Post by Teller on Aug 25, 2016 22:37:33 GMT -4
Name: Lady Mahaerat Ilyse Emilyan, (ma-HAY-raht ihl-EES em-IL-yan)
Also Called: *Saint Mahaerat, or abbreviated, San or Sain Mahaerat
Age: Twenty-six
Race: Human
Important Things of Note: Mahaerat is deaf and mute when it comes to communicating to humans, but the dead she hears and they hear her just fine.
Physical Description: Mahaerat is neither tall nor petite at about five feet and four inches, but with the correct expression she can make others feel taller or smaller. Part of being raised a lady is learning how to comport oneself in the appropriate way at all times, and how Mahaerat carries herself is additionally important to her, since so few can understand her otherwise, and her body is the only means she has with which to speak to the living. She tends to dress in modest and respectable styles, however she nearly always bedecks herself in vivid and scintillating colors, as many as she believes she can pull off at a given time. Her jewelry on any given day is most often worn in her hair or necklaces, and she prefers gems to metals, whether precious or not. She is nearly always accompanied by a translator, as she often understands others, but they rarely understand her without assistance.
Personality: The first thing people tend to notice about Mahaerat is that she is aloof—not by natural choice, however. Being unable to communicate with most living people without someone to translate her words for them leaves her lonely, as most people avoid the trouble of carrying on a conversation with someone who requires a translator to speak for them. This habitual laziness—as she sees it—of other people causes her to be initially cool around most, as she no longer expects anyone to speak to her unless she’s specifically sought them out, and it makes her lonely. She loves being around people but struggles to keep up with groups, as she can only understand them when she’s reading their lips, so can only ‘listen’ to one person at once, and then only when they’re looking at her. However she is passionate about her work and about the wellbeing of others, even if her own often goes unnoticed because so many people assume silence indicates contentedness.
History: Mahaerat was peculiar the moment she was born: soundlessly. Her mother cried, her older brothers cried. Mahaerat, all of a few seconds old, shook her fists and opened her mouth and never made a sound. The midwife, touching her throat, felt the vibration of what should be noise but what never expressed itself, and said Mahaerat was either cursed or blessed, and it would be up to her to decide, as she grew, which one she was.
Mahaerat still hasn’t decided. She was raised with as much normalcy as her ‘condition’ allowed, and her family raised her to learn sign language at the same time they did, so they at least could speak with her privately, when so precious few others could manage the task. Mahaerat had to learn to express herself to most through facial expressions and posture alone, a shockingly exhausting task.
She was also raised telling virtually no one of what came hand-in-hand with her inability to normally communicate with the living: she could communicate unhindered with the dead. The ghosts most people never saw, never noticed, stood clearly before her. She heard them when no one else did, and they heard her when no one else did. She wasn’t surprised when she realized her closest friends had been dead sometimes for decades. Most of the living weren’t up to the task.
While she felt most comfortable at home, where most people in the surrounding areas at least were comfortable with her presence, if not always her conversation, Mahaerat had longed from youth for travel, so began making her way north only a few years ago. Being a woman grown, with her own funds and no believable marriage prospects on her quiet horizons, she departed with little fuss, traveled to a variety of cities uncertain of what she sought, and finally settled in Atma.
However she felt motionless, purposeless, useless. Was she only going to sit here and watch others live their lives? She decided she was not, and set out at last to find a consistent use in her ‘condition’.
Thus, some several months later, after establishing several layers of trust and reliability, Mahaerat came to use her ability to speak with the dead to determine what had happened to those who had gotten that way prematurely. The dead don’t always tell the truth, of course, so even after hearing that Susie killed Willy she still had to direct others or find out for herself if that was indeed what had happened, then to see that Susie was appropriately dealt with, but at last she has a purpose, she is useful.
And she is not married to a man who values her for her silence.
*Common to her home region was a religion that had a lot of beliefs about people's abilities and disabilities, and their related moral character. The deaf and/or mute were considered particularly worthy, as they didn't 'trifle' with worldly chatter. Mahaerat meets fewer people of this religion in Atma, but by now is so accustomed to it she doesn't even roll her eyes. At least not where the believers can see.
