secondbestcloak | App for Ainmhian

PLAYER INFORMATION

NAME: Batya aka Toon
AGE: 44
CONTACT: email (batyatoon at gmail dot com) or discord (batyatoon#2432)
CHARACTERS PLAYED: Liz Whitaker (

porcupineliz)
RESERVED? n/a

CHARACTER INFORMATION

NAME: Deela Enyares
CANON: OC (D&D / Spelljammer setting)
CANON POINT: n/a
AGE: Mid-thirties

HISTORY:

[Pre-campaign backstory]

Deela grew up in a small village, one of the few half-elven children in a predominantly human population. When she was about ten, she was apprenticed to the elven wizard Methias and began training to become a wizard herself. At about age twenty-six, she began to realize that her master was no longer teaching her anything new ... but he refused to declare her apprenticeship at an end, or to give her a clear answer as to what she would need to achieve in order to graduate. Over the next nine years she grew increasingly frustrated, and finally desperate; her first and only attempt to demand an answer from Methias ended with him flying into a rage and striking her down with a spell she had never seen.

Two weeks later she made her escape, taking her spellbook, her meager possessions, and her master's second-best traveling cloak. She has been fleeing from him ever since; it's been about eight months, and she is convinced that he has been pursuing her with the intent to drag her back.

She doesn't know where she can go, but she is not going back to him, ever again.

[Campaign memories]

When she first met the crew of the Evening Star, Deela introduced herself as a "traveling scholar" looking to buy passage to wherever they were going next. It didn't take long for her real motivations to come out, as that very night she was confronted and assaulted by a boy she recognized as one of Methias's younger apprentices. To her shock, the crew assisted her and subdued the apprentice; under questioning he told them that he'd been sent to retrieve Deela and "whatever she stole," and bring them both home. Deela told the crew where she had come from and why, and denied having stolen anything but the cloak. (It isn't particularly expensive, or magic -- she checked.) After some discussion, the party took from the apprentice the bracelet charmed to track her, extracted a promise that he would leave them alone in future, turned him loose, and set sail with Deela on board as the newest of the crew.

In the many months since then, the crew has several times (among other adventures) run afoul of a cult seeking to restore a pantheon of evil, banished/dead gods. This appeared at first to be nothing directly related to them, but a recent discovery shook this belief: several cultists attacked the party on a world very far from their last encounter, and were found to be supplied with makeshift tracking charms designed to seek a particular pattern of divine energy. These charms unfailingly all pointed to Deela.

Bewildered and alarmed, the crew investigated further, and gradually discovered that:

The cultists have been seeking something called "a fragment."
Methias had apparently been seeking something similar recently, or possibly seeking to retrieve something similar.
The cult originated some five years ago, on one of their founding members (a former treasure-hunter) having found the "fragment" and delivered it to a wizard matching Methias's description. According to secondhand accounts, the fragment spoke to her.
The one cultist who appeared to know what the fragment was referred to it as "a fragment of the Dread Lord."
It looks very much as if the fragment (a) is a piece of the father-king of the dead gods, and (b) is somehow in Deela. And also as though Methias at least is aware of this second fact, and may indeed be directly responsible.

[Campaign divergence]

In a desperate bid to keep her friends safe from the cult, Deela jumped ship at their next port of call, leaving behind an explanatory note and one of the tracking charms, in case they should need to find her again. When she arrives in Ainmhian, it has been no more than four or five days since this departure.

PERSONALITY:

More than anything else, what Deela passionately wants is to learn and achieve mastery of the art of wizardry. Ten years of frustration in this passion have left their scars: she carries intense feelings of unworthiness and inadequacy, and an equally intense drive to prove herself worthy of the art. Without any real understanding of why Methias refused for so long to teach her anything new, she has been unable to fully blame him or even to consciously be angry at him; she's internalized it as being somehow about her. (Especially because Methias has taken and taught other apprentices; although she was mostly isolated from them, she was aware of their existence, and saw many of them surpass her and graduate to become wizards in their own right. Which means, since clearly Methias is capable of teaching well, the flaw or whatever the reason is must lie with her. She's only just begun to question this.)

Another side effect of this period of frustration is that Deela perpetually perceives herself as being only an apprentice and not knowing very much yet or being very powerful, with this perception entirely unchanged by her rapidly growing abilities since fleeing Methias's tower. Her default assumption is that any other wizard she meets (with so far the sole exception of Hazel, her erstwhile crewmate) is her superior. It will probably be some while before this changes, if ever. In the meantime, she has a driving desire to learn magic -- new spells above all else, but also theory and history, and even trivia. Non-magic-related information is likely to pique her curiosity and can often hold her interest, but isn't likely to feel like something she needs.

Apprenticed in her childhood and kept mostly isolated since then, Deela is comfortable in solitude and uneasy in crowds. She's also been deeply lonely, and has lost the handful of friends she has been making in the crew of the Evening Star, and is hungry for companionship or connection of almost any kind. Possibly relatedly, she's also intensely empathetic and compassionate, especially to anyone in a bad situation similar to anything she's experienced -- often even in cases where the similarity isn't something she's conscious of recognizing. When she does make a friend or an attachment of any kind, she attaches hard; anyone who befriends her, or is even slightly kind to her, can expect to have her loyalty for life.

Deela is profoundly timid, afraid of both physical and verbal confrontation; her first impulse will always be to flee the former even when doing so is a bad tactical choice, and avoid the latter by hesitating to openly disagree with anyone, even on factual matters where she knows them to be wrong. More specifically, right now she is most afraid of this fragment of a god that has apparently somehow been tied to her without her knowing, and of the fact that she's now being hunted by both the cult and her former master, if indeed they aren't working together. Though she's become able to overcome it with sufficient reason, fear is a constant part of her life and affects almost everything she does.

POWERS/ABILITIES:

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