Tribe: Blood Talon Auspice: Irraka. Pack Position: Beta wolf.
Virtue: Charity Vice: Sloth
Background: Rory's personal history lacks for anything like a terrible tragedy unless one considers the general cruelty of children towards those who stand out. Rory was the sort of child who would often get picked on for being more interested in things like computers, or just who was involved in the conspiracy to ascend the Moonchild as the king of the new Aeon.
Especially at the tender age of 12, this makes one the target of some ridicule, so instead of former enthusiasm for sharing his passions with others, Rory became more insular, drawing into himself and the internet, forming a world of social contacts for himself that could be half a world away and wouldn't exactly judge him for claiming that the death of Princess Di was an attempt by the monarchy to work a mystical working to reassert the dominance of the Monarchy over the common people.
Well, maybe a bit for the last part, but he didn't have the evidence to back it up so he can't quite blame them.
His first change was in its own odd way, one of the best things that could ever happen to him. After all, it opened up an entire world of the weird to map into his theories, and his being a werewolf to him at least explained some (but not all) of his social awkwardness.
Of course, now he has to deal with the fact that some of his conspiracy theories are in fact, not only possibly correct, but only scratching the surface.
And that he has a boyfriend.
The last part is honestly the bit most amazing to his packmates.
Personality: Rory is more than a little socially awkward, and he knows it. He's fascinated by the strange interrelations of the occult world, and wants to know what makes things tick. Combine that with a talent for computer hacking, and it can create conversations so utterly laden with jargon as to be incomprehensible to outsiders. He's aware of this fact, and has been trying to improve, and having a relationship is one of those things that will hopefully help.
Age: 19 Eye Color: Grey. Hair Color: Black. Skin Tone/Complexion: Fair. Hair Style: Short and messy, a combination of bedhead and can't be bothered.
Figure Notes: Rory is, for a computer geek, actually surprisingly fit, though a bit on the lean side. While not prone to get sick, at the same time he does tire easily, but it's more of a matter of "Why are we doing this again? Bored now..." than any real physical exhaustion. While not quite SL, he is definitely within the category of adorkable.
Clothing Notes: Jeans, T-shirts, hooded sweatshirts. Usually branded with some form of obscure geekery which he finds rather funny or clever, but is probably lost on anyone but him or someone who thinks like him. (Aka, the ThinkGeek catalog)
Accessories: A laptop bag and various bits of computer paraphernalia
Colin Barrett Gregory Watson, Michael Jones, Bernie Moore
Type: Water-Horse Clan: Ceffyl Dŵr Born: 1976
Virtue:Fortitude Colin is thoroughly immune to any kind of punishment, letting it slide off him like water. Vice:Wrath Colin’s temper is very brief, but when it strikes, it strikes like a thunderbolt.
Background: Colin Barrett was, in the delicate parlance of the small Irish town he grew up in, a 'handful'. He'd walk up to other children and talk to them, and he always knew exactly what to say to make them feel so bad that they cried. At school he was a compulsive thief, and despite being a dumpy, freckled redhead, he was also the ringleader of a small gang of hooligans. Catching him was next to impossible, since he could lie with the best of them, and even when it did, detentions, groundings, even suspensions were met with a blasé shrug. The local pastor said that Colin had the devil in him, the school guidance counselor muttered about lack of empathy, his parents simply despaired. They had two other children, and so when Colin hit eighteen, he was out the door and off to the university, never to see his family again. Not that he really cared. Colin didn't care about much.
He went to the University of Manchester for schooling, and eventually fell in with the programmers and engineers there. The University of Manchester was where they'd discovered the nucleus of the atom and where the world's first programmable computer was invented, and it had always had a steady supply of boffins and eggheads. Something about computers appealed to Colin -- they were so nice and clean and straightforward -- and in short order Colin became involved in computer engineering.
Now Colin was only an indifferent computer engineer, but he had some rather notable talents. First, unlike the greater percentage of computer geeks, Colin had charisma, at least in the short term. He was charming and personable and always told people what they wanted to hear, and people always liked him at first. Later on they might have noticed the utter lack of empathy, or his capricious, random behavior, but that was later. Secondly, Colin was very good at looking at what the boffins were doing and understanding the practical ramifications of it. Since this was in the mid-90s, this put Colin in a rather nice position.
Colin rode the tech-bubble for all it was worth. He gave a lot of tech demos, talked to a lot of venture capitalists, and helped set up several websites towards the end of the nineties that promised to revolutionize this or that thing -- he was involved in a website for rapid vegetable delivery, an early dating website, and a project to provide digital legal consultation to people, among other things. He bounced around a few companies, never quite settling down, mostly since Colin had a distressing habit of getting fired for this or that shady activity (bald lies in the tech demos, selling source-code to competitors, etc), though he never got arrested for anything. He always had a ready excuse and a bright, cheery smile, and so Colin just kind of glided on through... that and he killed a man to avoid being revealed once.
His name was... Walter something-or-other. Colin only vaguely remembers or cares now. He was a software developer who had a peanut allergy, and was annoyingly persistent in trying to figure out who had sent the basic code for their digital-lawyer project to another company. So Colin ground up a few peanuts, slipped them into his coffee, and watched him choke to death as his throat close up late one night. Then Colin replaced the coffee cup with a normal one, edited the security camera footage (he may have been an indifferent computer engineer but he was perfectly capable of doing this), and got away scot-free. The police suspected him, certainly, but he breezed through questioning without any problem and found a new job later that paid him more.
Colin made quite a lot of money in the dot-com bubble, but he was never all that good at keeping it. While a masterful and charismatic liar, he was abysmal at any sort of long-term planning, and so would spend money on the most random things, whatever crossed his mind. A trip to South Africa, an indoor waterfall for his London home, a massive donation to an animal shelter, whatever seemed like fun. He made a string of very bad investments, and more often than not ended up having to steal just to make ends meet.
Then the bubble burst. All of a sudden, there wasn't enough money in the dot-com world for Colin to make his way through charm and deceit, and people started paying attention to things quite a lot more. Suddenly, a lot of chickens were coming home to roost... and one of those chickens ended up killing him. To this day Colin doesn't know which of the people he managed to cheat broke into his house and held his face under his own, ornamental waterfall until he drowned. Truthfully, Colin doesn't care all that much.
He woke up a few hours later, lying next to his own drowned corpse. This was just a bit weird. Still, Colin handled the problem in his own classic, calm fashion. He chopped his own body into small pieces, stuffed them into plastic bags loaded with rocks and dumped them into the Thames. He was planning to change his name and move out, but for some reason, it hurt to leave his waterfall -- so he was still there when the Bard arrived a few months later to initiate Colin into the society of the water-horses. The murderer never tried again, possibly freaked out by his or her failure the first time around.
For the next few years, Colin lay low – he changed his name, moved to Wales for a while, studied the occult, and did a lot of thinking, about occult principles and next-gen computing and the machinery of murder cults. He’d visited a few of the old-school Eleusinian Mysteries in Wales (some of which now have some very advanced servers), and he’d always been good at getting people to do what he wanted. So in 2006, Colin return to London and star started his own cult, Intelligent Mysteries, a tech-startup focused on pushing the limits of artificial intelligence, using good old fashioned human sacrifice.
Intelligent Mysteries (IMYS on the London Stock Exchange) is a small, publically traded web-firm with an office in London’s Tech City, a growing tech-hub in the East End. It employs about thirty people, of whom a little over half (and some of the investors) are also members of Colin’s budding mystery cult. Recruiting cultists proved to be pretty similar to sweet-talking venture capitalists, and Colin’s designed his cult to appeal to the young, tech-savvy, and immoral. In part, it’s a hedge against punishment in the afterlife – his cultists help him out, and in exchange they can lie, cheat, and swindle to their hearts content, knowing that they’re in the good books of the gods of the afterlife. But the cult’s also a key to more worldly power as well, because not all the human sacrifices go down into the river. Some of them feed other spirits, particularly the growing brood of computer- and information-spirits that Colin, in a burst of marketing inspiration, calls the Data-Nymphs.
Here’s how it goes. First, the new recruit just gets told about the “spooky s***” going on after hours. Then they see some of the meetings, first just the ones where Colin talks about the future of supernatural computing, and then the ones where one of the Data-Nymphs makes an appearance, or Colin spreads his wings. Then before they know it, they’re driving through the cities of Britain, chloroforming drunks and prostitutes and teenage runaways and then stuffing them into the trunk of the car, back to the cult’s yacht. There’s a ritual and a prayer to Persephone and Demeter Aganippe and a whole lot of drugs and drink, and then they’re chained and wrapped in a whole lot of chicken mesh and sunk to the bottom of the Thames. Sure, some of the new recruits balk around this point, but Colin tends to dispose of conscientious objectors pretty thoroughly – after watching a hideous horse-fish monster slurping on someone’s entrails, most of Colin’s tech-cultists keep any qualms to themselves.
Besides, the perks are awesome. For the first time in his life, Colin has a product that he doesn’t have to lie to sell – though he lies anyway, because it never occurs to him not to. He’s got a few people thinking that Intelligent Mysteries is going to be the group that develops true Artificial Intelligence, and they want to be on the ground floor of that. Truth is, Colin’s actually downplaying the abilities of his software, because spirit-possessed computers really are self-aware. So far, Colin’s company hasn’t actually produced all that much, but there’s a couple of corporations and banks that have his pet Data-Nymphs nesting in their servers, which given how easily bored Colin gets, is a recipe for disaster.
Actually, Intelligent Mysteries is a disaster waiting to happen. The cult lurches forward more by accident by design, because Colin is horrible at long-term planning. He’s constantly improvising, always keeping the cult running for just one more month, never really looking ahead – which wouldn’t be such a problem if Colin’s go-to problem-solving technique wasn’t to simply lie to people and tell them what they want to hear, storing up trouble for later. A few of his savvier cultists are starting to realize that Intelligent Mysteries is the Titanic and there’s an iceberg dead ahead, but Colin’s managed to rope them into helping keep the cult going. The threat of disembowelment concentrates the mind wonderfully.
It’s in order to keep Intelligent Mysteries going that Colin’s started to sell his services to other supernatural creatures in London. He’s charismatic enough to pose as a very competent trouble-shooter, and he has just enough skill at deceit, magic, and murder to actually be quite good at making short-term problems go away. His true talent is at selling himself, however, and so it’s only a matter of time before he turns his mercenary activities into the same disaster as the rest of his life, and then the entire house of cards will come crashing down. When that happens, assuming he survives, Colin will just walk away, because he doesn’t really care about any of this.
People who just meet Colin Barrett find him enormously likeable and pleasant. He’s a vivacious, good-looking redhead who seems genuinely interested in other people, and who has a near-endless supply of interesting stories and jokes. There’s an attractive confidence about him, a casual certainty that people react to without really being able to help themselves. It’s only on closer acquaintance that the realization dawns that something isn’t quite right about Colin in the head – that everything about him is only an act, how nothing is quite real to him.
Colin’s grasp on reality is actually highly tenuous. He gives the impression of not really taking anything very seriously, as though everything in existence, even his own life, is no more real than a book or television show. This enables him to do some truly horrible things, because even the most vicious crime has no more effect on him than a gory movie has on most people.
This also means that Colin is constantly, horribly bored. Very few things are able to hold his interest for any length of time, which means that he tends to be impulsive and capricious in the extreme. He’ll do something right now because it interests him, without any real consideration for how it will affect him later on. He has enough self-preservation that he does make an effort to avoid getting arrested or killed, but that just means he’s careful not to get caught.
Together, his considerable charisma, weak handle on reality, and extreme boredom combine to render Colin into what is basically a serial killer. Colin mouths platitudes about the coming Singularity, spirit-interfaced computing, and the sacred duty to Demeter Aganippe, but at heart, Colin kills people because it feels nice and he can’t think of any reason not to, so long as he can dodge any repercussions.
That said, crazy does not necessarily mean stupid, and Colin has learned quite a lot about covering his tracks. In Intelligent Mysteries, he’s not the CEO or founder or any such thing, but rather the head of sales, the better to deflect attention. When dealing with other supernaturals, he always gives the impression that he’s working for someone else, that he’s only the messenger or secretary. He’s learned to shapeshift, and uses that ability frequently, maintains several aliases, several hideouts, and has a bag with a fake passport and plenty of cash in a locker in Heathrow.
In his natural form, Colin Barrett is a boyish, good-looking man who looks noticeably younger than his actual age. Before his transformation into a water-horse, Colin had been decidedly on the pudgy side, but apparently drowning is great for one’s figure, as he’s lost thirty pounds since then, though he still looks a little on the rounded side, as though he hasn’t lost all his baby fat. He has curly, dark red hair that always looks a little damp, copious freckles, a cherubic smile, and amber-colored eyes. He usually dresses in a pair of slacks and a dress shirt with the top button left undone, and a variety of silly ties with computers or question marks all over them. His water-horse form is pure white, with glowing yellow-red eyes. His wings are rather like those of an eagle, white with flecks of grey in them, and give him an unexpectedly angelic look when he manifests them in his human form.
Virtue:Temperance Katie's mellowed quite a bit since her hell-raiser youth. Vice:Wrath Katie's default-drive reaction to people is one of suspicious hostility.
Background: Growing up, Katie Sinclair was the terror of the North Ronaldsay Primary School in Kirkwall. Raised by her father after her mother's supposed drowning, Katie was prickly, stand-offish, too smart for her own good, and "a hellion". She was a latchkey kid, coming home from school to while away the hours alone until her dad's fishing boat came back, and she was always very bright for her age, actually skipping a year once.
This meant two things. First, Katie had a long, miserable list of disciplinary problems at school -- she got into fights, she was bored with the schoolwork, she talked back to her teachers. More often than not, she was in detention until her father, Adam Sinclair, got back to Kirkwall. Her attitude problems won her few friends among the other children, which only made her disciplinary problems worse. Secondly, Katie kind of raised herself. Adam tried to be a good father, but he himself suffered from depression, and in any case commercial fishing was an occupation with long, long hours. Katie spent most of her time alone, and she grew both self-sufficient and socially awkward.
The highlight of her days was when Adam Sinclair's boat, the Mermaid was docked, and Katie was able to explore the machinery on-board (how she didn't have a fatal accident is anyone's guess). There were so many noises and engines and whirring things, which were on the whole much more interesting than anything going on at school. Uncle Richard, who had inherited the brains of the family, quickly learned to buy constructor sets for Christmas and Katie's birthday. By the time she was twelve, then, Katie was a scrappy, self-sufficient tomboy with a penchant for the mechanical and a distinct distrust of anyone who wasn't family.
Then her mother came and took her away.
With puberty came the dreams of the sea, the urge to swim in the cold waters, the darkening of her eyes and hair. These were signs that the selkie knew, and so they brought Katie Sinclair to their Shadow-Isle of Finfolkaheem, and she swam in the spirit-seas, and transformed into a seal for the first time in the waters. When she changed back, she had a seal-skin wrapped about her, and was a selkie.
For the next six years, from 2002 to 2008, Katie lived in Finfolkaheem with her mother and her other uncle, the impetuous, beautiful, and erratic Effie Towrie and her brother, Patrick Towrie. She had a huge, extended family now, including a mess of cousins and second-cousins, and she was taught by an old selkie woman the ways of the sea and the Shadow, and more practical things by Mr. Lairn, who was a secondary school teacher in his mortal life.
Sometimes, she missed her father, but there was always so much to do... and then Effie said that he'd died, and that was all. To this day, Katie feels guilty about never going back to see him, never explaining what was happening. But she was only thirteen when he died. Finfolkaheem was always so very interesting -- there were Shadow-seas to swim in, strange islands to explore, old spirits to talk to, spirits of Gull and Wave and Storm, and cousins (Victor and Vicky Barclay) to hang out with. After her lonely childhood, it was a paradise.
Still, Katie grew up, and the selkie wanderlust set in, and a desire to further her passion -- machinery. The entire selkie community pitched in together, and they produced fake IDs, altered records, and in short order, Katie was accepted into the Imperial College, London, to study mechanical engineering. Her uncle Richard was teaching at a sister-college, and so she went to meet him. That was not a pleasant conversation, by any stretch of the imagination.
Still, in the summer of 2008, Katie and a her cousins Victor and Victoria, moved into a huge flat in uncle Richard's building, and Katie started attending the mechanical engineering program at Imperial. All of a sudden she had to deal a lot more strangers than she'd been used to, but Katie coped, and she had a stack of introductions from various older selkies to the supernatural denizens of London.
Today, Katie is still a tomboy, still prickly, and still way-too-smart for her own good. She's a proud, self-identified geek, though she's a geek in the Mythbusters vein -- how can she make things move faster and/or blow up. Her seal-skin, turned into a hoodie, is stained with machine oil, and Katie is never happier than when she's messing around the guts of some huge engine. What's more, she's good at it, having easily inherited her uncle's brainpower, but where Richard Sinclair uses it to understand the internal structure of Mithraic mystery cults, Katie uses it to build speedboats -- she's already built and sold one, and is working on her second, the Mermaid III.
Katie's selkie heritage and her natural standoffishness mix together in strange ways. On the one hand, selkies are renowned as seductive lovers and smooth-talking charmers. On the other hand, Katie's a suspicious-minded girl who takes offense easily and has a mean left hook (one does not spend that much time working with heavy machinery without developing some muscle). Still, Katie's not as antisocial as she used to be, and she mellows significantly when surrounded by friends (her cousins call her Kit Kat, because she's sweet when she gives people a break. So far, threats of violence have not stopped them from doing this.)
Katie is a good-looking, well-muscled young woman with short, unruly hair of a dark-brown color, and dark-blue eyes that are nearly black. She's on the short side, about 5'4'', and sensitive about her height, but aside from that projects a sort of vigorous, Amazonian allure, especially when she lets her selkie-side shine through. She usually wears ragged jeans and oil-stained t-shirts, with her seal-skin hoodie either thrown over her shoulders or wrapped around her waist. Her seal form is that of a grey seal, with a mottled grey-brown coat.
Virtue:Hope Victor's basically a good-natured fellow, who likes to make people feel happy... Vice:Lust ...and he's got a fairly specific way in which he likes to make people happy.
Background: It was a story as old as time. Alan Barclay was a minor business executive for BAE Systems, involved in Glasgow's shipbuilding business. This took him out of the city for weeks on end, travelling to this or that or the third conference, and leaving his young wife, Lucy Barclay, alone and bored out of her skull as a housewife. Enter Patrick Towrie, a good-looking, charming fellow with a touch of mischief about him, who worked as the Barclay's gardener. One thing led to another thing nine months later, and Lucy was the mother of a pair of energetic twins. If Alan Barclay ever noticed that the two little hellions (sharp-featured and raven-haired) looked nothing like their father (rounded, light-brown-haired), he kept his mouth shut.
Victor and Victoria Barclay were nightmarish children in the finest tradition of a certain kind of British children's book, the one where the kids drive away one nanny after another until eventually Mary Poppins or Nanny McPhee comes along to set them straight. The twins played practical jokes, terrorized the adults, ran away about twice a year to go exploring Glasgow's shady side, and drove the school's guidance counselor to the bottle after he realized how neatly they were playing him. This not being a certain kind of British children's book, instead of getting a magical governess the twins were put on medication.
Victor was always the creative force behind the trouble. He was a dreamer as a boy, a starry-eyed thinker who was always the first to ask 'what if...', which wouldn't be quite such a problem if the rest of the phrase didn't so often end with something along the lines of '...we put whipped cream in Dad's toothpaste?' He was the kid who came up with the games -- Victor had a limitless imagination for roleplaying, and by the time he was thirteen, he'd been a cop, a robber, an astronaut, a cowboy, an indian, a tax collector (long story), a high inquisitor, a pirate, and a meerkat (also a long story).
If Victor had turned his powers of creativity and roleplay to good, he probably could've become an excellent character actor. But Victor's creativity was equaled only by his disdain for any kind of hard labor, so he mostly used his skills to turn in virtuoso performances of 'the dog ate my homework.' He was a skilled malingerer and a master wheedler.
When the dreams and strange, aquatic urges came, Victor mostly responded by planning out great pirate heists -- up until his real father came to collect him and his sister. The Shadow-Isle of Finfolkaheem was paradise for an overly imaginative and too-curious-by-half boy. There was so much to explore -- though Victor was rather chagrined to find out that his usual tricks and pranks didn't actually work on the older selkies, who'd invented half of them.
On the island, Victor grew up out of a lanky, imaginative boy, to a creative, charming young man. But soon enough, even the wonders of Finfolkaheem began to pale. Quite honestly, even a Shadow island begins to grow a little boring when it's all there is for several years, and trips to Scotland or the Orkneys with his father and sister could only mollify Victor so long.
So when the twins' kid cousin Katie announced in 2008 that she was going to London to study, Victor leaped at the opportunity. London! The big city! Here was the chance to move from an island of about a hundred-odd selkies to a city with over ten million people. It took a bit of wheedling, but Victor was old enough to be self-sufficient, and selkies understand wanderlust quite well, and so when Victor was twenty he and Victoria accompanied their cousin to London.
London has proven to be everything Victor could want for. There was enough going on here that the young selkie would never get bored. Here were theaters, here were nightclubs, here were ruins to explore, here were parties, here were people. So many people, so many pretty girls and pretty boys, in all their infinite combinations, each and every one enticing in their own unique way.
Victor's taken to the urban life like a duck (or seal) to water. Gleefully unemployed (he claims to be allergic to work), Victor supports himself by a wide range of petty con-games and robbery, by mooching off a string of mortal girlfriends and boyfriends (Victor can usually juggle two or three at a time), and a certain amount of leeching off his cousin Katie and her long-suffering uncle Richard. That said, Victor does have a strong sense of family-loyalty, and is shaping up to be a quite competent con-man or actor, the latter of which tendencies Richard Sinclair is feverishly trying to encourage, for his own peace of mind.
Left to his own devices, Victor comes across as a dreamy young man, head lost in the clouds. He's enormously creative and surprisingly well-read (no one would ever mistake Victor for a studious youth, but he likes to read fiction and he reads quickly). He often claims to be a poet, and can actually pull out a verse with a bit of effort, though the truth is that Victor is more fond of the pose of the poet than the act of poetry -- Victor is perfectly aware that to a certain class of impressionable youth, the artist is irresistible.
There's a certain undercurrent of artifice to Victor, really. His relatives are convinced that he must be smarter than he looks, and to an extent they're right -- Victor has considerable social intelligence, always knowing what to say to disarm people or make them like him. He's simply too lazy to actually put effort into anything not related to his own self-centered desires. This does mean that Victor is an absolutely marvelous actor, however. With a flip of a switch, he can rearrange his entire demeanor, behavior, and body language to such an extent that other people have a hard time recognizing him. It's a game to him, and one he's good at.
Physically, Victor looks like a Romantic poet right before the tuberculosis really sets in. He's a lean, pale young man with dark-blue eyes and curly, pitch-black hair. He has delicate cheekbones, a sharp nose, and a distinctly V-shaped face, and he periodically experiments with little mustaches and goatees, but has yet to find something that doesn't look silly. He usually dressed in greys and blacks, with dark jeans that look like they're painted on and open shirts that reveal an expanse of creamy skin. He likes to accent with various bits of club or fetish-wear, either a neon-glowstick around his wrist or a spiky collar around his throat. His seal-form is that of a harbor seal, and his seal-skin is a mottled grey jacket that he always keeps nearby.
Virtue:Prudence Vicky is the most thoughtful of the selkie pod in London, and the likeliest to actually stop and think about something. Vice:Lust She's just a bit of a fan-girl. Okay, more than a bit. A lot more than a bit.
Background: The idea that Victoria and Victor Barclay were not really the children of the genial, mild-mannered Alan Barclay would have surprised no one. To start with, the twins looked nothing like their father and only a little like their mother, with their pale features and dark hair and eyes. Then there was the fact that both the twins were essentially small-scale demons of destruction and death (or at least annoyance and aggravation). They were unmanageable and impossible, and even a regimen of Ritalin only modulated their troublesome nature.
Blessed or cursed with a fabulist brother, Vicky (as everyone called her) rapidly became a keen connoisseur of various forms of b***-s***. There was the fresh, imaginative BS that Victor produced for his teachers, the bored lies her teachers gave them, the rather more subtle deceptions flying around her parents tossed around as they navigated their thorny marriage. Like most children, Vicky watched a lot of television, and unlike most children, Vicky read a lot of books, but she did more than merely consume entertainment -- she was given to analyze the threads around her. With as much enjoyment as Victor wove his threads of fantasy, Victoria picked them apart.
People who knew the twins, on the occasions they could tell them apart (which is harder than one might think, when dealing with near-identical pre-pubescent troublemakers), generally thought Vicky the more stable member of the pair. This was... imperfectly accurate. While Victor was the creative mind, Vicky was the one who put all of their schemes into action. She was the practical one, basically.
She also had a distressing love of maths. No one was quite sure what to make of that.
When puberty and the dreams of the sea came, Vicky dismissed them. When their real father, Patrick Towrie, arrived with the story of the twins' real heritage, Vicky couldn't dismiss it anymore. She was a bit more leery of the Shadow-Isle of Finfolkaheem than her brother was, but after that first swim through the spirit-seas, she became a convert. In a way, Finfolkaheem is an adolescent's paradise -- an eternally warm, green place full of adventure and places to explore, yet kept safe by a hundred generations of selkie cultivation of the surrounding Shadow-scape. When their baby cousin Katie Sinclair showed up, Vicky liked it even more, because now the girls had Victor outnumbered. Raised by the selkie community, and by her father Patrick and aunt Effie, Vicky grew into a self-possessed, confident woman, but like her brother she too was starting to find Finfolkaheem too small when Katie announced she was going to London.
London was worth the effort of talking Katie around, and putting up with sardonic Uncle Victor. One thing that Finfolkaheem was definitely missing was television, and pretty soon Vicky was neck deep back in all the television programmes and book series she'd missed while in the Shadow. Not that Vicky was a homebody by any stretch of the imagination. Slightly more go-getting than her brother, Vicky started taking night-classes in accounting and statistics (again, there was that incomprehensible love of maths). And of course, there were parties -- selkie parties are awesome, but everyone's related, so there's never an opportunity to drag someone to bed. Once in London, Vicky set about making up for lost time with due haste.
While not quite as intellectual as her cousin Katie (whom Vicky considers slightly worrisome in her enthusiasm for things that go whirr-CLICK), Vicky has a definite geeky streak to her. She worships Dr. Who, Sherlock, and Being Human, listens to Abney Park and Dresden Dolls, and is an avid video-gamer (favorite game: Portal). Vicky has a slight tech-fetish as well, and her brother tends to joke that she values her iPhone more than her seal-skin. While this is not actually true, it's a close-run thing. That said, Vicky's tastes are fickle, and liable to change at the drop of a hat, as more than one luckless suitor has discovered.
Fan-girlish enthusiasm aside, Vicky is probably the most pragmatic member of the selkie pod in London. She has a certain penchant for taking control of a situation, and is the one most likely to ask questions like 'Alright, now how do we do this?' -- not to say that she at all objects to insane, reckless schemes, she just is interested in figuring out how to carry them out. She's also the one most thoughtful about interpersonal relations, and the one most likely to actually think through the ramifications of events.
At first glance, people tend to mix the twins up, which the twins have cheerfully exploited all their lives. Vicky has the same pale skin, fine cheekbones, and sharp nose and chin as her brother, and her midnight-black curls tends to be cropped fairly short. She is, alas, rather flat-chested, which only makes the mix-up easier, and given that the twins to this day sometimes finish one another's sentences, the confusion is understandable. At home or informally, Vicky tends to wear dark jeans much like her brother, and a variety of tight, long-sleeved Dr. Who t-shirts. When she wants to impress, she has corsets and long, black dresses, which invariably produce an impact -- she has the same taste for club or fetish trinkets as her brother, and the twins often try to match. Her seal-form is that of a harbor seal, and her seal-skin is a short bomber jacket that she's never far from.
