Lilah "Sulwen" Morgan-Dorne

=• PHYSICAL DETAILS •=

A fairly short, curvy woman just over 5 feet tall. Her age is hard to pinpoint; she is clearly at least twenty and carries herself with an easy maturity, but beyond that it's tricky to say. She seldom does anything special with her wavy, shoulder-length dark hair, and avoids makeup except for lipstick, which she says "has a practical purpose", unlike other kinds of makeup. Her somewhat dark green eyes are sometimes mistaken for brown.

While her taste in clothes is fashionable, it is also somewhat quirky and non-traditional. Living in Belgium influenced her sensibilities. She likes dark gemtones and favors clothing that looks slightly feminine, but could be called at least a little 'badass'. She rarely wears a skirt; normally only on Illuminati business or at a party will she stray from her pattern of jeans and plaid pants. Red and blue are her favorite colors. She doesn't mind being slightly provocative on occasion, but overall prefers to leave more to the imagination. She's more likely to show a bit of cleavage than anything else, as it's her best asset.

=• PERSONALITY •=

Sully is a warm and giving person at heart, a healer in more than the sense of field work, but moody as well. She reacts quite differently to different people. She's suffered some terrible losses, and if she's caught without sleep after a high-stress mission, she might seem a completely different person than if at a relaxed party, or in a business meeting at Illuminati HQ.

While firmly heterosexual, she's very supportive of and comfortable with alternate sexual preferences. She dislikes intolerance, but tries to explain why she believes the person is wrong rather than taking everything personally, due to her study of psychology. Before she judges someone, she tries to ask herself, "What would I have been like if I'd grown up where they grew up? If I had their genetic tendencies? If I'd lived through and been affected by their experiences?" She tries to figure out why a person thinks as they do rather than immediately jumping to angry reactions because those reactions change nothing.

Her taste in men is somewhat varied, but always personal. Under normal circumstances (i.e. world not ending, not forcefully injected with drugs or under a love spell) she'd never sleep with someone she felt no respect for. She's not against casual encounters on principle, but hasn't had any before--she'd be more likely to relieve a shy guy of his virginity than just go home with someone strange for a night. While her experience is not quite as extensive as she'd have liked, she's a very sensual and avid lover once comfortable with someone. She has a profound weakness for redheads; usually without facial hair, except of course for the red eyebrows/lashes. (Fake-looking hair is not attractive to her, unless it's a funky color like magenta, green, blue, or white. Otherwise, natural hair colors are always better in her eyes.) She prefers guys who are either close to her age or somewhat younger, but mature in personality, probably because her father being roughly ten years older than her mother always seemed oddly creepy to her, though admittedly they seemed to be intellectual equals. Life seems to have taught her that advanced age in a man doesn't guarantee anything but grey hair, not necessarily maturity or a pleasant disposition.

She finds shyness attractive and is usually more bold/aggressive with those types than confident men, who might make her somewhat shy or even disinterested. Casual pick-up lines don't impress her, and she doesn't like elaborate first dates with people she doesn't know. She's not picky about profession, and money isn't a problem for her, but she does appreciate a person who works hard at something--even if it's gardening. She doesn't care for leader types (like her father) unless they are humble and respectful of their workers as being equal to them in humanity if not in rank, not arrogant or abusive. If she meets someone she doesn't like, however, she will try to reach their human side and help them, simply because it's her proactivity-oriented philosophy that the world isn't going to fix itself.

She suffers severe nightmares stemming from the aforementioned losses and from discovering that the horrors she used to love as fiction, such as Lovecraft's work, are essentially real. While her talents have put her on a swift rise through the Illuminati's ranks, they frighten her at the same time they give her confidence. There's an aggressive part of her that disturbs her a little, but she's not going to let it stop her because she can help people... spare them the pain she suffered when she lost loved ones to the darker places in the world.

=• PASTIMES AND PREFERENCES •=

Sully's grandfather was fascinated with technology, and got her into video games because she got to play them whenever she visited. She's a major fan of the Silent Hill series.

Sully had a lot of goth friends in school, and they got her listening to their sort of music. In the past, she was never much for clubs or crowds or bars, but since her tragedies, she's come to like them. To like the sense of the world going on, of life existing. If the music is at least decent, she'll stick around just to be reminded that the earth is still turning; just to keep her mind off the rest of what exists in the world.

=• EARLY LIFE •=

Sully's parents lived in New York, but she was born in Philadelphia during one of her parents' visits to her father's parents (Her mother grew up in foster care).

After a series of nannies and boarding schools, each of which were more attentive to Sully than her biological mother and father, Sully hit the age of 12. During one of her weekend Philly visits, she had a long talk with her grandparents about how she was being bullied and she didn't like life out there, and they were more parents to her than anyone. After some rather furious arguments, eventually arrangements were made and Sully got her wish--she moved to the Philadelphia area and lived with her parents throughout her teenage years. She only saw her parents on weekends, mostly staying in their large apartment alone, but around the age of 15 she started dressing like a goth and listening to music they hated, and eventually the visits stopped altogether.

Sully's closest friend during high school was Jess Nicholson, ironically a cheerful and pretty blonde cheerleader; very different from dark-haired, black-clad, cynical Sully. Their friendship was at first secret, and it began when she stumbled into the bathroom to find Jess in a liplock with one of her goth friends. After some awkwardness, it became something they joked about. Sully was a confidant for Jess; always interested in psychology from having tried to figure out why her parents didn't love her. Jess liked to say, "the reason they don't love you is because they sold their souls to the highest bidder in hell. Scratch that, your mom IS the devil."

=• ADULT LIFE •=

Sully spent her post-high school graduation life in Belgium, thanks to Jess's sense of adventure. Her friend wanted to study psychology in Leuven, and Sully eventually agreed to come along because it was her favorite subject as well. They were roommates during that first year of learning Dutch together, which went well for both, and through an online roleplay forum where both were looking for a D&D or Vampire: the Masquerade tabletop group, they met Niels De Keizer. He entertained them with an explanation of the history of his surname, and after the looks Niels and Sully were giving each other, it didn't take too much time before Jess decided to leave them alone.

Sadly, things didn't progress as well as anyone would've hoped. Finding an apartment, figuring out the relationship, trying to keep her head above water in her second language, and a host of other things such as the deaths of her grandparents kept Sully from finding a place of real peace. Niels and Jess were there for her, and they supported her through everything, but Jess had a habit of falling for all the wrong girls, and Niels found it very difficult to open up to romantic or physical intimacy. When Sully wasn't grieving or stressing out, she was worrying about them. She found pleasure in studying psychology, but every time she tried to translate what she was learning into Dutch, something snapped in her head.

After years of study, the trio lost a member for a little while to experimental jobs and girlfriends in the Netherlands, then Germany. But Jess came back eventually, around the time that Sully and Niels had finally found out what was blocking them--Niels was highly intelligent, a scientist, but his social persona was more a construction than an organic production, and his chronic missing of social cues fit with something that left both Sully and Jess kicking themselves; he had Asperger's.

At long last, Sully and Niels had hope of having a normal sex life and a more functional relationship. He was getting help with learning to relax and concentrate, and they were growing closer and closer. Instead of staying with Niels because of something she'd seen in him long ago, Sully was with him because he was showing his true self to her, which she'd only had small glimpses of past the initial falling-in-love stage. Happy and optimistic, they started talking about getting married in the future, despite how nervous it made them both. One of their heads had always turned whenever an attractive redhead passed; the more they thought about the paths life could take, the more they started to joke about whatever scared them to stop being afraid... they made a pact in jest that if one of them ever died, the other would look for a redhead. They each made the other swear to try to move on and be happy, then held each other, smiling and dreaming, glad to be alive and together and finally okay.

Around the time of Niels's birthday, he proposed another idea: a trip to Tokyo. He and Jess had been geeking out about the idea of a visit there for years, and Sully had always smiled and listened, but never been excited for herself. She found the thought of getting on a plane to be pleasant; when she'd left for Belgium the first time, she'd had a death-grip on Jess's hand the whole time before and during takeoff. When it became clear that there would be enough money for only two tickets, it was clear enough to Sully what she would do. She urged the two to go without her.

The decision would haunt her forever.

=• INTRODUCTION TO THE SECRET WORLD •=

After losing Jess and Niels, Sully felt like she had nothing left to live for. Closeness and weeping with Niels's family eventually became a sense of isolation; they all had lives and families and children, and all she had was her own desolation. She couldn't work. She couldn't eat. She slept extensively.

After around five months, a surreal dream came to her which left her feeling something had changed. The sense of a need to find a purpose came to her, but she wasn't sure why or what she should do. So when her parents showed a faint glimmer of interest in seeing their daughter again, getting on a plane suddenly wasn't so bad anymore. If it went down, she couldn't have cared less anymore. Maybe she'd be with the people she loved again. It sounded better than this half-life.

They got her at the airport, drugging her and smuggling her outside. To this day, Sully thinks it was her parents that did it--that they were always Illuminati and she just didn't know. They've avoided her ever since it happened. She was chipped and prepped, and used in some sort of experiment. Like many others, she saw what happened in Tokyo.

And then she knew what really became of the man she loved, and the woman who was her sister in all but name.

=• POST-ENLIGHTENMENT PERIOD •=

After a cute redhead caught her eye, causing her to duck into a coffee shop in London where she'd come just to pretend for a while that she was a Templar fighting evil and maybe even to find out if someone could free her of them, an embarrassed Sully was discovered spying on Icarus Squad. They became fast friends with her, and though she at first enjoyed being with them because she could pretend everything was fine, it wasn't too many weeks before the nightmares and flashbacks brought on by seeing Tokyo through her own eyes caused a total breakdown. Prome, Ennoc, and Kentah were all there for her, especially the third, who hugged her and let her cry.

When Sully found out that Prome and Ennoc's lives were threatened by a member of her own faction, Col. Than, it didn't take long for her to sign on to help. She began a careful campaign of espionage, and is currently doing her best to see to the Colonel's downfall. Her unrequited love for Prometheus, who is dating her friend Kentah, is a painful distraction, and some part of her hopes she'll meet someone who can capture her heart.

Anyone Sully has become attached to can count on her to put her fear aside for them and struggle through. Death no longer scares her the same way losing someone that matters to her does. She will fight tooth and nail to save everyone she can.