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[quiescence]

In Character Information
Basics
Character Name: Felicia Bailey
Username: quiescence
Fandom: Original Character
Played By: Katerina Graham
Icon: http://www.dreamwidth.org/userpic/1148669/1246535

4. Original Character Section

Physical Description: Felicia is 21 and almost all leg. She stands at 5'9 barefoot and up to 6'0 depending on the heel, and runs on the slim side of things. She could be a model, or at least try out to be one, but she prefers to stay in the background of such things and do her own thing as far as style and dress. She likes bright colors, both in her clothes and in her hair, and has no issue rocking a neon green raincoat in the middle of the summer. If it is exists, it's for her to throw on.

On the inside of her right wrist, she has a tattoo that reads "Nosce te Ipsum", Know Thyself in Latin.

Sexuality: Much to her family's chagrin (amongst other things), Felicia is an out and open lesbian. She has no sexual or romantic interest in men and never has been. She's been gay as long as she could remember and while she pretty much busted open the door on the closet, life's not perfect. She does have issues with how people seem to not accept her as a person just because of who she takes into the bedroom.

World Information: On the outside, Felicia's world looks just like a modern day New York City based on the story of London Mysteries. Deep under the superficial surface are darker traits: monsters, witchcraft, wars between species. Vampires run amok, werecreatures creep onto unsuspecting victims, witches cast spells on those they just don't like.

Of course, there are normal human beings and they run the world with their desires to have these powers. The Numen organization is ready to help them gain those powers, for a fee, and at the expense of those who are the supernatural. Eradication of the supernatural is a constant goal of those who call themselves the supernatural hunters.

Felicia, in particular, is unknowingly part of one of many witch bloodlines, springing from the fallen angels who procreated with mortal women. In the beginning, the witches were all powerful and feared, but as time went on and they intermixed with more and more mundane humans, one could say the blood was watered down. They still exist, though less in strength and in numbers.

History:

The dreamseeker bloodline can be traced back to practically the beginning of time, but the most important parts, the parts that effect Felicia now are the ones that fall within the last three generations.

The story begins with Bessie Johnson, the woman who would become Felicia's great-grandmother. Bessie lived in rural Georgia and was known at the medicine woman of the community. She knew how to ease the pain of a woman's childbirth and how to drain the poison from a snakebite. Herbs and tonics were her forte and the public knew that Miss Bess could fix what ailed you body. She could also fix what ailed your mind.

Of course, people talk and people get jealous and somebody said too much to the wrong person. Bessie and her family of four children seemed to have disappeared during the night without a clue left behind. Clothes were still folded neatly in the dresser drawers and the breakfast fixings were ready to be cooked up when the sun rose, but there wasn't a soul in sight.

Little did the community know that the Numen came to collect Bessie and harvest her dreamseeking power to sell it on the black market. With some quick thinking, her oldest child, Anna, managed to sneak her siblings out to safety where she knew the only way to survive was to run. To run as far and as fast as they could where the Numen couldn't find them and take Anna away too. She, too, was a dreamseeker. A young one, but the Numen didn't care about age, just ability.

Her best idea, at least to her, was to change her identity from Anna Johnson to Ruby Washington and raise her siblings after making her way up north to New York. There she settled and had her own child and lived in relative peace until her daughter, Coralla, started showing signs of the power. It had to stop, but stopping genetics was impossible. Ruby took to instructing her daughter what she was capable of the way her mother taught her, but as the same time, terrifying her with stories of the Numen and how they could come for her the moment she even thought about going into a dream.

It was enough to terrify Coralla, enough to terrify her into terrifying her own children when the time came. The only thing Coralla never knew was that up in her mother's attic was a thick leather-bound book that would tell her exactly how Bessie Johnson made her mark on the world.

Felicia Amaria Bailey was born in Brooklyn, NY twenty-one years ago, the first of three children born to Coralla and Denson Bailey. Life was uneventful, completely normal even. Her parents clearly loved each other and their kids, albeit there was the occasional argument between husband and wife and siblings. They were pretty well off; not filthy rich, but comfortable enough that no one wanted for anything necessary and a yearly vacation was easily doable.

Around the onset of puberty, Felicia realized that she didn't feel the same as she assumed the rest of her friends did. At night, her sleep was fitful with vivid dreams of places she had never visited, people she'd never seen, doing things no kid should be doing. During the day, she felt like she wasn't in her body sometimes, like her physical form was there but the rest of her skipped math to wander around in places nobody would believe were real. Her periods of lapsed memory worried her teachers in public and worried her parents, who knew that this was how dreamseeking presented itself at first. Her parents, aware that the Numen organization and hunters exist, tried to keep the secret that this skill runs on her mother's side of the family, including Felicia's mother herself, her maternal grandmother, and her maternal great-grandmother. They tried their best to tell Felicia to just pay more attention in school and stop daydreaming and making up lies, not knowing that in just a few short years their inquisitive (read: nosy) daughter would find out for herself.

To make matters worse for her parents, a fifteen year old Felicia decided to bring home her first girlfriend over for Tuesday night dinner and introduced her as such, knowing that her parents would be outwardly polite until the poor girl left. When she did, Felicia got drilled about her antics and why did she choose now to go through this phase because to them,that's all that it really was. Too bad the oldest Bailey child was well known to put her foot down about who she liked and didn't like. She quickly ended the conversation when she brought up the subject about her sleeping habits, with the knowledge that bringing up that unmentionable "condition" would make them go away. It was then that Coralla and Denson decided they would rather have a gay child who acted normal, and was therefore safe, over a gay child who could tap into her supernatural powers.

They really just instilled more issues in Felicia with that because now they have a child who does everything to announce that she's living an alternative lifestyle in sexuality and in dress because she can't tell the world that she really is different from them. Call it overcompensation. Call it problems. Whatever they are, Felicia has them.

At a visit to her housebound grandmother, who was in the last stages of dementia, a rare moment of lucidity on Granny's part fed the curious monster within. Felicia was eighteen at the time, thinking she would forever suffer from insomnia when her grandmother said a handful of words that would change her life: "Your parents know that you can play with dreams." If Felicia didn't already have a feeling about those dreams, she would have just chalked it up to a crazy old woman babbling. But it gave her reason to search and ask questions on the Internet, in books, and finally, she found what she was looking for in her grandmother's attic: a book of spells and methods of dreamseeking.

Since then, Felicia's been tinkering with the power, learning what to do and what not to do, though most of her time is spent getting her mental ass kicked because she does it in secret, without permission of others, making up a slapdash version of the bits she can understand and the ones she can't. The only person who knows is her best friend Alicia, who tends to be her guinea pig for dreamseeking experimentation at slumber parties or when they're left home alone and up to their own devices. She is the only source of support Felicia has for her supernatural powers and the one Felicia goes crying to when the need to feel free and open gets unbearable. Neither set of parents know and the girls would love to keep it that way, but really, after one too many times of the Dynamic Duo going to hang out and Felicia coming back sick, somebody's going to figure something out.

Powers: Felicia, by maternal bloodright, is a dreamseeker, though that simple term is currently still unknown to her. She can enter dreams of other people but only as a bystander, taking bits and pieces of information from the dream, rounding it out into something cohesive, and bringing it back with her into reality, and even then, she has to do a grand ceremony of spellcasting to get into the headspace of the person she's working with using something that belongs to the person. Permission is needed first, then an personal object belonging to the person: a picture, a necklace, even a hairbrush (which kind of finds a loophole in the rules of needing permission if there is hair attached to it) may work for this purpose.

The aftereffects of dreamseeking means that her adventures are usually short and limited in scope, leaving her physically and mentally worn out, much like a beginning athlete trying to do a five mile marathon before they can even make it one mile. The longer she forces herself to stay in a dream, the longer she needs to recuperate in bed and the more likely she is to carry back unwanted thoughts that slip into her subconscious and become her own. If the 'client' has self-esteem issues, they will more easily become Felicia's regardless of how high her own confidence is.

If and when she levels up, she may be able to control these thoughts, get rid of the need for a ceremony, and inspire certain dream related events, but Felicia is still a young Padawan and her skills are really just a patchwork of self-education (translation: she fucks up often and hard.)

Telepaths or anybody with strong control over their mental status can and most likely will knock Felicia out of dreamspace (and probably in her face too) and in contrast, those with mental instability are easier to slip into their dreams, though interpreting their messages is an adventure in itself.

Talents/Abilities:: If your wig is lying askew, your weave needs to be tightened, your roots are popping up and you need a color touch up immediately, Felicia is your girl. She is licensed to do hair in the State of New York, but with her being so young, she's only allowed to do shampoos, rollersets, and client prep in the salon she works at. However, she doesn't let this stop her as she hustles on the side doing her friends' hair and a few strangers by word of mouth. She has a lot more experience under her belt than her boss assumes.

Felicia is also skilled on making every day and event a fucking fashion show. Going to church? Taking out the garbage? Getting milk at the store? She is never not dressed to the nines.

Personality: On the outside, Felicia is the girl everybody wants to hang out with. She's popular, energetic, always smiling, and bit of a party girl with a little problem knowing her limits with the bottle, and knows how to bring life into a tension filled room with a well-timed joke. She lives in an environmentally friendly lifestyle, mostly eating organic and local products, and tries her best to reduce her carbon footprint. She's responsible, dependable, and really all around probably the best employee and friend one could ever have. Felicia even offers to babysit her younger siblings (in exchange for money of course. She might be nice but she ain't stupid.) She's rocking a decent GPA in her college classes, though she is only taking those as a Liberal Arts major because her mother pressured her into having something other than hairstyling to fall back on.

The inside is a lot different. Felicia holds her supernatural traits close to her chest. The world isn't ready to deal with people like her, though the idea of them existing is out there and on the lips of those who find an interest in it. Her own family isn't ready to deal with her and the fact she inherited the power her mother and grandmother were both born with. There are times where she feels shame for what she is, though logically, Felicia knows it has nothing to do with her and everything to do with how the world views her kind. Other times, she's proud of what she's able to do that very few others can do. She's also stubborn, willing to fight to the death for what she wants, when she wants it, and how she wants it.

Hidden even deeper inside is a nasty temper. Granted, in Felicia's defense, this might be leftovers from dreams she's gone into, but most of it is hers. Sooner or later, she's going to explode from having to hide herself away, from having to be ashamed, for having to do things socially approved. She just wants to be Felicia, the Dreamseeker and the Hairstylist, not Felicia the Person Everybody Else Wishes She Could Be Because It Makes Them Comfortable.