Cecily
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Slightly NSFW!
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Cecily grew up the eldest of seven in a coastal village where storms were frequent and comfort scarce. She learnt early how a gentle word and skilled hands could ease aching backs after a day’s net‑casting. At the Cat House she offers massages scented with juniper and stories woven from travellers’ yarns. Most evenings she can be found at the hearth, knitting scarves for whichever sailor told the saddest tale.
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Background
Her father, Garrick, was lost to a squall when Cecily was sixteen; her mother Stina took in laundry to feed the younger children. Cecily left home with only a needle‑case and a promise to send coin each month. She keeps every letter from her siblings pressed inside an almanac, reading them aloud to the fireplace embers as though the flames might carry her words home. Should Delilah travel, Cecily orchestrates the house with practised grace, balancing accounts whilst ensuring each girl receives her favourite pastry with breakfast. She maintains a herb‑garden in the courtyard, its square beds arranged like compass points, lavender to north, thyme to east, rosemary to south, mint to west. She claims the layout calms uneasy dreams. In quiet moments Cecily paints tiny watercolours of sea‑glass. None are larger than a postage stamp, yet each glimmers as if lit from within. She gifts them to departing guests so they might carry a fragment of dawn wherever they roam. Cecily’s mother taught her to read storms like scripture: the colour of distant rain decides whether nets are cast or prayers are said. Those instincts survive inland; she arranges the Cat House dining tables according to barometric pressure, swearing certain pastries collapse if baked under a falling glass. When funds allow she commissions wood-cuts of coastal folklore for her siblings - merfolk bargaining for anchor-chains, saints calming whirlpools with bread. The prints arrive rolled in oilcloth; each bears pencilled annotations guiding the younger children to hidden moral lessons. Her one indulgence is a weather-beaten fiddle. Too shy to perform for guests, she plays to the herb beds at twilight, believing thyme thrives on minor keys. Little Admiral Jinks, Delilah’s eldest cat, is invariably audience; he curls on her shawl, purring in perfect 3-time.Picture Cecily 02: Baking for the Bridgeport Children’s Downhill Derby
The morning of the Bridgeport Children’s Downhill Derby found Cecily elbow-deep in sweetened dough, commandeering the Cat House scullery as though it were a royal galley. With military precision she marched trays of honey-glazed hand-pies across town to the racecourse, where small competitors - helmets crooked, hearts aflame - queued for a blessing of pastry and luck. Each bite carried a note of seaside cardamom, and the cheers spilling down the grassy slope mingled with the warm fragrance like gulls wheeling over a bakery chimneypot.Picture Cecily 03: Drunk at the Fish and Shrimp tavern
Later that month, she was discovered in the smoke-dark snug of the Fish and Shrimp tavern, her lacquered boots propped on a barrel, reciting half-finished sonnets to a trio of off-duty riggers. Ale sloshed between stanzas, and now and then she aimed a slurred metaphor at the ceiling beams - comparing their weathered grain to the veined marble of lost empires - until the landlord called time and the room erupted in applause far too grand for such a modest stage.Picture Cecily 04: Costume for a special client
At the Shadow Masquerade Cecily obliged a patron’s exotic whim by appearing in a costume inspired by the frescoes of Boranga: lapis collar, linen sheath, and a serpent of green glass coiled round her upper arm. The ensemble was historical pastiche of the finest order, yet she wore it with such languid authority that guests swore the Cat House corridors lengthened into torch-lit colonnades as she passed, and that her measured gaze turned every whispered compliment into hieroglyphs upon the heart.Picture Cecily 05: Picknick with clients at the Duke's Downs
When spring unfurled its first pale leaves, Cecily arranged a discreet picnic for select clients upon the Duke’s Downs. Mechanical hampers clicked open to reveal quiches kept oven-hot by clockwork filaments made by Daphne, while brass lunettes enabled diners to chart skylark flight-paths between courses. Discussions drifted from bread prices to tragic opera, and by the time the sun sank beyond the hedgerows, half the party had pledged donations to Daphnes latest impossible invention simply for the privilege of tasting its prototypes at the next outing.Picture Cecily 06: Expedition with clients: unfittingly singing in a tomb
A fortnight later an eccentric antiquarian hired Cecily and three fellow courtesans to accompany him on a lantern-lit excursion beneath the city - an abandoned crypt rumoured to pre-date Bridgeport itself. Cecily's nerves fluttered, so she struck up a bawdy sea-shanty that ricocheted along the vaulted stone, scandalising the scholar yet steadying her companions’ steps. Their laughter - far too alive for so solemn a space - roused echoes that sounded unnervingly like distant applause, as though ghosts in the darkness approved of such unfitting revelry.This is GM information
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