|
|
Post by pizza on May 21, 2017 5:15:35 GMT -5
CHATHRA RANAWEERA
NICKNAME Chath or Chef AGE 36 BIRTHDAY September 3rd SPECIES Human (ungifted) ETHNICITY Sri Lankan-American GENDER Ciswoman SEXUALITY Heterosexual POSITION Head Cook/Chef POWER N/A. How and why Chathra is at the academy is explained in the backstory, but to summarise: her younger brother was gifted. When he revealed himself as such, he was rejected by many, fell into depression, and committed suicide. The fallout of this event caused Chathra to quit her career in the food industry, then later re-visit it at Foresta, possibly as an act of solidarity, or even guilt.
APPEARANCE Generally, Chathra has a no-nonsense look. Standing at 166 centimetres (roughly 5’5”) tall, she has dark brown skin and an athletic, rectangular build. Her arms are particularly muscular, as she uses them most in her line of work. Her face is narrow with a hard jawline, a pointed chin, and hollow cheeks, and her facial features tend to be sharp and defined; this lets a lot of shadow form on her face. Her eyes look as though they’re rolling at you, even when she stares forwards. They’re almost-black brown and her hair is the same colour.
Her hairstyle is harsh and severe, cut short into a straight, angled bob with a long fringe that gets tucked behind her ears at work. Her thick, downward-slanted eyebrows make her seem like she has a constant frown. She has a long, prominent nose that points downwards and a small, narrow mouth. Her arms, specifically her hands, are home to many scars, both old and new. Some of these are from cuts, while others are from burns. Burns are also the reason she doesn’t have much hair on her forearms. Her hands are also calloused and rough, but are clean with her fingernails trimmed down to as short as they go.
At work, Chathra wears the standard chef whites, with the sleeves crisply folded to the elbow, or rolled all the way up to her shoulders on scorching days. She doesn’t wear a hat, and she never wears her whites anywhere except the school grounds because she views these things as pretentious and boastful. Chathra doesn’t even wear her whites on the way to work; she expects everyone in her kitchen to get changed once they’re at the school, and change again once they’re ready to go home (this also helps prevent cross-contamination from the outside).
When she isn’t at work, Chathra keeps it minimal and repetitive. She tends to wear a pair of neutral pants (usually baggy, faded jeans or grey cargo pants), and a black top. In summer, it’s a tank top, and in winter, it’s a turtleneck with a long coat. The only item of clothing Chathra cares to invest anything in is her footwear, because her work requires a lot of moving around and standing. At work, she wears a black pair of Dansko clogs, and outside of work she sports some high-end trainers with memory foam. She wears these with black, merino wool-blend socks. Chathra doesn’t wear any jewellery or make up; she has to take it off for work anyway. For anything that requires dressing up, she will wear a plain black dress with some matching heels, but that is it. Oh, and the dress must have pockets.
Chathra’s used to being in cramped spaces where everything is hot, sharp, and/or moving, so she carries herself with small movements and an upright posture, as if in a constant state of tension. She tends to keep her elbows in as she moves her arms, and looks with her eyes instead of her head, which is how she looks like she’s eye-rolling at you constantly. Her tendency for small movements also affects her expressions, which means her face is often neutral or resting. Sometimes this can work against Chathra, because her strong features give her something the internet likes to call ‘resting bitch face’. When she can relax, Chathra becomes slouchy, as if her body is trying to get as close to the horizontal plane as possible. In this sense, it’s like her body works in a stern binary: working, rest, and no in-between.
PERSONALITY Chathra has spent most of her recent life working long hours in commercial kitchens; she’s used to those fast-paced, high-pressure environments that you pretend to be familiar with when you write your first resume, where efficiency is key, and over-cautious behaviour could turn an eight hour shift into a ten hour one. She is organised and she is decisive, but has an impatient nature that makes her decisions impulsive. She’s short-tempered and can be particularly tactless with people in her attempts to be direct.
She’s used to long hours and emergency shifts and over the years has become dedicated to professional cooking, perhaps even to the extent where she lets it define her sense of self. She's got a drive and a confidence that comes from being as good as she is for as long as she has been. She cares deeply about quality, about the way food affects people, and is always interested in improving her craft. In her spare time, she likes to experiment with food, read cookbooks and culinary magazines, and curate recipes. She likes to take charge but is open to stepping down to improve.
She prefers being co-operative over being competitive and dislikes "lone wolf", "I don’t need help" types. This is because she's also used to working with others, and views the people she cooks with as family, especially after the loss of her brother and after distancing herself from her biological family. As a leader, she is protective over her staff, but she treats all people with familiarity, regardless of how well she knows them, professionalism, status, or other social barriers. For example, she likes to give people nicknames, tell jokes when things aren't serious, and she isn’t afraid to share her thoughts.
Outside cooking, Chathra self-admittedly lacks interests but tends to be an adrenaline junkie, looking for the same sense of focused thrill an intense lunch rush gives her. She’s vaguely interested in foraging, fishing, or growing her own food but hasn’t had the time to explore it. When she isn’t thinking about work or cooking she dabbles in boxing, camping, and hiking, but otherwise tends to look for fun in bars. She deeply enjoys getting drunk after a long shift and is forever trying to quit smoking because she can’t do it on school grounds. She likes to clear her head by going for sprints or driving her motorcycle around town.
There’s a lot about Chathra that suggests she’s masculine to the point of rejecting femininity, but this is just how it seems on the surface. Chathra has no qualms with traditionally feminine things (or traditionally feminine people); she just wants to interact with them on her own terms rather than in a textbook way. The perfect example is her relationship with cooking and how she has made it a more industrial, less homey part of her life. She will wear a dress, but it better have pockets. She gets grumpy when people assume her preferences for her.
Her previous chain smoking habits have rusted her low-pitched voice down to a gravelly mutter. When she speaks urgently she doesn't raise her voice but instead puts more emphasis behind her words. If she needs more than that she opts for a good smack of a table.
WEAKNESSES Chathra can be a downright unpleasant person with her strong ego and stronger opinions. Her impatience, her temper, and her irritability between nicotine fixes are a dangerous mix that makes for a harsh, brash, and blunt person. Even her friendlier approaches to people can come across as being over-familiar or boundary-crossing, because when you treat people like family it means you can sound like the drunk aunt giving everyone unsolicited advice.
She’s also a blatantly a workaholic. Her ambition often gets the best of her and she tends to sacrifice her basic needs, her social life, and her self-development for her job. Up until very recently she’s defined her worth by how good she is as a chef and/or a cook. This is something she’s willing to work on, but just like cigarettes she finds it hard to quit. She has a lot of self-hate and guilt that stems from her brother’s death, and the realisation that she has somewhat wasted her life thinking her worth at work is the same as her worth overall.
She’s also an ungifted human on an island populated by mostly gifted people and/or creatures which can lead to vulnerable situations.
STRENGTHS Chathra is always well-intentioned. The work she has dedicated herself to is about serving others and ensuring the necessary experience of eating is enjoyable, so despite her grumpiness, she has the compassion to care for others. Her direct and familiar approach with people comes from a desire to be genuine and inclusive. What she says is what she means. She’s a stickler for integrity and is courageous and assertive enough to stand up for both herself and for others.
She’s obviously practiced in cooking, but she’s also more than just that. Her work and her impatience are a breeding ground for organisational skills and intense time-management, which means she can complete most tasks quickly and is punctual with her deadlines. She has a focus that isn’t easily broken by chaos or crisis. She does feel stress but doesn’t let it overwhelm her and slow down progress.
Whether Chathra is good at leadership is more determined by roleplay, but she at least has the capacity to be good at it in that she can take on feedback while still making decisions with minimal hesitation.
HISTORY She used to be distant.
Every relationship had a strain. Boyfriends with the livid silences and the long breakups. Non-work friends with the unseen and unanswered messages. Disappointed—deeply disappointed—parents still waiting for a feminine, scholastic, marriage-material daughter. And then there was Dilan.
Growing up, her parents were forever-absent from home; they were out working to keep the one-bedroom flat in Queens. It was a non-issue when it was just Chathra, who’d take herself to school, take herself home, and make instant noodles for dinner, but then Dilan was born. There was a collection of sitters to keep them supervised, but when Dilan was three, she was “old enough” to become the supervisor. A ten-year-old is not actually old enough to watch a three-year-old, but her parents forced her into the responsibility just as their gas bill forced them to start working second jobs.
School was never Chathra’s thing. Beyond her parents saying, “you must try harder”, she didn’t have the support to help her with her homework. Her constant failure in class made her a prime target. Kids were merciless and her parents were disappointed. She wanted to prove she could do something right. So, despite all odds, ten-year-old Chathra took care of her little brother, keeping him clean, fed, safe, and entertained. They were close, even after Chathra joined her parents in the workforce and Dilan was left to take care of himself.
She was fifteen when she started waiting tables at an Olive Garden, which soon became washing dishes at the same Olive Garden when she realised she hated customer interactions. School was still abysmal. Her parents were still disappointed but Chathra had grown used to it. She even began to resent them for their disappointment and absence, and became determined to not let Dilan become the same as her. She’d cut class and take extra shifts to afford a tutor for him, which no one in the kitchen liked but the manager had them too understaffed for there to be a choice.
Eventually Chathra moved out of the dish pit to become in charge of prep work and salads. There was a period where she wanted to drop out of high school entirely, but her parents threatened to throw her out. She wanted to move out, but it would mean leaving Dilan behind, or taking him with her and trying to support him so he could focus on school. It was her chef who pointed this out to her, convincing Chathra to begrudgingly graduate high school.
It was also her chef who encouraged Chathra to take professional cooking seriously, not that she needed that much encouraging. When you’re nineteen and don’t want to go to college, there aren’t many options for you. And by this point in her life, she already respected her chef and the line cooks deeply; they had cared for her in four years far more than her parents had in nineteen. Later that year she left Olive Garden to take up a line cook position in another, non-corporate restaurant. It was the same type of gig, only less cooking from a box of frozen goods.
Chathra basically did this for the next seven years, moving from kitchen to kitchen, rank to rank, picking up different things from different chefs along the way until she found herself in a sous chef position at a French-style hotel buffet named “Escoffier”. She moved out some point after Dilan became sixteen—she needed the privacy for dates and hook-ups—but she still talked to him on the regular. He had grown to be better with school as Chathra had hoped, though hadn’t outgrown his habit of talking to himself when alone in a room. At least, she thought he was alone.
Dilan told the family he could speak to the dead at Thanksgiving in 2007. For Chathra, it was surreal. She knew gifted people existed, and she had noticed the ones with obvious gifts like wings or spikes or webbed fingers, but her little brother, the one she had practically raised… it made sense but it was hard for her to process, which could only mean it was even harder for her parents. At first, they were in denial, but after Dilan started saying things that only the ghosts of Chathra’s dead grandparents would know, they became fearful. They wanted him out that night.
'Don’t worry,' Chathra said once they were alone back at her place. Dilan was crying hard into her side, and she wrapped her arm around him. Suddenly it occurred to her that she hadn’t seen him this upset before, even though they were close. 'Soon, they’ll pretend you don’t see dead people, just like they pretend uncle doesn’t have a boyfriend.'
'Yeah, but he never came out! Everything’s so fucked right now, I shouldn’t have said anything!' He continued to sob for what felt like hours. What was she supposed to say? She didn’t know what he was going through. 'All my friends are souls, everyone alive I tell thinks I’m a freak, but I thought… because they’re mom and dad…'
He was looking up at her with snot on his nose and she tensed.
'Yeah, well…' She felt her shoulders give an involuntary shrug. 'At least your freakiness got them to stop asking about setting up a plenty of fish for me.'
At the time, she thought a joke would offset the awkwardness, but to this day she has never regretted her words more. He was silent the rest of the night, retreating to her room while she crashed on her couch. She went to work the next day, and when she came back she found his body. Chathra cut contact with her parents after the funeral. They were blaming everyone except themselves, and she wasn’t tolerating that. She tried to focus on work, but during one of her shifts she had a public meltdown that forced her chef to send her on leave.
There were a few months of seeing a psychologist, which got her stable enough to go back to Escoffier, but after her first shift back, Chathra quit. The idea of going back to what she was doing before Dilan killed himself felt wrong, even if she did have bills to pay. Whatever she did, it had to be something different. She was a taxi driver for another year or two while finally going to culinary school (something you don’t need to become a chef but is good to have regardless), trying to figure out what that “something different” was when her old chef from Escoffier told her he’d heard there was an island in the Atlantic Ocean where there was a town and a boarding school for gifted children.
Chathra eventually figured out where Foresta was and was working as a line cook at some restaurant in Port Albion when she heard there were open positions in the school itself. Applying was an impulse decision, but once she started working it felt right.
IN CHARACTER SAMPLE 'What’dya mean, no water?'
Chathra didn’t raise her voice for her words—she couldn’t even if she wanted to, her ability to yell was lost four attempts to quit smoking ago—but instead punctuated them with a smack of the counter: utensils and prep bowls clattered with a threat to topple over from the impact.
'I’m sorry, chef,' said Johnny, raising his hands disarmingly. 'Apparently, it was some freak accident with one of the students, plumber said it’ll just be two hours.'
She sighed and withdrew from the counter, the prep bowls, and Johnny. She liked the kid—Johnny was twenty-two but at her age that made him a kid—he was one of the few in her crew who was a normie, ungifted. And for that, it was easy enough to be thinking what he was thinking, especially when a student freezes all the pipes before breakfast service. Chathra’s frown deepened as she swivelled back around to look at her cook.
'Believe it or not,' she said, moving to a cupboard to look for an extra commercial toaster, where she swore there was one, 'this shit has happened before.'
No toaster. Fuck. She moved to try some other shelves and cupboards, with Johnny hot on her tail because he wasn’t good enough in a crisis to find something more useful to do.
'Let me tell you,' Chathra continued, 'even if we do the prep and run the service, this joint won’t last thirty, let alone two hours. We don’t have the serve-ware, the pans… we gotta get water from somewhere. So call Princess, ask if she can come in early, drive some buckets or pots or whatever she’s got up from her place. Then call whoever you can get after that, ask the same.'
'Yes, chef,' Johnny said as he raised the phone to his ear.
'Atta boy,' the chef muttered, briefly wondering why Johnny had Princess in his contacts as "Tigger", which was as close to her real name as "Princess" was.
Still no toaster. Shaking her head, she moved on to see how much bread they had. One rack gluten-free and fifteen standard. They’d have to do less sandwiches for lunch, which would be a real problem at 11am. Chathra checked the wall clock. It was analogue. Was that hour hand on 5 or 6? She checked her phone. 5:16am.
Fuck those sandwiches.
'Chef?'
'Is she coming in early?'
'Yeah, but I was thinking, we could probably find some gifted, you know, one of the kids or something who can do water tricks an-'
'I ain’t replacing a sink with a human child, don’t make me kick your ass.'
'Sorry, chef.'
'Right, we’re doing fruit, toast, hash browns, and scrambled eggs today. OJ and milk for drinks until we run out. Lack of options is gonna make ‘em riot so for the love of god, make those hash browns perfect.'
'Princess could buy poptarts and cereal on her way in, Chef.'
'…It’s a school, Johnny.'
'I’ll shut up and call people now.'
'Yep.'
I traced the image from a Sims 4 screenshot and I’m not sorry, hahaha. You can click it for a larger image.
Template by Sky ★ Inspired by Laika of GS
|
|
