Post by Lady Thorn on Aug 25, 2008 21:45:50 GMT -5
Alias: Lady Thorn
Real Name: Catalina Alexandra Corvinus
Age: 2874
Gender: Female
Species: Vampire
Specialities: Most of Lady Thorn's skills are academic, as she has a passion for learning languages. Due to her nomadic nature during her centuries of life, she has had the opportunity to master many tongues, particularly the European ones, as that was where most of her wandering took her. She is fluent in Latin, English, French, Italian, Greek (both Classical and Modern) and Romanian. There are other which she can speak to some degree of fluency also. Her other academic skills include a knack for finding things in archives which other people would overlook, and she has utilised this skill over the ages to earn a bit of money. She has also written the odd poem, penned under a pseudonym, which has kept her income secure (due to continuing royalties).
Her martial abilities are not meagre either. Though not the most accomplished and brilliant of fighters, she can be pretty dangerous when using her throwing knives (of which she has many, concealed in her coat) or her gladius. She has never adapted her fighting style to accomodate her using guns, but since her accuracy and speed with her blades is formidable, if not masterly, she has never felt the need to do so. When deprived of the blades, she can defend herself, though she is loathe to do so.
Emotionally, she is relatively stable, tending towards a more solitary, quiet nature. She has no aversion to friendship and company, but does not feel the need to spend every moment in the presence of others. She is difficult to anger or scare (weaknesses notwithstanding) and when this happens, she calms down relatively quickly too. This is useful, as it means she fights (mostly) with a clear head, using logic and thought instead of instinct and brute force to overcome her opponent.
She is also pyrokinetic (see History).
Weaknesses: As well as all of the normal vampiric weaknesses (though the holy symbols which affect her are not Christian, but Roman pantheonic), she has a great and irrational fear of moths. If confronted with one, she will generally scream and attempt to flee its presence. She also tends to get more than a little irate on seeing people deface or damage books. This tends to lead her to irrational acts and she has regretted her actions on the odd occasion for this.
Her only great emotional weakness is an incident in her past which she hates bringing up- a lover she had in Ancient Rome, the poet Publius Ovidius Nasus. She detests speaking about him and feels guilty for his death (see History).
Physical Appearance: She is fairly tall for a woman of her time, about 5ft 9, and very thin. Her skin is the porcelain, flawless white of most vampires, though it's pallid tone is accentuated by her vibrant copper hair with balck highlights, which falls to her earlobes, though longer at the fringe. Her eyes are a pale, grey-blue colour, wide and large. They seem always to be very expressive, reflecting her moods and feelings as she speaks. Her eyebrows are very pale and thin, set a little higher than is usual, giving her a slightly surprised look. Her fingers are long, and she keeps her fingernails likewise, more often than not painted in one of various colours.
She normally wears dark jeans (black or blue) with a dark, goth-style top, though always a neat and presentable one. She wears little jewellery, normally just one necklace or a ring, and keeps her hair loose around her face. Her footwear of preference is a pair of black boots with reinforced, stiletto heels. The only piece of clothing she has with her at all times is her coat. It is a long, brown leather number, and contains her many knives sheathed in the lining and sleeves, ready for use.
Personality: Though emotionally, she is relatively stable within herself, she presents a rather quirky front. She often does strange things just to see how people will take them, and her mood swings and supposed feelings are more often for show than genuine. She is quite capable of true and earnest emotions, and will show them when they appear, but it is almost as if lack of feelings bores her, and she invents some to wile away the time between. Her likes and dislikes are normally extreme, tending towards love and hate rather than anything mediocre.
She is more than a little cowardly, admittedly so, and will avoid a fight if possible. She does this not so much out of fear but out of the desire to preserve herself, and this may be what has kept her these many years. She does, however, recognise that there are some times when fighting is necessary, and will do so then and without reluctance.
History: She was born outside the city of Rome at the height of its powers. Her parents were at the head of a rich family who were all vampires for many generations back, and were proud of their heritage. She was raised in a culture that tolerated such oddities as vampires, as many of the Roman nobility had their own bizarre quirks that far outweirded anything she could offer. Her family trained all the children in fighting arts from a young age, and she was given her sword "Arderius" at the age of 12, when it was deemed she could wield it with enough skill to defend herself.
As a child, she had a long-standing rivalry with her sister, a mutual hatred, almost. They had very different viewpoints, and would often come to blows or full-on sword bouts over their arguments. In all of these, Thorn never lost once. She was, by contrast, very close to her brother, a pacifist, and would spend many hours in conversation with him. On the whole, she was not well received by her parents, who misliked her reticence to fight and would often berate her for it. It was because of this that she ran away in her late fifties to the city of Rome itself.
In Rome, she disguised herself as a man and attended the school where most of the young aristocrats went to study rhetoric and wordplay. She was well-received, despite the drawback of vampirism, and kept most of the tutors and other pupils fooled as to her gender. Only one managed to figure her out, Ovid, but he told her he did not dislike her for it. They became firm friends, and later, lovers. He often wrote poetry for her, once he grew up and became a poet full time, and they spent most of their nights together, wandering the streets and listening to the public speakers. She even went away with him to the Baltic when he was banished for his works. She remained there with him, despite the fact that every day he grew older and older and she remained the same. As he became sick, she begged him every day to let her turn him into a vampire like her, but every day he refused. Finally, he died, having never been allowed to return home to the city he loved. She buried him, and made her way back to her family estates, in mourning.
When she returned home, her mother immediately locked her away inside the family villa in punishment for her "dalliance with a mortal". It was seen by most of the family as the gravest of embarrassements for one of their own to be with a normal human, and she was, from that point on, shunned by most of her vampiric peers. Her brother and father often visited her whilst she was locked away, bringing her things to read and news of the world outside, since they both were less inclined to elitism than most of the clan. The imprisonment was short, but was to be one of many, as from that point on she took great delight in flouting the many rules and regulations her mother so adored. She was, however, still loyal in some degree to her family and clan.
This changed, due to an incident that happened when she was around four-hundred years old. She was in a brief period between imprisonments, having spent a lot of time in contemplation of her morals, and was lounging around the family villa, when she heard some of the slaves muttering about her sister being out on a killing spree. She took her sword and headed after her, unsure why exactly, but wanting to do something. She found that her sister had destroyed a whole clan of werewolves, murdering families together. As she approached the scene of the murders, some of the clansmen of her family tried to stop her, but she sent them away to tell her father. Then she ran up the hill to confront her sister, who was standing in the doorway of an old, disused hut, fighting the last three werewolves. She killed the two parents as Thorn ran towards her, and advanced on the child, a young teenager, fearfully defending himself with his father's sword. Thorn stepped in as her sister attempted to strike the killing blow, and sent Rufilla away, muttering and defeated. She knew now that her family, Rufilla in particular, had things wrong and that she had been living her life by their morals. She decided to change herself, to try to abate the sudden guilt she felt for all the things her family had done amiss. The first thing she did was to give her sword to the young werewolf boy, knowing it was no repayment for his family's lives, but needing to give him something of value to show her sincerity in apologising. She left the hill thoughtful and depressed, only to be mobbed by some of the clan's soldiers and taken away to the villa once more.
She was locked away for the longest time yet, as her mother saw what she had done as being against the principles of the family. Even her father was a little unimpressed, and so only her brother came to see her in the years she was kept away.
After a long time alone, with only the odd bit of news to keep her aware, she heard strange noises above in the house, like fighting. Then she felt the heat of flames as the villa was set alight and began to burn around her. She began to fear for her life, locked away as she was in the cellar, but then the door opened mysteriously, and she was able to rise into the villa itself. The whole building was aflame, and Rome under attack from barbarian hordes from the North. Seeing the Goths advancing towards her, Thorn attacked, defending herself with force against the men who, she believed, were killing her family. Much as she hated her family, she didn't want them dead. She fought her way up to the atrium, only to see her parents murdered at the door as they attempted to leave the villa. Then the structure of the villa began to collapse, as the heat of the fire reduced the plaster and lathe walls to rubble and dust. Unable to leave via the front door, she searched for a way to another exit, passing the dead bodies of many of her family or clan. On more than one occasion, she was forced to kill foreign invaders who had found their way in and were determined to attack anyone they saw. Unable to find an exit, she realised she was trapped in her burning home, and alone. There was no one to save her. As she stood there in the wreckage of the once fine home, close to tears, she realised that she was about to die. Unwilling, she began to cry, angry at her fate and that of Rome. The flames came closer and closer to her, burning her skin, clothes and hair. At the point when she believed herself about to die, she discovered within herself a power that she never knew she had, though it had been known to her distant ancestors. Suddenly, the flames no longer felt hot and threatening, and she was able, by forcing her will out of herself, as though projecting her soul at the flames, to control the fires and create a path for herself. When she finally left, shaken and afraid, she was confronted by more Goth soldiers, ready to sack Rome. As they attacked her, she burned them each away, entranced by the flames she could control. But there were too many to fight alone, and she was forced to flee, her only escape lying towards the burning city.
Choked by the smoke and fires, the city did not see sunlight for days, and Thorn spent her time there defending the place she had felt more to be her home than the villa in which she lived. On the third day there, she finally gave up, knowing that the city was lost. She ran away from the city, heading North, the power of the pyrokinesis fading as she left the flames behind.
After that, she travelled around Europe, spending no more than a few years in each country. For a long time, she was unable to use the powers locked inside her, though she could still feel them, and it was only after many years of careful practise that she succeeded in harnessing them once again. She decided, though, to only ever use them as a last resort, remembering all the lives she had taken in Rome under their thrall. It was simply too dangerous.
Over the years, she spent as much time as possible in the great centres of learning, studying languages and history and burying herself in the past. She was reluctant to venture out amongst people, especially with the rather conservative attitudes towards women that characterised many of the middle ages.
She ceased her greater wanderings when she moved to England, shortly after the Battle of Agincourt. She had been in France, but saw in England the makings of a new Empire, and she hoped to see some remnants of her own lost home. She remained in England, though still moving around, masquerading as a lady of the night (much to her dark humour) and taking the pseudonym Lady Thorn, in order to procure victims to drink from and to earn the money to live by. She moved to London, knowing the city was riddled with such vice, and gained some measure of notoriety, which brought her into contact with the great artistic society of the Victorian era, who were often to be seen frequenting opium dens and brothels. She moved in the circles of poets and painters, finding in them some reminder of Ovid, and many of them became entranced by her, somewhat foreign, appearance. She knew many of the greats, Keats, Byron, Shelley, Blake, remaining in the company of each for a short time before the pain of memory became too great and she had to move on.
In the past few years, she has settled down, finally coming to terms with the loss of her lover, and meeting a new one for whom she could care. Her memories serve only to make her lenient towards those she takes blood from, as she knows the actuality of pain and death, and does not wish them on anyone. She still moves around, unable to find anywhere that feels like home, but she does so less regularly, and often returning to her house, rather than leaving it deserted and empty.
She seeks her sister, knowing somehow that she survived Rome's fall too, and wanting to end the hostility of centuries. She is still unsure, in herself, whether this will be by violence or by negotiation on her part.
Family: Mother: Clavia Thalia Corvinus (deceased)
Father: Catallus Alexander Corvinus (deceased)
Younger Sister: Purpurea Rufilla (unknown)
Younger Brother: Septimus Augustus (alive)
Real Name: Catalina Alexandra Corvinus
Age: 2874
Gender: Female
Species: Vampire
Specialities: Most of Lady Thorn's skills are academic, as she has a passion for learning languages. Due to her nomadic nature during her centuries of life, she has had the opportunity to master many tongues, particularly the European ones, as that was where most of her wandering took her. She is fluent in Latin, English, French, Italian, Greek (both Classical and Modern) and Romanian. There are other which she can speak to some degree of fluency also. Her other academic skills include a knack for finding things in archives which other people would overlook, and she has utilised this skill over the ages to earn a bit of money. She has also written the odd poem, penned under a pseudonym, which has kept her income secure (due to continuing royalties).
Her martial abilities are not meagre either. Though not the most accomplished and brilliant of fighters, she can be pretty dangerous when using her throwing knives (of which she has many, concealed in her coat) or her gladius. She has never adapted her fighting style to accomodate her using guns, but since her accuracy and speed with her blades is formidable, if not masterly, she has never felt the need to do so. When deprived of the blades, she can defend herself, though she is loathe to do so.
Emotionally, she is relatively stable, tending towards a more solitary, quiet nature. She has no aversion to friendship and company, but does not feel the need to spend every moment in the presence of others. She is difficult to anger or scare (weaknesses notwithstanding) and when this happens, she calms down relatively quickly too. This is useful, as it means she fights (mostly) with a clear head, using logic and thought instead of instinct and brute force to overcome her opponent.
She is also pyrokinetic (see History).
Weaknesses: As well as all of the normal vampiric weaknesses (though the holy symbols which affect her are not Christian, but Roman pantheonic), she has a great and irrational fear of moths. If confronted with one, she will generally scream and attempt to flee its presence. She also tends to get more than a little irate on seeing people deface or damage books. This tends to lead her to irrational acts and she has regretted her actions on the odd occasion for this.
Her only great emotional weakness is an incident in her past which she hates bringing up- a lover she had in Ancient Rome, the poet Publius Ovidius Nasus. She detests speaking about him and feels guilty for his death (see History).
Physical Appearance: She is fairly tall for a woman of her time, about 5ft 9, and very thin. Her skin is the porcelain, flawless white of most vampires, though it's pallid tone is accentuated by her vibrant copper hair with balck highlights, which falls to her earlobes, though longer at the fringe. Her eyes are a pale, grey-blue colour, wide and large. They seem always to be very expressive, reflecting her moods and feelings as she speaks. Her eyebrows are very pale and thin, set a little higher than is usual, giving her a slightly surprised look. Her fingers are long, and she keeps her fingernails likewise, more often than not painted in one of various colours.
She normally wears dark jeans (black or blue) with a dark, goth-style top, though always a neat and presentable one. She wears little jewellery, normally just one necklace or a ring, and keeps her hair loose around her face. Her footwear of preference is a pair of black boots with reinforced, stiletto heels. The only piece of clothing she has with her at all times is her coat. It is a long, brown leather number, and contains her many knives sheathed in the lining and sleeves, ready for use.
Personality: Though emotionally, she is relatively stable within herself, she presents a rather quirky front. She often does strange things just to see how people will take them, and her mood swings and supposed feelings are more often for show than genuine. She is quite capable of true and earnest emotions, and will show them when they appear, but it is almost as if lack of feelings bores her, and she invents some to wile away the time between. Her likes and dislikes are normally extreme, tending towards love and hate rather than anything mediocre.
She is more than a little cowardly, admittedly so, and will avoid a fight if possible. She does this not so much out of fear but out of the desire to preserve herself, and this may be what has kept her these many years. She does, however, recognise that there are some times when fighting is necessary, and will do so then and without reluctance.
History: She was born outside the city of Rome at the height of its powers. Her parents were at the head of a rich family who were all vampires for many generations back, and were proud of their heritage. She was raised in a culture that tolerated such oddities as vampires, as many of the Roman nobility had their own bizarre quirks that far outweirded anything she could offer. Her family trained all the children in fighting arts from a young age, and she was given her sword "Arderius" at the age of 12, when it was deemed she could wield it with enough skill to defend herself.
As a child, she had a long-standing rivalry with her sister, a mutual hatred, almost. They had very different viewpoints, and would often come to blows or full-on sword bouts over their arguments. In all of these, Thorn never lost once. She was, by contrast, very close to her brother, a pacifist, and would spend many hours in conversation with him. On the whole, she was not well received by her parents, who misliked her reticence to fight and would often berate her for it. It was because of this that she ran away in her late fifties to the city of Rome itself.
In Rome, she disguised herself as a man and attended the school where most of the young aristocrats went to study rhetoric and wordplay. She was well-received, despite the drawback of vampirism, and kept most of the tutors and other pupils fooled as to her gender. Only one managed to figure her out, Ovid, but he told her he did not dislike her for it. They became firm friends, and later, lovers. He often wrote poetry for her, once he grew up and became a poet full time, and they spent most of their nights together, wandering the streets and listening to the public speakers. She even went away with him to the Baltic when he was banished for his works. She remained there with him, despite the fact that every day he grew older and older and she remained the same. As he became sick, she begged him every day to let her turn him into a vampire like her, but every day he refused. Finally, he died, having never been allowed to return home to the city he loved. She buried him, and made her way back to her family estates, in mourning.
When she returned home, her mother immediately locked her away inside the family villa in punishment for her "dalliance with a mortal". It was seen by most of the family as the gravest of embarrassements for one of their own to be with a normal human, and she was, from that point on, shunned by most of her vampiric peers. Her brother and father often visited her whilst she was locked away, bringing her things to read and news of the world outside, since they both were less inclined to elitism than most of the clan. The imprisonment was short, but was to be one of many, as from that point on she took great delight in flouting the many rules and regulations her mother so adored. She was, however, still loyal in some degree to her family and clan.
This changed, due to an incident that happened when she was around four-hundred years old. She was in a brief period between imprisonments, having spent a lot of time in contemplation of her morals, and was lounging around the family villa, when she heard some of the slaves muttering about her sister being out on a killing spree. She took her sword and headed after her, unsure why exactly, but wanting to do something. She found that her sister had destroyed a whole clan of werewolves, murdering families together. As she approached the scene of the murders, some of the clansmen of her family tried to stop her, but she sent them away to tell her father. Then she ran up the hill to confront her sister, who was standing in the doorway of an old, disused hut, fighting the last three werewolves. She killed the two parents as Thorn ran towards her, and advanced on the child, a young teenager, fearfully defending himself with his father's sword. Thorn stepped in as her sister attempted to strike the killing blow, and sent Rufilla away, muttering and defeated. She knew now that her family, Rufilla in particular, had things wrong and that she had been living her life by their morals. She decided to change herself, to try to abate the sudden guilt she felt for all the things her family had done amiss. The first thing she did was to give her sword to the young werewolf boy, knowing it was no repayment for his family's lives, but needing to give him something of value to show her sincerity in apologising. She left the hill thoughtful and depressed, only to be mobbed by some of the clan's soldiers and taken away to the villa once more.
She was locked away for the longest time yet, as her mother saw what she had done as being against the principles of the family. Even her father was a little unimpressed, and so only her brother came to see her in the years she was kept away.
After a long time alone, with only the odd bit of news to keep her aware, she heard strange noises above in the house, like fighting. Then she felt the heat of flames as the villa was set alight and began to burn around her. She began to fear for her life, locked away as she was in the cellar, but then the door opened mysteriously, and she was able to rise into the villa itself. The whole building was aflame, and Rome under attack from barbarian hordes from the North. Seeing the Goths advancing towards her, Thorn attacked, defending herself with force against the men who, she believed, were killing her family. Much as she hated her family, she didn't want them dead. She fought her way up to the atrium, only to see her parents murdered at the door as they attempted to leave the villa. Then the structure of the villa began to collapse, as the heat of the fire reduced the plaster and lathe walls to rubble and dust. Unable to leave via the front door, she searched for a way to another exit, passing the dead bodies of many of her family or clan. On more than one occasion, she was forced to kill foreign invaders who had found their way in and were determined to attack anyone they saw. Unable to find an exit, she realised she was trapped in her burning home, and alone. There was no one to save her. As she stood there in the wreckage of the once fine home, close to tears, she realised that she was about to die. Unwilling, she began to cry, angry at her fate and that of Rome. The flames came closer and closer to her, burning her skin, clothes and hair. At the point when she believed herself about to die, she discovered within herself a power that she never knew she had, though it had been known to her distant ancestors. Suddenly, the flames no longer felt hot and threatening, and she was able, by forcing her will out of herself, as though projecting her soul at the flames, to control the fires and create a path for herself. When she finally left, shaken and afraid, she was confronted by more Goth soldiers, ready to sack Rome. As they attacked her, she burned them each away, entranced by the flames she could control. But there were too many to fight alone, and she was forced to flee, her only escape lying towards the burning city.
Choked by the smoke and fires, the city did not see sunlight for days, and Thorn spent her time there defending the place she had felt more to be her home than the villa in which she lived. On the third day there, she finally gave up, knowing that the city was lost. She ran away from the city, heading North, the power of the pyrokinesis fading as she left the flames behind.
After that, she travelled around Europe, spending no more than a few years in each country. For a long time, she was unable to use the powers locked inside her, though she could still feel them, and it was only after many years of careful practise that she succeeded in harnessing them once again. She decided, though, to only ever use them as a last resort, remembering all the lives she had taken in Rome under their thrall. It was simply too dangerous.
Over the years, she spent as much time as possible in the great centres of learning, studying languages and history and burying herself in the past. She was reluctant to venture out amongst people, especially with the rather conservative attitudes towards women that characterised many of the middle ages.
She ceased her greater wanderings when she moved to England, shortly after the Battle of Agincourt. She had been in France, but saw in England the makings of a new Empire, and she hoped to see some remnants of her own lost home. She remained in England, though still moving around, masquerading as a lady of the night (much to her dark humour) and taking the pseudonym Lady Thorn, in order to procure victims to drink from and to earn the money to live by. She moved to London, knowing the city was riddled with such vice, and gained some measure of notoriety, which brought her into contact with the great artistic society of the Victorian era, who were often to be seen frequenting opium dens and brothels. She moved in the circles of poets and painters, finding in them some reminder of Ovid, and many of them became entranced by her, somewhat foreign, appearance. She knew many of the greats, Keats, Byron, Shelley, Blake, remaining in the company of each for a short time before the pain of memory became too great and she had to move on.
In the past few years, she has settled down, finally coming to terms with the loss of her lover, and meeting a new one for whom she could care. Her memories serve only to make her lenient towards those she takes blood from, as she knows the actuality of pain and death, and does not wish them on anyone. She still moves around, unable to find anywhere that feels like home, but she does so less regularly, and often returning to her house, rather than leaving it deserted and empty.
She seeks her sister, knowing somehow that she survived Rome's fall too, and wanting to end the hostility of centuries. She is still unsure, in herself, whether this will be by violence or by negotiation on her part.
Family: Mother: Clavia Thalia Corvinus (deceased)
Father: Catallus Alexander Corvinus (deceased)
Younger Sister: Purpurea Rufilla (unknown)
Younger Brother: Septimus Augustus (alive)