Aether Princess
..::Basics::..
Name: Persephone (Per-sef-uh-nee) Hero Dhem
Pseudonym: Persephone Shan (mother's maiden name)
Age: 16
Species: Human
Sex: Trans Female
Heritage: Naboo
Homeworld: Coruscant
Force Sensitive: Yes
Profession: N/A
Faction: New Jedi Order
Rank: Padawan
Theme: Bastila Shan - KOTOR
..::Appearance::..
Height: 5' 7"
Weight: 135 lbs
Build: Average
Eye Color: Hazel
Hair: Golden Red
Skin: Porcelain White
Skin: Lana Del Rey
Trademarks:
Persephone’s most telling feature are her stark glassy eyes that always play with an innate dalliance of light and are framed by long dark lashes. She is incredibly pale with alabaster skin that almost glows in the sun. Her red golden hair is typically tied back cascading in loose curls to her buttocks or swept over one shoulder. A pretty youth with pouty lips and wistful eyes, Persephone does however retain an edge from living in such an urban setting. She trots through Coruscant with a masterful grace typically in incredibly tight trousers, giant earrings and a cigarra in hand. She is a crucible of both confidence and insecurity.
..:: Personality ::..
Overview:
Persephone wields a powerful wisdom that is inherited from her profound ability of introspection. Her overwhelming strengths and weaknesses are reflected in her energy of thought. Through the capacity of her insight coupled with her attunement to her intuition, she is adept at noticing the slightest variations of implication. As a result, it has granted her a cunning that allows her to talk her way out of any situation and the guile to contest any opponent in a clash of wills.
Surprisingly, despite this innate sophistication that was apparent at a fairly early age, she lets her emotions guide her. She is trademarked by her raw, powerful, unforgiving outtake but those layers of appearances shed to pose someone of a gentler nature, fraught with frailty and uncertainty. She has an inherent moral compass providing a strong sense of conscience that set her up as being a law unto Herself. She is as capable of great selfishness as she is of selflessness. When push comes to shove she always tries to do what she knows is right.
Pitfalls and Pinnacles:
Smoke and mirrors.
On one level Persephone is an unparalleled exhibitionist, but on another level she is the epitome of an introvert. The art of sprezzatura, she can easily make anyone and everyone believe she really doesn't care and put on quite the show of pomp and arrogance. Her moods change with the day if not the hour and she will ride on false pretenses just to explore someones reaction to it. This is conversely the truest testament to her hypersensitivity. She has a keen intuition of appropriating certain behaviors to certain situations or persons. Sarcasm and alluring good humor are her forte, and they are also her greatest tools for hiding her insecurities. The truth is that she is capable of great wrath but with gentle fortitude, those passions can be banked and sated to warmth, a gentleness of heart so great that her generosity seems as infinite as her willingness to understand. She will often forfeit Her discretion if the measure of another’s need is great enough; displaying a kind of naiveté that has a lot to do with the ineffable charm she exudes. When Persephone speaks her meaning is more often poured through her eyes that betray her insecurities and leave her in that wonderful realm of vulnerability. She can put on such a show, amass such energy of attitude of confidence and security that sometimes she even forgets that he's capable of such a genuine honesty and candidness.
Selfish, impatient and insecure. Persephone is prone to brash behavior and at times exhibit borderline tendencies. She falls prey to a gross exhibition of vanity. She craves independence, yet stability in feelings remains elusive. Constantly balancing individuality with acceptance, often using so much of herself to make a statement, she transcends physical taxation and public scandal to honor her genuine feelings, to immolate her blessings to burst in wonderful albeit ephemeral spurts of brilliance.
Persephone finds irony in the fact that it is in her loneliness that she achieves the culmination of both her content and longing. Her motivations are simple, to find happiness, love fiercely, serve those close to her, and to be true to herself. In that aspect she is both extraordinary and extraordinarily simple. She alienates herself from others into a black presence because it's the only thing for someone with such a scope and capacity of understanding to do. She feels universally and takes the weight of the world on Herself. In essence, the greatest beauty in Persephone is her passion and humanity.
One might take her acute force manifestation as the defining point of her inability to blend in, but she keeps that contained well in herself in a sense of artful sprezzatura. For someone so conservative with her words and so shy Persephone is a loud presence visually, drawing longing glances as she coquettishly flutters and flits on the streets of the ancient metropolis she calls home. This along with Her disdain turns off a lot of potential friends and acquaintances and usually marks her as the enigmatic loner in most of the groups she's applied to. Radical shifts of force energy can leave her with a vertigo that lends itself to maintain her frequent bouts of extreme isolation that are as emotional as they are physical. Persephone always finds that before her life can amount to anything substantial and she can make any significant milestones, it begins to shrink and wane in scope. Meanwhile trying to access her powers, which seems as if it would be one of the greatest gifts she possesses actually fuels an imbalance in her neurochemistry draining her reserves and having her succumb to feelings of depression and apathy. The routes of such things may not simply be chemical however, Persephone's childhood was marked by slight oddities. Whatever the case the impending power of the Force on her can present itself like a cancer.
::Force Powers::
Midi-Chlorian Count per cell: Unknown.
Subtleties:
An anomaly.
Without realizing it, Persephone has activated the art of small and force concealment from a very early age –4, which only serves as a hint at what else could be disinterred from the dormant presence of the force within her. Persephone has also noticed throughout her life that whatever she has endorsed seems to flourish, and whenever she forfeits something or her menace is applied that it wilts. The nature of the influence she invests manifests. By the untrained eye, this can seem to be mere chance, but any force user would understand that it is the result of manipulation through the force. This strong sense of influence can be assumed to be the subconscious use of Battle Meditation and to some extent shatterpoint. Persephone has demonstrated in a few instances features of the power that is typically classified as crucitorn by other force users as when she is able to drown the pain the force creates in her to deny its call, although of late it has been able to break through in blinding and physically searing flashes of light, or force flash. She has also exhibited a strange force ability that envelopes her in a cloud of swirling smoke that shimmers with an unknown substance that from afar can mesmerize one in a trance, but upon approaching her wards, slows and chokes others.
Without examination by a force user and the sublimation of her powers through some type of intense therapy, her connection to the force remains exceedingly raw and potentially life-threatening and destructive, opening a wormhole that would devastate entire star systems. Her inability to focus her connection poses a threat on to her own well-being as well as others. Persephone has never exhibited any control over these talents whatsoever, which leads her to believe it to be more of a detriment than anything else, a foreign invader of a sort. Further still, the presence of Midi-chlorians in her system have begun to grow in a malignant pattern. Without the means to control her powers and their increasingly pathogenic nature, the pressure of their tidal manifestation on her body and mind may prove to be too much for Persephone to withstand unless an intervention is made and more is learned of her condition.
::Character History::
Early Life:
Persephone Hero Dhem was born in the Fobosi District Medcenter on Coruscant, to Naboo migrants, the youngest of three sisters. Persephone’s lineage hails from Naboo, although the details of her family's life there remain vague to her. Persephone’s mother, Ghems Shan, had fled war on Naboo with her mother and sisters, outcasts of some kind. Persephone’s grandmother, although exiled from Naboo, was still of noble upbringing and had connections on Coruscant. It was later set for Persephone’s mother to be married into the Dhem family, also living as refugees from Naboo on Dantooine.
Persephone was raised in the East Minor district, arguably the closest you could get to suburbia on Coruscant. She seldom left the area for most of her youth, growing in a very insular sort of manner, one that thrived her very cerebral nature. As a child Persephone would play with neighborhood friends and her two elder sisters at Trophill Gardens but after the age of about 8 she hardly spent time with children her own age outside of school, her mother had always been anxious and instilled a nature of agoraphobia on Persephone, impressing onto her that the world was a dangerous and frightful place. Something haunted her mother, although Persephone certainly would never realize this at the time. On the other hand Persephone’s father was very distant and mysterious, Persephone never understood him, and there was a tacit understanding that neither child nor father had great love for one another, and that that was fine by them both.
There was an underlying strain at the heart of her upbringing that kept Persephone from fully appreciating home life in childhood. Persephone realized there was something different about her, something that at times seemed to truly set her above the rest, and at others sunk her into the a state of reclusion and self-doubt that prevented her from opening up and showing what she had to offer, isolating her from others beyond that of her mother's insistence. The Force had begun to manifest itself within the girl since birth, and it was unusually smothering. There had never been any force users within Persephone’s family, and her mother devoted to a denomination she brought with her back from Naboo, it was a longstanding opinion of theirs that adherents to the Force were a blight and practitioners of the Force was a materialization of that sin, and they took up a philosophy akin to 'kill the sin, not the sinner.'
This terrified Persephone and reduced her to tears and dread nightly from childhood on, for she was aware of the presence of this 'thing' within her since her toddler years. That her family might ever learn of her force-sensitivity, especially a connection so intense filled her with fear and doubt. Persephone learned early on, as early as four years of age, to suppress her force manifestation, her fear harbored a natural ability to block her force sensitivity not only from herself and hide it from her family, but also from other force users. Ironically, she used to force to banish any traces of its existence within her. The depth of control she had over her attunement was somewhat unnatural and certainly incredible, but without anyone capable of appreciating it, it went unguided and the grave consequences accumulated.
Throughout her younger years she had slip-ups, and some people, especially her family, came to understand Persephone was different, but hardly dared to amuse the appalling suggestion with their theories. But soon Persephone herself forgot about her connection to the force, for there became less of a conscious effort to conceal it, thus it played little part in her childhood. Persephone grew very adept in knowing how to achieve certain reactions from certain people, and used this talent to find gaps in someone’s defenses, where she would push friends to their edge in her trial of their loyalty. This example of her quarrelsome nature is but one reason why she has so few important and close figures in her life, and proved a useful mechanism in being able to protect herself from being exposed.
Recent Events:
Changes in Persephone’s body during puberty led to make it harder for her to subside that quiescent lobe of her mind to suppress the force and thus led her to spending less time at Academy because of her growing problems with her force powers. At first it was merely unsettling vivid dreams, premonitions, and the subtle loss of control over the lock she kept on her powers. She would be sitting in class when she would start with a tremble, her palms and knees cold, her stomach sunk, and with a twitch, the chronometer would slam to the floor. Her classmates surveying the room for a cause and retiring their glare upon her. These mild afflictions would eventually turn into bouts of uncontrollable fits. It did not bode well for her inner balance, the force seemed displeased. After skipping classes became more and more frequent, to a point where she would simply hide in the bottom of a stairwell waiting for her metaphysical duress to subside, Persephone knew she could never return.
Her family took this as simply a difficult time for her to transition socially to a higher level of learning. Persephone had the privilege of being tutored privately for the remainder of her teenage life at home where she sequestered herself away in her room to mold her identity on a very intricate level, without the scrutiny of the real world. But little did her family know that her perception of reality was ever converging to abysmal misconceptions. She witnessed everything from the confines of her room, her only hints of reality were the sunrise beyond the transparasteel of her room over the distant skyscrapers, to the fantasy of holodramas and the grandeur of history recordings. She had created a galaxy that while posed great allure, was a setup for sore disappointment. And while this helped her to stall the smothering encroachment of the Force, it also made her feel like she was caged.
Finally ready to experience the real world and claim what she had been building up from what the outside world had in store for her, Persephone began to rebel against the authority of her family in the predictability of her post-pubescence. She started dressing more provocatively, ran about Coruscant all day and night with her friends and became careless. But she also realized she was losing herself not only to the larger world she had offered herself up to, but the growing hold her force powers had over her. It was all-consuming and she began to really struggle with a sense of identity and motivation. Unfortunately the suppression of her powers all her life had caught up with her. Three quarters into her sixteenth year, Persephone was experiencing the worst of it. The ripples of power surging through her invisible net were taking their toll. Yet despite all of this, Persephone still retained an incredible control to conceal the true nature of the problem from others. Her family and her instructors noticed that something was wrong, but they couldn't quite place it.
Persephone felt she could only confide in her sisters at that point, being too aghast at the prospect of confiding in her mother. Saiya, her eldest sister, would eventually take her to a clinic that their other sister Khirse had been working for, without the blessings of their mother. Her sisters figured she was going through some type of teenage existential crisis and simply had some anxiety.
Persephone knew little to nothing about midi-chlorians, however, it was the specialty of a Sith inquisitor who grew very interested in Persephone’s case after evaluating her readings and learning that she was of two Noble houses on Naboo. Persephone had avoided a moment like this her entire life, but the degeneration of her psyche from the sheer weight of the force was proving too great for her. Agents of the Inquisitor infiltrated the med-center and made plans to immediately sequester the girl, conduct tests, and stemming from those further evaluations either find a use for her adeptness and family's political station or proceed with termination. Yet unknown even to the Empire, the knowledge of the results of Persephone's test managed to get into the hands of another. . .
Present:
Persephone and her friend Yor Faloz, a melancholy Ithorian with an identity crisis, but a well connected Coruscant street kid helped Persephone make an initial escape and connected her with the captain of a ship who offered to smuggle her off world, Tatum Eclipse, charming and offensive all at once, but a proven pilot with a beaming smile. However plans fell through and Sith officers moved in, abducting Persephone.
Persephone was taken into an Imperial asylum against her will, where agents, who assured her family she was just being given routine treatment, were deciding what use she could have for them and studying her anomalous exhibitions. Unbeknownst to them, a squadron of Jedi fighter on a scouting mission came upon the facility. In detention, Persephone witnessed her cell door being sliced up and a solemn face peering through. . .a sword enveloped in light draping a blue hue over his bright face. Jedi Knight Cassus Demici was accompanied by his Togruta Master Ashla Lai as well as his astromech droid 'The Machine,’ and several other Jedi.
A conjuring of red, green and blue cast sweeping glows, draping the walls with colored lightning, and sizzling and burning in a tsunami of sounds and smells. It all danced like a storm to Persephone’s perspective as all her senses were overwhelmed with shock, helpless, as she was carried away, not sure by who or where. She sensed a deep benevolence from her deliverer and when he was overcome by throngs of enemy warrior Persephone for the first time in her life walked through the threshold of holding on. . .
She became possessed of a light that came deep within her, a shadowy mist mantled her, and light shot through her eyes, the space between her fingernails, hour mouth and every orifice of her body. The blur of colors were washed away by the cleansing light, burning the acolytes of the dark and blinding the followers of the light. Persephone was no longer herself but the embodiment of the force, and it was a terrible sight to behold. The only warrior left standing was the one who carried her whom she had saved, blinking weakly, the hazel behind the immeasurable glow slowly started to dematerialize, she looked deeply into the ocean blue of her rescuer's eyes, whispered something incoherent and then there was just void.
Still in the shock from her abduction and in the throes of her falling victim of the force plague that seemed to consume her, the young girl was evacuated to a NGA medical frigate and put under intensive care for her traumas. When she awoke a towering organic and a steely white droid stood over her bed. . .
Present:
After learning of the dangers that Persephone experienced, her family, never thinking their daughter experienced the Force, relented in their harsh stance against it. Seeing her desperate medical condition her mother agreed to have her enrolled in the Jedi Academy on Coruscant to see if the Jedi Masters there could help control her condition. The council kept her under close guard for her first week and took all kinds of medical tests and surveillance through the force. A Medical Droid was assigned to her to constantly take her vitals and blood samples and the Jedi Knight who she seemed to imprint on through the Force who had just finished his trials,
Cassus Demici
was mandated to watch over her...:: Possesions ::..
• A communicator
• A leather holdall containing Persephone’s wardrobe which consists of clothes reflecting her unique sense of style infused with the fashions of the hipster cult of Coruscant:
- Skin-tight bodysuits
- Mantles of various cloaks and capes
- Black leather jacket
- Several skirts and dresses
- Jewelry
- Personal grooming items.
• A purse containing a bearer card with credit line and several thousand credits, ID, and other personal items.
• A long chain of pure aurodium stolen from her mother upon her departure from Coruscant.
• A powerful and seemingly ancient crystal found on Jedha. It is tuned with Persephone.
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