InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "I don't need more shoes!"

Irene. A. (bohemianscandal) wrote,
@ 2015-04-30 21:07:00

profile

Player Info;

Name/Handle: Ali
Are you 18 or over?: And a bit.

Character Info;

Source work and author: A mishmash of the Doyle canon, movies, and my imagination.
Door: Penny Dreadful
Character Journal name: bohemianscandal
Character Name: Irene Adler.
Character Age: 34.
Character Played By: Rebecca Hall.

Character History and Personality: There isn't a great deal that is kept on the woman who is, was, and might be Irene Adler. Conveniently, much of it has either been lost, or destroyed or purports never to have existed in the first place. The history that does remain has been carefully preserved: delicately, like tissue paper pressed blooms that give every indication of falling apart if examined too forcefully.

Irene prefers it that way.

The woman (and she is the woman to more than one man: not because of any great beauty or accomplishment, for she is neither to any great distinction save one, but because she is like water in her own ability to find crevasse and fissure and without precisely knowing how she has found her place, she has done so before you considered preventing her from doing. Generally, that place is expensive, and paid for by somebody else. Admiration, perhaps, engenders the moniker. More than a little consternation. The latter from those men who have thought their appeal outweighed the conviction and calculation of the lady. They were wrong.) has history. More than one, overlapping like petals. She turned up on the stages of Europe, in part due to a rather lovely contralto that rapidly graduated from poor operatic performances to great ones, and in part due to her position in the beds of the men of power across Europe.

Irene has talent. That her voice is a mechanism she applies much as one might set to a lock with tools to undo it, has been the subject of late-night speculation. However, given that voice has generally been in various potent ears, it is unwise to speculate too far in Irene's direction. She is sharp: the keenness in her eyes and the warm contempt of her laughter has put down many a man in a drawing-room.

(There is a marriage on paper, filed in a dreary church somewhere grey and miserable that permanently appears to be raining in a backwater in England. This links her on paper to a dubious address and suggests that the 'Adler' is a maiden name rather than one acquired. -- That it is entirely likely no one but the lady bestowed either name upon herself, should not be dismissed out of hand.)

She has no children it must be hoped. Irene has little apparent patience for the world at large, much less the world in miniature. That one marriage followed the first and then another and so on is entirely likely in either a blatant display of bigamy or no apparent intention to respect the institute of marriage. It's hardly likely that she respects many institutions, or indeed the law.

Beneath speculation and the tide-mark of moderately confused (and bamboozled) men she has left in her wake, the facts remain. And Irene guards the private a great deal more frequently and with greater passion than she guards any traditionally-held virtue. The truth: the truth is small and plain and complicated by the people who live it, rather than by its construction. Irene professes hatred for truth; Irene must live by it or risk something more substantial than fancy.

The truth is, the last marriage fell through with expediency. A man, whose passion was a little too cold and a little too calculating even for a woman who reaches for the limits. A man who died (terrible accident, the papers picked it up) and Irene fled. She ran underground, instead of above it, and she fell in with a man whose initial is more known than the rest of him, "M".

For necessary expediency and ready coin, she has embroiled herself in criminal enterprise (the banks more readily lending blunt to a gentleman, than he would a lady) and enmeshed as she is in the webs of the opium-dark underworld, her ability to cut the traces and run loose is shortening. There's also the question of being almost five-and-thirty and running ought to be a young woman's game.

Irene has always stacked the deck in her favor, however and sees no reason to change her hand on a whim.

Journal/Key: The journal is similar to a lady's appointment book, soft-bound and small: black leather. It is not initialed, or signified as hers in any particular way (this being convenient when she is not presently Irene). The key is useful, being conveniently a skeleton key that lends itself to many a lock. It is silvery, ornate, and is worn permanently on a very long, discreet chain.

External Door items: Irene brings with her a great deal of trouble. And a gaming hell, above a cellar given over to the sweet fug of opium smoke. Above, space is rented to a brothel. (Men, Irene finds, are given rather to convenience when vice is presented to them with a variety of choice). The den is not in her name, but it's not in anyone's name who is readily apparent.

Storylines;

Moriarty and his men: The shadowy connection.
Burned boats: Unfortunately, when one is forever climbing upward, one must climb over. Irene has burned fingertips. Whoever this is probably lost a little more.
The enemy: Something more than burned fingers.