Cordelia
About Cordelia Shadow Evara Cordelia's Background
About CordeliaShe's covered with short gray fur. Her ears are pointed, and she has retractable claws on her fingers and toes. Her eyes are black with no whites. Her fingers are a little too long, and her wrists are a little too flexible (but quite stable). She's capable of distinguishing and matching minute variations in shades of color.Shadow EvaraSince escaping from Evara, she's stayed as much as possible in human form. She's embarrassed to let people see that she even has a nonhuman form because of the stigma attaching to it in Evara.
The shadow Cordelia's from is called Evara. It's a high tech, high magic type of place. It's not a terrible place to live for most people. Everything is carefully controlled and regulated. Evara has a ruling oligarchy, and only members of that oligarchy can receive magical training under normal circumstances. About five percent of the population practices magic at a skilled level.Cordelia's BackgroundEvara deals with most of its unpleasantness with slave labor (whether native to the shadow or imported is up to the GM). The mages are responsible for the spells that keep the slaves under control. Using a combination of magic and technology, the rulers of Evara alter their slaves to suit the tasks currently necessary. The process is referred to as "reprogramming" and involves mind and body (It is possible to do just one or the other as well, but it's less common).
Physical reprogramming always alters the slave so that s/he no longer appears completely human. Any citizen looking at a slave will know it. Physical reprogramming often includes alterations to the senses and increased tolerance for toxins or other physical stresses. There are a few standard templates in general use, but occasionally circumstances require a special model.
Mental reprogramming can involve simple attitude changes or the addition of factual information to the slave's store of knowledge, but the part of mental reprogramming that terrifies all slaves is a complete mindwipe. Fear of this complete loss of self keeps most slaves docile even if they wish to rebel or try to escape. The gamble's too great.
Cordelia remembers growing up as a slave in Evara, but she's not sure if that means that the Evarans enslaved her as a child. They could easily have erased her memories and regressed her physically. They may even have mentally reprogrammed her multiple times. She has no way of knowing.Cordelia was a special model. She was created to be a Trump artist. The Evarans believe that only a shape shifter can create Trumps, but they fear shape shifting. They believe that it creates mental instability that makes true magic impossible and makes the user potentially dangerous to the established order. By law, only slaves can be Trump artists. Very few individuals in Evara have the potential to learn shape shifting.
Cordelia was programmed to look mostly human. She's covered with short gray fur. Her ears are pointed, and she has retractable claws on her fingers and toes. Her eyes are black with no whites. Her fingers are a little too long, and her wrists are a little too flexible (but quite stable). She's capable of distinguishing and matching minute variations in shades of color.
As a child, Cordelia was taught drawing, painting, calligraphy, flute playing and minor shape shifting. She also learned how to act as a general servant and, later, as a sex slave. A mage placed a shape shift resistant tattoo on her left forearm as an identifying mark in case she figured out enough about shape shifting to try to pass for human. The same mage also placed a locational tracking device just above her right knee; the device would let the authorities locate her at any time and would set off an alarm if she went anywhere she wasn't authorized to be or if she attempted (or succeeded) to remove it.
Once she reached adulthood, the authorities put her on a strict diet, limiting her caloric intake to just barely what was required to keep her alive and functioning. This was standard policy for dealing with shape shifters. Occasionally, if something special was required of her, she would receive extra food. Years of this treatment gave her a rather peculiar attitude toward food and a certain skill at stealing and concealing it. Cordelia's handlers never did figure out that their estimates of her necessary caloric intake weren't accurate, so she came close to starving to death on a few occasions when she wasn't able to steal enough to keep herself going.
Apart from training apprentices, shape shifters were kept strictly separated from each other. After she finished learning to draw Trump, Cordelia never saw another fully trained Trump artist. She did frequently encounter domestic or sexual slaves (a very small percentage of the slave population and available only to members of the oligarchy), but she quickly realized that she dared not make friends with any of them. The ones who most appealed to her as friends seemed to be the most likely to get mentally reprogrammed. The ones who weren't likely to be reprogrammed either weren't interesting or were actively dangerous.
During the next few years, she learned how to keep a poker face under almost any circumstances, how to make herself appear as physically unattractive as possible, and how to tell amusing fortunes at parties. Her specialty was tarot readings, but she could improvise with most methods.
The resemblance between tarot cards and Trump lead her to experiment with creating her own tarot deck (see question 4 of the Character Quiz) and to work out a theoretical basis for Trump scrying. She never had a chance to experiment with this while she was in Evara.
Since she had a fairly good grasp of the workings of Trump, she also came up with the idea of spying on Trump conversations. It didn't do her a lot of good in Evara, however, because the inner workings of the government really didn't have much of an impact on her directly and most personal messages were of equally little interest to her. She continued playing with the possibilities, however, even though she was quite well aware that, if she were found out, reprogramming was the most likely outcome.
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