Davida Ambrose
dava

Roleplayer: Ash


Date of Birth: 7th February 1978
Phase: Mencari
Gift: Projection
Calling: Seeker's
Pack: Kahlite
Rank: Zeta

Davida “Dava” Helen Ambrose (7th February 1978) is a werewolf originally from Australia. A former intelligence analyst (read: spy), Dava was Turned by her then-boyfriend in Colombia, after the country disintegrated in 2005. Two years of guerrilla warfare later, her old pack the Cotansucas were almost entirely killed by an explosion. Dava headed northwards to try and her Canadian family, the Elkyones. Now reunited with Dice, Izzie and Aras, Dava is currently a Kahlite Zeta and the Alpha’s mate.


Physical Appearance

Dava Ambrose is half Greek, half Persian, and looks it. She has olive skin, wide brown eyes, immaculately curved eyebrows, and a wealth of thick, black curly hair. That hair is normally plaited and coiled above a face with a wide, expressive mouth, and a straight, delicate nose. It is a face that can appear anywhere between plain and beautiful, depending on circumstance. She appears to be in her mid to late twenties, and has the same deep dimpled smile as her cousins. She also has Ambrose long, slender hands. Dava’s voice is low, throaty, and has the private school’s version of an Australian accent. This accent isn’t broad by any stretch of the imagination (indeed, it can sound more British than Aussie), but unless she’s speaking another language, she makes no attempt to moderate it.

In height, Dava is about 5’8 or so, and her figure is decidedly hippy. Her figure also fluctuates according to her circumstances; when it can, her body gains weight very easily, with the result of her becoming almost busty. But when the food supply slows (for example, should she go travelling), her body becomes slimmer, harder, and far more a pear-shape than an hourglass. She claims she needs her hips to balance out her hair. Her sense of style tends to lend itself to underestimation – Dava is a very feminine looking woman, and continues to be so even in clothes scrounged from whatever is available. Where possible, these clothes are colourful and pretty. Her clothes hide the worst of her scars (claw-marks starting at her left hip and ending under the right side of her ribs from where someone tried to rip her open). There is also a small cross scored into her left thigh. Since becoming Nikola’s mate, Dava also wears a braided red, white and yellow gold ring on her left hand, and it isn’t uncommon for her to wearing earrings.

Unless mentioned otherwise, she has a bandana, scarf, or other scrap of material tied around her left wrist to hide her moon-tattoo. The tattoo itself is about the size of a watch, with the moon where the face would normally be and a smaller spiral on the underside of her wrist.

moontattoo


Wolf

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As a wolf, Dava is closer in appearance to an Iranian wolf than the more well known Artic, Grey or Timber ones. A bit smaller than average, she has the kind of colouring to blend into semi-arid terrains; dark brown running from her eyes across her back, turning into a grey flecked russet across her sides and legs. Her cheeks and chest are a very light grey that not-quite continues down her throat. Her eyes are the typical wolf-amber, but more unusually, she doesn’t often howl. Her scars are more obvious in wolf form, but only when she rolls on her back. The exception to this is the scar on her left leg; a gunshot wound that someone had cut into a small cross for better healing.

Ability

After four years of applying her intellect to her Gift, she’d grudgingly call herself fairly proficient at Projecting. However, despite being able to both fly and pass through solid objects, Dava is used to using her Gift in short, sharp bursts to scout her surrounds before she moves. To slip into metaphors, she’s been grabbing her mental binoculars and scanning before running until she can do it in her sleep. Anything closer to orienteering, and her instincts start screaming at her to go back to her body. So far, she hasn’t consistently managed to overcome this.


Relationships


Personality

To a very large extent the description of her phase, Mencari, describes Dava herself; intelligent, practical, talented, cheerful, charismatic, driven, patient (depending on the circumstances), prone to risk-taking. Despite generally appearing to be a cheerful, competent secretary, Dava is all of the above things to differing degrees. Highly intelligent and driven, she is perfectly happy allowing her genuine cheerfulness hide just how devastatingly pragmatic and amoral she really can be. In this case, ‘amoral’ does not mean that she is disloyal once her allegiance has been set; it just means that everything else is to some extent up for negotiation. She can also be surprisingly blunt.

davaofficegirl

Dava’s Seeker’s Calling has seemingly fused with her natural, espionage-honed sense of curiosity, making it nearly impossible for her to fight it. Her previous hunger for knowledge is insatiable. Driven to learn and understand the world around her, she feels mentally and physically starved if she doesn’t. Her Calling can also afflict her with headaches of increasing severity (up to and including migraines) should she ignore an opportunity to use her knowledge.

She has a somewhat sardonic sense of humour, the Australian habit of understatement, and the deep cynicism that only someone dealing with history and espionage can manage. While perfectly happy to follow and obey someone she respects, should no one competent step forward, she normally finds herself taking charge without ever meaning to. Both a good cook and someone who adores food, there is something very earthy and sensual about Dava. If she trusts someone, she can show an almost poetic sense of whimsy and romanticism. Even if not, she is a genuinely nice person unless provoked to being cold. One of those people who makes a home of wherever she stays, Dava is nonetheless easily restless and bored. Still adjusting from the past several years, Dava is used to being her own boss and has deep, mostly unspoken issues about control – both of others (the unconscious fear being that they will be killed/leave her) and of herself.


Specifics

  • Birthplace: Tehran, Iran
  • Education:
    • History
    • Political Science
  • Religion: lapsed/secular Muslim
  • Sexuality: (mostly) heterosexual

Background

In Tehran, 1975, a young Greek-Australian doctor met a history student at the city’s university. They hated each other on sight. In 1976, George Ambrose asked Daria Rahim to marry him. In 1978, they called their baby girl Davida, after her maternal great-grandmother. In early 1979, the small family managed to catch one of the last planes out of Iran, and spent the next four weeks sleeping in a spare room at George’s sister’s house in Vancouver.

By the time they moved to Melbourne, Davida, unable to say her full name, was calling herself ‘Dava’. Twenty-eight years later, she still hasn’t stopped.

Dava grew up in surroundings that were well-off, but not wealthy. There was a suburban townhouse with bookcases lining every wall, and a small garden out the back that her mother patiently turned into a spot of paradise. With no siblings, and parents who were often busy (George as a GP and Daria as a history professor), Dava had to learn to entertain herself. She also had to learn how to play with the other kids on the street. It was here that she developed her love of, and gift of picking up, other languages. With her native English and Farsi, she would mix in bits of Italian, Spanish, Greek and Vietnamese (of these, it was only Spanish that she ever followed up on). But more than that, Dava learned how to get along with people. This included her Greek relatives, both Australian and Canadian, who could be suspicious of Daria’s (and by vague extension, hers) religion. On the whole, though, she could charm the adults and adored visiting the children.

When Dava was nine, her beloved mother was diagnosed with leukaemia. The five-year survival rate was forty percent, and Daria promised to live until at least Dava’s fourteenth birthday. This she managed to do, but she died before she reached her and George’s sixteenth wedding anniversary a couple months later. Dava and her father were devastated, but reacted in different ways. Dava threw herself into her studies, but George started drinking. Unable to bear the memories, he sold the townhouse and moved to Vancouver, where Kleos promised him a job at the Elkyone Private Hospital. Dava was left to go to boarding school; minded by relatives on the weekends and flying to Vancouver to be with her father over the longer holidays. Being on the other side of the globe, this meant that Dava always spent her summer holidays in snowing winter.

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Dava as a teenager

By her second Vancouver winter, she was also spending more time at the Elkyones’ place than at her father’s. George had become an alcoholic in his grief, and while he never, ever physically harmed his daughter, he could drive her sobbing from the house at 11pm with nothing more than words. Dava was turning up at the Elkyones’ front door so often that she ended up keeping clothes in one of the spare rooms. It was during this time that she learned to shoot: Faron, in a rare moment of emotional perceptiveness, recognized her suppressed anger for what it was, and decided that she’d benefit from an outlet. It was during this time that Dava became particularly close to Amon, Dice and Aras. She also started working as a waitress at Shah’s Palace, an Iranian restaurant run by one of her mother’s old Tehran friends. It was here, entirely unknown to them both, that she first met Nikola, serving him, his twin and sometimes the rest of the soccer team.

After taking her gap year in Vancouver (working full time, to the bemusement of her younger, far wealthier cousins), Dava attended the University of Melbourne, studying Political Science, History, and Spanish. For her post-graduate course (political science), she went to the UBC, and she used the proximity to her father to repair their relationship. After attaining her Masters, Dava was recruited into ASIS, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, as an intelligence analyst. After two years working in Canberra, the twenty-six-year-old Dava was stationed at the Australian Embassy in Bogotá, Colombia.

She loved it.

During the course of 2004, though, Dava’s reports were following the slow spiral of a country on the verge of civil war. For all she was mostly analysing the drug trade, the tensions running through the country were violent and disturbing and, as she worked in the capital, increasingly too close at home. Car bombs became common, one hitting a restaurant opposite the one where Dava and her Colombian boyfriend, César Escobar Aguilera were dining at with her father. George, ever the wandering spirit, had flown down to visit (and to escape the all-too-clinical habits he saw his younger sister and her family falling into), and it was while he was there that Colombia disintegrated. In early 2005, presidential candidate Salvatella, a mestizo with the education and family connections of the white elite, was shot in front of the Supreme Court. Colombia exploded into violence; by the end of the first day, Bogotá was in flames. George, however, refused to leave without Dava. He told her that he hadn’t left her mother in Tehran just to leave his daughter in Bogotá. Knowing precisely where she had inherited her stubbornness from, and unable to leave until she’d finished her job, Dava could nothing but grit her teeth and nod. George went to a make-shift hospital in one of the plazas – he was, after all, still a doctor – and it was there that he was killed. Bombs were being dropped over the city, and one landed in the plaza where he was working. That same blast nearly killed Dava; if César hadn’t managed to pull her from the rubble and given her lycanthropy, she would have died from her injuries.

davabloody

When she came to, a few days later, she was a werewolf like him. Numb from the shock of violence, grief, and disbelief, the intelligence analyst could do little but nod as César explained exactly who, and what, he really was. A werewolf, the Delta of his pack, the Cotansucas, who were Marxist guerrillas. That was when César explained about the compulsion that he had, and what she now possessed, something he called Obligación de Sabido. It was when he asked if Dava could shoot that she finally snapped out of her shock. She said yes, picked up a rifle, and shot him. Fortunately, César looked at the wound in his arm and just laughed; less fortunately, he then sent Dava flying into the wall. For all their affair had been up until that point something passionate and fun (made the more so by a clear expiry date), from that day it turned rough, its passions dangerous.

With the Australian Embassy in ruins, her father and friends dead, and nowhere else to go, Dava followed César into the Colombian jungle to find his, now their, pack. During that dangerous journey, she discovered just how much fun she found it all, up to and including the having to kill people. This only continued once Vidal, the dangerously charismatic alpha of the Cotas, accepted her into his pack. Dava had to learn how to fight without going Fireblooded, how to build bombs, how to use a machete both on jungle and on people. She had to learn how to kill people, but this being a civil war, and this being Colombia, the kills were rarely clean. Both through the necessity of survival and the hunger of her new Calling to know, Dava was taught how to torture and mutilate people, and she was taught (and trained herself) to find it fascinating. Partly, this was a new werewolf’s bloodlust, but most of it was the same fascination with violence that so plagues her family (her cousins Izzie, Dice and Aras being perfect examples).

Izzie herself managed to find Dava nearly two years after the Australian had vanished into the jungle, albeit just in time to see the screaming match between her and César in which Dava (genuinely by mistake) slammed her machete into the log he was sitting on, slicing off the top of his middle finger. Despite the violence (or maybe because of it), Izzie stayed. Soon after, though, a gunfight in an old cocaine processing plant ended with the whole area exploding. Dava and Hugo, the pack’s medic, were blasted off their feet, but then he started to scream. Soulbonded to Marlene, the projectionist (and César’s sister) had been killed too fast for Hugo to go with her. Not consciously thinking, Dava shot him, picked up her backpack, and fled. It took a day or so for the events to make sense (pack gone, César gone, all gone), and when it did, Dava started to scream. In the end, it was lucky that she did, because that was what enabled Izzie to find her again. By mutual agreement, the two women started heading north; questionable as their stability was, they knew that their reachable family was in Vancouver, and at the end of the world, what was more important than family? But somewhere in the tropics of Central America, Dava caught Lunapeste. Increasingly sick, she ordered Izzie to leave her and go; Izzie, reluctantly, bowed to self-preservation, and left. However, Dava turned out to be one of the rare people with the immunity system capable of fighting off the illness, and she survived.

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Still with her backpack, her machete and her AK-47, and on the verge of starving, she staggered into a farm, and threw herself at the mercy of the werewolf-and-human family still living there. They deemed her not a threat (amazing what shaking hands and an Australian accent will do), and nursed her back to health in return for information and the use of her gun, as required. It was a pattern that was to repeat itself again and again across her two year journey northwards, and then westwards. Although mostly Dava kept to herself, when she needed to, she would trade her gun, machete and gossip (and, ever pragmatic, sometimes herself) in exchange for shelter and supplies. Occasionally, she’d be tempted to stay with a certain pack and, once, with a certain man, but she’d always pack up and leave and keep on heading towards Vancouver.

Rift History

Dava Ambrose arrived in Vancouver in early April, 2009. She was met at the outskirts of Pacific Spirit by Nikola, the Kahlite Alpha. He, both attracted to her and annoyed that she was related to Dice (for reasons that would soon become apparent), told her that her cousin was alive, and that she could join the pack she should complete a certain task. It was only after that she’d finished filling the bathtub of room 301 in Gage with hypodermic needles, and replacing all the cutlery in the kitchenette with scalpels, that she realized that Nikola had used her to get back at Dice. Furious as she was at this, Dava still knew that the explanation given to her – that of Nik being jealous of the way Dice has Nik’s twin, Nine, wrapped around his little finger – wasn’t the whole truth. This was brought home to the ex-spy again and again as she introduced herself to the rest of the pack. As soon as it was let slip that she was Dice’s cousin, people would look away, get their shields up. Dice wasn’t in a hurry to enlighten her, either, and she both too angry at Nik and too calculating a person to just go and ask him.

davabuildingbomb
Dava building a bomb

It wasn’t until Dava met Serove that she finally found someone prepared to tell her what the score was. The Elkyones, Serove told her, had been kidnapping werewolves and experimenting on them in the Elkyone Private Hospital…and Dice had been involved. It was fortunate that Serove told her after they had sex, because man entirely missed just how coldly furious the news made her. Not long after, Dava dragged Dice out of the Gage to tell him that she knew, and that she had ideas of how to fix what their family had done. The next several months were spent, along with Nine and Ari, plotting and planning and preparing for what became known as ‘the Heist’. Due to Nikola’s edict to avoid the whole area after Nine and Dice’s previous (and failed) attempt to rescue and destroy, it was kept a secret between the four of them. During this time, Dava became friends with Serove’s cousin, Sybaris, and her relationship with Nikola became more complicated. He, recognizing he’d done the wrong thing by her (but not by Dice), went to apologize and ask for a second chance. She, being a calculating, practical woman, accepted (it would be easier to repair things with the original alpha, rather then instigate his removal), with the proviso that she would not forget, either. Things might have remained formal had not Dava, during the course of their conversation, mentioned that she needed to reread Good Omens. Nikola, being the closest geek that he is, immediately brightened, and the pair ended up going to Vancouver to raid a bookshop. They ran into some Infected and had to fight their way out, but it was the books that changed things between them.

Dice was less than thrilled at this, despite Dava stubbornly insisting that she could love him and be friends with Nikola at the same time, no matter what anyone said. Dice was even less thrilled when he (and his shadow, Nine) walked in on Nik and Dava making out on her bed. Still, Dava insisted that nothing had changed, and they got on with the Heist. The incident did, however, prompt Nik and Dice to attempt to call a truce, if only for Dava (despite being torn himself, Nine did side with his mate over his brother: Dava refused to.)

In the end, the Heist was (mostly) success: the Lab pack (including Izzie) were freed with minimum causalities, the hospital was blown up, and Dice avoided getting his family’s blood on his hands by keeping his little sister, Aras alive. Dava was not so fortunate. After using her aunt Kleos to order a general evacuation, Dava shot her three times. So far, the only people to know are Dava and, after she broke down at him (not entirely due to guilt – she was also in angry shock due to Jayden nearly killing Dice), Nikola. Nikola, the Guardian, who she had ended up hurting so badly about the Heist – the lying about it, the not including him, and the not trusting him while putting herself into danger. However battered it was, though, their relationship did grow and mature as a result, and it wasn’t long after that they started renovating two apartments at Green College to turn into their very own house. After the Point Grey-wide party, Nik and Dava exchanged rings and moved in together. She also started to teach herself how to weave, a childhood ambition that is now both practical and necessary due to her Calling.

But now, with both Heist and home completed, Dava the Seeker has found herself mostly at a loss as to what to do…


Roleplay Threads

Threads which Dava has played a part in.

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