Zee Aldemar || The Hanged Man

[n1komedes]

ZALEMA "ZEE" ALDEMAR • THE HANGED MAN • 29

[n1komedes]

—————— Iɴᴛʀᴏᴅᴜᴄᴛɪᴏɴ


『 FULL NAME || Zalema "Zee" Aldemar

『 ALSO KNOWN AS || Carmen Zaldana

『 AGE || 29

『 GENDER & PRONOUNS || Female, she/her/hers

『 SEXUALITY || Lesbian

『 ROLE || The Hanged Man

『 OCCUPATION || Con Artist

『 MOODBOARD || take everything you can carry

『 THEME SONGS || "I Like It" by Cardi B



Iɴᴛʀᴏᴅᴜᴄᴛɪᴏɴ ——————

[n1komedes]

—————— Dɪɢ Dᴇᴇᴘᴇʀ


『 COLLECTED || A big part of being a con artist is being able to keep your cool while telling elaborate lies, handling illegal business, and making a clean getaway. As a result of her life-long work, Zee is calmer and appears more laid-back than most, but she is far from carefree or whimsical. Internally she's a hardened pragmatist who keeps track of countless falsehoods, fake identities, promises, and crimes. Doesn't help anything to look like she's got that many irons in the fire, though. She tends to be the person kicked back with a coke and a smoke, even when tensions are high.

『 SUAVE || Confidence tricks rely on a con artist being able to put on airs of authenticity, trustworthiness, and authority. Zee is a smooth-talker to that end, usually able to charm, negotiate, or bluff her way out of tough situations or into nice ones. Her first response to any sign of conflict is to schmooze, not argue. She has been known to tactically flirt, even with those she otherwise wouldn't be interested in. In general, Zee exudes a sort of effortless stylishness and clout that eases her way through the world.

『 SLIPPERY || It's as hard to keep an Aldemar in somewhere (such as a prison) as it is to keep them out of somewhere (such as your family vault). Trained by countless family members, Zee has a gift for picking locks, getting out of handcuffs, disabling security systems, and avoiding guards. This doesn't just apply to her work; Zee has used the legendary skills of her family to dip out on one night stands, get into exclusive bars and clubs, and even check books out of the library without a card. Scoundrel...

『 LIAR || Zee is an incorrigible liar, a trait encouraged in her family for work but not helpful in creating and maintaining meaningful relationships. Living under false identities and running several long cons means Zee can lose herself in webs of lies for months at a time, and will often lie about things that don't matter impulsively, out of habit. Telling the truth or being forced to tell the truth makes her extremely uncomfortable, and is one of the rare circumstances where her calm demeanor cracks and she might snap at someone defensively.

『 ADDICT || Career criminals often have some odd psychology, of which an addictive personality is one of the milder quirks. Unfortunately, it's a big one Zee's stuck with, and at one point nearly destroyed her career. Zee is recently sober, having collected her two year chip three weeks ago. She made the hard choice to stop drinking after an incident with a mark for a forgery sale and an open bar nearly sunk her reputation in the art world and botched the sale. She leans on smoking now to avoid hitting bars again, or trying anything harder.

『 CUTTHROAT || Every Aldemar is saddled with the glory of those master criminals who came before them, which means Zee, like every other young person in her family, is ruthlessly ambitious. In striving to make a name for herself or survive to continue that work another day, Zee won't hesitate to take out threats. It can be unfortunately quite easy for a person to look like a threat to Zee, especially if they try to disabuse her of her criminal ways.

『 HOBBIES & INTERESTS || Zee's hobbies and interests tend to reflect a blend of her criminal hobbies as a kid, her modern work, and a more artistic nature that set her sights on duping the art world to start with. She likes studying art history, cheating at carnival games, drawing in charcoal, knife throwing, driving, and fashion, to name a few things.

『 PERSONALITY || Zee is an open and authentic person, happy to share her thoughts and feelings on a whim, and very charming— but everything she says is a lie. It is very, very hard to get to know anything approximating the "real" Zee Aldemar because she buries it so deep. There are facets of her in any role she plays which could be called character traits for the frequency with which they show up: she has a good sense of humor and loves to laugh, she doesn't like to start fights but she will finish them, she's more intelligent than she may at first seem, and she doesn't startle or get anxious easily. But her constant, near-pathological lying is a talent, tool, defense mechanism, and fault that keeps her actual thoughts, passions, and concerns buried deep. The personality she commonly presents (under the name Carmen Zaldana, her most-used identity) is a cool, collected expert on Latin American masters and artwork of the period, as erudite as she is fun-loving.

In her quiet, solitary moments, Zee is an artistic soul who takes pride in living outside societal norms and standards. Her interest in art forgery comes from a love of drawing and knowing several talented artists throughout her life. She sees "normal life" as a track others are on because they can't imagine anything outside it, and sees herself and her family as almost magical, doing whatever they like with panache and skill that keeps the "normal" world from bothering them. She has a deep satisfaction with this way of living that would make it hard for her to do anything else. She's acclimated to the thrill of lying and doing illegal things, and treats pretending to fit in with others as kind of game she's good at winning. Fundamentally non-committal, Zee has few long-term friendships or relationships. Her strongest ties are with family, but even then it's not unheard of for one Aldemar to double-cross another in pursuit of wealth or infamy. Continual challenge is something she craves, which has made settling into a niche difficult for her.



Dɪɢ Dᴇᴇᴘᴇʀ ——————

[n1komedes]

—————— Oᴘᴇɴ Bᴏᴏᴋ


『 HEIRLOOM || Zee inherited a tooled leather belt from her mother, a master jewel thief, which she claims has been handed down in the family for generations and has saved more than a few Aldemars in a pinch. Zee can use it for a +2 to dodging attacks, as it gives her a moment of extra nimbleness.

『 STARTING POWER ||
Backstabber: +1 damage ongoing. Zee does an additional +1 damage to targets unaware of her presence or distracted by other threats.

『 CHARACTER STATS ||
tab tab tab tab tab ◊ Tough +1
tab tab tab tab tab ◊ Cool +1
tab tab tab tab tab ◊ Charm +1
tab tab tab tab tab ◊ Nimble +0
tab tab tab tab tab ◊ Weird +0

『 LIST OF ADDITIONAL POWERS ||
Archivist: Tampering with provenance makes you quite the researcher. Gain +1 Weird, and when investigating a mystery, Zee finds the answer to at least one question, even if the rest of the investigation goes poorly.
The Hard Way: If it comes to a fight, Zee's better ready to finish it. +1 Tough.
Respected: Most of art fraud is having the right reputation, and Zee has cultivated hers. She gains +1 Charm, and now has some standing in the Havensrock.

『 HISTORY || The Aldemars like to brag in select company that no one in the family has ever done an honest day's work. They can trace their line back to swindlers and crooks who came to Cuba from Spain when it was first made a colony, and the family's move to America early in the twentieth century was no different. The family prides itself on fostering a wild, independent spirit in all its members alongside an irrepressible criminality which means every member of the Aldemar clan—from the baby cousin to the most aged grandmother—has a specialty, dubious skills, and some claim to infamy. The family is old and quietly wealthy, with vacation homes back in Cuba sitting atop buried caches of gold, jewels, cash, and other treasures, while the occupants within cook their own meals and decorate with thrift store finds. From this storied line came Halisa Aldemar, a jewel thief, who stole the heart of a security guard and turned him to her cause, and, eventually, gave him her name. Their youngest daughter is Zalema Aldemar, a woman still trying to find her niche and the way she’ll rob the world blind.

Born in Miami, Florida, Zalema grew up learning all sorts of criminal skills from her two older sisters, her parents, and her uncle and aunt who settled nearby. She spent most of grade school practicing those skills in the city: pickpocketing tourists, stealing the identities of other students for free lunches and merit awards, forging permission slips, and conning people into buying her treats and baubles with a sad story at some of her favorite haunts. Her father, Juan Aldemar, taught her self-defense and how to deal with hired muscle, and encouraged her to jump into schoolyard fights as a “free form of training in how rough fights go down.” Before long she was breaking noses and racking up detentions, which the family dealt with by transferring her to a private school they support generously, which is well used to the eccentric ways of the clan. As she grew up and showed she had mastery of the basics of being a crook, she was encouraged to look ahead. All Aldemars have a special niche. As much as Halisa Aldemar could’ve taught her daughter about stealing and counterfeiting fine jewelry, both she and Zee knew neither would be happy if Zee didn’t find her own niche. Inspiration struck when Zee started haunting the Miami Beach Boardwalk for easy money. There she met a group of boardwalk artists who amused themselves when not drawing caricatures or painting beach sunsets by teaching the little pickpocket the fundamentals of art.

With a high school diploma under a fake name she picked out for graduation in a family tradition, Zee applied for colleges seeking a degree in Fine Arts and Art History as the foundation for a career stealing art. In school Zee enjoyed drawing quite a bit, but she discovered she had no real talent for painting or different media, and so spent her time in school focusing on making contacts and learning how to pick targets for theft. In the process she met Dmitri Levandosky, a gifted young artist with technical brilliance but little inspiration. She got a wild idea after seeing him work and started asking Dmitri to paint her little recreations of famous pieces for her apartment in exchange for a home-cooked meal. Her hunch proved correct— Dmitri was gifted enough to ape most of the great masters, even with inadequate supplies. After that revelation her focus shifted from heisting paintings to running a bigger, more elegant con: having Dmitri create forgeries she could trick galleries and collectors into purchasing. Getting and keeping Dmitri on board was a trifling matter of blackmail, and then passing along his first cut of the profits on a test piece she sold. At that point on he was as complicit in the fraud as she was, and happy about it, able to graduate without loans and get a place of his own to live. Zee went on to complete a masters in Art History to give her fake identity, Carmen Zaldana, the background she needed to get into the high-stakes world of art collecting and brokerage, and Zee the knowledge she needed to play Carmen convincingly.

The major downside to trying to get into that kind of swindling is that advances in forensic technology and stricter scrutiny of a painting's purchase history, or provenance, have made passing off a fake much more difficult than it has been at any other time in history. To get Dmitri's work to a level where her bluffing can sell it, Zee has to constantly source materials for him which are very hard to obtain legally without suspicion: canvas or wood board of the right age and with the right distinguishing features, such as reinforcement or worm holes; pigments with the right composition, made in traditional ways; even damaged paintings of the right era Dmitri can touch up to create a work which will check out forensically, but be fraudulently attributed by Zee to a master painter. Picking the right piece to create is its own bit of legwork. Zee herself frequently has to research "lost" paintings for Dmitri to craft, as well as forge and plant substantiating documents to reinforce the provenance of the completed work. It's a highly-technical kind of crime, filled with auction block intrigues and mined with experts ready to discredit her efforts, but that, to Zee, just makes it all the more fun. Her first few sales made her parents and extended family quite proud, but all are waiting for her to land the big one: for Zee to sell something truly famous, make an upsetting amount of money, and firmly earn the infamy the family name invokes.

Her current con is in its early stages. Zee has her sights set on planting another ballerina painting in Edgar Degas' oeuvre, a subject so ubiquitous for the French artist it's safe enough to forge, and an artist famous enough to make Zee's reputation if she can pull off the sale. Dmitri needs a canvas from 1875 with several specific quirks. It doesn't matter what's on it, as Dmitri will scrape it clean and then paint over, but the age of the canvas, the structure of the wood framing, and other small forensic details must be exactly right. Zee has tracked a painting fitting the bill all the way to Havensrock, Oregon, currently hanging in Bell Mansion. All that remains now is to get inside and get that painting out and crated up for Chicago, where Dmitri's new studio is located, either the easy way (charming the museum staff into parting with one piece) or the hard way (breaking into the old house and making off with it). Zee figures compared to the work that will be actually selling the completed Degas, the canvas acquisition will be a piece of cake...



Oᴘᴇɴ Bᴏᴏᴋ ——————

[n1komedes]

—————— Cᴏɴɴᴇᴄᴛɪᴏɴs


(this post should be used to keep track of all plots and relationships planned out)

『 ABOUT THAT CANVAS... || Zee has tracked a canvas of the appropriate age and description to Havensrock, OR for her forger's next big project. There's only one problem, which Zee is soon to discover: the canvas has a history, a very specific person painted on it, and might just be an unwelcome entry point into a world even wilder than art forgery...

『 PLOT 2 || Answer Here

『 PLOT 3 || Answer Here

(add more as necessary)



Cᴏɴɴᴇᴄᴛɪᴏɴs ——————