"Interesting, isn't it?" If they'd realized who it was before the woman turned, they might not have even approached let alone do something so stupid as speak. The last time Hale saw her, they used a southern drawl and a different surname. Thankfully, they summoned the grace to not show the flash of panic on their face and instead offered an easy smile. "These Ivankov events seem to gather people from all sorts of backgrounds, and all of them are willing to play nice for an evening." @blccdmoon
It was almost like a reflex sometimes, a habit born of years spent using her magic to her advantage that now needed to be stifled lest she see something unfair or unpleasant. In this instance, she'd flicked ahead a few minutes in her head out of sheer boredom, only to see the one person she wasn't sure she could handle seeing tonight approach. Sure enough, fifteen minutes later she spotted him in the crowd and given her current position as the sole bartender covering while another took a break, she couldn't act on the childish impulse to hide just to avoid an interaction. "Did you know JB doesn't know what a quiche is?" she said as he neared, her lips twitching into a half smile. @blccdmoon
"It's actually my job to smile and be nice to you, you aren't special," the witch said, voice strained as she attempted to maintain at least a scrap of a bartender's expected stilted niceness. "Go flash your Rolex at someone who cares."
"Thirty minutes ago she ordered two flutes of champagne," Daphne said without looking up. The crowd at the bar finally thinned somewhat, allowing her to take her time with this last drink before she turned her attention fully to Rae. A long pause followed as she finished the drink and pushed it towards the waiting patron at Rae's side, her gaze unfocused while she worked. Once done, the witch rolled her shoulders before she continued. "You'll find her in about forty minutes," she continued, then grinned. "And there's a good chance she drank both flutes while looking for you. Sit a minute."
“—Uh, no thank you?” He held a hand up, stepped to the side to let the server pass him as he turned to the person next to him. “What the hell is a quiche?” And why was it ‘mini?’ He didn’t dare try anything being served around here that he couldn’t spell in a quick Google search and the crease between his brows proved all his confusion. “Is that French?”
Daphne had successfully avoided Dakota for much of the evening, a task somewhat complicated by the fact that she'd been tethered to the bar for most of it, but she'd still managed to spot both Zephyr as well as JB. A quick break found her mired in the crowd of party-goers, surrounded by people in suits and dresses while she herself wore a simple black outfit that identified her as staff for the evening. "Yes-- French--" she answered as she took a few steps to tail the passing server just long enough to swipe a pair of them from the tray. "I'm fucking starving," she added before eating one. "It's egg and pie crust with fillings--you might like it."
NAME: Safiye Başak
BIRTHDAY: 24 April 1992
ALIGNMENT: Chaotic Neutral
AGE: 31
SPECIES: Air Witch - Necromancy
FACECLAIM: Melisa Pamuk
Safiye can be resourceful, determined, and patient, but also selfish, manipulative, and deceptive.
☼ BIOGRAPHY ☼
Born in Çeşme, Turkiye to a witch couple of utterly average ability, and was placed thoroughly in her older brother's shadow almost immediately. He was naturally gifted--there wasn't much he couldn't do with ease and mastery of most things came with little effort. Safiye, on the other hand, required steady hard work to come even close to whatever her brother did without trying.
Her parents didn't mean to neglect her, but their son excelled in every task--magical and otherwise--and so in their pursuit of ensuring a place of esteem for their son, they often forgot Safiye existed. Birthdays were sometimes forgotten, and a solo walk home from school when they failed to meet her there happened a couple times a month.
Despite this, her brother was never unkind to her, a fact that only served to infuriate a temperamental little girl. Loneliness grew to resentment and bitterness, and when he finally left to do whatever it was that would make him More Amazing, Safiye thought perhaps finally her parents would do something other than fawn over him.
That didn't happen. Instead, Safiye was made to learn the family business, which involved the buying and selling of books both magical and mundane. Though numbers and organization were easy and interesting to her, her parents' insistence that this would be her life soured the activity to her.
Around age 20, she came across a bit of information in an old book her parents acquired that involved a ritual to funnel power to a witch who performed it. It wasn't so much instructions as it was a warning against such a thing, but Safiye was nonetheless intrigued. If she couldn't come by power so naturally as her brother, then she may as well take it for herself.
It took her two years to cobble together the ritual as well as the reagents needed to perform it. The resulting spell should have killed her, but instead resulted in demolishing half her childhood home and her expulsion from the family for performing such an abhorrent ritual.
With little more than what she could carry in a backpack, Safiye left home feeling lost and betrayed, but she soon realized that despite the destruction, something had changed about her magic. Her survival meant she was drawn to the trappings of death, and such things gave her power. Blood, sacrifice, and the dead themselves were now her domain.
Safiye's business knowledge and ability to work harder than anyone else eventually landed her with a small but successful magical bookstore in New York City. She doesn't willingly associate with the coven in power there and discovered most witches find her a little off-putting anyway. The ritual left a stain on her magic, one the magically sensitive often notice but aren't sure of the source.
Her bookstore doubles as a front for a successful smuggling business, one she doesn't discuss and and goes to great lengths to hide.
Caring for people doesn't come naturally given her upbringing and the difficult life she's lived since leaving Turkiye, and so she was a little blindsided when a shithead little witch by the name of Astraea bullied her way into her life and quickly became the most important thing in it. Safiye is not a particularly violent person--if only because clean up for such things is a lot of work--but if something happened to Rae, she'd burn the entire world to ash.
☼ EXTRA ☼
The ritual Safiye performed may have given her a wealth of incredible power, but it's not without its drawbacks. For one, where most witches have some sort of guidance in the form of elders or old grimoires, Safiye's magic is largely unknown territory--what she knows has been gleaned through hard work and experimentation, and it's not always successful.
In addition, where some witches might exhaust themselves with over-extending their abilities, getting too close to such a limit feels akin to burnout. She toes the line of her abilities carefully, quite sure that a step too far will result in her death.
A lot of usual spells don't particularly work for Safiye anymore, particularly when it comes to healing. From what she can tell, she's lost all ability to do such spells, even if she comes at them from an angle of blood or death magic. The spells either fail or backfire catastrophically. It's inconvenient, but Safiye is nothing if not careful.
The smuggling business is incredibly private and she's very secretive about it. She needs to trust the people with whom she does business, and after a lifetime of mistreatment from within her family and without, that trust doesn't come easily.
Vampires are not welcome in her shop. After a near-death experience in her mid-20s, she's been incredibly careful about vampires, and that includes an enchantment in her shop that makes it deeply unsettling for a vampire. At first it simply feels like an oppressive atmosphere, but as the vampire lingers, the enchantment will eventually incite pain akin to an aneurysm.
NAME: Daphne Burke
BIRTHDAY: 29 January 1989
ALIGNMENT: Chaotic Good
AGE: 34
SPECIES: Witch (Water + Precognition)
FACECLAIM: Natasha O'Keeffe
Daphne can be passionate, loyal, and imaginative, but also stubborn, rebellious, and unforgiving.
☼ BIOGRAPHY ☼
Dropped at a hospital in the Bronx when she was an infant and was immediately placed into foster care. Her foster parents were kind and patient but unfortunately not witches, which meant Daphne's burgeoning magical abilities were chalked up to coincidence or a trick of the eye. That on top of normal foster kid angst made her something of a difficult, rebellious child.
Once she figured out how to get a handle on her precognitive abilities, she used them to scam moron tourists out of their money with games or pickpocketing.
The leader of the Grimm werewolf pack picked up on her ability and offered her a place of protection among the pack in exchange for help using her magic. Daphne was 17 and in and out of shelters, so a little stability and a place among a community who knew about witches and other supernatural folk sounded like a dream. And to be fair, it was. The pack cared for her so long as she cared for them, and even now she thinks of them as her family above all others in the supernatural community despite the difference in both species and upbringing.
When the former alpha died and Zephyr assumed his role as new leader, one of Daphne's reads saved his life and helped him solidify his place as the pack's leader.
A little over two years ago, a particularly intense read of a situation for the pack ended abruptly in a seizure. It wasn't violent--she simply blacked out for a minute, frozen in place, the words describing a continuous read silent. This was the largest reaction to her ability that she'd ever experienced and completely blindsided her. Nose and ear bleeds, migraines, and physical and mental exhaustion were the only side effects until that point, and though she hides it well with an easy demeanor, it scared her.
The seizures have become more frequent, something she keeps to herself as much as possible so as not to worry the people she cares about, but there's patches of lost time an periods of confusion that follow even with less taxing reads.
If she ignores the problem it will go away. That's how that works, right?
☼ OTHER☼
Daphne's precognitive gift manifests mostly in the ability to predict the most probable outcome of a given scenario. It appeared when she was quite young; she doesn't ever remember not having it, though it took her quite some time to realize it was magic rather than a strong gut feeling about a situation. Most often, she'll read people just a minute or two in the future to decipher the most likely outcome of a conversation or a thought, giving her the appearance of someone with keen intuition rather than a seer's ability. She's the bartender who always knows what someone wants to drink!
Though she usually just taps her ability for immediate future situations, she can push it to see an outcome that may be hours or days away. The longer she must read or the farther away in time she must read, the more dangerous it is to her well being.
Precognitive dreams are very few and far between, but in her experience, they've been immovable, unlike her active magic predictions which simply see the most likely result given the current set of circumstances. She's had four total throughout her life.
Daphne's skills as a witch outside her precognitive ability and water elemental magic is self-taught, so she lags behind her fellow witches somewhat in terms of skill. She's always pleased to acquire a grimoire without an owner.
NAME: Hale Underwood
BIRTHDAY: 2 September 1842
ALIGNMENT: Chaotic Neutral
AGE: 182
SPECIES: Vampire
FACECLAIM: Brie Larson
Hale can be charming, meticulous, and resourceful, but also self-serving, callous, and arrogant.
☼ BIOGRAPHY ☼
Born to a wealthy family in Kensington near the beginning of the Victorian era.
Wanted for nothing where material possessions were concerned, but their lot in life was to make a good match, raise children, and otherwise live what they considered to be a terribly dull life. They married a sweet, boring boy and remained married to him until their early 30s, when a stranger offered them freedom from the gilded cage they viewed as their life.
The cost was their death, and their new life came with ravenous hunger that caused them to murder their husband in a fit of bloodlust and confusion. Their vampire parent abandoned them completely, apparently satisfied with sowing violence and chaos in someone who just wanted an outlet.
Hale almost decided dying was better than being a monster, but they stuck it out. Time allowed them the ability to reinvent themselves over and over, which grew to be something of a delight as they aged. They gave themselves a new name to go along with their new identity. As people their age died, so too did the memory of the person they'd been. Your deadname really is dead when no one is alive to remember it.
Wealthy society at least taught Hale how to read people and thus manipulate them effectively. Outside of what they'd been taught was necessary for a parent and manager of a household, they had no hard skills that translated to a job. Sewing and piano lessons made their fingers nimble, however, and that combined with a silver tongue and a talent for changing their appearance made them adept at theft both small and large.
They've traveled a lot throughout their life, spending most of their time in locations in the UK and France. New York is a comparatively recent endeavor, and though they've only spent a few years in the city, they're content to remain indefinitely.
☼ EXTRA ☼
Hale uses any pronouns. They don't care, and they're sort of delighted by how different people read them.
While a lot of their appearance changes, they've collected a lot of tattoos over the years. Full sleeves, hands, legs, ribcage, spine, feet. All over.
Though they're from Kensington, they sometimes change their accent when they move cities. People who have known them as a vampire from places other than NYC may have met Hale with a different name and vastly different accent. Currently they're using their natural accent!
Hale works as a bar manager for Kasandra Rosales at MAR.
location: ozdemir block party
tag: beck / @moravitris
The second Isra spotted the hunter, her blood ran cold and she rooted to the spot, unable to do anything but stare. She’d aged, of course, a silly thing to notice but one that struck her all the same. The same lean frame, the same sharp posture, the same icy expression Isra herself had come to master in time. But for all the time that had passed and the strength she’d grown into, the sight of this familiar hunter launched her backwards until she was seventeen again, alone and terrified with shattered hands and very little means to get herself somewhere safe. Once the fear subsided, that gripping horror gave way to seething anger, and before she knew it, she’d placed herself alongside the hunter at a makeshift bar set up near the center of the activity.
“Picked a fine time to move to the island--kidnappings and storms and all,” she said as she waved at the nearest drink vendor to order herself a beer. The heavy makeup covered her features nicely, and it did much the same for the scars on her hands. Admittedly the dulling of the magic within the area left her feeling a bit naked, but anger steeled her. “I don’t recognize you. Small community,” she continued nonchalantly.
for: isra siddiqui / @neverfalling
where: özdemir street party
While Afet has no love for mortals — and certainly none for werewolves — it so happens that sometimes there is no better place to be than amongst the crowd. With all the mayhem to befall recently, machinations of vicious intent that have left the island scrambling, Afet has been intent to sit back and observe in silence, to watch them all consume themselves. There’s a few that catch her eye, however, foxes masquerading as hens in the presence of guard dogs. Perhaps it’s curiosity, or boredom, or the always lingering thought at the back of the vampire’s head that interesting friends are always better to cultivate than enemies. Particularly the prettier ones. With a champagne flute in hand she glides across the concrete with a poise only one of the undead could possess, until she’s brought in front of the witch from the library. Suspected witch, though Afet’s pride is satisfied to see her estimation proven correct. “The storm has faired you well.” An observation, as dark eyes trail across the other woman’s form in appraisal. “Did you find what it was you sought after?”
It took fifteen minutes of pacing for Isra to enter the magic-free zone set up by the Ozdemirs and Whittakers. Internally she scolded herself for taking the time to do the makeup for her half-hearted costume only to decide against going, but the idea of being somewhere without her magic made her heat beat in her throat. The two days spent as a human made her skin crawl and to be without again, even for a few hours, seemed nearly an impossibility. Eventually, she forced herself to walk past the invisible barrier and to continue walking straight to the nearest alcohol vendor and bought something strong to keep her mind and hands occupied.
The sound of a familiar voice caught her attention and she turned, struck momentarily silent by the woman’s presence. Despite the protection charm that kept her magic still, vampire thundered in her head the second the other approached. She moved with a preternatural grace Isra could never hope to match in her lifetime, a knife as she moved easily through the crowd towards her. A few moments later she collected herself from stunned silence and canted her head back slightly, regarding the vampire with what she hoped was cool indifference--to reveal the unfamiliar gravitational tug she felt was akin to death. “Did you?” she said finally, then brought the drink to her lips and winced slightly. Strong, yes. Cheap and terrible, also yes.
Stray dirt shifts while a rock ticks over the earthen floor, drawn inward to Evangeline as all things were. Herself included. The gesture is familiar in the way that she imagines revisiting her former home might be. Dust on the window sills, a clothesline she ran through as a child. Haunting echoes of a life she couldn’t afford to remember paired with sentiment that was better left buried. So rarely was the witch willing to relinquish her iron grasp on magic, perfectly disciplined in a way that Beck used to appreciate, though exceptions are apparently still in the cards for one of them. She hums in affirmation as the other woman repeats her words back, remaining the picture of unfettered confidence–– as if the chase was hardly worth her energy, as if she’d always intended to wind up putting Ev down herself. It remained the farthest thing from the hunter’s actual intention, but why spoil their reunion? “Nothing,” that at least was the truth, “just watching you squirm.” There will be no winning if she harps on childish ploys, taunting and tugging at the other’s resolve when it brings her no satisfaction. “I’m not here for you.” Not tonight at least. “And you of all people should know I wouldn’t be stupid enough to kill a witch in a safe house full of them.” Then again, maybe they hadn’t known one another at all. If one could abandon the other so thoughtlessly and neither of them attempt to reunite in the years since… Perhaps it truly had been a pairing of convenience. Still, old habits die hard. “Might want to get that arm checked out before somebody takes advantage of it.”
As Beck continued to pick at an old wound with the precision granted by intimate familiarity, Evangeline’s strength and tolerance for ill-fated reunions wore thin. The pointed jab earned the hunter a mild blink in response, as though the witch had grown bored of the conversation. She’d never know Beck to be cruel, though she supposed fifteen years following the cataclysmic fall of their families and her own departure could do a lot to change someone. Or perhaps, she thought darkly, this was always the person at her side, and she’d merely been party to it.
A smile twitched briefly across the witch’s lips, a look of ironic interest rather than amusement before her expression turned to the controlled nothingness she’d spent her entire life perfecting. “I don’t know you,” she said finally, exhaling the breath she’d been holding. The hunter wouldn’t kill her. That she knew to be false, unless her estimation of Beck’s sense of duty proved wildly off the mark even given over a decade of time to change. If Evangeline deserved to die for her crimes, then what of Beck, whose sins mirrored her own? The mention of her shoulder, a strange act of almost-caring amid their near-hostile excuse for a conversation, distracted her enough to pull her from her thoughts.
“I don’t care,” she answered, and the exhaustion that blanketed every thought and action finally began to leech into her words. “And what would you care anyway--what have you ever cared.”
There was a fragility that shrouded the redhead, both in body and mind, a weakness that seeped from her pores. The stench was almost as nauseating as the idea of having a never ending stretch of time laid out before her, but the thing that really made her quake? Was the abrupt end of her life. Almost thirty years old and all she had to show for it were daddy issues, a God complex, and an extensive weapons collection. Evette never thought of much in terms of a list of things she wanted to do before she died, but she always figured she would have more time.
Her hourglass had run out and now she was left staring death in her smug face.
Fists clenched around the railing of the gazebo, watching the skin stretch over bone and joints as a scornful laugh was thrust from her chest. “ You murder people for sport. “ The words spat with a venom that mirrored the disgust on her features as she turned her full attention back towards the vampire. Her sire. “ You’re really out of you fucking mind if you think that people don’t need protection from the likes of you. “ Did the hunter agenda go beyond the protection of innocents? Depended on who you asked, but as long as creatures like Loveday roamed the streets, the mission of a hunter would never be done. The only question left was if she was going to commit the ultimate betrayal and add to the problem.
While the flicker of anger Evette felt distracted her from the pain that seared her throat, it did nothing to actually quell the hunger, something she was reminded of when the flask was pushed between them. Her head jerked with a quickness, something that certainly would have given her human form whiplash, and her lips pulled back, baring the shiny, new set of fangs. It was disgusting, the way she salivated at the metallic scent that filled the air, overpowering the smell of the storm that was rolling in. Overwhelming everything. To died, to die, to die. The choice should have been easy, but it wasn’t. She didn’t want to die, she may have deserved it, but she didn’t want to fade into an excruciating nothingness. To live. In a move that was the only form of self preservation the fledgling had offered to her, she lunged for the flask, palming the silver between her greedy hands before tipping it past the threshold of her lips.
Evette hovered in the strange place between life and death, an experience every vampire shared despite whatever sent them there in the first place. There in purgatory, all of them suffered the introduction to the bottomless hunger that would become a baseline for the rest of their lives, however long or short they might be following their stint in limbo. Loveday still remembered her own turning, though hers had gone differently than the hunter who agonized at her side. There were no saviors for people like her.
“I was murdered for sport,” she said, her chin dipping and eyebrows raising as she spoke. “And not by a vampire. Instead it was a man who simply wished to exert some measure of power over me--over the first person he saw--and did so with violence. A vampire saved me. Who’s to say it isn’t a gift?” Loveday paused, the Cheshire grin still on her lips. “I did kill you for fun though, you are correct.”
And then, in a startling and delightful display of both depravity and self preservation, the fledgling all but launched herself at the little flask, its silvery finish flashing in what little ambient light remained as the storm rolled in. The elder vampire laughed, surprised, and propped an elbow on the side of the gazebo as Evette tipped the container to empty it. A woman with a greater sense of responsibility might have taken the opportunity to now instruct her new progeny on the most efficient means of survival in her new immortal life, but where was the fun in that? Zelimir forced her to live two helpless, weak days as a mortal again, and now she would unleash a similar hell on the hunting community of Grand Manan.
“Fascinating,” she said as the woman finished the flask. “You should feel a little different soon--honestly I didn’t think you’d do it. I’d have put money on your pride winning, but I’m pleased to be incorrect.”
