Orla Rhatigan (original)

In general: Orla is not super athletic. She uses the pole more to orient herself on the stage, since she can't see where the edge is. For her first few months, at least, she won't do any athletic climbing or holding and hovering moves with the pole, but she'll hold it, swing on it, or dance with it, maybe jump up on it for a few seconds in a pose where she's holding it in multiple places. She may also be seen crawling toward the edge of the stage, sliding or skimming her hand across the surface -- this is almost always because she's lost her orientation and needs to find the edge, she's just good at making it look sexy.

What Orla does have is body confidence and attitude. She's never had a single doubt about her attractiveness within her niche, and it shows. She typically only strips to fully nude once a week or so, and even when she goes nude, she keeps something on her face to conceal her eyes. More often, she strips to a piece of lingerie; often this doesn't actually hide any private areas, maybe being crotchless and cupless or otherwise open, though sometimes she keeps on panties and pasties. Worthy of note is that Orla almost never wears heels onstage -- she understands that they're better for dancing, but they change her relationship to the space around her, so (at least as of now) she's always in flats or bare feet (which is usually actually dance paws).

Each of these routines has thumbnails for some visual aids -- what she steps onstage in, what she has on her face, what she strips down to, and what the music is. Those of keen eye may notice that a single small-but-bright light comes on at the end of a dance Orla does, always above the part of the stage she's exiting from.

Bratty and dumb - the first dance she thought of and still her favorite. Strutting out with bubblegum in her mouth, lots of high-stepping and shaking her ass as she strips, hair in pigtails.



Lick the wrapper - slower, more sensual, kind of meant to draw attention to how small and delicate she is.



It's awfully hard to stop - Enthusiastic and showy, kind of meant to recall a lot of classic burlesque and can-can acts.



The problem with you is - Slower and very sexual. Most of Orla's dances are meant to flirt or make her look hot, but this one is pure horny.



(I'm basically always adding to this page and have many ideas, it just takes some time to describe them in a coherent way and then put these blurbs together.)

Orla Caitlin Rhatigan was born on a space ship, the youngest of four children. It was her father's ship, a cargo hauler, while her mother was a software developer for an entertainment company, specializing in the manipulation of the inner ear to create holos with a sense of movement.

Ships comfortable enough to live and have families on were only about twenty to thirty years old when Orla was born. Before the invention of artificial gravity plating and shielding, ships had to imitate gravity with rotation forces or go without it, and new stabilization technologies made faster-than-light travel tolerable for children and pets. It was only around the birth of Orla's oldest brother that the negative effects of growing up in space began to be realized; small stature, fragile bones, and problems with future living in near-Earth non-artificial gravity. Moons, certain space stations, and other ships are all that a typical spacer will be able to live on (presumably, if Orla lives in Duplicity long enough to have problems, the more dangerous ones can be healed as needed). By Orla's adulthood, the official UEP (United Earth Powers, the human spacefaring government) position is that raising children in space is likely unsafe, but not enough that they can actually restrict reproductive rights or remove children from their parents.

The full spectrum of issues were still not well understood by Orla's birth, however, so she grew up with three older brothers, bouncing around a zero-gravity cargo hold, playing hide and seek when it was full and dancing across the open space when it was empty. Learning of the problems she may have one day only made her more determined to prove that she was strong, more determined to keep up with her brothers.

At 16, Orla jumped between two airlocks, separated by thirty meters or so, without any protective gear. This is perfectly survivable -- humans can generate enough force to propel themselves several meters a second, in a vacuum, and we can hold our breath for a couple of minutes. Space is cold, yes, but a vacuum doesn't conduct heat very well. The real problem is the pressure -- if you get the tube of a very strong vacuum stuck to your skin, you'll get a bruise, like a hickey. Full-body hickies are unpleasant, but not especially disabling. Unfortunately, Orla's eyes were damaged as part of this stunt. She could see, but she had to spend a couple of weeks with her eyes bandaged, and she was warned that they were still healing when the bandages came off.

Angry, she came back from this incident only more determined to prove that she was totally strong and a badass. More reckless behavior ensued (mostly not involving airlocks). A few months later, she was technically grounded, not allowed to leave the ship, but her brother Kerry (the youngest of the three boys, not quite two years older than Orla) helped her sneak off. The two of them snuck onto another ship, a small maintenance boat, and took it out of port, intending to have a little joyride around the station and be back before anyone noticed.

Unfortunately, someone noticed. Within minutes, they were being chased dead away from the station by more UEP police and military force than they knew how to deal with. Kerry was in the pilot's seat, so Orla was with the engine, trying desperately to bypass the anti-theft measures slowing them down. Like teenagers since time immemorial, they'd done something stupid and gotten in over their heads. The most surprising thing was that Orla's efforts eventually succeeded...only for security measures to kick in.

Orla was at her adult height, but her adult height is well under five feet -- if she'd been taller, the nonlethal electrical shock would have hit her in the upper center mass, making her fall. And if she'd been healthy, a nonlethal electrical shock to the face would hurt like hell, possibly doing some damage, but she would likely sustain only mild injuries. Instead, Kerry could only see his little sister lying still on the deck, her face turned away, but blood on her shirt.

Now in a flat panic and with the ship's full capabilities available, Kerry ran to the only place he could think of, an "unlisted port" his father had visited for work a few times. In the next few hours, it turned out that Orla was alive and could be healed, but her eyes were beyond repair -- the only way she could be expected to see again would be with expensive implants which often provide something very different from real vision, and have a small chance of not working at all.

Kerry was young, but he understood risk-reward calculation, including the fact that every minute of Orla's care racked up a debt that he didn't know how they'd be expected to pay. So he made the decision: no implants, just get her healthy.

Orla and Kerry were allowed to recuperate for a couple of weeks, and Kerry was able to send one message to his family, carefully scrutinized and scrubbed of any details that might lead law enforcement to this port -- they can overlook some light contraband, some harmless smuggling, but what amounted to kidnapping two UEP citizens, one of whom was underage, would bring a great deal of force to bear.

When the bandages came off, Orla had healed remarkably well. Her care had been minimal, but of solid quality, leaving her scarred, but fully functional. She did still have to wear bandages at certain times, still healing from the original pressure injury, but most importantly, she had enough light perception to be able to navigate around a ship by the lights. She was handed a white cane and told to bang around her new ship until she figured it out, because she had a debt to pay.

At this point, Orla finally met the woman who had bankrolled her care, Mariana. Mostly, Orla remembers her cool hands and businesslike touch as she placed Orla's hands on various significant points, showing her around in the way that would be useful. The ship they'd stolen had been pulled into dry dock to have its identifying information scrubbed and extra security and tracking measures installed, including a remotely-triggered disabling device.

("What, like a bomb?"

"No. It will merely break down the molecular bonds of your engine, leaving you to freeze, or cook, or starve, depending mostly on what you were doing when I pressed the button.")

Orla and Kerry were left alone to talk in their new ship, and Kerry pointed out that they could make it home, get current coordinates from Mom and Dad and flee back into the arms of society. Their parents could afford the debt, or at least some of it, enough to keep these people off their backs and go back to their lives. But Orla saw her opportunity to finally do what she'd been trying to do her entire life: a chance to really, truly prove that she could keep up with anyone she felt like, that her physical limitations were nothing. It would only be sweeter for having a new limit to push against.

So Orla went to work as a smuggler for a woman who turned out to be the head of a pretty significant crime syndicate. Smuggling work is pretty boring 90% of the time, and deadly the other 10% if you can't think your way out of something fast. Fortunately, Orla had always been whip-smart, and Kerry (having always been somewhat Orla's follower despite being older) was perceptive, quickly learning how to fill gaps for Orla when she didn't have information she needed.

By the time Orla was 22, she and Kerry both had rap sheets of modest length, and they had long since worked off the debt of her medical care. The Rhatigan smugglers were also known for reliability, a willingness to be reckless in pursuit of getting the job done; Mariana dumped a pile of requests to hire them into Orla's inbox when they finally left her service with their own ship: the Lonely Sidhe.

This was why Orla and Kerry had stayed in Mariana's employ so long: they paid off Orla's care and the associated costs, they paid off the alterations to the ship (after which the disabling and tracking devices were finally uninstalled, as they were now willing and not indentured), and then they saved up enough money to get the ship they really wanted. Orla had scrimped and saved enough to pay a larger share of their new (legally acquired) ship, the Lonely Sidhe, making her officially, legally, Captain Orla Rhatigan.

They flew to one of the deeper unlisted ports, the kind of places that family men do not go to buy duty-free nicotine sticks. Here, they hired their own crew. Phil became their pilot, being fresh off a five-year tour with UEP pirate hunters and having decided to switch sides. Gemma, a wealthy man's daughter with no criminal record of her own, was brought on to help open doors that a former kidnapping victim did not have access to. Finally, Rich was muscle.

Other crew were hired at this time who came and went -- building a pirate and smuggling crew takes some trial and error, and most new crewmates go through a few captains with no hard feelings before finding someone they want to throw their weight behind. Others settle with split loyalties, like Gemma, who still comes and goes from the crew, an untamable free spirit. Orla was never actually entirely sure why Rich didn't move on, because he never actually seemed to like her much, but he did what he was told and he was good at his job.

A few years into the life, Orla hired Bree, who openly came onto Orla from the start (not entirely taboo, but really not the done thing). A few months later, Kerry sat down and told Orla he wanted to leave and start a family. That was the first night Orla crawled into Bree's quarters, and a month later, the crew attended his wedding. With Kerry gone, Phil was offered a promotion and turned it down, so Bree was made first mate. Not only because Orla was fucking her (though it didn't hurt), but because she and Orla understood each other, often thinking on the same wavelength with much less effort than others.

This, apparently, was a silent last straw for Rich, and he began plotting mutiny. He was all right at it, knowing who to not bother approaching, but he wasn't counting on Phil listening to all of the recorded voice logs in the ship. Phil managed to hear one too many "casual" comments as Rich worked at sowing discord, and once he began looking for a pattern, it jumped out. Phil brought his findings to Orla, who had Rich locked in his quarters. It transpired that he could stomach working under Orla when he felt it obvious that Kerry was the real showrunner, but to be under a small, blind spacer with no particular intimidation factor and only the woman she was fucking for a first mate, this could not be endured.

Rich had been speaking to other crews about his mutiny, so an example needed to be made. Orla spent a couple of days harming him in whatever manner she could think of -- she had him beaten and cut by anyone in the crew who was willing, of course, but she also fucked with the temperature settings, played loud sounds, starved him, everything she could think of. At the end of it, the Lonely Sidhe flew to a large unlisted port and jettisoned the body out an airlock in front of one of the port's external view windows. Anyone who'd been caught on record collaborating or agreeing with Rich was sent video. Additionally, two of his cousins went missing soon after, his sister lost an eye, and his widow walks with a limp.

Orla was ready to take this incident as a reminder never to trust anyone. But in the middle of it, at night when Orla crawled into her bed for stress relief, Bree took Orla's hands and told the captain her father's name. Then her mother's name, then her aunts and uncles, and all the rest of her family. Orla realized after a little while what it was: Bree was giving her all the ammunition she'd ever need to keep her first mate in line, or punish her should she step out of it. Such an act of vulnerability and trust was incredibly powerful to Orla in that moment of her life, and Orla would later credit this as the night she fell in love with Bree.

Orla didn't exactly reciprocate, not with words, but she arranged a few hours in holo beds for them and arranged for them to go visit Orla's less-accessible brothers, then left Phil and the other crew with a couple days of shore leave while they took the ship alone to visit Orla's parents and Kerry. Orla introduced Bree as her girlfriend rather than her first mate, and said that yes, things were getting serious, when her family asked. The time in the holo beds also marked Orla's first time seeing Bree's face.

("You better marry me now, viewing me with unprotected eyes like a whore."

"Maybe I will!! Bitch!!")

Over the next few years, Orla began to rely on Bree more in private. Though Bree was the loyal guard dog in public, never daring to do anything that wouldn't just reinforce Orla's authority, in private they strategized together and made a good team. They were making more money, but also attracting more heat. It was around this time that Orla got a neural implant for disguise purposes, and Bree got one for...other reasons. Other crew came and went during this time, but Orla's reputation for how she handled the previous mutiny has kept away those who might make trouble for her.

Orla and Bree married, and in order to maintain the image of Orla being totally in control, Bree took her name. Finally, "the Rhatigan criminals" was a phrase on tongues again, only this time it referred to wives instead of siblings. A couple of years after their marriage, Orla and Bree decided to have a child. Most of their jobs weren't an active danger to their ship, so the baby would be safe on board until they were ready to retire, and there are cheap, basic robots that can take care of an infant for a few hours while the parents work. They underwent a procedure to harvest eggs from both of them, as well as a Y chromosome from one of their male relatives so the gender could be randomized (the clinic basically flipped a coin about whether to swap out an X or not). They decided that, since she already didn't require any physical prowess, Orla would carry.

Spacer pregnancies can be hard at the best of times, and Orla was injured on a job early in her pregnancy, making the rest of it difficult and painful. When her time neared, Orla gave her crew shore leave again and went to her parents' ship, equipped with a much better infirmary than the Lonely Sidhe, and they were able to call a doctor friend in for help. After a day of labor, she delivered a baby boy by c-section. Shore leave became "take any temp job with any other crew who will have you, it's going to be a few months."

Declan is now seven months old, and Orla is beginning to gather her crew back to her for their next job. She wants more children (Bree will carry this time) and to make a home somewhere, at least until her kids are old enough to decide whether they want to pirate with their moms or go have legit lives with their grandparents. But sure as the sky's black, she's not ready to retire just yet.

kink list!

OOC

Backtagging: Yes, but I prefer no more than a week between tags. Like, I can tag forever as long as they're consistently coming.
Threadhopping: prefer not
Fourthwalling: no
Offensive subjects: ask first

IC

Hugging this character: ask first
Kissing this character: ask first
Flirting with this character: yes
Fighting with this character: yes
Injuring this character: ask first
Killing this character: no
Using telepathy/mind reading abilities on this character: yes

Warnings: Orla is blind and has facial/ocular scars. I try not to describe them too explicitly, but if you'd rather i avoided mention at all, let me know.

❦ OOC Information
Name: Carley
Contact: y'all know me
Invite: n/a


❦ IC Information
Character name: Orla Rhatigan
Canon name: original
Canon point: n/a

Age: 31
Species: human


History: Orla is a spacer, born on a ship in a flotilla that made up a community, much like a small town. She spent a lot of time in zero gravity as a child, so she's smaller than average because that affects growth. She was blinded in an equipment accident at age 16 while learning to pilot. She spent several years working on a farm ship in her flotilla, this being work she didn't need sight for, but this was boring, so one day in her early 20s she had a friend shuttle her to the dock of a nearby planet and straight up stole a ship with three of her friends. They took it to a port of dubious legality and sold it, and Orla used her portion of the proceeds to buy a ship with her brother (smaller and crappier, but all theirs). She then bought audio-feedback technology for the piloting system and taught herself how to fly all on her own, already understanding the basic principles from her education before she was blinded. They began working as pirates, smugglers, and general shady-people-for-hire. Orla scrimped and saved every credit so she could start buying her brother out of the ship and become the captain, with him perfectly happy to be her first mate.

A couple of years into their career, her brother left to get married. Orla promoted the girl she was sleeping with at the time, and a few years later, married her in turn -- "the Rhatigan smugglers" now refers to spouses, not siblings. They have a crew of five other than themselves, including a pilot, a demolitions-and-weapons expert, two muscle-types, and a grifter.


Personality:-Orla is very impulsive. She has little filter between her brain and her mouth, and while she's gotten better about considering her decisions, she was much worse about it before she was blinded -- she once jumped between two airlocks with no suit on a dare. (This is pretty easily survivable, as long as the airlocks are close enough together. Heat transfer is low in space so cold isn't a problem, and you can survive a vacuum for a few seconds.)
-Orla likes new things. She gets bored very easily and is always seeking something else to do. She likes adventure.
-Orla is very intelligent, a quick learner and a great strategist.
-It's hard for Orla to trust people quickly, always a little paranoid that they're planning to turn on her. She can know someone for years and not fully trust them. This doesn't mean she'll cut them off completely or have serious problems with them, it will just be a small voice that questions it when she puts something important in their hands. If she can deal with something important herself, she will.
-Patience is not Orla's strong suit. When she wants something, she wants it now.
-When crossed, Orla can take it way too far. When people on her crew have turned on her, death wasn't enough. She had to utterly destroy them before she was satisfied.
-Orla is very decisive. Once she picks a course of action, she will stick to it, and she doesn't spend too long picking. She'd rather deal with the consequences of action than of inaction.
-Orla can be prone to moodiness and melancholy. This started after she was blinded, and even though it's been ten years now, sometimes she misses it. She also tends to be bitter and resentful when she feels she's been slighted.
-Losing her sight has, conversely, made Orla better at finding things. Objects, people, work, she always seems to know where to try first. In another time, she'd be a great hunter.
-Creativity has been Orla's greatest asset and carried her far. It's both enabled her to do what she's done and given her the reputation she has.


Sex: Orla is a lesbian. Sleeping with men isn't entirely out of the question, but it would have to be something like an event pushing her over the threshold and then it being something she can tolerate continuing for the sake of doing what she's supposed to (or, possibly, for the sake of a really good kink). She'll be reluctant at first to sleep with someone other than her wife, but while Orla is monogamous in practice, their relationship is actually open in theory, so once she finds someone who interests her, it won't be a real barrier. She doesn't hold any judgment for people who do sleep around, and while this whole "having sex powers us" thing is weird, she's certainly heard weirder.


Inventory: -clothes: jeans, tank top, underwear, fake leather jacket
-a desk. This is much like a modern tablet computer or smartphone, only futurey. It has powerful voice-to-text, text-to-voice, and other accessibility features that make it so Orla doesn't need to interact with a screen or text.
-a Hoover cane. This is the typical white cane with a red tip that the blind use to navigate. Orla's retracts into the handle and extends with a button push, rather than folding up.
Powers: Orla has an implant that allows her to change her hair color at will. Most of the time she leaves it at her natural red, but sometimes she'll turn it weird colors for fun.

Also, Orla is blind, but she still has light perception, so she can navigate the world on her own. She can also see some color. Most importantly, she's learned how sound and air bounces off surfaces around her, so she can generally tell if she's within five or ten feet of a large obstacle, whether she has her cane or not.


Sample: http://templegateslogs.dreamwidth.org/9824.html?thread=409952#cmt409952
http://throwitinabox.dreamwidth.org/134533.html


Anything else?: Being raised in space, Orla is very small and frail. Her bones are thin and brittle, she's uncommonly short and thin, and her heart and lungs can't really take the stress of full gravity forever. She'll be fine for awhile, but her time limit is a couple of years before her heart starts to give. She'll always struggle with particularly aerobic exercises, and it's easier to damage her physically than average. (Also, the first time she gets sunburned, she will have no idea what is happening.)

Player name: Carley
Player contact: shockvaluecola
Player age: 26
Characters already played: none!

Name: Orla Rhatigan
Journal: starryeye
Canon: original
Canon point: n/a
Age: 30
Reference: Orla's world is one where humans have discovered faster-than-light travel and become part of an interstellar alien community. They have representatives on the senate and ambassadors in interspecies space. For the most part, unless you're in politics, military, or high-level commerce, most people don't really interact with a lot of aliens on a regular basis. The races keep very much to themselves unless necessary -- the struggle of putting so many races together with unfathomably different psychology and culture is a recipe for disaster, and hard enough to wrangle when it's just the few hundred individuals comprising the senate. An average person who's born and raised on a planet might personally meet an alien maybe five times in their life, someone born and raised in space maybe three times that.

Planets are colonized and can be terraformed, but more often, a newly discovered world will be traded with an alien race. Terraforming is hard and expensive and doesn't always work as well as it should, and some worlds can't be terraformed at all, so it's a lot easier to trade it away to a race that can live on it as-is, most often for another world. If the other race has a world that suits humans in their pocket, that's ideal, but if not, three- and four- and more-way trades have occurred, or planets have been accepted for their harvestable resources, not their livability. No planet with tool-using life on it may be colonized or interfered with. The definition of intelligence and sentience varies a lot among different species, but the use of tools is pretty universal.

Ships dock at orbiting ports instead of landing, and passengers take shuttles to and from the surface. Ships are also required, under the 27th century's version of Titanic Laws, to have enough pod space for every person on board. Pods are small spacefaring craft, usually used to move between ships. A pod is to a ship roughly as a bicycle is to a car. Pods will burn up in atmosphere, and shuttles don't have the necessary systems for more than a few minutes of spaceflight. Ships are powered by the background radiation floating through space, and don't need much fuel (you go through fuel about the way a modern person goes through batteries -- buy a big pack for $40 and you're probably set for a couple of years). What's required is coolant. Between the outer and inner hull of a ship is a veinlike network of tubes which run coolant through them to dump waste heat, since the ship will generate a lot and a vacuum isn't very good at conducting heat away. This also functions as radiation shielding.

Orla is a spacer, born on a ship in a flotilla that made up a community, much like a small town. She spent a lot of time in zero gravity as a child, so she's smaller than average because that affects growth. She was blinded in an equipment accident at age 16 while learning to pilot. She spent several years working on a farm ship in her flotilla, but this was boring, so one day in her early 20s she had a friend shuttle her to the dock of a nearby planet and straight up stole a ship with three of her friends. They took it to a port of dubious legality and sold it, and Orla used her portion of the proceeds to buy her own ship (smaller and crappier, but all hers). She then bought audio-feedback technology for the piloting system and taught herself how to fly all on her own, already understanding the basic principles from her education before she was blinded. She took on her brother as first mate and began working as a pirate, smuggler, and general shady-person-for-hire, and so it's been ever since. She has a crew of six other than herself, including a pilot, a demolitions-and-weapons expert, two muscle-types, a grifter, and her first mate. When her brother left to get married, Orla promoted the girl she was sleeping with at the time, whom she herself is now married to.
Personality: Orla can be impulsive and impatient. The first reasonable plan she comes up with, she'll go with, and when she wants something she wants it now. She used to be a bit of a daredevil -- she once jumped between two airlocks without a suit as a teenager. That has mellowed somewhat with her disability, but traces of it can still be seen in her behavior. She's gotten more than one bruised shin or black eye from walking too fearlessly through a place she doesn't know. She'll usually refuse work if the payment isn't up front or immediately on delivery, partly because promises aren't worth as much as coin, but mostly because she just doesn't like waiting. Trying to get her to stand in a line is the worst. As part of all this, Orla bores easily and likes new things, so a life of travel suits her well. She likes adventure.

Orla finds it hard to trust people, and it takes a long, long time before she's not waiting for them to turn on her. This has built up over the years rather than being due to a specific incident. She has always tended toward self-reliance, being the youngest child with three older brothers, and there were too many little pranks played on her in the time when she was blind and working on the farm ship. She's always kind of waiting for someone to think it would be funny to trip the blind girl; she feels like an easy target. Most of her crew has been with her for years and she trusts most of them. Not all. This doesn't mean she'll cut them off completely or have serious problems with them, it will just be a small voice that questions it when she puts something important in their hands. If she can deal with something important herself, she will, which sometimes leads to her overwhelming herself or getting too micromanagey about something she should have delegated.

If her paranoia ever comes to reality, Orla will go full scorched-earth on someone. A crew member of Orla's has turned on her exactly once, and death was not enough to satisfy her. She utterly destroyed that person, then killed them, and a few of their friends and family members got some mysterious injuries around the same time -- the man's sister lost an eye and his widow walks with a limp. Given Orla's generous and democratic nature as a captain when happy, no one has tried to pull anything like that again.

Decisiveness, creativity, and intelligence are some of Orla's greatest strengths. She's very smart, able to think quickly and make connections, and her ability to learn something new is limited only by her listening speed (Orla doesn't read Braille or any other touch-text -- in an age when everything is digital and text-to-voice has been perfected, she doesn't need it). She's also a good strategist, knowing how to play to people's strengths and set up a fight to go her way before it ever happens, in which creativity also plays no small part. As for decisiveness, it feeds into her impulsivity somewhat, but Orla would rather deal with the consequences of action than inaction. If you're in a situation you don't like, just doing something will definitely change it, and the results of the thing you did will give you more information than you had before. Her greatest regret is the years she spent on that farm ship doing nothing because she was scared.

While impulsive, however, Orla is usually not reckless, especially with the safety of her crew. If something smells weird about a job, she's out and looking for the next one immediately. She doesn't give this much thought, so it doesn't conflict with being impulsive, it's based more on instinct. She'd rather deal with the consequences of finding a different job than the consequences of keeping one she didn't like because it was what she already had. Orla has learned to trust her instincts if they're speaking to her, because she knows she's probably picking up on something legitimate that she hasn't fully registered yet. It's better to figure out the exact cause later and act to protect her people right now.
CRAU: n/a
Skills and attributes: Orla has leadership skills and a level of base knowledge above what a modern person knows (on the same scale as an average modern person understands more science than an average medieval person). She can also change her hair color at will because technology. She has a small brain implant and nanobots in her head. The implant picks up a signal, and the nanobots pigment themselves (harvesting natural chemicals from her body to manufacture the pigments) and flow down the shaft of her hair. At the right angle, in the right light, at the right distance, you can still catch a hint of the natural red underneath when her hair is a different color.

Also, Orla is physically disabled. She has light perception and some color perception, but is otherwise blind. She uses a white cane and wears sunglasses to cover her eyes, which are visibly scarred.
First person sample: http://eudionet.dreamwidth.org/259026.html?thread=34064338#cmt34064338
http://eudionet.dreamwidth.org/143179.html?thread=21065035#cmt21065035
http://eudionet.dreamwidth.org/188550.html
Third person sample: http://throwitinabox.dreamwidth.org/128430.html