Skills:
Athletics |
Finesse. These days she's all about dodging and escape. A bit of parkour thrown in the mix to make it interesting. |
2>6 |
Deceit |
Falsehoods are a bit of a game for her. She likes it. Misdirection is more useful, but she is equally talented at them both. |
2>6 |
Might |
Breaking and Lifting. While she prefers to skip out of a fight she can't win, if she can win, it's nice to be able to really do some damage. |
3>6 |
Performance |
Her true passion is music. As a singer/songwriter of the Rock variety, she's not in a genre that will get her on the charts, but she is good with a guitar and knows how to put on a show. |
5 |
Discipline |
Emotional Control. She can keep herself in check. She doesn't show anything she doesn't want to, if she can help it. |
4 |
Fists |
Brawling. She's more attack than defense, since her first defense is a good pair of running shoes. |
4 |
Contacts |
She knows a guy for that. She's got a guy who knows a guy for that. Whatever that is. A 'guy' for every need. |
3 |
Craftsmanship |
Auto mechanic. She picked up the trade along the way. It isn't something she has much of a passion for, but she can fix up cars and keep them running. |
3 |
Intimidation |
Stare Downs and Threats. Harper likes to keep people scared of her, from time to time. It helps the image. And getting her way. |
2 |
Resources |
Money Money Money. She likes her money, even if she can't always hang onto it for long. She knows how to get it, that much is for sure. |
2 |
Alertness |
Combat Initiative. Strike first, strike hard. Or else get a head start in the escaping part. |
1 |
Conviction |
Mental Fortitude. She doesn't like psych 101, okay? And she's got her stubbornness to back her up. |
1 |
Driving |
It's LA. Gotta know how to drive and especially know how to drive around thousands of other people who may not exactly be very good at it in a city with tight streets and crowded freeways. |
1 |
Endurance |
She's not bad at taking a beating, if she has to, but golly she would prefer not to. |
1 |
Abilities:
Shadow Cloak |
6 |
Supernatural Sense: Health |
Harper can get a general sense of a target's health. She can't give you a diagnosis, but she gets a general understanding. Infection, virus, tumor, open wound, mental illness, etc, she can feel the blips in an unhealthy body. |
6 |
Narcotic Bite |
6 |
Growing up in privilege has its perks. Growing up in privilege in LA, though, is a special kind of perk. Harper never wanted for anything and with two busy parents working hard and hardly seeing her in her youth, she was taken care of by nannies and housekeepers. Her parents bribed their guilt away by giving her gifts and not being to firm with the idea of discipline. She always got exactly what she wanted. It wasn't much of a problem until those troublesome teen years. She'd been close to her housekeeper's son, Eli, since they were little, a fact her parents didn't know about, but the onset of hormones and desires and rebelliousness had them stepping beyond friendship and into romance. That was a fact they tried to keep from all the adults around the house, but as sexual heat and young love are two things you can't hide for long, it all came out eventually. She was seventeen when she and her parents entered a long fight about Eli, months and months long.
When they were both eighteen, Eli proposed and Harper accepted. The general consensus was that they were high on forbidden romances, rebellion and too much Romeo and Juliet, but the young couple were firm about the fact that they were in love. Her parents threatened to cut her off if she didn't come around to their way of thinking, assuming she wouldn't take to the idea of poverty well. They underestimated her stubbornness, as well as her depth of feeling. She packed her things and left with Eli, off to the much harder parts of LA to make their own way in the world.
She cried the first night.
Once they got married and moved into an apartment crappier than she even knew existed, she eased into it. It was hard, Living On A Prayer as they were, with Eli working in a mechanic's shop and her playing her guitar at seedy clubs with far too many customers prone to groping, but they were happy. She began to understand that desire got them into the paycheck-to-paycheck situation they were in, but the bond they had got them through it.
The one thing of value they owned was the ring Eli had given to Harper when they got married. Over the first year, he got steadily more paranoid of her losing it somewhere. Down the sink, whatever. By the time their first anniversary rolled around, she'd taken to wearing it around her neck on a chain tucked into her shirt. On her hand was a stand-in, a simple band. It may have been indulging his paranoia, but she didn't mind not having an expensive piece of jewelry out in public view. Especially with the reveal of the Fey wandering the world. It made things harder for her, when she'd look out on the dance floor of some club and see them out there among the masses. Unsettling.
By their 3rd anniversary, though, the steady life the pair had fought for came to a screeching halt. Harper got the call at work one night, that she needed to come to the hospital to see if she could identify Eli's body.
She drove to the hospital, feeling like everything around her was muted. Like she was underwater. People honked at her, nurses talked to her, someone took her elbow to guide her along, people explained things to her, warned her, tried to prepare her. But nothing sank in until she was looking at Eli's body. It was torn up, broken. They only wanted to show her his face, which was bad enough, but she ripped back the rest of the sheet to see the full extent of the damage. Looked like wild dogs, they'd said.
No one wanted to say what they were all thinking. The Fey were still too new, too frightening. Too unknown. But Harper knew. People started to inch away from her, the more obsessed she got with odd deaths around the city. Clippings from news articles, old and new, made their way to a large corkboard in the apartment she couldn't really afford on her own. She started picking fights, drinking too much and giving the first Fey she saw a shove. Her father stepped back into her life around that time, when someone — just a normal someone — put her in the hospital. But he used it. Her, Eli, pictures of them both, beaten to hell and torn to bits, made it into the public consciousness with her father as a rallying voice to put down some control on these ticking timebombs that walked among them. He campaigned and she was put into an institution to deal with her grief and the anger and depression that plagued her.
When she had confronted her feelings to the satisfaction of the staff, she was let loose with pills and an appointment with a therapist. Her father got her a nicer apartment, although nothing too posh. She insisted on making her own way just as much as he insisted that she accept his help. They came to an understanding. But it was around that time when her music really started to resonate with people. It was sad, but determined. It was full of an addictive sort of pain.
She hoped it had been her sadness that drew in the Vampire that sired her, like in the movies, but in reality, it was a bit more likely that it was a stab at her father. His own daughter turned into the very begins he hated the most. And when confronted with changing his stance and accepting his daughter for what she now was, he opted to go the other way. He shoved money at her and shoved her out the door, that being the last time she saw him in person. And the last time he saw her.
That anger that her therapist had always been so concerned about flared up. It stomped her depression down into a little hole, never to be confronted honestly again, and she took her new self, new power and newly stoked fire and recreated herself. Since then, she's been enjoying a steady, local sort of fame, complete with a stock of willing groupies and plenty of people stepping out of her way. There's a begrudging acknowledgement that her father hasn't tracked her down and tossed her in a cell somewhere, but rather than giving him any benefit of any doubt, she assumes it's a tactic to keep anyone from remembering that he has a daughter and finding out she's a vamp. That would just blow his house of cards right off the table.
The thing about fame is, it makes people want to be close to you. The thing about infamy is, it makes people want to be close to you when they know they shouldn't. Harper wouldn't say she's a bad person, but she isn't claiming any goodness, either. She looks out for number one. It's been a long time since she's had anyone she'd even consider a number two, let alone displacing her from her own pedestal. Oddly enough, her immortality has made her hyper-aware of the weaknesses she now possesses, and wary of losing that vague promise of eternity ahead of her. She has less of an immortality complex now than she ever did before. It comes down to the fact that her candy center is made up of pessimism and a deep well of depression she can't climb out of, but doesn't like to admit exists.
Apathy is her mood of choice, and most times, she's hard-pressed to care about anything but her own survival and her own amusement. But amusement is a goal she chases, and finds in the loyal fans she has flitting about. She's not a household name, and she wants to keep it that way.
As much as she's stubborn, distant and cynical, she has an engaging candidness to her. It fits well with the charm she siphons from the mystery of being a vampire and the persona she uses on stage, which teeters somewhere between scary and sexy. But more so the former, as she does have a reputation for being aggressive. It may or may not be true, but she doesn't mind it being assumed. Better that than everyone assuming she's weak, on account of those big, gaping emotional wounds she's yet bothered to deal with.