Anne de Groot

[Anne deGroot]

Name: Anne de Groot

Age: 25

Race: Human

Height: 5’ 10’

Weight: 135

Physical Description:

As for Anne de Groot’s looks, she is particularly unremarkable. She is nothing more than dark stringy hair and equally dark and unassuming eyes, none of which anyone pays any attention to. Her face is plain and pale and unmarked by any traces of attempts to improve upon its ordinariness. She is neither thin nor fat; she is soft and not built at all for hard labor or combat, even though her hands are rough and scarred with tiny burns. She is very utilitarian in dress, wearing the same grey shift dress and deep red surcoat day in and day out. Her garments themselves are wrinkled and stained from strange chemicals and black ink and pockmarked with odd little burned-out holes along the hem and sleeves. She is the kind of woman one would notice for merely an instant, and an instant afterward forget.
With her nearly slept-in clothes and black rings underneath her eyes she has the look of being continually exhausted, at times fidgety. Perhaps the only remarkable thing about her is the emotion bubbling behind her worn out ordinary eyes.
The eyes themselves are restless, inquisitive to anything that they behold. With them she carefully analyzes each object she comes across, appreciating them quietly as if they were the most valuable things in the world.
Her voice, too, is peculiar. It begins small and almost weak, but as she speaks of something of interest the voice swells with some hidden confidence and intelligence, while the faded, tired eyes light up and stare furiously with heightening excitement about her words and theories. It is as if one were to hear her speak and see the intensity of her eyes and body grow along with her voice, one would afterwards consider her perhaps taller, prettier, more remarkable.

Possessions:

At the moment Anne is a traveler, and all she keeps with her is the clothes on her back. She has an old mule from back home which she uses as her means of transportation. In the saddlebags of this mule (who is so old that his name is barely remembered) she carries several notebooks filled with her own scientific and natural observations, as well as a small first aid kit containing bandages and a few medicines and potions she mixed up for the journey. She also has a simple dagger which she uses primarily to make herself feel safe (for she knows barely anything about fighting an enemy) and would rather flee than fight anyone anyways.

Powers or Strengths:

One of her major powers is how unassuming she is, which allows her to escape harm or sneak around quite easily if needed. She is also an intelligent scientist and can quickly pick up a skill or piece of knowledge after being taught. Her father was a doctor, from who she learned some ability in creating medicine or potions of healing. Her father was also a secretly practicing alchemist, and from studying his books and notes she learned some scraps of alchemical knowledge, although she would never dare of using it for fear of getting caught.

Weaknesses:

She has little (if any) training in weaponry or martial arts, and prefers to escape conflict at any cost than fight. She scares easily and is overly cautious about every endeavor.

History:
(History getting a few tweaks at the moment, but basically will be unchanged)
Anne deGroot was born into nobility; however this nobility was only by name, for the old money of the family had been drained years and years before even her father’s time. She was born in and spent most of her life in the crumbling old house of the deGroot family in the small village of Lyon, a good 5 day’s journey east from the better known town of Shim. Living with her at the time were her parents Robert and Emily de Groot, as well as her maiden aunt on her father’s side, Marie.
Anne’s early childhood was comfortable and quite unremarkable. Her father was the only doctor in the village and supported the family as such. He was a basic practitioner as well as apothecary, caring for the sick in Lyon with medicines and potions he created himself, using his medical knowledge as well as basic, nearly harmless alchemy, which went undetected by authorities or the public. But as a result of his ability and overall compassion he and his family were well liked and widely known throughout the whole of Lyon and neighboring hamlets.
However, when Anne was 10, all of that changed. Early one morning as her mother and father were driving through the woodland paths, their coach flipped and her mother was thrown against a tree, killing her instantly. It was at this moment the end of all normalcies for the de Groots.
Afterwards, despite all the efforts of Marie, Robert could never forgive himself for his wife’s death, despite its accidental nature. He despaired for weeks, and just as he almost looked as if he might recover he buried himself in deep study and research.
Deep into the study of alchemy, the lost illegal science.
The study of the possibility of human regeneration.
Then began three long, tumultuous years for the surviving members of the family. Robert de Groot would lock himself in his study for weeks on end, letting his practice suffer in Lyon. He would leave on long journeys to unknown destinations and return, almost dead with weariness, months later. Anne and her aunt Marie barely got by with selling what little furniture and heirloom items they had, and their family name fell slowly into ruin.
After three years had slinked away, Robert went on one of his journeys and Anne and Marie assumed he would never return. They spent almost another eight years in desperate poverty, while Anne became a servant in a local middle-class merchant’s household, where she was treated miserably. As she grew to adulthood in those years she learned patience and hard work. The upkeep of her body was undermined by her determination to study the books her father left, and it was in her spare time she herself went deep into studies of medicine and science, to at least attempt to restore her family’s name and everything her father worked for. Marriage proposals from town came and went, but she would have none of it. She lived plainly, and was comfortable in her plainness and utilitarian looks, for it was only the knowledge of her father that mattered, and she was determined to preserve it in her own mind.
It was on one foggy night, however, that Robert de Groot came back. His sister and daughter were overjoyed to see him, and ran weeping toward him at the gate, but with one look a cold fear chilled their hearts and the tears of joy on their cheeks. He was alive, but his eyes were dead, staring into nothing. Every hair on his head had gone white, despite his young age, and he pursed his lips constantly, his eyes at moments flicking about with almost crazy abandon. When Anne held her father he felt thin, bony like a dead bird, but it was his eyes and face that frightened her so. How he carried his body seemed as if a huge weight were placed upon him, and his eyes were dark and murky, glinting at each moment with some suppressed memory, some terrible secret.
Her father knew something, and it was killing him. Whatever knowledge he possessed was dangerous for all mankind.
As the days after his arrival progressed, Anne worried more and more about her father. He never spoke, barely ate, and spent his days staring out of his windows and into the backyard, at the empty barn where his studies and practice had been. Anne prayed that he would somehow return to himself, but after one moment where the man finally hinted at his terrible past that Anne knew her father was never coming back.
Anne spent time with Robert sorting through his books while he watched nothing out the window. From his journey he had acquired many mysterious books and notebooks of his own creation, all with a strange symbol on their covers: two black snakes intertwining, either in combat or mating, Anne did not know. She opened several of the books secretly out of her own curiosity. Each page was covered top to bottom with scribbles from some weird spindly language. Occasionally there would be a cross section, or a chart, or an elaborate circular ornament, and while Anne stared at a diagram of a woman’s neck with the skin peeled from it to reveal her veins, Robert’s icy voice permeated the air.
“Those books came from the Guild, Anne.”
She snapped the book shut and turned to look at him. “The guild? What guild?”
His whole body shrunk. He had still not looked at her. “If you knew they would kill you.”
She came closer to him and kneeled by his chair, trying to meet his eyes. “Is it a magic guild, father?” she whispered. “A guild of alchemists?” The words terrified her, for it meant that Robert could be arrested and executed for treason and heresy. It was not even fifteen years ago that an alchemist’s guild was discovered around Shim, and their entire body of members burned at the stake along with their research. Alchemy was a forbidden magic with a vendetta against the gods and all men who walked the world.
Robert did not answer. He turned his head and looked at her, and Anne froze; looking into the empty sockets of a corpse whose eyes had rotted away would have a more comfortable returning gaze. “Anne….”
“Yes, father.
He sucked in air through his teeth. “What if I told you I could bring Mother back?”
At once Anne was chilled by his words and her curiosity strangely sparked. That was the nature of her thirst for knowledge; anything that repelled or frightened her was something of great intrigue. “What does that mean? How would you do it?”
There was a pause that lasted nearly a thousand years, and then he spoke. “What if I told you then that someone had to die to bring her back?”
“I don’t, know—”
“What if I told you that thousands would have to die?”
She was shaking all over with fear as she stood up to look at him and put a comforting hand on his head. “We are fine without mother….we get by, we move on. She is dead, father. Dead for nearly seven years.”
“I can fix that,” he said. “I can change that.”
Two days later Marie found him hanging from the rafters in the barn.

Anne had expected it. He had gone insane long ago, and his suicide was the culmination of his insanity. But his words still haunted her….could one person live again at the cost of thousands? This could have been the secret that her father had discovered in the guild he joined; yes, he must have joined a guild and studied in secret all of these years he was gone. She was determined again to preserve his scientific mind in hers. She would study these books he had brought home with him, despite her fears. She could not be afraid of knowledge, she told herself. She was firm in her determination even as she and her aunt washed and prepared the body and discovered the mark of the two serpents branded and scarred on his chest. This guild would not scare her. It was not based in the pursuit of fear-mongering, but of science. Perhaps she should one day go out and seek its members for herself, to understand her father’s secret life’s work.
Her father was laid to rest early one morning in a ceremony attended only by her aunt, a priest, the gravedigger and herself. Gone was the people’s upstanding gentleman. They had developed a fear and several rumors of him in his absence, and even stayed away from the other members of his family, for fear of catching his curse. It was as the gravedigger began to shovel on dirt and Robert De Groot’s body faded into obscurity below the ground that Anne noticed smoke curling up over the trees in the distance.
Smoke that came in from the direction of the house.
Anne rushed back only to find the entire house ablaze, fire spitting out from every window. The villagers at once forgot their fears for a moment to quell the fire, and it was only after two days of burning that the fire itself died, and Anne could look around in the ruins and try to salvage whatever was left.
The house fortunately was a stone house, so the foundations and walls were still standing and salvageable, even though the white stone would forever be charred black. The entire inside had been completely gutted and mostly turned to ash and bits of wood, but as she picked through the charred pieces a rising fear developed in her heart.
The books were gone. All of them. There were no remains of any kind of manuscript or metal binding that could have survived. These books were taken. The house was burned.
But who?
Someone from her father’s guild.
And suddenly, another fear rose in her throat.
The books…..the books, all the information, the thousands of people who could die because of the writings and research contained in them. Who knows what all those books contained, what horrible secrets or power they could wield if unlocked by a knowledgeable hand.
She had to find the guild, or the books, whichever came first. It was the only way. So she has spent the last 4 years of her life searching through all corners of the globe to find something, anything, about the whereabouts of the books and of the guild who takes the image of the two snakes as their own. She knows nothing of the knowledge contained in those books, only of the terror and unimaginable secrets that are contained in them, and the threat they pose to all people of this world.

[Frug]

That is an intriguing character and a great story, and I have some personal love of the subject matter. Followers of Asklepios I see.

Poor misguided scientists, wasting their efforts with silly theories and trinkets. They are the fools of Pal Tahrenor, trying to trick people into thinking that they're onto something. Science and alchemy would not be illegal in Thar Shaddin at all, mind you. People would just make fun of it and dismiss it. Though I imagine it would have the seeds of a great anti-magic religion, if only they could understand it. Until then it's doomed to secret societies for those who do. Just like the good old days.

Of course the character is approved. If I may make a suggestion for writing, stay away from mentioning eyes so much. It gets overused.