Jessalyn

Jessalyn Mariot Yorke
Portrayed By	Jessica Biel
Gender	Female
Species	Half-Demon
Date of Birth	28th of January, 1955
Age	46
Zodiac Sign	Aquarius
Aliases	Jess
Place of Birth	Cambridge, United Kingdom
Current Location	Los Angeles, California
Occupation	Freelance bodyguard and companion
Known Relatives	Mother, Marianne; Sire, "Aleksander"
Significant Other	None
Special Power	Shapeshifting
First Appearance

Part doppelganger, part biker, and part geek, Jessalyn is a somewhat confused woman who has wound up in Los Angeles in search of her demonic sire. A greater purpose in life than chasing an elusive shapeshifter might in fact be a more welcome discovery….

Personality

Determined, obstinate, secretive, intellectual, and consciously detached from society, Jessalyn is close to the borderline of Asperger's Syndrome. She's fascinated by human social activity, but isn't at all sure that she ever really understands it. Instead, she studies people intently, trying to work out what's going on in their minds and why they act as they do.

Prone to doubting her own abilities and judgements, Jessalyn has a tendency to over-think options and possibilities. In many ways, she's better as an analyst than she is at taking the initiative, though when one of her charges is threatened she tends to respond swiftly and decisively.

She likes to see herself as a protector and helper, eager to overcome the taint of her "demonic" heritage – but by no means all of her past employers have been benevolent. Those needing supernatural bodyguards are not, after all, always the nicest of people. As a result, she occasionally takes on low-paid or even free jobs, to try to atone for saving bad guys from deserved ends.

History

Click to show History

Though her mother was born into a wealthy and respectable New England family of impeccable public reputation, Jessalyn's own upbringing has been rather unconventional. While reading English Literature at Cambridge University in the early 60s, Marianne Yorke fell for an exotic and remarkably empathic young man, who presented himself as the descendant of one of the many fallen houses of Central European aristocracy.

In truth, he was a demon – a doppelganger – who had been tasked with delivering a humiliating warning to the Yorkes. Though Marianne herself was almost wholly ignorant of the supernatural world, her parents and uncle thought themselves serious players in the New England occult scene, trading in artefacts and dabbling in magical rites. Delivery of images of young Marianne in bed with a demon provided a clear warning from their rivals, without escalating matters to the level of outright warfare.

An unintended side-effect – beyond the shock to the senior Yorkes and the humiliation of their daughter – was that Marianne fell pregnant by the demon. Almost as disgusted with her family as she was afraid of their enemies, she refused their entreaties to terminate the pregnancy, opting to remain in England and have the child there.

Protected by some of her family's more sympathetic British contacts – people at least partly touched by the "spirit of the times" – Marianne was able to hide her abnormal child, eventually completing her degree and starting work as a journalist and author chronicling the changing times and the more avant-garde elements of 60s and 70s counter-culture.

Jessalyn was mostly raised in Britain, with occasional visits to New England - though she grew only slowly. Her demonic heritage not only granted her a distinctly otherworldly appearance, it put her physical development onto a different time-scale. Fortunately, she soon developed the ability to change her shape and somewhat alter her size, and could usually pass for a human child of close to the "appropriate" age. Even so, substantial portions of her education took place outside school, learning from her mother and the array of magicians and occultists who took an interest.

Jessalyn finally reached full physical maturity around the age of 30, by which point she had developed considerable control over her innate abilities. Determined to find out more about her place in the world, and the nature of her sire and its race, she began to accept contracts and commissions from denizens of the occult world. Able to pass for human with ease, yet needing neither weaponry nor armour to pose a threat, she became a bodyguard of some repute. After a time, she received an offer too tempting to turn down, and began to accept occasional contracts for more intimate companionship as well.

Throughout, however, she was looking to find evidence of her sire and its kin. She pursued a variety of legends, reported sightings, and other hints – but progress over the years has been slow at best. Recently, however, she managed to pick up the trail of an entity she thinks might be her sire, tracking it across the US to Los Angeles. Whether it's in hiding, leading her in a dance, testing her, or just working for something like Wolfram and Hart, she as yet is wholly unsure.

Timeline

• 13th December 2001: Hoping to discover some interesting bones at the Humorous Humerus - being something of a student of anatomical variation - Jess instead finds herself distracted by the strange proprietress and an offensive customer….
• 13th December 2001: Later that same day, Jess gets caught up in odd goings-on at Skid Row Florist's. Clearly, hunting for household decorations is a risky business in LA….

Abilities

Click to show Abilities (long!)

Jessalyn's sire has displayed the ability to fully alter its form at will (even mimicing specific individuals), to read thoughts and emotions, and to manipulate feelings through physiological or magical means. Jess's research has also suggested that doppelgangers may have a broader affinity for magics of illusion and mental deception. She, however, has inherited only part of this array of talents.

Shapeshifting:

When in her rarely-seen natural form, Jessalyn's nearly 6' tall, weighs about 125lb, and is clearly very odd. Ice-white skin, shimmering sky-blue eyes without visible pupils or irises, and inky black hair would make her unusual enough, even were her features not so fine nor her skeletal structure – including her skull - inhumanly sleek and delicate in appearance. She has sufficient human blood, however, to be very clearly female, and lacks any innate weaponry or overt defences.

Fortunately, she's got a great deal of control over her body and rarely has to use her birth-shape. It does take months of effort to develop stable alternate forms into which she can easily shift, but once mastered, she can thereafter remain in them without worrying about significant "drift" back towards her normal form.

At present, she's mastered male and female apparently-human forms (both in their 20s), as well as a very large and powerfully-built hound. Other appearances tend to be achieved by tweaking these forms – but her ability to imitate specific individuals is far from perfect, even only in terms of physical likeness. She can quite easily remind viewers of someone specific, but fooling those who know the individual in question would be very difficult.

She is also prone to "drift" back towards her nearest "mastered form" (or even her native shape) whenever she comes under significant stress, or otherwise wholly loses concentration (such as by falling asleep). Her mastered forms are prone to this drift to a limited extent: brief "maintenance" each morning is usually sufficient to avoid significant slippage in her appearance when wearing one of these.

As with most things in the Whedonverse, her ability to change shape moves at the speed of Plot – but in general she can easily perform minor cosmetic tweaks in under thirty seconds, though a full-body shift (e.g. human to hound) might take her five minutes to conduct. When rushed, she can force herself to change several times faster – but at that speed, the experience is acutely painful, accompanied by clear noises (as bones snap and reform), and prone to errors even with her most frequently-used forms.

Her shape-shifting is limited to a variation of about fifty percent from her natural form: her height / body-length can range from about 3' to 9', but her weight varies from 60lb to no more than 200lb at most – making for a very soldily built dwarf or a remarkably scrawny giant at either end of the scale. Since she gives most of her forms enhanced internal systems, bone structure, and musculature, she tends to weigh more than her appearance would suggest, which can further limit her options.

Though she can simulate most functions of other forms, she cannot create new processes wholly unkown to her natural body: thus, she can boost her natural testosterone to masculine levels while suppressing her oestrogen, but cannot sire a child; she could make her saliva unpleasantly acidic, but not develop poison glands, etc.

Her efficacy as a bodyguard chiefly comes from this control of her body's unseen workings. Whatever her form, her body automatically attempts to seal ruptured blood vessels, while it can in time reshape itself to repair almost any wound (though if left to its own devices, it will of course repair her to match her natural state, which may prove more dangerous than the original wound).

Invisible beneath the mundane surface of her favoured shapes, she has added reinforced plates of cartilage between and behind her ribs, strenghtened her bones, and given herself secondary systems to reduce the danger of significant damage to her major organs.

Musculature and internal systems are also enhanced, pushing her capabilities far beyond what her appearance might suggest: she can sprint flat-out for minutes, lift a grown man with one hand, and take a heavy-weight boxer's punch. In addition, she can produce less subtle alterations: shifting her forearm and hand into a bladed claw, covering herself in chitin, adding fangs and horns…

Her great limitation in shapeshifting, however, is that whatever she produces is part-human in origin. Armour plates are made of exceptionally dense, sculpted bone – but they're still organic matter, and part of her own body: great at turning a blow in melee, but not exactly immune to super-powered attacks or large-calibre weapons fire. They're also prone to chipping (or even shattering under an especially powerful assault): while that doesn't hurt, every bit that falls off is part of her mass lost, that she'll have to regrow in time.

The same limitations apply to her boosted bodily systems: overall, she's limited to about twice a competent human's capability for anything she generates, and cannot impersonate any wholly-supernatural abilities of any assumed forms – no fire-breathing, flying (even if she makes wings).

She's also still subject to awkward failings of living beings such as fatigue and a need to sleep, while her food requirements become quite impressive when she's done a lot of shapeshifting or healing. Similarly, though she's highly resistant she's not wholly immune to disease, toxins, and poisons, and can be affected by agents that target either humans or demons.

Mental:

Her demonic sire had an array of mental powers at its disposal, matching the potential of the identity-stealing monsters spoken of in legend. Jessalyn, however, has no more than a knack – quite possibly wholly mundane – for learning new languages by direct exposure to their use. She's talented, but there are humans aplenty who are more able. To her, however, this is the one hint she has that her sire's mental abilities might one day be open to her, so she clings to it as a supernatural gift.

Skills

Click to show Skills

Archery: Never really a fan of guns, habitually unconventional, and having grown up in Britain, Jess would probably have favoured the use of bows over firearms even if she hadn't discovered that they might conceivably be very useful indeed against vampires. Given her strength, she's able to handle a truly impressive degree of pull on a bowstring, and after more than a decade of practice she's really quite accurate.

First Aid: Basic medicinal lore has come in useful when attempting to figure out how her own body works (and what to improve within it), but it's definitely a helpful skill for a bodyguard to possess. Jess holds Red Cross certification as a qualified first-aider, but she's never had serious professional training.

Handyman: Depending on herself has always seemed like a good idea, and trying to figure out how things work has generally been less scary than approaching strangers and asking them for help. With something of an emphasis upon motorbikes, Jess is quite competent with her hands and a box of tools. For similar reasons (and in somewhat similar style), she's picked up a fair degree of competence in the kitchen - she's no gourmet chef, but she can fillet a fish and bake a loaf readily enough.

Linguistics: Though she likes to think of it as "proof" of her sire having given her more than an inhuman body, Jess's knack for languages has no obvious supernatural effects. In the course of four decades of learning, she's added to her native English fluency in Hebrew, Latin and Ancient Greek (thanks to her occult upbringing), as well as French, German, and Spanish from her own travels. She's competent in Portuguese and Italian (two languages that came easily after she'd mastered three other Romance tongues already), can get by in Russian, and knows a smattering of Cantonese and Mandarin (the last two chiefly learned from restaurants and a week in Hong Kong).

Martial Arts: Rejecting the obsession with Oriental martial arts, Jess chose to become a student of Savate ("French kick-boxing"), the style seen in the film "The Brotherhood of the Wolf". Its aggressive, athletic nature makes good use of her natural strengths, while some of its less conventional features (such as the use of canes as weapons) appeal to her taste for the quirkily different.

Motorcycles: Jess is a speed freak. She's not done much in the way of serious racing, for fear of a crash revealing her inhuman nature, and she's never quite "got" the fashion-focused side of the bike world, but she does love to play with powerful machines and find out how fast she can go.

Occult: Raised by and around occultists, Jess grew up with the idea that magic worked. Sadly, she showed no particular affinity for it. She's quite capable of acting as a useful ritual assistant, whether by holding a candle, copying symbols from a book, or adding her voice to a chant – but the sheer breadth and wholly-human nature of her education mean that she knows every bit as much about how ancient Greeks sacrificed to the Oracle at Delphi or the ways in which a Taoist exorcist might have fought ghosts in Iron Age China as she does about anything that might be of conceivable use to her.

Perhaps a fifth of her occult lore is both accurate and potentially useful, but even those parts tend to be swamped in inaccuracies and myths. For example, she knows about staking a vampire through the heart, but should the stake be hazel, ash, willow, hawthorn, silvered…? What about the Serbian legends that say that a vampire can only be destroyed by removing its toes with a burial shovel? Or the ones about graves and salt? Or…?

Weaknesses

Click to show Weaknesses

Jess has never really been sure if anything she feels at any point in her life is truly human. She doesn't know whether she's just acting out a role, or if she actually has a place in human society. And if she does, how well can she hope to fulfill it? She is, after all, something that spends some of its time neither human nor female… Should she even try to be human at all?

On the other hand, she's pretty sure that she doesn't have a role in demonic society - or at least not one she'd want to take up. After all, she seems to be far less capable than her sire, and it doesn't appear to have been an especially noteworthy figure among demonkind on Earth. What would be open to her, save for some position as a lowly lackey - and what would she be asked to do even if she accepted such a role?

Similarly, she's an outsider even in purely mundane terms: as a dual UK/US passport-holder officially here to work as a "personal security consultant", she's neither part of local society nor someone likely to pass wholly unnoticed by local law enforcement.

At present, she has a grand total of no long-standing contacts within the city, yet is intent upon trying to track down and question anyone who might be able to tell her about "Aleksander". She knows that she badly needs friends and allies, or even just some helpful contacts, but she's not at all sure how to go about acquiring them.

Relationships

Click to show Relationships

Family

Family

• Aleksander: Along with its variants (including the unisex "Alex"), this seems to be the name most favoured by the entity that sired Jessalyn upon her mother. She's spent much of the past two decades trying to track it down.
• Marianne: Jess's eccentric, cynical, occult-interested mother. She still works as a journalist and author, though she's now rather more of a cultural historian than a chronicler of cutting-edge trends in fashion and the arts.

Friends

Friends

• Lewanda: Not exactly a friend per se, but Jess likes the woman's determinedly optimistic demeanour, and feels rather protective of her.

Enemies

Enemies

• Seth: A petty bully, as best she can tell, who enjoyed picking on the other-worldly Lewanda simply because she was an easy target. His claim to command dire supernatural powers frankly hasn't impressed her, thus far.

Others

Others

Quotes

• "Memorable quotes!"

Trivia

• Interesting miscellany.

Hooks

• Family members! Though I've not written in any other siblings as yet, there's a fair amount more that could be done with the doppelganger powers (especially the mental and magical sides) - not to mention the mystery of quite who and what her sire was, and what it is up to now….
• Old contracts. Did you ever have need of a bodyguard while travelling on the East coast or further afield? Did you ever try to assassinate, kidnap, or otherwise harass someone Jess might have guarded? Were you in the same business as her?
• Occult circles. Jess has been involved in mortal occult circles in Britain for decades. Some of the older members know her true nature and have at times studied her. Younger ones are likely to know fewer of her secrets, but might well be aware that she can be called upon to provide protective "muscle", especially for those with links to her mother.