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Name: Sedna Savarin
Age: 29
Gender: Female
Race: Merfolk (seal) (but wait, I hear you say, seals are not fish! no shit, but it's a marine mammal and that's kinda legit, right?)
Bounty: 0 Beli
Personality: Like water that is constantly moving, Sedna is very dynamic and likes to move from place to place all the time.Like water – which is able to go around objects and find a path through any crack – she is very adaptable and can go around problems. As such she tends to be diplomatic and she does not like to use force: she simply finds another way to get what she wants. Like water that is constantly moving, Sedna needs to be free - to always shake things up, which is why she went out at sea in the first place. Always new faces, always new places. She cannot handle being stagnant. She dislikes to be controlled or locked. She can only breathe in the wide open spaces - she is rather claustrophobic. She also tends to be very indecisive at time. She is intelligent and has a natural knack for absorbing new knowledge. She is, in a way a reflector, like the ocean reflecting the sun and the sky. She's not so much an original as someone who imitates very well, adds and furthers. Water has no color. This carries over in conversation and interactions, where she will tend to pick up quirks and inflections of her interlocutor. Sedna is very proud and like to shove her skills and achievements in other people's faces. She is very wrapped up in being smart, beautiful and skillful. She doesn't take orders very well and never likes to finish second. With her intelligence comes anxiety, and she tends to fall prey to an inferiority complex when other people overshadow her. Sedna has also a very soft, emotional side. She will bawl, bawl sometimes for really insignificant things. She tends to be very open about her emotions, though more often than not this is a spectacle without witnesses. She likes to look tough, in command, cool, clever and handsome in front of everyone. She will cry herself to sleep instead, when no one is around. She is also someone who rejoices in happiness - and that is perhaps why, first and foremost, she likes to cook. Is there nothing better for the spirit and the soul, nothing that can spread happiness more readily than a good meal?One last thing. Sedna is not a killer. She has never killed anyone. She will never kill anyone. Not directly, anyway. Once crossed, though, if you hurt her anyone she cares for, you might as well give up: you are already dead. She is incredibly vengeful and wrathful - she does not forgive, and never forgets. She can be incredibly vicious and violent when she wants to be. History: There was once upon a time a little girl. She lived in a frozen land, cold-clad and frost fast year long, year short. She was the daughter of an important man among her people. They were merfolk, the fair people of the seas, living beneath and above the waves. This island was what is now called the North Blue. Her people where known across their region, traveling on boats carved out of icebergs. They traded in the treasures of the sea - fishes, pearls, pelts, precious stones of all sort. They were a prosperous, if somewhat isolated people, a small far flung colony of their people from the Grand Line.
Now this little girl loved travelling. As a child she would never stay in place, to the despair of her parents. She would wriggle and cry in her mother's backpack and she was not even a whole year before she could swim all over the place. At a young age she already accompanied her parents on trading expedition. This came at one condition: to never show herself to the villagers with whom they traded. You see, the villagers of the various islands they visited had no idea that they were merfolks - they thought them merely skilled, if somewhat odd tribe living in the cold crusted islands to their north. At the time Sedna was too young to morph her flipper into human legs, so she swam along with the iceberg barges with other members of her pod. Once at a village, she would lay low and wear long robes in occasion where she might encounter people.
But with you comes recklessness. During one of the trip, she carelessly approached one of the shores to collect shiny rocks and pebbles on the beach. A young boy spotted her and approached her. While he was at first surprised, he was also enchanted by the sight. They played together all day long. Though they promised each other to keep this secret, the boy could not resist telling his friends. From his friends, the word eventually found its way to the parents, and from the parents to marauders and slavers roaming in the area, always eager for expensive creatures to auction off.
They fell upon the merfolk of the island during a moonless night. The man-folk defended as best at they could their people, but they were eventually overwhelmed. Some of them were simply killed on the spot, but the slavers were very careful not to compromise their future merchandise. Sedna's whole family, clan, and most of her people were captured or killed that night, as she was herself now in fetters. Her father, a strong merfolk with a great, bushy walrus mustache, hatched a plan to free his people. The insurrection failed. Half of the prisoners died or were killed in the attack, and the slavers took quite a beating. But they had weapons. The merfolk had none. Sedna's father, leader of the insurrection, had to be punished. He was severely beaten, and starved, but they reserved a special punishment for him.
They would make him watch his daughter die.
Out of pure malice the slavers chopped off the tip of her tail, basically condemning her to never being able to swim forever - and to die pathetically in what she had called her home up to now. She screamed, and bawled, and cursed. Her father, weakened from famine and bloodloss, desperately tried to rise and help her, but was struck back down. Then, pulling Sedna by her black hair, threw her overboard. She managed to grip the side of the boat, holding out for dear life. The slaver came at her with a sharp knife, and he looked at her in the eyes, smiling, as he sliced off her 10 fingers and let her fall into the dark, deep sea. Her vision also went dark.
When she woke up, she was alone. In a cabin made of what looked to be brass. She lingered there for a while, between sleep and awareness, until someone else came into her line of sight.
''Oh thank goodness! You woke up!" said an elderly looking man, rushing to her side. Sedna blinked, at first to wash away sleep, and then to make sure she was really seeing what her eyes were seeing.
"... Who are... you? Where... am I?"
"Those are all excellent questions! Which I hope to answer in due time, but for now you must rest." he said, as he brushed her head with a sponge.
"No! Don't. Who are you!" She suddenly lashed out, raising her hand in protest.
Or rather, the fingerless stumps that were left of her hands. She froze in place. A lot was coming back to her in that one moment. The old gentleman placed the sponge back into the bucket he had brought with him.
"That, is a question I could ask of you too. I can only imagine that you came upon a dastardly fate and it must have been a tremendous stroke of luck that I found you. Imagine my surprise when I found the body of a young merfolk girl, so far away from the grand line, mutilated, and yet still breathing. What strange fate now binds us, I wonder?" Sedna could only breath heavily and sweat profusely, overwhelmed at the event, she could even feel tears swelling up even now. And she cried. Not prettily either, especially not with the sinuses kicking in. The old man looked uncomfortable for a moment, before awkwardly patting her on the back. He stopped, got up, and left the room, before wheeling back in a wheelchair.
"I hoped I would get a chance to try this. Fortunately you, came through. You wanted to know where you are? Why don't I show you?" he asked. Sedna looked up, sniffed and wiped her nose with the hospital-style garment she had on her, and, after a moment, nodded her head in approval. With the help of the old man, she stumbled into the wheel chair. "I hope your wounds are not paining you. I have treated them as well as I could, but your people have amazing recuperative abilities. Alas, what is lost, is lost." he continued, adjust her in her seat.
"Now then, the grand tour." he said as he wheeled her around the corridors of what, it turns out, was a grand submarine. "My greatest invention." he said, beaming proudly, as Sedna watched in amazement the underwater scenery from behind a great bay window "We, mere man, are condemned to live on small islands. And wherever there is land, there are rules and rulers, flags and governments, man with large sticks and people with none. Here, several hundred feet under the water, none of that matters. This is my freedom, the ultimate freedom. Me and my associates have rejected the chains in which all men are born into and have chosen the sea, where we can finally be free." He explained as he showed around the gigantic underwater vessel. The Professor, it turns out, was a great genius, who had once worked for the World Government, but tired of always making weapons of war, he ultimately stole his own prototype for the ultimate underwater anti-ship weapon - his Grand Submarine, the Coeleacanth, so styled because of it's impenetrable armour. He was accompanied by his fellow engineers and scientist, but also men and women who were tired of the world above. Along with this micro-society were robots of the engineers design roaming about. The ship was, in a way, also a great lab.
"You see, alas, men are condemned to pain, but some men have found a way to work around this limitation - they make other suffer for them, be it through exploitation, violence, or domination. In this economy of pain, they inflict always greater and greater pain on other so that they might be spared a bit of pain. All their power, all their mental and physical efforts, are devoted in new, crueller ways, to inflict pain upon others. I always hated that, but our world is dominated by these men with the capacity for cruelty. I wanted to help other, to soothe that pain - but my work was twisted around in other ways, always to hurt others. So I got fed up. I played a nasty trick on them, and this, this vessel, is my small vengeance upon them." He explained to her, as he led her to his lab. "But I think I can help you." he said as he pulled out a set of bronze fingers. "I cannot replace what is lost, but I can give you tools to work around it."
It took a moment for Sedna to accustom herself to this new world. She had lost everything, but she had gain something wholly unexpected.She accepted the professor's help and he fashioned for her a pair of bronze gauntlets with mechanize fingers that could connect directly to her nerves. True marvels of science. Then came her tail. This was a much greater challenge. He made her a mechanized flipper, out of much lighter material, more or less on the same lines as her hands. But it was just not the same.
"How did it feel?" he asked, as she swam back up from a dive. She accosted herself on the side of the submarine's upper part.
"I don't know. It feels... Heavy. Wrong. I can feel my flipper, but it is now dragging me downward."
"Hmm... I fear, then, that might be simply beyond the reach of my technical knowledge." the Professor confessed, somberly.
If Sedna became fast friends with the professor and the rest of the crew, she also became sullen and moody, brooding in her wheelchair, watching the sea. She was steadily falling into depression. She was not like the professor and his friends, who were happy to travel the seas in their wonderful submarine. She had tasted freedom - true freedom, one that doesn't require a multi-billion belis war machine to feel. She was like them now, but in that she was reduced. She was, in a way, no longer a merfolk. She could never return home. She would probably never see her parents again. Dark thoughts descended upon her, of the things she would do to those slavers, to those who had harmed her, her family, her clan, and her people. She dreamt darkly as she remained confined to her wheelchair. A year passed, and then two, and she was not getting better, to the point that the Professor grew alarmed.
"Would you like to walk, Sedna?" he asked her one day as he was reading in the great library.
"Walk? What do you mean? I can't walk like you humans." she snapped back.
"Well, not quite. But you can, if you want. You see, your people, the merfolks, can change their tails into legs. But that is something that comes with age and experience. You are also closer to us, being a mammal-type merfolk, so the age requirements is even lower. In a year or two, you should be able to divide you tail into legs like me and my compatriots. At that time, if you want, I will fashion you feet like I have fashioned you hands."
"But then I would never be able to swim again!" she said, exasperation mounting.
"If you cannot swim with what I have devised so far, I fear you might never be able to again. You will be able to fuse and unfuse your leg at will, but you will not recover your lost fin. If you cannot overcome that, I cannot help you."
Sedna grew angry, but she couldn't help but see that the professor was right. He had helped her so far, without a second thought or ulterior intentions. He had rescued her, nursed her back to health, and even provided her with a semblance of hands. But she was diminished. She felt diminished. She felt the full psychological effect of her amputations. When she swam with her mechanical leg, she felt for the second time since that night that she was drowning. Swimming was no longer something natural, an expression of freedom - it was now something that filed her with anxiety. And that struck her at her core as merfolk. Those slavers, those monsters, had robbed her of so much out of simple mean spirited malice.
"In the meantime, there is something I would like to show you." he said as he gripped the handles of her chair and wheeled her to the kitchen.
"This" he said, motioning, to a matronly looking lady, "is Rosetta Brillat. She was a bio-chemist back in the days, but now she has turned toward her true passion: food. She is our head cook. With your training you have regained some dexterity with your artificial hands, but Rosetta proposed that through cooking you could complete your recovery. I believe you have met already." They had. A few times around the ship. Rosetta made sure she ate everyday and that she was not wasting away.
"Believe me," Rosetta added when the Professor left, "that learning how to cook will do you much than heal your hand - it might just heal your food." Sedna became Rosetta's apprentice and she showed her a whole new world - the world of cooking and gastronomy, and with it a whole new way of being. She found, in a way, pleasure once more in living. Sure it was not swimming in the open sea, but it helped fill that hole. With food comes warmth, happiness, friendship, the pleasure of the plate and of the table, of communion and sharing, as well as the pride of skill and accomplishment. She spent, ultimately, 3 years under the tutelage of Rosetta. In those 3 years, she developed a new taste for life. It was also around that time that she became capable of forming legs - and thus the professor made good on his proposition, and fashioned her mechanical feet with a bronze luster.
"They can even turn into flippers with a press of a button!" he demonstrated eagerly. Sedna hugged him, hugged him like the father he had become to her.
Which made her next decision even harder.
"Professor, I would like to return to the world above."
The Professor was at first taken aback, he was incredulous.
"Why would you want to do that, my dear child!" he asked.
"Because I need to go out. I need to see that world. I don't want to see this home turn into a prison, professor. I want to be able to travel that world, with the feet you have given me!"
"But... only pain awaits you up there!" he exclaimed.
"Pain will find me here eventually. It has in the past, it will surely in the future. There are many things I need to see. I need to find out what happened to my people. To my family. And I need to make those who hurt me pay." she, her grip tightening.
"So you are still attached to that world after all." the Professor sadly said, slumping in his chair.
"Professor, while you may be done with that world, I am just starting. You gave me a second chance, I won't squander it remaining in this cage."
"Is this what this is to you, a cage?" he asked, bitterness apparent.
"No. This has been my home. And I want it to continue being just that. But I need to travel and see new horizons. To walk with my own legs, and not be pushed from point A to point B by you. I want to live my life - for real this time."
The Professor sighed deeply.
"I have built this submarine to grant myself and those I love freedom. What hypocrisy it would be... if I would deny you yours. But promise me Sedna, promise me you will be safe and we will see each other again."
"I promise." Sedna responded, solemnly.
The crew of the Coelacanth and Sedna separated a week later, at a beautiful dawn. Since then, Sedna traveled the four blues. Her ancestral home was deserted. The island where boy had been sacked. Eventually she felt the need to go further afield, deeper afield. The Grand Line was calling to her, but for that she would need a crew. A good one preferably. She was more mature now, a full-grown woman, with a reputation as a chef. She would surely find employment. She didn't give any details to anyone about her past, let alone telling anyone she was a mermaid, so she lived like a human, a cook for a crew willing to pay.
Talents: - Cooking
- Knives
- Singing
Skills: Basically, are abilities you learn through time via training, a major event, or upon reaching certain milestones.
Inventory:Her cooking knives.
Cooking kit
Fishing gear
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Posted 22 May 2016 - 04:46 AM
