Class: Scoundrel Rogue (Warlock MC)
Role: Striker
Alignment: True Neutral
Deity: The Traveler
Background: Early Life - Child Prodigy
Current Sheet
Snapshot:
Young, well-trained but inexperienced, bold, confident in her abilities, meticulous, eager to please, eager for challenges, until recently very obedient daughter, perfectionism, inquisitive, sly, manipulative, quick, desensitized to many inherently disturbing things, thinks lying and being lied is perfectly acceptable, energetic, impatient, task-oriented, wants to be treated as 'older' than she actually is, inappropriate, poorly socialized, dislikes younger children, cunning, morbid sense of humor, wants to become the best spy, but starting to question upbringing.
Physical Description:
Lena often appears as something of a puzzle to those who encounter her - on the one hand, her slight build and facial features lead many to think her even younger than her actual age; on the other, in demeanor and speech she usually behaves like someone several years older. Her half-elf heritage only further adds to the confusion.
The girl stands at about 4'10, a height she has maintained for at least half a year, and has a thin, sinewy build - more muscular than is commonly seen in children in her age group. her body has yet to manifest the usual signs of puberty have yet to any significant degree: her frame lacks any feminine curves, the slightest budding of breasts all but unnoticeable beneath ordinary clothes. Her skin is a dusky, medium-brown color, neither pale nor especially tanned. Lena's hair falls just past her chin, a dark green sometimes mistaken for black in poor lighting - another subtle sign of her fey-touched bloodline. Previously worn loose or tied back for convenience's sake, in a recent assertion of individuality the girl has taken to wearing it in a particularly unusual fashion - half dreaded and half loose, curling slightly around her face. Her eyes are a deep green, wide and large in proportion to the overall size of her head, and her ears, like those of most half-elves, are distinctly pointed.
The girl has yet to develop a completely distinct style of dress, though in the last year or so she has begun to pay more attention to such things. When working with her father she usually wore what he did - black and other dark colors when creeping around in the dark; ordinary, non-nondescript garments when trying to blend in with a crowd. Like him, she looks for things that allow freedom of movement, and lots of pockets and places to hide knives and lock-picks and other useful tools of the trade. That said, since having the chance to move about on her own in the world, Lena has found herself more and more drawn to the odd splash of bold color - greens especially. Sometimes the all black look makes her feel badass - other times it seems like a bore, too much of the same old, same old.
Personality Description:
Intrepid and bold - in Lena the usual near-fearlessness of youth was combined with years of intensive training and affirmation that yes, she really is good at the craft she was taught, better than men twice her age, a prodigy. She believes it, believes that she is skilled and ready to face the many challenges waiting out there in the world. This isn't arrogance, exactly - more like a lack of painful experiences or mistakes under her belt to cause her to doubt herself or exercise much caution. In truth, the idea of some serious injury or even death happening to her is, really, merely an idea: something that she is aware of, but also something that doesn't feel real, or possible.
That said, she is nonetheless careful, meticulous in her work as in battle - not cautious, but exacting in the standards she sets for herself. To Lena, it's not enough to get a task done - it needs to be done right, exactly as she was told to do it, exactly as it ought to be done. Until very recently, she was almost always dutifully obedient to her father, working hard to please him and to meet his expectations. The concept of just doing something to get it out of the way is foreign to her; if a task isn't done well, as close to perfect as she can manage, it will bother her immensely, oftentimes far more than it will whoever it was the task was being done for.
The girl is also very inquisitive and observant, both by nature and as a result of years of training in that direction by her dear papa. She can also be quite sly, manipulative, and deceptive, the limited empathy of childhood having been actively encouraged and channeled in this regard. She quite frankly doesn't see anything wrong with lying or using people to get what she wants. By the same token, with very few exceptions (her brother, really) she wouldn't be upset to learn someone had done the same to her. It's just how you interact, as far as she is concerned.
She can also be described as energetic, and impatient when not actively occupied with something that requires patience in a particular way - Lena can sit motionless for hours watching someone if that is what she was told to do, but if given the time for herself and told to 'wait' she will start climbing walls within ten minutes. She hates not having a task, something to focus on and get done, something to distract her.
Lena is polite, and rather adult-sounding in conversation much of the time, a result of spending very little time around any other children besides her twin. On the other hand, she can also be quite tactless and blunt, oftentimes failing to realize she said anything inappropriate unless or until it is pointed out to her. Due to her rather unusual upbringing and the personalities of her parents, talking and even joking about death, killing, sex, and all kinds of misfortune and calamities quite openly is perfectly normal to her. Coming out of the mouth of a child especially, this tends to perturb others.
She can occasionally put on a more exaggeratedly 'childish' persona if she must, but dislikes doing so and thus tries to avoid it. lena tends to have much more of a hard time interacting with children her own age than with adults, and she absolutely detests young children, who she sees as loud, annoying and useless "babies".
Background Description:
Lena Araxi Iktishaf entered this life as the offspring of two hard-working civil servants.
Her mother was a simple girl from a small rural village. Her family was large, the soil was poor, and there were always too many mouths to feed. As a result, as soon as she was old enough, the girl set off to make a living somewhere else in the world. Like so many others she found her way to a large city - the capital in fact, though she didn't know it at the time, never having had much of a chance to look at maps or read books or such things. She set right away to looking for work. One advertisement in particular soon caught her attention, the pay offered being much higher than that of the other jobs she'd heard of that she might be qualified to do. So the the girl, go-getter that she was, went right to the proper offices and announced her desire to fill the role - that of an Executioner. Her claim was met at first with some skepticism. Do you know your way around an axe? she was asked. The girl nodded and shrugged. I chopped wood for my father all the time, she replied. Being an executioner is quite a bit different than chopping wood, she was told. The girl was not deterred, so they agreed to give her a chance, a test run of sorts. The next morning, at dawn, a murderer was brought out to the gallows, a thin trembling wretch of a man. The girl picked up an axe and hefted it, nodding at her soon-to-be superior. She walked to the appointed spot, waited until the signal came, and then chopped. It really wasn't much different from cutting wood, the girl mused afterwards. Cartilage and bone did not offer all that much resistance, not to a properly sharpened blade. She didn't even frown when she finally noticed the thick spatter of blood on her boots. She was hired that day.
Lena's father, meanwhile, had a somewhat more fortuitous start in life - the youngest son of a prosperous, he was well-educated and well-fed in his formative years. Expected to help his older brothers in running the family business, he soon found the work to be quite a bore, and instead turned to less admirable pursuits. Within a few short years, he had become quite the con-man, his crew gaining some notoriety - this, in turn, eventually caught the attention of the local ruler's spymaster, under whose wing the young man finally found his true calling. He was ambitious, ruthless in his desire to climb up the ladder, such as it was, in that particular field of expertise. Unfortunately, a moment of miscalculation on one of his earlier missions led to a permanent injury which, while not completely crippling, greatly limited his abilities. He became a bit bitter and introspective, musing about how much he had lost by coming to the world of espionage so late in life - youth is wasted on the young, he would sometimes say. One day, while taking care of some meaningless, routine task he found himself at an execution. It was not the unfortunate situation of the convict that drew his attention, but rather the woman who decapitated him - a half-ef like himself, and the way she swung that axe just set something stirring in his loins. It was love at first sight.
Several years later, two children, twins, were born of that union: Lena and Lionel. Lena, born a few minutes earlier, was always better suited to the lifestyle of her family - less sensitive, less dreamy-eyed and drawn to books, more eager to please her parents. She was three when her mother took her along to an execution for the first time: she sat on the edge of the wooden platform and stared, wide-eyed and silent, sucking her thumb. A few months later, at a similar event, the toddler took advantage of the momentary distraction of adults around her, afterwards, to poke curiously at the now-detached head of a different convict. He was a tiefling, and the small child found those horns quite fascinating.
It was Lena's father, however, that truly shaped the girl's development. Fatherhood gave the spy opportunity to revisit his old idea - that it was his late discovery of espionage that had so fundamentally limited him. Lionel, it was clear quite early on, was neither suited nor interested in following his father's footsteps. Lena, on the other hand, proved quite malleable in that regard. He gave her lockpicks instead of toys to play with; taught her to detect magic and non-magic traps, and how to disarm the latter. Games includes following unsuspecting strangers, or losing a tail - her father - when being followed herself. She learned to thoroughly search a room, then put everything back in its place so that even the most astute observer would not realize anyone had been there. She learned to move silently, to scurry around rooftops and tight tiny spaces, and memorize entire conversations verbatim, and so much else. Her mother approved: the woman simply wanted her children to have good steady jobs that would keep them fed, and her husband, after all, made a good enough living - why shouldn't their daughter do the same, if she had the knack for it?
Lena had few friends, save for her brother. The two were near-inseparable. When they were young they created their own strange creole of a secret language. Later, as Lena got older and spent more and more time training with her father, and Lionel spent more and more of his time absorbed in his ever-growing pile of books, they would always find each other, come evening, exchange stories about their day. The strange man she followed right into his house, the wizards he read about and dreamt of joining, a funny song overheard, a stray cat discovered, minutiae. Sometimes they would play-fight with real blades, for there were innumerable axes and knives laying the family home, fascinating things to curious children with far too much energy to expend. When their father caught them he said nothing; he merely began to teach his daughter to use them in earnest.
Eventually of course even this semblance of childhood, such as it was, had to come to an end. It began when her brother announced his intention of truly becoming a wizard - that is, of going to join and study with the wizards of the academy at the tower. Lena knew that it was right for him, but nonetheless she hated the decision, hated being separated from the one person who had always understood, her other half, her mirror. The house felt empty without him there, even if he had been buried silently under piles of books most of the time. When, not long afterwards, her father proposed that she go on her first solo mission, Lena grasped onto the prospect with desperate enthusiasm, eager to distract herself with the work. Shortly before she was to leave to begin her work, her father took her to meet a man he'd met in the course of his work. Well, it looked like a man, but it was, in truth, something more and less than that. I was a great sorcerer-king once, the creature had said, its tongue slippery and cold. Now much of what I have is lost, and I wonder, but power is still mine to take and to give. Her father looked on eagerly. He can make could make you even stronger, better, you could go further and faster...and Lena listened, and nodded, and pushed away any doubts for she wasn't a baby, after all. She agreed, and bound herself in a pact, painful magic indeed. Then the man gave her a blade, an ink-black dagger that felt cold as ice in her hand, and he left. She was the same as she'd been before, and she was not.
Much of what she had to do, in the end, was not especially dangerous work. She watched and listened and figured out where what she needed was, and who could get it for her: scholars at a particular library. Soon enough the had the youngest among them wrapped around her finger, giving her the information she needed because she was, after all, merely a sad little girl that very much wanted to save her poor father from some disaster, and here in the library was they key...
Mission accomplished, dead drop made, execution flawless. Of course, she'd never even thought about what might happen to those scholars, afterwards. Her father had not spoken of that, and she had not thought to ask. Every act had consequences, and in this case, it was thus: a young girl goes to say goodbye to the youth who reminded her so much, in certain ways, of her twin, his love of books - a young girl finds a corpse, throat neatly, professionally slit. Girl stares, unable to think.
Lena had never questioned, before, anything that her father had taught her, the life he'd been preparing her for. Now she simply didn't know, whether it was silly to feel guilty, whether something her father said could be utterly, completely wrong. She needed time, to figure out what it was she was thinking and feeling, and going home suddenly felt awfully, unbearably constraining. So she got on a boat, not the boat that was supposed to take her back home but another, sneaked and swindled her way on naturally enough, and went...somewhere, anywhere. Technically, she supposed, it was 'running away', but it didn't feel that way. Just a break, a little break, she told herself. She would be back before anyone even got worried.
Then, of course, the boat passed by a certain island, the girl heard a certain summons, and well...
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