Felicity

Name: Felicity

Basically: Felicity is a twenty-eight year old hawk shape shifter. For the past few years she’s been living in the city as a homeless, crazy beggar with her friends Dodie and Silas who frequently disappear for bouts of time. She's dirty and weird, almost scary. The town has tried to chase her out, but she comes back and doesn't really do much harm. Slave traders don't want her because they know that no one else will want her either. So she’s safe enough from them. She has a number of things wrong with her including schizophrenia, ADD, and short-term memory loss, as well as multiple defense mechanisms that she has built up. She’s one messed up cookie.

Appearance: Felicity used to be pretty but it's hard to say that about her now. She's been living on the streets of Patientia for years now and it has really affected her, mentally and physically. The first thing you notice about Felicityis the way she looks. Her clothes are tattered and assembled just from layered clothes that she collected and wears over each other. Clothes that used to be brightly colored are now dingy and grey with age and grime. She doesn’t discriminate between the genders—she wears pants when she finds a good pair.

Excluding the times she's fallen in horse troughs, basins of water, or puddles, she hasn't had a bath in years. Dirt either flakes off or falls off in clumps since she can't just wash it away. She has oily skin, blemished from years of uncleanness, scarred in places, and tanned by the sun. She's a nail-biter. She chews her dirty nails until practically all that's left are the cuticles and sometimes gets sick because of it--such as with a throat infection. Her teeth are terrible, though not as bad as they could be--she still has them, most of them--the important ones. She's strayed so far from where she used to be--mentally, physically, and spiritually--that she's not even interested in being clean anymore.

Her naturally red hair is so dirty now that it all looks brown. She usually leaves it down unless she happens to find something she can put in her hair, like a clip or a ribbon, or put on it, like a hat. There have been times she's wrapped it up with scarves. She has lice. It's absolutely awful when she's in her hawk form--since they spread through her feathers and feed on her like fleas. Sadly, she hasn't shifted in so long that she doesn't even know if she still can. Actually, she can shift, but partially. For instance, she might change her eyes into hawk eyes, or change her nose and mouth into a beak, or her feet into talons. She’s tried to create wings for herself but it’s impossible, she can’t remember how, or doesn’t have the energy; the skin her back might ripple or bulge but that’s the extent of it. Felice’s posture is very bad--she hunches. She spends her days rummaging through trash to find food, clothes, and anything else she can somehow use and sleeps where ever she can covered in whatever she can find.

Personality: The second thing you notice about Felice, unless she's in a crowd of people that look just like her, is her strange behavior. While she is usually kind and relatively competent when given simple, direct instructions, she's never entirely stable. Even on a good day she will simply converse back and forth with people who aren't really there for hours, sing bizarre songs, or mutter nonsensical things, periodically growing louder or quieter in her speech. It's on a bad day that you have to watch out for her. She will start to behave in an almost rabid way--which can mean a number of things--she might become particularly mellow and mope around town silently, or she might get restless and run around aimlessly, or she might frantically run up to people trying to get them to believe that their lives are in danger from one thing or another. She’s not usually aggressive unless she’s under great stress, rather she shrinks away from people if they try to hurt her.

But in general, she is a very nice person. Every once and a while it might start to seem like she’s actually intelligent. Maybe she used to be. But she’s so messed up these days that you have to doubt her sanity even when she seems sane. She used to have a pet rat, but she ate it soon after making friends with it, that makes her sad. She misses it a little.

History:  Felicity was taken from her mother when she was only two. A man bought her and gave her to his seven year old daughter, Amalie. She grew up like a doll, dressed up to suit the older girl's fancy. When Amalie got in trouble, it was Felicity who was punished for her mistakes. But after two years Amalie grew bored of her doll and Felicity was sold. An entertainer bought her, hoping to train her as part of his act. However, she didn't have the necessary concentration to learn and after two more years he gave up on her. After that, since she was still so young and supposedly impressionable enough to learn some kind of trade, she was bought by other people seeking to teach her. Finally she was officially declared a hopeless case and no one would buy her for that anymore. She went to the petting zoo where another man bought her after a couple of months to give to his daughter, Eleanor. Her life had come full circle. However, this time she was the older one. She enjoyed living there, having tea parties and singing songs to the little girl, even if she did get punished in Eleanor's stead, just like with Amalie. But when the girl was kidnapped she got the worst beating of her life and almost died.

She was then sold to a traveling slaver and put in the petting zoo again. But this time she was older, fourteen to be precise. She was developing a nice human figure, sure to please masters in the market for younger, petite girls. She had none of the exotic beauty of a tiger, but she had a slender form with mature features. She was pretty enough, for a hawk in human form. It was at this age that she was forced into bed for the first time. She had always been submissive, but for the first time in her life she truly fought back; it got her no where, just beaten and raped, mercilessly. Her fighting back and his feelings of control pleased him more. Even when something in her broke and she ceased to fight, he was very possessive, so when he grew bored of her, he still kept her around. That was when she was introduced to a new method of pleasing him—in a group.

She gave up on escaping from him, and thought repeatedly of doing whatever she could to make sex impossible, but refused to mutilate herself like that. But when her master’s house caught on fire and she was separated from her guards in the chaos, she took the chance to escape with a few others. They thought about going to the iron forest, but didn’t want to brave it. So they eventually wandered back to town.

Some of Felice’s friends were re-enslaved. The fear of it forced her to learn to shift completely into a human, erasing every hawk-like trait unless she felt safe enough to change a little bit. The rest of her friends died. The closest friend she had was Aleese, an older hawk shapeshifter who had looked out for her like a sister for years. She was beautiful and grown up, with a womanly figure that, when talking about humans, would drive men crazy. She was sad, but always clung to a hope of release. She didn’t enjoy living on the streets but appreciated the freedom. But by that time Felicity was already talking to people who weren’t there and screaming in her sleep. Aleese did everything she could to help her, until Felicity found her in alley one day, assaulted and murdered. From the looks of it, she’d fought back. Felicity rushed to her and tried to get her to wake up, but she wouldn’t. She started beating on her chest, screaming for her to wake up, and to be alright, not to leave her, but she’d gotten there to late. And no one else cared what happened to Aleese because she was just a homeless girl, and a runaway slave, which made her all the lower in their eyes. It broke Felice’s heart and made her angrier than she’d ever been. Then it turned to anger at Aleese. How could leave her alone like this? She said she would stay with her forever. She lied. She broke down sobbing and cried over the body until the next morning. She woke up lying on Aleese’s chest, nothing but shreds of cloth and cold skin beneath her. Bruises that she hadn’t seen before had appeared, she did make them? She broke down crying again, apologizing, and then gave her a funeral.

Since that day she has been living on her own. If you ask her she’ll tell you she’s got Silas and Dodie, two of the other slaves she’d escaped with who were now dead. She didn’t believe so however, because she’d never found the bodies. They came back to her one day and now they’re all living happily. But every once and a while they go away--they aren't her constant companions.