Hide Your Pockets

Character Name: Catherine Nin Fisher

Gender: Female. Really, have you ever met a boy named Catherine? No, but there’s a boy named Sue.

Age: Seventeen, despite her childish attitude and shortness.

Description (hair and eye color, height, body type (skinny, muscular, etc) required): Catherine Nin has dirty-blonde, not-quite-brown hair and mischievous green eyes. She’s quite short, barely scraping past 5’1”, but that makes it all the easier to sneak into houses through the doggy door! She’s thin and fit from running track and cross-country throughout her school career. After all, a thief needs to be able to make a quick getaway!

God and mortal parent: Hermes and Catherine Kyne Fisher. She shares the same name (well, except the middle one) as her mother, so don’t get too confused. It’s part of a long family tradition to name all the girls ‘Catherine’. Eh, more on that later…

Powers**: Eh… well, none, really. She’s unusually good at finding valuable items to steal, and quite adept and creeping around and hiding and picking locks, but those are more like inherited traits than powers. Either way, I listed them here because it’s partly at the fault of Hermes. Meh.

Flaws: She has difficulty taking anything too seriously, usually fails to see the potential consequences of her actions, and is notoriously irresponsible. Unsurprisingly, she’s also a kleptomaniac… who would’ve thought, eh? It’s not like Hermes kids steal things… pfft.

Pets: None. She isn’t responsible enough to take care of a pet.

Weapon: She has a sort of celestial bronze Swiss Army knife type thing. It has many, many attachments: normal things like scissors, a file, a short blade, etc. But there’re also some not-so-normal things, like a lockpick, a fork, and a very tiny toothed saw. However, none of these things are really all that suitable for a fight (even though dear Kitty would MUCH rather just run away), so I decided that there should be a more magical blade in the little attachment thingy-dooers. This one, even though the knife unit itself when closed is only about three and a half inches long, extends out to the length of a regular fighting dagger, with the shiny red Swiss Army knife serving as a handle/hilt/whatever. How can this be? Well, magic. Ta-da. Oh, and, er, note, on the fighting blade, it does not magically spawn a crossguard. So, good luck to Kitty if she wants to block anything. Gahaha.

Talents/Skills: Sneaking around and filching things, of course!

RP Example*: I was very, very careful to look casual. So very, VERY careful. It was impossible to stress how VERY cautious I was being. I went to very great lengths to appear entirely inconspicuous as I walked away towards the automatic doors, carrying the purse of some lady that was pushing a cart through the aisles of Wal-Mart in the opposite direction, jabbering away loudly on her cell phone. I’d mostly chosen her as a mark because she’d pissed me off with her yelling, but also because she looked like the richy-rich type.
Now, the hard part about pulling off this deal wasn’t the actual snatching of the bulky purse, it was resisting the urge to just take off at a sprint right away. That’d make someone suspicious – as I’d learned from experience. No, I needed to wait until I was outside of the supermarket to run like hell…
But unfortunately for me, a very fat security officer who was leaning against the wall and munching on… a carrot?... started following me with his beady eyes. I just kept walking like I didn’t notice, telling myself not to panic and totally blow my cover. Maybe he was just a creepy pervert, and wasn’t actually suspicious! Wow, was I actually hoping that he was a creepy pervert? That was a bit disturbing in itself. I didn’t need to worry, though, because I finally stepped across the threshold of the self-sliding glass doors, and breathed a sigh of giddy relief.
My joy was short-lived, though. An indignantly annoying, richy-rich scream echoed from the produce section. Now I ran like hell.

Biography*: Every child learns at a young age to fear the great Kitty Fisher, who will no doubt come to steal their precious pockets.
Eh, does it ring a bell? Well, if it doesn’t, you will not understand my wonderfully pointless irony.
Anyways, I feel like telling the whole family story back from the time of Middle English. So grab some popcorn, you poor, poor soul.
The fist so-called ‘Kitty Fisher’ was born in the 1700s in England, as Catherine Marie Fischer. No, that’s not a typo, the name had a c back then. She was one of those upper-class types, who went around flirting with all the male nobles and making all the wives angry and such. But, unbeknownst to history, that routine was but a cover-up for one of the greatest series of thefts of all time.
See, whenever she went over to visit the rich lords and ladies, she’d leave with the hidden pockets in her dress filled with all sorts of shiny jewels and stacks of coin. She was sneaky about it, though, and somehow managed to avoid all suspicion. Perhaps she took only what could easily have been lost rather than stolen. Maybe she took only what wouldn’t have been missed. The world may never know. But she was so successful in her endeavors that, by 1763, she was actually rich enough that she ate a thousand-guinea banknote on her toast. She was married to a lord late in the year of 1766.
She died four months later.
History maintains that she had no children, but that is incorrect. She had an illegitimate child (whose scandalous existence was carefully covered up, I may add) who was roughly ten years old at the time of her mother’s death. She lived in one of the more well-off homes for orphaned children, and knew perfectly well who her secret parents were, and why the knowledge must be a meticulously maintained secret. It could ruin her mother’s career, and potentially expose her as a grandmaster thief. The child’s name was Catherine Jae Fisher (note the missing c at this point), and never actually met either of her parents in person. But upon the death of her mother, a sum of money and a leather-bound journal were willed to her. In the journal, the late Catherine Fischer had recorded the many, many tricks she used for stealing things, guides as to how to manipulate people, and the like. From it, she indirectly taught her daughter how to make a living for herself as a poor orphan. And so began a great family tradition.
Catherine Jae Fisher lived for a great many years, living a life much like that of her mother. She, too, recorded further things that she’d learned in the journal. She had a daughter, named Catherine Key.
Catherine Key Fisher was even more successful in her villainous endeavors, and too wrote her secrets in the old book. She had a daughter named Catherine Alice.
And so the family tree went on, with at least one female child in each generation being born with the name ‘Catherine ___ Fisher’. They were quite careful about choosing middle names, for that was the only differentiating aspect between them all. Quite often, they ended up just making up random combinations of letters, in the effort to remain unique. Today’s Catherine’s grandmother’s middle name was, and I quote, ‘Gerugkugrtkhgghrkghtu’. A number of them took to the nickname ‘Kitty’ (my character here, for instance), just like the original Fischer.
Every single one of them was a thief, with varying degrees of success. But nonetheless, they recorded what they knew in that ancient, leather-bound journal that they passed down from mother to daughter through the centuries. Every few generations, it would be taken to a bookbinder or other such professional to restore the quality of the pages. They wouldn’t be able to read it, though – all the entries were written in a specific code developed by Catherine Marie. The family was so notorious as a whole that they are collectively featured in the famous nursery rhyme ‘Lucy Locket’ were a very devious Kitty Fisher somehow ‘finds’ (cough, filches) her pocket, only to be disappointed at its emptiness.
Now, FINALLY, we can get to the part of the story about Catherine Nin.
For the sake of distinction, I’ll just refer to her as Kitty, her preferred nickname, so that she doesn’t get confused with her mother, whom I will call Catherine Jae.
Kitty grew up in a high-rise apartment, on the very top floor, in New York City. Her mother had no job, and claimed to those who were curious that she could afford the luxurious lodging from what was left of her ‘deceased husband’s’ wealth. Of course, no such husband had ever existed, but Catherine Jae had forged the birth, death, and marriage certificates to prove it.
In reality, the room was paid for off of – you guessed it – stolen money, and the profit from stolen items. When Kitty was ten years old, as was the ages-old tradition, Catherine Jae presented her only daughter with the dusty, old, leather-bound, encrypted journal, and told the child what it was, and how to use it.
Every Fisher, throughout the years, had developed their own personal code to write in. So every entry, by every person, utilized completely different (or even completely similar) ciphers. As a result, to learn what one Catherine had discovered through her life, the next had to unravel the devious code that she’d made up and, thus, actually prove she was clever enough to deserve that knowledge.
So, naturally, it took Kitty about two weeks over the summer to get the whole thing sorted out. And after that, many, many years of study and practice…
Just when Kitty thought she knew everything there was to know about her life, the foundations of it were shaken by the very sudden event of her claiming. She wasn’t a very high-profile demigod, with little actual power, despite being the child of an Olympian, and potentially could have gone her entire life without attracting the attention of a monster. But when the gods promised to claim all their children, the prospects of that peaceful, thief-ful future were stepped on, buried, and then had their graves danced on by purple squirrels.
Even after she learned the shocking truth about her father, Kitty survived in the mortal world for another several months before her high school became infested with empousai. She didn’t know how to fight them, so she retreated to a place she’d heard about for so-called ‘demigods’ like her – Camp Half-Blood. After she regained her bearings, she resolved that this development would not shake the long tradition of grand theft in her family – she’d rob the half-bloods blind!

Notes: Nope…s.

Approved.