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 Posted: Tue Dec 05, 2006 5:26 pm
 Two hundred years of Hell to be called this?!
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Posted: Tue Dec 05, 2006 5:41 pm
 Who she is.
Nicknames: Corbeau, Cora, Ageless Beauty, Golden Oldie, Belle (( feminine version of Beau, which means handsome / pretty )), CL, Grandma.
Age: Approximately One-hundred-and-ninety-eight years old.
Birthplace: Paris, France.
Birthdate: April Twentieth, 1809, at around six fifty-eight p.m.
Parents: Yves and Colette (( Morin )) Lepic
Siblings: Paul, Jean-Pierre, and Marie.
World Type: A (( 1809 Paris, France, to present day Paris, France ))
Eye Color: Brown
Skin Color: Typical pale white female.
Hair Color: Currently a honey blonde.
Favorite Quote: 'If life ain't just a joke, then why are we laughing?'
Likes: Sleeping, wandering, getting tattoos, sitting on her bed in her room, the memories of her family, the idea of her death.
Dislikes: Physical activity, the fact that she's immortal, the memories of her family's death, flashy clothing off-stage, the color pink, and the high hooker heels she was forced to wear for years.
Stage Name: 'The Ageless Beauty'
Special Ability: Able to change her appearance to suit how old she feels. (( can appear and have the health of a four year old, then change to feeling ancient at one-hundred. ))
Appearance Off-stage: She is petite, only standing around five feet, five inches tall at any age, and weighs around one-hundred-and-twenty-four pounds. She wears a pair of faded blue jeans, a black tee-shirt, and worn out riding boots, all under a knee-length black trenchcoat. She has eight tattoos; a red dragon wrapping itself all along her left leg, a sparrow on her right forearm, the scissorhands from the movie Edward Scissorhands on her lower back, a pair of demonic wings, a tribal symbol on her right ankle, a small black heart on her middle finger on her left hand, and the word 'Everlasting' written around her left wrist. Also, on her back, the words "Truth, beauty, freedom, love" are present. Most of the time, she has the appearance and health of a twenty-six-year-old woman, but she likes to mess with people in the way that she projects herself. She speaks French and English fluently, and sometimes uses some of each language in a sentence.
Appearance Onstage: She has the same physical appearance and health, though she usually wears a black top hat, a black shirt, black gloves, a red tie, a red miniskirt, white and red stockings, black boots, and often a clown nose and a fake raccoon tail for kicks.
Meanings of the Tattoos: The dragon signifies her strength and courage in her toughest days. The sparrow represents her will to fly away from her life. The scissorhands remind her of how truly different and alone she is. The demonic wings, she thinks, warns people that she is not as she seems. The tribal symbol shows her ties to the earth. The black heart means that no matter how rude she is, she still loves someone. The word on her wrist is a grim reminder of her immortal life. Truth, beauty, freedom, and love are all Bohemian beliefs of how life should be led, which she fully believes in as well.
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Posted: Tue Dec 05, 2006 5:59 pm
 Try not to mention this to her.
Corbeau shut herself up in her own little world for two years, until she was eleven. Her grandmother told her on one of her many trips into the child's room that she could pass off as sixteen at one moment, and barely pass off as four the next. The girl would stay in her room for days on end, saying that she wished to look younger to be able to beg in the streets to help her poor family, and by the time she was seventeen, she had perfected the craft. She just had to think that she was a certain age, and all of a sudden, her body would change into that age. One day she was twelve; the next, four. It was paradise. She gained enough weight to be considered healthy, and was soon the object of many marriage proposals.
When her two other siblings had gone for good off to a school in London, Corbeau came home one day to find her mother, dead on the floor, at the age of forty-six. Corbeau was forced to find a real job; begging was becoming too difficult for her to stand any longer. She turned to the one place in town that would hire her; the circus, the same one where her brother had been attacked and killed by the lion. She worked there without incident for four years, until she was twenty-one. During that time, she met the man she was destined to marry; Phillipe LeMay, a dark man of twenty-seven, and the current master of tightropes. They married when Corbeau was twenty-five, Phillipe thirty-one. He gave her a tiny silver locket, the initials PL and CLL carved crudely inside.
But disaster soon struck. Phillipe unexpectedly brought a pistol to his temple and shot and killed himself a few days after his thirty-second birthday. Corbeau was devastated, and vowed to never remarry. The girl went through life as though it was nothing but a bad dream, to be destroyed soon. For years, she used her internal auto-pilot to master the craft of lying about her age, much to her dismay.
She held a series of odd jobs in the circus until she was nintey-four, also taking some very looked down upon jobs as a theatre dancer and a brothel girl, though she still looked as though she was twenty-six. Her life seemed to have stopped the day Phillipe killed himself; she mourned his death by almost worshipping the locket he had given her on their wedding day. Every night, before she fell into yet another restless sleep, she would wish upon the first star that she saw that she'd die in her sleep. But she never did.
Though her age slowly progressed, her body never decayed, nor did it slow with age and physical problems. Her body type, however, adapted to the demanding world around her; it was thin when thin was in, it was shoved into extremely tight clothing when that was the style. She tried to blend in the best she could, confusing her employers to the point of insanity. She stayed eternally twenty-six, unless she wanted to feel younger or older, but she never made herself older than twenty-seven. That was then.
This is now.
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Posted: Tue Dec 05, 2006 6:01 pm
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Posted: Thu Dec 07, 2006 4:35 pm
 What makes her tick.
She hated the years she spent in a brothel, forced to tell men everything they wanted to hear before doing anything they wanted. She felt like a slave, let a lone the kind of slave she felt she was in her own body.
Yet, fear is something that lingers forever under the surface of her harsh exterior. Fear of failure, yet fearing success. Fearing danger, and becoming terrified of complete safety. The one thing that she is, for sure, afraid of, you ask?
Eternal life.
She despises it; this life has caused her too much pain for almost two hundred years. Her will to live and love has slowly broken down over time, until she can feel no feelings towards another human being but resentment. Resentment that they, in their perfect state, can die. That they haven't lived through two hundred years of hell. That they can move on from those few days of hell. That they can stand to see the sight of themselves in their old age. And that's how she came to Cirque; to find someone as cold and unfeeling as herself. Her one goal in life, to find one as miserable as she is, she knows will soon be completed.
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Posted: Fri Dec 08, 2006 6:23 pm
Reserved.
I know it's not all that pretty, but the character is open for critiques anyways.
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Posted: Fri Dec 08, 2006 6:28 pm
This seems like it could be a pretty solid concept.
I would like to know a little bit more about her personality. What makes her tick, what her fears are, aspirations, etc.
Her title makes me think of the Stars song. 'Ageless Beauty.'
Great song. <3
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Posted: Fri Dec 08, 2006 7:30 pm
I've never heard that song xD
I bet I could whip up some sort of a nice little information about her personality thinger-dinger... -off to go think-
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Posted: Sat Dec 09, 2006 12:39 pm
Wrote up a little on her personality. I'll probably add more later, but that's just a rough sketch.
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Posted: Mon Dec 25, 2006 7:58 am
I've bought some banners xD So now the thread is -almost- complete.
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Posted: Sat Jan 20, 2007 12:25 pm
And we have a reference image xD
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Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2007 1:29 am
... All I can think right now is, "this chick is gonna kill everyone". XD Seriously. Someone who envies people for their ability to die? There was this one episode of Cowboy Bebop, if you're familiar, where there was this immortal child that played the harmonica. He killed lots of people, until finally someone was able to kill him in retaliation. I can totally see Corbeau going the same way.
There's a few things that I have to raise doubts about. First off, Corbeau was 25, maybe 26 when Philipe killed himself. She was wearing the same clothing when she was 94. That's at least 68 years, during which she was working at the circus, at least some of those jobs presumably being hard labor of some sort. The clothes didn't rot right off her? Never got torn to shreds in 68 years? Unless her ability to change her appearence extends to her clothing (in which case, that's definitely worth noting; there could be room for improvement in her abilities if it isn't simply age but control over her physical form or dress, such as learning how to outright shapeshift), that's too far a stretch for my logic. I might suggest swapping out "wore the same clothes" for something more along the lines of her mourning over some trinket that reminds her of him, or if you like the concept of the clothes, maybe just sleeping with them under her pillow as opposed to subjecting them to the elements.
One other thing that might be worth looking into is the standard of beauty in her time, as compared to ours. I couldn't be sure, not having researched it specifically, but even a matter of two hundred years could have a strong impression on society. I know a bit of trivia that my mother told me, where in days past, being skinny was by no means "beautiful". It meant your husband could not support you to keep you well-fed. Successful families had more thick-set individuals, and because they were the upper crust, they were the standard of beauty. Try looking at paintings from around the time that Corbeau would have grown up (though, be warned, you'll be tripping over a lot of nude artwork from that time if you google it or whatnot), and seeing what was considered "beautiful" then. Looking at body type, face shape, and other traits might help to sort things out.
I'd also like to consider one thing about her. She dislikes flashy clothing... why? On-stage, she indulges in it- granted, she has to- but it seems a bit strange for her character. That, and her dislike for the color pink and high heels, all seem like more "modern" evolutions, things that people have decided they don't like based on standards other than their aesthetics (generally, it's for anti-aesthetic reasons; people don't want to be associated with "girly" or "prissy", if that makes sense). It seems like her dislikes should be tied more into things that would have been impressed on her when she was growing up, as compared to things that came around when she was already set in her ways of pet peeves and the like.
My last thing is, I'd like to know Corbeau's approach to religion. She would have grown up in a very religious era, but living the way she has might have changed that. I think that it could be an interesting facet to her character, and worth exploring.
I definitely think this is a character with a lot of potential, but the trick with her is going to find ways to develop her into an "outward" character, as opposed to an "inward" one. The difference being, when you have a character that has had a hard life and is very likely to shun social contact, they're going to want to be "inward" and any developments they make are going to exclude others, which tends to be less interesting in a roleplay situation. An "outward" character of this sort doesn't necessarily seek out other characters, but their developments are built based on interactions rather than reflections, and it doesn't tend to end up as that lonely "character X goes and sits in a dark corner in the room mullishly, everyone else has fun without them" deal when those connections exist. She does seem to have a goal that drives her in a positive direction (socially speaking), what with the "finding someone as miserable as herself", so that might help keep her from shutting off things. It's definitely something you're going to want to watch, though, because once you commit a character as anti-social in a roleplay, it can be hard to work them past that without having some extremely patient roleplaying partners.
So. Main thing is to check for historical accuracy and believability in its influence, second is to make sure the personality doesn't end up choking what could be a very interesting character. x3 I can see a lot of awesomeness coming out of this concept, so expect to see me back after more development's gone into it!
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Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2007 3:19 pm
Since most of this seems pretty strong and thought out, I'm going to nitpick on her tatoos.
She has a dragon, a sparrow (a la captain Jack), a demonic pair of wings, Edward's scissorhands, a tribal marking, a heart, and the word "everlasting"
How did she get all of these? They sound pretty recent for the most part, so how'd she pick them? Does each symbol have some sort of significance to her? For the sparrow and the hands, does she identify with these characters? What was the motivation behind them? How did she wind up with so many in the first place? If you assign each tatoo a history and a meaning (to her, at least,) it might help you better get inside her head. It takes a special sort of person to get 7 tatoos - maybe she gets them so that she can remember things in a permanant way? Is she adding to her collection? Perhaps she is already planning her next inking?
Even if you don't discuss it, the tatoos probably say a lot about her history. So at the very least come up with the story behind them. (Doing so will help her personality and her backstory.))
Also, you've got her story from the early 1900s to now absolutely blank. What was she doing all those years?
It's got to have to do with the tatoos. Think it over.
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Posted: Thu Jun 07, 2007 8:55 am
[ Okay, I think I've gotten everything that you two asked about... just tell me if I need anything more ^^ ]
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