character app
Jun. 30th, 2015 07:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
missceciliaCHARACTER NAME: Cecilia Elise Coombs
CHARACTER AGE: 26
SPECIES: Witch
BACKGROUND & HISTORY: Cecilia Elise was born to Reginald and Sarah Coombs three minutes after her brother Fabrice, making her, to her eternal annoyance, the younger child. Her father was a fisherman, her mother a veterinarian, and though she was indubitably a Coombs, her early life was kept free of the schemes and pressures that plagued her extended family. She was a shy, soft-spoken child, the wide-eyed shadow to her brother’s bubbly light.
After the “accident” at sea that claimed Reginald’s life, Sarah was left to raise two young children on her own. She did her best, but the fact was that she had a full-time job, one that frequently required odd hours, and Cecilia and Fabrice were handed off to a series of nannies and daycare centers while she worked. They were each other’s closest companions, and as Fabrice withdrew into himself in mourning, Cecilia became more and more outgoing to compensate.
In the fifth grade, she was invited to enroll in a boarding school for gifted students in upstate New York. Though Sarah was reluctant to send her daughter away, the opportunity was too good to pass up, and off Cecilia went. She missed her family, and wrote to Fabrice constantly, but for the most part, she was happy in boarding school. She quickly learned to imitate the poise and affectations of the well-bred society women who were the mothers of her classmates, and that, combined with her own vivacious temperament and occasional bursts of wild generosity, made her incredibly popular. She had friends at school, and over breaks, she would go home to Siren Cove to learn magic and be with her family. She loved her cousins, and spent time with them whenever she could, but as she grew older, her Aunt Violet became very interested in her future prospects in a way that Cecilia found somewhat creepy. She’d always planned to go to college, but when she was sixteen, her Aunt Grace offered her a job modeling in a series of print ads for her fashion line; when she graduated from high school the following year, she fell headfirst into Grace’s world. She took her aunt’s fame and her own striking features and turned them into a steady modeling career, and though she never quite achieved supermodel status, she quickly became a recognizable figure on the fashion circuit. She was young, beautiful, the life of every party, the darling of the media... and then, all of a sudden, she wasn’t.
What nobody noticed, under all the glitz and glamour, was that she was horribly, desperately unhappy. Caught up in a non-stop whirlwind of runways, photoshoots, and increasingly hedonistic parties, in a new city every week, far from her loved ones and unable to confide in anyone, Cecilia was only 22 when she drank an entire bottle of vodka and walked into the Mediterranean. It was an accident, she told the men who pulled her out again, she’d been too drunk to realize where she was going, but she knew it wasn’t true. Her family also knew it wasn’t true, and sitting at her daughter’s bedside in a French hospital, Sarah put her foot down. Cecilia was out of the modeling business. She went from the hospital to rehab, and from rehab to a cottage in the Andalucian countryside, courtesy of Grace’s guilty conscience, where she brushed up on her Spanish, honed her magical abilities, and took a long, hard look at her life. She couldn’t go back to Siren Cove, she decided, not as a washed-up former model with no job and no prospects; if she did, she would never be able to look at herself in the mirror again. Instead, she bleached and cut her hair until she was almost unrecognizable, took the necessary qualifying exams and applied to Oxford University.
During her three years at university, she kept mostly to herself, busy with classwork and determined not to regress to her party-girl lifestyle. When Fabrice was attacked, she dropped everything and got on the next plane back home, and it was only once he recovered enough to insist she go back to school that she returned to Oxford. She graduated in 2015 with double first-class honours in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, but emerged from academia almost as adrift as she was at her entrance. After so much time and turmoil, she just wanted to go home. She returned to Siren Cove at the end of June, and is now going about the process of building a new life for herself in one of the few places she was ever truly happy.
PERSONALITY: In a nutshell: outgoing society princess. Cecilia may have given up most of the trappings of her bright young thing lifestyle, but she's retained all the mannerisms. She’s vivacious without being over-the-top, witty without being too smart, charming, personable, and generally a delight. She was once described as the sort of girl who lights up every room she walks into, and she missed her true calling when she chose the runway over the stage, because it is, all of it, an elaborate front.
While she is genuinely an extrovert, the fact is that Cecilia wants desperately to be liked, and so she tries very hard to make herself likable. In public, she’s the effervescent, effortless Cool Girl. In private, she’s decidedly more complicated. Among her friends - those few people she trusts not to stab her in the back - she doesn’t bother to sand down her sharp edges, and the people in her inner circle will quickly discover that she’s somewhat mercurial. She is easily amused, just as easily annoyed, and can count the amount of times she’s apologized for anything on one hand, but she tempers her occasional bitchy moments with outpourings of kindness and generosity. If she doesn’t like someone, they will be met with a vaguely disdainful sort of politeness in public and a barrage of cutting insults in private, and while she doesn't hate many people, she does have something of a vindictive streak; people who manage to get on her bad side often find that their lives have been made thoroughly miserable in a matter of days. She doesn't trust easily, but she's extremely loyal to the people close to her, and can be genuinely dangerous in their defense (the most obvious example of this being her brother - Cecilia is not, by nature, a violent person, but she would burn Siren Cove to the ground to protect Fabrice).
Though she’s spent much of her adult life hiding it from the public eye, Cecilia is actually both whip-smart and a total nerd, and it isn’t at all hyperbole to say that she’s frequently the smartest person in the room. She’s never had her IQ formally tested, but it’s almost certainly high enough that if she did, she would be considered a genius. She’s long since grown tired of people looking at her and seeing a pretty face and an empty head, and she hates being underestimated, but she’s spent so long hiding behind her Cool Girl façade that she doesn’t quite know how to be anything else. At her core, under all her walls, she’s a lonely, slightly lost young woman who just wants people to see her for who she really is and love her in spite of it.
OPINION OF THE RIVALRY: Cecilia’s mother did her best to keep her children away from the rivalry, but Cecilia’s a Coombs, and if her mother wouldn’t tell her much about it, Violet and Moira were more than willing to pick up the slack. Given this particular combination of sources, combined with her life outside Siren Cove, she generally thinks continuing a rivalry over a centuries-old grudge is entirely stupid. However, her loyalty to her family sets her in automatic opposition to anyone who works against them, and she is deeply resentful of anyone who would force witches to hide themselves in one of the few places where magic still thrives, so in practice, she tends to come down on the anti-Thornton end of things.
LIFESTYLE: Cecilia spent her university years working various jobs and squirreling away all her earnings, and she’ll soon be starting an event planning business with Amelie, so while she’s not extravagantly wealthy, she makes more than enough money to get by. In her spare time, she hosts a reasonably popular YouTube series called “Butterfly Effect”, in which she (anonymously) breaks down current events and explains the political, social, and economic factors that cause them.
She lives in a nice two-bedroom apartment above a flower shop downtown, which she rents for a steal because it’s rumored to be haunted. Cecilia is as much of a social butterfly as ever, and when she’s not dragging her brother shopping or being dragged on ill-advised excursions, can be found almost anywhere in Siren Cove. She doesn’t have the greatest track record with relationships, is extremely bisexual, and, because nice popular girls don’t like other girls, is very much still in the closet - this despite the fact that she has been photographed kissing “gal pals” on multiple different occasions (it’s amazing what you can get away with when you’re a professional object of the heterosexual male gaze). She did come out to her immediate family following the first such instance, but they’re sworn to secrecy.
POWERS & ABILITIES: Cecilia’s an air witch, which, in and of itself, gives her a fairly limited array of powers. She can control the wind, scry with generally less than helpful results, and is moderately talented at casting glamours. There’s an interesting twist to her powers, however: she can control or alter almost anything as long as a) she intends to do so, b) she’s working in the physical realm, and c) she spells out exactly what she wants to do. She has to say it out loud, and if she isn’t specific enough, the spell will work, but it won’t necessarily work in the way she intends. (There also appears to be some sort of proximity requirement, but she's never really tested it.) When casting this sort of spell, she prefers to speak French, in order to keep people from realizing what she’s doing.
Having to describe precisely what she wants her magic to do is awkward and time-consuming - not things Cecilia’s fond of - so she’s devised a way to work around it. It’s effectively the magical equivalent of hotkeys: she builds spells in advance, describing what she wants them to do and then tying them to a particular word, so all she needs to do is say the right keyword to trigger a spell. (These keywords are usually in Latin, because she’s that sort of nerd, and Latin sounds cooler than English.) She’s done this for magic she uses regularly and an array of tricks that she’ll have to be able to cast quickly, should she ever need to use them, but any spell that it hasn’t occurred to her to create will need to be cast the long way.
She's decent with charms, terrible with potions, and doesn't do anything with herbs besides making things smell nice, and she can shapeshift into an American Marten.
PLAYED BY: Tuppence Middleton
CHARACTER AGE: 26
SPECIES: Witch
BACKGROUND & HISTORY: Cecilia Elise was born to Reginald and Sarah Coombs three minutes after her brother Fabrice, making her, to her eternal annoyance, the younger child. Her father was a fisherman, her mother a veterinarian, and though she was indubitably a Coombs, her early life was kept free of the schemes and pressures that plagued her extended family. She was a shy, soft-spoken child, the wide-eyed shadow to her brother’s bubbly light.
After the “accident” at sea that claimed Reginald’s life, Sarah was left to raise two young children on her own. She did her best, but the fact was that she had a full-time job, one that frequently required odd hours, and Cecilia and Fabrice were handed off to a series of nannies and daycare centers while she worked. They were each other’s closest companions, and as Fabrice withdrew into himself in mourning, Cecilia became more and more outgoing to compensate.
In the fifth grade, she was invited to enroll in a boarding school for gifted students in upstate New York. Though Sarah was reluctant to send her daughter away, the opportunity was too good to pass up, and off Cecilia went. She missed her family, and wrote to Fabrice constantly, but for the most part, she was happy in boarding school. She quickly learned to imitate the poise and affectations of the well-bred society women who were the mothers of her classmates, and that, combined with her own vivacious temperament and occasional bursts of wild generosity, made her incredibly popular. She had friends at school, and over breaks, she would go home to Siren Cove to learn magic and be with her family. She loved her cousins, and spent time with them whenever she could, but as she grew older, her Aunt Violet became very interested in her future prospects in a way that Cecilia found somewhat creepy. She’d always planned to go to college, but when she was sixteen, her Aunt Grace offered her a job modeling in a series of print ads for her fashion line; when she graduated from high school the following year, she fell headfirst into Grace’s world. She took her aunt’s fame and her own striking features and turned them into a steady modeling career, and though she never quite achieved supermodel status, she quickly became a recognizable figure on the fashion circuit. She was young, beautiful, the life of every party, the darling of the media... and then, all of a sudden, she wasn’t.
What nobody noticed, under all the glitz and glamour, was that she was horribly, desperately unhappy. Caught up in a non-stop whirlwind of runways, photoshoots, and increasingly hedonistic parties, in a new city every week, far from her loved ones and unable to confide in anyone, Cecilia was only 22 when she drank an entire bottle of vodka and walked into the Mediterranean. It was an accident, she told the men who pulled her out again, she’d been too drunk to realize where she was going, but she knew it wasn’t true. Her family also knew it wasn’t true, and sitting at her daughter’s bedside in a French hospital, Sarah put her foot down. Cecilia was out of the modeling business. She went from the hospital to rehab, and from rehab to a cottage in the Andalucian countryside, courtesy of Grace’s guilty conscience, where she brushed up on her Spanish, honed her magical abilities, and took a long, hard look at her life. She couldn’t go back to Siren Cove, she decided, not as a washed-up former model with no job and no prospects; if she did, she would never be able to look at herself in the mirror again. Instead, she bleached and cut her hair until she was almost unrecognizable, took the necessary qualifying exams and applied to Oxford University.
During her three years at university, she kept mostly to herself, busy with classwork and determined not to regress to her party-girl lifestyle. When Fabrice was attacked, she dropped everything and got on the next plane back home, and it was only once he recovered enough to insist she go back to school that she returned to Oxford. She graduated in 2015 with double first-class honours in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, but emerged from academia almost as adrift as she was at her entrance. After so much time and turmoil, she just wanted to go home. She returned to Siren Cove at the end of June, and is now going about the process of building a new life for herself in one of the few places she was ever truly happy.
PERSONALITY: In a nutshell: outgoing society princess. Cecilia may have given up most of the trappings of her bright young thing lifestyle, but she's retained all the mannerisms. She’s vivacious without being over-the-top, witty without being too smart, charming, personable, and generally a delight. She was once described as the sort of girl who lights up every room she walks into, and she missed her true calling when she chose the runway over the stage, because it is, all of it, an elaborate front.
While she is genuinely an extrovert, the fact is that Cecilia wants desperately to be liked, and so she tries very hard to make herself likable. In public, she’s the effervescent, effortless Cool Girl. In private, she’s decidedly more complicated. Among her friends - those few people she trusts not to stab her in the back - she doesn’t bother to sand down her sharp edges, and the people in her inner circle will quickly discover that she’s somewhat mercurial. She is easily amused, just as easily annoyed, and can count the amount of times she’s apologized for anything on one hand, but she tempers her occasional bitchy moments with outpourings of kindness and generosity. If she doesn’t like someone, they will be met with a vaguely disdainful sort of politeness in public and a barrage of cutting insults in private, and while she doesn't hate many people, she does have something of a vindictive streak; people who manage to get on her bad side often find that their lives have been made thoroughly miserable in a matter of days. She doesn't trust easily, but she's extremely loyal to the people close to her, and can be genuinely dangerous in their defense (the most obvious example of this being her brother - Cecilia is not, by nature, a violent person, but she would burn Siren Cove to the ground to protect Fabrice).
Though she’s spent much of her adult life hiding it from the public eye, Cecilia is actually both whip-smart and a total nerd, and it isn’t at all hyperbole to say that she’s frequently the smartest person in the room. She’s never had her IQ formally tested, but it’s almost certainly high enough that if she did, she would be considered a genius. She’s long since grown tired of people looking at her and seeing a pretty face and an empty head, and she hates being underestimated, but she’s spent so long hiding behind her Cool Girl façade that she doesn’t quite know how to be anything else. At her core, under all her walls, she’s a lonely, slightly lost young woman who just wants people to see her for who she really is and love her in spite of it.
OPINION OF THE RIVALRY: Cecilia’s mother did her best to keep her children away from the rivalry, but Cecilia’s a Coombs, and if her mother wouldn’t tell her much about it, Violet and Moira were more than willing to pick up the slack. Given this particular combination of sources, combined with her life outside Siren Cove, she generally thinks continuing a rivalry over a centuries-old grudge is entirely stupid. However, her loyalty to her family sets her in automatic opposition to anyone who works against them, and she is deeply resentful of anyone who would force witches to hide themselves in one of the few places where magic still thrives, so in practice, she tends to come down on the anti-Thornton end of things.
LIFESTYLE: Cecilia spent her university years working various jobs and squirreling away all her earnings, and she’ll soon be starting an event planning business with Amelie, so while she’s not extravagantly wealthy, she makes more than enough money to get by. In her spare time, she hosts a reasonably popular YouTube series called “Butterfly Effect”, in which she (anonymously) breaks down current events and explains the political, social, and economic factors that cause them.
She lives in a nice two-bedroom apartment above a flower shop downtown, which she rents for a steal because it’s rumored to be haunted. Cecilia is as much of a social butterfly as ever, and when she’s not dragging her brother shopping or being dragged on ill-advised excursions, can be found almost anywhere in Siren Cove. She doesn’t have the greatest track record with relationships, is extremely bisexual, and, because nice popular girls don’t like other girls, is very much still in the closet - this despite the fact that she has been photographed kissing “gal pals” on multiple different occasions (it’s amazing what you can get away with when you’re a professional object of the heterosexual male gaze). She did come out to her immediate family following the first such instance, but they’re sworn to secrecy.
POWERS & ABILITIES: Cecilia’s an air witch, which, in and of itself, gives her a fairly limited array of powers. She can control the wind, scry with generally less than helpful results, and is moderately talented at casting glamours. There’s an interesting twist to her powers, however: she can control or alter almost anything as long as a) she intends to do so, b) she’s working in the physical realm, and c) she spells out exactly what she wants to do. She has to say it out loud, and if she isn’t specific enough, the spell will work, but it won’t necessarily work in the way she intends. (There also appears to be some sort of proximity requirement, but she's never really tested it.) When casting this sort of spell, she prefers to speak French, in order to keep people from realizing what she’s doing.
Having to describe precisely what she wants her magic to do is awkward and time-consuming - not things Cecilia’s fond of - so she’s devised a way to work around it. It’s effectively the magical equivalent of hotkeys: she builds spells in advance, describing what she wants them to do and then tying them to a particular word, so all she needs to do is say the right keyword to trigger a spell. (These keywords are usually in Latin, because she’s that sort of nerd, and Latin sounds cooler than English.) She’s done this for magic she uses regularly and an array of tricks that she’ll have to be able to cast quickly, should she ever need to use them, but any spell that it hasn’t occurred to her to create will need to be cast the long way.
She's decent with charms, terrible with potions, and doesn't do anything with herbs besides making things smell nice, and she can shapeshift into an American Marten.
PLAYED BY: Tuppence Middleton
