Lidda Reed (Breed).

OOC.

NAME: Rian!
AGE: 21. I'm actually drunk every time I RP.
EMAIL: moc.liamg|4091yawarac#moc.liamg|4091yawarac
MESSENGER(S): AIM: caraway1914
TIMEZONE: Arizona Time ~
PB: Jaime King; she's held!
JOURNAL: perfect storm

IC.

NAME: Lydia Margaret Reed.
ALIAS(ES): Lidda Reed is what she's been known by since she was a teenager, a general corruption of her given name by non-English tongues. She's also gone by Jack Robins, Maggie Dawson, Rose Reed, and others. While she initially went by Lidda with clients, she eventually switched to the much simpler (and more ~enigmatic~) Ivy Le Guin.
RACE: Therianthrope; Golden jackal.
APPARENT AGE: Early 20's.
ACTUAL AGE: 300's. She's not entirely sure of the exact number. She arbitrarily sets her birthday whenever she wants, and occasionally has as many as five birthdays a year.
NATIONALITY: English, officially, though it's been so long, she couldn't really say. She also has a number of passports from other countries in order to get her work done.
OCCUPATION: Technically? Unemployed. Unofficially? Hunter/Gun for Hire/Bounty Hunter/Home repairman! She's a jack of all trades, really, though her preference — and her real skill — lies in hunting. Predominately other hunters, but she's not against knocking off unscrupulous Others too (especially those vampires, they are skeevy fucks).

This doesn't mean she doesn't have to occasionally fix a toilet to eat for that week, though. :|
HOME: Varies. Largely some crappy hotel wherever she happens to be currently employed. She doesn't have a car to live out of, since driving terrifies her, and has more than once just chilled in a park or some other public structure for the night.

APPEARANCE: She's a skinny bitch.
PERSONALITY:

• Playful, caustic, loud. 300 years hasn't really dimmed her inherent rambunctiousness, though she's learned to control it. Far less of a hair-trigger temper, though she definitely has her buttons.
• Possessive of what's hers, since she doesn't have much. This includes people, targets, jobs, clothing, whatever.
• Stubborn. Ridiculously so. You'd think 300 years would have quelled that, but NO SIREE. While she definitely was turned so she wouldn't age or die (or have to leave David, let's be honest, since EVERYONE ELSE WAS GONE), it was a huge moral struggle for her: give up her pyrokinesis, which was her very essence, or give up everyone else. She did sacrifice a part of herself, so since then, she has just stubbornly refused to change anything else. She won't learn any languages other than what she happens to glean in passing (as such, she knows an almost absurd amount of vulgarities in other tongues), she has difficulty keeping up with the times, and she refuses to believe she's any different than the 24-year-old who was turned on the Zheng.
• Since she lost her pyrokinetic abilities (which she still bitches about, and sort of regrets the change, ultimately), she just became a good old fashioned arsonist instead. Always carries a lighter on her, and in her ~sack of goodies~ for work, there is at least one thing of kerosene. Possibly a flare or two. Fireworks are like tiny explosions of joy for her. She wishes America were less densely populated so she could just burn shit and not have to worry about all these cops and people, JESUS CHRIST.
• Misses David. :(
• Also Jay, who she still vehemently believes didn't really hate her, and would still really like to know wtf she did to make him so angry. 8| She will be very :D :D :D when she finds him in Denver.
• Committment issues. Not just with ~relationships~, but in general. Has a hard time sticking in one place for any period of time, or keeping to one group of friends. Drifts between social circles without much thought. Sort of ADD, really. Only things she can focus on are sailing, fire, and hunting. And since sailing isn't really an option, well.
• Doesn't talk about her age, or about her time on the Zheng, if she can avoid it. Not because it's before she was turned, or ~bad feelings~, but because she honestly misses it, and the more she talks about it, the more she wants to just go back.

SKILLS:

• Avid reader, almost ludicrously so. Had no idea how to read while on the Zheng outside of basic letters and numbers, and didn't really learn until well after she'd been turned. When books became even more readily available in the 19th century than they had been in the 17th, she started picking them up, and just couldn't stop. Sadly, she doesn't sound any smarter for it.
• Skilled gymnast and athlete. Oh, sure, she can't throw a football or kick a goal, but being up in the rigging and running round a pirate ship all those years didn't exactly leave her bereft of athletic ability. She worked for years afterward on her flexibility and balance as well, and compounded with the therianthrope abilities, makes her something of a NINJA. So she says, anyway.
• Knowledge of swear words in an absurd number of languages. Not that she knows much else of those languages.
• Really, really skilled with a knife, cutlass (not that she uses those much), most hand blades, and a number of small firearms. Can disarm most men before they can react, as long as they're not trained in disarmament themselves.

LIMITATIONS:

• Limited in her understanding of certain modern concepts. While she LOVES THE INTERNET, she is terribly unskilled with computers, cellphones, HDTV, etc. Somewhat behind news-wise, if it doesn't directly affect her. Likely only heard about Obama a few days after the election, and then had to sit and remember who he actually was. Pop culture references largely go over her head (unless it's on the internet). She still thinks Titanic is a Good Movie.
• She may have therianthrope strength and piracy skills, but she is still a skinny, tiny little thing. God forbid a bigger therianthrope catches her unawares; she'd be crushed like a bug.
• Mouth tends to run off on her. Sometimes her honesty is charming; a lot of times, it ends up getting death threats levied against her. OH WELL.
• Not really a limitation, but more of a detriment: has a number of enemies accumulated both through personal conduct and through having a hit or bounty taken out on their family. Most just want to get on with their sad lives once she moves through, but some have tried to retaliate. She still has the scars to show for it.
• A complete and utter weakness for Top-Gun era Tom Cruise. It is crippling, ok. CRIPPLING.

ANIMAL FORM:
POSITION: Your mother's role.
TERRITORY: Absolutely none.
ALLIANCES: Her employers! Though that's tenuous.
RIVALRIES: People she's been hired to kill! People she pisses off! Jay, though she will never admit this.
REGISTERED: Lolol no. She's not even a citizen.
SUPERNATURAL POWERS: Standard therianthrope abilities, with a special proclivity for balance and stamina.
SUPERNATURAL WEAKNESSES: Standard therianthrope weaknesses, with a large part of that devoted to silver allergy. Possibly due to Lidda being allergic to silver to begin with, the therianthrope allergy is nearly fatal in her, depending on the dose. A brush with a piece of silver jewelry will give her hives, while being shot with a silver bullet — anywhere on her body — will likely kill her. Which is, you know. Awesome.

HISTORY:

• 17??: Born to middle class craftsmen parents on a British colony in the Caribbean isles. Things were hunky-dory, if completely boring. Lidda spent most of her days cleaning their little two-room house with her mother, learning how to gut and cook fish, and generally wanting to DIE OF BOREDOM.
• …Until she was picked up in a raid by a vampire ship and brought aboard as food. Whoops. Lidda was 9 at the time, highly impressionable, highly frightened. One of the older kids, Jay, took her under his wing.
• Blah blah endeared herself as a pyro.
• Jay left, couple years later, she got swept off in a raid onto the Zheng. Bosuntiems!
• David! O hai Jay
• Blah blah stuff happens.
• David and Jay leave, sad times.
• Around her 24th, she's attacked on shore by (ANIMAL HERE). She had never intended to be a werething, at least not until she was done ~adventuring~, and certainly not while trying to get LAID on SHORE LEAVE, WTF. The short of it was: they had docked at (whatever port this was; India?) a few times previous, and a therianthrope by the name of Thackeray lived there. Thackeray was clever if not all that smart, kind in his own way, and liked Lidda right from the start. They would hit up the pubs when she was in port, talk about their ~lives~, etc. etc. Thackery was unmarried, and Lidda was extremely uninhibited; she was perfectly okay with the idea of hittin' it and quittin' it, not quite realizing that Thackery was forming more and more of an attachment to her in the process. He lied and said he had a "girl" in mind whenever she came around, which didn't deter Lidda from banging him, but certainly added to her list of reasons of why to keep it casual (among other things, like her being on the sea most of the year, her having other partners, her waning interest, and David being a steady partner, ok). She knew what Thackery was and had no problem with it. Until, you know, he got it into his head that Lidda would make the perfect mate. Jackals live in pairs, after all, and he'd been one for a few decades without any hope of meeting another, let alone one he liked. So while he and Lidda were having one of their interludes, and after Lidda had passed out on the bed, Thackery quietly transformed and bit her. Lidda's reaction was something along the lines of "WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU FUCKING CRAZY," and she immediately took off for the ship and refused to see Thackery again. She knew what it meant for her powers, too, which made things even worse. David and the other therianthropes on board took care of her, but she was still pretty bitter about it for a while. She feels a part of her is lost and replaced with something foreign — like a splinter she can't dig out.
• Zheng eventually sinks/is dismantled/blown up/becomes obsolete/WHATEVER. David and Lidda go off ~adventuring~. She's a fan of independence now that it's been forced on her, however, so she runs off pretty frequently — but always comes back.
• Yay adventures! Yay discovering new lands! GOLD RUSH WHOO.
• David dies? Idk, probably still off doing his thing. Probably around gold rush era, they part ways on a more permanent basis. Or maybe more recently? Lidda certainly liked gold and shit when they were on the Zheng, but I imagine once she was out in the ~wide world~, it didn't mean as much to her. The Zheng and the crew were what was important, not the booty. ALAS. But she's not dumb; she knows she needs it to live. So she does what she does best.
• PLUNDER. Rape, pillage, etc. Less of the raping, more of the plundering.
• Likely becomes a bounty hunter while bounty hunting is still pretty important — the Wild West! Probably sticks with it for a while, as being a wolf, she's damn good at it. Not sure what to do with the money, as she's not used to living lavishly. Stores it! Whoo! Stocks! Bonds! She's actually secretly rich.
• When bounty hunting went out of style (o hai FBI), she likely went into the ~private sector~. Probably traveled some more, went to Europe, acted as a bodyguard and/or HITMAN for some European and Near Asian moguls. One of these was David Gushiken, Hana's father, who she worked with for little over a year in 2005(?). She still maintains connections to the Gushiken line, and occasionally does contract work for them. Now that Hana is in Denver working for Reiter, David periodically calls on Ivy to look in on her and report back.
• Came back to America for…some reason or another. To look for David, maybe? BEING CHASED BY SOMEONE SHE PISSED OFF? Not likely. Probably just got bored and decided to come look for David again, since that's what she does.

RANDOM TRIVIA:

• Loves chick flicks. Hugh Grant films, especially.
• Smokes pretty regularly, though it doesn't do much to or for her. And yes, she picked it up because it "looked cool."
• Still speaks in a thick semi-English, semi-Carribbean dialect. Theoretically it could be called an accent, as she's dropped much of the slang and colloquialisms she grew up with (she would not be caught DEAD saying landlubbers anymore), but it grew up out of a hodgepodge of her native English and the Carribbean French and slave dialects. She's pretty good at masking it when she needs to, but most days, you can still hear the sharp t's and hard d's. Most of the old slang has been replaced by new ones, and you can hear Lidda make up any variation of the word 'fuck' on any given day.
• Her codename, "Ivy," is actually a feminised version of "Ivan," from Jack London's novel The Assassination Bureau, Ltd. Ivan Dragomiloff was the head of the eponymous bureau, who did kill for money, but generally with some sort of moral reasoning behind it, until he accepts a hit from a young women on himself. It's all convoluted machinations, and really, Lidda didn't understand much of it, but Ivan was probably the bamfest name ever, so she took it.

WRITING SAMPLE.

PBs

Jamie King
http://musicaal.insanejournal.com/30529.html#cutid1
http://musicaal.insanejournal.com/30734.html#cutid1
http://musicaal.insanejournal.com/30322.html#cutid1
http://musicaal.insanejournal.com/30196.html#cutid1
http://asylums.insanejournal.com/icondust/147285.html#cutid1

NOTES.

• Orca - Wintersleep. "When I grow up I'll be a killer whale. When I grow up I'll be a monster." "Clenching my jagged jaws over the captured, I'll be a killer when I grow up."