33 | ♀ | Orphan of Solitude | Nord/Imperial
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Barmaid, Bard, Cook
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Willpower (Major) Personality (Minor)
══════ A P P E A R A N C E ══════
Joy is of average height - standing at 5'6. Her figure is womanly, soft, and unthreatening and it is clear she has a fondness for food. Somehow, she keeps herself in an enviably svelte shape that has caught the eyes of more than a few men and women. During winter, she has the pale appearance typical of a Nord, her hair falls like fire to her collarbones, in soft curls -- one section happens to be far more unruly and so she often tucks it behind a hairband. Joy does not care too much for over grooming herself, she is not a vain individual, and yet she still radiates an undone kind of beauty, her smile is especially disarming in its sincerity.
If she is fair in winter, her Imperial heritage shows in the summer, the sun drawing out a more olive tone to her skin. Her hair, too, takes on a far more golden lustre in the sunlight.
Perhaps the most standout of her features are her eyes. They carry the colour of a brittle blue sky, and are warm with happiness. She communicates well with expression, not averse to raising a brow to be coquettish, or pulling her full lips downwards into a faux frown to coax a laugh from someone else. When Joy smiles, it is clearly a mischievous one that reflects her mind at work.
Under her clothing, she bears the scars of her trade, and more so than that, the scars of her life. An accident with a pan of boiling sugar has left a particularly nasty burn across her ribs. There are faded stripes that adorn her back from beatings at the Orphanage, and the reminder of a particularly violent mugging - the scar of a stab in her side. It makes her nervous and insecure, to have such scars; at the same time, they are her secret. She sees them as the reminders of her experiences. Her hands are frequently peppered with small knife cuts and little burns. Occupational hazards. She is not remotely as bothered by these as she is by her disfiguring marks.
═══════ P E R S O N A L I T Y ══════
Joy is at her very essence, a hopeless romantic. She has searched endlessly for requited love, whether that is familial, found in platonic friendship, or romantic love. It is the only thing she has ever felt that her life was truly lacking. A home. She found that, or so she believed, in The Blushing Hawk -- seeing the women she tended to with sisterly affection. During her time there, she saw many of them arrive, work, and then leave eventually, in a manner that was not too dissimilar to her upbringing in Honorhall.
The friendliness they shared ended when they would leave. Despite this, Joy has fond memories of them too - and so is drawn to women as friends quite quickly. The women saw her through her own heartbreaks, and soothed her when she was sad too.
She is naturally charismatic, with a curiosity about everyone and everything. She is the kind of woman who carries you away with her, and makes you feel as if you are the only one who matters to her. It is a byproduct of her living a life where people come and go as freely as they need to. She is poetic in her speech, and even more so in her thought. Observant of the world around her, she sees beauty in everything, even if her life has shown her nothing but ugliness. She has come to expect only short relationships from those she encounters. Her empathic nature lends itself well to finding trust in others quite quickly. They move on, and she stays behind - in the moments she shares with others, she wants to see the world through their eyes.
Having never been adopted by a family, and having been sold to a brothel, her unorthodox upbringing has left her riddled with her own insecurities. She opts to hide this behind her trademark smile - never letting her vulnerability show for fear of judgement. She fears that she will never find stability in her life, with someone, with a family. Like anyone else, Joy is not without the ability to feel deep sadness from time to time too. She grieves for the life she never had, and the mystery of her parentage will always haunt her on some level. Her own insecure questions that she carries in her heart for her mother and father sting her from time to time. It would take someone who knew similar feelings of pain and loss to find them within Joy.
The hardships she has faced have never truly broken her spirit, however, and instead they have only ever made her more adamant to find happiness in dark spaces. She brushes off negativity rather easily, and has an easy way of approaching almost anyone, finding it easy to make a good impression.
A practicing bard and performer of sorts, she adores music and brings a flair of musicality to most of the things that she does - writing songs about her experiences in love, life, and even penning songs about the tales of deeds of those she has met. To most, she is a vibrant light in the dark spinning out songs that do her namesake proud, but there is occasionally a word, a line, a string of a melody that pulls back the curtain just so, that shows the heartache beneath the surface.
Joy is a caretaker to those around her, giving herself almost selflessly to the needs of others, she fills her cup by being a listening ear with a wise and uplifting word to others when they need it, even if they don’t know it.
One would be foolish to pass her off as a simple barmaid spouting loving words. Many have, and many came to regret that. Joy was never formally educated, so she has no real intelligence of the world and its history - only the stories she hears from others. Her emotional intelligence is much more astute and she is patient. This level of emotional intelligence has afforded her an almost fearless level of grit. She is more bold and daring than her lack of skills should allow her to be, and more outspoken than most too. She speaks for those in need, and is not afraid to speak her mind loud and proud when it comes to matters of morality and justice. She has no fear towards other people, no concept of authority and respecting a view because it has passed through a hierarchy. It is her ability to see the good in people that gives her the confidence to talk openly with anyone, about anything.
═══════ H I S T O R Y ══════
My name is Joy, just Joy.
Nobody knows where or when I was born, only where I was found. I was discovered abandoned in Solitude, under the shawls of the first snow of Frostfall. It was the blurred vision of a blushing drunk, and his curiosity that followed that led to my being rescued from a sure death, and soon after that encounter, I was sent to the city Orphanage.
It was a bleak childhood. The Matron of the Orphanage was crueler behind closed doors and I spent most of my time dreaming about my future. I always felt so deeply unsettled, and I was never satisfied with the nonchalance and disregard of who I really was, of who left me, of who my parents were.
My fellow orphans and I would play together with the few toys we had, often we’d fashion dolls and the like from the sticks and stones in the yard and we would play out our lives in those hours of free time.
I have never been able to cast a spell, but I like to believe that the other orphans and I created magic by the fireplace from pure imagination. It was all I could do to turn their attention away from the cruel Matron who would punish us over the smallest slights. I know the sting of a stick across my back, the curled handle of a cane dug into my ribs, the whip of a belt across the back of my legs, and the feeling of a simple punch or a kick all too well. I always tried to take the brunt of her malice. If she was mad at one child, and looked to want to beat them, then I’d be naughtier instead. I sparked her ire so much one evening that a beating did not satisfy, and she cut off my hair in uneven clumps to make an example of me. Imagine her further rage when I cut the rest clean off and fashioned it so stylishly the very next day.
I watched over the years as one by one they were each adopted and I never saw them again. We had always promised to be friends forever, but once their ‘forever’ was with a family that loved and chose them… My forever with them was extinguished.
At 13, with no more hopes of adoption at my age (who would adopt the scrawny, naughty, unruly child, afterall?), I was simply sold for a meagre purse of coin to a Dunmer Madam named Minasi. I rode with her in the back of a cart from Solitude, across the border to High Rock where I wound up on the outskirts of Evermoree. I was frightened, my life, as miserable as it had been, was changing. I always believed that it was better the misfortune that you know, than the one that you did not. She barely spoke a word, only prodded and poked at me on the ride.
I was soon put to work in her brothel, The Blushing Hawk. I was bought as her maid, since she was frailer in her age now and ailed with a rattling cough. The other women she employed were too busy with duties of a different kind to be of any other use to her. Minasi worked me hard, and over time I learned that this was simply her pride, and her need to run a safe place for the people who stepped in.
She was certainly refined, and the unmistakable matriarch of her establishment, but I could see in the smouldering embers of her eyes that she was wounded in many ways more than her ill health. I theorised that perhaps once upon a time, she had been just a girl here too, how she may have loved and lost, as many of us did. Her temper was coarse, in a way that I could only liken to a saber-cat with a thorn wedged in her paw. She was eager to react to any touch. Her flame had gone out.
After a year or two of that, the last of her kitchen staff left and I was then put to work in there. I’d never even picked up a knife or peeled a potato, but I learned quickly. Before long, I’d moved on from simple stews, to pies, to some rather exquisite desserts. When I wasn’t cooking, I was plucking the strings of a lute that had been left behind by a patron. The very same one I have now. I taught myself to play music, putting myself through the rigorous torture of freezing the tips of my fingers in the snow just so that I could play as cleanly as possible. What else could I do, but give something my all? It was how I showed the dedication to my craft. I still do it to this day. After this, Minasi saw something valuable in me and at the late age of 19 she started teaching me how to read and write. Among my lessons were those in her mother-tongue, Dunmeris.
I struggled with it at first and she would slap the backs of my hands if my penmanship was anything less than perfect. I think for close to a year the skin was red raw -- but I learned. That’s my gift you see, persistence, and the voracious hunger to learn crafts. As she continued to lose her vitality, I became the one holding the establishment together. She was approaching the winter of her life, and I, my spring. I kept the girls and the patrons fed, I sang and played music while they waited, I kept the place clean, mended the sheets, curtains, and clothing. I found a life for myself. I made one, as best as I could, I made one. I was as close to happy as I’d ever been.
It had been a slow evening when I came to her in her bed, I could see that the colour from her eyes had drained completely, and there was no longer any light behind them. She was the cruel mother I had never wanted, a far cry from the kind woman in my dreams who nurtured and took care of me, held me, and fed me with warmth. But, however I looked at it, Minasi had raised me, and everything I had, I had her to thank for.
Minasi had told me once that we lived our lives like a stream, travelling in more or less one direction until we were broken off into something that led us to a new current, a new path...
That change came soon enough after Minasi had passed. While tending and cleaning out her room, I came upon the transactionary paperwork of my sale to Minasi, beside it - a package, wrapped in cloth, with my name written on a piece of parchment. It was a shawl. The very same one I was swaddled in as a baby, and wrapped inside that shawl was a brooch. A small pair of golden wings; in the very centre a blue stone.
It belonged to me.
I stared upon it with awe, and in the feather details of that brooch I saw opportunity, a clue to my past, a key to my future.
In that instance my life changed forever. Where I had only ever pictured The Blushing Hawk, and it’s many closed doors - suddenly there was a path stretching out across the land before it. How could I stay? Everything I had ever wanted could be answered by someone. Someone had to know where this brooch came from, and then perhaps, where I came from. That clue, to me, was love. Whomever had left me, had given me the first breadcrumb to find them again.
28 long years later I found it.
All I had seen day after day was The Blushing Hawk. It was so much so, that the only thing that had mattered in my world was that rickety brothel, in the backstreets of Evermore. As Minasi was laid to rest, I was forced to open my eyes and I observed that most people had nothing to do with my world at all. I couldn’t stop thinking about the life I could have led, had fate not carried me on that cart with Minasi from Solitude to the doors of the Hawk.
The next 5 years of my life had me travel from place to place, working in many a Tavern and Inn. I wrote songs for the strangers I met, danced with soldiers, tended to passing members of the Lion’s Guard. I’ve been a moment in the lives of so many people - just a passing, glimmer of a moment..
Life wasn’t miraculously easier when I left the Blushing Hawk. I’ve been mugged more times than I care to count now for a start… But there is romance to be found in the freedom of the road, that road is all I’ve had and I’ve walked it. I’ve witnessed the way of life change for so many recently, that strange phenomena. People are shadows of themselves… Even strangers that I’ve never met before, I can see that they’re not who they’re meant to be. I can feel it. Now I am here, in chains and darkness. I remember resisting them, my eyes turned to the strange colours in the sky until I met a painful darkness.
I am frightened, but sometimes the only way to carry ourselves through such fear is by believing that our dreams may come true, and our prayers are answered. My only hope now is that one day, in some quiet place, when all this has passed, there will be a house on a hill with a candle in the window for me.
Calling me home at last.
▼ S K I L L S▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔
► Speechcraft - Music, Empathy, Mercantile - Highly Proficient
► Speechcraft - Bilingual - Dunmeris
► Provisioning - Culinary arts - Highly Proficient
► Tailoring - Moderately Proficient
► Athletics - Somewhat Proficient▼ R E L A T I O N S & A F F I L I A T I O N S▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔
► Solitude Orphanage
► The Blushing Hawk
► Minasi - The closest she has had to a mother - Deceased.
▼ E Q U I P M E N T▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔
► Stylish linen rucksack.
► Coin Purse - 47 septims currently.
► Lyre, Lute, Ankle Chimes.
► A brooch in the shape of wings with a blue stone in the centre - the only clue she has to her parentage. She keeps this hidden.
► Sewing and knitting needles, threads.
► A selection of face paints and make up. Lavender and Orange oils for scent.
► A set of 6 chef’s knives, and the tools to keep them sharp and well maintained.
► Tasting spoons seem to litter her pockets.
► Pinches and pouches of salt in various grind sizes, as well as sugars and other herbs - always somewhere on her person to sprinkle into a dish without searching too far.
► Parchments, notebooks, quills, and ink pots -- a supply of everything she needs to continue writing her songs, and more recently, a novel that she is working on drawn from the stories of those she meets.. ▼ C L O T H I N G & A R M O U R▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔
► Casual: Never one for vanity, Joy dresses in simple outfits - usually in shades of light hues, figure hugging feminine clothing that do not necessarily have grandiose embellishments, but little touches here and there in pretty stitching. Practical clothing, that allows her to move freely. She will often be wearing her apron as she gets to work in the kitchens, or to her other barmaid duties.
► Formal: When performing, she dresses slightly more luxuriously - as much as can be allowed. She’ll wear deeper hues, revealing cuts, and often opt to go barefoot, banded chimes adorn her ankles and she will show a lucrative amount of skin to display them.
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