__________________QUICK STATSName Alera N'Rali
Age 29 (give or take a couple hundred years)
Gender F
Species Human Vampire
Ethnicity Serenian
Height 5'10"
Occupation Intelligence agent, information broker, mistress of The Sightless Eye
Residence Castle Apocrypha, Thunderblack Mountains
The Silent Watcher on Apocrypha's Throne | Commissioned from
Ksenia Dookartsy-- Refrain from a peasant folk rhyme
__________________IN-DEPTH STUFFPhysical DescriptionTall, pale, and athletic with long, straight black hair. Fully indulges the "goth vampire" look with a lot of black leather, dark makeup, capes, veils, and anything else that will make her look tall, dark, mysterious. Carries herself with an untouchable haughtiness.
However, she is a master of disguise -- a fact she very much enjoys -- and can adopt whatever appearance and composure she pleases, especially if she decides to employ her shapeshifting abilities.
PersonalityAlera is defined, above all, by her naked, unrepentant self-interest and hedonism. All things are secondary to her own security, power, and comfort. However, this does not make her a petty, backstabbing weasel who will swindle and betray anyone she meets at the first opportunity. Her avarice is tempered by a focus on long-term gains, and as such she finds it more profitable to remain collected, professional, and occasionally affable during most dealings. Indeed, she's not one to let personal feelings get in the way of business or other matters, and is generally open to working with just about anyone so long as she can profit in some notable way from the association.
Her sharp intellect and burgeoning information network afford her access to countless personal and public secrets and have trained her with a keen analytical eye. These feed an unwavering self-confidence matched only by her selfish, pragmatic, and manipulative nature. Her leverage with and intimate knowledge of the people she works with frequently give her a strong upper hand that she will play to her benefit wherever she can. This combination of confidence and control grants her a powerful force of personality that she uses to passively entice people of weaker will into following her and doing what she commands, or browbeat them into doing it should passive approaches fail.
In addition to reveling in her monstrous nature, she also loves her job, especially the parts where she gets to don disguises and secret identities. It sates her vanity to exercise her mastery of textiles and cosmetics and become whoever she wishes to be. She thrives on the thrill of collecting secrets, manipulating the weak-minded, laying others low with a few whispered words, and generally challenging the pride and security of others and would not choose to live her life any other way.
While she views just about everyone with the same quiet disdain and condescension and she considers basically no one to be her equal, she holds a particular animosity for those who would use necromancy or other arts to gain control of higher forms of undead (such as vampires like herself). She also considers stopping those who would poach or end mortal life on Earth a profitable endeavour in and of itself; this is not out of a sense of altruism, she just has no patience for anyone who would destroy her source of food. Despite being an undead and necromancer herself, she is openly opposed to the cult of necromancers known as The Circle Undone.
Magic/AbilitiesIn life, she was a vanilla mortal, albeit one with considerable intelligence and charisma. Her transition into a higher form of undead has magnified those skills considerably and supplemented them with a wide array of supernatural powers. Faster, stronger, and more perceptive that she was even in life, she can amplify her physical and mental prowess further by burning the lifeblood she has taken from others. Other vampiric abilities (usually at the cost of blood) include rapid healing of physical injuries, resistance to the magic of others, a hypnotic presence, moderate shapeshifting, blinding speed and reflexes, turning into a cloud of dark mist, levitation, and being able to gently subvert or brutally crush the will of lesser minds.
Her vampiric abilities are considerable for a comparatively young age because of her frequent indulgence in diablerie: the consumption the life and power of other vampires, a capital crime in most vampire societies. Most vampires who have met their end before her have done so at the end of her fangs, and while none have been as powerful as her sire, the sheer number of other vampires whose power she has consumed has had a substantial cumulative effect.
She also inherits the weaknesses of her vampiric bloodline. She casts no shadow, nor a reflection in anything made of silver. The touch of silver is toxic to her and she withers in sunlight and holy places. Such things do not immediately destroy her, but they are immensely draining and will inevitably destroy her with prolonged exposure. Should she survive exposure she will still need time to recover.
She's become proficient with many weapons over the years, but her weapon of choice is knives, particularly throwing knives.
She rounds out her vampiric powers and martial abilities with dalliances in necromancy and primal magics, though generally to the tune of defending or gratifying herself and manipulating, controlling, or harming others.
Despite being undead, many of her internal organs have not atrophied and are, in fact, still fully functional. This is due to her sire's intervention to keep her capable of bearing him an heir. Although they aren't necessary to her continued survival like they were when she was mortal and she could simply allow them to atrophy, Alera still takes advantage of them to fully enjoy mortal food and drink and make herself appear more alive when she is disguising herself.
RelationshipsErastus Harlecion, Baron of Liene: Sire, master, diablerie victim
Damien Harlecion: Son
The Sightless Eye: Leader
The Circle Undone: Opposed necromantic cult
Polite vampire society: Persona non grata
HistoryAlera was born to the well-off Valita merchant family in Ketra. Her childhood was unremarkable as her family considered a good education to be a sound investment and prepared her to join in the family business of trade and financing. She took well to the ins and outs of business, but quickly grew bored of dealing in fabrics, furs, spices, and crops. Using the family money, she began her own dealings under the table, trading in secrets. Rare books, confidential documents, military orders, intangible gossip, and more fit into smaller packages and fetched higher prices than mercantile goods, and she herself could participate in their acquisition. This brought her immense personal wealth with which to feed a decadent and adventurous lifestyle. She would frequently use it to pay managers to cover her family branch office while she accompanied trade caravans to smuggle information into or out of other cities or even other nations, or while she verified rumors of forgotten treasure tombs which she could sell to overconfident adventurers...after skimming her pick off the top first. After several years of coercion, bribery, seduction, and psychological programming, she had assembled a modest if functional information network that would be known in whispers as The Sightless Eye.
Her dealing in secrets eventually caused her to run afoul of the necromantic cult The Circle Undone. When tracking down a particularly lucrative lead on a local Serenian noble, Erastus Harlecion, Baron of Liene, she uncovered two secrets darker than even she had anticipated. Not only was the good Baron an ancient vampire who had been adopting the identity of a new heir every half century or so, he was a deacon of The Circle Undone and one of their foremost agents on the Adelan-Serenian border. Unfortunately, Erastus captured her before she could escape. He could not let her leave -- the secrets she had learned threatened to unmake the cult's centuries-long plans -- but he was impressed with her skills of infiltration and subterfuge. As such, he turned her into a vampire and enthralled her to his will.
For several years, Alera was sent to do the bidding of The Circle Undone, the whole while the last shred of self-awareness Erastus had left in her, necessary for her to employ the skills Erastus desired from her, railed against the cage the elder vampire had imprisoned it in. She had absolutely no qualms with being made into a vampire -- she gladly stalked, hunted, hurt, and killed others all the time in her previous life; in that regard, the immortality and superpowers were basically free. What she objected to was being bound to the will of another, particularly one she despised as much as Erastus. But the millennia had not been kind to Erastus, and his age, power, and ego all combined to form a creeping senility and madness beyond even the realm of the followers of The Circle Undone. The binding he had laid upon Alera's free will had been imperfect and as the years passed she had quietly weakened it more and more. As Alera brought Erastus success after success, his senility worsened and evolved into full-blown megalomania, until such time that he declared Alera his most trusted lieutenant, even as she had obviously broken her bindings.
On the eve of what Erastus would call his greatest victory, Alera gave up pretending. She struck down Erastus where he stood and diablerized his corpse to steal his power before the illusion of warmth had even faded. With Erastus's power now made her own, Alera set about subjugating or consuming all of Erastus's retainers and the citizens of Liene until the only one left who remembered the Baron was her. She employed them to loot Erastus's palace and castle down to the bare stones, then left the whole place to rot.
Using her new ill-gotten gains, she set to work rebuilding and expanding The Sightless Eye, starting with a citadel of her own, nestled in the Thunderblack Mountains: Apocrypha. As the centuries have passed, she has seeded agents across Le'Ranna and turned The Sightless Eye into a cult itself, a cult that worships her as the dark goddess of secrets and knowledge, in whose name analysts and cryptographers worship by laboring to uncover the secrets of a thousand cities and a million lives. With countless faithful to feed all her hungers, Alera lives the life she always wanted: beholden to none but herself, able to wield power over almost any she chooses.
In the centuries since, she has gained an aspect in folk legend known as The Pale Lady or The Woman of Midnight. Alera's preferred method of talent acquisition is to personally investigate reports of exceptional individuals, particularly young adults. If the individuals' skills are as rumored, she abducts them and brings them back to Apocrypha for indoctrination into The Sightless Eye. This pattern of behavior has given rise to widespread scare-stories and folk tales about a snow-white woman dressed entirely in black whose presence heralds the disappearance of children.
__________________THREAD TRACKERCurrent ThreadsWhy Hello There My Little Pawn [M] [Celeste Adra]Squeeze Blood from a Stone [M] [Belafay]Complete Threads"Enchantress / Lady with no master and no god / Her temple shall not fall."
