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Name: Marja Virtanen
Pull-point: August 2015
Canon: Old World of Darkness / Mage: The Ascension
Age: 35

Mid-thirties, white with a slight Asian element, with long, straight black hair. Her height, weight, and general appearance are all pretty average. She tends to use a lot of kajal and has a preference for black in her clothes, though she wears a reasonable amount of white and colours, too. The thing that stands out the most about her is probably that there is always at least a little cat fur on her.

Marja was born in 1980 in northeastern Finland, and an hour later joined by a sister: Anneli, her identical twin. They grew up in a small village somewhere between nowhere and nothing with hardworking but loving parents, spending most of their childhood out in the woods building treehouses, gathering berries, running around on skis, and so on. And going to school, obviously. Everything was very normal, or at least it seemed to the sisters like it was.

But more and more, Marja had strange waking dreams that she of course told her sister about, and while after some initial curiosity her twin really wasn't interested in those weird stories, she helped Marja hide just how much she "slept" and waited patiently for her when she tried out her new abilities when they were out in the woods or on the lake or wherever else. Now, it proved to be a huge advantage that there were few children in the village so that they had always tended to mostly only play with each other.

They had always been very focused on each other, from the very beginning, sticking to each other's sides like glue, making a point of looking identical (to the extent where when their mother had decided to give them different haircuts they had grabbed paper scissors and taken it into their own hands) and sharing everything that could be shared. Sure, they sometimes fought, but their bond got never damaged. Not only because they liked it this way, but also because it was practical: They were so in tune that nobody but them could tell them apart. Even those who believed that they could, like their parents, could be fooled, because they relied on personality traits and those weren't nearly as clear cut as the girls made people believe. Yes, Marja was generally the more dutiful and behaved sister and Anneli the tardy one who lost her temper more easily. But Anneli also had less issues with authority and Marja had a serious anger management problem as a child that later turned into issues with impulse control. It was, however, way too useful to have one "good child" between them, so they got into the habit of making everyone think that every time that Marja slipped it had been Anneli. That way they could both assume Marja's identity when one of them wanted to do something that they needed the adults' trust for, and Marja could say that she would look after Anneli to let their parents do them things together. Later, they would much expand on their ability to pretend to be one another, up to the point where for years Marja pretended to be both of them to hide that Anneli was gone.

Because two years after Marja figured out magic and found a spirit mentor, she got herself into serious trouble. Her spirit mentor could not help her, and for the first time Anneli saw herself confronted directly with the dangers of the world that her older sister had entered two years earlier. And she jumped in to save her, changing into her Crinos form for the first time.

Now Marja did what Anneli had done for her and helped her hide all evidence of her being different, not asking more questions than Anneli wanted to answer, and for a while things worked out well.

But then Anneli vanished.

Marja, equal amounts scared and pissed off, told her parents that they wanted to go camping in the woods for a week and hike up to one of the old landmarks in the north of the village, packed up as if Anneli was still with her, said goodbye twice as both of them and took off to track her sister down.

It was the hardest tracking that she'd ever done, but eventually she found Anneli and the pack that had adopted her (or rather, they noticed that they were being followed and confronted her). Furious, she demanded that Anneli return, stating that she would follow her sister until she returned home. Told that she would likely die before that, she responded that yes, she was aware of that and that she gave herself a week. And she was dead serious. Luckily, the situation could be diffused and after a long and hard arguing it was agreed that Anneli would return until the end of their mandatory comprehensive school years, which was only one and a half years off. After that, the sisters would move to a different town, nominally to attend upper secondary school there. But in practice only Marja would go and in return for only pretending that Anneli was with her be able to stay in contact with her sister.

Marja, deciding that a comprehensive school degree wasn't enough and trying to stifle loneliness with overworking herself, ended up weaselling her way through two schools at the same time by pretending to be sick a lot, so that she got two high school diploma, one for herself and one for Anneli. For this she had to study a lot of books on medicine to be able to pretend successfully to be sick often enough, and from this necessity Marja developed a strong interest in medicine. Due to the complicated situation of her high school time, she didn't have the grades to go into medicine directly, though, and thus trained to be a nurse first with the plan to study medicine afterwards. Her uni years were uneventful. She developed a private life of her own, took some singing classes and even she managed to establish some relationships that could have been called friendships when she joined a band as a lead singer. They wanted to do more once she was done with her training and waiting for med school. But that was thwarted, again.

One day, shortly after Marja had finished her training to be a nurse, Anneli suddenly showed up in her door and told her that they needed to leave Finland and get as far away as possible now. She was too shaken at that time to properly explain (and later plainly refused to talk about it), but something had happened to her pack and it was not only on her tail but Marja was also likely to get caught in the crossfire because of their physical resemblance.

Marja, despite having had wanted to complete her studies as she wanted to go on to become a doctor dropped those plans then and there. She didn't question her sister for long and immediately organized for them to get as far away as they possibly could without needing complicated visa work. Which was the Iberian Peninsula. Luckily she had a degree and additional qualifications that made it easy for her to find a job even at such short notice, and after a hasty move they had a little apartment in Lisbon and Marja was working long shifts to cover for both of them, while Anneli struggled to secure a proper job at close to no qualifications in an already ailing economy. Things didn't work out well. They would never have taken into consideration to leave each other, but they started fighting often and sometimes viciously, which they had never done before, Anneli started sleeping around, Marja started spending as much of her off-work time physically or at least spiritually out of the house, and things kept deteriorating. This situation didn't change after they had to move again, once because of Marja's work and once because of safety concerns.

But then Anneli became pregnant. She couldn't pinpoint who the father was, and they decided that dodging the issue entirely was the best idea and that, besides, moving back to a country with at least a reasonable climate and better job opportunities for Anneli was probably safe at this point, and ended up in Southern Germany. It took them a while to get their feet on the ground, but their relationship recovered. For a while, Marja worked in emergency cars and units with all the bad hours and stress that come with that, supporting them both and the baby, until she had saved up enough to do what she'd wanted to do for a long time: She opened her own doctor's office.

Well, not doctor, not strictly, but she offered all those alternative things that you can do officially without a doctor's degree, and which nicely mask the usage of magick in your healing methods while gathering sleepers around you that through their beliefs actually make it easier to perform said magick. They bought a little house out in the woods outside of Nuremberg, and after a few hiccups her practice took off. Naturopathy, Osteopathy, Antrophosopic Medicine, Homeopathy, Acupuncture... Not only was she good at providing what those practices excel at, a charismatic person listening and offering time to the patients (/their parents/owners, as she also treated children and pets). Her methods also worked surprisingly well, reenforcing her patients' (or their owners/parents) belief that they do and getting her new patients by word of mouth.

The good side effect of the office was that she could work from home and take care of the baby, so Anneli was freed up for looking for a job again - and with the different economical and educational structure of Germany (and a good degree from high school, courtesy of Marja), she reasonably easily found an apprenticeship at a bank, completed it successfully and worked at an ecological bank after.

During this time, Marja also started to fulfil her other big dream and started adopting cats from shelters all around. The downside to this only occurred to her when she was at three cats and stared at four pairs of eyes looking up at her, realizing that she wasn't sure anymore which of them was her avatar, who had taken a perfectly realistic cat shape for many years now. It didn't stop her from getting more cats - she had the space and funds for it, after all - but it started her habit of always taking at least one or two other cats along when going to places where it was acceptable, simply because she couldn't figure out which of them was her avatar.

After a while, Marja even had the funds to employ a receptionist, a middle aged woman by the name of Monika Huber from one of the surrounding villages who was a staunch believer in alternative medicine. But she never handed the task of buying supplies over to her. Most of the supplies were of little if any medical worth anyway, so parts she just substituted with cheaper things. But some she did get from actual speciality stores, mostly to keep up appearances and to stay up to date with what new methods were hot in the alternative cloud.

One day, in a speciality store that she had been visiting often and whose Owner Katja Nahles she'd talked with a lot, she suddenly stopped being on her own with her magick. After finishing her purchases, Katja told her that there was someone that she absolutely needed to introduce Marja to, and her curiosity being picked, Marja did what she always did at times like these: Message Anneli with what was happening and going along.

Katja brought her to an used bookstore, and introduced her to an elderly Macedonian, quite distinguished looking man: Athenas Onassis, the first other Dreamspeaker that she'd ever really talked to, who offered to be her (human) mentor. Him and Katja, a Verbena, also took her along to Nuremberg's guild house, a four room affair above a Gothic club run by Hollow Ones. With free coffee inside and free parking outside, the guild house is a good spot for Marja to use as a waiting place and park&ride location whenever she drops her niece off in Nuremberg for ballet class. This way she also keeps getting involved in shenanigans, which is just a bonus to her.

Such shenanigans have brought her into contact with an even wider world than she knew before, but also made her even more careful to get attached to others. During run-ins with the Technocracy, werespiders, vampires, strange clockwork shit, crazy scientists, and other things, she kept losing those she was working with - being captured by the Technocracy, wandering off into the spirit world without a handle on how to navigate it, being left behind in rooms they couldn't reach after, succumbing to their addictions or simply being killed.

But she also made a friend, a Verbena mage called Robert McCullen, and after a long time without any romantic interests started crushing on one of the Hollow Ones running the guild house, so it's not like it really killed her ability to connect with others.

Edited 2017-01-10 19:30 (UTC)

- stubborn as fuck. temper management issues, but she's developed an iron self control to deal with it
- can be callous when removed from regular human contexts (including seeing no issue with torturing, killing or abducting people, though she'd still not do it on a large scale and without good reason).
- curious, likes to figure things out, but can also be very pragmatic which can kill her curiosity completely - if she can't risk being identified as Garou kinfolk, she'll not ask questions that will risk her being identified as such
- tries to hold a lot of things close to her chest - her sister being a werewolf among mages, and herself being a mage when dealing with her sister's people (the first tends to work, the second... does not). She generally doesn't talk a lot about herself, though she'll not usually lie.
- generally helpful if you have somehow earned it, sometimes to larger degrees than most people would be - working with her is a good way of getting it, being her family, generally having positive importance for her.
- manipulative
- charismatic
- can be incredibly loyal if you somehow manage to earn it. Kind of obsessive about Anneli, very protective of Kaisa
- questing avatar
- holds grudges like whoa

Edited 2016-12-22 01:04 (UTC)

Anneli and Marja don't share everything; they have, in the end, quite a lot of separate areas and secrets from each other, due to what they are, and places important to them that they would never go to together. Perhaps it is that what protects their relationship from turning from tight to harmful. It certainly is what allowed them to grow into very close sisters that are still independent to a degree. There was a time when they were inseparable and impossible to tell apart, and the latter holds still true (unless you are able to tell apart a mage and a werewolf, or look for some very minor differences/were clued into who is who after they got dressed in the morning). And they still live together, raise Anneli's daughter together and are the most central person in each other's life, to the point where they will organize their own around the other. Marja has spent years of her life working to maintain a place in the human world for Anneli, and Anneli has repeatedly made decisions based on how to best keep Marja safe. They can let each other go, they can let each other do "their weird thing", knowing that those things are generally dangerous, but they will also do their best to keep each other updated on what they are doing so if something happens the other will at least have a clue as to what happened. They say it is to make sure that Kaisa is cared for, but really that's only half the truth. Perhaps a bit of Marja's lack of self-preservation is based on being aware of Anneli's auspice not usually coming with the greatest life expectancy.

Kaisa, continuing from above, is the person in Marja's life whom Marja feels the need to protect - the kid might be bright for her age, but unlike the other people important in her life, Kaisa is just a regular human, and a child on top. She will come to the aid of everyone else, too, but with Kaisa she'll take preventive measures. Kaisa is also what can hold her back from making dumb decisions, because she is the one who would suffer the most if Marja got herself into serious trouble. All that aside, Kaisa is like a daughter to her, and she's doing her best to raise an independent, confident child by mostly letting her run free, being consequent where it is necessary and supporting her when needed. And, of course, trying to impart at least some of how her and Anneli see the world to her, wrapped up as religion and tradition.

Robert is a Verbena and the only other mage that she has done a lot of things with. He is about her age, from Scotland, and... well, Verbena and Dreamspeakers tend to get along well because the way in which they approach the world tends to be two friendly sides of a coin, spirit and flesh. And they have a similar worldview outside of that, too. So more often than not, they would look at each other over the rest of the group and shake their heads, or just go off and do their own thing by themselves. Robert is the closest to a friend that she has right now, and she's been trying to help him settle down in the area half because he seemed to want to and half because she'd like him to stay.

And then there's Barbara. She belongs to the group of Hollow Ones running the guild house in Nuremberg, also is roughly Marja's age and has been a steady presence around, someone whom Marja got along with from the beginning and through some trials and tribulations started to care about more and more - kind of volunteering for the same cause, to keep the guild house intact, just running into one another more often, rolling your eyes at the same people... Both of loving cats a lot... Well, and then it turned out (in the context of Barbara making a really bad one-night-stand choice) that Barbara was into women. And Marja realized quite abruptly that she was harbouring a fairly significant crush. They've slowly gotten closer ever since.

Edited 2018-04-06 22:53 (UTC)

- MEDICINE
She has the training of a regular nurse and some book knowledge beyond that. But she also has training/certificates in/knowledge of various alternative methods (in order of how likely she is to use them): Naturopathy, Osteopathy, Antrophosopic Medicine, Acupuncture, Homeopathy, and a few other methods that she will only do upon request or if in talking to the patient she finds that they hold a strong belief in said method. Because using her magic is the easier the stronger the sleeper's (non-mage's) belief in the method is.
She also has learned a couple of meditation techniques in her life, and while she isn't certified to teach any of them can still teach some of them. Meditation techniques, especially when performed in a sauna, mean more to her than exercises for the physical well-being, though, as they also are an integral part of her magical practice, helping her to get better in touch with the spirit world.

- COMPUTERS
She's capable at using computers, including some basic programming.

- FIGHTING
She can use a rifle (and take care of it) and has some Krav Maga training. She doesn't strictly have training with daggers, but can handle her knive aptly in a fight.

- LANGUAGES
Over the course of her life, Marja has picked up a lot of languages. She's fluent in Finnish, Northern Saami, Portuguese, English and German, and decently fluent in Russian, Swedish and Spanish. Having a schooled ear, she can fairly easily pick up on the gist of content said in languages related to the aforementioned ones.

- DRIVING
Cars and motorcycles.

- SKIING
Cross country, mostly. It's the only kind of athletics that she's really good in.

- DISTILLING VODKA
How to assemble, use and repair a little black distillery.

Edited 2016-12-21 13:18 (UTC)

- MAGICK

- KINFOLK

- MIX THE TWO
There are some magical feats that she can perform without the fear of incurring paradox because they aren't mage abilities, strictly speaking, but werewolf abilities that she can use despite her insufficient genetic set-up.

- However many cats she can bring
- Avatar that looks like a cat (male)
- Mobile phone
- Rifle with ammunition
- a knife.
- Two flashlights
- 2nd mobile phone (prepaid, cheap)
- flask with vodka in it

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