[beyond the rift] Application
About You - The Player
Name: Emily
Age: 23
Contact: iluvroadrunner6@gmail.com / iluvroadrunner6 on AIM
Past Role Playing Experience: Here and paradisa, and other places.
The Character
Name: Paz Mendoza
Age/Birthdate: 199 / October 23, 1812
Species: Demon
*Type: Rakshasa
Canon: Original Character // Cameo character
*Pre-existing powers: The usual demon powers, enhanced speed, strength, agility. She’s also well skilled in most hand held weapons that aren’t firearms. She likes knives. A lot.
*Rift Change, if applicable: N/A
Livejournal: laywastetothee
Played By: Zoe Saldana
Icon: http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/106233911/32421272
Appearance: Paz is a proud woman and carries herself as such. She’s not overly tall, about five-seven, but she has impeccable posture that makes her seem taller. She’s clearly Hispanic in origin, with dark tan skin, and long dark hair, big round eyes. She carries a lot of her age in her eyes, but there’s still a youthful joy to them, as well as a predatory gleam. When she speaks, she is clear and articulate, and while she speaks fluent Spanish and was raised in Chile, there is little trace of her natural accent-which took decades of practice to perfect. She loves her mother tongue, however, and slips between the two easily when she feels the opportunity.
She pays attention to the changing times, as she’s lived through almost two centuries, and is often seen in fashionable, albeit loose fitting clothing that’s easy to move in. Mostly pants-never dresses-with a loose top, over a closer fitting one. She likes a lot of color, so they’re usually bright, noticeable, and all her clothes are well tailored to fit her-she can afford it. She doesn’t wear make-up-she doesn’t see the point, and her hair is usually left hanging, unless she happens to pull it up so she can work.
She has large black crow wings, and they are hidden under jagged looking scars on her back that form a V shape along her shoulder blades.
Personality: Paz is a very old demon who didn’t get that way by being stupid. She also didn’t get there by being ambitious, either. It was about fifty percent skill, thirty percent luck, and twenty percent being absolutely ruthless.
She has very little remorse for the people she kills, as she was raised to believe that that was how you survived. If you were going to start something, you better damn well finish it, and she does. There are very few people she will let live, and usually if it does, she sees it as a challenge, and wants to have the opportunity to better herself before she comes at you again, and if she does, in fact, let you get away, odds are she won’t do it twice. (The only person she ever faced twice and let them go is Julian Cuevas. The rest of them are dead.) There is a hierarchy to what she considers acceptable prey versus acceptable opponents. As far as she’s concerned, humans are cattle meant for slaughter. Supernatural humans and other demons are good for practice, while Wanderers are an interesting toy to play with due to their abilities and the fact that they come from other worlds-but still meant to be killed. Angels are the only beings that she considers real adversaries, and more to the point that mostly only applies to archangels. As for weapons, she’s mostly fond of blades, if she needs something other than her bare hands, but she despises guns. She finds them too messy and impersonal for her taste. She likes to get in close for the kill, to see the look in the prey’s eyes as they meet their end. It gives her a bit of a thrill and she wants to be the last thing they see.
She has a lot of internalized anger, mostly associated with the way her village rejected her after her Calling came, but she’s learned to use it as oppose to it using her. There are certain victims (members of the clergy, for example), where she will use a bit more rage than others, but for the most part, Paz goes through life with the calm, cool collection of someone who has been around too long for much to rattle her. She’s very slow to actual anger, and there’s a bit of a playfulness to her mood. She looks at most things as a game-a very deadly game, but a game nonetheless. She’s not arrogant, however. She never had a formal education, and while she is intelligent, and can fake it with her speech, she is not well-educated. She learns by making the mess as oppose to reading about it, and when she’s coming up against a foe she’s never faced before, she treats it as she would any other kill, and does not let up because she thinks it’ll be “easy”-she knows better than that. Every single kill gets the full Paz Mendoza treatment. They should be grateful for that.
Paz is incredibly loyal, if you can get close enough to be considered a friend. Currently, the only person that merits that treatment in her life is Raff, even if their relationship is as violent as she is. He does have a slight edge of control over her, but it’s not much. If she doesn’t know what to do in a situation, she’ll default to him. They’ve been together for so long that there are times where she trusts him completely, and if she lost him … Heaven help whatever town they happen to be in. She would tear it apart looking for the parties responsible, and then tear them limb from limb. He’s her family, and even though they do have their moments where their relationship is rather explosive, there isn’t anything she wouldn’t do for him.
History: Paz Mendoza was born in a small village near what is now Viña del Mar, Chile, in late 1812, during the height of Chile’s push for an independent state. She was the daughter of a poor woman who was forced into an affair with one of the local officials and was shunned when she became pregnant. Her father, not that her mother knew it, was a Glaysa-Labolas demon who had manipulated his way into the seat of power when the first whispers of revolution started. After Maria Mendoza gave birth, she was dismissed as an adulteress and was forced to raise her daughter on her own, apart from the rest of the community. With the exception of snide looks and the occasional comment from those around them, they were mostly left alone, until Paz hit puberty at the age of 16, and her body changed into that of a demon. It happened in the middle of Sunday service, which naturally didn’t go over with the rest of the heavily Catholic congregation, including her own mother. Believing her to be some kind of instrument of Satan, they tossed her into the nearest prison, where they tried every form of exorcism to expel the demon out of her. She was left there for a month, minimally fed and left to stew in her own resentment as well as her Calling’s urge to reach out and strike. She was patient, bated her time, until one of the guards opened the cage to give her food, and then she struck. She used them to break her way out, slaughtering every person who had held a hand in her imprisonment-which, incidentally, was ninety-nine percent of her village and included both her parents who had abandoned her.
She left town with essentially little else but the clothes on her back, and headed towards Santiago, the capital. On her way there, she met a fellow Rakshasa demon, Simon Ortega. He was the one who actually trained her on how to hunt and kill more efficiently, as opposed to just acting out of rage. What he did not teach her, however, was to restrain her Calling at all, encouraging her to kill whenever the urge struck. She later learned that he had been an associate of her father’s in a special group called the Society. He brought her into the fold, intending to use her as a weapon more than anything else. She was all of eighteen years-old, and they indoctrinated her into their ways and views of the world, and she never learned to question it. As she got older, and more accustomed to things, she developed rules on her own-for example, she wouldn’t kill children unless they were sick and (in her opinion) needed to be put out of their misery, and she had a special penchant for church officials-but other than that, she didn’t discriminate. Anyone who crossed her path-human, demon, angel or otherwise-stood an equal chance of ending up on the end of her knife, and she took far too much pleasure in the kill to let them get away. The Society could direct her or channel her, but for the most part she killed whoever she deemed fit.
Over the next forty years, she made her way through the nations of South America on various missions for the Socitey, until she found her way up to Texas and the United States. In 1875, she first crossed paths with Julian Cuevas. He didn’t kill her, but as far as she was concerned, he definitely won. She was still a baby as far as her demon age was concerned, and had no business trying to take on an archangel, but she was always more of a doer than an observer. She gave it as good as she got in terms of her battle with Cuevas, and in the end they parted in a tentative stalemate, and Paz left town quickly, taking the time to lick her wounds and heal before Cuevas could come back for seconds. She headed east, towards New York City, stopping over in different towns to indulge her calling, before finally landing in the city and losing herself in the massive amounts of people. She took various jobs as she went, saving her money as she did so that she could make enough to support herself, even with her constant need to move due to her Calling getting her into trouble. She didn’t need much to actually live on, so most of the money was packed away with her, holding into it as she moved through the decades and eventually building herself quite the nice nest egg.
In 1910, she was in a crowded club in the city when she happened to run into a Temeluchus demon named Shannen Rafferty. They hit it off right away, and began a tumultuous relationship, that would span the next century. They both found a matched connection with their Calling, and began working together with each other, cutting a bloody swath across New England, before heading West towards California. They became almost the demonic version of Bonnie and Clyde, only much, much more dangerous. Over the course of that century, she also happened to run into Cuevas again, just outside Woodstock in 1969. Raff was in the middle of the festival, playing on the insecurities and fears of those who were a little more susceptible, due to the influence of the narcotics, while Paz took on Cuevas again. They still both managed to walk away with their lives intact, but this time, having almost another century under her belt, she gave it back to him a little harder, beating him by enough of a margin to declare herself the winner in her mind. She didn’t finish him off, however, content to keep that open rivalry between them. She then disappeared into the festival to find Raff, and hasn’t seen Cuevas since.
She and Raff continued on their way until she got a call from the Society, directing her attention to Chicago. She and Raff parted ways, and she headed in the direction of the city, with clear orders as to what to do when she got there.
Writing Sample:http://rift-overflow.livejournal.com/29726.html