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biography (in progress)
Name: Sarasi Manandhar
Physical Description: A tall woman of Tamil Indian descent, Sarasi is roughly 5'10" and 160 pounds, soft-figured but not particularly buxom. Her hair is a very dark brown-black, and falls almost to her shoulder blades, sometimes with a hint of curl; her eyes are dark brown. While her attire often varies based on the role she's playing, the style of the persona she most often presents is dressy, somewhat formal, and prone to wearing jewelry.
Sexuality: Sarasi is pansexual and enjoys romance as long as it's temporary. There has never been any romantic relationship for her that spans decades; she's a conwoman and a bit of a user, someone who enjoys people and then moves on, content to stay amiable with past significant others but just as pleased to forget about them entirely. She's had a few husbands and sometimes forgets the order in which she married them, or confuses their names/features/personalities. Her memory for everyone else isn't that great either. Her sexual preference does tilt toward men and male-presenting people, but part of this is also her desire to have naga children. The apocalypse is NOT an appropriate time to do this but she's constantly scouting out brilliant men for potential future breeding purposes. Flirtation is a near constant with her, assuming the situation is appropriate and conducive to that and not like, life and death.
World Information: KAY'S WORLD OF APOCALYPSE HUGS AND LADYMONSTERS
History: A daughter of the Pallavas, a Tamil dynasty which ruled the northern Tamil Nadu region and the southern Andhra Pradesh region with their capital at Kanchipuram from roughly 555 - 901 CE, Sarasi claims descent from the nagas who once lived in an underground kingdom known as Naga-loka or Patala-loka. Long ago a resplendent realm, it lies empty and in ruins now, the snake descendants scattered, dying, and dead. Its decay is linked to the thinning of power with human integration as well as the desecration and pollution of the waters that served as the link and gateway between that world and the human world. Sarasi too had declined, growing old and weak as the years passed, until the Apocalypse, when her powers were renewed. She'd never been much of a humanist, but being among those released by Sonja from the Prometheus labs, she willingly joined their cause, though she only cares about it in the most general of ways, i.e. being opposed to everything being destroyed.
Irandati was the name of a naga princess. Sarasi is not Irandati, but she finds it to her advantage, from time to time, to pretend that she is, for Purposes and Reasons. She may in fact be related, somewhat distantly, to Irandati; both of her parents were of partial naga heritage themselves. From the Velurpalaiyam plates dated to 852 CE:
The time that passed in declining Patala-loka was, to them, little more than a year. When they returned to the human realm, however, they found that nearly five hundred years had passed. Though the new world and era was incredibly difficult to manage, it was debateably better than emerging into their own, where they would have had to face persecution from the Chola dynasty which had driven out the Pallavas. India in the 1400s was largely under control of Persian-based Muslim armies: in 1206, the Sultanate of Delhi had been established, an empire based on Muslim theocracy and military might. It would last until 1526. Despite Muslim rule, the caste system continued, now with Muslim rulers at the top, and the native Indians kept poor through harsh taxation. The Muslim accepted Hindus as "people of the book" (what they called Jews and Christians in the west, because they shared the same Biblical traditions as the Muslim), as long as they kept to their place in society. Sarasi and her family's first interaction with this new paradigm was a disaster which led to her mother's death. She and her sister were separated in the ensuing flight; when Sarasi took refuge in a village temple, her life as con artist began. She was taken as and then actively made herself out to be various supernatural entities of lore and occasionally, reincarnations. Manasa was the original con, as she is a Hindu folk goddess of snakes, a daughter of Shiva and the one from whom the byname "of the poison eye" comes. At the time, Sarasi did not actually possess the ability to strike people down with a glance, but she could heal people of poison very easily, as Manasa is venerated for, and she could from time to time and with enough preparation take various shapes. Her reception was varied over the years. In some places she was accepted as, if not a reincarnation, at least someone capable of doing some seriously weird shit, and in other places, she was run out of town.
In 1526, the Muslim conqueror Babur took over most of India himself, and other than a brief struggle with the previous rulers, his sons continued to rule. Their reign was initially bloody and forceful, but in time, Babur's grandson, Muhammad Akbar, chose to eliminate the distinction between Muslims and non-Muslims that had characterized Islamic societies before him. This integration increased loyalty to him. He also recruited Hindus into his military, abolished the taxes on Hindu pilgrimages and other taxes that Islamic rulers had imposed on non-Muslims, and married a Hindu princess, Padmini, whom he permitted to conduct Hindu rites in his harem. He decreed that farmers would be taxed no more than a third of what they produced, and increased the wealth of the imperial treasury. This was a roughly 200 year period of happiness for Sarasi. During this time, she met a young man who claimed to be her sister's son. Though she was never really certain he was, it did inspire her to try to have her own children, in the interest of nagas not fucking dying out, but for whatever reason, she was never able to. Her mother probably would have been able to tell her why but whoops, dead, and Raya was still missing. After about 20 years of selecting mates that seemed promising and seducing them and then failing to have any children, she gave up on that. It was disappointing that she couldn't help bring more nagas into the world, but not crushing; she was and is not particularly maternal, and her interest in having snakebabies was pretty much limited to the repopulation of the naga species. Besides boning dudes, she spent time learning anything that interested her, such as dancing and music and poetry, but also more pragmatic things like cooking and hunting. She looked high and low for other nagas, but only ever found old signs they had been there, aside from her supposed nephew. They did stay together and travel for about 8 years. However, he was never able to learn to use whatever powers he'd inherited (if indeed he had, but it's true that not all children of naga-human descent are able to do special things), and in time, settled down to marry and have a family while Sarasi moved on. She lost track of him pretty quickly, though she's always remembered in the back of her mind that there may yet be other nagas in existence due to him at the very least.
Akbar's great grandsons fucked up this time of relative peace and prosperity, though, and by 1707, the Mughal empire was near implosion, vulnerable to incursion from the British East India Company. A large trading company with strong backing from the British crown, it sought a class of leaders loyal to British who could themselves profit from the new commercial arrangements established by the company. They played one prince against another, formed alliances with some, subdued others, and managed to enhance its control over Indian politics in the process.
Powers:
Personality: Anything but cold-blooded, Sarasi is above all else a conwoman. Personal gain has been the name of her game for centuries, but she is philosophical about it, not ruthless — not malicious in her manipulativeness, not greedy, but opportunistic — a gambler who does it for the its own sake, a good loser but an unscrupulous cheater as well. With that comes a certain callousness, a default level of disregard for the trouble she puts people through, but she is not without empathy, just lacking in sympathy. She doesn't balk at killing people, but before the apocalypse happened, she would have said it's often more trouble than it's worth, or may come with bigger potential unforeseen consequences than leaving a person alive. She would also have said, though, that that would depend on the situation. Moral flexibility and an easy conscience are useful things to develop as someone who plays the odds. Now, her world is in a pretty shitty place, and as she sees it, people are going to die anyway, it's not really the appropriate time to be fussy about these matters. She's not much of a hero (none of them are!), nor is she much of a humanist, but the world ending is not in her interest, so she is aligned with Sonja's cause. Other than personal gain, however, the cause closest to her heart would be the restoration of Patala-loka and the gathering up of her people. It's not something she talks or even thinks about often, being too cynical to dream of such an unlikely event, but if anyone were in a position to set these matters to that course, it's her and she knows it. She's one of the oldest remaining nagas (as far as she knows, there are a few others in various parts of Asia) and she has a piece of an important cultural relic. Obviously, however, destroying Lucas takes priority.
She can be kind just as easily as she can be cruel, though she often assigns neither value to her actions. One of her past aliases was Lucky, short for Lakshmi, and while she was a follower of Hinduism growing up (and the Pallavas were tolerant of other faiths), the way she's lived her life is really in devotion to that idea of luck or fortune. That isn't to say she's opposed to hard work, but Sarasi prefers to be picky about what she'll put hard work into, and thus ends up choosing very few such pursuits. But, for instance, you can't con your way into learning traditional Indian dances — you have to practice and work at it.
As befits both a conwoman and a snakelady, Sarasi does have some predatory instinct, tempered primarily by the much longer time she spent as someone who could not just kill people and get away with it. The powers she has now, she did not gain until the apocalypse, and she's still more inclined to wheedle and charm and manipulate than straight up attack someone. Knowing she has that option, however, is changing her. She isn't truly sadistic, but enjoys the new power she has, enjoys being in control of her life and being a person of some importance. She's being careful not to let that get out of hand, it's just for the first time in her life, she feels safe in looking down at people, secure in commanding them, instead of being an outsider reliant on fortune.
Her instincts are still rooted in her earlier life, however. She is a woman who is constantly turning slightly away, someone who keeps changing as a reflex to keep people from seeing who she is. It continues to a much lesser degree when she's with Sonja's band.
Physical Description: A tall woman of Tamil Indian descent, Sarasi is roughly 5'10" and 160 pounds, soft-figured but not particularly buxom. Her hair is a very dark brown-black, and falls almost to her shoulder blades, sometimes with a hint of curl; her eyes are dark brown. While her attire often varies based on the role she's playing, the style of the persona she most often presents is dressy, somewhat formal, and prone to wearing jewelry.
Sexuality: Sarasi is pansexual and enjoys romance as long as it's temporary. There has never been any romantic relationship for her that spans decades; she's a conwoman and a bit of a user, someone who enjoys people and then moves on, content to stay amiable with past significant others but just as pleased to forget about them entirely. She's had a few husbands and sometimes forgets the order in which she married them, or confuses their names/features/personalities. Her memory for everyone else isn't that great either. Her sexual preference does tilt toward men and male-presenting people, but part of this is also her desire to have naga children. The apocalypse is NOT an appropriate time to do this but she's constantly scouting out brilliant men for potential future breeding purposes. Flirtation is a near constant with her, assuming the situation is appropriate and conducive to that and not like, life and death.
World Information: KAY'S WORLD OF APOCALYPSE HUGS AND LADYMONSTERS
History: A daughter of the Pallavas, a Tamil dynasty which ruled the northern Tamil Nadu region and the southern Andhra Pradesh region with their capital at Kanchipuram from roughly 555 - 901 CE, Sarasi claims descent from the nagas who once lived in an underground kingdom known as Naga-loka or Patala-loka. Long ago a resplendent realm, it lies empty and in ruins now, the snake descendants scattered, dying, and dead. Its decay is linked to the thinning of power with human integration as well as the desecration and pollution of the waters that served as the link and gateway between that world and the human world. Sarasi too had declined, growing old and weak as the years passed, until the Apocalypse, when her powers were renewed. She'd never been much of a humanist, but being among those released by Sonja from the Prometheus labs, she willingly joined their cause, though she only cares about it in the most general of ways, i.e. being opposed to everything being destroyed.
Irandati was the name of a naga princess. Sarasi is not Irandati, but she finds it to her advantage, from time to time, to pretend that she is, for Purposes and Reasons. She may in fact be related, somewhat distantly, to Irandati; both of her parents were of partial naga heritage themselves. From the Velurpalaiyam plates dated to 852 CE:
...from him (Asvatthaman) in order (came) Pallava, the lord of the whole earth, whose fame was bewildering. Thence, came into existence the race of Pallavas... [including the son of Chutapallava] Virakurcha, of celebrated name, who simultaneously with (the hand of) the daughter of the chief of serpents grasped also the complete insignia of royalty and became famous.From the Kasakadi plates, composed in 753 AD:
From [them] descended the powerful, spotless Pallava dynasty [vamsavatara], which resembled a partial incarnation [amsavatara] of Visnu, as it displayed unbroken courage in conquering the circle of the world...and which resembled the descent of the Ganges [gangavatara] as it purified the whole world.So some of her ancestors were kings, but she and her immediate family were not royalty, though they were well off and of the Kshatriya caste. They lived primarily on earth, but traveled several times a year to Patala-loka, up until Sarasi was about thirteen, which is when it started to become more difficult and dangerous. Additionally, the Pallava dominion passed to the Chola kings around 880 (from whom they are perhaps descended — the matter is under debate due to a lack of reputable documents). There are other dynasties that claim descent from nagas, but her particular branch was decimated. She, her sister Raya, and her mother fled to Patala-loka, where they lived for some time before its decline forced them to rejoin the human world.
The time that passed in declining Patala-loka was, to them, little more than a year. When they returned to the human realm, however, they found that nearly five hundred years had passed. Though the new world and era was incredibly difficult to manage, it was debateably better than emerging into their own, where they would have had to face persecution from the Chola dynasty which had driven out the Pallavas. India in the 1400s was largely under control of Persian-based Muslim armies: in 1206, the Sultanate of Delhi had been established, an empire based on Muslim theocracy and military might. It would last until 1526. Despite Muslim rule, the caste system continued, now with Muslim rulers at the top, and the native Indians kept poor through harsh taxation. The Muslim accepted Hindus as "people of the book" (what they called Jews and Christians in the west, because they shared the same Biblical traditions as the Muslim), as long as they kept to their place in society. Sarasi and her family's first interaction with this new paradigm was a disaster which led to her mother's death. She and her sister were separated in the ensuing flight; when Sarasi took refuge in a village temple, her life as con artist began. She was taken as and then actively made herself out to be various supernatural entities of lore and occasionally, reincarnations. Manasa was the original con, as she is a Hindu folk goddess of snakes, a daughter of Shiva and the one from whom the byname "of the poison eye" comes. At the time, Sarasi did not actually possess the ability to strike people down with a glance, but she could heal people of poison very easily, as Manasa is venerated for, and she could from time to time and with enough preparation take various shapes. Her reception was varied over the years. In some places she was accepted as, if not a reincarnation, at least someone capable of doing some seriously weird shit, and in other places, she was run out of town.
In 1526, the Muslim conqueror Babur took over most of India himself, and other than a brief struggle with the previous rulers, his sons continued to rule. Their reign was initially bloody and forceful, but in time, Babur's grandson, Muhammad Akbar, chose to eliminate the distinction between Muslims and non-Muslims that had characterized Islamic societies before him. This integration increased loyalty to him. He also recruited Hindus into his military, abolished the taxes on Hindu pilgrimages and other taxes that Islamic rulers had imposed on non-Muslims, and married a Hindu princess, Padmini, whom he permitted to conduct Hindu rites in his harem. He decreed that farmers would be taxed no more than a third of what they produced, and increased the wealth of the imperial treasury. This was a roughly 200 year period of happiness for Sarasi. During this time, she met a young man who claimed to be her sister's son. Though she was never really certain he was, it did inspire her to try to have her own children, in the interest of nagas not fucking dying out, but for whatever reason, she was never able to. Her mother probably would have been able to tell her why but whoops, dead, and Raya was still missing. After about 20 years of selecting mates that seemed promising and seducing them and then failing to have any children, she gave up on that. It was disappointing that she couldn't help bring more nagas into the world, but not crushing; she was and is not particularly maternal, and her interest in having snakebabies was pretty much limited to the repopulation of the naga species. Besides boning dudes, she spent time learning anything that interested her, such as dancing and music and poetry, but also more pragmatic things like cooking and hunting. She looked high and low for other nagas, but only ever found old signs they had been there, aside from her supposed nephew. They did stay together and travel for about 8 years. However, he was never able to learn to use whatever powers he'd inherited (if indeed he had, but it's true that not all children of naga-human descent are able to do special things), and in time, settled down to marry and have a family while Sarasi moved on. She lost track of him pretty quickly, though she's always remembered in the back of her mind that there may yet be other nagas in existence due to him at the very least.
Akbar's great grandsons fucked up this time of relative peace and prosperity, though, and by 1707, the Mughal empire was near implosion, vulnerable to incursion from the British East India Company. A large trading company with strong backing from the British crown, it sought a class of leaders loyal to British who could themselves profit from the new commercial arrangements established by the company. They played one prince against another, formed alliances with some, subdued others, and managed to enhance its control over Indian politics in the process.
"There are, however, serious difficulties in any interpretation of 19th-century Indian history that divides it into an age of reform that gave way under the shock of rebellion to an age of conservatism. This may in a very rough sense reflect the intentions of India's British rulers, but what the British intended and what they were able to achieve were often very different things. [...]In 1857, after putting down a major revolt of Indian princes concerned about growing British power, the British crown formally took India as a colony. In some parts of India (known then as British India), such as Bombay and Madras, the British ruled directly, with British civil servants responsible for collecting taxes and for adjudicating law and order. There were about 500 independent Princely States who were allowed a relatively free hand, while the Bengal area was indirectly ruled by transforming traditional Indian economic elites into legal landlords in exchange for periodic payments to the colonial administration. In reality, British rule seldom reached deeply into rural areas, which were organized into self-sufficient villages and organized socially into religiously sanctioned caste groups, with some landowning castes dominating the other castes lower in the ritual hierarchy and occupational and income scales.
"Whatever the British may have intended, their early rule seems generally to have consolidated the hold of what they regarded as 'traditional' intellectuals, rather than displacing them by new ones, and the authority of Brahmins and of doctrines of caste separation grew stronger, not weaker. [...]
"Any attempt to explain the revolt of 1857 as traditional India's rejection of modern reform is far too crude."- [x]
"Universities, colleges and schools proliferated in the towns and cities, most of them opened by Indian initiative. They did not produce replica English men and women, as Macaulay had hoped, but Indians who were able to use English in addition to their own languages, to master imported technologies and methods of organisation and who were willing to adopt what they found attractive in British culture. The dominant intellectual movements cannot be called Westernisation. They were revival or reform movements in Hinduism and Islam, and were the development of cultures that found expression in Indian languages.The first Indian woman doctor to graduate from Madras Medical College was Dr. Muthulakshmi Reddi, an women's rights activist, social reformer, legislator, and writer who did a boggling amount of work for women in India. As might be expected of this time period, it was a struggle for her to get the necessary schooling throughout her life, though she was a brilliant student; she attended school until the age of 13, whereafter she had to be tutored privately, then pass matriculation (national board exams at the end of high school), then get a special exemption to attend college, THEN enter Madras Medical College. Sarasi had no records, not as much formal schooling, and she was not a brilliant student.
Within the constraints of a colonial order, a modern India was emerging by the end of the 19th century. British rule of course had an important role in this process, but the country that was emerging fulfilled the aspirations of Indians, rather than colonial designs of what a modern India ought to be."- [x]
Powers:
- Propensity for and limited control of water. She can sense (both with smell and an inner instinct) the presence of water, and it improves her general well-being, mental state, and powers. She can use it to scry or to travel between places, but only if the bodies of water are natural, she's not going to pop out of your toilet. Even a manmade lake is not sufficient, though if it's been there for a few years, then maybe she'll be able to squeeze through. She can purify a body of water, but it takes a lot out of her, and the bigger the body of water, the harder it is. Much easier to take a handful of water from a dirty source and purify just that handful for drinking than trying to bless the whole damn thing.
- Shape-shifting. She can assume a few different forms ranging between human and snake (normal snake, bigger snake, GIANT SNAKE, human torso with snake tail, human body with multiple snake heads — the last two are extra taxing and will wipe her out once she resumes human form). In these various snake forms she still is able to travel via water, but scrying, healing, and purifying require that she be in an at least partially human form. Her snake forms also allow her to be venomous :E the venom is comparable to that of Oxyuranus scutellatus (coastal or common taipan), capable of causing death in humans anywhere from 30 minutes to eight hours if left untreated. She can also tweak aspects of her appearance in any form, such as the shape or color of her features or markings. But she's still generally the same size/shape/scent. When she shapeshifts, it usually involves the shedding of skin, which means that she can't just go around changing all the time like Mystique, she has to have some private time, prepare a little, and she prefers to get rid of the skin rather than leave it out for people to find.
- Communication with snakes. She can communicate with and... sort of command them, but generally speaking, snakes aren't all that biddable, nor do they have a language. Though it depends on the individual snake's temperament, they will usually (if they aren't magical) recognize her for what she is, and give her a wide berth. She could herd them around a bit, drive them to an area maybe, or drive them out of an area, but it's mostly done with pheromones and posturing. Soothing them is about the most nuanced form of control she has, so she can, in fact, "charm" snakes, if she wished to do such a silly thing.
- Healing. Her personal regeneration is quicker than that of a human's, but her healing powers, which she can only use on other people or animals, are much stronger and more effective, capable of repairing broken limbs and internal damage as well as curing poison and disease. However, even with the power upgrade from the apocalypse, she has a limit of about ten critically injured people, perhaps twenty if their injuries aren't too bad. Furthermore, doing all ten or all twenty will knock her out for the rest of the day.
- Poison eye. With a single gaze, she can strike a baseline human with no magical defenses down by infusing them with poison. Effects range from partial paralysis to intense pain, hallucinations, and if not removed or left untreated, death. This is different from her natural poisoning capabilities (available only in her various snake forms) — it comes from her fake left eye, in which is embedded a shard of the Nagamani jewel, that which was once the gem in Vasuki's forehead. It can only be used 2-3 times within a short period, because she takes some damage from using it as well, though not nearly as much. Magical defenses, supernatural constitutions, etc., will weaken or outright block the effect. They might recoil as if from a powerful physical blow, but not suffer any poison damage.
Personality: Anything but cold-blooded, Sarasi is above all else a conwoman. Personal gain has been the name of her game for centuries, but she is philosophical about it, not ruthless — not malicious in her manipulativeness, not greedy, but opportunistic — a gambler who does it for the its own sake, a good loser but an unscrupulous cheater as well. With that comes a certain callousness, a default level of disregard for the trouble she puts people through, but she is not without empathy, just lacking in sympathy. She doesn't balk at killing people, but before the apocalypse happened, she would have said it's often more trouble than it's worth, or may come with bigger potential unforeseen consequences than leaving a person alive. She would also have said, though, that that would depend on the situation. Moral flexibility and an easy conscience are useful things to develop as someone who plays the odds. Now, her world is in a pretty shitty place, and as she sees it, people are going to die anyway, it's not really the appropriate time to be fussy about these matters. She's not much of a hero (none of them are!), nor is she much of a humanist, but the world ending is not in her interest, so she is aligned with Sonja's cause. Other than personal gain, however, the cause closest to her heart would be the restoration of Patala-loka and the gathering up of her people. It's not something she talks or even thinks about often, being too cynical to dream of such an unlikely event, but if anyone were in a position to set these matters to that course, it's her and she knows it. She's one of the oldest remaining nagas (as far as she knows, there are a few others in various parts of Asia) and she has a piece of an important cultural relic. Obviously, however, destroying Lucas takes priority.
She can be kind just as easily as she can be cruel, though she often assigns neither value to her actions. One of her past aliases was Lucky, short for Lakshmi, and while she was a follower of Hinduism growing up (and the Pallavas were tolerant of other faiths), the way she's lived her life is really in devotion to that idea of luck or fortune. That isn't to say she's opposed to hard work, but Sarasi prefers to be picky about what she'll put hard work into, and thus ends up choosing very few such pursuits. But, for instance, you can't con your way into learning traditional Indian dances — you have to practice and work at it.
As befits both a conwoman and a snakelady, Sarasi does have some predatory instinct, tempered primarily by the much longer time she spent as someone who could not just kill people and get away with it. The powers she has now, she did not gain until the apocalypse, and she's still more inclined to wheedle and charm and manipulate than straight up attack someone. Knowing she has that option, however, is changing her. She isn't truly sadistic, but enjoys the new power she has, enjoys being in control of her life and being a person of some importance. She's being careful not to let that get out of hand, it's just for the first time in her life, she feels safe in looking down at people, secure in commanding them, instead of being an outsider reliant on fortune.
Her instincts are still rooted in her earlier life, however. She is a woman who is constantly turning slightly away, someone who keeps changing as a reflex to keep people from seeing who she is. It continues to a much lesser degree when she's with Sonja's band.