Post by Natasha on Jun 5, 2010 17:21:10 GMT
Name: Natasha Anne Rose.
Nicknames: Nat or Nats are obvious ones but she actually prefers to be called, her very close friends call her Nattie.
Race: Werewolf; bitten.
Occupation: Pack Fighter, though Natasha is still in training.
Gender: Female.
Skin Color: Caucasian; very slight tan and freckles.
Age: 256.
Clothing: More often than not Natasha can be found in loose fitting clothes that give her no real defined shape, it’s not that she really goes out of her way to hid her figure, it’s more that she doesn’t really have much of one and doesn’t go out of the way to try and force herself into having curves; she’s rather tall and straight, having very long, willowy limbs and no real hips to speak of, with the breasts of a size zero model. Therefore t-shirts and jeans tend to just hand off her, it’s not such a bad thing really, she’s always comfortable at least. When training, like many of the fighters and fighters-in-training she opts for sweat pants and a tank top, sometimes with a zip up sweater if she’s feeling a chill, though that generally gets dumped out of the way once she’s warmed up. Frequently she can be seen in a traditional Chinese tunic and cotton pants though, she has a handful of these garments in various colours. When indulging in ballet practise she had the traditional leotards, skirts and tights. As for excursions out of the hotel she wears a pair of fitted black pants that are tight fitting and stretchy, perfect for her distinctly fluidic style of fighting, with small black, flat pumps. These are an odd sort of choice for a fighter, a high percentage of them tending towards boots with or without steel toes in them, but again because of her style of fighting Natasha finds them far too heavy and restrictive, her pumps allow her to be much faster and lighter through her moves. Her tops tends to vary through a wide range of long, three-quarter and sleeveless shirts, but she always wears a short, tan leather jacket over that, her twin pistols holster neatly into the small of her back beneath it.
Height: 5’9”
Weight: 122lbs
Tattoos: None.
Piercings: None.
Jewellery: Yu Yong, a fighter from her original pack, gave her a carved jade necklace when she parted ways that she wear at all times. It reminds her where she came from.
Body Modifications: Natasha has her fair share of small scars for a werewolf of her age and experience; the most significant is where she was turned -- her inner left arm, just above the elbow jount bears the teeth marks of her turning.
Wolf Form
Build: Lean is the best way to describe Natasha’s building wolf form, she is lithe and built for fluidic movement that lends itself well to evading bigger, thicker and generally more heavy set tank-like opponents that she couldn’t hope to outweigh but can out manoeuvre easily
Height: Bipedal; 6’7”. Quadruped; 4’4”
Weight: 247lbs.
Hair: Short and coarse all over with a busy tail and a mane of longer, white fur.
Eyes: Blue.
Defining Marks: Natasha’s wolf is a pristine white colour with very distinctive russet coloured ears and markings on her face, easy to spot and recognise.
Pack
Pack: Cole's Pack.
Position: Fighter in training.
Territory: Cole's Territory; roughly half of LA.
Hair
Length: Short, usually kept around her jaw but has been known to grow down to brush her shoulders if she forgets to have it seen to for a while.
Style: Natasha actually tends not to bother with styling her hair much, it’s a little wiry and tends to have a life of its own, being wavy and frizzy of the damp gets to it.
Colour: Red.
Facial Hair
Length: N/A.
Style: N/A.
Eyes
Color: Green-grey.
Oddities: Natasha’s eyes will wane the bright blue of her wolf when threatened, aggravated or else to show or assert dominance or to threaten herself.
Personality: It might seem as though there’s nothing much to say on Natasha’s personality but that would be a faulty assumption. While she is quiet and extremely calm on the outside, even serene most of the time, she has the fiery temperament of a redhead. Given over to her frustrations in private she can turn her anger at her condition inwards with incredible ferocity. To know that she has so much more she is capable of, that she ought to be a fully fledged fighter already and isn’t fills her with a dangerous kind of rage; she’s gotten better over the years at channelling that into her fighting and as such her aggressive side tends only to come out during spars or when she’s facing off against enemies, thanks to Cole’s guidance she may just have found the key to taming her permanently damaged short term memory through that ability to focus her frustrations into a fight. Natasha is an undeniably graceful wolf as well, though she is tall and straight, she is also feminine and sweet, her personality helping to soften her angular frame somewhat, but it should be said that she also has a certain amount of guile about her; though she seems young and innocent, Natasha has been through a lot in her time and is a worldly sort of wolf, having travelled from Asia, through Europe and to America where she fell in with Cole’s pack. Natasha has experienced great loss in her life, as most wolves can claim and it’s been a trial for her to remain calm but she does so, she believed in peace and would be a pacifist if it weren’t for the need to defend those she loves.
In some respects the gaps of her mind have been filled by the wolf, making her less two entities and more like one, though the animal within her seems to be of a similar temperament, she is not quick to anger at others, she rarely snarls or growls and is by all accounts judged to be an extremely level headed wolf for such a comparatively young age, something that was taught to her by her Chinese pack; she is well versed in Chinese proverbs and feels that most of them -- while seeming to be clunky and outdated -- are in fact more true than the modern world would believe.
Weaknesses: Natasha's main weakness is her innate allergy to silver as any of her kind; it physically burns her skin upon touch and can cause her to become dizzy and nauseated. This can be fatal depending upon length of exposure and the type of contact. Natasha has suffered with early onset Alzheimer's Disease since she was a human woman in her twenties. Lycanthropy has put a stop to the progression of the disease but the initial damage of the early stages had already manifested by the time she was turned and while the symptoms won't get any worse, they won't get any better either. Sometimes the effects can be as simple as misplacing a book or her cup of coffee and having to spend a few extra minutes looking for it, right up to walking into a room and being completely unable to remember what she wanted there or forgetting the names of pack members she has known for centuries. Through her time with the pack it has been hard to disguise the symptoms of the disease, be it little things like forgetting what day of the week it is, or forgetting to put her watch on in the morning, the little things became obvious to her pack mates, but far from explaining her situation, Natasha allows them to think that she is simply a forgetful young wolf, nothing more. What she cannot hide, of course, if the fact that she is blind and has been for decades thanks to an awful disease that ravaged her in the youth.
Abilities: As a lycanthrope Natasha enjoys all the perks of her kind; heightened senses, stamina, speed, the capacity to jump huge distances without breaking pace and a superhuman healing speed. With her age also comes the ability to control her change during the three nights a month when the moon's pull is the strongest and indeed change at will any other day of the month. Surprisingly her lack of sight has caused her other senses to sharpen and has arguably the best hearing in the pack, able to pick our heartbeats from amazing distances, detect lies and changes of pulse and breathing. Natasha is notably proficient in a slew of Chinese techniques and weaponry, the double bladed straight sword, the jian and the gun (Chinese equivalent of the Japanese Bô staff). Though impractical for battle, Natasha also trains with a qiang, a Chinese spear, it improves her flexibility and coordination. Unsurprisingly then she is highly skilled in the martial art of Wushu a modern mix of gymnastics, martial arts and boxing which these weapons lend themselves to. As both a way to focus her mind, wind down or warm up, Natasha practises Tai Chi chuan; both in the modern, well known slow motion breathing exercises and as a formidable, defensive martial art. When practising she can often be seen with a Guan Dao, another weapon that while more or less impossible to use in the field helps in her training, as with the iron fan (tiě shān) she uses to practise balance and precision. All in all she is an extremely fluid, competent fighter, but it is her memory that holds her back, something that can make her very frustrated and this if anything is one of her downfalls.
Given her upbringing, Natasha also speaks Chinese (Mandarin), she is fluent in a handful of different dialects as well as being able to write faultlessly in the language. This has also developed into an obsession with calligraphy which naturally helps her wrists to be loose and very finely trained in terms of hand-eye coordination.
Natasha is also an extremely talented and competent ballet dancer; she can often be found en pointe in the training room.
Weapons: For excursions beyond the pack's home, Natasha will usually carry her Jian sword and twin pistols as anything else she is sufficiently competent at handling in a battle situation is too bulky. That said she is incredibly resourceful and more often than not her surroundings are her best weapon; spry and fast and quick witted she is able to turn a warehouse into an obstacle course of danger for her opponents.
Prized Possessions: In all honesty Natasha didn’t have a lot when she first came to the pack as a young scrap of a girl but since then she has accumulated several items which she holds dear including the first pair of ballet shoes that was bought for her after she revealed that she was a dancer -- but that she no longer uses for fear of ruining them -- and her Jian sword.
Home(s): The Hyperion Hotel with the rest of Cole’s pack.
History: Almost eighty years before the first British envoy was officially assigned to the country of China Natasha Rose’s father took his pregnant wife and his brother with him to the capital of Shanghai. Fluent in the native tongue he went with the intention of improve Eastern and Western relations in order to facilitate a better understanding between cultures and to learn from the Chinese as much as they could learn from his culture. Benson Rose had nothing but the utmost respect fot the people of the country and he and his family met with little to no trouble aside from the staring as so many of the Chinese people had never seen white ment or women before. When his wife went into labour with their first child he was able to solicit the help of a Chinese midwife who bore Wendolyn Rose through the birth in their small house. Natasha Rose was born in China, happy and healthy. It was sad that Wendy never really recovered from the pains of birth, she wasn’t sick exactly but her petite body had undergone something massive and she never truly recovered her strength. When Natasha was just three years old Wendy fell ill, her immune system, while by now accustomed to the Chinese lifestyle, was weakened, her body frail and without the strength to fend off the disease as it ripped through her. Natasha’s uncle was swift to follow and in terror that he and his daughter would be taken as well, Benson waited only long enough to bury his wife and brother before stealing away from the cramped city and into the quiet farming countryside with Bai, the nanny who had been helping to raise her.
For a time it seemed that the worst had been avoided, Natasha grew into a happy, healthy young woman in her early twenties, she was not shy of work though her overprotective father much preferred it when she tended to her studies and her ballet dancing in the safety of their home. Tragedy seemed to rear its head again when she fell ill with a cold one harsh winter that she just couldn’t shake no matter what medicines were given to her. Benson interrogated Bai relentlessly about Chinese mysticism in his desperation to find a cure for his beloved daughter and eventually the woman gave in and told him that there was a woman he could speak with who might be able to help. Tai Wen was a Chinese witch doctor who lived in the middle of a bamboo forest. Without hesitation Benson hitched a wagon to a horse, loaded his frail, practically skeletal daughter into the back and travelled to find this woman. Once there he begged, pleaded and bartered with the old woman to save his young daughter. Ta Wen informed him that there were only two ways to save the girl from the disease that had taken hold of her lungs and robbed her f her sight; to be turned by a vampire or to be bitten by a werewolf. He asked if there were any such creatures near enough to help and she affirmed that yes, there was a pack that lived a day and a half away and she could bring them to Natasha. The wolves owed Tai Wen a great deal for her ability to heal silver wounds by sucking out the poison from their blood and so when she requested that they come, they did. Natasha roiled in and out of consciousness for three days, tended by her father while Tai Wen fetched the wolves, but when they came in she was roused enough for them to explain to her what would happen now she protested, she didn’t want this. Benson beseeched her to do this for him, his guilt over bringing his family to China only for them to die had broken him down, and he couldn’t bear to watch her die too. Natasha was a good daughter, obedient and loving and with her father’s please she couldn’t resist. The Alpha, with his fighters watching on, turned her then and there.
It took three weeks for Natasha to recover, her weak body fought the lycanthropy valiantly as it burned through her system, filling her with such hot agony as she was sure that the earth was dragging her down into hell itself but when those three weeks had passed, her fever broke and she could sit and stand and move again she felt... strong, stronger than she had ever felt before in her life though her eyesight was gone forever. The pack took her in and somewhat surprisingly her father too. Natasha didn’t know the true extent of what had been done to her, no matter how many times it was explained. It was only when the first full moon came upon her and she transformed that she realised what had really happened. Yet her father seemed so happy that he had saved her life that she couldn’t hate him for it, even as the agony ripped through her every month for the next twenty years she only had to look into her father’s eyes as he grew grey and old to know that he had thought all for the best. He died an old man and Natasha buried him in his beloved China. Whether the two events were related or not she was unsure, but sooner after her father’s death, the Alpha male who had turned her, Ru Zhou, decided it was time for the pack to see the world. If they were to survive and adapt, no matter how traditional they chose to be, they had to understand the modernising world and so they left China behind.
Natasha stuck out like a sore thumb amongst them, the tallest of the pack – save for one fighter, Yo Yong who exceeded six feet -- with her ghostly white skin and shocking red hair, it took them years to really accept her into their hearts and see her as family. They trained her. She found that being the height she was, Wushu was a difficult thing to master as it was meant for much smaller men and women than she but over half a century she began to show real, impressive mastery of the art. It became a release for her, a substitute for ballet; she could no longer so much as look at her ballet slippers anymore, let alone put them on and the Chinese martial art filled in the hole she felt there. Still though her memory frustrated her. Ru Zhou told her frequently that she would likely never regain her short term memory, that lycanthropy couldn’t heal that part of her mind as it had been damaged already before he had bitten her, but that in time her mind might find a way to compensate, that other parts of her might awaken to fill the void in other ways and she was just to be patient and trust in destiny and balance that sooner or later she would recover something. That was one of the last conversations she truly remembers having with him.
In the early 1900s, Natasha aged around 190 years and in full control of her change and a slew of Chinese weapons, not to mention steely command of her body, they passed through France, too close to an aggressively territorial pack who decided they didn’t much like nomadic packs coming into their country. They never violated any boundaries, or asserted dominance in any way, but at night the French pack decided to attack. Natasha and a handful of other escaped with their live. Ru Zhou and his wife fell defending the youngsters of the pack, only Yu Yong and Natasha were left in any capacity as defenders of the pack wolves that were left; they fought back the French fighters until the border, stopping when and if they could to rest and let the youngsters sleep. Once they were clear grief hit hard. Yu Yong wanted to take them back to China and rebuild. He confessed that he loved her and wanted to be her mate but Natasha couldn’t go back to China. Simply couldn’t face it and wished she could do so just for him but it was too hard, she needed to put distance between herself and her life until that point, and he needed to take care of what was left of the pack. Sharing a tearful and heartfelt goodbye she went west and the scraps of the pack that were left went east.
It wasn’t until she hit 203 that she met a pack in America that she could see herself with in any respect. Cornered by what was at the time one of the very last scraps of a coven, a group of vampires who had been desperately trying to cling on to territory as the wolves dominated the night she staved them off on her own with just her sword and her martial arts until word of the skirmish got back to the pack Alpha; Cole Stanton. He sent fighters out to clean up the vampires and they brought back the redheaded she-wolf, in rather a ragged condition. They tended her wounds and offered her a place with them. Lonely now after several decades alone, Natasha accepted and has been with the pack ever since.