Post by Jessy Jackson on Sept 12, 2009 7:45:38 GMT -5
Referred by:Frannie, but five years ago.
Name:Jessica Jackson
Age:19
Race:Shapeshifter
Essentially, Jess is a human/demon hybrid, but this particular combination has been around so long it has gained its own name, just as the vampires did. And the two are very alike – demon blood, pure demon blood, mixed with a human’s at the dawn of time to create a race that looks like one, contains the other and, for all that they number many, accepted by neither. Shapeshifters, like vampires and werewolves, can be made through a blood turning, through a bite, but they can also be born, because shapeshifters, unlike vampires, are alive. Over millennia humanity has bled into them, and they are practically indistinguishable from humans. Those born are stronger than those turned, but not by much. Their powers are not infinite though – while animal and, to some extent, human forms are open to them, it always drains any shifter of considerable energy to take it on for the first time, and is exhausting if maintained by any, however experienced. The power of instinct is a danger too – insects are a no go, unless one wants to die suddenly after mating, or carry breadcrumbs, while simple bloodlust can take control too.
Gender: Female
DoB: 27th January 1990
Appearance: At five foot three, Jessica is hardly the tallest girl in the world, but she’s certainly not the shortest. She prefers to think she is erring on the lower side of middling, but only slightly. However, she often seems smaller than she really is, due to her tendency to bury her head in a book or stoop over a desk in school or the library, furiously writing her school assignments. Her posture is ram rod straight though, trying to emphasise what height she has.
She does however have rather long legs and arms for her height, often giving her the appearance of a young colt with legs too long to be able to stand up properly, or for those with less romantic minds, like a stick insect. Jess is not incredibly graceful either, pigeon toes and very slightly clumsy, adding to the resemblances. She’s rather skinny too, due to her naturally fast metabolism, sometimes mistaken for picky eating, something easily disabused by taking her out for a meal. She’ll eat a mountain of the least healthy food on the menu and grin a week later when she’s lost weight.
Jess inherited her father’s platinum blond hair which she has grown to just past her shoulders and has layered. Due to this, she can rarely tie it back completely with the result that when she wears it in a ponytail, the shortest bits hang around her face, irritating her beyond belief. She would pin it back with clips but she loses them so often she can’t buy new ones fast enough. Despite practicing, she hasn’t yet managed the hair flip that her friends who watched soaps would assure her she would encounter in America. However, she does know that her hair, combined with her complexion, gives her a slightly ethereal look, rather more Luna Lovegood than Pamela Anderson. She tried to get rid of this impression by acting incredibly down to earth whenever she meets someone for the first time, but it often remains in people’s minds.
Her complexion in rather pale, strange considering the balmy atmosphere of the south where she spent the first seventeen year of her life, but natural if you consider the incredibly amount of time she spent inside, reading whatever dusty, mythic tome she could get her hands on. If she did spend too much time in the sun, she’d turn bright pink and burn horribly. As it is, the reasonable amount of time she spends in the sun leaves a smattering of freckles over her shoulders and nose, giving her a firm girl next door look that her platinum hair can only just get rid of.
As for her features, well, they are in proportion. She is of the opinion that her nose is a little too long and that her top lip is slightly shapeless and her bottom one too big, but otherwise she’s pretty regular. Her eyes, if not large, are a pale shade of green, inherited from her mother. Being nineteen, she makes the most of this and has ten different shades of green eye shadow, not to mention mascara, eyeliners and a set of contacts. She also uses lip liner to add shape to her lips. The first time it happened, she looked like a vampire who’d just fed.
On the makeup front, well, it depends when you catch her. For school, it is generally subtle or just her going au natural. When she’s going out, not so much. Don’t get me wrong, she doesn’t slather it on like a thirteen year old experimenting with her friend’s/mother’s/sister’s makeup, but she can look pretty striking with her pale face and subtly enhanced eyes. She’s certainly not gothic though- after knowing what she does, looking like a vampire is not her dream.
Jess is generally pretty fine with her image, but there are a few things that bug her. Her nails won’t grow long enough to be considered nails and unlike the stiff, glamorously painted nails of Wonderland, Jessica’s are jagged from where she rips them, and also incredibly bendy and covered with milk spots. She has a tendency to chew on her hair a little when she’s very nervous or studying hard, leaving her with split ends a lot of the time. The final flaw that Jess notices is, well, her shape. Whilst being skinny is pretty much a gift from heaven, the resulting lack of curves is hardly amusing. Ok, so she’s reasonably developed for a nineteen year old, but Jess just doesn’t see it that way. She blames her mother, but since she barely ever sees her, the frosty shoulder she’s been receiving is not incredibly obvious.
Jessica’s clothing style is pretty much that of any teenager. Her mother offered her money to spend on designer clothing ever since she realised when Jessy was eight that she barely spent any time with her. Consequently, Jess went and bought half of the cheap and cheerful Primark on Oxford Street. Her parents couldn’t tell the difference. She owns nine pairs of jeans, all basically plain, all for under a fiver, all annoyingly well-fitting, which she layers over with checked shirts, braces and the odd blazer, playing up the Oklahoma heritage. Jewellery is a big no no with her, unless it comes down to a hunt, in which case she’ll wear a silver crucifix, just in case. She does, however, wear a watch, being a firm believer in punctuality. Often she sets it five minutes fast so that she arrives on time, with the result that she can sometimes be up to half an hour out. Jess keeps her watch with her at all time, having received it from her grandfather.
Of course, you may not notice this. When you meet her, she might look quite different. Four legs and furry different.
Drives:
She’s a teenager, what can I say? She has a vaguely enforced set of Christian values that instil a sense of right and wrong inside her that she wants to act on. Jess doesn’t have any tragedy, she’s just a bit ignored by her parents, whose attention she desperately wants. This does lead to her doing something drastic like all night hunts, or clubbing at late hours, but they barely notice. She’s an attention seeker, yeas, but not too much of one.
The strongest driving force for Jessica is her thirst for knowledge. Jess was a boffin before she ever changed, always studying that extra bit more to fully deserve that A*. She started reading incredibly early and never really stopped after that. However, ever since the first time she shifted in the sixth grade she has been questing for information, knowledge on where exactly her power comes from. Having discovered it partially, she cannot stop researching, buying heavy, dusty volumes from old occult shops tucked into corners.
Ultimately, Jess wants to understand how it all works. Not mechanically, like those creeps at the initiative, but literally. She wants to understand the balances that occupy and control the supernatural world. The balance between good and evil, the dead and the living, the soulless and the souled, not to mention the balance of normal life with demon fighting. Oh, it doesn’t seem logical on the surface, of course, but Jess is pretty sure there’s an order, and if not, well, in discovering that she would have found knowledge.
And here’s where we come to the root of it all. What it all boils down to. Jess wants to understand herself, understand the balance inside her between human teenager and primal, ancient, powerful demon. Where does her humanity end and her power begin? Can she ever truly control what she is, or will instinct always play a part? And will her power, wherever it came from, ultimately be good, or evil? Or just some shade of grey, darker than that of the rest of humanity?
Fears:
God, her fears. Truth be told, Jess’s fears go from a slight aversion to spiders crawling anywhere in her vicinity to the heart pounding world stopping pure moments of terror, those Macbeth Act V poor player moments, when life is put into more than perspective and suddenly seems so small and insignificant that she might just as easily be dead and no one, really, in the long term, would care, like so many other nameless faceless creations of humanity.
Most of her fears though fall into two categories: the perfectly sensible and the downright insane. The sensible fears surround her fear of death, vampires, abandonment (boyo, she had to get over than one pretty quick once the body toll started racking up) fire, which was a new fear she’d acquired. When she’d considered herself just plain human fire had never seemed something to be feared, just another element that man had mastered, used and then passed up on in favour of electricity. She had rather enjoyed fire, actually, the crackle, the raw heat and the flickering light conjuring up images of home and hearth that had been infinitely comforting. Now, however, the sight of flames stirred some animalistic instinct insider her to run, hide in quiet, damp darkness. Still, the fear isn’t all too insane, since fire is after all, well, fire.
The insane fears were perhaps a little more of a hindrance. I mean, a fear of vampires wasn’t very helpful when your unofficial job was to hunt down and kill them whilst doing the IB, but a fear of mechanical pencils because they had a huge spring inside them was very difficult to deal with during a maths lesson. Similarly, an aversion to flying insects, particularly stingers, made picnics more of a spectacle than a fun day out with friends and meant that a phone on vibrate could cause horrific screaming at any point, as well as a flailing of arms and a spinning that made her look like a whirling dervish.
Hopes:
Jess’s hopes would never win her Heroine of the Year or the Miss World competition. She doesn’t want world peace since she thinks it is completely impossible and unlikely in the grand scheme of things and hoping to find a cure for cancer is a little bit beyond this wannabe author, as is the solution to world hunger (her grand idea had been to share all the food and her grandfather had referred to her as the Commie in the family for the next six months.) No, Jess’s hopes were far more simple.
The main one was to graduate. Ok, not graduate, because face it, she could get hit by a bus tomorrow, be in a coma and she’d still wake up to graduate, Jess loves uni that much. She wants to graduate well, top really, and she wants people to know that she did. Hell, she might even spray paint her head if she got Valedictorian. It should be a snap but vampires demons and all the other crap running round LA now Angel’s gone, it’s getting a bit of a hassle.
There was of course the dream; A good job that paid well and left plenty of time to write from her large house outside of the city with beautiful gardens; An intellectual husband was a must have, preferably with horn rimmed glasses and an accent – she didn’t care what accent, as long as it wasn’t hers – and a passion for reading. Three children, two boys, one girl. It would be nice to live beyond twenty five as well, to get all that, and Jess is pretty determined to do so, but it’ll go down under hopes all the same.
Images:
Personality:
Jess is less shy than just plain un-noticeable, or at least she was in her old school, before her accent became a novel aspect of her, and she will no doubt be so again once the novelty wears off. There are people who can become so neutral, so part of the furniture that people will leave them to their own devices and never notice them unless they do something drastic. Then there are the people who are born like that, like it or not. Jess is, most unfortunately, one of the latter group. She may have helped someone with their homework a dozen times or more and she still won’t be recognised the next day, despite her distinctive appearance. It is just a fact of life for the nineteen year old, but she enjoys the irony, knowing that she can do things others can only dream of.
Due to her unfortunate intangibility Jess could have done one of two things. She could have chosen to be loud and outspoken, opinionated, rude, obnoxious and flirty, the traits which force an imprint onto people’s minds and create notice, if unwelcome, and bad publicity, or she could have become a quiet more introverted person, more interested in observing rather than participation in social matters. Naturally she chose the former. The latter struck her as rather boring and hardly fun when she might have only a few years left, something she had picked up from her Grandmother.
However, around so called ‘normal people’ Jess tends to exploit her un-notability – she doesn’t really want to make friends with a bunch of clueless Americans who could be killed like flies by whatever demon she takes on. Her more exuberant personality then is more often seen by her enemies, and others think her a loner, or even unpleasant – she doesn’t pull any verbal punches, of which she has many, and while she tries to refrain from it, violence has a tendency to leak in from her other life.
Despite being the loud type, if you try to talk to Jess, having discovered her latest cranny reading with a cup of coffee, you would find her as responsive as a stone wall. She’s about as sociable as Jack the Ripper when she’s reading, without the exciting homicidal maniac streak. Well, unless you interrupt her three pages before the end, then the homicidal maniac streak comes roaring up. People, especially people who interrupt her reading time, irk her. She’ll only reply in monosyllables that somehow still seem to convey her total and utter disgust at your presence at that particular moment in time, despite being only grunts.
You may have guessed, but if not, I’ll tell you straight; Jess is an academic. Her brain never stops whirring, analysing events, trying to understand every little detail in an attempt, if futile, to understand how the world around her worked. As a Shapeshifter the difference between humans and demons not only intrigues but frightens her, and still she will keep on endeavoring to find that line, that crucial point of difference that separates the them from us. She’s fascinated by words and numbers. She knows she’s more intelligent and more enthusiastic in using her intelligence than most people and though she doesn’t often lord it over people, she does like to add quotations or theories to any conversation she’s enticed into, just to prove her worth and, subconsciously, to enjoy the small amounts of fading respect the people around her will award her. Jess loves to learn. Her teachers know it, she knows it, heck, the whole class knows it. She’ll ask questions at the end of class, she’ll research essays for hours in the Library, getting pulled off on some tangent or another that makes it twice as long. The only limits to her length are the time she can spend on it, since she almost always has to stop to set off on a self-inflicted patrol.
Most of all, Jess understands that knowledge is not only power, but the hundred other things that feed into power – safety, confidence, ability, judgment, wisdom, fear and courage. Nothing can be judged independent of knowledge and so she sets a greater store in it than anything else. Jess will spend more time researching a new demon’s habits, whereabouts, weaknesses and methods than she’ll spend training to fight it. Sometimes this method pays off, and sometimes it doesn’t, especially when her information is outdated or her reflexes get caught up in calculations. Still, it’s her way and she’s sticking by it, for better or for worse.
Whilst Jess would love to fancy herself as thorough and brilliant as that most famous detective, Sherlock Holmes, observing all the miniscule paraphernalia that surrounded her, she would be, unfortunately, as observant as the incompetent Watson gone blind, if she didn’t have her powers. Since she often has her head in a book, she would barely notice anything unless it happened less than three feet away and involved an explosion, but the shifter inside gives her a greater sensitivity and quicker reflexes. If she is without a book, she will take time to study those around her, but mostly on this first glance, she will only see the obvious. She has a large vocabulary and a rather posh, well enunciated manner of speech, due to her very upper class upbringing and the fact that she has been reading fanatically since she was four years old. There is hardly a single photograph of her as a child where she doesn’t have a book in her hands or being wrestled out of them.
Learning doesn’t exclude the fun though. Jess wants to have the most fun she can possibly have, all the time. The idea of a quest for fun is pretty typical in teenagers, but in Jess it’s different. Her fun-life isn’t going to burnout quickly, and end in a drug fuelled motorcycle race or in a last, long, lethal binge. Jess wants a long happy life, with fun being a constant theme, and she can understand that the definition of fun changes with age. So while she enjoys a vodka and lemonade right now, that doesn’t mean she won’t like a gin and tonic when those G&T years come flying in. She certainly doesn’t hide from fun like her classmates expect her too, being Southern and geeky, or deliberately dis-involve herself with the social scene for that reason. She’ll join in games, have debates with classmates, even share a joke or two with a complete stranger, with only a hint of secrecy that has to be there when you’re a teenager fighting the forces of evil.
Summer is when Jess is really let loose on the world. It’s a shame really, that the one season where she becomes her most colourful, fun loving, talkative self is the one where she is away from uni, back home with no one to share her exuberant mood with. She’s almost a different person when the sun shines, all laughter and shouting, like a little child. Uni has something to do with this, of course – though she loves it, away from work and classes Jess has the energy to really throw herself into things, body and soul. Summer, with its long days also offers some refuge from her other responsibility. Who can feel afraid when the sun stays up, bright and shining, until well into the night, keeping the monsters at bay.
Jess crushes on people. It’s sad but true. Her little heart is always stretching out to someone, almost always someone who doesn’t notice her existence. It’s rather pathetic, since to date her affections have never been returned, but after a decent amount of time, she will give up, have some chocolate, and move on, always to someone who she has even less of a chance with. It doesn’t depress her, since, in a departure from her normally chatty self, she rarely talks to her crushes and thus never has a chance to be rejected.
But all in all, Jess’s a happy person. Jess is not introverted at all, but is one of those people that tend to get left on their own for no real reason. Her enthusiasm often endears her to people at first, but then frightens them a little as they see just how much she wants to accomplish in so little time. Jess is ambitious, like all the women in her family, but it’s a strange kind of ambition. It’s not for social graces and good connections and friends with holiday homes in the Bahamas like her mother, and it’s certainly not for a prominent position in the Government like her father, but just to enjoy herself and learn.
History:
Born to farming parents on the 27th of January, 1990, Jess for the first few years of her life was a perfectly normal, if excitable little girl. She enjoyed the freedom of living on a ranch but also the loneliness – she had one best friend, Rory, and no others. She rode horses pretty well, though not as well as her mother would have liked, preferring not to push the large peaceful creatures harder than Jess imagined they wanted to go. Even then she had a special connection with animals, a sense that she understood them more than most humans and visa versa. As her relationship with her family deteriorated as she grew older and less of a novelty, her communication with animals, though merely imaginary at that point, grew stronger until she was more happy in the company of her old cat than her mother.
The big change happened when she was seven. Her mother, never the maternal type, abandoned her small family for a millionaire riding through one day. They were never the same. Jess loved her father, dearly, but even that couldn’t stop the man taking to the bottle. If Jess took the odd slap now and again, it was repaid with grovelling apologies the next day, but nothing could stop the two growing apart. By the time she was sixteen, her family was gone and two strangers left in its place.
That wasn’t her biggest problem though – no, when she was thirteen a slightly bigger one emerged. One night, on her way home from a friend’s, something leapt out at her. Something that was not animal, or vegetable, or mineral and most certainly not human. Had Jess been living in a typical horror film, which considering the gothic mansion in the background, was not wholly unlikely, it would have been the end for the child, but luckily for her, it wasn’t. Blood kicked in, blood that had been lost for generations of her mother’s side but came back with a vengeance in her, and she had her first transformation into a long dark panther that had ripped the stuffing out of what she later learned was a vampire.
Life changed then, though Jess seemed pretty much the same girl. Her father, caught up already in his own problems and concerns, didn’t notice that she stayed out later, healed faster but also gained more bruises than would seem plausible. For a while her schoolwork fluctuated away from her norm but it was attributed to stress and natural nerves about starting a new school or going on to a new stage of life. The area was pretty quiet anyway, not an epicenter of evils of all sorts.
For college she decided she had to get out. perhaps by leaving, she would shock her father into realising the reality of his life, but she doubted it. Her mother and her new step father, though they never actually came to see her, were more than happy to support her through uni if it meant she stayed away from their new life, and Jess was happy to oblige. Harvard gave her an offer, but in the end she had to turn it down in favour of UCLA – duty called, and when the dragon flew out into the streets Jess knew that LA needed her help.
Name:Jessica Jackson
Age:19
Race:Shapeshifter
Essentially, Jess is a human/demon hybrid, but this particular combination has been around so long it has gained its own name, just as the vampires did. And the two are very alike – demon blood, pure demon blood, mixed with a human’s at the dawn of time to create a race that looks like one, contains the other and, for all that they number many, accepted by neither. Shapeshifters, like vampires and werewolves, can be made through a blood turning, through a bite, but they can also be born, because shapeshifters, unlike vampires, are alive. Over millennia humanity has bled into them, and they are practically indistinguishable from humans. Those born are stronger than those turned, but not by much. Their powers are not infinite though – while animal and, to some extent, human forms are open to them, it always drains any shifter of considerable energy to take it on for the first time, and is exhausting if maintained by any, however experienced. The power of instinct is a danger too – insects are a no go, unless one wants to die suddenly after mating, or carry breadcrumbs, while simple bloodlust can take control too.
Gender: Female
DoB: 27th January 1990
Appearance: At five foot three, Jessica is hardly the tallest girl in the world, but she’s certainly not the shortest. She prefers to think she is erring on the lower side of middling, but only slightly. However, she often seems smaller than she really is, due to her tendency to bury her head in a book or stoop over a desk in school or the library, furiously writing her school assignments. Her posture is ram rod straight though, trying to emphasise what height she has.
She does however have rather long legs and arms for her height, often giving her the appearance of a young colt with legs too long to be able to stand up properly, or for those with less romantic minds, like a stick insect. Jess is not incredibly graceful either, pigeon toes and very slightly clumsy, adding to the resemblances. She’s rather skinny too, due to her naturally fast metabolism, sometimes mistaken for picky eating, something easily disabused by taking her out for a meal. She’ll eat a mountain of the least healthy food on the menu and grin a week later when she’s lost weight.
Jess inherited her father’s platinum blond hair which she has grown to just past her shoulders and has layered. Due to this, she can rarely tie it back completely with the result that when she wears it in a ponytail, the shortest bits hang around her face, irritating her beyond belief. She would pin it back with clips but she loses them so often she can’t buy new ones fast enough. Despite practicing, she hasn’t yet managed the hair flip that her friends who watched soaps would assure her she would encounter in America. However, she does know that her hair, combined with her complexion, gives her a slightly ethereal look, rather more Luna Lovegood than Pamela Anderson. She tried to get rid of this impression by acting incredibly down to earth whenever she meets someone for the first time, but it often remains in people’s minds.
Her complexion in rather pale, strange considering the balmy atmosphere of the south where she spent the first seventeen year of her life, but natural if you consider the incredibly amount of time she spent inside, reading whatever dusty, mythic tome she could get her hands on. If she did spend too much time in the sun, she’d turn bright pink and burn horribly. As it is, the reasonable amount of time she spends in the sun leaves a smattering of freckles over her shoulders and nose, giving her a firm girl next door look that her platinum hair can only just get rid of.
As for her features, well, they are in proportion. She is of the opinion that her nose is a little too long and that her top lip is slightly shapeless and her bottom one too big, but otherwise she’s pretty regular. Her eyes, if not large, are a pale shade of green, inherited from her mother. Being nineteen, she makes the most of this and has ten different shades of green eye shadow, not to mention mascara, eyeliners and a set of contacts. She also uses lip liner to add shape to her lips. The first time it happened, she looked like a vampire who’d just fed.
On the makeup front, well, it depends when you catch her. For school, it is generally subtle or just her going au natural. When she’s going out, not so much. Don’t get me wrong, she doesn’t slather it on like a thirteen year old experimenting with her friend’s/mother’s/sister’s makeup, but she can look pretty striking with her pale face and subtly enhanced eyes. She’s certainly not gothic though- after knowing what she does, looking like a vampire is not her dream.
Jess is generally pretty fine with her image, but there are a few things that bug her. Her nails won’t grow long enough to be considered nails and unlike the stiff, glamorously painted nails of Wonderland, Jessica’s are jagged from where she rips them, and also incredibly bendy and covered with milk spots. She has a tendency to chew on her hair a little when she’s very nervous or studying hard, leaving her with split ends a lot of the time. The final flaw that Jess notices is, well, her shape. Whilst being skinny is pretty much a gift from heaven, the resulting lack of curves is hardly amusing. Ok, so she’s reasonably developed for a nineteen year old, but Jess just doesn’t see it that way. She blames her mother, but since she barely ever sees her, the frosty shoulder she’s been receiving is not incredibly obvious.
Jessica’s clothing style is pretty much that of any teenager. Her mother offered her money to spend on designer clothing ever since she realised when Jessy was eight that she barely spent any time with her. Consequently, Jess went and bought half of the cheap and cheerful Primark on Oxford Street. Her parents couldn’t tell the difference. She owns nine pairs of jeans, all basically plain, all for under a fiver, all annoyingly well-fitting, which she layers over with checked shirts, braces and the odd blazer, playing up the Oklahoma heritage. Jewellery is a big no no with her, unless it comes down to a hunt, in which case she’ll wear a silver crucifix, just in case. She does, however, wear a watch, being a firm believer in punctuality. Often she sets it five minutes fast so that she arrives on time, with the result that she can sometimes be up to half an hour out. Jess keeps her watch with her at all time, having received it from her grandfather.
Of course, you may not notice this. When you meet her, she might look quite different. Four legs and furry different.
Drives:
She’s a teenager, what can I say? She has a vaguely enforced set of Christian values that instil a sense of right and wrong inside her that she wants to act on. Jess doesn’t have any tragedy, she’s just a bit ignored by her parents, whose attention she desperately wants. This does lead to her doing something drastic like all night hunts, or clubbing at late hours, but they barely notice. She’s an attention seeker, yeas, but not too much of one.
The strongest driving force for Jessica is her thirst for knowledge. Jess was a boffin before she ever changed, always studying that extra bit more to fully deserve that A*. She started reading incredibly early and never really stopped after that. However, ever since the first time she shifted in the sixth grade she has been questing for information, knowledge on where exactly her power comes from. Having discovered it partially, she cannot stop researching, buying heavy, dusty volumes from old occult shops tucked into corners.
Ultimately, Jess wants to understand how it all works. Not mechanically, like those creeps at the initiative, but literally. She wants to understand the balances that occupy and control the supernatural world. The balance between good and evil, the dead and the living, the soulless and the souled, not to mention the balance of normal life with demon fighting. Oh, it doesn’t seem logical on the surface, of course, but Jess is pretty sure there’s an order, and if not, well, in discovering that she would have found knowledge.
And here’s where we come to the root of it all. What it all boils down to. Jess wants to understand herself, understand the balance inside her between human teenager and primal, ancient, powerful demon. Where does her humanity end and her power begin? Can she ever truly control what she is, or will instinct always play a part? And will her power, wherever it came from, ultimately be good, or evil? Or just some shade of grey, darker than that of the rest of humanity?
Fears:
God, her fears. Truth be told, Jess’s fears go from a slight aversion to spiders crawling anywhere in her vicinity to the heart pounding world stopping pure moments of terror, those Macbeth Act V poor player moments, when life is put into more than perspective and suddenly seems so small and insignificant that she might just as easily be dead and no one, really, in the long term, would care, like so many other nameless faceless creations of humanity.
Most of her fears though fall into two categories: the perfectly sensible and the downright insane. The sensible fears surround her fear of death, vampires, abandonment (boyo, she had to get over than one pretty quick once the body toll started racking up) fire, which was a new fear she’d acquired. When she’d considered herself just plain human fire had never seemed something to be feared, just another element that man had mastered, used and then passed up on in favour of electricity. She had rather enjoyed fire, actually, the crackle, the raw heat and the flickering light conjuring up images of home and hearth that had been infinitely comforting. Now, however, the sight of flames stirred some animalistic instinct insider her to run, hide in quiet, damp darkness. Still, the fear isn’t all too insane, since fire is after all, well, fire.
The insane fears were perhaps a little more of a hindrance. I mean, a fear of vampires wasn’t very helpful when your unofficial job was to hunt down and kill them whilst doing the IB, but a fear of mechanical pencils because they had a huge spring inside them was very difficult to deal with during a maths lesson. Similarly, an aversion to flying insects, particularly stingers, made picnics more of a spectacle than a fun day out with friends and meant that a phone on vibrate could cause horrific screaming at any point, as well as a flailing of arms and a spinning that made her look like a whirling dervish.
Hopes:
Jess’s hopes would never win her Heroine of the Year or the Miss World competition. She doesn’t want world peace since she thinks it is completely impossible and unlikely in the grand scheme of things and hoping to find a cure for cancer is a little bit beyond this wannabe author, as is the solution to world hunger (her grand idea had been to share all the food and her grandfather had referred to her as the Commie in the family for the next six months.) No, Jess’s hopes were far more simple.
The main one was to graduate. Ok, not graduate, because face it, she could get hit by a bus tomorrow, be in a coma and she’d still wake up to graduate, Jess loves uni that much. She wants to graduate well, top really, and she wants people to know that she did. Hell, she might even spray paint her head if she got Valedictorian. It should be a snap but vampires demons and all the other crap running round LA now Angel’s gone, it’s getting a bit of a hassle.
There was of course the dream; A good job that paid well and left plenty of time to write from her large house outside of the city with beautiful gardens; An intellectual husband was a must have, preferably with horn rimmed glasses and an accent – she didn’t care what accent, as long as it wasn’t hers – and a passion for reading. Three children, two boys, one girl. It would be nice to live beyond twenty five as well, to get all that, and Jess is pretty determined to do so, but it’ll go down under hopes all the same.
Images:
Personality:
Jess is less shy than just plain un-noticeable, or at least she was in her old school, before her accent became a novel aspect of her, and she will no doubt be so again once the novelty wears off. There are people who can become so neutral, so part of the furniture that people will leave them to their own devices and never notice them unless they do something drastic. Then there are the people who are born like that, like it or not. Jess is, most unfortunately, one of the latter group. She may have helped someone with their homework a dozen times or more and she still won’t be recognised the next day, despite her distinctive appearance. It is just a fact of life for the nineteen year old, but she enjoys the irony, knowing that she can do things others can only dream of.
Due to her unfortunate intangibility Jess could have done one of two things. She could have chosen to be loud and outspoken, opinionated, rude, obnoxious and flirty, the traits which force an imprint onto people’s minds and create notice, if unwelcome, and bad publicity, or she could have become a quiet more introverted person, more interested in observing rather than participation in social matters. Naturally she chose the former. The latter struck her as rather boring and hardly fun when she might have only a few years left, something she had picked up from her Grandmother.
However, around so called ‘normal people’ Jess tends to exploit her un-notability – she doesn’t really want to make friends with a bunch of clueless Americans who could be killed like flies by whatever demon she takes on. Her more exuberant personality then is more often seen by her enemies, and others think her a loner, or even unpleasant – she doesn’t pull any verbal punches, of which she has many, and while she tries to refrain from it, violence has a tendency to leak in from her other life.
Despite being the loud type, if you try to talk to Jess, having discovered her latest cranny reading with a cup of coffee, you would find her as responsive as a stone wall. She’s about as sociable as Jack the Ripper when she’s reading, without the exciting homicidal maniac streak. Well, unless you interrupt her three pages before the end, then the homicidal maniac streak comes roaring up. People, especially people who interrupt her reading time, irk her. She’ll only reply in monosyllables that somehow still seem to convey her total and utter disgust at your presence at that particular moment in time, despite being only grunts.
You may have guessed, but if not, I’ll tell you straight; Jess is an academic. Her brain never stops whirring, analysing events, trying to understand every little detail in an attempt, if futile, to understand how the world around her worked. As a Shapeshifter the difference between humans and demons not only intrigues but frightens her, and still she will keep on endeavoring to find that line, that crucial point of difference that separates the them from us. She’s fascinated by words and numbers. She knows she’s more intelligent and more enthusiastic in using her intelligence than most people and though she doesn’t often lord it over people, she does like to add quotations or theories to any conversation she’s enticed into, just to prove her worth and, subconsciously, to enjoy the small amounts of fading respect the people around her will award her. Jess loves to learn. Her teachers know it, she knows it, heck, the whole class knows it. She’ll ask questions at the end of class, she’ll research essays for hours in the Library, getting pulled off on some tangent or another that makes it twice as long. The only limits to her length are the time she can spend on it, since she almost always has to stop to set off on a self-inflicted patrol.
Most of all, Jess understands that knowledge is not only power, but the hundred other things that feed into power – safety, confidence, ability, judgment, wisdom, fear and courage. Nothing can be judged independent of knowledge and so she sets a greater store in it than anything else. Jess will spend more time researching a new demon’s habits, whereabouts, weaknesses and methods than she’ll spend training to fight it. Sometimes this method pays off, and sometimes it doesn’t, especially when her information is outdated or her reflexes get caught up in calculations. Still, it’s her way and she’s sticking by it, for better or for worse.
Whilst Jess would love to fancy herself as thorough and brilliant as that most famous detective, Sherlock Holmes, observing all the miniscule paraphernalia that surrounded her, she would be, unfortunately, as observant as the incompetent Watson gone blind, if she didn’t have her powers. Since she often has her head in a book, she would barely notice anything unless it happened less than three feet away and involved an explosion, but the shifter inside gives her a greater sensitivity and quicker reflexes. If she is without a book, she will take time to study those around her, but mostly on this first glance, she will only see the obvious. She has a large vocabulary and a rather posh, well enunciated manner of speech, due to her very upper class upbringing and the fact that she has been reading fanatically since she was four years old. There is hardly a single photograph of her as a child where she doesn’t have a book in her hands or being wrestled out of them.
Learning doesn’t exclude the fun though. Jess wants to have the most fun she can possibly have, all the time. The idea of a quest for fun is pretty typical in teenagers, but in Jess it’s different. Her fun-life isn’t going to burnout quickly, and end in a drug fuelled motorcycle race or in a last, long, lethal binge. Jess wants a long happy life, with fun being a constant theme, and she can understand that the definition of fun changes with age. So while she enjoys a vodka and lemonade right now, that doesn’t mean she won’t like a gin and tonic when those G&T years come flying in. She certainly doesn’t hide from fun like her classmates expect her too, being Southern and geeky, or deliberately dis-involve herself with the social scene for that reason. She’ll join in games, have debates with classmates, even share a joke or two with a complete stranger, with only a hint of secrecy that has to be there when you’re a teenager fighting the forces of evil.
Summer is when Jess is really let loose on the world. It’s a shame really, that the one season where she becomes her most colourful, fun loving, talkative self is the one where she is away from uni, back home with no one to share her exuberant mood with. She’s almost a different person when the sun shines, all laughter and shouting, like a little child. Uni has something to do with this, of course – though she loves it, away from work and classes Jess has the energy to really throw herself into things, body and soul. Summer, with its long days also offers some refuge from her other responsibility. Who can feel afraid when the sun stays up, bright and shining, until well into the night, keeping the monsters at bay.
Jess crushes on people. It’s sad but true. Her little heart is always stretching out to someone, almost always someone who doesn’t notice her existence. It’s rather pathetic, since to date her affections have never been returned, but after a decent amount of time, she will give up, have some chocolate, and move on, always to someone who she has even less of a chance with. It doesn’t depress her, since, in a departure from her normally chatty self, she rarely talks to her crushes and thus never has a chance to be rejected.
But all in all, Jess’s a happy person. Jess is not introverted at all, but is one of those people that tend to get left on their own for no real reason. Her enthusiasm often endears her to people at first, but then frightens them a little as they see just how much she wants to accomplish in so little time. Jess is ambitious, like all the women in her family, but it’s a strange kind of ambition. It’s not for social graces and good connections and friends with holiday homes in the Bahamas like her mother, and it’s certainly not for a prominent position in the Government like her father, but just to enjoy herself and learn.
History:
Born to farming parents on the 27th of January, 1990, Jess for the first few years of her life was a perfectly normal, if excitable little girl. She enjoyed the freedom of living on a ranch but also the loneliness – she had one best friend, Rory, and no others. She rode horses pretty well, though not as well as her mother would have liked, preferring not to push the large peaceful creatures harder than Jess imagined they wanted to go. Even then she had a special connection with animals, a sense that she understood them more than most humans and visa versa. As her relationship with her family deteriorated as she grew older and less of a novelty, her communication with animals, though merely imaginary at that point, grew stronger until she was more happy in the company of her old cat than her mother.
The big change happened when she was seven. Her mother, never the maternal type, abandoned her small family for a millionaire riding through one day. They were never the same. Jess loved her father, dearly, but even that couldn’t stop the man taking to the bottle. If Jess took the odd slap now and again, it was repaid with grovelling apologies the next day, but nothing could stop the two growing apart. By the time she was sixteen, her family was gone and two strangers left in its place.
That wasn’t her biggest problem though – no, when she was thirteen a slightly bigger one emerged. One night, on her way home from a friend’s, something leapt out at her. Something that was not animal, or vegetable, or mineral and most certainly not human. Had Jess been living in a typical horror film, which considering the gothic mansion in the background, was not wholly unlikely, it would have been the end for the child, but luckily for her, it wasn’t. Blood kicked in, blood that had been lost for generations of her mother’s side but came back with a vengeance in her, and she had her first transformation into a long dark panther that had ripped the stuffing out of what she later learned was a vampire.
Life changed then, though Jess seemed pretty much the same girl. Her father, caught up already in his own problems and concerns, didn’t notice that she stayed out later, healed faster but also gained more bruises than would seem plausible. For a while her schoolwork fluctuated away from her norm but it was attributed to stress and natural nerves about starting a new school or going on to a new stage of life. The area was pretty quiet anyway, not an epicenter of evils of all sorts.
For college she decided she had to get out. perhaps by leaving, she would shock her father into realising the reality of his life, but she doubted it. Her mother and her new step father, though they never actually came to see her, were more than happy to support her through uni if it meant she stayed away from their new life, and Jess was happy to oblige. Harvard gave her an offer, but in the end she had to turn it down in favour of UCLA – duty called, and when the dragon flew out into the streets Jess knew that LA needed her help.
