Post by undeath on Aug 3, 2012 22:59:32 GMT -5
Awoken by the melodic hum of a voice in her head, the young woman gazed bleary-eyed about in the smoldering crater, some few-hundred feet into the mountainside at the foot of the spire. She gazed up, slowly and blearily, looked around in the small, vaguely-woman shaped crater that was supposed to be her tomb, at the massive stockpiles of broken, destroyed weapons, shields, armor suits, and other variegated objects that stopped the immediate death of the young woman on impact, all ruined by tunneling into the earth. Elle herself, miraculously, was okay, though nothing that she wore as equipment, had survived the vicious trip down from the top of the spire, save for a small band around one finger. There was a plate-mail boot-print right in the center of her chest that had begun her terrible descent to the smoldering hole in the side of Siranda that she had been stuck in for.. That was a valid question. How long has she been out? She wondered this, totally to herself, and out-loud, before looking down to behold the small band, which played a voice in her head to answer these questions.
"Longer than any of us have cared to stick around for, Elle. You're on your own, unless some survivors stuck around, or new ones arrived." Her heart sank, and she looked up at the seventy-odd foot descent she had made into the side of the island, grunted with effort, and began to prize her way out, along the way, going over the absolute truths she knew about herself.
Name: Adelle Di'Anama
Weight: Hundred twenty five pounds
Weapon of Choice: Greatsword
Hair: White
Eyes: Blue
Profession: Fighter
Most Closely Followed Deity: Tempus, god of battle.
How I came to be here...
As far back as I can recall, I've been wandering, taking needless risks, fighting and surviving, always with the largest blade that I could find. Born in Everaska to a mother who died in labor and a father unknown, the future didn't have much hope for this lone young girl, especially not with all of the local clerics being too powerless to raise the woman who had given me life. I was given my mother's name, Adelle.. A pretty sounding name, nice and appealing, but given what little I'd heard about her from my caretaker, an elderly woman who had never been able to have children, I did not want to associate it with myself. My mother had been the opposite of what I aspired to be, she was weak, permissive, easily bullied..
To me, all of these things were personified by the name that I was given. I vowed to never be an Adelle, but also to never allow myself to forget my humble roots, the woman to whom I owed my continued survival, Maureen Di'Anama, gave me my last name, and from then on, I took up the name Elle to distance myself from the pathetic permissiveness of my mother, while never totally allowing myself to forget where I came from in that regard either. That's why I kept the name Adelle, instead of abandoning it in favor of something that seemed more appropriate from the young woman with some combat prowess that I was shaping up to be.
As long as I could remember, my fascination with swords and armor lasted. Because of the relatively small nature of the city of Everaska, there was no formal education to give me basic knowledge, I read in the library and trained with the guardsmen of the city to inspire a love of learning and refining of my combat abilities within me. I knew that I'd never crack up to be the magical stuff of legends that I'd always heard about, but I knew that, if I truly did set my mind to it, that there was some hope for me yet, in the form of my fascination of all things with a blade and a sharp tip.
So I worked with the guards, with a local blacksmith who was kind about giving me less-than-stellar creations in return for my assistance with him, and came home to a life of simple ease, Maureen, my not-mother, ran a mill, therefore we lived a life of simple elegance, all the things we needed, most of the stuff we wanted. Though I'd always wanted something more, those who have are rarely content, after all.
One day, at the ripe old age of about fourteen, I figured I knew better than all those who said that leaving was a bad idea, and I figured that I would be on my way. So I left. I'd bought a horse from a farmer, took the biggest and sharpest of swords from the blacksmith, a whet stone, a satchel full of food, and a set of chain under-armor. With this, I set out to begin my glorious career as a swordswoman!
The only problem with this, as I soon found out, was that adventuring, in this day and age, is not the lucrative, goldspinning business it used to be, and while I was getting astronomically better at slaughtering things that looked at me funny or tried to smash me over the face and take me away for a night in the cave, I was slowly running out of gold and my sword was losing its edge. I'd need a renewable source of revenue and a sword that wouldn't get cracks no matter how many people's failed businesses as highwaymen I shut down.
Eventually, I'd came to a rather small city that was apparently built on top of an entrance to hell, because upon venturing into the cave that the villagers promised me their life savings if I cleared out, I found, much to my surprise, that I came face-to-face with the thing that was destroying all of their livestock, a rather large and unfriendly looking half-dragon. He stood at about ten foot tall, smelled like he'd eaten a whole lot of cows and not bathed recently, and he was holding an immolated axe. He was my first real threat, and what started me down the road to becoming the fighter I am.. Well, was before I was kicked into the spire.. Today, because the first time I fought him, I couldn't cut through his hide, and I received a greataxe to the chest for my troubles. Running from the cave in a hilarious defeat, this wasn't going so well.
Eventually, though, I returned with a better sword, more training in the countryside, and butchered the stupid ugly git, then collected the life savings of all the villagers, which included a giant blade with some vague magical angle to it. That solved one of my problems, and from about my sixteenth birthday on, I became obsessed with finding magical stuff, as the sword cut more beautifully and effectively than any I'd ever seen.
My wanderlust grew greater and greater as I progressed my way through the lands, and about the time my eighteenth year came around, I found that I was disproportionate, which something I'd decreed I'd never let happen. I hadn't set foot in a library or any institution that could teach me about the local affairs in well over two years. The next year or so was spent in total silence from me, as I educated myself as formally as I possibly could, spending day after day going into libraries, learning about what was known about many basic practices. Fishing, farming, language, mathematics, some things about foreign cultures, and, my personal favorite, learning about alive things. Having done nothing but barter, travel, and kill things for the last few years, I had fallen out of touch with the way of the civilized world worked, and with the way that the magics were now engineering better and better fighters and creations.
One day, I had decided that my curiosity had become too great, and I ventured to a city that was several days away to work in their magus's tower as an assistant and a combat tester. Basically, in those weeks, I combined two things I loved, using my head, to find weaknesses within the things that I was pitted against in battle, and using my blade to actually execute what I had found. Logical thinking had become a strong suit of mine, as I found myself using it constantly in the world, so I fast learned to become a rather brutal fighter, aiming always for the head and upper body, trying to strike whatever weaknesses I found, most of them up where all the most important body parts were, as I personally lacked the strength to chop my way through a limb at that point (I chuckled weakly, remembering that I had actually thought that, but the pain in my arms quickly shut me up, I wasn't even half way out of the giant crater that I had been kicked into), and there wasn't much other tactical value in striking for a leg.
During that time, I fought all kinds of follies of mad magic gone awry: owlbears, far off monstrous things called "Tigers" that had venom in their fangs, snakes, spiders, and all sorts of other things that the men there either wanted to test the effectiveness of or that were failures that needed to be disposed of.
At this point in time, though, sadly not all could remain as it was, despite how much I was enjoying myself. Over the course of a few weeks, they'd gotten a few new assistants to do what I'd done, and I was sent to begin working on portals in a different floor of the labyrinthine tower. So dutifully I went the next morning, and I learned that my new job was less brain and more brawn, and that I had been moved for showing exceptional prowess in terms of combat and the like. As a result, I found myself destroying things that the wizards disliked when they opened portals to the abyss, which left me fighting mostly dretches and succubi of relatively low power, all of whom were swiftly destroyed by me.
This job, though marginally less enjoyable than the last that I worked at, taught me a lot about the cornucopia of planes out there, and got me interested in interdimensional travel, though I never dared to try it, as it always seemed very risky, as there were all sorts of tales from wizards and even the experts on it of things such as mess-ups where the portal closes when the person is stuck between dimensions and is left half in each with very little chance of survival, of times when the portal would malfunction and throw someone into an entirely different dimension and then close behind them, and a host of other such things. It was for this reason that this particular tower rarely sent people traveling in such a dramatic way, though it was frequent that they teleported other places on this plane.
That was what I started with, because it was much less risky. I always thought that there wasn't nearly as much chance of being cut in half with no chance of being put back together again with teleportation over a relatively short distance, usually into other mage's towers. Many times, I'd act as a courier because of my fearless resolve about something that made many people concerned. Other times, I'd be sent in with a giant sword to fix things with the edge of it and learn about what happened. I'd been teleported into drow strongholds in the underdark, towers under siege, and plenty of other such places, sometimes making a more substantial impact than others.
Despite all this, my contempt for mages gradually grew, their apprehensive fear about over-stretching their boundaries led them to very rarely take risks with casting and using new scrolls.. ("Forget that, if I had mastery over time and space and the prime elements, I'd be pushing boundaries all day!" Elle remarked, aloud, as she continued to claw her way out of the ditch.)
Over time of travelling between the various outposts of the land, I became more and more skilled with a blade, and more and more skilled with the art of teleporting, so when I hit my first mistake, it would figure that karma would see fit to balance and make it a big one. The teleport spell opened up a wormhole into the Ringwood Tower, whereupon it promptly closed and left me trapped, dizzy, confused and alone.
And so it came to pass, of course, that a few years worth of combat training later, Adelle Di'Anama came to the island of Siranda a few days after the original outbreak took over, in the days of Kela the goddess of Dragons, where she came to meet people, acquire the greatest artifacts readily available to her, and just generally become the best that she could.
At the point of which her mental reminiscing had been finished, she had crawled her way out of the ditch, breathless, tired, ragged and desolate, her armor crumbled to pieces, leaving her in little more than rags. She looked at the mountain she had to scale from the water up to the ground, sighed, and got to work, and got to thinking about her time spent as a survivor of the undead apocalypse.
((Please, feedback is welcome in PMs, and if there's any interest I can post a couple of stories from the various incarnations of Survival's Dawn (where this mod got its roots) and SoS as a whole, almost all of which Elle survived through.
"Longer than any of us have cared to stick around for, Elle. You're on your own, unless some survivors stuck around, or new ones arrived." Her heart sank, and she looked up at the seventy-odd foot descent she had made into the side of the island, grunted with effort, and began to prize her way out, along the way, going over the absolute truths she knew about herself.
Name: Adelle Di'Anama
Weight: Hundred twenty five pounds
Weapon of Choice: Greatsword
Hair: White
Eyes: Blue
Profession: Fighter
Most Closely Followed Deity: Tempus, god of battle.
How I came to be here...
As far back as I can recall, I've been wandering, taking needless risks, fighting and surviving, always with the largest blade that I could find. Born in Everaska to a mother who died in labor and a father unknown, the future didn't have much hope for this lone young girl, especially not with all of the local clerics being too powerless to raise the woman who had given me life. I was given my mother's name, Adelle.. A pretty sounding name, nice and appealing, but given what little I'd heard about her from my caretaker, an elderly woman who had never been able to have children, I did not want to associate it with myself. My mother had been the opposite of what I aspired to be, she was weak, permissive, easily bullied..
To me, all of these things were personified by the name that I was given. I vowed to never be an Adelle, but also to never allow myself to forget my humble roots, the woman to whom I owed my continued survival, Maureen Di'Anama, gave me my last name, and from then on, I took up the name Elle to distance myself from the pathetic permissiveness of my mother, while never totally allowing myself to forget where I came from in that regard either. That's why I kept the name Adelle, instead of abandoning it in favor of something that seemed more appropriate from the young woman with some combat prowess that I was shaping up to be.
As long as I could remember, my fascination with swords and armor lasted. Because of the relatively small nature of the city of Everaska, there was no formal education to give me basic knowledge, I read in the library and trained with the guardsmen of the city to inspire a love of learning and refining of my combat abilities within me. I knew that I'd never crack up to be the magical stuff of legends that I'd always heard about, but I knew that, if I truly did set my mind to it, that there was some hope for me yet, in the form of my fascination of all things with a blade and a sharp tip.
So I worked with the guards, with a local blacksmith who was kind about giving me less-than-stellar creations in return for my assistance with him, and came home to a life of simple ease, Maureen, my not-mother, ran a mill, therefore we lived a life of simple elegance, all the things we needed, most of the stuff we wanted. Though I'd always wanted something more, those who have are rarely content, after all.
One day, at the ripe old age of about fourteen, I figured I knew better than all those who said that leaving was a bad idea, and I figured that I would be on my way. So I left. I'd bought a horse from a farmer, took the biggest and sharpest of swords from the blacksmith, a whet stone, a satchel full of food, and a set of chain under-armor. With this, I set out to begin my glorious career as a swordswoman!
The only problem with this, as I soon found out, was that adventuring, in this day and age, is not the lucrative, goldspinning business it used to be, and while I was getting astronomically better at slaughtering things that looked at me funny or tried to smash me over the face and take me away for a night in the cave, I was slowly running out of gold and my sword was losing its edge. I'd need a renewable source of revenue and a sword that wouldn't get cracks no matter how many people's failed businesses as highwaymen I shut down.
Eventually, I'd came to a rather small city that was apparently built on top of an entrance to hell, because upon venturing into the cave that the villagers promised me their life savings if I cleared out, I found, much to my surprise, that I came face-to-face with the thing that was destroying all of their livestock, a rather large and unfriendly looking half-dragon. He stood at about ten foot tall, smelled like he'd eaten a whole lot of cows and not bathed recently, and he was holding an immolated axe. He was my first real threat, and what started me down the road to becoming the fighter I am.. Well, was before I was kicked into the spire.. Today, because the first time I fought him, I couldn't cut through his hide, and I received a greataxe to the chest for my troubles. Running from the cave in a hilarious defeat, this wasn't going so well.
Eventually, though, I returned with a better sword, more training in the countryside, and butchered the stupid ugly git, then collected the life savings of all the villagers, which included a giant blade with some vague magical angle to it. That solved one of my problems, and from about my sixteenth birthday on, I became obsessed with finding magical stuff, as the sword cut more beautifully and effectively than any I'd ever seen.
My wanderlust grew greater and greater as I progressed my way through the lands, and about the time my eighteenth year came around, I found that I was disproportionate, which something I'd decreed I'd never let happen. I hadn't set foot in a library or any institution that could teach me about the local affairs in well over two years. The next year or so was spent in total silence from me, as I educated myself as formally as I possibly could, spending day after day going into libraries, learning about what was known about many basic practices. Fishing, farming, language, mathematics, some things about foreign cultures, and, my personal favorite, learning about alive things. Having done nothing but barter, travel, and kill things for the last few years, I had fallen out of touch with the way of the civilized world worked, and with the way that the magics were now engineering better and better fighters and creations.
One day, I had decided that my curiosity had become too great, and I ventured to a city that was several days away to work in their magus's tower as an assistant and a combat tester. Basically, in those weeks, I combined two things I loved, using my head, to find weaknesses within the things that I was pitted against in battle, and using my blade to actually execute what I had found. Logical thinking had become a strong suit of mine, as I found myself using it constantly in the world, so I fast learned to become a rather brutal fighter, aiming always for the head and upper body, trying to strike whatever weaknesses I found, most of them up where all the most important body parts were, as I personally lacked the strength to chop my way through a limb at that point (I chuckled weakly, remembering that I had actually thought that, but the pain in my arms quickly shut me up, I wasn't even half way out of the giant crater that I had been kicked into), and there wasn't much other tactical value in striking for a leg.
During that time, I fought all kinds of follies of mad magic gone awry: owlbears, far off monstrous things called "Tigers" that had venom in their fangs, snakes, spiders, and all sorts of other things that the men there either wanted to test the effectiveness of or that were failures that needed to be disposed of.
At this point in time, though, sadly not all could remain as it was, despite how much I was enjoying myself. Over the course of a few weeks, they'd gotten a few new assistants to do what I'd done, and I was sent to begin working on portals in a different floor of the labyrinthine tower. So dutifully I went the next morning, and I learned that my new job was less brain and more brawn, and that I had been moved for showing exceptional prowess in terms of combat and the like. As a result, I found myself destroying things that the wizards disliked when they opened portals to the abyss, which left me fighting mostly dretches and succubi of relatively low power, all of whom were swiftly destroyed by me.
This job, though marginally less enjoyable than the last that I worked at, taught me a lot about the cornucopia of planes out there, and got me interested in interdimensional travel, though I never dared to try it, as it always seemed very risky, as there were all sorts of tales from wizards and even the experts on it of things such as mess-ups where the portal closes when the person is stuck between dimensions and is left half in each with very little chance of survival, of times when the portal would malfunction and throw someone into an entirely different dimension and then close behind them, and a host of other such things. It was for this reason that this particular tower rarely sent people traveling in such a dramatic way, though it was frequent that they teleported other places on this plane.
That was what I started with, because it was much less risky. I always thought that there wasn't nearly as much chance of being cut in half with no chance of being put back together again with teleportation over a relatively short distance, usually into other mage's towers. Many times, I'd act as a courier because of my fearless resolve about something that made many people concerned. Other times, I'd be sent in with a giant sword to fix things with the edge of it and learn about what happened. I'd been teleported into drow strongholds in the underdark, towers under siege, and plenty of other such places, sometimes making a more substantial impact than others.
Despite all this, my contempt for mages gradually grew, their apprehensive fear about over-stretching their boundaries led them to very rarely take risks with casting and using new scrolls.. ("Forget that, if I had mastery over time and space and the prime elements, I'd be pushing boundaries all day!" Elle remarked, aloud, as she continued to claw her way out of the ditch.)
Over time of travelling between the various outposts of the land, I became more and more skilled with a blade, and more and more skilled with the art of teleporting, so when I hit my first mistake, it would figure that karma would see fit to balance and make it a big one. The teleport spell opened up a wormhole into the Ringwood Tower, whereupon it promptly closed and left me trapped, dizzy, confused and alone.
And so it came to pass, of course, that a few years worth of combat training later, Adelle Di'Anama came to the island of Siranda a few days after the original outbreak took over, in the days of Kela the goddess of Dragons, where she came to meet people, acquire the greatest artifacts readily available to her, and just generally become the best that she could.
At the point of which her mental reminiscing had been finished, she had crawled her way out of the ditch, breathless, tired, ragged and desolate, her armor crumbled to pieces, leaving her in little more than rags. She looked at the mountain she had to scale from the water up to the ground, sighed, and got to work, and got to thinking about her time spent as a survivor of the undead apocalypse.
((Please, feedback is welcome in PMs, and if there's any interest I can post a couple of stories from the various incarnations of Survival's Dawn (where this mod got its roots) and SoS as a whole, almost all of which Elle survived through.