Shenora Tillen

[Nora]

Player Name: Xeis
Name: Shenora Tillen, often called Nora
Age: 16
Race: Human
Height: 5'5
Weight: 105
Physical Description:
Nora is of average height for her age and race with a shapely "hourglass" figure and fair skin. Her dark brown hair is wavy and a bit on the thick side, so she will often wear braids in it to pull it back from her face. Burn scars on her right palm and ankle have turned the skin there puckered and shiny, but she avoids drawing attention to them. With a full mouth prone to smiling and large, blue-green eyes, she is a sweetly attractive young lady.

Possessions:
• A pair of spectacles
• Her father's flute
• A small trunk of costume pieces and jewellery
• Various journals and notebooks

Strengths and Talents:
• Growing up in a family of travelling performers, Nora herself is an actress and singer. She performs regularly for the Drunken Rat stage patrons, mostly ballads or humorous monologues that break up the dreary monotony of living in isolated Marn, and is well-liked for her skills as a performer.
• Spending her formative years on the road with her parents gave Nora a much broader view of the world than many Marnian citizens decades her senior. She is open-minded and very respectful and curious about other cultures. Generation gaps bother her not at all, making her just as likely to make friends with adults as with someone her own age.
• Though she lacks any "formal" education, Nora is quick-witted and observant, and possesses a particularly good memory for sound. She knows people instantly by the sound of their voices and can memorize songs and poetry after about three repeated hearings.

Weaknesses:
• Nora is very near-sighted. Her vision loses clarity after a distance of about five feet, and it degrades further from there. She has spectacles to assist with the problem, but they are several years old, and her eyesight has worsened to the point where she hardly bothers with them these days. Besides, she thinks the glasses make her look silly.
• For all of her experience outside the city of Marn, Nora is still very young. She has never really dealt personally with shady or unscrupulous people and still possesses a lot of grand and noble ideals about how the world is "supposed" to be. Oftentimes, her frustration over others' narrow-mindedness causes the pendulum to swing too far in the other direction and makes her naively trusting.
• A horrific experience in her childhood has given Nora a phobia of fire. A cheerful hearth burning at night is a source of anxiety, and even having too many candles lit in a room can make her stomach clench.

History:
Errohin Tillen, Nora’s father, came from a respectable Synevive family that owned and operated a jewellery shop on Main Street. His days were spent minding the shop alongside his father, and nights saw him inside The Drunken Rat, where Nora’s mother Mallothi worked as a waitress and occasional entertainer. She had been part of a failed effort to establish a trade settlement within the plains of Thar Shaddin and ended up in Marn when the small community died. He was 25 and she was 20 when they began a romantic relationship, to the disapproval of Errohin’s puradyne family. Mallothi was a gentle and beautiful young woman, but she was an outsider. Though she claimed no magical abilities, vicious rumors began to circulate that she was of fae descent and could bewitch people with her singing. Errohin ignored the rumors, and eventually the two wed in secret. When Mallothi became pregnant, the union was discovered and Errohin’s family disowned him.

Mallothi had two sisters, a pair of twins who had become successful travelling bards. Every year they came to visit her in Marn, and when they arrived a week after the confrontation with Errohin’s family, they insisted that Errohin and Mallothi leave with them. Faced with only grim prospects in the city, the young couple did just that.

By the time Shenora was born at a dockside inn in Zhaltev, her family had become a popular band of travelling musicians. Her father had discovered a hidden talent for the flute, and free from the oppression of Marn, her mother threw herself happily into her singing. Her aunts, Jhia and Hauna, both turned their specialties to the violin. They moved from city to city, town to town, sharing and learning new music and tales, and little Nora grew older with her eyes always turned to the next horizon, surrounded on all sides by the love of her family.

She was eleven when tragedy stole that family from her. A severe summer lightning storm sparked a fire in a tavern where they were performing to a packed common room. The press of panicked people turned to chaos. Nora heard her mother’s agonized screams at the end of a fiery hallway as the little girl frantically tried to find the rest of her family. Twice she stumbled and was nearly trampled to death, the second time catching her hand on a piece of burning timber. She managed to kick out a section of planking and escape the building, just before the heat and smoke overwhelmed her.

She awoke the next morning in a healer’s hut with her father sitting beside her bed, padded bandages covering his hands and most of the left side of his face. Mallothi and Hauna both perished in the blaze; Jhia died a day later.

Errohin faced an awful reality. With his wife and sisters-in-law gone, their livelihood destroyed, and himself now ill, he had no way to care for Nora. Their rootless existence meant that he had no one nearby who could look after his daughter... except for the home city he hadn’t seen in more than a decade. He used what savings they had left to travel back to Marn, his dread and sadness mounting with every step.

When he arrived in the city with Nora in tow, he immediately contacted his sister Kaylith. Their father had passed away not long after Errohin’s departure, and the family shop was now hers. At first she refused to take Nora, citing the old rumors about Mallothi and claiming they would be persecuted for raising a child with fae-blood. Angry and heartbroken, Errohin confessed that he was dying, and at last Kaylith relented. She promised to keep his daughter’s identity a secret from the rest of their family, both for Nora’s protection and their own. Errohin stayed hidden in her home until his death three weeks later.

Nora has been in Marn with Kaylith and her husband Tonas ever since, though every day she longs for the freedom and adventure of the open road. She helps her aunt run the jewellery shop, or uses her talents to entertain patrons at the Drunken Rat, unconsciously mirroring the footsteps of her parents. Her ears are always trained for a new song or tale, her mind constantly dreaming up new adventures, and lately she has started saving bishani against the day when she can leave Marn behind for good and try her luck in the wider world.

[Niabi]

Approved.