Moor
Posted: Tue Feb 21, 2006 6:13 pm
Moor
Age: Approximately 31
Height: 5’8”
Weight: 150 lbs
Species: Anomalous; human-related.
Gender: Female
Eyes: Red
Hair: Copper, with small bits of black.
Other outstanding at-a-glance physical features: Four arms.
History:
Moor is, if no other word could apply to her – which they periodically don’t well – a foreigner. There are likely those in her history who, upon encountering her, might even say that was a bit of a euphemism, but she gets on all right.
It is unknown, even (and especially) to her, how she arrived on the world, Pal Tahrenor, or even if there was an ‘arrival’ per se that was any different from birth. So, we’ll start with the real story and Moor can fill in the blanks on her own time.
Moor comes from another world, another –plane- if you will, one that was very nearly sundered by the ravages of unspeakable nuclear warfare long before her grandparents were ever conceived. Her stock were human, or the evolving descendants thereof, genetically struggling to adapt to an uninhabitable Earth. In that place, she was a prosperous player in a game of cut-throats and cut-purses; a pirate on the white and gold sea of a desert unfit to support any life but those willing to take it from the unsavvy. She grew up in a world that moved between buried cities of steel, like giant bunkers, where jaded citizens took refuge from the unfiltered sunlight. Above, wind and radiation would lash up storms of sand, fire, and electricity so fierce that they would literally polish the surface of the ground into pitted, cloudy glass.
Needless to say, it was an unstable place. Trades grew around manipulating the fallout into personal ability – a taxing, but extremely powerful process that, over generations, had begun to crop up somewhat naturally as ‘talents’ that rendered themselves much like magic might. Obviously, this was discovered and capitalized on, in a number of different incarnations and – as it is the nature of man to fear – with varied degrees of acceptance in the new society.
What Man did not have a proper handle on was that the same force lending certain people their eldritch abilities was taking a far greater toll on everything around them. Beyond the desert to the north, hidden behind the Winter Wall where no one (even Moor and her then-cadres) dared to trespass, reality was persistently unraveling.
After twenty-some odd years of the existence which she made for herself; trader, sharp-shooter, privateer, mechanic, collector of archaic goods, and to her small band of cohorts She Who Must Be Obeyed, Moor started to recognize that conditions were beginning to become unstable. Unfortunately, she didn’t have anything like the resources to divine –how- until it was much too late (not that there was much that could have been done about it, really, but the poor girl didn’t even get a chance to try). Then, through a series of events much to terrible to have happened in any fashion other than far too fast, she was cast from her native land – which succinctly ceased to exist – and into this one.
An occurrence like this, at least for people from Moor’s world – where they had, to be fair, learned to cope with a great many hardships – does not go easy on the mind, the nerves, or the body. Perhaps a year and a half passed in which Moor was, effectively, close to death in her lack of proper consciousness. She was taken in by a small community of widows well outside the borders of her later-destination, Thar Shaddin, who assumed she was some sort of unfortunate magical creature, bent in mind and body by some unknown injury. They weren’t entirely wrong; the living was quiet, and with time, focus returned. Moor regained first her sense of her surroundings – only really absent a couple weeks – and was able to work for the largely-older company. Language resurfaced, as did the exploration of some – but not many – memories of her former self.
She assumed, though she had a feeling that this was somehow off-base, that the bright, burning land she remembered hazily was simply some other country. That she’d been abducted, perhaps in some botched murder attempt, and drug to wherever she was now, beaten within an inch of her life and brain damaged. Lamentable, true, but the base clockwork of Moor’s mind was exactly the same as it had always been: the cunning survivalist, who could not be too-concerned over something lost irreparably. After all, if you lost it, it must not have been –that- important to you anyway. The show must go on.
Then, came a couple of years of … rather methodical exploration. She lived on the land, traveling and trading what she came across for what she needed. Skins, stones, blades… Retaining the instincts of a keen merchant and life-long marauder, Moor did not find that she was hard-pressed to support herself. She laid pretty low, though… no robbing caravans or ransoming well-dressed maids. A smooth tongue and a nimble hand carried her well-fed enough into Thar Shaddin, and toward the city of Marn.
And here we are at the pit of her story.
Weapons and equipment:
Living nomadically, Moor owns no more than she can carry, and really doesn’t carry very much. A few articles of basic clothing, unornamented and in hues of black and dark brown, in a pack with (usually) a few days’ rations, metal tankard, preserved poultices for first-aid on the road, bandages, a length of rope, a couple of small knives for preparing meat and hides, all of which are packed into a sling-like pouch that she wears across her back. She carries a short-bow and arrows for hunting.
More notably on her person would be the actual weapons that she walks with: a small-sword made out of a dark-coloured metal that does not ring when struck, and a steel rapier of impeccable quality. Neither are particularly decorated, and both look remarkably functional. She keeps them sheathed in black leather at either hip. Secondly, the only piece of clothing that she owns that could possibly be considered extravagant, is her coat. Full-length, and constructed of soft oxblood leather with black tie-closures and a double-breasted front, she is never without it.
Physical Appearance:
Most notably, though by keeping the second set pressed down close at her side it may not be the –first- thing you see about her, Moor possesses two sets of fully functional, otherwise regular-looking arms. The second set begin just beneath and behind her ‘normal’ shoulders. She is ambidextrous in terms of right/left handedness, with the upper set of arms being slightly more dominant (stronger, and more agile); though both are quite useful given most tasks.
Her skin is a rich, burnished-bronze hue. She has an angular face that accommodates sarcasm remarkably well. Her lips, eyelids, the interior of her mouth, cuticles, slightly-translucent fingernails, and anywhere else that you or I might be softer and a little pinky, are black. Her eyes are red, gem-bright, and her pupils usually appear to be slightly more contracted than they should be for whatever light-conditions she’s in.
Beyond the two extra arms, she’s built normally, somewhat tall and lean but robust, strong. She has long, thin hair in very fine strands that resemble spun copper wire, but don’t feel like it. Her hair also has small streaks of black that don’t run from root to tip, as if feathering strokes from a tiny paintbrush loaded with India ink. Generally, her hair is braided straight down her back (nearly to her waist) and fastened by a small metal clip. It’s shorter around her face, also.
Lastly, she has a highly stylized black tattoo of a lioness in profile, sitting, across her entire back. It is from before she came to Pal Tahrenor.
Personality:
Moor is, first and foremost, keenly observant. She’s totally un-shy, an easy conversationalist, one to strike up talk with a city guard as soon as she would another trader, no matter how shady. In verbal matters, she’s very smooth, being reasonably adept at reading her companion (or foe) and speaking accordingly. Generally good humored, periodically lewd, Moor is thick-skinned and cool-tempered. For the most part, especially in a land where people are unpredictable and often not what they appear, she’s aware that getting into an altercation just to prove a point is not usually a wise decision.
When angered, however, she will not hesitate physical violence. Moor is no stranger to tavern-brawls, and frankly, especially on the road, she’s not carrying either blade for decoration.
She’s intensely curious, which could perhaps be accounted for by the fact that her subconscious has a lot of empty space to fill in, and has developed something of a hobby for following people stealthily around in cities, watching where they go, and letting them lead her to places and things that might be of interest. She also likes children; an unrecognized harkening, or lament, for the youthful son she lost in the disaster that untied her home world.
Strengths and Abilities:
On the more basic side of things, Moor is a good swordswoman; physically hardy and able to take good care of herself in most situations. ‘Survivalist’, if you will. She’s a knack for directions and can usually find her way to the nearest settlement based on what the road has come to look like by the traffic on it. It’s already been mentioned that she’s a good talker; she’s a fair pickpocket, and a ruthless liar when a situation calls for her to be.
More unconventionally, Moor retained some of the abilities she had where she came from, though at significantly altered states. She was ‘talented’ on her own plane, able to manipulate ambient radiation to a variety of sorcerous ends. Pal Tahrenor, lacking the absurd levels of nuclear energy that her world had, does not afford her this fuel. However, she is learning to harness the energy of the astral plane to similar effect, based on the same channels. It does not register itself profoundly: Moor is no wizard. She can bend light limitedly, casting shadows or reflections where they shouldn’t be, momentarily blind an opponent with a flash of intense light (or darkness) across their vision, or adjust a few beams of daylight to encourage someone to look the other direction as if the sun was in their eyes all of the sudden.
Being where she’s from, as a result of what happened to deliver her to Pal Tahrenor, she is very slightly out of sync with the vibrations of the world. This allows her to be able to drop, temporarily, out of the material plane, or more precisely -halfway- out of the material plane. To see it occur is to see the woman blurred out as if by some kind of cosmic eraser, smearing her for a second on the air and then snuffing her shape all together. Physically and visibly, she ceases to exist where she had been until she comes back in. She cannot spend more than, perhaps, fifteen minutes outside of the world before she is sucked back into it (by much the same visual process, only in reverse). However, she cannot instantly come back into it, either. To put herself, at her own will, back into the material takes twenty to forty seconds of concentration. The ends that she can perform this trick to are as follows: she can move in the astral plane, but only a little, and can really manipulate no other thing there. She retains a muted awareness of the area of reality she was in, as if seeing shadows of it, and hearing its echo under water. Coming back to the movement, it’s a fight, and she can’t go real far. She could cross a room with some practiced accuracy of where she wanted to be. However, that accuracy is not one-hundred percent. She sometimes misses. For this reason, there is always some reeling when she drops back into the stream of reality, as her body and mind grasp for bearing. The process is somewhat exhausting, able to repeated about twice (or three times, in a really, really pressing situation) before she cannot draw up the personal reserves to do it again.
Weaknesses
To start off, Moor has a faulty memory. She has zero knowledge of her past, her childhood, her heritage. Things begin to come in fragments of her teenage years, her memories growing in volume but not continuity up until the length of black space that is her last weeks on her Earth an her first weeks on Pal Tahrenor. This fact alone distances her from people a little bit, psychologically deterring her from dropping roots anywhere. An inevitable stage of friendship is sharing your history with a person, and she has no stories to tell. She also came from a place of violently stilted social biases against the unwanted and, while she doesn’t exactly remember the fact that this literally exiled herself and her people from the three cardinal cities, the psychic impress of that fact remains very strongly in her mind and makes her very wary of letting people know too much about her. After all, four arms is risk enough, in that regard.
This fact, along with inhibiting her socially, causes her to have unspeakable nightmares as her subconscious tries to shuffle her memories around like a slider-puzzle and make sense of them. For one thing, having an instable subconscious is just disturbing to the rest of the mind; secondly, a lot of her memories are very terrible. She came from a hard, violent land, and those images carve themselves easily into shattering dreams. After a bad bout, she’ll sink into something like insomnia, spending a few days haunted and removed from the world, as if seeing through a grey veil of cringing headaches and sleep deprivation.
Physically, she suffered a bad injury to her left leg that, despite their best intentions, the widows did not set quite right. She does not limp, and has no trouble walking for long periods of time or carrying weight. However, she has to be very cautious about impact to that leg… if it is struck in combat, or even by accident, if she trips on it, or lands on it too hard running, the injury flares up into incredible pain, making it very difficult for her to stand on it until her nerves settle back down, which could take hours but doesn’t always.[/img]
Age: Approximately 31
Height: 5’8”
Weight: 150 lbs
Species: Anomalous; human-related.
Gender: Female
Eyes: Red
Hair: Copper, with small bits of black.
Other outstanding at-a-glance physical features: Four arms.
History:
Moor is, if no other word could apply to her – which they periodically don’t well – a foreigner. There are likely those in her history who, upon encountering her, might even say that was a bit of a euphemism, but she gets on all right.
It is unknown, even (and especially) to her, how she arrived on the world, Pal Tahrenor, or even if there was an ‘arrival’ per se that was any different from birth. So, we’ll start with the real story and Moor can fill in the blanks on her own time.
Moor comes from another world, another –plane- if you will, one that was very nearly sundered by the ravages of unspeakable nuclear warfare long before her grandparents were ever conceived. Her stock were human, or the evolving descendants thereof, genetically struggling to adapt to an uninhabitable Earth. In that place, she was a prosperous player in a game of cut-throats and cut-purses; a pirate on the white and gold sea of a desert unfit to support any life but those willing to take it from the unsavvy. She grew up in a world that moved between buried cities of steel, like giant bunkers, where jaded citizens took refuge from the unfiltered sunlight. Above, wind and radiation would lash up storms of sand, fire, and electricity so fierce that they would literally polish the surface of the ground into pitted, cloudy glass.
Needless to say, it was an unstable place. Trades grew around manipulating the fallout into personal ability – a taxing, but extremely powerful process that, over generations, had begun to crop up somewhat naturally as ‘talents’ that rendered themselves much like magic might. Obviously, this was discovered and capitalized on, in a number of different incarnations and – as it is the nature of man to fear – with varied degrees of acceptance in the new society.
What Man did not have a proper handle on was that the same force lending certain people their eldritch abilities was taking a far greater toll on everything around them. Beyond the desert to the north, hidden behind the Winter Wall where no one (even Moor and her then-cadres) dared to trespass, reality was persistently unraveling.
After twenty-some odd years of the existence which she made for herself; trader, sharp-shooter, privateer, mechanic, collector of archaic goods, and to her small band of cohorts She Who Must Be Obeyed, Moor started to recognize that conditions were beginning to become unstable. Unfortunately, she didn’t have anything like the resources to divine –how- until it was much too late (not that there was much that could have been done about it, really, but the poor girl didn’t even get a chance to try). Then, through a series of events much to terrible to have happened in any fashion other than far too fast, she was cast from her native land – which succinctly ceased to exist – and into this one.
An occurrence like this, at least for people from Moor’s world – where they had, to be fair, learned to cope with a great many hardships – does not go easy on the mind, the nerves, or the body. Perhaps a year and a half passed in which Moor was, effectively, close to death in her lack of proper consciousness. She was taken in by a small community of widows well outside the borders of her later-destination, Thar Shaddin, who assumed she was some sort of unfortunate magical creature, bent in mind and body by some unknown injury. They weren’t entirely wrong; the living was quiet, and with time, focus returned. Moor regained first her sense of her surroundings – only really absent a couple weeks – and was able to work for the largely-older company. Language resurfaced, as did the exploration of some – but not many – memories of her former self.
She assumed, though she had a feeling that this was somehow off-base, that the bright, burning land she remembered hazily was simply some other country. That she’d been abducted, perhaps in some botched murder attempt, and drug to wherever she was now, beaten within an inch of her life and brain damaged. Lamentable, true, but the base clockwork of Moor’s mind was exactly the same as it had always been: the cunning survivalist, who could not be too-concerned over something lost irreparably. After all, if you lost it, it must not have been –that- important to you anyway. The show must go on.
Then, came a couple of years of … rather methodical exploration. She lived on the land, traveling and trading what she came across for what she needed. Skins, stones, blades… Retaining the instincts of a keen merchant and life-long marauder, Moor did not find that she was hard-pressed to support herself. She laid pretty low, though… no robbing caravans or ransoming well-dressed maids. A smooth tongue and a nimble hand carried her well-fed enough into Thar Shaddin, and toward the city of Marn.
And here we are at the pit of her story.
Weapons and equipment:
Living nomadically, Moor owns no more than she can carry, and really doesn’t carry very much. A few articles of basic clothing, unornamented and in hues of black and dark brown, in a pack with (usually) a few days’ rations, metal tankard, preserved poultices for first-aid on the road, bandages, a length of rope, a couple of small knives for preparing meat and hides, all of which are packed into a sling-like pouch that she wears across her back. She carries a short-bow and arrows for hunting.
More notably on her person would be the actual weapons that she walks with: a small-sword made out of a dark-coloured metal that does not ring when struck, and a steel rapier of impeccable quality. Neither are particularly decorated, and both look remarkably functional. She keeps them sheathed in black leather at either hip. Secondly, the only piece of clothing that she owns that could possibly be considered extravagant, is her coat. Full-length, and constructed of soft oxblood leather with black tie-closures and a double-breasted front, she is never without it.
Physical Appearance:
Most notably, though by keeping the second set pressed down close at her side it may not be the –first- thing you see about her, Moor possesses two sets of fully functional, otherwise regular-looking arms. The second set begin just beneath and behind her ‘normal’ shoulders. She is ambidextrous in terms of right/left handedness, with the upper set of arms being slightly more dominant (stronger, and more agile); though both are quite useful given most tasks.
Her skin is a rich, burnished-bronze hue. She has an angular face that accommodates sarcasm remarkably well. Her lips, eyelids, the interior of her mouth, cuticles, slightly-translucent fingernails, and anywhere else that you or I might be softer and a little pinky, are black. Her eyes are red, gem-bright, and her pupils usually appear to be slightly more contracted than they should be for whatever light-conditions she’s in.
Beyond the two extra arms, she’s built normally, somewhat tall and lean but robust, strong. She has long, thin hair in very fine strands that resemble spun copper wire, but don’t feel like it. Her hair also has small streaks of black that don’t run from root to tip, as if feathering strokes from a tiny paintbrush loaded with India ink. Generally, her hair is braided straight down her back (nearly to her waist) and fastened by a small metal clip. It’s shorter around her face, also.
Lastly, she has a highly stylized black tattoo of a lioness in profile, sitting, across her entire back. It is from before she came to Pal Tahrenor.
Personality:
Moor is, first and foremost, keenly observant. She’s totally un-shy, an easy conversationalist, one to strike up talk with a city guard as soon as she would another trader, no matter how shady. In verbal matters, she’s very smooth, being reasonably adept at reading her companion (or foe) and speaking accordingly. Generally good humored, periodically lewd, Moor is thick-skinned and cool-tempered. For the most part, especially in a land where people are unpredictable and often not what they appear, she’s aware that getting into an altercation just to prove a point is not usually a wise decision.
When angered, however, she will not hesitate physical violence. Moor is no stranger to tavern-brawls, and frankly, especially on the road, she’s not carrying either blade for decoration.
She’s intensely curious, which could perhaps be accounted for by the fact that her subconscious has a lot of empty space to fill in, and has developed something of a hobby for following people stealthily around in cities, watching where they go, and letting them lead her to places and things that might be of interest. She also likes children; an unrecognized harkening, or lament, for the youthful son she lost in the disaster that untied her home world.
Strengths and Abilities:
On the more basic side of things, Moor is a good swordswoman; physically hardy and able to take good care of herself in most situations. ‘Survivalist’, if you will. She’s a knack for directions and can usually find her way to the nearest settlement based on what the road has come to look like by the traffic on it. It’s already been mentioned that she’s a good talker; she’s a fair pickpocket, and a ruthless liar when a situation calls for her to be.
More unconventionally, Moor retained some of the abilities she had where she came from, though at significantly altered states. She was ‘talented’ on her own plane, able to manipulate ambient radiation to a variety of sorcerous ends. Pal Tahrenor, lacking the absurd levels of nuclear energy that her world had, does not afford her this fuel. However, she is learning to harness the energy of the astral plane to similar effect, based on the same channels. It does not register itself profoundly: Moor is no wizard. She can bend light limitedly, casting shadows or reflections where they shouldn’t be, momentarily blind an opponent with a flash of intense light (or darkness) across their vision, or adjust a few beams of daylight to encourage someone to look the other direction as if the sun was in their eyes all of the sudden.
Being where she’s from, as a result of what happened to deliver her to Pal Tahrenor, she is very slightly out of sync with the vibrations of the world. This allows her to be able to drop, temporarily, out of the material plane, or more precisely -halfway- out of the material plane. To see it occur is to see the woman blurred out as if by some kind of cosmic eraser, smearing her for a second on the air and then snuffing her shape all together. Physically and visibly, she ceases to exist where she had been until she comes back in. She cannot spend more than, perhaps, fifteen minutes outside of the world before she is sucked back into it (by much the same visual process, only in reverse). However, she cannot instantly come back into it, either. To put herself, at her own will, back into the material takes twenty to forty seconds of concentration. The ends that she can perform this trick to are as follows: she can move in the astral plane, but only a little, and can really manipulate no other thing there. She retains a muted awareness of the area of reality she was in, as if seeing shadows of it, and hearing its echo under water. Coming back to the movement, it’s a fight, and she can’t go real far. She could cross a room with some practiced accuracy of where she wanted to be. However, that accuracy is not one-hundred percent. She sometimes misses. For this reason, there is always some reeling when she drops back into the stream of reality, as her body and mind grasp for bearing. The process is somewhat exhausting, able to repeated about twice (or three times, in a really, really pressing situation) before she cannot draw up the personal reserves to do it again.
Weaknesses
To start off, Moor has a faulty memory. She has zero knowledge of her past, her childhood, her heritage. Things begin to come in fragments of her teenage years, her memories growing in volume but not continuity up until the length of black space that is her last weeks on her Earth an her first weeks on Pal Tahrenor. This fact alone distances her from people a little bit, psychologically deterring her from dropping roots anywhere. An inevitable stage of friendship is sharing your history with a person, and she has no stories to tell. She also came from a place of violently stilted social biases against the unwanted and, while she doesn’t exactly remember the fact that this literally exiled herself and her people from the three cardinal cities, the psychic impress of that fact remains very strongly in her mind and makes her very wary of letting people know too much about her. After all, four arms is risk enough, in that regard.
This fact, along with inhibiting her socially, causes her to have unspeakable nightmares as her subconscious tries to shuffle her memories around like a slider-puzzle and make sense of them. For one thing, having an instable subconscious is just disturbing to the rest of the mind; secondly, a lot of her memories are very terrible. She came from a hard, violent land, and those images carve themselves easily into shattering dreams. After a bad bout, she’ll sink into something like insomnia, spending a few days haunted and removed from the world, as if seeing through a grey veil of cringing headaches and sleep deprivation.
Physically, she suffered a bad injury to her left leg that, despite their best intentions, the widows did not set quite right. She does not limp, and has no trouble walking for long periods of time or carrying weight. However, she has to be very cautious about impact to that leg… if it is struck in combat, or even by accident, if she trips on it, or lands on it too hard running, the injury flares up into incredible pain, making it very difficult for her to stand on it until her nerves settle back down, which could take hours but doesn’t always.[/img]
I'll re-write that bit to make it a little more apparent. On further thought, it might be more appropriate to say that she can step rather 'halfway' out, just out of the visible spectrum, but the strain on the body is what makes it hard, nearly impossible, to move around much etc etc. I'll just edit it in the post itself if that's keen with you.