- Posts:
- 11
- Group:
- Members
- Member
- #1,527
- Joined:
- 01/12/2016
- Character Clan/Species:
- Toreador
- Character Sect:
- Camarilla
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Player Handle: Chess.
Name: Thomasin Porter. (Her close friends, of whom there are few, call her 'Sin.' Her deceased husband called her 'Tommie' and she never much cared for it. Sometimes she will claim the title of Dr. though she never received such a degree.)
Age: 76
Place of birth: Brighton, UK.
Age of embrace: 29.
Clan: Tremere.
Sect: Camarilla.
Species: Vampire.
Derangement: N/A.
Disciplines:
Appearance: She's pretty. In her life, on numerous occasions, she was told that she was 'too pretty.' Too pretty to be taken seriously, too pretty to worry her little head about medical charts, too pretty to realistically expect to succeed alongside the other students and apprentices unless she 'toned it down' a bit and stopped 'distracting them.' Thomasin has spent her life alternating between using pretty as a weapon and despising everything about it, although she continues to despise ugliness and frumpiness more. It's a love-hate thing. Almost everything about Sin Porter boils down to that.
Thomasin is 5'7", which was considered very tall in her youth. She is also slender and willowy, with yellow-blonde hair that curls around her shoulders, icy crystalline blue eyes and a cupid's bow mouth just wide enough to be expressive even while it is generally thinned and disapproving. She used to be flexible, because although she was never an athlete she was a good dancer, and because she came from money and certain things were expected of her as a daughter and a good-looking daughter at that.
Her dress depends entirely on the occasion. She is inordinately fond of the color pink, and she'll wear it quite often, especially to try to confuse others and make them take her less seriously. She is a little stuck in the past and hasn't quite made it to modern styles, and generally if she can stay in the styling of the sixties and before, she's happier. Luckily, retro is in. For more formal affairs she can be fierce in a three piece suit or a long slinky gown. In the lab, she wears scrubs and a white coat, of course, and sometimes thick rimmed glasses that she does not need in order to seem "more scholarly." She's still a victim of her conditioning about pretty girls being smart.
Thomasin is sharp and layered. She is a slash of movement, of color, of scalpel or pen. She spins rather turns. She trots rather than runs. She is either still or she is in motion. She is uncomfortable with physical touch unless she initiates it, though she can smile like a cobra and pretend. Her hands never shake.
Haven: At first, she'll expect to spend most of her time residing in the Chantry. She would expect a fair amount of skepticism and wariness on her arrival in London. Eventually, once she's gotten a fair idea of the city, established herself therein (read gotten permission for one of these) and got a little cash flow going, she'll set up two very small safehouses scattered across South London and a private facility in a warehouse in the central city.
Sin is a snob and her tastes are unfortunately generally above her current means, which tends to fill her with jealousy of the things that other, richer Kindred have. Her room in the Chantry is furnished with elegance and taste, though it is sparse because everything must be perfect and perfection is a very difficult ideal. Visitors would note: it smells constantly of a lemon cleanser, it is scattered with mostly-open books, and there is no sign of a laboratory, although there is a plethora of oddly shaped and framed mirrors upon the walls.
History:
"Shall I begin as 'David Copperfield?'" Thomasin Harrow was born in Brighton in the spring of 1940 to an ambitious and starved for attention socialite mother who had hoped very much for a son that she might name after her husband, who was a fairly wealthy man and an officer in the British army. In some attempt at consolation, Dinah Harrow named her daughter Thomasin, pulling out an obscure variant of Thomasina (which she claimed later sounded too 'twee' a name) though she didn't bother to change her daughter's intended second name, Michael, to anything less masculine.
Disliking any nicknames she could think of for the name she'd come up with, Dinah called her baby girl by any pet name she could think of, including 'pet', 'princess,' and 'jewel,' and she doted on her despite her initial disappointment. It helped that Thomasin was an adorable baby: rosy-cheeked, blue-eyed, golden-haired. Dinah might not have gotten the son she wanted to solidify her place in Thomas' affections, but she had a little doll who would assuage some of the loneliness, who would be hers and hers alone and love her unconditionally. Or so she firmly hoped.
For the first four years of her life, Thomasin knew her father only as a voice occasionally on a telephone, sounding strained and distant and a little bit afraid. It wasn't exactly like speaking to a father, though a little girl with no concept of what it should have been had no idea that anything was wrong and merely jumped and squealed every time her mother told her that 'Daddy' was on the telephone.
When the war ended and Tommy Harrow returned home, rather than become suddenly the perfect little family that everyone expected, things took on a subtle but palpable chill. Thomasin, barely five, could feel the change but had no idea of the reasons. All she knew was that suddenly, instead of being her mother's darling, she was seen a competitor for her father's attention and was constantly shuffled off to her room to 'play' or told to 'go straight to bed' because of some imagined transgression. 'Daddy' was no great shakes either - he drank too much and was happier anywhere but home. Half the time, when he was home, he locked himself in his study, which was off limits to women, and finished off a bottle of sherry while painstakingly gluing together model airplanes.
School provided a welcome distraction, as the girl was intelligent, eager, and desirous to please. She was a favorite of her instructors and popular enough among her peers. Particularly gifted at maths and sciences, her early studies were escapes, because her teacher found her more and more complex things to look at to feed her interest. She got herself a library card and checked out book after book, devouring each new subject as if it were her last chance to learn.
In a way, for a little while, it almost was. Dinah and Tommy were having problems at home, and neither of them particularly wanted to be raising a daughter. They had enough money to hire a nanny, but decided to send Thomasin to boarding school instead. That way, no prying eyes could gossip about his increased time spent at the pub or her mid-day meetings with gentlemen who were not Mr. Harrow.
Sin was eleven when she packed her bags for school, or, as she would soon consider it, her own minor war.
"You always knew, you never learn" This war was not a bitter feud or a daily battle with bullies, it was a cold war against a sub-par institution that wanted to churn out clever little Stepford beauties fit to find good husbands, or if necessary, join the steno pool or some other acceptable 'female job.'
Thomasin excelled but was constantly praised more for her handwriting and her level head than for her actual marks or her original solutions to complex problems. Thinking 'outside of the box' was not particularly encouraged. This happened to be the sort of school that taught deportment and cooking as well as literature, math, science and history. By the time she was fifteen, Sin knew how to pluck her eyelashes and apply cosmetics, and she didn't learn it from the older girls. She did learn that said older girls often sneaked out over the fence at night to the local pub for a night of music and dancing.
At first, even when invited to join them, she constantly refused. She had a natural fondness for rules and regulations, patterns and set classifications with which to carefully categorize and control. Finally, fed up with seemingly hitting a wall every time she sought to expand her scientific knowledge further than the set curriculum, she agreed. It was a minor act of rebellion, but it was her first. Without it, she would never have met Archie.
She was seventeen and months away from her graduation, and with all awareness of the cliche, she was counting the days. Although the working class types in the pub that the girls chose for their illicit escape tended to see her (not without reason) as a spoiled ice queen with a perpetually sour expression and a litany of excuses why she wouldn't dance and couldn't drink, she nonetheless opened up slowly from the excursions, blossoming as she watched others enjoying themselves. Sometimes she'd have a short conversation with one of the more quiet gents, and she'd idly try to poke her way under his skin to try to determine what it was that kept him here of a night rather than home where his wedding ring suggested he might be. Often she thought of her father while she did, and the latest news she'd received of his deteriorating condition.
Archie was different. He was beautiful: an oil painting made even more interesting by the scuffs and scars it had taken from an unkind life. If he hadn't been so shy, he'd probably have been making cinema somewhere. As it was, he was aloof and intriguing, chain-smoking black cigarettes and turning her every attempt to upset him on its head. Eventually, she drank with him (he favored Scotch) and then she danced with him. And then she left with him instead of leaving with the other girls, eventually stealing back into bed just before the final check. Archie had said that she looked like an angel, and he wanted to see her fall. She'd found the sentiment refreshing and the iconography enticing. Willingly, though not with eyes open, she threw herself into his abyss.
Their tryst was brief but haunting. For five days Sin would sneak out of school, forego the pub entirely and spend the evening with Archie (last name never disclosed). No one had ever gotten deeper under her skin and she felt an odd ambivalence about the whole encounter: freedom and shame, elation and anger. It would have been different if he could have married her, but far apart from the tan line that marked the wedding ring he didn't wear on those evenings, he had been open with his feelings: he didn't love her. Thomasin shrugged and said that was fine, she didn't love him either. She was using him just the same as he was using her. It wasn't true, but the willowbark lie was easier to swallow than the truth of her budding obsession.
In the spring two things came and one thing left: she turned eighteen, she graduated and Archie disappeared.
She returned home briefly, but her father was in a very bad way, a shell of the dynamic, handsome man she had known for a few short years and she didn't feel enough attachment to him to want to weather the ugliness of his accelerating sickness. Her mother looked tired and old, but was warmer than she'd remembered since she'd been a baby.
That warmth didn't last much past Thomasin's revelation that she wanted to go to university.
"For what?" the reply had been, inevitably.
In a truth that was also a lie, Sin had said "Nursing," pretending it was about taking care of Tommy Harrow. In truth, it was the easiest way she could see to explore her interests in science, medicine and pharmaceuticals, and held the advantage of getting her away from her parents again. She barely paused a month between graduation and sending in her applications and was accepted to a school in London in 1959.
The scar that was Archie festered in the back of her mind, and she put her head down and spent almost all her time studying, to the consternation and frustration of many of her colleagues. It paid off in the long run, because she graduated on time, with exceptional marks and a Bachelor's degree in Nursing. In 1963, that was all that you needed for a position in a mental institution, and while her youth and inexperience meant that she began at the very bottom of the ladder, she found that wide eyed charm and even some fairly bad acting would get her a long way.
The Woodview Institution was an oubliette, both for its patients and for its senior staff. Young nurses and doctors who cut their teeth here might have a chance at a better position further down the line, but for those further established in their careers, it was the sort of place you went when everywhere else turned you down. Even by the time Sin accepted a position there, rumors were surfacing. By the eighties, these rumors would include mistreatment of patients, medication over-prescribed or denied, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and even unnecessary or experimental surgeries after-hours. In '63, there were only murmurs about harshness and overmedication, and given the size of the hospital and the very very small staff, most people (including Harrow) shrugged them off as either inflated or inevitable.
After a rough transitionary period learning the ropes (stand when the doctors enter, don't speak to the matron, don't look at the charts, defer to the senior nurses), Thomasin found that she did very well at Woodview. Nothing aforementioned was a lie - all of this and more occurred at the sanitarium, but after a few months of being pushed and sworn at and having bedpans thrown in her face, she didn't have the compassion she should have had, even for those patients who were docile and innocent. Even for those patients who exhibited absolutely no sign of mental illness at all.
On paper and when senior staff was present, she had very little power at all, but alone in the ward, she could do almost anything. She passed out medicine, she spoke to the patients, she decided when to try to stroke their hair and make them believe they were speaking to an angel and when to strap them down and just leave them in silence. At the same time, she cultivated a relationship with the head doctor which made the matron both jealous and nervous. It was never sexual, but he liked the way she looked in the white uniform, and he liked the way she complimented him and purred over his achievements.
Eventually, he invited her to assist in surgeries that were far outside of what should have been her purview. They were out of his purview as well.
This was Thomasin's first experience both with surgery and the idea of experimentation. She watched (and assisted) as Dr. Kellerman performed lobotomies or removed limbs and teeth. She dispensed medication and carefully insulated for unneeded electroshock and she began to be the go to girl for manipulating patients through their sexualities, as both threat and reward. She watched and she learned, and she began to wonder.
Kellerman was a sadist, and while he was a skilled enough surgeon, Thomasin found his methodology muddy and his research unconvincing. While she pretended to be in awe of his faculties, his contention that leucotomy and psychosurgery had been too quickly abandoned in favor of medication was the only one of his many bizarre and completely unfounded opinions with which she found some common ground, although she was far more interested in the potential effects of removing various different parts of the brain (or the connections to them) than she was in the continued use of the practice as a behavior modification tool. Her interests, even then, lay in 'improving' the species and removing natural human limitations, although everything that she did while at Woodview had the opposite effect.
"I didn't know you had a heart. Does it hurt?"
Love, when it came to Thomasin Porter, was a distraction, an irritation and an unwelcome shock. She still remembered the humiliation of Archie Too-Good-To-Divulge-His-Surname, and she was just starting to make strides both in moving up the ladder of status and in attempting some friendships with the other nurses at Woodview. Generally, when the doctors flirted with her or "inadvertently" rubbed against her, Sin would ignore it. She didn't protest, she didn't slap their hands, she simply didn't acknowledge that it had occurred at all. A cold silence or a clarification of a medical directive was all the response that could be expected.
For gents in pubs frequented by the nurses sometimes after their shifts, she was much crueler. Rumors began to circulate among the staff that she didn't like men. She ignored this as well, for while the idea of being with a woman did nothing for her, if it kept off unwanted attention, it could be a necessary evil.
Then, at the annual staff Christmas party, which was open to other visiting professions in the medical or psychiatric profession, she met Dr. Julian Porter. The ambitious young thing that she was couldn't ignore a man so prestigious and recognized in his field (cosmetic surgery was his passion and he wished one day to open a practice doing just that but he currently worked in orthopedics), so despite reservations, she sought him out and they ended up spending the entire evening talking.
Julian never spoke down to her, quite the contrary. He was charming, witty, knowledgeable and open-minded, and he could flit from "work talk" to social commentary to subtle flirtations in the time it took to draw a breath. It also didn't hurt that he was quite good looking, although he was fifteen years older than she.
They began to see each other when he phoned a week later, and after four months they were engaged to be married. Sin left Woodview in 1964 to become Mrs. Porter. Even as a part of her was elated and optimistic, a sliver of doubt and discontent twisted in the curves of her mind.
The first year did its damnedest to erase all of those negative feelings. Julian was a delightful husband, when he was around, and the fact that he was constantly working or traveling meant more time for her own studies. He had a variety of scientific books, publications and medical journals in the house, and she could peruse and memorize them at her leisure while busying herself with the sorts of things that she disliked but liked having done, like cleaning and cooking. When he was home, he was attentive, appreciative and interested in actual conversations about his day and his worries and then about her own desires. He understood her feeling of stagnation and offered to let her go back to work, this time as a nurse in the hospital in which he worked, in Southampton where they'd moved. Her intention was to accept, but pregnancy got in the way of returning to the workforce.
Their son was born in late summer of 1965. Daniel Julian Porter was born healthy and husky, and he was both the most beautiful thing that his mother had ever seen and the beginning of a downward spiral into darkness and obsession which would haunt the rest of her life. Thomasin had never loved anyone so deeply in her life. Compared to the way she felt with Danny in her arms, she'd never loved before and she would never love again. At first he seemed perfect. He became her everything.
She barely even noticed that Julian was having troubles at work: he'd lost an important patient and inquiries were being made. She had other things to take her time, and besides, it was all silliness in any case. Not worthy even of conversation, Julian said, and she was too preoccupied to doubt him.
But Julian, despite his vaunted reputation and his overt confidence, was hiding a deadly secret from his staff, his patients and from his wife. He wasn't a very good surgeon. He tried to make up for this with schmoozing, going out on every international trip he could, meeting with all those highly regarded in his field, picking their brains for ideas and information, and then choosing the juiciest, most wealthy (and often least risky) of clientele. When it came down to a vote of confidence from the hospital, the result, as the legal battle dragged on, was that Julian was asked to take a voluntary (unpaid) leave while the situation 'resolved itself.'
Thomasin would normally have taken a more aggressive tack in Julian's defense, but her husband's misfortunes hit just around the time that she started to notice problems with Danny. He would forget words that he'd already learned ("Mama" in particular haunted her), he had lost interest in games of peek-a-boo and other social exploration. Worry about these changes in aptitude and interest made the fact that her husband was 'temporarily' at home both timely and welcome.
She started researching the symptoms she saw at the same time that Julian decided to supplement their frozen income by doing some work at home. Mostly he took on patients without insurance who would rather not have their injuries known - victims of gang violence or domestic abuse, and sometimes women who wanted quiet abortions. But he found this sort of thing draining on his morale, and he fell increasingly into sloppy habits. Also, he'd begun to use morphine for 'a finicky back' and this made him even less reliable.
Thomasin's golden life had proved to be made of crumbling sand. She begin to assist Porter in his surgeries, picking up the slack for his lack of focus and lack of talent, and as she did, she learned a lot about surgery under adverse circumstances and in imperfect facilities. It wasn't her inclination to care too much about the majority of their patients, but she liked the money and she liked the reputation, so she pretended. Here her sordid experiences helped, because she was creative but also ruthless and generally incapable of feeling empathy for those who were not 'like her.' She didn't mind working without full anaesthetic.
As Julian's chemical dependence grew and he spent more and more time with no idea what was going on, she simply took over the simpler procedures and informed him afterward that he had done a stellar job. Sometimes people would come off the street and instead of asking for Dr. Porter would ask for "the blonde lady." Taking charge of business seemed to be helping the finances and, if their reputation was growing a little sordid, because as discreet as you ask people to be, they're never really quite that good, at least there had been no further deaths or inquiries. However, the situation with Danny was getting worse. He no longer liked to be held or kissed. He was practically mute. When alone, he seemed to be as intelligent as ever, but he had no interest in playing with other children and little interest even in his mother.
Thomasin diagnosed his condition as autism long before his pediatricians were willing to make that statement. Wait and see, they suggested. Try to stimulate his senses. Be warm and giving. The underlying opinion seemed to be that if there was a problem with the baby (who was now two years old), it was Thomasin's fault. The term 'refrigerator mother' was never actually used in her presence, but she heard the whispers and saw the looks. Given her general demeanor and the prevailing psychology of the day, it was an easy assumption to make. In 1967, the options for treating autism were constantly increasing, but in almost every case, they would involve removing the child from the home in order to give him round-the-clock supervision at a facility. Since autism was still considered a form of schizophrenia, Sin was still quite aware what sorts of treatments would be favored by all but the most cutting edge of institutions and, hypocritical as it was, she had no intention of allowing that to happen to her baby.
When Julian finally returned to the hospital, Thomasin hired a full-time nanny with experience working with special needs children and rented out a storage space to turn into what she called a laboratory but was in reality merely a house of horrors. At the same time that she began her experimentation, she was turning to research of other, even less highly regarded avenues of potential treatment. Mysticism and the occult became a hobby of hers. Most particularly she was interested in mesmerism and various forms of occult healing.
"Inside my head's a box of stars I never dared to open"
The brutal, ugly truth of the matter was that Sin wasn't a good enough doctor (hell, she wasn't a doctor at all) to carry out the experimentation that she was interested in pursuing. Diagrams and descriptions of procedures in books could give a rudimentary understanding exacerbated by the year she'd spent assisting Dr. Kellerman and the year she'd spent assisting Dr. Grant, but when it came down to it, what she wanted to do was experimental, dangerous and probably impossible, and two years surgical experience as a nurse wasn't going to get her even close to the facility she needed. She was aided by her iron reflexes and unshakable will, but that was hardly enough to combat the fact that all the successful procedures she'd managed on her own were setting broken bones, giving stitches and administering medication.
After two instances of bringing a druggie runaway to her warehouse (the younger the better, really, since her baby was still two and a half) and losing her on the table, Sin took a break from the idea of science and focused wholly on spiritual healing.
It was an odd jump for the young woman. She had spent so much of her life discounting everything related to the occult as 'Oriental mysticism' or 'black juju' that it was difficult to do a heel-face-turn and begin to study under Jackson Heartsong. It didn't make any easier that Jackson Heartsong billed himself as a Native American shaman (he never did clarify past those words to the English people he taught his 'craft', not unless he chose to initiate them further in the mysteries) and was gorgeous but dark and carved in teak and wore his hair down to his waist half-braided.
Thomasin couldn't make up her mind how she felt about him. She had been raised (and her natural inclination to force all others to be subordinate to her in her thoughts helped with this) to dismiss people of other races, hippy-dippy namby-pamby shite, and all the rest, but Heartsong (or, as she would always call him 'the Crow') was enticing, intelligent and produced results she could not explain. There was no trick here, no joke. He could do things - he could move things, heal animals, hurt animals, he could make people do things that they would never have done. It didn't seem to rely overtly on the idea, as in hypnotism, of strong minds or weak ones, either. Sin was positive she had a strong mind, as did all those who studied beside her, and yet on numerous occasions the Crow had, to make a point, simply told one of them to do something, and it had been impossible to refuse.
There had been no clock swinging back and forth, no 'think back on a past memory, like a river', no mumbo jumbo or snapping fingers. He'd told her, for example, to cut her hair just under her ears, and she'd done it, and then she'd wept for the curls and argued with her husband about it that night, pretending it had been intended. But she'd returned to the class the next day.
Notes:
Likes: Accolades. Patterns. Seashells and the Fibonacci spiral. Needles, pens, and other pointed things. Power and those who wield it well. Bleach and lemon verbena. The advances of modern technology. Silence. The colors pink and white. White Christmases. Crisp new paper. Zip-ties and straight jackets. Puzzles and puzzle boxes. Vermeer. Talking to people with mental illnesses or obvious vulnerabilities. Talking to people without mental illnesses or obvious vulnerabilities. AB-. Dislikes: Ugliness. Filth. Being kept down or condescended to. The internet. Rap music. Her own lack of means. Her own dependence upon/obsession with men and sexuality, despite her change. Who has time for that? Small-mindedness and restrictions. Chaos. The color orange. The scent of burning flesh. Abstract art. Overuse of tinsel or, outside of the holidays, overuse of perfume. Tagging. Leggings. Valais de Rada. The blood of people who eat too many processed foods. Summer. The nights are too short.
Languages: English, some Latin, some Greek.
Degrees: Bachelor's Degree in Nursing.
Feeding Preferences: Given her absolute druthers, she'll gravitate to young white men or white children. That being said, her watchword is caution and she practically worships the Masquerade. Preying on the homeless, runaways, drug addicts and the mentally ill is generally much easier and safer, so these are her more usual victims. She also is not averse to using blood from bags, if it is fresh and brought to temperature.
Disclaimer: Sin Porter is a monster. I do not defend her actions or her ideas. In fact, many of them make my skin crawl. Please do not consider anything she does or thinks to be the writer's opinions.
Edited by Aidan Byrne, Thursday, 29. December 2016, 00:45.
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