Prudence "Sicilia" Thanes

=Biography=

Early life (1992-2004)
Prudence Beynon was born in New Kent, VA on December 14, 1992, to Robert Beynon, a former History professor at Oxford University. Born with a slight aversion to bright lights, she was homeschooled by her father in a quaint house by the woods. Although they never hunted for food while she was still below 10, Robert taught Prudence in the art of wielding a blade to “cut through tall grass.” On the few days when he went to work, he dropped her off with friends at a local shooting range, where she gained proficiency with a rifle at a young age.

Prudence learned a lot from her father – more, she believed, than what she could learn from the school attended by the other children she met briefly when she went to town with her father’s friends – but there were two things she never asked him about more than once in her life: his profession and her mother. Robert only ever told her that whatever he did made him very busy at times, took him away from her for days on end, and she never questioned the scratches on his body when he arrived home. Her father looked too happy to see her, and Prudence allowed his smile to distract her starving curiosity.

As for the matter of her mother, well, she was dead, and her father looked weary, almost frighteningly old, when he uttered the words. Prudence never broached the topic again. Still, her father knew her well – and whenever she longed for her mother, an intelligent woman from the faraway island of Japan, a place she dreamed of constantly, he told her that they never truly lost her. For you possess her eyes, windows to the soul, Robert would say, stroking her hair. And only yours can still draw her forth. Her father likely spoke of apparitions, but she never saw her mother. Neither did he ever supply Prudence with a photo.

On the Mountainside
When Prudence turned 12, her eyesight worsened. Colors were slightly less bright and she found she sometimes preferred the dark, where she felt her eyes could rest. It was then that Robert relocated them to the island of Sicilia—Sicily of Italy—where he continued to train his daughter with a blade and occasionally went shooting. Secretly hunting small game for food, the two constantly roamed the countryside, never quite settling until, before her 16th birthday, Robert decided he rather liked their residence among the cavernous mountains of Sicily.

Here, Prudence and her father were separated. In hindsight, Prudence recalled that her father was in a mood during the days leading up to his disappearance, ambivalent as to whether he should take her along for their journey that weekend, but by then it was already too late. They had entered a cave, one she and her father had not previously visited amidst their explorations, and from the darkness it lashed out at him. Robert tried to fight back, attempted to usher Prudence out of the cave, but the girl stood frozen to her spot. Even in the dim, flickering glow of her father’s flashlight, she could see the hulking beast, wild and grizzly on all fours, saliva dripping from its teeth, clawing at her brave father.

Given that it must have been three times his size, Robert put up a decent fight, at least to Prudence’s memory. He was swift in comparison to the beast’s lumbering steps, just like he taught her to be, and at times she could hardly keep up with his movements as she turned her attention to the monster instead. But in the end, Prudence saw, none of his training sufficed. He was only human, after all. The beast caught an opening and hurled Robert to the cavern wall with a decisive crack, knocking him unconscious. Or perhaps it was what Prudence hoped when she watched, breathing heavily, temples pounding and body growing ever lethargic. Shaking, vision fading, she looked up at the beast, bearing down on her with its snarl and hot breath. Then she fainted.

Survival
She woke naked in the cave with a gnarled pendant in her hand, looking as though it was chewed on repeatedly and spat out. It was a green emblem that she barely recognized; later, she would see it in her father’s journals, but he scarcely wrote anything of use to her so that she still had no idea what it could mean. She had not the courage to follow the dark path deeper into the cave, and her clothes had been torn to shreds. Her father was nowhere to be found; neither was the beast. Taking her ruined clothes – she was lucky to escape with a few scratches on her arms – Prudence hurtled out, running as far as her feet could take her. For days she slept hidden in small copses, though her sleep was out of utter exhaustion and never a choice. She returned to the small shack they lived in for garments, quickly, for even as she neared town, she felt as though the beast might still find her. When she reported the incident to the police, she cried and insisted at their laughter. They frowned only at the thought that it could be the mob, though they doubted.

Prudence overheard their discussion. She understood them, having learned in the marketplace when shopping for supplies, and her father taught her as soon as they moved. Lunatic, mental facility… Bastard father leaving a child like this, they said. When the authorities asked her again, she feigned the act of waking up from a trance and sobbed, admitting that her father had indeed left her that morning. They sympathized, telling her someone would come for her soon to take care of her papers. Taking up her father’s journals and an intricate sphere whose purpose she couldn’t fathom, she bolted and sought a way out of the country, for she and her father had no passports.

Involvement with the Mafia
The mob provided her with that option, but they had a price she could never bring herself to pay. On her first night on the job – her customer was an enemy to her employers, and one they would dispose of once he was comfortable enough with her to send his bodyguards out to patrol the area – they had only gotten to the room when Prudence drew the bolo she kept in the drawer and it was off with his head. The bodyguards were simple when she was fighting for her life. In her mind, nothing compared to the monster that did away with her father.

A hired cutthroat was better than what they had initially asked of her. Not many suspected a girl of 16 of surviving, much less taking up such an occupation, and the Mafia was all too pleased with a new, less-obvious tool to truly punish her disobedience. When Prudence got over the initial nausea within the first few months, vomiting in the apartment they provided after each assignment, she began earning their confidence. It was never ‘all right,’ but she had accepted that one did what one could to survive, and convinced herself that she had a greater purpose than those whose lives she took away.

Escape
By the end of her third year there, she had curried enough favor to convince one sympathetic figure working alongside the mob to complete the falsification of her passports and Visas. Completing her last job, she departed Sicily without notice and returned to America, changing her surname to her father’s little known maiden ‘Thanes.’ It was likely that they now had her marked, especially since they had technically issued her papers.

Prudence settled somewhere in New York City, alive. And though she felt it, she could not say alone—at times she spent hours staring into the mirror, looking at her mother’s eyes or smoothing her thumbs over the pendant left behind by her father. She perused his journals every day, noting the small red cross she found in most of the pages. A symbol of the Templars, a quick search on Google informed, but it meant nothing to her. Prudence didn’t know where to start; only that when she was ready—and she had to be, had to train and somehow study and haul herself back to that accursed cave—it would all end in Sicilia.

Back in America (late 2011-2012)
Prudence worked as many part-time jobs as she could manage to keep a small apartment and enough money to spend on internet cafes, finally finding the time to study up on the content her father’s journals. While those she had managed to read in Italy were filled with confusing, sometimes senseless words, these carried detailed drawings of beasts – she would call them monsters, in truth, save for a few beings that looked relatively friendly – many of those he found in her childhood. Perhaps even before. What had her father gotten himself into? Did he bring them inside that cave knowing that thing would be there? She couldn’t believe he could ever take her anywhere his daughter might come to harm. And if he did, why had he never prepared her for such a reality?

At any rate, she didn’t want to get into it with mobs again. Too much looking over her shoulder to make sure they hadn’t decided she was disposable and too little to show for her caution. Although she did take a few freelance mercenary and bodyguard work from private individuals when she was low on supplies. Most of the time, her sad excuse for 'research' hit a dead end, and on those nights she left home to prowl about alleys, waiting to be ambushed so she might do away with criminals and let loose some steam. Training, too. When Prudence was especially frustrated, she took on one armed man too many and nearly lost her life.

She escaped by a hairline, slinking through a tiny crack in the city that the brutes couldn’t fit in and hadn’t seen in the darkness. Nearly broken, Prudence summoned the last of her energy to return to her apartment and lick her wounds, mend herself. That night, she awoke hacking, almost choking, grasping at her throat, and next she knew her favorite sweater – a jacket one of the victims she rescued in her nightly excursions had given to her as a token of gratitude, for it was all they had at the time – had caught aflame, by fire that burst from her own body.

Recruitment (2012-present)
Prudence wasn’t aware of how much time passed when she sat in her room, the fire – but it was more than that, it was energy, and then it was unimaginable power – coursing through her body and surging outward in uncontrollable blasts. When next she awoke, the colors in her vision were extremely weak; most things looked duller than before. Prudence didn’t realize it was the evening until morning rose with the sunlight, and her eyes shunned it with a sharp pain. Everything looked different; not like things were flat against each other, but in a way it was a mite more difficult to distinguish the items that surrounded her. It irritated her to no end. Prudence thrashed about in her room for a long time, contemplating clawing her own eyes out.

Sleep was a better alternative, however, one she always chose over the bottle. Over her brief tenure with the mob, Prudence had met only a few men who could hold their liquor in bars as she stalked for targets. She doubted she would hold up much better, so she’d always found a way to empty her glass somewhere else. And as if to make up for her trying morning, her vision that evening improved. Only the moonlight filtering through the blinds illuminated her apartment, but she could see all of her room, as though she were back at the cave staring at the full form of the beast but clearer.

Enhanced was the word. There was no 'fire' left, only litheness unparalleled even by what she could do before despite her training, and in addition, Prudence could hear better the noise of the streets outside her window. She could decipher the once-muffled quarrels of the couple that lived next door. (She had always thought they were brother and sister; judging by the noises she heard, they were not. How awkward, she supposed.) The barrage of sounds and scents assaulted her, giving her headaches, but she decided she would have to learn to focus her senses. The smell of meat tickled her nose in particular. Prudence wolfed down what little she had around the apartment with finger-licking gusto – she had gone without a meal for days, something she thought would never again occur after those caverns – and slammed the door shut on her way out to test herself. The coming days would be especially interesting.

Prudence had no idea. She was enjoying her excursions much more those nights—her eyes had gotten to the point where sunglasses were her only way of enduring the daylight, so she felt much more at ease in the soft darkness surrounding the moon. Criminals were suddenly less difficult to overpower. She believed she was ready to move on. Perhaps ambush a small-time mob base in the dark. Prudence felt that she could do anything. She was finally beginning to get ready. Soon it would be time to return to the island, she decided, what with her new abilities, and that was the evening she came home to a man sitting on her broken couch, wearing a smirk so well that Prudence’s first instinct was to slug him in the nose.

He swiftly dissuaded her, insisting he wasn’t there to attack. She wondered if they were opposites such that he needed to wear sunglasses in the dark, but the only gist she could understand from what he was saying was that the people he worked for would kill her if she didn't join them. And if she did, she would receive a wealth of power, riches, and information. “The kind you don’t gain skulking around at night, apprehending petty thieves, powerhouse or not,” he said. "Come on. Former mercenary turned vigilante? Too small-time for you, don't you think?" Prudence didn’t like his tone or that he knew of her ‘hobby,’ but he seemed to know what he was selling. Riches she didn’t need to survive, but information she could use, like why her father had left Oxford when she was born, or why she had no existing records at all. For all her senses, she was a terrible researcher. And he made it sound as though her powers might be trained, focused—by whoever she was supposed to meet at Brooklyn. News of her father was few and far between. And at any rate, she had gone incommunicado for so long that she must have already lost her jobs. Perhaps it was time for a new one. Despite her aversion to what appeared like an organized crime syndicate, Prudence was intrigued. She would kill for information on her family.

They dangled it in her face. The Illuminati. You earn information, they said. And rank comes with that. Prudence understood the necessity while she was without loyalty, but she didn’t enjoy it. There it was again, looking over her shoulder constantly. That chip installed in her – or chips, she couldn’t doubt the existence of more – and the contacts. That was one perk. Someone in the society had taken an interest in her aversion to light, and the next thing she knew, her reward for one of her missions in that undead-infested waste of a town was a replacement for her sunglasses.

The lenses now protect her eyes, but dull them to a hazel, too. Her father always told her that she and her mother shared a brilliant lime green. But it is worth it, sometimes, like when the society taught her the meaning of Templars and Dragons, of the red cross in her father’s journals and the green pendant she keeps in her apartment. And then there’s the sphere; the one she takes to the roads below. More importantly, it’s the one her father left. She had never been able to use that Agartha conduit because it's his. She understands what that implies… but she hopes not to dwell on it until she has further information. And in the Illuminati, Prudence – no, Sicilia, for she can never forget what drives her – will find what she needs, no matter the cost.

= Appearance  = Prudence has shoulder-length brown hair and fair skin she inherited from her father. Her lips, nose and eyes are all her mother’s, though her naturally green eyes are now a dull hazel because of her Illuminati-issued contact lenses made to shield her eyes from the sunlight during the day. White, fine scratch marks that appear to be healing (but never change) from her encounter with the Sicilian beast can be found on her arms, stomach, back, and legs. Always on the move, Prudence has a lean body type. She doesn’t care what she wears on missions as long as her garments do not encumber movement. Her ‘default’ face is a distant one, giving others the impression that she is bored, but she is only in deep thought.

= Personality  = Prudence keeps to herself, though she will engage in conversation and give her opinion if asked. She is only awkward unprepared for certain conversations (usually ones that involve no purpose besides getting to know her, which is new for her at the moment), but is generally well-mannered, if not businesslike, when in polite company. She has much in the way of sympathy but dislikes the idea of being a bleeding heart simply because it would get in the way of her goal. She is extremely emotional, but only about those she considers significant. Currently, only her father and his work are on that list.

For all her ‘experience' with work, Prudence is still naïve, especially when it comes to forming meaningful relationships instead of just contacts, whether platonic or romantic (she has no experience with the latter). Survival and work have always been her sole focus, so encounters for the sake of being sociable are yet unexplored territory. Once her friendship is earned, however, she is a loyal friend and will go to every length to defend someone.

Prudence doesn’t usually form a sure, solid opinion about other people unless they become important to her or get in her way. For the most part, she believes in the saying, ‘’Live and let live,’’ and does not harbor ill will toward the Templars or the Dragons except when their operatives hinder her from completing certain missions that would get her to a position where she can finally receive her requested information. Even so, she will not hesitate to join a skirmish between factions if so ordered.

Because she feels neutral or shows neutrality about most things that don’t directly involve her and because of the natural mood of her work environment, Prudence is not inclined to passing out smiles. Nevertheless, it isn’t something she really thinks about, so she has no qualms about smiling to those who greet her politely or give her even the tiniest bit of aid without demanding anything in return.

Still, many have found an interest in Prudence's physical appearance only to find her boring because she hardly speaks of anything but completing missions. When asked what she looks forward to, she might say, 'finishing the next job quickly.' She's all about expediting the process. It will probably take patience and persistence to make her understand the meaning of true 'social interaction.' = Work Ethic  = Prudence takes things as they are. With zero experience in luxury, she finds little to complain about in her life and sees no point in the act. When it comes to assignments, she will ask for the ‘why’ to better understand the situation, but if her superiors choose not to tell her, Prudence shrugs it off as long as the vitals are provided. The only compensation she cares for is information on her father and the beast that stalks the caverns of Sicily. She doesn’t care for pride and will team up with someone willing to join her to complete coinciding missions; she will aid them in turn to show her gratitude.

When she isn't working on missions or loitering about Brooklyn and London, she works for private individuals who need mercenary or bodyguard work done for large bulks of income to keep her nourished and sheltered. She has terrible research skills so she refuses to dabble in that again. Prudence will do everything in her power to complete a job successfully whether or not she likes her employer, though this has some limits.

At the moment, the only thing binding Prudence to the Illuminati is the information she needs from them and the trackers they have installed inside her. The society is a means, so until she gets what she needs and gains the power they promise, she will do everything they ask to the letter. Not to mention she doesn’t approve of their experiments because she hates the idea of propagating the existence of beasts. She does not admit that she holds some interest in seeing their development and improvement, however, an interest she unknowingly shares with her father.

= Abilities  = Prudence is agile and light on her feet, sacrificing heavy blows for speed and attacks that whittle enemies down piece by piece. Ever since her senses were enhanced, she has been able to see in the dark even without the aid of a low light, though this comes with a price as she cannot stand the bright sunlight. Her special contact lenses reduce the sensation to mere discomfort. Her auditory and olfactory senses and well as her stamina greatly exceed a normal human being’s.

=Fighting Style= Although Prudence has survived most fights and has managed to come out on top with a blade, a long knife, or a dagger at least half the time, her advantage comes mostly from the element of surprise. Her distant expression is, during intense moments on the job, a feint for her (sentient) opponents to underestimate her. She has exceptional agility on her side, giving her slithering ease when it comes to evasion, but to those well-trained, her offensive technique leaves much to be desired. Those who knew Robert Beynon well will see that he taught his daughter his raw, lightning-quick fighting style, something he failed to hone in order to focus on research.

Prudence prefers to use a blade over a rifle because she wants to train, doesn't believe that a gun will be able to defeat the Sicilian beast, and she would like to feel the rupturing of its fur and skin under her tight grip. Although, she has been practicing her aim in Kingsmouth alongside the survivors lately. When out of weapons, she will scratch and claw desperately, though she doesn't believe she is one meant for pugilism.

= Trivia  =
 * Prudence doesn’t profess to have inherited her father's intelligence and is nearly inept with computers, having learned the basic controls and using the internet only when she worked for the Mafia. In essence, despite her home-schooling, Robert Beynon raised her to be a fighter
 * She usually goes over her plans and contingency plans countless times before and while setting out, hence the constantly distant expression she wears.
 * Ever since joining the Illuminati, she has chosen to leave her apartment and lives wherever the nearest civilized area is. She has yet to seek a permanent residence.
 * When resting from missions and not harassing her handler for information, she finds herself in London, knowing it to be the base of the Templars, in whom she has taken a particular interest for her father’s former connection to them.
 * Prudence is fond of asking 'why,' and is accustomed to receiving a vague answer. She never insists unless it's something she really cares about.
 * When she does stay in an apartment or a hotel room, she prefers to keep the lights off. It protects her from possible ambush and she secretly likes the idea that she is saving electricity.
 * Shining a light on her eyes in the dark causes a bright green glare to reflect from them.
 * Like many others, she loves hearing the laughter of infants. It’s her favorite sound.
 * Her favorite smell is the air before the rain starts pouring.
 * She will politely eat anything presented to her, but her favorite food is meat. Anything meat.

= Quotes = “Sorry, what?” “Pardon me?” “I didn’t quite catch that.” “I was elsewhere...” "Will it get the job done more quickly?" (when presented with an idea) "I can't see why it's necessary..." (when the answer to the question above is no)

=Observations= ((This is the space for other characters to comment on if ever they meet Sicilia. :) Edit this part as you like.))

=You may know Sicilia if=
 * you worked with any of the mobs in Sicily between 2008-2010
 * you have hired her for mercenary/bodyguard work between late 2010 and the present
 * you were a Templar before the year 1990 and knew her father, Robert Beynon, and see their resemblance in fighting style (blade)
 * you were a Dragon before the year 1990 and knew her mother, known only as Rin, and see their physical resemblance
 * you are a member of the Illuminati and have seen her or spoken to her for some reason.

((Feel free to just approach Sicilia online! If you’d like to start a pre-defined relationship (friend, mentor she’ll meet for a certain field, enemy, etc.) of some kind beforehand, just PM me on the tsw-rp forums because for some reason, I cannot log into the official forums. My username is helando, or character name Sicilia.)