Ruby Chowdhury

Name/Nicknames:  Dr. Ruby Chowdhury

Alias:  Disney

Age:  29yrs

Ethnicity:  British Indian

Status:  Witch (Half-Fae)

Pronouns:  She/her/hers

Date of Birth:  June 24th, 1967

Place of Birth:  Bristol, England

Education:  PhD in Psychology, MA in Occult Studies

Occupation:  Blog Writer

Significant Relations:  Mother and adoptive father back in Bristol, both very wealthy and on the older side, both very unhappy with her choice to leave the UK and run away to America. August is her best friend! Presumably a biological father running around somewhere.

Appearance:  Ruby is 5'5" of brown skin, black hair, and bright green eyes. She has a compact frame with a little more strength in it than there ought to be, likes her hair long and her make-up light. Her attire waffles around terms like practical, sturdy, and stylish most of the time, but she has been known to run around in a dress now and then when the mood strikes her. She has a few tattoos, mostly runes for protection, and a scar on the side of her neck like a crescent that she's had since she was a baby.

Personality:  She's a girly girl at heart, and takes every chance she can to indulge it. As a child she loved horses and dogs, spent hours in the woods around her house, and pretended to work with her parents cataloguing and investigating various supernatural happenings on the island she once called home. At eighteen, she joined Aegis and has been working for them ever since. Experience has turned her into a woman who is good in a crisis and tenaciously stubborn about finding answers to the questions she wants to ask. Intermittently, she also needs to be the kind of person who can fight back.

Strengths:  Ruby carries a backpack with her that contains several portable versions of machines for the measurement and analysis of supernatural creatures. She's a fast reader and light on her feet. Eager to learn, brave enough to count as a death wish, and pretty enough to talk her way past a lot of barriers.

As a witch, she's really only skilled at rituals and potions. Things with recipes, and time to set, and which don't require a great deal of raw talent or power. As a fae, Ruby's powers are unreliable at best, and usually only good for a party trick or bursting out of her at inappropriate times. Usually when she's afraid or angry enough to let the walls down.

Presumably attached to her fae ancestry is a kind of magnetic pull Ruby seems to have. Supernatural creatures have a way of turning up when she's around, as if something about her draws them out of the woodwork. This is an exceptional ability to have in her given job, but she has no control over it and no idea which half of her is at work when this happens. If it's her fae half, she would rather it just stopped.

Weaknesses:  Ruby can't control her fae powers! She doesn't know who her father is, and finding out the answer to that lifelong question stands a good chance of taking her out at the knees. She would also prefer to study, rather than kill, which can get her into a lot of trouble around things she really should be putting down rather than learning about.

She requires time to set up rituals and potions, materials, components, that kind of thing. In the field, Ruby is rarely a source of magical intervention. She prefers to use the equipment in her backpack and the brains she was given to manage well enough.

As half-human, Ruby has a weakness to bullets, knives, that kind of thing. As half-fae, Ruby has a weakness to cold iron and salt. She can also get very drunk off heavy cream.

Other Skills, Hobbies, and Interests:  Ruby is an excellent writer who publishes sanitized versions of her experiences online as the 'fictional' blog of a cryptid hunter. She has a small, feral, following who have never seen her face but are eager to click through her ads. She's a terrible cook, but an excellent shopper. Drives pretty well, can throw knives, and practices at a gun range whenever she can.

Living Situation:  Ruby lives in a small room next door to August's.

History:
Growing up, Ruby always knew her dad wasn't biologically related to her. Before she was young enough to ask any questions, a simple "you were magic" worked wonders, but as she got older those answers stopped working for her. During a particularly bad tantrum about wanting to know her "other daddy", a burst of magic lifted every expensive piece of furniture in their dining room. Plates shattered, chairs broke, a cacophony of disaster as everything came crashing back down.

In an effort to ensure she had some control over her abilities, and in the hopes of protecting their other rooms, her parents began teaching her to access her powers. She tried very hard to learn, but never quite managed to stop power from bursting out of her in all directions when she was upset enough. Among her uncontrollable abilities, seemed to be one that drew a high number of small supernatural creatures to their home. Bogeys, brownies, pixies, wolpertingers, wisps, the occasional ghost all found their way to visiting her as a child. At first this alarmed her parents, but eventually became an unusual but expected part of life.

Her parents were loving, supportive, wonderful people who desperately wanted Ruby to feel like she belonged. Perhaps they should have told her the details about her biological father sooner, but they simply hoped she would never feel the need to go looking. When, in fact, Ruby tried to uncover information about him at eighteen, reasoning that she was an adult now and deserved to know the circumstances of her birth, they were forced to sit her down and explain.

It didn't go well.

She felt betrayed and lied to by the people she had loved and trusted most in the world. The way she couldn't control her magic suddenly made sense, but Ruby was in no mood to actually puzzle it out anymore. She packed her things while her mother cried, and steeled her heart against the ache that tried to eat her alive. The voice that kept telling her to stay, please stay. She fled to London, where a large HQ for the Aegis Network took her in and trained her as an agent. Her name, and her heritage, got her fewer odd looks in a larger city, and Ruby was relieved to just fade into the crowd a bit. Even if her roommate did occasionally complain about the creatures which sometimes made it into their shared room.

Her first real experience with the job, outside her parents' stories when she was growing up, was breaking a young man out of an asylum the night of a full moon. It was supposed to be the night before, but Ruby misread the lunar calendar and ended up on the business end of a werewolf massacre. Responsible for so many human deaths, she grieved. Honestly, she's still grieving that mistake. It helped her to sharpen up, though. to research more thoroughly, and to take her job seriously. When she didn't pay enough attention, people died, and Ruby wasn't going to let that happen again if she could stop it.

After nine years in London, Ruby asked to be reassigned to the States. It was a new adventure, it was farther from her parents sad eyes and calm acceptance of Ruby's ever-sparking hurt at being lied to all her life, and she was eager to shake off the shackles that came with serving the British arm of the Aegis Network. She moved to Chicago two years ago, and has lived on The Row ever since. At first as a recent transfer with a big name to live up to, but now as a kind of mother duck to new recruits and an unofficial second-in-command to August.

Model:  Varada Sethu

Anything Else:  Ruby speaks passable Italian and Russian, and fluent French and English. She's excellent at riding horses and loves dogs, especially stubborn little shits who can match her energy.

Timeline:
1967 - Born!
1974 - Her first magical accident.
1976 - The first time Ruby is found playing with a wolpertinger in the backyard.
1985 - Finds out her parentage and leaves home. Joins Aegis Network.
1986 - Ruby is the reason for a failed retrieval of a werewolf.
1991 - Given a position as a lead researcher and field agent with the London branch.
1994 - Moves to America, to The Row, and starts working with August.
1996 - Hiiii!

Player:  Pixie