Rezza Shami

Race: Human
Class: Beserker (MC Ranger)
Role: Primal Defender

Alignment: Chaotic Good/Neutral
Deity: None
Background: Sea of Dust

Conceptual Character Sheet

Snapshot: Survivor, ruthless pragmatist, set in stone values few but strongly felt, mental and physical scars, persistent, stoic especially in regards to physical pain and hardship, temper intense when triggered, can be brutally violent, distrusts good fortune and most people, lots of internalized anger and resentment, disillusioned, cynical pessimist, very reckless attitude towards death and serious danger, uses strenuous physical activity to cope with stress, repressed maternal instincts, very much has a soft spot for young children, virulently opposed to religion.

Physical Description:
Rezza stands at 5'6 tall, average in height for a human woman. Though quite athletic, her frame is very thin, the underlying structure of bone and musculature very well-defined. Hers is a leanness that speaks of many years of heavy activity and never enough to eat. Though more than moderately curvy, the woman's feminine features or heavily de-emphasized by the clothing she habitually wears - her gear is meant not to emphasize things like breasts but keep them covered and out of the way. Rezza's skin is light brown in tone, tanned from years spent outdoors in the sun. It is also covered in numerous scars. Two thick ones run down the lower part of her right arm. Another crosses her belly, a reminder of the time a beast's claws almost caused her innards to fall out. Less dramatic lines can be seen on her legs, her back, her neck, even across part of her forehead.

Rezza has thick, auburn-colored hair, unevenly cut and very rarely brushed. Sometimes she works in smaller braids through some of it, and other times she can't be bothered. Her eyes are a honey-colored kind of hazel. In general, the woman wears just about whatever the hell she can find that fits her frame and needs. Often her garments are in various states of disrepair, many times patched and threadbare.

Personality Description:
At this point in her life, Rezza by large has the mindset of a ruthless pragmatist, someone for whom survival in the short term in paramount and far more important than more abstract moral concerns, though she does have a set of values that she subscribes to strongly. She will fight against those she thinks deserve it brutally and without limits, though she will protect the people she feels ought to be protected with equal ferocity. Lies mean nothing to her, nor hurt feelings, but tangible suffering does have an effect, sometimes a rather strong one.

She tends to be very persistent in her determination once she decides on a course of action. Obstacles, no matter how dangerous or difficult, are unlikely to deter her or even give her pause. Given her apparent apathy/occasional desire for death and even pain, she tends to be a hard person indeed to intimidate. On the whole, Rezza is stoic, hardened both mentally and physically. Not only is she used to intensely painful experience, she expects them to happen, gets uncomfortable and antsy if things seem to be going too well. Though verbal insults hardly merit her attention, in other ways Rezza is easily angered. She can control her emotions up to a point, but if really pushed she is capable of losing her shite complete, regardless of the possible consequences of her reactions. Coupled with her general disregard of her appearance, these situations can make for quite the picture of a 'beserker' indeed. This isn't helped by the fact that she tends to lose her ability to speak when very upset or angry.

Rezza is generally is distrustful of people who haven't already proven their trustworthiness, and is even more distrustful of the world in general, of fate. She obviously harbors strong feelings of hatred and resentment for the Oestian empire, and its military in particular. Unsurprisingly, she has something of a soft spot for children, especially young children, though if they remind her of her daughter too much she tends to try and keep her distance, not trusting herself with the emotions that tend to bubble up at those times.

Overall, she can be described as disillusioned, cynical pessimist, with a rather reckless attitude towards serious danger. She doesn't like cities, has grown to be quite observant and tends to cope with stress by engaging in strenuous physical activity. Notably, Rezza refuses to worship any god: her view is that either they don't exist, or they don't deserve worship given what they've allowed the world to become. Instead she finds comfort of a sort in physical suffering - hunger, thirst, pain, exhaustion. It has a wonderful ability to utterly distract the mind.

Background:
Rezza was born in a small village near the border between what was once Harmon and Kent. The land there was harsh, close enough to the western wastes that eaking out a living on it was a perpetual struggle, though one its people managed for generations. The invasions from Oeste had changed much, however. Now there were marauding soldiers, raids and reprisals, forced relocation with little notice or reason given. The girl's family was forced to move in this manner three times before she reached adolescence. When she was nine, Rezza's father left to look for work further inland; he was never heard from again, the question of whether some misfortune had befallen him or whether he'd simply abandoned them never answered. Rezza worked hard to help her family get by - youth was no excuse from hard labor in such difficult times. She saw people die of hunger and disease and random violence and thought little of it, for that was simply the world as she knew it, and the stories told of a time before, when things had been so very much different and better only that, stories, daydreams.

She was fifteen when her mother died, and after that life only got harder. She had other family, of course, aunts and cousins, but everyone had their own bunch of mouths to feed and their own problems to be concerned with. Rezza became even more familiar in those teenaged years with hunger, with desperation, with working until your head was literally spinning from the lack of sustenance and rest because how else were you going to survive? She learned to keep her head down, and mouth shut. A few years later a man from a nearby village began showing interest in her, and making the familiar gestures of courtship. He was far older than Rezza ad not at all attractive, but after her initial shock of distaste, the girl began to see this as a sort of salvation, a solution to her biggest and most immediate problems. So she said yes, and she married and bedded him and moved into his simple hut. She still had to work hard, but she wasn't so hungry all the time anymore, and she had a place to truly call her own, and he didn't beat her all the time the way some husbands did, so Rezza was satisfied with her lot. A couple of years later she gave birth to their first child, a girl she named Lorena and loved in a way she had not loved anything or anyone before, with an intensity she hadn't known she was capable of.

This life, of course, did not last. When her daughter was two, a band of rebels, those few brave souls that still put up a resistance to Oestian rule, carried out a notable attack on a nearby army outpost, one typical of the guerrilla type actions the rebels were wont to engage in. The Oestian army responded with brutal, punitive raids against nearby villages. Rezza's husband was killed in one of these reprisals, and the woman herself was dragged away, kicking and screaming, by Oestian soldiers who obviously thought her attractive enough to kidnap and rape. Rezza was distraught, not on account of her own circumstances but because she'd been forced to leave her daughter behind in the care of a neighbor she hardly knew and certainly did not trust. The soldiers had taken her more than halfway towards the Oestian border when the woman finally decided that she would not let herself be taken any further, no matter what the cost. She simply couldn't stand it any longer. So she waited for an opportunity and made her move. This was the first time she had picked up a weapon with the intention of using it against another person. It was the first time she killed someone, too.

Blood-spattered, injured and half-starving, Rezza somehow managed to force herself down the same road the soldiers had ridden over with her in tow. Days passed, and she scavenged for food and dealt with her injuries as best she could, ignoring the pain as they oozed blood and then slowly closed over, healed. She had never traveled so far alone, and her sense of direction, unsurprisingly, was quite mediocre indeed. It took weeks for her to finally find her way back to her village - or, rather, the ruins of what had been her village, for she got there to find that the buildings had all been razed and burned. It was pretty clear from the lack of death and bodies that the remaining inhabitants had likely been forcibly moved rather than merely killed off en-masse, but when or where or how she did not know, could not begin to fathom. Despair overwhelmed her. Rezza had thought herself used to suffering and loss, but this was another degree altogether and the realization that she might never see her daughter again just filled her with such intense hopelessness. What was the point of this life, if all there was in it was misery over and over in different flavors and shades?

She gave up. It was not dramatic, not noticeable or notable in any way. A thin, haggard woman wondered down the side of a road, walked and walked until the soles of her boots were hardly there. She walked in a direction no one had reason to walk so far in, walked past village and fields and all signs of civilization. She walked as the earth itself around her seemed to dry up and die, until finally she walked right into it, death, the edge of the Western wastes. What can one say about that place? There is sand and yet more sand, flat and smooth and rippled in dunes, and the sun bears down so hard you can hardly breath for the heat, and then the winds begin to blow and grains of sand burn as they slam into your skin. She expected to die there. She was still carrying the axes she'd taken off of the Oestian soldier she'd killed, but what good would that do her, a mere woman or girl, against the beasts know to dwell in the waste?

She was attacked, and fought in a desperate frenzy - some part of her might have wanted to be killed and yet even so she could not bring herself to just submit, allow it to happen. She fought and she lived. It happened again, and again, and again. Sometimes she ran instead, hid, and somehow each time she came out of the encounter alive. She grew used to it all, the heat and the constant pounding headache and thirst, the sound of a dehydrated heart pounding madly in her chest, and burning wounds and the ever-present, gnawing hunger. It became natural. Eventually she found herself fighting a drake, and she won, and afterwards Rezza stared at what was left at the creature and realized she hardly knew what she had become and that she couldn't remember the last time she'd actually spoken words aloud.

She spent three years wondering alone on the edges of the Western wastes. Eventually she found that even this existence, in such extremes, no longer occupied enough of her mind to shut off the thoughts she wanted to avoid. She'd gotten too used to this primal kind of living, was no longer fighting tooth and nail all the time just to stay alive. No, she slowly realized, now she wanted more. Perhaps to try and find her daughter again. If that was as impossible as it seemed...perhaps she might try to join those mad rebels in their hopless cause. Perhaps it was not a desert beast but an Oestian soldier she was meant to be fighting, when death finally came for her. So Rezza walked and walked some more, out of the desert and back towards the known world.