A lonely stowaway hoping to find a new purpose.━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Searc Brolaigh.
⧐ pronunciation "SHARK BROLLY".
Fifteen.
Female.
Leannán, but presides in Chaleur currently.
Searc has the paradoxical appearance of someone whose body has not quite caught up to the maturation of her mind. Obviously young, Searc has full cheeks that haven’t been melted away by dreary, life-pulling time. Her small, button-nose, dusted with light freckles and reddened at the highest peak, whether it’s cold or not, accentuates her cheeks and gives them an even wider appearance than the baby chub. However, her lower cheekbones have begun to thin, showing the beginnings of a strong, diamond-shaped jawline. The dull tan roughness of her lips, bitten to scabs and dried by the occasional dehydration, are disproportionate in thickness as the top is wide and the cupid’s bow is a small dip that barely impacts the upper lip’s shape while the bottom lip is thinner. Searc possess a small overbite, pronouncing the difference in her lip shape, and revealing the front of her teeth, which are slightly larger and with a small gap in-between.
Despite all the youthfulness in her face, Searc’s forest green eyes are surrounded by purple bruises brought by weary day’s work and little sleep. Her normally pale skin has an unhealthy sallowness to it and dark tan lines from where she works in the hot sun all day. The tan lines tend to show along her clavicle and lower thighs, since Searc prefers to wear shorts and cotton shirts that do not cling uncomfortably to her neck, though fit perfectly everywhere else to prevent the shirt from falling during stunts. Searc’s hair, once beautiful locks of light honey blonde, have been horrendously bleached by the day and constantly greased with sweat. Searc’s fingers and palms and heels and soles are rough with visible callouses; her fingernails are slightly chipped with a thin layer of dirt creviced between the nail and the bed.
Searc is young – obvious in her face, her body features, her small height of 5’1”, and even in the way she bounces on her feet. Though, the overwork on her body illustrates a life of hardship and constant struggle.
Certain traits are expected in someone with enough nerve to stowaway on the most famous ship of the moment. Adventurous, brave, ambitious, and definitely thrill-seeking. Searc Brolaigh is none of these. Actually, she is quite the opposite.
In reality, Searc is a lost soul who has no ambition or even a specific desire for adventure. She’s lost and doesn’t really know who she is; she moves through the motions of life, but she isn’t really living. The only thing Searc is focused on is surviving in this harsh, cruel world. Hardly living as a human, Searc lives as a subhuman, willing to degrade and demean herself for the cruel entertainment of upper caste members. Though, her humiliation does not affect her much – she instead believes she deserves it as she has an abundance of self-hate for herself. Everything that has ever happened in her life, Searc blames herself more and finds her life as more of a curse than a blessing. Seeing life as a curse, it should come to no surprise that Searc is an extreme pessimist. The world is dreary and in shades of black and grey for her; no good in the world can be seen. The only thing keeping her alive is her instinctive drive for survival.
Knowing how bleak Searc lives her life, it is a logical leap to assume that she is a rather withdrawn individual. She’s quiet and tends to internalize her problems, preferring her own company over that of others. This is not due to a dislike of other people, but rather of deep ingrained trust issues from her past naivety being taken advantage of too many times. However, if someone were to gain her trust, Searc could be easily manipulated by them as she tends to put her whole being into a new formed bond. Searc is obviously a very lonely girl, with no one to call family.
Not all of her personality is miserable and sad, though. Searc could pride herself on her independence – despite being all alone, she has made a living in the world and can provide for herself. She is capable of doing things on her own and does not want someone to hold her hand through the walk of life (though maybe she needs it). When she sets her mind onto something, Searc is incredibly determined and she is a hardworking individual that will do what she has to until her fingers bleed and her vision blurs. In addition, Searc is rather clever – she catches onto things quickly and can figure out things without help. Unfortunately, however, she has been deprived of a proper education and so she lacks in more scholarly knowledge, but she's not quite illiterate.
●
Stealth.●
Intel.●
Acrobatics.
Searc suffers from astraphobia - fear of lightning and thunder. Searc developed the fear after being left by her circus troupe and abandoned to the life on the streets. Searc had to wait out storms in the open and suffer through them which has caused an extreme phobia of them. During a storm, Searc gets anxious and panicked - has vomited on multiple occasions due to her anxiety. On two occasions, Searc had broken into someone's home out of fear of the storm.
Furthermore, Searc has no skill in combat whatsoever and has never fought in her life. Searc has always been the type to runaway rather than face things head on. In all of her life, Searc had chose cowardice over coming to blows - avoiding the problem has always been the best solution in Searc's mind, and so she never learned how to protect herself from others.
Searc Brolaigh was born and raised on a small farm in Leannán. Her caretakers were her loving father and uncle – a year after she was born, her mother had run off with a travelling merchant and that was the extent of which Searc knew about her. Their small farm didn’t have much – a small coop of chickens and a single cow named Aoibheann. The first six years of her life were spent on that farm.
Famines are hard to live through – disease and starvation rattled the country. Searc’s home wasn’t any different. They had survived off the bare minimum of eggs and milk with a few fruits and vegetables they managed to salvage from their dying crops. It became much harder after Aoibheann stopped producing milk and two-thirds of the chickens were killed by a hungry fox. It was at this breaking point that Searc’s father and uncle decided on eating their livestock to survive. Searc was only five years old and didn’t understand why they had to die – she was very attached to the farm animals and she had developed a one-way bond with them as a child. Searc couldn’t prevent her dad and uncle from eating the chickens – they had done it before Searc even knew it – but she was able to save Aoibheann. Searc opened the gate of Aoibheann’s pen and let her runaway.
Without food, her uncle had a weaker immune system. He had an infection of some sort – he would cough up blood and mucus and got violent chills and night sweats. Her uncle eventually died and it was just her and her father at that point. They did what they could to survive – sometimes Searc would go in to town and steal items for them – food, blankets, other such necessities. Unfortunately, the only thing that lasts in a famine is the famine. Searc’s father had caught smallpox – Searc doesn’t know how (though she later believes it was one of the blankets she stole). Searc had become acquainted with death since the start of her life – the famine made sure of that – and after her uncle’s death, she understood disease quite well. Searc was six years old, and she didn’t want to die. She abandoned her father to the smallpox, running as far away as she could, in hopes that she wouldn’t die of it as well.
Weeks went by and Searc made do with stolen food and lived under any possible coverage, even during the rain. There was a point where Searc snuck into a travelling circus to see the sights – and to steal some coin for food – and an old woman caught her with her hands in another’s pockets. The old woman took kind on her and brought her under her wing. The old woman was named Amal, from Chaleur, and was a retired acrobat that travelled with the circus to lend a helping hand as a fortune teller. Under Amal’s direction, Searc began performing with the circus and travelling with them. She learned all sorts of acrobatics – tightrope walking, flips, trapeze, hooping, juggling, aerial silks, contortion, acrobalance. The circus became her family – for seven years, at least.
The circus had been doing a show in Chaleur – Searc was particularly excited to show off her new trapeze routine. Before it was her turn to do her act, Searc was walking along the circus’s caravans, when she overheard Amal arguing with another man over debts. Searc couldn’t hear the full conversation before she was ushered away to perform. However, later, she asked Amal about it – Amal only gave her cryptic, vague answers and Searc figured that was that. Except it wasn’t.
The next night, Searc wasn’t going to be performing, and so Amal brought her out to “meet a friend.” This friend, named Hakim al-Somail-Dokar ibn Fazid, was the same man she had been arguing with the other night. Amal owed him a lot of debts from before she ran off with the circus and now that she was back in town, he had come to collect. Working at a circus doesn’t pay that well, though, and Amal had nothing to offer him. Except for Searc. Fortunately, Hakim had no interest in such areas, but he did have use for Searc yet.
For the next two and a half years, Searc was employed to him as a spy of sorts. She gathered intel for Hakim from on the streets, helping him further his political position with her information. Meanwhile, she lived her life as a street rat. With no steady income, and being forced to pay off Amal’s debts with work, Searc had to resort to performing on the streets to gain money. At times it was bearable, at other times it became humiliating with jeers from the crowd over something or another. With what little money she had, Searc bought food, and for the things she couldn’t pay for, Searc stole. Living her life as a scoundrel, Searc became part of the “Ashen”, the low of the low in the caste system. People watched her from afar, treated her like shit, but Searc bared it with gritted teeth.
Until Searc snapped. It was a break of her anger, or even of her patience – it was the slow shattering of her resistance to such squalor. Searc became so tired of how she was living, or just living in general. Everything became a chore – breathing was a chore. But her drive to live kept her from ending it all. It was only when she caught wind of a special airship leaving that she found a way to escape Amal’s debt and Hakim's cruelty – Searc snuck into the bowels of the airship and said goodbye to her old life.
Searc hopes to start anew. She wants to live a life worth living and this airship might very well be her last shred of hope in the world. Even if it's a life of adventure and danger, Searc wants to feel more like a person than she ever did before and be able to let go of her past. Though, at the same time, Searc feels like she doesn't deserve it.
What does your character always have on them?
● Wire Rope — Typically used for tightrope walking on the streets as it is very durable.
● Cloak — A dark cloak with a hood that helps conceal Searc; it is covered in ash.
● Bag - The bag is completely empty except for three coins at the bottom of it.
