Name: Charlotte “Lotte” Treich
Gender: Female
Age: 20
Nationality: German
Appearance: Charlotte is a small, thin woman, standing just at 4’11”
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Personal Effects: A suitcase of clothes, both plain and for performance. A collection of letters, mostly from her fans. A Fritz Mann 6.35mm.

Background: Singer
Backstory: Charlotte Treich was born to a family of urban poor in Berlin. Her childhood was spent in want, and oftentimes pushed to desperation even in the years before the war even with a large family. Though she received compulsory education as required, hunger pains hobbled academic success despite best efforts to apply herself through classes in her early years, though she took to music quite well privately and at church, proving to be a lifelong habit of hers.

Then the Great War broke out, and disrupted what dynamic the family managed to create. Her eldest brothers were both drafted to the front early in the conflict, only one of whom would return, while her father worked ever longer hours in an attempt to make ends meet under the Allied Blockade. The Hunger Years of 1917 and 1918 proved particularly difficult for the already strained family, and Lotte herself turned to underhanded methods to secure scraps of food.

Life after the armistice proved little easier, at least initially, the Spanish Flu robbed her mother and father and youngest brother from her, leaving Alois, her demobilized brother to return as head of a much quieter home. However, this did not change the circumstances of the family as much, and they still resorted to theft to help make ends meet. These years of malnourishment and desperation taught the girl what it was like to be unnoticed, and how to move as such, and gave the skinny girl a surprising speed on the run and a sense of environment to make use of it.

The Bloody Week of 1919 in Berlin ultimately saw Alois killed in the extrajudicial violence carried out by the Freikorps, once more robbing the Treiches that remained in Berlin of their primary breadwinner, forcing Charlotte, now 16 to take to the streets to find what work she could. Fortunately for her, Charlotte found work as a dancer at one of Berlin’s cabarets.

This would ultimately prove to be the start of Charlotte’s lot improving. Pretty, if stunted in terms of height and seemingly naturally talented at dance, the young girl caught the attention of the manager as a background dancer. From there, she spent the next two years improving and developing her abilities with the hopes of eventually headlining her own act.

 As of present, she is still a minor name, but it is a growing one in Berlin and its suburbs. She is not without her fans, of course. One incident stands out, however, when she found a black lacquered jewelry box with floral gold inlay waiting in her little dressing area with a letter written in the most elegant print Charlotte had ever seen. In contrast to the penmanship, the woman found the contents to be a painfully boring and generic love letter, but the box still held her attention.

Opening it, she found a simple gold chain, supporting a rather large red crystal pressed into an archaic style of pendant. Curiosity pressed her on, and grabbed the pendant. She found it to be ice cold, and noticed that the gem reacted to her touch as though there was a fluid within the deep crimson.  A deep wave of nausea swept over her as she placed it over her neck, causing Charlotte to stumble from her chair. Hellish screams bombarded the young woman’s senses as she felt cold spread out from her chest. Instinctively, she reached for the necklace and attempted to rip it off to no avail.

As the cold burned into her hand and spread to her neck, she tugged with all the strength she could muster and finally broke the thin chain as she wrenched the necklace free. Quickly, she tossed it away. Charlotte proved keen on forgetting the event, and another letter waiting for her carried good news.

Her sister was to be married in Bavaria, just outside of Munich.