Nadira Sahar - XERES LIVE!

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Basic Information

Full Name

Nadira Sahar

Nickname

The Eye of the Bazaar

Race (Grade)

Human (E)

Class

Expert / Bard

Height

5'7"

Birthday

Goldenleaf 22, 1271

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

Nadira Sahar above Uir's Great Bazaar, wearing roughly the value of a small estate

Appearance

Nadira is a strikingly beautiful woman with deep brown skin marked across her face, arms, chest, and legs by soft, pale patches, like petals scattered over dark wood. She was born with vitiligo, and there is no curse, celestial ancestry, magical accident, or hidden transformation behind it. Her long, thick curls began turning white unusually young; rather than dye them, she deliberately cultivated the effect, and her hair now falls in a mane that is dark on one side and pure white on the other. Her eyes are a warm amber, and she smiles easily and often. She dresses lavishly, because she is effectively her own advertisement: a crimson gown worked with gold embroidery, a sheer crimson shawl, a gold circlet set with a red stone at her brow, a gold collar with a matching gem, crescent earrings, stacks of gold bangles on both wrists, and a jeweled chain belt hung with tiny golden charms.

Unique Characteristics

Every piece Nadira wears comes from someone she has worked with. One bracelet was made by a dwarven goldsmith, another by a traveling elven artisan, and the crimson fabric was woven in a city she visited fifteen years ago. The red stone at her forehead was the first valuable gem she ever purchased entirely with her own money. In a world where nearly everyone is expected to be flawless, she decided long ago that the thing that made her different would be the thing that made her unforgettable. She is exceptionally recognizable, and for a merchant, that is useful. She also has an absurd eye for quality: give her a gemstone and she will find the tiny flaw that three jewelers missed, give her silk and she will tell you where it was woven, and show her a supposedly antique vase and she may quietly tap the bottom before telling you exactly how old the glaze is.

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Personality & Temperament

Positive Traits

Warm with everyone, from farmhands to duchesses
An eye for quality that borders on the uncanny
Admires honest craftsmanship above rank or price
Confident, generous, and effortlessly social
Wears what makes her different like a crown

Challenging Traits

Cannot resist inspecting anything set near her
Ruthless with counterfeiters, frauds, and fakes
Prices everything in a room without meaning to
Talks shop at dinners, parties, and funerals
Knows exactly how impressive she is

The glaze is twelve years old. [The seller swears it was his grandfather's.] Then his grandfather had an unusually productive decade after his death.

What is the whole outfit worth? Which part? [All of it.] More than your house. [A pause.] Probably less than your land.

Where did you get this? [From the dungeon.] Yes. [She slowly looks up.] Which floor?

Likes

Honest work made beautifully, at any price
Pearls with a luster she hasn't seen before
A negotiation where both sides leave happy
Being asked her opinion by someone who'll listen
Crimson silk, old gold, and a good red stone

Dislikes

Counterfeits, and the people who sell them
Snobs who judge a craftsman by his boots
Being asked what's "wrong" with her skin
Fine work sold to someone who won't value it
Haggling that's rude rather than clever

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Background & History

Born to the Caravan Roads

Nadira was born in 1271 in the Merchant's Quarter of Uir, into a family of caravan merchants who worked the long desert roads between Uir's Great Bazaar, Vangra's Golden Market, and the wealthy cities beyond. Her father dealt mainly in spices and textiles. Her mother specialized in gemstones. Nadira became interested in neither. She was interested in value. As a child she would sit silently through her parents' negotiations and then ask questions afterward: why that ruby cost four times as much as the one beside it, why one merchant had accepted less than he originally wanted, and why anyone would haul silk five hundred miles when another city already made cloth. Her mother eventually gave her the lesson that shaped her entire life: "Something is worth exactly as much as the right person wants it." Nadira never forgot it.

Twenty, Twenty-Five, Thirty

By twenty, Nadira was negotiating purchases for the family business. By twenty-five, merchants twice her age were quietly asking her what they ought to buy. By thirty she had saved enough to establish herself independently, and she did it as a luxury merchant, appraiser, trade broker, and jeweler all at once, dealing in jewelry, clothing, perfume, wine, art, furniture, spices, dyes, rare woods, ceramics, and anything else beautiful enough to be worth arguing over. More importantly, she understands who wants them.

Counterfeiters Hate Her

Nadira is not a snob, and that matters. A farmer in muddy boots gets exactly the same greeting from her as a visiting aristocrat, and if someone has spent six months carving a beautiful wooden bowl, she may admire it more than a noblewoman's diamond necklace. What she cannot tolerate is anyone deliberately passing off poor work as something valuable. She has ended entire fraudulent businesses by walking through the door and asking to inspect something. Once, when a seller protested that his "antique" vase had belonged to his grandfather, she tapped its base, dated the glaze at twelve years old, and observed that his grandfather must have had an unusually productive decade after his death.

Among the Elves

When she set out on her own, Nadira went north to Gelderai, where artisans spend months coaxing a single branch or a single sheet of silver into shape and where the elves have never been eager to sell to outsiders. She won them over the only way that works in Gelderai: by admiring the craft and not the price. For five years she brokered elven work to buyers far beyond the canopy, and she paid the makers what their work was actually worth, which several of them found so unusual that they assumed at first it was a trick.

A Pearl From the South

In her last year in Gelderai, a trader showed Nadira a single pearl from the southern coast, with a luster she had never seen in twenty years of looking at pearls. She bought it on the spot and has carried it ever since. When the undead nearly destroyed Gelderai in Goldenleaf of 1306, she had to go somewhere, and she decided she might as well go to the source. She has been in Rokoura for three weeks. She has already walked the Tātahi Market Coast end to end, introduced herself to every pearl diver who would stand still long enough, and concluded that Rokoura's craftspeople have been underselling their work for years.

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Goals & Aspirations

Priced Properly

Nadira intends to teach Rokoura's pearl divers, carvers, dyers, and weavers what she knows: presentation, pricing, sourcing, quality control, and above all how to find the right buyer. She does not believe she makes anyone's work better. She believes she makes sure it is finally sold for what it is worth.

"Nadira Sahar Is Buying"

Nadira has let it be known, in all the right places, that she is buying. Merchants carrying unusual goods have already started taking the long way round to Rokoura: rare dyes, foreign jewelry, strange spices, exotic fabrics, masterwork furnishings, peculiar wines, and art from distant kingdoms. Every so often, something genuinely extraordinary will turn up in someone's inventory simply because the merchant heard her name.

Which Floor?

Nadira has heard that treasure comes up out of an intelligent dungeon beneath Goodberry, only a portal away. She has not yet seen any of it. She would very much like to, and when she does, the first thing she will want to know is not what it is, but which floor it came from.

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Current Status & Relationships

Residence

Rokoura

Role

Luxury Merchant

Notable Contacts

Keshet Amunar

Old Friend from Uir

ATTENTION!

Nadira Sahar is an E-grade human merchant who has traveled with caravans most of her life; she is competent with a dagger and can talk her way out of most trouble, but she is not the person you put on the wall. Her power works in the market, long before any battle. She can find a flaw three jewelers missed, tell you where a bolt of silk was woven, and date a glaze by tapping it. If you are selling her something, she will know exactly what it is worth. If you are selling her a fake, she will know that too, usually before you have finished your sentence. She greets a farmer and a duchess exactly the same way, and she will think less of you if you do not. If you have something strange to be appraised, she is the person to ask. And do not ask her what is wrong with her skin. Nothing is.