Name: Blair “The Blade Siren” De Silva AKA “Blair of the Blades”
Age: 20
Occupation: Swordswoman/ (renounced) Assassin
(Former Slave)
Bounty: 11,000,000 Beli (for counts of murder and murder of a marine official)
Species: Black Tiger Shark Mermaid
Allegiance: To the highest bidder- i.e. Blair’s loyalty lies with anyone with high quantities of wealth and power, specifically, anyone who can help her to advance in life- regardless of whether they may be Pirates, Yonkou, Shichibukai, World Government, Marines, Cipher Pol etc.
Birthplace: (Presumably) Fishman Island, Grand Line
Appearance: Blair is a Black Tiger Shark mermaid who measures just about 6ft in length from the top of her head to the tips of her main fins. From the waist down, her tail is a slate-grey colour and lined with black, asymmetric stripes. Her main fins are sharper in shape than the gossamer sort of that of a typical mermaid and a deep black in colour. In stark contrast, Blair herself has an extremely pale complexion though it is marred by several faded scars along her arms and abdomen. She has pearly grey eyes with the same wide-in-diameter pupils as a typical shark’s, accompanied by faint, thin eyebrows and light blonde hair that falls to her shoulders in an uneven cut. She has a black tribal tattoo covering her right shoulder from neck to joint. Her lips are thin and a soft pale pink colour and once opened, reveal rather sharp-looking white teeth.
In terms of clothing, Blair wears a black waist-coat style top with two silver buttons at the joining, which strains at her chest and reveals her bellybutton, which is pierced with a silver ring. Her ears are also pierced with the same silver rings and she wears a black leather strap around her waist to attach various objects to e.g. money purses etc. Her fingernails are often painted black and she wears a pair of leather fingerless gloves, fishnet coverings stretching from her wrists to her elbows
Blair wears both of her katana strapped to her back with a similar leather strap, both sheathed with removable black casing.
History:
Blair’s past is verifiable mystery to her and if asked, she will not recall anything from beyond the age of thirteen years old.
The “Blade Siren”’s earliest memory is of her waking up on board a ship, in a sailor’s bunk, her tail being bandaged by someone whom she had (apparently) never met before.
The man informed her that he was the doctor of that particular crew and that he had both good news and bad news for her. The good news was that in a matter of days, she would make a full recovery. The bad news was that her brother’s life had been claimed in the “battle” and they had both just managed to escape.
Blair was stunned on all accounts as firstly, she could not remember ever being in any such “battle” and secondly, she could not remember having any such brother.
In fact, she couldn’t even remember her first name.
The doctor was perplexed by this and eventually deduced that Blair’s head trauma and to a lesser extent, psychological trauma, had caused her to contract severe long-term amnesia.
He informed her that she and her brother had been caught in the inter-water crossfire between the pirate vessel that she was currently on and a marine ship that they had been attempting to ambush.
He told her that during the attack, her brother had begged for her to be taken on board as she was injured and that prior to her fainting, Blair had introduced herself as “Blair De Silva.” The pirate captain ignored his plea but the slightly superstitious helmsman, (fun fact! Apparently pirates once believed that witnessing the death of the purest creature in the ocean i.e. a mermaid was extremely bad luck, whereas their tears, kisses and presence on board a ship were all immensely lucky), caved in and took her on board, taking her to the doctor immediately to be treated.
Unfortunately, just as Blair was starting to come to terms with this shocking information, the captain discovered her presence on board and without hesitation, had her thrown overboard- seeing her as nothing more than an extra mouth to feed and a hapless vulnerable damsel whom he was in no mood to be sympathetic too.
Lost, alone and confused, Blair swam in circles around the area for days, trying to remember who she was and looking for clues to help her find her way back home. Not sleeping and only eating kelp fronds, she soon became desperately weak and thin.
One day, a herd of dugong were passing through the area and Blair was surprised when the giant, graceful mammals acted in such a kind and friendly manner towards her- an alien species. Blair felt a certain connection to them and even with the obvious lack of language, the mermaid child immediately wanted them to be her surrogate family. She followed the pack around for a while, eating where they ate and eventually bedding down with them in underwater caves at night.
The intelligent creatures, seeing her as no threat, allowed her to do so.
However, her newfound solstice did not last long.
One day, the dugongs came to rest in the cove section of a commercial harbour of an island in the North Blue.
Whilst aimlessly watching the dugongs lounge around on the rocks, a rather shady merchant noticed a small, pale, slender body in amongst all of the large, rotund bronze flab. Using his telescope, he identified Blair as a mermaid and smirked to himself, suddenly hatching a devious plan.
Business in the slave trading industry that week, it seemed, had been rather slow.
He used cannon-fire to scare away the dugongs and in the confusion, with no natural instincts of navigation, Blair was easily caught in a set of metallic fish-nets cast out by the slaver- merchant and his gang.
Blair, whose tail was now healed, fought viciously against the men and women who had captured her, almost scaring herself with her own violent retaliations. Sadly though, they succeeded in beating her down and dragged her to a nearby slave market.
She was sold as a pet to a noble’s daughter.
The little girl was only seven years old and wanted a mermaid as a best friend, so her father had gone out and bought her one.
Kept in a glass tank in the little girl’s bedroom, forced to wear a ridiculous lacy blouse like a doll and a degrading slave collar with people gawking at her all day, Blair soon became withdrawn and agitated with the world.
At night she lay awake, trying to conjure up feelings of sorrow…but alas, she had no family in the outside world that she could remember and thus no family to miss or worry for.
Despite her ghastly degradation, Blair (now fourteen) didn’t mind playing with the little lonely human girl or talking to her. The child was too young to understand what was going on and what kind of crime her father had committed.
She was fed nicely, provided with meat and a variety of seaweeds to keep her healthy- and as such, eventually, Blair’s physical health improved greatly. As she grew, she was also provided with a larger tank and better clothing (though her wardrobe mainly consisted of the same silly, doll-like blouses and corsets).
Blair remained as a pet-slave until she was sixteen years old.
The nobleman’s daughter, now ten, had started to ask questions regarding why exactly Blair had “decided” to come home with her daddy one day or where her daddy had found Blair when mermaids were supposed to only live out in the open sea.
Deciding that his daughter was starting to ask too many questions around the wrong people, he swiftly had Blair sold to another buyer- telling his tearful daughter that her dear friend had “gotten homesick” and had decided to “go back home to her family.”
In reality, Blair had been sold as a servant to a wealthy member of Cipher Pol.
The lifestyle in that household was much more brutal than the one in the noble’s house. She worked in the water filled canals beneath the house, cleaning drains and adjusting underwater boilers.
Blair initially rebelled to being treated so badly but was once again, beaten and threated with lashings if she didn’t perform her duties as asked- often taking the corporal punishment just to get a break from swimming around in the dark, cold waters of the canals.
Blair was slowly becoming hardened to the world, rage boiling beneath her skin, her psyche still tattered and possessing no memories of genuine love or fondness being shown towards her.
She was not completely alone as there were other servants in the household too who often spoke to her and tried to coax the young mermaid out of her shell.
However, though Blair was grateful for their interactions, she remained shy and distrusting, knowing that anybody that she got close to could easily die or be taken away from her.
If any of the house stewards ever spoke to her, even to give her orders, she was far from grateful and often resorted to snapping at them or growling verbal abuse- gladly taking a lashing or a beating than do her work quietly.
Though she rarely ever saw the master of the house, he one day took a fleeting interest in the feisty tiger shark mermaid with no past and seemingly randomly had her order of daily gruel replaced with a rather fine chunk of meat.
This aroused jealousy in the other servants as he knew it would and one of them began to insult Blair, saying that she had obviously done a favour for the master to earn such a treat and that her hatred of the family that she worked for was clearly all an act.
Losing her temper at long last, Blair suddenly attacked the other servant, biting his arm and severely mutilating the skin, completely lacerating several arteries with her sharp teeth. The other servants could only watch in horror as the young man bled profusely, unable to move as Blair pushed him into the canal waters and watched him drown slowly.
The look in the mermaid’s eyes was unforgiving and though she was overcome by shock, grief and disgust in later reflection; at the time, Blair felt as if she was finally getting a chance to relieve her taut, suffocated rage at long last- with no family to disappoint, no status to uphold, no reputation to damage and no future to regret not having.
The master of the house had been watching the whole even and he too, noticed all of these convenient qualities surrounding Blair.
He ordered for her to be brought to him and though the teenage mermaid was expecting to hear arrangements for her death sentence, the master offered her a chance to escape slavery by becoming an agent of Cipher Pol. He explained the kind of personal espionage and assassination work that he wanted her to do on his behalf, the benefits that she could gain from her time as an agent and the CP concept of “dark justice” that she was expected to live by.
After taking a single night to consider his offer, Blair accepted it and was sent to the CP2 base, the very next day to begin her training.
The training was severe and difficult but for the first time, Blair found herself being treated as an equal among her fellow trainees, if not a very special person. After all, she soon learned- the average mermaid was always assumed to be a gentle, sweet, kind and innocent creature.
As such, Blair was actually given charm-school type lessons in manners, etiquette and behaviour as well as hand-to-hand combat and use of hand daggers for quick kills. Her mentors found her easy to work with as her shark genes gave her a somewhat “naturally” violent nature and with no prior-teachings due to her amnesia, she was a virtually blank slate in terms of culture and even morality, to an extent.
She learned the full skills of an assassin- how to blend into a crowd, how to infiltrate a building without being spotted, how to improvise with weapons, how to interrogate effectively and also how to use her looks and acquired charm to manipulate and seduce targets, putting them at ease.
Blair was seventeen when she completed her training and with the scars to prove it, she began work as a paid assassin.
Though you could never quite call it “friendship”, she did enjoy a level of comradeship with her fellow agent and assassins.
The odd thing was that no matter how many successful missions she went on or how much Beli she found falling into her purse, she was never quite satisfied.
Mainly because, she could never find a reason for why she was murdering all of these people. She didn’t care that they were threats to “world peace” or that she had a reputation as an elite assassin to maintain and she certainly wasn’t taking out her anger on anyone anymore.
If anything, she felt like she had almost become robotic…devoid of emotion and unable to feel anything “warm” anymore. She would get close to her target, swiftly end them, return with evidence of their death and be paid for her actions. It was routine.
Plus, the fact that her main weapons were her own teeth and a collection of close-contact daggers made her feel like a barbaric monster.
One afternoon, after slaying the owner of a smuggling business in East Blue, Blair took a moment to relax in the outdoor hot springs that overlooked a nearby dojo. She noticed a swordsman training with an attack dummy.
She was amazed at the precision of his blows despite the size of the weapon, the gracefulness of his form despite the power of his moves and the look of concentration and confidence upon his face rather than one of blood-lust or one devoid of any kind of emotion.
His passion for the art-form was clear and impressing and Blair decided that she needed a closer look. She visited the dojo and asked the swordsman to allow her to watch him train, asking him various questions about the form of fighting. At first he seemed reluctant to do so but he eventually gave into pride and let her study him.
After a few more days of watching sword-play, the eighteen year old mermaid was enchanted by the fighting style and wished to learn it for herself. She asked the swordsman to become her mentor but he refused to teach her- saying that he was only a student himself and that it would be too hard for a creature with such a low centre of gravity to learn sword-work.
Nevertheless, Blair decided to teach herself about the sword-style, visiting Blacksmiths’ forge, sword-merchants and reading about the sword-style’s history, varieties and forms.
She watched the swordsman that she had become friendly with in detail, making light conversation with him as he worked while silently trying to memorize each stroke and strike that he executed even though he still refused to teach her anything
Blair noticed that he had started to make a few flirtacious passes at her every now and then and suddenly started to consider a rather shameful strategy in order to coerce him into tutoring her into the artform that had suddenly started to give her something to work towards- to shape her phantom-like life.
Blair started to return his flirting as she had been taught to do at CP2 but took it a step further and began to offer him sexual favours in return for teaching her basic sword-skills.
Once again, he initially refused but eventually gave into their “deal.”
Though deep in thought, trying to master holding and positioning a blade, Blair was also trying to wrap her mind around this new concept of desire and how easily it can be used as a tool to bend someone else’s will. The idea of another being attracted to her was also a rather strange one and though it never quite became “love”, Blair did start to feel some levels of affection for her swordsman tutor.
That said, the moment she picked up the skills that she needed, Blair stopped returning to the dojo, only leaving the swordsman a small note of her gratitude and good wishes for his future.
Shortly after this, Blair visited a local smith and finally started to use her blood money to have a decently sized katana crafted for her.
Between her work for CP2, Blair began to improve her sword-skills alone, dedicating at least three hours a day to the blade. Though discouraged to do this, Blair began to use her katana for assassinations and gained the nickname “The Blade Siren” from her comrades and those who had heard rumours of a “sword-wielding mermaid.”
Blair experienced difficulties when it came to using the blade on land as her tail did not provide the same equilibrium and balance as a set of legs and the sword was hard to use underwater as it was too susceptible to resistance in the surrounding water.
Though through long months of study and more observation at the forge, Blair soon devised a way of smoothing the steel and thinning it so that it was more lightweight and just as deadly underwater as it was in thin air.
After self-teaching herself for another year, Blair used her wages to purchase a second sword, thinned the steel and began learning to double-wield.
Her life ended up taking a whole new direction because of her newfound passion for swordsmanship however she also ended up taking scary new paths in life due to an unfortunate incident on one of her missions.
Blair’s task was to assassinate a suspected pirate captain, however an undercover marine had already happened upon the man before her and witnessed her stalking the captain, drawing a blade. Immediately assuming him to be a bystander and without hesitating, slaughtered the plain-clothes marine too, the pirate getting away in the confusion.
When CP got word that she had killed a member of the marines without orders to do so and having let a pirate escape, they immediately discharged her and declared her a rogue agent before the World Government.
CP2 left her at the mercy of the marines, denying that she was ever one of their elite agents but allowing rumours about her being a cold-blooded murderer and a pirate sympathist to flourish.
Blair De Silva- “the Blade Siren” was soon on Wanted Posters all over the world and she found herself fleeing East Blue completely, constantly forced to travel alone but now with her skills to rely on for her own survival.
All this time, piece by piece, Blair soon denounced life as an assassin, having realised that the lifestyle now might be the death of her and wishing to restore the humanity that she still hoped she had inside of her- having memorised the swordsman’s code of self-protection, protection of others and protection of beliefs.
Blair decided that so far, her life had been a poor means of repaying her brother’s sacrifice and with no other knowledge of her past kinsfolk, she decided to make her way across the seas once more, this time – no longer aimless- but driven by a desire to remember who she was before that fateful day when Fate spared her but claimed her brother.
Personality:
Blair is an outwardly distrusting, abrasive and cold person, slow to empathise with others and quick to anger, particularly when put under pressure or challenged. Blair is also extremely nervous when in large groups of people and will become edgy and shy if forced to behave in a sociable manner for too long.
She often uses an aura of coolness or an uncaring attitude to mask her own insecurities and fears about her own nature and is eternally reluctant to make long lasting relationships with people as she is afraid that these will soon end as quickly as they began- as have all of the relationships in her past.
Though Blair seems casual and frostily polite at times, her mind is filled with turbulence and constant self-doubt.
That said, she also deeply calculating and intelligent- able to learn new skills in a matter of days and also capable of teaching herself. She is resourceful and independent- often not letting other people’s wants, views or opinions influence her own. Blair is also perpetually feisty and determined, her lithe exterior hiding an iron will beneath and an immense capacity for pain and emotional turmoil.
Despite her monstrous capability to kill without reason, Blair does in fact eventually feel remorse for her crimes and is worried about losing her abilities to feel emotion. Despite her loyalties constantly shifting and her best interest being in the only person that she has to look out for (herself), she will feel inclined to repay those who help her or show her kindness.
Crew: N/A
Ship: N/A
Flag: N/A
Devil Fruit: N/A
Type: N/A
Effect: N/A
Special Abilities: Blair has all the basic skills of an assassin- speed, stealth, seduction and of course, killing quickly and with as very little mess as possible. Blair is also highly intelligent, calculative and doesn’t find it difficult to teach herself new moves- particularly sword-type ones.
Learned Techniques: (note: Blair uses all attacks both above and below water HOWEVER, her attacks are significantly more effective when used underwater)
Noir Slash: Blair takes both blades and slices them across the chest of her opponent in an “X” formation.
Schwarz Roulette : Blair twists her body into a spinning motion and brings her swords across the neck of her opponent in unison, decapitating them.
Tear Into the Black : Blair digs one sword into the top of her opponent’s spine from behind and slices into their back with the other, making a vertical cut downward and lacerating their spinal cord in extreme cases. If not given enough time to execute the attack, it will leave a significant gouge in the person’s back.
Foile a Deux: Blair points both blades forward and shoves them both into the kidney spaces (below the ribcage and above the hip-bones) of her opponent , in perfect unison, before withdrawing them quickly and then slicing them both across the opponent’s neck once they are doubled over with pain.
Last Resort: If pushed to her limits or in extreme circumstances, Blair will abandon her swords and sink her sharp teeth into the neck of her opponent, tearing away a chunk of their flesh and leaving them with a fatal bleeding wound.
Weapons: Two mid-length katana with black handles, modified in terms of blade diameter for use underwater.
Items: Only a purse for money and a pocket map of the Seas in addition to her katana.
Goals:
(1) To avoid capture at all cost.
(2) To better her skills as a swordswoman and further her knowledge of sword-wielding skills.
(3) To learn anything she can about her childhood or her family.
(4) To prove to herself that despite her dark past, she has not completely gained a heart of stone.
Fri Jan 27, 2012 8:36 pm
