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| User: | haunted_dancer (163568) |
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| Name: | Lirije Vllasi | |||||||||
| E-mail: | britjannor@gmail.com | |||||||||
| Bio: | Character Name: Lirije (lee-REE-uh) Vllasi. Nicknames: Liri, Rije Date of Birth: March 13, 1985 Age: 22 Race/Species: Werepanther Hometown: Pristina, Kosovo Physical description: Lirije is a woman who could never pass for imposing by physical attributes alone. She stands at 5'3 and weighs somewhere right around 100 pounds. There's not an ounce of bulk on her, all lean muscle built by years of intense dance training and increased metabolism due to her werelion blood. Her eyes are bright green, cat eyes, she's been told. She has olive toned skin, always covered with a light dusting of makeup, and her long, dark hair is almost always pulled back as is practical for ballet, most commonly in a traditional bun. As far as distinguishing marks go, she has a capital letter A branded on the back of her upper right thigh. She also has various other scars inflicted by Alexander, most of which she can hide. Her feet have all but been ruined by ballet. PB: Jenna Dewan Personality: Lirije's past has left her without a grasp on what normal relationships should be like. As a result, she is mistrusting and often distant from those around her. She's fearful at the core, terrified that she hasn't really escaped and that He'll come back and get her, but she tries to cover all this insecurity up with bravado when provoked. She pretends to be a normal, well-adjusted person to the best of her ability, but acting can only make up for a past to a certain extent, and in some aspects she fails miserably. She is incredibly mistrustful of men, in particular. She's not sure if she believes at all that people have any true goodness, because in her experience any good deed has come with the weight of debt. People expect payment for their kindness. As a result, she has a cynical view of humanity. In her eyes, there's no such thing as love. She's never even had a real friendship, not in a normal sense. Not where she wasn't expected to pay up in some way. She doesn't open up easily, and once she does, she often closes off again and refuses to acknowledge anything she's said. To avoid making mistakes, she keeps her head clear. Doesn't drink or do any drugs that might mess with her ability to think straight and protect herself. She's been the victim her entire life and at this point, she's ready to take control. If that means fighting, she hopes she has the guts for it. She knows she has the physical strength, but her weaknesses emotionally far outweigh that. If cornered, she will fight. Her feral instinct kicks in and the metaphorical claws come out. Lacking confidence, however, she normally feels overmatched and looks for any chance to flee, biding her time with caustic remarks in the meantime. She doesn't want to take the chance of taking things too far, winding up in the same situation she escaped from. Who knows how many men are like him. The next time, she might never escape. Background: The early years only exist in occasional flashes and dreams today, but in the beginning, Lirije had a family. She was born in Pristina, Kosovo when the country was beginning to fall to pieces. Her early childhood was sheltered as much as possible from the conflict building outside. Her mother had been a dancer until she was bitten. Her father had turned her unknowingly on his own first full moon. The pair were little more than children themselves when they married and started a family in Pristina, taking monthly trips out of the city so they could run without fear of harming anyone. But not all of the harm would be their doing. Kosovo was a hotbed for conflict, and Pristina was an epicenter of it. The Vllasi family did not have enough money to flee when the Albanian population began to be persecuted, and Uesli, her father, lost the job he held within the city government. They were living in poverty by the time Lirije and her twin sister, Luljeta, turned five years old. Still, the family was happy. They managed to survive. Her father worked in a factory and her mother took a job cleaning at the company she used to dance for. The children, all under the age of 13, spent long hours at home alone during the day. But it was night they should have feared the most. One April evening, when the rioting and fighting in the streets got violent enough that Uelsi and Ariana were considering fleeing to the country until things calmed down, Lirije’s world fell apart. A mob formed and drew closer. The family huddled in the bedroom all the children shared, near the back of the house, but it made no difference. A bullet still tore through the wall of their ground floor apartment and lodged just a foot above where they were crouched on the floor. Lirije and Luljeta clung to one another, both crying as their older brother, Rei, held them close. Uesli was trying to block the doors when someone burst through. All Lirije heard was a crack of wood and her father’s shout of surprise, then of pain. A group of men started scouring the house. The closet they were huddled in had no door, so Rei shoved the two small girls behind a stack of boxes and clothes. Liri couldn’t see anything, but she could hear the screams as she and Luljeta tried not to make a sound. But Lirije couldn’t hold back a cry when she heard her youngest brother scream out in pain. Moments later, they were uncovered in the dim light through from the fires burning in the streets. Liri remembers fangs. Fangs and blood as Luljeta was killed by one of them. And she was bitten. She cried from the pain of it as one of the monsters drank her blood, knew she was going to die. She could see the bloodless bodies of her mother, sister, and two of her brothers out of her periphery as she was held down. She screamed, but no one who cared was listening. Lirije passed out from blood loss. When she awoke, she was no longer at home. She was stuck in a cage of sorts, at least that's how she remembers it, with other terrified people from her city and from others. There was little food and water, and occasionally frightening people walked by and prodded through the bars at the 'slaves,' as they called them. Lirije huddled in a corner against the bars, too small and weak to fight her way to the safety of the center of the crowd, and cried for her family. She had the audacity to ask one of the guards if they knew where her mother was, and was laughed at and hit before the vampire moved along. One of the others in the enclosure, a young woman, took pity on the terrified child and took care of her as best she could after that point. They were taken to an underground slave auction. Lirije had no idea where she was or how long it had been since she had been taken from her family, since her family had been killed, and she was frightened. The woman who had protected her over the journey was taken from her at that point and Lirije again dissolved into tears, sobbing uncontrollably until she, too, was taken away. She wasn't put on the auction block like the others, but was taken directly with a few guards who transported her by car to Drystan Emrys' enormous home in Europe. It was like being transported to a completely different world. It was opulent and beautiful, and she was expected to blend in as part of the surroundings. She followed a more experienced servant around, dolled up in fancy clothes every day of the week, dressed to her "master's" liking. She was timid and quiet at first, afraid of making a wrong step because of the warnings the servant who was teaching her gave. Her eyes were always wide with fear. And then she saw him for the first time, and the recognition was immediate. She screamed when she realized he had been the one who had bitten her, who had been there, who had helped to kill her family. She screamed and backed up against the wall, dropping the silver tray she was carrying, shattering the crystal chalice full of blood that had been on top of it all over the floor. He had not been pleased. That had been her first introduction to the basement 'torture' chamber. He had gone easy on her that time, but the child had thought she was going to die. The abuse didn't stop there. Every time she stepped out of line, sometimes for the most trivial things, she was punished severely. It wasn't all physical. Some of the torment was purely emotional, and in some ways that had more of a lasting effect on her than the bodily harm he did her. Even as a child, Drystan abused her sexually, and if he had twisted guests who wished to use her in that way, she had no choice but to go with them as well. She was at the mercy of the whims of Drystan and whichever guests he chose to loan her out to for the duration of their stay. She grew up this way, a slave to the fickle desires of a sociopath. For the most part, she did her best to blend into the background and not make waves, but every young woman has her breaking point, and he found hers too often on occasion, especially near the full moon when her emotions were on edge anyway. When she bared her teeth, so to speak, she was always put back in her place with a very firm hand. During the full moons, she was always caged, which was torture in itself. Because of this, she taught herself over time to postpone the shift as long as she possibly could, despite the exhaustion it would cause the following few days. When she was fourteen, Lirije decided she'd had enough and attempted to escape. She failed, was caught before she even made it out of the house, and suffered dearly for that indiscretion. However, she caught the eye of one of the guards during this time, one who wasn't as cruel and heartless as he seemed. He took pity on the girl and decided to help her escape. It was eleven years of hell, but finally someone found her a way out. Two years after her initial escape attempt, when Drystan went on one of his many trips, the guard came to her rescue. He had arranged to get her away from Drystan and on a plane to America, quite an undertaking when the girl had no documentation or identification at all. He put her on the flight to New York City. He knew the girl had loaded her bag with as many of Drystan’s valuables as she could stuff in it, and he knew he wouldn’t survive this betrayal. Lirije only knew she was free. She stepped off the plane at JFK and into an entirely new world. She hawked all of the valuables she could, going from pawn shop to pawn shop. She managed to make out with a decent amount of cash. Enough that she didn’t have to sleep on the streets. She was afraid of her own shadow, certain that Drystan would find her and kill her, or worse, keep her alive and continue to toy with her, but at least she wasn’t homeless. She rented out half of a room in a seedy two-bedroom apartment in the lower east side. One of her roommates happened to be an entepreneur who specialized in falsifying identification. He gave her a discount and she was able to find a job. She didn’t know how to use a computer, didn’t know how to do much of anything that required a lot of skill, but she managed to get a job cleaning in an office building for a big corporate law firm. Within a few weeks, the boss man had taken an interest in the girl. He had seen her documentation when the time came to file her first paycheck, and called her into the office, showing her the ID and how he knew it was fake. Lirije burst into tears, thinking she would be deported, sent back to Drystan, sent back to that hell. But the boss man had other plans. Said he had been watching her. Said he could get her citizenship legally, could find her a place to live that wasn’t inhabited by criminals, could support her. Liri was running low on money. Drystan’s treasures could only stretch so far, and she had already spent far too much trying to simply survive in the city. She agreed. The lawyer, Mitchell Gorham, was a forty-something with a wife and two kids who lived on Park Avenue. He wanted something on the side to make him feel young again, and a sixteen year old girl with no family and no connections seemed like just the thing. He told her he couldn’t get her documentation until she turned 18. He didn’t want her working in the office any more, but he wanted her living nearby. He got her a one-bedroom apartment a few blocks from his office building. He asked her if there was anything she wanted, said he wanted to spoil her. Remembering how her mother had been a dancer, she said she’d like to learn ballet. He immediately footed the bill for ridiculously expensive classes at a studio in the Village. From then on, she didn’t work. She danced during the day, taking as many classes as would fit into the studio’s hours, and came home to be available for Mitchell at night should he choose to drop in. He often did. His job required a lot of travel, so she doubted his wife ever suspected a thing. It was probably better that way. Five years later, due to relentless work and the aid of her were blood, Liri had progressed enough in ballet that she was ready to audition for an apprenticeship. Mitchell had allowed her to get her citizenship at this point, but he was reluctant to let her audition for a company. Didn’t want her time monopolized. She convinced him with the promise that she’d stay in the City, and landed an apprenticeship with the Joffrey. She’s been there for almost the past two years. The conflict of the full moon has caused some problems for her career path, as well as living in the big city. It helps that she has excellent control and can hold off on the shift, but she also had a doctor that Mitchell (she was forced to tell him so that he could find her a safe place to run on the full) paid off write up a diagnosis of severe endometriosis. As a result, there are three days out of each month that she’s normally excused from classes if necessary. If there are performances that fall on the full; that’s why every part has an understudy and everyone is an understudy for someone else. Two months ago, Lirije received word through a colleague of Mitchell’s that his chartered jet had gone down over the Bahamas. He had been “on business” with some friends, so his family survived by exclusion, but no one had escaped the crash. For a few weeks after his death, things seemed to progress as usual. She could no longer afford her expensive apartment, so she moved and took a job waiting tables at night to make ends meet. Then, one of Mitchell's business acquaintances, Adrien, showed up at her door one night. She spiraled back into a situation where abuse and manipulation were common and, to her knowledge, inescapable. And just as suddenly he disappeared. Though Lirije is a lovely dancer, she simply wasn't par for the professional companies when it came down to it. She would have gone back to school, but with no formal education, that was simply not an option. Mysteriously, she recieved an email from an unknown address telling her about a school in the Boston area called Tiberius J. Swann. She researched it and called about admission and found that she could get her education there. Thrilled at the opportunity, she agreed to start. She has no idea that Adrian, or Bastian as he is now called, is the one who is bringing her back within his reach. Abilities: Shifting. Over time she has learned to fend off the shift until the last possible moment on the full moon, sometimes postponing it for hours, even until near dawn, though this drains her for days afterward and she only utilizes this ability if absolutely necessary. She also has had years of intensive ballet training. Weaknesses: Shifting and silver, spinal trauma, etc. To start with the superficial, she's got a pack-a-day plus smoking habit, picked up from other dancers while she was training at the Joffrey. The rest of her weaknesses are all a result of her past. She lacks confidence in herself because she lacks a sense of self-worth, thanks to her childhood, and covers this up by making efforts to be the best at everything she does, throwing herself utterly into dance, leaving little time for anything else. She has a strong mistrust of a majority of people in general, men in specific. Roommate: Anyone will do! Other Character's journal: haunted_dancer.insanejournal.com | |||||||||
| Schools: | None listed | |||||||||
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| Friend of: | 59: ardent_malice, better_days, blood_maid, bury_the_past, calculated_fate, chasingjonah, creux_ami, dreamscraps, driving_model_v, drstrange, dust_and_shadow, elieatssin, felonious_punk, fiery_dame, from_the_dark, from_the_depths, frostyflowers, gavreel, gentle_shield, haunted_dancer, haunted_npc, hopewithoutholy, innominepatri, jadedheart, jane5ays, joryan, just_ami, lapislazuli, lex_isa_wreck, liar_for_hire, line_forms_here, livialovesit, losthorizen, lucid_conscious, lucky_trouble, mojave, mother_maggie, mr_rockstar, nocturnalcoitus, pain_is_art, petite_douceur, pheonixwaves, ramble_on, rashnu, reggie69yo, rubylambert, saffronrunsit, savageallure, sensing, shadows_prism, shadowwhisper, shiftersoldier, sinsofseven, snakecharm, sweetly_cecily, tail_chaser, the_pretender, unwittingly, whiskertips | |||||||||
| Account type: | Free Patient | |||||||||
