Name: Hannah Southwick
Age: Twenty-six
Physical Appearance: With gently-curling hair the colour of bitter chocolate and a pale heart-shaped face, everything about Hannah's features is soft and finely-drawn. Languid blue eyes, the colour of rainwater reflecting the desert sky, a neat slightly upturned nose and small rosebud lips make her looks saccharine and pretty, though not quite beautiful. She is relatively short with an elegant, hourglass figure that wears the fashions of the time as well as any variety-show actress. Her hands are losing their callouses now, and her skin its tan but the sole physical memento of her past is hard to miss; the midnight blue lines of a Comanche facial tattoo adorn her chin with their stark geometry. For this reason alone, she is unmissable amongst the townspeople of Fort Trinity.
History: Much of Hannah's history is well-known. In the autumn of 1870, her family were ambushed by a band of Kiowa in New Mexico whilst attempting to cross the border into Texas. Her mother and father, along with her older brother were killed. She and her sister, badly beaten but alive, were taken captive and kept as slaves, made to walk brutal distances and do unspeakable things between the raids they carried out on the edges of their territory. After fifteen months of this horror, her thirteen year-old sister dead from pneumonia, she was part-sold, part-gifted as a way of sealing a treaty, into the ownership of the neighbouring Comanche tribe. There she was treated as one of their own, integrated into the tribe's social structure, given the name Topsannah and willingly adorned with the facial tattoos that mark them, man and woman alike. For eight years she lived with them, until word of a white woman living with some of the remaining Comanche who had not yet retreated to the reservation in Oklahoma travelled back to her aunt and uncle in Fort Trinity. In return for a temporary ceasefire and a substantial ransom of horses and food, she allowed herself to be handed over to the town authorities.
She became a celebrity overnight, simultaneously attracting fascination, sympathy and mistrust for what had happened to her. Having turned down several offers to tour the state telling her story in variety-acts and side-shows, she lives a quiet life with her upper-middle class aunt, now widowed, in Fort Trinity. Although now a permanent feature of life in the town, she is still a relative outsider and treated with cautious delicacy and a degree of fear, as if she were a brittle glass object easily capable of shattering and injuring those in close proximity. Although the townspeople would be more than happy to superimpose a picture of an innocent white woman degraded and enslaved for a decade by brutal savages upon her past, her silence has so far denied them that delicious opportunity. Instead, rumours abound at the true events of those eight years.