((Sort of just typing this out as it flows, so may or may not make much sense right now. Going to look back over it later and try to clean it up. Criticism, comments, questions welcome. Thanks.

P.S. Edits after original posting made in this color.))

Name: Anne Rhipsime
Age: 18
Place of Birth: New York
Hair Color: Black (slightly lavender tint)
Eye Color: Deep Purple
Ethnicity: Caucasian
Pubic Hair: No

Distinguishing features: Burn scars along the right side of her body (right side of her face, from mid-eye to her ear, along right arm to her hand, right side around the side of her breast and curling down to around her lower back, and covering most of her right leg){she usually covers the right side of her face with her hair}, blind in her right eye. Normally dresses to cover her scars (i.e. stockings/hose for her legs, long sleeved blouses or hoodies, occasionally gloves. Judging from the description of the campus uniform she'll be wearing something under her skirt year-round, and the winter jacket most of the time as well.)

Height: 5'4"
Weight: 114 lbs
Bust: 33B
Waist: 22
Hips: 33
Virgin? Yes
Piercing or Tattoos: Ears pierced once, though she only ever wears an earring in her left ear.



Background:

Anne knows nothing of her birth family, as she was left on the steps of St. James cathedral at barely more than a month of age. The sextant of the church found the young child and promptly turned her over to the Sisters of Charity for care. After a thorough search for information regarding the child the sisters remanded her into the care of one of their hospitals infant wards, until she was old enough to be placed into an orphanage. Though unaware of the significance of the date, the then nameless baby was placed in the care of Sister Cafferty of St. Agatha's Home for Children on the one year anniversary of her birth.

Her caretaker gave her the name Anne Rhipsime in honor of two saints close to the heart of her order, and raised the young child with all the love and care shown to the other orphans and foundlings of the Home. Indeed, until the age of 12, Anne was much like any other of her fellows. Cheerful, friendly, energetic, and faithful as all the children were taught to be. Things started to go wrong for Anne on her birthday, not the day the sisters had assigned to her birth certificate, but 12 years from the actual day her mother had born her crying into the world. As she stood in front of the communal bathroom's mirror and carefully brushed out her hair before the sisters put the children to bed, she had her first vision.

...legs, moving quickly, tiny legs, shuffling, running, stairs, jumping, skipping, sliding down, falling, falling, falling, breaking, screaming, legs, tiny legs, bent legs, breaking, screaming...

Bewildered, Anne faced her now pale reflection, staring into her own dilated eyes, her young mind struggling to make sense of what she'd just seen and heard. She jumped in alarm as Sister Cafferty took the hairbrush from her hand and gently ushered her and the other children from the room and to their beds. She came to the uncertain conclusion that her imagination had gotten away from her and settled into an unquiet sleep.

The next day one of the younger children tripped and fell down the stairs to the orphanage's chapel, breaking both of his legs against the hard stone at the base. Anne nearly fainted as an overwhelming sense of deja vu washed over her, the sounds, the sight, everything exactly as she had seen it the day before. She tried to tell Sister Cafferty, but was bundled up and moved back to her room with the other children as the sisters moved to get the injured child to the hospital.

From then on, Anne had many more visions, always of pain, or disaster, always when she was in front of a mirror. She tried to tell the sisters about her visions, only to be met with worried looks and kind smiles as she was told she had quite the imagination, macabre though it may be. As the visions continued to come true however, the sisters slowly began to suspect something was truly amiss with the young girl, though their suspicions tended more towards behavioral or mental problems than those of a supernatural nature.

As the day of her 13th birthday approached, Anne found herself much changed compared to the previous year. No longer cheerful, shunned by the other children ("Creepy Annie, don't talk to her, or you'll be hurt to."), and more often than not wrapped in a worried silence, she shuffled like a small forlorn ghost through the halls of the Home, even the sisters giving her wary glances as she wandered to and from the library ("...does it for the attention...destructive impulses more likely than not...."). She lost herself in reading, first the Bible, then anything she could understand the words in. Fiction, Non-fiction, it didn't matter, so long as it provided an escape. It was while she was returning from a long session in the library that she had a particularly strong vision, her eyes catching her own reflection in the gleaming metal of a stand candelabra.

...light, crying, smoke, burning, crawling, screaming, burning, fire, creaking, groaning, falling, crushing, burning, bodies, trapped, screaming, burning, burning, burning...

She came out of the vision with a small shriek, colliding with a sister carrying a stack of towels down the hallway. The sister brusquely pulled her to her feet and marched her to Sister Cafferty's office, demanding that something be done about the child, as they were all tired of her "lies" and "pranks", and sick of her skulking about the Home. Left alone with her surrogate mother, Anne desperately tried to tell her about her vision, to warn her about the fire she had seen, had felt so clearly. Sadly, her tale was met with nothing but disbelief and anger, as Sister Cafferty demanded that she stop telling such horrid stories immediately ("We know you've been playing these pranks Anne, telling us these stories and then making them come true. This is not the way to get attention, and the Lord as my witness you will not make anymore trouble for Home with this atrocious behavior.")

Crying and screaming that she wasn't a liar, that it wasn't her fault, she was dragged by the sister's painful grip on her arm to a small room usually kept for children with anger issues, and locked inside to "reflect and pray on how she should be behaving". As Sister Cafferty's footsteps receded from the other side of the door, Anne lapsed into silence, staring out the tiny window and dreading the coming day, her secret birthday. Eventually, stress and exhaustion let her drift into a fitful, restless sleep.

No one could be sure what started the fire. The police ruled out arson, and given the age and state of the building any number of things could have sparked the blaze. A frayed wire in the heater, a stray spark from an oven, perhaps even a candle knocked over in a votive display? Regardless of the cause, a fire there was, and everything that poor little Anne had seen greeted her upon her waking. Smoke slowly filling the small room, screams and crying echoing through through the hallway, and the smell of burning, wood and metal, cloth and flesh. She pounded on the locked door and screamed for someone, anyone, to let her out, to not forget her. She climbed into the window, too small to allow her to escape, and beat upon the glass until it shattered. She screamed out into the night lit orange by the flames of her home burning around her, and was heard by the fire department crew as they arrived at the scene. It took them what felt like an eternity to find the door to her room through the inferno of the orphanage, her small body alive only due to the clean air she breathed from the broken window, and the scant protection her perch afforded her as the flame consumed the room behind her, the heat scorching and charring the right side of her body.

Of the 80 staff and children of the Home, Anne was one of only 9 survivors.

The next year Anne spent in a hospital owned by the Sisters of Charity, in and out of a shock induced coma as the doctors treated her burns and tried in vain to save the vision in her scalded right eye. After her wounds had finally begun to heal and scar over, she slowly began to return to consciousness, as if afraid of what she would find. The doctors and therapists helped her acclimate to her scars and the partial loss of vision, gradually coaxing her into replying to their questions as they assessed the mental toll her experience had taken. She said nothing of her visions and as they held up a mirror for her to look at herself for the first time in over a year she held her breath in fear....only to be greeted with nothing but her own disfigured image. She was far from happy with the mass of burned tissue covering her face and neck, but it was far better than another vision of worse to come.

She remained in the hospital for another three months, her recovery pleasing the doctors as she seemed to accept her disfigurement with surprising ease. At the suggestion of her therapist she was enrolled into a high school for disabled and special needs students, under the intention that she needed to catch up to others her age not only mentally but socially as well. Much to her relief she was assigned a blind girl as her roommate and quickly became close friends with the other girl, Leslie. The lack of a need to hide her scars allowed her to be at ease, and the help her friend needed with certain tasks gave her a sense of being needed she had yet to feel.

For the next four years Anne was blessed to live a "normal" life, as such things go. She was almost painfully shy and timid, unable to face people who could see her scars for long periods of time, but otherwise capable of attending classes and maintaining a healthy social life through her roommate. She still showed a great love for reading and spent most of her free time doing so, either aloud for Leslie's benefit, or quietly for her own peace of mind and enjoyment. She even found the first flutterings of love in the entrance of a quiet, rather serious boy into their school. He became a fixture in Anne and Leslie's placid days, walking with them, listening to Anne read or to Leslie playing the piano, all the while never judging, never mocking her nervous stutter, never staring at her scars. Anne slowly began to grow comfortable in his presence, then further, to enjoy him sitting beside her as they ate lunch, to cherish the little bumps of their arms as they walked together on the school grounds.

During all this time her visions had left her at peace, mirrors offering her nothing more than her own reflection day after day. That is, until the day she discovered that this boy had feelings much like her own....only for Leslie. She didn't know how to feel, what to think, conflicted feelings of happiness for her friend, and sadness for herself roiling inside her. She wandered the courtyard of the dorms, lost in her thoughts, until she happened to catch her own pensive expression in the waters of a fountain.

...tears, crying, bodies, Leslie, knife, blood, crying, so much blood, crying, knife, Leslie, a hand, blood, the knife, crying, burned hand, crying, blood...

She caught herself just before falling face first into the water, her eyes wide as she stared at her mirrored self in horror. That had been her hand, her burned right hand holding the knife, the knife covered in blood, buried deep in Leslie's chest, the tears her own as she cried over the body of her best friend. Panicking, she buried her face in her hands, mind whirling. How could she stop it? Telling people didn't work, no one ever believed her. What could she do? What could she do?!

She finally looked up, a dull determination in her gaze as she shuffled to the administration building. She had to leave, as soon as possible. It had been her hand, of that she was sure. If she was gone, the vision couldn't come true. She found the bursar and haltingly asked what options there were for a transfer from the school, to a university, or preparatory academy, anything so long as it was something immediate.

Grudgingly, the overworked functionary looked through the files for something that would fit the bill. Nothing seemed to be immediately available until he happened on something that had been delivered to him not long before, a packet for a special program for transfer students, seeking young women looking to broaden their horizons at a private institution without the distractions of co-mingling with the opposite sex. And it seemed a spot was still open for an incoming transfer, with the departure date set for the following morning. Happy to have found something on such short notice, he entered Anne's name into the program and informed her of her "good fortune".

Relieved to have found a way out of her nightmare, Anne quietly made her way to her room, packing her meager collection of belongings while Leslie was still out with the boy that had entered their lives...and somehow ruined everything. She left that very night, not waiting to say goodbye, not willing to chance that even that brief meeting would give the vision chance to materialize.

And so it is with mixed feelings of sadness at her separation, and joy at having finally beaten her horrid visions that Anne boards a plane...a plane set to take her far further than she expects.

-end-


Psychological Profile: Timid and introverted, overly shy about her scars. Stutters when nervous, which is almost all the time. Has a deep, primal fear of fire, even candles or lighters making her uneasy, with larger flames driving her into a mindless panic until she gets away from them. Has difficulty trusting others, and is very, very slow to open up to them. Never, ever talks about her visions, as she fears doing so will make them even worse than they already are.

Language: English, Latin (read only)

Likes: Reading, sweets (particularly chocolate), taking walks, playing made up games by herself (such as counting tiles in the floor, or skipping odd numbered cracks in the pavement).

Dislikes: Fire. Loud noises. Surprises. Sour or spicy food. Recently cooked meat (the smell brings back bad memories).

Activities: Reading. Writing short stories, though she never lets anyone else read them. Making pastries when she can stand to be near an oven. Has to use an electric stove, as she can't abide an open flame for more than a few seconds. Has a rather sweet singing voice when she chooses to use it, though she rarely sings loud enough for anyone other than herself to hear.

Magic? Yes, of a sort(see below).

Visions: Anne is unaware of her ancestry, as her mother abandoned her just after giving birth to her. However, ignorance is no protection from her blood, as she is a far descendant of a woman thought to be a myth, the tragic Cassandra of Troy, cursed by Apollo to see the disasters of the future, but never be believed. This ancient curse has plagued the line of Cassandra through the ages, growing slightly weaker with every generation. In Anne's case, it only manifests when she sees her own reflection, and even then, only sporadically at best. Anne is unaware that the visions tend to be self-fulfilling prophecies, and that they would more than likely not occur if she took no action at all regarding them (as shown by the long periods of quiet during her coma, and the time spent distracted by her school work and new friendship). The visions are vague jumbles of sounds, images, smells and sensations at best, and given the inhibitors of the island, are even further muddled should they occur again. The knowledge she may gain from them is never beneficial, usually only serving to terrify and worry her before the events even come to pass.

Shokushu Info:
Year: 1st
GPA: 3.73
Room Number: 418
Roommate: None

Visual references:




Themes:

Vienna Teng - "My Medea"

The Birthday Massacre - "Shallow Grave"

Whoaaaa... quite a long history you written there. Anyhow, she looks to be an interesting character, and let me be the first to welcome you to Shokushu.

And that's the short version...seriously.

Not quite happy with how the profile reads yet, but its not as bad as I thought when I was typing it out.

Also, thanks for the welcome.

Quite a history there.

Too much? I kept telling myself to shorten it or it'd go on forever. Oh, also, as I've an admin looking at it apparently, are the burn scars alright in their severity? I don't want to put anyone off with her disfigurement.

*edit* Also edited original post for grammar/spelling errors, flow problems, and redundancies. Still not fully happy with it, but its getting there.

I think it's just aces. It's the sort of bold and nuanced character we don't get enough of around here. She's the kind of girl that makes me want to keep Elise around!

Thank you kindly. She sort of built herself in my head by muddling together influences from the character who I got her art from and a protagonist from a sort of under-appreciated manga I loved reading.

My pleasure. Hope you have fun here!

I already am, messing around in the Trivial Pursuits forum at least. Hopefully will have as much fun with any threads involving Anne, assuming I'm ever satisfied with her.

Nice profile. Welcome to Shokushu, hope to bump into you sometime.

Thanks. More than likely she'll wind up in his path sometime or other.

Most likely, especially since I manage several threads at once.

Full on threads? Kudos. I wager I'm too nitpicky to handle multiple stories at a time.

I tend to have dozens going at once so I always have 2 or 3 of them to tackle at once but I like writing and do alot of it. Plus keeping storylines straight is rather easy for me since I'm use to handling various storylines in RPGs.

Never could get too into RPG's. Maybe I just never had the time?

Also, re-re-edited original post for clarity and removing yet more redundancy, as well as a bit more detail for general clothing choices.