Ara
Profile
Basic Information
Name:
Ara
Nickname(s):
Goldy (work)
Age:
100
Birth Date:
31 Sun, 8195
Height:
5'7" (170 cm)
Gender:
Female
Race:
Dark Elf
Class:
Marauder
Occupation:
Informant
Guild(s):
Enhancement(s):
Dark Blossoming
Mareus' Favour
Likes
The Good Old Days
Street fairs
Children (even when they're little gits)
Linhythe's beaches
Traveling
Dislikes
Capitalism
Shitty parents
Forgetting
New machinery
Her lifespan
Personality
✓: free-spirited, flexible, charismatic, empathetic, shrewd
x : stuck in the past, prescriptive, distrusting, secretive, flippant
Ara is an easygoing woman who treats even strangers with an outright, thick-skinned, and liquid friendliness. She can accommodate different sensitivities with ease and puts forth real effort to mind them as a basic courtesy. Decency is important to her, so as much as possible, Ara treats everyone she meets like a person. Her wide social network reflects this nonchalant regard (or disregard) for their histories, mistakes, and regrets; she knows better than anyone that value does not wear the same face.
However, that gaiety masks a surprisingly wary interior. Made cynical by her environment, Ara treats her experiences as facts of life and will superimpose them onto new circumstances as it benefits her safety and sense of vigilante justice. She doesn't trust at face value, is always wondering whether she's the cat or the mouse, and can honestly be pretty obtuse about the truth. Once she's made a moral judgement, she is nearly impossible to budge. In other words, she really gets in her own head. Trying to really know her is a frustrating task, especially because she is just as good at brushing people off as she is at including them. Since her life and that of loved ones holds ultimate weight, threats will be cast aside with neither remorse or warning.
History
Ara’s early life was defined by difficult but fond years in a Linhian orphanage, until its aging director passed away. Too soon for his many wards, the plot was relcaimed by his family, who set about reaproppriating it for one of their many business. To their credit, they managed to rehome most, though not all, of the children. After a period of dwindling interest from both families and their interim caregivers, it became clear that the leftovers would have to fend for themselves.
Their numbers pared along loyalties; Ara, unchosen for her color and long life, clung to the two boys who she loved most. Together they settled in the slums, where the boys began working and Ara began learning to hide during the day, walk like a ghost at night, and spirit coins from pockets. Somehow, she passed her first decade only a little worse for wear. But Linhythe was not benevolent, and misfortune eventually found them in expensive diseases, deadly accidents, and misplaced rage. Much of Ara's education came from losing what she couldn't protect, and it shadowed her into an aimless adulthood of thievery and cunning. It was all she knew - and beyond that, she felt she deserved recompense from those who could afford to lose a little. Even when she hoped for trouble, she always scraped by...like she siphoned all the luck her family ever had.
Eventually her self-destructiveness faded alongside her purpose, and she traveled just to pass the time. But one hour became another, and each day followed the next. Ever so slowly, and without a thunderous realization, Ara began living again. Her horizons expanded with the years, but still she straddled the line between a second-rate today and an irrecoverable yesterday. Time carried on with a swiftness that threatened to leave everything she was - her memories and loved ones, their lives - behind like it was just an ugly thing to improve. New technology, a life without loved ones, no one but her to celebrate and remember them...she longed for the past and was uninterested in the future.
Current Story
As such, the country's political shifts were a periphery concern, if that. It wasn't until it hit home, with her sister-friend's decision to enact a long-brewing revenge upon Reluir, that she was forced to confront what it meant to go on. As it always seemed to do, these unhappy realizations propelled her. They carried her to the Shackles Isle, where she participated in the rescue of Prince Sigmund and Princess Marise on a whim - was helping royal children was too cruel an irony? Surprisingly, no; she didn't regret when they emerged battered but alive.
Her ghosts were quiet that day, and heeding them, she resigned herself to a choice. Her beginnings were dried ink. But there were those just picking up the pen, and whether for them or for retribution, for atonement, for the love she remembered or to justify why she survived - maybe she could find it in herself to be the guardian she had needed. Maybe then, she will have been a proper legacy.
Try she would, when the Prince strayed into her turf on his parents' trail. Not wishing her incidental ward to be mugged or worse, she accompanied him to the Citadel, where a mysterious mission ended with the Emperor dead and the Empress incapacitated. Prince Sigmund would soon follow with a sudden death...that proved to be a con after her own heart. He then proffered a new quest: Iadlain, for some unknown and possibly demented end. After gathering a retinue of dangerous individuals, they set off, only to be waylaid at Hangman's Cross with the search for Iryneia. And here, everything went wrong.
Additional Info
Her job: Ara works as an informant for anyone who can't enlist proper authorities, like poor or unlucky folk who need her to break privacy laws in their stead. Though it's not a collected enterprise, she finds most of her clientele by word of mouth, since her work has garnered esteem within common and marginalized communities. Over her many years, they've proven a formidable source of intel, resources, and even loyalty. Ara considers it a symbiotic relationship.
Blossoming: black nails, black tongue
She learned combat (of the dirty, underground cage-fighting sort) from one of her brothers, and has since amalgamated other street techniques in a functional but chaotic way.
Partial to rooftops when outdoors but prefers compact indoor spaces. Wary of places with too many rooms, or ones that echo.
Ara is single-mindedly protective of children. Each represents a future that may be trodden on by powerful whims (of others, of the world) for no reason at all, only to be forgotten like they were never here. Protecting them is equivalent to protecting her principles, her past, and her hopes - and this responsibility makes them nearly sacred. She knows there's only so much she can do, but the fact remains that her siblings might have grown old if someone had cared enough; she has chosen to care. It's deeply personal and very much her due north.
She returns to Linhythe frequently and refreshes her mental map of it whenever necessary. Their relationship status is It's Complicated.
She was raised by humans and is particularly conscious of time. After outliving so many loved ones, she has learned to slowly but surely remove herself from their descendants' lives. She keeps an eye out, but only from a distance. It hurts less that way.
