Duo's characters
Mar 23, 2012 0:23:45 GMT -5
Post by Deleted on Mar 23, 2012 0:23:45 GMT -5
Name: Aranea “Ara” Spinner
Gender: Female
Age: 41 (Appears to be in her late teens/early twenties, time shenanigans to be addressed a little further on)
Elemental Signs (and where they're located): 1 Beast Sign (spider, black widow specifically), on her left shoulder blade.
Home Nation: Ilyamen
Appearance:
A tall, lanky, rather graceful woman, Ara stands at about 5’11” and weighs in at about 195 pounds. Lithely muscled, she bears more than a few scars that are clearly visible along her arms and hands, the results of a career of criminal behavior. A rather pretty young woman, she has a pointed chin and a rather prominent nose, noticeably crooked as the result of injury. As she has only a single sign, Ara is, for the most part, rather lacking in arachnid characteristics. What she has, however, are rather off-putting: the pupils of her bright blue eyes are eightfold as a spider’s would be, making eye-contact deeply uncomfortable. Furthermore, when she grins (which is frequently) her canines are visibly pointed and fang-like. These are capable of injecting a poison which, like the black widow’s, is intensely painful and immobilizing, if rarely fatal. Finally, beneath the long overcoat (more patch than original material at this point) and the shirt beneath it the skin of her back is marred by a bright red hourglass. However, for the most part her eyes are the most immediately noticeable bestial part of her appearance. Clothing-wise she prefers comfortable and flexible materials, though her gold-buttoned overcoat, filthy and tattered, is almost ever-present. Similarly, the wide-brimmed hat she wears is so ruined as to be little more than a scrap of cloth wrapping at this point. Finally, Ara likes to wear her dark hair long and without any particular style, growing deeply annoyed should it ever slip past her shoulders. When that occurs, she’ll often take a dagger to it herself.
History:
Born in Ilyamen in 976, Ara was the daughter of a Water sign mother and a Beast sign father. Or so she surmises, from the water sign the woman who left her in an orphanage bore on her left cheek and from the nature of her own sign. Ara has theories surrounding her own conception, but ultimately cares very little for her lineage (or at least prefers to appear that way). What is known for a fact is that she grew to adolescence in an Ilyamen orphanage. Even as a young girl, Ara realized she was rather cleverer than her peers, often solving puzzles while they played at games of hide and seek and tag. It did not take her very long to figure out that this afforded her certain very profitable advantages. She began to turn wits to currency very young-she is fond of reciting a scam involving a fence, whitewash and the free labor of her fellow orphans as her first business venture. According to Ara, this scam was conducted at age five
By the time she was sixteen, Aranea found the orphanage rather too restrictive. More to the point, she had earned too much of a bad reputation and alienated too many of her repeat victims for it to be profitable. More than that, the young woman had a burning desire for adventure. She wanted to see the world and leave her mark upon it. She desired riches, power and fame and she wanted to forcibly wrest these things from the world with nothing more than the clothes she left her orphanage with, the sign upon her back and the brains she had sharpened with an underhanded and profit-hungry childhood.
A child of the city, Ara spent most of these early years eking out an existence in Ilyamen. She was unwilling to brave the savagery of the Beastlands and frankly found the idea of sheerly physical competition quite tiresome. The lands to the north interested her, particularly Talen’sul, but the trip there was not even remotely economically feasible and after not more than a year on her own Ara found something that proved an even greater lure-The Great River. Tired of the monotony of petty scams and disappointed by her continued lack of greatness the girl turned away from the seediest bits of city underbelly that she could find and instead embraced the river. However, the life of a merchant ship hand was rather too tame for Ara and legitimate seafaring professions held little charm for her. In short, she wanted to be a pirate.
Naturally, Ara’s age and gender stood as quite brutal obstacles to this goal but she was nothing if not resourceful and less than a month after she set her sights upon the seas (well, river) Aranea was aboard a small, river-faring boat as a deckhand going by the name Adam. Not specifically a pirate vessel but crewed by shady enough folk, it took only subtle hints to get her new captain (a stern but rather foolish man) to try assaulting a small trade vessel from Ronduin. With that new success bright in their minds a career of buccaneering stood in the foreground for this crew of men of all signs and ages and only a single background: poor.
Of course, Ara would never be satisfied as a mere deckhand and through a series of trysts and alliances and mutinous whispers she had seized captaincy of this small vessel within a handful of years. No longer masquerading as Adam the deckhand, Ara was now the captain of her own riverboat (albeit one with a crew of all of six men) and had augmented her formidable mental talents with equally or more impressive physical ones. An exceptionally well-versed swordswoman, a skilled archer and with a talent for knives of all sorts and shapes Aranea blossomed into an exceedingly deadly and beautiful flower. Her dreams of grandeur were in no way curbed, however-stealing shipments of gems and medicine was only the first step in some vague, upwards social saunter.
Always on the lookout for a challenge Ara found herself taking graver and graver risks. None of those were greater than the clearly-mutinous water sign she made her second mate-Ronaldo. Ronaldo was not a stupid man, though neither was he clearly Ara’s intellectual match and she considered his presence an excellent challenge for her to overcome. This arrogance, paired with an accident and a single miscalculation would cost her deeply.
The only man that Ara trusted unconditionally was her first mate-a stoic, loyal Earth-sign named Bryce with whom she had grown up. When the tensions with Ronaldo erupted into open mutiny, Aranea was absolutely positive that this man would remain on her side. And he did not. Without a single loyal soul in the crew, Ara was in something of a bind. However, she situated herself in the bulkhead of a narrow corridor, ensuring that her opponents would be forced to confront her one by one if they attempted to utilize conventional weaponry. Comprised of water, storm, fire and earth signs, her crew had few other options. Certainly sinking the ship, burning it or incidentally electrocuting everyone involved were unattractive options and without a coast in sight Bryce himself could do little with his sign aboard a boat.
Thus the young woman’s arrogance and a tactical miscalculation had led her to a stalemate, but Ara was exceptionally talented at turning stalemates into victories. However, after an hour of the mutineers and the captain mutually scrambling to defeat the other in this game of wits, a freak storm sprang up around the little boat. Being most often at home aboard their ship the strange weather patterns and influx of demons had little bothered or been noticed by the crew of pirates, so the sudden appearance of this storm took them very much off-guard. Several crew members were lost overboard in the fresh-water swells, amongst them Ronaldo. When the survivors (including Bryce) entered the captain’s chamber to check upon Ara, what they found rendered them speechless. Trapped amidst the heavy overcoat and wide-brimmed hat that Aranea had used to mark her station aboard the ship was not the deadly, ruthless opponent that they expected but an exceptionally confused girl of approximately five years old.
Caught in one of the freak time-mishaps that plagued the land during these strange times, Ara had found nearly two decades lopped off of her physical life. Uncertain what to do in the aftermath of this odd occurrence, the formerly mutinous crew rather peacefully conveyed the damaged ship and their tiny captain back to Ilyamen. Here Ara found her life brought almost back to the start-she was once again an orphan, no longer fit to wield the sword she so prized or to captain her beloved boat. Still, tenacity is a virtue hand-in-hand with ambition and Aranea swore to bounce back from this new and strange obstacle. Indeed, if anything, it afforded her a new opportunity to approach her life with the adorable appearance and disarming, youthful innocence of a child and the experience of a veteran pirate.
Ultimately, Ara would come to ingratiate herself with a roughly middle-class merchant family as a maid and, in a particularly impressive display of foresight and manipulation, elope with this family’s father-figure (and, more importantly, just about every coin in their possession). From there it was a simple matter of ditching the man and scrambling off with his life savings. Armed now with more than twice her age in knowledge, a throbbing ambition once-thwarted and a comfortable sum of money Aranea is once more prepared to take the world for her own.
Personality/Quirks: Coming eventually
Gender: Female
Age: 41 (Appears to be in her late teens/early twenties, time shenanigans to be addressed a little further on)
Elemental Signs (and where they're located): 1 Beast Sign (spider, black widow specifically), on her left shoulder blade.
Home Nation: Ilyamen
Appearance:
A tall, lanky, rather graceful woman, Ara stands at about 5’11” and weighs in at about 195 pounds. Lithely muscled, she bears more than a few scars that are clearly visible along her arms and hands, the results of a career of criminal behavior. A rather pretty young woman, she has a pointed chin and a rather prominent nose, noticeably crooked as the result of injury. As she has only a single sign, Ara is, for the most part, rather lacking in arachnid characteristics. What she has, however, are rather off-putting: the pupils of her bright blue eyes are eightfold as a spider’s would be, making eye-contact deeply uncomfortable. Furthermore, when she grins (which is frequently) her canines are visibly pointed and fang-like. These are capable of injecting a poison which, like the black widow’s, is intensely painful and immobilizing, if rarely fatal. Finally, beneath the long overcoat (more patch than original material at this point) and the shirt beneath it the skin of her back is marred by a bright red hourglass. However, for the most part her eyes are the most immediately noticeable bestial part of her appearance. Clothing-wise she prefers comfortable and flexible materials, though her gold-buttoned overcoat, filthy and tattered, is almost ever-present. Similarly, the wide-brimmed hat she wears is so ruined as to be little more than a scrap of cloth wrapping at this point. Finally, Ara likes to wear her dark hair long and without any particular style, growing deeply annoyed should it ever slip past her shoulders. When that occurs, she’ll often take a dagger to it herself.
History:
Born in Ilyamen in 976, Ara was the daughter of a Water sign mother and a Beast sign father. Or so she surmises, from the water sign the woman who left her in an orphanage bore on her left cheek and from the nature of her own sign. Ara has theories surrounding her own conception, but ultimately cares very little for her lineage (or at least prefers to appear that way). What is known for a fact is that she grew to adolescence in an Ilyamen orphanage. Even as a young girl, Ara realized she was rather cleverer than her peers, often solving puzzles while they played at games of hide and seek and tag. It did not take her very long to figure out that this afforded her certain very profitable advantages. She began to turn wits to currency very young-she is fond of reciting a scam involving a fence, whitewash and the free labor of her fellow orphans as her first business venture. According to Ara, this scam was conducted at age five
By the time she was sixteen, Aranea found the orphanage rather too restrictive. More to the point, she had earned too much of a bad reputation and alienated too many of her repeat victims for it to be profitable. More than that, the young woman had a burning desire for adventure. She wanted to see the world and leave her mark upon it. She desired riches, power and fame and she wanted to forcibly wrest these things from the world with nothing more than the clothes she left her orphanage with, the sign upon her back and the brains she had sharpened with an underhanded and profit-hungry childhood.
A child of the city, Ara spent most of these early years eking out an existence in Ilyamen. She was unwilling to brave the savagery of the Beastlands and frankly found the idea of sheerly physical competition quite tiresome. The lands to the north interested her, particularly Talen’sul, but the trip there was not even remotely economically feasible and after not more than a year on her own Ara found something that proved an even greater lure-The Great River. Tired of the monotony of petty scams and disappointed by her continued lack of greatness the girl turned away from the seediest bits of city underbelly that she could find and instead embraced the river. However, the life of a merchant ship hand was rather too tame for Ara and legitimate seafaring professions held little charm for her. In short, she wanted to be a pirate.
Naturally, Ara’s age and gender stood as quite brutal obstacles to this goal but she was nothing if not resourceful and less than a month after she set her sights upon the seas (well, river) Aranea was aboard a small, river-faring boat as a deckhand going by the name Adam. Not specifically a pirate vessel but crewed by shady enough folk, it took only subtle hints to get her new captain (a stern but rather foolish man) to try assaulting a small trade vessel from Ronduin. With that new success bright in their minds a career of buccaneering stood in the foreground for this crew of men of all signs and ages and only a single background: poor.
Of course, Ara would never be satisfied as a mere deckhand and through a series of trysts and alliances and mutinous whispers she had seized captaincy of this small vessel within a handful of years. No longer masquerading as Adam the deckhand, Ara was now the captain of her own riverboat (albeit one with a crew of all of six men) and had augmented her formidable mental talents with equally or more impressive physical ones. An exceptionally well-versed swordswoman, a skilled archer and with a talent for knives of all sorts and shapes Aranea blossomed into an exceedingly deadly and beautiful flower. Her dreams of grandeur were in no way curbed, however-stealing shipments of gems and medicine was only the first step in some vague, upwards social saunter.
Always on the lookout for a challenge Ara found herself taking graver and graver risks. None of those were greater than the clearly-mutinous water sign she made her second mate-Ronaldo. Ronaldo was not a stupid man, though neither was he clearly Ara’s intellectual match and she considered his presence an excellent challenge for her to overcome. This arrogance, paired with an accident and a single miscalculation would cost her deeply.
The only man that Ara trusted unconditionally was her first mate-a stoic, loyal Earth-sign named Bryce with whom she had grown up. When the tensions with Ronaldo erupted into open mutiny, Aranea was absolutely positive that this man would remain on her side. And he did not. Without a single loyal soul in the crew, Ara was in something of a bind. However, she situated herself in the bulkhead of a narrow corridor, ensuring that her opponents would be forced to confront her one by one if they attempted to utilize conventional weaponry. Comprised of water, storm, fire and earth signs, her crew had few other options. Certainly sinking the ship, burning it or incidentally electrocuting everyone involved were unattractive options and without a coast in sight Bryce himself could do little with his sign aboard a boat.
Thus the young woman’s arrogance and a tactical miscalculation had led her to a stalemate, but Ara was exceptionally talented at turning stalemates into victories. However, after an hour of the mutineers and the captain mutually scrambling to defeat the other in this game of wits, a freak storm sprang up around the little boat. Being most often at home aboard their ship the strange weather patterns and influx of demons had little bothered or been noticed by the crew of pirates, so the sudden appearance of this storm took them very much off-guard. Several crew members were lost overboard in the fresh-water swells, amongst them Ronaldo. When the survivors (including Bryce) entered the captain’s chamber to check upon Ara, what they found rendered them speechless. Trapped amidst the heavy overcoat and wide-brimmed hat that Aranea had used to mark her station aboard the ship was not the deadly, ruthless opponent that they expected but an exceptionally confused girl of approximately five years old.
Caught in one of the freak time-mishaps that plagued the land during these strange times, Ara had found nearly two decades lopped off of her physical life. Uncertain what to do in the aftermath of this odd occurrence, the formerly mutinous crew rather peacefully conveyed the damaged ship and their tiny captain back to Ilyamen. Here Ara found her life brought almost back to the start-she was once again an orphan, no longer fit to wield the sword she so prized or to captain her beloved boat. Still, tenacity is a virtue hand-in-hand with ambition and Aranea swore to bounce back from this new and strange obstacle. Indeed, if anything, it afforded her a new opportunity to approach her life with the adorable appearance and disarming, youthful innocence of a child and the experience of a veteran pirate.
Ultimately, Ara would come to ingratiate herself with a roughly middle-class merchant family as a maid and, in a particularly impressive display of foresight and manipulation, elope with this family’s father-figure (and, more importantly, just about every coin in their possession). From there it was a simple matter of ditching the man and scrambling off with his life savings. Armed now with more than twice her age in knowledge, a throbbing ambition once-thwarted and a comfortable sum of money Aranea is once more prepared to take the world for her own.
Personality/Quirks: Coming eventually