Name: Rán
Race: Aasimar
Sex/Gender: Female
Age: 26
Appearance: Standing at five feet, ten inches tall with pale skin and well defined muscles, Rán cuts a somewhat imposing figure. Her hair hangs down to just below her shoulders and generally has at least one if not more braids in it. At first glance Rán would appear to have jet black hair though those looking closely might notice lighter patches where her natural colour is starting to show. Clothes wise, Rán favours practical hard-wearing clothes that can survive the daily rigors of ship life.
Role: Striker
Strengths:
Water Baby: Years of experience of diving to harvest oysters from the sea floor mean that Rán is quite comfortable both in and under water. She is a keen swimmer and diving beneath the surface while no longer some she has chance to do frequently, is practically second nature to her.
Quite good at throwing things: Through plying her trade as a striker Rán has had occasion to throw harpoons at whales, sharks and really anything big and valuable the ocean has to offer. As such she had developed quite the throwing arm and fairly decent aim. Betting against her in a game of horseshoes would be a mistake.
Welcome to the gun show: Years of regular swimming and general life on the ocean waves have given Rán a muscular physique a professional strong man could be proud off. When sheer brute strength is required, Rán can bring it in spades
Weaknesses:
Does Not sleep well: Rán is not a good person to share a room with if you want a restful nights sleep. Nightmares that have haunted her for most of her life often will often wake her multiple times a night or have her scream in her sleep. It is a rare event to see a bright eyed and well rested Rán instead of a sleep deprived one.
Functionally Illiterate: Between being a future bed slave and becoming a striker, good honest education never got much of a look in on Rán's life. Her ability to read is based more on recognising the shape certain words and knowing their meaning rather than being able to comprehend a written message. Anything more complicated than the simplest of messages generally needs to read and explained to her. And writing, well the closest Rán gets to writing is making a cross at the bottom of contracts she has signed.
Hayfever: For as long as she can remember, Rán has struggled with hayfever. While not literally debilitating, Rán's life is certainly a lot more trying when there is pollen about.
Strong odour: Unfortunately the liquid that Rán uses to dye her hair has a rather strong and unpleasant odour that tends to hang around for a week or two. For those not use to the smell being in close quarters with Rán for the first time can be quite an unpleasant experience. Also, it doesn't exactly help her keep a low profile.
Marked: The small of Rán's back still bares the brand of her former master and marks her out as an escaped slave. To certain kinds of bastard, this makes her more valuable a target as they imagine the reward the might collect for returning Rán to her owner.
Biography
While many in Oshanlenor and other parts of the world would consider being of aasimar blood a curse, Rán owes her very existence to it. Her mother, Ursi, was a pleasure slave on a vast estate in Keelibral. Had she been of any other blood, her master would have likely forced her to end the pregnancy. However, in an ugly and perverted twist of fortune, he, still remembered how much he had paid for one aasimar and considered the prospect of a child as a welcome recouping of his investment.
In those early years, Ursi was only a fleeting visitor in Ráns life, kept busy night and day by her duties in the masters house. Time for the pair to be together was scarce, and what few spare moments they did have together would often be spent watching the ships that sailed in and out from the nearby Mirgho's Harbour. As each ship passed, mother and daughter would tell each other stories about where the it had come from and what it carried. By the time Rán turned seven her childhood was over and she was marked with the brand of her owner and put to work. The fact that she was assigned to help the domestic slaves who tended to the master's house alongside her mother was no coincidence. One night after he was done with Ursi, her master, in what he considered an act of supreme kindness, had told Ursi that she should begin to prepare Rán for the particular nature of her role soon. Not wanting her daughter to suffer everything she had to, Ursi knew they had to escape.
The plan she came up with was ambitious to say the least. One night, Ursi slipped from her master's bed and made her way back to the slave quarters where Rán was as usual. This time, however, instead of climbing under the thin blanket with her daughter, she used it to create a bundle of as much food and drink as she could carry. Just as dawn began to inch across the sky, the pair crept their way towards the small private jetty where the master kept his collection of leisure craft. With Rán stashed behind some shrubbery, Ursi approached the guard and began to use everything she had been forced to learn as a bed slave to seduce him. Rather taken with the attention of his employer's exotic bed slave, the guard was quite easily persuaded to abandon his post in favour of what would turn out to be a fatal rendezvous. It was only a couple of minuets before she scurried back along the jetty, grabbed Rán and practically dragged her to a small dingy where the guard now lay with blue lips and a rope coiled around his throat. With no sailing experience and only a plan to follow one of the passing ships to a new land, the pair cast off from the jetty and slipped away into the early morning gloom.
The plan, of course, didn't work. After a week at sea, the mother and child had nearly run out of food and water and had lost sight of the ship they had been following. By rights both should have died aboard that dingy. But they didn't. Perhaps Hisani did smile on the aasimar after all. After two weeks at sea, the half dead pair were picked up by a merchant vessel. It didn't take their rescuers long to work out these marooned aasimar were escaped slaves. There were those amongst the crew agitated to return the pair for the reward that would surely have been offered. The ship's owner, however, was an unusually soft hearted man, who took pity on the pair's plight. He offered Ursi and Rán safe passage Farenthaes and promised to find them positions in his aunt's fishery enterprise.
The jobs their rescuer secured for the pair were far from easy. Ursi assisted in the gutting and preserving of fish, while Rán, still being too small for much else was assigned to help the small fleet of pearl fishers. Initially, she merely helped with carrying and sorting the collected oysters but as she grew older Rán started helping on the boats while they were away at sea. Soon after her eleventh winter she had progressed to being trained to dive down to the sea bed to collect the oysters. She took to this last role almost as if nature had intended it for her and. While many of the people in the small fishing village had plenty of prejudice against aasimar, they were grudgingly forced to admit the girl had talent. Desperate to impress, Rán threw herself into diving and over following years, striving to go ever deeper, driven on by nightmares of being sent back to the estate if she wasn't worthy enough. As she developed some small reputation for being useful she also started to be taken on excursions to hunt larger prey such as turtle, sharks and whales.
By the time Rán turned eighteen life was very much different to how it had been ten years before. Ursi had married one of the few locals who didn't have a problem with an aasimar. Rán's new step father owned his own business and while not rich, he was wealthy enough for Ursi to be able to give up her job. Rán still adored her mother, but she no longer felt that the pair needed each other as they at once had and she had started feeling restless. Never having forgotten the stories her mother had once regaled her with, or the wonder she had felt when she had first stepped ashore in a new land, Rán found herself drawn to the idea of sailing the oceans of the world.
Ursi wasn't thrilled that her only child wanted to leave just as she felt their lives had finally become something worth living. However, she also wanted her Rán to have the freedom to do as she wished that being a bed slave had denied her. And so it was, with a kiss and several clay pots of vile liquid that stained her hair black, that Rán walked up the gangplank of a visiting whaling ship. After that initial voyage Rán flitted by between ships, finding pay wherever she could as a striker. She wasn't overly concerned about whether the crews she joined where legitimate sailors or pirates. A lifetime of being at best, looked down on and disparaged had left Rán somewhat disconnected from what society felt was acceptable. The only ships she wouldn't sail on where those she knew or discovered dealt in selling slaves.
Rán found herself back on Oshanlenor quite by accident when her last ship was struck by lightning and limped into port for repairs. Hiding below deck while the captain organized repairs, Rán drank and then drank some more. The idea to burn down the estate she had escaped from came to her in this moment as a way to shake off the nightmares she had suffered since that fateful night, nightmares of being dragged back there. Fortunately, she sobered up before getting anywhere near her target. Spooked by the thoughts of what could have happened and with her current ship going nowhere fast, Rán started looking for a new crew to get her off Oshanlenor.
When she saw the poster calling for a crew and offering gold and treasure, well it was a lead that she couldn't ignore.
Hex colour: #4B1