Therian

User: [Nightshadow]
Sex: Female
Species: human
Age: approx. 829 (see history)
Rank: rogue/ guide/ bodyguard
Alignment: True Neutral

First Impressions: No part of Therian's skin can be seen. She wears two cloaks that fall in opposite directions, so she's one big mass of ragged black cloth with feet. Her long hood completely covers her face...those who don't read too far into it identify her as blind, though her practiced ease of movement may belie that.

Her voice is seriously damaged, quiet and very rough. She's incapable of yelling.

Due to her male manner, concealing garments, ambiguously weak voice, strength, and lack of breasts, it can be extremely hard to identify her as female.

Therian, until about four hundred years ago, was an assassin well-known for her skill. As well-known as the good ones get, anyway. So if someone is old enough and follows that sort of thing, he might remember her.

Personality: Depressed and bitter, and usually suicidal to boot, Therian isn't exactly personable. Though sane, she has enough personality disorders to fill a textbook, including severe clinical depression, paranoia, and schzoid personality disorder. Among others. She doesn't try to speak much except to swear or to give someone a sample of her sadistic, acidly sarcastic sense of humor. If it can be called humor, since she doesn't take pleasure in much of anything. Far from caring about anyone's impressions of her because she's already convinced that everyone hates her, Therian's distrustful of everyone. She's slightly quicker to trust elves, but will probably never trust a drow. Along that line, she is extremely racist, against drow, and will kill them with little provocation. Despite that, though, she's at least slightly ashamed of her bloody past on some level, and is much slower to kill than she would lead others to think. This doesn't mean that she's not capable of doing so without thinking twice or looking back.

Appearance: Therian, a long time ago, was considered a beautiful woman. She doesn't even remember that. Many years of brutality have left her face and body with so many scars that an observer would be hard-pressed to find smooth skin...really, she may not have any. She's quite the gruesome sight to behold underneath all her garments. Her figure wouldn't actually be bad were it not for the fact that her breasts were torn off in a torture session way back when.

Therian's appearance is basically comprised of her clothing, layer after layer. All of it's black and most of it's tattered…an ill-fitted shirt and equally loose pants, (belted too tightly to be a bane,) a tunic-like cape that hangs in front and back to conceal her weapons, and, on top, a longer, hooded cloak. The hood is sewn a certain way that keeps it from coming off of her face except intentionally or when it's jerked off, even in a fight's level of movement. She wears a wide black blindfold beneath the hood. Her hair--usually concealed completely beneath her hood and cloak--is black with a loose natural curl. It would be her best remaining feature if she would only wash it once in awhile. She does bathe, when not in enemy territory or on a guide job, but seldom bothers much with her hair.

Weapons: Therian carries a ridiculous number of weapons. Throwing daggers are old favorites from her assassin days and she keeps as many as she can on hand. Which is quite a few, tucked into every conceivable spot and then some. She usually has one long sword and often a spare, always has at least two short swords, and any weapon of interest that she takes from a dead enemy. She is, for obvious reasons, limited to close and mid-range tactics and doesn't normally carry any form of bow.

History: Therian was once a princess of a lesser noble family, but was driven from her home when her land was conquered by the militant drow lord Vayen. She fled to a neighboring kingdom, the only surviving member of her immediate family, and found comfort and love with one of its princes. When she and her lover were later ambushed by dark elves in the woods, though, the loyal prince readily betrayed her into slavery to save himself.
Therian endured the rough conditions of bondage to the drow well. When her fighting skill was noted by certain guards, she was brutally..."trained"...to be an assassin. Training consisted both of being taught to fight and, mostly, kill by any number of methods...and an equal part torture to keep her in line. Slave assassins are considered the most valuable on the edge of sanity, quite the fine line for torturers to maintain. She excelled in the trade quickly, though, as per some level of talent, even killing notable elven lords and other especially difficult targets. In light of this, Vayen wished to bind her to service for much longer than the piddling human lifespan. A sorcerer of his caliber had little trouble granting her agelessness. He only adjusted her body, though, not her mind, a detail that caused and will cause her a good deal of trouble as the years pass.
Four hundred hellish years later, Therian failed an important assassination due to an injury that Xayu, Vayen's highest general and her most adamant tormentor, had dealt. After receiving due and brutal beating, including having her throat all but destroyed for a smart-ass remark, Vayen put out her eyes for her failure. She was tossed to the surgeons, to have her wounds treated and eyelids sewn shut, and then left unconscious to recover. The sedation that kept her in that state, however, was administered improperly, and she awakened unguarded. She had lost a fair amount of blood and, with her sudden blindness, no one had really thought it necessary to keep a close eye on her. They'd underestimated the ability of a longtime slave assassin to bear pain.
Despite a formidable number of close calls, she got out of the fortress made her way into the mountains...not as unwise a path as it would seem because she knew the paths in the dark. When she was forced into a run by drow pursuers, though, she missed a loose stone due to both her blindness and disorientation from blood loss. She was thrown from a cliff, breaking her back in two places.
When she awoke again, she was in a bed, something she hadn't experienced for four centuries. A usually very aloof elven mage who had been watching her ordeal for hundreds of years had broken his objectivity to take her from the cliffside to safety via a long-distance transportation spell. He nursed her back to health over more than a year and, after losing his own home to Vayen's drow to save her, became the only person to have her trust.
Therian eventually went on her way, becoming a guide to earn what little money she has, killing any of Vayen's followers that she runs across—she picks them out by accent—and just generally surviving.

Other: Afraid of heights. Falling off a cliff and breaking your back has that effect.

To go into more detail about the spells that keep her from aging, Therian is not immortal. That is, she can be killed as easily as any other human, save for the fact that she can heal a very little bit more quickly. Only her inhuman skill--eight hundred and twenty-nine years of hard/obsessive fighting tend to cause that--has kept her alive thus far. She does not, in any way, age physically.

While she can be killed, however, she cannot kill herself. A sort of enchanted mental block keeps her from doing so...she cannot slit her wrists deeply enough to be fatal. The dagger simply stops, by her own strength, and there's absolutely nothing that se can do about it. If she were to try to jump off of a cliff to die, she would freeze at the edge, unable to proceed.

On a side note, since it is a mental block that involves just suicide, if she were to try to jump from that same cliff to evade pursuers, without a thought of dying, she would be able to do so.

Other drow spells about her include one that makes her unable to strike against Vayen directly--though she does try to make his life as difficult as possible and ocsassionally succeeds rather well--and one that always makes her able to pick out the direction of his stronghold.