Player Name: Tami

AIM Contact: Tamiest

Character Name: Rosalin Gosford, known in were circles as Sirjata

Date & Place of Birth: 2 January 1977, Springerville, Arizona

Character Type: Hyena

Character Occupation & Skills: Oba of the werehyena clan in New Orleans, wack-ass mother-goddess leader figure -- she is teacher, mother, queen and insane teen girl president, with a tight-fisted grasp on her pack. Civilian-wise, being far too lazy to do any work that involved either lifting things or not being able to sleep in, she bums around as a bohemian sculpture artist sculpting malformed shapes doing eerie and violent things to each other. Although renowned most for being a local artist, she had enough national cachet to be able to survive through thin local work after Katrina. She has a modest amount of fame as her art is perfect for shoving on a plinth and being discussed by pretentious artists (who never knew that the true titles of these things involved, say, PERSON RAPING FISH or PERSON EATING FISH or PERSON RAPING AND EATING FISH). Many of these are bought by the overly wealthy to stick in their garden as a fashionable talking piece.

Rosalin has very few degree skills, having attended no colleges: she has an unusually strong knack for fashion, sophistication and getting her foot in to where she wants to go. Ros moves in whatever circles Ros wants to move in (she generally can be found in artistic circles, but she will go and get a nice martini at whatever damn party she wants). Rosalin Gosford has a natural sense of class and social networking. In a more concrete way, Ros is an excellent seamstress and yoga maven.

Abilities: Infected with hyena lycanthropy age sixteen, Rosalin has been a were a very long time. She must change at least once every month during the full moon, is gifted with enhanced reflexes, strength, speed and senses and is weak to silver. Her injuries are rapid-healing except for those inflicted by other weres or silver, and can transform whenever she desires to or needs to. The downside of this is that physically she is becoming more recognisable as a werehyena, gaining a few features that mark her as having spent too much time in her animal form.

As an alpha female hyena, Ros' bite carries more weight even than the bite of another were -- hyenas are carrion-feeders and their mouths are septic. Upon getting a successful bite upon another were (breaking skin and drawing blood) she causes foul, festering wounds, which take much longer to heal and can even become gangrenous if measures are not taken.

As another note, due to highly acidic digestive systems, hyenas may devour whole carcases and digest them without leaving any evidence behind. Werehyenas are also not subtle -- you can smell them coming from around half a mile, especially for weres with powerful noses (like lukoi). They reek so badly that they have the ability to nauseate other weres and cause them to want to leave the area, especially those less dominant. Rosalin herself smells so indescribably bad in transformation that younger weres may flee from the scent.

Appearance: Tall-ish at 5'7", Rosalin is legs up to her armpits, alabaster skin, long delicate lines and beautiful bones: and, mind you, a chest as flat as a boundless prairie, but bra stuffing was invented for a reason. Rosalin generally puts the viewer in mind of one of those classic pin-up girls; she has red hair cropped short to her shoulders and generally put in wild curls, big who-me blue eyes and a full mouth generally painted bright Ferrari red. Oval face, firm chin: Rosalin tends towards an in-your-face unsubtle kind of beauty, her expression generally alight with childish excitement and too much mascara, wholly beautiful but in a slightly uncomfortable way -- her colours are too bright, she tends to be too much there. Her smile is sincere and clear and bright and generally fairly bubbly and joyous, but there tends to be something constantly malign in her eyes. She is youthful-looking (and claims her age at nineteen, though at least it's a transparent lie). Her dress is 24/7 eccentric and a hangover colour palette. If she could, she would wear neon. She misses the eighties SO MUCH. Nonetheless, she manages style in the same way she manages beauty -- vibrant, too much there, slightly eccentric.

Her hyena form is that of the spotted hyena, dull brown-gold with darker spots, six-feet long and five-nine at the shoulder height. Due to staying in her hyena form too often, she has hyena spots -- some pale, some becoming more arresting -- dotted over her shoulders and upper back.

Personality & History: Ros was born in Arizona, the youngest child of upper-middle-class and doting parents, who was spoiled rotten and spent her life making her three elder siblings' lives a misery. She was beautiful and charming (when she wanted to be) and knew it; she possessed the kind of looks that people would follow her around for, less for her being beautiful and more for being fascinating-looking. She was forgiven far too much for this - her father worshipped at her feet (for which she held only utter contempt) and her mother entertained daydreams of her youngest becoming Miss America, which lead to unfortunate stints at child pageants. Ros liked the pageants: she liked smearing vaseline on her teeth and poking elbows into the competition and making the littlest girls cry. It was all valuable life experience.

Her tenure at school merely sharpened her skills in regards to taking people on and chewing them up like Kleenex, as by the time she reached high school she was the most glorious Mean Girl who had ever lived. It was probably due to her sunshiny popularity that her parents were not forced to step back and, perhaps, think about taking her to genuine counselling to discover what the hell syndrome she had, since from a young age Ros had shown signs of absolute apathy and indifference to human suffering (physical or emotional). She had a coterie of hangers-on and a little notebook of who she had managed to drive to eating disorders. She was alive and enthusiastic and fascinated -- and fascinating -- and, above all, one of the most malicious creatures anyone could ever meet on the planet. Life was the Rosalin Show, starring Rosalin, and everything else that has a heartbeat was to be played with and then thrown away like a used Kleenex -- she was like an amoral child, totally fascinated with a baby chick and squeezing it to death. She was bubblegum-bubbly and gleeful nearly to the point of being obnoxious for some people (okay, probably past the point of being obnoxious for some people) and slightly childlike in her demeanour: nonetheless, she had a mind like a steel trap, and used it for petty evils to entertain herself. Academic work bored her, otherwise she could have turned her head to something productive.

It was during the heyday of her youth, age sixteen, at a nighttime pool party where she was infected -- she wandered off to have a cigarette out a little ways into the desert, and was savaged by a young hyena who hadn't been able to control himself. She was rescued by the hyena pack, whose oba executed the young hyena for putting them all in incredible legal jeopardy, and Rosalin was fairly much shoehorned into his place. They hid her condition from her family and her school so that questions would not be asked. Rather than being devastated by this turn of events, Ros -- who had found life insufferably boring -- thought it all great fun. The clan she was with was seventy-to-thirty women to men, with a psychotic paranoid oba who kept them all under her thumb, and rather than suffocating in these conditions Rosalin played along with them. For the next five years she started clawing her way to the top, getting her jollies playing mind games and fighting for the oba's favour, pitting other hyenas against each other and forming patently transparent love affairs, putting poison into the oba's ear about real or imagined plots from the other alpha females within. She was in a bodyguard position by the time she was twenty, and realised a terrible thing: she was so bored.

Her part of Arizona was provincial and dull with no other were presence except for a couple of lukoi who were on friendly terms with the hyenas. Playing mind games with an uber-paranoid oba leads you to realise you are fighting the unarmed, and she yearned for actual society and not all the sand she could eat. She lost all feeling and attachment to her pack and her oba. For the next year or so, she idly murdered civilians hoping for a quick thrill, but she had lost her lovin' feeling: she abandoned everyone promptly and went off into the wild blue yonder, eventually finding herself in New Orleans. She arrived just after the death of Butcher in 1998, when the hyenas had been on the fall. Finding the oba there not to her match, she immediately challenged and dispatched her, and took on the role of matriarch of the clan.

Rosalin is a possessively loving mother and oba, maternal in an odd, dim way, incredibly territorial of her pack -- they are the only things that, in the past ten years, she has let herself genuinely love, and without that genuine love they probably would have ousted her years ago. She would do anything for them. She would not die for them, because that means she couldn't kill for them, and Rosalin would much much prefer to kill for them. She lives in the moment, flitting to superficial thrill to superficial thrill, but not so distracted that she doesn't drive her pack on to whatever heights she think they can reach. She tends to be unswervingly cheerful and -- when annoyed -- gets stampy-tantrumy. When genuinely angry, Rosalin drops everything and goes rather unnervingly blank, gets rid of the cause of the fury, and goes back to Happy Sunshine Poke-My-Finger-In-Your-Eye Land. This tendency to go from point A to point Do Something About It has made her a very effective leader. It has not made her gentle, but it has made her effective.

What softens the werehyenas is the fact that their oba's love of life and sense of fun is actually kind of infectious, and when she finds you interesting, she can be terribly charming; nearly sweet, inevitably more than a bit of a bunny-boiler. She is a drama queen who dances through life as if it were some holiday set up specifically for her. This holds true for her clan: she thinks that if they aren't being entertained, they might as well hole up and commit suicide. Life, for Ros, needs to be interesting. She is immature and amoral and malicious and has a god complex up the wazoo and is Queen Manipulator, but by god at least she has fun. She is also not dumb enough to do anything but have full respect for Mahmoud and the Frenzy, even if her one breathless goal in life is to see the STREETS RUN RED WITH THE BLOOD OF THE UNBELIEVERS ALSO NO MORE CROCS (NOT WERECROCS THEY'RE OKAY: WE'RE TALKING ABOUT THE SHOES)

Ros is a lesbian by main definition -- unusual and often regarded as slightly wtf for an oba, in the matrilineal hyena line - but fluid enough to both keep men around and, if needed to, make them her bitches for whatever purposes. (Ros does not care so long as Ros is on top and so long as Ros can see a TV.) The streets are sadly littered with the tear-stained faces of her million jillion jilted girlfriends. The werehyena pack -- The Syndicate -- does, alas, sort of resemble a large collection of the popular kids in high school, all beautifully dressed and bitchy. They're like the were equivalent of the Largest Collection Of Fag Hags. Seriously they are such dramafags that Ros calls herself "Sirjata" as her weretitle. They would like to throw themselves a tickertape parade.