biopically.

[thumbcocked]

Name: Cecilia "Lia" Vedder
PB: Leigh Lezark

Species: Werewolf
Position: Beta

Age: 19
Birthday: , 1992
Zodiac:

Appearance:Height: 5'6"
Weight: 125-135 lbs
Blood Type: B -
Hair: Black
Eyes: Dark gray-green
Skin: White, pale
Build: Lean - she'd be willowy if she was a bit taller

Dress:

She mostly stays in jeans and cheap t-shirts, platform boots stuffed with therapeutic insoles to give her a few extra inches and make her look older. She's got a beat-up windbreaker kind of jacket worn over a hooded sweatshirt, and can usually be found toting around a black, scuffed up duffel bag big enough to hold at least one good-sized body. Think a sailor's bag when he ships out and you've got about the size of it.

Fake ID:
Name: Debra D. Carson
SS#: 377-28-0479
Age: 23
Birthday: June 15, 1988
Address:437 Lakeland Terrace - Southfield, MI 48034
At least that's the one she's using now. She has another half-dozen tucked away in her duffel bag.

History:

Cecilia Vedder isn't your typical orphan story.

The group home in Terre Haute, Indiana that she was raised in was very well-funded, the building was kept up to code, the staff was congenial and competent, and all the kids had enough to eat and clothes to wear. No abuse happened outside of the usual things that happen when you have a few dozen youths living in close proximity - certainly nothing out of Oliver Twist or Annie. It was normal and quiet and if little Lia didn't get a real home right away, well. Neither did a lot of other kids. As her mother - unnamed and unclaimed - had died giving birth in the local county hospital, Lia didn't know anything different, and it wasn't as if she felt like she was lacking for anything so. Whatever, right?

She rounded out averagely in school while being shuffled from one placing to another - not actual homes, just stopgap houses run by middle-aged ladies who'd take in five at a time to try and get them out of the system for a while. When she was thirteen, she was finally put with a real family, in a real house with a room all to herself for the first time ever. Lia settled in beautifully with Grant and Kelsey Hursey - they were good people, a perfectly average yuppie middle class couple that loved each other and wanted to put on an addition to the happy household.

Six months passed rather uneventfully - or eventfully in that entirely normal kind of way. A botched science project that almost wrecked a kitchen table, some family movie nights with burned popcorn, a few tentative sleepovers with girls from school, that kind of thing. Very idyllic, and Grant and Kelsey had talked over formally adopting Lia as being a very real possibility in the coming months. Things were looking up!

...At least until that May. Lia started getting sick - swinging between dangerously high fevers and hypothermia-grade chills with terribly debilitating migraines, muscle spasms, full-out seizures, chronic all-body pain, and constant nausea that made it impossible to keep anything down longer than twenty minutes. The first couple of days, they thought it was just a nasty strain of flu going around. By the end of the week, Lia was being rushed to the emergency room, and the morning after that - she was in a bed in an intensive care unit with fluids and medications and liquid nutrients being pumped into her. Blood was drawn, samples were taken, tests were run - and nothing. According to all the doctors who got on the case, there was absolutely no reason for Lia's symptoms - diagnosticians, cardiologists, immunologists, oncologists, neurologists, pulmonologists, gastroenterologists, all of them and all their theories together summed up to one big pile of 'what the actual fuck'. Not a single prescription written seemed to alleviate the problems either - not even a morphine cocktail that would put down an elephant through the entire Lord of the Rings film trilogy could dull the pain enough for her to actually sleep. One frustrated doctor inadvertently blurted out to the Hurseys that her body was simply "going haywire, and for no good reason". All that they seemed able to do was keep her from dying of dehydration.

As the days turned into weeks and Lia remained delirious with pain and fever, and as the doctors continued hitting dead end after dead end, the Hurseys started looking into any alternative specialist they could find. An herbalist from Dayton, a so-called "guru" from Chicago, and even a priest from New Orleans were called in with a blessing from the Vatican to do an exorcism. (There was no pea soup vomit involved, though there was a hell of a lot of dry heaving - kind of hard to hurk up anything on an empty stomach.) But still, no matter who they tried or who they called or who they paid, there was no change.

After almost a month, the hospital was finally forced to transfer her to a longer-term, more advanced facility, despite the vehement and panicked protests of her foster parents. But as much as the hospital staff was desperate for an answer - the case had quickly become a tantalizing mystery to every med student and intern in the county looking to be a real-life Greg House, while the actual doctors and nurses were just generally freaked out by it - they couldn't find anything. And there were people who needed the bed who could actually get better. They lied, assuring Grant and Kelsey that one of the doctors there would be able to help them.

The ambulance set to transport didn't arrive until late in the day, long past sundown, and the gurney was wheeled from out under the harsh fluorescent lights of the hospital hallways to the even harsher orange streetlamps on the street. With all of that going on, it's no wonder that no one noticed the moon that was full-to-bursting shining down on the scene.

Not fifteen minutes into the ride, all the monitors went hog-wild - wailing almost louder than the sirens. Her eyes rolled back into her head and she started convulsing violently. The paramedics barely had time to react when her bones starting contorting and shifting before vanishing from sight under the thick fur that sprouted and spread like a bad rash. In the span of less than three minutes, Lia Vedder had transformed into a hulking black wolf.

One thoroughly freaked out wolf that was still entirely intubated and full of needles and hooked up in the back of an ambulance full of equipment and one thoroughly freaked out paramedic.

Needless to say all hell broke loose. In the ensuing chaos and flailing and howling and crashing and yelling, it's no wonder the driver careened off the road, rolling over a few times for good measure. Once everything stopped moving, the wolf crawled out of the wreckage and bolted into the night. A passing motorist saw the accident and phoned it in to police. After arriving on the scene, the cops called the hospital the ambulance had originated from, and then the Hurseys got the call. Nobody could figure out just what had happened - the driver had died in the crash, the paramedic in the back didn't last long after being rushed to the emergency room, and the patient had apparently vanished into thin air. The police were stumped, Grant and Kelsey were devastated, and the hospital was baffled at what looked like claw- and bite-marks on the second ambulance technician.

Lia managed to run all the way back home before the sun rose again. Luckily, the Hurseys had been shuttled straight from the hospital to the police station to find some answers, so no one was home to see the wolf in the backyard transform into a very traumatized (and very naked) young girl. Panicked and confused about everything that had happened in the last twelve hours, Lia's only instinct was to run like hell. She used the spare key hidden under the fake rock by the patio, snuck in through the back door, threw on some clothes, and proceeded to stuff a duffel bag with more clothes, food, and the cash she knew Grant and Kelsey had kept aside in case of emergency (because if this didn't qualify, she didn't know what did). Less than a half hour later and she was back on the road, hood thrown up as she sprinted for the highway.

She'd only just made it past the city limits when night fell again. She barely managed to stagger into a field and get her pants off before she changed again. It wasn't any less hysteria-inducing than the first time, but Lia somehow kept her head about her enough not to leave her stuff. That night, as well as the next one, was spent pacing and whimpering in a secluded field with her ears laid back against her head and her tail between her legs. When the moon began to wane on the fourth night and she didn't change, she literally sobbed with relief until she passed out in the dirt amid the cornstalks.

After the first decent night's sleep she'd had in over a month, she spent the next day hidden in the field as she tried to piece together just what the hell had happened, what she was, and what she was going to do now.

The second question seemed to answer the first - Lia wasn't raised in a cloister, and she'd seen enough television and movies and read enough books to know even if up until now she'd just thought it was simple fiction. Werewolf. She was a werewolf. An actual, factual werewolf. As for what she would do... Well, running sounded good enough for now, until she figured out something else. But she wouldn't be able to get far enough on foot, at least not far enough that she wouldn't be found and brought back to Terre Haute. And since she didn't have any other kind of transportation... It couldn't be that hard to hitchhike, could it?

So before the week was out, Chicago was plus one twiggy, pale, and very wary werewolf. She cut her hair, picked a new name, and started trying to figure out just how to live on the streets. She'd never done anything like this before, but one of the nice things about growing up in the foster care system is kids swapping stories. Though not all those stories were nice, a good number of them were very educational on this sort of thing. Between those stories and a huge helping of common sense, she managed all right enough to survive. It wasn't easy, and there was some that tried to take advantage of a fresh young face in all the possible ways. The first that tried it ended up being kicked clear across an alley and into a perfect, jackass-shaped dent in a dumpster. Lia booked it as soon as she stopped staring at what she'd just done. Her monthly changes were just the start of the strange new powers she apparently had now.

After that, even as she was beginning to carve a niche for herself - sleeping on the El, sneaking food from soup kitchens without catching volunteers' attention, and picking her own share of pockets - she couldn't stop worrying. Chicago wasn't that far from Terre Haute, not nearly far enough, and she didn't want to even try and live on the streets of Chicago through a winter. Spring and summer were easy enough but... So by the time the trees started turning colors, Lia was back on the road, a little wiser and a hell of a lot more jaded and packing a few fake IDs, hitching her way south along Highway 55.

Money ran out about the time she hit Little Rock. Walking along the streets and worrying about what she'd do (her pickpocketing skills were kind of fail - only her speed had kept her from being caught), she spotted a 'help wanted' sign in a window of the diner. A job off the books that didn't require any previous experience or prying questions? Lia was on that like white on rice. And she turned out to be pretty decent at it - quick tongue, good memory, and friendly and cheerful on cue that she managed some pretty decent tips. She stayed for a while in Little Rock, sleeping where she could and in the diner when it got bad enough weather-wise, building up funds until her coworkers started asking more questions than could easily be deflected. Then she packed up her things and hit the road again. Eventually, she got to the Southwest and fell in love with the heat, the deserts, and the asphalt shimmering under the sun.

She kept this up for the next five years - hitching, settling a while, hitching again. All the while, she looked. Whenever she had a free moment, she would look - in libraries, online, in movie theaters, anywhere at all that might have more information on what she is. She figured out most of her abilities through trial and error experimentation, and weeded out quite a bit of bunk from the fiction available. But what she never found was anyone like her.

Until a truck driver went and dropped her off in Raton, New Mexico towards the beginning of November, 2010. From the minute she hopped down from the cab, something was off - something in the air just put her nerves on edge and made the hairs on the back of her neck stand straight up. As she hefted her duffel bag higher onto her shoulder and looked around, Lia tried to case out the place to figure out where to head for the cheapest places to rent (or the least observed places squat in) and the easiest diner to land a job. The weird feeling could take a hike until she figured out the necessities... At least that's what she thought until she caught sight of a group of people across the street standing stock still and staring a hole into her back. While her first inclination was to roll her eyes and get a move on, the brisk, autumn breeze that made the dust swirl around her stopped her in her tracks. Nostrils flaring, she turned on her heel to gape back at the twenty-somethings, mouth stuck in a silent "o".

There was no mistaking that scent. Werewolves. She'd finally found other werewolves.

...More will go here as I. Try and think up an original plot that hasn't totally been done to death. Hrm.

Personality/Psychology:

In order to understand Lia at all, you first have to understand one word. Contradiction. Say it with me, kids: con-tra-dic-tion. The duality of her nature isn't just confined to what she is - it defines her, shapes her even as it rips her apart.

Lia's learned very quickly and very well just what kind of face she has to show to the world. Collected, calm, confident, always in control, with more than the fair share of blase whatever that most twenty-somethings have these days - put Lia in any situation and she'll land on her feet, and failing that she'll just get up and brush herself off like that was the plan the entire time and head to the next thing on the list without batting an eye. She's incredibly self-reliant, and more than capable of taking care of herself without anyone's pity or charity. ...At least, that's how she tries to be. That's how she has to be since she's on her own and she can't let herself rely on anyone else. She has to lie about being older and keep up this facade in order to keep people at arm's length and prevent them from asking too many questions, poking their noses into her business. Should anyone try and get past this initial defense, or even hint at implying she can't take care of herself due to her age or gender, she goes into full battle mode, and she'll switch off her laid-back, chill nature in a fucking minute to practically bite your head off before packing up and lighting out again. Survival is the number one priority, and anonymity is a damned close number two. Lia skates along under the radar and out of memory, and she'll tell you that's exactly how she likes it, thank you very much.

The flip side to all of this is that despite all her bravado and devil-may-give-a-shit-cause-I-don't attitude, Lia's only nineteen and in many, many ways is still just a scared little girl. She's desperately lonely, and aching to find somewhere where she can belong and be a kid again. She wasn't abused in the home or horribly neglected or anything like that, but she's so starved for affection and love and acceptance that even she doesn't quite realize how bad she has it. What she does know is that late at night when she can't sleep, she remembers those six months with the Hurseys, wonders what they're doing now, and kind of feels horribly guilty that they've still got no clue what actually happened. However, since that kind of sentiment has absolutely no place on the road, she keeps that emotional peat moss shoved down so far into the lowest sub-cockles of her soul it's becoming a giant wellspring of angst crude oil that will never willingly be drilled for. Fuck your emotionally-fueld Hummers - get a Prius, you bastards.

On top of all this is her status as a werewolf, which just adds into all of the above. Lia's ingested enough werewolf and general fantasy fiction to figure that people either get into government quarantine mode or angry mob mode when they inevitably find out what's really going on - and she could totally go without any Hazmat suits or pitchforks and torches. Seriously. She's good on that front forever. So the arms-length thing she has going on for herself is doubly useful in keeping her furry little problem from coming to light. 'Caution' is a word to live by, far as she's concerned. Whenever the full moon rolls around, she makes sure to go deep enough into the desert that absolutely no one will witness her change, and she never uses her enhanced abilities in a way to draw attention to herself - she keeps up the act of regular girl with such dedication she deserves an Oscar because Daniel Day-Lewis ain't got nothing on this.

But back to that flip side. Werewolves are incredibly social creatures - it's ingrained into their DNA, hardwired into their brain, it's just how they are. That she's gone this long without any definitive 'pack', not even a single real friend, has left this large, gaping hole where the pack solidarity should be. It's this constant throbbing pain that gets shoved and dulled down down along with the rest of the stuff that Lia feels she can't resolve and so just resolves to live with until it just goes away. ...What, she's a teenager, this is a fantastic coping strategy, you don't know what you're talking about. Shut up.

Also, when it comes to the subject of other werewolves, that fantastic duality comes back up again. On the one hand, even though it's been six years since her first change in the back of that bus, Lia still doesn't know the first damn thing about what she is. She knows the term Lon Chaney's gone and coined, and all the stereotypes and tropes on the subject (and spent no small amount of time debunking and testing a lot of them), but... That's not the same. It's like trying to re-learn your native language after you've all but forgotten it from people who've learned said language from someone else who might have been fluent in it at some point as their second language. It's incredibly frustrating and makes Lia all the more determined to find others like herself to find out how things really are.

At the same time, she's absolutely, positively terrified of the day she find them. It's partly the lingering unrest and uncomfortableness at the fact that people aren't supposed to turn into wolves, this stuff just doesn't happen, and if she ends up finding other werewolves... Then that means she isn't insane. That all this is real, and someone out there actually has answers to all of this. (You spend six years looking for something with no solid leads whatsoever, you start wondering if you're really a werewolf or just a particularly special kind of crazy.) The other part is the irrational fear that somehow she's been doing this wrong all these years, and will either be rejected out of hand or - and possibly worse - pitied for being such a failure at a wolf.

Having never been among a pack, there's a side to Lia's personality that hasn't fully woken up yet. She doesn't know it, but she was born to be a beta. If she was to ever actually make real, lasting friends, there's an ocean of loyalty and support that hasn't even begun to be tapped. She's ready, willing, and able to be that right hand needed behind the scenes - not to be the one people look to to fix things, but the one that one looks to for help. Eventually, with the right influences, she can grow to be someone who'll willingly put herself on the line for the greater good. But without that, having instead been where she's been and having gone through what she has, Lia's still stubborn, cynical, defensive, suspicious, dryly snarky and sarcastic, and is first and foremost concerned with looking out for number one - all hidden behind a bland, uncaring wall of whatever, man.

In order for her to get past that, however, she'd need to be forced into a corner so she couldn't run anymore. Because that's all Lia knows how to do is run. Fight never has a chance against flight when it gets down to the wire - it's her first and loudest instinct when shit gets too much to deal with, and she's been letting it have free rein since her first change. At first, it was just blind fear driving her out on the road - fear of herself, fear of what people would do when they knew the truth about her - but she's now gone so long without actually confronting the problem that she doesn't really know how to stop running. All that fear's just redoubled and re-tripled back onto itself like a horrible black hole of anxiety and if she slows down even for a second, it can catch up and suck her in. Staying on the move and never settling down is the only bit of power that she knows she has full and total control over - she gets to decided where to go, how long to stay, and with her calling the shots, she'll never be the one who gets ditched. By doing all the leaving, she gets to forestall anyone getting close enough to hurt her by going away. To be actively and completely stuck in one place... It's never happened before, and will be enough to have her pissing in her pants.

Abilities:

Okay, so most of Lia's werewolf abilities have been sussed out through a series of trial and error after extensive research (if by research, you can count scouring the youth fiction section of various public libraries and Google).

Well, first and foremost is the whole... Changing into a wolf. Part. Yeah, there's that. Lia's wolf form is slightly larger than your average normal wolf, with much denser muscle mass and thicker bones - thus making her much more durable and a hell of a lot stronger. She stands about four feet at the shoulder (a foot taller than a normal wolf), though with her head held up straight and ears pricked, it's closer to five. She weighs in about 105-115 pounds, a full twenty to thirty pounds heavier than a regular wolf. In this form, she can get up to speeds of about forty-five miles an hour, and can keep that up for a good couple of hours; she's also capable of a ground-eating lope that can cover about twenty-five miles an hour for an indefinite amount of time. There's also the fangs and claws.

The change is compulsory during the nights of the full moon, but Lia is capable of transforming into her wolf form at any other time should she want to. Also, as the moon waxes fuller, Lia feels more energized, with the days immediately prior to the full moon making her incredibly restless and hyper.

Even when not all wolf-ified, Lia's got some serious stuff going on. There's strength enough that she could break bones with a good punch or kick, and her senses are almost as sharp as when she's all fuzzed up. There's also a decent regeneration factor helping her along as well, though it's a lot speedier while in wolf form. Still, it's enough that any bones she gets knit within the week, while bruises and lacerations get gone in a matter of hours. That health deal is also what keeps her from getting so much as a sniffle - she's a hardy little thing.

One ability she doesn't know she has yet - as she's never met any others like her to find out - is an instinctive, quasi-psychic link with other werewolves while transformed. It's part magic, part ESP, part pack mentality, part all the heightened senses they all have letting each wolf pay that much more attention to every nuance and detail of the wolf running next to them. It not actual telepathy, with clear and defined communication of words and sentences - more feelings, images, that sort of thing. Whether this will work with just werewolves from her world or any weres... Is up for discovery.

As for more mundane abilities, she's a hell of a cook - at least when it comes to greasy diner fare, a mediocre pickpocket, a fantastic liar, pragmatic and practical and cool-headed to a fault, and a fucking scrappy little brawler thing when it comes to a fight.

Weaknesses:

Not silver. That was the first thing she tested, and wearing silver doesn't do anything to her. The same goes for silver in the blood - don't ask how she tested that. It's not a fun story. Fire, however, most definitely goes on this list - she's been burned enough either from splashed grease or accidental brushes against the grill to know that much. Also decapitation, mutilation, all those physical things that apply to regular folk. It'd just take a hell of a lot more of it to put her down.

You know those movie's where a werewolf's able to track people without a sound through a forest? ...Yeah, Lia can't do that. She can follow a scent trail, sure, but she has no idea about the finer points, or how to move quietly enough to sneak up on a deer. She's also never hunted before, so that's another point against her favor.

Her metabolism's also a point of weakness. In order to keep her body running hotter and stronger and faster than a regular human, it works double overtime all the time. Without a constant, decent intake of food - and a lot of it - she starts winding down very quickly. She can power through it, but only for a day or so before she collapses into an angry, whiny, hungry little ball of pissiness.

And, just as Lia gets energized by the full moon, the new moon leaves her dysphoric, irritable, fatigued, anxious, and just. All around blah. Think of it as lunar PMS.

...Also, she's barely got an eighth-grade education. Haaa. Yeah.