Altered Realities - A Tour Guide

by sweetbutsarcastic

Basically what the title implies. Information about the series / authors notes / original character sheets can be found within. This is mostly for my own good, because if I don't have the information at my disposal in multiples, I'll forget or make a mess of everything. So, if you're curious or there's something you weren't sure about, this is the thing for you. IN PROGRESS!

4. Character Sheet - Ekaterina Spencer

One sentence description:

If you're curious as to whomst I'm picturing as each character, please refer to the 'cover pic' of their story. I'm shit at giving vivid physical descriptions -but I swear I'm trying to get better, I really am- so the cover photo being the OC in question (and maybe their pairing partner if I can figure out the finer points of graphic design just enough to slap a cover together) is what made most sense for me to do.

Ages & Backstory may have been toyed with here to make things fit and flow as cohesively as humanly possible. Sorry up front if this bothers anyone.

General

Full Name: Ekaterina Laurel Cassadine (Spencer)

Reason for name: Stavros gave her the name after Helena stole her from the hospital nursery. He liked Ekaterina and Laurel was derived from Laura, her mother.

Nickname: Kat, Kitty, Lala.

Reason for nickname: Kat and Kitty are shortened versions of her first name. Lala is kind of a play on her middle name and it's mostly her niece and nephews who call her this because her first name is kind of a fucking mouth full.

Age: 33

Gender: Female

Place of Birth: Port Charles, NY

Birthday: August 8th

Currently living in: Port Charles, NY

Species/Race: Human

Ethnicity: Caucasian

Blood Type: N/A

Occupation:

Sexual Orientation: Straight

Social Status: N/A

Relationship Status: Single

Status: N/A

Appearance

Body Build: Petite

Height: 5'4

Weight: N/A

Skin colour: Fair

Hair style: Long blonde hair that hangs down to below the middle of her back. She has curtain bangs and often wears her hair in a mess of wild and tight curls with a bandana or colorful silk scarf tied into her hair as a headband.

Hair colour: (Natural) Blonde, (Current) Bronde. It's a mixture of light brown and blonde.

Eye colour: Blue

Distinguishing Features: The first thing people tend to notice about Ekaterina is her hair or her eyes, to be honest.

Preferred Clothing: Sexy casual with a hint of "hippie".

Accessories: Left wrist covered in bangles and handwoven or beaded colorful bracelets, a necklace or three, flavored chapstick and a bandana or colorful silk scarf tied into her hair.

Health

General health: Seasonal allergies, migraines and occasional indigestion.

Posture: Not the best in the world. She's very slouchy and relaxed.

Any physical illnesses?: None, currently.

Any mental illnesses?: Nope.

Take drugs?: Nope. She has smoked marijuana a few times as a teenager, but that's about it..

Smoke?: Nope

Mental/Emotional State

Archetype: N/A

Mental age: Her literal age.

Act before thinking/Think before acting?: Act before thinking, tbh.

Emotion-wise, generally: N/A

Conversation

Way of speaking: Relaxed and calm tones, kind of softer spoken than her fraternal twin Lulu, with a very loud and infectious laugh.

Common conversation starter: N/A.

Swears?: Now and then, yeah. She calls them sentence enhancers.

Made-up words?: Nope

Made-up language?: Also nope. She is fluent in Spanish though.

Likes/Dislikes

Likes:

- Traveling

- Fresh fruit

- The way the sun feels on her face

- Sleeping late

- Swimming / Skinny dipping

- Rain storms

- Animals

- Kids

- Cardigans

- Cooking / Baking

- DIY anything

- Reading

- Spending time with her niece and nephews. She's really close to them all.

- Long hot baths

- Red wine

- Tequila

- Winning

- Playing cards

- Board games

- Freshly cut grass

Dislikes:

- Being told she can't or shouldn't do something

- Most sports

- long traffic jams and being stuck in them

- food stuck in her teeth

- Extreme cold

- The smell of gasoline

- Being talked over or down to

- Being ignored

- Cruelty of any kind

- Waking up extremely early

- Hangovers

- Tension

- Being confined in a small space

Hobbies

- Swimming / Skinny dipping, surfing, lazing around on the beach, reading, writing, listening to music, traveling, watching television, yoga, kickboxing, cooking/baking, DIY projects.

Habits

Strengths/Weaknesses

Strengths:

- Self sufficient

- Intelligent

- Level Headed

- Nurturing

- Quick thinking, resourceful

- Witty

- Empathetic

- Mellow

- Confident

- Spontaneous

- Good sense of humor

- Protective

Weakness:

- Loner

- Very private and closed off from the ones she's closest to because she doesn't want to be a burden or a disappointment somehow.

- Stubborn

- Pessimistic

- Impulsive

- Holds grudges

- kind of spiteful sometimes

- Absent-minded

- Temperamental

- Easily irritated

- Sarcastic

- Petty

- Uninhibited

- Blunt / Outspoken

- Acts before thinking

- Reckless

Skills/Abilities

Fluent in Spanish. Knows how to perform maintenance on a vehicle and is very good at thinking on her feet while keeping calm and clear-headed in an intense or risky situation. Can pick locks and hotwire vehicles. Got the 'gift of the con' from her deceased father Luke though she only uses it when she absolutely has to. Can hold her own in a deep conversation.

Self published erotica novel writer.

Cooking and baking are two skills that anyone who knows her would not associate with her but she happens to be very, very good at.

She's very good at photography.

Education/Intelligence

Education: College graduate.

IQ:

EQ:

Secrets

Sometimes she wonders if the lies Stavros told her in the six years he raised her aren't just a little true and Lulu really might be the preferred twin. She'd never say it because she really does love her sister, but sometimes she wonders about this.

When Logan first started dating her twin, Ekaterina may or may not have had a bit of a crush on him that she masked with sarcasm and their back and forth banter. She does still feel a tangible connection to Logan that she can't explain, but she's wary at best.

Even though she hadn't been home in years, she somehow felt it right before her mother Laura called to tell her about her twin Lulu slipping into the coma due to her brain tumor. She knew it and when she hung up with her mother, after she booked a ticket on the first flight back, she got drunk on cheap tequila, really good and angry and she trashed her apartment in anger because she felt like it wasn't fair, like Lulu shouldn't have been the twin with the tumor and the coma.

Luke wouldn't ever admit it out loud, but he's always felt a deeper fatherly bond with Ekaterina. As a result, he always seems to sense whenever she's going through it and will randomly call out of the blue to check on her. Ekaterina hasn't ever told any of her other siblings this, but she kind of gets the feeling that even if no one else did, her father really and truly preferred her to her twin. She doesn't say anything because A - she'd never hurt Lulu like that and B- it just feels good to feel important and she doesn't want to share the feeling. As a result of this, Tracy makes a point to call Ekaterina and get her to come back to Port Charles shortly before Luke passes away so that Ekaterina can have one last quiet sit in with her beloved father.

Fears

It's not so much a fear as it is a feeling of complete and total inadequacy. Like she can't measure up to any of her siblings or either of her parents and she struggles with it a lot, but privately because it's just entirely too hard to talk about or explain to anyone else.

Confined spaces

Rats/Mice

Spiders

Deep water

Dreams/Goals

She wants to settle down. Put down roots somewhere permanently. She wants a family too.

To have one of her self-published erotica novels get on a best seller list. To become a published writer.

Views/Opinions on...

Government: She doesn't care for politics.

Religion: Considering she's angry with God at the moment for some of the things that have happened to her personally or her loved ones, yeah. She's not overly religious.

Economy: We're all probably fucked.

Technology: She kind of hates it because she makes it a point to stay as tech free as humanly possible.

Favourites

Food: Chef salad with ranch dressing, any and all fruit, strawberry milkshakes.

Colour: Pretty much any pastel or soft color.

Animal: All.

Number: N/A

Holiday: Halloween

Season: Fall

Time of day: Sunset

Thing to watch: true crime documentaries, horror movies, old movies and soap operas.

Movie: The Notebook, An Officer And A Gentleman, The Breakfast Club.

Show: She's not really that big into watching anything. Oh, but soap operas. Those are her guilty pleasure.

Type of art: All

Genre of music: Classic Rock and oldies

Genre of literature: Erotica

Genre of shows: Documentaries, Historical or Crime dramas

Genre of movies: Horror, Romance

History

Ekaterina Laurel Cassadine ( Spencer) was born Lena Lynn Spencer on August 8th in Port Charles, New York to parents Luke and Laura Spencer. She is the youngest in a set of fraternal twins (non-identical) at just 5 minutes younger than her twin sister Leslie Louise (Lulu). The night before Luke and Laura were to take their twin girls home, Helena Cassadine broke into the nursery and made off with Ekaterina. She originally intended to place her on the black market for adoption / sale, but when Stavros saw the infant, he got attached. And given that he was Helena's golden child, she wasn't about to cause him any pain, so for the first six years of Ekaterina's life, she was raised by Stavros as a Cassadine and the man absolutely doted on her. During this time, Helena saw an opportunity to brainwash another of Luke's offspring and so she began to lie to Ekaterina and explain that "mommy left daddy and baby because she wanted to go off and start a life with a new family. A family she thought was better." and if you're wondering, this did work. And later down the line, it did/still does cause issues and doubt from time to time.

Ekaterina was 6 when Luke and Laura finally closed in on where Helena had taken her, because Helena had been taunting them with this knowledge for years to make them -Luke in particular, do her bidding. Luke and Laura show up at the compound where there's a fight between Stavros and Luke. Luke ends up winning the fight and leaves Stavros to die. Helena had vanished earlier on during the altercation and left Ekaterina behind. Luke is the one who kicks in the door to her bedroom and picks her up, carrying her out of the compound. Upon the return to Port Charles, Ekaterina has a great deal of trouble accepting what's happening and she openly rebels at every turn. She's constantly questioning this man who calls himself her father and the mother who supposedly ran out on her and the man she was led to believe was her father. She and Lulu don't really bond at all upon Ekaterina's arrival. Not only are they opposites, (Lulu is the more outspoken one at the time and not only that but, she's jealous that her parents seem to be doting on Ekaterina the way they are so she's a little bully) but Ekaterina has to learn to differentiate between the lies she was told for 6 years and what she's now being told is the truth.

Things don't really get less tension filled for her until she's around 8 and she hears her mother crying after they've had a heated argument over Ekaterina running away from her and out into traffic because she thought she saw her "father" Stavros going into one of the office buildings nearby. She starts to think back to everything she's been told and shown since she was brought to Port Charles and the talks she's had with the child therapist that Luke and Laura have her seeing twice a week and something just clicks. She wanders into Laura's room and curls up in bed with her mother, snuggling against her as she starts to cry too. From then on, she's a lot more open to forming a bond with her parents and siblings. Lulu and Ekaterina start to become closer, but they're never the twins who are so close they're inseparable, truth be told. When they're in grade school, Lulu sort of takes on the protective role over her twin because for years, Ekaterina is more or less the more soft spoken of the two.

As a teenager, she's sent to live with Luke and Tracy, same as Lulu. By now, it's blatantly obvious that Lulu and Ekaterina are nothing alike. With Lulu rebelling and acting out more blatantly as a reaction to being sent back to Port Charles to live, Ekaterina seems to be the more well behaved of the two. However, she does indulge in her own share of shenanigans, but she's smarter about it. She's better at being sneaky and covering her tracks. She makes quick enemies with Brooklyn Cerillo and Maxie Jones and in the case of Maxie, there is more than one or two physical altercations because of this. It's merely because Maxie kind of 'bullies' her sister and like Lulu did for her, she's watching her back.

In high school, the most mischief Ekaterina was likely to indulge in was smoking a little marijuana now and then, having the occasional nip of tequila while sitting up late at night when she couldn't sleep and playing cards with her father, Luke. These late night card games were a huge source of father daughter bonding between the two and continued well into Ekaterina's college years. Upon graduation, Ekaterina chooses to leave Port Charles and kind of go on her own little adventures for a while. She travels all over, never really settling in one place for very long before she feels the urge to move on all over again.

Around 06, she winds up returning to town to visit her family and given that this is the first time anyone's really seen or heard from her in quite some time, they're all shocked at the massive change and the amount of growing into her appearance and personality she's managed to do. Lulu is dating Logan and from the word go, it appears as if Ekaterina and Logan don't get along well at all. (Spoiler alert, Logan was being an ass because he felt serious strong feelings for her but he was with Lulu and not about to do anything that might mess this up for him again, so the banter and snark between the two was mostly both of them masking very very strong feelings.) However, when everything plays out between Lulu and Logan, Ekaterina is the one who finds him and makes the call that saves his life. She nearly wrecks trying to get him to an emergency room, but she gets him there and Scott is waiting. After Logan is admitted and placed in a cubicle in the ICU, Ekaterina does slip into his cubicle long enough to tell him that he needs to wake up because she doesn't want to live in a world without him in it before leaving, which Scott overhears. She leaves without a word and presumably, this is the only time she visited Logan in the hospital before he's released. It actually isn't and Scott becomes aware of this when he's coming to check in on his son and finds her leaving in a hurry on the night Logan wakes up.

A week later, Ekaterina leaves town again, doing the nomadic and unsettled thing.

As she moves around, she takes different odd jobs to keep money in her pocket and she starts writing the first of a series of erotic novels that she'll go on to self-publish. Around 2011, she returns to Port Charles again to visit her sister and the rest of her family and meet Lulu's new husband Dante for the first time and while she's there, Lulu kind of subtly hints that she could have the same thing for herself if she'd just go find the one that got away, revealing that Lulu did in fact read between the lines of all the bantering and snark and all the sarcasm that passed between Logan and Ekaterina a few years prior. Ekaterina laughs it off and tries to pretend like she doesn't know what Lulu is talking about, but Lulu insists. She promises to at least consider the idea before leaving town again. 2012 sees the second installment of her erotica series and the realization that the leading man in said series is basically Logan with a different name. She tries to convince herself this is not the case, but after Laura, Tracy and her twin read the novel before she prepares to self-publish a second time, all three women point out the fact that the leading man reminds them of someone. Laura and Tracy aren't entirely sure who, but Lulu basically asks her sister "Oh my god, is he Logan?" and the conversation when Ekaterina was in town visiting last arises yet again. Ekaterina finally admits that she does feel something but it has to be silly because nobody knows "That's it, he's the one." after barely knowing a guy for half a year. She also tells Lulu that she's still got a lot of stuff she wants to get out of her system. Which isn't a lie, but it's not entirely the truth, either. The biggest reason she won't just go to him is that she's afraid she's not enough. That she'll never measure up or be what he wants or needs from her. And she just doesn't want a potential relationship between them to end in disaster. She'd rather have her fantasies than have them shattered by reality.

She's writing her fourth book around 2014 when she returns to Port Charles for a brief stay with her father and Tracy to kind of pick herself up after the end of a long emotional rollercoaster of a relationship with a guy that Luke told anyone who would listen he wouldn't piss on if the guy were on fire. She bumps into Lucy and Scott out at an event in the park and Lucy mentions having read all of her books. Scott is kind of giving her that solemn and knowing look. He's heard Lucy listening to said books as audiobooks on her Kindle and yes, he's put two and two together himself. As a parting jab, Scott stops Ekaterina and tells her that Logan's doing great but he could be a lot better to which Ekaterina responds with her own little jab about "I thought you were against your son getting involved with a Spencer woman, sir." and Scott just kind of shrugs. He hasn't forgotten the panic or the rush the young woman was in to get his son to a hospital and get him medical attention on the night he almost died.

Logan returns to town just after Ekaterina's left. And Lulu, who is done with the whole two ships passing in the night thing, she corners him up and explains everything. She presents one of Ekaterina's old journals and Ekaterina's current erotica series as her supporting evidence. Logan admits that he felt something too but he thought he loved Lulu at the time and wasn't willing to mess up what they had. He asks where Ekaterina might be and Lulu has to tell him that she doesn't really know, "Kat just comes and goes. She takes after Luke in that respect."

Logan does try to track her down to finally have that confrontation he's been longing to have since he woke up from his coma to an empty hospital room and the lingering scent of cotton candy body spray he knew she preferred back then. All his attempts are in vain and every place he thinks she might be, she's either just left or hasn't been there yet.

2021 sees Ekaterina living in Aspen, Colorado and working at a popular night spot as a bartender / hostess as she works on another installment of her series as well as outlining the beginnings of a suspense type crime novel she's gotten an idea to write recently. She's just kind of living her life and it's revealed that she diligently mails each of her nieces and her nephews Christmas presents and birthday presents regularly. That she calls to talk to her mother -often on video call and that she and Lulu as well as her brothers have a group text going back and forth. It's even revealed that Lulu has brought her new fiance and her children out to Colorado to spend a week during the past summer.. However, her longest and most frequent calls are the ones made to her father Luke, who is rumored to be in Austria with Tracey, the two of them having realized that their marriage worked so much better when they were away from Port Charles and the never-ending stream of drama and past ties coming back to bite them both.

On New Years Eve, Tracey shows up at Ekaterina's lake-front cabin to tell her about Luke's death on her way back to Port Charles to tell the rest of Luke's family. Ekaterina decides to return to Port Charles and arrives the day after Tracey.

Presently, Ekaterina is working on three writing projects, the third being a book to immortalize her father's various misadventures over the years, only fictionalized. She's helping Ethan and Johnny run The Haunted Star where she can often be found behind the bar mixing cocktails of her own creation. She's also working on tracking down Victor because she wants revenge for her father's death in Austria, but nobody really knows this because it's not like she's going around and advertising "Oh hey, by the way, I'm going to war with the Cassadines."

Personality

See strengths and weaknesses. These are the best way to describe her.

Relationships

Family: Luke and Laura Spencer, parents. Nicholas Cassadine (Half brother), Lucky Spencer (brother) and Lulu Spencer ( fraternal twin, non identical), Ethan Lovett (half brother). Charlotte Cassadine - niece via Lulu, Rocco Falconeri - nephew via Lulu, Ivy Holloway - niece, via Lucky, Spencer Cassadine - nephew, via Nicholas.

Love interest: Logan Baldwin

Friends/Allies: She's kind of a loner, truth be told. Her closest actual friends are/were Georgie Jones and Adele Corinthos. She spent nearly all her time with those two.

Enemies: She loathes Brooklyn. When it comes to Brooklyn, her hands are rated E for everyone.

Quotes

N/A

Trivia

N/A