and everything that could remind you of how easy i was not

[andbreathes]

DOMINICA ADDISON NORRINGTON D E S C R I P T I O N Dominica is 5'6" with dark hair, dark eyes and strong, even features - a pretty, attractive woman, but unremarkably so. She has what she would personally describe as 'a generous bosom', and a figure that tends towards an hour-glass; her personal style is laidback, simple and flattering. Her wardrobe contains both the clothes she brought with her from Dustdevil, and more modern alternatives that she's accumulated since living in Baedal - day to day, she's fine and dandy in jeans, boots and a tunic. She usually smells faintly of lavender oil and cigarettes. H I S T O R Y Dominica Addison is the only and illegitimate daughter of Naomi Addison, née Davis, born on the 20th of August 1853; she doesn't know who her father was, and was told that her mother didn't know either. An inconvenient situation all around, but Naomi made the best of it that she could and, when Dominica was still a little girl, allowed herself to be 'saved' by their local preacher Timothy Addison, who married her and decided to raise her quiet daughter as his own in the hopes of making something worthwhile out of such a terrible beginning. He gave Dominica his name and a strong male influence to call her own; this story might have ended differently if all things had been equal, but it would also be very boring. Unlike her coolly, calmly pragmatic daughter, Naomi had been willful and wild in her youth - and eventually it caught up to her family. When the ghost of lovers past showed up (very alive, and very angry) looking for something he alleged she'd taken from him when they parted ways, Pastor Addison was away tending to a dying man and Naomi's efforts at prevarication were not doing her any favours. Dominica, all of sixteen and yet unnoticed, quietly found her father's gun and shot their intruder from behind. Unfortunately, in the confusion before he properly died, he shot Naomi - and at this point Dominica, who'd been apprenticing to a midwife and courting with one of the local boys, simply decided not to wait for Daddy to come home. She sat with her mother while she died, cleaned up the gruesome scene the best that she could manage, and then packed her things along with all the money in the house, and left. The version of events that Naomi told Dominica as she lay dying was that he accused her of taking a box of his, and that she didn't remember it; she would live the rest of her life unaware that he'd tracked them down looking for Naomi and the daughter that he'd named for the Lord. A sixteen year old girl on her own, raised by a foolish woman and a sheltering pastor, is not going to get too far - even a clever and practical-minded one like Dominica. Realizing this, she set about finding herself the first of a series of men whose company she would keep in her trek westward. She made some poor decisions simply out of youth and naivete, most of which she's learned from and some of which will just never make any sense, but she eventually worked out that taking their money was going to get her further than just their affection. Having been in and out of a brothel or two, she eventually took up with a gentleman whose name she prefers not to discuss these days who was headed for Wyoming - she fancied they were properly in love, but when a heated argument led to her being abandoned in the dust kicked up by his horse on the road toward Dustdevil, well. Certain illusions were shattered. From there, she went into town and found herself a job working for the local madam - Pamela Roze - at Miss Etta's, where she did profitably for about a year and settled herself into the community. She became accustomed to being an under the table alternative to the local doctor (Dominica has a cool head in a crisis, is a dab hand with a needle, and doesn't ask questions), and interestingly enough considering all this, befriended the local sheriff, who assisted her in her quiet, patient efforts to better learn to read. In return, she did his laundry, and found it interesting how often she found evidence of wounds in his torn, bloodstained clothes - but he never asked for her help with that, and nor did he (to the best of her knowledge) have much to do with the doctor. In a bit of chaos that coincidentally went down at roughly the same time, Dominica got herself into a spot of trouble (when some old acquaintances drifted into town) around about the same time as the good Sheriff got himself shot and, to all appearances, killed in front of her. After a bit of hysterics over the body that led to several locals wondering if perhaps they'd missed something, Dominica palmed his keys and waited until nightfall to pack up her things and quietly slip out of the parlor house and slip into the sheriff's former residence. Praying that she was guessing right, she packed up his belongings as well, took a few papers that looked likely (one of which appeared to be addressed to her; she later discovered it named her the recipient of his worldly possessions, which would've saved her the theft if she'd read it first) and left town on his horse while the sun was near to rising. She found James Norrington a few miles out, walking along the side of the road, and they were only a little bit surprised to see each other. Posing as Mrs Norrington as they headed towards San Francisco, it seemed prudent to simply maintain the charade when they reached that city - and then, again, when they found themselves in Baedal. Something of a skilled chameleon, Dominica presents herself within Baedal as a mild-mannered housewife, doesn't talk much about her past, and mixes a practised ability to feign extroversion with a more natural stillness in her manner. S K I L L S Prior to fleeing her hometown, Dominica was apprenticed to a midwife and she maintained an interest for the rest of her life in learning about the human body and how to take care of it, specifically women's health. The safe having of babies and, as necessary, avoiding having babies. She's not a fully trained and qualified medical professional of any era, but she is accustomed to sterilizing with alcohol and stitching up wounds, digging out bullets, etc. She's delivered babies before and probably will again. In Baedal, while she'll probably be sticking to 'I'm a housewife, obviously', she'll be available for your under the table doctoring needs. In an effort to pretty much teach herself doctoring, she'll be collecting medical texts as she can get her hands on them - she will be willing to trade her help with injuries for other people's help getting the books she needs to improve her skillset. Additionally, she's a good shot with a revolver and can hit the broadside of a barn with a shotgun (the recoil gives her trouble), and Norrington has been teaching her to use a sword. She's far from a master at it, and his lessons are primarily based around "not getting stabbed". P E R S O N A L I T Y Most of all, Dominica is calm. Where her mother was fretful and flighty, Dominica has been a steady rock all her life, somehow serenely down to earth. It's difficult to rile her, and she's genuinely fond of most people just on principle - she doesn't trust them, but people aren't trustworthy creatures and that doesn't make the good Lord love them any less, so why should she? On which note: her religious upbringing gave her a relatively stable home (until that night she killed a man and her mother died and she had to abandon everything - right up until then), for which she is grateful, but she'd never have been much of a 'god-fearing Christian woman' even if she'd settled down, married, and become a midwife as she'd planned to. God is a decent sort, she thinks, but he has his concerns and she has her own, and she'd better look after her own before she worries about his. Pragmatic and practical, Dominica is a survivor; when confronted with a problem, she doesn't allow herself panic or hysteria, instead rolling up her sleeves and searching for the solution. Sometimes her solutions are...a little left of center, but she'll do her best to find one and then carry it out. It's possible she just channels her panic into action, reacting calmly but sometimes in ways that are maybe not the best thing for the situation; cleaning out her stepfather and fleeing town was something done in shock, but she did it coolly and with steady hands. To be frank, while her pleasant serenity is one thing on the day to day, it can be disturbing to realize that she is always like this, there's a steely element of self-control involved, stubbornness and pragmatism. It doesn't help to get upset, so nine times out of ten, Dominica doesn't (visibly) get upset. She's willing to lend a hand when she can - in fact, she's had to learn caution there, coming to understand that it's not entirely safe to give so freely of yourself, all the time, to almost anyone who seems to need it. Still, she's interested in people, if not very close to them. Her mother wanted to fall in love with more or less everyone she met, but Dominica just wants to understand them for a moment or two, and she doesn't need anything more from them than that. Understandably, then, she's very independent, and also very focused. She has a knack for concentrating on one person in a moment as if they are the most important thing in the world - perhaps the only thing in the world - and doing her best to please them. This (and, you know, her astounding rack) is kind of a handy skill in her profession ('whoring'). Men do not hold the mystery that they once did, but she's been perfectly willing to convince them for a while that they most certainly do. She's friendly and charming, if you don't find her sometimes eerily firm sense of self and serenity off-putting, and she can be a little bratty with her rather deadpan sense of humour. (It's not always easy to tell when she's kidding.) S E X U A L I T Y Dominica is both bisexual and biromantic, but due to the time period she grew up in and her specific upbringing within it, she presents herself as heterosexual and has rarely had any opportunity to safely express a same-sex attraction. She has a tendency to gravitate to individuals who are louder, more extroverted and volatile than she is herself, and given the nature of her relationships and the nature of the men available to her, this led to involvement with men who tended to get her into various flavours of trouble. She's lost a lot of her romantic illusions; while she's unquestionably fond of people, and prone to giving people whatever she can divine they need from her, she's not very invested, personally. Through her line of work (prostitution) and her personal experiences, sexuality has become something slightly distant to her - it's a point of pride, something by which she derives satisfaction in herself, but romance is not a priority. Her relationship with James Norrington is a blurry grey area, having begun posing as a married couple for travel convenience and simply not stopped yet; they are sexually involved, live together, publicly share their lives as a couple, but privately the issue is more complicated and indistinct.