[OOC] Profile

[glitter_effect]

Full Name: Vanessa Cordelia Payne
Gender: Female
Age: 22
Occupation:Performer, escort, and prostitute employed by the Subrosa Brothel in Persephone. Aspiring singer-songwriter and poet.


Appearance: Vanessa is a pretty, doll-like woman with long, curly strawberry blond hair that hangs to her waist, light skin, and bright blue eyes. She's petite, standing at roughly 5' even without shoes, but she's curvy enough to turn many heads. She's skilled with makeup and is seldom seen not wearing any.

Vanessa's clothing choices can vary widely upon her mood and the company she's keeping at the time. In general, she prefers smart, stylish clothing with classic lines that makes her look dominant, sophisticated, successful but not necessarily approachable. In reality, when she dresses like this, it's generally a good indicator that she's feeling the opposite: depressed, weak, vulnerable, and needy. Dark colored suits and white shirts in the successful career woman style are fairly common. She also wears her hair up more often, usually in a ponytail, in these ensembles, and accessorizes with expensive, designer jewelry gifted to her by besotted admirers among her clientele.

When she's working or out on dates, Vanessa's opts for more romantic, feminine styles that project a softer, bewitching, and more inviting image. Elegant dresses with curved lines, fabrics that cling, bold or dramatic colors that complement her natural beauty, and exotic accessories are common. Vanessa always wears her hair down when she's on the job (it also hides her neckport quite nicely) and frequently cuts quite the provocative glamorous figure making her a popular escort among some circles in Eden.

Her familiar is a swan so Vanessa has a swan tattoo on her left bicep. It changes colors and hue fairly frequently due to Vanessa's mood swings and difficulty regulating her emotions.

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Personality:

On the surface, Vanessa is a very flamboyant, flirtatious woman. She's playful, fun-loving, and thrill-seeking. She's gregarious, and open-minded with her choice of companions to the point that she delights in smashing social convention and stereotypes. She comes across as a vain, promiscuous party girl who doesn't take life very seriously and while that is true of her personality, she's also a great deal more intelligent, sophisticated, and insightful than most would assume just looking at her.

She's very rash and impulsive which comes out most in the form of self-indulgence and promiscuity. Vanessa's rather disorganized. She's always over-committing herself to different things. She tends to rush into things without much forethought or planning. She doesn't have much patience or tolerance for boredom. If life's too "normal" for her, she'll take it upon herself to make it more interesting by stirring up some kind of trouble for her own personal amusement without considering the consequences too deeply. Most of the time, she just indulges in silly, harmless pranks that don't leave any lasting damage beyond a bit of ego bruising.

She has a broad range of interests, many of them falling into more intellectual categories like philosophy, religion, history, mythology, science, psychology, and so forth but at the same time, she loves trashy sensationalist talk shows like Jerry Springer, weird Japanese game shows (particularly the ones that are sex-themed), and mecha anime. At times, she can display a child-like sense of wonder, enthusiasm, or simplicity in her outlook, giving the impression that she's more immature than she genuinely is. Sure, Vanessa still gets excited over pillow forts, laser tag, water balloon fights, and carnival rides but at her heart, she's very much an adult capable of making tough decisions and behaving in a mature manner when situations call for it.

Appearing strong, confident, and dominant are important to Vanessa so she doesn't show her soft side to just anyone. Due to her high pressure upbringing, she's come to associate emotional vulnerability with weakness. Historically, showing weakness led to exploitation of some sort so she doesn't trust others very easily despite coming across as the opposite. She's very shrewd and a great deal wiser, particularly when it comes to people's true motivations, than she reveals herself to be more than not.

Underneath her light-hearted, sassy exterior, Vanessa is actually extremely sensitive and highly intuitive with a high degree of emotional intelligence. At heart, she's a selfless humanitarian capable of great loyalty, caring, and devotion to those willing to prove themselves trustworthy and worth her time and energy. She takes something of a visionary approach to people she gets involved with and tends to be drawn to wounded people in need of some sort of spiritual or emotional healing. It's rare for her to form permanent, lasting bonds but when she does, she's dedicated and loyal, almost to a fault. For the most part, she has good intentions but she can be uncomfortably direct at times in a "tough love" fashion.. She's a good deal more submissive and laid back underneath her public persona, as well.

Vanessa suffers from depression, social anxiety. While she seldom gets furious, she does have moody periods of snappish irritability or apathy. If one were to really get to know her, they'd find a painfully shy girl who is uncomfortable with her place in the world and desperately seeking some kind of security. There's a lot that Vanessa hides about herself out of fear of being criticized, ridiculed, or exploited in some way. In general, she tends to have more positive outlooks for others than she does herself. She'll give other people pep talks and positive reinforcement (or negative reinforcement) but she's often reluctant to accept help for herself.

One important thing to know about Vanessa is that she's also a textbook case of borderline personality disorder meaning that she has an unstable sense of self and shifting identity, is driven by fears of abandonment and engulfment, and plagued by chronic feelings of emptiness. She has a very fierce need to feel one with people and to some degree, this is a factor in her apparent bisexuality. She switches sexual choices and orientations with ease because her identity is in flux. As a result her moods and views can be highly malleable or variable by her relationships. The above description is a general overview of the 'default' formation of her personality but because of her disorder, her personality can seem unstable during times of intense stress.

Vanessa's very creatively and artistically inclined. Her main interest is music but she delights in any activity that involves some kind of designing process.

History:

Vanessa was born into money and prestige, the second child and daughter of a privileged couple living in a prosperous New York City suburb. Her father, Thomas Payne, is the wealthy, successful owner and CEO of one of the Big Apple's top advertising firms. Her mother, Sharon Willows, is a renowned stage actress and singer, famous for her performances on Broadway, but forced into retirement by her husband after the birth of their children. She has an older sister, Monica, who is a successful fashion designer and entrepreneur running her own boutique in the city. Vanessa also has extended family within the area but does not get along with most of them due to her status as the black sheep. Vanessa's family is one of those that's a permanent feature of the society pages and always in the news for philanthropy, political aspirations, misfortune, and scandal. They're not quite in the same league as the Vanderbilts, the Hiltons, or the Kennedys but they're not far terribly far from it, either.

The household Vanessa grew up in was extremely dysfunctional. Thomas, a passive, weak-willed, and gullible man who owed much of his success to the support of others, had rushed into marriage with a clever, beautiful woman many years younger than him that preyed on his loneliness. That his young wife, Sharon, would turn out to be a highly intelligent psychopath after his money never occurred to him, even after his daughters were born. By the time he suspected a thing, it was too late to do anything in his mind and resigned himself to the situation. Sharon held most of the power within the Payne household which she exercised without conscience or integrity, her only concern being furthering her own agendas and fulfilling her own needs.

Due to her mother's antisocial nature, Vanessa grew up in the care of a woman who viewed her as a possession and a raw material to mold at will instead of a person with rights, thoughts, and feelings. This proved to be a devastating influence on what had been a naturally shy, sensitive, and malleable little girl who was eager to please her mother. Monica, who had a stronger mind and more dominant personality, fared better against her mother's molding, but being a child in the same predicament herself, could not do much to protect her little sister.

With her father looking the other way and preoccupying himself with running his business, Vanessa fell easily to her mother's influence. Due to her own unresolved issues concerning her career, Sharon pushed her daughters into showbiz. Much to her dismay, Monica resisted her to the point that the cons of such an endeavor outweighed the pros and she abandoned her elder daughter to the care of day care facilities and focused her efforts on her younger one.

To the public eye, it seemed as if Sharon was simply interested in cultivating Vanessa's natural talents as from a very early age she displayed a gift for musical composition and performance. In reality, however, Sharon was simply investing in upgrades to her daughter. Any time spent with Vanessa was in the interest to making the girl her own personal work of art, not in genuinely bonding or nurturing her. It was only a fortunate coincidence that Vanessa happened to love and enjoy the path she'd been pushed into.

Because of her youth and the way her mother kept her isolated to ensure her grip on Vanessa's psyche did not break and her influence remained the strongest, Vanessa had very limited exposure to other ways of life or other mother-daughter relationships. She could tell that her mother and sister didn't get along well but that was the gist of it. Most of Vanessa's childhood was eaten up by an endless parade of talent lessons, hairstyling sessions, makeovers, auditions, beauty pageants, and school, leaving little time for developing friendships or any other skillsets.

Thomas, Monica, and other family members didn't entirely approve of the situation but were hesitant to go up against Sharon. The woman worked hard to cultivate a charitable, doting, supportive "supermom" image and was an extremely clever and shrewd manipulator with dirt on much of the paternal side of the family thanks to Thomas's gullible sharing over the years. Most were reluctant to provoke Sharon out of fear that she'd air their dirty laundry to the public and stir up more scandal.

This went on for most of Vanessa's childhood and adolescence. Eventually her mother's investment in her did pay off and she drew the eye of a talent scout for television studio recruited her to play as the youngest daughter of a sitcom family on prime-time. America watched Vanessa grow up in the role of Alexis Fontaine, a character partially based on the girl herself. By the time the show ended, Vanessa had established herself as a rising starlet, much to the excitement of her mother who immediately pushed her even harder.

By the time Vanessa reached adolescence, she was in the merciless grip of a psychopathic stage mother who cared only for the attention and money she received through her daughter. Thanks to the Coogan Law, fifteen percent of Vanessa's earnings were protected in trust but it didn't stop her mother from working her hard. As she grew older, Vanessa began to start feeling burned out on acting and resenting her mother for pushing her constantly to do something she no longer cared for. However, her mother had conditioned her to perceive rebellion as simply not an option and by this point, the studio and fanbase and joined in with heaping on the pressure to conform to their desires for her. While child labor laws protected Vanessa to some degree, they didn't protect her from the hours of extensive practice her mother dumped on her. So in the end, Vanessa felt the only choice she had was to resign herself to the situation and accept the life Sharon wanted her to live as her own.

Puberty was extremely kind to Vanessa physically and she blossomed from a cute little girl into a beautiful young woman. The roles chosen for her became increasingly sexualized, this combined with Sharon's constant objectification over the years encouraged a somewhat narcissistic mindset in which Vanessa viewed herself as a sex object and little else. Between her mother's psychological abuse and the fickle, unforgiving nature of the public, Vanessa had grown up to develop serious self-worth issues. Her acting jobs were becoming a growing source of shame and she felt like she had no other options; in her mind, she was good for only one thing - performance.

Vanessa's career left her little time for interacting with people outside of showbiz. She had no time for friends, dating, and the only reason she got schooling at all was because it was required by law. She had very little education. Eventually, Vanessa got a break of sorts. When she was seventeen, her mother pulled her out of the studio over a contract dispute. For the first time in her life, Vanessa had freedom, at least as much as she would ever have under her mother's thumb.

So Vanessa did what many former child stars do when given a taste of freedom, she launched into into a high stakes, long-needed teenage rebellion much to Sharon's displeasure. Alcohol, drugs, sex, and partying became pretty much the norm, as did scandal and her name in the tabloids. Desperately, Sharon tried to bring her daughter to heel but other members of the family indirectly encouraged Vanessa's rebellion, enjoying a bit of vicariously lived revenge of their own.

Life still didn't go smoothly for Vanessa, who by this point, had begun attending college at New York State University where she studied her true passion - music - with the intention of becoming a singer-songwriter after she graduated. Her sister, feeling guilty for her lack of involvement in helping Vanessa through her struggles, became a very supportive, stabilizing influence in Vanessa's life. When Vanessa's rebellion spiraled out of control and she needed rehab, Monica was the one to foot the bill and offer her a place to stay when she was released.

One note about her mother, Sharon hasn't stopped trying to regain control of her cash cow and bring her to heel. Her efforts have just been unsuccessful so far. Chances are she never will. Vanessa disappeared shortly after getting out of rehab and reappeared as a new prostitute in the Subrosa Brothel.