Adele Elizabeth Hamilton

"Since I was no bigger than a weavil
They've been saying I was evil
That if bad was a boot then I would fit it
That I'm a wicked young lady
But I've been trying hard lately
Aww fuck it, I'm a monster I admit it..."

ATTRIBUTES

Nightmares: Adele has never quite gotten over the site of the Headless Horsemen chasing her down during her Dream Dance...it haunts her constantly. Perhaps it's due to how ingrained the legend is, goring up in Sleepy Hollow...it certainly keeps her up at night.

Mild Phobia: Related to her nightmares; Adele has Equinophobia, a fear of horses. It's not an enormous fear, but it is present; you won't see her on any carriage rides.

Fame/Infamy: Due to her parent's death and her subsequent adoption by her mentor, she's fairly well-known in Sleepy Hollow. In New York, she may be known among the elite or those who remember the news story; the Infamy is due to rumors that she may have killed her parents. She never was a normal child, or quite right, after all...

Mentor: Warren, her mentor during her Fosterage, remains close to her. Despite the fact that they're in opposite Courts, there's a close bond, and Warren's always trying to get her to come to the other side. She's always "just about there," but hasn't made the permanent leap yet.

Dreamers: Two college students who are in love with her (not literally), she has been slowly inspiring and taking Glamour from when she needs to. One is a budding gothic poet who has potential; the other draws a lot, and maybe, one day, she'll be quite good. For now, she's just okay, although Adele plans to make her more then that.

Contacts: One of her teachers at Columbia, a History Professor who she has managed to make friends with that keeps her up to date on new and interesting things to pass through the Museums. Never know when that may come in handy...

Description: 
Mortal Seeming:
The best thing to describe Adele would be “quiet academic.” The girl is tall and thin, almost to the point of being willowy, with long limbs and elegant curves. Dark haired, pale, she is a shocking sort of quiet, like something that prefers to hide in the dark corners of the library, reading Edgar Allen Poe or Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her hair is shoulder length, left to flow free over her shoulders in an ebony wave, complementing dark eyes in a sometimes serious, sometimes humorous, always strangely calm and confident, if bookish, expression. Her choice of clothes tends toward a toned-down gothic ware, more of a Romantic style; corsets with jackets, long skirts, flowing tops, and the like, with the occasional casual day involving more brash T-Shirts. A pair of reading glasses, subtle and unobtrusive, rest on her delicate nose.

Fae Mien:
Tall and thin, darkly attractive, the woman is a sight to behold. Long, dark black hair falls down to her waist, resting over her shoulders and the corset she’s wearing. Her eyes, dark and sunken in her pale face, hold a keen intelligence to them, and they peer out over the world around her, taking in every little secret, every dirty little detail they can and storing them away for future knowledge. Long fingers are capped with sparkling black nail polish, reaching much of the way down past her waist and over the black gossamer skirt thanks to long, almost spindly arms. There is a vague odor around her, of things long dead and soon to die.

Weapons:
N/A

Equipment:
Her home in Sleepy Hollow, mostly abandoned and used when she wants to get away.
Lots of clothes.
A dorm room at Columbia U.
A bicycle
Schoolbooks
Cell Phone (Sidekick II)
A laptop

History:
Adele Elizabeth Hamilton was born to privilege. Her parents, old money, grew up in the famous little hamlet of Sleepy Hollow, part of the original Dutch blood that settled the community where Washington Irving set the tale of the infamous Headless Horseman and Ichabod Crane. Casper and Marien Hamilton only ever had the one daughter…some would whisper, behind their backs, that they simply didn’t have time for any others, or that more then one child would have been socially unnecessary, and more of an inconvenience to the wealthy couple. To say that the Hamiltons were socially conscious took on a whole new meaning…not that they cared about the world around them, just their own social status.

Adele grew up, as stated, in a life of privilege, but also a life of high expectations and little love. Casper was an emotionally cold man, very stern. Get him in a party with the social elite? He was very charming, outgoing, and really the life of the world. Doing so as often as he did, however, seemed to leave him no such warmth for times when the parties weren’t going on. He expected his daughter, a meek girl from birth, to be the perfect accessory, a well-behaved, charming little social deb. Sadly, this was not to be the case…Adele was destined to be an intellectual, not a socialite. This did not go well with Casper.

With Marien, it went over even worse. If Casper was ever conscious about their social status, Marien was absolutely obsessed over it. She punished Adele regularly for not performing up to expectations…not child abuse, per se. But definitely things that would make Child Services raise an eyebrow at least, if they cared enough to look in on it. However, such organizations worry about the down-trodden, not the high-and-mighty, so Adele’s problems, such as they were, remained behind closed doors.

Try as they might, Casper and Marien couldn’t squash Adele’s yearnings for knowledge. She found herself from an early age with the usual kid things, albeit with an odd twist. She had imaginary friends, but often of a strange and bizarre nature…morbid kinds of things. Spiders that talked to her, ghosts, and so on. Her parents assumed it had to do with their town’s rather infamous stature. They tried to take privileges away from her to discourage it…it simple taught Adele that some things should be kept secret.

The young girl tried to be what her parents wanted to be…she really did. But she couldn’t. She wasn’t any good at social events…she’d get shy and withdraw, or accidentally say something that creeped people out. Her presence at such events were enough of an embarrassment that eventually, her parents just stopped bringing her, or even addressing that she was there. It was as if, suddenly, they didn’t have a daughter. And that worked fine for the girl, who was able to stay in her own little world of shadows and wonder.

One thing that Adele didn’t lack was breeding, and she grew into an attractive enough girl…perhaps it would have been more evident early one if she’d bothered to take much care of herself. Perhaps Marien would have decided to give her another try. But it wasn’t until she was fourteen that her looks became evident. By this time, she was developing her own identity, and was getting very tired of being ignored by her parents. She found herself gravitating toward a gothic lifestyle, associating with the social outcasts of her private school. Imagine the headaches this probably caused Casper and Marien…then double it. Then square it. Then double it again. That’s about how much tension it caused in the family. At this point, there was little they could do to stop her…none of their usual punishments worked. They had a little monster on their hands.

Adele loved it. She found her niche…a place where she could be her, have her odd quirks, morbid friends, and say such bizarre things as the clichéd ‘I see dead people’ and get away with it. Her friends encouraged her, and she found herself disconnected with regular society, shoved in with this new, strange element. She was at home. All the subtle shifts in her perceptions, the weird things she was seeing…she attributed that to her strangeness that she’d always had, or perhaps to the pot.

Casper finally found a solution. On Adele’s fifteenth birthday, he and Marien told her that she was going away to a private school in Westchester. A strict Catholic school, where she wouldn’t be able to get away with the nonsense she’d been getting away with up to this point. Adele threw a fit, and that…didn’t help matters much. It ended with her storming up to her room and slamming the door shut.

The girl was furious…utterly furious and heartbroken. This could NOT be happening. She slipped out the window—despite her very unathletic lifestyle, she always was able to get down that trellis with perfect balance—and slipped off to the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. She needed to think…figure out how to solve this. Maybe she could pretend to be normal, and see her friends on the sly…she didn’t know, but she had to find something.

How appropriate, then, that something found her. Namely, her Dream Dance.

On her way to the cemetery, shivering in the cold October air, she heard hooves pounding on the ground, up ahead of her. She rolled her eyes and continued on…such pranks were common in the small village, as kids loved to try and scare others with the old tales. It was quite the surprise when she actually saw the horse come out. All black, red glowing eyes, hot steam rolling from it’s nostrils…this was no ordinary horse. Nor was the rider anything but the real, true Headless Horseman out of legend. Suddenly, her world burst forth, as the Glamour of Sleepy Hollow invaded her, opening her eyes and showing her her true image. Visions of Arcadia flashed through her head, images of her past lives…she was staggered by the sudden rush.

Unfortunately, she still had a chimerical Horseman to deal with. The nightmare galloped forward, ready to take the newly awakened Sluagh’s head…and would have too, but for a figure who dashed out of the bushes, dragging Adele out of the way. He pulled Adele along, through the bushes and darkness while the Horsemen followed behind, and a harrowing chase ensued…finally, the mystery man pulled Adele down into the sewers, and the Horseman moved on, looking for other prey.

Adele stumbled along, completely lost and distracted as she followed this strange, thin, grotesquely pale man through the sewers. Eventually, they came to a small area that was, oddly, set up like a home. The man had Adele sit, and introduced himself as Warren Gardiner. He was a Sluagh grump who’d been watching Adele for some time, waiting for her Chrysalis to come to a peek. And now that it was, it was time for her to begin her fosterage.

Of course, there was the problem of Adele being sent away. Warren wasn’t a big fan of that deal…and Unseelie Sluagh have interesting notions about how to resolve such a concern. The car accident that they suffered, sending them careening over the bridge that ran through town, was never traced back to Adele, and her parents were pronounced dead on arrival at Phillips Memorial Hospital on November 16, 2002, precisely one month after Adele’s birthday. Everything was left to the girl, in a trust…she was now free and rich. A friend of Warren’s within the Child Services division made sure that Adele slipped through the cracks, and was never placed in a foster home…”Long Lost Uncle Warren” was essentially her parent figure now. The neighbors were scandalized, but there was little they could do.

Adele’s fosterage was very much an eye-opener for the girl. She found herself both inspired and mellowed by her year in training into the ways of the Kith. While she found herself very much attracted to the freedom she now had, she also learned how silly the goth movement was…idiots playing at what they thought the real thing was. Ironically, she found herself needing the structure that the Unseelie Court was lacking…when her Saining came, she ended up aligning herself with the Seelie, much to Warren’s surprise and annoyance. Despite this, they remain close to this day, and the older Sluagh is always there for his Adele.

When she became eighteen, Adele graduated from high school, and got accepted into Columbia University, where she’s just now in her first year. The young woman is very much an academic, a little bit back into her quieter stage of her youth, though with a confidence that was lacking there. She is Seelie in a nominal fashion, and slips between legacies fairly often. Above all, the pursuit of knowledge and secrets interests her…and she hopes, in time, to hold some of the greater secrets New York and the Kingdom of Apples has to offer.

 

Adele's Fae Mien	Adele in her Unseelie Seeming