Post by Sati Beshara on Apr 22, 2012 17:11:45 GMT -5
✓►PLAYER◄[/b][/color]
Username: rodentfanatic (RF in the cbox)
Preferred method of contact: PM or cbox
How did you find us: butts butts butts
Codeword: BUTTS BUTTS BUTTS
✓►CHARACTER◄[/b][/color]
Name: Sati Beshara
Nicknames: None, really, though stoners inevitably call her Sativa
Date of birth/age: (like it says on the tin: date of birth and age)
Gender: Female
Sexuality: Straight
Job: Coffee-shop cashier at Mimir's Haunt
Human or shifter: Shifter
Appearance:
Played by Jasika Nicole but wears her hair in Cleopatra style braids bound with gold clips and her bangs in a choppy 'emo' fringe. At 135 pounds and 5’6, she is much taller than she feels. She is between slim and average, depending whose opinion you ask, her chest between small and average as well, and her hips the same, with nothing out of the ordinary, good or bad, about her body or face, save for that she looks younger than she really is, more around college kid age. She has golden skin, black hair, and brown eyes. Her heritage is South Asian, Ethiopian, Egyptian, Moroccan, and English, and she tends to be hard for most people to place racially appearance-wise. She gets taken for Latina, Middle Eastern, you name it.
The preferred colors in Sati's wardrobe are black, white, cream, shades of red (usually dark), berry/maroon/burgundy tones, and all shades of brown. She often wears layers, and doesn't mind (in fact, even rather likes) the fact that this can be uncomfortably warm in Miami. On top, it'll usually be something like a vest over a tank top over a ruffly blouse over a lace-sleeved something. Her bottoms are shorts or skirts over tights or tall socks/thigh-highs, which can range from semi-transparent black to thick dark red, but when she goes for pants, it's typically ladies trousers in vertical stripes or plain black. If it's hot enough that she's going barefoot, though, it's probably just a cami and some tweed shorts. Shoe-wise she wears boots (very plain, black or brown, rarely higher than mid-calf), simple flats, and sandals. Her makeup is minimal, save for some black (or sometimes red) eyeliner done in a cats-eye style. Most of her jewelry tends to be ethnic gold bangles or pieces with a Gothic undertone to them, and she always has on a pair of small gold hoop earrings.
Personality:
Despite her oddities, Sati is rarely the sort to stand out, and she likes it that way. She is an elusive and intelligent sort, and her natural mode of movement seems to be to slink or sneak. She isn’t deceptive, just merely an out of the way type. She is quiet in public, but smiles at anyone because that’s polite, and doesn’t stay totally silent around others for fear of seeming snobbish or isolating them. If she has an opinion, she’ll put it out there, but with very carefully chosen words, always thinking before she speaks, which can in fact sometimes help her more than if she just spat it out bluntly. Even with friends, she can be hard to read, her facial expressions, vocal tone, and body language giving away little. It could be that she’s deliberately hiding her emotions, but it’s more likely that this is in fact just how she is. When she does have something she wants to keep secret, she will conceal it with silence, but never actually lie. Sati values the truth, but has also seen the trouble that too much and/or too open honesty can stir up, and this also contributes her soft, self-censoring demeanor. She is very concerned about offending others, and always tries to see things from the perspective of others. That sounds trite, but it's true. Sati is a sympathetic girl, who always tries to keep it in mind (and in heart) that everyone else is a human being too, though she'll be the first to admit that, being human, she can't always succeed at this. It's very sad to her how often that people seem to forget that other people are people too. When it comes to interactions that she doesn't like, she becomes evasive, defensive, and even dismissive. She is particularly averse to flirtation.
While not charismatic in a flashy way, she is charming in her soft, sweet way, her submissiveness placating more power-concerned or dominant people. Her status as a lack of threat allows her to go places and know people that a more competitive or considerable person would, though of course her anonymity can also do the reverse as well. It depends. She does like this advantage, when it is an advantage, as she is actually more adventurous than anyone would guess…it’s just a timid sort of slipping around in strange alleys and seedy clubs (really, Sati, what *is* a girl like you doing in a place like this?) with alert eyes at night sort of adventurous rather than a go-getting guns-blazing chaaaarge type adventurer. Sati walks into territories she shouldn’t, not because she’s looking for trouble, but then…she seems to know that she could find it…so whose to say what her real motivations deep down are? She couldn’t tell you herself. Sati also elicits her social life passively, putting herself in places where others are likely to approach her whenever she feels the need for companionship. Sati does, however, also dare to make the first move if she can find a good precedent for it. She may not be able to just walk up to anyone for no apparent reason, but if you have a lovely pair of shoes she can start a conversation with a compliment towards them. Once she already knows someone, though, she can be, by her standards, downright bold in approaching them, running right up to them in public, regardless of what they’re already engaged in there, and be stuck at their side for the rest of the night.
Speaking of sticking to your side, Sati is faithful. Very, very faithful. She is firstly loyal to her family, not because they are close but on principle, because she feels strongly that she *should* be just *because* and she would lay down her life in a second for them because that is how family should be in her eyes. She does fret quite a bit over those she cares about, but not without good reason...just sometimes a bit much in proportion to that reason. Dutiful little thing, Sati is. So dutiful it could lead to her downfall one day quite easily were her immense faithfulness granted to the wrong side. Loyalty to the death means to the DEATH for her. And that's not her only trait that has potential for disaster either, and her other ones are more than mere good traits gone to dangerous potentials. Sati is maybe a little off, put it that way. She deals with living in a world that she finds to be disturbing, and at times even violent, by retreating in secluded spots and just basically getting lost in her own head for however long it takes her to heal from whatever blows that the day has dealt. She calls it meditation, but those who know about it are more likely to call it a form of catatonia, or at least creepy. She also tends to punish herself, sometimes because she feels she has done something that needs atoning for, sometimes because she thinks an injury will help her achieve something from others or make her appealing in some twisted way, and sometimes Just Because. This typically takes the form of self-denial (she has an uncanny ability to go for stretches of time eating very little) but she has showed an interest, at the very least, in burning herself as well. She probably isn't self-burning anymore, but she used to do it as a teen, and still feels the urge to pick up old habits again.
She likes raw silk, candles and bonfires, night-blooming flowers (especially Reina de la Noche), autumn (if only because her clothes are most suited to it), persimmons, walnuts, bilva fruit and bilva sharbat, and monochromatic drawings/paintings with a divided picture plane that combine physical landscapes with psychological ones. She dislikes overly strong-smelling oils (especially cedar and lavender), immoderation, ingratitude, the idea that just because a family isn't nuclear means that it's a "broken home", and whenever she lets the little things get to her. One of these "little things" is when people ask where she's from and then follow with "But where are you from ORIGINALLY?" after she says she was born right here in America. She doesn't mind being told that she's exotic-looking, but she finds it thoroughly irritating and racist that so many people think that she MUST be a foreigner just based on her looks alone. Another pet peeve of hers is this modern trend of apathy, the idea that chronic negativity is a sign of coolness and intelligence and that any sign of hope or happiness is lame and stupid. She just hates that attitude so much, because she's been sad and hopeless and it's not hip or fun. One of Sati's greatest fears is that she will once again become the unhappy girl she used to be. Another is that she will lose, drive away, or be abandoned by those she cares about. Mannequins with missing parts also freak her out; seeing these female figures without eyes or lips or legs just terrifies her on a deep psychological level, likely because she might see herself in their incompleteness.
Sati practices a fatalistic sort of optimism. Yes, what will be will be, so why get upset about it, why despair and make yourself all the more unhappy? If you are misfortunate and then become sad, then you are sad AND misfortunate and half is your own fault, and what is the point of that? To be a pessimist is to double all the blows of life, and life doesn't need the extra ammo. So stop whining. You don’t need to be happy if it’s such a huge inconvenience for you and your drama, but the negative attitude is ridiculous, myopic, selfish, and perverse in her eyes, not to mention really, really annoying to have to listen to/about. One last thing is that she never, ever gives up on her dreams and desires, and the magnitude of what she will do or allow to be done in order to get what she wants is truly exceptional, and not something most would expect from such a subdued sort of girl. Luckily there is nothing that she wants YET that would require terrible lengths and even more terrible consequences, but then, since her teen years she has had a sort of free-floating longing for a thing she cannot name…
Strengths:
+ Her body is much sturdier than it looks, and can soak up more damage than you would expect without caving. This is not from being a shifter, she was always this way. She is also a surprisingly vicious fighter if she is truly cornered, though she's not skilled in any way.
+ Loyalty, and determination that comes with it
+ Can go (within still-human limits) a long time without eating and has a high pain tolerance
+ Sympathetic to others
+ Hard to 'read' in terms of body language, tone of voice, etc.
+ Her way of being non-threatening gives her a certain charm to some and can work to her advantage in various ways
+ Spiritual
+ Good at staying concealed or out of the way
+ Really is doing a good job staying positive and keeping afloat
+ Shifter abilities, see appropriate section below
Weaknesses:
+ Her loyalty can really be as much a strength as a weakness---being loyal to the wrong person, putting loyalty ahead of her own safety or morals, etc.
+ Tendency towards self-punishment and unhealthy self-denial
+ Non-threatening manner can also make her read as a target to predatory folks
+ Regular recurring problems with cranial pressure, sensations of heat moving through her body, mild anxiety, depersonalization, and 'trance' states; she chalks this up to being side-effects of her depression medication
+ Really does have to make a conscious day-to-day effort against slipping back into a place where she'll be vulnerable to her depression again
+ Compelled frequently to walk alone at night, often in something of a fugue autopilot-ish state
+ Vulnerable
+ Since becoming a moth shifter, she now becomes entranced by light sources in otherwise dark or dim place, to the point of being unaware of her surroundings and deaf/blind to everything else going on around her until the light is either put out or someone pulls her away so that her gaze on it breaks
+ It's just really hard for her to get through the day sometimes, okay?
+ Sensory overload issues, see section on shifter abilities below
History:
Sati was the second child of Aziza and Ogbay Beshara, arriving five years after her brother Zahid had. However, before the girl was even born, Ogbay was found to be an illegal immigrant, and deported back to Africa, after which Aziza lost all contact with him. Prior to Sati's birth but after Ogbay's deportation, Aziza moved in with her Amazonian sister, Shakuntala, and it was between these two women that Zahid and Sati were raised. This was sufficient family for Sati to the point that she probably would not have questioned why she didn't have a father for many years, except that Zahid went and told her when she caught him crying about it one day. Naturally, the idea of a family member being yanked away by other people and sent somewhere far away where they were never heard from again was terrifying to a child's mind. Sati became convinced that this fate could befall any one of her family at any time, and tended to cling to them and be upset when one person went anywhere else without the others, concerned any time that they weren't all together and thus safe, as she was sure that straying from the herd was how "they" were able to "get" you. It took awhile before it was figured out just what was the source of little Sati's neurosis, and then it was still awhile before she was able to really understand the explanation they gave her regarding why her father had been sent away and why it couldn't happen to any of them. Even when she was old enough to understand it, she still couldn't shake her fear of coming home and finding everybody gone. Just because one knows something is impossible rationally doesn't mean that it isn't still going to prey on one's mind, especially if it's already been there for a good long time before rationality arrived.
Other than this, though, she went through childhood quite normally both in terms of what went on her life and what went on in her head. She got along normal to well with her peers, and was herself quite average, if on the quiet side, up until her teen years. when she became distant and withdrawn. As teens almost always tend to, she also became moody and discontent, perhaps to a somewhat greater degree than typical. No, not perhaps--definitely. She fell into a very pessimistic mindset, unable to focus on anything beyond the misery in life, and not only did it suck major balls just for that, but it took quite the toll on her social life, and thus her social development as well. While everyone else had packs of friends and were ‘experimenting’ with each other, she stayed in the dark of it all, literally and metaphorically, friendless and frigid. Not to mention her practice of burying the heads of lit matches and lighters into her arms, as well as taking up a minor marijuana habit. And given the type of style that she had started sporting, those who noticed her self-harming activities and depressed demeanor just let it go overlooked as a plea for attention or dismissed it with the assumption that she was just doing it as part of the fashion.
When things started getting worse, however, her family did realize what was going on and how serious it was, and they got her the best therapy that they could afford, and proper medication to supplement it. This took quite some time, and lasted through the years that most people attend college during. It also ended up costing the money that was supposed to have put her through college, so once she was through it all and able to function enough to go, she couldn't. Instead, she went straight into employment, but without a degree she was only able to get minimum-wage positions. She worked as a janitor at a corporation building, and once it was clear she was handling that alright, she began community college as well. After getting her two-year degree, she saved up enough to move out and get a place of her own. Relocating meant changing jobs, and she started custodial work at the Starbucks in a Borders bookstore. She worked there long enough to move up to cashier position, during which time the Versi outbreak happened and she became a moth shifter. When Borders closed down, she was left jobless. The fact that she was now a shifter made it difficult for her to find work again, but she was able to get the same position at the shifter-owned bookstore-and-coffee-shop Mimir's Haunt.
She's very much doing better now, but it's something she has to consciously maintain or she could relapse any time, despite that medication that makes it possible for her to stay afloat emotionally/mentally in the first place. What really turned her around, though, and what really keeps her going most, more than any external help that she got, was the longing that emerged in the midst of her depression. A burning, burning need to reach or find something. What, she has no idea, but now she has something to drive her, to live for, something that goes beyond the real world or brain chemistry or anything less than the very bit of her soul. And somehow, that gives her peace.
✓►SHIFTER◄[/b][/color]
Species: Luna Moth
Group: Insect
Conservation status: Least Concern; it is endangered in some areas, but not overall, and conservation efforts are rarely required on its behalf
Appearance:
Abilities:
Just as moths process scent through their antennae, the hair on Sati's head now does the same along with her nose. Her sense of smell isn't any better for it, though. As for her body hair, it now functions like the setae (sensory hair) that cover the entire body of a moth, and they give her information about her environment. Unfortunately, it's not information that her human brain can process or understand when she's not in moth form, and so she's had to take to waxing and shaving all over in order to avoid being overloaded with bizarre and unwanted sensory information. She can now, as moths do, navigate naturally by the moon and stars without having been taught. Her touch can sometimes cause lepidopterism to people with sensitive skin. As for the standard set of shifter abilities, Sati has had no improvement save for gaining a healing factor.
Username: rodentfanatic (RF in the cbox)
Preferred method of contact: PM or cbox
How did you find us: butts butts butts
Codeword: BUTTS BUTTS BUTTS
✓►CHARACTER◄[/b][/color]
Name: Sati Beshara
Nicknames: None, really, though stoners inevitably call her Sativa
Date of birth/age: (like it says on the tin: date of birth and age)
Gender: Female
Sexuality: Straight
Job: Coffee-shop cashier at Mimir's Haunt
Human or shifter: Shifter
Appearance:
Played by Jasika Nicole but wears her hair in Cleopatra style braids bound with gold clips and her bangs in a choppy 'emo' fringe. At 135 pounds and 5’6, she is much taller than she feels. She is between slim and average, depending whose opinion you ask, her chest between small and average as well, and her hips the same, with nothing out of the ordinary, good or bad, about her body or face, save for that she looks younger than she really is, more around college kid age. She has golden skin, black hair, and brown eyes. Her heritage is South Asian, Ethiopian, Egyptian, Moroccan, and English, and she tends to be hard for most people to place racially appearance-wise. She gets taken for Latina, Middle Eastern, you name it.
The preferred colors in Sati's wardrobe are black, white, cream, shades of red (usually dark), berry/maroon/burgundy tones, and all shades of brown. She often wears layers, and doesn't mind (in fact, even rather likes) the fact that this can be uncomfortably warm in Miami. On top, it'll usually be something like a vest over a tank top over a ruffly blouse over a lace-sleeved something. Her bottoms are shorts or skirts over tights or tall socks/thigh-highs, which can range from semi-transparent black to thick dark red, but when she goes for pants, it's typically ladies trousers in vertical stripes or plain black. If it's hot enough that she's going barefoot, though, it's probably just a cami and some tweed shorts. Shoe-wise she wears boots (very plain, black or brown, rarely higher than mid-calf), simple flats, and sandals. Her makeup is minimal, save for some black (or sometimes red) eyeliner done in a cats-eye style. Most of her jewelry tends to be ethnic gold bangles or pieces with a Gothic undertone to them, and she always has on a pair of small gold hoop earrings.
Personality:
Despite her oddities, Sati is rarely the sort to stand out, and she likes it that way. She is an elusive and intelligent sort, and her natural mode of movement seems to be to slink or sneak. She isn’t deceptive, just merely an out of the way type. She is quiet in public, but smiles at anyone because that’s polite, and doesn’t stay totally silent around others for fear of seeming snobbish or isolating them. If she has an opinion, she’ll put it out there, but with very carefully chosen words, always thinking before she speaks, which can in fact sometimes help her more than if she just spat it out bluntly. Even with friends, she can be hard to read, her facial expressions, vocal tone, and body language giving away little. It could be that she’s deliberately hiding her emotions, but it’s more likely that this is in fact just how she is. When she does have something she wants to keep secret, she will conceal it with silence, but never actually lie. Sati values the truth, but has also seen the trouble that too much and/or too open honesty can stir up, and this also contributes her soft, self-censoring demeanor. She is very concerned about offending others, and always tries to see things from the perspective of others. That sounds trite, but it's true. Sati is a sympathetic girl, who always tries to keep it in mind (and in heart) that everyone else is a human being too, though she'll be the first to admit that, being human, she can't always succeed at this. It's very sad to her how often that people seem to forget that other people are people too. When it comes to interactions that she doesn't like, she becomes evasive, defensive, and even dismissive. She is particularly averse to flirtation.
While not charismatic in a flashy way, she is charming in her soft, sweet way, her submissiveness placating more power-concerned or dominant people. Her status as a lack of threat allows her to go places and know people that a more competitive or considerable person would, though of course her anonymity can also do the reverse as well. It depends. She does like this advantage, when it is an advantage, as she is actually more adventurous than anyone would guess…it’s just a timid sort of slipping around in strange alleys and seedy clubs (really, Sati, what *is* a girl like you doing in a place like this?) with alert eyes at night sort of adventurous rather than a go-getting guns-blazing chaaaarge type adventurer. Sati walks into territories she shouldn’t, not because she’s looking for trouble, but then…she seems to know that she could find it…so whose to say what her real motivations deep down are? She couldn’t tell you herself. Sati also elicits her social life passively, putting herself in places where others are likely to approach her whenever she feels the need for companionship. Sati does, however, also dare to make the first move if she can find a good precedent for it. She may not be able to just walk up to anyone for no apparent reason, but if you have a lovely pair of shoes she can start a conversation with a compliment towards them. Once she already knows someone, though, she can be, by her standards, downright bold in approaching them, running right up to them in public, regardless of what they’re already engaged in there, and be stuck at their side for the rest of the night.
Speaking of sticking to your side, Sati is faithful. Very, very faithful. She is firstly loyal to her family, not because they are close but on principle, because she feels strongly that she *should* be just *because* and she would lay down her life in a second for them because that is how family should be in her eyes. She does fret quite a bit over those she cares about, but not without good reason...just sometimes a bit much in proportion to that reason. Dutiful little thing, Sati is. So dutiful it could lead to her downfall one day quite easily were her immense faithfulness granted to the wrong side. Loyalty to the death means to the DEATH for her. And that's not her only trait that has potential for disaster either, and her other ones are more than mere good traits gone to dangerous potentials. Sati is maybe a little off, put it that way. She deals with living in a world that she finds to be disturbing, and at times even violent, by retreating in secluded spots and just basically getting lost in her own head for however long it takes her to heal from whatever blows that the day has dealt. She calls it meditation, but those who know about it are more likely to call it a form of catatonia, or at least creepy. She also tends to punish herself, sometimes because she feels she has done something that needs atoning for, sometimes because she thinks an injury will help her achieve something from others or make her appealing in some twisted way, and sometimes Just Because. This typically takes the form of self-denial (she has an uncanny ability to go for stretches of time eating very little) but she has showed an interest, at the very least, in burning herself as well. She probably isn't self-burning anymore, but she used to do it as a teen, and still feels the urge to pick up old habits again.
She likes raw silk, candles and bonfires, night-blooming flowers (especially Reina de la Noche), autumn (if only because her clothes are most suited to it), persimmons, walnuts, bilva fruit and bilva sharbat, and monochromatic drawings/paintings with a divided picture plane that combine physical landscapes with psychological ones. She dislikes overly strong-smelling oils (especially cedar and lavender), immoderation, ingratitude, the idea that just because a family isn't nuclear means that it's a "broken home", and whenever she lets the little things get to her. One of these "little things" is when people ask where she's from and then follow with "But where are you from ORIGINALLY?" after she says she was born right here in America. She doesn't mind being told that she's exotic-looking, but she finds it thoroughly irritating and racist that so many people think that she MUST be a foreigner just based on her looks alone. Another pet peeve of hers is this modern trend of apathy, the idea that chronic negativity is a sign of coolness and intelligence and that any sign of hope or happiness is lame and stupid. She just hates that attitude so much, because she's been sad and hopeless and it's not hip or fun. One of Sati's greatest fears is that she will once again become the unhappy girl she used to be. Another is that she will lose, drive away, or be abandoned by those she cares about. Mannequins with missing parts also freak her out; seeing these female figures without eyes or lips or legs just terrifies her on a deep psychological level, likely because she might see herself in their incompleteness.
Sati practices a fatalistic sort of optimism. Yes, what will be will be, so why get upset about it, why despair and make yourself all the more unhappy? If you are misfortunate and then become sad, then you are sad AND misfortunate and half is your own fault, and what is the point of that? To be a pessimist is to double all the blows of life, and life doesn't need the extra ammo. So stop whining. You don’t need to be happy if it’s such a huge inconvenience for you and your drama, but the negative attitude is ridiculous, myopic, selfish, and perverse in her eyes, not to mention really, really annoying to have to listen to/about. One last thing is that she never, ever gives up on her dreams and desires, and the magnitude of what she will do or allow to be done in order to get what she wants is truly exceptional, and not something most would expect from such a subdued sort of girl. Luckily there is nothing that she wants YET that would require terrible lengths and even more terrible consequences, but then, since her teen years she has had a sort of free-floating longing for a thing she cannot name…
Strengths:
+ Her body is much sturdier than it looks, and can soak up more damage than you would expect without caving. This is not from being a shifter, she was always this way. She is also a surprisingly vicious fighter if she is truly cornered, though she's not skilled in any way.
+ Loyalty, and determination that comes with it
+ Can go (within still-human limits) a long time without eating and has a high pain tolerance
+ Sympathetic to others
+ Hard to 'read' in terms of body language, tone of voice, etc.
+ Her way of being non-threatening gives her a certain charm to some and can work to her advantage in various ways
+ Spiritual
+ Good at staying concealed or out of the way
+ Really is doing a good job staying positive and keeping afloat
+ Shifter abilities, see appropriate section below
Weaknesses:
+ Her loyalty can really be as much a strength as a weakness---being loyal to the wrong person, putting loyalty ahead of her own safety or morals, etc.
+ Tendency towards self-punishment and unhealthy self-denial
+ Non-threatening manner can also make her read as a target to predatory folks
+ Regular recurring problems with cranial pressure, sensations of heat moving through her body, mild anxiety, depersonalization, and 'trance' states; she chalks this up to being side-effects of her depression medication
+ Really does have to make a conscious day-to-day effort against slipping back into a place where she'll be vulnerable to her depression again
+ Compelled frequently to walk alone at night, often in something of a fugue autopilot-ish state
+ Vulnerable
+ Since becoming a moth shifter, she now becomes entranced by light sources in otherwise dark or dim place, to the point of being unaware of her surroundings and deaf/blind to everything else going on around her until the light is either put out or someone pulls her away so that her gaze on it breaks
+ It's just really hard for her to get through the day sometimes, okay?
+ Sensory overload issues, see section on shifter abilities below
History:
Sati was the second child of Aziza and Ogbay Beshara, arriving five years after her brother Zahid had. However, before the girl was even born, Ogbay was found to be an illegal immigrant, and deported back to Africa, after which Aziza lost all contact with him. Prior to Sati's birth but after Ogbay's deportation, Aziza moved in with her Amazonian sister, Shakuntala, and it was between these two women that Zahid and Sati were raised. This was sufficient family for Sati to the point that she probably would not have questioned why she didn't have a father for many years, except that Zahid went and told her when she caught him crying about it one day. Naturally, the idea of a family member being yanked away by other people and sent somewhere far away where they were never heard from again was terrifying to a child's mind. Sati became convinced that this fate could befall any one of her family at any time, and tended to cling to them and be upset when one person went anywhere else without the others, concerned any time that they weren't all together and thus safe, as she was sure that straying from the herd was how "they" were able to "get" you. It took awhile before it was figured out just what was the source of little Sati's neurosis, and then it was still awhile before she was able to really understand the explanation they gave her regarding why her father had been sent away and why it couldn't happen to any of them. Even when she was old enough to understand it, she still couldn't shake her fear of coming home and finding everybody gone. Just because one knows something is impossible rationally doesn't mean that it isn't still going to prey on one's mind, especially if it's already been there for a good long time before rationality arrived.
Other than this, though, she went through childhood quite normally both in terms of what went on her life and what went on in her head. She got along normal to well with her peers, and was herself quite average, if on the quiet side, up until her teen years. when she became distant and withdrawn. As teens almost always tend to, she also became moody and discontent, perhaps to a somewhat greater degree than typical. No, not perhaps--definitely. She fell into a very pessimistic mindset, unable to focus on anything beyond the misery in life, and not only did it suck major balls just for that, but it took quite the toll on her social life, and thus her social development as well. While everyone else had packs of friends and were ‘experimenting’ with each other, she stayed in the dark of it all, literally and metaphorically, friendless and frigid. Not to mention her practice of burying the heads of lit matches and lighters into her arms, as well as taking up a minor marijuana habit. And given the type of style that she had started sporting, those who noticed her self-harming activities and depressed demeanor just let it go overlooked as a plea for attention or dismissed it with the assumption that she was just doing it as part of the fashion.
When things started getting worse, however, her family did realize what was going on and how serious it was, and they got her the best therapy that they could afford, and proper medication to supplement it. This took quite some time, and lasted through the years that most people attend college during. It also ended up costing the money that was supposed to have put her through college, so once she was through it all and able to function enough to go, she couldn't. Instead, she went straight into employment, but without a degree she was only able to get minimum-wage positions. She worked as a janitor at a corporation building, and once it was clear she was handling that alright, she began community college as well. After getting her two-year degree, she saved up enough to move out and get a place of her own. Relocating meant changing jobs, and she started custodial work at the Starbucks in a Borders bookstore. She worked there long enough to move up to cashier position, during which time the Versi outbreak happened and she became a moth shifter. When Borders closed down, she was left jobless. The fact that she was now a shifter made it difficult for her to find work again, but she was able to get the same position at the shifter-owned bookstore-and-coffee-shop Mimir's Haunt.
She's very much doing better now, but it's something she has to consciously maintain or she could relapse any time, despite that medication that makes it possible for her to stay afloat emotionally/mentally in the first place. What really turned her around, though, and what really keeps her going most, more than any external help that she got, was the longing that emerged in the midst of her depression. A burning, burning need to reach or find something. What, she has no idea, but now she has something to drive her, to live for, something that goes beyond the real world or brain chemistry or anything less than the very bit of her soul. And somehow, that gives her peace.
✓►SHIFTER◄[/b][/color]
Species: Luna Moth
Group: Insect
Conservation status: Least Concern; it is endangered in some areas, but not overall, and conservation efforts are rarely required on its behalf
Appearance:
Abilities:
Just as moths process scent through their antennae, the hair on Sati's head now does the same along with her nose. Her sense of smell isn't any better for it, though. As for her body hair, it now functions like the setae (sensory hair) that cover the entire body of a moth, and they give her information about her environment. Unfortunately, it's not information that her human brain can process or understand when she's not in moth form, and so she's had to take to waxing and shaving all over in order to avoid being overloaded with bizarre and unwanted sensory information. She can now, as moths do, navigate naturally by the moon and stars without having been taught. Her touch can sometimes cause lepidopterism to people with sensitive skin. As for the standard set of shifter abilities, Sati has had no improvement save for gaining a healing factor.
