Name: Annaliese Graele
Sex: Female
Gender Identity: She/Her
Appearance:Spoiler (click to show/hide):
Splices: Blonde wolf ears with white inner tufts, endowments of her mother and her mother's mother. Annaliese doesn't bother to conceal them.
Attributes -Might – 6
Finesse – 9
Quickness – 10
Vitality – 12
Wits – 6
Resolve – 8
Credits: 0 ¤
Equipment -Shotgun (Firearm) – Wisser Arms Shopkeeper: Patria's legacy is of life, wealth, blood and plunder. As an infant frontier world, countless colonists and adventurers flocked to claim its riches and breathe its sweet air. With great potential of course followed great danger, and ambitious entrepreneurs like Abraham Wisser stood ready to do their service to the immortal business of conflict.
A capable engineer, talented gunsmith and most of all an honest, reliable man, Wisser made his fortune arming the good people of the newly christened Patria with diligently crafted firearms of such precision and reliability that his designs continue to influence gunmakers today. While he has long passed and his company and family line are now but a memory, his proud emblem remains as a mark of exceptional quality and mint condition Wisser guns are popular collector's pieces among the rich and powerful.
The Shopkeeper is an embodiment of Wisser design – mechanically simple, practical and suitable for anyone with something to protect and someone to shoot. A short-barreled pump-action shotgun forged from stainless metal and polished cherry wood, the Shopkeeper (accordingly) fits well under a counter, in loose clothes or behind one's back. Lacking sights, safeties, sockets for attachments or other complexities to improve its aim, the Shopkeeper subsists on its precision engineering and carefully balanced weight to handle the terrifying strength that makes it (like many Wisser guns) devastating against even modern body armour and a nightmare for medics.
Being a collector, it's no surprise Annaliese's father would've run into one of the few surviving models and restored it to working condition. Found its way to Annaliese as a reward for getting an A+ in school. It probably speaks to the girl's fortitude that she can handle it with minimal difficulty.
Blade (Knife) - Antique Knife: A tapering, acutely pointed poniard-like thrusting blade with an oval crossguard and vaselike ring-textured grip. Expressly designed to slip cleanly through security checkpoints, ribcages and exposed arteries, this model of knife was once a favourite of rough-and-tumble paramilitaries and old school soldiers. Artisan craftsmanship and vigorous resharpening compensate for its obsolete manufacturing. Inscribed with the emblem of a long-dead knifemaker, it's another holdover from Patria's earliest days. Bequeathed from the collection of Annaliese's father as a birthday present.
Clothing (Normal) – House Fashion: A slender white blouse, white apron, narrow black brass-buttoned waistcoat, loosely cut trimmed linen skirt, white black-trimmed thighhighs, flowing hooded red linen cloak and a favoured pair of tall pink-trimmed brown boots, all appointed with colourful ribbons. Suitable for moseying through the forest, napping under a tree, concealing contraband or tearing apart to make field dressings. Easily mended, too. Rustic fashions may have been lost to the galaxy in its race to master science and warfare, but Annaliese's family line is one of seamstresses who happily keep the traditional ways alive, both for sentiment and practicality. Who knows, maybe it'll catch on again?
Music Player: A glowy paperweight-sized widget fitted to a pair of triangular headphones to feed bad influence into a young, impressionable mind. Stores thousands of songs. Six hour battery life, somehow. Another birthday gift from the old man after Anna's aunt threw the last one into a river.
Sigils: Life, Vigor, Fire
Background:Spoiler (click to show/hide):
Like everything in life, it begins with a love story.
Once upon a time in Karnaca, a young man met a woman. But she did not notice him. Until then, his romance with his wealth and the arcane had given him purpose, but now he found himself without art – invisible to the girl with the golden locks who had washed her hands of all that he was. Her only lust was for life, her only respect for nature – but among the glittering crowds of that world, all he wanted was her.
His poems were crude scratches. His gifts went unnoticed. His finest flowers wilted. His great displays of magic flickered and died, and his invitations rejected. She was as an army and before long she had broken him. Lost without recourse, all he had left was warfare – and so he fought. He anguished over what she held dear, and with a drop of her blood in his hand, he retreated to a manor in the woods to weave his spell of grief.
SO LONG AS YOU RESIST, MAY DEATH ALWAYS FIND YOU.
The forest died first. The spring abandoned the plants and the trees, and the verdant world turned to ash around her.
Then came the wolves, starved and eyes glowing, to stalk her in the night. Their pups and mates had long since died and it did matter to them that their teeth broke against the wood of the cottage, or that their blood spilled amid the shattered glass.
When they finally had hold of her, then came the change – and last of the wolves died. Their beastly aspect erupted from her head, and never again would her compatriots look her in the eye. She had become as they feared – a creature of the forest, so spiteful of Karnaca and its great progress that she was to be thrown aside.
Then came another man – of no known character other than love for her, and her love for him. They retreated from the ashen forest, and in time she learned to handle her animal visage – to not pass it down to the children she wanted.
Then came the daughter. And she was as her mother.
She cried.
The daughter was orphaned young. First the father, who died protecting his family, and then the mother, who burned. Eventually the daughter would grow, and she too would overcome her pain – determined to not pass it down to her children. In time she found her own man, and they had their own sons and daughters.
The parents died, one after another. By accident or by intention, by disease or by disaster. Then the came the sons, and in time only one daughter remained. She overcame her pain, and would not let it pass to her own children.
The blood of the girl with the golden locks flowed down the river of time, followed by bloody death. And on his last day, the young man of Karnaca – now old and pale – whispered a final legacy to his sole heir:
YOU MUST HAVE HER, NO MATTER HOW LONG IT TAKES.
Then came Bayrios, and the blood of the young man and the girl with the golden locks disappeared in the waves that thrashed the churning river of time. The heirs of the heir and the daughters of the daughter lived and died having never known each other, and as the legacy was be forgotten the beastly visage of the girl with the golden locks would no longer be hideous to the galaxy, but rather something normal – and beautiful.
And yet still, death had tailed her blood. The Edict of Thunder wiped away Karnaca, and only one daughter survived. To Bullabhan she fled, seeking the shamans who might dull the unending grief which her family seemed to never escape. The shaman studied her blood over an open fire, and in the flames he saw the words of a man long dead scratched onto her very being:
MAY DEATH ALWAYS FIND YOU.
The daughter's daughter settled on that lush planet, and it was peaceful for a while. She married, and in time started to forget about the wild wolves that never seemed to take their eyes off her family. The verdant, arcane world was what her predecessor would've wanted.
The death of Bullabhan by Bayrios' Edict followed soon after. Only a daughter survived. The blood of the girl with the golden locks fled back into space.
Time passed.
It happened again and again.
The blood of the young man fought elsewhere through the echelons of time – vanished to history unknown.
Some decades ago there were three children – two girls and a boy who had shed the golden locks of their ancestor. They were wise youth and knew that for all the love that glued them together, death would one day split them apart as any other family.
On the day of their parents' funeral, the eldest of the three spoke.
Enough.
Eleanor Graele rarely made promises.
I will end this.
The young sorceress had learned of the words burned into their souls as a youth, and even before she had mastered the secrets of ten Sigils as but a child she had felt its influence on she and her siblings.
Even if it took her a hundred years, she would see the dead man's curse burn away.
Her power over the arcane wasn't yet enough. Perhaps it would take a hundred years.
She left the next morning.
It's difficult to ascertain the exact nature of Eleanor Graele's travels, but what is clear is that over the next fifteen years a kind of boogeyman formed in the halls of the arcane and the corridors of power – a name whispered not alongside heroes or villains or rebels and conquerors, but as an unrelenting force that left mysterious disappearances and strands of potent magic where she journeyed and expelled the humour from a room with but a mention.
Particularly persuasive and determined minds may have scraped together an image of this woman from the scarce Imperial records and those privileged with personal knowledge of Graele, but she remained elusive and largely unseen until she returned to her brother's doorstep as an adult, her eyes sunken and worn and her mother's wolflike endowments scoured from her skull by magic of an unknown and brutal nature. For her brother Matthias, she had a warning:
You will revive this curse. Leave that woman.
Thus began the rift between the Graele siblings. Matthias and Charlotte, much like their ancestors, had enjoyed lives of relative peace and normalcy and it was inevitable that Matthias would find love. In this new era, perhaps it wasn't so ironic that the woman he chose had the genes of a wolf, but whatever the science of her heritage, Eleanor did not offer her brother an explanation nor brook an argument.
A scant two years later they would meet again – for the last time. The day of Matthias' wedding. What transpired that day is clear only to the Graeles, but what is known are the consequences: Eleanor, storming off in a fury, leading her sobbing younger sister by the wrist while Mathias stared on... with his pregnant wife.
Perhaps because it was still far away from Bayrios' watch or because the lonely, excitable planet had been overshadowed in the storms of war, Eleanor hurried she and her sister off to distant Patria and never allowed them to look back.
Which finally brings us to Annaliese.
Charlotte Graele, as the emotional heart of her family, found no resistance from her elder sister when she wished to be away from the noise and bustle. Deep within a sunny green forest in a quiet little corner of Patria where the flowers grew bright and the animals played freely, Eleanor appointed a small cottage on the bank of a cool blue river. War could never touch this place, and the lush soil was eager to grant them a copse of magnificent apple trees.
It was peace – and to Eleanor, it was useful. While her sibling busied herself with her gardening and quilting,the sorceress made no qualms about exploiting Patria's ripe nature to her ends – a great deal of potions, spells and wards were poured over their little home, fending off interloping pests and the odd thunderstorm. It was one particular machination, though, which eventually set in motion the cycle of love which none of their ancestors seemed able to escape.
The fruits of Patria had been of great interest to Eleanor, being how frequently the more exotic morsels figured in Patria's cuisine and easy-going culture. After Sigil upon Sigil, she had altered the apples from their orchard to a great degree – they were brighter and shinier, and perhaps tastier, but Eleanor quickly tossed them away into the river as mere tests for a more important experiment. I
t was a few days later that packs of nearby wildlife were seen tearing through the forest in a frenzy – unusual, being that it was the nadir of the mating season. A prismatic, ecstatic fire glowed in their eyes, and while the carnage soon passed, a young hunter – one of the few others to make his home in the forest – was left curious and disturbed. In following the clues, he stumbled upon an innocent looking woman with messy hair set upon by a remnant pack of wolves.
With some effort he warded them off, and the woman was thankful – and surprised. It took great curiosity to ever drive Charlotte far from her cottage, ironically in pursuit of some company. Eleanor was a protective sort, and while the peace of the forest left little to be desired, there came times when they felt alone; Charlotte always held a lingering desire to see her brother again, especially after he learned his child had been born. With Eleanor being away, she invited the man to the cottage.
This being Patria, the outcome quite disastrous, not withstanding the efforts needed to bypass the Sigil wards that “inhibited” unknown men who approached their home.
On the verge of disintegrating the half-naked man in her bedroom, Eleanor eventually relented to her sister's pleading. The man with the bright young eyes didn't seem to mean harm... and Charlotte liked him. Perhaps he could be good for her – in moderation.
If you're going to keep coming, bring firewood. We're short on it.
Thus began the union of Charlotte Graele and Isaac Aratora, a troubled young man who'd left the metropolis to find solace in nature. And as fate would have it, Eleanor returned home only a little too late.
If you need to make a mistake, you must exploit it.
And the ultimate mistake was the ultimate opportunity. Eleanor was not angry when she learned – she was in thought. She had always suspected the curse might be at its weakest in the womb – a theory she'd never been able to test on Matthias' child. She plotted. At Charlotte's insistence they later held a small ceremony out in a glade, inviting Isaac's few friends and the townsfolk Charlotte had met on their outings.
The pregnancy progressed well with the aid of Patria's natural medicines, and Eleanor's arcane meddling began early. Weaving Sigils of graduating complexity, the sorceress infused her sibling with various magics under the guise of maintaining her health – naively, Charlotte could only agree. The effects were not immediately obvious, as Eleanor intended – but it was later in pregnancy that Charlotte started to show... side effects.
The young woman became ever more sleepy – and forgetful. The troubles of the world seemed to fade in and out for her as if under a delirium, and it wasn't long before she nearly burnt down the cottage leaving a fire unattended. Isaac, already frustrated and resentful that his now sister-in-law wouldn't explain the nature of her spells, demanded Charlotte be taken to the city for treatment, but Eleanor refused, continuing to work her influence until the final days of her sibling's pregnancy.
On a warm spring night, with the wolves baying to the moon and the land shaking off the final throes of winter, their daughter was born. Yet as Charlotte and Isaac cried tears of joy over their newborn daughter, Eleanor brooded. The golden ears of a wolf flickered on the child's head.
Immediately, the sorceress rushed outside and conjured an open flame, peering into the newborn girl's blood. And on it, she saw the words of a dead man... stronger than ever. In the child's eyes, she saw an ember of something... else.
They named her Annaliese – a proud, strong name. She had her father's eyes.
For the first time in her life, it was Eleanor Graele who had made a mistake. But all she could do was observe.
Annaliese grew up healthy and happy. Their little cottage was safe from the wilds and the weather and nature provided for them. While Charlotte was ensnared in mounting forgetfulness and delirium that kept her close to the house for most of the year, it only served to teach Anna the value of contributing to her household, small as it may have been. Eleanor and Isaac, mutually unwilling to share a household nor part with Charlotte, arranged for Anna to split her time between them.
Navigating the forest's pleasant trails came naturally to the girl, who would come to enjoy camping out with her father and enjoying the stars. It wasn't a luxurious life, as her aunt was legendarily strict in making up for the discipline that her sister lacked, but it worked. She eagerly picked up schoolwork, divided between her aunt's harsh but effective tutelage and the curriculum of a school built toward the rim of the forest, but for the most part, Annaliese spent her entire childhood alone, rarely having been granted permission to wander too deeply into the forest – or out, into civilization.
But children grow older. Taller, and a little smarter.
They learn to break the rules, even if it gets them punished – repeatedly.
They'll adopt a pet – a lame wolf's cub shivering in the rain that grows into an enormous, slobbering headache.
They learn to shoot – from their father, of course.
They start eating and drinking forbidden things.
They start listening to their own music.
They start picking up bad influences...
And one day, they'll have no choice but to shoot. They'll fall against a tree, soaked in blood, holding their father's gun, contemplating the corpse of the man who'd tried to attack them and eyeing the basket of shiny apples she'd been ferrying to the marketplace.
It was then the girl's aunt will know what she's created. And it is then she'll take her niece by the hand and begin her work.
May death never stop you.
