AINSLIE'S BIO

[sealskinsuit]

full name

📢 🦭

alias

Ainslie Grey

age

72

d o b

Summer

zodiac

Cancer

pronouns

she/her

hometown

Isle of May, Scotland

species

Selkie

department/job

Knowledge / General

connections

N/A

AINSLIE GREY

Ainslie is a young selkie on a warpath. She has spent the last thirty-odd years coming on shore to dance in the moonlight and tryst with humans without issue, but recently, uh ... a big, big issue arose. Her selkie skin was taken from her and instead of being locked in an old chest or buried under a lovely rowan tree nearby, it was packed into a suitcase and flown to who knows where. Now she is on the hunt to get it back and return to the sea. Only the longer she goes without her skin and the further it is from her, the weaker she becomes. Ill, irritable, and brimming with ire for her circumstances, she accepted her position at the Adventure Society as a means of finding help before it's too late.

personality

+

perceptive . curious . clever . determined . playful . down to clown, if we're being honest

=

droll . mischievous . evasive . blunt . ill-mannered . luddite . preoccupied by longing for the sea

–

VENGEFUL . immature . insensitive . prone to ennui . suffers from terminal uniqueness . purposefully unpleasant

appearance

Ainslie appears to be in her mid 20s by human standards. Perpetually watery eyed. Frequently wane. Even when she objectively looks like shit, she is inexplicably lovely to look at. Gives off an impression of dampness?? Constantly being offered towels or asked if it's raining out, even when she is bone dry. A visibly miserable person.

height

5'9"

build

Svelte

eyes

Green

hair

Brown

abilities

species-related abilities

Ainslie is a fae shapeshifter whose ability to shift between seal and human forms is bound to her seal skin. When she is in her seal form, she maintains her humanity but otherwise thinks and behaves much like a common grey seal. In her human form, Ainslie retains some qualities of a seal (i.e. enhanced low-light vision, lung capacity, and tolerance/preference for extreme cold) and some qualities of the fae (i.e. preternatural allure and esoteric, otherworldly knowledge). Ainslie physically and mentally ages roughly three times slower than an average human and selkies live to be ~300 years old. Beyond this, Ainslie has no magic. Her health is directly tied to her seal skin; the further it is from her, the more ill she becomes. She assumes there is a limit to this distance that will eventually kill her, but she's not sure what that limit is. She could live permanently in her human form if her seal skin was nearby but her compulsion to return to the sea is incredibly strong.

bonus ability

Energy transfer, otherwise known as psychic vampirism. Ainslie is wasting away without her seal skin but can rejuvenate by leeching life force from others. She does this by eliciting strong emotions and slurping them right up. She finds it easiest to induce melancholy, embarrassment, and frustration, though technically she could feed on positive emotions if she felt like it. She has to be the source of the emotion for her power to work; she cannot feed on ambient emotions.

mundane abilities

Lovely singing voice.

background

🦭 Ainslie was born to a pair of selkies on the Isle of May, Scotland in the summer of 1951. She lived as a seal for the first forty or so years of her life, never shedding her skin. While selkies do have their own communities and traditions, which are highly cooperative and egalitarian, they live among common seals and Ainslie's life during this time was not much different from what you might expect from a grey seal.

🦭 Driven by compulsive curiosity, Ainslie began coming on shore and shifting into her human form in her early adolescence. She felt a sense of permanent listlessness that drove her out of the water and back into it cyclically for the past thirty years. She is attracted to revelry and youth, so often she would travel to nearby universities and blend in by pretending to be a uni student. Humans ask surprisingly few questions of unnaturally beautiful women, she finds, and it was easy to come and go. Rarely did she spend more than a few days out of the sea, until recently.

🦭 Six months ago, an ornithologist studying on the Isle of May caught her attention. Ainslie spent four nights with them and began entertaining the idea that this might be the human she would come permanently ashore for (perhaps unwillingly, but them's the breaks). Alas, it was not the coercive love match that she anticipated. After stumbling across an interesting looking seal skin tucked away in an Atlantic Puffin cove, that good for nothing bird nerd scooped it up and left with it. Didn't even TRY to force Ainslie into marriage! Wth?!?!

🦭 None of Ainslie's selkie kin had ever heard of such a thing, so when she began to rapidly physically deteriorate they could only guess at the cause. Ainslie was forced to strike out on her own to recover her seal skin and, hopefully, her health. It's been a wild six months filled with steep learning curves but eventually Ainslie was able to track her skin to Toronto. For a moment. It seems to be on the move again, to who knows where. Exhausted and without a fresh lead, Ainslie joined the Adventure Society in hopes of gaining the skills and allies she will need to find her skin and return to the sea.

miscellaneous trivia

🦭 Ainslie knows VERY little about human history or pop culture, since she has spent so little of her life ashore. Since losing her skin, she has done her best to catch-up quickly by voraciously reading wikipedia.

🦭 Until recently, Ainslie spoke almost exclusively to Scottish people, so she herself speaks with a mild Scottish accent, although it is already fading as she picks up new slang and reads/hears new dialects.

player

Colleen (she/her)

pb

Alison Oliver

contact

Discord

timezone

PST

code