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fellden - application;
PLAYER
NAME: Mina
AGE: 24
PREFERRED CONTACT:
OTHER CHARACTERS: -/-
CHARACTER
NAME: Flora Hansard
AGE: 26 (27 in November)
CANON & CANON POINT: Original Character – Flora was out gathering berries when she ends up following the Wolf. I have a snippet of general world information here. It's not super detailed, but it might work as a tiny overview of sorts. c:
RESERVATION LINK: HERE.
HISTORY:
Flora was born in Dromineer, County Tipperary, Ireland, in 1798. She is the third of twelve children (only seven of whom lived past infancy), and grew up, in a word, poor. The rural Catholic population of that time had limited to no access to education, tenant farming was standard fare (meaning any chance at a rise in social strata was was effectively zero), and the penal laws, laws specifically designed to keep the Irish away from parliament, anything to do with land-owning, or, once again, education, were in full effect.
Up until the age of eight, Flora lived in a single-room cottage with the rest of her family, so it was impossible for them not to notice the fact that they had a happy little shapeshifter in their midst. Among her very first life-lessons was to keep those powers hidden, for her own safety's sake –– that said, they were a tight-knit bunch, and as much as bouts of sickness, poverty, and hunger shaped her early years, she did very much grow up feeling loved and happy.
However, at that time, it was very common for poor families to send their children (often at ages as young as seven) off to work. Flora was eight when she first travelled to Nenagh with her older brothers to find a place that would hire her. As a general rule, this had two major perks: one, parents could be assured that their children were fed, and two, come spring (or fall, depending on whether it's a summer or a winter term), they would return with their earnings, thus helping the rest of the family survive.
So, up until her teenage years, this is how her life played out: she worked as a farmhand, taking care of animals, cleaning, mending clothes, doing the washing, beetling linen, watching and taking care of younger children. What she earned, she'd safe, and give to her family once she was back with them. Rinse, lather, repeat.
This went well enough until one winter. She was sixteen, it was a bad year, and she used her power to shift into a fox at night to catch the occasional bird or small rodent to eat, in addition to the couple of potatoes she was given on the daily. One night, the man who'd hired her caught her mid-shifting, and, thinking she must be some kind of faerie, chased her out of the house. Now she was penniless, without a place to go, and her options were limited. If she tried to find work elsewhere in the village, the man would certainly out her. She ran much the same risk if she took the day's travel up to the nearest bigger town. If she returned home to her family, she'd have to do so without having earned any money, while also being an additional mouth that had to be fed during an already lean season.
She chose to live out the season as a fox in the forest. Come spring, when she'd meant to find a new place of work, so she could return to her family after the summer term, she instead fell sick – and the sick don't get hired, because coffins are expensive. By the time she finally found employment again, she was seventeen, nearing eighteen, and was unsure how she could face her parents again. More so now that the time had come where they'd hope she would get married (something she didn't want to risk, considering how she might pass on her shifting to her children).
In the end, she never returned home at all. For the next six years, she worked odd jobs – sometimes as a farmhand, sometimes with a baker or weaver or any other thing in towns, sometimes resorting to nicking pennies off of tourists if she was out of other options.
Eventually, while making a fox-den for herself to survive a winter in, she met Old Peg. Peg and her two goats live in a tiny, low-walled hut just about an hour's walk away from the nearest village, where Peg makes her living as a bean faesa, a 'cunning woman'. Getting a doctor to come from the nearest town is pricey, pricier than most people can afford, but giving a halfpenny (or some eggs, a bit of milk, some aid in fixing her roof) to Old Peg is cheap and gets the job done. She works with herbs to cure general ailments, and much like Flora, she was quite on her own – she might be a necessity to the villagers, but she's still seen as an outsider, someone who could be in cahoots with all sorts of spirits.
They strike up a friendship quick enough – in fact, Flora approached her after witnessing the old woman turn into a goat to climb up a tricky part of the hill – and Peg agrees to teach her the ways of healing in exchange for Flora's help. Peg's nearly blind and elderly and simply needs a bit of assistance in her day to day life, Flora's young, quick, and has a far easier time gathering herbs, digging up roots, milking the real, non-shifting goats – in short, plenty of the things Peg's been having trouble with. And that's been the arrangement for the past few years. Neither of them has any family to speak of by now, but if she was asked, Flora would happily introduce her as her grandmother.
PERSONALITY:
Are you looking for relentless and sometimes almost ill-timed optimism? Then you came to the right fox… person! Flora is five foot worth of concentrated effort to look at the bright side of life. At first, this has simply been a kind of a defence mechanism cooked up in the face of a rather harsh life, but by now, it’s simply become who she is. She is determined to make the world just a little bit better, to help others with whatever means she has, and to feel, well, happy. She is someone who celebrates every little thing she has, in part because she’s had times in her life where she had absolutely nothing at all, and while she doesn’t expect others to face the world with the same level of enthusiasm, she does try to spread it as much as she can.
Coming from a time and place when most everything she had was on some level made by herself, she’s become surprisingly crafty, and her natural curiosity helps speed up most learning processes. While it sometimes means she spreads herself just a little bit too thin, as she tries to do and learn and see everything at once, at least least she doesn’t shy away from trial and error, nor does she hesitate to share any newfound knowledge. She’s perpetually in motion and always seems to weasel her way into the very core of a new project, and puts as much of her heart and soul into what she does as she humanly can.
Even if her hardiness goes unrewarded, she isn’t one to regret putting in the effort in the first place, and this extends from material projects as much as it goes for interpersonal relationships. While she is proud of having survived on her own as long as she has, it’s also lead to her, on occasion, breaking with some of her own values – at her lowest, she’s stolen food and coins when she’s had the chance, and the associated guilt has marked her deeply. However, it has also shaped her into a person who fiercely doles out second and third chances, sometimes past the point of wisdom. After all, if she managed to turn back to a good and god-fearing (tm) life, anyone else can and wants to, too, right? While mostly, this just makes her kind, and while her forgiveness doesn’t spring fully eternal, she can occasionally be in need of someone to shake her by her ruff and tell her that maybe, just maybe, she can’t rehabilitate everyone and everything in her wake.
Her own experiences have shaped her, but they also shaped her perception, which, especially in the context of other worlds, other universes, and other standards of living, are sure to clash –– for one, she’ll be quick to apply her own standards of ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ to others, and draw divisive lines accordingly. A good example of that can be seen in her test-drive thread with Dimitri – she sees his armour and the way he expresses himself, and essentially assumes he’s lead a life of some measure of wealth, and doesn’t consider that he might, too, know what it’s like to fend for his survival in much the same way she has. While she’s not intentionally mean about these things, it does showcase that her world has, before this new experience, been fairly small. Far travelled she might be by the standards of a farmer in rural Ireland, but she’s not exactly ever left her County, and there’s plenty of walks of life she only knows from hearsay or sidelong glances, and it shows.
More than anything else, what she is really looking for is a kind of kinship. She has been on her own one way or another for most of her life, and that kind of loneliness has deeply marked her. Especially during her adulthood, she has often resorted to living as a fox, and it’s heavily influenced the way she approaches others now - she can be clumsy, she can be quick to assume that a single kind conversation equates a friendship, she might ask about fifty questions too many in a single meeting. When she makes a friend, she’ll be fully ride or die for that person, and she longs to be part of a community that she’s not really had since she was a small child. It’s also something that makes her determined to help build that kind of community, and she is someone whose goal, at the end of the day, is to ensure harmony.
Others can usually tell exactly what is going on in her mind –– not just because she's happy to speak it, but because she usually wears her heart right out on her sleeve. Her emotions lie close to the surface, and while she won't always be all that fantastic at expressing just what she's feeling, just by virtue of lacking practice in that area of self-expression, she'll give it her best shot. Most of all, she's fairly easy to read, and it's not something she's all that inclined to change. All that is once again the result of spending so much time immersing herself in her fox form and thus relying heavily on the associated instincts, as well as the general mannerisms and defence mechanisms in place – just like a scared fox will raise its fur involuntarily, a nervous or anxious Flora will openly show what and how something bothers her.
ABILITIES/SKILLS:
✪ shapeshifting ✪ Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s –– no, she was definitely born with it. Flora is a shapeshifter who can turn into a common red fox at will. This is an ability she has relied on for survival in the past, as her fox form is a little more hardy than her human shape, if only by virtue of foxes being able to digest pretty much anything they eat while also being able to withstand the relative cold of an Irish winter. Left to her own devices, she shifts as much as she’s able to, often even choosing to sleep in her fox shape, so as far as her ‘magical’ abilities go, this is the one she’s most commonly and reliably using. Side effects include: excellent hearing, sense of smell, and seeing well even in the darkness.
✪ plant magic ✪ After several years of staring at plants, Flora has figured out how to transfer small bouts of energy to them to help them grow – she’s not about to go full Jack and the Beanstalk on anyone’s backyard, it’s really just a small scale thing that speeds/supports a normal growing process a tiny bit.
✪ healing ✪ Flora has been in training to be a healer for a few years now, and she’s been along for just about everything one might contract in rural Ireland circa the 1820s. She can set a bone, patch up a wound, assist in childbirth, break a fever, so far, so good. However, she’s never seen the inside of a school, knows no proper medical terminology (not even the time-appropriate kind), and might attribute a lot of things to ghost, spirits, and the Evil Eye. In summary, she knows her way around plant-based cures, can make salves and tinctures and the like, and can clean up a wound –– but there's nothing in the least bit supernatural about it.
✪ general ✪ She’s pretty used to doing things herself. She can mend clothes, sew, fix up a hut, make a fire, take care of all kinds of ordinary farm animals, bake, and cook. She’s used to having to survive in the most basic sense of the word – she knows how to find and/or make shelter, she knows how to feed herself even if she’s in the middle of nowhere all on her own, she can function on very little sleep and very little food, and she’s used to doing hard labour under those conditions.
INVENTORY/COMPANIONS:
clothing:
✪ a simple linen shift
✪ a pair of working stays
✪ a pair of ribbon-tied pockets
✪ a simple 'skirt' with two slits on the sides (so the pockets worn underneath can be accessed)
✪ a neckerchief
✪ an apron
✪ a rough-spun brown wool cloak
in her pockets:
✪ a small knife meant for cutting herbs and roots
✪ a wood-carved charm against evil spirits, made by Old Peg
✪ a piece of cloth she usually uses to tie back her hair
FACTION CHOICE: Court of Stars
REASON: As survival-focused as she is, deep down, she's a follow-your-heart kind of person who tries her best to listen to what her gut tells her. She doesn't necessarily have dreams of grandeur (her big dreams are more centred around everyone having a dry place to sleep and a good meal to eat), but she does firmly believe that anything's possible with some chutzpah, and she can go above and beyond in the idealism department.
TATTOO: Vulpecula complete with the outline of a fox, just above her right ankle.
SAMPLES
NETWORK:
’s a bit strange to be talking into a compass. I know I’m being heard, I know it’s magic at work here, but it still feels a little… foolish?
⟪ she goes quiet for a moment, and there is a rustling of cloth heard in the background as her hands clench in the fabric of her apron. ⟫
Perhaps not the kindest word for it? I don’t mean to insult no one, it’s a brilliant invention, and it’s a dizzying thought to imagine my voice carrying all the way across a whole big continent. All the while, it still feels like I’m talking to myself.
⟪ there’s the huff of a nervous little laugh. ⟫
It’s not done like this back home, I think that is what I’m meaning to say.
⟪ lord, she had a point in this, didn’t she? ⟫
Sorry, I don’t mean to ramble on off forever. I’ve been running into some troubles, you see. There’s a bakery by the marketplace, it’s run by a woman called Alva. She’s none too trusting, but she don’t mind otherworlders much if we’re hardworking and timely, and she’s looking for more employees. People who know how to bake would be good, but there’s heavy lifting to be done, too, and beside, if you’re no good at baking yet, I can teach you a bit.
⟪ now that she’s gotten past the initial awkwardness, words seem to bubble out of her like sweet porridge from the pot in the fairytale. the smile is audible in her voice: ⟫
She’s been asking me to put up signs for hiring, but I’m no good at the writing yet, so I’m trying things this way. I think Alva pays quite alright, and she don’t mind letting us have a little bread in the morning if it makes us work a little faster. So – ⟪ the sound of her hands clapping together ⟫ if you’re in need for a place to work and you like food, please uh… Send me message. My reading’s a lot less bad than my writing.
⟪ end transmission ––
oh. no, not yet. ⟫
If you’re good with letters, though, and don’t mind the teaching, I can give you a little coin for a few lessons in it. It’d be most sincerely appreciated.
NOTES, QUESTIONS, COMMENTS:
