ooc: Application
PLAYER
✧ NAME: Mhairi
✧ LJ USERNAME: uglytidings
✧ CONTACT (EMAIL, AIM, MSN, PLURK, ETC.): AIM/plurk: deathwailart||email: eyelinerkisses@hotmail.com
✧ CURRENT MUSE LIST: None
CHARACTER
✧ NAME: Shirley McAllister
✧ SERIES: Original - To Ride a Death Coach (Cóiste Bodhar a mharcaíocht)
✧ HISTORY:
There's an old power flowing through the women in Shirley's family, one that comes right from their Gods, the Gods back in Ireland. A power that lets them sense death and to warn loved ones of that impending tragedy.
It's the power of the bean sidhe - banshee.
Shirley is the next in a long line of women who perform their duties but die by the time they hit fifty from the grief of their job and how much it drains them in the end. Only Shirley isn't content with that and she's seeking out others to see if this curse can be lifted or if there's a way to extend her life before she resides permanently in orbis alia, still performing her normal duties along the way.
Shirley, along with her twin brother Cedric, was born to Lachlan and Iona McAllister on July 7th 1990 and became the next child to inherit the ancient banshee power that had been passed down through her maternal line. She spent her childhood and early life fairly uneventfully in Edinburgh, Scotland, living a privileged life due to her parents careers being so well paying; her mother was an author who wrote both fiction and non-fiction involving Celtic mythology and folklore and her father a psychologist who specialised in adolescent psychology. She was raised in Silverknowes and attended the Royal High School (Edinburgh) where she was a fairly good student who worked hard. Her best subjects were English, history, music and languages but she performed badly at maths and science until she was able to drop them completely.
Her banshee powers became fully active when she was thirteen (as they come with the onset of puberty and the first period due to the nature of blood sacrifice) and from then on she began to learn how to use them and became very aware of death which is something she fears for herself as she knows the totality of it and that once someone dies, they can never return to the human world ever again. Learning how to use magic involved a great deal of study of ancient texts and learning about the Gods and Goddesses and how true the stories that had been told actually were - it was at this time that she started to learn the old languages as well (Scots Gaelic, Irish Gaelic and Old English as well as more modern Irish) to be able to say the magic. The more she learned and the more she sacrificed even just practicing the magic, the more she worried for the life that was already beginning to seep away from her due to Dobrón (grief) a side effect of predicting deaths and feeling them which was said to be the eventual cause of a banshee's death.
But Shirley knew of others performing the same duties as her who hadn't died from it like the bean nighe or the Dulluhan but when she asked her mother questions, her mother told her not to question the natural order of things and that there was a reason for things to be as they were. Naturally that didn't satisfy Shirley but she bit her tongue and continued her research alone.
Throughout her school life though she had a very small clique of girls she was close with who feared her rather than liking her but nevertheless, if anyone was rude to them or hurt them, Shirley would be the one to get back at them. She did have one or two female friends that she held very close and whom she trusted completely enough to let them know about the vulnerable sides of her and she already knows that if they die before she does, she will be in a great deal of pain from the losses. The person she became closest to outside of her twin brother was his girlfriend Cassandra Verity, a Seer from a similar ancient bloodline like Shirley and together they slowly began to piece together more of the legends which continued more or less uninterrupted until Shirley turned eighteen.
At the age of eighteen, Shirley underwent a ritual to fully awaken her banshee powers which involved spending a month in orbis alia (Otherworld) where she learned the spells she would need to aid her in her calling as a banshee. This is where she gained the silver markings on various parts of her body, carved upon her skin with a bone knife by ancestors of her bloodline to seal the spell within her. This is where Shirley met her grandmother Elspeth for the first time as part of the ritual to oversee it and to channel information from the family and Shirley's ancestors; she too told Shirley to seek out the Dulluhan and see what she could learn from them. She was then sent back to the human world to hone her magic fully by practicing on humans that had been marked for death and started to get a real taste for what power could be like and began to seek ways to extend her human life beyond the typical span of a banshee.
For the rest of the summer, Shirley and Cedric were packed off to London to help run the pub of old family friends, a supernatural pub with an enchanted till and jukebox and all types of supernatural being running in and out at all hours and this provided Shirley with her first real opportunities to learn about extending her life and breaking what she assumed to be a curse placed upon the banshees but found very little help - especially from vampires who were far more interested in turning her instead. Still, she found she enjoyed the experience of working at the pub and it was one of the first true times she was honestly independent and didn't complain unless it came to changing barrels or cleaning up, especially the loos.
Before the summer was over though, she did manage to find out that the more magic she learned, the quicker she would bring down the weight of grief upon herself and so she put an end to learning more magic, satisfied with what she currently had. The summer over, she headed to university to study English and history, taking up a job at the bar in the student union where she met Finn, a ghost of student who'd died who claimed to know of a Dulluhan in the area and that he'd heard through the grapevine that Shirley had been looking for answers and that he'd be agreeable to speaking with her. At first, despite wanting to believe what she'd heard, Shirley maintained her skepticism and ignored it, focussing on her studies instead until she went to warn of a death and found a Dulluhan waiting for her. The pair warned the household of the impending death that was to occur and then instead of going home to sleep and rest from the drain on her, Shirley climbed up with the Dulluhan into its death coach where they started talking about their respective paths in life and, despite everything she had learned to the contrary up until this point, Shirley was shocked to realise that the Dulluhan was actually alive rather than dead.
After that, life continued on in much the same way it had with very little extraordinary happening beyond warning the families of the soon to be deceased, working increasingly with the Dulluhan and spending the summer in London working in the pub with Cedric, Cassandra joining them this time to help out. It was during the summer when they had turned nineteen that Shirley met Blair, a trainee lawyer and one of the few normal people to venture into Alea Iacta Est and it didn't take long for the pair to start going out and the two couples spent a great deal of time together in the flat although on one occasion Cassandra managed to ruin the mood by having a spontaneous burst of prophecy relating to the pair getting married as that showed a very fatal flaw in Shirley's plans: she didn't intend to ever marry or have children to prevent the banshee line from continuing.
It was in London that, through a dream, she found herself sucked into orbis alia through a dream, pulled there by the Dulluhan she had met at home. Standing on a frozen loch, he told her that he had information on how she could go about putting an end to the curse - there was a trade to make though in exchange for this and that was to give up her abilities. Although this seemed like an ideal solution as Shirley didn't want to keep up the course but her grandmother appeared to her from under the ice and before dragging her under the ice with her, telling her not to trust a Dulluhan.
Shirley woke up from the dream and began to plan a trip to orbis alia to find out what exactly the Dulluhans were, how they had been created and just who she had met.
✧ TIMELINE: Preparing to go on her search to orbis alia
✧ PERSONALITY:
On the surface, Shirley appears to be just your average girl who lived a somewhat privileged lifestyle: she is very used to having a good amount of disposable income and being able to have someone else do things for her and that is often the front she likes to present to others as it means that very often they will not expect much from her so if she does put in an extra little effort, they are often more taken aback than they would normally be. She dislikes most manual labour and so if there is any sort of DIY or some sort of appliance disaster, she will usually whine for a man to come and do it for her, stamp her feet or cry. She's very good at crying on cue. One thing she doesn't mind, surprisingly, is working for a decent wage but more because it enables her to buy her own things without having to ask her parents as normally she has to ask her mother and she prefers not to.
Dig a little deeper and Shirley is actually more intelligent than she lets on (unless it comes to science or maths because she is, by her own admission, utterly shite at those avenues) and knows pretty much all there is to know on Celtic, Irish and Scottish mythology and folklore and Old English history, and, if you flatter her enough and catch her in the right mood, she will ramble away happily about them although there is a caveat: if she thinks someone is being insincere, she will stop talking to them for a while. To Shirley, all this mythology is real and tangible. She has a very strong, very real hatred for Christianity to the point where she refuses to take God's name in vain as she doesn't believe in him and blames the spread of Christianity for destroying a great deal of the ancient power of the Tuatha Dé Danann. It is the Tuatha Dé Danann that she will refer to and, in times of need, she will invoke the names of various Celtic figures depending on what she needs to pray for.
As with most banshee, her relationship with her mother and with older women in general is not the best. This is due to the fact that as the next banshee of her line, part of her wishes to seize control of the power although unless she actively kills her mother, she will have to wait for her to die before she has the full power of the bloodline. She sees older women as a challenge and will often refer to them as crones (although this is either under her breath or behind their back.)
Most people though are kept at a distance as Shirley has experienced enough grief when predicting the deaths of strangers in her vicinity and she knows how much more painful it will be when the grief is her own so for this reason, she keeps a wall between herself and others as she doesn't wish to be in more pain than she has to be. She also knows that as a banshee, she will 'die' (in the human world, in reality she will return to orbis alia) at a relatively young age for modern times as most banshee rarely make it past fifty years of age before all their sacrifice and the grief catches up with them.
Her relationship with her father and brother were far better than her relationship with her mother. She's every inch daddy's little princess and is skilled at twisting him right around her little finger and she counts her twin brother as one of her best friends. She generally prefers the company of men to women though as she finds them more straightforward and easier to manipulate although she does enjoy the art of manipulating other girls and blackmailing them.
Ultimately Shirley puts herself first and if she hurries to help out someone else in need, it's usually because she feels she stands to gain something from helping them. Unless the person in need is out for a little help in getting back at someone because Shirley enjoys helping out in things like that for a little power fix. Her true goal though is to gain control of her bloodline and power and to try and extend her life although she isn't entirely sure how to go about that yet although she has thought about brokering deals in orbis alia to extend her life in the human world before she returns there for enternity.
✧ ABILITIES/POWERS:
Shirley can perform magic if she makes a blood sacrifice to the Tuatha Dé Danann. Any spell she chooses requires blood and the larger or more involved the spell, the more blood sacrificed. After performing large spells she will either go into shock unless she has prepared herself beforehand or she'll become sick for a week or two with very severe iron deficient anaemia.
Breithniú - analysis: if Shirley obtains the blood of a person with their consent, she can learn about them but the blood must be freely given.
Claochlaigh - transform: Shirley is able to turn into one of the forms associated with being a banshee which is mostly commonly a hooded crow.
Seachmall - illusion: Shirley can summon an illusion of an object or a person. Depending on how much blood she sacrifices, the illusion can either be very faint and just an image or very real and able to be touched.
Scáth - shade/protection: One of her ward spells. This allows Shirley to hide herself or an object. No blood sacrifice is required.
Cosaint - safeguard: One of her ward spells. This protects Shirley's home should she need it and will only allow in persons of her choosing. In an emergency, she can use this spell on herself. No blood sacrifice is required.
Truailligh - contaminate: if Shirley inflicts a wound while invoking this curse, she can cause someone to become sick with some sort of virus or infection, mostly commonly a fever. The severity depends on how much blood she shed on her own knife in preparation but it rarely lasts longer than a week.
Gnáthaigh - haunt: If Shirley casts this, she will summon nightmarish visions to plague the victim for a week.
Shirley is also able to tell whether or not a person is alive or dead and to predict when a character will die if their death is imminent in the next three days as she will arrive either on their doorstep or the doorstep of those close to them and howl. This howl can be heard for miles and doesn't sound like any noise a human would. This is called Tairngreacht or prophecy. Shirley is at her most irritable in those three days as the howl manifests in the form of a migraine and she's very physically weak.
She's fluent in Irish, Old English and Scottish Gaelic as well, due to all the magic being passed down in those languages.
She has markings relating to her spells on her body. Images of them and the spell they relate to along with a location will follow. All markings are silver and hard to spot at first unless someone knows what they're looking for and where to look for it.
Crow - corresponds to Claochlaigh. Located on her left shoulder.
Eye - corresponds to Breithniú. Located on the nape of her neck.
Dragonfly - corresponds to Seachmall. Located on her right shoulder.
Pentragram - correpsonds to Scáth. Located on her right wrist.
Horse shoe pointing up - corresponds to Cosaint. Located on her left wrist.
Evil eye - corresponds to Truailligh. Located on her right index finger.
Skull - corresponds to Gnáthaigh. Located on her right foot.
For Tairngreacht she has a line across her throat - this is to allow her howl to come out as it uses her orbis alia voice and not her human voice.
✧ TIME OF ARRIVAL: Day
✧ MASK DESIGN:
There isn't any great significance behind the choice of the mask beyond the fact that Shirley is very vain and wouldn't settle for an ugly mask.
✧ PLACE OF SOLACE: Alea Iacta Est (the die has been cast) - the supernatural pub she and her brother Cedric ran for family friends in the summers from the age of 18-20
SAMPLES
✧ FIRST PERSON: (please treat this as though it's a private journal or blog entry)
Back in the old days, the really old days, things were so much simpler. It was easier to go about your calling and well, people didn't really live that long anyway - making it past forty was considered to be one hell of an accomplishment but that's not something we can apply to day to day life. Now though people live longer and longer unless they're a typically unhealthy fat bastard or something catches them and pulls the plug but fifty? Fifty isn't really that much of an accomplishment.
And I'm meant to be dead by then. Dead and grey and wrinkled and old. Snuffed out. Everything is going to come down on me link a ton of bricks and that'll be me gone, off to the Otherworld to do...whatever it is. Great, stuck until the end of time in the sodding cold with a bunch of wraiths and weird things that I can't ever figure out what the in the name of Brigid they are.
Maybe I should take the deal. It's not like I asked for any of this did I? Generation after generation of people having daughters who grow old before their time and die. I don't even remember gran.
Well, I do. I mean I've seen her in the Otherworld but that's not the same is it? Why am I even asking this? It's like I'm talking to myself or a brick. Or to Cedric if a nice arse and pair of tits saunter past, all the more so if they're jiggling.
That Dulluhan...I need to know more. See if the offer is worth it. I want to take it, I want to be able to grow old - well, okay, no one wants to grow old and lose their looks and smell like pee and cabbage - but to be a disgraceful old woman with that expression of having her knickers in her handbag. With her cleavage out. In sequins. Tasteful but still a little disgraceful.
If I don't take him up on it though then I've got 30 years left. Dad and Cedric losing me as well as mum and in the name of the All-Father I know how much grief hurts by now.
Anyway, enough of this sentimental tripe, party tonight and I haven't quite picked out the right dress yet.
✧ THIRD PERSON:
The headache had been building in her dreams this time and by the time she woke it was already pulsing and throbbing. Every inch of her body ached and the night of spell casting and blood letting from the previous evening weighed heavily upon her now and, judging from the fact that at least one of the wounds was still healing, the spell was still taking shape on the victim. She yanked the covers back over her head with an irritable sigh; all of this blood sacrifice was ridiculous and she knew what it meant for her and her kind. It meant she was another step closer to crossing over and staying in orbis alia permanently and, despite how much she enjoyed her time there, it meant another day closer to being trapped there for the rest of eternity.
"Eochaid Ollathair (All-Father), grant me strength," she murmured to herself as she tried to will herself to sleep, automatically tracing fingers over the pentagram and horse shoe markings on her wrists to add to the protective wards. She didn't need to do that but the little thrum of power helped to reassure her that nothing would cross her threshold and cause her harm in this state and for hours she drifted, mentally making note of where she would have to go. It wasn't too far to the house of the man marked to die and all his family lived with him still but it was cold again and she was already exhausted.
She'd need to get as much rest as possible to make sure she didn't faint when she was done.
Hours later she woke again, the sky dark and she nodded in satisfaction. She hated the summer months when it never really turned dark outside until the small hours or never at all but tonight was a rare night and she wrapped up warm, choosing a pair of jeans for a change; she didn't want to let the air at the still tender cut along her left calf.
Setting off, she hurried quietly through the streets, remaining out of sight of anyone who would happen to be there until she felt the tug in her stomach, the burn at the line across her throat and she knew without even really knowing at all that she had found the right doorway. Collapsing to her knees, she sucked in one huge breath, tilted her head right back and let loose a keening, howling moan that should never come from someone as slight and small as she. Someone who looked so utterly human.
She was gone before anyone spotted her, quickly scraping over her leg as she mouthed, "Claochlaigh," and then she was gone, a black crow staring up at the terrified woman opening the door before flapping off with one final caw at her.
✧ ORIGINAL CHARACTER QUESTION:
Last she remembered she was sitting at the breakfast bar in the kitchen in the flat above the pub, tapping her pen against her notebook as her brother and Blair played on the X-Box and Cassandra bustled about making tea when she was waking up on a bench, brushing her hair out of her eyes as she took in a city that was wholly unfamiliar and she leapt from the bench so quickly that she nearly fell out of her high heels, tapping at her waist where the bone knife she carried was still safely tucked away against her skin.
"Scáth," she muttered under her breath, hand cupping the marking on her wrist before clearing her throat and calling out. "Ced? Ced are you here? Cassie? Blair? This isn't funny if you're playing a bloody joke on me!" Then, with a sickening jolt she pulled out her knife and held it tight to her person as she started walking, looking around and muttering to herself as she tried to place it. It certainly wasn't orbis alia because she would recognise the cold and the gloom anywhere and this looked like nothing she had seen there either; it almost looked more like something from a travel brochure. Bone knife still at the ready, she took tentative steps forward, looking out for anything that might be lurking around.
✧ NAME: Mhairi
✧ LJ USERNAME: uglytidings
✧ CONTACT (EMAIL, AIM, MSN, PLURK, ETC.): AIM/plurk: deathwailart||email: eyelinerkisses@hotmail.com
✧ CURRENT MUSE LIST: None
CHARACTER
✧ NAME: Shirley McAllister
✧ SERIES: Original - To Ride a Death Coach (Cóiste Bodhar a mharcaíocht)
✧ HISTORY:
There's an old power flowing through the women in Shirley's family, one that comes right from their Gods, the Gods back in Ireland. A power that lets them sense death and to warn loved ones of that impending tragedy.
It's the power of the bean sidhe - banshee.
Shirley is the next in a long line of women who perform their duties but die by the time they hit fifty from the grief of their job and how much it drains them in the end. Only Shirley isn't content with that and she's seeking out others to see if this curse can be lifted or if there's a way to extend her life before she resides permanently in orbis alia, still performing her normal duties along the way.
Shirley, along with her twin brother Cedric, was born to Lachlan and Iona McAllister on July 7th 1990 and became the next child to inherit the ancient banshee power that had been passed down through her maternal line. She spent her childhood and early life fairly uneventfully in Edinburgh, Scotland, living a privileged life due to her parents careers being so well paying; her mother was an author who wrote both fiction and non-fiction involving Celtic mythology and folklore and her father a psychologist who specialised in adolescent psychology. She was raised in Silverknowes and attended the Royal High School (Edinburgh) where she was a fairly good student who worked hard. Her best subjects were English, history, music and languages but she performed badly at maths and science until she was able to drop them completely.
Her banshee powers became fully active when she was thirteen (as they come with the onset of puberty and the first period due to the nature of blood sacrifice) and from then on she began to learn how to use them and became very aware of death which is something she fears for herself as she knows the totality of it and that once someone dies, they can never return to the human world ever again. Learning how to use magic involved a great deal of study of ancient texts and learning about the Gods and Goddesses and how true the stories that had been told actually were - it was at this time that she started to learn the old languages as well (Scots Gaelic, Irish Gaelic and Old English as well as more modern Irish) to be able to say the magic. The more she learned and the more she sacrificed even just practicing the magic, the more she worried for the life that was already beginning to seep away from her due to Dobrón (grief) a side effect of predicting deaths and feeling them which was said to be the eventual cause of a banshee's death.
But Shirley knew of others performing the same duties as her who hadn't died from it like the bean nighe or the Dulluhan but when she asked her mother questions, her mother told her not to question the natural order of things and that there was a reason for things to be as they were. Naturally that didn't satisfy Shirley but she bit her tongue and continued her research alone.
Throughout her school life though she had a very small clique of girls she was close with who feared her rather than liking her but nevertheless, if anyone was rude to them or hurt them, Shirley would be the one to get back at them. She did have one or two female friends that she held very close and whom she trusted completely enough to let them know about the vulnerable sides of her and she already knows that if they die before she does, she will be in a great deal of pain from the losses. The person she became closest to outside of her twin brother was his girlfriend Cassandra Verity, a Seer from a similar ancient bloodline like Shirley and together they slowly began to piece together more of the legends which continued more or less uninterrupted until Shirley turned eighteen.
At the age of eighteen, Shirley underwent a ritual to fully awaken her banshee powers which involved spending a month in orbis alia (Otherworld) where she learned the spells she would need to aid her in her calling as a banshee. This is where she gained the silver markings on various parts of her body, carved upon her skin with a bone knife by ancestors of her bloodline to seal the spell within her. This is where Shirley met her grandmother Elspeth for the first time as part of the ritual to oversee it and to channel information from the family and Shirley's ancestors; she too told Shirley to seek out the Dulluhan and see what she could learn from them. She was then sent back to the human world to hone her magic fully by practicing on humans that had been marked for death and started to get a real taste for what power could be like and began to seek ways to extend her human life beyond the typical span of a banshee.
For the rest of the summer, Shirley and Cedric were packed off to London to help run the pub of old family friends, a supernatural pub with an enchanted till and jukebox and all types of supernatural being running in and out at all hours and this provided Shirley with her first real opportunities to learn about extending her life and breaking what she assumed to be a curse placed upon the banshees but found very little help - especially from vampires who were far more interested in turning her instead. Still, she found she enjoyed the experience of working at the pub and it was one of the first true times she was honestly independent and didn't complain unless it came to changing barrels or cleaning up, especially the loos.
Before the summer was over though, she did manage to find out that the more magic she learned, the quicker she would bring down the weight of grief upon herself and so she put an end to learning more magic, satisfied with what she currently had. The summer over, she headed to university to study English and history, taking up a job at the bar in the student union where she met Finn, a ghost of student who'd died who claimed to know of a Dulluhan in the area and that he'd heard through the grapevine that Shirley had been looking for answers and that he'd be agreeable to speaking with her. At first, despite wanting to believe what she'd heard, Shirley maintained her skepticism and ignored it, focussing on her studies instead until she went to warn of a death and found a Dulluhan waiting for her. The pair warned the household of the impending death that was to occur and then instead of going home to sleep and rest from the drain on her, Shirley climbed up with the Dulluhan into its death coach where they started talking about their respective paths in life and, despite everything she had learned to the contrary up until this point, Shirley was shocked to realise that the Dulluhan was actually alive rather than dead.
After that, life continued on in much the same way it had with very little extraordinary happening beyond warning the families of the soon to be deceased, working increasingly with the Dulluhan and spending the summer in London working in the pub with Cedric, Cassandra joining them this time to help out. It was during the summer when they had turned nineteen that Shirley met Blair, a trainee lawyer and one of the few normal people to venture into Alea Iacta Est and it didn't take long for the pair to start going out and the two couples spent a great deal of time together in the flat although on one occasion Cassandra managed to ruin the mood by having a spontaneous burst of prophecy relating to the pair getting married as that showed a very fatal flaw in Shirley's plans: she didn't intend to ever marry or have children to prevent the banshee line from continuing.
It was in London that, through a dream, she found herself sucked into orbis alia through a dream, pulled there by the Dulluhan she had met at home. Standing on a frozen loch, he told her that he had information on how she could go about putting an end to the curse - there was a trade to make though in exchange for this and that was to give up her abilities. Although this seemed like an ideal solution as Shirley didn't want to keep up the course but her grandmother appeared to her from under the ice and before dragging her under the ice with her, telling her not to trust a Dulluhan.
Shirley woke up from the dream and began to plan a trip to orbis alia to find out what exactly the Dulluhans were, how they had been created and just who she had met.
✧ TIMELINE: Preparing to go on her search to orbis alia
✧ PERSONALITY:
On the surface, Shirley appears to be just your average girl who lived a somewhat privileged lifestyle: she is very used to having a good amount of disposable income and being able to have someone else do things for her and that is often the front she likes to present to others as it means that very often they will not expect much from her so if she does put in an extra little effort, they are often more taken aback than they would normally be. She dislikes most manual labour and so if there is any sort of DIY or some sort of appliance disaster, she will usually whine for a man to come and do it for her, stamp her feet or cry. She's very good at crying on cue. One thing she doesn't mind, surprisingly, is working for a decent wage but more because it enables her to buy her own things without having to ask her parents as normally she has to ask her mother and she prefers not to.
Dig a little deeper and Shirley is actually more intelligent than she lets on (unless it comes to science or maths because she is, by her own admission, utterly shite at those avenues) and knows pretty much all there is to know on Celtic, Irish and Scottish mythology and folklore and Old English history, and, if you flatter her enough and catch her in the right mood, she will ramble away happily about them although there is a caveat: if she thinks someone is being insincere, she will stop talking to them for a while. To Shirley, all this mythology is real and tangible. She has a very strong, very real hatred for Christianity to the point where she refuses to take God's name in vain as she doesn't believe in him and blames the spread of Christianity for destroying a great deal of the ancient power of the Tuatha Dé Danann. It is the Tuatha Dé Danann that she will refer to and, in times of need, she will invoke the names of various Celtic figures depending on what she needs to pray for.
As with most banshee, her relationship with her mother and with older women in general is not the best. This is due to the fact that as the next banshee of her line, part of her wishes to seize control of the power although unless she actively kills her mother, she will have to wait for her to die before she has the full power of the bloodline. She sees older women as a challenge and will often refer to them as crones (although this is either under her breath or behind their back.)
Most people though are kept at a distance as Shirley has experienced enough grief when predicting the deaths of strangers in her vicinity and she knows how much more painful it will be when the grief is her own so for this reason, she keeps a wall between herself and others as she doesn't wish to be in more pain than she has to be. She also knows that as a banshee, she will 'die' (in the human world, in reality she will return to orbis alia) at a relatively young age for modern times as most banshee rarely make it past fifty years of age before all their sacrifice and the grief catches up with them.
Her relationship with her father and brother were far better than her relationship with her mother. She's every inch daddy's little princess and is skilled at twisting him right around her little finger and she counts her twin brother as one of her best friends. She generally prefers the company of men to women though as she finds them more straightforward and easier to manipulate although she does enjoy the art of manipulating other girls and blackmailing them.
Ultimately Shirley puts herself first and if she hurries to help out someone else in need, it's usually because she feels she stands to gain something from helping them. Unless the person in need is out for a little help in getting back at someone because Shirley enjoys helping out in things like that for a little power fix. Her true goal though is to gain control of her bloodline and power and to try and extend her life although she isn't entirely sure how to go about that yet although she has thought about brokering deals in orbis alia to extend her life in the human world before she returns there for enternity.
✧ ABILITIES/POWERS:
Shirley can perform magic if she makes a blood sacrifice to the Tuatha Dé Danann. Any spell she chooses requires blood and the larger or more involved the spell, the more blood sacrificed. After performing large spells she will either go into shock unless she has prepared herself beforehand or she'll become sick for a week or two with very severe iron deficient anaemia.
Breithniú - analysis: if Shirley obtains the blood of a person with their consent, she can learn about them but the blood must be freely given.
Claochlaigh - transform: Shirley is able to turn into one of the forms associated with being a banshee which is mostly commonly a hooded crow.
Seachmall - illusion: Shirley can summon an illusion of an object or a person. Depending on how much blood she sacrifices, the illusion can either be very faint and just an image or very real and able to be touched.
Scáth - shade/protection: One of her ward spells. This allows Shirley to hide herself or an object. No blood sacrifice is required.
Cosaint - safeguard: One of her ward spells. This protects Shirley's home should she need it and will only allow in persons of her choosing. In an emergency, she can use this spell on herself. No blood sacrifice is required.
Truailligh - contaminate: if Shirley inflicts a wound while invoking this curse, she can cause someone to become sick with some sort of virus or infection, mostly commonly a fever. The severity depends on how much blood she shed on her own knife in preparation but it rarely lasts longer than a week.
Gnáthaigh - haunt: If Shirley casts this, she will summon nightmarish visions to plague the victim for a week.
Shirley is also able to tell whether or not a person is alive or dead and to predict when a character will die if their death is imminent in the next three days as she will arrive either on their doorstep or the doorstep of those close to them and howl. This howl can be heard for miles and doesn't sound like any noise a human would. This is called Tairngreacht or prophecy. Shirley is at her most irritable in those three days as the howl manifests in the form of a migraine and she's very physically weak.
She's fluent in Irish, Old English and Scottish Gaelic as well, due to all the magic being passed down in those languages.
She has markings relating to her spells on her body. Images of them and the spell they relate to along with a location will follow. All markings are silver and hard to spot at first unless someone knows what they're looking for and where to look for it.
Crow - corresponds to Claochlaigh. Located on her left shoulder.
Eye - corresponds to Breithniú. Located on the nape of her neck.
Dragonfly - corresponds to Seachmall. Located on her right shoulder.
Pentragram - correpsonds to Scáth. Located on her right wrist.
Horse shoe pointing up - corresponds to Cosaint. Located on her left wrist.
Evil eye - corresponds to Truailligh. Located on her right index finger.
Skull - corresponds to Gnáthaigh. Located on her right foot.
For Tairngreacht she has a line across her throat - this is to allow her howl to come out as it uses her orbis alia voice and not her human voice.
✧ TIME OF ARRIVAL: Day
✧ MASK DESIGN:
There isn't any great significance behind the choice of the mask beyond the fact that Shirley is very vain and wouldn't settle for an ugly mask.
✧ PLACE OF SOLACE: Alea Iacta Est (the die has been cast) - the supernatural pub she and her brother Cedric ran for family friends in the summers from the age of 18-20
SAMPLES
✧ FIRST PERSON: (please treat this as though it's a private journal or blog entry)
Back in the old days, the really old days, things were so much simpler. It was easier to go about your calling and well, people didn't really live that long anyway - making it past forty was considered to be one hell of an accomplishment but that's not something we can apply to day to day life. Now though people live longer and longer unless they're a typically unhealthy fat bastard or something catches them and pulls the plug but fifty? Fifty isn't really that much of an accomplishment.
And I'm meant to be dead by then. Dead and grey and wrinkled and old. Snuffed out. Everything is going to come down on me link a ton of bricks and that'll be me gone, off to the Otherworld to do...whatever it is. Great, stuck until the end of time in the sodding cold with a bunch of wraiths and weird things that I can't ever figure out what the in the name of Brigid they are.
Maybe I should take the deal. It's not like I asked for any of this did I? Generation after generation of people having daughters who grow old before their time and die. I don't even remember gran.
Well, I do. I mean I've seen her in the Otherworld but that's not the same is it? Why am I even asking this? It's like I'm talking to myself or a brick. Or to Cedric if a nice arse and pair of tits saunter past, all the more so if they're jiggling.
That Dulluhan...I need to know more. See if the offer is worth it. I want to take it, I want to be able to grow old - well, okay, no one wants to grow old and lose their looks and smell like pee and cabbage - but to be a disgraceful old woman with that expression of having her knickers in her handbag. With her cleavage out. In sequins. Tasteful but still a little disgraceful.
If I don't take him up on it though then I've got 30 years left. Dad and Cedric losing me as well as mum and in the name of the All-Father I know how much grief hurts by now.
Anyway, enough of this sentimental tripe, party tonight and I haven't quite picked out the right dress yet.
✧ THIRD PERSON:
The headache had been building in her dreams this time and by the time she woke it was already pulsing and throbbing. Every inch of her body ached and the night of spell casting and blood letting from the previous evening weighed heavily upon her now and, judging from the fact that at least one of the wounds was still healing, the spell was still taking shape on the victim. She yanked the covers back over her head with an irritable sigh; all of this blood sacrifice was ridiculous and she knew what it meant for her and her kind. It meant she was another step closer to crossing over and staying in orbis alia permanently and, despite how much she enjoyed her time there, it meant another day closer to being trapped there for the rest of eternity.
"Eochaid Ollathair (All-Father), grant me strength," she murmured to herself as she tried to will herself to sleep, automatically tracing fingers over the pentagram and horse shoe markings on her wrists to add to the protective wards. She didn't need to do that but the little thrum of power helped to reassure her that nothing would cross her threshold and cause her harm in this state and for hours she drifted, mentally making note of where she would have to go. It wasn't too far to the house of the man marked to die and all his family lived with him still but it was cold again and she was already exhausted.
She'd need to get as much rest as possible to make sure she didn't faint when she was done.
Hours later she woke again, the sky dark and she nodded in satisfaction. She hated the summer months when it never really turned dark outside until the small hours or never at all but tonight was a rare night and she wrapped up warm, choosing a pair of jeans for a change; she didn't want to let the air at the still tender cut along her left calf.
Setting off, she hurried quietly through the streets, remaining out of sight of anyone who would happen to be there until she felt the tug in her stomach, the burn at the line across her throat and she knew without even really knowing at all that she had found the right doorway. Collapsing to her knees, she sucked in one huge breath, tilted her head right back and let loose a keening, howling moan that should never come from someone as slight and small as she. Someone who looked so utterly human.
She was gone before anyone spotted her, quickly scraping over her leg as she mouthed, "Claochlaigh," and then she was gone, a black crow staring up at the terrified woman opening the door before flapping off with one final caw at her.
✧ ORIGINAL CHARACTER QUESTION:
Last she remembered she was sitting at the breakfast bar in the kitchen in the flat above the pub, tapping her pen against her notebook as her brother and Blair played on the X-Box and Cassandra bustled about making tea when she was waking up on a bench, brushing her hair out of her eyes as she took in a city that was wholly unfamiliar and she leapt from the bench so quickly that she nearly fell out of her high heels, tapping at her waist where the bone knife she carried was still safely tucked away against her skin.
"Scáth," she muttered under her breath, hand cupping the marking on her wrist before clearing her throat and calling out. "Ced? Ced are you here? Cassie? Blair? This isn't funny if you're playing a bloody joke on me!" Then, with a sickening jolt she pulled out her knife and held it tight to her person as she started walking, looking around and muttering to herself as she tried to place it. It certainly wasn't orbis alia because she would recognise the cold and the gloom anywhere and this looked like nothing she had seen there either; it almost looked more like something from a travel brochure. Bone knife still at the ready, she took tentative steps forward, looking out for anything that might be lurking around.