kaisa grünewald - lucanter - f - birdy

bipedal

name • kaisa grünewald
age • fifteen years
appearance • striking. when you see her you can imagine her on trial in salem. it's probably her eyebrows, strong and dark. or her eyes that are such a dark brown that they might as well be black. her thick, ebon-brown hair that falls down around her hips. the pale skin. she's small, but she's no waif. she looks strong. she looks like she could last a hard winter. her bones are big and her limbs are lined with flat muscle that you can see through the skin. she looks like a werewolf from old human stories would look- like a shadow thing, or a curse. But her smile is big and genuine and full of summer, and the lines around her eyes are proof that she uses it often. her fingers are long and deft and calloused but easily capable of tenderness; her hands can chop wood or embroider with equal adeptness. she stands with her feet wide apart and her shoulders relaxed. her chin up and those ebony eyes winking, always watching.

quadrupedal

name • miles
appearance • a hard looking wolf, but pretty. she looks like a scrap of an old photograph: a standard timber wolf rendered in black and white. Her base goat is the pale grey of an overcast sky, under a mantle of cinder colored fur streaked with ink. there's not a smudge of red on her body, save for when she bleeds. her eyes are full black, glossy like a doe's, and wide spaced, giving her face a foxlike shape. her skin is black, showing through around her eyes, on her muzzle, and where scars have split her smoke-soft pelt. she has many scars for a young thing, riddling her face, scoring her sides. she still has a little time to grow, but will probably never be tall. indeed- birdy is compact and built more for stamina than speed.

enduring traits

personality • kaisa is brave: she is often frightened, but is excellent as feeling the fear and pushing herself through. it's a thing of pride for her. she is used to being alone, but she enjoys the company of her pack, if she has one. she is not loyal, per say. she is too 'easy come, easy go' to hold that title. still, she makes a good enough friend and pack mate. she cares for her friends and kin, and will not wantonly abandon them. kaisa introspective and even tempered. she has never lost her temper, and rarely gets 'hyper'. she is optimistic in a quiet, confident way. and she loves the natural world. she loves climbing pine trees, getting her hands sticky-sweet with sap. she loves icy winter wind ruffling her fur after a long wind. she loves dirt and mud and growing things, and the awesome grandeur of summer storm clouds. a contented, but serious child- maybe too serious. she doesn't know how to play. she'll laugh and joke, but she's all about business, all hunt and survive. she needs to learn how to let down her hair.

powers • kaisa has the power of silence. she could sneak up on a dormouse through a field of eggshells. you might see her, or feel the vibrations of her footsteps coming toward you, or feel her breath on the back of your neck, but you will never, never hear her coming. she has yet to explain how she can do this. perhaps it's minute clairvoyance, to be able to sense and instinctively avoid obstacles in her path that might make cracks or rustles. but then, she can move through thick undergrowth with out a sound, too. more likely it's intangible- a sonic dampening around her like an aura that muffles the sounds of inanimate things.

history • mother and father were both second generation german, but they never taught their daughters how to speak the language. "you're americans," father always said when kaisa asked. "there's no reason for you to speak german." kaisa learned over time that the real eason was so that they could argue with each other without her sister and her knowing what they were saying. they argued frequently, and yet, they loved their daughters so fiercely, and they hunted like reflections of each other, perfectly in sync. while kaisa's parents didn't always make a good family, they were always a good pack.

the grünewalds lived in the brittle gold hills in eastern washington state- a lonely trailer outside a small, dusty city called wenachee was the home that they knew best. sometimes, in summers where money was thin, kaisa's parents would take their daughters and an old canvas tent and go to the fields in the north to live off the land. hunt their food and live in the sun. kaisa's big sister maria hated these summers. she had friends in wenachee- friends with human families, who did normal, human things during summer.

but kaisa lived for them.

she spent her childhood daydreaming about her first shift. her sister played with barbies inside while kaisa practiced hunting blackbirds in the yard on awkward human feet. One day, when she was twelve, she caught one in her hands. it died of shock. birds are fragile creatures that way. she was a little dismayed, but when she showed her parents, they danced her around the living room and took the whole family out for milkshakes. maria sat sullenly in the back seat. she'd been able to shift for four years but had never hunted anything.

a week or so later, kaisa shifted into her feral form for the first time. it was more than she could have dreamed: the strength her muscles took on, the vivid senses, the speed at which she could run. birdy, they called her, after her very first kill. her parents pulled her out of public school a month early- she was failing her classes anyways, even as a kid- and took her out to the wilderness. maria insisted on staying home. kaisa's parents tried to make her, but she locked herself in her bedroom until they were gone.

so the rest of the family went out on twelve pairs of paws to the canyons and ran in the sun, and slept under the moon with the cool grasses as a pillow. Those few months were the best of kaisa's life.

when they came back, maria was gone. the note on the dining table said "gone human." the car, which they had left in the driveway, was nowhere to be found.

kaisa lay awake that night, listening wide eyed like a cat in a thunderstorm- to the machine-gun fire of german coming through the cardboard walls of the trailer from her parents room. those sharp, rapid words crescendoed to a roar, a shriek, and a slammed door. Kaisa, with shifted wolf ears to better hear the words she couldn't understand, listened to her father's feral growl in the back yard and her mother's muffled weeping in the living room. kaisa was too overwhelmed to cry herself. Just lie there, as the moon slid across her window. although at that time she thought she never would again, kaisa fell asleep.

in the morning, kaisa's parents woke her. the sky was the dusky periwinkle of late summer dawn, and her mother was still asleep. "sweet thing," her father said. "my sweet baby girl," her mother said. neither of them looked at the other- only at her, with big, serious eyes. "you're gonna go with daddy to grandmama's house in waymoor." and just like that, kaisa's pack was demolished like an old house in a tornado.

the girl didn't know where waymoor was- nor had she ever met her grandmother. but she packed up a duffel like daddy told her too, hugged her momma goodbye, and loped off in were form, trailing behind her father, taking one-last-looks at that battered old trailer so many times she lost count.

they didn't have the money for a plane ticket, and there was no car any more, so the pair, father and daughter, spent one year walking east. mostly, they stayed in their feral forms. they made much better time that way, and anyways, with no income and not too much money, they had to hunt the bulk of their food. kaisa learned fast and well, but she was only a child. there were some thin times, that year.

One night, some two months into the journey, kaisa's father, with his eyes' tangled up in the fire, told her what he and kaisa's mother had been fighting about that night: mother had wanted to go look for maria, go find her and bring her back. he had said that they should let maria go, that she would probably come back soon anyways, and if she didn't, well, that meant she was ready to be on her own after all. mother had taken that as abandonment of their firstborn child (who father had, according to mother that night, always been too hard on) betrayal of their pack. neither of them would give in. so mother kicked father out, him and his favorite child.

kaisa brooded on that for about six months. she could never think of the argument and anything but stupid and cruel. she never told her father that, of course, but she thought of him differently for it.

they arrived in waymoor on kaisa's 13th birthday, ragged and exhausted, and discovered that grandmama had died, and her house had been sold.

so kaisa's father went from job to job, painting houses, pouring cement, digging ditches. after another year of rough living in the woods, her father saved up enough to build them a scrappy little cabin in the woods set up with plumbing and electricity, and on bought land, too. kaisa was almost uncomfortable sleeping in a bed by that time.

they made tentative relations with the lucanter pack, never joining.

kaisa's father got a job in a coal mine west of the north face soon after the house was built. now, he leaved home very early and goes to the bar after hours until very late. he often comes home drunk, muttering in german. kaisa sees little of him, and has grown to be thankful of that.

the girl has reached out to the lucanter pack on her own now. she is tired of being alone, and ready to have a family again.