Clarinda Hale

Concept: Professor of Linguistics

Desc: Lately she’s got big old Samsonite bags under her pretty blue eyes but that doesn’t make them any less arresting.  She’s in her early thirties and lean as a rake. Practically lives on yogurt, granola, and Turkish blend coffee. Runs every other day. high Slavic cheekbones paired with an expressive mouth and olive complexion. Her hair is naturally curly, but she often irons it so she can tie it back. Great smile even if she doesn’t seem to do it a lot these days. On the tall side. Healthy, if stretched a little thin.

History: Clarinda story really starts with her parents Esperanza and Mikhail Ostrokov.  Esperanza and Mikhail met on an operation in Afghanistan. The operation went south, but the partnership did not and over time they would find opportunities to work together in various picaresque places fighting Yankee capitalist oppression. 

Mikhail got selected for a deep cover mission, and while Dzherzhinsky Square had a bride all picked out for him, He didn’t like her...and he was senior enough as a field operative to suggest a replacement.
So. eventually Mike and Rita Hale snuck themselves across the border, made contact with a man who provided necessary ID and funds to get set up, and then they settled into a quiet humdrum suburban existence. Rita was somewhat skilled as a dancer (and also a martial artist) and she eventually opened a school enabling her to make contact with bored upper-class housewives. Mike, was a skilled pilot and was in demand for charter flights.
    Over time, It became clear to them, that while there was SO much wrong with the American way of life, it was, in its own way, seductive. And each time the KGB made contact...There was a bit of clenching, worrying about losing the life they had worked so hard to build together. This got worse when Clarinda came along.
    At first, the idea of a child was just cover. Never mind that Mike and Rita had become perhaps overly fond of one another, but the child was, of course, a way of blending in.
As Clarinda puts it, “I had no way to know just how messed up my childhood was. It wasn’t until I hospitalized a classmate for snapping my bra strap, that I began to understand that I wasn’t really like other kids".
     Clarinda grew up with a pair of spies, gone helicopter parents, watching over her.   Mike and Rita realized that the KGB might use Clarinda as a way of ensuring their compliance and that cost them a good deal of sleep.  As a result, Clarinda is a skilled camper, mountain climber, can hit a target at 100 yards, and live off the land damn near indefinitely.
   Additionally, she grew up in a household where she learned to speak English, Spanish, Russian, and Chinese. and this led to her bewildering facility with languages. She has a real gift and it has only gotten stronger as she’s matured.  She has a flair for dead languages and a near endless understanding of dialects for the living languages she speaks. She’s writing a book on languages and the mental modalities that shape them.

Eventually, the Soviet union collapsed, and their handler died of old age and the call never came really. So, at one point, Mike and Rita came in from the cold. They had help from an old nemesis from back in the old days and eventually settled in as naturalized American citizens.
 
Clarinda’s not a full doctor or anything like that. But she is a full professor at the local university and this is where her current problems start.

Supernatural creatures can be remarkably sneaky and yet also have huge blind spots. A vampire was needing a translation of something in Etruscan and after some searching around online found someone who could do the work.  Naturally, he was pretty careful to erase her memory of their interactions.  But, the translation work itself...No. he didn’t remove that. After all, that would have taken HOURS of time to erase completely.

Now that’s bad enough, but when another vampire or mage friend runs across something in Aramaic that wants deciphering, then the original guy says something like, “Hey go see my girl Clarinda. She’ll fix you right up.”

And of course that asshole tells two friends, and they tell two friends, and so on, and so on...
Now. Clarinda is missing classes that she’s meant to be teaching because she’s tired all the time, and thinks she’s having a nervous breakdown and is having episodes of missing time... All because supernatural creatures can’t be bothered to compare notes about this sort of thing.

Not to mention, some of the things she’s been translating have been giving her nightmares...
Mike and Rita have noticed that something may be wrong, but no one seems able to figure out what.  However, it’s only a matter of time before some shmuck with fangs, fails to do a complete job and the whole thing comes crashing down.

Attitude: “I love the work. Maybe one day I'll get a nice cushy gig at the UN. But honestly, my favorite part is the research into how a language becomes what it is. What causes it to crystallize in the way it does. The only real drag now is that since my parents came in from the cold, I can’t travel anymore without jumping through a dozen damn hoops. I think some yo-yo at Langley suspects I want to defect. *Prolonged Yawn*  Sorry about that."

Skills: Clarinda is a bit of a mixed bag. Dots in Athletics for sure and a few in Survival as well. Quite a few in Academics as you’d imagine. Able to shoot (but not likely to have shooting related FS Merits) and a capable combatant in Capoeira (So is her mom.) This would make her an interesting gal all by itself if it weren’t for the truly mind-shocking number of dots sunk into language skills.  Just assume she’s got a nodding familiarity with any language that your plot requires and you won’t be far off the mark. She could also likely take off or land a plane in a pinch. Clarinda is such a language nerd that she listens to books and podcasts in other languages and occasionally rotates them around onto anything she feels she’s getting rusty on.   She’s on an NSA watchlist because of this, but they HAVE figured out that she’s relatively harmless. Any kindred who figures she'll be easy to erase for knowing too much is going to pull a huge amount of notice from NSA, CIA, and FBI Counterintelligence. Not to mention her pissed off spook parents.

Gear: Never without her little survival cord wristband, which has a tiny compass and a tiny knife inside. She also carries a steel Kubotan on her keyring which she is very capable with. Has a smartphone. It won’t be of any use to you unless you can read Cyrillic.

Home:Clarinda, like most professors, is poor as a church mouse and furnishes her entire apartment in books. When she goes for her doctorate, she likely won’t have to make a single trip to the library. She’s not a hoarder. I mean there ARE flat spaces that aren’t taken up with books, but on the other hand, most of those are in the bathroom and kitchen. She has an aversion to cooking and is hoping to meet a nice student of Culinary Arts who doesn’t mind the occasional camping trip.  She has a box under her bed with 500 bucks in various foreign currencies, an ID proudly proclaiming her to be Leah Silverman, a Glock 9, and a knife made of hardened plastic. There is also a key to the family cabin and a silent whistle which will get the attention of a mountain lion that Mikhail has been making friends with over the years.

Circle: Clarinda dates some. But unless you’re multi-lingual too it can be a real turn-off. She has friends in a number of departments on campus and has even told a few of them a little bit about her past.  Her friends are a little worried that she’s not sleeping well and that the dean of the linguistics department loves her, but not teaching her classes is putting her on thin ice. Clarinda also has a few people she knows through her parents and while she NEVER wants to go into espionage, the stories they tell ARE fascinating, and horrifying, and funny.  Sometimes all at once.

Story Uses:
* “Wow...I didn’t think this dialect actually existed...Where did you find this?”
Ok. it’s fairly obvious that Clarinda is the sort of person you want to bump into when you got pottery shards with squiggles on them or when you got 30-year-old KGB documents up from the bottom of the sea. Would it surprise you to know that she’s got a little cryptography? It wouldn’t?  Good. It means you’ve been paying attention.

*” Madre...I just don’t know what’s wrong with me. Maybe I should see a doctor?”
There’s nothing physically wrong with Clarinda and eventually a decent doctor will tell her so. Sooner or later, someone might suggest a psychiatrist and while Clarinda will be resistant at first, eventually, she’ll go talk to someone she knows in the Psych department.  When that guy/gal uses hypnosis to uncover what’s been happening, it will likely crack the already overburdened wall in her mind and she will remember EVERYTHING.  I pity the poor supernatural creature who tries to put the whammy on her after that.

Connections:
*Got her ID from Clavo Hernandez, of course. They dated some but never gelled well with his friends from the old hood. She was weird about taking the gangsters seriously. She couldn't do it really. She grew up with people who are incredibly dangerous. It has that effect when someone's trying to act all hard.
* Dr. Dennis McMurtry is the old nemesis who helped Mike and Rita come in.  "Uncle Dennis" is across the quad from Clarinda and is usually good for dinner on those rare occasions when Clarinda desperately needs a steak and a baked potato the size of your head. Uncle Dennis has turned into a kind of mentor for Clarinda. Although he refuses to help with her romantic life. That would be...complicated.