About

Stephanie is an infectiously charismatic and informal bird with a keen sense of humour. Indeed, humour is often central to many of her interactions with others; she loves to make other people laugh or smile. In situations wherein she might otherwise feel intimidated or nervous, she finds that deliberately attempting to be funny allows her to speak more confidently. Outwardly she will almost always come across as cheerful, curious and fun-loving. However, a flaw that Stephanie has is her inability to express negative emotion as much as she would like to; she knows this flaw of hers and is trying to change it, but it is a struggle. When she has an issue with someone or is otherwise upset, however gravely she is, she no longer possesses the courage she once had in order to give the relevent individual a piece of her mind. She tends to bottle up her most dire emotional and mental issues, out of sheer shame of what others might think of her for such problems. What other people think matters to Stephanie a lot, and she certainly doesn't think highly of herself in turn. As a result, she is very eager to please - something that, unfortunately, has been used against her a few times before.

Stephanie was born of the only egg in her particular clutch, into a close-knit community of harpies and their neighbours. Her particular family, The Gales, were primarily composed of what are known as 'Corvid Harpies', namely harpies who closely resemble and share many traits with birds such as crows, ravens and jays. Their family was not especially wealthy but neither were they exceptionally poor either. They were a modest flock who lived within their means and maintained close bonds with one another. While Stephanie was the only child of her clutch, she did have one sibling who had been born several years prior. This was her older brother, Jack - so-named upon hatching because, of all corvids, he most resembled the Jackdaw bird - and it was thanks to him that Stephanie suffered the most devastating blow to her mental health that she has ever endured.

Given he was her only direct blood-related sibling Stephanie thought very highly of her older brother. He was infrequently home and she was always happy to see him whenever he came back. As she approached adulthood she began to take up the job of Messenger and Courier so as to see more of the world around her and start to earn a living. However, as her travels took her to more and more places, she began to overhear things about her travelling sibling that not only came as a surprise to her but really gave her pause as to consider if he really was the idol to her that she'd thought of him as for all these years. Covertly, she began to investigate and make inquiries as to the stories she had been hearing, slowly building up a gruesome picture as to the reprehensible kind of man Jack really was. He was more hateful and more despicably toxic unto others than Stephanie could ever have expected. She could not confront him, however, as she felt as though she needed to see the sort of person he had become for himself. After all, there was every chance that she could have been misinformed or not heard the whole side of what he had partaken in. The next time Jack left home Stephanie followed at what she thought was a safe distance. What she was able to observe came as a terrible shock. Stephanie discovered that Jack had fallen in with a religiously toxic crowd, and had been working to suppress or be done with those whom said group saw as being against their beliefs in even the slightest way. She observed from a distance Jack's meeting with them for a while, but her flight back was interrupted when the returning Jack spotted her in turn and realised what she had just witnessed. He was both outraged that his younger sibling, someone who he viewed as beneath him, had the audacity to spy on him and could not allow her to return home to tell the rest of the flock. The two fought, and in the struggle Jack's talons caught Stephanie's eye. As a result of the fight Stephanie was left permanently blinded in said eye. Shocked, broken hearted and knowing she would be at least somewhat disfigured as a result of the encounter, Stephanie only just managed to make it home. The shock of the incident had left its mark on her mentally as well. For the longest time she shut herself away, refusing to travel for fear of encountering her brother who had gotten away as she knew now what he was both physically capable of and willing to do. She warned her family he had done it, but such was the fear of him he had left her with that she was not able to tell them what else she had learned that night.

The trauma left Stephanie a mere shell of the woman she once was for a very long time. Her self-esteem was brought down to rock-bottom levels, not because of how her blind eye physically looked but because of the memories it brought back for her when she caught sight of her reflection with her now only functioning eye. She felt a mix of shame for betraying her brother despite what he had done to her, outrage that a family member would do this to her, and fear that she might encounter him again. While those are issues she still carries with her to this day, she eventually found ways to at least outwardly cope. Most notably, she began to come back out of her self-imposed shell by latching onto her love of humour and using that as a way to rebuild the confidence she'd once possessed. Slowly but surely she began to dedicate herself to keeping her mind away from that which bothered her the most as much as physically possible. She had to reteach herself how to fly but once she had successfully done so, she eagerly dived right back into her work as a Messenger and Courier. She enjoyed her work and frequent travel, rarely if ever letting on that she was continuing to bury her head in the sand when it came to confronting the deepest issues of depression and post-traumatic stress that still continued to affect her. She did her best to stay brave and improve, though that has continued to be a struggle - especially as she knows her brother was not caught for his act, and there have been times when she's run into those he once knew and that were on his side.

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