Sofya Chanse

*ONE OF A PAIR*

* Overview
* Sheet
* Background
* 'Ships
* Logs

 We are the music-makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.

— Arthur O'Shaughnessy

Sofya and her twin sister, Darya, are the children of a Russian emigre and the waning days of the Cold War. Despite their age, they don't look much older than their teens - good genes, surely. Or maybe that dollop of not-quite-human. It's not hard to tell that they have some abilities, and an affinity for felines. And for heavy metal rock music, trading roles as lead guitarist and singer when their band takes the stage. Just don't leave tempting shinies out in front of them....

## Personality

As much feline as they are human, the twins live by their own rules. Despite their demonic origins, there is not a hint of genuine malice in them - they prefer to live life carefree and independent, moving from one bit of fun to the next. By the standards of "normal" people, they are Weird, and they like it that way. The only certain way to earn their ire is to harm what they have considered "theirs" - be it a person, or a shiny bauble, a long-time friend or one just now acquired - for this, they will not forgive. In all other things, they live in the Now - the moment matters more than the long term. Still, they have some understanding of things beyond the Now, of the longer term and the short. Thus, they are impulsive, yet not reckless, carefree, yet not careless.

## SKILLS

Sofya is a bit of an amateur artist, working primarily with sketches and digital media. She tends to focus on fanart and custom character sketches, marketed through the internet under an alias.

Sofya pursued a degree in business and economics at Harvard, and has a decent command of the basics involved in running a business.

The most significant talent nurtured by the twins' criminal connections was the art of stealthy infiltration. Walking without trace, climbing to reach high windows, lockpicking and security systems both electronic and, to a lesser degree, mystical. She is eminently talented at the skills of getting into places she shouldn't, and absconding with things that aren't hers.

Sofya spent two years in Boston, running a "gaming-slash-nerd-haven" shop mostly as just a place to have an income from and to attract interesting people. She isn't the most terribly skilled at boardgames, wargames, or role-playing, but she can talk the talk.

Sofya's work with Parkour lead her into a side-trip, the Russian martial art known as Systema. The art focuses on swift, efficient, explosive motion, combined with joint locks and throws, knife fighting, and pressure point strikes. Like parkour, she finds the training drills meditative and liberating. She has had few occasions to put it to the test, however, and knows well that there are those far more skilled than she.

Sofya is a confident musician, specializing in the guitar and capable of styles ranging from metal to folk, with no prejudice as to where in the spectrum she might fall on any particular occasion. (On stage, though, she tends more towards the former.) She is a competant if unexceptional singer as well.

Sofya has had occasional chances to practice at prestidigitation, from juggling to minor illusions to pickpocketing, she has a light and delicate touch perhaps attributible to her feline nature.

Sofya loves to be in motion. Whether it be dance, or her energetic guitar style, or simply to get out and run. Beginning at college and continuing it through their adventures in Boston, however, she has taken it to an extreme. 'The Art of Motion' takes her through wild careens up walls and across rooftops at ridiculous speeds, taking advantage of every tiny foothold and bit of leverage to keep her moving.

## POWERS

As a half-demon, Sofya ages at a very slow rate, perhaps one-tenth that of a human or less. Despite having passed her fiftieth birthday, she does not look a day over eighteen. (That this has necessitated a succession of false identities is, of course, natural.) She is almost never sick, and poisons not intended for demons are next to useless.

All cats are graceful, swift, and agile, and rakshasa are no less so. Sofya has had the good fortune to inherit the full measure of this. To dance through the midst of a gunfight, juggle running chainsaws, outrun a speeding race car, leap several stories straight up from a standing start, none of these are beyond her.

Sofya has access to a cat's senses in all forms. Her sight is quite good, her night vision better. Hearing is more acute and has a wider range than the human norm, and more directional. Her sense of smell is also enhanced, but not enough to track a person with. One drawback of this is that even in human form, her eyes have a cat-slit pupil and reflective tapetum lucidum. She usually covers this with a minor illusion - or a pair of sunglasses. (In some crowds, a casual mention of costume contact lenses works wonders, too.)

Sofya has inherited the Rakshasa gift for elaborate illusions. While she cannot cloak a large area in the world of her imagining, she can create quite the detailed environment within a small area - a good-sized room is easy, something the size of a parking lot takes a bit more effort, a city block would take enough concentration to be quite distracting from other activities. While the illusions she creates have no physical substance, she can stimulate the sense of touch - with more fidelity in smaller regions - well enough that it is hard to tell the difference. Her talent also gives her a cunning sense for illusions created by others, which combines with her enhanced senses to give her an advantage at seeing through them.

A tiger's claws and fangs are easily capable of rending flesh and tearing through weaker materials. (And that's not counting in her impressive strength.) Sofya can use these with ease whether she is in feline form or human.

Sofya is, as the line goes, made of hardier stuff than the norm. She is considerably stronger and more resilient than any human. She can easily lift several hundred pounds, bend metal bars, smash through solid wooden doors, or crush a brick in her hand. Similarly, she is very hard to injure (at least, permamently). Minor wounds (from non-'holy' sources, at least) heal within seconds; severe wounds might inconvenience her for a day or so, and so long as she is not killed instantly she will recover fully (in time) from even the most grievous of injury.

While not actually physically changing her shape, Sofya is quite capable of convincing others she has done so by way of illusions. Her true form shows some of her demonic heritage, a humanoid figure with several feline features. Covering this with the illusion of her 'base' human form is a trivial matter for her, upheld easily even when asleep.

## ADVANTAGES

Their time with Uncle Ilya has given Sofya a good sense of relationships among the criminal community, and good skills at telling who's who and who to look for when she needs something.

While the twins have the potential for spellcasting, they have no training or practice.

The twins are fluent in English and Russian, of course, and Sofya can carry on a conversation in Japanese and German as well. She can puzzle out some forms of Hindi but only slowly.

While the twins are not obscenely wealthy, nor do they try to live beyond their means, they do have a comfortable bankroll set aside from their previous exploits. Much of it has, of course, been invested carefully to provide them a reasonable income.

## WEAKNESSES

Rakshasa are infamous for their endless hunger, and Sofya is not immune to this. While she does not have the infinite appetites of her demonic parent, she is almost always hungry, and her body's metablism demands a huge daily calorie load -- almost all of it meat.

Sofya's partially-demonic nature renders these a painful aggravation to her in even close proximity, increasing with physical contact. Unlike a full demon, however, they do not cause her actual injury or repel her from their presence unless they are particularly strong -- the average blessed cross would be a minor annoyance, but she would probably run screaming from the presence of the Shroud of Turin, as an example.

The twins consider themselves obligated to their patron in the Russian Mob, 'Uncle Ilya', and he will occasionally call on them for favors. Often rather on the grey side of legal and moral.

The twins, Sofya and Darya Orlova, trace their ancestry to a small village in the mountains of Georgia - the country in southeastern Europe, that is, not the American state. Rumor and legend trace its founding to the Varangian Guard, a lost Roman Legion, and even a lost tribe of Israel. It's entirely possible that more than one of those legends is true, given the way soldiers and warriors of many cultures have melded into them over the centuries. The most recent was a Soviet officer in World War II, Gennady Orlov, the twins' grandfather.

Gennady's daughter, Kseniya, would never know that the lover who swept her off her feet was not human, nor that he had visited her village many times over the centuries. He set her up in a comfortable home in New York, and made sure she and the twins would be well cared for, at least for a time. He would vanish from their ken in February of 1989, with the girls not even in their teens. (There is no evidence, but his departure coincided directly with the departure of Soviet troops from Afghanistan.)

Kseniya did her best, of course. But for an immigrant single mother in the 1980's, things were difficult at best. She eventually did find help, though not from the most wholesome of sources. The twins knew him as 'Uncle Ilya', but he was actually Kseniya's employer - a local boss from the Russian Mafia. Their exotic good looks and catlike agility served them in good stead and the two adapted quickly to a life of thievery. Picking pockets, picking locks, passing unnoticed through crowds and by security guards... the twins became quite adept thieves rather quickly, and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Ilya soon put Kseniya in touch with Martin Chanse, a corporate manager who dabbled in white-collar crime and owed him several rather large favors. They were married just over a year later (and the twins would eventually gain two younger half-siblings, Sylvia and Annette.) Martin arranged for the girls to get a more formal education, supplementing thievery and con-artistry with history, literature, and science courtesy of Harvard. This was also where they discovered their musical talents, joining a student band and getting into considerable mischief.

Finishing their first four years of collegiate education without causing any major catastrophes, the twins elected to try out their newly-earned degrees (in business administration and economics, respectively) by opening a business of their own. They purchased a disused industrial building, converting the upper floors to living space while the ground floor become a shop. The store - "Wonderful Things" - did a brisk business with Boston's gamer and "nerd"/"sci-fi fan" crowd, while the twins learned the realities of modern business. In between all of this, they managed to get up to several adventures, including a daring heist to get a potentially-apocalyptic artifact away from the wrong hands, a semi-romantic entanglement with a White Court vampiress and her true love, and more.

After a time the thrill of running a business became more job than fun, and the twins decided to move on. This time, they'd focus on their musical skills, get a new band together, and see what the west coast had to offer.

Logs featuring Sofya Chanse:

*Coming soon!*