Isobel

Please note the great, big, honking TRIGGER WARNING for references to torture, child abuse and sexualised violence. Note also: some gorey images.

Isobel of the Agony
Seeming:	Elemental
Kith:	Archived-Chirurgeon
Court:	Spring Court ••
City:	Canberra
Title:	Claviger
Entitlement:	?
Group:	?
Player:	P. Silver
Storyteller:	Canberra VST

Personal Information

"Isobel has gone to Hell;

Someday she’ll be back,

With razors on her fingertips

And hooks upon her -

Oh, no, what have you done?

You’ve called up Ramora;

It’s time now to run!

Don’t sleep,

Don’t walk alone,

Don’t look at your reflection!

She knows who you are,

You’ve drawn her eye;

Best kiss your Mama

Because you’re gonna -

Run, don’t walk

To holy ground,

And pray to Him

That you’re not found -

No priest or nun can help you now;

You summoned her, she made a vow!

She won’t relent;

Your frightened tears

Will run as she rips off your -

Sing a song of sixpence,

A pocket full of lead;

Ramora

Knows just who you are,

And soon now you’ll be DEAD!"

The clapping game is called, "Razor Ramora", and the children play it to scare themselves. There’s an urban legend of a beautiful woman with mutilated flesh who appears in the mirror if you say her name, and comes through to tear at you with her hooked or razored fingers. Supposedly, no-one ever survives. The children never think to ask how, if that’s the case, anyone knows the story.

Isobel finds this endlessly embarrassing. That was a different time, when she was freshly returned from Arcadia, and an Autumn Courtier of the Scarecrow Ministry. It was a time when she wasn’t her best self. She’s rehabilitated, now, and a member of the Spring Court in good standing. She's improved her Clarity. She’s a recovering person, she insists.
Now, she only hurts people who want her to.
Or people her Monarch wants her to...

Appearance

Mask: Isobel is exotically striking rather than conventionally pretty, in the angular, vaguely feline way so commonly exhibited by those the Fae have warped. Slim beneath broad shoulders, long-necked and fine-boned, she has coolly glittering slanted grey-blue eyes set in a long, angular face surrounded by a halo of soft, platinum hair. Her nails are long, and curved, her lips sculpted and full, but prone to a slightly bruised off-plum shade, and her canines and incisors are just a little more hooked than the average person. She's rarely seen without a neat flick of cat-eye eyeliner. When working, she wears the sort of severe, aggressively flattering clothes associated with the modern corporate/academic ice-queen archetype, and high, spiked heels. On her own time, she favours the latex and vinyl garments that are all the rage in fetish and Goth spaces.

Mien: Her skin is bluish-white, waxy and cold, like something long-drowned. Her eyes are even more tilted than in her Mask, and with the eyeliner blurring instead into thick, trailing dark demarcation that rims the outside, starting from the bridge of her nose and running almost to her temples - like a mask. The hollows of her cheeks are deep, the bone structure pronounced, and her lips alluringly curved though swollen and discoloured. Her graceful fingers narrow to inhuman points, tipped with cruel brass talons, and cold metal hooks hang bloodily from the meat of her back. Disturbingly, she's still beautiful - a succubus from your most profane nightmares, projecting a cold, forbidding allure that viscerally attracts, despite all decency or reason, even as it repels.

Mantle: Where Isobel walks, and paradoxically to the ominousness of her appearance, she seems to bring a brief, enlivening breeze; a literal breath of fresh air. The heady smell of fresh, blooming flowers follows her wherever she goes; most simply attribute it to a delicate, but particularly persistent, perfume.

Personality

Isobel tries to be friendly, she really does. It's just that she's lost the knack. She's relearning how to be a person, instead of a nightmare. Sometimes her overtures fall short, as she falls back into the creepiness of Ramora, and she frightens people - then she'll catch herself, be horribly embarrassed, and apologise awkwardly for the offense.
Due to the difficulty caused by her impaired social skills, she often just opts to keep quiet, and stand in the background, listening and watching; something interpreted by many onlookers as only adding to her sinisterness of her presence.

Mortal World

A sports masseur and physiotherapist by day, and the most sought-after dominatrix working in Canberra by night, Isobel also occasionally moonlights as a fetish model.
Her website for "Madam Agony" gets the most hits out of any Google search using the keywords, "ACT Canberra sadist domme dominatrix mistress".
She services her sports and rehab clients out of a small suite of rooms she leases, just a short walk from her large, comfortable home down a sunny, tree-lined street in idyllic Manuka, and her night clients - as she calls them - out of a modest but pristine studio in Civic, fastidiously eschewing the social and literal grime of Fyshwick.
She also makes house calls, for both professions.

Information Known by Lost Society

Isobel, like many of her Lost brethren, doesn't like to talk about her Durance. Something about being taken far too young, and for far too wrong a purpose.

Timeline

• 1987: Little Isobel Novak is born to Karen, a housewife, and Paul, a stock-trader, in Decatur, Alabama.
• 1991: Her parents enter her into her first pageant, "Little Miss Decatur". She finishes in the top three, and upon receipt of the prize, her mother gets pageant fever.
• 1993: Isobel begins school, but is quickly pulled by her parents in favour of home-schooling when it becomes apparent that the limitations of a state curriculum will interfere with her availability for competitions. Reared on Disney, little Isobel quickly falls in love - as so many little girls do - with the fairytale princess narrative.
• 1994 - 1996: Isobel is kept more or less constantly busy on the pageant circuit, with schooling having to fit in in between. She's a rousing success, and with her sweet charm and doll-like blue eyes and bouncing blonde curls, takes home prize after prize, her profile gradually growing within that sector.
• 1997: Immediately after receiving her first-place crown for "Little Miss Southern Belle" in Georgia, she is approached backstage by the most handsome young man she has ever seen, who tells her he is the Prince of a far-distant kingdom in a magical land, come to take her away to live with him in his shimmering crystal castle, and make her fairytale come true at last. Isobel is taken, and Taken, completely. He doesn't bother with a Fetch.

Her disappearance makes the newspapers, and with the JonBenet Ramsey case still fresh is the public imagination, her loving parents come under suspicion of having done away with her. Though the case is eventually dismissed by the local police as having insufficient evidence to arrest the Novaks, in the court of public opinion, they are tried, convicted and sentenced to ruin. Paul Novak's portfolio crumbles, as no-one will do business with him, they lose their big, beautiful home and their lives, as they know it, are destroyed.

• 1998 - 2013: Arcadia; Isobel gets her "fairytale", alright.
• 2014: She escapes in June to the Brisbane Freehold, a beautiful monster with barely the Clarity to understand that she is no longer in Faerie.
• Late 2014 - 2015: For the poetry and glamour and horror of what she is, she is snapped up by the Autumn Court, and soon finds occupation for herself becoming a boogieman of local urban legend, frightening mortal children away from acts that might draw the eye of the Gentry.
• 2016: Having slowly regained the Clarity to realise that she is not content to be a monster, that she was once human and wishes to try be again, Isobel makes the transition from Autumn Court to Spring, channeling her Fae-given affinities into a more safe, sane and consensual endeavour of becoming a dominatrix.
• Mid 2016: She travels with Authell to the frontier of Canberra, there to found a new Freehold.

Arcadia

You parents all that children have, And you that have got none; If you would have them safe abroad, Pray keep them safe at home. - Three Children Sliding On The Ice, Old English Nursery Rhyme

Once upon a time, and far, far away, there was a cherubic little girl whose adoring but domineering parents determinedly steered her around the child beauty pageant circuit, despite all the warnings from their friends, her teachers, and much of society at large, about the dangers of sexualising their child.
In time, the little girl's beauty caught the attention of a dashing and handsome Prince of Faerie, and he paid court to her, wooed and won her, and took her away to The Land Of Summer's Twilight to be his lady and his love.
And he was beautiful, and heroic, and adoring, and she lived in a plush palace where her every desire was met without question. And she feasted on cakes spun from the tears of flowers, and she had a hundred dresses, each more beautiful than the last, and living dolls of heart-aching grace and loveliness who danced at her very whim, and she wandered and played in gardens more fragrant and perfect than any storybook could conceive, and at night, she slept in his arms atop a great bed made of pale pink velvet. And if there was pain, sometimes, and confusion, and shame, why, it all faded from memory in the earnestness of his comfort.
And it was a soft-edged, pink-tinged little girl's dream, for a while.
But eventually, she began to grow, as all little girls must. And as she inched towards womanhood - as her hips spread and her breasts began to bud - she found her handsome Prince grew distant, disenchanted. She was aging beyond his interest. But he did not discard or replace her, as he had so many before her; instead, he began to introduce new "games" into their relationship.
And, as time passed, and the little princess grew to womanhood under Arcadia's purple sky, the glittering palace of luxury and pleasure became a symphony of screams, a mirror-hall of sweet, smiling lovers who vivisected instead of kissing, an adagio of exquisite arpeggiations picked delicately out on her own raw and quivering nerves.
And pleasure, of course. That was the worst of it; the most corrupt, the most sickening, the most compelling and shameful -
Always still pleasure.
She learned her lessons well. In time, her lovely form twisted, her soul warping, as the hooks he hung her from fused to her back. Her fingers curved into cruel, barbed talons as she learned well the music of agony, and learned to compose and play songs of her own.
And the little Princess who might once have been Fair, became something else entirely...

Escape

By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes. Open locks; whatever knocks. - Macbeth: Act IV, Scene 1, by William Shakespeare

During Authell's Durance, servicing friends of his Lady, Isobel's Prince brought her often with him to visit the salon, and the luscious young Incubus had enough of a moment of Clarity to refuse to employ his talents on the then-child, and had, in fact, grown fiercely protective of her - placing himself, when he could, defiantly between her and the depredations of the rest of Faerie.
Though at the time of his own Escape, he had not seen her in some years, still he remembered her, and so upon his slipping free of his own Keeper's attention, he went in search of her to bring her with him on his walk back out of the Hedge. Finding Isobel in her chamber/cell deep within her Prince's manor was easy enough, but he did not reckon on the degree to which Arcadia had claimed her mind. He was almost captured again, by her Keeper, but together they were able to escape, and fled hand-in-hand into the Hedge...
Where they became separated. Authell broke back through the Hedge in Brisbane, in May, 2014, while Isobel remained lost, wandering in the Thorns, for days, weeks, sleeping in what hollows she could find, and subsisting on goblin fruits as she slowly succumbed to the madness of that place.
She was found, eventually, by the Spring Courtier, Nathan Steele, on a routine trip down a known trod, and, with some difficulty, he guided her out of the Hedge, breaking back through into the world just South of Grafton, in early June.
Steele then brought her to be presented to the Brisbane Freehold, whereupon the Autumn Court opened its arms to the high Wyrd, low Clarity, darkly beautiful fiend, and took her greedily into its bosom.

2013

• JUN - Details
• JUL - Details
• AUG - Details
• SEP - Details
• OCT - Details
• NOV - Details
• DEC - Details

Quotes

It doesn't matter so much which way you stand; More which way you're facing. - Carpe Jugulum, by Sir Terry Pratchett

Quotes By

"Our duty to them, the still-human ones - like farmers to their fields - is a cycle of harrow and harvest. Without the harrowing in the Autumn, there would be no harvest in the Spring."

- when questioned on the subject of desertion and Goodwill.

"They say that living well is the best revenge. I will be more than he made me."

- on the subject of why she changed Courts, when Spring seems so counterintuitive a choice for her.

"We stand at the crossroads of a most exquisite paradox, you and I; as sadist, my purpose is to withhold from you what it is you want, but as masochist, what you want is for me to deny you. Mmmmm, such a delicious brainteaser, wouldn't you say? Desire, it seems, has us both outsmarted. A conundrum, indeed. Well, keep up with that lusting, darling; I guess we'll just have to have to feel our way."

- opening negotiations with a new client.

Quotes About

"Quote."

Whoever, and why.

Conversations

"Quote."

"Quote."

Whoever, and whoever, and why.

Rumours

• Actually just a particularly kinky Fairest.

Inspirations and Soundtrack

• Clive Barker's Cenobites: "I will enjoy making you bleed. And I will enjoy making you enjoy it." "What you think of as pain is a shadow. Pain has a face; allow me to show it to you. Gentlemen, I. Am. Pain." "Oh, no tears please. It's a waste of good suffering!" " It is not hands that summon us. It is desire."
• The Cell: specifically this (not safe for work: kink) scene (not safe for sanity: graphic torture) and this one (not safe for work or sanity: body horror, some nudity)
• The Fall: "Are you trying to save my soul?"
• Thir13en Ghosts: The Angry Princess (not safe for work or sanity: graphic nudity, graphic violence)
• Rev 22:20 by Puscifer: Don't be aroused by my confession, unless you don't give a good Goddamn about redemption
• My Skin by Natalie Merchant: Take a look at my body, look at my hands - there's so much here that I don't understand
• Pleasure And Pain by Beccy Cole: Please don't ask me how I've been getting off
• My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark by Fall Out Boy: Be careful making wishes in the dark; you never can be sure they've hit their mark, and besides in the meantime, I'm just dreaming of tearing you apart. I'm in the deep details with the Devil, so now the world can never get me on my level

OOC Information

This character is an exploration of themes I have visited before - the intersection and pivot point between desire and fear, attraction and revulsion - with a short-lived Sabbat Inquisitor, Penanggalan, in Vampire: The Masquerade - Sabbat, but whom I only got to play twice, and touched on shallowly with my Vampire: The Requiem Nosferatu, Batavia, but never went into depth with.
These are particular themes I keep coming back to, but here explored in an entirely new context; what measure is a monster?
And what happens when they want to be more than that?

Member Information
Player:	P Silver
Number:	AU2003100615
Domain:	Canberra