Eva Dubois

From Gothpoodle

Latest revision as of 00:39, 11 June 2011

Aspects

• SHAPESHIFTING WIZARD ATTORNEY (High Concept)
• BOTHERSOME CLIENT SCUM (Trouble)
• SO MUCH FOR NORMALCY
• NOSE FOR TROUBLE
• PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
• MOTHERHOOD'S A BITCH
• GIRLS SHOULD STICK TOGETHER

Relationships

• Divorced from Solomon.
• Mother of Jean and Jeanette.
• Alicia Reynolds works for her.
• Maddy Barnes is her apprentice.
• Christophe Devereaux is her father.
• Her brothers are Etienne and Rene Devereaux.

Notes

Eva lives in a condo downtown.

Les Enfants d'Ishelle (Les Bons Chats de Mater Ishelle)

Les Enfants d’Ishelle are a group of hereditary werejaguars native to Louisiana. Their shapechanging abilities are thought to be a gift from a minor loa named Madam d’Ishelle, and they are traditionally petitioned to avenge members of the community who have been unjustly harmed by things from the Nevernever.

Les Enfants manifest sporadically in several Creole families in the region. Generally, approximately one in every fifty descendants of Jean Yah Yah, the Amerindian shaman who first brought Ishelle veneration to New Orleans, turns out to be one of Les Enfants. Such people generally change in their mid-teens, and are brought into one of the region’s half-dozen prides. However, Ishelle’s blessings are more likely to manifest in children of a female Enfant and more likely to manifest in the children of a practitioner, so that on the occasions that a sorcerer of Eva’s strength has had children, they have invariably bred true.

Origins

In the early-1500s, the Lady of Endless Night who called herself Toci Yoalticitl among the Aztecs and Ix Chel among the Maya, was driven out of her traditional Central Mexican hunting grounds by systematic hunt lead by a Spanish holy man, enthusiastically joined by native converts.

She, along with her remaining children and thralls, retreated back to the Red King’s court in the Yucatan. While the Red King reserved the settled, farmer kine and the finer hunting grounds on the peninsula for himself, he permitted her and her people to feed among the unclaimed Maya hunter-gatherer tribes remaining in some of the deeper jungles.

Itzel was a Maya wise woman and an extremely potent sorceress, by the White Counsel’s terms, responsible for maintaining her fertility of her tribe and the lands and animals it hunted. When the bulk of her tribe was slain, turned or enslaved by the Red Court, she crossed the Obsidian Mirror into the Nevernever and, after a trying quest, fought her way to the demesne of the true Ix Chel, the man-eating Maya jaguar goddess of childbirth and war. After besting the goddess in a duel of riddles, Ix Chel blessed Itzel, her children, and her “worthy ancestors” with the ability to wear the form of a jaguar.

Equipped with their hunting form, the wise woman and her ten surviving children waged a guerilla war campaign against the false Ix Chel and her children, eventually slaying the Lady of Endless Night and driving her remaining children from their lands. For approximately a century and a half thereafter, they traveled among the Yucatan Maya tribes, protecting them from the vampire and from beasts of the Nevernever.

The Red King takes the long view in conflicts and, by the late 17th century, the Court had ceased fighting the church and had successfully co-opted large portions of its bureaucracy. Over the course of several decades, the Church and the Red Court successfully turned most of the descendants of the Maya who once sought the aid of the jaguar-folk against them, and the bulk of Itzel’s bloodline was exterminated. Most of those who remained fled further inland. On the rare occasions that a child of the jaguar is born in the Yucatan today, it is generally found and made into a pet by the Red Court.

New Orleans

In the early 1800s, one of Itzel’s scattered descendants, an Afro-Hispanic sailor and ritualist born in Mexico City, made his way to New Orleans. Under the name Jean Yah Yah, became involved in the local voodoo culture, married a free Creole woman and sired children with several other women.

Yah Yah incorporated portions of his family’s traditional Ix Chel veneration into his voodoo practice, presenting the Loa Mater Ishelle as an ancestor spirit, a sort of composite of Ix Chel (a rada-aspected cannibal Loa) and Itzel (a petro-aspected fertility goddess). When one of his daughters demonstrated the ability to assume a wereform, he explained a blessing from Mater Ishelle, whom she could call to ride her at will.

As shapeshifting descendents of Doctor Yah Yah became more common, they were formed insular prides, and assumed a place among Vodouisants similar to that they once held among the rural Maya. Those in the know realize that, in times of need, they may petition Mater Ishelle’s avatars with gifts, to protect them from baka, loup garoux and other spiritual and physical predators.