Profile
A high society spinster in the late 1800s, and also a werehyena who devoured Jack the Ripper.
She refuses to marry, since in her experience it largely seems like a bad move. Unrelatedly, she's a closeted useless lesbian, who writes flowery things about women in her diary and then doesn't follow that thought through to its logical conclusion.
Outside of marriage, though, she knows the everyday utility of being in society's good graces, and she takes deliberate measures to keep her foot in there. It's an uphill battle in a time of wildly overt racism. She hosts banger dinners and even better dances, which she finds stressful and overwhelming, but which do the job they're meant to.
She smiles politely and infrequently, except for around the full moon, when a gleam enters her eye and she disappears to pace the lanes of Devil's Acre and Whitechapel. There are animal attacks sometimes, there in the slums: the victims both rich and poor, their last actions invariably to reveal a garotte or to pull a knife on a prostitute.
Sometimes, sometimes, Ada can transform at will, instead of at the mercy of the moon –– or perhaps she only convinces herself that one change or another was under her control, because that would mean a little of her stolen heritage has been returned to her.
She has two large, wiry dogs called Edward and Henry, you know, after the book by Stevenson. While they're around, it's easy to explain away any coarse brown hair found on the carpet.
HISTORY
Ada was born around 1865, to a couple whose marriage had caused no small amount of interest and scandal among their peers. Her father James was a wealthy doctor, moulded by the glory days of British empire, with a very Victorian interest in the strange and foreign, and an equally Victorian assumption that his country was the centre of the universe. He toured the world, bringing back medical and historical souvenirs from such widespread places as Egypt, America, and Japan. Her mother Atsede, meanwhile, was a sharp and clever and distant woman, a daughter of rebellion-torn Abyssinia. She took her chances marrying James and moving to England to escape constant war. She quickly realised, though, that despite his initial passion, her new husband saw her as little more than part of his collection, and she grew to despise him for it.
As parents, her father was domineering, and her mother private and angry. Atsede's life was one of loneliness and bottled resentment; she kept her head down and her mouth shut, and didn't talk about herself. When James told stories about his travels, he flattened them into something just foreign enough to tittilate his wealthy English friends. As a result, one entire half of Ada's ancestry is a puzzle which she has to put together from only a handful of pieces. It's hard not to be angry about that, especially in a society obsessed with long pedegrees.
When Atsede's own mother was pregnant with her, all signs pointed to her being born a boy. And maybe she should have been, because she shunned things young girls are supposed to like, begged to help at her father's forge, and inherited from him the magic power to transform into a hyena. She brought this power with her to England, as another part of her heritage that she had to suppress until the day when she no longer could.
James and Atsede both died when Ada was thirteen, in the same animal attack that left Ada's face scarred and something curdled up inside her. The newspapers at the time made a great deal of the story, speculating that the family's dog had lost its mind and turned on its owners. Young Ada was found huddled near the bodies: mauled, catatonic, and clutching a silver hat-pin. To this day she chooses not to elaborate on the story, nor to explain why her mother's fatal wound was not from biting or clawing but from stabbing.
From then on, Ada's care and education was handled by aunts and uncles via the considerable funds her father had left behind, at least until she was old enough to take control of them herself. She made a quick recovery in her body, but a slow recovery in her mood, and was left with a "weakened constitution" which caused the once-healthy child to retreat to bed with "fever" at least once a month.
Magic is governed heavily by time and by place and by belief. Atsede's power had begun to warp in the climate of England, enough that silver was suddenly a deadly weapon, and enough that it was her bite, not her blood, that passed the power to her daughter. Ada's version of it was at first unrecognisable: she transformed at the whim of the full moon, mindless and out of control.
Nuru, a stoic lady's-maid, who had accompanied Atsede out of Ethiopia and who knew about her late mistress's power, was Ada's saviour here. She trapped the werehyena in her room during her transformations, while she was still young and weak enough for that to be possible, and, month by violent month, she trained the girl. First, to not instinctually attack. Then, to understand some words. And then, gradually, building on that hook into conscious understanding, to retain at least most of her mind during each transformation. Nuru is old now, and infirm, at least in part thanks to the injuries she sustained before Ada learned to hold back. She lives with Ada still, not employed as a servant but honoured as an adopted grandmother.
Included in Ada's inheritance was a couple of tenement houses in the poorer parts of London, and at first they were just a number on an income sheet. It wasn't until she encountered one herself — in animal form, at night, flush and pleased with herself after saving some poor soul from a ruffian — that it really hit her how squalid and unfit these places were. It didn't take long for her to wonder what she was doing, if she saved some fallen woman from a killer only to send her running back to an unsafe and unsanitary den. So she began making improvements to the properties she owned, quietly: a little cleaner, a little better repair, a sturdy door on each room, a hot meal offered at night. Lately, she's purchased more tenements, and she's giving them the same treatment. If any of her peers ask, she doesn't breathe a word about it, or downplays it into some fashionable act of charity that doesn't challenge anyone's ideals. It's not as if they need to know.
POWERS
In classic were-creature tradition, Ada heals quickly, and silver is the only thing that will cause a serious wound or a scar –– but any wound, however inflicted, will persist between her two forms until it heals. She's strong, and fast, and bites like a crocodile. The legends say that a loved one calling her name and throwing her clothes onto her will change her back, but no-one's actually tried it yet, so she files that one under 'probably doesn't work'.
