Hannah Snell/James Gray

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Hannah Snell/James Gray; Marine Private
Topic Started: 28 Mar 2008, 01:56 PM (244 Views)
Aztec Gold	28 Mar 2008, 01:56 PM Post #1
Administrator Posts: 509 Group: Heathen God Member #21 Joined: 30 September 2007	Username: James Gray How did you find out about AG: already here Given Name: Hannah Surname: Snell Nickname: Her alias is “James Gray” but she used to have the nickname “Molly” and now most people call her “Deadly Jemmy” or just “Jemmy” Age: 28 Sex: Female Ethnicity: English Country of Birth: England Current Whereabouts: Port Royal Occupation: Private in the marines Former Occupation(s): N/A Parents: father Samuel Snell and mother Mary Snell Siblings: Susannah, George, Arthur, Emily, Henry, Laura, David, Elsa Children: Susannah Summs (dead) Avatar: Hilary Swank Description: Hannah looks like a boy. This is because five years of cross dressing and taking on a man’s way of moving have made it natural to her now and she doesn’t have to think about it. She walks like a man and expects everyone else to get out of her way. She lounges like a man and moves her arms like a man. There isn't anything feminine left in her behaviour. She also has a soldier’s bearing which is very straight and methodic. Because she walks the walk and talks the talk so convincingly it makes it much easier to accept her more delicate features and short height of 5’4’’ as the boy named James Gray. She does have a light skinned face that is very smooth for a boy. She is taken for a young man in her late teens because she does not have any stubble. She pretends to shave every morning with a razor to make it more reasonable why her face is always so smooth but she is really just running it over her face. She has a face that is rather thin with harsh and severe lines, it is very bony. Her teeth are white but a little bit uneven, and she has a very wide and expressive mouth, it is usually in firm line. She has green eyes with a really focused look in them and dark eyebrows that are fairly thick. Hannah has dark brown hair that she cut short like a man’s. It is coarse and thick and she usually hold it back in a tail. Sometimes it is in a queue, which is a short braid. And sometimes it is clubbed, which means it is wrapped around a little pouch and tied off into what looks like a little "club" at the back of her head. If she let it loose it would go to her shoulders. She always has a hat and usually her black tricorn, which is trimmed with white with a black and white cockade on the left fold. The hat is part of her uniform. If she is in a parade dress she powders her hair white with candle grease and flour. She has a good accent which shows she comes from a fairly good background. She pronounces her aitches and her gees and she can talk with a more proper language if she wants to, but she often curses a blue streak. She has a very low contralto voice which is in the same range as a man’s tenor voice, so her naturally deep speaking voice helps her disguise that she is a female. She is always in men’s clothing and would never be persuaded to put on a woman’s dress again. She is usually in the marine’s uniform, which is a short tailed red coat made of wool with lapels and cuffs that are white with a maddening amount of buttons. There are white leather crossbelts, too, and they carry her ammunition and her bayonet. She has a white waistcoat on underneath and a white shirt with a stock around the collar. She wears white breeches and stockings and black gaiters. She has ordinary buckled shoes on her feet. If she is not in the red coat she is in an off duty uniform, which is a white faced gray jacket over a checked shirt with a black stock. It has the same pants but brown gaiters. And she wears a red cap with a white flap that turns up in the front. Sometimes if she is on liberty she will also wear an outfit that is pulled together out of the marines "go to town clothes" in the barracks. It is basically ordinary clothing like any other man would wear. She has a thin and wiry body that helps her be able to pass for a boy in the uniform, she has very small breasts. Since she is not very buxom it helps, but she still has to bind her breasts flat to her chest with bandaging. It can be hard to keep that hidden but she has succeeded so far. She is just kind of careful and private about it in the barracks without making a big deal about it so that she won’t draw attention. She just makes sure she isn’t ever seen naked. She also stuffs the crotch of her pants with rags tied up in a stocking to give a bulge in the vital place. There are gunshot scars in her ribcage and her groin and she has a dozen smaller scars from bayonets in different places on her body. The palm of her left hand is scarred from burning. She isn’t shy and she has several friends with the marines. She is usually very charismatic but she always has kept her privacy about herself. It’s really easy to have friends if you always listen, so she is the one who listens usually. And her friends can always count on her for help if he needs it. She is usually very chattery and light hearted. She will joke a lot and she is very good at telling stories. Because she is constantly pretending to be a man she has become a good actress. She has a good memory and can take on a new role quite well. She doesn’t talk much about her past to anyone, because she knows that if she invents a story for herself that is too complicated she will get caught in a lie sometime and found out as a woman. Also, she deserted from the 6th regiment in the army, so if she were found out about that she could be shot unless she revealed her sex. So she has a lot of secrets to keep. The basic story that she tells people if they ask is that she was a London carpenter’s apprentice who was badly treated, and that she went to Portsmouth to become a sailor and joined the marines there. After that she can be open and tell the truth. She likes to be taken for granted because then that raises the least curiosity. One of the things that sometimes raises a few eyebrows whenever people think about it is that she never goes to visit whores. Of course she can’t visit whores since she doesn’t have the equipment, but most of the marines do so it is unusual for a boy like James Gray not to do it. She gets around that by pretending that it’s just because of strict morals and fakes a strong Christianity, although she doesn’t really believe in God very much. She is known to be very brave and a quick and strong fighter, which is why she has the nickname Deadly Jemmy. That is what her friends call her, or usually just Jemmy. Her reputation for courage from the campaigns in India came with her to Kingston and then to Port Royal. She isn’t afraid of anything except being found out. She can face any pain and she can even look death in the eye without flinching. She will fight anyone who challenges or insults her. And when she fights she is aggressive and vicious. But she doesn’t pick fights, she only doesn’t back down when they come to her. If she loses a fight she takes a thrashing and just deals with it. She is pretending to be a man but her loyalty to her chosen profession is not pretend. Her years of serving the King made her a staunch patriot and she will always follow her duty. When she first joined the marines she had a problem with authority, but it was taken out of her very quickly and she takes orders without any trouble. She is clever and quick learning. She has very sharp eyes and can see like a hawk. She is also very observant and watchful so that she is good at seeing things that people want to hide. She can read, which is a valuable and pretty rare skill, but she can't write except for her names. She could probably learn to write pretty quickly if she had the time and thought about it since she knows how the letters are shaped, but it would be very hard for her. Strengths & Weaknesses: Hannah is a very tough woman and she can deal with pain and keep on going. She is good at fighting bare handed since she is very quick and unpredictable. She is also good at shooting and fighting with a bayonet. She can fire four rounds a minute. She knows arms drill and all the duties of a soldier. She is a really good actor and she is intelligent with a photographic memory, plus she can read. She can’t write except for her name and she is pretty small, smaller than most men and less strong. She has a lot of secrets to keep and the biggest one is to constantly take care to conceal her real sex from her fellow Marines, which isn’t always easy. She has to bind her breasts and stuff her crotch with rags tied up in a stocking. She has to act a part 24/7. Every month she goes through really severe PMS, with out of control spurts of anger, anxiety and depression. She also has to hide the bloody rags that she stops her menstrual blood with and she has to be able to change them without anyone noticing. And since she wears white breeches that is a big monthly challenge. History: Hannah Snell is the daughter of a tradesman in the large and tightly packed city of Worcester named Samuel Snell and his second wife Mary Snell. Her father was a hosier and a dyer and had nine children from his two marriages. She was the eighth. Samuel Snell was a poor worker because there was a downturn in the textile industry. The Snell family struggled against poverty with so many mouths to feed. They lived in Number 25 Friar Street, just up from the city gaol in a small house dating back to the Elizabethan age. The house's beams bowed with the weight of centuries. Even though her family was large and poor they were pretty happy when she was young. They had a lot of relatives in Worcester and the kinship system kept them all afloat whenever things got too bad. Hannah was especially close to her grandfather who had the same name as his son Samuel Snell. He was once a Captain Lieutenant in the army and filled her head with war stories when she was a little girl. Hannah always liked to play soldiers with her friends when she was a child. Once when she was ten she organized them into a regiment and she wore her grandfather’s coat while she lead them through the streets of Worcester. Hannah went sometimes to lessons at a little school where she had a very rudimentary education. She learned to read but not how to write. Things got less happy when she got older. Some of her sisters and brothers died young and while the clothing trade went down the entire Snell clan got poorer. Her parents died when she was seventeen. She had no more family who could help her in Worcester so she went to London. She lived with her older half sister Susannah and her brother-in-law James Gray, a carpenter in Ship Street, Wapping near the docks of London. Hannah had to work to help support the little household and spent long hours spinning in a sweat shop. To get out of her hard life she started looking for a husband and made friends with a Dutch sailor named James Summs. Soon after she married him she realized she made a terrible mistake. James treated his wife with contempt and lived a high life of gambling and whores that he started paying for by stealing her things and pawning them for money. It got worse when Hannah found out she was pregnant and James despised his wife even more as her belly swelled and she became ugly to him. She was twentyfour years old and seven months pregnant when he abandoned her, taking everything she had left with him. He had stolen all of her money and possessions and she was left a beggar soon to have a baby. Hannah moved back in with her sister Susannah and then she had her baby which she named Susannah after the kindness and help from her sister. But Hannah’s little daughter was unwell and underfed and seven months after birth her daughter died. At first Hannah grieved bitterly but then she became more and more angry against the man who was the cause of all of injuries. Over the next few months she made a plan to go after James Summs and get her revenge on him. She decided to change her dress to man’s clothes knowing that she would be safer traveling that way and that she would have an easier time carrying out her plans. She cut off her hair and stole a suit of clothes from her brother-in-law and set out in secret to track her husband down using the name of her brother-in-law, James Gray. “He” followed the trail of James Summs to Coventry, but in this city she found out a problem with pretending to be a man. She was taken for a teenage boy and she was pressed under the name of "James Gray" into the Sixth Regiment of Foot in command of General John Guise. She was in Captain John Miller’s company. The army regiment was being sent to Scotland to put down the Jacobite Rebellion. James Gray marched to garrison Carlisle and then joined with the other soldiers chasing down the rebels who followed Bonnie Prince Charlie. Her career in the army was very short though since she angered the sergeant of her company. She was branded in the palm of the hand with B.C. for Bad Character and she was given a field punishment, she was shackled in irons and fixed to a gun wheel and left there for 21 days, although she was taken down at night. But after those punishments she was not going to stay in the army, especially not after she had been pressed to begin with and she decided to desert, running away from the camp in the middle of the night. She disappeared into the city where she went back to England and into Portsmouth. It was easy to keep from getting caught as a deserter because she just put a dress back on and became a woman again. She had to hide the brand of B.C. though, and she did that by carefully burning the palm of her hand so that the whole thing would be scarred and the brand wouldn't be visible. It hurt but she had always been good at putting up with pain, she knew she had to cover her tracks. Now that she was free again she wanted to look for traces of her husband in the port city since James Summs was a sailor. She spent a few months searching for him and eventually found out he was gone abroad to escape all of his debts. Hannah was determined to follow him but she couldn’t pay to sail on any ship. She was also close to starving and couldn’t get any job except whoring and she refused to do that. She dressed back up as “James Gray” again and “he” enlisted in Fraser’s Regiment of Marines so that she could travel. She was already used to the military life so she wasn’t afraid to put on a red coat again. She was assigned to a Navy sloop Swallow in Admiral Boscawen’s fleet that was sailing for India. She was a very good cook and good at household tasks and she was made into assistant steward and cook for the officers mess. Because of her feminine talents and also because of her very fresh, smooth and youthful face she got the nickname “Molly.” They were just teasing her for being a boy who hardly seemed to need to shave by calling her a girl’s name. But she wasn’t happy with the name Molly because she was worried someone might guess the truth. She found the man who came up with the nickname. He was one of her fellow marines, bad-tempered Cross Johnson, and she challenged him to a fight. Hannah had learned how to fistfight in her service with the army in Scotland. She was very quick and small so she was hard to hit back and she wiped the deck with him. After that she had a new nickname, “Deadly Jemmy” and was accepted among the other marines much easier. The ship sailed to Lisbon first where Hannah heard the news of her husband she had been hoping to hear. But she discovered her revenge had been taken away from her because he had been hanged in Genoa. She was never going to catch up with him now. But she didn’t know what else to do with herself and the marines kept her fed and clothed. She was taken seriously as a soldier too, she liked having the power of a man. She had friends with the marines and even though she was shaken up from losing her goal she decided to stay with the ship on her tour of duty and keep on being Private “James Gray.” The Swallow sailed out of Lisbon and stopped in Gibraltar and then sailed around the Cape of Good Hope to Mauritius where an invasion was planned by surprise. The plan failed and the invasion was aborted, the Swallow sailed away again without seeing any fighting and went to Fort Saint Davids in India. The marines on board were unloaded and went to fight with the British army forces and East India Trading Company men. They were laying siege to the French fort of Araapong and Hannah was in the front lines. She was nearly killed by the falling rubble when the enemy magazine in the fort exploded. She survived though, and saw the entire fort leveled to the ground with charges of gunpowder set behind the army. They were force marched to try and beat the soon coming monsoon season, Admiral Boscawen led the British soldiers on to besiege the city of Pondicherry. Many of the men were falling sick from tropical diseases in India including her commanding officer Lieutenant Wagget. The monsoon rains had started already although they weren’t there in full force and as they approached Pondicherry they had to ford a raging river that was unexpected in their path. They were being fired on by the French cannons in the fortified town and many of the men died trying to cross the river. Either drowned by the current or smashed by the French cannon fire. The army was shattered against the walls of Pondicherry and in the failed assault Hannah was shot in the groin. On the retreat from Pondicherry she could not treat the wound herself so she was forced to go to see the regimental surgeon or to die. The surgeon extracted the bullet and bandaged her wound and he planned to report her. But he was sick with malaria and in his feverish state he forgot all about the strange anatomy of the marine named James Gray. He died soon afterwards and her secret was kept. She was transferred from the Swallow sloop to another Navy ship, the mano’war Eltham. The ship sailed back to Fort Saint David and then sailed to Porto Novo where they were going to attack the French held town of Devicotta. The marines on board worked with army and EITC men again to storm the fortifications. The battle was intense. The rains had put out the powder for the muskets so that there couldn’t be any shooting and the fighting was bayonet to bayonet. But the French cannons inside the town were kept under awnings to protect their powder from the damp. They were firing constantly at the British men. The fighting at the walls was unusually vicious and many men were killed including many of Hannah’s friends. Hannah fought like a lioness among the front lines, she really earned the nickname “Deadly Jemmy” there since she was bayoneted a dozen times in the battle of Devicotta. She was sent to Cuddelore Hospital after the battle but again she didn’t allow the surgeon to treat any of them, she had to see to her own injuries. Since she did not have to extract bullets she could bandage her own wounds. She made a full recovery from her wounds and the victorious British fleet sailed away leaving the town of Devicotta under a new EITC garrison. They stopped at Fort Saint David first and then sailed back to Portsmouth in England where her tour of duty had started. Hannah was with the marines for two years now. She stayed on the Eltham and she was sent out again very soon after that. The marines on the Eltham were being sent to Kingston in Jamaica to fortify the garrison there and Private “James Gray” sailed with them. She was under Colonel Trombley in Kingston and was put in Corporal Dryden’s squad. It was a lot quieter in Kingston and she just served out regular duties on board the Eltham and in town, patrolling and guarding the town. After the pirate attack on Port Royal though, the garrison was short handed and Corporal Dryden’s squad was sent to reinforce it. Things weren’t really very different fromn Kingston in Port Royal and she just served out regular duties. But then everything changed and got ugly when familiar faces from her past came invading Port Royal, the East India Trading Company forces under Lord Cutler Beckett came to take over. Hannah remembered them from fighting with them in India and she did not have any good memories of them. They constantly mocked the marines and she remembered they were cowardly, it was the EITC men who turned to retreat first at Pondicherry when the assault failed. It was their fault that so many of her friends had died in India. After they took Devicotta the EITC was merciless against the townspeople and massacred them which made the army and marines disgusted with their bloodthirst. The EITC men in Port Royal were wearing uniforms that looked basically like the marines' which was a mockery. They caused more trouble than that for the garrison in Port Royal because after the marines' commanding officer Major Collins got in an argument with Lord Cutler Beckett the EITC leader demanded the resignation of Major Collins. Major Collins was a man who cared about the welfare of the marines and he had won their loyalty. Major Collins resigned, so the marines had lost their most beloved officer. They were under the command of Forsythe now and there was a lot of resentment against him. It was suspected that he had sympathies with the hated EITC. Everything just kept on boiling up slowly until finally it boiled over. All of the hatred grew into mutinous talk and many of the marines turned on their officers and fellow men with rebellion. “James Gray’s” squad with Corporal Dryden were among the mutineers. Hannah had to make a choice between her duty and her friends when everything exploded in Port Royal, and she chose the duty that she followed for four years. Sample/Past Roleplay: N/A Answer here if you give permission for a link to exist on the website to your bio: yes



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