The backstory of my (former) Exalted character...
Before I start, I'm going to point out that I know this is full of over-used fantasy tropes, and I was shameless in stealing from some combination of Star Wars, Narnia, Lord of the Rings, and who knows what else. I don't claim that this is original, or all that well thought out, and I don't promise that your life will be in any way better after reading it. But part of the benefit of having one's own web space is one can brag about his or her characters there. And my one D&D character is already visible to all who want to see him (yes, I'm playing a guy in that game; the character was made before I joined, and I don't really mind at all). So, you know, uh, read at your own risk. If you've got long-winded character histories for Exalted or Shadowrun and want to send them to me, I bet I'd enjoy reading them. coral dot hess at gmail dot com.
Fifteen years ago (a land near?) Cherak was ruled by
the Queen of a dying House. She had no children, no siblings, and no
relations who did not owe their allegiance to another House. The second
most prominent House and likely heir to her throne was headed by Natalia
and Rostislav Starfall, who had always been loyal to the Queen and whose
ascension she supported. The other Houses, while containing many worthy
individuals among their lower ranks, were largely headed by corrupt and
selfish people who found it impossible to form a united front, a
necessity if they intended put one of their own on the throne over the
Queen's chosen successors.
Natalia and Rostislav had two daughters, Irina and Yana. They were as loving and attentive to their two children as their political and diplomatic duties would allow, but as their leisure time was very limited, each child was provided with the best full-time tutor their money could buy. By the time she was eight, Irina Starfall knew how to read and write in two languages, shoot a bow, ride a horse, address various levels of royalty, and eat with the proper utensils; she had learned to project vivaciousness and to practice discretion. Yana, two years younger, was similarly accomplished. To outsiders both girls appeared perfectly courtly, polite, and well-behaved, and for the most part, they were. But it was not unknown for Irina, in particular, to wander away during a moment of inattention on her tutor Anatoly's part, and she and her sister knew of several secret passages within the manor, which she used to great advantage in these "escapes." When the weather permitted, the girls would play outside with the servants' children, exploring far deeper into the pine forests than their tutors or parents would have liked.
On the night before her ninth birthday, Irina was awakened by Anatoly, who clamped his hand over her mouth. In a frantic whisper, he told her they needed to leave immediately--she would not have time to pack. As they moved into the hall, Irina heard the faint sounds of men and women shouting and weapons clanging together. She and her tutor hurried to Yana's room, but it was empty. In a panic, they began to look for her, but the sounds of fighting were coming closer; they would have to abandon their search. Aware that this was not the time for secrets, Irina led her tutor through a particularly useful passage, one she had often used to access the servants' exit.
Once outside the manor, Anatoly acquired a horse, and they rode through the night and most of the next day, before making camp several miles off of the road. Irina was full of questions and worries, which her tutor addressed as honestly as he could. Were her parents all right? No, several Dragonblooded and their armies had descended upon her parents' manor with the goal of killing everyone in the House. Why them? Probably, they had done the same thing to the Queen's palace, and her parents were next in line for the throne. The Empire wanted the land--and its tribute--for itself, and neither the Queen nor her parents would give it to them. Would they find Yana? He hoped so, but did not think it was likely. Did he think she was dead? He hoped not; maybe her own tutor had rescued her. How did he know about the attack? Mostly luck; he happened to be awake when the fighting began. And so on.
He explained that they were headed toward an orphanage run by a very nice woman he knew, in another city. To keep herself safe from the Dragonblooded who had assumed control of her homeland, Irina would need a new identity. From this point on, she was to be known as a merchant gentleman's daughter from several towns over, whose mother had died in childbirth and whose father had recently died at sea. She had no siblings. She had travelled very little, but had learned reading and writing from her father's shop hands, one of whom had told her to seek this orphanage at the news of her father's death, but refused to come with her. All the names and faces she'd learned in her life thus far, including Anatoly's, she would need to bury deep and keep secret. This was hard for her to hear, but he persisted, and made her repeat the details until she knew them by heart--almost until she started believing them, herself. And there, in the forest, he gave her a new name: Elana Tergiver.
When Elana gave Anatoly a last hug goodbye, outside of town, he reminded her, again, to be cautious. "You must play your part well, and forever. Forget now the idea of avenging your parents, for you can't possibly take on the Empire, or even the Dragonblooded responsible for killing them. I wish I could counsel you otherwise. Perhaps by the time you are older, the world will have changed, but I don't believe that is likely." They wished each other well, and he rode off.
Elana played her part well, covering her infrequent mistakes as convincingly as she could, and she got along well with the orphanage's other children. She excelled, perhaps more than was strictly wise, in the classes they were offered, and before long found herself informally indentured to a local bureaucrat, who only very rarely--and, then, dimly--sensed that perhaps Elana did not like him. Of course, she loathed him and all he worked for, but she knew that the Empire sent less bright and helpful children to far worse places. Rather than seriously contemplating escape, she instead rationalized her position and began to feel that perhaps the key to preventing other children from losing their parents as she had was to work from inside the Empire's bureaucracy, to slow things down and perhaps decrease the Empire's growth rate. At 17, she was formally hired into the Empire's service, as a low-level bureaucrat, and she began her slow ascension through the ranks.
Every few months the Empire would ship something through the area, bringing supplies for the legions outwards from the Emerald Isle, or various forms of tribute inwards. Sometimes, those shipments would go astray; it was rare, and the local office had trouble tracing the source of the errors, so it was generally chalked up to "bureaucratic inefficiency," and everyone would receive a strict talking-to. Similarly, sometimes inventories were found to be wrong, scheduled tax increases wouldn't happen, and so on; the errors were never traced.
The strain of accessing documents that she shouldn't and of hiding the "errors" she introduced--and, far worse, the knowledge of all of the documents she had processed flawlessly--wore on Elana. She had no confidant, no outlet for her frustrations. She had a few friends, whose company she enjoyed--and they hers--but she kept her thoughts so close to her chest that their relationships would eventually end up rather strained. She spent time at pubs, drinking with friends or pretending to do work when her friends were busy, just to soak up the presence of other people who were out enjoying themselves.
On one of the latter occasions, she heard some men and women, who may have had too much to drink, having an interesting conversation at an unwise volume, bemoaning the Empire's hand in this thing or that, and she listened hard, while pretending to compose a letter. The people sitting around the table were clearly unhappy with the Empire and would love to see bad things happen to the Dragonblooded who was "advising" the mayor. From time to time, Elana looked around the pub and was pleased to see nobody seemed to be paying attention to the table of miscreants--and nobody besides her seemed to be studiously ignoring them, either. As their conversation turned to other topics, she packed up her writing tools and left the pub, intending to discreetly follow a couple of them home.
One night, a week later, one ringleader of the dissension heard a knock at his door, and when he opened it found only a letter, suggesting that perhaps his goals and the author's were in concert. The person who wrote the letter claimed to know about an important shipment coming up, one which the Empire would hate to lose, but which, in the right hands, could benefit many. The author also suggested that, if he would be amenable to working together, he should leave a token in a certain place, and another letter would arrive, giving a meeting location. The letter also contained an apology in the case that there had been a misunderstanding. Finally, the letter writer insisted on secrecy; if anyone were to find out about the plan, it would be unworkable.
The token was placed as requested, and a meeting was set up. Both attendees were to wear masks and were to come alone. The abandoned house offered very little in the way of hiding spaces for an ambush; the approaches were clear, and large sections of the walls were missing. Just in case, Elana positioned herself so that she could watch the approaches, in case this man brought the authorities.
He did not. Their first meeting was successful; she claimed she knew someone at the Bureau, not by name, but by the same method as he knew her--the person (whom she referred to as "he") had found her, had somehow known of her anti-Empire leanings (she would not tell him how she had guessed at his feelings, claiming it was merely good fortune) and provided information. This Bureau contact was dissatisfied and therefore willing to leak information. The shipment in question was not coming for another month or so, which would give them time to organize. He said he knew some people who would be willing to help them, and she suggested that they should remain anonymous to her, as she was to them, as her contact was to her, and as this man would remain to her contact, thus preventing them ALL from being caught if the Empire were to find out one of them. They discussed the need for secrecy.
Thus began a moderately successful campaign to slow the Empire's progress and perhaps eventually push them out of the area. The shipment's loss was blamed on bandits, and the small band of criminals split the shipment, each smuggling their portion out of the city to where it would do the most good.
Elana kept the rate of her small organization's attacks as low as she could, and changed their attack method often, to avoid suspicion, but perhaps such suspicion was inevitable. After a few years--and several very close calls--Elana found documents on her desk describing a shipment she couldn't ignore: young slaves were being taken from very far north down to the Emerald Isle. The caravan would be passing close to her city in two weeks. It was already too late to send a false cancellation or to bureaucratically fix the situation, so she called together her band of criminals--larger and containing several more levels than when she had first conceived it--and told them about "her contact's" findings. Their plan to slow the caravan and rescue the slaves was sheer genius, and at the end of the night, they went home, resolved to meet again in a week.
The next day at work, Elana's manager announced that she had some visitors, whom she could meet in the second floor conference room. She was somewhat surprised--who would visit her at work?--but she assumed it was someone from a branch office, wanting to discuss some bureaucratic matter. As she walked down the hall, she began to feel a little bit strange. [I'm going to put this part in ellipses for now. Suffice it to say, she Exalted and got the heck out of there. The shipment had been a set up; someone on the inside of her group of bandits had been working with the Empire; someone external to the Bureau had set up several fake shipments and determined the identity of the Bureau leak based on which one the bandits chose to go after, perhaps over the course of months.]
She didn't go home, but did leave a note for her second-in-command, warning him not to go to another meeting with that group and suggesting he leave town. Worried that perhaps he, too, had betrayed the group, she left no hint as to her own plans. Trusting nobody and having nowhere to go, she stole a horse from the very same pub where she'd conceived her grand plan, and galloped away from life as she had known it, again. She stopped for provisions--some bought with the price of the horse, some stolen--two towns over and took to the forest on foot, knowing the Wild Hunt would be after her, in addition to whatever forces the Empire might have sent searching for a spy, or leak, or bandit, or whatever they would call her.
Over the next year, she wandered. She went far enough south and east to have a chance of surviving the winter alone, avoiding civilization when she could. She explored ruins, as much for something to do as for shelter or material gain. From time to time, she would go into town to trade away her finds.
[Suggested addition to the history, here...] She got into a bit of a scrape with some Dragonblooded, one day, and some subset of Inik, Su, and Nadine stepped in and saved her. [The group never really agreed on how we all met and got to trusting one another, and that might be a first step in that direction.]
Interesting fact: nobody has ever seen her caste mark.
Natalia and Rostislav had two daughters, Irina and Yana. They were as loving and attentive to their two children as their political and diplomatic duties would allow, but as their leisure time was very limited, each child was provided with the best full-time tutor their money could buy. By the time she was eight, Irina Starfall knew how to read and write in two languages, shoot a bow, ride a horse, address various levels of royalty, and eat with the proper utensils; she had learned to project vivaciousness and to practice discretion. Yana, two years younger, was similarly accomplished. To outsiders both girls appeared perfectly courtly, polite, and well-behaved, and for the most part, they were. But it was not unknown for Irina, in particular, to wander away during a moment of inattention on her tutor Anatoly's part, and she and her sister knew of several secret passages within the manor, which she used to great advantage in these "escapes." When the weather permitted, the girls would play outside with the servants' children, exploring far deeper into the pine forests than their tutors or parents would have liked.
On the night before her ninth birthday, Irina was awakened by Anatoly, who clamped his hand over her mouth. In a frantic whisper, he told her they needed to leave immediately--she would not have time to pack. As they moved into the hall, Irina heard the faint sounds of men and women shouting and weapons clanging together. She and her tutor hurried to Yana's room, but it was empty. In a panic, they began to look for her, but the sounds of fighting were coming closer; they would have to abandon their search. Aware that this was not the time for secrets, Irina led her tutor through a particularly useful passage, one she had often used to access the servants' exit.
Once outside the manor, Anatoly acquired a horse, and they rode through the night and most of the next day, before making camp several miles off of the road. Irina was full of questions and worries, which her tutor addressed as honestly as he could. Were her parents all right? No, several Dragonblooded and their armies had descended upon her parents' manor with the goal of killing everyone in the House. Why them? Probably, they had done the same thing to the Queen's palace, and her parents were next in line for the throne. The Empire wanted the land--and its tribute--for itself, and neither the Queen nor her parents would give it to them. Would they find Yana? He hoped so, but did not think it was likely. Did he think she was dead? He hoped not; maybe her own tutor had rescued her. How did he know about the attack? Mostly luck; he happened to be awake when the fighting began. And so on.
He explained that they were headed toward an orphanage run by a very nice woman he knew, in another city. To keep herself safe from the Dragonblooded who had assumed control of her homeland, Irina would need a new identity. From this point on, she was to be known as a merchant gentleman's daughter from several towns over, whose mother had died in childbirth and whose father had recently died at sea. She had no siblings. She had travelled very little, but had learned reading and writing from her father's shop hands, one of whom had told her to seek this orphanage at the news of her father's death, but refused to come with her. All the names and faces she'd learned in her life thus far, including Anatoly's, she would need to bury deep and keep secret. This was hard for her to hear, but he persisted, and made her repeat the details until she knew them by heart--almost until she started believing them, herself. And there, in the forest, he gave her a new name: Elana Tergiver.
When Elana gave Anatoly a last hug goodbye, outside of town, he reminded her, again, to be cautious. "You must play your part well, and forever. Forget now the idea of avenging your parents, for you can't possibly take on the Empire, or even the Dragonblooded responsible for killing them. I wish I could counsel you otherwise. Perhaps by the time you are older, the world will have changed, but I don't believe that is likely." They wished each other well, and he rode off.
Elana played her part well, covering her infrequent mistakes as convincingly as she could, and she got along well with the orphanage's other children. She excelled, perhaps more than was strictly wise, in the classes they were offered, and before long found herself informally indentured to a local bureaucrat, who only very rarely--and, then, dimly--sensed that perhaps Elana did not like him. Of course, she loathed him and all he worked for, but she knew that the Empire sent less bright and helpful children to far worse places. Rather than seriously contemplating escape, she instead rationalized her position and began to feel that perhaps the key to preventing other children from losing their parents as she had was to work from inside the Empire's bureaucracy, to slow things down and perhaps decrease the Empire's growth rate. At 17, she was formally hired into the Empire's service, as a low-level bureaucrat, and she began her slow ascension through the ranks.
Every few months the Empire would ship something through the area, bringing supplies for the legions outwards from the Emerald Isle, or various forms of tribute inwards. Sometimes, those shipments would go astray; it was rare, and the local office had trouble tracing the source of the errors, so it was generally chalked up to "bureaucratic inefficiency," and everyone would receive a strict talking-to. Similarly, sometimes inventories were found to be wrong, scheduled tax increases wouldn't happen, and so on; the errors were never traced.
The strain of accessing documents that she shouldn't and of hiding the "errors" she introduced--and, far worse, the knowledge of all of the documents she had processed flawlessly--wore on Elana. She had no confidant, no outlet for her frustrations. She had a few friends, whose company she enjoyed--and they hers--but she kept her thoughts so close to her chest that their relationships would eventually end up rather strained. She spent time at pubs, drinking with friends or pretending to do work when her friends were busy, just to soak up the presence of other people who were out enjoying themselves.
On one of the latter occasions, she heard some men and women, who may have had too much to drink, having an interesting conversation at an unwise volume, bemoaning the Empire's hand in this thing or that, and she listened hard, while pretending to compose a letter. The people sitting around the table were clearly unhappy with the Empire and would love to see bad things happen to the Dragonblooded who was "advising" the mayor. From time to time, Elana looked around the pub and was pleased to see nobody seemed to be paying attention to the table of miscreants--and nobody besides her seemed to be studiously ignoring them, either. As their conversation turned to other topics, she packed up her writing tools and left the pub, intending to discreetly follow a couple of them home.
One night, a week later, one ringleader of the dissension heard a knock at his door, and when he opened it found only a letter, suggesting that perhaps his goals and the author's were in concert. The person who wrote the letter claimed to know about an important shipment coming up, one which the Empire would hate to lose, but which, in the right hands, could benefit many. The author also suggested that, if he would be amenable to working together, he should leave a token in a certain place, and another letter would arrive, giving a meeting location. The letter also contained an apology in the case that there had been a misunderstanding. Finally, the letter writer insisted on secrecy; if anyone were to find out about the plan, it would be unworkable.
The token was placed as requested, and a meeting was set up. Both attendees were to wear masks and were to come alone. The abandoned house offered very little in the way of hiding spaces for an ambush; the approaches were clear, and large sections of the walls were missing. Just in case, Elana positioned herself so that she could watch the approaches, in case this man brought the authorities.
He did not. Their first meeting was successful; she claimed she knew someone at the Bureau, not by name, but by the same method as he knew her--the person (whom she referred to as "he") had found her, had somehow known of her anti-Empire leanings (she would not tell him how she had guessed at his feelings, claiming it was merely good fortune) and provided information. This Bureau contact was dissatisfied and therefore willing to leak information. The shipment in question was not coming for another month or so, which would give them time to organize. He said he knew some people who would be willing to help them, and she suggested that they should remain anonymous to her, as she was to them, as her contact was to her, and as this man would remain to her contact, thus preventing them ALL from being caught if the Empire were to find out one of them. They discussed the need for secrecy.
Thus began a moderately successful campaign to slow the Empire's progress and perhaps eventually push them out of the area. The shipment's loss was blamed on bandits, and the small band of criminals split the shipment, each smuggling their portion out of the city to where it would do the most good.
Elana kept the rate of her small organization's attacks as low as she could, and changed their attack method often, to avoid suspicion, but perhaps such suspicion was inevitable. After a few years--and several very close calls--Elana found documents on her desk describing a shipment she couldn't ignore: young slaves were being taken from very far north down to the Emerald Isle. The caravan would be passing close to her city in two weeks. It was already too late to send a false cancellation or to bureaucratically fix the situation, so she called together her band of criminals--larger and containing several more levels than when she had first conceived it--and told them about "her contact's" findings. Their plan to slow the caravan and rescue the slaves was sheer genius, and at the end of the night, they went home, resolved to meet again in a week.
The next day at work, Elana's manager announced that she had some visitors, whom she could meet in the second floor conference room. She was somewhat surprised--who would visit her at work?--but she assumed it was someone from a branch office, wanting to discuss some bureaucratic matter. As she walked down the hall, she began to feel a little bit strange. [I'm going to put this part in ellipses for now. Suffice it to say, she Exalted and got the heck out of there. The shipment had been a set up; someone on the inside of her group of bandits had been working with the Empire; someone external to the Bureau had set up several fake shipments and determined the identity of the Bureau leak based on which one the bandits chose to go after, perhaps over the course of months.]
She didn't go home, but did leave a note for her second-in-command, warning him not to go to another meeting with that group and suggesting he leave town. Worried that perhaps he, too, had betrayed the group, she left no hint as to her own plans. Trusting nobody and having nowhere to go, she stole a horse from the very same pub where she'd conceived her grand plan, and galloped away from life as she had known it, again. She stopped for provisions--some bought with the price of the horse, some stolen--two towns over and took to the forest on foot, knowing the Wild Hunt would be after her, in addition to whatever forces the Empire might have sent searching for a spy, or leak, or bandit, or whatever they would call her.
Over the next year, she wandered. She went far enough south and east to have a chance of surviving the winter alone, avoiding civilization when she could. She explored ruins, as much for something to do as for shelter or material gain. From time to time, she would go into town to trade away her finds.
[Suggested addition to the history, here...] She got into a bit of a scrape with some Dragonblooded, one day, and some subset of Inik, Su, and Nadine stepped in and saved her. [The group never really agreed on how we all met and got to trusting one another, and that might be a first step in that direction.]
Interesting fact: nobody has ever seen her caste mark.