Post by Helen(a) of Troy on Mar 26, 2014 4:00:57 GMT -5
Character Image:
Image/Face claim: Jessica Stam
Name: Helena of Troy (But you can call her Light of Your Life, Goddess Divine, Queen of Your Heart; she isn’t picky.)
Gender: The finer sex. (Female)
Age: How rude; never ask a woman her age! ;D (She looks like she’s in her early thirties but she’s got a few centuries on her.)
Occupation: A Queen, of course.
Family: Leda(Mother), Pollux/Castor/Clytemnestra (Siblings-Deceased), Menelaus (Husband-Deceased), Hermione (Daughter-Deceased)
Friends: Everyone loves Helena! Unless you’re one of the men whose throats she slit. Oops! Xoxo! (Alright, so she only really trusts the one these days: Thanatos. Given her place in history, are you all that surprised her only real friend is Death?)
Enemies: Too many to count. There’s her late husband, her sister, That-Bastard-King (Theseus, but she doesn’t like to say his name), the men that died in the war she caused, the families of those warriors, all of the other men that didn’t die but she lied to or manipulated or used to get what she wanted. Helena is a woman walking constantly amidst her ghosts.
Strengths: All of them! (Cunning, humor, determination, reads people well.)
Weaknesses: She’s perfect, silly! (Selfish, stubborn, emotionally manipulative, untrusting, often childish. There’s a great deal of blood on her hands. She isn’t very sorry for some of it.)
Quote: “Why, we haven’t seen each other for the whole of an hour! You’ve probably forgotten already how pretty I am; quick, look again to remind yourself!”
Personality:
For all her pretty chatter, Helena is a tactician at heart. She lived out her formative years in a politically tumultuous climate and learned early on the importance of studying war. Some people are lovers and some people are fighters; Helena is one in the same, bartering her stunning smile and the soft planes of her body for whatever leverage keeps her alive and gives her ammunition against her enemies. She is calculated and cunning, but slow to show that. Nobody ever expects the pretty fool to pull a knife upon them, after all.
She has the sort of smile that promises she’s carrying some hilarious secret nobody else could possibly be in on. If she’s not crafting some elaborate scheme to get what she wants, she’s generally pretty playful. It’s hard to tell which pieces of her are honest and which are constructed as resources, though; if there’s one thing she has learned to do, it’s figure out what a person wants, what they need and then which of those two she’s going to give them if there’s any discrepancy.
Some men have described her as blushing and demure; others have sworn she’s the most wicked woman they’ve ever lain with and they liked it that way. She might bat her eyes and tuck her chin down shyly. She might grin over her shoulder and saunter off. She might tell you that she loves you and then promptly forget your name. Some men like to chase things, some men like to possess them. Some want to hold her tenderly and some want to hurt her. Helena can be anything you’d like, so long as you have something she’d like in return. (And, no, your charming personality isn’t proper compensation. Economics, darling.)
History:
She is nine years old when she finally understands the meaning of the word ‘beauty’. They’re wrong when they say it’s in the eye of the beholder; it’s not. It’s her. It’s the moon’s caress of her milky stomach and the hide-and-go-seek of light in her eyes. Even when the radiance dies and she is sad, she’s lovely. A tragic sort of beauty, her mother will tut when she returns home, to Sparta, and does nothing but lie in bed and hold her legs closed for days on end. Eventually Pollux comes in and sits beside her. “You have to be brave, little Helena,” he whispers. With his coaxing, one day she gets up and she goes outside but every time somebody looks down and smiles at her, says what a pretty little girl!, she tries to fold in on herself a thousand-thousand times until she is too small to be seen.
--
She is thirteen when she learns the meaning of the word ‘power’.
“This is very lovely,” she says of a delicate golden comb, engraved and hand-painted with flowers. “Can I have it?”
“It’s my sister’s,” laments the visiting boy. His sister is off with Clytemnestra somewhere down the hall.
Helena runs her fingers gingerly over the piece. She can feel his eyes upon the lush flesh of her chest, where the gauzy drape of her dress gives way. She bites her lip and smiles a little at him. He looks up at her. “Would you trade it to me?” Helena asks.
“For what?” He can see that she has moved a little closer.
Then her face is right in front of his. “I don’t know,” teases Helena. “Maybe a kiss.” When his brow rises to meet the line of his hair, she presses her soft, pink little mouth to his and she swipes her tongue between his lips.
Two days later, the foreigners are gone and Helena sits to lunch with her sister. Clytemnestra narrows her eyes. “I don’t recognize that comb you’re wearing,” she says. “Is it yours?”
Helena just smiles and daintily flicks her tongue out to catch a little bit of the soup dribbling down her spoon. “Yes,” she replies.
--
She is fifteen when she remembers the word pain. Lying on her back, Pollux at her bedside, her fingers are wrapped so tightly around his, she half-fears she’ll break them. Sweat has formed a second skin down her cheeks and her neck. She screams but Leda whispers, “Shh, you’ll wake Menelaus.” Fuck Menelaus. (Then again, that was what landed her here in the first place.) There is something inside of her, clawing at her, shredding her insides as the midwife pulls the little demon out into the air, squalling like the mouth of hell itself has opened before them.
“It’s a girl,” the woman smiles. “Look at her, my Queen. She’s beautiful.”
Helena turns her face into her brother’s shoulder. “Oh Gods,” she rasps and she weeps.
--
She doesn’t say goodbye to the child when she departs. Helena rarely says good night to her at all, so it would be conspicuous. She has ensured that the King is her favorite, that she is her father’s girl, because then he will love her and take care of her in ways that Leda’s husband never did for Helena. There is only so much a mother can do to protect her young. This is Helena’s gift to her child; indifference. Apathy.
She sets sail with Paris in the dead of night. It is the beginning of Helena’s affair with mortality. Corpses will line up over the next ten years to shake her hand, make sure it’s marked with their blood. The face that launched a thousand ships, they will call her and everyone will marvel at how a woman could be so heartless as to leave her husband and her child, to let good, innocent men sail to their graves for her and a whole city burn in her name.
How romantic, History will croon, and how reckless too that so many men would fight for love. The heart can make fools of us all.
Helena knows a secret though, and it’s this: men do not go to war for love; that is only a pretty cover story. They do it in anger or agony, for glory or for greed.
History doesn’t even get her name right. It’s not to be trusted.
--
When the ships land in Troy, everything is engulfed in a festival of flame. Troy is burning, Troy is burning, she thinks as she flees through the rubble. She can practically feel him breathing down her neck even before he’s caught up to her. Legend has it that when he does, she sheds her dress and he is so blinded by her beauty and his love for her, that Menelaus cannot kill her even after swearing to a hundred times.
In truth, it took a lot more than just that—a little blood, a lot of begging, some time on her knees and on her back. She goes along with it because, above all things, Helena is a survivalist. Maybe a sadist. Life is cruel to her but she loves it desperately despite its abuse.
And a good thing too, because she outlives them all. Theseus, Menelaus, the suitors and soldiers. Some of them she slaughters herself, writing her story over and over again in red. One day she turns the wrong page and there is her mother-in-law and you all know how that is bound to go. Helena finds herself adrift in the ocean. ‘If you like to sail so much, fine; you can do it for the rest of eternity.’
Fine, thinks Helena. I still win. I’m still alive. I’m still their Queen. And it’s true, but her crew and her subjects are only the spirits of the men she slew and as sweet as the song of the sea can be, she can’t even hear it most nights over their taunting.
--
She keeps buying herself more red ink, angry and lonely: a woman bound to a ghost ship.
Then…then everything is quiet.
Thanatos stands on the deck, his arms folded over his chest, one eyebrow raised. “You make my job a living hell some days,” he says. “I’m tired of collecting your bloody men. Can’t you find a new hobby?” She can hear the swish of the wind and the rhythm of waves now. The crew has fallen silent with Death present to tame them.
She isn’t sure how it happens, but one day she wakes up and he is still there with her and she realizes that it’s been at least a few decades since he stepped foot aboard her ship. Sometimes they talk; sometimes they don’t. She calls him ‘The Captain’ cheekily, and The Captain likes his silence. Everyone she has ever known has been afraid of Death, the stench and feel of it but she thinks he smells like clean leather and feels like peace.
“They’re not all afraid to die,” he confides in her one night. The light of a candle warms his face. “But everyone is afraid to die alone.”
“Even you?” she whispers.
His mouth twitches into one of his almost-smiles. “Even me.”
--
When he goes missing, that is her greatest fear: that he is dying, or wilting, or ceasing to be—whatever will happen to him at his end, and that he is alone. She tears apart entire realms to find him, even with Menelaus and Theseus whispering in her ear all the while. Everywhere is noise and chaos and empty space where she wants his body to be, though.
“—Have y’ tried Storybrooke?” asks a gap-toothed man at a secluded port. “Ship passed through here a couple weeks ago. Brought rumors ‘bout a second curse sweepin’ a buncha’ folk off that way again.”
She is losing track of which corners of the world she has searched already; all of the barren places she has been. Part of her wants to start burning them down once she departs, to leave a trail of ash so that she’ll never waste time looking back.
--
Likes: Flattery, attention, people who laugh at her jokes, pretty things, good fun.
Dislikes: Religion, politics, manual labor, being ignored or spoken down to, most other women, a lot of men, children, the elderly, animals. (The last five are sort of bluffs on her part.)
Roleplay Example: See Jefferson!!
Lastly... Where did you hear about us? RPG-Directory! ;D
Image/Face claim: Jessica Stam
Name: Helena of Troy (But you can call her Light of Your Life, Goddess Divine, Queen of Your Heart; she isn’t picky.)
Gender: The finer sex. (Female)
Age: How rude; never ask a woman her age! ;D (She looks like she’s in her early thirties but she’s got a few centuries on her.)
Occupation: A Queen, of course.
Family: Leda(Mother), Pollux/Castor/Clytemnestra (Siblings-Deceased), Menelaus (Husband-Deceased), Hermione (Daughter-Deceased)
Friends: Everyone loves Helena! Unless you’re one of the men whose throats she slit. Oops! Xoxo! (Alright, so she only really trusts the one these days: Thanatos. Given her place in history, are you all that surprised her only real friend is Death?)
Enemies: Too many to count. There’s her late husband, her sister, That-Bastard-King (Theseus, but she doesn’t like to say his name), the men that died in the war she caused, the families of those warriors, all of the other men that didn’t die but she lied to or manipulated or used to get what she wanted. Helena is a woman walking constantly amidst her ghosts.
Strengths: All of them! (Cunning, humor, determination, reads people well.)
Weaknesses: She’s perfect, silly! (Selfish, stubborn, emotionally manipulative, untrusting, often childish. There’s a great deal of blood on her hands. She isn’t very sorry for some of it.)
Quote: “Why, we haven’t seen each other for the whole of an hour! You’ve probably forgotten already how pretty I am; quick, look again to remind yourself!”
Personality:
For all her pretty chatter, Helena is a tactician at heart. She lived out her formative years in a politically tumultuous climate and learned early on the importance of studying war. Some people are lovers and some people are fighters; Helena is one in the same, bartering her stunning smile and the soft planes of her body for whatever leverage keeps her alive and gives her ammunition against her enemies. She is calculated and cunning, but slow to show that. Nobody ever expects the pretty fool to pull a knife upon them, after all.
She has the sort of smile that promises she’s carrying some hilarious secret nobody else could possibly be in on. If she’s not crafting some elaborate scheme to get what she wants, she’s generally pretty playful. It’s hard to tell which pieces of her are honest and which are constructed as resources, though; if there’s one thing she has learned to do, it’s figure out what a person wants, what they need and then which of those two she’s going to give them if there’s any discrepancy.
Some men have described her as blushing and demure; others have sworn she’s the most wicked woman they’ve ever lain with and they liked it that way. She might bat her eyes and tuck her chin down shyly. She might grin over her shoulder and saunter off. She might tell you that she loves you and then promptly forget your name. Some men like to chase things, some men like to possess them. Some want to hold her tenderly and some want to hurt her. Helena can be anything you’d like, so long as you have something she’d like in return. (And, no, your charming personality isn’t proper compensation. Economics, darling.)
History:
She is nine years old when she finally understands the meaning of the word ‘beauty’. They’re wrong when they say it’s in the eye of the beholder; it’s not. It’s her. It’s the moon’s caress of her milky stomach and the hide-and-go-seek of light in her eyes. Even when the radiance dies and she is sad, she’s lovely. A tragic sort of beauty, her mother will tut when she returns home, to Sparta, and does nothing but lie in bed and hold her legs closed for days on end. Eventually Pollux comes in and sits beside her. “You have to be brave, little Helena,” he whispers. With his coaxing, one day she gets up and she goes outside but every time somebody looks down and smiles at her, says what a pretty little girl!, she tries to fold in on herself a thousand-thousand times until she is too small to be seen.
--
She is thirteen when she learns the meaning of the word ‘power’.
“This is very lovely,” she says of a delicate golden comb, engraved and hand-painted with flowers. “Can I have it?”
“It’s my sister’s,” laments the visiting boy. His sister is off with Clytemnestra somewhere down the hall.
Helena runs her fingers gingerly over the piece. She can feel his eyes upon the lush flesh of her chest, where the gauzy drape of her dress gives way. She bites her lip and smiles a little at him. He looks up at her. “Would you trade it to me?” Helena asks.
“For what?” He can see that she has moved a little closer.
Then her face is right in front of his. “I don’t know,” teases Helena. “Maybe a kiss.” When his brow rises to meet the line of his hair, she presses her soft, pink little mouth to his and she swipes her tongue between his lips.
Two days later, the foreigners are gone and Helena sits to lunch with her sister. Clytemnestra narrows her eyes. “I don’t recognize that comb you’re wearing,” she says. “Is it yours?”
Helena just smiles and daintily flicks her tongue out to catch a little bit of the soup dribbling down her spoon. “Yes,” she replies.
--
She is fifteen when she remembers the word pain. Lying on her back, Pollux at her bedside, her fingers are wrapped so tightly around his, she half-fears she’ll break them. Sweat has formed a second skin down her cheeks and her neck. She screams but Leda whispers, “Shh, you’ll wake Menelaus.” Fuck Menelaus. (Then again, that was what landed her here in the first place.) There is something inside of her, clawing at her, shredding her insides as the midwife pulls the little demon out into the air, squalling like the mouth of hell itself has opened before them.
“It’s a girl,” the woman smiles. “Look at her, my Queen. She’s beautiful.”
Helena turns her face into her brother’s shoulder. “Oh Gods,” she rasps and she weeps.
--
She doesn’t say goodbye to the child when she departs. Helena rarely says good night to her at all, so it would be conspicuous. She has ensured that the King is her favorite, that she is her father’s girl, because then he will love her and take care of her in ways that Leda’s husband never did for Helena. There is only so much a mother can do to protect her young. This is Helena’s gift to her child; indifference. Apathy.
She sets sail with Paris in the dead of night. It is the beginning of Helena’s affair with mortality. Corpses will line up over the next ten years to shake her hand, make sure it’s marked with their blood. The face that launched a thousand ships, they will call her and everyone will marvel at how a woman could be so heartless as to leave her husband and her child, to let good, innocent men sail to their graves for her and a whole city burn in her name.
How romantic, History will croon, and how reckless too that so many men would fight for love. The heart can make fools of us all.
Helena knows a secret though, and it’s this: men do not go to war for love; that is only a pretty cover story. They do it in anger or agony, for glory or for greed.
History doesn’t even get her name right. It’s not to be trusted.
--
When the ships land in Troy, everything is engulfed in a festival of flame. Troy is burning, Troy is burning, she thinks as she flees through the rubble. She can practically feel him breathing down her neck even before he’s caught up to her. Legend has it that when he does, she sheds her dress and he is so blinded by her beauty and his love for her, that Menelaus cannot kill her even after swearing to a hundred times.
In truth, it took a lot more than just that—a little blood, a lot of begging, some time on her knees and on her back. She goes along with it because, above all things, Helena is a survivalist. Maybe a sadist. Life is cruel to her but she loves it desperately despite its abuse.
And a good thing too, because she outlives them all. Theseus, Menelaus, the suitors and soldiers. Some of them she slaughters herself, writing her story over and over again in red. One day she turns the wrong page and there is her mother-in-law and you all know how that is bound to go. Helena finds herself adrift in the ocean. ‘If you like to sail so much, fine; you can do it for the rest of eternity.’
Fine, thinks Helena. I still win. I’m still alive. I’m still their Queen. And it’s true, but her crew and her subjects are only the spirits of the men she slew and as sweet as the song of the sea can be, she can’t even hear it most nights over their taunting.
--
She keeps buying herself more red ink, angry and lonely: a woman bound to a ghost ship.
Then…then everything is quiet.
Thanatos stands on the deck, his arms folded over his chest, one eyebrow raised. “You make my job a living hell some days,” he says. “I’m tired of collecting your bloody men. Can’t you find a new hobby?” She can hear the swish of the wind and the rhythm of waves now. The crew has fallen silent with Death present to tame them.
She isn’t sure how it happens, but one day she wakes up and he is still there with her and she realizes that it’s been at least a few decades since he stepped foot aboard her ship. Sometimes they talk; sometimes they don’t. She calls him ‘The Captain’ cheekily, and The Captain likes his silence. Everyone she has ever known has been afraid of Death, the stench and feel of it but she thinks he smells like clean leather and feels like peace.
“They’re not all afraid to die,” he confides in her one night. The light of a candle warms his face. “But everyone is afraid to die alone.”
“Even you?” she whispers.
His mouth twitches into one of his almost-smiles. “Even me.”
--
When he goes missing, that is her greatest fear: that he is dying, or wilting, or ceasing to be—whatever will happen to him at his end, and that he is alone. She tears apart entire realms to find him, even with Menelaus and Theseus whispering in her ear all the while. Everywhere is noise and chaos and empty space where she wants his body to be, though.
“—Have y’ tried Storybrooke?” asks a gap-toothed man at a secluded port. “Ship passed through here a couple weeks ago. Brought rumors ‘bout a second curse sweepin’ a buncha’ folk off that way again.”
She is losing track of which corners of the world she has searched already; all of the barren places she has been. Part of her wants to start burning them down once she departs, to leave a trail of ash so that she’ll never waste time looking back.
--
Likes: Flattery, attention, people who laugh at her jokes, pretty things, good fun.
Dislikes: Religion, politics, manual labor, being ignored or spoken down to, most other women, a lot of men, children, the elderly, animals. (The last five are sort of bluffs on her part.)
Roleplay Example: See Jefferson!!
Lastly... Where did you hear about us? RPG-Directory! ;D