Info.
Name: Chelsea Elisabeth St. Clair.
Age/Birthdate: Twenty-one. February 20th, 1987.
Sexuality: Mostly heterosexual. Being in love with one girl doesn't make her... gay, does it?
Occupation: Bartender at Impulses.
Fairytale: The Young Cook; Sleeping Beauty.
Ability: N/A.
Status: She doesn’t like to tell people who she was, even though she knows that most people won’t care. She’s constantly scared that the Ogress will pop up and punish her in this life for what she did.
Past Lives: She’s almost always reincarnated into a cook who ends up on the kitchen staff of someone very important. For more than a few lives after her tale, she prepared food for royalty. Eventually she started cooking for people who were just wealthy, then actors, then a president or two. Her most famous life, one of the ones where she didn’t cater to someone else primarily, was that of Hanaya Yohei.
History: In 1973, Elisabeth Katrina Dubois married Oscar St. Clair. The marriage was a bit of a scandal; you see, Elisabeth was only sixteen where Oscar was twenty, and the couple's first child, Louise, was born only six months after the spring wedding. They had their second child, Malcolm, three years later. Shortly after Malcolm’s first birthday, Oscar got laid off from his highly paying job, and Elisabeth, barely twenty, had to find a way to support her family. She applied for a job as a jewelry store clerk, and began to claw her way to the top. She divorced Oscar, and was becoming one of the best-known jewelry designers in the Baton Rouge Parish. But somewhere between the divorce and the opening of her very own shop, fourteen-year-old Louise met the good-for-nothing sixteen-year-old musician Devon Novak, and conceived Chelsea Elisabeth St. Clair.
Elisabeth, who her grandchild was named for, was chagrined. The apple, it seemed, did not fall far from the tree, and she was convinced Louise had thrown away her life. She took immediate action; the matriarch sent Louise to live with an aunt, a Miss Madison Lee who just happened to be the strict headmistress of an all-girls school for bad seeds (read: pregnant girls) in Lafayette. To add insult to injury, Elisabeth cut Louise out of her will, but swore up and down that Chelsea and any other children her daughter would produce would get a hefty inheritance. Just because Louise was stupid didn’t mean her kids would be punished. It may seem extreme, but Elisabeth was a staunch believer in fixing one’s own mistakes. Louise was not going to pop out babies and laze about on Elisabeth’s watch; not on her hard-earned money, either.
When young Louise was sent to Lafayette, her baby’s daddy followed. Mr. Novak was madly in love with Louise at the time, and wanted to marry her as soon as she was legal. And so four years after Chelsea was born on a mild February night, Louise bade farewell to her overbearing aunt in a blaze of glory (the phrase “suck on that” may or may not have been used), and she and Devon became the Novaks. Chelsea was the lone St. Clair in the family - this was a sort of passive aggressive gesture from Louise to Chelsea. Louise, though she loved her child dearly, still felt quite resentful of her - but she didn’t remain that way for long. Chelsea found herself with a little brother named Jason Oliver who also took on Louise’s maiden name. Perhaps because of their shared last name, or just because they were related, she was quite enamored with him, and still is.
Chelsea’s early childhood was mostly typical, save for the few drunken stupors her father would return in after spending the weekend touring with his band. She had friends, her parents mostly got along, and she was a friendly, curious child. By the time she had turned six, however, things started changing. Her father spent more and more time away from home and her mother’s temper became short. When Devon was around, Louise was sweet, and tried her hardest to keep up their façade of the perfect family, but when he was gone, Chelsea’s mother could be a horror. She never drank and she never hit her children, but she would become withdrawn, leaving Chelsea, who could barely take care of herself, to take care of her younger brother. Sometimes their mother would even take off for the day. Eventually, Louise told her daughter that her father was never coming back.
Just before Chelsea’s seventh birthday in 1994, Louise returned from one of her days away from her children and roused her daughter from her sleep, telling her they were going to visit grandma. After packing a few days worth of clothing for herself, Chelsea stumbled sleepily into their car, helping her mother fasten Jason into his booster seat. Louise drove the distance from Lafayette to Baton Rouge silently, ignoring every word that came out of Chelsea’s mouth. The family found themselves in front of a large, secluded house and Louise ushered her children out of the car and up the drive. She rang the doorbell, and then started back toward the car. She stopped once, when Chelsea asked her where she was going. Louise told her daughter that she forgot something, and that she’d be back. Chelsea watched her mother drive away, clutching her brother’s hand tightly, only turning when she heard the front door open.
Her mother never came back.
Chelsea and Jason stayed with Elisabeth, who liked to be called grandmere, and her newest husband, Joseph Duncan, for close to a month. Then one bright April morning, Devon showed up at the St. Clair residence, and after a long conversation with Elisabeth where she disclosed she was going to cut him a rather large check, he told his two children they were going to come live with him in La Grange, Texas. And so, ten thousand dollars richer, he returned to the small town where he had made a second home not long after he and Louise married. He lived with Sophia Ramirez and her two children from another relationship; a set of twins, Michelle and James, who were Jason’s age.
Sophia was a kind woman to both Jason and Chelsea, and her own children got along with them. Devon didn’t drink anymore and he went to mass. It was the perfect environment for children to grow up in, and while Jason flourished and Chelsea liked her new family, she wasn’t quite as nice to other people. She acted sweet and never once physically harmed her “friends”, but she was a bully. She’d convince her peers to believe malicious lies - mostly their parents did not love them - and always acted sympathetic to them, but secretly relished in their pain. Around fifth grade, she learned how to cook, and left an apple pie anonymously on the desk of a teacher she didn’t like. Little did Mrs. Hoyt know that Goldie the goldfish, their class pet, was baked right in.
She wasn’t any better in middle school. In fact, she became worse. She started being openly cruel to her friends, trying to mask it with a friendly demeanor that didn’t work anymore. If asked, most of her friends would tell you (after you promised not to tell her, of course) that they only remained as such because they were scared of her… and because she made a killer chocolate cake. It was around this time she started having dreams about being a cook for an evil ogress; at this same time, Devon and Sophia, after witnessing some of her behavior, made her see an analyst who told her that these dreams were probably symbolic of Chelsea trying to please her absent mother. The girl stopped seeing the analyst after a few sessions on the basis that the woman made ridiculous claims. Chelsea firmly believed that she didn’t care about her mother anymore (she did, though; always did, always will).
Chelsea’s unpleasant dreams soon turned into nightmares where she’d have to keep the ogress from eating a beautiful princess - the same beautiful princess she was starting to become very devoted to, maybe even in love with; in fact, Chelsea was beginning to feel an obsession with the princess, though she would never acknowledge it - and eventually the nightmares became even worse. When she started high school, she had a dream she’d never forget. In this dream, she actually cooked the princess’ children, something that Chelsea was ashamed of. She’d never want to hurt the princess like that. A week or so after that dream, Chelsea was contacted and told that she was a fairy tale. She wanted to laugh it off, but it sounded about right after reading Sleeping Beauty.
Through high school, Chelsea tried to tone down her meanness. It didn’t always work, but most of her maliciousness had turned into mere bitchiness, so when her true thoughts permeated her constant uber-sweet cover, she didn’t seem so bad. In the April of her senior year, she got news that she was accepted to both NYU and UNT. She eventually chose to go to NYU, remembering that most tales resided there, and she felt like it was time to explore her origins. Upon arriving in New York, she stayed at the Pentamerone until she could find a job and someone to room with. After her freshman year at NYU, she decided to take a year off. Her year got over, and she didn’t go back. Truthfully, she was worried about how she was going to pay off all of her student loans in a timely fashion.
The answer to that question came when her mother, almost thirteen years after abandoning Chelsea and Jason, came in contact with her daughter who was, suffice to say, surprised. It was then she learned why her mother seemed so resentful, being cut out of the will. Though she was happy to hear from her mother - she loved her, still - she wasn’t sure if she wanted to keep up the contact. The woman had left her, for God’s sake, over money. Still, Chelsea, without fail, waits for the call from her mother every Sunday afternoon. And when she isn’t doing that, she alternates between drinking cheap wine, cooking, and floating between jobs. Girl just can’t seem to keep one.
Personality: Chelsea tries to be nice, she really does, but there are so many stupid people out there that she can’t help but be an awful person sometimes. Of course, even when she is being awful, she still acts nice. She’ll call you darling, smile, act like she’s trying to help you (when in reality, she’s just being a condescending jerk), and with that sweet Southern accent, she’s almost always believable. But sometimes the act just gets so tiring that she’ll give up, and, in that same sweet accent, just call you a string of names, each one worse than the last. Truth be told, Chelsea sometimes feels she doesn’t have enough time to pity the fool, as it were, there isn’t enough patience in the world, really, when it comes to some people, et cetera. She can’t really be blamed when her victim is being an idiot, can she?
Despite all her fake sweetness, Chelsea really can be an interesting and fun person to be around when you really get to know her. And underneath the fakeness and the fun, there’s another layer to her (no, ogres do NOT have layers, thank you), one that is much darker than the previous two. She’s terrified that the Ogress is going to get her for tricking her, and will do just about anything to survive. She hasn’t had to do a lot as of now, but she is prepared to. She’d sacrifice a lot in order to save herself. There are a few things she won’t sacrifice, however. Her brother is one of those things. She loves him more than she loves herself, and feels deeply indebted to him. He was the one person throughout her whole life that she felt would never leave or hurt her. Jason is a perfect human being in her eyes, and she’d sacrifice herself readily to keep him safe. Another sacred being is one Jessica Winters. As the young cook to her princess, she feels an urge to protect her, one that probably isn’t very… sane.
Speaking of sane, Chelsea kind of… isn’t. She’s not quite a sociopath, but sometimes she’ll just snap and do things like the goldfish-pie in fifth grade and she’s quite vicious when provoked. However, her madness, for lack of a better word, while at its peak as a child, seems to subside as she gets older. To put it in perspective, while she’s not about to go off on a murderous rampage, she will find ways to subtly punish people who hurt her or her friends; she’s so over physical pain, anyway. Just be warned that there is always a breaking point.
Played-By: Laura Ramsey.
the obligatory bit
Well, though Chelsea isn’t entirely like her tale - dilution through all of her past lives has made sure of that - she does love to cook! All of her past lives, actually, were cooks. To expand on that, this is one of the only lives where she hasn’t been a chef to someone famous. There’s always time, though! Other than that, there aren’t many similarities. Oh, except that she is completely and totally devoted to Jess. And in love with her. But that’s because all of the lives, again, have changed the devotion to a bit of an obsession (Chelsea is a little crazy). She’d do anything for Jess. Period. Oh, and she hated Shrek. Stupid ogres.