Do not mistake me for my mask. You see light dappling on the water and forget the deep, cold dark beneath.
NAME: Charles Kian
BIRTHDAY: December 11, 1619
GENDER: Cisgender Male
SPECIES: Samodiva
OCCUPATION: Innkeeper at Oddities Inn
FACECLAIM: Martin Sensmeier
Memory is a fragile thing prone to breaking, and Charles is all too familiar with the way it fractures from a touch. His own is hardly full-proof: it seems the older he gets, the less he remembers about his past. Consider it purposeful misremembering, or the product of a life lived far too long, he doesn’t much care which. The truth is he has no wish to share his life story with anyone who wasn’t there to experience it, and those people are few and far between in recent years. He was born on the shortest day of the year - and one of the coldest. By the time he was born, the spring was a distant dream, though it was no more difficult for his family to survive the winter than it was in the spring. He lived to the joy of his family and his people. There simply weren’t enough people with samodiva blood left in their tribe to lose some to the frost. When puberty came and went, bringing with it the gifts his tribe so coveted, there were celebrations all around. It wasn’t unusual for people to ask a boon of him, an act he found peculiar given his inability to do anything more than muster a flame. Guardian, they called him. To them, this was enough and it was a sign of their changing fortunes. It would be nearly two decades before another samodiva was born to his people, and he was well into his adulthood, married to a woman by the name of Rissa, when his parents were blessed with another samodiva child: his younger sister, Tillie. His only sibling, and one he took under his wing from the day they introduced her. No siblings were closer than he and Tillie though nearly two decades separated them. When their mother died the following winter, Rissa and Charles brought her under the wing entirely, their own children nonexistent. When her powers blossomed, he taught her all he knew.
But when the pendulum swings one way, it must eventually fall, and he can tell you the exact day it changed: the first day of autumn in the year 1653 when his mother died. He could tell you little else about how, or why, only that his mother’s death marked the beginning of the end for his life with the tribe. His story veered off its allotted path when Tillie, in her grief, or her fear, fled from the tribe into the vast wilderness. It was several days before her disappearance was noted, and several more before he convinced the others to join him in a search. To them, she would return with time, but either instincts or providence nagged him to follow, and he was duty bound to finish his quest. The days fell one by one, autumn trading places with winter in the blink of an eye, and there was no sign of her. Resigned, and wary of the approaching winter, he and the others returned, though a raging storm thwarted their escape. It was here that he unlocked the full gifts of the samodiva - and it is a story he refuses to tell, short of that it was mercy that had him cutting someone’s life short in that snow drenched meadow. Suffice to say, when the snow thawed enough for them to travel, only half of their people returned to the tribe, and he was not among them. They held a letter for Rissa: in it, a promise to return, one he hoped to fulfill before long. Years passed, though, and perhaps those years are the fragile memories he cannot quite grasp, for he knows little of what he did with them short of searching for Tillie.
Many years have passed since then, and still he cannot tell you what he did in each of them. Fought in wars and skirmishes. Survived diseases and the stretching hand of death. He sent word home, and prayers too, though no response was ever brought back. It was nearly fifty years of traveling and searching that he came across the settlement of Zora in the backwoods of Quebec. While he hoped to find the answers to his quest and the location of his sister inside, he only found a group of scared supernatural people in search of safety. They didn’t seem to enjoy his arrival, thinking him human, though he was quick to make friends with the samodivi among them. He stayed with them for a time longer, and he keeps an ear out for his sister, traveling as a recruiter from time to time. A soldier whenever necessary, and a protector to them if they require it. Charles has traveled so long, though, and his weary bones long for rest. As the collective settles in New Orleans, Charles takes his chance, and settles in as the owner of Oddities Inn, a place on the edge of Zora and the human world. Some might think it selfish to give up before his quest is complete, and others might see is as well-deserved rest, but Charles? He isn’t sure what to think of it, only that Zora is loud, and boisterous, and it makes him crave the home and family he hasn’t seen in so long.
Alina Hennigar: friend and employee at the Oddities Inn.
Yohan Ernest: friend and employee at the Oddities Inn.
