Catrina's bio

[Samira]

"You know there’s got to be a faster way to do this. How about we just change the first question to ‘have you recently dated a homicidal pyromaniac?’"
-Derek Morgan, "Compulsion"

Your Name: Sami. Or Causti. Or Veilz, Whispered, Padfoot, or any of various other monikers...
How many years roleplaying?: Five.

French poet Jacques Rigaut said, "Don't forget that I cannot see myself. My role is limited to being the one who looks in the mirror."

Jason Gideon, "Plain Sight"[/center][/size]

Character Name: Catrina Radley.
Age: 29.
Date of Birth: 21 September.
Residence: outside Washington, D.C.
Profession: Tour guide.

Appearance:
Catrina is a beautiful person, from the outside, anyway. Thanks to nice genetics, a high metabolism, and a fondness for physical exercise, she has a sleek, muscular figure. She stands about five-foot-seven and carries herself with poise and confidence. Her eyes are dark, long-lashed, and hold a mischievous sparkle over high cheekbones. One eyebrow rests a little higher than the other, giving her a slightly skeptical expression even when she's smiling, suggesting that she takes everything as a vaguely amusing joke. Her mouth seems meant for smiling, but can also frown quite convincingly. Her hair is fairly long, hanging to about her mid back, almost black and quite straight. Her hair might be called her best feature if it weren't for the fact that all her features seem to be good; but she pays little attention to it. If it isn't left down, it's pulled back into a ponytail – quick, simple, out of the way.

She has a casual look and dislikes dressing up. She usually wears tight jeans and boots and for some reason has a penchant for white V-neck tees, which can be a problem in her line. Bloodstains don't wash out of white shirts well, so she frequently has shirts in a tub bleaching and tends to need new shirts more often than would otherwise be necessary. Despite working in DC, city of many metal detectors, Catrina almost always has at least three knives on her. She carries an assisted switchblade in her left pocket, a Swiss-army knife and a Gerber three-inch stainless steel pocket knife in her purse, and a Smith and Wesson bootknife in a sheath on the inside of her right calf. She seldom actually uses them away from home – they're useful from time to time for mundane things like slicing open an apple or clipping tags – but she feels naked and vulnerable without them.

Personality:
She likes to laugh. She likes good jokes and good books, good music and good steak. Come to think of it, Catrina seems pretty normal at first glance. She has friends – she's not a popular party-animal type of woman, but she has her friends and she likes to hang out with them. She has a sarcastic brand of humour and little patience for slow people or people who have irritating habits, but in general she comes across as a nice person. A little stand-off-ish, perhaps, but generally a nice person. She doesn't do well trusting people, but then who does? She's a very independent person. She's always been a quick learner, and she will do it for herself, whether it's changing a tire or getting herself out of some sort of legal trouble. Not that she's had legal trouble in a long time; she got much better at covering her tracks since the beginning, which is a good thing considering she's no longer running at low petty-theft-style stakes. She's very possessive. She's not a caring person, but once she's begun to see a person as hers, she will go to extreme lengths to protect them. It's not out of any concern for them, but she likes to take care of what belongs to her. She has a thing about keeping her possessions nice. The same impulse that makes her polish her wooden furniture is the impulse that makes her protect her family. She likes things orderly – she's not actually obsessive-compulsive, but she dislikes messes and chaos. She keeps her living space and work space clean and neat, and she really hates people making a fuss over things that shouldn't matter. She tends to be fairly stoic herself, taking pain and fear silently, and she can't stand people crying and carrying on over something they can't fix anyway.

Catrina isn't a talker – she can carry on a conversation well enough, but she isn't a chatterbox and she'd rather listen and learn about people than talk about herself. “Learn about people” - she doesn't care about their lives, their hopes, dreams, sorrows – but she likes trivia. Perhaps it's a control thing – she tends to be a bit of a control freak – and she likes knowing trivia about people. Knowing, for example, that Mrs. Carr is allergic to fish or that Mr. Donaldson lived in Idaho when he was in high-school – it gives her a satisfied feeling, even though she'll probably never have any use for the information. Is she a sociopath? Perhaps. Perhaps not. She has feelings, though she certainly has no ability to empathize. She doesn't kill people that annoy her or make her angry – that would be a lack of control. She simply kills people who catch her fancy. Usually attractive people; she has a thing for beautiful things. Beautiful music, beautiful artwork – beautiful people. She likes killing them. She's never asked herself why; it's never seemed like a necessary question to ask. It's simply a hobby. Some people enjoy horseback riding, or stamp-collecting, or knitting – she enjoys killing with knives. Why knives? She doesn't know; she just likes them.



History:
Perhaps Catrina's fascination with death comes from her parents. Her mother was a veterinarian whose job often entailed euthanizing old or sick animals, and she never made any effort to keep her children ignorant of the way life and death worked out. Her father worked in a medical capacity at a funeral home, so Catrina was exposed to the concept of death from a very early age, and the idea of sanctity of life was never introduced to her. There were two kinds of people – live people, and dead people, and while live people could become dead people, the dead people could never revert to their living state. Death fascinated her from a very early age, then, and there never seemed to be anything that said that dead was worse than living. There was nothing bad about her father's handling dead people all the time, and it was a very small step to move from the concept of handling dead people to the concept of making them dead. Aside from the morbid influences in her life, Catrina had a fairly normal childhood. Her parents both worked long hours, but she had older siblings who were around enough to keep her from being a neglected child. She was an average student, and the first real upheaval in her life came when she was in high school.

It hardly counted as upheaval. Catrina was fifteen and she was ready to take on the world, and her father was an overprotective paranoid workaholic who should've been around more if he intended to be a pain about it now. If he didn't want her to go on a spring break trip with the rest of her friends, he could do something about it himself. She was going. ...She went, of course. Miss independent didn't need parental approval and she would live her life her way. It was a typical teenage thing, perhaps – the rebellion, the relationship rift – and really, if there hadn't been much of a relationship to begin with, could it be called a rift? It started a trend, though. By the time she headed off to college she barely spoke to her family at all. By the time college ended, she hadn't contacted them four years. She keeps tabs on them – they're hers and she likes to know where they are and what condition they're in. In college she studied various things, changed her major around a few times, and ended up quitting before she actually got a degree in anything. Her favourite courses were history, science, and music, but nothing caught her interest enough to make her want to pursue it entirely. She ended up leaving college and moving to Washington, DC where she got a job in the tourism industry as a tour guide. It lets her work with history, have a fairly flexible schedule, make the money she needs, and watch people. She gets to spend all day watching people, finding the beautiful ones, the ones who will be fascinating to watch die.

Likes:
Lemonade
Sharp knives
Unusual knives
Any knives
Candles
Random trivia
Attractive people
Music
Dancing
Cats
Killing people.

Dislikes:
People screaming
Dull knives
Messes
Feds
Alcohol – it makes her brain fuzzy
Feeling out of control
Sentiment
Pigeons
Rich, sweet foods – they upset her stomach
Stained clothes.


Strengths:
Keeping her thoughts hidden
Appearing non-threatening
Remembering – she has an incredible memory, especially for details
Manipulation – she's very good at talking people into things and getting her way without ever seeming confrontational
Very fast learner

Weaknesses:
Can't empathize – although she doesn't see this as a weakness
Beauty – she finds beautiful things irresistible
She's very bad at denying herself anything that she wants
Won't accept help, even if she needs it
Heights – it's not bad if she can't see out the window or if she's only a short distance up, but the higher she goes the worse the acrophobia gets.


Parents: Thomas Radley, embalmer; Marie Radley, veterinarian; - live in Wisconsin.
Siblings: Older sister: Leigh Radley Branson, elementary-school teacher; lives in Manhattan. Older brother: David Radley, veterinarian; lives in Wisconsin.
Spouse: none.
Children: none.

Anything Else? none.

Roleplay Sample:
DC in the summer – hot, muggy, full of stinking pigeons, crying babies, sweating joggers, and camera-carrying Asian tourists. Home. Catrina couldn't wait. She clicked the 'lock' button on her car remote as she headed toward the parking-lot elevator. It was ten in the morning and already steamy. She had lunch shift on a bus tour today and it looked like it would be a hundred degrees until it was over, and then start pouring rain about the time she was trying to find lunch. That was the way life seemed to work lately.

The metro was full of old men with cigarettes, young people with big purses and voices, old ladies reading romances, and toddlers who thought the whole thing was a new kind of McDonald's PlayPlace and tried to play peek-a-boo around the adults' legs. Kicking one might have been entertaining, but it would hardly go over well and then there would be a commotion. She disliked commotion. She could already tell how this day would go. Like every other day, she would get to work, deal with tourists all day, call out interesting historical facts, knowing that nobody there really cared about what she was telling them, eat overpriced food, probably get caught in the rain and have to dig a second white shirt out of her bag – but maybe, just maybe, she'd see someone interesting today. It had been too long since she'd taken anyone home with her. Her little friends were getting tense and eager, their razor-sharp blades hungry for another bite...

It was worse than usual – somebody fed their child a canoli before taking them on the tour and the little thing got motion sick and hurled the half-digested canoli all over the aisle. Joy. One of those days. And now, headed back – at last – she was stopped by some kind of political rally that was blocking the entire street. So was it worth walking in the other direction and trying to get around, or if she waited would it be gone in time? Politicians. She hated politicians. They were always causing trouble and making life less convenient for everyone else. Overpaid, overly ego-centric bigots...

”Sir – sir you need to back down – sir -” One of the security guards trying to keep some overly-enthusiastic onlooker from invading the politicians' personal space. Mildly curious, she took a few steps to the left until she could see the action. A middle-aged man was apparently trying to get up close with one of the female politicians – some senator or governor that Catrina should probably have recognized but didn't care about. A tall, young guard in a blue uniform was hauling the man back. A gorgeous guard in a blue uniform... Now this was interesting. She wondered how long his shift lasted and whether it would be worth sticking around the city a while and catching his name. Worth it to at least catch his name, she decided. With the expertise of a city dweller, she began working her way through the crowd until she was close enough to bump shoulders with the man. She murmured an apology, glancing down at his tag as she did so. Thomas Valker... what a nice name... and what nice blue eyes you have... Perhaps we should meet up... Yes, it was definitely an idea to pursue. In the meantime, she had to get home. He was the only interesting person she'd seen all day and there was no chance of bringing him home with her – not in this chaos. She would have to find him again, though. It had been too long since she'd had an evening of enjoyment.