Post by Elle on Jan 23, 2008 22:40:36 GMT
NAME: Élodie Carrière-Ash.
NICKENAMES: For publicity reasons -and the lack of any desire to have the French mangled- she goes by 'Élodie Ash' instead of her double barrel name. When it comes to shortenings of her given name the standard mode of address, the one she encourages, is Elle, those she considers close friends often augment that with the affectionate shortening of Ellie. The latter she finds it demeaning and condescending when used by people that she doesn't know well enough and she will actively discourage that.
RACE: Human.
OCCUPANT: Architect, Author and Presenter of Architrave, a US version of Grand Designs.
GENDER: Female.
SKIN COLOUR: Caucasian, with a tan.
NATIONALITY: French with American citizenship.
AGE: 35.
CLOTHING: As a modern professional woman of C List fame or thereabouts, Élodie dresses in attire that is befitting of her occupation and status and that means flattering suits, dresses, blouses and tailored jackets, pants and feminine skirts. There is a definite style flair about her mode of dress, and she obviously has a sharp eye for colour and lines and what is flattering to her and what is not. If she's working a project and needs to be on site then she will wear simple cut jeans and a t-shirt, or maybe a pant suit depending on the amount of hands on work she is intending to do. For functions, and she has to attend several throughout the year including benefits, openings of buildings she had designed or endorsed as well at the general networking she is expected to do in order to keep her industry contacts sharp, she owns several dresses, a few decidedly up market ones, and an array of matching bags and shoes to compliments them. One thing she shies away form whatever the attire or occasion is dramatically low cut shirts and dresses due to the scaring on her chest; she is far form ashamed of it, but it is noticeable and she is not yet comfortable with that and showing enough skin to make it obvious. All that said, she is not above lounging around her house in slacks and a t-shirt that's too big for her, in a lot of ways she prefers that, her life is so busy that every now and then she likes to curl up with a tub of Häagen-Dazs in her pain pyjama bottoms and a sweater she's had since she was in college. Balance is the key for her in all things, not least in the way she dresses, she cannot be smart and formal all the time; it's just not her.
HEIGHT: 5'8"
WEIGHT: 129lbs
TATTOOS: None.
PIERCINGS: Just her ears, once through each lobe.
JEWELLERY: Perhaps unsurprisingly Élodie has a range of jewellery for a range of occasions, some flashier and more expensive than others. Though she has several favourite pieces, a few necklaces and bracelets she especially likes such as her black pearl pendant, there are none that she wears without fail beyond her watch.
BODY MODIFICATIONS: Élodie had a heart transplant, just over a year ago and bears a distinctive scar on her chest from the surgery; it runs vertically down her sternum, between her breasts, tapering away a few inches below her clavicle. In addition she has a small, pale scar on the right side of her neck near the hinge of her jaw which her hair mostly covers and is actually must less obvious than she feels it is. Apart from that Élodie has a number of small scars here and there from a car crash, she is very lucky not to have anything more severe than that.
Élodie's black pearl necklace.
Élodie's watch.
HAIR
LENGTH: Anywhere between shoulder and jaw length, she tends to get it cut at irregular intervals so that it can fluctuate somewhat.
STYLE: Élodie usually blow dries her hair straight if only for speed when she needs to get out of the door and into work on time, though it carries something of a light natural curl and bounce when she lets it dry naturally. On building sites she often tucks it up under a hard hat or, if it's long enough, ties it back into a knot or a ponytail. Obviously when she's filing someone styles it for her, but that's not exactly a look she can pull out every day and that suits her just fine.
COLOUR: Dark or chestnut blonde with highlights.
FACIAL HAIR
LENGTH: N/A
STYLE: N/A
EYES
COLOUR: Green-Hazel.
ODDITIES: N/A
PERSONALITY: Élodie is a fighter in every way but the most physical. In all aspects of her life she will fight, strive on and struggle through to get what she wants and ultimately what that is very simple; she wants to live. Eighteen months ago she was literally on death's doorstep - without being melodramatic about it - and after surviving a string of harrowing, difficult events crammed into the space of a few months has given her an undeniable drive to make the most of whatever time she has left. Nothing is going to get in her way of fulfilling her goals and enjoying her life, even with the restrictions that have been put in place on things like her diet and alcohol, all vices are more or less off limit to her, but that in no way hinders her ability to have fun or her desire to. To her though, and some might find it completely ridiculous, making the most of her life means working, Élodie loves her work, she adores architecture and breathing life into structures with exciting decor, colours and shapes. If she can create something that is aesthetically pleasing just by being there, its contours exciting to the senses, engaging and enjoyable to people who walk past it or work in it or even if they just park across the street from it then she feels she's done her job effectively. Though she works very hard, and has done all her life to achieve the success that she hold onto, Élodie knows when she has to slow down and take a breathe, sometimes he might need a gentle reminder of the fact, especially if she gets engrossed in sketches in her studio office, but all in all she has impeccable self control.
In some way, Élodie almost has a split personality, there's the persona that she exudes on television, strong, confident and honest, opinionated and witty, While she is all those things in real life to varying degrees when the occasion calls for one trait or another, there is a wariness about her off camera, she doesn't let it show too much and on the surface is perfectly capable of holding a polite, even open seeming conversation with new people but she has a difficulty being honestly open to a lot of people, especially men given that there is an overshadowing worry in the back of her mind that the man who caused the scar on her neck is out there somewhere. It's irrational, and when - if ever - she realises the fact of what holds her back from making new meaningful relationships she would likely think it utterly ridiculous, but Élodie is after all only human, and though her physical effects of the car crash have faded with time, it will take much longer for the more influential, emotions wounds to close up completely, if they ever will.
Generally Élodie is a loyal, quiet woman, though she's in television - a notoriously cut throat profession - she has completely separated herself from the person she sometimes needs to be to make sure she gets what she wants and needs in terms of her job. A empathetic listener, always willing to advise her friends, or let them pour out their troubles to her, she is most essentially, and simply a good woman. Perhaps the most off-putting, out of place part of her persona though is the direct opposite of her normal self, of the friendly, compassionate and kind woman she is most of the time; there is a spiteful, bitter side to her, one easily angered and upset, the side of her that is linked to her mother. After Yvette Carrière moved back to France, Élodie felt betrayed and hurt and has honestly never gotten over it, she refuses to make the first move towards a reconciliation with her mother, she doesn't see it as her responsibility to be the most mature in the relationship, and though it might be in direct opposition to her ideals about embracing life and enjoying it, she cannot and will not put that part of her life to rights. There might be something of the wounded teenager in it, even at her age so many years after actuallybeing a teenager, but she freely admits she is far from perfect, and she knows her mother isn't either; they're both flawed and were both devastated by her father's death, but to Élodie that is no excuse for her mother running away, she feels she was abandoned in the time she needed her mother the most and for that she cannot forgive her freely.
WEAKNESSES: Given a severe accident in her past, Élodie is extremely wary of her fans, bordering on paranoia; most of the time she manages to mask it, especially if she's in a public place surrounded by lots of people, which makes her feel secure, she is after all a performer, an actress in the loosest sense of the word and if the public knew of her fear it could damage her reputation and the persona she puts for to the public. It also makes certain tasks difficult for her; she doesn't like walking alone after dark, or even to her car, often taking extra time to reach her destination on foot by walking through well lit, populated pathways, she is almost certainly going to run in a fight-or-flight situation. On top of that, because of the car accident she is rather claustrophobic, disliking any sensation that alludes to being trapped or held against her will. Rather than having nightmares about it she will on occasion awaken to phantom sounds in her home, thinking she hears knocking at the window, or a voice in the shadows; because of events in her life she is a very light sleeper and the slightest sound tends to rouse her.
Physically, apart from being human and therefore one hundred percent venerable to all manner of injuries and illnesses that can slow or ultimately kill a mortal, it's rather obvious that having had heart surgery she isn't exactly going to be running marathons or performing crazy stunts. Élodie values her life more than she can possibly say and take very good care of herself, part of this is the medical treatment that it ongoing for her donated heart; she must take immunosuppressants every day for the rest of her life to ensure that her body will not reject the donated organ, on top of that she takes medication to prevent the anti-rejection drugs from damaging her liver and kidneys.
ABILITIES: Being a smart, some would even say shrewd business woman is easily one of Élodie's abilities, she has been in the business long enough to know her way around a studio and the executives and backstabbers that she frankly has to deal with more frequently than she would like. Obviously, given her profession she is an accomplished architect and therefore has all the skills that she needs for the job, she is a very talented decorator and draws up all her own scale plans of the buildings she works on and in fact she is a rather talent artist with it comes to drawing and painting as she often does full colour designs and projections of her projects to serve as visual aids to the crews and clients. In more extracurricular talents, she is more or less average in all aspects of her life, she can cook fairly decently, she's not very musical but can hold a note enough to sing along to her CDs when she's working. Due to her upbringing she reads, speaks and writes in French as well as English.
WEAPONS: A can of mace (pepper spray) in case of emergency.
PRIZED POSSESSIONS: If only for monetary reasons, her car, a Chrysler 300C is one of her prized possessions, more sentimentally she owns a second edition of Ernest Hemmingway's To Have and Have Not which is amongst her most treasured objects. Most of her prized possessions are what would basically be trash to other people, she has a box of trinkets from her father and mother and her life in Paris, she displays some objects around her home. It's cheesy, but in the very literal sense she treasures her heart, someone died so that she could live and she does not take that lightly.
Élodie's Chrysler 300C
Élodie's second edition of To Have and Have Not.
HOME(S): A spacious home in Beverly Hills designed both architecturally and interiorly by Élodie herself, it has been completed for roughly a month. Currently Elle is living out of her home due to her stalker having surfaced in recent weeks.
HISTORY: Élodie Carrière-Ash was a single, happy child; born in 1971 to Yvette Carrière and Owen Ash and raised in a bilingual household, her early years were spent in France, living in Paris with her parents where her mother owned a fashion boutique and her father worked for an international banking company. Both of her parents made very good money, Yvette was one of the up-and-coming fashion designers in Paris and together with Owen's annual salary they lived a extremely comfortable, uneventful life. When Élodie was ten, her mother and father made the mutual decision to move to America; Yvette wanted to launch a branch of her by then well known label across the Atlantic and Owen could frankly work anywhere in the world thanks to his bank. So the family moved to Miami, a newly flourishing fashion hotspot, and somewhere that Yvette felt she could make an impact in without having to fight her way through the reams of new designers as would be the case in New York. Élodie, being the daughter of both American and a French citizens was awarded dual citizenship, whilst her mother applied for and received a green card and again, life became what it had been for the last ten years; comfortable and quiet, both parents worked hard and the young girl settled into her school well, her grades were good and she made friends easily enough, given her 'exotic' accent.
Unfortunately they didn't stay that way for much longer. Owen suffered from hereditary coronary heart disease and in his early forties, when his daughter was about fourteen, had a heart attack which, though he spent a short stint in the Hospital, proved fatal. The days surrounding his death and leading up to the funeral were a haze to Élodie, but it was carried out amidst the torrent of flowers and cards and sympathy that descended on the two of them from all sides. Within a year Yvette decided to return to France. In her own words there was 'nothing left for her in America'; her chain of boutiques would thrive on her own now, where she could continue to work in fashion, as the CEO of Carrière and at the same time be in the place she loved most; Paris. Her daughter refused to go though; even at fourteen she was obstinate and emotionally driven and felt angry that her mother would leave everything behind to return to Paris. Élodie had new friends, the best she'd had in her life, she was already looking at what she wanted to do when she left high school, from an early age wanting to go into design, though not the kind her mother was in, she wanted to pursue architecture and interior design. More than that, she felt that leaving would be betraying her father, leaving his body in America whilst they returned to France without him was out of the question to the teenager, perhaps it wasn't the most solid logic in the world, but that was the way she viewed it.
After argument upon argument on the subject Yvette relented. Using a portion of her by now extensive funds she bought a house for her daughter and employed a caregiver to keep and eye on the young girl, she set up a fund for her so that when she wanted to go to college she could just go without there needing to be a great fuss about money and she left. Just left. Needless to say, the rift between mother and daughter was deep and wide, Élodie resented her more than ever, having perhaps naively thought that if she had been adamant enough in refusing to leave Miami that her mother would cave and stay with her, even the idea that it was her mother's grief which drove her to want to return to Paris failed to lift some of the anger from the young girl and she resolved to be nothing like her mother and to make her life in America for the rest of her life.
Yvette wrote to her daughter occasionally and always received a perfectly polite reply from her, thanking her mother for the letter, thanking her for the money and the place she was living, telling her about generic things like the weather and her studies. The routine kept up well into her days at college were she went into Architecture as she had wanted to since her youth. The course was exciting to her, completely absorbing and she knew she had found the thing that would make her happy and upon graduating she made a leap straight into the business, working as a runner in cheap slacks and t-shirts at first, she steadily climbed through the ranks with her original ideas for design and her critical eye for colours and decorating, eventually launching her own business, working alone under the name 'Élodie Ash' after her father - and notably dropping her mother's part of the name - she took on projects as the head designer, beginning to build her reputation and relocating with the initiation of her business in Los Angeles in her mid-twenties. It was in LA that she was offered a deal to host a new design based TV show; someone at the studio had seen her first big completed project in the city and was suitably impressed by the attention to detail and for the next several years her time was split between the series, touring the country to follow different building projects going on, returning to Los Angeles to run her own business, drawing up plans for her own new home having bought a plot in Beverly Hills.
It was around that time she started getting the letters. Though she was hardly a famous face, she did have a decent sized fan base who followed the show who occasionally sent her letters with wishes of support or eve questions about design techniques - something that had prompted her to write her first book - but out of the generic fan mail came something much more disturbing. Every month or so, Elle would receive an envelope bulging with paper upon which someone had written sentence upon sentence about the show, and more specifically about Elle herself, how talented she was and how heart warming the show was, starting innocently enough before moving into obsessive rants that ended abruptly and always the same, "For Keeps, Pete". They honestly creeped her out. Of course after the first handful of letters she was thoroughly spooked and reported it to the police who, for all their assurances that TV personalities got letter like that all the time, told her there was very little they could do without a crime having been committed. Troubled, but not overly so with the reassurances from the police that she should simply filter her mail to avoid such letters bothering her, Élodie got back to her routine and tried to put it out of her head.
Several months later, after recording the voiceovers for a couple of episodes in the fifth season of her show Architrave, Élodie walked out of the building and into the parking complex it was late, there had been some editing problems and she was exhausted from a long day and more or less collapsed into her car where she sat silently for several minutes, gathering her frazzled nerves. Before she could even start the engine the passenger door opened and a man sidled in, slamming it behind him. Briefly she opened her mouth incredulous surprise but any words eh had been about to produce died on her tongue as the man pulled a knife out of his coat and twisted to face her, holding the weapon towards her. When he told her to drive, she did as he said, turned the key and reversed out of her parking space. Driving through the streets of LA her hands felt frozen to the steering wheel as the man spoke to her, leaning across the gear shift to talk right into her ear; he told her how he had watched her show every week since it began airing, he taped the shows and watched them over and over, he had memorabilia at home, signed copies of her books from readings she had given, signed promo photographs, none of which compared to the real thing, he told her. None of those things captured the way she smelled or the softness of her hair, he reached out and ran his fingers through her loose, highlighted locks, inhaling her scent, inciting a shiver as she felt his clammy fingertips skim the warm flesh of her neck. Nervously she looked across her shoulder at him, pale faced and horror struck and saw that his eyes were almost wild, darting around, flicking from her face to the windows of the car, back to her face then to the rear view mirror, he was pasty and sweating; he was high.
Never in her life had she been a hero, she wasn't about to do something stupid and Élodie offered him money, promised not to tell the police anything, speaking in stilted sentences, terrified out of her mind. But he didn't want money, he didn't care about that; he wanted something of hers to keep with him, something of hers, he repeated the words in a fervour, reaching out and grabbing a handful of her hair so sharp and fast that the wheel jerked and the car lurched out of one lane, into another, the wheels span and Élodie lost control of the car at the sudden yank as he used the knife to cut a handful of the wavy, blonde lengths away. The car ran off the road, hit an embankment and flipped over, rolling down into the large, concrete storm drain where it came to rest, underside to the sky and at an angle, both occupants dazed, barely conscious but still alive.
Élodie's seatbelt was tight across her chest, making it difficult to breathe, swathes of long blonde hair obscured her view of much of anything, and what she could see was misty and foggy with concussion. Confused, she tried to push the deployed and deflated airbag out of her way and beyond it the dashboard but found that she was trapped, her legs caught between the seat and the steering column. A look to her right revealed the form of a man in much the same position as she, though he was the closer to the ground of the two. Triggered by seeing him and the knife that he still managed to clutch in his hand, still intertwined with lengths of her hair, memories flooded back from moments before the crash and panic ignited within the woman; bloody fingers clutched at the seatbelt and she tried to yank it off, jamming her thumb against the release button repeatedly in a desperate attempt to get away, to get out.
Movement to her right told her that things had gone from bad to worse; he had woken up and he was moaning her name.
Élodie began screaming for help, hammering her hands against the steering wheel and the roof above her head, crumpled against the flat ground as it was. Sirens were already piercing the night air; the rescue teams were on their way, someone must have witnessed the crash and called it in. The man was trying to scrabble towards her and agony stabbed though her chest and up her left arm. Élodie yelped hoarsely, her left hand balling into a fist as pain jumped down it and she realised she was having a heart attack. Paramedics and the rescue team appeared at the window beside her moments later and through tears and shouts of agony she tried to explain to the crew that were trying to free her what was happening, but she couldn't catch her breath properly and the interior of the car was bending in and out of focus and as much as she tried to obey the paramedics and stay conscious, she blacked out.
When she woke up she was in St Benedict's, nasal cannula wrapped over her ears and connected to an oxygen tank, an IV was taped to the back of her hand, needle digging into her vein, dripping a steady flow of clear liquid into her system and she couldn't remember what had happened. For a time she slipped in and out of consciousness, dazed, senses clouded with the painkillers that the doctors administered liberally but soon she was roused enough for one of the doctors to speak to her. They did not come bearing good news. The stress that the crash put on her body turned out to be the trigger for a massive heart attack, damaging the already weak walls of the muscle that pumped blood around her body. The doctors reset her broken leg, they patched her up, fixed her in every way they could but she needed a new heart, her own was too severely damaged and her body was weak, unable to struggle on without a transplant. There was no chance of being released without having the surgery and without it she would die. They put her on the transplant list and told her that all they could do was wait and hope and if there was anyone that she wanted them to call. Thinking of her mother in France, Élodie refused, bitterly stating that her mother hadn't cared about her when she'd been fourteen and it was unlikely that she would start now.
Continued below...