Information

Verna has a minion!

the Painted Songbird

Verna

The

Glacier Mahar
Owner:

Age: 2 years, 1 month, 2 weeks

Born: April 6th, 2011

Adopted: 2 years, 1 week, 6 days ago

Adopted: May 8th, 2011

Statistics

Level: 5
Strength: 10
Defense: 10
Speed: 10
Health: 10
HP: 10/10
Intelligence: 0
Books Read: 0
Food Eaten: 0
Job:

I . II . III . IV

» Story «

i confess i've lost control

i let my guard down

england. 1935.

I graduated Oxford Medical School at twenty-five with possibly three-quarters of my life in front of me. Oxford’s name on my resume secured me multiple enticing job offers; the one which I accepted in early July was a psychiatric post in a small town in the very North, bordering on Scotland.

The pay was very good, especially for a town in the middle of nowhere, and I was able to further my studies in peace. The house I purchased with the money from my father’s estate was an old Victorian that came with its fair share of tales of woe, kindly supplied to me by the realtor.

My father, who died two months prior to my graduation of cirrhosis of the liver, never left a will and so his estate passed to me, his only living relative.

My family came from old English money, and my father was a stupendously wealthy, selfish alcoholic who delighted in telling my cousin Iris and I tales of his bravery and brutality in the war. He encouraged us to pursue activities such as embroidery and piano, simply because encouraging young people to take an interest in the arts made him seem like a well-rounded and intellectual person.

My parents were an arranged marriage, and I’m quite certain he never came to love my mother. She was blindingly pale with sad dark eyes; if anything, rather plain in appearance.

I have few memories of my mother, but there is one night that I will never forget. I was about five or six years old. It was very late summer, for I had not yet begun school, but the nights were markedly colder than before. Slipping downstairs in my embroidered nightgown for a glass of water, I avoided the creaky stairs. The soft padding of my feet on the wooden floors was the only sound until I reached the kitchen. I avoided turning on the lamp and instead filled my glass in the dark. As I drank I gazed out the large round window above the sink, half-awake, and was surprised to see a figure stumbling around our garden.

Setting down the glass, I opened the heavy back door with much effort and approached my mother. She was all in white with a dark shawl wrapped around her thin shoulders, the ends of her hair blending in with the material. I called to her; she turned very quickly. I was close enough to see the dark purplish circles underneath her eyes and the dried blood covering her hands. I stopped in the tall grass, waiting for her to come to me, but she didn't; she ran towards the woods behind our main house.

Briefly I considered following her, but she was a frightening stranger and I a child.

My mother lost what remained of her mind when I was seven and slit her throat in the middle of the woods on midsummer’s day. I was the one who found her. I knelt next to her and trailed my bony white fingers over the drying bloodstains covering the front of her nightgown before running back to the main house and telling my father that mother was dead in the woods.

Although my father never loved my mother, he used her death as an excuse to spend even more of his time in a haze of whiskey, and my cousin and I became wild children, unschooled and uncared for by any adult. I spent what time I could in my father's library. He was well-read for an ignorant man, and most of his collection centred on logic, medicine, mathematics, and chemistry.

The rest of my time was taken up with Iris. My cousin was a delicate pale creature; she bruised easily and had platinum blonde hair and nearly translucent skin. Iris’s mother was a simple country whore who died giving birth to her, and her father was my mother’s brother. He spent his part of the fortune on racehorses and shot himself in the head with my grandfather’s Civil War rifle when he went bankrupt, and so Iris came to live with us.

Iris was three years younger than me, and absolutely devoted to me. She would do anything I asked of her, no matter the consequence or possibility of moral wrongness. I was never questioned. If anyone else tried to get her to do anything, she would scratch and bite and run back to me. I bathed her, I taught her, and we were the only two people in the world.

I was fourteen when I discovered that I could hurt her. She tripped on a twisted root in the woods behind the main house where we spent most of our time, and I was delighted when a purplish-grey bruise sprung up on her shin. I wondered if bruises would look as beautiful on other areas of her. We were picking wild strawberries in a thicket near the woods after a spring rain when I shoved her to the muddy ground and started beating my thin fists against her delicate body. She was surprised but made no noise, accepting the pain with closed eyes and a few tears.

My father never asked why Iris was bruised, if he even noticed. I made sure she wore sleeveless dresses and no stockings during summers so I could see my handiwork bloom into beautiful grey and purple roses dotted with red.

The summer I turned sixteen, everything changed. It was late July and the hottest day we’d had; my cousin and I were laying out on the sun-bleached wooden dock of the lake a mile away from our house. Our neighbour’s two red bikes lay on their sides in the dry dirt, stolen and then put aside.

Iris lay on her back, her legs pulled up, her dress forming a pale pink tent around them. Her pale hair fell over the boards of the deck like daytime moonbeams, and she was barefoot. My own hair, black like my mother’s, hung past my waist; neither of us had thought to cut it in years.

I rolled onto my stomach lazily, pressing one side of my face into the sun-warmed wood. I could feel each gap between the boards against the soft flesh of my stomach through my thin dress.

» basics «

Name » Verna Sophia Temple, BM BCh, MD
Gender » Female
Age » Twenty-eight
Species » Human
Birth date » 17 November
Zodiac » Scorpio
Orientation » Bisexual; very picky, uninterested
Occupation » Psychiatrist
Heritage » English

» appearance «

skin tone » Very pale, does not tan and dislikes the look of them.
build » Thin, curvy. Not very strong, but somewhat toned. C-cup.
height » Five-foot-six / 1.67 m
hair » Black. Naturally somewhat wavy, styled into big loose waves with one side partially clipped back. Always left down. Goes to just below her shoulder blades.
eye colour » Black.

clothing & style » Usually wears black and red, fond of velvet and leather gloves. Always wears simple pearl earrings. Preference for tight skirts and sheer tops.

» character «

personality » Always has weird relationships, especially with women. Sadistic, curious, impulsive. Blunt, self-serving. Comes off as soulless and guarded due to lack of emotional speech + actions.

Hard to befriend. Lies a lot. Tends to do everything for seemingly no reason. Orderly, organized, insensitive to the misfortunes of others. Unattached. Overly cynical. Somewhat arrogant, narcissistic. Suspicious. Not interested in a family or holding long-term relationships.

Very intelligent. Cold. Not very approachable. Values competency over compassion. Hyper-rational. Not physically affectionate.

religion » None.

politics » Uneducated + unaffiliated; does not care for the subject.

» background «

Verna was born in 1907.

Her parents were a loveless arranged marriage between an alcoholic and a schizophrenic.

She grew up with a younger cousin, Iris, who was absolutely devoted to Verna. They do not exactly have a healthy relationship, and Verna is sent to boarding school after her cousin drowns and her father decides he has had enough of children.

She continues her studies of mathematics and chemistry in private at the school, until one day a teacher catches her sneaking an anatomy book out of the library along with sewing patterns. He takes her under his wing and she excels in the hard sciences.

She goes onto receive multiple degrees from Oxford University and moves into the wilder country after completing her M.D.