Post by Elske on May 16, 2021 6:53:57 GMT
ELSKE
Languages - Common, Glacic, High Durish, High Brutish
Aliases - none
Aliases - none
Class(es) - Rogue
Ability - Instinct
Race - Human
Gender - Female
Ability - Instinct
Race - Human
Gender - Female
Height - 5' 8"
Weight - 150 lbs
Age - 79
Age - 79
(BELIEFS)
Elske's mother used to tell her there were two skies, and that when you died, you traveled through the first sky into the next world, where you had your second chance to live a decent life, before dying truly. Elske would like to believe she has a second chance waiting for her behind the first sky, but doesn't put much stock in it. She believes people ought to be decent to each other, but if they aren't, she sees no harm in being indecent to them in return, and has gotten into trouble for 'correcting' others for their faults before.
Elske's mother used to tell her there were two skies, and that when you died, you traveled through the first sky into the next world, where you had your second chance to live a decent life, before dying truly. Elske would like to believe she has a second chance waiting for her behind the first sky, but doesn't put much stock in it. She believes people ought to be decent to each other, but if they aren't, she sees no harm in being indecent to them in return, and has gotten into trouble for 'correcting' others for their faults before.
(PROFESSION)
Elske spent nearly thirty years as a cordwainer, working leather and primarily making shoes. But she'd been taught fighting and survival skills since a young age. These days she primarily travels and takes jobs as she feels like it or can find, often simply to learn the trade while spending time in a particular region. She's also fulfilled an apprenticeship for smithing, though hasn't worked it consistently, and has made a reasonable maid, caravan guard, and stablehand as well, in the past. She does occasionally steal, but she's particular about who from. However, she has been caught at stealing before, for a variety of reasons, and there are areas she now avoids so she has to evade fewer people who may recognize or remember her. She still sees nothing wrong with what she's done, given the circumstances.
(TEMPERAMENT)
Elske spent nearly thirty years as a cordwainer, working leather and primarily making shoes. But she'd been taught fighting and survival skills since a young age. These days she primarily travels and takes jobs as she feels like it or can find, often simply to learn the trade while spending time in a particular region. She's also fulfilled an apprenticeship for smithing, though hasn't worked it consistently, and has made a reasonable maid, caravan guard, and stablehand as well, in the past. She does occasionally steal, but she's particular about who from. However, she has been caught at stealing before, for a variety of reasons, and there are areas she now avoids so she has to evade fewer people who may recognize or remember her. She still sees nothing wrong with what she's done, given the circumstances.
(TEMPERAMENT)
Elske's primary reaction to anything is to be angry about it, but she swings between being a pessimist and a tired optimist depending on the day. She does believe in the general goodness of people, but simultaneously in their enormous capacity for unkindness. Thankfully, she typically feels comfortable handling the unkindness, either with a broken arm or a burned house, whatever she sees fit--though she doesn't often make a loud, verbal expression of her anger. Elske can be deeply protective, which is how she came to steal a herd of mistreated horses once, and an abused dog, several years later, and occasionally accept punishment for something she didn't do, to spare someone else who she believed was undeserving of the punishment.
(KNOWN MAGIC)
Curse of Longevity - Cursed by a lesser spirit with an increased lifespan. She has no idea how long she has left, but at nearly 80 years old, she appears in her 30s.
(EQUIPMENT)
Two Hatchets - two old, worn hatchets that she uses in typical hatchet fashion, but also to fight
Hound - Fenir - a massive, long-haired hound of brown, black and white, who she's spent years training in a variety of ways. He's neutral to strangers, friendly to people Elske allows him to socialize with, and can be a hellhound upon those she needs protection from, though she greatly prefers to keep him out of harm's way. She considers him her backup, rather than a weapon or a shield.
Rib Guard - a leather and metal guard on her lower right side, protecting an area missing several ribs
Hound - Fenir - a massive, long-haired hound of brown, black and white, who she's spent years training in a variety of ways. He's neutral to strangers, friendly to people Elske allows him to socialize with, and can be a hellhound upon those she needs protection from, though she greatly prefers to keep him out of harm's way. She considers him her backup, rather than a weapon or a shield.
Rib Guard - a leather and metal guard on her lower right side, protecting an area missing several ribs
(BACKGROUND)
Elskenari was born intentionally. Elske to this day doesn’t know what the local baron or his people threatened her father Faren with, but evidently it was something more valuable than herself and her sister. Faren had been an army general in his time, and an accomplished fighter. For reasons that died with him, the baron convinced him—and indubitably other such accomplished men—to sire children until he bred females, then to raise his daughters to be as adept of fighters as he could accomplish. Faren only had two living daughters, and he did as he was ordered to do. When her entire family fell sick, Elske wished not for the first time that her family lived closer to town (Dahliz). Those who could have helped had no idea their assistance was even needed. Elske was the only survivor, and as it happens, fled the region the day before the baron’s soldiers came to at last retrieve herself and her sister.
They themselves spread the rumor that Elske had killed her family, hoping her notoriety would make her easier to find. Elske escaped the notice of the baron for the next four years, avoiding notice boards with her face on them and civilization in general. She was doing well until she unintentionally made the acquaintance of the man who became her husband. It terrified her to settle into living in a house again, always fearing someone would come after her to burn it down or try to hang her again—as had happened more than once before—but eventually she managed. Until someone from the baron’s employ recognized her by chance--years past the last time she had feared going to market--managed to capture her while nearly killing her husband, and take her to the baron’s estate, where she came to understand the nature of both her birth and her childhood.
The baron wanted women trained in fighting—a spare few—because nobody suspected women of knowing how, and therefore they made more formidable weapons against men, and the monarchy he wanted to overthrow. She also came to understand that she’d been pregnant when she was captured. Elskenari hid it for as long as possible, but soon the baron noticed, as he was bound to do. Her husband pled for her release and was repeatedly turned away. Elske could only be glad he wasn’t killed. Her husband could not find a way to free her, and she refused to allow him to know she was pregnant, terrified of what he would do when he found out, trying to find her way out alone so not to risk anyone else’s life.
One of the baron’s men--one who had complained about her age (now nearly forty)--said she might repay them now with her child. But she wasn’t smart enough to find the way out of the merchants' cells, in which she had been kept since her arrival. She fought her labor, the healer and his assistants subdued her, and while she was unconscious they removed her child and stitched her back together empty. Elske’s rage was strong enough to keep her alive when the baron, realizing she had a stronger spirit than was tolerable for him, threw her into a fighting ring to break her of it. She was strong enough to survive the ring. But she wasn’t strong enough to find or save her son, and after a few years fighting for the baron’s sport, and hearing that her son had died of illness, she disappeared.
It had taken her as long to figure out how to escape the lower dungeons—the ones well belowground, where any uninformed visitors would never stumble across them—and she left more than a third of them in shambles when she did. She went to the nearest city, one populated mostly by elves, trying to convince them to help her overthrow the baron. They either wouldn’t or couldn’t, and Elske departed from them with despair. She got nearly all the way out of the forest before a rockslide threw her down an incline into a ravine she couldn't climb. She survived, but with significant injuries. She decided the time was ripe to not bother attending to them, and settled in to wait peaceably to bleed out. A Spirit found her there, and started to treat her injuries, waking her from her stupor. She tried to fight it off, not wanting its or any assistance, and as was natural it won that battle.
The Spirit healed her wounds and she hated it for it. She wanted to die and the Spirit hated her for it. The Spirit gave her then the curse of an unwanted longevity, and sent her on her way. She didn’t know how long it would last, only that now it would be far harder for her to pass on when she wanted to. She didn't even look her age anymore--she had lost ten or more years with its curse. After that Elskenari traveled, purposeless. She found a secluded city of drugar by dint of the fact that they took her to be a lost madwoman, and didn't want the bother of having some human die so close to their city, and spent several years with them because their lives differed so greatly from hers that they gave her no reminders of what she'd once had, or what once might have had.
They taught her a broader skill in fighting, and apprenticed her to a blacksmith when they found she was interested in it. However in time she felt suspicious again, frustrated, anxious, and with virtually no warning left again. She skirted heavily populated areas, and found others who shared her hatred of a particular man and region. The people she fell in with had found a small gem apparently magically useful somehow—Elske didn’t want to hear about anything magically related. They wanted to give it to the king, knowing he would put it to greater use than could they. They just did not know how to safely transport it to him. Elske asked if the gem could safely be inserted under her skin; she would transport it.
It took her six months to convince them; in desperation she invoked and won her right to request the scars she now wears under the hair on the right side of her head—a ceremony through which she earned their trust—and eventually they wedged the gemstone between her fourth and fifth ribs, where it could be only barely felt through the skin. Then Elske left again. Half the trouble was all of the baron’s spies. Not only did Elske not have access to the maps that would help her find the capital, she could not be seen going to them directly in case she was recognized. Several years later she ran into her husband again. She had thought he was dead, and they had grown apart. They went their separate ways. Then someone who knew from where she had come found her again, and took her captive, using magic to keep her calm and contained. Someone from their allies had betrayed them, but they knew only half the story.
They knew Elske had the gem in the right side of her ribcage but not where. They didn’t feel the need to kill her, not being necessarily evil people themselves, so they removed her ribs one by one until they found the gem, then dropped her at a nearby healer. The healer was unconvinced that Elske would survive. She proved them wrong, had the leather and metal guard made to protect herself, and learned how to live again. Needing somewhere to safely sleep while she was vulnerable, still relearing how to safely fight--and if she even could--with half of one side's ribs missing, Elske stole a maid's uniform from a clothesline and, unbeknownst to the owners of the house, employed herself to a local lord and lady.
Elske had intended only to remain--poorly paid but with a mattress and food--until she felt healthy enough to fight again, but while in residence she picked up a number of other useful skills. She learned how to talk like the nobles do, and talk like the maids do, as well as how a noble house is typically run and organized, and the average value for the finer things in life. Wanting to know how various houses differed from each other, Elske vanished as soon as she'd appeared, stole another uniform, and repeated what was now an experiment with another house, comparing the two. She did this on and off through the years, finding it absurdly easy to slip in with the other maids--some of whom were always coming and going--as she felt the need or impulse to.
A while after that the baron became more than an annoyance to the king, but a true hindrance, and Elske was able to rouse herself enough to at last make her way toward the capital. She is trying to learn how to associate peacefully with other sentient beings again, though she is doubtful she will ever again be able to trust elves. She never references the exact nature of why she lost her ribs, nor does she draw attention to or avoid the fact of their absence, though the how she’ll share if you ask correctly and she feels like it; explaining how she had lost the prized gemstone and all of its power is now irrelevant.
