[App take II]
Feb. 7th, 2018 10:04 pm( Application: )
Snowhell repository thing!
Apr. 21st, 2016 06:41 pmMovements template:
Day XXX: Character Movements
Starting Location:
Travel:
Ending Location:
Notes:
Day XXX: Character Movements
Starting Location:
Travel:
Ending Location:
Notes:
Day XXX: Character Movements
Starting Location:
Travel:
Ending Location:
Notes:
Searches to file:
Day 334: Sports shrine on building 43 re: Samantha
Day XXX: Character Movements
Starting Location:
Travel:
Ending Location:
Notes:
Day XXX: Character Movements
Starting Location:
Travel:
Ending Location:
Notes:
Day XXX: Character Movements
Starting Location:
Travel:
Ending Location:
Notes:
Searches to file:
Day 334: Sports shrine on building 43 re: Samantha
[Snowblind -- keeping track]
Jan. 8th, 2016 12:07 amExposure/status effects:
Isolation lvl. 1
Beacon OFF
USED Winter's app; lost memory of first meeting with Dame Ariel
( Inventory! )
Isolation lvl. 1
Beacon OFF
USED Winter's app; lost memory of first meeting with Dame Ariel
( Inventory! )
[IC Inbox -- Snowblind]
Jan. 7th, 2016 11:50 pmIs it worki - oh. Ahem. This is Kesara Freamon. Please leave your message here and I will call back on you as soon as I can.
Wait, is it still - argh, how do I ma-
Wait, is it still - argh, how do I ma-
Basicest of infos:
Kesara is an original character from an alternate history type story taking place in about the 1840s, give and take some timeline tweaking, an apparently-no-magic world (see the app for more details on that "apparently".) Born in Shimla to a family serving the British officers there, and discovered to be a genius polyglot, she is the student of Dame Doctor Ariel Stein, celebrated Orientalist explorer. At eleven years old, she accompanies her mentor and a small band of book smugglers on an archaeological expedition to alternate Central and East Asia, during which very strange things happen.
Kesara is bold and reasonably resourceful, practical but not remotely cynical, somewhat greedy, happy by nature, and very, very ambitious. She is aware that the odds are stacked against her due to her gender, colour, and her apparent inability to learn to read or write (she suffers from severe dyslexia; this is a plot point later), but this will absolutely not stop her from following in her mentor's footsteps to High Adventure and Scholarly Glory. She is also an incorrigible liar - I mean storyteller. The difference, she maintains, is very important.
OPT OUT THING:
Since Kesara does come from a historically more-or-less accurate 19th century British India, and due to the role these particular issues do play in her own story, she does have some less than great ideas regarding race, gender, religion and disability. Just as an example, she has been told and has internalized the idea that her learning disability is a result of being biracial. I completely understand if this is not the kind of thing you want to encounter in your pretendy funtiems; so if you would rather I steered clear of those subjects when tagging you with her, or if you want to opt out of tagging with her altogether, just comment on this post and let me know, I won't mind!
How's my driving?
All feedback, good and bad, is welcome and sought after. Please never hesitate to tell me about any problems in my playing or portrayal!
Pemissions:
Fourth wall breakage: Not applicable ha ha OC magic.
Back-tagging/thread hopping: Very welcome!
Touching/hugging: Sure, hug the kid!
Romance/smut: She's eleven dude.
Fighting/injury: Freely. Mun has no triggers and appreciates a good piece of character abuse. But she is eleven so.
Mind reading: Go for it why not.
IP logging off.
Anon commenting on.
All comments screened.
Thank you kindly, everyone!
Kesara is an original character from an alternate history type story taking place in about the 1840s, give and take some timeline tweaking, an apparently-no-magic world (see the app for more details on that "apparently".) Born in Shimla to a family serving the British officers there, and discovered to be a genius polyglot, she is the student of Dame Doctor Ariel Stein, celebrated Orientalist explorer. At eleven years old, she accompanies her mentor and a small band of book smugglers on an archaeological expedition to alternate Central and East Asia, during which very strange things happen.
Kesara is bold and reasonably resourceful, practical but not remotely cynical, somewhat greedy, happy by nature, and very, very ambitious. She is aware that the odds are stacked against her due to her gender, colour, and her apparent inability to learn to read or write (she suffers from severe dyslexia; this is a plot point later), but this will absolutely not stop her from following in her mentor's footsteps to High Adventure and Scholarly Glory. She is also an incorrigible liar - I mean storyteller. The difference, she maintains, is very important.
OPT OUT THING:
Since Kesara does come from a historically more-or-less accurate 19th century British India, and due to the role these particular issues do play in her own story, she does have some less than great ideas regarding race, gender, religion and disability. Just as an example, she has been told and has internalized the idea that her learning disability is a result of being biracial. I completely understand if this is not the kind of thing you want to encounter in your pretendy funtiems; so if you would rather I steered clear of those subjects when tagging you with her, or if you want to opt out of tagging with her altogether, just comment on this post and let me know, I won't mind!
How's my driving?
All feedback, good and bad, is welcome and sought after. Please never hesitate to tell me about any problems in my playing or portrayal!
Pemissions:
Fourth wall breakage: Not applicable ha ha OC magic.
Back-tagging/thread hopping: Very welcome!
Touching/hugging: Sure, hug the kid!
Romance/smut: She's eleven dude.
Fighting/injury: Freely. Mun has no triggers and appreciates a good piece of character abuse. But she is eleven so.
Mind reading: Go for it why not.
IP logging off.
Anon commenting on.
All comments screened.
Thank you kindly, everyone!
[Application - Snowblind]
Jan. 8th, 2015 12:05 amPlayer Information
Name: Jax
Age: 30
Contact Info: plurk at lightsarestars
Other Characters: Beckett (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bookofnope)
Character Information
Name: Kesara Freamon
Canon: Original
Age: 11
Gender: Female
Starting inventory: Kesara comes dressed in 1840s Afghan native garb, including a long shirt and undershirt, long baggy trousers, overcoat, a large sash around her waist, and over all that a pretty huge sheepskin coat meant to endure winter nights on the steppes. She also has a large Russian style felt hat with ear-flaps, thick wool gloves, and tall boots. Actually pretty Snowhell-ready!
On her, mostly stashed in that sash, she has:
1. A notebook full of scribbled Chinese and Tocharian characters, and charcoal sticks to write in it
2. Surveyor's compass, 1840 style
3. A variety of coins (rupees, Afghan falus, Mexican dollars), mostly copper, some silver
4. A wooden begging bowl
5. A rosary of Buddhist prayer beads, made of wood
World Description:
Kesara's world is very much similar to "our" world circa the 1840s, with some tweaking around historical edges, and one massive fantasy-historical conceit that the characters only become aware of later on. On the surface, her story takes place primarily in Central Asia, which in her world is usually called Serindia, referring to the lands enclosed between China, Persia, India and Siberia. In some respects the political situation is as it was in real-world 1840 - the British rule India through the East India Company, and are fighting a cold war of sorts with Tsarist Russia across Central Asia, a match of diplomacy and espionage commonly called the Great Game. Though formally at peace, both empires consider the other an expansionist threat - the British being sure that the Russians have their eye on India, and work in a variety of ways to curtail each other's influence and occasional moves towards gaining territory. A recent move in that "game" at the time is the British invasion and occupation of Afghanistan (the historical First Anglo-Afghan War.)
The important tweaks take place further East, where two major things are going on. Thing the first is the continued, historically-not-quite-accurate isolation of China. While historically 1840 saw the first Opium War, in Kesara's world this has not happened and the situation is closer to the first years of the 19th century, with the China trade being extremely limited and Indian opium not yet introduced in force. China remains almost entirely closed to foreigners, and uninterested in most of the rest of the world. The second tweak, which is about the one thing that China is interested in, is the rebellion led by adventurer-general Yaqub Beg in Xinjiang, China's westmost territory, which he established as the Muslim kingdom of Kashgaria. Historically this happens in the late 1860s; in Kesara's world, it happened about a year prior to the beginning of the story. Those changes are historically significant, but don't do much to the essential nature of the world otherwise.
Then there's the big one. In Kesara's world, Serindia's trade routes, the Silk Roads, were dominated until about the 7th century by a single nation - the Tocharians (a real historical people, though I'm really just borrowing their name and cultural flavour - they haven't existed for 1400 years so I don't think they'd resent it.) While other peoples and their occasional kingdoms came and went within their territories, they were the mercantile, and thus essentially political rulers of the vast heart of the Euroasian continent. They were able to maintain this power through the magic of their language and writing. Tocharian writing, when placed on an appropriate vessel such as a foundation stone or a stele, can be used to give magical names to places (cities, kingdoms, buildings), geographical features (rivers, wells, mountains), and routes. These names were assembled in annals called Books of Heavenly Names, and those who could read the books, could hold an absolutely accurate, constantly updating mental map of the places named in them, including everything from weather, to the mood of the local people. This complete knowledge and control of the terrain and of military, political and popular goings-on through their territory allowed the Tocharians to exercise absolute control of it for hundred of years, through the jealous guarding of two secrets: the Books themselves, and the fact that they could only be "used" by people who have learned Tocharian as their first writing system. The language needed to set itself into the reader's mind. Anyone whose mind has been conditioned to another writing system first could still read the Books of Heavenly Names, but only as books, without any of their magical effects.
In the mid 7th century, the Chinese Sui dynasty managed to get its hands on a Book of Heavenly Names, and learn the secret of the Tocharian place-name seals. The Sui proceeded on a concentrated effort to destroy and conquer the Tocharians. The mercantile empire was overwhelmed and dismantled, and its people were reduced to living as a tribe within what was now Chinese territory, around their original homeland in the east of Xinjiang. As the Tang dynasty ousted the Sui, Tocharian knowledge was mostly wiped out, and their memory began to fade. The Sui, the Tang, and following them all Chinese and other rulers of the Tocharians' new country, imposed a harsh law to prevent the tribe from ever rising again - the Tocharians were, and are, strictly prohibited from literacy. Reading and writing are both forbidden, and books of all sorts, in any language, are banned in the country. Twelve hundred years later, while the modern Tocharians themselves - now knowing themselves only by their Chinese name, the Yuezhi - are confined to their bookless land, all that's left of the Tocharians' empire are the occasional place-name seals, found all across Serindia and fascinating the Western scholars starting to bring the "new science of archaeology" to the Central Asian steppes. The memory of an empire of magical writing is completely gone.
Background:
Kesara's story rightly begins with the story of her mentor, Dame Doctor Ariel Stein, who came to Calcutta while neither a dame nor a doctor, as a young woman with her Company finace, and ended up parting from him in favour of dedicating her life to exploration and Orientalist research. In Calcutta, the still young Ariel came to employ a servant named Isaiah Freamon, who had no education, but a natural knack for languages. They would be trusty companions on the road for a number of daring journeys of exploration that built up Ariel's expertise and reputation as a scholar-explorer. By the time they were both thirty, Ariel - now Dr. Ariel Stein - was only just getting started, but Isaiah's health had suffered in the service of exploration and he was ready to settle down. He retired to Simla, where he married a local woman of mixed Nepali and Punjabi heritage, and within the year the couple had a daughter, whom they asked Dame Ariel to name - Kesara.
Kesara's father was determined to raise her British, despite her mixed origins, and his and his wife's employ as servants to a British officer in the developing hill station helped. Kesara spent her earliest years within the British settlement famous for its high society and growing political importance, but there was stopping the curious, lively child from absorbing some of her mother's native culture as well - most especially, her mother's language. By the time Kesara was four, she was speaking her father's English, her mother's Punjabi and Nepalese, and Hindi. This was when Dame Ariel, visiting between one of her expeditions, first met the girl, and was astounded by her talent.
Over the next two years, Dame Ariel and Isaiah went back and forth, as she tried to persuade him to hand Kesara over to her for an education. Isaiah was reluctant - on top of remembering the hardship of his own life as an explorer, he also remembered the particular difficulty of being an explorer's servant, with no chance of ever winning any of his own credit. Kesara had not only her race to complicate things, as he had, but also her gender. What decided matters was that Kesara, herself, had quickly and obviously attached herself to Dame Ariel, who treated her with awe and fascination, but also with seriousness, not like the little child she was. Six years old, Kesara was packed off to Calcutta, to live in Dame Ariel's household as both a maid and a student.
A major problem revealed itself almost at once. For all her linguistic aptitude, and the high intelligence that made itself quickly known, Kesara just couldn't seem to master reading and writing. She tried hard, constantly, furiously; if at first Dame Ariel - a strict and demanding teacher - accused her of sloppy studying, even she had to eventually admit that something more essential was wrong. Kesara was already known for embellishing the truth even then, and it was hard for her elders to believe when she claimed that the letters just wouldn't stay still for her, that she could just see them mixing up on the page until they couldn't possibly make sense. Doctors were called in, but no one found a solution.
But even a seven years old, a defeated exile back to Shimla was unacceptable to Kesara, and her talent prevailed over her "defect". She devoted herself entirely to her studies, figured out memory tricks and techniques to compensate for her continued illiteracy, made herself useful in other ways when questions came up of her continued presence in the household. Dame Ariel had no particular gift for languages, herself, which could be a serious problem for an explorer; Kesara stepped in naturally to fill the space that her father had vacated. When she was nine, Dame Ariel took her along for a small scale expedition, travelling up the Indus into the Punjab, towards the mountain passes of the Lesser Himalayas. This was not real exploration - not what Kesara got to do, at least, as she didn't get much further out from Peshawar. But she learned a great deal among the porters, cooks and animal handlers, the soldiers and the body servants, and proved herself invaluable as an interpreter. The expedition sealed things as far as Dame Ariel was concerned. Kesara was staying, and coming along everywhere she would go.
The next bit of "everywhere" was Kabul, two years later. After the occupation of Afghanistan, Dame Ariel was invited to the city by one of her oldest friends, Lady Frances Gavin, wife to a senior British officer in the city and herself an Oriental scholar, who, on the side, played translator, coordinator and local informant for the Queen's agents in the Great Game - though Kesara didn't know this at the time. Kesara adored Kabul, and spent her time there learning Urdu and Farsi, as well as Russian from Lady Gavin, and coming to the slow and horrifying realization that she was going to be twelve in no time. She was swiftly growing into womanhood. And she had never forgotten what her father warned her of before leaving Shimla - that for anyone who was not Dame Doctor Ariel Stein, womanhood meant the end of ambition. Time to become civilized, marry and settle down. Kesara was not ready to settle down.
She was not destined to. Six months after her arrival in Kabul, Lady Gavin recruited her, along with Dame Ariel, into a scheme. Lord Gavin's men has captured a smuggler carrying something priceless: a page from a manuscript in Tocharian, Chinese and Sanskrit. If the manuscript could be recovered, it could be the key to unlocking the mysterious language that Dame Ariel had been researching for years. But the smuggler was naturally unwilling to talk to her British captors. Lady Gavin and Dame Ariel hoped to use Kesara, with her skill at languages and lying, to pose as a fellow captive and win the smuggler's trust.
However, once Kesara was in the cell, the smuggler, a Yuezhi woman named Roksann, quickly turned the tables on her. Seeing through Kesara's ruse, she instead played on the girl's empathy, telling her the story - the true story - of how the motive for her smuggling was to get books into her homeland, where all reading and writing were forbidden. Kesara was instantly fascinated by this strange and heroic woman, and Roksann easily got her to settle close - close enough to snatch the gun that Dame Ariel had given Kesara to hide on her person, and use it to hold her hostage and demand her own release. This may not have worked had there not at the same time been a mob gathered around the British mission house, demanding the release of the supposed local women that the British were supposedly holding captive. Lord Gavin was grudgingly persuaded to release Roksann, on the condition that Kesara slip out with her and follow her movements, which was easy to do as Kesara quickly made herself useful to the smuggler, who didn't speak Farsi, as a translator.
She was taken by Roksann back to the caravanserai, and to the smuggler's partner, the Chinese scholar and polyglot Lao Dian, who quickly figured out her connection to Dame Ariel - whose work he knew and admired. He got the amazed Kesara to reveal her original purpose in following Roksann. All Roksann herself cared for was getting her treasure back, and she was willing to trade the knowledge of where she had obtained it for the thing itself, but Kesara warned her that Dame Ariel would never deal with a mere criminal. Instead, she was able to persuade the two smugglers that her mentor would be most inclined to parley with a fellow scholar - Lao Dian.
The meeting, which started tense and difficult, ended on a note beyond all Kesara's dreams. Lao Dian revealed that he and Roksann already held the book from which the page had been taken - a full document in three languages, the Book of Heavenly Names. The two scholars struck a deal. Dame Ariel agreed to provide funding for the two smugglers in their effort to return to Roksann's homeland in Xinjiang with their forbidden merchandise, and they agreed to let her join them on the search back for the origin of the Book, which Lao Dian himself was eager to discover. Making good on her promise to Kesara to take her everywhere she would go, Dame Ariel allowed the girl to join the expedition.
The party's first destination was to be the independent khanate of Bukhara. Kesara is taken from some time into that journey, during which she had made a fantastic discovery. While watching Lao Dian and Dame Ariel begin to decipher and translate the Book of Heavenly Names, she realized that the Chinese and Tocharian idiomatic characters, unlike the English alphabet, stayed still and solid. She could focus on and remember them (Note: this is not a magical fix - people with language-specific learning disability are a real thing!) Trying to keep this a secret for Dame Ariel, hoping to surprise her, she asked Lao Dian to teach her, and he was only happy to agree. She'd been learning Chinese writing, and studying Tocharian, for a little over three weeks by now, but her genius for languages and memorization is already asserting itself. She has the highest of hopes for the future.
Personality:
At the basis of Kesara's character is probably her high intelligence. She isn't a prodigy as such, except with languages, but she is a very, very smart kid, with a particular talent for rote memorization that helps a lot with compensating for her learning disability. She isn't only book-smart either, but is perceptive and quick to take stock of situations - her best thinking is on her feet, and while she isn't exactly happy under pressure, that is usually when she's at her most competent. Her thinking tends to be structured, especially due to the structured and strict education she'd received, so that she isn't always as imaginative and off the wall as many kids her age, but tends to be more analytic and logical, and straightforward in her conclusions. Her mental and emotional ages are pretty out of sync: she's very articulate, but full of bounce and energy, and prone to quick boredom and even sulking when she feels she's treated like too much of the kid she is. She can argue like a scholar and keep her head like a pro in a crisis, but when it's over she'll probably be blubbering in a corner. She's not great with games and doing things for fun; the whole concept is pretty lost on her. When she's in the company of other kids, she usually ends up semi-bullying them into much more complex endeavours than they ever wanted.
Kesara can be very astute, but also very naive, in that she's only recently really begun to grasp adult ideas of politics and power. She's unhealthily quick to trust and sympathize; in fact she's prone to feeling empathy with an intensity that stuns even her. It's the easiest thing in the world for her to put herself in another shoes, and she tends to assume that it's similarly easy for other people, so that she quickly comes to expect the best of anyone she interacts with in an even vaguely friendly fashion. This attitude came back to bite her a number of times so far during her journey, so she's begun to overcompensate by trying to be suspicious and standoffish. She's pretty bad at it.
She is, however, brilliant at fitting in and working with people who either are genuinely friendly, or don't suspect that she has any ulterior motive. She actually does have a spy's natural flare for melding right into a crowd, mimicking people's styles and following their habits, talking back to them the way they talk to her. She enjoys it. This skill, her high empathy, her immense talent for languages, and her fascination with stories are all part of the same thing - Kesara is good with other people's lives. Her budding closeness with the scholar-smuggler Lao Dian, who is similarly skilled and motivated, has made her more aware of her interest and more determined to pursue it consciously. She wants to know and understand as many people and their stories as she can, and likes to imagine herself as playing a part of these stories, too. She isn't a manipulator per say, but she loves the feeling of mattering, of changing the story somehow. This can be a benevolent, charitable tendency, but she's also quite young, and quite bright, and derives no small amount of pleasure from feeling powerful.
Kesara is tremendously ambitious. Her wits are more than matched with, perhaps even outmatched by, her determination to use them to make herself great. She's keenly aware of the disadvantages of her circumstances: her gender, her race, her young age, and she is set to defy them all. She wants to be at least a great a scholar as her mentor Dame Ariel - and hopefully greater, though she'd never consciously linger on such a treacherous thought. She very much hungers for fame and fortune, to be known, celebrated and, indeed, powerful. While her scholarly passion is absolutely genuine, she still has a rather immature idea of exploration and discovery, despite all her first-hand experience of both at Dame Ariel's side. She always imagined her moment to be right around the corner, her own Great Adventure, and the quest for the Book of Heavenly Names seems to be the realization of all her hopes and dreams. The fact of it getting a bit more complex than that is still dawning on her.
Nonetheless, Kesara is normally good with difficult realities. She's very pragmatic, not given to complaints, and largely unbothered by unpleasantness, hard work, mess and dirt, or even death when it isn't likely to be her own. Young as she is, she has been through a thing or two (though at a greater distance than she'd like people to know) and while she isn't cynical - she has far too much empathy for that - she's also very good at telling apart the things she can and cannot change and thus should or shouldn't worry about. Her upbringing has made her very much aware of more down to earth, material concerns, and she is materially greedy to a degree - she likes money and likes good food and interesting trinkets - but also casual, even stoic about physical hardship. Stiff upper lip. It's the bold British explorer way.
The final essential of Kesara's life is her genius for languages and her love for stories. The former is well and truly exceptional: not supernatural, but somewhere in the peak of human ability. At elven years old, she's fluent in eight languages and a number of regional dialects, a talent that stuns everyone she knows and is at the heart of her ambitions and hopes. She had made her peace with the fact that she can't, and possibly could never read or write, and saw it as a kind of trade-off - at least until she learned that there are languages she can master, at which point she became absolutely sure - with a child's unshakeable certainty - that she is destined to play a key role in the historical achievement of solving the mystery of the Tocharians. Her love of stories and storytelling is all-encompassing - any story. Legends, literature, personal stories and anecdotes, historical narrative, just gossip, she'll take everything as long as it has some kind of beginning, end, and meaning. When Kesara lies, which is reasonably often, that's what she sees it as - telling stories, making up a more interesting, useful, or meaningful reality than the one at hand. How can that hurt?
Flavor Abilities: None. While her learning Tocharian has begun to subtly affect Kesara's mind, the change is still negligible, and wouldn't come into effect in Norfinbury anyway. Her skill with languages is exceptional but not superhuman, and also isn't really relevant THANKS TRANSLATOR MICROBES.
Name: Jax
Age: 30
Contact Info: plurk at lightsarestars
Other Characters: Beckett (
bookofnope)Character Information
Name: Kesara Freamon
Canon: Original
Age: 11
Gender: Female
Starting inventory: Kesara comes dressed in 1840s Afghan native garb, including a long shirt and undershirt, long baggy trousers, overcoat, a large sash around her waist, and over all that a pretty huge sheepskin coat meant to endure winter nights on the steppes. She also has a large Russian style felt hat with ear-flaps, thick wool gloves, and tall boots. Actually pretty Snowhell-ready!
On her, mostly stashed in that sash, she has:
1. A notebook full of scribbled Chinese and Tocharian characters, and charcoal sticks to write in it
2. Surveyor's compass, 1840 style
3. A variety of coins (rupees, Afghan falus, Mexican dollars), mostly copper, some silver
4. A wooden begging bowl
5. A rosary of Buddhist prayer beads, made of wood
World Description:
Kesara's world is very much similar to "our" world circa the 1840s, with some tweaking around historical edges, and one massive fantasy-historical conceit that the characters only become aware of later on. On the surface, her story takes place primarily in Central Asia, which in her world is usually called Serindia, referring to the lands enclosed between China, Persia, India and Siberia. In some respects the political situation is as it was in real-world 1840 - the British rule India through the East India Company, and are fighting a cold war of sorts with Tsarist Russia across Central Asia, a match of diplomacy and espionage commonly called the Great Game. Though formally at peace, both empires consider the other an expansionist threat - the British being sure that the Russians have their eye on India, and work in a variety of ways to curtail each other's influence and occasional moves towards gaining territory. A recent move in that "game" at the time is the British invasion and occupation of Afghanistan (the historical First Anglo-Afghan War.)
The important tweaks take place further East, where two major things are going on. Thing the first is the continued, historically-not-quite-accurate isolation of China. While historically 1840 saw the first Opium War, in Kesara's world this has not happened and the situation is closer to the first years of the 19th century, with the China trade being extremely limited and Indian opium not yet introduced in force. China remains almost entirely closed to foreigners, and uninterested in most of the rest of the world. The second tweak, which is about the one thing that China is interested in, is the rebellion led by adventurer-general Yaqub Beg in Xinjiang, China's westmost territory, which he established as the Muslim kingdom of Kashgaria. Historically this happens in the late 1860s; in Kesara's world, it happened about a year prior to the beginning of the story. Those changes are historically significant, but don't do much to the essential nature of the world otherwise.
Then there's the big one. In Kesara's world, Serindia's trade routes, the Silk Roads, were dominated until about the 7th century by a single nation - the Tocharians (a real historical people, though I'm really just borrowing their name and cultural flavour - they haven't existed for 1400 years so I don't think they'd resent it.) While other peoples and their occasional kingdoms came and went within their territories, they were the mercantile, and thus essentially political rulers of the vast heart of the Euroasian continent. They were able to maintain this power through the magic of their language and writing. Tocharian writing, when placed on an appropriate vessel such as a foundation stone or a stele, can be used to give magical names to places (cities, kingdoms, buildings), geographical features (rivers, wells, mountains), and routes. These names were assembled in annals called Books of Heavenly Names, and those who could read the books, could hold an absolutely accurate, constantly updating mental map of the places named in them, including everything from weather, to the mood of the local people. This complete knowledge and control of the terrain and of military, political and popular goings-on through their territory allowed the Tocharians to exercise absolute control of it for hundred of years, through the jealous guarding of two secrets: the Books themselves, and the fact that they could only be "used" by people who have learned Tocharian as their first writing system. The language needed to set itself into the reader's mind. Anyone whose mind has been conditioned to another writing system first could still read the Books of Heavenly Names, but only as books, without any of their magical effects.
In the mid 7th century, the Chinese Sui dynasty managed to get its hands on a Book of Heavenly Names, and learn the secret of the Tocharian place-name seals. The Sui proceeded on a concentrated effort to destroy and conquer the Tocharians. The mercantile empire was overwhelmed and dismantled, and its people were reduced to living as a tribe within what was now Chinese territory, around their original homeland in the east of Xinjiang. As the Tang dynasty ousted the Sui, Tocharian knowledge was mostly wiped out, and their memory began to fade. The Sui, the Tang, and following them all Chinese and other rulers of the Tocharians' new country, imposed a harsh law to prevent the tribe from ever rising again - the Tocharians were, and are, strictly prohibited from literacy. Reading and writing are both forbidden, and books of all sorts, in any language, are banned in the country. Twelve hundred years later, while the modern Tocharians themselves - now knowing themselves only by their Chinese name, the Yuezhi - are confined to their bookless land, all that's left of the Tocharians' empire are the occasional place-name seals, found all across Serindia and fascinating the Western scholars starting to bring the "new science of archaeology" to the Central Asian steppes. The memory of an empire of magical writing is completely gone.
Background:
Kesara's story rightly begins with the story of her mentor, Dame Doctor Ariel Stein, who came to Calcutta while neither a dame nor a doctor, as a young woman with her Company finace, and ended up parting from him in favour of dedicating her life to exploration and Orientalist research. In Calcutta, the still young Ariel came to employ a servant named Isaiah Freamon, who had no education, but a natural knack for languages. They would be trusty companions on the road for a number of daring journeys of exploration that built up Ariel's expertise and reputation as a scholar-explorer. By the time they were both thirty, Ariel - now Dr. Ariel Stein - was only just getting started, but Isaiah's health had suffered in the service of exploration and he was ready to settle down. He retired to Simla, where he married a local woman of mixed Nepali and Punjabi heritage, and within the year the couple had a daughter, whom they asked Dame Ariel to name - Kesara.
Kesara's father was determined to raise her British, despite her mixed origins, and his and his wife's employ as servants to a British officer in the developing hill station helped. Kesara spent her earliest years within the British settlement famous for its high society and growing political importance, but there was stopping the curious, lively child from absorbing some of her mother's native culture as well - most especially, her mother's language. By the time Kesara was four, she was speaking her father's English, her mother's Punjabi and Nepalese, and Hindi. This was when Dame Ariel, visiting between one of her expeditions, first met the girl, and was astounded by her talent.
Over the next two years, Dame Ariel and Isaiah went back and forth, as she tried to persuade him to hand Kesara over to her for an education. Isaiah was reluctant - on top of remembering the hardship of his own life as an explorer, he also remembered the particular difficulty of being an explorer's servant, with no chance of ever winning any of his own credit. Kesara had not only her race to complicate things, as he had, but also her gender. What decided matters was that Kesara, herself, had quickly and obviously attached herself to Dame Ariel, who treated her with awe and fascination, but also with seriousness, not like the little child she was. Six years old, Kesara was packed off to Calcutta, to live in Dame Ariel's household as both a maid and a student.
A major problem revealed itself almost at once. For all her linguistic aptitude, and the high intelligence that made itself quickly known, Kesara just couldn't seem to master reading and writing. She tried hard, constantly, furiously; if at first Dame Ariel - a strict and demanding teacher - accused her of sloppy studying, even she had to eventually admit that something more essential was wrong. Kesara was already known for embellishing the truth even then, and it was hard for her elders to believe when she claimed that the letters just wouldn't stay still for her, that she could just see them mixing up on the page until they couldn't possibly make sense. Doctors were called in, but no one found a solution.
But even a seven years old, a defeated exile back to Shimla was unacceptable to Kesara, and her talent prevailed over her "defect". She devoted herself entirely to her studies, figured out memory tricks and techniques to compensate for her continued illiteracy, made herself useful in other ways when questions came up of her continued presence in the household. Dame Ariel had no particular gift for languages, herself, which could be a serious problem for an explorer; Kesara stepped in naturally to fill the space that her father had vacated. When she was nine, Dame Ariel took her along for a small scale expedition, travelling up the Indus into the Punjab, towards the mountain passes of the Lesser Himalayas. This was not real exploration - not what Kesara got to do, at least, as she didn't get much further out from Peshawar. But she learned a great deal among the porters, cooks and animal handlers, the soldiers and the body servants, and proved herself invaluable as an interpreter. The expedition sealed things as far as Dame Ariel was concerned. Kesara was staying, and coming along everywhere she would go.
The next bit of "everywhere" was Kabul, two years later. After the occupation of Afghanistan, Dame Ariel was invited to the city by one of her oldest friends, Lady Frances Gavin, wife to a senior British officer in the city and herself an Oriental scholar, who, on the side, played translator, coordinator and local informant for the Queen's agents in the Great Game - though Kesara didn't know this at the time. Kesara adored Kabul, and spent her time there learning Urdu and Farsi, as well as Russian from Lady Gavin, and coming to the slow and horrifying realization that she was going to be twelve in no time. She was swiftly growing into womanhood. And she had never forgotten what her father warned her of before leaving Shimla - that for anyone who was not Dame Doctor Ariel Stein, womanhood meant the end of ambition. Time to become civilized, marry and settle down. Kesara was not ready to settle down.
She was not destined to. Six months after her arrival in Kabul, Lady Gavin recruited her, along with Dame Ariel, into a scheme. Lord Gavin's men has captured a smuggler carrying something priceless: a page from a manuscript in Tocharian, Chinese and Sanskrit. If the manuscript could be recovered, it could be the key to unlocking the mysterious language that Dame Ariel had been researching for years. But the smuggler was naturally unwilling to talk to her British captors. Lady Gavin and Dame Ariel hoped to use Kesara, with her skill at languages and lying, to pose as a fellow captive and win the smuggler's trust.
However, once Kesara was in the cell, the smuggler, a Yuezhi woman named Roksann, quickly turned the tables on her. Seeing through Kesara's ruse, she instead played on the girl's empathy, telling her the story - the true story - of how the motive for her smuggling was to get books into her homeland, where all reading and writing were forbidden. Kesara was instantly fascinated by this strange and heroic woman, and Roksann easily got her to settle close - close enough to snatch the gun that Dame Ariel had given Kesara to hide on her person, and use it to hold her hostage and demand her own release. This may not have worked had there not at the same time been a mob gathered around the British mission house, demanding the release of the supposed local women that the British were supposedly holding captive. Lord Gavin was grudgingly persuaded to release Roksann, on the condition that Kesara slip out with her and follow her movements, which was easy to do as Kesara quickly made herself useful to the smuggler, who didn't speak Farsi, as a translator.
She was taken by Roksann back to the caravanserai, and to the smuggler's partner, the Chinese scholar and polyglot Lao Dian, who quickly figured out her connection to Dame Ariel - whose work he knew and admired. He got the amazed Kesara to reveal her original purpose in following Roksann. All Roksann herself cared for was getting her treasure back, and she was willing to trade the knowledge of where she had obtained it for the thing itself, but Kesara warned her that Dame Ariel would never deal with a mere criminal. Instead, she was able to persuade the two smugglers that her mentor would be most inclined to parley with a fellow scholar - Lao Dian.
The meeting, which started tense and difficult, ended on a note beyond all Kesara's dreams. Lao Dian revealed that he and Roksann already held the book from which the page had been taken - a full document in three languages, the Book of Heavenly Names. The two scholars struck a deal. Dame Ariel agreed to provide funding for the two smugglers in their effort to return to Roksann's homeland in Xinjiang with their forbidden merchandise, and they agreed to let her join them on the search back for the origin of the Book, which Lao Dian himself was eager to discover. Making good on her promise to Kesara to take her everywhere she would go, Dame Ariel allowed the girl to join the expedition.
The party's first destination was to be the independent khanate of Bukhara. Kesara is taken from some time into that journey, during which she had made a fantastic discovery. While watching Lao Dian and Dame Ariel begin to decipher and translate the Book of Heavenly Names, she realized that the Chinese and Tocharian idiomatic characters, unlike the English alphabet, stayed still and solid. She could focus on and remember them (Note: this is not a magical fix - people with language-specific learning disability are a real thing!) Trying to keep this a secret for Dame Ariel, hoping to surprise her, she asked Lao Dian to teach her, and he was only happy to agree. She'd been learning Chinese writing, and studying Tocharian, for a little over three weeks by now, but her genius for languages and memorization is already asserting itself. She has the highest of hopes for the future.
Personality:
At the basis of Kesara's character is probably her high intelligence. She isn't a prodigy as such, except with languages, but she is a very, very smart kid, with a particular talent for rote memorization that helps a lot with compensating for her learning disability. She isn't only book-smart either, but is perceptive and quick to take stock of situations - her best thinking is on her feet, and while she isn't exactly happy under pressure, that is usually when she's at her most competent. Her thinking tends to be structured, especially due to the structured and strict education she'd received, so that she isn't always as imaginative and off the wall as many kids her age, but tends to be more analytic and logical, and straightforward in her conclusions. Her mental and emotional ages are pretty out of sync: she's very articulate, but full of bounce and energy, and prone to quick boredom and even sulking when she feels she's treated like too much of the kid she is. She can argue like a scholar and keep her head like a pro in a crisis, but when it's over she'll probably be blubbering in a corner. She's not great with games and doing things for fun; the whole concept is pretty lost on her. When she's in the company of other kids, she usually ends up semi-bullying them into much more complex endeavours than they ever wanted.
Kesara can be very astute, but also very naive, in that she's only recently really begun to grasp adult ideas of politics and power. She's unhealthily quick to trust and sympathize; in fact she's prone to feeling empathy with an intensity that stuns even her. It's the easiest thing in the world for her to put herself in another shoes, and she tends to assume that it's similarly easy for other people, so that she quickly comes to expect the best of anyone she interacts with in an even vaguely friendly fashion. This attitude came back to bite her a number of times so far during her journey, so she's begun to overcompensate by trying to be suspicious and standoffish. She's pretty bad at it.
She is, however, brilliant at fitting in and working with people who either are genuinely friendly, or don't suspect that she has any ulterior motive. She actually does have a spy's natural flare for melding right into a crowd, mimicking people's styles and following their habits, talking back to them the way they talk to her. She enjoys it. This skill, her high empathy, her immense talent for languages, and her fascination with stories are all part of the same thing - Kesara is good with other people's lives. Her budding closeness with the scholar-smuggler Lao Dian, who is similarly skilled and motivated, has made her more aware of her interest and more determined to pursue it consciously. She wants to know and understand as many people and their stories as she can, and likes to imagine herself as playing a part of these stories, too. She isn't a manipulator per say, but she loves the feeling of mattering, of changing the story somehow. This can be a benevolent, charitable tendency, but she's also quite young, and quite bright, and derives no small amount of pleasure from feeling powerful.
Kesara is tremendously ambitious. Her wits are more than matched with, perhaps even outmatched by, her determination to use them to make herself great. She's keenly aware of the disadvantages of her circumstances: her gender, her race, her young age, and she is set to defy them all. She wants to be at least a great a scholar as her mentor Dame Ariel - and hopefully greater, though she'd never consciously linger on such a treacherous thought. She very much hungers for fame and fortune, to be known, celebrated and, indeed, powerful. While her scholarly passion is absolutely genuine, she still has a rather immature idea of exploration and discovery, despite all her first-hand experience of both at Dame Ariel's side. She always imagined her moment to be right around the corner, her own Great Adventure, and the quest for the Book of Heavenly Names seems to be the realization of all her hopes and dreams. The fact of it getting a bit more complex than that is still dawning on her.
Nonetheless, Kesara is normally good with difficult realities. She's very pragmatic, not given to complaints, and largely unbothered by unpleasantness, hard work, mess and dirt, or even death when it isn't likely to be her own. Young as she is, she has been through a thing or two (though at a greater distance than she'd like people to know) and while she isn't cynical - she has far too much empathy for that - she's also very good at telling apart the things she can and cannot change and thus should or shouldn't worry about. Her upbringing has made her very much aware of more down to earth, material concerns, and she is materially greedy to a degree - she likes money and likes good food and interesting trinkets - but also casual, even stoic about physical hardship. Stiff upper lip. It's the bold British explorer way.
The final essential of Kesara's life is her genius for languages and her love for stories. The former is well and truly exceptional: not supernatural, but somewhere in the peak of human ability. At elven years old, she's fluent in eight languages and a number of regional dialects, a talent that stuns everyone she knows and is at the heart of her ambitions and hopes. She had made her peace with the fact that she can't, and possibly could never read or write, and saw it as a kind of trade-off - at least until she learned that there are languages she can master, at which point she became absolutely sure - with a child's unshakeable certainty - that she is destined to play a key role in the historical achievement of solving the mystery of the Tocharians. Her love of stories and storytelling is all-encompassing - any story. Legends, literature, personal stories and anecdotes, historical narrative, just gossip, she'll take everything as long as it has some kind of beginning, end, and meaning. When Kesara lies, which is reasonably often, that's what she sees it as - telling stories, making up a more interesting, useful, or meaningful reality than the one at hand. How can that hurt?
Flavor Abilities: None. While her learning Tocharian has begun to subtly affect Kesara's mind, the change is still negligible, and wouldn't come into effect in Norfinbury anyway. Her skill with languages is exceptional but not superhuman, and also isn't really relevant THANKS TRANSLATOR MICROBES.
