Name: Girl.
Age and Gender: She has been permanently shifted since the age of 11, and therefore she remains that old mentally and, due to her time being spent solely as an animal, physically, despite her technical age (it’s been four years) - her time shifted passed as a series of dreams, filled with instinct, sensation, survival. However, in recent months, since being drawn to Pannis away from her usual territory (the drier grasslands beyond the woods), the sights and smells of civilisation have been triggering memories, feelings and thoughts that had been previously been buried.
Character Group: Feral shape-shifter, non-aligned as of yet.
Abilities: Very adept at being a Steppe Polecat. Great at sniffing out and catching squirrels, even if the fact that they can climb to get away is new to her, having spent the majority of the past five years catching the burrowing variety.
Otherwise, she is a shape-shifter, but doesn't really know the full implications of that – she had only learned how to take one form when the accident happened. Accelerated healing as a result of her shifting abilities in general, however, and when she masters the ability she can adopt the form of any animals (although she finds it very difficult to nuance the specific characteristics she adopts, hence trying to change into specific other humans in nigh on impossible for her at the moment). The shift is difficult, generally - once in the form, it takes control to prevent the instincts and the new sensations overwhelming the shifter - and as she is quite young, traumatised and new at it all, she became trapped and went feral - for the most part willingly. It is only with willpower that she'll drag herself back out of it, as well, but that means she'll have to deal with what she successfully has been running from these past four years.
I doooo know more about what exactly she is, but I’d rather not reveal it quite yet. I will message you about it, though, if you want. :3
Weaknesses: Mortal weaknesses - hunger, dehydration, poisoning, etcetera. Also doesn't like sticks of Sorghum, or fennel - although once she chooses an 'alignment', she will adopt one of them as a weapon. Nothing wrong with silver, as she isn't a werewolf.
Appearance:
Human form: Skinny, evidently a little malnourished, she is nevertheless four foot, but is unlikely to be much taller than five foot once she's fully grown. Her face is slighlty gaunt despite its wide cheekbones, an unnerving look for a child, and it makes her monolid eyes look larger. Her skin is a light olive, her eye colour an indeterminate grey-green, the colour of a clouding sky. She has a mop of tangled back hair that reaches her mid-back where it is not knotted and bunched around her shoulders – once she fully shifts back, she will cut most of her hair off until it curls slightly around her ears.
I’ll update this with an outfit once she gets one.
Shifted form: A small, steppe polecat. Looks like a large ferret with creamy-white underpelt with a black, although thinner, overcoat. The underpelt darkens to black around the shoulders and remains black along all four legs and paws. The tip of the tail is black as well. The face is mainly black furred/skinned with a shock of creamy fur across the eyes. Large teeth. Physically, her shift is indistinguishable - it is her mannerisms and the behaviour that act as her 'tell'. She has a tendency of lingering at the edges of human settlements to watch the inhabitants, rather than to scavenge, and the way she watches something that has caught her attention belies her submerged intelligence and consciousness. It's her gaze, primarily, that gives her away. This has only become more prevalent recently, however.
Personality:
She was a cheeky child, careless, but sensitive – superstitious despite herself, due to her grandmother’s tutelage, and also fairly conservative for the same reasons - she has the values of an old soviet babushka. As a result she is reluctant to lie, or go against her principles, and refuses to be swayed by empathy – colder, in that way. Stubborn. Fearful, but will try to be brave in such cases.
Following her grandmother’s death and her time shifted, however, while these elements remain, her self-confidence and sense of self has been shattered – she was feral, completely animal, for three full years – at first as a coping mechanism, an embracing of her instincts as a way to block out what she’d seen and experienced, but the life quickly absorbed her itself – she began to forget, without realising it, her other life, and although at times she’d remember her mother, her friends – in her new life she didn’t really have family, friends. She was a solitary hunter and it was so hard to concentrate on these duller memories without the scents and sensations that filled her life now, and in such alien colours, that it was easier to let it all slide away together. Unable to shift back, she did after a few months try and return home, but couldn’t find her way back to the city. Very insular, loss of empathy – self-protection focused. Finds it difficult to trust.
History:
Her father is an unknown soldier from the Russian peacekeeper forces stationed in Transnistria, her mother a Russian speaker whose family had migrated to Soviet Chișinău in the post-war period as part of one of the the state’s programs of incentivised migration, in the wake of the demographic losses the region had suffered under the combined impacts of the Second World War and Stalinist repression, arrests and deportations. Her family doesn’t have a history, as far as she knows, of supernatural abilities: Her mother’s family were civilians, although her grandmother would tell her tales about the Ле́ший and, if she’d been particularly bad, the strigoii mort, the undead sinners who’d, like her, been born with the caul and who were doomed by their bad behaviour to haunt the countryside until the end of days. Her grandmother would always relent before her tearing gaze, however, and console her with lighter stories, stories of ended floods and village heroes, pressing the pouch that held the girl’s dried caul firmly in her hands with a comforting smile.
The girl grew up primarily under the care of her grandmother in the city, as her mother, due to job-scarcity, lived and worked in Russia, sending back her pay check monthly and returning in person when she could. She is bilingual, and speaks Russian and Romanian (with Russian being her mother tongue), and has a little English, although the time she spent shifted has further undermined her knowledge of it. Before the accident, she lived a relatively normal life, spending the majority of her time meandering through the meagre woodland that encroached the city limits with her friends after school. She’d had dreams of the shift – of tumbling over her paws in pursuit of the local stray dog packs, of scaling her school roof and batting at long lost, deflated balls with a cat’s claws – but those episodes had been brief, broken by daybreak and flitting from her memories, the products, her mother had told her affectionately one rare July weekend walking along the sunsoaked Alley of the Classics, of too many fairytales.
She has an arbitrary fondness for Steppe Polecats that ended up driving her first change. She’d only previously seen a polecat behind bars during her trips to the zoo – it was pretty, when it wasn’t hidden in its manmade burrow in the corner of its pen and she’d liked how soft its fur looked, and how it looked like it was wearing the reverse of a ninja mask, the dark of its eyes stark against the shock of ashen-white that flared around its nose. When the accident had happened, she and her grandmother had been taking a crowded bus north from the city to visit an old family friend - when a truck had driven out of control into lower right hand side of the bus, they’d been sloping through the rolling hills of the Bălţi steppe, the cultivated fields of farmland and grassland just beginning to wax gold in the late summer heat – where the polecat’s lived, she’d thought, pressing her finger against a smudge on the window.
She can remember how the blue of the sky and the gold and the green had spun and splurged themselves together into an ugly, sooty red that had dripped painfully into her eyes as the bus had seemed to just fall apart. She remembers being surrounded by the smell of faint flowers and the slight tang of pickles – her grandmother’s smell, her grandmother’s arms wrapped securely around her shoulders, cradling her head against her chest. She remembers the silence beneath her ear that seemed to dig a place for itself in her own beating heart, remaining loud and unignorable despite the screams and metallic shrieks and crunches that still surrounded them – one of them her own voice, calling for her grandmother, hands pawing at unresponsive features. She remembers the crumpled metal siding that pinned her beside her grandmother, freedom a small square of sunlight sparkling off of broken glass.
She’d clung to the thought of dark eyes in a white mask, a body sleek enough to wriggle under and out and into the surrounding fields, and shrugged into a reality outside of the wet weight of her grandmother’s body on top of her.
Shaking, struggling to pull itself through the wreckage, a small polecat limped into the dusty fields.
Alrighty, that's it for the time being...! I'm still doing research into PTSD, so the personality field will be more fleshed out in a bit, but I wanted to pass the mythology by you first. There are a few quirks there that I can explain, but would rather do it over message.
Although if people guess anyway I'm going to be sad....
ALSO you mentioned Europe, I assumed Eastern Europe/Romania, but it doesn't overly matter, she had a good long while to wander around anyway. :x In any case, there remains the issue of what languages are spoken in this rural backwater. I'm prepared for my little feral girl to be nigh-on non-understandable, I can deal with that, I knew that was a key issue in making her so young and giving her the background she has. I was just wondering if you had an idea? I don't actually know any romanian, sadly, and have only a rudimentary knowledge of Russian so far, so don't worry I'm not going to be switching languages.