Thar Shaddin

( Just a quick OOC note: from what I have read about the setting, I don't believe the plot for my character as laid out in her history is too "out there" -- at least, I'm hoping not, because it could make for a really fun, twisty story -- but if it needs any adjustments, please let me know. Thanks! )


Player Name:
( Prefer to be called by my character name, thanks! )

Name:
Rhemara ( or “Rhemi” )

Age:
Approximately 27 years

Race:
Half human-half Faerie

Height:
5 feet 8 inches

Weight:
Approximately 130 pounds

Physical Description:
At first glance, Rhemi might actually appear to be a scrawny young man: her earthen-hued hair is cropped boy-short, tousled wildly about her features in an unkempt manner, shrouding her mossy-green eyes. Her clothing is usually clean but worn loose, her breasts pressed and bound close to her body to hide her femininity. Her ability to conceal her nature with illusions completes her identity as a male, from the huskiness of her voice to the “stubble” that appears to grow on her face to a masculine frame of body.

However, when not employing magic to hide her true nature, Rhemara is very much a woman. Though fit and tone from doing a man's work, she lacks nothing in curvature, from the unrestricted swell of her breasts to the gentle curve of her hips to the slender length of her legs. Her eyes are almond-shaped, lined by thick lashes, and her features, though determined, hold a woman's softness; her jaw curves gently up to the slender column of her throat and her lips pout softly.

Possessions:
Nothing especially worthy of note.

Powers or Strengths:
Illusion: As a result of her Faerie blood, Rhemi has the ability to make others see her as she wishes to be seen; manipulation is a common trick of Faeries and this is one of the many ways in which it is manifest.

Uncommon physical strength: Rhemi possesses an uncommon, although not superhuman, strength for her size; she has a prowess comparable to a human male when it comes to things such as brute strength and stamina, though her feminine stature belies this.

Weaknesses:
Troublesome curiosity: Again, thanks to her Faerie heritage, Rhemi is imbued with a troublesome and insatiable curiosity about her environment and things that are otherwise inexplicable to her. This often leads her to dangerous or uncomfortable situations, but she just can't seem to learn her lesson.

Emotional instability: Due to the abusive environment in which she was raised, Rhemi can be very emotionally unstable, and this can affect her powers and strengths; at the height of any emotional state, she may be unable to sustain an illusion or may forgot how strong she actually is, to her own detriment and the detriment of those around her.

Cursed by the Seasons: Unbeknownst to her, Rhemi's full-blooded Faerie father is a creature of the seasons. While his powers as a Faerie are heightened during the peak of the seasons – the solstices and the equinoxes – hers become wildly uncontrollable, even dangerous. These “seasonal powers” vary in type and intensity, with the only common factor being a tie to the corresponding season, and occur for that single day.

History:
Rhemara's father is a full-blooded Faerie, and a vindictive trickster at that. After playfully spying on the populace of Marn – a dangerous game to be playing at in a city that shunned those magically-inclined – her father found himself “challenged” by a certain elitist Human female whose vanity, conceit, and drive for prominence within the city caused him to formulate a rather risque scheme for his own amusement.

Using his abilities as a Faerie, he concealed his true nature with the power of illusion, turning himself into a handsome, seductive Human man and began to court the woman, Koshara. It was not long until Koshara found herself carrying the seed of this “man”, and once he was assured of her healthy conception, he wasted no time in vanishing from her life, satisfied with himself. Koshara had no idea of her child's half-blood heritage until the birth of her daughter, when the Faerie returned out of spite for her and all of her ideals to reveal his true self and thus the true nature of their spawn.

Koshara had threatened to end the life of the infant, her stigmas more powerful than her maternal instincts, which seemed to vanish almost as quickly as her Faerie lover had; however, in his continued pleasure at torturing this woman, the Faerie warned her that she would be haunted by the spirits of magic and nature for the remainder of her days if she did not see to the child's proper upbringing. In fear of that which she hated, Koshara relented, but their daughter – called Rhemara – would not have the luxury of growing up in a loving home. Instead, her mother almost immediately began to conceive of how to use Rhemara to further her own interests of gaining prestige within Marn. The seed of a plan began to form in her mind, and almost immediately, Koshara began to parade the young girl as a young boy, all in the name of attaining what she wanted from life in the city. Shamed by the fact that her “husband” had suddenly left her, Koshara knew it would take many years for her scheme to mature, but as Rhemara's Faerie heritage began to manifest itself, her mother's plan became cemented: she would raise Rhemara – or “Rhemi” – as a boy, force her to join up with the City Guard when she matured, and through her Faerie-born abilities rise through the ranks and thus pass her “fame and fortune” down to her mother.

It became apparent at an early age that Rhemara was usually strong. Her abilities of illusion did not become apparent until adolescence, and even then, she did not have good control. Also during this bloom of womanhood, Rhemara began manifesting strange and unexpected powers during certain times of the seasons, which Koshara later pinpointed for the solstices and equinoxes. During these times, Koshara would retreat with Rhemara to an isolated cabin on the outskirts of the Virdara Woods where her powers could erupt without the fear of exposure to the peoples of Marn; these occurrences only lasted a day, so it was fairly easy to hide.

Although Rhemara was terribly curious about the reasons, her mother never revealed the source of her talents or why she was masqueraded as a boy; instead, she constantly emotionally and mentally abused her, telling her that she was a freak within a city full of people that she could strive to be like but would never attain to. Only through her mother's elaborate plot could Rhemara be able to make a name for “himself”, even if she could not live in her true nature. Even while she demeaned her daughter for her abilities, she insisted that Rhemara work on controlling them, for it was only through the use of these abilities that she would ever be able to amount to anything.

After twenty-five years of enduring this, acting the part of a man became almost second nature to her. Any time she left the relative safety of the home she still shared with her abusive mother, she would don the illusion of being a man; by this time, her skills were well-honed and it was a simple task, when she wasn't under emotional distress.

For the next two years of her life, she strove to join the City Guard, just as her wicked mother had ingrained into her. She was dismissed from the academy the first year for refusing to be in attendance during the peak of the seasons, but the next year, at twenty-seven, she was readmitted into the academy for training.

Only time would tell if she would be able to become what her mother wanted her to be, or whether the uncertainties of Thar Shaddin would take her life in a completely different direction.

Hello and welcome to Thar.

I have read over your character and while I can find nothing within it that could be considered "out there," I did have a few questions.

As far as illusions go, is the ability to change her own appearance the extent of her power? Can she change her environment or make objects appear that don't really exist? Can powerful magic users see through her spell?

Living most of her life as a man, how has this affected her? Does she think of herself as being a man? Does she connect more with men than women? Does she have any negative body image issues because she lacks the physical body of a man and has to create it through illusion?

I also feel I should mentioned that females are allowed to join the City Guard but very few do.

Thank you for that feedback. I took some time to go into more detail about her illusory abilities and also revamped her history so that masquerading as a male doesn't have quite such a devastating effect on her psyche ( thank you for bringing that point out to me! ). Here it is:


Her ability is more a natural power common to Faeries to change the way others perceive her and not an illusory spell, and it applies only to herself. For example, she cannot make herself appear to be a large dragon because she does not look anything like a dragon in shape or size; however, if she were trying to fool someone, she could make herself appear to be elven in heritage, older or younger than she actually is, or change her gender. If she were trying to frighten someone away, she could make herself appear as to be a phantom or a demon, as long as what she was trying to project was humanoid in nature. Also, she is not changing her actual physical form, but is simply changing the way others perceive her. This is why, in the story, she keeps her hair short and her breasts bound, to help aid in her projections; if she did not, and someone reached out to touch her chest, they would feel her actual breasts instead of the chest of a man as they might expect. She cannot give herself additional “working” appendages such as a tail or wings or extra set of arms. She also cannot “conjure” items for use or change her environment. Given that her ability is not a spell, but rather an innate heritage ability, only Illusionists trained specifically to detect such things or other naturalistic beings with a heritage ability to detect the truth in an illusion can see through her folly; being that it is not a spell that is cast, it cannot be “canceled out” by a “dispel” or “see magic” invocation.




History:
Rhemara's father is a full-blooded Faerie, and a vindictive trickster at that. After playfully spying on the populace of Marn – a dangerous game to be playing at in a city that shunned those magically-inclined – her father found himself “challenged” by a certain well-off elitist Human female whose vanity, conceit, and drive for prominence within the city caused him to formulate a rather risque scheme for his own amusement.

Using his abilities as a Faerie, he concealed his true nature with the power of illusion, turning himself into a handsome, seductive Human man and began to court the woman, Koshara. It was not long until Koshara found herself carrying the seed of this “man”, and once he was assured of her healthy conception, he wasted no time in vanishing from her life, satisfied with himself. Koshara had no idea of her child's half-blood heritage until the birth of her daughter, when the Faerie returned out of spite for her and all of her ideals to reveal his true self and thus the true nature of their spawn.

Koshara had threatened to end the life of the infant, her stigmas more powerful than her maternal instincts, which seemed to vanish almost as quickly as her Faerie lover had; however, in his continued pleasure at torturing this woman, the Faerie warned her that she would be haunted by the spirits of magic and nature for the remainder of her days if she did not see to the child's proper upbringing. In fear of that which she hated, Koshara relented, but their daughter – called Rhemara – would not have the luxury of growing up in a loving home.

Shamed by the sudden disappearance of her handsome “husband” and worried about what people might think of her daughter, who began manifesting strange powers at an early age, Koshara retreated to a small cabin on the outskirts of the town of Shim. Koshara did not treat Rhemara well, keeping her true heritage a secret and treating her as though she were a freak that needed to get her “defects” under control before they could return to the city of Marn; because of this, Rhemara developed a somewhat timid manner and a low self-esteem, shying away from any attention, even though she held the natural beauty of the Faerie.

It was apparent that Rhemara had unusual strength at an infantile age. Her ability to “cloak” herself in an illusion began manifesting itself in her pre-teen years, although it was far from controlled and usually catalyzed by an emotionally distressing event. When she reached the bloom of her womanhood, another power – or curse, as she saw it – occurred during the seasonal solstices and equinoxes, wherein for that single day, strange and dangerous naturalistic powers would manifest through her, the only “common factor” being to which season they were tied. Her mother would often keep her subdued through herbal remedies during these days to try to lessen the manifestation of these powers.

Like most teenagers, Rhemara grew through a stage of lashing out, especially against her abusive mother. She would often run away and roam through Shim, using an illusion to keep anyone from recognizing her, though she stayed away from the cemetery and the Manor, as did many of Shim's residents. Many times she would pick fights with the other few children of the town, seeking an outlet for her strength and anger. Most people thought her a young vagabond and never associated her with Koshara. This behavior, of course, was met with further abuse from her mother, who cursed her and blamed her that they were in the town of Shim, and that neither of them would amount to anything if Rhemara did not learn to control herself.

As Rhemara matured and did earn how to control her powers of illusion, her mother was pleased to note that her daughter could even make herself appear to be male. As Rhemara worked and improved on maintaining this illusion, a plan began to form in Koshara's mind as to how she might use her daughter to regain prestige within Marn: although women could join in the esteemed City Guard, it was not common, and they were not as like to be promoted in the ranks as men were. However, if Rhemara could master this illusory ability, she could use her unusual strength in the Guard to rise through the ranks, thereby passing her “fame and fortune” down to her mother.

At twenty-two years of age, coming into her adulthood but still feeling like a lost child, Rhemara grew through a stage of desperately trying to gain her mother's approval, and so she relented to Koshara's plan of having her masquerade as a man and join the City Guard. Because her illusions were just that – illusions – and not an actual shifting of her physical form, Rhemara hacked away her beautiful, long brown tresses into a boy-short, tousled mane that fell wildly about her features and began binding her breasts with a length of cloth to help maintain the appearance of being a man.

She took up training for the next two years with a local weaponsmith in the town of Shim while acting the part of a sixteen-year-old boy, until her skill with a sword was decent enough to be of some use to the City Guard. When she was twenty-five years of age, Rhemara moved back to Marn with her mother, always parading herself in public as a boy, while retaining her true nature in the safety of their home.

Koshara spent the next year re-establishing a name for herself and “showing off” her “strapping young son” that was sure to “be the next Captain of the Guard”. At age twenty-six, Rhemara joined the academy and was doing very well, but was expelled due to her absence during the peak of the seasons. Now, at age twenty-seven, she has been readmitted to the academy for training.

Only time would tell if she would be able to become what her mother wanted her to be, or whether the uncertainties of Thar Shaddin would take her life in a completely different direction.

The changes look great. Can I get you to copy them into the first post? I'd also like some details as to what kind of power(s) she has during the peak of the seasons should she happen to not take her suppressing herbs.