More characterization exercises
Same universe, different woman.
* "Sasha" and "Captain Markov" are the same person: Captain Aleksandra Ivanovna Markov(a). She uses the masculine form of her last name because she was originally a Sweet Polly Oliver and that's what's on all her paperwork.
* The "now" for these takes place about forty years after the "now" for Valeriya's 100 Sentences, so Katya was in her late teens then, late fifties now.
* Maria is a bisexual orc Action Girl, and was a Sweet Polly Oliver at one point. Jin is a human psychic from a pseudo-Korean culture who can communicate with spirits, and also a Gray Haired Pretty Boy (a side effect of strong psychic abilities in this world). Bodie is their daughter, and takes after her mum. She's also the main protagonist at this point in the time line. Her current best friend is a dark elf Non-Action Guy.
* Athena is another one of the good guys. She starts off as a rather luckless young aspiring Action Girl, but gets better.
* Poppaea's another female spy. She also provides a lot of fanservice.
* The Aristoi are this world's Ancient Conspiracy. They are international in scope, and contrary to certain popular conspiracy theories, they have no religious affiliations and aren't a secret level of the Freemasons or any other organization that operates openly.
* Some inspiration taken from a Saki short story, A Song of Ice and Fire, Fingersmith, and "Stray."
Though Ekaterina never explicitly planned on dying young, she didn't really anticipate living as long as she has. Maria is the only woman Katya's ever really loved. According to her still-officially-secret-but-most-easily-accessible file, Ekaterina's mother was a mental patient who died in childbirth, leaving her daughter to be "adopted" at birth by agents of the Aristoi. Ekaterina is almost certain that this is not, in fact, the case. Working for Termena discouraged her from wearing metal hairpins.
Unless she's consciously trying to restrain herself, Ekaterina talks with her hands. Pawns, knights, and queens are all just pieces of carved ivory - it's much better to be a player, even if you can't always win. She believes in an afterlife - who wouldn't, after spending so much time with someone who can talk to ghosts? - but has no religious attachments. She hasn't used it for anything but first aid in years, but Ekaterina has the training and certification of her setting's equivalent of a Nurse Practitioner. When she was working for Dr. Termena, there was a rumor around the fortress that she was the scientist's daughter.
Liking girls has never been a source of personal discomfort to her, except for making seduction missions that much squickier. Ekaterina's loved cats since she was a small child. She's had so many aliases over the years that she doesn't identify with any surname or patronymic. Maria, for reasons best known to herself, liked to call her Kitty. Sometimes she wishes Bodie had grown up to look a little less like her mother.
Maria's relationship with Jin didn't make Ekaterina particularly jealous - it didn't seem reasonable to want a monopoly on someone's attention when you spent half your time away on some secret mission or another. She'd be insulted of someone accused her of Chronic Backstabbing Disorder - if she screws someone over, she does it for a damn good reason (although sometimes "they had it coming" or "the prospect was unbearably funny" count as compelling reasons to her). Neither of them know it, but Ekaterina is distantly related to Zip von Eschenbach. Ekaterina likes cherry jam in her tea. Dr. Termena taught her the importance of making an entrance.
Despite high marks in Applied Sciences during her training, Ekaterina prefers not to poison people with lethal intent (as opposed to slipping people truth serum or sleeping draught) - that's what guns are for. She was on to Poppaea within a week of Poppy's arrival, but kept her speculations to herself. A lifetime of subterfuge has made Ekaterina reluctant to reveal even completely innocuous personal information. Learning all those ridiculous elaborate gun tricks was, among other things, a way to channel her natural fidgetiness into something less nervous-looking. Ekaterina knows how to cook.
What's life without a little pointless theatricality? It's a bit baffling that the Aristoi have ever trusted her, considering the type of person they deliberately raised her to be. She likes pretty weapons, although not at the expense of function. The Aristoi's training was a profound influence on her personal development, although not always in ways they'd intended. In a weird way, Captain Markov is one of the most disturbing people Ekaterina's ever met, although she's known plenty who were scarier from a self-preservation perspective.
Although Ekaterina is much less wince-prone than most people, painful looking things happening to hands can bother her, especially if blunt trauma's involved. She's thankful that gloves are fashionable for middle and upper-class women, because anyone reasonably observant who got a good look at her hands could tell that she's not the lady she pretends to be. Old age and treachery will overcome youth and firepower. Working for megalomaniacs has its wearying aspects, but the impromptu soliloquies always liven things up. As long as she can control what matters to her, Ekaterina doesn't care about being officially in charge.
A stylish long swishy coat can take you anywhere. She found Markov so disturbing because while Termena's weirder qualities were due to nature and an accident of fate, Markov actively chose to be in a relationship with an electric mad scientist with tentacles. Ekaterina long suspected that Markov had hidden depths (and not just the depraved kind), but never did feel she had a satisfactory understanding of her character. Being able to give the impression that she knows what she's doing and has a right to be doing it has helped her more over the years than her skill with a gun. Her hair's currently off-white, but was originally a pale golden blonde.
While she doesn't wish for more scruples, Ekaterina resents having been brought up to run someone else's more morally repugnant errands. She actually liked Athena, although not enough to call off the immense mind-raping Xanatos Gambit the poor girl had stumbled into. Double-crossing a globe spanning conspiracy is one thing, but anyone who consumes vodka on an empty stomach (except for medicinal purposes) is being criminally careless about their health. One of the Aristoi's early unintentional lessons: if you're willing to give all your strength to a task, are willing to sacrifice your personal safety and well-being, and don't care about collateral damage or how much it hurts, you can do almost anything. The incident in which she learned this also taught her that the people who claim to be making you miserable in your best interest are lying their pious heads off.
Early in her training, Ekaterina learned that her instructors cared more about her continued existence than she did about theirs, although the situation was reversed when it came to concern about the other party's moods and opinions. However callous one might be, it doesn't do to ignore the feelings of others - people have a nasty habit of acting on them. History can remember her any way it chooses. She once died her hair black and spent six weeks as the world's most Slavic tea house waitress on an assignment. The tea house job gave her sore feet and a lifelong taste for shrimp pancakes.
A lot of Ekaterina's medical practice at Bezumiya-Krepost consisted of chiropractic treatment for Termena's sparring partners. Her hair currently only waves at the ends, but she had curls as a small child. By the standards of her culture, she's a light drinker. Ekaterina consumes a lot of tea. Despite the late hours she keeps and the stress of her job, Ekaterina still has a lovely complexion for a woman in her late fifties.
She was brought up to be conscientious, but the obsessive streak is something endemic to her nature. Ridiculously big guns just make you look silly and inclined to overcompensation, unless you're hunting zombies or something like that. Due to a careful program of controlled exposure, she's rendered herself resistant to all common truth serums - at least in doses that wouldn't be immediately obvious. Ekaterina's succumbed to the lure of dramatic villain speeches on a few occasions, but never gave away any accurate details of her plans in them. Proper accessorizing is important - if you can't kill a man with your hair ornaments, you're doing it wrong.
Ekaterina does not believe in repressing trauma: you need to remember the relevant details so you'll be able to properly avoid it or get revenge in the future. The sample of her hair in the Aristoi's main office has actually been a piece of hair switch since she was twenty-eight. Cyanide pills are one of the minor banes of her existence, because, talented as Ekaterina is, she has no gift for necromancy. Despite her fondness for sweets, she has pretty good teeth. She has the constitution of an ox, apart from a slight predisposition to respiratory troubles.
She gave her revolvers nicknames. All of her corsets have a secret pocket built into the lining for smuggling documents. Compared to Maria, or even Markov, she makes a horribly unconvincing man. The rumor about Ekaterina's parentage probably started because, despite the fact that she was of Dr. Termena's favored gender, coloring, and age group, Termena never flirted with her - and they both had blonde hair and light eyes. One of Ekaterina's missions when she was in her twenties involved acting as governess to a diplomat's three children.
The diplomat's kids became surprisingly fond of her, mostly because she told marvelously hair-raising stories with no didactic elements whatsoever. Unless she has a specific reason to look fashionable, Ekaterina never wears hoops - stealth is hard enough without your skirt knocking over end tables. She's a gunslinger at heart, but appreciates the advantages of more easily camouflaged weapons. Her knowledge of "home chemistry" extends to things like skin care products as well as poisons and antidotes, all of which has come in handy. In the course of one of her missions, she one spent three weeks in a harem - which gave her plenty of opportunity for foreign language practice.
It can be a bit disconcerting to discover that "what you want someone to believe" and "the truth, as far as you know" are the same thing, but it can also be rather refreshing. She's trained herself to be functionally ambidextrous. Manipulating the fates of nations is fun and all, but sometimes even Ekaterina wants a vacation. People who think they're being maliciously clever - but fail at the cleverness - give her a certain amount of mean-spirited amusement (but not the kind they were aiming for). If Ekaterina attended Hogwarts, she would sort Slytherin, but her more stereotypical housemates would annoy her no end - there's nothing wrong with playing the card-carrying villain, but is it necessary to be so obnoxious about it?
If she's not in a situation likely to give her hypothermia, Ekaterina rather enjoys cold dry weather. However, she loathes being cold and wet. Swords have never been her strong point - she much prefers revolvers, knives, and potentially lethal hair accessories. Markov seemed to like her, which was much preferable to the opposite, but meant that Ekaterina's life got uncomfortably interesting whenever Termena had to travel and couldn't take her girlfriend. Psychics with invasive powers disturb her - there's a reason she doesn't use truth serum to flavor her tea.
While she believes that her ultimate goals are right, she'd consider herself one of the villains if she thought of her life in literary terms. People who can't properly aim have no right to go around shooting people - machine guns violate her sense of the natural order. It's a trifle gaudy, but she'd like to have an airship base someday - she's always liked heights. She appreciates black humor as a coping mechanism. Most of Ekaterina's hand to hand combat experience comes from Maria using her to practice on when she couldn't find any other willing partners.
Ekaterina's not exactly a plain dresser, and unlike Maria, she almost always wears skirts, but she avoids anything that would keep her from moving fast if she needed to. She can sing (mezzo-soprano) and play the piano well enough to pass for an accomplished middle to upper class lady. The fact that Bodie attached herself to a little silver-haired nerd amused Ekaterina immensely when she found out about it. After Termena, it takes a lot more than strangeness and painful-sounding talents to make Ekaterina scared of a person. Licking blades has always struck her as an unsanitary practice.
In her weird electric mad scientist way, Termena seemed to like Ekaterina more than her own handlers ever did. Most of her career, except for the stint as a governess, has been spent working with people considerably taller than her own 5'3". Pain in itself is not all that fascinating: the interest lies in how people take it. Attempting to intimidate someone through brute force, without any attempt to psych them out or discover their vulnerabilities, offends Ekaterina's sensibilities. Termena, never one to let notions of "appropriateness" or "undue familiarity" get in the way of doing whatever she felt like, liked to call her "Koshechka."
* "Sasha" and "Captain Markov" are the same person: Captain Aleksandra Ivanovna Markov(a). She uses the masculine form of her last name because she was originally a Sweet Polly Oliver and that's what's on all her paperwork.
* The "now" for these takes place about forty years after the "now" for Valeriya's 100 Sentences, so Katya was in her late teens then, late fifties now.
* Maria is a bisexual orc Action Girl, and was a Sweet Polly Oliver at one point. Jin is a human psychic from a pseudo-Korean culture who can communicate with spirits, and also a Gray Haired Pretty Boy (a side effect of strong psychic abilities in this world). Bodie is their daughter, and takes after her mum. She's also the main protagonist at this point in the time line. Her current best friend is a dark elf Non-Action Guy.
* Athena is another one of the good guys. She starts off as a rather luckless young aspiring Action Girl, but gets better.
* Poppaea's another female spy. She also provides a lot of fanservice.
* The Aristoi are this world's Ancient Conspiracy. They are international in scope, and contrary to certain popular conspiracy theories, they have no religious affiliations and aren't a secret level of the Freemasons or any other organization that operates openly.
* Some inspiration taken from a Saki short story, A Song of Ice and Fire, Fingersmith, and "Stray."
Though Ekaterina never explicitly planned on dying young, she didn't really anticipate living as long as she has. Maria is the only woman Katya's ever really loved. According to her still-officially-secret-but-most-easily-accessible file, Ekaterina's mother was a mental patient who died in childbirth, leaving her daughter to be "adopted" at birth by agents of the Aristoi. Ekaterina is almost certain that this is not, in fact, the case. Working for Termena discouraged her from wearing metal hairpins.
Unless she's consciously trying to restrain herself, Ekaterina talks with her hands. Pawns, knights, and queens are all just pieces of carved ivory - it's much better to be a player, even if you can't always win. She believes in an afterlife - who wouldn't, after spending so much time with someone who can talk to ghosts? - but has no religious attachments. She hasn't used it for anything but first aid in years, but Ekaterina has the training and certification of her setting's equivalent of a Nurse Practitioner. When she was working for Dr. Termena, there was a rumor around the fortress that she was the scientist's daughter.
Liking girls has never been a source of personal discomfort to her, except for making seduction missions that much squickier. Ekaterina's loved cats since she was a small child. She's had so many aliases over the years that she doesn't identify with any surname or patronymic. Maria, for reasons best known to herself, liked to call her Kitty. Sometimes she wishes Bodie had grown up to look a little less like her mother.
Maria's relationship with Jin didn't make Ekaterina particularly jealous - it didn't seem reasonable to want a monopoly on someone's attention when you spent half your time away on some secret mission or another. She'd be insulted of someone accused her of Chronic Backstabbing Disorder - if she screws someone over, she does it for a damn good reason (although sometimes "they had it coming" or "the prospect was unbearably funny" count as compelling reasons to her). Neither of them know it, but Ekaterina is distantly related to Zip von Eschenbach. Ekaterina likes cherry jam in her tea. Dr. Termena taught her the importance of making an entrance.
Despite high marks in Applied Sciences during her training, Ekaterina prefers not to poison people with lethal intent (as opposed to slipping people truth serum or sleeping draught) - that's what guns are for. She was on to Poppaea within a week of Poppy's arrival, but kept her speculations to herself. A lifetime of subterfuge has made Ekaterina reluctant to reveal even completely innocuous personal information. Learning all those ridiculous elaborate gun tricks was, among other things, a way to channel her natural fidgetiness into something less nervous-looking. Ekaterina knows how to cook.
What's life without a little pointless theatricality? It's a bit baffling that the Aristoi have ever trusted her, considering the type of person they deliberately raised her to be. She likes pretty weapons, although not at the expense of function. The Aristoi's training was a profound influence on her personal development, although not always in ways they'd intended. In a weird way, Captain Markov is one of the most disturbing people Ekaterina's ever met, although she's known plenty who were scarier from a self-preservation perspective.
Although Ekaterina is much less wince-prone than most people, painful looking things happening to hands can bother her, especially if blunt trauma's involved. She's thankful that gloves are fashionable for middle and upper-class women, because anyone reasonably observant who got a good look at her hands could tell that she's not the lady she pretends to be. Old age and treachery will overcome youth and firepower. Working for megalomaniacs has its wearying aspects, but the impromptu soliloquies always liven things up. As long as she can control what matters to her, Ekaterina doesn't care about being officially in charge.
A stylish long swishy coat can take you anywhere. She found Markov so disturbing because while Termena's weirder qualities were due to nature and an accident of fate, Markov actively chose to be in a relationship with an electric mad scientist with tentacles. Ekaterina long suspected that Markov had hidden depths (and not just the depraved kind), but never did feel she had a satisfactory understanding of her character. Being able to give the impression that she knows what she's doing and has a right to be doing it has helped her more over the years than her skill with a gun. Her hair's currently off-white, but was originally a pale golden blonde.
While she doesn't wish for more scruples, Ekaterina resents having been brought up to run someone else's more morally repugnant errands. She actually liked Athena, although not enough to call off the immense mind-raping Xanatos Gambit the poor girl had stumbled into. Double-crossing a globe spanning conspiracy is one thing, but anyone who consumes vodka on an empty stomach (except for medicinal purposes) is being criminally careless about their health. One of the Aristoi's early unintentional lessons: if you're willing to give all your strength to a task, are willing to sacrifice your personal safety and well-being, and don't care about collateral damage or how much it hurts, you can do almost anything. The incident in which she learned this also taught her that the people who claim to be making you miserable in your best interest are lying their pious heads off.
Early in her training, Ekaterina learned that her instructors cared more about her continued existence than she did about theirs, although the situation was reversed when it came to concern about the other party's moods and opinions. However callous one might be, it doesn't do to ignore the feelings of others - people have a nasty habit of acting on them. History can remember her any way it chooses. She once died her hair black and spent six weeks as the world's most Slavic tea house waitress on an assignment. The tea house job gave her sore feet and a lifelong taste for shrimp pancakes.
A lot of Ekaterina's medical practice at Bezumiya-Krepost consisted of chiropractic treatment for Termena's sparring partners. Her hair currently only waves at the ends, but she had curls as a small child. By the standards of her culture, she's a light drinker. Ekaterina consumes a lot of tea. Despite the late hours she keeps and the stress of her job, Ekaterina still has a lovely complexion for a woman in her late fifties.
She was brought up to be conscientious, but the obsessive streak is something endemic to her nature. Ridiculously big guns just make you look silly and inclined to overcompensation, unless you're hunting zombies or something like that. Due to a careful program of controlled exposure, she's rendered herself resistant to all common truth serums - at least in doses that wouldn't be immediately obvious. Ekaterina's succumbed to the lure of dramatic villain speeches on a few occasions, but never gave away any accurate details of her plans in them. Proper accessorizing is important - if you can't kill a man with your hair ornaments, you're doing it wrong.
Ekaterina does not believe in repressing trauma: you need to remember the relevant details so you'll be able to properly avoid it or get revenge in the future. The sample of her hair in the Aristoi's main office has actually been a piece of hair switch since she was twenty-eight. Cyanide pills are one of the minor banes of her existence, because, talented as Ekaterina is, she has no gift for necromancy. Despite her fondness for sweets, she has pretty good teeth. She has the constitution of an ox, apart from a slight predisposition to respiratory troubles.
She gave her revolvers nicknames. All of her corsets have a secret pocket built into the lining for smuggling documents. Compared to Maria, or even Markov, she makes a horribly unconvincing man. The rumor about Ekaterina's parentage probably started because, despite the fact that she was of Dr. Termena's favored gender, coloring, and age group, Termena never flirted with her - and they both had blonde hair and light eyes. One of Ekaterina's missions when she was in her twenties involved acting as governess to a diplomat's three children.
The diplomat's kids became surprisingly fond of her, mostly because she told marvelously hair-raising stories with no didactic elements whatsoever. Unless she has a specific reason to look fashionable, Ekaterina never wears hoops - stealth is hard enough without your skirt knocking over end tables. She's a gunslinger at heart, but appreciates the advantages of more easily camouflaged weapons. Her knowledge of "home chemistry" extends to things like skin care products as well as poisons and antidotes, all of which has come in handy. In the course of one of her missions, she one spent three weeks in a harem - which gave her plenty of opportunity for foreign language practice.
It can be a bit disconcerting to discover that "what you want someone to believe" and "the truth, as far as you know" are the same thing, but it can also be rather refreshing. She's trained herself to be functionally ambidextrous. Manipulating the fates of nations is fun and all, but sometimes even Ekaterina wants a vacation. People who think they're being maliciously clever - but fail at the cleverness - give her a certain amount of mean-spirited amusement (but not the kind they were aiming for). If Ekaterina attended Hogwarts, she would sort Slytherin, but her more stereotypical housemates would annoy her no end - there's nothing wrong with playing the card-carrying villain, but is it necessary to be so obnoxious about it?
If she's not in a situation likely to give her hypothermia, Ekaterina rather enjoys cold dry weather. However, she loathes being cold and wet. Swords have never been her strong point - she much prefers revolvers, knives, and potentially lethal hair accessories. Markov seemed to like her, which was much preferable to the opposite, but meant that Ekaterina's life got uncomfortably interesting whenever Termena had to travel and couldn't take her girlfriend. Psychics with invasive powers disturb her - there's a reason she doesn't use truth serum to flavor her tea.
While she believes that her ultimate goals are right, she'd consider herself one of the villains if she thought of her life in literary terms. People who can't properly aim have no right to go around shooting people - machine guns violate her sense of the natural order. It's a trifle gaudy, but she'd like to have an airship base someday - she's always liked heights. She appreciates black humor as a coping mechanism. Most of Ekaterina's hand to hand combat experience comes from Maria using her to practice on when she couldn't find any other willing partners.
Ekaterina's not exactly a plain dresser, and unlike Maria, she almost always wears skirts, but she avoids anything that would keep her from moving fast if she needed to. She can sing (mezzo-soprano) and play the piano well enough to pass for an accomplished middle to upper class lady. The fact that Bodie attached herself to a little silver-haired nerd amused Ekaterina immensely when she found out about it. After Termena, it takes a lot more than strangeness and painful-sounding talents to make Ekaterina scared of a person. Licking blades has always struck her as an unsanitary practice.
In her weird electric mad scientist way, Termena seemed to like Ekaterina more than her own handlers ever did. Most of her career, except for the stint as a governess, has been spent working with people considerably taller than her own 5'3". Pain in itself is not all that fascinating: the interest lies in how people take it. Attempting to intimidate someone through brute force, without any attempt to psych them out or discover their vulnerabilities, offends Ekaterina's sensibilities. Termena, never one to let notions of "appropriateness" or "undue familiarity" get in the way of doing whatever she felt like, liked to call her "Koshechka."