Zinaida Gavrilova
| Zinaida Gavrilova | |
|---|---|
| Pending. | |
| IC Information | |
| Full Name: | Gavrilova, Zinaida Ilyevna |
| Gender/Sexuality: | Female/Lesbian |
| Species: | Human |
| Place of Origin: | Yakutsk, Sakha Republic, Russian Federation |
| Age/Birthdate: | 21 (May 29, 1996) |
| Zodiac Sign: | Gemini |
| Height: | 5'10" |
| Hair Colour: | Black |
| Eye Colour: | Hazel |
| Romantic Status: | Single |
| Romantic Identification: | Polyamorous, Open, Disclosed |
| Residence: | Cabin on the Uaine River |
| Occupation: | Figure skater |
| Preferences | |
| Likes: | Figure skating, math, a brisk cold, canoeing, horseback riding, fresh-fallen snow, Khatun and Edjerha, finding friends who speak Russian, nice clothes, flavoured teas, fellow pagans, the open sky |
| Dislikes: | Putin, English contractions, muggy summers, being naked in front of a lot of people, romantic touches, being mistaken for Chinese or Slavic, giving away her secrets, the overly amorous |
| OOC Information | |
| Source: | Original Character |
Zinaida Ilyevna Gavrilova is a resident of Yuriba who arrived in roughly 2015. A polite young woman with no real urges towards intimacy, she spends much of her time exploring, or relaxing in coffee shops in search of pleasant conversation.
Zinaida tends to vanish from Yuriba around the time of spring and summer, but usually surfaces around the onset of fall. It's unclear if this is her normal MO or just a circumstance of outside events.
Contents |
Character
At a glance, Zinaida is a creature of reserve but not dispassion. She appears, most of the time, to be well in control of her emotions, presenting herself with an elegant, slightly mirthful slyness and a tendency to flash little mysterious smiles that bring out her pronounced cheekbones. She makes a conscious effort to embody an outward grace and poise, typically moving with a smooth elegance that makes her look like she could glide across snow without ever leaving a footprint.
Zinaida tends to be polite and mellow in her approach to others. A common approach for her is low-intensity coffee shop talk. While she's generally soft-spoken and may be mistaken for low-energy, she's not shy, and her natural curiosity tends to lead her to approach others just to get a feel for what they're all about. She's the sort of person who wants to have a good-sized network of acquaintances and who doesn't care much for the idea of having enemies; she'll generally try to stay on people's good side. In most conversations she tends to be warm, polite, a touch impish, and often just the slightest bit probing - she tends to keep a few secrets about herself, or dangle things she thinks might pique someone's interest, then nudge the other person into revealing more. In some ways she prefers to observe the way others behave and define themselves, viewing people as innately fascinating and Yuribans in particular as especially uninhibited and prone to revealing inteesting things.
Aside from her human friends, Zinaida's constant companion is her dog, an East Siberian Laika by the name of Khatun. She also owns a fairly large mare by the name of Edjerha.
Despite her tendency towards low-energy conversation, Zinaida is actually quite athletic; she tends to be a regular at ice skating events in Yuriba, and when the lake freezes over, she can regularly be seen skating across the smoother parts of the ice, performing figure skating maneuvers and perfecting them. Her talent as a figure skater is extremely high, and her aspiration is to one day compete as an Olympian, should she ever return to Russia. She's also an accomplished equestrian, though opportunities to ride a horse in Yuriba are fairly rare, much to her disappointment. Most of Zinaida's athletic pursuits tend to otherwise turn to outdoor things - she loves to canoe, in particular, and she likes hiking with her dog. She's also an avid camper. In many ways her interests in this area tie into her spiritual views on the relationship between humans and nature.
Zinaida seems to have very little interest in romantic relationships. While she's attended a few Naked Sundays at Leona's Bar and Girl, she's never actually taken her clothes off in public, nor allowed anyone to see what she looks like under her sweaters. She's also not gone out of her way to make girlfriends or romantic partners, nor to engage in sexual activity in just about any capacity; in general, she dislikes being touched in an intimate way. She's appreciative of little displays of affection when others share them but tends not to venture into that territory herself, preferring that she be considered a challenge and that those who take it up show sustained interest - a stance driven by a very high sense of self-worth and an underlying confidence in her own value. While Zinaida is theoretically polyamorous, in practice she sets an extremely high bar for romantic partners and isn't the type to just give it away. She tends to limit her romantic forays to encouraging public displays of affection along, seemingly preferring to get a show than a romp.
Religious beliefs
Zinaida is a follower of the revival strain of Tengrism, the traditional pagan faith of certain Turkic and Mongolic peoples, predating their conversion to Christianity and Islam by various conquerors. While she can't be said to be exceptionally zealous, she holds her beliefs fairly close and tends to identify well with other pagans and with animist traditions. By her strain of belief, there is no holy book because all of nature and the cosmos are the book of Tengri, the sky god. Similarly, she doesn't need any sort of temple because the entire world is a temple. Zinaida considers some of her beliefs to overlap on at least a superficial level with Yuriban animism, particularly in her conception of the world as sustained and embodied by a series of nature spirits, though the fact that her primary deity tends to appear as a genderless white swan flying over an endless expanse of water makes the comparison inexact.
Skills and hobbies
Zinaida is an exceptional ice skater and tends to show up to just about any event or situation in Yuriba in which skates might come out. Her predilections lie towards figure skating; she is an admirer of a number of famous Russian figure skaters and has trained extensively. Only societal pressures - and the fact that Russia seems to prefer female figure skaters to be much shorter than Zinaida - have kept her from honing her craft to an Olympic level. In terms of pure skill she's extremely gifted and graceful, capable of skating with utter elegance on just about any ice surface.
Zinaida's outdoor hobbies are myriad. She maintains a canoe at her cabin in the mountains with which to explore the Yuriba River and the lake as well as to paddle along the ocean coasts when the temperature gets warm. Often in the company of her dog, she'll hike through the forests and the mountains just for the sake of exploring, sometimes in the hope of discovering ancient Yuriban ruins. Her knowledge of outdoorsmanship, particularly in the winter, is quite high. She can strike a cozy campsite suitable even for the deep freezes of the Sakha Republic, make tasty food from things she finds in the wilderness, catch and field dress fish, rabbits and deer, and find her way back home without the aid of a compass or a map.
As part of her interest in the outdoors, Zinaida has become a relatively good archer, and she owns a traditional Mongol-style composite bow and keeps it well-stocked with arrows. When she does hunt, she does it by bow. She's never tried shooting arrows in a combat situation but could probably do it in a pinch.
While Zinaida is an adept equestrian and can even shoot a bow from horseback while on the move if she tries hard enough, she's had few opportunities to ride a horse in Yuriba given that the island has no horses. She eventually came into possession of one through a visitor looking to sell.
Relations
Yuriba
- Sarai: A friend Zinaida has encountered mainly at Leona's, and one who seems most receptive to Zinaida's tendency to tease and observe. She finds Sarai to be the sort of person prone to putting on a show now and then, which works well for her, and she's often quick to offer the catgirl some words of encouragement. It's entirely possible that Zinaida is a bad influence on her, but Zinaida doesn't mind.
- Fujiko Tanaka: A polite woman whose path has crossed Zinaida's on more than a few occasions. Zinaida tends to show up most times Fujiko hosts ice skating and will otherwise look for chances to engage the redheaded librarian in polite conversation, often with a touch of light teasing. While she enjoys Fujiko's company, Zinaida is content to keep their friendship at the level of playful words.
- Five: An interesting young woman with a little more of a depth of understanding of spiritual matters than Zinaida might expect from an eighteen-year-old. She crosses Five's path rarely but finds her to be an intriguing person, and perhaps a bit of a mystery.
- Jennifer Braddock: Zinaida likes this woman in part because she didn't just automatically assume she was Chinese, Japanese or Slavic on sight. She finds Jennifer to be a pleasant and interesting person who seems to have lived a fascinating life, the sort of life Zinaida could never lead in her own right.
- breisleach: While Zinaida encounters the fox less often than she might like, she considers breis to be a pleasant acquaintance and someone with whom she can enjoy a pleasant and engaging conversation in a pinch. She sees something intriguingly mystical in the kitsune and tends to be drawn to that through sheer curiosity.
History
Zinaida is the third of four children born to Ilya Vladimirovich Gavrilov, a Russified Christian Sakha living in Yakutsk, and his wife Sardaana, a cynical Sakha woman with a quiet appreciation for traditional Siberian shamanism and culture. She is the sole sister to three brothers, two older and one younger.
As a child, "Zina" was an adventurous sort, growing up with rather more ambition than her father might've liked from her. He being an accountant tended to discourage outdoorsy things beyond simple play; Zinaida's mother, on the other hand, encouraged the young girl to become better acquainted with the open sky and the joyous times one could have beneath it. Zinaida did, quickly taking to the joys of skating on open ice beneath a clear blue sky, or taking a long walk on a crisp spring or autumn day just for the sake of exploring. She'd spend many a summer out in the fields playing with the family dog, or learning to ice fish on the Lena River in the winter and canoe it in the summer.
By the time she reached her teenage years, Zinaida sat between two worlds. On the one hand, she seemed destined to follow her father's career path into finance and accounting. On the other, she was by far the most outgoing and athletic child in her household, could outrun and outskate all of her brothers, and had by far the busiest social life. She'd spent much of her childhood learning to skate, pursuing a dream she'd developed of one day becoming a world champion figure skater and representing Russia at the Olympics.
The early and middle years of her adolescence were doomed to be filled with disappointments. She discovered her own inclinations towards other women around the time she hit puberty and realized she was less interested in boys than in an exceptionally-well-endowed female classmate, though nothing came of her interest. As she hit her growth spurt, she found herself well on the way to being taller than her brothers, and indeed most of her peers. A touch self-conscious and awkward about it, she eventually adjusted by cutting her hair very short and going through a period of a couple years where she came across as more of a soft butch than anything else. This period also saw her begin to follow her mother's interests into a greater understanding of the ancient religion of many of the Turkic peoples of Siberia, including the Sakha; she quietly wrote off Orthodox Christianity in her heart and began to embrace the revived worship of Tengri, the sky god.
Of course, Zinaida had the misfortune of coming of age at a time when Russian society was growing increasingly hostile towards LGBT people, with prominent gay pride parades cancelled across Russia as politicians under the Vladimir Putin regime decried homosexuality as "satanic." With discriminatory anti-gay laws making their way through the State Duma on a flotation of public support from conservative religious folk, Zinaida found herself under incredible external pressure, as a visibly boyish young woman rumoured among her peers to be a probable lesbian. While she had her first girlfriend and her first intimate experience at the age of 16, her paramour's parents pulled the girl out of school and moved to Vladivostok, and rumours continued to swirl around her. Even her father gave her a few nasty lectures. On top of all of these disappointments, Zinaida's dream of skating in the Olympics fell apart when a coach judged her to be too tall to be a good figure skater, though it was clear enough to her what was going on: They didn't want a lesbian on their team.
Faced with all of this, Zinaida buckled and quietly let her hair grow out again. She outwardly professed an interest in men and went out of her way to appear more feminine, effectively receding back into the closet to avoid becoming a target. Privately, however - and with her mother's knowledge and understanding - she continued to see girls, pursuing a secret relationship with a fellow outdoorsy-minded young woman, a young Ukrainian girl named Larisa who had moved to the area a couple of years earlier. In truth, most of the "canoeing trips" and "hikes" Zinaida went on between the ages of 17 and 18 were spent tangled up with Larisa in one capacity or another. While she grew to prefer to present as more femme and to hide her emotions behind a smooth, elegant poise, she never quite lost some of her earlier mindset.
Good things don't last forever; with Larisa's family eventually returning to Ukraine, Zinaida found herself alone and increasingly dissatisfied with her place in Russian society. She moved out of her family's house and into her own apartment, making her way as a bookkeeper.
Flirting with Yuriba
Zinaida stumbled on Yuriba almost by freak accident a few months before she turned 19; one cool January day, she stepped outside into a snowstorm on her way to work, only for the snow to pick up and white out her vision, before passing and revealing that she was no longer on the streets of Yakutsk, but in a small village populated by kitsune, elementals, women from all over the world and even a few mystical creatures.
Zinaida's interactions with Yuriba followed a pattern at first: She would arrive there for the winter, explore for a few months, make friends, and then find herself back in Russia as spring wound around, largely due to a part of her worrying about how she would fare on an island with a hot, humid summer. The other factor drawing her back was a quiet hope that things would improve at home.
She resurfaced in Russia after February 2017, rather more sure of herself and influenced by Yuriba to take a more brazen stance in favour of LGBT rights. In May of that year she traveled to St. Petersburg to take part in a march protesting the arrest, torture and murder of gay people in Chechnya. She was one of several activists harassed by anti-gay protesters, then roughed up by police and detained for her trouble. While she was eventually released without charges, the event left her bitter towards the thought of living the rest of her life in a country which seemed intent on criminalizing her very existence. Making her way home only to find herself let go from her job, and with no avenue to receive justice given Russia's lack of anti-discrimination laws covering LGBT people, Zinaida scraped by for a few months before finding herself longing to return to Yuriba for good.
She got her wish one cold October night, when she fell asleep on her couch and woke up the next morning in one of the beds at the Apex Inn. She could not have been happier.
Permanent residency
Zinaida established herself as a permanent resident of Yuriba in late 2017 by finalizing a real estate deal with a dryad living in the valley of the so-called Uaine River, a modest tributary stream descending through a forested mountain valley near Engetsu-san to flow into the Yuriba River.