Biography
| Zhari Nezworski | ||
Zhari has a striking appearance, one that tends to draw people to look at her immediately. Bright red hair and even brighter blue eyes, and exceptionally fair skin so that people tend to stop and stare as she passes by. It might be the hair, it might be the eyes, it might be the flawless complexion, but it might also be related to the extra sway she has in her step. Zhari has a relatively curvy figure, stemming from her Slavic birth ancestry, and at 5’3” she is of average height for her lineage. When it comes to clothing, Zhari prefers to dress comfortably in jeans, combat boots and whatever shirt she happens to pull out of her closet. This is not to say she doesn’t dress up from time to time, it’s just a rare occasion that prompts anything other than jeans and a blouse. The exception to this is that for work she is required to wear short skirts and heels. Not so much because of it being a formal requirement as much as people are more prone to tip her when she's dressed so. In bird form she appears in what would cause many to do a double take. Her body is the shape of what one would expect of a peacock, with the long tail feathers and slight crest atop the head, except that instead of the bright blue or white of the male peacocks, she is a covered in red and orange plumage. |
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Age: 25 D.O.B.: April 15th Blood Type: B+ Race: Phoenix Powers: power over fire, ability to take phoenix form Sexuality: heterosexual Family: adoptive parents Alice and Mikhail Nezworski - deceased Career: barmaid PB: Simone Simons | ||
| personality | ||
One would think that with such striking looks would come an equally striking personality. In truth, Zhari is a bit on the reserved side. She is not generally rude or crass, but she doesn’t say something unless it is genuinely meant. She doesn’t always speak when spoken to, coming across as a touch shy when really it is just a desire to not draw any more attention to herself than necessary. Even though she is mostly quiet, when the situation arises she will rise to the challenge and not only speak her mind, but defend those dear to her regardless of cost. Often mistaken for shy, she isn’t, she is in reality just wary. She knows what she is, knows that others covet what she is and prefers that others outside of her kind that might take a vested interest in what she is, not know what she is. It’s safer for her that way. Zhari does tend to retreat into herself when stressed, rather than show much for outward signs of it. She’ll buckle down, focus and try to busy the stress away from her life. Many mistake her reserved nature for a lack of intelligence, but that simply isn’t true. She is a clever being, with a knack for getting out of difficult situations as they arise. After all, one has to think on their feet with the constant changes going on in the world around. She does make friends easily, once she gets over her initial wariness of them. And once she’s become friends with someone she will remain loyal to them through anything life can throw her way. | ||
| history | ||
What everyone knows of Zhari they know of her in this lifetime. She lived a relatively normal life, a supposed orphan with a wilful amnesia, adopted by a nice Polish family in Milwaukee, Wisconsin at the age of 15 and given their surname. She claims to not remember much from before that age, and to an extent it is the truth. It was impossible to recall the previous 14 years when she had simply been reborn at 15. Life in Milwaukee was anything a ‘normal’ teenager could want, except that Zhari knew she was far from normal. She attended Pius High School, a private Christian school known for its variety of elective programing. Here she truly discovered music and while she did well in all her classes, it was in choir that she really shined. She was more shy than her classmates, but she did extremely well on solos when given to her. It seemed that it caused an almost tranquilizing effect on her audience. A phenomenon no one could really explain other than assuming her audience was simply enthralled with her voice. She received an acoustic guitar as a gift for Christmas while in High School. A gift she cherished until its later destruction in the house fire of 2003. Eventually she purchased another, once her finances allowed and took to really learning it as a way to honor her deceased adoptive parents. She vacated Milwaukee at the age of 19 when mysteriously the house she had been living in with her family went up in flames. Her family, or those she had come to know as family in those four years, had all perished in the fire while Zhari lay in the heat of the inferno, sleeping and unharmed. She awoke to the sound of glass breaking and the rippling roar of flames. It was too late by that time for her adoptive parents. Rushing through the heat of the building, before it could come crashing down, she searched for her adoptive mother Alice and father Mikhail when the firefighters found her. She was moved to safety, but not without putting up a fight first. It mystified the paramedics with how she could have been moving through the inferno mostly unscathed, with only a few scratches to count as damages. What confused the firefighters more, was upon investigation it appeared that poor wiring in the house had started the fire in the room beside Zhari's. By all logical accounts, she should have perished along with her adoptive parents and sooner than they. Writing it off as luck, she remained in the Milwaukee only long enough to settle the estate and the insurance claims. She moved to a suburb near Detroit, Michigan, leaving Wisconsin completely in her wake. There she found a job for herself, and a home. She lives in a small apartment, works as a barmaid in a local tavern and is quite happy with her simple life. No one questions those in a simple life. No one suspects. What no one outside of Zhari knows is that in her first lifetime she was raised in a loving family in southern Russia. She was born on 4/15/1851 as Anja Moscovitz to a poor couple: Egevney and Ludmila Moscovitz. Both Anja and her older sister Ekaterina did the best that they could to help their parents with anything they needed. It was at the tender age of eleven that she supposedly caught the same plague that struck others in her village. Along with it came fevers and chills, violent illness and apparent dehydration. Except that while her fever kept climbing, much to her mother’s horror, she lay in her bed dreaming of the mysterious Firebird of their mythology. There were rolling waves of fire in her dreams, fire that would shift and morph and take to the sky in the splendorous form of a long tailed bird of magnificent plumage. When the fever subsided as much as it was going to and Anja went about her business as much as a child in Russia who survived such an ordeal would do, she was changed. Forever. She knew what she was, but didn’t know at first if it was just a figment of her imagination or if it was real. She knew she was real, certainly and that her new affinity for fire was real, but the Firebird was only a legend. Wasn’t it? As she grew older she dared things that baffled her parents, such as sticking her bare hands into the fire to add a log or stoke the coals. It wasn't as if she didn't understand the danger of burning, it was that she instinctively knew she couldn't burn. The fire seemed to part as she set the logs within it, when it did lick her skin, it was without consequence. The food of her people seemed too bland to her suddenly, she craved spices and flavor – things that were simply not affordable in her lifestyle. Her father saw her married to a strong, working-class gentleman by the name of Stanislav Fedotov. From there she moved from her small village to Moscow, never to see her parents or her sister again. Rumors and letters from a distant relative told her of their disappointment in her childless marriage, their longing to see her and their eventual deaths. It pained her a great deal to never return to see them alive. Anja's marriage was not filled with love and caring. Stanislav was a cruel man who degraded his wife for her inability to bear him a son. Though whether that trouble was hers or his is unknown. Throughout her lifetimes, she bore no children, but made no active attempt to do so either. She desperately wanted to learn more about what she knew she was, but whenever she made an attempt to learn more about the the Firebirds of their mythology, she was shot down by her husband and told to give up the childish stories. Except that she couldn’t. Those stories, if they could be considered simply that, were part of her now. Not only did she learn that she was incapable of burning in fire through instinct alone, instinct also told her that she could create fire. Anja tried, tested and played with the notion and the reality of it whenever her husband was not around. In 1917, Russia was in chaos. While it was a great thing that they were not in Saint Petersburg, Moscow was not unaffected by the riots and strikes. It was then that Stanislav made the decision to leave with his wife from Russia to America and find a better life for them. Traveling through Europe first they took the first ship they could afford to board in Ireland and sailed for the United States. Aboard the ship, illness sprang up around them. With the ship came rats, with the rats came fleas and with the fleas came disease. Abnormally healthy, Anja was unaffected. Stanislav, however, was not so lucky. He grew very ill and eventually died. She knew not the full extent of her powers at the time or perhaps she would have made an attempt to save him, as even though she didn't like her husband much, she did not wish him dead. She wished no one dead. She arrived at Ellis Island speaking not a word of English, alone and having to deal with both immigration and a deceased husband at once. With all their shared worldly possessions they chose to carry with them on the ship and the money saved and garnered from the sale of furniture in tow, she moved into a small shared apartment in New York City. Anja gradually learned English at the assistance of a gentleman who lived across the hall from her, a gentleman who had done as she had and left from the old country. He had been an affluent man in Saint Petersburg, but lost everything when he left the comfort of his job and home. He taught her to read and they shared each others company throughout the years. It was in his company that Anja finally learned more of the folktale of the Firebird. She learned of it's mythical powers, of its governance over fire and of its deaths and rebirths. Curious, and aging herself, Anja could not help but wonder what would come of her in old age. Would she die and go one in the afterlife or would she regenerate as the Firebird did in their stories? She was in her late sixties when she first attempted to transform into a bird willingly. She was alone in her apartment and was thrilled when it worked. It was not long after she had come to America. There were so many more things to learn, to try and to master. Unfortunately old age took a grip on her body in September 1930. America was in ruins much as Russia had been when she left. The Great Depression taking its toll on the people. It was then that Anja fell asleep one evening knowing she was going to die. She remembered dozing lightly, then being overcome by a burning deep within that engulfed her whole body. Then, nothing. 24 hours later from the unfound ashes emerged a girl around the age of 16, confused and unsure what to do. She was no longer Anja, but she was all the same. The neighbors that had grown to be her friends over the years shoved her rudely out the door, threatening to call the police on her. They assumed she was simply a poor child that was robbing a helpless old woman. There had been much theft in their neighborhood since the start of the Depression. Out in the streets of New York, she considered her previous life, though it was vague around the edges, she recalled it much like one might recall a story in the moving pictures. She recalled her birth mother and birth father, her sister and her dead husband. She needed a name, something to go by. As a child in her previous life she'd always loved her mother's name, but since going by Ludmila at her age would have seemed strange to those around her, she chose simply Mila as her first name. Mila was forced to live on the streets for a time, taking a job in a factory sewing along with teenagers her age and women who had previously only spent time in the house. It was necessary. There wasn't much money to be made, but some money was better than no money. Some money bought her bread to eat and a place to lay her head in a public house. Something others were not so lucky to have. Again someone took pity on her situation and cared for her. An older woman and her husband, Mrs and Mr Mazhari, took her into their home, and showed her every kindness the middle eastern family could. They had no children of their own and saw in Mila kindness and caring that they wished for in their own had they ever had children. Without them, Mila would have been lost. In that lifetime, Mila never took a husband. This time, though, she knew immediately of her powers in what she was, but told no one. No one would understand what it meant. She did share with this family her stories of the Firebird from the homeland of her birth and they shared with her their stories of a similar creature. A creature that they knew of as the Phoenix. Through these stories Mila began to wonder if there were others like herself out there. Others with the same powers and the same abilities.If the legends transcended borders, certainly there were more. She hoped that one day she would meet another like herself. Traveling West with her family, they came to stay in Chicago. Here the Mazhari family stayed until the Mr and Mrs passed of old age, leaving Mila alone to fend for herself. She worked, she experimented with her powers and her ability to shift into bird form. Eventually sadness and loneliness caught up with her in 1999 and again she found herself engulfed in flames and later reborn as a child of approximately 15. Again she found herself lost, confused and alone. Not old enough to fend for herself in this society, and not allowed to by the social constructs of the time, she was scooped up into foster care, telling those that tried to help her what her name was and why she had no family to speak of. Again, she was Mila and not Mila at the same time. She was still Anja, she was still Mila and now, as homage to her Mazhari family, she took the first name of Zhari and claimed to have been living on the streets, alone, as far she could remember. It was then that Alice and Mikhail Nezworski took her into their home, north in Wisconsin. | ||
| since Light of May | ||
Zhari is frightened, paranoid and on edge. Her kind has yet to come out of the shadows and she hopes, for the safety of all of them, that they never do. She's never met another phoenix but is certain that they must exist. She’s more careful now than she was prior to the Light of May, watching her own actions and thinking them through before completing them, wondering if anything she does would set her off as a Phoenix to those who would be her enemy. The only time she relaxes is around fire elementals, because she knows that she could easily be mistaken as one of them, and around cherished friends. It means she’s frequently lonely, which is better than having someone covet her because of what she truly is. | ||
| special skills | ||
She’s a skilled musician, but she’s incredibly shy about it. While her guitar is her closest and most treasured companion at home, she will very rarely crack it out and play in front of others. Only the closest of friends will have ever heard her play. Also, as a phoenix she is extremely skilled with fire. She, in her spare time, dances with fire. Whether that be something as simple as sticking her hands in a burning campfire to turn the logs without even thinking about it, or spinning lit fire poi, she feels more alive when there is fire burning around her than she does at any other time. | ||
| weaknesses | ||
Serpents - They are the natural enemy of the phoenix. Specifically Lamiae. While they can both identify each other on sight, Zhari is unwilling to out the other for fear of outing what she is. Because of this she harbors a sort of phobia of anything remotely serpentine, including toys that appear just a touch too realistic. Mythology - While she is thankful that not many know of the reality that are Phoenixes, those that do know the creatures exist also know the mythology that surrounds them. From their healing powers to their control over fire to their rebirths and everything in between. Because of their raw and attractive mythology, they are often hunted and sought out, which has left Zhari being very wary of everyone she meets. Reservations - Being a more reserved individual means she may miss out on opportunities to meet new people and engage in new things. While it has probably saved her life in the past, trusting her instinct to be reserved in situations where a non phoenix may jump right in, it has certainly left much to be desired in terms of life experience. | ||
| strengths | ||
Soothing - Zhari doesn’t like conflict and thankfully the sound of her voice - whether in human speech or song, or in bird song, tends to calm those around her. She is a talented singer, but it’s just something that is a hobby. She’ll sing to herself as she works, to others if they are ill or hurt or even just for the joy of it, just to calm. Many times over it has distracted those around her from violence. Extended life span - She isn’t exactly immortal, but she does get ‘reborn’ in a sense. On her third ‘life’ now she retains some memories from her previous existences, learned from each one and vows to try not to repeat mistakes. Thankfully, she does age, as it would absolutely kill her to watch those she has grown to love, grow old and wither away. | ||
| living conditions | ||
She has a very simple, modest apartment. There is one bedroom, a small living room that seems a touch crowded by her furniture and an even smaller kitchen. Everything is decorated in complementary colors, keeping it comfortable and soothing to the soul and the mind. | ||
| credit to splott at rp_tutorials | ||