Amrita Singh

Human Host Kami, adopted Uktena Kinfolk

Player: Alesia

Pictures

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Equipment

• 2010 Audi S4 4-door sports sedan
• HTC Evo 4G smartphone, Android, rooted, 16GB internal, 32GB external storage & assorted cords, chargers, & paraphernalia
• Sig P229 Elite Dark, .40 Cal 5 damage dice, rate 3, range 25, 12+1 mag capacity, conceal J
• 2 clips of PE enchanted bullets
• Portable altar kit
• Paperback copy of the Bhagavad Gita
• Luggage with clothing (2 suitcases, garment bag, box for footwear)
• Shotgun with 16 PE rounds.
• Comm unit from Ashton.
• Magical tracking device from Ashton
• Med. Ballistic Vest. Soak Bonus: 2 bashing, 1 Lethal, 3 Bullet. Dex penalty 1, concealment: J
• Ray Ban RB 3016 Clubmaster Sunglasses
• http://www.shelterness.com/diy-hanging-felt-planter-for-perfect-a-balcony/ -- if you're wondering what Vox's "dirt pouch" looks like. Just put straps on this one.

Talens:

The first two items are objects of plant matter whose spirits Amrita has learned to awaken to function as simple Talens. She currently carries one of each of these two items. Both of these plants are native to northern California.

Wild Cucumber (Gnosis 6) - The seedy, spiked pod of the Wild Cucumber plant, when awakened, becomes a sort of fragmentation grenade. When it is activated & tossed into position ( Dex + Athletics), inflicts 5 dice of AGG damage in area of effect (10 ft radius) and emits an absolutely unmistakeable stink.

Comfrey (Gnosis 5) - One broad-bladed leaf, placed on an open wound or fresh bruise. Heals as many Healing Levels as her successes on activation of aggravated damage. +2 HL if it's Bashing or Lethal damage. 

Wyrm Scale (Gnosis 8) - This sigil possesses some protection against the power of the Wyrm. Servants of the Wyrm revert to their true forms if the sigil activates in their presence. Some believe that this action alerts the Wyrm to the existence of the sigil, but in any event, the sigil combusts in a greenish fire immediately after use, and it is incinerated completely. (this is a standard Talen that Linda created and gave to her)

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Description & Personality

What it feels like to be a host to a kami spirit: http://front.moveon.org/is-there-anything-more-beautiful-than-this  The last 1/3rd of this video can make you feel hints, at least, of a Garou's Rage.

http://awakeningwod.pbworks.com/w/file/45115833/spiral_dynamics_aqal_MED.jpg -- An infographic with very, very dense info about Integrative Studies. It's a surface-level depiction of the understandings Amrita tries to bring to what she's doing.

Hey, here's a new song. Amrita invites you to listen: http://whiteswanrecords.bandcamp.com/track/rise-in-me-c-k-remix

Anyone who's expecting yet another dreadlock-sporting, patchouli-wearing, hemp-clad, barefoot hippie tree-hugger kami host probably ought to take a breath before reading much further. Amrita Singh's awakened spirit draws from a tradition that values beauty, refinement, culture, sensuality, and pleasure. 

Her transformation added six inches to her stature, changed her hair color to the vivid red seen in Japanese maples or the new growth on rose bushes. Her eyes, once soft brown, now glisten green/grey/gold, like the leaves in an oak grove at Midsummer. What's more, the shy, retiring person she used to be didn't survive the change. The new Amrita is confident, dynamic, passionate, and at times prone to lengthy interludes of personal, sensual indulgence. She wears nice clothes, cosmetics, jewelry, and perfume. She carries a pistol and knows how to use it. She drives an Audi sports sedan customized for performance, and drives it fearlessly. Gaia's heartbeat thrums in her veins, and that intimate connection to the Life Force of the World informs and illuminates her thoughts and actions.

Her life has become a rootless wandering that is nonetheless neither aimless or directionless. She is one of Gaia's Advocates and her mission is to preserve the places that are free of Triatic taint as well as do whatever she can to correct the Triat-caused imbalances she finds. In that role she finds great pleasure in taking care of others. Other people, places, animals, plants -- anything that needs nurturing and support. She also has the "caregiver's curse": Putting the needs of others so far in front of her own that she often has nothing left to take care of herself. It's those times that her kami spirit is most likely to step in and insist on correcting that imbalance -- hours in a bubble bath, a complete makeover, a night spent in intimacy, an afternoon in a spa with steam and massage and hot tubs, whatever will help her feel pampered and restore the essential imbalance her nature and demeanor have created.

If asked what she feels is her greatest personal weakness -- and if you're on good enough terms with her to get a direct answer -- she'll tell you that more than anything, she hates feeling out of control. If that feeling of helplessness lasts long enough, she's been known to turn to alcohol and some other recreational drugs to numb it away (she is a child of the West Coast, after all, and San Francisco has never lacked access to anything recreational).

You might find her hiking trails in the national forests, or playing piano in a jazz bar. She could be handing out meals in a homeless shelter or rescuing a kitten from a tree. It might be that she's meditating in a park or dancing in a club, but wherever you find Amrita, she's sunk up to her perfectly plucked eyebrows in LIFE and all its pulsing, throbbing, mind-blowing glory.

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Blue-Booking

• The Yoga Meditation Scene
• The Blighted Place
• Aftermath, part 1  (Amrita Singh & Ashton Knight)
• Aftermath, part 2  (Amrita Singh & Ashton Knight) 
• Aftermath, part 3  (Amrita & Ashton, guest starring Linda Lee)
• Aftermath, part 4 (Amrita & Ashton again)
• Epilogue (from Aftermath) (Amrita & Ashton, or what you're allowed to see of the end of that scene)
• The Truth About Amrita Singh (Amrita, Songan Rides-the-Winds and Soaring Condor)
• No Indoor Plumbing (Amrita, Linda and Joseph Chases-the-Dream)
• A Day Off, Mostly (Amrita Singh & Ashton Knight)
• A Walk in the Woods (Amrita Singh & Ashton Knight), takes place between EofM II & III
• Frisco and New York (Amrita Singh & Rowena Brennan)  "          '              "
• Triage (Amrita Singh & Linda Lee)
• A Messy Business (Amrita, Prishni, and Vox) No new game information, and that's why the link is here rather than on the history page. Evolution is a messy business, even on the personal level.
  

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Backstory

If you're wondering why I ultimately consented to become an avatar of Prshni, who in turn was an avatar of Bhudevi, the Earth Goddess aspect of Lakshmi, I can answer it easily enough. When it came down to it and I had to make a choice, I decided I didn't want to live life as a widow who hadn't had the guts to throw herself on her dead husband's funeral pyre.

Metaphorically speaking, of course. Sort of.

I had been raised in privilege, exposed to some of life's harsher realities in doses carefully controlled by my father, a native Bengali medical doctor who practiced in the San Francisco Bay area. My blonde, beautiful mother had been a stock broker and financial analyst for a major firm. Her earliest personal investments had been in some startup women's cosmetics companies and she was independently wealthy when she married my father. I had just started my senior year in high school in 2001 when the planes hit the twin towers of the World Trade Center. 

My mother was there, being head-hunted by Cantor-Fitzgerald. Trapped in one of the top floors, she jumped rather than face the fire that was consuming the building behind her. I adored my mother, she was an amazing, powerful, gifted woman and as a teenager I despaired because I was so unlike her.

I don't remember much of that school year. I graduated, with honors, was accepted at Stanford. It was all a blur of grief and drugs.

    Fast forward a few years. I cleaned up my act, graduated with a liberal arts degree from Stanford, met and married my husband, Jagjit Singh. He was a firefighter for the city of San Francisco, tall, handsome, gregarious and charming. He used to spend summers fighting wildfires around the country. So brave, so determined. Again, everything I wasn't. I spent those years caring for him and for my father, being a doting aunt to my brother's young children, letting my husband make all the major decisions in our lives, and teaching yoga part time. 

Jagjit was killed while fighting the Station wildfire, north of Los Angeles, in late  2009. His "funeral pyre" burned over 250 square miles before it was defeated. There wasn't enough left of Jagjit to cremate properly, afterwards. 

So there I was. Grief and drugs, most of them by prescription this time. My father and I took care of each other as best we could. It was he who introduced me to the elderly Hindu woman known only as Dadeema -- Hindi for "grandmother," fittingly enough. It was Dadeema who, through weeks of cultivated friendship, courted me for a possible avatar. 

I don't know why, for sure. She said I was "marked" for it, but I still don't know what that means. She explained what was involved very thoroughly -- my consent had to be fully informed, not blind or instinctual. I thought about my mother and her deep appreciation for beauty and sensually pleasing things. I thought about my husband, his bravery and dogged determination. Then I envisioned a grey and lonely life spent drifting from yoga class to yoga class, empty, meaningless.

I talked it over with my father. He didn't understand it all either, and what he did understand, I'm not entirely sure he believed. But he loved me - loves me still - and wanted to support my decision, since it's likely the first important one I'd ever made on my own. 

I prepared the ritual, and the concoction to be drunk during it, exactly as Dadeema had instructed. I woke up three weeks later in a hospital bed, my father at my side.

Physically, I'd grown six inches. My hair and eyes had changed color. I had somehow become a beautiful woman, though everyone always thought I was "pretty" before that. What's more, within me was an innate knowledge of what had changed. I could sense the plant life in most of the building around me. My father told me that they'd had to remove several potted philodendrons and monstera plants which had vined themselves into my room almost overnight. The cut flowers sent on the news of my "illness" hadn't wilted or died. In fact, most had formed roots and were growing! They were having to mow the lawns and trim the hedges almost every day, an anomaly that remains unexplained to this day.

Needless to say, I felt well enough. I got checked out by my physician, who wanted to run more tests. I declined, of course, and left as soon as they'd let me through the doors. 

Dadeema was waiting at my home in Pacifica. She explained that I could never stay in any one place for long, the phenomenon of plant overgrowth would follow wherever I went. Bhudevi would extract an oath from me never to sleep in the same bed twice in a row in order to encourage me to stay on the move. Having already told me of the War, and my enemies, she now described my allies in greater detail. In this culture they are protectors and defenders of Gaia, shapeshifters known as Garou, or werewolves. Powerful, unpredictable, and dangerous, they were my best hope of survival against a foe who had no face, and all faces. 

She had met one or two in her long years, but had no idea how to find them. I wrapped up my affairs in the city, took my oath with Dadeema and my father as witness, then jumped in my car and headed north. 

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