Azryssa Vhal - XERES LIVE!

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Basic Information

Full Name

Azryssa Vhal

Known As

The Laughing Blade

Race (Grade)

Human (E)

Class

Barbarian

Height

5'4"

Birthday

Mistfall 3, 1283

Age

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Birthsign

The Mist Chimera

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Bloodline Ability

🔮Unknown

This Bloodline ability has not yet been unveiled to you.

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Physical Description

Azryssa Vhal in the Elderwood, Silmarithil

Appearance

Azryssa Vhal is twenty-two years old and the first impression she gives is almost always the wrong one. She is compact and angular, with sharp green eyes, warm brown skin, and dark hair worn in layered cuts that fade from deep violet at the roots through to the tips, the result of dye she does herself with materials she carries specifically for this purpose. Tucked into the violet is a cluster of fresh flowers, changed out regularly, which she selects with the same care she gives to everything else that matters to her. Today's are pink dahlias. Yesterday's were white wisteria. She has opinions.

Her armor is the second impression, and it tends to recalibrate the first one significantly. It is fully custom plate in a deep purple-black, worked in dense scrolling filigree that runs across every piece, breastplate, gauntlets, greaves, thigh guards, and at the shoulders it rises into ornate wing-shaped crests that catch light in a way that metal arguably should not. The pieces are lighter than they look and she moves in them with a fluidity that suggests she has worn this suit for years and that it fits her the way a second skin fits. Whether the wing shapes are purely decorative is a question people think about after they have seen her fight, when they have time to think about things other than how they are still alive.

Unique Characteristics

She has purple-painted nails, always, and she keeps them intact through combat through some combination of technique and refusal to accept the alternative. She laughs frequently and easily, a real laugh, not a performed one. The laugh and the violence do not exist in separate registers for her. She has been observed giggling at something and then turning around to address a threat with the buster sword before the giggle fully finished, with no visible transition between the two states. This is, for most people who see it the first time, the most alarming thing they have seen that week.

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Personality & Temperament

Positive Traits

Genuinely funny; the humor is real and spontaneous
Completely fearless in situations others find terrifying
Honest and blunt, sometimes more helpful than tact would be
Curious and fully engaged when something interests her
Has real aesthetic sensibilities: deliberate, consistent
Not cruel or sadistic; violence is practical, not savored

Challenging Traits

The switch from cheerful to lethal is fast and unclear
Gets bored fast; boredom causes most of her incidents
Has a "seemed fine at the time" approach to consequences
Not interested in consequences that haven't happened yet
Wanted in multiple cities; an active, ongoing limitation
Impulse control exists in theory

Boredom is the real danger. The sword is just what happens when I'm not bored. The two things are related. You see how they're related, right?

I like the flowers here. Silmarithil has good flowers. Goodberry had good flowers too but everyone was so nice about them. Here it's just, they're there. It's better.

People always ask about the sword first. I've started charging for the story.

Likes

Fresh flowers, she considers this non-negotiable
A fight that requires her to actually try
Purple, specifically, as an aesthetic commitment
Cities with good markets and bad security
Forests at dusk; she finds them appropriately dramatic
Anyone who does not immediately ask about the sword
Pan'Che-style food, which she currently can't get

Dislikes

Goodberry (too picturesque; the cheer felt like a challenge)
Boredom, it bears repeating
Being underestimated; also useful, also complicated
Anything that takes longer than it should
Cities where she currently has outstanding warrants
Rules that exist for no reason she can identify

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Combat Style

Azryssa fights with a two-handed buster sword that she carries as casually as most people carry a walking stick, and her fighting style is the reason people who have seen it cannot agree on what to call it. It is not the structured form of Haven's knight orders. It is not the academically documented traditions of Grafton's war colleges. Scholars of martial practice who have reviewed eyewitness accounts tend to identify fragments of four or five recognizable styles, incompatibly combined, that should produce a confused and ineffective result but observably do not.

The working theory among those interested in such things is that she trained under someone in Pan'Che whose own style was similarly composite, possibly self-developed, and that she then modified it further according to instincts that are difficult to argue with given the outcomes. She does not Rage in the theatrical barbarian tradition, the transition is subtler than that, a kind of focused acceleration where the cheerfulness does not disappear so much as it becomes very specifically about whatever is happening in the next three seconds. The sword is enormous relative to her frame. She swings it without apparent effort. These facts are both correct and have not yet produced a satisfying explanation.

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Background & History

Pan'Che, The City That Made Her

Pan'Che is a city that rewards the quick and the strange, and Azryssa Vhal arrived from it with the particular confidence of someone who was formed by a place and then exceeded it. She grew up in the market districts, where noise and movement are the ambient conditions and where the ability to read a situation at speed is not a skill but a survival requirement. Her family name, Vhal, is a short, sharp Pan'Che word for a particular kind of unlucky weather that arrives without warning and leaves damage in its wake. She thinks this is funny. Her mother thought it was appropriate. Her father did not stay long enough to have an opinion either way. She was raised practical, curious, and with a very specific relationship to personal property, hers she kept, others' she evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Pan'Che does not produce people who ask for permission as a first step.

The Sword and the Teacher

She found the buster sword, or the sword found her, depending on who is telling the story, at sixteen, in a situation involving a market dispute that escalated beyond what market disputes typically involve. The sword's previous owner was no longer in a position to argue ownership. She took it home, could not lift it initially, and spent six months training until she could. Her teacher was a woman named Caress Vha who operated outside Pan'Che's formal martial academies and who described her own style as "whatever works in the moment, codified afterward." Caress taught Azryssa for three years before announcing that she had run out of things to teach her and suggesting she go create some problems and report back with questions. Azryssa has not yet run out of problems to create. She has not yet reported back.

The Incidents (Pan'Che)

The warrants began accumulating at nineteen. The first involved a guild contract dispute in which three guild representatives miscalculated how the negotiation would go after one of them made a comment about the sword. The building sustained structural damage that the authorities characterized as "disproportionate to the circumstances." Azryssa characterized it as "efficient." A second incident involving a dock authority inspector followed, then a third involving a private security company that had been hired to find her after the first two, which she found both flattering and professionally instructive. By twenty she was wanted in Pan'Che proper, in the port district which technically has its own jurisdiction, and in a coastal city she had only been visiting for a long weekend. She left Pan'Che at twenty with a bag, the sword, the armor, and no particular plan except that staying had stopped being viable.

Goodberry, Too Nice

She heard about Goodberry from someone she met on the road who described it as welcoming, beautiful, and peaceful. This turned out to be entirely accurate and entirely the problem. Goodberry is exactly what it looks like, a city that has been deliberately made good and takes the making of it seriously. Everyone was pleasant. The architecture was pleasant. The flower arrangements in the common areas were pleasant. She spent three weeks there, made one friend she liked genuinely, attended two community events she found deeply unsettling in their cordiality, and left before she could do something she would only sort of regret. The one friend she made did not ask her to stay, which she appreciated. She left them a note and a good flower recommendation.

Silmarithil, Currently

Silmarithil is better. Not in the Goodberry way, it is not trying to be perfect, it is just trying to be itself, and what it is happens to include a forest she can swing the sword in without anyone finding it strange, taverns with the kind of noise that suggests something might be about to happen, and a population that is varied enough to be interesting without being so populated that someone is likely to recognize her face from a wanted notice. She has been here a short time and is in what she privately calls the "assessment phase," which means she is walking every street, eating at every establishment, and taking note of every person she finds interesting. She is bored in the way that a loaded thing is bored. She does not know what she is waiting for. She is confident she will recognize it when it arrives.

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Goals & Aspirations

Find Something Worth Getting Invested In

She has not found it yet. She has found a lot of things that were interesting for a while, and then she found the edge of how interesting they were, and then she moved on. She is aware this is a pattern. She is not sure what to do about the pattern except keep looking for something that does not have an edge she can find. Silmarithil has more corners than Goodberry. She is checking them.

Not Get Arrested

This is a more active goal than it sounds. She is wanted in Pan'Che, the Pan'Che port district, two coastal cities, and one city she is being deliberately vague about because admitting how she got wanted there would require a longer explanation than she is prepared to give. She is not especially worried about this. She is aware she should be more worried about this. These two things coexist in her without producing additional concern.

Figure Out the Next Chapter

She is twenty-two. She has a sword, a warrant collection, a very good armor set, and no discernible long-term plan. She is not troubled by this. She is mildly curious about what it will turn out to be, the way she is curious about most things, with the full expectation that it will be interesting, and with no particular need to rush it. Something will happen. Something always happens. She finds this more reassuring than most people find it alarming.

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Current Status & Relationships

Residence

Silmarithil

Role

Warrior

ATTENTION!

Azryssa Vhal is an active combatant and should be treated as such. The "cute" reading is accurate. So is the "dangerous" reading. Both coexist without contradiction and there is no safe assumption that one cancels out the other. The transition from cheerful to combat-ready is not preceded by warning signs that most people know to look for.

She is currently laying low in Silmarithil by choice and preference, she is not hiding in distress, she is biding her time. She is also very bored. These two facts together should inform how you approach her, because a bored Azryssa Vhal who finds something interesting is a situation that can develop quickly in directions that are not always easy to walk back. Approach with genuine curiosity rather than an agenda; she is perceptive enough to notice the difference. Do not make the mistake of picking a fight she did not invite. She has a warrant collection and she is not in a hurry to extend it in Silmarithil, but her patience with things she finds irritating has a documented ceiling.