Krista Kingsley

The Basics

Name: Krista Kingsley
Fae Name: Sir (Serisabeth)
Journal: Ladiesss
Race: Kithain (Fairy), Sluagh
Age: 17 (but her Fae soul has lived a very long time)
Height: 5'9"
Sexuality: Goth chicks.
Played by: Stick
Room: 206
Arrived: March 20th, 2012
Grimoire: Classy stuff.

Theme Music:
Krista: "Oh No!" by Marina & the Diamonds
Sir: "Shake It Out" by Forence + the Machine

Stats

Seeming: Wilder
Court: Unseelie
House: Unaffiliated

• Attributes
  • Physical - She's hilariously weak--only able to lug around about 20lbs at a time--and her reflexes are average, at best. Her overall health and stamina are outstanding however, and her relentless will to live is nearly unmatched.
  • Social - She's nothing special. She's agreeable enough, passable at being persuasive, and her appearance has nothing about it that'd really make her stand out in a crowd of like-minded teenagers.
  • Mental - She's exceptionally perceptive of the world around her, especially when it comes to the motives of others. She's fairly smart (with an IQ of 120~) and benefits from quick wits as well, making mental tasks her strongest field.

• Abilities
  • Talents - She has an uncanny knack for noticing things and staying alert to the world around her. She's also got a particular gift when it comes to finding other sources of magic. She has very little talent for combat, however, and is hilariously bad at acting intimidating.
  • Skills - Having grown up with two siblings, she has a very good understanding of how to sneak around unnoticed, even in poor conditions for sneaking. However, she's a novice in a lot of other fields--she has very little understanding of what to do in a fight, and don't ever, ever let her drive a car.
  • Knowledges - She has an expansive knowledge of fairy magic and lore, despite knowing very little about Kithain society, or even about her own Kith. She has a knack for remembering and piecing together details, helpful in getting around difficult problems or solving riddles.

• Arts
  • Primal (5)
    • Willow Whisper - This allows her to talk to anything, even things that can't talk. One catch is that she can only do so in a whisper, so it does not work well in loud places. The other catch is that some things that do not posses a sentient intelligence may not be very good at explaining things in a way a human could understand.
    • Eldritch Prime - She can make any of the five elements (fire, water, earth, air, wood) appear out of nowhere. Cannot appear in an unnatural or manufactured form; she can only create the raw elements themselves.
    • Oakenshield - This allows her to imbue anything (including herself) with the solid, protective essence of oak bark. This extra "armor" only works against magical and chimerical damage, however. It does nothing against physical damage.
    • Heather Balm/Holly Strike - This power works by reaching into something's imperfections. From there, Krista can choose to either fix it or break it further. It's commonly used on other people. Heather Balm may heal up a gash in someone's chest, while Holly Strike could be used to rip it open irreparably. So long as there is a present flaw, she can exploit it.
    • Elder Form - The most difficult of the Primal spells, she can give something another form for a varied amount of time. Turning a rock into a frog would be fairly easy. Turning a vampire into a lawn chair would be much more difficult. Turning a normal mortal into something is the hardest. She can also use this on herself, but depending on what form she takes, she may have trouble turning back.

• Realms
  • Actor (5) - She can cast magic on any person, from a good friend to a dire enemy, regardless of whether or not she knows their names.
  • Fae (5) - She can cast magic on anything magical, from monstrous beasts to little pieces of dross found out in the woods.
  • Nature (4) - She can use her magic to affect any organic matter, including animals. She can also affect natural occurrences such as the weather, earthquakes, etc. She cannot affect the individual base elements (such as water, earth, etc) that can be found in these things. She must target the whole.
  • Prop (4) - She can magically affect almost anything man-made, with her only boundaries being arcane artifacts so complex that she can't easily understand how their mechanisms work (examples given: TVs, computers).
  • Scene (2) - She can only use her magic to affect an area of about 200 square feet. Increasing the area affect of a spell makes it harder to cast.
  • Time (0) - She has no ability to delay her spells, which means that all of her magic happens the moment she completes her Bunk for it.

• Other
  • Quicksilver (Artifact) - An anklet with a jeweled spider on it. When she wears this, she can move at super-speed for three seconds at a time. It has no glamour cost, but she must be wearing the anklet for this to work.
  • Bone Keeper (Artifact) - A necklace of small bones. These bones all hold spare glamour, a lot like rechargeable batteries. Together, she holds an extra four points of glamour at a time.
  • Squirm - Because she is a Sluagh, she can dislocate all of her bones and wiggle into or out of almost anything. Because this is horrifying to watch, she cannot do this around normal mortals.
  • Sharpened Senses - Another birthright of the Sluagh is their clarity; their ability to perceive the world around them. Because of this, Krista can see through all illusion magic to varying degrees.
  • Curse of Silence - All Sluagh are quiet, but not always because they want to be. Because of her Kith, Krista cannot speak above a whisper, no matter how much she tries.

• Glamour
  • To cast one of her spells, Krista must perform a "Bunk", some kind of little ritual that makes the magic happen. The complexity of the Bunk depends on the complexity of what she's trying to do with her magic.
  • Krista can have up to ten points of glamour at a time, but only seven are permanent, or "fixed". She uses up glamour by:
    • Casting spells without a bunk.
    • Using magic around mortals.
    • Infusing glamour into other objects.
    • Using glamour to bolster the effect of her spells.
    • Glamour may be lost if she hangs out around strong "banality", or a mortal presence that doesn't believe in magic. The city, for example, will slowly drain away her glamour if she sticks around for too long.
  • If Krista's glamour drops to zero, she runs the risk of losing her Fae self and becoming just a normal human with no fairy memories. This can be fixed by exposing her to more glamour, but she would likely not be inclined to seek it out herself. Normally, Krista can regain glamour by:
    • Staying in a glade, a place where magical energy is naturally generated.
    • "Eating" dross, things that have been either naturally or synthetically infused with glamour.
    • "Ravaging", specifically exhausting the creativity in people, gets her glamour.
    • Inspiring and feeding off of people's dreams; being a Sluagh, she gains particularly from bad dreams and nightmares.

Appearance

Krista's Fae Maen; her true appearance.

As a human, she's tall, wispy, and only averagely gifted in the chest department. She looks frail and consistently sleep-deprived. Her narrow grey eyes are unremarkable and her clothes are nice, but usually plain and conservative. Her straight, black hair is often braided, tied back, or put up in clips. Her "style" edges towards blacks and lots of eye makeup. She's a fairly easy girl to ignore, especially with how she never seems to talk above a whisper.

While some people with an eye for magic can see it right off the bat, she can also change into her Fae appearance--she becomes even thinner and more angular, her cheeks sinking in. Her eyes are small and all-white, her mouth marked with lines that look like stitches (perhaps more out of humor than genuine symbolism). A band of darkness covers her eyes and smudges down her cheeks. Her neat hair undoes itself and becomes a messy tangle, reflecting her less-reserved nature. She's always dressed as if she's got a funeral to go to, and has a particular fondness for anything with webs or spiders on it.

Personality

Anton: Maybe it's like... the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Krista: The enemy of my enemy is still likely to shoot me in the face. Just saying.

She's the very definition of a jaded teenager, already snarky and world-weary at the age of seventeen. She's not all that great with being social, either stumbling through her interactions or acting tough and up-front about things to cover for her insecurity. She's sarcastic, she's straight-faced, and there's a good chance that she's already tired of your shit. All of her mother's overprotectiveness and her unhappy childhood has left her bitter, and she carries that bitterness wherever she goes; she's learned to turn this into something she can point at others, using her sharp and quiet rage to smother her fears.

Underneath all the drama is a very smart and talented girl who craves attention and validation. She wants someone to tell her she's good at something, and she wants to feel like she belongs somewhere. While she may be distant or a little hard to get along with in the beginning, she treasures her friends above all else. If you've managed to get her on your side, she will fight for you until her last, dying breath. That said--she'd rather not fight. She tends to work best from the sidelines, helping other people out or building off of what's already being done. She's definitely the brains-before-brawn type, using her knowledge to help her stronger, more battle-ready companions get an edge over the situation.

Her Wilder nature makes her rebellious, impulsive, and overconfident. She's a fairy with godlike magical powers, why should she listen to the rules? While her Unseelie nature hardly turns her into a bad guy, she has very few qualms about using less savory methods to get needed results. She very much believes that the ends justify the means. Her Sluagh nature makes her interested in things she doesn't need to know about; she's very curious, and that often gets her in trouble. If there's room for eavesdropping, you can bet that she'll be hiding around somewhere, listening in.

History

Krista was a normal girl stuck in a family of geniuses. Between her famously successful father, her prodigy older brother, her robot-building little sister, and her obsessively sheltering mother, she's always been under a lot of pressure to follow along and find her own success (within her family's narrow, business-oriented guidelines). But for some reason, that's never quite worked with her. Her mother has tried, time and time again, homeschooling her and sending her to child psychologists--but Krista has always been a bizarre opposite of the rest of her family. Quiet, distant, and completely disinterested with the world her parents laid out for her.

The problem was that Krista saw a different world than everyone else. Her world was full of make-believe and monsters and "secret whispering people". She dreamed up stories instead of studying history. She doodled her visions instead of paying attention to math lessons. Eventually her mother got fed up and sent her to a specialist; she started meeting with a counselor who put all that childish nonsense to rest. Krista didn't believe him, but eventually stopped talking and started lying so that her mother wouldn't make her go back to see him ever again. As time passed, she stopped thinking about it, too. Eventually she was just a normal girl. Still quiet, still disinterested, but at least she didn't still believe in her imaginary friends.

Hoping to help Krista build social skills and break her out of her introverted shell, her mother eventually sent her off to a very private, very Catholic high school. There on Bainbridge Island, just a ferry ride away from Seattle, her world was flipped upside-down. While she was largely antisocial the first year, she was finally out from under the ever-scrutinizing gaze of her mother and allowed to make her own choices. She stayed in the dorms, took classes that sounded interesting, stayed up as long as she wanted, and even eventually started making friends. She became particularly good friends with an unfortunately effeminate boy named Anton; they bonded quickly as two like-minded social outcasts.

At the start of her Junior year, though, things started getting weird. A few weeks before classes started, she woke up to see a completely different reflection in the mirror--that of a horrible, gaunt, bony thing that only resembled her in broad strokes. She started seeing things again, started hearing things. She started remembering things she hadn't actually done, and knew her name to be one she had never been called in her life. She noticed that some other people around the campus looked different too, and when she ran to Anton to try and get help, she realized that he looked different too--scary and nightmareish, just like her. When the orientation day came, even more strange people started showing up. The new gym teacher looked like a beautiful princess, the new headmaster was a blue giant, and one very young boy was--to their disbelief--a pig walking around on his hind legs like a person. All of them collected together and slowly realized that many of them had met before a long time ago, in some way or another. When strange things started happening around the school, it didn't take long for the half-dozen of them to band together and start piecing together that they were all newly awakened Kithain, all of them with different abilities and histories and baggage to match.

And that's when things really started picking up.

The second day in, Krista met a vampire who called himself "Harry". He was mostly irrational and probably insane, but Krista took a liking to him anyway. Problems with him were mostly minimal and swept up in a lot of other trouble. There were several attempts on the headmaster's life, stopped short on account of him being a Troll with ridiculous inhuman strength. The gym teacher got frequent threats and did her best to sweep in emotional drama on the side, while Anton had to deal with the antics of a girl who'd fallen in love with him--the catch being that the girl in question was actually a horrible spider monster. Between kidnapping attempts and occasional trouble from the PTA, it was hard to keep much attention on the trouble with Harry... But then things started getting really bad. They learned that Harry was stuck sharing his body with another soul named "Charles", who turned out to be one of the reasons behind all the trouble they were in. Krista was threatened, kidnapped, and even tortured by Charles to try and advance his mad plot to destroy the world, but in the end, our heroes were able to separate the two halves into different bodies. Now Charles was on the loose and on his own, but the group decided to take a day off to recuperate, collect up what they know, and come up with a plan of attack.

Two important things happened to Krista between Harry's introduction and Harry's eventual separation from his evil counterpart. The first was that Krista's little sister showed up, having... escaped from the special "school" she was left in to try and save her from the monsters around her. Krista was forced to tell her sister that they weren't monsters--they were her friends. She eventually admitted that she was one of them, and her sister didn't take it well; she went back to her school, swearing that one day she'd get rid of all of the monsters. Krista still doesn't want to know what her sister meant by that, but it proved one thing to her: she couldn't go back to her family, not after everything she'd been through. No human family would ever accept her for what she really was. The people who liked her and helped her at the school... Those friends were her family now.

The second important thing happened to her in the Dreaming. After the disaster with her younger sister and well after Harry'd started showing signs that he might be dangerous, Krista's patience for all this personal agenda bullshit was wearing thin. She was also starting to feel a little left out and unimportant, but not for anything anyone did on purpose. Her friends were all discovering their true Fae pasts, one by one. It was revealed to them that they were either a knight or a princess or a king cursed into animal form... But there Krista was, with no knowledge of her past self save for her true name. She was just a lowly little Sluagh, tagging along behind all the Kithain with grand, important pasts and histories. That was... until she found her old house.

She was leading the party through the Dreaming, looking for something, when she felt a familiar pull and followed it. It led to a tunnel that ended in a door, and she immediately started remembering things--the door was trapped, so she undid the mechanism. The immediate room was filled with stacks of boxes, but she knew what was in all of them. She knew where the stairs up would lead, and she knew what she would find if she went up there. When she opened a door and found the half-rotted, long-dead corpse slumped over in the bathroom, she remembered everything. She went downstairs to explain everything, but something fired at her from the door; she was shot in the shoulder, but the headmaster covered her and knocked the assailant off his feet. It was a man working for "James", the one who killed her last human incarnation--now rotting upstairs. Apparently, he'd come to kill her new form as well. After all that, after finally remembering, she didn't take it very well. She had the Troll pin him up to the wall, burned his arm to make herself feel better, and then told him to tell James that if he wanted her dead, he should come do it himself.

After that, she took a meat cleaver and chopped off his hand, intending to keep some of the bones as a prize and send the rest of the hand back to James as a little... warning. The man was promptly kicked out into Boston traffic and never heard from again, and no one really doubted her conviction again.

When the dust from all that settled and she had a chance to fix her shoulder, she explained what she learned. Her true self, Sir, is very old. She'd been around almost as long as there have been fairies in the mortal realm. Being a Sluagh, she never took well to living around other living things, much preferring the company of the dead. It became something of a self-appointed job of hers to go around to wherever people are dying and speak to ghosts who have not yet left the world. She speaks to those who were unloved in life, those who were rejected or abandoned or had no one around to speak with them in their last living moments. She wanted to be a last, nice thing for them before they moved on. She would listen to their stories when no one else could, and promised to remember each and every one of them. For many, especially those who died in wartime or during a time of sickness, she tried to grant their final requests and lay their bodies to rest the way they would prefer, whether that be a burial, a funeral, cremation, or just simply moving their corpse somewhere else. In return, she took something from their remains. Sometimes a button, some loose change, an old photograph from their wallet, a note that was in their pocket... but most often, she would take one of their bones. This is how she "kept" them and remembered them, and this is why she became known to other Kithain as the Bone Keeper. She brought all of those things to the very house they were in, and kept everything in those very boxes. While she was alive, Sir kept to herself and had a very quiet existence. But while she spoke mostly to the dead, she occasionally made a friend among the living, too. The only place she could ever be spotted in public was at funerals, because she went the funeral of each and every friend she ever made, humans and fairies alike.

Her latest end came when Sir learned something from a dead man that she shouldn't have, and Charles wanted the secret very, very badly. To keep it from falling into Charles' hands, James had Sir killed so that she wouldn't be able to tell him. From there, Sir's soul laid dormant in Krista, awakening again on that faithful day right before the start of the school year. Learning this has given Krista a sense of purpose and a new determination to stop Charles. Unfortunately, she was brought to Accord before she and her friends could make a move against him.

Extras

• She's a bottomless pit. She could eat for hours and still find room for desert. Because she is a Sluagh, she can even eat things that are too old or rotten for normal humans to eat, and can't help but take delight in grossing people out by it.
• Though she has an ancient soul, she can't remember much from her past lives. It all feels kind of like a dream she only sometimes remembers details from. The exception to this is when she looks at pieces of her bone collection, which help bring up more specific memories.
• She's mostly aware that she doesn't like boys and kind of likes girls, but overall, she's not that interested in relationships right now. Most of her focus is on figuring out her crazy fairy self first.