I'm not really new to Crack Den, having been here off and on for a while but I've been making another effort to get back into roleplay and thought I'd post here.

Alexis Landry’s roots run deep in Laveau, the Bayou town she’s never truly escaped, though life keeps trying to shake her loose. She grew up in a weather-beaten house on the swamp’s edge, raised by her mémère, Claudine, a healer known for her gris-gris and whispered talents. People came from miles around for Claudine’s potions and charms, but she always warned Alexis that the Bayou demands its dues. Under her grandmother’s watchful eye, Alexis learned to listen to the swamp and to the secrets it held in every shadow and rustle of Spanish moss.

Katrina changed everything. Alexis’s parents, who had gone to New Orleans to check on family before the storm, never returned. She and her grandmother searched and waited, but the rising waters swallowed any trace of them. After the storm, it was just her and Claudine, weathering the years in a town that grew more ghostly by the day. Laveau, once vibrant, was now just a collection of half-sunken houses and abandoned lives, with most folks moving on. But Claudine held fast, teaching Alexis what it meant to endure.

When Claudine passed away, Alexis lost more than family; she lost her connection to that old house, too. The walls began to sag, the roof leaking with each new rain. Without money for repairs, Alexis had no choice but to move out, ending up in a converted garage-turned-studio in the ruined streets of Laveau, a far cry from her childhood home. She took a few precious things with her—mostly her mémère’s books, bound in cracked leather and smelling of old herbs and secrets. Those books are her only tether to her past now, and she reads them by candlelight, sometimes sensing her grandmother’s voice in the pages.

Alexis makes a living dancing at the Serpent’s Den. It can be a rough place, and the regulars aren’t always the easiest to deal with, but she’s learned how to move confidently, blending her brand of charm with a flash of mystery. Some of the faces watching her are those she grew up seeing in Laveau when she was a child, which doesn't make it any easier. Dancing on the steel poles may be a far cry from the quiet ways her grandmother once taught her, but it’s a job, and in Laveau, that’s about as much as anyone can hope for.

Some nights, when the bar closes, and she’s walking back to her tiny apartment, Alexis feels the pull of the Bayou as strongly as ever. She sometimes wonders if she’s meant to leave, but deep down, she knows something has kept her here. Maybe it’s the books, filled with mémère’s handwriting and notes scrawled in the margins, a library of old Cajun remedies and folklore. Or perhaps it’s the sense that her family’s spirit lingers in these swampy shadows, part of a story that’s not finished.

So she stays, holding onto memories and hoping to understand what Claudine saw in the Bayou’s mysteries.