DETAILED PERSONALITY: Ilsa's primarily characterized by a pragmatic sort of cheerfulness - after twenty years, she's essentially gone native on shore, and her years of intense sadness over losing the sea are more or less behind her. Sometimes she fakes sad, especially to newcomers, because that's expected from a land-bound selkie and because she likes screwing with people. Under that, her attitude is basically that it's more enjoyable to bake and make friends and be happy than to spend every minute of every hour missing the sea. But under that…yeah. She spends every minute of every hour missing the sea.

She's not particularly cerebral, but she is really, really curious. She reads a lot, because she likes to know things and she hates to feel ignorant - she equates it with stupidity. (She felt very stupid when she first came up on shore.) She also just wants to be as well-rounded as possible - she's never going to let her life be about just one thing ever again. She's tried a few courses at the community college, and is considering trying for a degree at the university.

Her manner is generally direct, if gentle about it - she's honest in both the letter and the spirit of the word, and isn't usually prone to the truthful misdirection games some fey use. She has a vaguely mean sense of humor. She's mischievous and a little wild, but she's not prone to playing pranks on her own - she feels silly unless she has a partner in crime (at which point pranks become the best thing ever). She's generally a cheerful, calm person, except for when she's really fucking scary. She feels powerless sometimes, and she has a lot of anger built up over her inability to use magic or find her skin. She can be vicious if either of those things are poked. For a not-entirely-unrelated piece of information: in recent years, she's developed a certain affection for knives, and she's got a few interesting (read: magical) ones in her collection.

But actually, she's very human these days. She loves music, but has a thin and ordinary voice. She's a total lush (tequila!). She likes cats. She stress-bakes.

HISTORY: For most of her life, except to fellow selkies, Ilsa has gone by the name "Edene" in fey circles, mostly because her true name is weird (it translates vaguely like "the sound of the wind above the current"). She's spent most of her life in the sea, during which she doesn't have a mortal concept of time. She thinks she was born in the early 1500s - she was a very good friend of Grace O'Malley's, and she doesn't remember much earlier than that.

When she was still very young, she entered into an arranged marriage with another selkie. They never really properly fell in love, but he is very dear to her, and she misses him sometimes. He visits her, and she likes to tease him over all his human lovers.

Her clan is originally from the shores of Ireland, but after a particularly violent series of attacks against the fey, they decided to join the others who were leaving. Because selkies' fey selves die if they wander far enough from the shore, her clan made a deal with the sidhe courts. For some sidhe, particularly those tied to the land and growing things, a sea voyage could be painful and dangerous. So her clan and the land-based fey bound their souls together for the duration of the journey to the Americas. The connection enabled the courts to take energy from the oceans, instead of waste away among them, and their souls were as land to the selkies. No one died. For the journey Edene bound herself, over a particularly smutty and enjoyable (if also bloody) weekend, to a sly and striking lordling of the unseelie court. He respected her linguistic precision in the formation of their bargain, and they parted amicably after the voyage. Upon arrival, everyone dispersed, and she and her clan traveled the shores until they found one of their liking, settling in the Pacific Northwest.

For most of her life, she has been a messenger and go-between for the landed and the finfolk, and on the side, she was an occasional finder of lost things, for anyone who could pay or would offer an unrestricted debt. In the latter case, she is very careful to choose the right time to call them in. She's made a few enemies this way.

She's explored the land many times before, but she's only spent a significant amount of time out of the ocean twice.

The first time, she came ashore on March 3, 1919. A human girl had lost her young husband to war. The girl cried seven tears into the sea, and Edene felt her sorrow so keenly that she shed her skin and went to comfort her. She stayed for five years, her skin carefully hidden all the while, and the human girl loved Edene so truly that she never sought to claim it. Edene left when she realized she wasn't needed anymore. She now regrets that, when she remembers to. It was a long time ago.

The human girl's name was Ilsa. When Edene was forced ashore again, over sixty years later, she took Ilsa's name as her own, to honor her memory.

She has only been tricked out of her skin once. She got tangled up in a fisherman's net in the mid-1980s, which is how she met Henry Teague. He asked her name, and she was still too dazed to answer, so he grinned and said that "Nettie" would have to do. She didn't mind this; she thought it was funny. She still does, actually, though she's particular about who can call her that.

She retrieved her skin and swam home, but she visited him often, for she liked his easy smile. She saved his life, once. He pledged it to her in return, and though he meant it whole-heartedly, he did not understand what he did. She took it anyway. She told him where to find the things he'd lost. He asked her where he could find his heart, and she told him he could not have it back, and he smiled. He told her stories, and anything she asked of him. He did not look for her skin, until the day he did.

Another fey - Ilsa never found out who - told Henry that she would never stay with him, called him an idiot and a fool, a passing fancy. Henry got angry, and it made him thoughtless. In a flash of stupidity, he stole her skin and hid it. When he realized what he'd done, he wanted to return it, but he was afraid that she would leave. From April 12, 1992, she loved and hated him in equal measure. She took Ilsa's name as her own.

Sometimes they would almost forget and be happy, but they were disintegrating as a couple, and they lost themselves as individuals. Henry's act pretty much ate him from the inside out - as she got sadder and more distracted, he turned serious, increasingly desperate and petty. He tried to give her gifts, most of which she put somewhere for safekeeping and promptly forgot. Some of them she destroyed. A few years in, it was like she suddenly remembered how much more she used to be, and she started ransacking their house over and over again, looking for her skin. At first, he didn't say anything, just cleaned up after her, but one day he got mad enough to ask why, and she was mad enough to tell him: she hated him, she didn't want him, she wanted to leave. She said it and it was true. The color drained from his face, and he stood there, and then he walked to her skin - and there it was, there it was and she was joyful, there it was! - and he picked it up and he walked towards her, and he held it out to her, the last and sweetest gift. She reached for it, but he looked into her face and hesitated, and with one last flash of anger and hurt he threw it into the fire.

It wasn't destroyed - he hadn't known that she would feel anything done to the skin, and when she screamed, he burned his hands badly to get it out of the flames before it burned through. She passed out from the pain, and when she woke, he wasn't there, and he'd taken her skin again, too. She didn't know which loss made her angrier, and the fact that she could think of him as something she'd lost pissed her off even more, so she got really smashing drunk and spent the night on his boat, alternately smashing things, crying, and singing dirty songs.

And then she flung his life far from her. She could do that; it belonged to her.

That was November, 1999. He left. She restricted herself to one swim a week, and started building a real life on shore. It was stressful; she took up baking. She really loves baking - it feels like alchemy, like magic she can still do. Also: tasty. She can't feel her skin anywhere near, but she knows it was not destroyed, so she assumes he took it with him. She's in the process of putting Henry behind her, and with a few more years and the retrieval of her skin, she's going to succeed at that.

She's got a pretty short memory, actually.

Henry spent the rest of his life wandering, always feeling the need to press on, to go farther. He died in 2008 in a bar brawl, and in his will, it specifically states that he left all of his possessions, and her skin, to her (the lawyers were confused). His belongings were shipped to her, but she's gone through everything, and it's not among them; it could be anywhere. It is now technically "lost" instead of "stolen." She's beginning to consider desperate measures.

FAMILY:
Mother - murdered 1848 in Ireland. Her headstone bears the name "Grania," but it was no more her name than "Nettie" is her daughter's. Her skin passed to one of her human children, and it is now in possession of one of her descendants.
Father - still alive and very well, in the waters off Ocean Cove. He's solitary and a bit daffy, and tends to think of time in terms of decades. He loves his daughter, but he may not have noticed that she's missing yet.
Mate (selkie) - has been going by Niall for the last century or so. Smart, uncharacteristically serious for a selkie, even-tempered but stormy - literally - in his rare rages (things in the ocean tend to capsize), loves to play the truthful misdirection game, total manwhore, has many children, none by Ilsa.
Mate (human) - Ilsa Baden-Greene, deceased. Probably. Vaguely pretty, graceful, intelligent, careful. When in mourning she was pretty much just sad, but once she regained her personality she proved to be delightfully cranky. She married again after Ilsa/Edene left, and has descendants in Portland and Seattle.
Mate (human) - Henry Teague, deceased. Witty, plain, impulsive, selfish, loving, and quick to laugh. He had a solid sense of self and an appealing contentedness when she first met him; this wasted into desperation after he hid her skin. She now loves him like an afterthought, and she thinks they ruined each other. She doesn't miss him.

EDUCATION: Ilsa's dabbled at a little of everything at the community college, but hasn't identified her niche, yet. It'll probably be in the sciences, but she wants to figure out what she wants to study before applying for university. She tried formal training in pastries, but didn't like all the rules.
OCCUPATION: She works at Sugared, and she loves it. She's constantly trying new recipes and occasionally bakes while tipsy (not at work. mostly).
HOME: She sold the house she shared with Henry, and rents a dilapidated cottage by the sea.
WHY THEY ARE LIVING IN THE COVE: Her clan settled against the Oregon coast when they first traveled over, but they installed themselves in Gray's Harbor not long after her stay with human-Ilsa - she isn't sure precisely when (it was mid-1930s).

EXAMPLE: The fog sat heavy over the ocean, drifted through the hills around her small house, and Ilsa stepped outside her door and smiled. It was the best kind of morning - every moment its own small eternity. The wet and cold seemed to be calling to her, as if the ocean missed her, too. She walked the length of her private dock and stood at the end, the wind and the damp cutting through her thin sleepshirt and sweatpants. She hadn't planned to, but a moment later she leapt forward in a dive and slid beneath the surface of the water. She was home.

She surfaced with a gasp - it was so cold, and she felt it too keenly - and shoved her hair off her forehead, treading water. She opened her eyes, and met his.

"Niall," she laughed, and launched herself at him with a splash.

They swam together, a silent sort of comfort, but finally she reached out to stop him. "It is too soon since the last. Why are you here?"

"You look better."

"You don't think I should look ugly?"

He didn't take the bait. "I only wonder how hard you are trying to come back," he said.

She stilled, sinking a bit in the water before righting herself. "You think I should be unhappy," she said, coldly.

"I think you have debts owed to you," he answered gently, and she relaxed.

"No," she replied, shaking her head. "A full restoration of power? No one owes me so much."

"Perhaps you forget you will also have gifts to offer," he snapped. "To help you regain yourself could also be beneficial to others." Again, she heard him say, I wonder how hard you are trying to come back.

She felt too-human, plain in some huge and unfathomable way. "I will not make blind promises," she said. "Go."

He sank slowly, first his chin, then his mouth disappearing under the water. His large, dark eyes were steady on her, but she couldn't read him. She didn't really want to - he misunderstood her, and she was suddenly both tired and bored with him. He watched her for a bare moment more, then turned and swam away. The fog swallowed him up in seconds. She wondered where his skin was.

Despite her command to him to go, she felt dismissed. Abruptly grumpy, she started swimming for shore. She stomped a bit, once she'd got her feet beneath her again, just for the sheer satisfaction of it.

It wasn't that she hadn't considered it. She had demanded a debt for her services in the past; now, she needed help, and there was no reason she couldn't offer a debt in return for such help. Except, of course, that she knew precisely how much could be demanded from such an imprecise bargain. And then there was -

Well, who would she ask? It had been a long time since she'd had dealings with other fey.

One last stomp - and she cut the sole of her foot on a sliver of stone. She cursed and looked down, and saw her blood smeared wetly on the rock. "Wonderful," she sighed, and picked it up.

She limped back inside, carrying the bloody stone. She closed the door behind her.

She wanted her magic back - her true self back. That he could doubt that was incredible.

But, well - yes. This was home, too.