RomanAria

RPGC #13: Resolutions! - Voting and Discussion

Right, so aria again forgot what day it is! I'll be tallying results and such as soon as I get back from clarinet sectional. Brb.

RPGC #13: Resolutions! - Voting and Discussion

For anyone who has not voted yet, there's still a few hours left to do so!

The Westminster League Of Extraordinary Individuals (WWII Superhero Spy RP)

Kazia flushed, mildly embarrassed, as the tall blonde youth beside her noticed her laughter. He seemed gentle enough, addressing her softly, and quite polite and articulate. He introduced himself as Henry.

The girl scrambled with her thoughts for a moment, sorting out which voice she was going to use. It wasn't much of a challenge, really- she would use her best friend's. Lena had always been talkative, and as soon as she'd figured out that Kazia couldn't make words on her own, she'd had Kazia write what she wanted to be said and would read it off. The result was that Kazia had conversational phrases that worked without being too disjointed.

"My name is Kazia Andrysiak." She said, in reply to Henry, her English quite accented - Lena had been taking classes in it, but she was by no means fluent. "It is nice to meet you." She had to switch voice for the next question, bought it was to another of her female classmate's, not noticeable to someone not paying perfect attention. "Have you ever been on a plane before?" Damn it, that sounded too childlike, the curiosity of a young girl who'd never been in the sky before. Oh well.

As she spoke to Henry, she noticed a tall, very thin boy approach her. In good English - though still slightly hesitant - he asked if she was Polish. She turned to look at him, realizing as he spoke that he, too, was from her country. She flashed him a soft smile, switching back to her native language- well, switching back to Lena's Polish. "Yes. It would be nice, to become friends." She hesitated for a moment, wincing at her disjointed voice. "My name is Kazia. What is yours? Also. Would you sit with me?" She patted the bench next to her.

Someone else- a tall young man, sitting next to an exceptionally sullen-looking girl, spoke up loud enough for everyone in the truck to hear, reminding them to get used to their aliases.

Right. Crap.

The small girl turned to the two males beside her. "As far as the rest of the world knows... I am Anna Slaski." She bit her lip, realizing that she'd used her grandmother's voice for the first part of the line, and then one of her friend's voices for the last part, a clear change. (Anna Slaski was the protagonist in one of their favorite books - a terribly obscure one that someone who wasn't Polish wouldn't know, and even most Polish people likely wouldn't - when they were small, and the line had been stolen from when they were playing pretend once.) She wondered if anyone would notice and realize that her "superpower" was her mimicry.

The Westminster League Of Extraordinary Individuals (WWII Superhero Spy RP)

@Prophecy it's all good! Sorry it's taking me so long.

The Westminster League Of Extraordinary Individuals (WWII Superhero Spy RP)

I'll have a reply sometime after 2:00, pending when my advisor decides to talk to me about my research funding. It's only my first day back and school is already kicking my ass. -.-

The Westminster League Of Extraordinary Individuals (WWII Superhero Spy RP)

Asdfghjkl like I said I'll post after class.

The Westminster League Of Extraordinary Individuals (WWII Superhero Spy RP)

I will post as soon as I wake up a bit better. @.@ I'm so sleepeh.

The Westminster League Of Extraordinary Individuals (WWII Superhero Spy RP)

@AdobeFlash ooooooh I like the character!!

The Westminster League Of Extraordinary Individuals (WWII Superhero Spy RP)

Kazia fidgeted with the fabric of her pants uncomfortably. She… couldn’t say she’d ever worn pants, not really- in school she had always worn the mandatory English-style “sailor” uniform, with its long pleated skirt, and at home after the war broke out she still wore her pretty, modest dresses and no-nonsense shoes. She’d taken as good care of them as she could so they’d lasted her for the two years after the invasion. It was expected of little Polish girls who happened to be spies to dress like normal little Polish girls, after all.

But now that they were airdropping into France… that attire would be conspicuous. She’d finally managed to scrounge up better clothing, in the form of a moderately well-worn pair of boys’ trousers and one of her own looser button-up blouses in a comparatively inconspicuous shade of light bluish gray. She had a few other clothes in a small knapsack that was snugly fastened across her shoulders, a sack that also contained some very carefully-wrapped smoke bombs and the various other diversions she carried.

The one item of her culture’s clothing that she’d kept, though she probably shouldn’t have, was one of her bright, floral-patterned headscarves. There were a few others in her bag but this was her favorite, and she wore it today to give her a bit of a confidence boost. And to keep her curly, at times poofy hair out of her face. She had carefully pinned it up in a bun this morning but there was no promise it was going to stay like that…

She wasn’t sure how long they’d all been gathered in the room when a relatively tall, well-put-together woman stepped to the front of the room. Everyone else rose to attention, or at least to alertness, leaving poor Kazia standing on tiptoe, craning her neck to see what the devil was going on. She could at least process the woman’s words, that was not an issue, but she might’ve liked to see something other than the shoulder blades of the person in front of her.

As the woman concluded her speech, Kazia thought she saw some unease in the faces around her. She herself felt almost none- it was either stay here, and do some good, or go back home and fight a losing battle… the British official who’d given Kazia the necessary papers to be here had made it clear that Kazia had only been brought on because of her agreement to be in Ms. Bianco’s group and she’d be shipped off with the next batch of grunts to Warsaw if she backed out for whatever reason.

The group filed out to the trucks, Kazia remaining near the tail of the group- the last thing she wanted was to get trampled before they even got into the air.

Of course, most of the group was seemingly less than eager to load up into the trucks, so Kazia wove her way through the group, then scrambled up into one of the waiting vehicles (being short did make for some awkward moments for climbing up into things) and plopped down into a seat, at the last moment slinging her backpack around so it was in her lap (the last thing she wanted to do was accidentally set off a smoke bomb in here.) She found herself next to a tall, lanky blonde boy, probably somewhere around her age. As she swung into the seat, she heard him say, “Jesus Christ, I’m terrified of heights!”

The girl instinctively opened her mouth as though she was going to give the boy a sharp warning for using Christ’s name in vain. Then she promptly shut it again as she realized that, well… here they were, on their way to war, in the back of a troop transport truck… and she’d never been in an airplane, so how would she even know if she was afraid of heights or not… and she was going to yell at someone for a curse word that was, well, barely even a curse, by most of the street army’s standards…

Suddenly the whole situation struck her as absurdly funny and she started silently laughing, quickly covering her mouth, though that was more an observed mannerism than anything- she’d never really mastered the art of using another person’s laugh while she was laughing, it always sounded weird. There were so many different kinds of laughter…

Kazia forced herself back to the task at hand, her mirthful expression fading and turning serious. Why was she being so scatterbrained? Maybe it was the waiting- yeah, it was probably the waiting that had her so antsy. She half-wished she was back in the streets. She’d have been given an order and immediately allowed to execute it. None of this stupid transportation and logistics and whatnot. Yes, logically she knew that the logistics and higher levels of planning were what was (theoretically) going to make this operation successful… but still. She hated waiting.

The Westminster League Of Extraordinary Individuals (WWII Superhero Spy RP)

Kazia Andrysiak

Name: Kazimiera Andrysiak

False ID Name: Anna Slaski

Nationality: Polish

Age: Seventeen.

Height: Four feet, nine inches.

Weight: eighty-nine pounds (BMI 19.3)

Appearance: Her shortness being her only notable trait, Kazia is in most other ways fairly average. In part due to her height, and in part due to the way she styles her appearance, she is often taken to be several years younger than she actually is. She has an average, if slightly on the thin side, figure, dull hazel-blue eyes, and unremarkable wavy medium brown hair that hangs to the middle of her back. Aware that it’s too long for practicality, she normally keeps it braided and rolled into a low bun, and the flyaways held down with a colorful headscarf, though she has also been known to plait it into pigtails when attempting to appear more childlike.

Other Appearance: Kazia has fairly unblemished skin, save for a scattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose and a small vertical scar at the very corner of her mouth, from once being too close to an exploding window.

Superpower(s): Kazia’s power is rather passive- vocal mimicry. She can mimic nearly any sound she hears, from the full range of human voices to various bird songs and animal sounds. She has also proven adept at mimicking alarms, though she’s fairly useless at many other environmental sounds. It should also be noted, though she’s not entirely sure if this counts as part of what makes her special or if this is just a quirk of her mundane brain, that she has a nearly-perfect photographic memory. The combination of her memory and her mimicry is such that she is sort of a human tape recorder – she can listen in on a conversation and repeat it back days or weeks later, verbatim, and with the voices of the people who had originally spoken. Given the passive nature of her powers the only real limitation on them is the strain on her vocal chords, but an interesting quirk of them is that she doesn’t seem to have her own voice- whenever she must converse with someone, she uses phrases that she’s heard spoken around her in a variety of other people’s voices.

Skills: Kazia is conversational in Polish, reasonably understanding of Russian (As she was required to study it in school, and has some (broken) understanding of English, French, and German due to listening to the people around her. The nature of her power is such that she can use full sentences of any language she’s overheard with no accent or hesitation, but a lot of times what she says will not be entirely fit to the scene at hand, as there is no promising she understands all the words in all the sentences. She’s physically fit, though never properly trained, and a decent runner with good endurance. Also, she is known to be quite resourceful, if a bit impulsive.

Personality: Kazia is, to be summed up in one word, very reserved. She always prefers to listen rather than talk- though once she decides she can definitely trust people she will at least begin conversing with them, if not ever really “open up.” Her outlook on life is rather cynical, and she is normally rather sarcastic- though she does a good job of (externally, at least) seeming to be perfectly docile and naive. This said, she is decidedly not a killer, never having taken a life despite working in and around the front lines – if the resistance could even be seen as having a “front line”. Above all, she is fiercely loyal to whatever cause she puts herself behind.

History: Born in Warsaw in 1924 to an upper-middle-class family, Kazia lived a relatively normal childhood. She has one elder brother and a younger brother and sister, and her family is devoutly Catholic. She went to a public school for all six years of her primary school, and three years of grammar school.

In regards to her power she, and her family and friends, have known about it since she was little more than a toddler. She distinctly remembers one day in particular as the “onset” of her ability. She’d been toddling around the house while her mother was cooking and singing along to the radio, and then for whatever reason her mother had stopped and turned the radio off. She had wanted to hear more of the song, but didn’t have the words to ask, so instead had mentally replayed the song and sang along with her mother’s voice. Understandably her mother was absolutely confused, as her daughter who had never made a sound before had suddenly perfectly mimicked her voice, but they assumed it was just a quirky talent. They didn’t think it might have been something more until a few days after Kazia turned eight; she had overheard her mother and father arguing about something, and a few weeks after the argument confronted her mother about it by reciting it verbatim and then asking in her schoolteachers’ voice, “Now what was the meaning of THAT?”

Rumors of “magic” and such were prevalent, of course- but this was Poland, full of hyper-superstitious Catholics. And in any case, whatever this… quirk or power that Kazia had was, it seemed mundane enough to pass as a normal talent. She was everyone’s favorite study partner in school, given that she could repeat verbatim her teacher’s lectures, no matter how long ago they had been.

All in all she had a rather happy childhood…Until, that is, the bombs started falling, on September 1st, 1939. Kazia had been walking home from school, minding her younger siblings and entertaining them by singing various songs from the radio in the artists’ voices. A flight of aircraft, not like any they’d really seen before, flew in formation over the center of the city, dropping what she would later realize were bombs, though she wasn’t aware of that at the time. The blast, though they were over a kilometer away, was still enough to knock them off their feet, and immediately they saw the columns of smoke and fire. Fleeing to their home on the outskirts of the city, the younger children were the ones who had to describe to their mother what they had just seen.

Kazia’s older brother had recently enlisted in the Polish army, and her father- a reserve soldier – was soon called away. The church soon became a sanctuary for their family, a place they could go no matter what, and for a few hours at least shut out the terrible thought of what was going on outside.

On September 28th, the city was surrendered, prisoners of war taken. Kazia had no idea if her father and brother were in that number, dead, or perfectly safe elsewhere. The following Sunday found the family in church, of course, and that same Sunday the Germans marched in, took everyone at gunpoint into the courtyard, shot the bishop and priests and anyone else who dared make a sound of protest.

At first it seemed like the people would be broken by it. But then, not even a month later, there was a not-so-quiet rebellion, the secret Polish army. Quiet whispers that they were seeking people with “unusual skills” circulated. Finally, Kazia mustered her courage and went to TAP, convinced her ability would be outright rejected- it wasn’t like she had something terribly useful. It was much to her surprise when they seemed glad to have her, and even more to her surprise that she was shuffled around to increasingly more-important reconnaissance jobs. It seems she underestimated the value of a small, quiet listener.

Finally, she was shuffled over to a French operation that was working alongside the polish resistance, and then over to a British operation working alongside them, and now she’s landed here, still slightly befuddled as to what, exactly, is going on.

Equipment: Standard British issue, an assortment of the crude, handmade smoke and noisemakers that youth in the resistance were so fond of.