E L S E W H E R E A D U L T
CHARACTER INFORMATIONCharacter Name: Aina Taís Fabregas.Gender: Female.Age: 1949Blood Status: Muggleborn.Education: Beauxbatons Academy of Magic 1961 - 1966
Dropped out at 15Residence:Flat 1A 17 Anchoritic Alley, London
Occupation:
Frontwoman, Cursebreakers
(a punk band)
Do you plan to have a connection to a particular existing place?
No.
Requested Magic Levels:
- Charms: 6
- Divination: 10
- Transfiguration: 7
- Summoning: 8
Please list any other characters you already have at the site:Leander Laskos, etc.Biography: (300 words minimum.)Maldit.
Bruxia.
Safranera.Numerous names had been hurled at her like curses for as long as she could remember. She was three when the looks had started. Then the whispers. Denial and defences had followed at first, but they stood no ground against the unexplained. A child could be surrounded by only so much coincidence before it was called calamity.
There were glimpses, though, of what came before her magic started to manifest. Gentle smiles, tight embraces, cooing words. Soft feet on rocky soil. A musky perfume sweetly mixed with sweat and wood and earth. All beneath the warmth of some distant sun she knew she could never revisit. The center of a world for which she didn't want to admit she still searched even after being cast from its hold long ago.
Maldit.It was then, on her eleventh birthday, all that had been argued and augured bore out. Under suspicious eyes and wary whispers, a strange woman appeared on their doorstep, wielding impossible truths with her words and even more impossible feats with her wand. Aina Taís was different. She too had been a stranger among them all along.
The last light of hope fell from her mother's face, leaving only a hollowness in her eyes which seemed no longer able to see her daughter before her. It was that look, vast and distant, which remained in Aina’s memory more than any other words spoken that day.
Afterwards, they no longer called her daughter.
Bruxia.A fistful of money and a small suitcase were the final offerings burnt in her grasp, banishing her from their doorstep. What was left unsaid was enough to dispel any possibility of return.
It was dawn of her eleventh year and first day that her feet left the cold, hard dirt of her homeland. The warmth of the sun had long departed and indigo shadows stretched across the familiar landscape. The strange woman’s thin, unblemished hand clamped around Aina’s arm, entrapping her within the sleeve of her green woolen coat. It was impossible to signal any goodbye other than a look which glistened, wet with uncertainty. Yearningly, it searched for some beacon back to safer moorings, only to find dark eyes reflecting back-- still, unmoving, absolved.
With a flick, the world twisted and swirled as if she stood at the eye of a storm, dissolution surrounding them as they disapparated.
At Beauxbatons she received no better welcome. Not for her Catalan dirt and little for her blighted heritage. New eyes-- some icy blue, others pale green, or warm brown-- speared all-too-familiar looks. They pinned her for inspection like some exotic specimen, looking for differences by which to classify her. She was not like so many of them. Their differences were superficial, beneath they were all the same. Pure. Refined to the last spec of their being, while she was made of cruder stuff.
She chafed at uniformity and bleached under stricture. She struggled to breathe beneath pressed creases and fitted pleats. The hierarchy smothered any trace of defiance with oppressive omnipresence. To survive she adapted a kind of mimicry, assuming a blend of accents and affectations which became ambiguous in amalgamation. She could bend and bow and keep her head up only so high and hold a smile sweetly. But behind sharpness of her teeth and her tongue, a spark remained, flickering and biding.
At fifteen she left with only a flimsy command of her magic and this pretense of etiquette, but it was plenty to masquerade above her station.
Among the bustle of the gare, with her back straight and chin confidently leveled, she simply diverted her path again with her suitcase in tow and a wand of silver fir and basilisk scale tucked in the deep pocket of her pedal pusher pants. This time she was ready to leave the aspersions of others behind her without looking back.
The journey was slower than her last trip across the continent, the train car swaying her gently side to side instead of abruptly upending everything which came before. From the window at her seat, she watched the sun arc across the sky, and heard the languages of the passengers shift from the soft, gargled French to the hard, rolling Spanish.
Safranera.In Madrid, she found a city held in white-knuckled clutches for control, but with its pulse throbbing precipitately beneath the surface. In the dark was a vibrancy-- a life-- in the buzzing neon lights, cold, impassive, and enthralling. It beckoned her to the underground and its undercurrent of dissent. And in it she submerged deeply in the surreal and subversive.
Here condemnation was reserved only for those who demanded submission and stifled truth. She was surrounded by others who too only longed to breathe free yet only dared take breath in secret. But even in this world of underground freedom, she kept her own secrets buried.
Here the aristocratic arts served her more than any other aspect of her education. It was better to flash a smile that spoke more in silence, filling the gaps rendered by questions with hinted assumptions and coy allusions rather than answers. She unnerved with the direct defiance within her dark eyes, brooking no deeper confidences. A refined chuckle kept jokes more to herself than fully shared with others. With this cultivated mystique, in the darkness she dazzled.
She joined the outcasts, the artists, and the poets in their private salons, where they knew her as she painted herself to be rather than bearing the placards of others. Her identity was one which she could forge.
It was in this cabal, awash in freedom and the defiant music in another tongue, a voice arose. The music was raw in the throat and resonant in the lungs. Her breath like a bellows fed that starved spark within her and it grew. And it growled, chasing the disillusionment in the lyrics and disdain for the melodies of erstwhile days. It was wild and daring to be tamed.
Only in front of a microphone could it be contained.
She borrowed words to sing what she could not say. With song, she could break from that suffocating silence while keeping her secrets intact. She could embrace the displacement and rebellion which had always been stains on her identity, straddled between worlds of rejection. From that with which she had been cursed, she found a new power and place all her own.
Now the eyes which surrounded her yearned and desired. They adored.
And doors opened.
A stranger approached her, this one a man but no less a thief, summoned by her sirenous command. She regarded him through the screen of her thick lashes and smoke of her cigarette. With honeyed compliments he offered her more than crumpled bills. A stage.
Cantant.Her elbows cantilevered against the burnished wood of the bar top. Dark eyes pierced the dimness of her surroundings, the laughter, the half shouting, the underlying scream washed over her.
Eyes slid through the crowds, seeking her out in the darkness. With whispers they tried to name her.
She smiled at them, her lips closed and knowing.
The eyes averted and the whispers trembled.
Tilting her head over a shoulder, she brought her cigarette to her lips and took a slow drag. She felt the smoke swirl in her nostrils and burn down her throat, only to leave sweet bliss in its wake.
When she stood, the crowd parted for her anticipatory, but there was a yearning in even their distance. A stage darted into an inky void which swallowed the rest of a low platform at the back of the club. As she stepped up onto it, she dropped the remains of her cigarette, crushing it beneath her boot as the conjured abyss swallowed her too. Smoke from the dying embers, more than what should have remained.
Then, a crack of drumsticks.
A row of heatless flames sparked across the front of the stage. A fortunaestrum whirr reverberated in the room, inciting a momentary hush, a breath before a roar overtook the crowd. The darkness from the stage receded in a flash.
There front and center, she smiled over the flare of the voice amplifier. Eyes gleaming, teeth brandished. Joining the electric shimmering melody, her voice ripped through like a shout which softened as she sustained the note, launching into her first song of the night.
The audience cried in response.
La Sibil-la.--------
Maldit - Catalan (n.) cursed.
Bruxia - Catalan (n.) witch.
Safranera - Catalan (n.) truant.
Cantant - Catalan (n.) singer.
La Sibil-la - Catalan (pr. n.) the Sibyl. The Cant de la Sibil-la is a medieval liturgical chant sung on Christmas in Catalonia dating over a thousand years and is one of the oldest surviving Christmas traditions in Europe. The Sibyl sings of Judgement Day and the coming of Christ.Roleplay: Option One - Roleplay Response:Value.
Such an arbitrary scale upon which worlds pivoted. Unequal spheres of influence each jockeying for more power. Dominating, devouring, devastating.
If she had learned any lesson it was this: purity would always corrupt.
People were not programmed to accept a speck of difference. It was unnatural to welcome the unnatural. The other always had the shadow of a threat. And it had been long since that Aina had taken up that mantle of shadow. Better its uncertain embrace than the stranglehold of supremacy.
Protection and safety were all too used to garrotte the voice of the people. It debrided difference. But all too often security could not shake the suspicion that more must be sacrificed. This new thrill and illusory control had already atrophied much of what was once vibrant of her home.
If in the daylight Aina was less than impressed with this English imitation of autocracy, she did not divulge it. A shrug or sneed spoke as much as any statement she was prepared to make. She knew enough that dissent was meant for the darkness, if only to light an eventual torch.
But this was not her fuel to ignite. Her drop would not have counted for much anyway. She was, after and underneath it all, foreign.
In other ways, though, her foreignness was an asset. The softness of her accent soothed and seduced. The glow of her skin seemed born of the sun. The European etiquette radiated a refinement her blood supposedly precluded.
That was how Aina was able to deftly wind the cobbles of Diagon in her black leather platform boots, receiving broader smiles than those she returned in thanks. She was used to inciting stares. As she walked, the thin gauze of her sleeves billowed gently against the weighty embellishments of cutwork embroidery.
But then, a shoe skittered haphazardly over the uneven pavement in front of her path. A look of dispassionate amusement flitted in her eyes, finding the supposed own of the shoe skittering herself not long after it.
Aina dropped to a knee to retrieve the shoe. Straightening, she offered it to the discomposed witch with a sympathetic quirk to her lips. “Rough out there, hm?”
