Hannai - Finished
Jan 28, 2014 0:02:34 GMT -5
Post by Harbor on Jan 28, 2014 0:02:34 GMT -5
Full Name: Hannai
Other name: White
Race: Human
Side: Varden
Playby: Anastasia Zhidkova
Birthplace: Narda
Age: Eleven
Gender: Female
Birthday: Spring
Eyes: pale blue-gray, poor vision
Hair: white and straight, very fine
Weight: sixty-eight pounds, mostly muscle
Height: four feet even
Magic User: Yes, minimally. Over the years Hannai has discovered the ability to nudge breezes. She can only influence air that is already moving, and mostly she uses it to cool herself down or to better overhear things people don’t expect her to be listening to.
Preferred Weapon(s): Running away fast or hiding. Hannai is very good at hiding.
Appearance: Hannai is slender and abnormally pale, on account of being an albino. She has a number of what her mother used to call ‘life scars’ on her hands and feet, brought about by falling repeatedly when she was still learning the faultless balance and strength of the gymnastics all her family was skilled in. She has only one obvious scar, a rope burn from a couple years ago when she was forced to perform on ribbons higher than she was comfortable with or ready for—when she fell and caught herself she saved her own life but earned the scar, which wraps from just below her right ear, behind her shoulder to the middle of her back. *She also has a thin, faint, nearly invisible scar not even an inch long on the right side of her upper lip, pointing toward her cheek. There are a few to match it on the insides of her cheeks and on her tongue.
Personality: Most people who know her now or knew her ever are either dismissive of Hannai or unnerved by her. Nobody can remember her ever trying to speak, and her absolute silence and steady gaze causes most of them to believe she is simple. To be truthful Hannai is much more aware of her world and the opinions of others than anybody thinks. Everything she sees she remembers, as well as everything she hears. The entire world feels loud and terrible to her, and if all she must do to feel her life is worthy is to add something small and beautiful to it, she is happy. But she sees no reason to add her voice to the cacophony. She has nothing that important to say. Instead she silently watches and observes, and wishes she could help the world and escape the noise.
--->Likes: Music, quiet voices, dance, acrobatics, small beautiful thing.
--->Dislikes: Loud noise, harsh sounds, intimidating people, violence, cruelty, people who try to bully her into speaking or treat her like she’s worth less because she doesn’t speak at all.
--->Strengths: Quick and quiet movements, hiding, acrobatics, secrets, resilience, climbing anything, high tolerance for pain.
--->Weakness: Being hurt by the things people do to each other, being disheartened by the darkness in the world, wanting to be around other people but feeling like she doesn’t belong because she doesn’t participate. She just likes to watch and listen to people. Absolute silence makes her heart ache because she begins to think about terrible things.
Family: Hannai remembers being the youngest daughter of two circus performers and had an older brother and an older sister.
> In truth she had two older brothers.
History: She had been born Haleise Tadekor, youngest child of Veran Tadekor, younger brother to the king of Surda. She had loved the unloved animals of the world—insects, shrews, mice, fish, salamanders—being outside in all the weather her country had to offer, wearing costumes, and climbing all of the things she wasn’t supposed to climb. She had also had a talent with commanding small breezes, but because she didn't use the Ancient Language for it her parents cautioned her to keep it to herself. She couldn't remember now if her brothers had known about it; she couldn't remember she'd even had brothers.
They had not lived at the castle. Her parents, her two older brothers, herself and the pets even her brothers sometimes shuddered at had all lived in a handsome gold marble house on the southern coast, near the border with the next country over. Her father had been at the head of trade management there and her mother had occasionally helped them, though she preferred to do charity work in the city and neighboring towns. Her older brothers had gone with her father to work some days, but most days were still taking lessons or some form of training. Haleise had been too young for the constant lessons, only six years old, and besides she hadn’t had the patience of body to sit for so long. Some of her tutors had adapted to teaching her while sitting or walking outside, as they’d observed that she learned better when she was in motion, but many still demanded that she sit indoors to learn from them.
They had just come back from a play, the five of them, when Haleise ran down to the small, secluded beach that she loved best because she could pretend it only belonged to her. It was hedged in with rocks and mangroves, and because of the twists of the rock outcroppings was invisible from the open water. That was the only reason her parents allowed her to play down there unsupervised. Only those who knew her and had watched her do it knew how she climbed down to reach the soft sands cupped within the tall stones.
She was still wearing her pale blue dress—to bring out her blue-white eyes, her mother said fondly when she’d given it to her—when the men and women who disliked her father’s trade work threw a potato sack over Haleise’s head and carried her off.
They wanted to know what her father was working on, why he ‘favored’ the foreign traders so much. They asked her about her mother, what she liked and what she was afraid of; when her brothers were in the house and when they were off on errands. How many servants they kept, how many guards. They asked what Haleise was afraid of.
After the first couple days Haleise had to stop eating—the new cuts inside her mouth made it hurt too much to try. She decided, while her captors were off grumbling about her stubbornness, that she would never speak again if people’s words could be used against them and those they loved so easily, that people would fight so hard both to take and to keep them. She hated the way they were always shouting at her. She stopped making a single sound.
After a number of quiet days Haleise’s wrists narrowed just enough that she was able to, over the course of several hours, work them out of the ropes holding them bound to the arms of the child-sized chair they’d put her in. After that she was able to slip out of the ones holding her tied to the back of the chair. As she ran for the first copse of trees she found, desperate first to just escape the reach of people entirely, she thought of what she would say if anybody else found her. Over the course of the next week and a half, while she got lost on purpose between getting lost by accident, stealing raw eggs from hen houses and eating them, she fabricated an entire past for herself that was expectable enough for people not to question her, and just depressing enough for them not to want to press her, though not so much that they might feel the need to. She was a happy child, she told herself, over and over again. She was happy with the way she had turned things out for herself, therefore there could be no need for prying.
After the week and a half, a traveling circus came across Haleise—by now having entirely convinced herself that her name was Hannai—and convinced her to stay with them until they got to the next town, at least, and they could find someone to take care of her. But when she loosened up and they saw how she could climb, they began to teach her the tricks of ground acrobatics, of being tossed about by men and women four times her weight and balancing with one foot on the top of a man’s raised hand, and she learned as much as she possibly could with them.
Her story ended a year later, when Hannai was seven years old, and a middling-sized town’s local theater managed to come up with a high enough price for Hannai to convince the circus to give her up. After that everything is real, but Hannai doesn’t remember a shred of where she truly came from—she feels safer this way, and has hidden her own memories so deep they could only be found by somebody who was searching strongly for them.
In her remembered past, Hannai's family all learned gymnastics and performance and acrobatics, and even though Hannai showed the most aptitude for it her inability or refusal to ‘perform’ or act the part that her parents demanded of her, and her silence, brought them to believe that she could never be taught all the qualities that she would need to survive in their dynamic and competitive world. When they began losing money and couldn’t pay for enough food for five of them, her parents sold Hannai to a local company of performers because she still had talent, just not the talent that they could use.
It wasn’t long before the company learned that Hannai had more natural ability than her family had realized or acknowledged. They had her perform before some visiting nobility, who spoke to their friends, who spoke to their merchants, and within a year Hannai was performing regularly as the most valuable ribbon acrobat in the capitol’s most expensive theater. She wasn’t paid of course—Hannai had been paid for and therefore earned money only for the owners of the theater, and her owners. Since they didn’t know her name everybody there just called her White, on account of her hair and skin, but she didn’t mind. She had no way to tell them her name anyway.
One night, while performing Hannai realized that despite the fact that she was swinging and spinning a dozen feet above the heads of the nobility below, she could hear and follow what they were saying with perfect clarity, especially if she tweaked the tiny flutters of air around them to follow her. Knowing from eavesdropping and observation that many of these men and women were planning awful things for each other, she began to listen, and remember, because she hoped that someday she would be able to do something wonderful with the horrible things she heard.
Hannai was sitting on the roof of the theater just before one of her performances when a woman she’d never seen before and never saw again showed up on the street below and asked her to come on. Since the woman looked interesting Hannai climbed down the gutter and railings until she stood before her. The woman didn’t introduce herself, only looked down at Hannai for several long moments, then dug around in her satchel until she produced a brown glass sphere a little smaller than a shooter marble. She gave it to Hannai and told her that whoever touched it while Hannai held it would be able to hear what she was thinking, if she so wished them to, and possibly see, if she could concentrate hard enough. The gift of the brown sphere was intriguing, but equally intimidating. If this strange sorceress thought Hannai needed magic to be heard, did that mean that her refusal to speak was actually an inability?
Not wanting to either lose the sphere or test her worries, Hannai found a few lengths of undyed cord and used it to bind the sphere tightly onto a length of the knotted cord, which she hung around her neck until she had to take it off and hide it for performances. She doesn’t know if she’ll ever need it, but it’s good to know that she can make herself heard without adding to the wretched chaos of the loud world.
Anything extra: *Hannai can't see or feel these scars because she's convinced herself that they aren't there. She'd rather be the person she's convinced herself she is than the person she used to or might have been.
