species of fae is so able to change at will. Ilde does have one, but she's additionally capable of changing her form - in freshwater (not a huge fan of salt water) she prefers a fishtail, but can transform all the way into a fish if she so desires. (Unlikely, mainly because Ilde is not interested in ending up on the end of a fishhook, but theoretically possible.) Her shapeshifting isn't limited to fish variants, but also isn't something she's explored in depth.


4. Glamour: Being very visibly inhuman is not necessarily convenient - especially when discretion is key and the light has a habit of catching on her skin. Separate from shapeshifting, glamour is merely a mastery of illusions; Ilde can seem to appear any way she chooses, from her own previously human appearance to an entirely different look, to doing a convincing impression of vampirism. Her glamours are impenetrable to the naked eye (though she sometimes appears slightly too vivid, oversaturated in comparison to humans around her), but do not conceal her fey nature from those familiar with what they're looking at. Glamours do not hide the coolness of her skin to the touch (which is actually useful if she wants to impersonate a vampire).


5. Water: It is physically impossible to drown her. Fresh water lends her strength, speeds her healing process and grounds her in herself; everything is better when she has steady access to a fresh water source, preferably a waterfall or a river, but a lake will do. Ilde's power is amplified and at its height in close proximity to water.


6. Faerie magic: Elemental and impulse-driven, faerie magic is something that Ilde is capable of but not at all trained in, which results in her sometimes reaching for power in self-defense with no real knowledge of exactly what she's about to do. The words 'trial and error' spring to mind.


7. Sensitivity: --to magic, to other faeries, to the supernatural in general. Ilde can feel magic almost like a taste, a scent, a muscle-memory; she can differentiate between different types and different people's signatures with practise. (She doesn't see through glamours, per se, but will recognize them for what they are.)


8. Music: As a result of her nature, the fact that Ilde studied music is the laziest thing on earth; she can't not be good at this, it's innately tied to what she is. Her particular instrument of choice is the cello, but being what she is, she could probably play almost anything she picked up - with a particular aptitude for stringed instruments.

WEAKNESSES:

1. Iron: Ilde can be bound with iron - it weakens and pains her, and iron is the only kind of weapon capable of leaving a scar on her. Injuries inflicted with iron will heal sluggishly and are more likely to kill her without careful treatment. Iron-treated water was used to keep her alive but substantially weakened in captivity.


2. Partial deafness: Ilde's ears aren't like human ears, are not really designed to best function above the water, and as such her natural hearing is now slightly impaired on dry land. As a result, she lipreads and has a tendency to talk slightly louder than is necessary (in order to hear herself).


3. Water: The lack of it literally saps her will to live, and if she's kept away from it long enough and permitted to dry out, it can kill her. If kept away from a fresh water source for a prolonged period, Ilde will become melancholic and listless, uninterested in the world around her and mentally checking out. She will typically find herself drawn to water sources of her own accord, and it tends to be a matter of how difficult it is to get there.


4. Vampires: The fae are delicious - specifically, they are an intoxicant. A full-blood fairy would be roughly the equivalent of trying and failing to drink Kai under the table; with her power boosted by the storms, Ilde is close to that.


5. Alcohol: Not only is Ilde an intoxicant, she's a cheap date. The fae are massively more susceptible to human alcohol than...humans, generally; there are probably toddlers who could hold their liquor better than she can. She gets drunk fast, though in general she's a laidback, talkative drunk and it tends to be the content of her conversation that gives her away. That and the fact she falls over when she stands up.


6. Ignorance: Ilde doesn't fully understand what she is, how to control all of it, or the implications of her nature in general - this makes it potentially easy for someone more familiar with the supernatural than she was before the decimation to use it against her, possibly through manipulation.

Talents/Abilities: Ilde is a trained cellist, writes a lot of poetry, and makes a pretty good cup of tea. She speaks native English, fluent Italian, and more-than-conversational Russian. Her French, on the other hand, is pretty much terrible. By necessity, she's learning how to fire a gun and defend herself with a knife, but her primary weapon is herself and the nearest body of water. She has begun to practise lip-reading in order to supplement her poor hearing (and inability to wear a hearing aid).

Personality: Ilde, like all fey and their kin, doesn't think quite the same way a human would - unfortunately, having for most of her life known very little besides a human world, this has been a source of more than a little bit of concern for her and remains a matter she's sensitive about. She is constantly in a private argument with herself - the back and forth pull of what her instinct to do is and what she knows is the more acceptable thing. Often, this results in some Olympic level justifications being dredged up to make the most insane spur of the moment decisions sound like sound, pragmatic choices. (As long as you don't look too closely at what she's actually doing.) She presents herself as being very pragmatic, and in some ways this is true - but her driving force is often curiosity and a lack of self-preservation instinct (to the point of being, from time to time, passively suicidal), which is more than a little at odds with the practical nature she tries to project having. Her ability to justify to herself decisions that are objectively bad should be legendary, and frequently involves 'but I could be doing [even worse thing], and I'm not, ergo I am totally in the right right now'. Aware that decisions are, in theory, supposed to be made based on logic and not on 'I want', she spends a lot of time twisting logic 'til it screams so that what she wants is the logical answer. Somehow.

The combination of a baseline impulsive nature, a tendency to justify doing whatever she wants to do and a great deal of unhappiness she doesn't want to deal with results in a slight tendency to be a bit of a tiny hedonist - exacerbated now by the fact the world seems to have been shot to hell in a handbasket and her coping mechanisms are few and far between. (A preexisting tendency to become slightly codependent has also been exacerbated by this, and she is likely to fixate on the people close to her to the point where they can simply do no wrong; if she feels that she needs someone, she is willing to forgive a lot more than she really should.)

Bitter about her upbringing and simultaneously guilty for her bitterness (aware of the fact that as a spoiled heiress she has had the luxury of wallowing in her own self-pity and prone to maintaining that assessment of herself despite having later acquired some really good reasons to hate the whole world), Ilde thinks she's more cynical than she is - believes herself to be more worldly, less innocent, registers the fact she's been spoiled but has only recently (in the face of the apocalypse) registered exactly how sheltered she'd been beforehand. A hereditary risk of alcoholism obviously means she's qualified for the jaded air that she likes to adopt, preferring to psychoanalyze the people around her. Ilde is pretty self-aware, but not nearly as much as she thinks she is, which is not really unusual for someone her emotional age (probably closer to 17-18ish than her chronological age of 21, in part as a result of her long-term confinement). Her knack for social interaction has been stunted by aforementioned confinement, and Ilde can be awkward - it can take her a bit of time to her stride in interactions, and her conversation can sometimes be a little too blunt and/or nonlinear for some. Non sequiturs: there will be many.

Ilde has an undiagnosed and untreated depressive disorder that she attempts to BOOTSTRAPS! her way through, uncomfortable with her own internalized hatred and mistrust of mental illness; this is not something she seeks help for, this is something she's ashamed of and will strive to conceal, occasionally at the expense of her close relationships. Her self-worth suffers as a result of this - she frequently thinks of herself in terms of 'a problem' that other people are forced to deal with. She can seem (and ... be) irrational, lashing out when she feels backed into a corner and then turning on a dime as her mood shifts - she experiences emotions more intensely than the human baseline norm and often finds this difficult to contend with when living in a human environment where it's noticeably abnormal. In reaction, she devotes a lot of her time to striving to be useful and indispensable to the people she feels she needs or whose approval she desires, wanting to be necessary to them and not a burden.

On the positive side of things, having her around is a lot like keeping a temperamental cat; she's tactile, inquisitive, affectionate, and inclined to think that the people she's closest to are mobile furniture. (She also enjoys napping in the sun and attempting to cute her way out of it when she's just done something she knows she probably shouldn't have.) She can be both manipulative and mercenary, but as a general rule her attempts to manage the people around her are at least well-intentioned, and she's invested in people-pleasing. (Which is debatably positive, depending on how out of hand it gets.) Her sense of humour tends toward the bleak, morbid and sometimes inappropriate, but she responds readily to other people's lighter moods - on a good day she laughs a lot, likes to be playful, will feign brattiness for a laugh. (...not always feigned; Ilde is bratty.)

Secretive and mistrustful - a lack of anyone in her life she finds genuinely reliable has meant a tendency to perceive people in general as unreliable - Ilde finds it difficult to discuss her own feelings in any coherent way, and as a rule she's unwilling to try. Most of the time, she puts off inquiries (or straightforwardly lies), and will typically do her level best to wriggle out of having to do it before anyone manages to pin her down. When she does recognize the necessity, she hates it, and will change the subject or distract the other person with a mood shift as soon as she thinks she's told them 'enough', sometimes justifying a little with the fact that she hardly ever does this at all. Clearly, they should accept this far and no further, and let her talk about something else. Anything else. (The closest she gets to willingly going into things tends to be dropping bite-sized portions of awful into conversation in a self-mocking, easy-to-play-off kind of a way - though she has much less of a filter when she's drunk.)

Ilde's careful use of glamours to conceal her true appearance is, in part, a coping mechanism she developed in captivity; with no control over the situation and no privacy, when her powers began developing beyond their initial bounds, she did at least find she had the ability to control her own appearance and how much people could "look at her", properly. Having never really liked to be looked at, to Ilde being without a glamour is a little like being naked is for other people - she has no problem with nudity, doesn't particularly care who sees her without her pants on, but she feels uncomfortably vulnerable permitting people to casually observe her natural appearance, sans-glamour.

Object: Her cello, in its case.

Reason for playing: Ilde is a character that I've had in various incarnations since roughly around 2004, but only in the past year or so have I really been able to develop her in a way that I feel confident about playing - she has a lot of themes that are interesting to me (most of which are probably recognizable to those of you who've been playing with me for several years now) and I'm kind of proud of where I've gone with her. This is a variant on my "regular Ilde" who was created specifically for an apocalyptic PSL set in a world that Kay created, and I am interested in playing out this version of Ilde in Baedal - I think the balance between the fact she's nonhuman and her unfamiliarity with that outside of the context of their war will make Baedal an interesting experience for her and she has a lot to offer, plot-wise!

Gods: Ilde is a river creature who has a complicated relationship with humanity/humans, and as such is most likely to come to the notice of Maryis. Additionally, she is very likely to try to appeal to Shada to have her sterilization reversed.

Writing Samples

First-Person Network Post: Xana!Ilde commenting to Cody.

Third-Person Arrival Post: The door doesn't open from the inside.

This is the first and most important thing that Ilde consciously realizes; the size of it isn't small enough to trigger claustrophobia, but she isn't claustrophobic, she's just got this thing about being locked up, and what the fuck is the point of a door handle that doesn't open anything? The rising sense of panic mingles with frustration at what she can't help but perceive as a taunt and the voice at the back of her mind saying Christ, don't start hyperventilating sounds like some unholy blend of Sonja and her father; her sudden laugh is too loud, inappropriate, and brittle.

(Her hands are shaking; she bites the inside of her cheek until it bleeds and tries to ground herself with the taste of her own blood.)

Kneeling in front of the door, she fumbles fingers that seem nerveless through her purse (why did they let her keep her purse--?) and finds the gun, first - point-blank range improves her aim, but the possibility of killing herself with ricochet drags her hand past it to the knife. She slides the blade between the door and the frame just to be sure it will open, at some point--

Ilde doesn't register the pamphlet, or the CiD, or even her cello case in the corner, and if she doesn't recognize the person who next opens that door they will have a very short window of time in which to avoid the wrong end of a painfully literal panic attack.

Third-Person Action Post: Prometheus jailbreak. Excerpt:

Oh.

Ilde is still for a moment, thinking, but ultimately she already knows what she wants to do; she has always believed, for better or worse, in finishing everything that she starts. She has no experience with guns and she doesn't want to fuck this up, so it's a knife that she takes when she steps away, steady with deliberateness that she didn't have just moments before. (There is a task now; do it.)

She doesn't remember what he looks like - she doesn't need to, she remembers the smell and taste of him and she doesn't need much more than that, attuning senses she never knew existed a few years ago to find him in the line up. The glamour dissipates for this (he will know who did this to him - briefly, he will know) and the steps she takes are almost incongruously delicate, picking her way through and ignoring those who aren't of direct concern to her.

All her eyes are windows to, right now, is a deep, still pool.

When she stops in front of him, she holds him still with her voice - this isn't something she's practised and the compelling edge of it stills the men nearest him, too, more power of impulse than subtle, nuanced focus - as she neatly flicks his shirt open with the knife to be sure, first, that she left a mark. (The savage scar on his shoulder where her teeth sank in and pulled stirs a glimmer of satisfaction that begins to tug her out of apathy.)

She holds him so still that when the knife goes in, he doesn't scream.

Misc
Other: Ilde will probably be relying on the Gross Tar as her ~water source~ of choice, being a city girl and it being a city river. Pay no mind to the naked fairy in the river, she probably won't drown anybody. ...unless they deserve it.