» PLAYER INFORMATION
Player NAME: Hannah
Current AGE: 20
Personal JOURNAL: feilyn
IM & SERVICE: AIM - xfeilynx
Player PLURK: hannahcake
Current CHARACTERS: Kaidan Alenko, Katniss Everdeen, Ermillina Curtana

» CHARACTER INFORMATION
Character NAME: Rosaline ‘Lena’ Cardonell
Character PULL-POINT: Soon after she has agreed to look for her brother.
Character AGE: 19
Character ABILITIES:
- She has an affinity for animals. She can’t speak to them or anything, but they’re drawn to her, and like her.
- Swording! She rocks it
- She is also a mediocre blacksmith :’D
- She has a collection of charms and talismans with various effects. She’s protected from a lot of magic unless it’s particularly strong or underhanded, but there’s a limit on how much that one can be used. She can make certain things visible only to herself, and another charm prevents her from being tracked by most forms of tracking magic. There are also charms against disease and poisoning on there.

Character HISTORY:
Lena is from a world shaped entirely by magic. It's not a one-way relationship though - just as the magic shapes the people, the people shape the magic. Crossing the boundary between one kingdom and the next can be like stepping from one world into the next, depending on how different the cultures that formed them are.

Lena hails specifically from Orandin, aka fairytale land. While not everyone can use magic, it's still a part of everyday life. Everyone knows someone who knows someone who got turned into a donkey this one time. However, due to a few interesting coincidences centuries ago, most of the magic in this kingdom focuses on the royal family. Beauty and the Beast, Snow White, Cinderella, all of these stories are the reality that keeps befalling the royal family of Orandin - to which Lena (real name Rosaline Cardonell), is currently the sole heir.

Backing it up a bit, the fairytale that affected Lena’s parents was the Princess and the Frog. However, when the frog became a man again, he was unfortunately sterile, something that wasn’t discovered until quite a few years after he’d already married the princess. It was believed that this was due to the curse that had turned him into a frog and back again, but the truth was much simpler. A childhood friend of the princess, a powerful mage who had been expected to marry her, wasn’t happy with the situation. He cursed the man in the hope that the princess would eventually remarry.

Because the magic of the kingdom is so focussed on the royal family, there’s a widely held belief that if the royal family starts falling apart, so does the kingdom – and because the magic that shapes the kingdom is heavily influenced by the people within its boundaries, this is a very real possibility. Even once the truth became apparent, however, the princess – now queen – refused to give up the man she loved.

Just as the royal couple were starting to despair, they had a visit from a witch. Unbeknownst to them, the witch was actually the closest thing in the kingdom to the personification of magic, the woman in charge of creating fairy tales and delivering happy endings. She made them an offer; she would heal the king if they gave her their first born child. The couple agonised over this, but ultimately agreed – after all, they had the most powerful mages in the kingdom on their side. Surely their protections could foil one witch.

As it turned out, they couldn’t. The queen gave birth to a healthy baby boy, who disappeared from their lives only three days later. The couple was devastated, but the kingdom moved on. It was all par for the course, after all.

Two years later, enter Lena. Although the witch had said she only wanted the royal couple’s first born child, they had an irrational fear that she would come for their daughter, too. As such, protection after protection was layered over and around her, both magical and mundane. Growing up, she was confined almost entirely to the palace and its grounds, and she was never alone. Whenever she was allowed to venture out into the capitol, Loria, it was always under heavy guard and she was usually spelled to have a different face. As such, most of the kingdom has no idea what their princess really looks like.

Despite all the restrictions on her life, Lena was kept busy enough that she never really noticed how strange it was. She had no friends her own age, instead spending all her time with tutors and her parents. She started getting stir crazy when she was around ten, and a suggestion was made that she be allowed to take up some sort of weapons training in order to both help defend herself and to give her something of her own to focus on – most of the other things she learnt about had to do with her role as a princess. Learning swordplay, the weapon she chose, gave her an outlet and an interest that was just hers.

Seeing as she was a princess, she was still pretty young when the topic of marriage came up. Of course with the peculiarities of this royal family, marriages weren’t actually arranged until after the heir in question’s eighteenth birthday, just to be sure the magic of the kingdom didn’t find them a commoner to fall in love with. Still, the idea of getting married to a dude and living happily ever after was a strong theme in Lena’s life, and as she got older, she started to realise that she was definitely not okay with that. The happily ever after thing was okay, but the dude? The dude thing was going to be a problem.

Having no real friends, Lena struggled with her sexuality largely on her own. Because of the focus on happy endings in Orandin, romance between people of the same sex wasn’t unheard of. But it was the sort of thing that nobles, if they were so inclined, did on the side after they’d secured their family’s future. As Lena grew older and started to realise that there was really no escape for her ~duty, she started to get more and more bitter about the status quo – in particular, because it shouldn’t have even been her position in the first place. The usually cheery girl started scowling more and more, arguing with her parents about making the country be a democracy, throwing herself into her swordplay.

And then she started dodging her guards. At first it was just in little ways, but eventually she grew bolder until finally she escaped into the greater city. She was found immediately of course, but that didn’t stop her. Lena was on a mission, although she wasn’t all too sure what that mission was. At first her excursions were pointless, but on one particular occasion she managed to avoid her minders long enough to make her way into one of the city markets. Wandering around the stalls, one in particular caught her eye – unbeknownst to her, it was the witch who had taken her brother. The witch had her story to worry about, and she was concerned that someone would take advantage of Lena’s excursions to do some royal-napping of their own.

So she sold a number of protective talismans to the unsuspecting Lena, who thought she was just buying some cheap trinkets from a mediocre mage. But after that day, she found she was able to avoid her minders for as long as she wanted to, so long as they didn’t actually catch physical sight of her. Her parents constantly took her to task for this, but Lena was deep in the throes of teenage rebellion and didn’t care.

Eventually on one of her excursions, she met the daughter of some count’s chamberlain. This is where the name Lena came into play, her persona when she introduced herself to people in the city. The girl was only a few years older than her, and so Lena experienced her first real crush. As crushes go it went pretty well for her – the girl seemed to return it, and as time passed they went from sharing kisses to awkward fumbling in quiet corners. Her mood even picked up when she returned to the castle, but as she was spending increasing amounts of time away from home and protection and her duties, her parents were beginning to get more and more concerned.

Eventually, she discovered that they were planning on sending her to a more secure tower until her eighteenth birthday had passed and she had both calmed down and was no longer in danger from any witches. This was the breaking point for Lena. Just when everything had been starting to look up for her, this sent it all crashing down.

So she ran away. She left a note for her parents, but her choosing to do it on her 16th birthday meant that most people thought the witch had taken her as well, and her parents didn’t refute that. It took some planning, but Lena made her way to the port city of Sarnia, where she became a maid in a lady’s household.

Well, it was actually a lord’s household, but he was almost never there. For the first few months she tried keeping her head down, but the lady of the house was almost incorrigibly nosy, and kept prodding at her newest maid. Slowly but surely, Lena started to open up. Much to her surprised, the lady returned the favour. She had been in the house maybe six months when the woman first kissed her.

It was all downhill for Lena after that. She fell in love, hard, and for another six months lived in something akin to bliss. Lady Yvonne was in a loveless marriage, so Lena didn’t have much problem with the fact that she was cheating on her husband. It took the older woman a while, but eventually she admitted to Lena that she loved her. Lena, caught up in the romance of it all, whispered her true identity to the woman.

A week later, the guards came. Yvonne had her own future to think about, and it was her hope that rescuing the lost princess would gain her some prestige, some honour of her own outside of her husband. If things had gone especially well, perhaps Lena might have forgiven her, and she could have been mistress to a future queen.

Things didn’t go well, though. Lena escaped again before the guards could catch sight of her. Shaken and betrayed, she decided to leave the city – and all cities – entirely. Her talismans and the money she’d managed to take with her kept her safe and travelling for about a month until she stumbled across the village of Angevine. She was instantly of interest – they didn’t get a lot of travellers there, with the neighbouring village of Norraine being right on the main highway. She’d been intending to go further north, but kept putting off leaving. Two years later, she was apprenticed to the village blacksmith, and showing no signs of going anywhere.

She was just starting to think that maybe things would be okay, when the mage showed up. This woman, Adara, met her on the edge of the village and informed her (in front of her oblivious friend Derric) that she was here to rescue her from the witch. Some quick thinking and a lot lying sent the mage off on a wild goose chase, giving Lena a head’s start to go on the run again. Despite the fact that she’d been lying to him for two years, her friend Derric insisted on coming with her. Lena didn’t have time to argue, and agreed.

The two of them might have actually had a chance at getting away, if they hadn’t run into a troll in the middle of the forest. Whatever head start they had was lost in the fight and the recovery from it, and the mage caught up with them soon after. While Adara had been pleasant enough on their first meeting, she didn’t like being tricked – needless to say, her relationship with Lena didn’t get off to a fabulous start. She was on the verge of knocking our princess over the head and dragging her back to the capitol when Lena hit upon an idea. A deal. The mage would use her particular abilities to help Lena look for her brother. If they couldn’t find him in six months (she was negotiated down from a year), Lena would go back to the capitol and let the mage tell whatever story about her return that she wanted to.

The mage agreed. And then Lena ended up in Exsilium :’D

Character PERSONALITY:
Lena is really grumpy.

She wasn’t always that way. The princess of Orandin was a cheery child growing up, but experience hasn’t been all that kind to her over the past few years, and she has learnt the value of keeping her cards close to her chest. While she is confident in a lot of things – namely her abilities – she is more insecure about herself as a person.

Part of this stems from the fact that, no matter what her parents told her, she has always believed she was a replacement baby. That her brother had been the golden child, and she was the necessary back up, born to ensure the country had a future. She loves her parents, and she knows they love her in turn, but there’s always been a niggling doubt in the back of her mind that they love their lost son more. When she was a small child Lena would often turn to this mystical brother for help with her problems, but as she grew up she started to resent him more and more for not being there, for making her take his place, for not being as good as she perceived him to be. He’s taken on a sort of superhuman quality in her mind, and she holds herself up against this image as a way of goading herself into doing things – ‘Frederick would be able to do this’ etc.

That whole debacle with Lady Yvonne has resulted in her becoming incredibly closed off as a person. She’s incredibly defensive about people poking into her past – it’s clear to most people that she has some sort of secret, but she clings to it like a life raft. The only person in Angevine who still asks her about her past is her friend Derric, who mostly became her friend because he wouldn’t leave her alone. He’s the only person who can get away with asking questions about her past, mostly because her temper just rolls right off his back. She snaps at him, he makes a joke about it, and things settle down again. Most other people just back right off when Lena loses her temper at them, and she’s okay with that. Or at least, that’s what she tells herself.

The truth is that Lena is actually incredibly lonely, and she always has been. She misses her time in both Loria and Sarnia when she was pretending to be Lena rather than Rosaline the princess, because it’s the only time in her life when she was actually free to make friends and get to know people. And she enjoyed that a lot – she was once a very good people person with a sly sense of humour and a flirty nature once she got over her initial awkwardness. She had a sort of natural charisma and confidence that came from having been treated like an adult from a young age – no one had ever shut her down, so when she did finally start meeting people, she breezed through social interaction without a care, because she’d never experienced the negative consequences before.

She misses being that person, but she’s an incredibly goal-driven person, and can get sort of tunnel vision when she’s focussed on something. And right now, she’s focussed on not being a princess. She wants to live out the rest of her life in Angevine as a mediocre blacksmith, and she’ll fight tooth and nail to be allowed to do it. Lena is an incredibly determined, stubborn young woman who has long since been used to getting her own way about most things. And even though things haven’t gone well for her in the past few years, she’s still mostly managed to get her own way, really – she’s still free, hasn’t been dragged back to Loria yet. Adara the mage forcing her into the deal is the closest she’s ever come to being taken back, and it’s put the frighteners on her. She’s more determined now than ever to avoid her fate as a princess and make sure her life turns out the way that she wants it to.

She’s not completely humourless, but her humour tends to skew towards dry and sarcastic, deprecating comments that fit in well with her blacksmith master (who’s kind of an ass) and her friend Derric (who is a nice guy, but ridiculous). There’s a certain arrogance to her that she hasn’t quite been able to shake, and at the point she’s at right now she has difficulty in placing other people’s problems over her won. Deep down somewhere there’s a girl who loves her kingdom and really does want to do a good job as queen, and cares about her people, but right now? Right now she’s too busy focussing on Lena to pay much attention to that.

» EXSILIUM INFORMATION
Chosen WEAPON: A plain, unadorned sword. The only magical thing about it is that it can’t be used by anyone else – I think as time goes on this can change from people flat out not being able to pick it up, to them getting more and more intense burns until someone else touching it will get immolated, whoops.
Chosen SKILLSET: At the point she’s at, she’s a fighter. Maybe when she grows up a bit, she’ll be more for diplomacy.

» SAMPLES
First PERSON:
Here!
Third PERSON:

“I’m not going anywhere with you, much less Loria,” Lena replied tightly. It was hard to get the words out around the sick feeling crawling up her throat. There was nothing she could do to stop the mage if she chose to use force, after all.

Something like frustration flickered across Adara’s face, wiped away almost immediately. The gem topping her staff flared with a brief, bright light at Lena’s throat, the skin tingling beneath it. “Why?”

It was just one word, but it was enough to spark a hope in Lena. She didn’t doubt that the woman would take her to the Capitol even if her curiosity wasn’t sated, but for the time being it seemed that the mage was more interested in finding out why she wasn’t in Loria than in putting her back there.

“Do you want to remove the staff from my throat?” Lena shot back testily.

“Not really.” Nonetheless, the cool surface of the gem lifted from her collarbone. Adara set the staff in the ground, her hold on it deceptively casual. “Tell me why.”

“Why does it matter to you?” Now that the staff was gone, she could breathe a little easier. Lena didn’t like being scared, and her fear and unease began to process itself as anger. She took a step forward, wishing that she knew where her damn sword was. “What’s an Usran doing in the backwoods of Orandin searching for its long lost princess?”

“I’m asking the questions.” The woman’s expression didn’t change, but Lena could see the colour starting to rise in her cheeks. She stepped forward again, pushing her advantage.

“Oh, did I hit a nerve? You don’t like people pointing out what you really are, fishing about in your history?” Her hands clenched, unclenched. “I can’t relate.”

She wouldn’t have seen it if she hadn’t been looking for a reaction, but the woman’s hands shifted on her staff, grip tightening. From the corner of her eye, Lena could see Derric getting steadily more and more uncomfortable. Apparently he didn’t have that much faith in her method of dealing with adversaries.

“The difference,” Adara clipped out, “is that the only person I have to answer to is myself. You, on the other hand, have a duty to this kingdom—”

“This is bullshit,” Lena cut her off, unable to contain her fury. “You don’t somehow gain the right to interrogate me because of who my parents are. Being a princess doesn’t make me public property to be hauled about as you like!”

The woman remained unmoved, Lena could see it in the way she stood, the harsh lines of her body. Next to her, Derric started edging away. “No one gets to choose their parents. But as heir to the throne you have a responsibilities as well as rights.”

“I gave up those rights.” She didn’t care that she was yelling now, infuriated by the other woman’s words, her presence, everything about her. “Do you see me swanning about making demands and giving orders? I don’t want to be a princess, I don’t want any part of it! If that means spending the rest of my life as a mediocre blacksmith, I don’t care.”

Far from meeting Lena’s frustration with anger of her own, Adara’s face had reverted to inscrutable. Any ground that Lena had gained with her pointed comments before was now lost. “You can’t just give up your birthright. You are the heir to the throne of Orandin. The only heir.”

“Well that marks the first time anyone’s ever forgotten my brother,” she spat. “That isn’t my fault, and it’s not my problem.”

» ADDITIONAL NOTES
I have permission to app a fourth!