Eliza Jin some of us are so sharp
we could just cut ourselves.
- N. Gaiman. |
Basics
Race: Mixed blood
Caste: Chiet
Gender: Female
Age/Birthdate: Nineteen/1st Day of Summer 494
Starting City: Wind Reach
Birthplace: Ravok |
Appearance
Eliza is the product of a half-breed Eypharian and an Inarta, muddling her bastard blood until her desert heritage is difficult to define. At a glance, she looks more Inartan than not; but outside of Wind Reach, no one would be like to realize it. Her flesh is sun warmed but not gilded, her dark hair blood thick without the use of paint, and her eyes are a soft amber, more ivoried than sunny. A sturdy five feet, three inches tall and made of noble lines and healthy curves.
Character Concept
Silver linings can come tarnished, but they are almost always there.
Eliza is an unexpected optimist. Born to nothing in a city of rot, she would find marrow in the bones tossed her and call it fortune. A girl could take more things from bones than bare sustenance; a clever girl could take learning. Lizard bones could be given to the grizzled seer for a glimpse into tomorrow. Bird bones told the secrets of flight. Her bones are not so elegant, but she pretends not to mind. Her mind was sharpened by the teeth of her absent father, instilling in her a bottomless curiosity for everything living and dead. Congregation with ghosts has made her both ruthless and kind, a combination as improbable as the rest of her and as unlikely as her highest hoped for goal. |
Character History
Eliza’s story began before she did, connecting far flung cities and scattering sun bleached bones to the four corners of the world.
Her father was not an ordinary man. Sprung from opulent Ahnatep, Alander Jin was a half breed nobleman with four hands instead of the preferred six. He spent his youth in service to the House of the Northwinds, learning fine art, sound business, and cut throat politics. It is in his thirtieth year that the skin of his story shrinks from the bones of it, cooked too long in the unforgiving sun; and so he disappears, exiled from his own tale like fat into the fire, cast from the city of his birth and reappearing years gone in the midst of Ravok’s dank canals.
These are not secrets he has told his daughter, unless perhaps he whispered them with spiders legs to spin in her cradle.
Her mother, Eliza was made to understand, was a slave. It explained to Eliza her childhood situation, spent largely crouched hearthside turning a spit while cooks and downstairs maids, slaves and apprentices, tradesmen and delivery boys dashed and chattered. For the first five years of her life, Eliza believed patient Jassa (from the tents of Sion, of the sons of Malech) was her mother. Jassa watched her with khol-lined eyes, sharp as any falcon preparing to stoop. She would dust Eliza out of harm’s way or watch her blunder, ready to assure Eliza learned the correct lesson and went on not to err in the same manner.
Choices were small, little slivers of false independence, but each held infinite learning. For example: take the garden path and be tempted to dawdle, the message delivered late to the butcher and all the desired cuts sold out for the day. Dalliance and self-indulgence, therefore, earned you and empty stomach and the back of a hand.
Jassa taught her more. Pretty lies and half truths lived within the flickers of light that often dusted the edges of Eliza's vision. Those lights belonged to the stubbornly dead, Jassa claimed, and so Eliza's conversations with ghosts began. It was a burned man -- "I died in a fire," Nolan sighed, "Exactly the way they wanted." -- who told Eliza her mother had come from the sky on the back of the wind and not, in fact, in sweat and chains.
Shortly thereafter, Eliza's father came to collect her. He put her to books and figures, lifting her from the neglectful ashes of his boarding house kitchens and repositioning her in the factors offices above. Money clinked and a lonely accountant -- "Drowned," the phantom smirked. "By which I mean murdered." -- wiled a bit of her eternity assisting Eliza with her sums. She and all the others would vanish, however, whenever Jassa came with her deeper lessons in love and spiritism.
And so Eliza learned that the dead still had things to fear.
The year passed quick and imprisoning. She had few friends in the household for the fact of her father's identity and fewer still for her training in Jassa's shadow. Bumps occured, little and large, but nothing she was much inclined to mention amid the chatter of ghosts. Just short of adulthood, Alander came gusting home from a journey, rich earth still staining his pants, to pack up his daughter with haste and send her off at dawn out of the floating city and toward the largely unexplored shore. His explanation was terse, but Eliza recognized its portent and did not complain.
She was a girl who understood secrets and had a few to hound out herself. By the time she flared past the reach of Alander’s partners, she was already en route for answers. |
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![[Verified by Siren]](./images/checkmark.png "[Verified by Siren]")
Eliza. 
by Eliza on June 29th, 2013, 6:35 pm 
