Many apologies to Edward Burne-Jones. Sorry Ed, but I am going to steal and photoshop your paintings.Student Bio/ProfileName: Morgan Khorsandi
Gender: Female.
Age: 19
Place of Birth: Isfahan
Nationality: Iranian
AppearanceHair Color: Long, very dark, reddish-brown. Morgan usually has it done up under a scarf, but that's more of a gesture towards practicality (she's sick of getting her hair caught in things), and product of habit, than any real meaning.
Eye Color: Dark brown. She wears fairly strong tinted glasses, and can't see all that well without them.
Ethnicity: Welsh-Iranian. Some people draw all the short straws.
Skin Tone: Olive.
Pubic Hair: Yes, black. Morgan's read enough feminist literature to know that she shouldn't feel pressured into doing anything more than trimming down there, and besides, razor bumps are
icky.
Distinguishing features: No distinguishing features to speak of, although Morgan is, generally speaking, a fairly striking woman - she's not pretty, not curvy, all awkward flatness and angles, but there's something fierce and about her bearing and demeanour that is, well, a distinguishing factor all of its own.
Height: 154cm.
Weight: 47kg.
Bust: 28
Waist: 26
Hips: 28
Clothing: Morgan tends towards the light and practical - white blouses, hard-wearing trousers, and a black scarf to keep her hair tied up.
Background:History:Morgan Khorsandi was born to loving parents. Maryam Khorsandi, an Iranian businesswoman, locked eyes across a picket line with Huw Rae, a Welsh oil worker who had been marooned in Iran following the Revolution, and they fell in love at first sight. Huw's questionable legal status meant that they had to keep their relationship discrete, but love conquers all obstacles (or so they thought), and so they purchased a spacious house in what passed for a leafy suburb of Isfahan, and began, quite literally, to play house. Morgan was an accident, but a happy one for the two lovers, and her early life was similarly blessed. She had doting parents, not to mention rich, and a beautiful home in which to take her first faltering steps. She inherited her mother's keen wits, and, if she could not have her looks, then she could at least claim her father's stern but handsome mien. First words, then sentences, then languages of every kind flowed like water from her mouth, and she wrought wonders of brutalist architecture from the toy blocks she was given.
There was only one problem - one little, tiny problem - she didn't have her father's surname. She was illegitimate.
For a time, this seemed to be ignored. In the aftermath of the revolution, even the new morality police had better things to do than chase down every scrap of parentage, and, with the advent of a catastrophic war against Iraq, there were certainly more interesting things going on than a little fornication. And so, Huw and Maryam were able to present to the world the semblance of a conventional, married, expat couple, with an adorable little half-Iranian daughter playing hopscotch in the front garden. It couldn't last, though - when Morgan first went off to primary school, withered but nonetheless all-knowing neurones fired in the clumsy, inefficient, yet inexorable mind of the state bureaucracy. It noticed a
discrepancy. How could this girl - who didn't seem to have a father listed on her birth certificate, now they came to look at it - fit into their new society? The machinery of state, of police, of judges and civil servants and social workers, began to swing into action.
And so, one day, little Morgan - some eight years old - returned to find her mother gone. She had been replaced by a pair of men, wearing the pseudo-traditional garb that so many seemed to affect in those days. Later, she would look back at them as officious little men, full of pretension and posturing, bloated on authority and gorged on station. But back then, she was young, both impressionable and impressed by them and their impressive bearing, and took what they had to say at face value. Her mother, they told her, was a whore, an adulteress, a slut. She was a loose woman, without any sense of propriety, who prostituted herself to anyone who'd come by. They told her - and Morgan accepted - that Maryam had been taken away for Morgan's own good, to remove the corruptive, unloving influence in her life. Morgan didn't know what any of that meant, but it sounded bad - and her father, who sat deflated, head in his hands, in the corner of the room, said or did nothing to contradict them. And so, Morgan lived the rest of her life without a mother.
The Maryam-shaped hole in the family's life quickly became poison. The house, once so spacious and airy, became too big, a yawning vacancy of empty bedrooms and bathrooms that neither Morgan nor Huw dared to enter. Huw, too, was poisoned by it. He came to blame her - the cursed child, the ill-luck child, the obstacle to his happiness and the cause of his wife's arrest and incarceration - for all that had happened. At first, it was a seething, silent resentment, but soon grew to open anger, directed against the daughter he suddenly didn't want any more, and began to persuade himself that he'd never wanted. Morgan, for her part, fought back. The throes of puberty gave her confidence and aggression, as well as a rather good understanding of what the men from the Welfare Department had meant. How dare he - how dare Huw fail to stick up for his beloved in such a way? How dare he let them win? The house echoed, for years, with the sound of their arguments.
School was not much better. If there was one thing that Morgan's classmates enjoyed more than mocking the different-looking girl - the half-Iranian, with the boyish-looks and no curves - it was the scandalised titillation that could be got from her reported past.
Why does Morgan's mother never pick him up from school? Did you hear what happened to her? Do you think Morgan's an adulteress too?. For a few months, they made her life hell, a misery, and things were difficult for a while. And so, Morgan fled. Not from home - she was too much of a homebody to do that - but into her work. Her memories of her mother were all about being told that she was special, that she was a good and wonderful person - and, damn it, she
would be that person. She threw herself into her work, into her understanding of the world with a fierce, unabating passion, working to better herself. She would not be broken by these people's contempt - instead, she would break them. She's horrified by this - how hopelessly self-dramatising it was - but it worked. She won a measure of grudging respect through her devotion to study and single-minded purpose, if not any friends, and certainly not intimacy. But that didn't matter - she occupied a calm eye in the storm of confusion about gender, work, boys, future plans, girls, and made her own way through the difficult rocks of adolescent life.
Once she finished school, IB certificates in hand, she knew that she was ready, ready to explore the world, and herself. The word 'university' (or maybe 'college') blazoned across her eyes, she set out in search of somewhere to learn more. 'Shokushu High School'? Well, despite describing itself as a high school, it did look as if it would offer what she might want - an isolated, quiet place to study, far away from the world of morality police officers and oil money. A literal island community should offer its own rich reserves of sniping, infighting and drama, especially if it was largely made up of but she could deal with that now - it would, perhaps, be an interesting and instructive experience.
Morgan as a personPersonality/Psychological Profile: Morgan is, how shall we put it, an intense person. For the first near-third of her life, she was the apple of her parents' eye, a world view that was shattered and ruined by the loss of her mother. She's clawed her way back from that, though, over the bruised egos of a thousand put-down schoolgirls, and has restored her confidence, independence, and self-respect. She possess a near-inhuman capacity for snap judgements about her values, good and bad, and other people - usually in her favour. For all that, though, she possesses a fierce loyalty and quiet devotion to whatever, or whoever, she chooses to bestow her trust and friendship upon, and throws herself into friendships, relationships, and enmities with a cautious, reserved energy.
She is, in sum, very much her own person, and won't be broken or brainwashed easily. Whether that will be a good thing or a bad things at SHS is yet to be seen ...
Virgin: Intacta. Sleeping around
too obviously would just be an unnecessary risk in Isfahan, and hey, isn't rectifying the virginity issue meant to be what college is
for? So what that it's a gender-segregated school …
Orientation: Unsure - it's not like experimenting with boys is encouraged in Iran, where even the notion of a gender-mixed party is anathema, and, of course, 'there are no homosexuals in Iran.' She's certainly willing to explore matters of gender and sexuality, though - at length and extensively.
Piercing or Tattoos: None. Morgan's acts of teenage rebellion were few and far between, and generally so subtle as to be invisible.
Language: Several. At the insistence of her doting parents, Morgan is fluent in English, Farsi, Arabic, and Welsh. Nice one, mum and dad.
Likes: crafts, handiwork, being smugly and gloriously right about things, the great out of doors.
Dislikes: pretension, not being in control of a situation, having her food mixed together (I mean, eugh!).
Activities: art, making things, following an interesting historical or sociological argument down the informational rabbit hole, cross-country running.
Magic: Morgan's willing to allow that 'the truth is out there', but isn't really at the 'trust no one' stage yet, as far as the extra-terrestrial is concerned - likewise, there might be something at the root of all that 'supernatural' nonsense, but it's almost certainly just the result of certain applications of 'fringe science', and she's not particularly interested in it herself. Leave it to the National Enquirer-readers and people who post on Yahoo Answers, the grown-ups have better things to do.
Field of study: Linguistics and anthropology. Morgan is extremely interested in the way that people think and the way that it informs their language, and is likely to regard her fellow diverse students as a fertile (heh) breeding ground for the study of the subject.
OOC notes: I'm open to all sorts of weird stuff RP-wise, but I do want to suggest one thing to anyone interested in RP - that Morgan's hardly a natural victim. While I understand that the main idea and appeal of this site is tentacle monsters violating nubile college girls, and that there are all sorts of things like the inhibitor fields to promote that, I'm personally interested in a little bit more conflict, and a little more uncertainty as to the result. Morgan's a fast, capable, determined young woman, and while she won't be able to fight monsters, all things considered she can probably get away from them. Of course, encounters can, and likely will, end in rape, but I think that that would be all the sweeter, and all the more developed, if a monster thought they''d earned it fair and square against someone who was trying to escape - a scenario that also allows for plot development.
I think that's what Stormwind's getting at here:
Quote:
6. In occasional situations where there is an OOC arrangement between student and monster players, the student can achieve a temporary victory, only to make her final failure all the more galling to her.
In a Greek tragedy, for example, the audience knows that they're watching a tragedy, and that the fatally flawed hero(ine) will suffer a downfall, but that shouldn't be inevitable on an in-character level - it's the steps they take towards that downfall (or rape by tentacle monster, as the case may be) that build up genuine tension, fear, eroticism, w/e. In this case, while I'm certainly amenable to all sorts of gruesome violations at the hands of all kinds of monsters, I do think that the chase - and the possibility of escape - make an RP much sweeter.
Sorry to bust out the Aristotle there, but I think that taking it into consideration could make for some fun RPs. Thanks for reading all this massive wall of tl;dr, folks - I'm certainly willing to accomodate suggestions from more veteran SHS members.
Also, is it fixed what sort of education level SHS is? For obvious reasons, it's 18+, and there are suggestions that it's got elements of being university-level, and a campus, etc, but at the same time it seems more like (and is called) a high school. I realise that
very little learning really takes place there, but I just want to check that my initial concept of a bright-eyed bushy-tailed undergrad is OK.