Gerri Hatch - XERES LIVE!

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Basic Information

Full Name

Gerri Hatch

Nickname

The Wall

Race (Grade)

Human (E)

Class

Fighter (Sword & Shield)

Height

5'7"

Birthday

Goldenleaf 22, 1274

Age

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Birthsign

The Harvest Sphinx

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Bloodline Ability

🔮Unknown

This Bloodline ability has not yet been unveiled to you.

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Physical Description

Gerri Hatch, Rokoura

Gerri Hatch is not the largest person in a room, but she has a way of being in it that makes the room feel smaller. Her build is lean and thorough, the kind of muscle that comes from doing the same thing correctly ten thousand times rather than from grinding something heavy into exhaustion. Her skin is a deep rich brown, her hair silver-white and thick, worn in heavy braids gathered loosely up at the crown before falling in loose waves down her back. Her eyes are a muted grey-green that carries the particular quality of someone who is calculating geometry when other people think they are just looking at a wall.

Off the practice field she dresses simply: a sleeveless black tunic, a leather belt worn at the hip, light bracers. There is no ceremony to it. When she is drilling, which is most mornings, she carries a round shield so dark it barely catches light, and a sword with a handle worn smooth by fifteen years of the same grip. Her stance when she settles into position has been refined past the point of thought. Weight low, shield slightly forward and angled, sword mid-height with the elbow close. She does not adopt this posture for effect. She adopts it because it is correct, and correct is what she practices until it becomes automatic, because automatic is what saves you when everything else goes wrong.

What strikes people, when they see her train, is how still she is. Not rigid, still. There is a quality to her waiting that belongs to something with deep roots, something that is not going anywhere and is completely calm about it. She has sparred with people twice her size and left them wondering what happened, because the thing that happened was that she was never where they expected her to be, and yet she never seemed to move very far. She is, in the specific sense that experienced fighters use the word, technically exceptional. She does not talk about this. She does not need to.

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Personality & Temperament

Positive Traits

Genuinely humble, but never downplays her real skill
Courteous to all until given a reason not to be
A sincere student of combat, always cataloguing techniques
Reliable in the deepest sense: she does what she says
Knows when to speak and when to listen
Warm once you get past the quiet exterior

Challenging Traits

Has trouble accepting rest; stillness makes her suspicious
Rarely voices her own needs, out of long habit
Hard to read; calm can seem like disinterest
Can't explain what pulled her to Rokoura, and it nags her

"A shield arm doesn't stop the blow. It tells you what the next one is going to be."

"I've been called the Wall. I don't mind it. A wall that holds is exactly what it was supposed to be."

"People watch my feet. They should watch my shield. By the time they notice, it's already too late."

Likes

Morning Drills Before the City Wakes Up
Watching a Fighter Who Actually Knows What They're Doing
The Sound of the Ocean at Low Tide
A Meal Eaten Slowly, Without Urgency
People Who Are Honest About What They Don't Know
A Well-Balanced Shield, No Ornamentation

Dislikes

Fighters Who Telegraph Everything and Don't Know It
People Who Mistake Courtesy for Softness
Being Asked to Explain a Decision She Made on Instinct
Unnecessary Cruelty in Any Form
Wasted Potential (in People, Weapons, or Situations)

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Background & History

Verdant Hold

She was born in Verdant Hold and learned to fight there, which is not an unusual thing in a city that has needed defenders. What was unusual was how she learned: systematically, methodically, with the patience of someone who understood early that the point of training was not to feel capable but to become capable, and that the two are not the same thing. She was not a prodigy, she did not have some natural gift that announced itself early. What she had was an absolute willingness to practice the same thing until it stopped requiring thought, and then practice it some more. The reputation came later, and it came slowly, because people who fight defensively take longer to be recognized than people who make dramatic offensive plays. You have to watch them in the wrong situation and see them not fall before you understand what they are.

The Battle of Verdant Hold

She was on the wall when the Chromatic Council came. She will not describe in detail what that fight looked like up close, not because she has suppressed it but because she has processed it into information, which is what she does with difficult things. She held her section. Her section held longer than it had any right to, and afterward the people around her said so, and she did not argue with them. What she does not talk about, what she has barely been able to articulate to herself, is what she saw during the fighting from the defenders' side, specifically a Vaitafe warrior whose name she did not know yet, working the battle in a way she had never seen at that scale. She watched him the way she watches anyone whose technique she doesn't fully understand: with complete attention and a growing awareness that she was seeing something she did not yet have the vocabulary for.

The Call

She found out his name afterward. She had not gone looking for it exactly, but the city talks and she was still listening. Karthos. Duke of Rokoura. She filed this and went back to her life, and for several months nothing changed. Then gradually, with no particular trigger she could name, the idea of Rokoura began to take up more space. She told herself it was professional interest. She had seen something in his fighting that she had not been able to categorize and she wanted a better look. That was a reason that made sense. She told herself this for roughly six months before she acknowledged that the pull was larger than a professional interest could account for, that it felt less like curiosity and more like something drawing a line from where she was to where she was supposed to be. She does not use the word destiny easily. She used it in this case because she could not find anything more accurate.

Rokoura

She packed what she needed, which was not very much, and she came. She arrived in a city built on beaches and deep cultural memory, whose people put the ocean at the center of everything, and she found, to her own mild surprise, that she liked it immediately. She has not formally introduced herself to Karthos and is in no hurry to do so; whatever drew her here did not come with instructions, and she is comfortable with that. She wakes early, trains on the sand while the light is still low, and spends the rest of her days doing the quiet work of becoming a resident rather than a visitor. She still does not know exactly what she came here for. She has stopped expecting to understand it before it arrives.

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Goals & Aspirations

The Question

There is something in how Karthos fights that she does not have the vocabulary for yet. She is aware this is unusual, because she has a very good vocabulary for how people fight; it has been one of the primary things she has spent her life building. Whatever she saw at the Battle of Verdant Hold exists at the edge of what her current understanding can name. She is not here to challenge him, not here to prove anything to him or to herself. She is here because you cannot figure something out from a distance, and she would like to figure it out. This is the clearest single reason she can articulate for being in Rokoura, and she suspects it is only part of the actual reason.

Learning Rest

She has been a fighter her entire adult life, and a serious one. She has never had a period of genuine rest, only periods of lower intensity preparation for the next serious thing. Rokoura is asking her to try something she has no real practice at: being somewhere pleasant without using it as a staging ground for whatever comes next. The ocean is loud and warm and does not require anything of her. The people are welcoming without being intrusive. She is trying to be present in this rather than cataloguing it for future use. She is not very good at it yet. She is treating it like a new skill and approaching it with the same patience she would bring to any other technical problem, which she acknowledges is not quite the right tool but is the best one she currently has.

Not Getting Rusty

This is the one she does not need to work at. She will practice as long as she is physically able to. It is not compulsion, it is not anxiety, it is simply what she does, the same way some people read or cook or tend a garden. The beach gives her good training ground, sand being its own challenge for footwork. She has begun to notice which hours other people come down to watch her, which she does not mind, and which hours she trains without an audience, which she slightly prefers. She has no specific goal she is training toward. She is staying ready for whatever Rokoura or the world eventually asks of her. She has been doing that her whole life, and there has always been something to answer.

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Current Status & Relationships

Residence

Rokoura

Role

Fighter

ATTENTION!

Gerri Hatch is E-Grade and carries no magical refinement. Within that constraint she is one of the most technically accomplished defensive fighters in the region, when experienced warriors talk about the top five sword-and-shield practitioners they have personally seen, her name appears consistently. She is not aggressive, not politically motivated, and presents no threat under any foreseeable circumstance. She came to Rokoura drawn by something she cannot fully explain but associates clearly with Karthos. She has not approached him directly and shows no urgency to do so; the move itself seems to have been the thing she needed to make, and she is content to let whatever follows unfold at its own pace. In any defensive situation, holding ground, protecting someone, or buying time, she should be treated as a significantly greater asset than her grade would suggest. Her presence on a defensive line raises the effective capability of everyone around her, because she reads a fight exceptionally well and communicates what she sees without wasting words.