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Description
template and icon designs for character sheet by Turtle-Arts

old ref and the accompanying overly, excessively, unnecessarily comprehensive bio can be found here: sta.sh/0a2a4hjjw9k
NB: minor retcons had been made to certain pre-SH events
------

Sisika, Tribe of the Twin Ice-Lake

"My name speaks for me."

Name: Sisika ("Bird")

Age: 31
Physical Age: 19

Height: 5' 4" (162 cm)
Hair: dark brown (appears black unless under direct light)
Eyes: light blue

Health Condition: born mute

Personality: reserved / precise / caring / amenable
------

Faction: Insurgent
After struggling with survivors' guilt for the first two decades she had spent in the city, Sisika has eventually found peace of mind - although she still blames Basileus for saving her instead of her lost friend.
The fallout of the the '94 Riots had also left their mark on her: she now sees that the Organiser's system is flawed, his methods to control the population are faulty. Through the Riots she had seen that the people of the city possess real power, enough to shatter the system -- but without guidance, and a just cause to rally behind they are but a destructive force. In an attempt to help open the eyes of those who are still unsure or just blissfully unaware, she agreed to join the rank of the information brokers of La Certeza, where she now works as a codesmith.

Occupation: Certeza codesmith & medic

While Sisika's old herbalist store is still sitting undisturbed on the top of a Seele storage house, it's function has been stripped to a cover business:
She still caters to long-time return customers, for whom she prepares and packages spices and herbs as per their request for pickup. Most of her medicinal stocks, however, stay in reserve so that she can attend the injuries of Certeza agents whose jobs had gone south.
Most of her days are spent in the basement of the storage deciphering coded messages La Certeza had captured or working on new ways to secure the agency's written communication. To this end she had established a multi-key code system; a small notebook with logs of archived keys can be found with her at all times.

Her days off are spent in Heilig, helping out in Nagi's shop or just spending idle time with him.

Sybal: The Totemic Bulwark

Sisika's Sybal is quadrupedal monster, with ~6' height at the shoulders. It is covered in short, soft fur with a dark brown mane running down in the back of it's neck. A patch of missing fur on the right side of its neck reveals a scar underneath, running across its throat. Its long limbs end in three digits each, with opposable toes on the front paws. It's front legs sport two massive wings, made of incredibly hard black stone; their sheen is akin to obsidian, although they are much sturdier. The Bulwark is able to move (or at least shuffle around) the floating feathers of these formations -- it utilises this to create a rhythmic, humming noise with them as it clicks the feathers against each other. This technique was inspired by many-many nights spent in the company of the Singing Deva. The time spent together had also left its imprint on the wing-plates hovering above the Bulwark's shoulders: their change gradually shifting to resemble the Deva's crescents of enlightenment.
Despite the large appendages, the Bulwark is quite nimble traversing the nighttime city with the grace of a giant lanky cat.

Other than the "music" of its floating stones, the Bulwark is incapable of making sounds despite having a mouth, tongue and possibly even vocal cords.

Sybal Power: Pain Mirror

The Bulwark is insusceptible to pain on its own. This does not make her invincible, by any means: serious injuries will have the same consequences as they would for anyone else: breaking an arm or a leg will rend the limb useless, major blood loss will lead to fainting or death. Even more so, due to not receiving the natural warnings, the Bulwark is more likely to miss when it's injured or forget about wounds completely.
Instead of feeling it's own physical pain, the Bulwark senses any it inflicts on other Sybals as vividly as if the pain was its own. It may cross its own tolerance this way and lose consciousness; killing another Sybal would lead to its death as well.

Docile or Feral: Circumstantial feral

Having worked through the immense grief with which Sisika had come to the city, the Bulwark's altruistic instincts had died down in the past years. When the sun sets though, the Bulwark is still overcome by the urge to protect, setting out on a quest to find the Singing Deva. Throughout this journey it will attempt to ignore any other Sybals and will get positively miffed if interrupted or delayed. Anxiety and unresolved pain tends to overcome it's behaviour.
Once the Bulwark finds the Deva, it's decision making and reasoning return to daytime norms. It may decide to part ways with the Deva, or spend the night with him enjoying their music. Disrupting or threatening the Deva is ill-advised in its presence.
Should sunset find them together, the above mentioned questing is simply skipped.

Pre Sybal-Heim history:

Sisika was born in 1681 as a member of an Algonquian (Odawa, to be precise) tribe inhabiting the northern shore of Lake Huron. They established friendly relationship with the French colonists, trading crops and fur for western medicine and stock animals.

As she grew older it became apparent to her parents that something was not right with the child, as Sisika has not spoken a word by the age of 4. She was laughing and crying like every other kid and by all means she understood what her tribe members said to her, but she never talked. Worried for the child, her parents turned to the tribe's shaman for advice. The man said, her voice was with the Spirits: they had taken it as a toll for ill deeds that had gone unaccounted for in her family. While there was no way to give the child back her voice, the shaman sensed Sisika would have great potential to commune with the Spirits -- a part of her already among them.
While the exact details eluded her at the time, Sisika understood that offering herself to the service of the Spirits would be for the good of her family and tribe.

Sisika grew up studying from the shaman, who has became a second father to her. Over the years they had developed a sign system to communicate, borrowing from the universal language between other Indian communities and expanding it with their own symbols. Being a diligent disciple, she spent most of her time learning the ways to prepare herbs for ceremonies and remedies, as well as practicing communion with the Spirits.
With little free time to spare and a language barrier between her and most everyone else, she eventually drifted away from the social community of her tribe spending most of her adolescence alone.

During the year 1697 the presence of the French army grew as the Iroquois kept raiding their colonies and slowly chipping away their land. Most Algonquian tribes, including Sisika's welcomed the French, having a hostile relationship with the Iroquois too.
Nicodéme Roux came to the New World in 1695 with the French army, in hopes of adventure and seeing the New World in it's full glory. But his initial eagerness to explore the life of the people of the new continent had dwindled quickly, when he had to face that most of them did not speak French (or any other European language) and even those few who did had a very narrow vocabulary limited to trade related topics. Within a few months, his expectations waned and he was about ready to write off his journey as a great mistake, when he met the young medicine woman of a local tribe who spoke with signs instead of words and within her system of gestures Nicodéme found a vague but thus far unparalleled understanding.

While Sisika was initially dismissive of the Frenchman, his persistence backed by his curiosity eventually got to her. After all, he was the first person who truly treated her as equal the language gap leaving them both wordless. He seemed genuinely interested in getting to know her, to understand her life and feelings -- and went to great lengths and effort to convey these concepts to her. Eventually she agreed to teach him her signs, in return he taught her his language.
Over the years that Nicodéme's unit had spent posted near Lake Huron the two of them grew close -- although how close exactly, was hard to tell...
Nicodéme had hoped to find glory and adventure in the Americas, fight for his country then meet a pretty French girl and settle in New France with the fortune of pioneers. He thought best not to confess his feeling for Sisika, silence and uncertainty seemed easier for him than to validate his feelings by admitting them. But secretly, he had hoped she would read between lines, that she would understand the unsaid words.
Having grown up in isolation, however, Sisika had little understanding what feelings tied a person to another more strongly. She cherished the bond she shared with the Frenchman, but being the only real bond she had, she never would have thought to distinguish it. She just wished, she had more people to love like this when growing up.

Their bittersweet status quo lasted until 1700, when the French armies started pushing into English territories, under the lead of Louise de Buade, Comte de Frontenac. Caught in the retaliation, the camp of Nicodéme's was attacked by English soldiers eager to have vengeance for the French raids on their own colonies. Sisika was out with him collecting herbs when they got ambushed by two Englishmen on the meadow. Nicodéme shot them down but was mortally injured while defending her. His musket's barks could be heard for half a mile and they could pick up the shouts of the reinforcements coming their way.

Desperate to help him, Sisika tried to drag the half-conscientious Frenchman with her into safety. With his weight over her shoulders, she used his musket as a staff to support herself as she headed towards the surrounding woods to seek cover. But the undergrowth of the forest was thin and lacking for long yards and her progress fatally slow. She kept fighting on despite the voice of reason in her head that said she will not make it like this: if she wanted to live, she would have to leave Nicodéme behind.
But she was not able to.
She just walked on, slowly crawling deeper between the woods knowing the thin wilderness around her will offer no safety, barking guns and battlecries trailing behind them in the distance

"Save her..." Nicodéme begged to God, to the wilds, to the foreign spirits or any invisible power that could save Sisika from the same fate that he would inevitably suffer.

And the Forest answered, revealing it's path before them, just as his last breath escaped Nicodéme.

She dragged herself towards the shades ahead with the dead weight on her shoulders. The edge of the inner forest -dark and thick beyond reason here- was getting closer, just a few steps ahead but her strength was leaving her. Loosing her balance she tripped in the crooked roots beneath her feet.
The fall dragged her back to reality in an instant; her head clear, she was fully aware once again. Springing up she listened for the shouts of Englishman but the forest was awfully quiet. Yet, she dismissed the unexpected calmness in a heartbeat as she turned to look for Nicodéme. To her utter dread, his body was nowhere to be seen. There was just a tiny clearing behind her, empty save for his musket. Looking around she realised she was lost deep, deep in the forest.

"He's gone," she heard the voice from behind. Quickly spinning around she spread her arms as if her fallen friend was still behind her. "You need to let him go," said the pale skinned man. He was dressed somewhat similarly as the soldiers of the French army, but Sisika's instincts told her, he was not one of them. There was something unnerving in his eyes -a knowledge too alien and ancient to be anything she could have known.
Dread and anger finally taking her she rushed at Theo to hit him, as if letting her despair out this way could ease the pain. He nonchalantly dodged her weak punches waiting until running out of steam she collapsed into his arms crying. For how long they stood there, she doesn't know.

She have never told anyone know about her first meeting with Theo and she will keep her secret.

Sybal-Heim history:

Despite the caring welcome and all the counselling, the weight of grief felt all to heavy for Sisika. A month after her admission to the city, she decided to move away from Doxa, looking to leave all familiar sights behind. After some consideration, she had settled in the Seele marketplace -- the bustle offering plenty of distraction and fresh sights. She lived there, operating her herbalist shop (after running the obligatory bureaucratic cycles to obtain a license) in relative peace. But as she grew accustomed to everyday life and socialising, the true extent of Nicodéme's loss dawned on her and grief was eating her away.
Through marketplace gossip and the shady sort some of her waves brought in, she eventually learned about the unrest of the Insurgency. The fact that her own painfully ambivalent feelings about the city and Basileus were not on their own filled her with new purpose, though she refrained from openly engaging with the Insurgents for a long while.

She met Kiyohara Nagi in 1878 quite by accident. While it took for them long months after their initial meeting to get close, their relationship blossomed into something very precious for Sisika. But even with her now broadened perspective of feelings and the nuanced difference between bonds she shared with people, it was not until the Riots of '94 that she really understood and accepted her own feelings.
In the aftermath of the Riots they both found comfort in each other -- warm feelings, neither of them wanted to go without from then on.

History of Nicodéme's Musket:

Sisika entered the city without Nicodéme, however, the Frenchman had left behind his musket which travelled with her into Sybal-Heim. Being the only thing she had left of him, she held onto it with frantic anxiety, afraid that if she would let it go even Nicodéme's memory would be gone. Her attachment to the musket defined much of her early years in the city, so much so that she learned to handle most of her belongings and wares by one hand. In an attempt to help her move on from the loss and strip the weapon of its original purpose of killing, she carved the stock into a crude staff.
The staff was damaged in the Redey Raids, suffering a deep crack.
In the Riots of '94, Sisika lost the staff as she engaged in combat to defend Nagi from out-of-control rioters. She later returned Nagi's wrecked shop, to find the staff in hopeless splinters. While initially devastated, she did acknowledge her need to move on, or at least to change. She had the barrel of the musket fashioned into a metal cane (not entirely unlike Nagi's), with a wooded crane as its handle that she carved from the remaining piece of the stock; the lock and trigger of the musket, which she refers to as the "heart", she wears as a heavy pendant.

Notes and tid-bits:

- Sisika had kept her name despite the obvious contradiction and she actually finds it funny
- Nicodéme never knew Sisika's name. He knew she was called "bird" but since she couldn't speak he never heard the actual word; he usually called her "Jaseur", meaning waxwing or talkative in French
- Her customers and acquaintances know her by name, but nobody is sure how; they all seem to have heard it from someone else
- Reference shows spring/autumn attire
- But on that note, she does not like wearing clothes all that much ... may or may not be forgetting to put clothes on when she waters her plants in the mornings
- While she had absolutely refused to read/write Sybalian in her first (almost) three decades, she had kicked this habit after joining La Certeza: the thought that a language Basileus planted in her mind would be aiding her to work against him entertains her to no end
- Picked up woodcarving as a hobby after '94 -- if you ask nicely enough, she will probably make something for you
- She understands French and Ottawa (dialect of Ojibwe) and a little bit of Japanese. She also recognises English, though she makes no attempt to learn it
- She did not wear the "pendant" for the midwinter ball of '96

Description
template and icon designs for character sheet by Turtle-Arts

old ref and the accompanying overly, excessively, unnecessarily comprehensive bio can be found here: sta.sh/0a2a4hjjw9k
NB: minor retcons had been made to certain pre-SH events
------

Sisika, Tribe of the Twin Ice-Lake

"My name speaks for me."

Name: Sisika ("Bird")

Age: 31
Physical Age: 19

Height: 5' 4" (162 cm)
Hair: dark brown (appears black unless under direct light)
Eyes: light blue

Health Condition: born mute

Personality: reserved / precise / caring / amenable
------

Faction: Insurgent
After struggling with survivors' guilt for the first two decades she had spent in the city, Sisika has eventually found peace of mind - although she still blames Basileus for saving her instead of her lost friend.
The fallout of the the '94 Riots had also left their mark on her: she now sees that the Organiser's system is flawed, his methods to control the population are faulty. Through the Riots she had seen that the people of the city possess real power, enough to shatter the system -- but without guidance, and a just cause to rally behind they are but a destructive force. In an attempt to help open the eyes of those who are still unsure or just blissfully unaware, she agreed to join the rank of the information brokers of La Certeza, where she now works as a codesmith.

Occupation: Certeza codesmith & medic

While Sisika's old herbalist store is still sitting undisturbed on the top of a Seele storage house, it's function has been stripped to a cover business:
She still caters to long-time return customers, for whom she prepares and packages spices and herbs as per their request for pickup. Most of her medicinal stocks, however, stay in reserve so that she can attend the injuries of Certeza agents whose jobs had gone south.
Most of her days are spent in the basement of the storage deciphering coded messages La Certeza had captured or working on new ways to secure the agency's written communication. To this end she had established a multi-key code system; a small notebook with logs of archived keys can be found with her at all times.

Her days off are spent in Heilig, helping out in Nagi's shop or just spending idle time with him.

Sybal: The Totemic Bulwark

Sisika's Sybal is quadrupedal monster, with ~6' height at the shoulders. It is covered in short, soft fur with a dark brown mane running down in the back of it's neck. A patch of missing fur on the right side of its neck reveals a scar underneath, running across its throat. Its long limbs end in three digits each, with opposable toes on the front paws. It's front legs sport two massive wings, made of incredibly hard black stone; their sheen is akin to obsidian, although they are much sturdier. The Bulwark is able to move (or at least shuffle around) the floating feathers of these formations -- it utilises this to create a rhythmic, humming noise with them as it clicks the feathers against each other. This technique was inspired by many-many nights spent in the company of the Singing Deva. The time spent together had also left its imprint on the wing-plates hovering above the Bulwark's shoulders: their change gradually shifting to resemble the Deva's crescents of enlightenment.
Despite the large appendages, the Bulwark is quite nimble traversing the nighttime city with the grace of a giant lanky cat.

Other than the "music" of its floating stones, the Bulwark is incapable of making sounds despite having a mouth, tongue and possibly even vocal cords.

Sybal Power: Pain Mirror

The Bulwark is insusceptible to pain on its own. This does not make her invincible, by any means: serious injuries will have the same consequences as they would for anyone else: breaking an arm or a leg will rend the limb useless, major blood loss will lead to fainting or death. Even more so, due to not receiving the natural warnings, the Bulwark is more likely to miss when it's injured or forget about wounds completely.
Instead of feeling it's own physical pain, the Bulwark senses any it inflicts on other Sybals as vividly as if the pain was its own. It may cross its own tolerance this way and lose consciousness; killing another Sybal would lead to its death as well.

Docile or Feral: Circumstantial feral

Having worked through the immense grief with which Sisika had come to the city, the Bulwark's altruistic instincts had died down in the past years. When the sun sets though, the Bulwark is still overcome by the urge to protect, setting out on a quest to find the Singing Deva. Throughout this journey it will attempt to ignore any other Sybals and will get positively miffed if interrupted or delayed. Anxiety and unresolved pain tends to overcome it's behaviour.
Once the Bulwark finds the Deva, it's decision making and reasoning return to daytime norms. It may decide to part ways with the Deva, or spend the night with him enjoying their music. Disrupting or threatening the Deva is ill-advised in its presence.
Should sunset find them together, the above mentioned questing is simply skipped.

Pre Sybal-Heim history:

Sisika was born in 1681 as a member of an Algonquian (Odawa, to be precise) tribe inhabiting the northern shore of Lake Huron. They established friendly relationship with the French colonists, trading crops and fur for western medicine and stock animals.

As she grew older it became apparent to her parents that something was not right with the child, as Sisika has not spoken a word by the age of 4. She was laughing and crying like every other kid and by all means she understood what her tribe members said to her, but she never talked. Worried for the child, her parents turned to the tribe's shaman for advice. The man said, her voice was with the Spirits: they had taken it as a toll for ill deeds that had gone unaccounted for in her family. While there was no way to give the child back her voice, the shaman sensed Sisika would have great potential to commune with the Spirits -- a part of her already among them.
While the exact details eluded her at the time, Sisika understood that offering herself to the service of the Spirits would be for the good of her family and tribe.

Sisika grew up studying from the shaman, who has became a second father to her. Over the years they had developed a sign system to communicate, borrowing from the universal language between other Indian communities and expanding it with their own symbols. Being a diligent disciple, she spent most of her time learning the ways to prepare herbs for ceremonies and remedies, as well as practicing communion with the Spirits.
With little free time to spare and a language barrier between her and most everyone else, she eventually drifted away from the social community of her tribe spending most of her adolescence alone.

During the year 1697 the presence of the French army grew as the Iroquois kept raiding their colonies and slowly chipping away their land. Most Algonquian tribes, including Sisika's welcomed the French, having a hostile relationship with the Iroquois too.
Nicodéme Roux came to the New World in 1695 with the French army, in hopes of adventure and seeing the New World in it's full glory. But his initial eagerness to explore the life of the people of the new continent had dwindled quickly, when he had to face that most of them did not speak French (or any other European language) and even those few who did had a very narrow vocabulary limited to trade related topics. Within a few months, his expectations waned and he was about ready to write off his journey as a great mistake, when he met the young medicine woman of a local tribe who spoke with signs instead of words and within her system of gestures Nicodéme found a vague but thus far unparalleled understanding.

While Sisika was initially dismissive of the Frenchman, his persistence backed by his curiosity eventually got to her. After all, he was the first person who truly treated her as equal the language gap leaving them both wordless. He seemed genuinely interested in getting to know her, to understand her life and feelings -- and went to great lengths and effort to convey these concepts to her. Eventually she agreed to teach him her signs, in return he taught her his language.
Over the years that Nicodéme's unit had spent posted near Lake Huron the two of them grew close -- although how close exactly, was hard to tell...
Nicodéme had hoped to find glory and adventure in the Americas, fight for his country then meet a pretty French girl and settle in New France with the fortune of pioneers. He thought best not to confess his feeling for Sisika, silence and uncertainty seemed easier for him than to validate his feelings by admitting them. But secretly, he had hoped she would read between lines, that she would understand the unsaid words.
Having grown up in isolation, however, Sisika had little understanding what feelings tied a person to another more strongly. She cherished the bond she shared with the Frenchman, but being the only real bond she had, she never would have thought to distinguish it. She just wished, she had more people to love like this when growing up.

Their bittersweet status quo lasted until 1700, when the French armies started pushing into English territories, under the lead of Louise de Buade, Comte de Frontenac. Caught in the retaliation, the camp of Nicodéme's was attacked by English soldiers eager to have vengeance for the French raids on their own colonies. Sisika was out with him collecting herbs when they got ambushed by two Englishmen on the meadow. Nicodéme shot them down but was mortally injured while defending her. His musket's barks could be heard for half a mile and they could pick up the shouts of the reinforcements coming their way.

Desperate to help him, Sisika tried to drag the half-conscientious Frenchman with her into safety. With his weight over her shoulders, she used his musket as a staff to support herself as she headed towards the surrounding woods to seek cover. But the undergrowth of the forest was thin and lacking for long yards and her progress fatally slow. She kept fighting on despite the voice of reason in her head that said she will not make it like this: if she wanted to live, she would have to leave Nicodéme behind.
But she was not able to.
She just walked on, slowly crawling deeper between the woods knowing the thin wilderness around her will offer no safety, barking guns and battlecries trailing behind them in the distance

"Save her..." Nicodéme begged to God, to the wilds, to the foreign spirits or any invisible power that could save Sisika from the same fate that he would inevitably suffer.

And the Forest answered, revealing it's path before them, just as his last breath escaped Nicodéme.

She dragged herself towards the shades ahead with the dead weight on her shoulders. The edge of the inner forest -dark and thick beyond reason here- was getting closer, just a few steps ahead but her strength was leaving her. Loosing her balance she tripped in the crooked roots beneath her feet.
The fall dragged her back to reality in an instant; her head clear, she was fully aware once again. Springing up she listened for the shouts of Englishman but the forest was awfully quiet. Yet, she dismissed the unexpected calmness in a heartbeat as she turned to look for Nicodéme. To her utter dread, his body was nowhere to be seen. There was just a tiny clearing behind her, empty save for his musket. Looking around she realised she was lost deep, deep in the forest.

"He's gone," she heard the voice from behind. Quickly spinning around she spread her arms as if her fallen friend was still behind her. "You need to let him go," said the pale skinned man. He was dressed somewhat similarly as the soldiers of the French army, but Sisika's instincts told her, he was not one of them. There was something unnerving in his eyes -a knowledge too alien and ancient to be anything she could have known.
Dread and anger finally taking her she rushed at Theo to hit him, as if letting her despair out this way could ease the pain. He nonchalantly dodged her weak punches waiting until running out of steam she collapsed into his arms crying. For how long they stood there, she doesn't know.

She have never told anyone know about her first meeting with Theo and she will keep her secret.

Sybal-Heim history:

Despite the caring welcome and all the counselling, the weight of grief felt all to heavy for Sisika. A month after her admission to the city, she decided to move away from Doxa, looking to leave all familiar sights behind. After some consideration, she had settled in the Seele marketplace -- the bustle offering plenty of distraction and fresh sights. She lived there, operating her herbalist shop (after running the obligatory bureaucratic cycles to obtain a license) in relative peace. But as she grew accustomed to everyday life and socialising, the true extent of Nicodéme's loss dawned on her and grief was eating her away.
Through marketplace gossip and the shady sort some of her waves brought in, she eventually learned about the unrest of the Insurgency. The fact that her own painfully ambivalent feelings about the city and Basileus were not on their own filled her with new purpose, though she refrained from openly engaging with the Insurgents for a long while.

She met Kiyohara Nagi in 1878 quite by accident. While it took for them long months after their initial meeting to get close, their relationship blossomed into something very precious for Sisika. But even with her now broadened perspective of feelings and the nuanced difference between bonds she shared with people, it was not until the Riots of '94 that she really understood and accepted her own feelings.
In the aftermath of the Riots they both found comfort in each other -- warm feelings, neither of them wanted to go without from then on.

History of Nicodéme's Musket:

Sisika entered the city without Nicodéme, however, the Frenchman had left behind his musket which travelled with her into Sybal-Heim. Being the only thing she had left of him, she held onto it with frantic anxiety, afraid that if she would let it go even Nicodéme's memory would be gone. Her attachment to the musket defined much of her early years in the city, so much so that she learned to handle most of her belongings and wares by one hand. In an attempt to help her move on from the loss and strip the weapon of its original purpose of killing, she carved the stock into a crude staff.
The staff was damaged in the Redey Raids, suffering a deep crack.
In the Riots of '94, Sisika lost the staff as she engaged in combat to defend Nagi from out-of-control rioters. She later returned Nagi's wrecked shop, to find the staff in hopeless splinters. While initially devastated, she did acknowledge her need to move on, or at least to change. She had the barrel of the musket fashioned into a metal cane (not entirely unlike Nagi's), with a wooded crane as its handle that she carved from the remaining piece of the stock; the lock and trigger of the musket, which she refers to as the "heart", she wears as a heavy pendant.

Notes and tid-bits:

- Sisika had kept her name despite the obvious contradiction and she actually finds it funny
- Nicodéme never knew Sisika's name. He knew she was called "bird" but since she couldn't speak he never heard the actual word; he usually called her "Jaseur", meaning waxwing or talkative in French
- Her customers and acquaintances know her by name, but nobody is sure how; they all seem to have heard it from someone else
- Reference shows spring/autumn attire
- But on that note, she does not like wearing clothes all that much ... may or may not be forgetting to put clothes on when she waters her plants in the mornings
- While she had absolutely refused to read/write Sybalian in her first (almost) three decades, she had kicked this habit after joining La Certeza: the thought that a language Basileus planted in her mind would be aiding her to work against him entertains her to no end
- Picked up woodcarving as a hobby after '94 -- if you ask nicely enough, she will probably make something for you
- She understands French and Ottawa (dialect of Ojibwe) and a little bit of Japanese. She also recognises English, though she makes no attempt to learn it
- She did not wear the "pendant" for the midwinter ball of '96