Adrianna Deveaux

### Aliases

Adri (by those who don't care that nicknames upset her), Donatella (by Gene Carney)

## Biography

Adrianna was born on August 1st, 1999 at around 4am in Paris, France. She's the only child of Antoine Deveaux and Joséphine Deveaux (née Mérieux), a pair of socialites. The Deveaux family is noteworthy as being the namesake of Deveaux Énergie, built by Antoine's father from the ground up to be Europe’s leading electric utility company. Although Adrianna's parents were never involved in the business, her uncle, Henri Deveaux, is the current CEO, taking after his father. This connection, along with a generous inheritance from Joséphine's family, meant the couple was financially secure enough to live comfortably without employment. Despite this, their extravagant tastes and lavish lifestyle meant they often had to rely on the generosity of family to find the difference, namely Henri. Adrianna was born while the couple were in their early twenties, only about a year into their marriage. Family life didn’t suit the couple, who travelled often and cherished their parties, so at the earliest possible convenience Adrianna was enrolled at Witcomb School, a prestigious UK boarding school.

While she excelled scholastically, achieving high grades and distinguishing herself through extracurriculars such as figure skating, socially she struggled. As a largely anxious, overly-obliging child, she found no social niche among the other students. In fact, the school fostered a fiercely competitive environment, where other students quickly came to regard said meekness as intensely annoying. The exclusion became a self-perpetuating cycle; the others didn’t like her because nobody liked her. This difficulty contributed to growing concerns with self-image, feelings of helplessness and a sense of lacking control, which culminated with having to leave the school mid-year for a brief stint in hospital. This absence meant she had to be asked to withdraw from studies at Witcomb School. She later transferred to Saxton, another boarding school with similar claims of renown and inspiring excellence. Determined not to allow her earlier social failures to repeat themselves, she began to overcompensate with a domineering manner, emulating the attitudes of the more popular students at her old school and cultivating their behaviors in herself. This strategy was successful; She became popular, and combined with her academic successes, cemented her a position as head prefect and eventually valedictorian. Despite this, her newly developed compulsive need to remain distinguished drove her to attending Wormwood college in place of a more prestigious institution, where she felt she could unquestionably establish herself as the very best.

At Wormwood, she continued to strive to achieve all the traditional understanding of success: stellar grades, conventional glamour, and popularity (maintained largely though fake friendships). She also struck up a long term relationship with Nigel Giocondo-Jones that would end soon into the investigation, initially for the sake of appearance as a “power couple” but soon came to genuinely fall in love. While Sam’s disappearance had little to no personal effect on her beyond mild schadenfreude, she was quickly wrapped into the ensuing investigation.

## Personality

Adrianna could best be described as confidently difficult. Prone to manipulation, she might make an effort to appear sweet, though this is most commonly a ruse and only employed to those she sees the value in maintaining a friendship with. To those deemed without social value, she'll more likely come across cold, domineering and, to put it bluntly, a total bitch with a suffer-no-fools bravado. Accusations of unfeelingness are not unfounded- she's both obsessively opportunistic and highly values control, especially emotional control, inflicting these exacting, untenable standards of emotional composure on others as well as herself. Simply put, she's often deliberately unaffected by the distress of others and will actively cause it if it benefits her. Adrianna projects an image of poise, maturity, accomplishment, and grandeur. Similarly, while she strives to be logical, methodical, objective, and rational, she is actually rather impulsive and frequently prone to overexpressing her emotions (typically at the expense of others).

Adrianna is particularly obsessed with how she's perceived by the world at large. This fixation with her own image and what others think of her leads to selfishness and vanity and becoming extremely emotionally volatile when the world fails to conform to her expectations. This volatility paired with a bitter competitiveness and deep-seated distrust in the world often leads to rather extreme arguments, at which Adrianna delights. She unequivocally adores tearing others down and, perversely, its even better if her opponent responds in kind. Driven, ambitious, relentless, and keenly intelligent, it's clear she's built herself up for success in even the most vicious corporate rat race. While Adrianna earnestly does try to improve herself, she struggles to actually acknowledge her faults, blinded by a learned ruthless pragmatism.

Beyond her defensive unpleasantness, Adrianna is generically lonely, struggling to form and therefore often overvaluing what connections she does manage to form with other people. Particularly, she is notably deferent and overtly sappy in romantic relationships, prone to falling in love unreasonably quickly. Her overattachment tends to be a compensatory reaction for the lack of connection she generally feels in day to day life. In her more self-aware moments, Adrianna understands that her attempts at perfection have alienated her from herself and that she can't actually identify what she really wants or feels, actively sabotaging her attempts at intimacy and vulnerability in the name of maintaining an image of superiority, but she's unsure of what to do with this knowledge.

## Trivia

* Speaks with a Parisian accent that she plays up.
* A chronic insomniac.
* Wears 6 inch heels exclusively so that she can be taller than Raf.
* Transportationally useless: can't drive, can't bike, refuses to use public transport. She's okay at sailing but that never comes up.
* Had a phase where she was really, *really* into ghosts and ghost-related media.