I am not a number (Baedal Application)

[emptychamber]

Character Name: Emily Finch
Username: emptychamber
Fandom: Original
Played By: Rachel Weisz

Original Character Section
Physical Description:
Emily is a woman in her early-to-mid twenties. Given her work, her personal style is a bit fluid, but she favors a mod-influenced look that’s on the cusp of being outdated back home for her. She has dark brown hair, which she wears generally sleek but flipped at the bottom. (Think Avengers-era Diana Rigg.) Her eyes are hazel, rather large and expressive. Her build is curvy, but fit; she’s clearly in quite good shape for those who care to look, and seems like she’d be quick on her feet. Her mannerisms, when she’s at ease, are frank and echo those of her father to a degree of which she’s not always aware, as if she has to borrow his toughness any time she’s not playing a part.

Sexuality:
Emily isn’t shy about using her sexuality for work, or to get people to do things for her. She does enjoy sex, but generally sees it as a means to an end - bonding someone to her, making them more hesitant to do her harm, getting them to be more likely to tell her things, etc. She’s not terribly attached to monogamy, but realizes other people are, so takes care to preserve at least the appearance of it in most cases where she plans to see someone more than once. She’s only slept with men thus far, but would be open to sleeping with other genders if the chance arose and it seemed advantageous. As the above (and her bio below) might imply, she’s not uncaring but is kind of shit with things like trust and intimacy - at least when flowing both ways.

World Information:
Emily’s world started out similar to ours, with a very slight nudge toward the supernatural. She wouldn’t believe in vampires or fairies easily back home, but knows witches and sorcerers exist, and she’d find ancient Egyptian curses very plausible. There aren’t non-human creatures living in the world, at least as far as she’s ever heard, but magic is rumoured widely, and known for a fact in the higher circles.

It’s 1971 and the world is in the midst of a Cold War. Rather than nuclear weapons, however, it’s an arms race to control and understand magic. America and the UK jointly ended WWII by unleashing three sorcerers on Tokyo and four on Berlin, though the official story was somewhat more full of bombs and heroic raids and less mind control and melting through bunker doors. Stalin, furious that Russia had been kept out of the war-ending attacks, broke off diplomatic relations America and the UK; it was shortly revealed that he’d created a panel of magical advisers of his own - seven witches, whose power was rumored to be enormous. After Stalin’s death, word on the street was that the witches were effectively running the country; Emily doesn’t know whether or not this is true, and very few do.

Thus, through the 50s and 60s into the early 70s Emily inhabits, a Cold War mirroring the one in our world arose, though it is in many ways informed more by fiction than fact. Emily’s world is loosely based on the puplier pop culture representations of Cold War espionage - more classic James Bond than Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. As Thomas Finch’s world was, hers is a pastiche, with a pinch of urban fantasy; hers is simply moved up from noir to spy stories.

History:
Emily Finch was born in 1948. Her father was Thomas Finch, an ex-cop and private investigator. He told Emily that her mother’s name was Ivy, that she was dead, and refused to be drawn on the topic any further.

Emily grew up in the Bronx. Though her dad still took a PI gig now and then when someone sought him out specifically, he was mostly retired from detective work. His steady job was fixing cars, and Emily thought nothing of it when he’d occasionally leave her with a friend for a few days. She had no extended family, as far as she knew; it was just her and her dad, but they were very close. As she grew, she suspected there was some secret about her father’s past - something they’d specifically run away from - but her attempts to find out indirectly were fruitless and she knew better than to directly ask.

Once she was old enough to understand, he did begin teaching her about her powers; both how to use them and how to keep them hidden from others. It wasn’t the secret, but it was a secret, and she was delighted to share it with him. Things just fell into place for both Finches, and that wasn’t a crime, but being actively supernatural could draw the wrong kind of attention.

When Emily was 14, her father came home one day unsmiling and unhesitant. He informed her that he was sending her to school in England. Out of the blue, this came as quite a shock; she’d no idea he had the money for that sort of thing, for one. They had always had enough to eat, but they’d been firmly blue-collar and lived like it. For another, she protested loudly the idea of being so far away from him. He, however, was implacable, and said that she would be better off with a good education and out of the turmoil that was beginning to grow on the streets of New York City.

He could and did make her go, and she resented it a great deal. Soon after she arrived, however, a woman named Peggy Atkinson got in touch. Peggy had been a friend of her father’s or, more accurately, of her uncle Bobby’s in the war. Emily knew nothing about Bobby other than that he’d once existed and died in France; it turns out that Peggy had been assigned to his aviation unit due to her ability to influence air currents. She and Bobby had become close, and she and Thomas had stayed in loose touch ever since. Thomas, knowing Emily had talents beyond his own, had asked Peggy to train her in use of them. He hadn’t told Peggy about her luck powers, but had mentioned she had a skill that would need nurturing.

So, during her public school education in England, Emily also learned about her ability to manipulate and influence metal. During her school years, she lost her Bronx accent; her ear was quite good, and while she normally favored a then “Hollywood style” Mid-Atlantic speech pattern, she could pass for English out and about with strangers if she chose. She also convinced Peggy to let her learn to handle a gun. (She’d long ago learned how to fight with knives, as Thomas believed luck alone was no self-defense plan, even supernatural luck).

It turned out that it was not as hard to convince Peggy as it might have been; the older woman was working with MI6, and the combination of Emily’s supernatural talent, her adaptability and her intelligence meant that the young woman was being groomed as much as trained. When she was 17, she was approached by a joint department, with members in both MI6 and the CIA, that focused on using supernatural abilities for espionage.

Emily hesitated to take something that would keep her so far away from her father - she hadn’t seen him in person since leaving for England, though they’d written (at sometimes long intervals), and he’d called her on her birthdays, though he’d turned a deaf ear to her requests to come home for vacations. However, while she was hesitating over her career offer, she received word that her father had died under questionable circumstances.

Angry and grieving, she took the spy job. She spent six months in training, a year and a half in supervised field work, and has been a full agent for three years now. She’s still young and new, but her talents are remarkable, and she’s done quite a lot in a short time. Given the mysterious circumstances - and that they never found a body - she doesn’t believe her father is dead, but she feels she needs more skills and more autonomy before she can go after him. She hopes, if he’s in trouble, he can hang on that long.

When she comes to Baedal, she’d been on her way to East Germany to start a new assignment.

Powers:
Emily, like her father, influences probability fields in her favor. Though it happens at a low-level naturally, her father taught her some measure of control. The harder she “pushes,” the more unlikely a result she can cause; if she pushes too hard, the ability can occasionally backfire, making the odds tilt against her instead. Generally, she saves this ability for dire situations, as it tends to draw the attention of empaths and other magic users if used too liberally.

In addition, she has an affinity for metal, allowing her to manipulate it with an exercise of will. Physically smaller objects are easier for her to manipulate; she’s good with bullets, knives, and locks. She can, however, sometimes manage bigger things or focus on component parts of bigger things. (For example, she couldn’t stop a tank, but given a few moments of focus, she could probably bend the barrel of its main gun so it wouldn’t fire or, if she were familiar with the model, could shift parts of the engine so it would break down abruptly.) She’s much less shy about this ability than her other one, and at home, her bosses know about it and use it tactically. (They don’t know about the probability manipulation.)

A colleague has told her she probably has the ability to learn practical magic, as it’s commonly termed - the kind of magic that takes study - but she’s not especially interested, as it would probably mean giving up field work and going into research.

Talents/Abilities::
As touched upon above she’s a trained, if relatively green, field agent. She’s proficient with handguns, more than proficient with knives, and knows basic hand to hand. In addition, she’s quite good with both accents and languages; she’s fluent in England, but is also proficient in French and Russian, and more than conversational in German. Her ear for accents has also fooled some, in passing, into thinking she’s more or less fluent than she is. She’s quite a good liar, and a decent hand a poker, whist and baccarat.

Personality:
Part of what makes Emily interesting to play is that, at this stage, she’s still very plastic in a lot of ways. She’s always felt like an outsider; when she was young, she and her father were set apart by their talent and by choice, and then he chose to ship her away. Then she was an outsider due to her nationality, her accent, and her social class - even if her father could pay for her tuition, he didn’t have much extra to burn on non-uniform clothes or pocket money. She likes company, but she always maintains an inner sense that she’s not like those around her.

That said, she’s become very practiced at mimicking the outward signifiers that would make her like everyone else. These can range from the obvious, like her accent, to the way she jokes or flirts to the body language she uses. Part of this is simple defense mechanism, but more and more it’s deliberate.

She has problems with trust and intimacy - not just sexually, as noted above, but in general. She does trust eventually, given enough time and reinforcement. She mostly trusted Peggy, and she trusted her father. But even those she loves most can’t be relied upon, and it became clear in her own mind early that she would need to take care of herself.

In Baedal, I would love to explore what it would take her to get close to someone, and what she would do in a world where looking for her father is no longer an option (or a problem, depending on one’s point of view). I think it will also be fun to subvert a lot of the more traditionally male spy tropes by applying them to a female character in a world where the fantastical/fictional element has shifted gender dynamics somewhat from where they were in the early 70s in our world.

Overall, on first meeting, Emily would seem clever, engaging and very charismatic, but longer exposure would suggest she resists being pinned down and that she can change wildly in how she appears depending on her surroundings.

Object:
A framed photograph of her father and herself; she is possibly four or five, and it’s one of very few that he was in rather than taking.

Reason for playing:
Emily’s been in my head recently, and I think she’d be a good fit for a large game with a fair amount of plot. She’s an active character, and often goes out and catalyzes things, which is something my current cast is missing; likewise, she is outgoing by nature, and hopefully this can lead to interacting with players and characters I so far haven’t! I enjoy the world she and her dad come from, and I didn’t get to play Thomas very long before, so I’d like to revisit it.

Gods:
Rundas is the clear choice, given her powers. Luck is kind of Emily’s thing.