Post by ascot on Jan 1, 2014 12:00:16 GMT -5
Rachel Ascot, Queen of Daversdale
BASICS
Name: Rachel Ascot
Aliases: Queen of Daversdale, Beer Bombshell, That Mad Woman
Gender: Female
Age: 25
D/O/B: January 23rd, 825
Race: Human (suspected to be half-dwarf, but this has never been confirmed)
Place of birth: Daversdale
Height: 5' 3"
Weight: 107 lbs
Picture:
Physical Description: For a queen, there's little about Rachel that's particularly royal. She's very short, for one, and the constant energy in every one of her motions make her seem like a terrier of a person, yipping and yapping as she looks up to all of them. Although she does have somewhat of a dangerous air that makes her difficult to look down on, it's more wild than royal. She rarely hasn't got a smile on her face, and it's usually a wide smirk or a toothy grin. She styles her black hair into almost a bulb shape around her head. She has a strong jaw but one that doesn't so much have a chin as just a point where it just ends. Her skin is the colour of wood, a deep, thick, rich brown that matches her eyes, and her hair is only a darker tone. She likes to cover herself in jewelry and golden torcs, including the Sapphire of Daversdale, the symbol of power in Daversdale. Other than that, her clothes are certainly "out there", as if someone started a dress and then slashed the majority of it away; a tunic that only wraps around her waist and thighs though connected via a huge gold brooch to a cloak that reaches her feet.
Special Physical Traits: Mostly her diminutive height, at least for a human.
PERSONAL INFO
Personality: Rachel Ascot's greatest trait, skill and advantage is her charisma, and she is very experienced in using it to get what she wants. She spends much of her time mingling with both the cream of society and the masses and can play both to her will. She's an immediate presence in the room, a wildness in her eyes and a confidence in her stride - she's a playgirl in many ways, a lust of life flowing through her bones and an infectious sense of fun. She's an eccentric and a party animal, but one who also acts with enough confidence in her life to look wise, making her difficult to not like. Most of all, she was blessed with the gift of the gab; the way she speaks and the words she chooses always seem the right ones to charm and impress, either being friendly and personable or grand and powerful.
Rachel certainly has the brains to back her words up; she's wily, sly and calculating, with a cool head on her shoulders. She has a knack for reading people and can immediately use that to her advantage, often pegging people before they even speak to her. However, she often doesn't seem it. She's never been known not to have a grin on her face, and for a good reason; she's somewhere between eccentric and completely deranged. Rachel is impulsive, bold and shameless. She's essentially the kind of person who would (and did) buy an elephant as a pet on a whim, or turn up at a white tie ballroom dance in a cake and completely naked. She isn't stupid, but she combines a cool head and street wisdom with not enough insanity to be genuinely insane, but enough and then some to make her dangerous to match wits with and doubly dangerous to try and plan around; if someone attempts to pull one over on her, they can expect her to act completely against every expectation.
However, her faults are certainly not small in number, the biggest one being a product of her upbringing. She's reactive rather than proactive, and has always slipped into the right place rather than worked towards it. In short, she's lazy. Exceedingly so. She'd rather party all day and night, and simply have the world leave her to it. She is exceedingly capable in the role as Queen of Daversdale, but she always seems more interested in something else. Since her rise to power, Rachel's become known as the leader who acts least like royalty. Rather than downplay her eccentricity, she's brought it front and centre, freely indulging in the wildest excesses and maddest nonsense she can afford. Some think it's an act to throw her opponents off. Some think that Rachel's finding it difficult to give up the life of the party. Some think she's just an unhinged loon.
The truth is simply that she enjoys it.
Quirks: Too many to mention. Her inhuman ability to drink alcohol like air, her 'curious' sense of dress, her pet elephant Samson, her habit of annoying and embarrassing others are certainly amongst them.
Has Trouble With: Restraint. While she's usually quite good at reading people, it also means that she's precisely the person who enjoys embarrassing others too much and never really knows when to stop.
Loves: Samson the elephant, alcohol, annoying others, partying, jewelry, Dwarves
Hates: Frederick Ascot, cooking, sophisticated ball dances, people trying to ruin her fun, social injustice
Deep Dark Secret: The true events of the night her father burnt down her pub and disappeared.
CLASS INFO
Class/Trade: Queen/Barmaid
Strongest Skill: Understands People; be you human, elf, dwarf or the like, Rachel is the kind of person who can simply look right into your eyes and retell your life story and your goals for the future right back at you. She can peg a person down the moment they walk into the room, and will instantly use it against them. She can charm someone who she sees as gullible, intimidate anyone who she sees as weedy, or simply have a rough (and often accurate) guess at an embarrassing personal flaw.
Weakest Skill: Vain Yet Insecure; Rachel is not a greedy girl nor a greedy queen. She judges the success of her rule not on the richest men and women but the poorest; she's only satisfied if she is sure that the poorest person in her city can still go to bed without worrying if they'll get to bed the following day. So it's not out of greed that she covers herself in gold and jewelry. It's because she wants to look good. She is highly insecure about her own looks, and will spend hours obsessing over her hair and extravagant clothes and jewelry, so she is just so. And, sometimes, her own vanity will get the better of her. She wants to look pretty. She often looks odd instead.
HISTORY:
Frederick Ascot was never suspicious of his wife before Rachel was born.
Rachel was an only child, with a politician for a father and a barmaid for a mother. Frederick attempted to mold Rachel into the perfect child; everything was given to her, she was sent to tutor after tutor, given a parade of lessons in history, the high arts, mathematics and political theory. This went from the ages of seven until she was fourteen, and Frederick blindly gave Rachel everything despite just how little she seemed to care, and it took years for him to realise that there was even a problem. Despite his increasingly desperate measures, Rachel almost refused to excel at anything. She was considered lazy, simply floating through school with barely average grades despite obviously being quite smart and repeatedly causing trouble, a bored expression plastered onto her face. While Frederick made excuses such as boredom, the teacher's inability or simply that Rachel was a genius, it became increasingly frustrating to him that he had given everything he could do his precious daughter and she had nothing to show for it.
Then the most dangerous explanation planted itself in Frederick's head.
Rachel's mother Indrith worked at The Tangerine and Cave, a pub that was most frequented by dwarves who came in from the Whitehall Mountains to trade. She was quite popular, kindhearted and fair. This was the first clue, one that Frederick at first denied to himself. Then Rachel hit puberty, but remained quite short, and she always seemed far more interested in her mother's business than her father's despite being more noble and profitable. No dwarf, though, was an academic as far as Frederick was concerned. It was against their nature. However, the final blow that led to the suspicion was when Rachel fell ill when she was fifteen. A healer was consulted, and they found that it was a disease of the liver. A disease that was most commonly found... in dwarves.
Convinced, and against the repeated assertions of loyalty by Indrith, Frederick cast the "illegitimate little girl" out of Daversdale in a fit of rage. He swore that if he ever saw her again, he would ruin her life, and he forced her to fend for herself. His words were "... you've taken everything from me already, now go and make something of yourself already!"
He was yet to realise how much he'd learn to regret saying those words.
Rachel survived her illness by a slither, thanks to a dwarven healer who managed to heal her liver. In the process, it actually became a lot closer to a dwarf's, but Rachel, now on the streets with no money and no home, saw a way to use this to her advantage. There was one thing that her father couldn't take from her, and it was her only skill; the gift of the gab. She hung around the pubs in the Whitehall Mountains, entering drinking competitions which she usually won with the help of her inhuman liver. Most dwarves were amused that this human who could go toe-to-toe with a dwarf, and she made connections. Soon, connections became friends. She was invited to places and parties, becoming more and more famous within the world of the dwarves. She was fun to speak to, fun to have around, and knew both how to make others feel good about themselves and how to enjoy herself; she slipped right in. As she made more and more friends, gained more and more connections, saw more people and heard more secrets, it wasn't long until Rachel became one of the most well-known faces in all of Barlea. She had made something of herself alright.
However, there was only one goal Rachel had in mind.
When she was 22, Rachel finally snuck back to Daversdale. It had become much poorer, with Frederick's personal vendetta against the dwarves extending to his new regime as he had become the King of Daversdale. No dwarves allowed in Daversdale. Many lost their jobs as there were no dwarven traders coming in. No one drinking beer or buying their goods. Rachel saw this, and struck. She soon began her plot. She got a job running a bar, but used the bar to smuggle in dwarven goods. Managing a black market, she became very wealthy very quickly. In addition, her rare beer and ale became very popular, given the superior qualities of dwarven drink, thus making her legal business also rapidly rise. She had to lie low for a couple of years until she felt ready to strike. That day came when she found the guards coming into her bar more and more. Soon, she was far more popular than her father, and so she sent a short, single sentence letter to her father.
"Made something of myself after all."
Enraged, Frederick sent his guards to sort out the problem. Here was a black market racketeer, and his daughter no less, back and making a mockery of his law. He was told by the captain of the guard that she was gone, and he rested easily... until he saw the captain's wife wearing dwarven jewelry. Rachel had simply paid them off. Furious, he banished the captain of the guard and told the new one to deal with the problem properly. He refused; he quite liked Rachel's inn. The more desperate Frederick got, the more blatantly his guards ignored him. A rude shock came to him; Rachel had completely outwitted him. He flew once more into a rage, and went to the inn himself with a flaming torch. He walked in and attempted to burn it down to send a message to his upstart daughter about who really ran the town.
He never returned.
Frederick's body wasn't found in the wreckage of the tavern, though the Sapphire of Daversdale was. The great blue necklace. Of course, with him dead, no one was able to step in... that is, but his daughter, Rachel Ascot. She was a hugely popular choice, promising to bring riches back to Daversdale. And things were good for the next year. The dwarves were welcome again, the trade started once more, the quality of living rose beyond before even Frederick's reign. The eccentric Queen had done good on her promise to make the city a rich one, one of the richest in Daversdale, even if many thought she was quite odd. It was only Daversdale that she ran, and while she was never sure of how she stood amongst the other nobles and important persons of Barlea, she certainly made herself a household name in Daversdale. She was popular amongst the people and the traders, but there was suspicion surrounding her from the beginning. After all, no one knew if Frederick was her real father after all, not even her, and how legal was the selling of dwarven goods in the end...
... and was her father's death really an accident?
TRIVIA:
- Rachel speaks Common (001eff) and Dwarf (ff00f4)
- Rachel owns an elephant called Samson, a 12ft tall beast that obeys her every word without fail. It is a wonder where she got it; she says she found it in the wild, but given that she lives in Barlea it's more likely that she bought it.
- While somewhat official, Queen of Daversdale is only a local title; her jurisdiction only reaches as far as Daversdale, and even then there's little in the way of formality about who is or isn't leader. She's certainly the most powerful person in Daversdale and her word may as well be law, but it's shady as to how official her authority really is.
PLAYER INFO
Player Handle: Sponge
Other Characters: None as of yet
Creator Comments: I a-grope