Chathra - Printable Version

Chathra
32 (As of November 2014)
Female
Mesalian
Chef

Appearance
Standing at 166 centimetres (roughly 5 feet and 5 inches) tall, Chathra has light brown skin, and a rectangular, athletic build. Her arms are particularly muscular, as she uses them most in her line of work. Her down-turned, almond-shaped eyes look as though they’re rolling upwards, even when she stares straight ahead. They’re dark brown, almost black, and her hair is the same colour. Her hairstyle is harsh and severe, cut short into a straight, angled bob with a knife and some precision. Her fringe is long and parted, and tucked neatly behind her ears. On particularly warm days, she puts all of it up in a small ponytail, which always looks like a hacked-up mess because of all the different lengths of hair. Her thick, low, downward-slanted eyebrows make her seem like she has a constant frown. She has a long, beak-like nose that points downwards and a small, narrow, thin-lipped mouth. She has laugh lines coming in as she enters her 30's. Her features tend to be angular and defined; this lets a lot of shadow to form on her face. Her arms, specifically her hands, are home to many scars, both old and new; some of these are from cuts, while others are from burns. Burns are also the reason she doesn’t have much hair on her forearms.

Her hands are calloused and rough, but are usually clean. In fact, Chathra is a clean and tidy-looking person: no jewellery, no hair beyond the collar, short nails, etc. She wears a simple, coarsely-woven black dress with the sleeves rolled all the way up, and a white, full-body apron that's slightly stained. When she isn't working, the apron isn't worn; it's usually slung over her shoulder instead, or around her neck like a scarf. The hem of her dress is frayed and dusty. At her waist is a belt with leather scabbard, where she carries a seax (as Chathra would never use a kitchen knife for anything other than cooking). She’s also often seen with a leather knife roll, with straps so it may be worn like a messenger bag (see items). She almost always has a few cloths slung over her left shoulder, or tucked into her belt. Though they don’t really go with her dress, she also wears old leather work boots that are coming apart at the sole; these are thick, and heavily padded with rags. Why? Cooks don’t work sitting down. In spite of her neatness, she always smells like sweaty armpits mixed with onions; it’s as though she has worked so long in hot kitchens that the smell of sweat can’t be removed. Her feet are particularly stinky, due to how much time they spend moving around in shoes.

Vocal Details
Chathra’s voice is the result of her previous drinking and smoking habits. She sounds very low, dry, and gravelly, and generally keeps to a mutter or an almost mutter when she talks; there’s a slight nasal quality, as though her nose is blocked and is affecting the clarity and volume of her words. Her voice isn’t very expressive, though it isn’t fully monotonous; it’s bland and unenthusiastic at worst, but calm and casual at best. For the most part, I refer to her tone as ‘friendly enough’. If she isn’t working or in a rush, she speaks slowly and tends to cut out the start of her sentences, i.e. ‘reckon it’ll rain today’ rather than ‘I reckon it’ll rain today’. However, when she is in a rush or is getting angry, this changes. Her sentences generally become fuller, and she speaks at a faster pace. Her tone becomes more pointed or taut, and she sounds more direct and emotive. If she raises her voice above her almost mutter, it tends to sound very raspy and strained; this can be harder to understand. For this reason, Chathra rarely raises her voice in anger, and instead relies on the sharp contrast between her casual voice and her angry voice to express herself, as well as her general body language.

She tends to keep to a simple vocabulary, which reflects her illiteracy. The exception of this is any specialist cooking vocabulary, which relfects her cooking knowledge. As a somewhat crass, impulsive, yet opinionated person, she has very little filter between what she thinks and what she says. As a result, her word choices tend to be strong ones (e.g. ‘hate’ as opposed to ‘dislike’), and she swears often. This filter only becomes thinner as she gets angrier, or more emotional in general; this of course means she swears more as she gets angrier, and is a lot less careful with her words (and it’s not like she is careful to begin with). Other miscellaneous speech patterns include the following tendencies: ‘aye’, ‘sure’, and ‘heard’ instead of ‘yes’; ‘heh’ as a slight laugh; ‘reckon’ instead of ‘think’; merged words such as ‘dunno’, ‘gonna’, and ‘howzitgoin’; ‘motherfucker’ as a word to refer to people; food as a conversation topic; 'gotcha' as a way of saying 'I see'; that sarcastic and brief, 'great'; insults that are a hybrid of a swear word and a random noun (e.g. pissloaf); talking through clenched teeth when angry, and kitchen lingo used out of habit (e.g. ‘hot behind’ meaning ‘I am holding something hot and am coming up behind you, so don’t bump me’). Voice inspirations: Jane Lane of Daria (season one at least, she got more expressive later), Tara Strong’s portrayal of Raven (Teen Titans and Teen Titans Go), and Junot Diaz's use of 'motherfucker'.

Physicality
Chathra has spent most of her life in professional cooking. Thus, she moves like she’s always in a kitchen, where everything is cramped, hot, sharp, or moving. Generally, this means the following: she keeps her stance upright so she takes up less space, she keeps her movements as small as possible so she doesn’t bump anything, and she is nimble for the sake of productivity. More specifically however, it leads to physical habits and tendencies such as the following: she weaves through obstacles smoothly, even if there’s plenty of room to go around; she often multi-tasks by talking while doing, and having both hands do different tasks simultaneously; she rarely touches her face and hair so her hands stay clean; she mostly stands, even when there’s a chair; she avoids leaning on things in case it’s a cabinet, or hot; she coughs and sneezes into her arms instead of her hands; she slams things shut to quickly ensure they’re fully shut; she goes to grab everything with a rag in case it’s hot, and she knocks on doors before opening them, in case there’s someone on the other side, etc.

Her tendency towards small, minimal movements even affects more subtle aspects of her physicality, such as her expressions. When talking, Chathra not only doesn’t gesture with her hands much, but she also doesn’t move her head much. This basically means that when she looks around, she doesn’t move her head; she instead moves her eyes to look. As you can imagine, this can create an unintentional, eye-rolling vibe of condescension. Her facial expressions in general are quite subtle and small, which unfortunately means she’s prone to chronic bitchface. That is, her expression is usually a relaxed and neutral one, but that neutral expression looks pissed (see appearance). She’s quite aware of this, and keeps an array of responses prepared for anyone who points it out to her. Whenever Chathra does get the chance to switch off her brain and relax, she’s actually quite slouchy and sloth-like in posture. This is particularly evident when she goes to sit down; she either slouches forward until her head’s on a surface, or she slouches back until she might as well be lying down, like her body’s trying to get as close to the horizontal plane as possible. Essentially, it’s almost like she doesn’t really have a sitting down mode: she just sleeps, and works.

As this slouchiness might suggest, Chathra isn’t well-versed in any manners unrelated to hygiene; this is reflective of her upbringing. Thus, she also has many other bad habits, such as talking with her mouth full, elbows on tables, burping and flatulence, not holding the door open, etc. Other miscellaneous ‘Chathra-isms’ include: cracking her knuckles, especially when anxious; holding a pipe by the stem instead of the bowl; handling hot things painlessly due to the calluses on her hands; fake smoking her pipe when contemplative or idle; smirking when giving approval; pulling her lips tight when stressed or concerned; shrugging slightly when lying or unsure of her answer; forced, menacing smiles when asked to smile; gritting her teeth with a closed mouth so it hardens out her jawline when annoyed; intense, strangle-you-with-my-eyes stares when annoyed; slow, menacing turns of the head when annoyed; huffing when annoyed; sighing through her nose when losing her patience, and slamming surfaces when telling someone off (for additional volume). Like all my characters, Chathra is left handed, though can perform a few kitchen-related tasks ambidextrously.

Personality

Spoiler

Chathra is mostly the result of the kitchen she was born and raised in: an environment where living and working melted into each other. Due to this, and the fact that she mentally associates taking a break with the loss of her home, she values her work the most. This is the basis for all her other values, as productivity doesn’t just rely on working hard: it also relies on speed (as deadlines are within hours and minutes), as well as teamwork (cooks in castle kitchens usually work together) and communication (a combo of speed and teamwork - honesty saves time). These three things are also what Chathra ultimately values, in addition to people; she believes her work as a cook would be pointless without them, as everyone has to eat, and food is meant to be consumed and experienced. These values are the base of everything Chathra is, and will generally motivate her. However, something that also affects her actions is her anxiety, which comes from the loss of her home in the Civil War and the hostility she experienced soon after. This anxiety manifests itself mostly in the form of restlessness and irritability; she often has difficulty sleeping and can seem to be always on-edge, though these are well hidden in her personality.

For instance, Chathra’s opinions on work can simply make her anxiety seem like she’s just in a constant state of vigilance, when in reality it’s more like paranoia; she can be quite the workaholic, which goes hand-in-hand with her restlessness. She often struggles to take a break from her job, and can really dislike being idle and having nothing productive to do. This regularly extends itself to things like insomnia, irritability and experimental cooking. Her value for efficient, but fast work leads to positives such as good time and resource management, decisiveness, organisation, and general efficiency in what she does. However, it’s also closely related to her irritability; a need for speed leads to Chathra’s impatience, which in turn leads to her short temper, and her tendency for reckless decisions. For example, Chathra can become frustrated easily when faced with a complex issue, and instead of patiently thinking things through, she tends to make quick, ‘fuck it’ decisions. While this does make her quick to respond, these decisions are usually based on her past experiences (which are at best estimated guesses), or her ‘gut feelings’ (which are just downright assumptions). By consequence, she tends to be cynical, deeply sarcastic, and quick to judge people.

As her temper, vigilance, and strong set of beliefs may suggest, Chathra is a very opinionated and fiery person. She will often give unsolicited advice (which again is based on her experiences) and isn’t afraid to be honest; she will tell you if she thinks you’ve done wrong. However, her honesty is especially toxic when combined with her cynicism and short temper, which leads to her sounding like she is being pointlessly critical rather than trying to be helpful. Basically, she’s confident and assertive, but she’s often too proud and brash with her words; Chathra often forgets to consider others’ feelings before she talks, much like how she rushes through thinking before she acts. And yet, Chathra still views teamwork as a necessity in life and strongly believes in working alongside others, rather than against them or independent of them. Thus, it follows that she dislikes competitiveness, selfishness, and ‘lone wolf’ mentalities (i.e. ‘I work alone!’). This is where Chathra gets very self-contradictory and hypocritical; she believes things like pride, a lack of respect, and emotional dishonesty get in the way of progress and co-operation, but she herself is very capable of such. Her pride especially enables this behaviour whenever her own flaws are pointed out, as she is always quick to defend herself and lie about how she feels in order to be right.

Stubbornness, pride, and temper aside, Chathra is generally alright to get along with. Though she has built up a barrier of anxiety due to her past, the fact that food is made for people stops her from being an unsociable shut-in. She is blunt, but she is also very genuine; one can usually count on her honesty, for better or for worse. She also can be quite caring, as her job is essentially about servitude as much as it is about deliciousness. And despite her capacity for aggression, she isn’t violent; she’s too community-oriented for that. Until she is ticked off, she’s usually pretty casual with her composure. She even has a sense of humour, which is crude and offensive at worst, but witty and lighthearted at best. Her jokes tend to be at the expense of other people however, even if her intentions are usually just to affectionately tease; as stated before, she tends to have little consideration of how others feel. Limited and biased exposure to Xitians and Lucins has lead to her prejudices; Lucins are pompous snobs, and Xitians are pompous dangers. She also has a slightly complicated relationship with religion; she was raised to worship the gods, particularly the fire and earth gods, but her faith has waned over time.

She likes the sound slicing an apple makes, watching smoke rise and sink, salt in everything, bowls of separated egg yolks, blue bandages, rasping steel when sharpening knives, lime juice in everything, the smell of onions sweating in butter, peeling things in one go, the smell of rain, freshly cleaned rags, the first sip of coffee in a day, weirdly-shaped mutant vegetables, washing her feet after work, warm milk with whiskey and a grate of nutmeg before bed, sticking her hand in dry sacks of grain, duck fat, and the ‘aaaahhh’ sound that comes after drinking. She dislikes cutting citrus, the sound of dragging feet, watching inexperienced people chop things, live animals, well done steak, getting up early, inefficient plate and bowl stacking, that small line of dirt that doesn’t go into the dustpan, long words, the shrill screams of children, picky eaters (including vegetarians), splinters from firewood, accidentally swallowing grape seeds, knives in dish water, and lending things out to others.
Her favourites: golden brown, black coffee, family meal, toasted apples with honey and cinnamon, and grinding up fresh spices. She's something like an ENTJ.

Theme Song
Kitchen - Stomp Out Loud
Coming Down - Ball Park Music

Capabilities

Spoiler

Advanced Cooking [skill]: With two decades of professional cooking experience, Chathra’s beyond simply memorising recipes; she has an in-depth understanding of the theory behind cooking. For example, she could identify what every individual ingredient in a dish is supposed to do, which allows her to cook without recipes. She’s familiar with lots of different ingredients and techniques, as she has travelled the mainland a little, and the various nobles’ kitchens she has worked for didn’t really have limited access to anything. That being said, if she lived in our universe, her cooking would be described as medieval European (all of Europe, which is culturally varied); anything outside of that would mean reliance on recipes, if not educated guesswork. This skill also includes knowledge of butchering (most mammals, birds, and fish), and food preservation (optimal storage, drying, smoking, salting, jam-making, pickling, etc). A downside is that Chathra is used to having lots of ingredients at her disposal; she's no stranger to 'peasant cooking' or to being resourceful, but the quality of her cooking depends on her ingredients. She makes the best she can with what she has; don't expect your food to be perfect without any salt. Chathra also doesn't have much experience in gathering and processing basic ingredients such as flour, cheese, salt, and herbs, because most of the working environments she's been in have had those things delivered rather than made in house. However, since coming to the setting, Chathra has learnt how to make butter and cream.
Basic Brewing[skill]: Brewing is cooking; this especially applies in the middle ages, where it’s common for alcohol to be served with food. Thus, she has learnt this skill alongside her cooking as a part of her apprenticeship, though most of the brewing was left to actual brewers. That being said, Chathra can only brew the following things (though she brews them well): tea, coffee, soup broth, and standard medieval ale. And what I mean by ‘standard medieval ale’ is that there’s only enough alcohol in it to act as a preservative--it’s no where near as strong as modern beer, and it could even be considered suitable for children. Alcohol brewing has fallen into disuse lately, though Chathra still knows and understands the basics--the knowledge is still relevant when it comes to cooking anything with alcohol or yeast.
Novice Knife Combat [skill]: Chathra usually uses a seax to defend herself against the occasional dusk attack. Generally, all she does is slash quickly and wildly at her opponent, aiming for general soft places like the eyes and neck. This was taught to Chathra by various people from the kitchen as she begun to explore outside of town. She then went on to use this rough technique more as she travelled the mainland. She still uses it regularly whenever she's unfortunate enough to come across a dusk.
Novice Survival [skill]: This just involves making a fire and cooking on it, and setting up a tent. These things were taught to her by the kitchen as she begun to explore outside of town, but they were mostly used when she travelled the mainland. These days, Chathra might struggle with a tent, but the cooking side of things is something that's hard to forget--especially since the small inn kitchen of Alroc occasionally means she has to prepare food outdoors.
Novice Literacy [knowledge]: Chathra's been learning how to read and write with Koi for the past two years. Currently, Chathra remembers most of the alphabet and its sounds, though she's still a while away from being literate fluently. She has to read and write very slowly in order to understand anything, and even then, she's still prone to mispronunciation and misspelling. Generally, Chathra has the capacity to learn literacy much quicker, but is slowed down significantly by her lack of patience. She's frustrated easily when she makes a mistake, or when something doesn't make sense to her, like silent letters.

Goals
- Move on properly
- Never be content with the mundane
- Find a way to cure boredom
- Start working less
- Learn more cooking
- Learn literacy from Koi
- Learn to garden from Lapis and a new book
- Learn to ride from Victor
- Learn more corny jokes
- Start a new garden by the tavern
- Show off future leet riding skills to Orosvor
- Draft one document without spelling error
- Try someone else's cooking
- Teach Koi how to cook
- Obtain a new gardening book
- Obtain a new seax
- Obtain new supplies for the tavern
- Obtain firewood from Hector
- Explore outside the town
- Talk to Lapis about how Lapis is feeling
- Talk to Nadia about whatever she wants to talk about

Current State

Relationships

Items of Importance

One leather knife roll (1x Chest: “Chathra’s Knife Roll”). Spice brown leather, finely crafted. Simple and plain design. Has detachable and re-attachable leather straps so it may be worn like a messenger bag. Something like this and this. Usually with her at all times: rarely left alone.
One chef knife (1x Iron Sword: “Chathra’s Chef Knife”). High-carbon steel, wooden handle. Well made. Has a smooth, rounded spine. 21cm (roughly 8 inches) long. Kept in her knife roll.
One paring knife (1x Arrow: “Chathra’s Paring Knife”). High-carbon steel, wooden handle. Well made. Has a smooth, rounded spine. 6cm (roughly 2 inches) long. Kept in her knife roll.
One boning knife (1x Arrow: “Chathra’s Boning Knife”). High-carbon steel, wooden handle. Well made. Has a curved, stiff blade. 8cm (roughly 3 inches) long. Kept in her knife roll.
One fillet knife (1x Arrow: “Chathra’s Fillet Knife”). High-carbon steel, wooden handle. Well made. Has a curved, thin, and flexible blade. 10cm (roughly 4 inches) long. Kept in her knife roll.
One cleaver (1x Iron Axe: “Chathra’s Cleaver”). Thick, soft, low-carbon steel, wooden handle. Well made. Has a smooth, rounded spine. 15cm (roughly 5 inches) long. Kept in her knife roll.
One honing steel (1x Lever: “Honing Rod”). Kept in her knife roll.
One whetstone (1x Iron Ingot: “Whetstone”). Kept in her knife roll.
One pipe (1x Torch: “Chathra’s Pipe”). Wooden. Simple design. Kept in her knife roll. Originally belonged to Rulf (see backstory). Purely sentimental to Chathra.
One light broad seax (1x Iron Sword: “Chathra’s Seax”). Single blade weapon/general not-cooking knife, primarily the latter. Iron, leaf-shaped blade, wooden handle. Poor quality. 21cm (roughly 8 inches) long. Kept in a sheath on her belt.
Three cloths (3x White Carpet: “Rag”). Cyan cotton, lightly stained. Roughly the size of a tea towel. Tucked into her belt.

So.. for a very long time I've been trying to write a backstory for this character. The reason it's taken so long is because I wanted it to not just dish out information; I wanted it to be a good piece of writing. But the short story is... I got really close to finishing, but it stressed me out and I was exhausted with writing it, so I just wrote an information dump. I'm still going to put some of the unfinished backstory here though, because even though I'm not really sure if it's good writing any more, I worked too hard and too long to not put it up anywhere.

So here it is as optional reading (seriously optional to whoever is grading me -- not part of my actual application, hence the second post).

Spoiler

Expect this WIP to be finished some time tomorrow. It's sorta done now, but I need to check it properly.
Happy New Year, everyone.