NAME. Lila Yıldırım AGE & BIRTH DATE. 32 & November 5th, 1988 GENDER & PRONOUNS. Female & She/Her SPECIES. Witch ( Water + Sensory Scrying ) OCCUPATION. Thief FACE CLAIM. Melisa Aslı Pamuk
BIOGRAPHY
( tw: death, murder ) When someone wears so many masks, eventually, the face underneath gets lost as they all start to run together. That’s who Lila Yıldırım is, a coalescent of different acts she’s put on, different names and roles and personalities, none any more real than the one before. If there’s anything left of the person the water witch used to be, she doesn’t know anymore. But hardly any of that matters, deemed useless to help her now, so it’s been discarded away along with every other identity she’s held over the years. Now, there is only Lila. But that isn’t the way that her life started.
First, there came Gulizar Candan into the world. She was the second child of a family of witches, born on the Anatolian side of Istanbul, near the Sea of Marmara. Though her older brother took after their mother’s fire element, Gulizar was her father’s daughter, and never felt more at home than when close to the sea. Perhaps that is where her story went wrong, from the very beginning. The home she was born into was not a happy one, the product of an arranged marriage between two people that hardly knew each other. While her mother had been eager to attempt to make the match work, her father had been in love with another woman, and resented the life he found himself in. His detachment was quiet and cold, rare to show affection to anyone in their household, not even his children. And one day, when he simply disappeared and never returned, she might’ve seen it coming all along.
Gulizar had been seven at the time. It was a change she handled remarkably well, for being such a young child. But the person who did not was her mother. She had become bitter and resentful over the years, and with her husband no longer around to as the fixation of her unhappiness, it was to her daughter that fell her ire. She was too much like her father, both in appearance and nature, and whenever the Candan matriarch looked upon her child, she only saw the man that had refused to even attempt to love her. She was not cruel to the girl, except only in her negligence. While her son had always been her favorite, due to their mutual element, such favoritism only increased with her husband out of the way. It was because of that, she found herself blind to any of his flaws.
But Gulizar saw them. Her brother had always frightened her, there was a wicked streak inside of him that had been there as long as she could remember, but with their father gone, he only became emboldened. There were accidents around the house, injuries that the young girl would need to see the local coven’s healer to fix, explained away with excuse after excuse from her mother’s lips. She wouldn’t see her son as a budding monster, even as his antics became more and more dangerous, to the point of nearly burning their house down. Demir was the golden child who could do no wrong, while Gulizar was the scapegoat, always at fault.
Because of this, the young girl began to spend less and less time at home. When wandering the streets of Istanbul was safer than the roof she had been born under, she learnt how to get by on her own, with sticky fingers and big sad eyes to bat at the adults around her. Still, it never became a matter of true survival until years later, when Gulizar was sixteen. She’d spent a long night out in the city, only to return home in the early morning hours. But something was… wrong. The house was half destroyed to fire, the smell of blood and ash in the air. Inside, she found her mother’s charred corpse, her brother standing nearby with his soul stained with dark magic. He’d reached out to the god of death, and offered their mother as sacrifice for the ritual, emerging the other side as a genasi. But he had no intentions of stopping there.
He wanted to test his new powers, and Gulizar happened to be the perfect, unfortunate guinea pig on which Demir’s sights were set. Though she tried to flee, he moved faster, grabbing a hold of her in his arms as his body turned into fire. The flames cooked against her skin where it connected, her screams filling the air surrounding them. It was only her magic that saved Gulizar, calling forth water from the kitchen sink to her aid. Though it wasn’t enough to completely douse her brother, it gave her the opportunity to pull away, her feet carrying her in a sprint towards the sea that offered her protection. Fortunately, he did not follow.
With what was left of her home now gone, she knew there was nothing left for her in Istanbul. And so the water witch made a run for it, out of the city and country entirely, landing in the UK before her feet finally halted. It was terrifying, truly out on her own for the first time, but her childhood antics came back to serve the teenager in her time of need. Adopting a new name, a step away from the past she didn’t want to remember, she became Serra Adanır. What first started as lifting wallets off the street, stealing enough money to put shelter over her head where no one would ask questions, quickly became a way of life. While her actions were done for survival in the beginning, it became clear to the water witch that she had a talent for such things. Her dark eyes could conceal dozens of secrets, bat innocently and pull in near anyone with her charm. She became good at reading people, at estimating what they wanted to see of her, and adjusting herself accordingly.
She was nineteen years old when she committed her first larger theft, already moved onto a new country. She was Giorgia by then, an Italian woman who conned her way into a villa by playing the role of mistress to a wealthy gentleman. He saw her as a pretty, lost young woman, with big innocent eyes and the need to be protected — with the benefit of sex as well, of course. It was a role that the witch found easy to play, but she had her sights set further, with no intentions to spend the rest of her life under a man’s thumb. So the young woman collected every piece of jewelry he gave her, everything of value in the villa, and pawned it all, right down to car he had loaned her to drive. Disappearing into the night, she was off with her newfound money and onto the next life, taking a new name just as easily as the last. If the man were to ever go looking, all there was to be found was a dead end.
Her travels took her across Europe for a time, running similar thefts and cons against anyone who caught her attention for too long, before the appeal of North America offered new prospects to the Turkish native. At first glance, she was not so easily identifiable, allowing her to blend in among the masses of larger cities. Her accent was a deliberate thing she fought to lose, adapting to the world around her with precision, always playing the role she had cast herself in.
As she got older, her thefts became more and more elaborate, with higher stakes on the line. Her specialty had developed long before, back when she was still a teenager, and only lent to her natural skills as a thief. She could reach into the minds of others, sliding inside like the backseat of a car, allowing herself to experience things the things that they went through. Though she could not steer, that was far beyond her ability, she could still see whatever her host did, and used it to her advantage with little hesitation — whether it was to case a place, or to become more familiar with her target. It made for an already good thief to become great, and nearly unstoppable. For a woman who had felt so little power in her own life for so long, she took a sense of satisfaction in the knowledge that through her cleverness she could make fools of arrogant men and women who considered themselves wise, that she could take something valued so highly with slick fingers. If she would not be given what she felt she deserved, then she would take it by force — whether by stealth or by smile.
But eventually, the price of such actions began to take a toll. She had been wearing so many masks for so long, the water witch began to lose sight of the woman beneath them before she ever even realized it. Gulizar was long gone, replaced with so many different names over the years, she hardly remembers half of them anymore. But even more than that, it felt as if she had become something fake. Pieces of herself, even small actions, she forgot whether it was something she truly enjoyed, or had been something she picked up in order to carry the character she portrayed with conviction. Though she would never admit to spiraling, anyone paying close enough attention, who knew the young woman for long enough, could see that she was slipping.
Perhaps matters were only made worse, then, by the time she made it to LA. It was meant to be the same as any other, a young man with bright eyes and a charming smile happened to own a painting that a client wanted for their own personal collection. So she took the name Dorothy Vale, flashed a charming smile, and weaved her way into his life. But the more time she spent around him, the more muddled her own feelings became. Letting emotions conflict with her targets was a rule that she never broke, and yet his sincerity and kindness managed to slip it’s way beneath her armor. It was not love — not on her side, no, though he professed as much of his own feelings. But it was something. Something that ate away at her insides, even as she gained access to the painting that was her goal. She could’ve stopped there; could have cancelled the arrangement, give in to the temptation of a normal life with someone that promised to love her. For a moment, she could almost envision it. Instead, she made the steal and took off running for her life.
It was too close, too much, and the feeling terrified Lila. So she kept to what she knew, even as it continued to consumed her whole. In the end, she had become a creature of habit, and to change that would be to split herself in half and go digging around for anything left of the girl she used to be before. That would mean confronting the demons that she had left behind in Istanbul, so long ago. So she buried it instead, as deep and as far back in the depths of her mind as she could, and hoped on a flight to Greece. Lila Yıldırım was born there, returning to her roots when so close to her home country. The fake passport and papers were all secured with ease, the same as all her identities before. Nothing that would ever make anyone look twice, so long as she did not give them reason to. Not unless she wanted them to.
There’s a lot of magic to be found in Corinth Bay, which means inevitably the chance for money to be made as well. Artifacts of the magical variety always carried a heftier price than other relics, even if the danger is also amplified. But such an idea does not bother Lila. Someone is always willing to pay to get it, without having to get their hands dirty themselves, and she needs the opportunity to get her head screwed on straight; to lean into this identity that she’s created instead of allow the past to swallow her whole. As with anywhere she lands, Lila has no intentions of making this a permanent residence. But she intends to make the most of the city and what it offers while she’s here, before it’s time to run again, with a bag full of cash and the next job on the horizon.
PERSONALITY
+ charismatic, disciplined, perceptive - conniving, apathetic, materialistic
PLAYED BY ABBY. CST. She/Her.
