Bernadette Seymor
Race: Passive
Birthday: Roalis, Day 1, Year 2693
Age: 25
FC: Luca Hostelle
Place of Origin: Vienda
Current Location: Gated in Brunnhold
Occupation: Servant/Servitude
Birthday: Roalis, Day 1, Year 2693
Age: 25
FC: Luca Hostelle
Place of Origin: Vienda
Current Location: Gated in Brunnhold
Occupation: Servant/Servitude
Physical Description
Off duty appearance
Due to fifteen years of servitude and physical/practical work Bernadette has become physically fit despite her delicate build. It doesn't show. She is neither muscular nor voluptuous and the baggy personal clothing she wears is human size and slightly bigger than it should be, so she doesn't fill it out properly. She is tattooed with the passive symbol on her right bicep, but her clothes are decent and conceals this too. Her long red hair is at best gathered in an artless style, like a braid. The freckles on her face are countless.
Most people are able to literally look down at Bernadette. Her height is only 5 feet (153 centimeters). If they don’t see her face or only see her at a distance it happens that they mistake her for a child. If they happen to meet her gaze that impression will quickly fade away. The passive’s dark brown eyes are serious and her gaze is somber and unsmiling.
Her hands are marked by fifteen years of physical work in kitchens and with cleaning. The skin is a bit chapped and if she has recently been washing floors it's also reddish. Her nails are short. There's a few scars after old cuts and spots from her kitchen maid days, fading and vague these days. Despite it all the hands of Bernadette Seymor are small and well-shaped and surprisingly elegant. They are not big, but they are stronger than they look.
On duty appearance
When she wears her servant uniform she looks even slimmer and daintier than she looks in the oversize personal wear and her hair is neatly put up and adorned with a white ruffled headpiece. The uniform is the property of Brunnhold. It consists of a black button down dress under a white apron. The cut, the skirt length and the sleeves can vary depending on the work tasks of the day. It will for example be plainer than plain when she is on cleaning duty, but if she works as waitress at an elegant dinner it can be as stylish as a black and white servant uniform can be.
It makes her look very spotless and anonymous, not really a person with her own thoughts and feelings, just a function, a mere convenience.
As Bernadette is working in the locations of her betters and they don't like when servants smell of the sweat of hard labor is't part of her work duties wash regularly and use a cheap deodorant which smells like soap and clean linen. After she became a housemaid, the uniform is changed as often as it's needed for keeping the housemaid from looking dirty or disheveled.
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Diablerie: Disintegration*
*Disintegration is the magical ability to turn targets (beings and items, organic or inorganic) into dust. The target doesn’t totally disappear but becomes dust.
Personality
When a plant isn’t able to grow the way it was meant to grow, it will still grow, just to another shape and other size, with other appearance and perhaps even other properties than nature intended. When one branch is broken or sawed off, new branches sprout from the stump. Roots and branches will find their own ways into the soil, around obstacles and inside containers. Some see it as deformation. Others say that the power of life is unstoppable and will manifest in the ways that are possible for it. In either case the plant doesn’t die, it just changes.
Bent and Twisted
The enormously stressful life-events Bernadette experienced had profound impact on her, but they didn’t stop her from developing, but just bent and twisted her in unforeseen ways. When the first Bernadette Seymor had to go and turn into just Berna, she didn’t die, just change. This wasn’t an instant transformation. It was a slow process. It took many years.
Uneducated, but a quick learner of practical tasks and a sly opportunist
Bernadette’s high intelligence could have taken her to brilliant heights if it had been trained and schooled by higher education. Instead it rested inside her like an uncouth diamond embedded in the earth, hidden and invisible, but nonetheless existing. She was a quick learner of the practical things she was allowed to learn, such as domestic work, useful handicrafts, how to find her way in Brunnhold and the names of well-known and important people there. The girl understood instructions and orders after hearing them just one time and was smart enough to do as she was told.
Full of home-made ideas and views
In lieu of reading books and learning about established knowledge and theories she crafted her own patchwork of beliefs and opinions based on what she happened to see around her and hear from other servants. Whether her view on the world, society and its people is right or wrong is perhaps less important than the fact that she became accustomed to rely on herself and her ideas and common sense for interpreting and understanding people and events. Instead of growing in a controlled manner, like topiary in a formal garden, her thoughts grew like a wild jungle living its own life.
Ambitious and looking to "rise"
Her ambition continued to drive her to want to rise. As the only kind of “career” that is open to a passive in Brunnhold is to become a more skilled and useful slave, potentially with a few privileges, this was what she went for. It was not an easy career. Brunnhold was the home of thousands of other passives and many of them had the exactly same plan. The competition was tough, even though they were just trying to reach a servitude position which was seen as superior to the other servitude positions. It took five years before Berna was promoted from kitchen maid to general housemaid. Ten years later she was still a general housemaid.
Bitter loser
There were only so many open positions for butlers and other qualified servants working for professors and other potentates. Most of those positions seemed to go to passives who had been as fortunate as to get to work in a similar role for their own family before they came to Brunnhold. Those were often more qualified in mental and social skills, sometimes to a degree that could make it seem like their families had secretly allowed them to study a bit more than they should and taught them about the social codes of the upper class. Berna with her practical profile would perhaps have been able to match the demands on mental abilities if she had been given a chance, but her understanding of the social codes were too lacking. By age twenty-five the failure to advance added a significant last drop to the growing pool of bitterness that had been brewing in her for ages. She was at the point where it started to turn into toxic hate and a wish to crush and destroy the world that was crushing her and destroying her.
Subtle saboteur at a petty scale
As Berna was an independent thinker who wasn’t particularly good at speaking, but a concrete and practical doer, she didn’t think about meaningless fussing, like trying to influence people with political prattle. She had more practical ideas. One could simply put papers and books on fire and burn them up, destroy food and drinks to make them taste awful, smear dirt from behind on the beautiful clothes of bypassing “peacocks”, show new research notes into piles of other papers so it would hopefully take desperate academics days to find them, put people’s coffee near the edges of tables an shelves in order to maximize the risk for coffee accidents ... there were a multitude of things a secret passive revenge activist could do. She had no field ... this was the curse of her life, but from an avenger point of view it was a good thing. There were no vibes to sense from her. Just the nothingness of the passives.
Large scale destructivity wasn’t possible for Berna. Although she might fantasize impotently about murder, arson, gross assassination, it was just fantasies. Major acts of hate and revenge was out of reach and she knew it. Petty revenge and subtle minor sabotage was all she could get. She wasn’t a generally mean and sly person and those who didn’t cross her had nothing to fear. Berna would be nice to those who were nice to her and loyal to those who didn’t betray her, but she would target all bastards who had been bad to her and crossed her, regardless of their race and position.
Daydreamer specialized in visions of horror and destruction
This made her feel free to fantasize about drenching the world in rivers of enemy blood. It wasn’t real. We can all feel free to fantasize about horrors that will never come true, can’t we? There is no harm in comforting ourselves by killing our opponents and oppressors just in our thoughts, right? Berna gave her hideous dreams free reins, while she went about her boring housemaid chores, diligently cleansing Brunnhold of every small hint of dirt she was able to find.
Backstory
Bernadette has been gated in Brunnhold since year 2703, when she failed at the initiation tests. The galdor girl who had taken her privileged lifestyle and superior social status for granted became a passive and was immediately sent to Brunnhold.
There she became a servant of the lowest possible social status, below wicks and humans. She who had excelled at her early studies and loved to read and write was forbidden to ever do that again. Instead she was put to physical work just like the children of lesser races.
She lost everything, her family and her friends, her home, her freedom, her rights to lead a normal life with love and children, the favorite books she loved, most of her clothes and other possessions and even her identity. In Brunnhold her name was shortened to just Berna. It was easier to yell at her that way.
When Bernadette was still a child she was a helpless victim of the extreme psychological cruelty it means to be made someone who isn’t existing, just a dehumanized host of unknown magical powers, supposedly evil. Whether the galdori were aware of it or not, their treatment of the innocent children who turned out to be passives was incredibly atrocious and what consequences it would have for the individual was something only time could tell.
Little Bernadette, or Berna as her name was now, worked endlessly long hours as kitchen maid until her frail little body felt ready to break. In the evenings the child was so spent that she fell asleep the moment she laid down on her bunk. This was a good thing, because it prevented her from being consumed by fear of the monster inside which was the new self she had been told was her now.
Perhaps it was also the reason for why she survived at all during the first year of descending into the life of the passive. She was too tired to be able to even think of suicide. Sleep felled her every evening anew, and she slept like dead until the work started over next morning. Time rolled on in a haze of hard and repetitive physical work and endless mental torment only interrupted by sleep in exhausted stupor. Berna lost track of time and her age as the birthdays of a cursed passive was nothing to celebrate. A darkness wrapped her mind in a state of waking sleep as she successively detached from everything and sank inwards to her own depths.
Time passed.
Due to having withdrawn into herself she was behaving like a totally compliant servant who obeyed all orders like a well-trained animal who blindly does its master’s bidding. She was considered suitable for “promotion” and so she “rose” from kitchen maid to general housemaid. She was given other kinds of work now, still physical of course, but more varied and in other places than the hot kitchens where she had worked for an uncertain period of time.
On her first day at the new job she saw a glimpse of the sunshine and blue summer sky through a window she was put to cleaning. The sight shook her, because she hadn’t seen the light of day and the sky for years, due to her long workdays. With a shock she realized that the world she had left still existed out there. The fresh summer air filled her lungs and at a distance she could hear the sound of a bird-call. A chill went up her spine because she thought she heard the bird sign Berna-dette, Berna-dette... For the first time in years she thought of her real name and recalled who she had been in the past. Well-trained servant as she was, she continued to clean diligently all the time while she had this life changing and mysterious experience. It was best to not be disappointing.
Another time, another room ... a half written letter left on a table... while Berna wiped non-existent dust from the shelves which were placed on top of the table, close to the wall, she was leaning over the letter. She looked at it she saw that there was a date on the top. Once upon a time she had learnt to write dates that way. She read it automatically, without intention and saw that it was the first of Roalis year 2708. Berna continued to work and moved on to next room she must clean, but the date burned in her mind. It had used to be her birthday. She was fifteen years old this day and she felt like she had connected with time again.
More years passed and she grew older.
After fifteen years of oppression and harassment Berna finally matured to a full-blown grownup. She started to feel entitled to think enough is enough. The sorrow and pain she had felt during her years of servitude has been replaced by rage. She still plays her role as a paragon of a complacent gated servant, but she isn’t a nice girl, not anymore. Seething with suppressed hate of the galdori, the passive roams around in Brunnhold, working diligently with practical chores and looking for opportunities to be secretly toxic and subversive. Many of the mall vexations of people’s everyday life in Brunnhold can actually have been staged by Berna.
If she would stumble over a chance to work for the freedom fighters she would jump at it without hesitation.
Aptitude Skills
| Mental | Physical | Social |
| Good | Good | Average |
Focus Skills
Career and Income
Housing and Inventory
Housing: Type
A Gated Passive lives in Brunnhold in a same-sex dorm wing, sharing a room with 2-4 other passives on a block of 20, overseen by a matron or patron, depending on their gender. All meals are shared in a passive-only cafeteria, staffed on a rotating shift by themselves.
Inventory
The Passive Starting Package
- One set of personal clothing (of Poor quality)
- One uniform (For gated or owned passives only. Not their own property but their owner's or Brunnhold's.)
- One set of shoes
- One heirloom: She was allowed to keep the old compass her grandfather had given her to play with when he replaced it with a new and more modern device. The compass is not advanced and it's more than a little bit battered and scratched after the years it spent as toy, but being of simple and sturdy old-fashioned quality it still functions properly.
Passive Bunkmate
Name: Mary Lambert
Age: 45 years old born Roalis 2, year 2673 in Vienda
Personality: Grumpy and street-smart
Profession: Housemaid, formerly criminal
Aptitude skills: Mental average, Physical good, Social bad
Professional skills: Swindling (Storytelling) Combat (Stealth), Aeroship (Flying Hot), Housekeeping (Cleaning)
Diablerie: Smokescreen. This is the magical ability to surround objects (organical or inorganical) with an enormous screen of smoke and create danger by the potential confusion, disorientation and mistakes that can follow.
Raised in Old Rose Harbor where she spent the lion's part of her life after being "set free" as a child, Mary "The Lamb" Lambert was eventually accused for devious book-keeping. The total suspicions were way more than just this, but there was no clear evidence of her guilt. When Mary was interrogated she told long stories indeed and seemed to have answers to everything, most of them enormously complicated and hard to check up. Eventually it became obvious that she was hard as nails and would continue to hold on to her claims of being innocent.
The fact that she had been outed as a passive who was said to have tried her hand at both writing and accountancy and now stood accused for what seemed like attempted tax evasion was however considered proof enough. She was sentenced to servitude, with the motivation that it was best to keep this cursed woman close in Brunnhold where she could be supervised and prevented from relapsing to crime again.
Mary arrived in Brunnhold in 2715 and in order to make the supervision as efficient as possible she was given a the paragon servant as bunkmate, the twenty years younger Bernadette Seymor, a young woman who had a perfect track record of obedience, good behavior and supposed loyalty with the galdori. This paragon of passive submission was supposed to serves as a good influence and an inspiration for well needed improvement.
Goals
Career
For a start Berna's goal is to work her way up to the position as butler or housekeeper in a galdori household in Brunnhold. If nobody volunteers a PC to become the unfortunate receiver of her work I guess I will need to get an NPC.
Revenge
It's a constant goal for Berna to take all opportunities to put a spanner in the works, if she thinks she will be able to get away with it without being revealed.
More
More goals may arise, eventually ...
