svana . the . chosen
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'Twas night in the dwelling,
and Norns there came,
Who shaped the life
of the lofty one;
They bade him most famed
of fighters all
And best of princes
ever to be.
------------------------------ from Helgakviða Hundingsbana I
Name: Svana Ming Aesir (Svana means 'swan' in Old Norse, Ming means 'life, fate' in Chinese.)
Gender: Female
Age: 8 years old
Appearance: Svana is fairly unremarkable in appearance, with no particularly distinctive features. Her skin is somewhat tan naturally and her hair is muddy brown, due to the genetic goulash that runs through her veins. She does, however, have bright blue eyes, a nice recessive throwback, but that's not unique to her even within her family; her mom also has blue eyes, as does her oldest brother.
The one odd thing about Svana is that she has white hair sprinkled throughout her otherwise brown hair - nothing as dramatic as a streak of white, but just a single white hair for every hundred brown. She's always had that, since she was a baby.
Personality: Svana is very uncertain, good at second-guessing herself. She sees things, you see, things that nobody else sees - little flickers out of the corners of her eyes, flashes in the mirror or the shop window as she walks by. Sometimes they come true. Sometimes they don't, but she hides under her bed afraid until the time foretold has passed with no ill effects.
Because of this, Svana is a nervous and anxious child. This gets worse after every vision; anticipatory anxiety, if you will. She keeps this a secret because nobody she's ever mentioned to has understood, yet because her visions have shaped her so much, she tends to be withdrawn from others, quiet and not social in the least. She doesn't angst about what she sees so much as be silently afraid. She's developed a stoic front to hide her fear and her strangeness from others. When she must interact with others, she does her best to be perfectly good and not give them a reason to interact with her, or even notice her more than polite pleasantries require.
Svana has silenced a great deal of her own personality under her anxiety and her fear of what she sees; but the one truly positive thing her fear has allowed is the will to protect and prevent the flickers from being true. She doesn't always succeed, and when she does, she's never sure if her success was legitimate or just... the vision not being accurate. Still, this has given her a strong protective streak, and a grim determination. All of this is tempered with her relatively young age; she is not incredibly mature, just withdrawn and afraid.
If given freedom from her fears, or at least a decent understanding about why she sees what she does - and what it is, exactly, that she's seeing - Svana will blossom out into a bright young girl. She'll never be hyper or loud, but she will come out of her shell a bit.
History: To understand Svana, you first have to understand her family.
Svana grew up and still lives in Harbor South, one of seven children living in a Crowd neighborhood that backs up onto the warehouse district. Her father and mother are both alive. They're not super well-off, but they're not poor either. They get by and have a bit saved up, and everything manages to work. Usually.
Svana's father is not around very often. He's a deckhand and cargo loader, taking jobs on various ships going in and out of the harbor, and Svana sees him maybe a day or so every month (the longest she can remember him staying home at one time was three weeks when one of her siblings was born and there were complications). He's a stolid man, not very expressive, but a good person. Svana doesn't know that much about him, though, simply because he's not around enough to really get to know.
Svana's mom... well, she's had a huge impact on her daughter's life. Her name at birth was probably something much more sane, but now she's called Aether Moon Aglaia.
Yes. Aether Moon Aglaia.
Aether is a bit of a kook, a New-Agey-hippie type who gets high on odd things inside hookahs and names her kids random things. Once she left her parents' house, Aether decided the best way to stand out in the Crowd was to really forge her own unique identity. Aether fancies herself a cosmopolite, a member of all cultures due to her utter mutt heritage, and makes a big deal of it; one of Svana's six siblings is named "Hoshino Starlight", which honestly makes "Svana Ming" seem frankly normal. (There is a strong suspicion that poor Hoshi was named while Mom was on some particularly good crack.)
Aether brings in some extra money by doing 'fortune telling', all of which is complete nonsense, but it makes her happy and she does have a fairly regular clientèle, for some reason. She wears very bright nail polish, an absurd number of bangles on her arms such that you can hear her coming a mile away, and has filled every doorway in their house with cheap plastic bead strings. Indeed.
The rest of the family is similarly strangely named, and the kids range in age from 24 to six months. Svana is not terribly close to any of her siblings; with such a large family, it became surprisingly easy to go unseen when she wanted to be.
Svana's home life isn't abusive in the least, but it is REALLY REALLY weird and Aether has little idea of how to properly relate to the girl. Honestly, though, Svana doesn't much care.
Svana's personality describes a lot of her personal history - she's always been anxious and easily frightened. For a while, her mom thought she was just shy and tried pressing her into social situations to fix it, which did about the opposite. Currently, her mom's trying the "smothering" tactic, giving Svana lots of attention at home and keeping her inside a lot. That's not working too well either. Svana does love her mother, though, and Aether knows the most about Svana's visions, although she doesn't really understand them or their source. She keeps trying to fix Svana's problems and failing miserably at it.
Overall, nothing of incredible note has happened in Svana's life other than those dratted visions. All you need to know is those flickery visions sometimes had grisly and nasty ends, and that one of Svana's young siblings died when she was five, and it took Svana a long time to convince herself that it wasn't her fault.
And then the Norns found her...
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