Cathryn Flood
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Race: Human
Birthday: Intas, 9, 2679
Age: 41
FC: Original Drawings
Birthday: Intas, 9, 2679
Age: 41
FC: Original Drawings
Place of Origin: Vienda, Soot District
Current Location: Vienda
Occupation: Unemployed (Former Factory Worker and Convict)
Player Name: KnittingKneedle
Current Location: Vienda
Occupation: Unemployed (Former Factory Worker and Convict)
Player Name: KnittingKneedle
Physical Description
Ten years ago, when viewed from a distance, Cathryn Flood’s was an ordinary face amongst many others.
She had some beauty- a good set of bones. a good set of teeth, and a dimple on the left side when she smiled- but it was typically covered up by the uniform of the factory where she worked. A modest cap hid sleek brown curls, a rough grey dress and apron covered her body. It took close and careful inspection to really see the ferocious intelligence in her dark brown eyes.
Nowadays, there is grey streaked through her hair. Her body, once abundant with a particular, feminine, strength- having borne three children, survived sickness and endured- has changed too. The poetically inclined could call it transcendence, moving beyond the mortal bounds of fleshly concerns, to suit the asceticism and deprivation of a life behind bars. It’s a diminished form, but still somehow powerful. The bones of her have absorbed hardship deep within themselves, becoming both weaker and stronger for it.
Cathryn still smiles sometimes, but time has worn down the dimple in her cheek and her teeth have aged like old papers. Her skin has turned sallow, and the flesh that once sat content around her jowls and bunched into the fat apples of her cheeks has diminished.
Ten years later, her ferociously intelligent eyes require no close inspection. They sit large and wide upon an otherwise disappearing face. In them, seems to sit a shelf of meticulously kept records; pain, unimaginable, defiance, undefeatable, death and horror and a whole history of a people crying out to be avenged. One glance and it is plain to see: Cathryn Flood remembers.
Personality
The greed of men shaped Cathryn to be exceptional. Quite accidentally. The galdori who employed Cathryn’s father ran the calculations over in his mind and decided that the profit to be had from employing and educating a mechanically skilled human workforce in his factories outweighed the social dangers. Cathryn Flood’s father became an expert machinist and saved the overseer money when he could justify paying the man lesser wages than an educated galdori in the same role. To study designs and think scientifically, he was given a writ of literacy where others of his race would have been arrested for doing the same.
The pride of men also shaped Cathryn to be exceptional. Quite accidentally. Her father, proud of his achievements, and his abilities, wanted a legacy of exceptional, educated human men who might flow from his bloodline. But he failed to account for his body. In his life, he had only a single stillborn son and a living daughter. Looking at the girl child, he made calculations of his own, and- as the golly chose greed over social constructions, he put pride before social constructions too. Cathryn Flood was educated in the manner of a man, in the manner of a race with better prospects than she, and became a voracious reader, an astute young woman and a skilled enough mechanic in her own right.
Cathryn Flood was thus brought up to see, right before her eyes, the few holes in the great canvas of oppression where, rather than part with the gold to reinforce them, rather than admit to their own fleshly failings and fallibility, those with power- large and small- are content to allow a little wind to creep through. So why not place a finger upon a hole? Why not apply some pressure? Why not see if the fabric in the canvas wouldn’t give and that hole couldn’t become a little larger? Cathryn never came up with a good enough reason not to try.
This upbringing didn’t breed a humble woman. Obviously. And Cathryn would never be confused for one of those. She’s obstinate. She’s arrogant. She’s bullish and indefatigable. These qualities are not always bad- especially when they converge into the vigour and swell of energy that make for a warm friend and compelling drinking partner. But she is loyal to a people rather than any one person and those around her must do well to remember that-or else risk being disappointed. Ten years in prison has not altered this much. Instead, it’s shaped these qualities like a stone sharpening a knife into a fine point.
She has no love for the galdori, and even takes some pleasure in pitying them. Not a typical response from a human, but Cathryn has long harboured the notion that they must be inferior to humans. Without magic, she thinks, they must all be quite useless. Which is why they need humans to help them at every turn, building their cities, peopling their factories and raising their children. Cathryn looks at a pen, she looks at a piston and a poem, at a carriage, at a musical instrument and anything else without magic and sees the ingenuity and invention of humanity.
But Cathryn is no gun runner or shadowy resistance member. Her arrogance would never allow it, her arrogance takes exception to the very methods and make up of it. It’s the potential of the union, in the factories, controlling the means of production that excites her. It's the people standing in the sun, making their numbers known to all and sundry, not hiding within the population that drives her. It's speaking with legislation and not secret code that Cathryn wants.
Revolution, she believes, should cost more in ink than in blood.
Backstory
Prison has been Cathryn Flood’s life for the last ten years. And the life has been as endless and monotonous as any grinding gear in a Soot District factory. Days bleed into other days, bleed into weeks, bleed into years, marked only by meals, work assignments and the long stretches of solitary confinement. With little to look forward to, a prisoner might choose to look sideways: through the bars in a window, out into a world in constant motion, just out of reach. Or a prisoner can look back and remember.
At night, as she stares at a bare wall, Cathryn remembers the courthouse that came before the jail. The weight of the chains on her wrists is easy to imagine up- so is the heat and murmurs rising from the gallery and the scents of sweat and ink and paper. They said she stole from her employers. But she had stolen nothing- it was her work and the work of the women on the factory floor and they had a right to refuse to make it, a right to take it back if they were not fairly compensated for it. They called her an agitator, they called her a radical and protestor and then they locked her away.
Perhaps it was more pride that kept her from a worse fate than ten years in jail, for how dangerous could a wife, a mother of three, a woman, standing in the dock with a dimple in her left cheek and a modest factory cap on her head really be?
Before that, Cathryn remembers her arrest. The seventen came for her later than they must have intended. First, they tried Cathryn’s home. They found her son and daughters sleeping in their beds and her husband sleeping in the arms of another woman, but they did not find Cathryn.
She was across town by then, with a lover of her own and had been for two years. She had never truly been the wife and mother that people saw at trial. Whilst her children were growing, Cathryn had worked. Because of the organizing, she had never been there to soothe their bruised knees, or marked their heights upon the wall and, in truth, she had not missed them then. It was not until the days in prison when her thoughts came to them more often: they had such dear little laughs, they had such sticky little hands, they had needed her so desperately and she had only ever seen them as distractions from her work- when, of course, in prison, distractions are worth their weight in gold.
Her husband, Cathryn had left earlier than the children. In her mind- if not in her body. Even with her first baby growing inside of her, she had known that the love between them was fading. There was tolerance there, there was affection- on Cathryn’s part at least, but he was no great love of her life.
Cathryn loved Clarie more. Beyond the shape of her- she found laying with her husband perfectly pleasurable, gave him three children out of the union. and never found herself attracted to men over women or vice versa- Clarie was simply a better fit. Mind to mind. Heart to heart.
Cathryn remembers Clarie’s wild sobs and cries the night that the seventen came. She remembers pressing a coin, a pin and a small leather-bound book- all that she had on her person, all that was precious to her in the world- into the other woman’s trembling hands. And Clarie kept sobbing and Cathryn tried to calm her, pulling her coat over her nightdress, placing a hat over her pillow mussed curls, before the grasping hands of a golly found her arm and pulled her out into a darkness that would last ten years.
Once Clarie too was just a face amongst many. Cathryn remembers that often now. With the women packed tightly in the same uniform, with the metal pistons whirring, and the gears in constant motion, it was as if the factory floor was a great grey sea for Cathryn to cross, crested by a hundred white caps like the white crush and spray of restless waves. She would sail up and down that ocean, with an oiled rag slung over her shoulders, a wrench weighing down the left side of her apron pocket, a stack of letters and a collection of pamphlets weighing down the other.
Over the years, Cathryn learned to distinguish between a willing hand and an unwilling one. Illicitly, she would find the hand, ready and waiting, whilst she passed her letters and pamphlets underneath the weaves and the looms, the thrill of the secret in her spine like electricity, two times, ten times, twenty times a day. And, once, she found Clarie’s hand. It happened quickly, the same as the rest, a scrap of parchment passed from palm to palm. But then, so very lightly, a fingertip brushed against Cathryn’s skin and the willing hand she found felt somehow more willing, and the illicit thrill felt more thrilling. And Clarie rose her capped head and pulled away from the crush of the waves on the great grey sea, to reveal- just for Cathryn- her face. And Cathryn will always remember it.
But not even Clarie would put the fear of prison into Cathryn, not even Clarie could stop Cathryn doing as she pleased. Perhaps no one ever will.
Her organization work came before Clarie and will likely outlast their love. Cathryn remembers that It started simply on the factory floor too, with murmurs on the grey wave. As the whir of the machinery, it was a monotonous noise: the same problems every day from half a hundred voices, speaking to themselves, all at once. It was the pay packet, it was the cramped and damp conditions, it was the quotas, it was the cheap machinery that not even Cathryn and her clever hands could always make safe.
But they didn’t dare speak to anyone but themselves. Fearing the wrath of the overseer or being labelled ‘difficult’, no one person would make demands. Fearing the wrath of the government and seventen, no group was willing either. They had heard talk of riots and protests in other factories and other parts of the country, so the gossip said. At first, they were cautionary tales, things to fear, reasons not to speak. But then they changed into stories of hope: even if they failed, they had at least tried.
Cathryn wasn’t the first to wonder out loud who had organised these other riots, how they did it, what they did right, what they did wrong, but she was the first to find out. She wrote letters, and in return received reading material and answers to her questions which she then dutifully passed out onto the factory floor.
Later, there were men to be found at her kitchen table, houseguests who stayed for days or weeks or months, with accents from up and down the country, eating dinner with her children, and talking loudly about their own beliefs. Cathryn remembers those days fondly. How invigorating, how exciting it seemed, to be learning and learning. Her husband did not object to these men but he was never present to entertain their houseguests. His eye wandered and Cathryn allowed it, then he strayed into other women’s beds and Cathryn allowed that too. Her husband’s love was an easy trade when it came to her mission.
The men would give speeches, and Cathryn and her friends would organize the events. It was easy enough, too easy perhaps- their factory was full of women, with all of the men upstairs, sitting in offices with the doors firmly closed. They said the events were to do with unwed mothers, with the dangers of drink, concerned with feminine health and nobody cared because it was all off-site and out of hours and nobody cared because it was only the women involved. And, from time to time, Cathryn remembers looking up at the glass of the office doors and the men growing fat behind it, sneering with anger and sneering in disgust as she thought: “I’m better than you, I’m cleverer than you. And you don’t even know it.”
Those words, Cathryn remembers, dominated her younger years when she’d had more fire and arrogance than ever. Before the cause, she’d been listless and searching desperately for her purpose. She recalls a girl, just sixteen years old, with a child growing in her stomach and feeling growing in her chest, swelling like an ocean. “It’s not fair,” she cried- she couldn’t keep it in, staring down at the wages she made, compared to those of her husband’s. “I’m better than you. I’m cleverer than you.” Cathryn paid no mind to the blows she rained down on his ego, not when she was nursing her own wounds. Her husband, not much older than she was at this point, said nothing.
He was always an honest man- Cathryn had affection for him, a tolerance for him if nothing else- he knew better than to argue against a truth that was as hard and stark as a stone.
It was a truth that had been passed down to her,
Cathryn remembers, before her husband, a time when she was a child. There had been her father, sitting at his meagre writing desk, scrawling frantically onto a sheet of mechanical drawings. Cathryn tried to avoid him, and leave him to his temper, but he heard her at the door and beckoned her over, pointing to his desk.
“Read this,” he told her. His voice was soft but his face was still quite red as Cathryn looked down at the page. She found a series of expletives, almost beautiful in their inventiveness and their bubbling black anger, but nothing she wanted her mother to catch her saying. One phrase, near the corner, was all that she dared recite: “I’m better than you. I’m cleverer than you. And you don’t even know it”
“You see, they taught me to write,” her father said, “So at least I can fuck them in ink.”
Cathryn cannot easily imagine the befores before this one. But there must have been many. Before her, there was her father and his greedy golly, before that her grandparents and before that her great grandparents, and people before, and people before and oh, so many befores. Prison is nothing but thinking of befores, when the after is so far away.
Now, as she draws close to her release, Cathryn finally has an after. But she won't ever forget.
Aptitude Skills
Mental
Good
Good
Physical
Average
Average
Social
Good
Good
Focus Skills
Career and Income
Housing and Inventory
Goals
Cathryn first needs to rebuild something like the life she left whilst in prison. That means employment- no easy task given the stain associated with a criminal conviction. It means accommodation. It means creating a new social circle and relearning the lay of the land in terms of politics, economics, culture and everything.
She knows little of how her children have fared, little of how the world has changed, little of the scope and style of work to be done. But she does know that there is so much work to do.
In the long term, Cathryn wants what so very many humans want- freedom. Trade unions are her primary goal. Suffrage, better wages and representation form most of her agenda. Illegal means are not her aim. However, an experienced organiser and passionate agitator could be a good asset to the resistance and who’s to say whether the difficult life of a freshly released convict might not force her down that path.
