Gabriel Octavia Folsom
Sept 7, 2014 14:59:58 GMT -7
Post by Atmosphere on Sept 7, 2014 14:59:58 GMT -7
Player handle: BasilBacillus
Character name: Gabriel Octavia Folsom
Birth-date: 03/08/1961
Species: Vampire
Date of Embrace: March 1st, 1984 (at 23 years old)
Clan/Bloodline: Brujah
Generation: 11th
Sect: Anarch
Derangements: Generalized Anxiety Disorder, with Depersonalization/Derealization as comorbids.
•Generalized Anxiety disorder, according to DSM V:
•Depersonalization:
Disciplines: Celerity, Potence, and Presence.
•Celerity:
Appearance:
Gabriel was always pretty, yes, but because of her habits in life, she doesn't look altogether healthy. In fact, she doesn't look very healthy at all. She's tallish for a woman, a Latina in particular, with spindly limbs and bones especially defined beneath the skin. Her cheeks are sunken, and her eyes look eternally hungry for sleep and sustenance. The colors in her eyes remain consistent; a light, saturated brown. Her hair is dark, nearly black, and falls in waves to the middle of her back. Her style of dress really depends on her mood; if she's feeling confident, she might go for something more flashy--perhaps a little black dress and heels to match. If she's got work to do, or feels a little more like a wallflower, she might dress in plain old jeans, t-shirt, maybe a jacket. She has an affinity for leather and patches, as well as biker boots.
Haven:
Gabriel lives in a work in progress that will never be complete, although it's just passable enough to seem as though the unfinished parts were designed that way on purpose. Walls and flooring into the main room are constructed of cheap plywood, smoothed with a few layer of lacquer and plastic apoxy, turning into faded brick once it stretches around the couch and into the rest of the house. The brick stretches even to the bedroom, whose windows are covered in a tinted black screen and with thick black curtains as an extra safety precaution. While she doesn't really use the bathroom, it is still there. Sleek black tile against beige walls are finished with a unique wooden barring just below the fluorescent lights and cast impressive shadows. Furniture is simple, almost spartan, and there is a very large, very full bookshelf along the back wall of the living room. Artwork is sparse, as it is difficult to hang frames on brick walls. The apartment is located in South Phoenix.
Story:
In 1961, a child was born to George and Maialen Folsom in Houston, Texas. Her mother’s citizenship was ensured only by her marriage to George a year earlier after he brought her back from Peru, where he had been on holiday. He spent an entire week with Maialen, who had been a cocktail waitress at the time, before agreeing to bring her home with him. When she became pregnant, they both hoped for a boy, and Maia was sure it would be. They went so far as to name the child before the sex was ever confirmed, and stayed true to that wishful thinking even when they were awarded a little girl instead. George was never quite satisfied with the fact that God had given him a child who would never be able to help him with the demands of physical labor around the house, and so treated Gabriel as though she were a male child anyway.
She was given boy’s clothes to wear, boy’s toys to play with, and taught the arts of mechanics and shooting from a very young age. Her hair was even cut in the style of her father’s, down to the jaw line, and she was mistaken for a male throughout her childhood. This suited her just fine, because even if she had the choice, she would have chosen to play with trains and hot wheels over dolls and ponies anyway. She admired her father endlessly despite his seemingly consistent disdain for her work, wanting only to somehow reach the level of excellence that he required to be proud. Her mother, however, was an ever-present source of support and guidance, and while she didn’t advocate Gabriel’s masculine tendencies, she would never go against George’s wishes for her upbringing. In the background, Maialen would attempt to teach her how to apply makeup, how to select material colors, and how to sew—although it was to no avail. Gabriel loved her mother, but she didn’t love her mother’s preferences.
Going through school as a tom boy at this age wasn’t easy. She wanted to play with the boys, and would even force her way into games—but they didn’t like her. They would only allow her to play when the teachers forced them to, although they would usually change activities shortly thereafter. The same usually went for the girls when Gabriel normally broke down and tried to engage in their activities. She was an outcast, but did find her place among the other children who were excluded from general group activities. There were a total of four children who could never find their way into the main chunk of children, and these would also be the people who found themselves involved with the vindictive pranks that Gabriel enjoyed pulling in response to static rejection. The other children joined, but when detention was dealt, they would be disallowed to hang out with her. She became a problem child that her parents weren’t sure how to handle.
As she got older, she got into fights with the other kids at school—well into high school, as a matter of fact. Mostly, it was over the mean things that they would do to each other. Particularly to the kids who were at a disadvantage. The rest, however, she brought upon herself when she would try to pay someone back. Embarrassing, but mostly harmless pranks would bring a rain of torment down upon her, especially when she practiced pranks like stealing people’s clothes from the locker room while they were showering. She did very little school work around this time, although she did find a safe, concealed place to stay and read in the library during most of her class periods. Any real work was done over the summer, when she would retake the classes she failed because she wasn’t there. She did want to graduate, but she never did enjoy the work involved—it was far beneath her potential level of education.
Around senior year, Gabriel became mixed up in a crowd of kids she’d never really had the opportunity to know in her years at school; somehow, they ended up in different classes, with different teachers, or never saw one another because they weren’t at school very often. One, in particular, was a notoriously shady boy—James—he dealt in just about anything the people at school were willing to buy. He introduced Gabriel, who was still quite naïve at this point, to weed and the business of selling it. Acid and shrooms were starting to trend around the school now as well. Where she was an outcast before, she was now being invited to parties because of the suspicion that she might be carrying, and willing to sell. She was far to bitter to appreciate it now, but she did enjoy the money made by poisoning the kids who had created the person she became.
The girl managed to graduate, but only by the skin of her teeth. She lost her connection with the dealers she had befriended once every graduated, as they all seemed to disappear to corners of the country where business might boom with the Punk movement. She tried to work minimum wage jobs to get by, rather disinterested in college on the whole, but found that she would never be able to even move out of her parents’ house on what she was making—and they desperately wanted her out. George was disappointed on the whole, and Maialen was overwhelmed. They had no idea she had gotten involved in the distribution of recreational drugs, but they knew she was involved in something less than savory. She quit the burger joint that served as her first legitimate job and picked up another at an alternative clothing store, where she found her reentry into the drug trade.
This would be the first time she ever got along with people of her own gender, but only because they had similar interests for the most part. The girls who worked at the store had the supply, but not the right connections or business model to create a trade that would make any capital. They sold weed, tabs, shrooms—everything at half the price it could potentially fetch, in the wrong areas of town. Gabriel took it upon herself to fix this system. Sandy and Michelle, her coworkers in more than one respect, began to see a difference; their new associate’s name was dropped more than once to their supplier. She’d effectively impressed her superiors, made the three of them moderately wealthy for women in their early twenties, and created a name for herself among the best clubs and club-goers in the area. She was the face of their business, after all.
It was finally requested through Michelle that their supplier be allowed to meet Gabriel, and while she was hesitant, there was no harm in trying to move up the ladder. This was better than any office job, even with the risk of jail involved. She was allowed to feel a thrill while providing the beautiful people with complete freedom of which substances entered their bodies, a feeling that she was deeply satisfied with for more reasons than the underlying payout. Their main supplier, a businessman who worked in the heart of Houston, was more than interested when she shared this information with him—because she wasn’t a pawn, she actually enjoyed her job and wanted to continue to improve at it. She was a natural salesperson, a woman with a silver tongue who knew what to say to who to get their product on the street. The man informed her that his name was Maxwell, then told her how she could reach him directly. He wanted her to work as a distributor directly under him.
She took the job, and soon enough, she was able to move out into a small condo of her own. Gabriel was a middleman now, delivering product to those who would be giving sales pitches rather than dealing with street clientele directly. Maxwell let her run at her own pricing, and continued to be impressed with how well she could sell an inflated item—not to mention how many people were now in his debt. They had their own business model now, with he as the head, and Gabriel as the face of the business. It was about a year after she took this promotion that he would reveal his true nature to her, as a vampire of clan Brujah, a supernatural being. He would persuade her, the way kindred to tend to, that it was perfectly safe before going on to make her his ghoul.
They were partners on the surface, but the relationship beneath that was of Master and Pet. Gabriel managed to stay clean until now, where she found that Maxwell’s blood was sweeter than any wine and more potent than the purest cocaine. He was generous, as far as masters went, and taught her the common lore behind their clan. He didn’t know everything, but the bits that were as well known as folk tales were the bits that fascinated her—particularly for his lack of knowledge and the holes this caused n his storytelling. She loved the idea that he was some kind of warrior poet and she had the potential to become this, although she never voiced this for fear that he might change his mind. She began to learn how to control supernatural power, while also learning what it was to have a true addiction.
Their business flourished without incident for a time until their district was threatened, until a new dealer began to sell on their stomping grounds. It was tense at first, but when all hell broke loose, it became an all out war in the shadier Houston neighborhoods. Maxwell was afraid they would lose their business for fear of their competition seeking retribution, and Gabriel was distraught by her master’s concern. She took to the streets again for the first time since her promotion to gather information on who they were up against, using a spare chunk of money and targeting a dealer who was clearly using his own supply. He knew the main distributor for their business, had even run errands for him. It turned out it was the same boy who introduced her to this line of work, James.
It was easy enough to hand this dealer her phone number with a message for James the next time he saw him, and within a week, her former friend had already called her twice. It was on his third call that she finally picked up and agreed to meet with him to discuss business, but she wasn’t entirely interested in buying from him—the last thing she wanted was to be his customer. Instead, when she met him at his apartment up town, she had a gun tucked into the back of her jeans. Once she was inside, she didn’t hesitate to blow his brains out, and it was unlikely that he ever expected a thing until the barrel was already between his eyes.
She slunk back home thinking she would be punished; she shouldn’t have done such a reckless thing without Maxwell’s permission, shouldn’t have risked exposure in such a way. However, the fact that she’d just eliminated the second most popular distributor in the city only proved to raise his spirits; it was only days after this incident that he would decide she was worthy of embrace. She died and was reborn on September 24th, 1984.
The proceeding years were spent mastering her disciplines, focusing primarily on Presence and Potence over Celerity. Gabriel was by no means a natural, but she was a quick learner, and they came more quickly to her than most Brujah. She had an advantage in the fact that she knew her sire, where most of their ilk were doomed to find their own way or perish. Ties had been cut with her family long ago, leaving very little to worry about in that respect. Using her disciplines, she became more and more the mouth piece for her sire—although she started to find that the things he said were often contradictory or hypocritical, even colored more brightly for one group of people than the other. She was being used as a pawn in a great deception, and when she confronted Maxwell about the issue, he sent her elsewhere to keep her from making too much noise about it.
Early into 2007, she settled into Phoenix, Arizona. She didn’t know anyone here, had no contacts here, but had once heard of the Anarch presence that had a foothold in the area from a stranger passing through their domain. She didn’t have much of anywhere else to go, and could choose just about anywhere from the sale of her condo and all of her belongings—not to mention what was in her savings. Phoenix seemed to be common sense, an opportunity to meet more of her Anarch brethren. Houston was not a place where one could fit their foot in the door, not anymore.
Gabriel moved into a newly renovated apartment in South Phoenix, taking root as soon as she could in the community at large. She knew where to search and found the crowd she was looking for almost immediately, being a pretty petite girl in a community where heroin chic was valued above all else. Within a few years, she’d ingrained herself into the underground economy, making herself invaluable. Her ideas helped keep a dying trade afloat in the area, and while it did attract a less than savory crowd, that crowd fell in line with the rest of her clientele. She was back on her way up the ladder, feeling at home again in the only business she’d ever truly know—although now, on her own.
Miscellany:
Gabriel met Agustin around 2010, upon his arrival into the city and the trade.
Character name: Gabriel Octavia Folsom
Birth-date: 03/08/1961
Species: Vampire
Date of Embrace: March 1st, 1984 (at 23 years old)
Clan/Bloodline: Brujah
Generation: 11th
Sect: Anarch
Derangements: Generalized Anxiety Disorder, with Depersonalization/Derealization as comorbids.
•Generalized Anxiety disorder, according to DSM V:
Generalized anxiety disorder is characterized by persistent, excessive, and unrealistic worry about everyday things.
People with the disorder, which is also referred to as GAD, experience exaggerated worry and tension, often expecting the worst, even when there is no apparent reason for concern. They anticipate disaster and are overly concerned about money, health, family, work, or other issues. GAD is diagnosed when a person worries excessively about a variety of everyday problems for at least 6 months.
•Derealization:
Derealization is an alteration in the perception of the external world so that it seems unreal. Other symptoms include feeling as though one's environment is lacking in spontaneity, emotional coloring and depth. It is a dissociative symptom of many conditions, such as psychiatric and neurological disorders, and not a standalone disorder. (A comorbid disorder.)
•Depersonalization:
Common descriptions of symptoms from sufferers include feeling disconnected from one's physicality or body, feeling detached from one's own thoughts or emotions, feeling as if one is disconnected from reality, and a sense of feeling as if one is dreaming. In some cases, a person may feel an inability to accept their reflection as their own, or may even have out-of-body experiences. The disorder can also be described as suffering from recurrent episodes of surreal experiences, which may in some cases be reminiscent of panic attacks.
Depersonalization and Derealization tend to go hand in hand, not only with each other, but with anxiety and depression disorders. These descriptions are summaries of DSM-V definitions.
Depersonalization and Derealization tend to go hand in hand, not only with each other, but with anxiety and depression disorders. These descriptions are summaries of DSM-V definitions.
Disciplines: Celerity, Potence, and Presence.
•Celerity:
Supernatural speed said to make the world around the user move at a snail's pace. Stressors tend to cause Celerity to function at a more effective rate.
•Potence:
Incredible strength. Potence can cause the user to jump great distances and attack with terrifying force.
•Presence:
Presence gives the user the ability to sway rooms full of people; it gives power in the art of politics, rallying troops, convincing the audience to agree with the speaker. It makes the user the center of attention.
Appearance:
Gabriel was always pretty, yes, but because of her habits in life, she doesn't look altogether healthy. In fact, she doesn't look very healthy at all. She's tallish for a woman, a Latina in particular, with spindly limbs and bones especially defined beneath the skin. Her cheeks are sunken, and her eyes look eternally hungry for sleep and sustenance. The colors in her eyes remain consistent; a light, saturated brown. Her hair is dark, nearly black, and falls in waves to the middle of her back. Her style of dress really depends on her mood; if she's feeling confident, she might go for something more flashy--perhaps a little black dress and heels to match. If she's got work to do, or feels a little more like a wallflower, she might dress in plain old jeans, t-shirt, maybe a jacket. She has an affinity for leather and patches, as well as biker boots.
Haven:
Gabriel lives in a work in progress that will never be complete, although it's just passable enough to seem as though the unfinished parts were designed that way on purpose. Walls and flooring into the main room are constructed of cheap plywood, smoothed with a few layer of lacquer and plastic apoxy, turning into faded brick once it stretches around the couch and into the rest of the house. The brick stretches even to the bedroom, whose windows are covered in a tinted black screen and with thick black curtains as an extra safety precaution. While she doesn't really use the bathroom, it is still there. Sleek black tile against beige walls are finished with a unique wooden barring just below the fluorescent lights and cast impressive shadows. Furniture is simple, almost spartan, and there is a very large, very full bookshelf along the back wall of the living room. Artwork is sparse, as it is difficult to hang frames on brick walls. The apartment is located in South Phoenix.
Story:
In 1961, a child was born to George and Maialen Folsom in Houston, Texas. Her mother’s citizenship was ensured only by her marriage to George a year earlier after he brought her back from Peru, where he had been on holiday. He spent an entire week with Maialen, who had been a cocktail waitress at the time, before agreeing to bring her home with him. When she became pregnant, they both hoped for a boy, and Maia was sure it would be. They went so far as to name the child before the sex was ever confirmed, and stayed true to that wishful thinking even when they were awarded a little girl instead. George was never quite satisfied with the fact that God had given him a child who would never be able to help him with the demands of physical labor around the house, and so treated Gabriel as though she were a male child anyway.
She was given boy’s clothes to wear, boy’s toys to play with, and taught the arts of mechanics and shooting from a very young age. Her hair was even cut in the style of her father’s, down to the jaw line, and she was mistaken for a male throughout her childhood. This suited her just fine, because even if she had the choice, she would have chosen to play with trains and hot wheels over dolls and ponies anyway. She admired her father endlessly despite his seemingly consistent disdain for her work, wanting only to somehow reach the level of excellence that he required to be proud. Her mother, however, was an ever-present source of support and guidance, and while she didn’t advocate Gabriel’s masculine tendencies, she would never go against George’s wishes for her upbringing. In the background, Maialen would attempt to teach her how to apply makeup, how to select material colors, and how to sew—although it was to no avail. Gabriel loved her mother, but she didn’t love her mother’s preferences.
Going through school as a tom boy at this age wasn’t easy. She wanted to play with the boys, and would even force her way into games—but they didn’t like her. They would only allow her to play when the teachers forced them to, although they would usually change activities shortly thereafter. The same usually went for the girls when Gabriel normally broke down and tried to engage in their activities. She was an outcast, but did find her place among the other children who were excluded from general group activities. There were a total of four children who could never find their way into the main chunk of children, and these would also be the people who found themselves involved with the vindictive pranks that Gabriel enjoyed pulling in response to static rejection. The other children joined, but when detention was dealt, they would be disallowed to hang out with her. She became a problem child that her parents weren’t sure how to handle.
As she got older, she got into fights with the other kids at school—well into high school, as a matter of fact. Mostly, it was over the mean things that they would do to each other. Particularly to the kids who were at a disadvantage. The rest, however, she brought upon herself when she would try to pay someone back. Embarrassing, but mostly harmless pranks would bring a rain of torment down upon her, especially when she practiced pranks like stealing people’s clothes from the locker room while they were showering. She did very little school work around this time, although she did find a safe, concealed place to stay and read in the library during most of her class periods. Any real work was done over the summer, when she would retake the classes she failed because she wasn’t there. She did want to graduate, but she never did enjoy the work involved—it was far beneath her potential level of education.
Around senior year, Gabriel became mixed up in a crowd of kids she’d never really had the opportunity to know in her years at school; somehow, they ended up in different classes, with different teachers, or never saw one another because they weren’t at school very often. One, in particular, was a notoriously shady boy—James—he dealt in just about anything the people at school were willing to buy. He introduced Gabriel, who was still quite naïve at this point, to weed and the business of selling it. Acid and shrooms were starting to trend around the school now as well. Where she was an outcast before, she was now being invited to parties because of the suspicion that she might be carrying, and willing to sell. She was far to bitter to appreciate it now, but she did enjoy the money made by poisoning the kids who had created the person she became.
The girl managed to graduate, but only by the skin of her teeth. She lost her connection with the dealers she had befriended once every graduated, as they all seemed to disappear to corners of the country where business might boom with the Punk movement. She tried to work minimum wage jobs to get by, rather disinterested in college on the whole, but found that she would never be able to even move out of her parents’ house on what she was making—and they desperately wanted her out. George was disappointed on the whole, and Maialen was overwhelmed. They had no idea she had gotten involved in the distribution of recreational drugs, but they knew she was involved in something less than savory. She quit the burger joint that served as her first legitimate job and picked up another at an alternative clothing store, where she found her reentry into the drug trade.
This would be the first time she ever got along with people of her own gender, but only because they had similar interests for the most part. The girls who worked at the store had the supply, but not the right connections or business model to create a trade that would make any capital. They sold weed, tabs, shrooms—everything at half the price it could potentially fetch, in the wrong areas of town. Gabriel took it upon herself to fix this system. Sandy and Michelle, her coworkers in more than one respect, began to see a difference; their new associate’s name was dropped more than once to their supplier. She’d effectively impressed her superiors, made the three of them moderately wealthy for women in their early twenties, and created a name for herself among the best clubs and club-goers in the area. She was the face of their business, after all.
It was finally requested through Michelle that their supplier be allowed to meet Gabriel, and while she was hesitant, there was no harm in trying to move up the ladder. This was better than any office job, even with the risk of jail involved. She was allowed to feel a thrill while providing the beautiful people with complete freedom of which substances entered their bodies, a feeling that she was deeply satisfied with for more reasons than the underlying payout. Their main supplier, a businessman who worked in the heart of Houston, was more than interested when she shared this information with him—because she wasn’t a pawn, she actually enjoyed her job and wanted to continue to improve at it. She was a natural salesperson, a woman with a silver tongue who knew what to say to who to get their product on the street. The man informed her that his name was Maxwell, then told her how she could reach him directly. He wanted her to work as a distributor directly under him.
She took the job, and soon enough, she was able to move out into a small condo of her own. Gabriel was a middleman now, delivering product to those who would be giving sales pitches rather than dealing with street clientele directly. Maxwell let her run at her own pricing, and continued to be impressed with how well she could sell an inflated item—not to mention how many people were now in his debt. They had their own business model now, with he as the head, and Gabriel as the face of the business. It was about a year after she took this promotion that he would reveal his true nature to her, as a vampire of clan Brujah, a supernatural being. He would persuade her, the way kindred to tend to, that it was perfectly safe before going on to make her his ghoul.
They were partners on the surface, but the relationship beneath that was of Master and Pet. Gabriel managed to stay clean until now, where she found that Maxwell’s blood was sweeter than any wine and more potent than the purest cocaine. He was generous, as far as masters went, and taught her the common lore behind their clan. He didn’t know everything, but the bits that were as well known as folk tales were the bits that fascinated her—particularly for his lack of knowledge and the holes this caused n his storytelling. She loved the idea that he was some kind of warrior poet and she had the potential to become this, although she never voiced this for fear that he might change his mind. She began to learn how to control supernatural power, while also learning what it was to have a true addiction.
Their business flourished without incident for a time until their district was threatened, until a new dealer began to sell on their stomping grounds. It was tense at first, but when all hell broke loose, it became an all out war in the shadier Houston neighborhoods. Maxwell was afraid they would lose their business for fear of their competition seeking retribution, and Gabriel was distraught by her master’s concern. She took to the streets again for the first time since her promotion to gather information on who they were up against, using a spare chunk of money and targeting a dealer who was clearly using his own supply. He knew the main distributor for their business, had even run errands for him. It turned out it was the same boy who introduced her to this line of work, James.
It was easy enough to hand this dealer her phone number with a message for James the next time he saw him, and within a week, her former friend had already called her twice. It was on his third call that she finally picked up and agreed to meet with him to discuss business, but she wasn’t entirely interested in buying from him—the last thing she wanted was to be his customer. Instead, when she met him at his apartment up town, she had a gun tucked into the back of her jeans. Once she was inside, she didn’t hesitate to blow his brains out, and it was unlikely that he ever expected a thing until the barrel was already between his eyes.
She slunk back home thinking she would be punished; she shouldn’t have done such a reckless thing without Maxwell’s permission, shouldn’t have risked exposure in such a way. However, the fact that she’d just eliminated the second most popular distributor in the city only proved to raise his spirits; it was only days after this incident that he would decide she was worthy of embrace. She died and was reborn on September 24th, 1984.
The proceeding years were spent mastering her disciplines, focusing primarily on Presence and Potence over Celerity. Gabriel was by no means a natural, but she was a quick learner, and they came more quickly to her than most Brujah. She had an advantage in the fact that she knew her sire, where most of their ilk were doomed to find their own way or perish. Ties had been cut with her family long ago, leaving very little to worry about in that respect. Using her disciplines, she became more and more the mouth piece for her sire—although she started to find that the things he said were often contradictory or hypocritical, even colored more brightly for one group of people than the other. She was being used as a pawn in a great deception, and when she confronted Maxwell about the issue, he sent her elsewhere to keep her from making too much noise about it.
Early into 2007, she settled into Phoenix, Arizona. She didn’t know anyone here, had no contacts here, but had once heard of the Anarch presence that had a foothold in the area from a stranger passing through their domain. She didn’t have much of anywhere else to go, and could choose just about anywhere from the sale of her condo and all of her belongings—not to mention what was in her savings. Phoenix seemed to be common sense, an opportunity to meet more of her Anarch brethren. Houston was not a place where one could fit their foot in the door, not anymore.
Gabriel moved into a newly renovated apartment in South Phoenix, taking root as soon as she could in the community at large. She knew where to search and found the crowd she was looking for almost immediately, being a pretty petite girl in a community where heroin chic was valued above all else. Within a few years, she’d ingrained herself into the underground economy, making herself invaluable. Her ideas helped keep a dying trade afloat in the area, and while it did attract a less than savory crowd, that crowd fell in line with the rest of her clientele. She was back on her way up the ladder, feeling at home again in the only business she’d ever truly know—although now, on her own.
Miscellany:
Gabriel met Agustin around 2010, upon his arrival into the city and the trade.
