Jasmine

From Gothpoodle

Courtesan

A player character.

Description

She has very long, thick black hair, that is kept up, partially braided. She has hair decorations/fasteners of long, golden strands that weave in and out of her hair. Her hair seems perfectly balanced, loose, but will not fall down. Her skin tone is dusky, and the light always hits it perfectly, evoking the fantasy of the desert. Her body is perfect, curvy in that perfectly firm and beautiful way, not jiggly. Her hips invite a firm grip. Her breasts are medium-large. She is barefoot, or wears light slippers of cloth. She is clothed in light fabric that either shows off her shoulders, or is wrapped around her securely. She will from time to time, wear a veil. Her age is undermined; she exudes womanhood on the edge of youth - not teenager, but not older woman.

Mask

Much the same, but her face looks more like it used to when she was 25, although the skin tone is that beautiful dusky color, and her body is curvy and perfect.

Storytelling Hints

None.

Stats

• Mental Attributes: Intelligence 3, Wits 2, Resolve 2
• Physical Attributes: Strength 1, Dexterity 3, Stamina 1
• Social Attributes: Presence 4 (pumpable), Manipulation 3 (pumpable), Composure 2
• Mental Skills: Academics 3, Medicine (psychiatry) 3.
• Physical Skills: Athletics (insubstantial) 2, Larceny 1, Stealth 2.
• Social Skills: Empathy (confidant) 3, Expression (Storytelling) 3 (8-again when harvesting Glamour), Persuasion 2 (pumpable), Socialize 1, Subterfuge 2.
• Merits: Dual Kith 3, Market Sense 1, Resources 2, Hedge Beast Companion (Monkey) 1.

Advantages

• Willpower: 4
• Health: 6
• Initiative: 5
• Defense: 2
• Armor: 0
• Speed: 9

Changeling Traits

• Clarity: 7
• Wyrd: 2
• Glamour/per Turn: 11/2
• Contracts: Eternal Summer 1, Moon 1, Separation 3.
• Pledges: None.

Weaknesses

• Flaws: None
• Derangements: None
• Frailties: None

Equipment

None.

Background

Mortal Life

Janis was born in 1946, into a strict, working class family in Massachusetts. She was expected to marry and pump out children, but instead she went to college. Her father and mother did not disown her, but made it difficult for her in many ways. She had to work and save on her own, as she got no help. She got scholarships, as her grades were excellent, but she never had college easy. She was part of the feminist movement only tangentially.. while she appreciated what it said, she had no time to demonstrate, and thought it incredibly impractical to burn her bra.

Janis DeMornay worked hard, and was top in her class in medical school, and top in her class again when she got the many degrees it took to become a full fledged, working psychiatrist. In the beginning, she was an idealist, working in public institutions with the very disturbed. She wrote papers on the nature of schizophrenia and delusion. These were her most favorite things.. she was fascinated by the fantasy worlds that the delusional could concoct. Eventually, the conditions in the publically funded places really got to her, and she moved to the more cushy, privatively run places. She had a tremendous sense of guilt over this for a very long time, and still feels a little pang now and then. She knows she is a good doctor, and she feels that she was depriving her patients, and future patients the opportunity to be treated by a good doctor. The money she made, and the contact she made there eventually wore down that feeling, until it only came up once and a while. She met her first husband there.. not a doctor, but an orderly. Ben was a very active man.. he got her into climbing, and biking and hiking. They spent their honeymoon hiking around on one of the islands in Hawaii, soaking in the wildlife. She only cared mildly for these things (aside for what it did for her figure, which went from normal to athletically striking), but loved basking in Ben's enthusiasm. After four years, Ben left her for a (much) younger woman who was very into these things. It was 1976, and she was 30. Two years later, she had a baby.

Her child, Lila DeMornay (She changed her name back after the divorce), was beautiful. Conceived during an anonymous drunken tryst (with the most beautiful black haired man) New Years eve on a trip to New York City, Janis felt like she'd had her eyes opened. She moved to New York, having fallen in love with the place. She opened a private practice, to have more time with her daughter, and on the strength of her contacts and reputation, she got a list of clients with a lot of money to spend, and a lot of minor problems to fix.. with the occasional 'embarassment' child with real problems to sink her teeth into. She met and married her daughter's pediatrician, David Kincaid, but kept her maiden name. She told David it was for work purposes.. name recognition, but it was out of supersition. She had another child with him, Jonas, who received his father's last name.

She kept her fingers in her real passion, though. She became a consultant, and dealt with some strange and very disturbed patients. One of these claimed that he had made a deal with the devil for power, and the devil had taken him to hell for a year and a day. He had power, he claimed, but it had come at a hard cost. She helped him as best she could.. and felt that she did a good job when he stopped believing that his head was on fire whenever he lied... but she could never shake him of his tale.

Time went on. Lila (a raven haired beauty with aspirations to be writer) and Jonas (Strong, mild, a little slow.. he wanted nothing more than to make music and friends) eventually left home and got their own lives.

Janis was in a lot of pain now. Her arthritis was attacking her joints, and she was unable to move much. David suggested they move to a drier place, with fewer seasonal changes. As much as she loved New York, she had to agree.. but she made it a condition that they move someplace just as full of life and oddity. Las Vegas was really the only choice. They had a lot of money. They had lived sensibly, invested sensibly, and had both been in professions with a lot of money in it. They bought a very nice house with a beautiful pool, and made it handicapped accessible.

Janis hated it. She missed freedom. She missed being able to walk. She missed living without pain.. and while the climate helped considerably, it still hadn't -cured- her. Eventually, she was diagnosed with cancer. The treatments were awful, and she knew she was going to die, horribly and painfully.

Her daughter moved in with them, along with her children, Angela (5)and Will (2). Her own husband had left her just a year earlier. She was not yet a writer. Her grandchildren brought her joy in spurts, but she lay, in her decaying body, and hated the world. One evening, during a moment of physical clarity, she set up candles along the bath, and got into it. She prayed now, and she had never done so before. She asked the God she knew did not exist for mercy.. to let her just die and let her family move on. She lay in the warm water, and thought about her life.. about the things she'd never done. She felt trapped now by everything, by her children, her husband, her money, her job. She had always made her own destiny, with a fiercely independent and strong hand, but now she felt that perhaps she'd made the wrong choices. It led her back to her life in New York, to the patient who had made his deal with Satan. She'd prayed to God, and no one had answered. With a wild and hysterical laugh, she looked in the water and spoke out loud. She offered her soul if the devil would put her out of her misery. The only answer was a strong impulse to slip beneath the surface of the bath, and she did, with a mind to drown herself.

Instead, she surfaced in an oasis, where a man of mythical beauty offered her youth in exchange for a year of her life. She made the deal. She assumed that he would make her family believe she was dead.. but did not ask him for it. He allowed her to make some provision for her return; a bank box with her papers, and a number to her bank account overseas with a great deal of money in it. She did not take so much that her family would be left in the cold when she died, but enough to set herself up well when she returned. She kept the key on a golden chain around her neck for her durance.

Durance

She spent a year in a fantasy of a Persian paradise. He changed her into a curvy, dark skinned beauty, with flawless skin that was always hit by the light to make it appear luminous, large dark eyes and expressive hands. He gave her many gifts.. gold, jewels, a golden monkey. She played music for him, she sang.. sometimes in many voices at once. She told him stories late into the night. At the end of the first year, he offered her freedom, according to their deal, and she begged him to keep her for another year.

This year was better than the first. She accompanied him to the markets, bargaining with shifty dealers for marvelous wonders.. for slaves, for bolts of fine cloth made from stars and dreams. She lay at his feet and listened to his problems, she was with him everywhere, his confidant, his trusted slave. He took her to bed only once.. a night which lives in her memories and her dreams as vividly as the night it happened. It was the perfect night, and he was the perfect lover.

All the same, at the end of this year, he said that he could not continue year by year.. that she would need to be his forever, or not at all. She loved him, but longed to see the world. She had begun to dream of her grand daughter, and missed the little cherub like face, the laughter. He let her go gently, but told her that no matter how bad it was, that she could not return to him until two more years had passed, as punishment for giving up paradise.

Changeling Life

She has come to love the desert. She loves the heat, the light, the cycles it goes through.. the smell of the sand, the sky at night and morning. Her new youth comes with a youthful mind and heart... she can't remember much about her family, as it would drag her down.