Nolani

Player Name: Lills
Player DW: silvermoonshade

Contact: 

burningbrightly

A recent addition to her person is a tattoo going up her right arm from the bicep to the shoulder of a trail of Mountain Lion paw prints that seem to be left in a swirl of stars and stardust.

Personality: 
Nolani is a happy-go-lucky, easy going person. Usually she is just moving from one scene to the next, never staying in one place for too long. Mostly this is because she is used to traveling around a lot, and also because she is a skinchanger. Ending up in one spot without the ability to leave will probably make her go a little stir crazy at first, but eventually, she will see it as a new experience. She is a loner by nature, though she does not mind the company of others and like all felines, if and when she seeks it out she wants exactly as much attention as she wants before becoming irritated if she gets too much more than that. Affection is meted out on her own terms. That is not to say that she isn't affectionate, only that she chooses when and where she will be doing so. 

Out of habit, she is very good at avoiding the subject of her past by either skillfully changing the topic, deflecting the question or indirectly answering the question in a convoluted way. These are things that both her grandfather and mentor Istaqa taught her in order to better survive in slowly but ever changing world.

She is curious to a fault which sometimes gets her into more trouble than she would like. More than once she has narrowly avoided a disastrous situation because of her uncanny good luck. Unfortunately her good luck does have a disastrous side effect: She is far too trusting. She won't reveal the truth about her skinwalker abilities easily, but she is forever putting herself in danger by befriending total strangers almost instantaneously.

She loves arguments and debates, if only to rile the other person up with nonsensical things or random bits of odd philosophy or humor. She also loves to gamble and bet. Which has in the past caused her some problems because she also likes to cheat to win if she can. Blackjack and poker are her two favorite games to play when gambling. (Las Vegas is one of her favorite places to frequent even though she has been kicked out of every casino at one time or another.)

Nolani has no formal education beyond the 6th grade. Everything else is self taught. She has a sharp mind but it is hard for her to focus on something for too long unless it interests her. (ADHD)

However, when she shifts into her feline self, she becomes hyper focused. As a Mountain Lion, she can understand people speaking to her and can even attempt to communicate through verbal (grring, hissing, etc, or physical means (pawing, head shaking, nodding) Or as an animal, (body posturing) Although she can think like as a human if she puts effort into it, most of her decisions are instinctual, very much like a natural mountain lion would be. In the past, Nolani tried to ignore the feline part of herself with poor results. Now she embraces it instead, willingly assuming her second form as often as possible. It is when she does this frequently that she is at her most balanced and focused.

As easy going as she is, there are two things that she cannot abide. The first is child or spousal abuse. Through her mother's dreams, she learned that her father beat her mother and her siblings on a regular basis, because he saw them as tainted by the devil. She also saw that her older sister committed suicide to escape the abuse, that her oldest brother Emanuel became just like their father, beating his wife until he was thrown in jail and that her youngest brother, Roberto ran away like her and ended up in a gang where he was shot and killed in East L.A. Her father had died some time ago in Viet Nam, serving his country with distinction. 

The second thing that she cannot abide is the catholic church. She sees it as the true evil since it can only see things in black and white and not the shades of gray that the world actually exists as. She is never vocal about her hatreds, as that would draw too much attention to herself, but she does have private means of expressing herself. She likes to visit the dreams of people who fall on her bad side with horrendous nightmares for nights on end until the people are half mad from lack of sleep. This however, is a very taxing and time consuming activity, so it can only be done sparingly. 

Nolani rarely engages in this behavior though, as it conflicts drastically with her easy going, happy-go-lucky lifestyle that is her preferred state of being. Due to this, she has developed an uncanny 'out of sight, out of mind' approach to life.

Animals do not get along with Nolani easily. Dogs bark or growl at her, cats hiss. Horses shy away. They can sense the predator inside her and instinctively react accordingly . Only through prolonged exposure do animals begin to tolerate her. She tries to avoid animals whenever possible, not wishing to clue people into the fact that there is more to her than meets the eye. 

History: Nolani was born Arizona in 1950 As Margarita Rosa Sanchez, the youngest of four. Her father was a sergeant int he United states Army, so as a result they moved around a lot. For the first few years of her life, Margarita lived a normal, childhood until one spring day she suddenly found herself transformed from a girl into a young puma. Naturally of course her family freaked out. Her father a devout catholic, called her the spawn of the devil and drove her from their home on base. For several hours Margerita wandered alone, lost and confused. Later that night, her mother found her hiding in a storm drain, naked, cold and confused over what had happened. Together they traveled the 300 miles the Navajo reservation in New Mexico were Margarita’s grandfather lived. There, her mother left her to the care of her grandfather, telling her youngest daughter that she would never see her again, which in the end was almost true. Margarita visited her mother in hospital the day before she passed away as an old, blind woman. 

Her grandfather, Joseph Watson taught Margarita all that he could about skinwalkers and about what she had become, but ultimately was not much help since it was her grandmother's blood that carried the magic of Skinchanging. When she turned 16, Margarita began to develop serious bouts of wanderlust and soon was ranging further and further from the Reservation until one day she just didn't come back.

She traveled all over the country hitchhiking and walking from one end of it to the other. Part of her was curious to see if she could find others of her kind and another part of her was eager to know what had happened to her family. During this time, she got caught up in the peace movement and embraced the hippie lifestyle, experimenting with drugs and alcohol. However such experimentation did not last long. One side effect of smoking pot was that she lost the ability to control where and when she shifted forms. After scaring half a dozen hippies one night, she fled into the countryside, swearing off drugs. By the time 1970 rolled around, she was trying to lead a normal life. She renamed herself as Amelia Watson and took up a job as a secretary at a local law firm, met someone and began to build a normal life for herself.

However, wanderlust began to set in once more, worse than before. She also was struck by a wave of homesickness so profound she would end up crying herself to sleep at night. Finally, after warring with her emotions for two months, she found herself waking up one morning on the side of the road naked and utterly lost. Forced to take on her puma form until she could steal some clothes, she wandered the back roads and byways of rural America rediscovering a part of herself that she did not know she had missed. 

This was also when she met Istaqa, another skinwalker. Unlike her however, he was a Coyote shifter and far, far older. He told her what he knew of her 'kind' saying they came from further north along the rockies, but that time and the white man had wiped almost all of them out. He also explained that Skinwalkers were not of 'one tribe or another' but that they were the direct result of a Medicine man or Woman entering a pact with a spirit and agreeing to give birth to a 'gateway' between the spirit world and the human world and that Skinwalkers were that gateway. 

He acted like a big brother to her, teaching her how to open up her second sight, enabling her to see spirits and the dead. She also learned to partially transform parts of her body and to 'spiritwalk' out of her body and appear in the dreams of others. She used the spirit walking ability to find her mother in the hospital.

Nolani also learned that there are other creatures out there, were creatures, vampires, revanants, demons and angels all living among humanity. That she had never encountered any of them before now was largely due to her luck and not skill. For a time she and Istaqa traveled together. He was with her when she went to visit her mother in the hospital, and was there for her when she cried at the grave of her grandfather who had died two years after she vanished.

Eventually Istaqa felt the wanderlust in one direction, while Nolani was driven another. They separated ways but before they did Istaqa gave her two things, one a dreamcatcher so that they could find each other in dreams and secondly a silver bracelet with a coyote engraved on it as a reminder of him. 

By herself for the first time in several years, Nolani then decided that she wanted get a proper education and perhaps make something of herself. She changed her name to Nolani Watson, the and set herself up as the daughter of Amelia Watson, and went through various minority institutes, she was able to finance a trip to the local college, but soon found that school life was not for her. She was too restless in class and bored too easily to make much sense of what was being taught so she dropped out of college and once more too up wandering the country, working odd jobs and never staying in one place too long.

She also recently has developed a moderate to severe arachnophobia thanks to her past encounters with the spiders in Deme. Most of the time she can kill the spider before a panic attack sets in but the larger a spider is, the sooner and more severe a panic attack she has. 
 

After Deme:

After her first visit to Demeleier, Nolani found herself once more back in the forests of the Oregon Territories where only a few minutes had passed since she became separated from the group of college kids she was taking backpacking. Although her memories of Demeleier were all but non existent, she felt as if something momentous had occurred within her life.

She cut the trip with the college kids short, returning home. She then tendered her resignation as a nature guide and drifted south, deeper into the United States, where she ended up in San Francisco working at an occult book store owned by a witch. For the first time Nolani actually was not afraid to come across other supernaturals and soon became a local in the underground scene.

The entire time she was nagged by a growing sense of something that she was forgetting, of lost memories, and baffled by her sudden and unexpected arachnophobia that never bothered her before now. In desperation, she tried to contact her old mentor Istaga, but he remained frustratingly out of touch.

Eventually, she gave up trying to contact him, and began to rely more and more on the advice and opinion of Magrett, gradually beginnign to open up to the older woman, though it was hard, and there was much that Nolani never told her.

(Nolani's world is also an AU earth world where there are things alive that go bump int he night. Humanity is largely unaware of them and arrogant in it's belief that humanity is superior. As a result, supernatural creatures work in shadows and behind closed doors to keep humans ignorant of the truth, controlling vast tracts of media, government and technology. The computers and the internet is just starting to get off the ground in the tale end of 1999. Vast tracts of wilderness have been set aside the world over to prevent nature from being destroyed and many of the cities are smaller in population because of indirect control over the human population via means of war, famine, plague, and 'natural disasters'.)



Timeline: Taken from her world in the late 1990s

Abilities: 
Second sight: Able to see ghosts and spirits. 
Spiritwalk: Able to leave her body behind and travel in the spirit world. She can communicate to others this way through dreams. 
Ageless: Like all of her kind, skinshiftersdon't tend to age after reaching a certain plateau. She stopped aging somewhere around 1975. 

Differences between skinwalker and other shapechangers: Skinwalkers differ from werewolves in two different ways: For one, they are not bound by the moon and secondly, their transformations are almost always instantaneous and are never painful. 

Silver does not hurt her, in fact silver and turquoise tends to be her favorite jewelery. 
She cannot regenerate like werewolves, though she does have the ability to change her form to bypass injury and heal some of the damage. For example: if she breaks her leg as a human and changes into a Mountain Lion, she will just have a sore leg but it will not be broken. If she changes back into a human, her leg will still be broken, but it will have healed a small amount. The longer she is in one form while injured in the other, the faster the regeneration. She can suffer from disease and illness, though she has a higher and faster recovery rate than a regular human. 

Although she is ageless, she can die like any normal human. She needs to sleep and eat on a regular basis or face serious fatigue which is heightened if she shifts forms a lot or if she uses her second sight or dream walking abilities. Exposure to the elements can kill her, just not as easily if she were a normal human.
Luck: She has uncanny good luck, almost to the extent of it being supernatural. This is reflected in her being in the right place at the right time, or just not being killed when something should have killed her.

Inventory: 

Thigh length raincoat, t-shirt, jeans and a leather belt, and nice sneakers, (brand new), faded green messenger bag containing: Notebooks, a few pens, a book on hiking in California, wallet with sundry amount of money and I.D. A couple hair ties, a brush, Bag of of 'fun sized' snickers, a bottle of water, an extra dreamcatcher talisman, her dreamcatcher talisman, and a her silver bracelet.

Link to an image of the character: Human form Mountain Lion form

Prose Sample: 

[Once again she awoke from sleep, feeling as if there was something that she was forgetting. It nagged her every waking moment and made her already distracted mind even more fractious. And it was getting worse. She didn't know how it could be, just that it was. Working in Magrett's occult shop had been a good distraction for a time, and the old witch seemed to know a think or two about helping her out, but it wasn't enough. It was Never enough.

What was even more annoying was that she could feel herself trying to dreamwalk somewhere and finding only resistance. At first she though her mind was casting out for Istaqa, trying to seek the old coyote out, but soon, she realized that her dream walking was going even farther afield than ever before. It was scary, to think that her spirit self was casting out ever wider. Istaqa had said once that if she traveled too far afield, that she might not ever return. Not that he had bothered to tell her just how 'too far' was.

Grumpily she got up and made herself ready for the day. Magrett needed her at the shop today. Outside, the sky was a gray overcast so common in San Francisco. The city's slate gray waters reminded her of some place, but the memory was always vague, faded around the edges as If she was recalling it from a dream. Usually she to her favorite coffee shop to get a tall coffee and a muffin, but today, she was feeling like forgoing the usual. Instead, she just hurried to Magrett's shop, chased the entire way by a cold wind, and the pervasive thoughts that she was forgetting something important.]

You're here early today Nolani. [The chipper voice of Magrett floated out from the storeroom at the back of the shop.]

Couldn't sleep. As usual. [Nolani huffed. Magrett was one of the few people that knew her real name, it was a privilege that Magrett rarely abused. But today, hearing Magrett use her name, bothered her, it made her skin feel prickly. Suddenly an overwhelming urge to just walk away surged through her.]

On second thought, Magrett I am gonna get my coffee and muffin after all. [Nolani called over her shoulder already heading out the door. Magrett peeked out of the back room with a frown on her careworn face.]

Careful Nolani, and I wish you the best of luck.

[Outisde, the wind had brought a thick fog out of the bay, making the street nothing more than massive white and gray shadows. Nolani took a few steps into it, quickly becoming swallowed by the fog. The sudden appearance of the fog was no concern to her, as it often came and went quickly here in the bay. But the thickness of the fog, and the cold tingling that danced along her skin seemed unusual.

As she walked, the growing desire to just lie down and rest consumed her until she found herself sitting on the pavement, with her back against a building, as her eyes began to drift closed. Somewhere in the distance, she heard singing, soft and faint. It sounded like Magrett singing but the voice was too soft and distant to make out more than the lilt to the song.]