InsaneJournal

NAME: James Lee
AGE: 27
DOB: 22 November, 1981
BLOOD TYPE: B-

RACE: Skinwalker
POWERS: Can take the shapes of animals she has herself properly killed and skinned. Her family totem is the raven. In addition to that, she has in her collection: golden eagle, peregrine falcon, kestrel, black swan, turtle-dove, masked owl, red deer, imbala, gazelle, raccoon, raccoon dog, ocelot, black wolf, arctic fox, brown bear, black panther, and her current project: the American Black Bear.

PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: James is a girl (yes, a girl) with long, dark brown hair and equally dark brown eyes. Who happens to wear a lot of dark clothing. Are we seeing a pattern here? Yes, James has a lot of black in her wardrobe, but she is not (and never has) been one to written off as goth. She just likes dark colors. And, okay, it often reflects her personality. Though she has the means to dress in nothing but the best, it’s not at all uncommon for her to look like she stepped out of a thrift store. On the right day, you might say she is completely average with nothing all that special about her. And on the next, she may look like she stepped out of a fashion magazine. She’s sometimes regarded as painfully thin, and of a completely average height. She does have a host of scars, all of which she keeps hidden.

PERSONALITY: James is… complicated. Those who know her might describe her as perfectly charming and witting, with a truly gracious nature. But odds are good none of those people really know her. A lot of people don’t ‘really’ know her, actually. Above all, she is extremely hard to get through to. She doesn’t let people too close, and has mastered the art of keeping people at arm’s length without them being any the wiser. Cutting to the core, James is a person who has suffered a great deal of personal injustice and tragedy, and she never dealt with any of it at all. Oh, sure, she’d pretend to, but there are certain traumas that James is convinced you simply can’t deal with and get over. You just fucking fake it, and the world keeps turning.

Her theory comes apart sometimes, mainly via a rather explosive temper. She was a girl born to abusive parents, one of them a fire elemental, and it shows. She's got a lot of your standard 'fiery' traits, actually. Intense? Check. Willful? Check. Spontaneous? Does going on safari because you have nothing better to do with your time count? She's dominating, instinctive, and a fighter. She's just as impulsive, hot-tempered, obsessive and violent, too. Then again, she's got some of the typical watery traits too: she's moodier than hell, secretive as all get out, frequently depressed, addictive, and occasionally emotional. And James would be the first to say, with a personality like that, why would you want to know the real her, anyway?

HISTORY: James’ mother, Lily Lee, was barely out of high school when she got herself pregnant. She insisted she had only ever been with one man, the love of her life, a fire elemental named James Davies. Unfortunately, James refused to quit school and settle down for this family business. After the baby was born, and Lily named the newborn baby girl after her father, Davies’ resolve crumbled. He quit school, got a job, and the young family moved in together – though the two never married. Davies’ always held back, and so Lily refused to give their daughter his surname until he did the proper thing. You see where this is going. Yes, sadly, this rather set the tone for their entire relationship.

James Davies (or just Davies, as he was often called by his friends) was a man with an awful lot of resentment in his life. His parents never gave him a thing, and he was taught that anything he ever wanted, he’d have to work for. So from the moment he was able, he’d been working his ass off, trying to get his shit together and make a better life for himself. Then he fucked up and got this girl pregnant. And no one was going to help him with that. Lily insisted on having the child, and he knew damn well she’d never be able to support herself and a baby. From the moment he first saw her, he loved his daughter, and wanted to give her a good life. They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. He resented the mother of his child for, well, just being the mother of his child. She was barely a high school graduate, good for little more than cooking and cleaning and basically being a housewife and a pretty face. He was the one that quit school to work two jobs, and even then they barely ever scraped by. The fights between the two started immediately, and it didn’t take long after that for things to get physical. Ninety-nine percent of James’ memories of her parents together are of them fighting, in one way or another.

To top things off, when James was a toddler, Davies was attacked on his way home from his night job, becoming a bitten werewolf. He had it better than some people, in the way that he already knew that werewolves existed and what was in store for him. But it was a small consolation considering the elemental nature he lost. Being at the fifth stage of fire elementalism when it happened, Davies suffered a deeply physical and mental loss. On top of that, his former element turned on him. If he walked past an open flame you could bet your ass the fire would seem to almost grab at him, and years later, his leg was badly burned in a work-related accident. From then on, everything just got worse.

When James was six, her parents had their biggest fight ever, and Davies decided he had had enough. He walked out, not bothering to take anything with him, and after two weeks it was quite clear he had no intentions of coming back. Lily caved without him. One day at school, young James was ecstatic to see her daddy come in the class room to speak to her, only to have him deliver the news that her mother was dead. At the time it was never explained to her, but the grief had been too much for Lily. She ended her life.

After that, Davies came back to the house to care for James, but it was a small comfort. Davies, wracked with guilt, never wanted to speak of James’ mother. It was like she just… disappeared. Not knowing how to deal with everything she was feeling, James began acting out. Every baby-sitter she ever had ended up quitting, and Davies had no idea what to do with his daughter. He loved her, but Lily had always been the parent. He had been the provider. He didn’t know how to read bedtime stories and hem clothing and comfort a little girl dealing with the loss of her mommy. He especially didn’t know how to do that last one when he felt that it was his fault. And unfortunately, on top of everything else, Davies was never the same after being turned. Some days were good. Some days he could barely take care of himself. It was on one of these days that he quite simply disappeared. James came home from school one day, and he just wasn’t there. Ever since Lily died, he would be arriving home from work just as school let out. He never came home. To this day, James has no idea what happened to him. He didn’t take any of his things. He was just gone.

And James, seven at this point, had no idea what to do but wait for him to come back. Davies had stopped bothering with baby-sitters a while ago (looking back, James marks this as the first real sign that his sanity was near-gone), and she had no living relatives that she knew of. So she decided the most practical, grown-up thing to do was carry on like everything was normal. And the craziest thing of all? This actually worked, for nearly three weeks. With her father’s parenting skills, James had already learned to be a self-sufficient child. No one noticed a thing. And if James hadn’t broken her wrist on the playground one day, she probably would have kept on carrying on until she ran out of food and was forced to figure out a ‘plan B’. But then she fell, got hurt, got taken to the hospital, only for the horrified adults to slowly to discover her father was MIA. First the school called the house, and then Davies’ place of work – only to find out he’d been absent three weeks, and eventually fired. Once school officials and doctors confronted James, she tried to lie a little, and then ultimately was forced to admit her daddy had disappeared and she’d been taking care of herself. After that, everything seemed to go by really fast. She was put in a temporary home, while the authorities tried to locate her father. And then any relative at all. After eventually finding no one that would claim the poor kid, she was placed in foster care.

James remembers those days as nothing more than a living hell. She was in and out of different houses almost as much as she was in and out of fights. By age nine, the adults in her life were damn near ready to write her off as a lost cause when a miracle happened.

William Ballard was a London-born man in his late 40s living in Ireland. He had been raised alone by his father, and barely knew his mother. She had left when he was a boy, and years later had remarried. Even had a little girl, named Lily, though there was a huge age-gap between William and Lily. As it was, the two had only met a handful of times in Lily’s youth. As an adult, she didn’t even bother telling people she had a half-brother. But when word eventually reached William Ballard, he immediately stepped forward for custody of his niece. James was, predictably, more than a little skeptical of him.

In the end, she needn’t have been. William Ballard was the only truly good person in James’ childhood. He came to love her like a daughter, and she would see him as a better father than her own had been.

William was also an extremely wealthy man, though how he had amassed this wealth wasn’t explained to James until she was a little older. William was a man of secrets. The Irish mansion they lived in together was always full of guests, people William had taken in for one reason another. They didn’t always stay long, just long enough to (James assumed) get back on their feet. As it was, they actually stayed just long enough to accept themselves for what they were – supernatural – and get it under control.

William Ballard was a shapeshifter. He had learned the craft from his father, who had learned it from an American mentor. William did whatever he could to help anyone who needed it. If that meant giving a scared were or even vampire a place to stay for a while? So be it. It was done. Eventually, James learned the art of skinwalking. There were shed tears over the first time she had to kill an animal – in this case, a raven – but she came to embrace it fully. Through-out her youth, she and her uncle would often embark on adventures (IE: hunting trips), and James still recalls those days as the happiest of her life. But as James would soon learn, everything always falls apart.

With many of William’s contacts, he maintained credibility by passing as a were-raven. He had a lot of friends that were weres, and sometimes, on full moons, they would all go out romping (and flying) in the woods together. And then one day, when William and James thought they were alone and unseen, they took the shapes of red foxes and went for a run. They were seen by a were, and one that couldn’t keep his mouth shut. His brother was into shady business, many of the darker aspects of the supernatural, and when he heard that William Ballard could take two forms? And it was somehow done through a magic fur? Well, that was a trick he just had to have. By any means necessary.

At first, this pack tried asking nicely. William first pretended he had no idea what they were talking about, and when things got a little rough, flat-out refused. He was threatened, but sadly, he never took these threats seriously. One early August night, when James was 17-years-old, armed men broke into the house. The pack, knowing that James had the same magic, killed William on the spot, and took her. For over a month she was held captive and routinely tortured in any way possible in attempts of making her teach them the spell. The true bitch of it was, she eventually did tell them the truth. It wasn’t a spell, it was a study - a craft you had to dedicate a good chunk of your life to. They didn’t believe her. The torture and interrogation continued as they tried to force the answers they wanted out of her. Eventually, on September 6th, James was tortured and beaten savagely one final time, and then left for dead in a ditch. She was discovered by – what are the odds – a were that had picked up her scent, and rushed to a nearby hospital. James would stay the remainder of her days as a seventeen-year-old either in the hospital, the psych ward, or a group home for crime victims. Despite knowing the names and faces of the pack that had taken her, they were never caught.

James was released a few days after her eighteenth birthday, but in her mind, she didn’t have a hell of a lot to live for. She had inherited everything, but she didn’t want to go back to the house where everything had happened. Eventually, she returned only to retrieve her remaining skins, and burn what she could find of her uncle’s. From there, James hit the road. She decided to burn each of her uncle’s skins in the country where he had caught them, and spread some of his ashes there as well. It was the only way she knew how to pay tribute to the man that had showed her that there had at least once been good in this world. She traveled a few years, and eventually ‘settled’ (as much as she ever could) in London. She moved in to one of her uncle’s properties (which was entirely too big for just one person), and… just closed herself off from the world. With her responsibilities to her uncle taken care of, she found she had no idea what to do with herself. In the end, a rather unlikely source got her out of the house again.

Patrick Varick was the man – or, rather, were panther – that saved James’ life. In the time she was in the hospital he came to visit her a few times, and out of obligation James had exchanged contact information with him. She had never expected him to keep up with it – but he did. He would e-mail her weekly to check in, perhaps sensing that she had nobody else in the world that would do it. And when James finally stopped replying, by the end of the month the Irish panther showed up on her door. He was not welcome in the least. In fact, James rather pitched an unholy fit at the invasion of privacy, ignoring the fact that she had once given him her mailing address and he’d hopped a flight to London because he’d been worried about her. Patrick was and is – quite simply – a good man. When he realized that he was the only person that ever came to visit James, he developed a soft spot for the girl, and took it upon himself to take care of her. At his persistence, they became friends. It took months, but he came to be the only person she trusted. Eventually, she enrolled in university.

Her entry was not out of any desire, however, but simply because she didn’t know what else to do with herself. Varick had a point – she couldn’t stay cooped up in her house forever. If she continued living – and for some reason she never really understood, she had decided to do that – she had to do something. So university it was. For the first two years she switched her area of study the way other girls her age switched hairstyles and phone ring-tones. At school, she kept to herself, and still counted Varick as her only friend – albeit a long-distance friend. Her life was spent in class, or at home. And after weeks of that, the solitude would grate on her like no other. Eventually, she decided she would have to do something, or go utterly mad. So she picked a seedy, hole in the wall bar, and would go there at random hours when the solitude was too much for her.

That wasn’t to say that she socialized at the bar. Some days all she did was drink, some days she brought a book, some days she did her homework. When people spoke to her (or men tried to pick her up) she usually told them to piss off, and she got in no few fights over stupid drunks not taking ‘no’ for an answer. She craved the noise, though, and the arrangement worked for her.

If you asked her today, she still wouldn’t be able to tell you why Aiden Smith was different. To this day, she can’t figure it out, and the question and its lack of answer truly bothers her. The fact of the matter simply is, he was. Aiden was the bartender, and for months they never spoke outside of James’ drink orders. One night, Aiden spoke to her. And miraculously, James didn’t tell him to go fuck himself. Little by little, every time James caved and headed to the bar for some noise, they’d talk a little more. And then something really insane happened. James would find herself wanting to go - just to see if he was there. Naturally, she hated herself for that. It didn’t stop her from going anyway, even if all she did at the bar was mentally curse herself for being stark raving mad.

It shouldn’t have been a surprise when Aiden and James’ interactions drifted outside the bar. James wanted them to, but when it happened, she still couldn’t believe it actually had. Ever so slowly, the two grew closer – but never too close. Even once there was an emotional relationship between the two of them, neither of them ever let their guard completely down. James never told him what she’d been through, though she knew he had guesses. He had to know something had happened – there were scars and even burns all over her body. Likewise, she saw hints of his own troubled past, but never knew the specifics. They kept each other at a comfortable distance, even once they were in a quasi-honeymooners state and practically inseparable. They could sleep together, but James would never actually sleep. Too afraid of exposing him to the screaming nightmares, she’d leave in the night, or just stay awake until a time when she could ‘safely’ sleep.

The two were ‘together’ for a couple years. There was that blissful honeymooner period, in which James remembers fondly as the only times after her uncle’s death that she was actually happy, or really close to it. That blissful stability (or near-stability), however, didn’t last forever. Both Aiden and James were, at their cores, truly damaged people, each coming from an extremely broken or dysfunctional place. When the two fought, one would think that not only was the world ending, but they were going to be the ones to tear it down. As far as relationships went, theirs was as dysfunctional as they come, and nothing was really safe. Screaming matches, punches being thrown, shit being broken, shit being set on fire… there wasn’t really a limit. They were two extremely volatile people who were probably really bad for each other. And the problem was, James found herself unwilling to walk away from him. Some days she’d be sure one of them would kill the other one, and she’d decide she just didn’t care enough to stop it from happening. Everything came to an end, but she didn’t want to be the one to end the only relationship she’d ever had. She loved Aiden, though she didn’t want to admit to it. In a way, he had become her world.

Once again, it was at Varick’s instance that she finally did something about it. Never approving of the match (and the things it did to James), Varick was constantly encouraging her to get out. Finally, after one particularly epic fight, James took the advice. She never meant to leave permanently. She told Aiden she needed to leave the UK for a while, and that was that. They agreed to go their separate ways until… whenever.

But James never went back. She never returned to London. Eventually, she picked an area of study and stuck with it – following in her uncle’s footsteps as a full on philanthropist, deciding that she had to at least do one good thing in her life – but even that she did outside of Britain. It’s been years since she has spoken to Aiden Smith. She never had the guts to return. She convinced herself remarkably early on that if she returned, she’d only be rejected. So, she avoided it entirely.

AFTER THE LIGHT OF MAY: After the Light of May, James continued to keep her uncle’s legacy alive. She established and backed supernatural-friendly charities and organizations around the world. When the Light of May hit, she had been in India, though she immediately began traveling again. She decided that it would not be wise to stay in any one place for too long, until the dust started to settle and she could see which countries were safe and which weren’t. Once she started to get a clear idea, she got to work with her charities. Still, she was always on the move. Eventually she grew tired, wanting some time just to herself. A request for help came from a charity in Scarlet Oak, Michigan called Joining Hands, and James headed there to meet face to face in mid July. Upon seeing what a clusterfuck the place was, she decided to settle in there. She could open up a safe haven house and see it off the ground. It was as good a place as any.

SPECIAL SKILLS: Thanks to her uncle, James is a hell of a good hunter, and generally handy in the outdoors. She’s skilled with different firearms and bows (her favorite), a skilled tracker, and generally has a lot of knowledge on the animal kingdom. James is the girl you want to take along on your camping trips.

WEAKNESSES: Abandonment Issues. Her mother killed herself and her father just plain bailed. Even things with Aiden didn’t last. Her uncle didn’t willingly leave her, but she was still alone – and is pretty much convinced that in the end, everybody leaves – one way or another. In some ways, this makes her want to soak up as much goodness as she can when she’s actually happy. Like with Aiden – might as well enjoy his company while he was there, because eventually, he would leave her. And then she would have times of anxiety where she would push him away herself, as a way of protecting herself. It’s a hell of a lot to deal with, and it’d be nigh-impossible to make her believe that someone was there to stay.

Trauma and Terrors. James is a young woman who has survived a living nightmare. She pretty much believes that the damage of her time in captivity can never be undone. She has Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and frequently has night terrors. It’s not at all uncommon for her to wake up screaming. Some days she can be happy as can be, see something that reminds her of what happened, and freak the hell out. When the flashbacks hit, she’s pretty much impossible to deal with.

Bound. James cannot tolerate being bound, in any way. In captivity, her hands were constantly tied either behind her back or above her head, and to this day she cannot tolerate the feel of anything constraining her. Which doesn’t help anything, because if she starts freaking out over something else, and someone tries to restrain her? Everything just gets a lot worse. She will react extremely violently if anyone so much as tries.

Addictions. Uppers, downers, you name it, she’s got it. Not all of it legally, but what the hell does she care? On any given day she’s probably got at least a half dozen pills in her system, and she’ll try anything that promises to mellow her out. While her ole’ standby are pills, she won’t at all shy from hard drugs or booze – and when she hits them, she hits them hard. The problem is she can’t be under the influence when she’s skinwalking, so she tends to go through stages – or hardcore benders that would take down a horse. Then she’ll be clean and irritable for a while, and generally, a pain in the ass to be around.

Explosive Temper. This isn’t to say that James will blow up at the smallest slight. Her uncle saw that she had a proper upbringing once he took over, and she knows how to keep her cool. But when her temper blows, the world goes up in flames, and it’s extremely difficult to rein it all back in.

Aiden Smith. The man she loves, and really shouldn’t. It doesn’t matter that she hasn’t spoken to him in several years. It doesn’t matter that they weren’t just the equivalent of a house on fire, they were the whole fucking neighborhood getting hit by bombers. She let him in as much as she ever could let a person in, and he’ll always have a soft spot in her heart. And GOD HELP the stupid fuck that ever hurts him.

Patrick Varick. To this day, Varick is the only person she really considers a friend. After graduating and getting involved in her uncle’s and her own charitable organizations, Varick ended up working for her. He counsels newly turned weres, and generally goes wherever James goes as a soundboard and all-around right-hand-man. He might as well be family for James, and she would die (or kill) for him.

Curses. In her time in captivity, James’ abductors submitted her to any spell they could possibly write up that would force her to shift. Of course, none of them worked. A lot of them did alter her, however – and in some pretty rough ways. After her rescue and recovery, she went looking for witches to lift as many of the spells as she could – and she had a reasonable amount of success. A few still linger though, causing anything from wonky behavior, reversed shadows, changing eyes, and horrible fits.

Vendetta. James knows the names and faces of every pack member that had a hand in her uncle’s murder and her own abduction. And a bounty has been placed on each of their heads since her recovery in the hospital. James needs for them to suffer, and needs for them to die. Preferably, she needs to see them die. If she got even the vaguest tip that one of them was possibly in hiding in a third world country? She’d be gone within the hour, and wouldn’t come back until she was sure they weren’t there (or until she’d killed them).

STRENGTHS: Independent Woman. James can take care of herself. Maybe not in the healthiest of ways, but she can. At the end of the day, she’s a survivor. She’s made the decision to live, and she will not be taken down.

FAMILY: Dead, dead, and dead to her. Next question.

No, seriously. Her mother and her uncle are dead. Her only remaining family is her father, and he? Is dead to her. She has no idea where he is, if he’s alive, and you could not pay her to care. Actually, she hopes he’s dead.

LIVING CONDITIONS: She’s setting up a massive halfway house for supernaturals in Scarlet Oak called Ballard House. She’s living there for now.
CAREER: Philanthropist/general Head Bitch In Charge.
PB: Keira Knightley