Hello, children! I'm Maddie, I'm 22, a poor community college student who is new to this shiny shiny steampunk world. I'm bringing Inara Serra, companion (not whore!) from the Firefly/Serenity world. In her canon, her position as a Companion directly and often explicitly involves sex, though she's still of a very high class of people. To keep her social status high in a Victorian world, I did some tweaking- Sex is not a technical part of the Companionship tradition, though it is silently accepted and recognized happening. I wrote roughly thirty two trillion paragraphs about her training in her profile, for those who are interested.
So, back to Inara- She's ethnically Eastern Russian and Italian, culturally Japanese (though growing up in a Companion House was very much it's own little cultural microcosm), and very quick to assimilate to other cultures. After the death of her mother, she has steadily traveled West. She is either the first, or one of the very first and few companions to have made it to the States thus far, but with Temples in France and Germany, some sort of influx into the States is really only a matter of time.
I've made some other tiny changes to her past- For example, canonly her temple was called House Madrassa- Considering Madrassa is an Arabic word, I changed her temple to House Hotaru, which means firefly :)
Other than those changes, her personality is pretty much the same, though she is more likely to keep her feminist opinions to herself in classier company- After all, she is being paid to be polite and pleasant company, which usually does not involve talking politics. She's grown close to the crew in the months she's been on Serenity, and I am looking forward to interaction with the FF crew!
As for other characters, if your character is upper class and of the more trendy, adventurous crowd, there's a good chance you'll be meeting Inara.
Jesus, that got very rambley, and I got sucked in by The Soup in the middle of writing it. Anywhoodles, I can be found at magrathea, a chr0i on aim and babysonfiyah@gmail.com (because someone has achr0i there, which breaks my heart). Hit me up any time!