GENERAL INFOName: Lydia Marie LaRochelle
Nicknames: Leela
Ethnicity: French
Birth Date: September 9th (Virgo)
Age: 25
Sexuality: lesbian
APPEARANCEHeight: 5 foot, 4 inches
Distinguishing Marks: -A long, thin white line of a scar down one side of her neck, starting behind her left ear, and ending near her collar bone. It's from just after her parents kicked her out; during her first few nights on the street, she was attacked by another homeless youth with a knife. It was the first physical fight of her life. She lost it. -She has a single large tattoo, covering her back from the nape of her neck to her hips, and across her upper arms. It's a blazing orange and red phoenix, whose lower half fades into a pile of swirling ash, so that you can't tell in this one frozen moment if the bird is rising from the ashes, or burning all over again. She had it done when she finally managed to get into school so she could get on with her life. She even secretly used a few hundred dollars of her scholarship money to get it, writing it off under living arrangement needs, like furniture.
Lydia is short and slight, with a slightly-foreign look, and a lean, wiry muscularity. She still wears her hair in dreads, and never really got back into the habit of make-up after it became an option for her again. She wears glasses that have been dashed and repaired repeatedly. Her wardrobe varies wildly from her older clothes in dark colours, unobtrusive, not in good condition but unlikely to attract unwanted attention, to her newer clothes that are loud and colourful to make up for all that time she went through life hiding in her old ones, especially since after she started making friends here in America, she started exploring the rave scene with them, and is now into it pretty heavily. She talks with her hands a lot, especially when she's excited, and it's a good idea to maintain a distance greater than arm's length when she's explaining something.
PERSONALITYTenacious, smart, and ambitious. She's smart as blue blazes, functionally a genius in some areas, and seriously out of her depth in others, mostly with people. She has very little natural awareness of how other people feel and react, and doesn't ready facial expressions and body language well, and speaking on most normal conversational topics, she sounds like maybe a bit of an idiot. Because of her lack of social awareness, she can be easily cheated by people who take advantage of her inability to read the situation, and is sometimes excessively wary of this. On the topics she enjoys though, she's practically an encyclopaedia, and she never stops designing and theorizing. She projects an energetic, cheerful--sometimes even unsettlingly manic--exterior, but is still very bitter about her parents' exiling her to America, and bitter about all the beautiful things that she lost and might never be able to replace, and regrets that having lost that innocence, she can never be again the person she was when she did have all those things, even if she could replace them. While she may seem well-adjusted, she struggles with this anger and when her drive to revenge is motivated, it can't easily be ignored. "The best revenge is living well", Oscar Wilde once said, and she firmly believes that. She wants money and power and everything her parents had exiled her from, and she wants to get it herself, without their help, and if half the chance is afforded her, will stop at nothing to get it. She has big ideas and huge ambitions drive that together can push things a lot further than anyone but her had been originally willing to go. She also has more to lose than perhaps anyone else she knows: before her scholarship, she was technically here illegally. When her schooling is done, her student visa expires, and she could be deported back to France, losing everything all over again, including her family and life here, and be back on the streets in a city she never wants to see again.
Likes/Dislikes/Hobbies: She likes electronic music, and is still involved in the local rave scene. She studies rare ethnobotanicals in her spare time, but has never managed to get her hands on much. She's always had an interest in science and experimentation, and frequently develops small designs or formulas by herself. She doesn't like using computers, not having really grown up with them, but sees them as a necessary evil. She is phenomenally bad at any and all video games.
Role: Grower
Major: Organic bio-chemistry, with a minor in plant/fungi genetics
HISTORYRelationships: There's the handful of friends from around campus she's about to go into business with of course, and her raving buddies (some but not all of whom having once been other homeless kids). She's totally estranged from her family back in France, and was an only child.
Known Languages: French (first language), English (fluent, with accent)
Lydia was born in France, only child to an 'Old Money' family. They had a huge castle-like house that had been in their family since historical times. Like most 'Old Money', they held to the oldest traditions, holding the chronicles of their lineage as high as living people because the historicity of their name is really the only advantage they have over the 'New Money', families who were rich by their own hand, typically business moguls, who the older families feel are forcing their way into High Society without having a legitimate place there. The descendants of old nobility simply resent having to share tables at black-tie events with the sons of shoe salesmen and peach farmers.
But since Lydia's family is from the Old School, she was raised 'properly'. Taught to speak with the French equivalent of a the upper-class boarding school accent, to ride a horse (which she was rather bad at), to quote French classical literature and poetry, even taught to walk in heels with a pile of books on her head. She always went along with this quietly as a child because she knew nothing else, but never really enjoyed much of it: her private tutors focussed on history and etiquette, no maths and sciences. Like most children of old, traditional families, she was assigned shortly after her birth to an arranged marriage with a boy from another old, traditional family. For most of her life, this idea seemed distant and unreal, and she had little or no opinion on the matter other than to hope he wasn't her cousin or something.
At the beginning of high school, she was switched from personal tutors, to a private high school. To help preserve family image and honour, and make sure their daughter made the right marriage, her family sent Lydia to an all-girls private boarding school, where they assumed she would be away from any temptation unfitting their plan for her. This backfired badly. Lydia had never looked at a boy before in her life, not because her parents didn't want her to, but because she didn't want to. But now that she was here, she was certainly looking at the other girls. It was strange at first, and frightened her, but a lot of the other girls there were in the same situation as her, and through her time at the boarding school, learned a lot about herself through her first few romantic relationships, just like any other high school couples. When her time at the boarding school was up, she decided to come out to her parents when they brought her home, and try to introduce them to her then-girlfriend.
Her parents were furious. She hadn't expected them to react this way. She knew it would be a hard sell, but she thought they cared more about her than just what her uterus could some day do to provide another link in their precious genealogy. The fact that this meant she'd never marry the boy she was betrothed to was only the icing on the cake. She'd shamed their family, their appearances and reputation, and their French Catholic God. They tried various ways of "fixing" her, firstly by cutting her ties with the girl she'd hoped to introduce to them (Lydia often wonders what bcame of her high school girlfriend). They wanted no part of this, and would never deign to accept this black mark against their family, and after the failure of the last of their 'anti-gay treatments' told her it would be best (for them, of course) if she just left. They had her pack some clothes and things into a big rucksack, and took her to the airport that night. They told her the Americas probably are okay with this filth, and some distant relatives would pick her up at the airport.
No one ever did. She stayed around the airport for a couple nights, until someone noticed, and then simply wandered blind into a foreign city. She was about eighteen. The first few nights were the hardest. She didn't know The Rules. She didn't blend in. They heard her posh accent, they saw her expensive clothes under her jacket and in her bag. She was robbed practically immediately. What they left her with, she intentionally defaced so that it wouldn't happen again, and from then on was very careful about not coming into possession of anything "too nice" that someone bigger and meaner might take from her. She got in her first fight with a boy a bit older than her who had a flip-knife, who thought she was trying to rob him while he was sleeping. She wouldn't have done that, especially back then when she was vulnerable. She'd just ignored the wrong territory-marking graffiti scribble and wandered into the wrong dark corner looking for a place to sleep of her own. She doesn't bother to cover the scar. But she did learn The Rules, and The Rules don't leave you once you know them. They're always in the back of your mind, even when you're off the streets, and you peek into doorways and under bridges on your way to your house, as if still always scouting for a place to sleep tonight.
She passed much of this time in libraries during the day. No one minds people staying at the library all day; even homeless people if they don't cause a fuss. She could feel her diamond-sharp mind dulling with the stress and ill-health of being on the street, and it scared her. Her mind was all she had, her greatest tool, her greatest strength. Her ace in the hole. Her mind is incredibly powerful, fast, and agile, and she needed to keep it sharp, like whetting a knife, if she ever wanted to pull herself back up from here. So she practically lived in the libraries, feeding her brain voraciously with knowledge of every kind, reading every word in that damn library, studying from textbooks of schools she'd never even heard of, on topics her tutors had deemed people of her station had no need of knowing. And she wrote. She wrote notes, she wrote essays, she wrote theories. In dozens of 3-for-a-dollar spiral-bound notebooks, she wrote enough material on enough topics for 100 thesis papers. Even when she sat by the side of the road with other homeless kids her age begging for change for dinner, between appealing to passers by, her nose was between two pages of a notebook, scrawling ink over blue college-ruled lines. Then she'd go back to the library, and type up her latest writing. Then she sent it in to universities as a scholarship application. Day after day, year after year, she just kept writing and kept sending them in, until she was fairly sure every university and college in the country had blacklisted her completely.
Finally, one day she got a response. It was a letter, from the university where she would later meet her friends and 'business associates', accepting her into the bio-chem program thanks to her extensive treatise on the subject she'd written. Full scholarship, fully paid textbooks, even basic living arrangements for the first semester. And they thought she was a foreign student because of the photocopy of her French passport she'd sent with her paper work. So she could use the money they'd give her for transport from France to get off the streets. It was perfect.
Recently, she finished her first semester of classes, pulling honours marks so far. She doesn't have trouble with her student visa yet, but did just run out of funding for her living arrangements, and will have to find some other way of raising the money: being still a French citizen, she can't get a job in America. So while she's just barely comfortable for now, in her cramped attic apartment in a rooming house on the bad side of town, the money is already running out, and she's looking to her big, beautiful, dangerous brain-power again to get her out of the situation.
OTHER:She once, while she was on the streets looking to make money, invented a chemical litmus test for street drugs, which she formulated from items shoplifted from a pharmacy, that could test the purity of the kinds of drugs she and her friends would see in the rave scene. Basically, with a tiny, tiny sample, you could tell, say, how much MDMA is in an ecstasy tab, or if it's all just baking powder and meth. Since that let everyone know who's selling drugs that have been tampered with, it could have gotten her in a lot of trouble, and she was nearly killed by less-honest dealers angry they couldn't dupe their customers anymore. But before they could 'get rid of her' and her invention, she was contacted by some smarter dealers in the scene and one of their suppliers, who saw how they could turn it to their advantage. They offered to buy the formula from her, so they could know when the Big Guys were sending them shipments of lower quality than they'd been promised, thereby keeping themselves from being similarly duped on a larger scale. She happily sold the formula in exchange for her safety. Later on, having met the guy who is to become the Leader in her and her friends' own 'business venture' she strongly suspects (but can't be sure) the guys she'd dealt with in this incident, were ultimately connected to said Leader's father.