Profile

Kaitayarenne Noellaurelai Taghdottar Aire an Galweigh is twenty-one years old and a member of one of the five Families that ruled her land. The past tense is important – the rule of the Five Families has been broken, and most of House Galweigh is dead. Not that Kait will see what will become of Matrin in the new order, for she was thrown out of her world before Milliways restarted, and the way back to her old home has been permanently shut.

Kait is of medium height (about 5’6) and slender; with delicate features, long black hair, dark eyes, and a distinct air of prestige and old money. Despite this, her long fingers and hands are strong, and she has the thick wrists of a swordswoman. Like all Galweigh children, she had been trained since she was thirteen to be of service to her Family; in her case, trained to be a diplomat and spy. She is intelligent, scholarly, principled, and has a genuine gift for disguise and language.

Kait also possesses the full affliction of an hereditary curse, known as the Karnee curse after the man who originally cast it. As Karnee, Kait is a skinshifter, unable to go more than forty days without Shifting into a large, wolf-like creature. She is also unable to escape the sharp, sometimes terrible temper that even those mildly afflicted possess, and the hunger for all (food, sex, death) that life can offer.

Notes: The closest analogy for Kait’s world is that is like a pagan Moorish Spain, with the family and city-state in-fighting of the Italian Renaissance, with some steampunk thrown in with a tropical climate. As such, Kait looks and (vaguely) sounds southern Spanish, and her clothes have late medieval-early Renaissance flavour to them. Unless otherwise mentioned, she is always wearing red and black clothes and a dagger on her belt with the Galweigh crest on it.

In a full Shift, Kait is a large black wolf-like creature with the same dark eyes as her human self. Her fur is short and silky, and there can be no mistaking her for a normal wolf. The Shift can be brought on by anger or other emotions, or by her choosing deliberately to do so. There are also a number of side-effects in human form. Kait has improved eyesight and sense of smell, not to mention strength and stamina, and she can heal most damage within a day or so. She is also able to smell magic, and has slight precognition.

Another noticeable side-effect is that Kait has a heightened sex drive combined with a heightened charisma. Either by pheromones or magic (it is unclear), Kait has a certain something that is noticeable by both males and females. If your character is shielded by magic, or not inclined to find young women attractive, then her magic can’t affect them – it is more of a heightening of what would already be there rather than an indiscriminate ‘lust spell’. She can tone it up if she flirts, but she cannot turn it off.

Disclaimer: Kait Galweigh is from the Secret Texts trilogy and is the property of Holly Lisle. She appears here solely for the purpose of role-playing in milliways_bar, from which no profit whatsoever is being made.