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- Posts:
- 7 (0.005 per day)
- Custom Title:
- On A Boat
- Personal Text:
- Screw Grad School, Man
- Name Information:
- "Rodia" is a family name indicating proximity to pomegranate trees, which, let's face it, are kind of dime-a-dozen in Elysia. Also there is a deeper significance having to do with pomegranates being full of hidden secrets and blood, but Cleis doesn't know that and neither do any of her relatives.
Cleis is a very pretty name that, in another world, is also associated with someone much more famous.
- Appearance:
Cleis is diminutive for a sailor, lean-muscled and trim-if-curvy and narrow-shouldered and not particularly tall, but moves around enough to give the impression that she's bigger.
Her cheery oval face is dimple-cheeked on a regular basis, her brown eyes bright with enthusiasm, and her full pink lips are only schooled down into a Serious Professional Frown when she puts effort into it. Adding to that the practical chin-length bob of her thick black hair and the closest thing an Elysian gets to a cute button nose, and she comes off mostly as adorable whether she wants to or not. Her caramel-custard skin is healthy and even enough to indicate both youth and that she hasn't been at sea long, but is well-tanned and a little windburned around the forehead and cheekbones, and her hands have the calluses of someone who knows her way around a capstan.
She wears her navy uniform tight and flattering, with glossy high boots and, when she thinks she can get away with it, a snappy oiled-leather tricorn.
- Playby:
- Preity Zinta
- Age:
- 19
- Friends and Family:
- The Rodias, including her parents and brothers and sisters, are nice people, but she doesn't really know them and hasn't seen them since she was a kid.
The Mother Superior at Our Archive was probably glad to have Cleis out of her hair.
Those early research voyages crossed Cleis' paths with those of Rufus Atticus, who was frankly indulgent about her babbling because she seemed like a good kid and was pretty sharp with the note-taking, and he helped get her a reference into the Navy, which merited a big hug that made him kind of uncomfortable.
Other than that, "friends and family" for Cleis means the crew she serves on, where she is perky enough to be both well-liked and really irritating, and why is she so excited about sailing anyway, man, it's hard work. This includes Captain Karras, who Cleis tries not to piss off too much, because the Olympias and the crew are great and she doesn't want to get marooned or keelhauled or anything.
Somewhere out there, a certain lady pirate is now the Snow and Thunder Empress, and could not pick Cleis out of a lineup if she tried, but man, will she laugh if you ask her about the convent story while she's drunk.
- Usual Daily Routine:
- Hop out of the hammock.
Breathe in the gorgeous salt air.
Raid the galley.
Batten some things down, raise up some other things, heave and ho some other things, get yelled at, narrowly escape swabbing the deck.
Play with lots of interesting instruments, set the course, fiddle with the steering, haul some more ropes.
Attempt to pray, because whoops, she does that now.
Raid the galley some more.
Get way up in the masts and watch the sunset.
Get yelled at some more.
More battening and raising and trouble.
Hammock.
Consider what kind of trouble to make on shore leave.
- Background:
- Plenty of people in Elysia get an education and a chance to do amazing things to push the march of philosophical understanding forward.
Not everyone has a pile of cash to do more with that education than crunch numbers for someone more impressive, or donate medical-research material, or push a really impressively high-tech broom.
The Rodias were not rich, and they had a whole bunch of kids, some of which were getting sponsored into good schools, and some of which were probably going to have to plow a lot of fields to pay for it, and their smallest daughter was the last straw when it came to mouths to feed and affordable futures, so they decided to work some leverage out of it and send her to one of the more prestigious research convents to raise.
Our Archive of the Supported Hypothesis, on the coast, was one of those oldschool, hardline convents that barely considered thaumatic philosophy philosophical, and felt that too natural philosophy was trending a wee bit too much toward the practical in a troubling way these days, and isn't that a shame.
That is to say: young Sister Cleis spent a lot of time cataloging, cross-referencing, and footnoting things, as a lifestyle, with lab time five times daily when the bells rang; lived in a little tiny stone room with nothing but books and one very somber outfit that included a wimple, lab coat with elbow patches, and optional safety goggles; and took very simple meals that had been proven through rigorous testing to be nutritious. There were occasional hymns to reason and process, as a lovely break from doing some of the heaviest archive-research grunt work on the island and experimentation whose results, piously free of profit, would go to the best institutions for, well, we try not to say the word "application."
Sister Cleis was a bubbly teenager who was going a touch stir-crazy in there, much as she was smart enough for the work, and getting increasingly bitter about the whole never going outside Because It's Not Logical. One night, in the wake of a pirate raid (they'd mistaken Our Archive of the Supported Hypothesis for Gorgo's Alchemical Laboratory For Wayward But Promising Young Ladies down the road a ways) the little research nun slipped out, caught a rowboat and a hay cart to the nearest port, and got onto the crew of one of the science boats to see the world.
The sailing part and the adventure part, she liked, but there was a bit too much research, and at one of those port stops, having a bitter crisis of reason about natural philosophy in general, Cleis got religion (as best she could) and decided to abandon research altogether. Which meant running away again, to boats where she wouldn't have to do any footnoting at all. Possibly she could learn to cuss.
And that's how chipper little Cleis Rodia buggered off from a research convent and joined the Elysian Navy.
- Quirks:
- This is a cheery kid, who spent much of her life staring out a cloister window at the sea, and now gets to be out on it in a new place every day. That's one thing.
Another thing is that after more than a decade cooped up in nunland doing Important Science, she got really bitter about What It All Meant and, exposed to religion for the first time on a dockside somewhere, decided this was her ticket out. She doesn't really get religion, and doesn't know who she's praying to exactly, or which God clearly is the explanation for what just happened, let alone the theology of the matter, but the intellectual part of religion is just not something she's dealing with yet. She's just cheery about the logical backdoor to everything and will be very disappointed to discover that faith is kind of more complicated than that. In the meantime, she has a bit of the zeal of the ignorant converted all mashed in with the habits of many years doing nothing but research research research.
If it is new and interesting--that is to say, a set including most of the world--Cleis wants to know about it, and will pretend very hard not to be analytical about it.
Mostly she is really enthusiastic about this whole new adventure of working with her hands, going to bed exhausted, meeting pretty people on shore leave, and curse words. It remains to be seen at what point the luster will wear off.
- Darkest Secret:
- Cleis will tell you she ran away to join the Navy out of a sense of brave exploration and service, ready to see interesting new places and fire cannons at them, sir, yes, sir, no, sir, the convent was not as inspirational as the open sea, sir, thank you sir for the opportunity to put her studies in practice, sir.
She will not tell you that the real reason is more like this: one night a while back there was a foggy night and a pirate raid and while the convent didn't have a lot of concrete treasure to cough up, it being mistaken for an alchemical lab down the coast in the fog, a very comely lady pirate decided to ravish the dickens out of Sister Cleis and promptly forget her name the next morning.
And Sister Cleis thought, wow, there's a whole world out there I'm not seeing because of all this theory and archiving and airless experimentation.
At the same time, she also thought, shit, man, I want to be a sailor.
And then she roughed up her room a bit after grabbing the good stuff, pretended she got kidnapped, bobbed her epic Bride of Research hair and sneaked off to find a port that looked likely to get her pressganged as quickly as possible.
- Reactions to Sudden Hugs:
- Hugging is new and interesting!
...if the Cap'n isn't looking, anyhow.
- Special Skills and Aptitudes:
- She is that particularly Elysia! Land of Science! sort of spooky-smart, and learned in fields most of the planet has never heard of on a vast and all-encompassing level that is almost purely theoretical. You will almost never guess this unless you ask a direct question about something she still finds interesting, like, say, oceanic navigation, or thaumatic-philosophical theory regarding the effects of Moon-arrival on global estrus patterns, after which it will take something very shiny to distract her from talking, accurately, forever.
There are only a handful of people alive who can footnote the way Cleis can footnote. Much as the rest of the world has invented swords and guns and cotton/poly blends which are doomed to vanish, only to return eons later, Miss Rodia has already invented the Chicago Manual of Style, Twenty-Fourth Edition. She just doesn't know it's called that.
She can also do things with a sextant and astrolabe you would not believe, and predict the weather with funny little jars, and the water currents with the weird little wicker thing that random islanders and nobody else are supposed to know how to use.
Also, she will try anything twice--the second time to make sure that the burny stove wasn't a fluke and secretly full of fun after all.
- Living Situation:
- What Cleis would say is "anywhere that doesn't have four walls and a roof." What her superior officers would say is "on the goddamn Olympias and don't you forget it."
- Date Registered:
- August 21, 2009
- Local Time:
- May 22, 2013
- Last Active:
- March 18, 2013
Signature:
this ain't no Sea World
this is as real as it gets
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