<div align="center"><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: andale mono;"><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 20pt;">Millicent Stokes</span></span></div><br/><div style="text-align: left;"><div class="floatright">(http://i187.photobucket.com/albums/x237/zweites/e8bfbd6eaac22845c71463fa0fd50b36.jpg)</div><strong>Species:</strong> Dragon Kin <br/><strong>Gender:</strong> Female<br/><strong>Age:</strong> 26<br/><br/><strong>Abilities:</strong> A powerful telekinetic, Millicent does not directly control the ability. Most commonly applied in combat, the small framed woman is noted as being supernaturally strong, her subconcious mind bolstering her strength by virtue of her gift. The telekinetic force is most effectively brought to bear by her "sister" however. Though not affiliated with the Order officially due to her "unclean" years as a prostitute, Millicent possesses extensive combat training from a great many Sword Maidens of the Order. Adept in hand to hand combat and numerous styles of swordplay, she is noted for her viciously feral tendancies. She also has some basic knowledge of herbology, though she rarely relies upon it. A blunt object, she typically favors the direct approach, an unstoppable object guided by her righteous fury.<br/><br/><strong>Orientation:</strong> Homosexual<br/><br/><strong>Flaw:</strong> Milly is considered by many to be insane. To be entirely frank, she is mentally divergent, prone to hallucinations and has questionable mental stability to say the least. That said, she is not delusional and is aware of her condition.<br/><br/><strong>Treasure:</strong> Mr. Hopps, Millicent's Childhood Bunny Toy<br/><br/><strong>Weapons:</strong> Millicent favors the use of two handed bastard swords, and is noted for going through them rather quickly. Less concerned with the quality of the blade so much as its weight, she most often utilizes them as they were bludgeoning weapons. She also utilizes her gauntlets for defensive and offensive applications, the knuckle dusters fitted with tempered steel spikes. She uses a grapple and chain occasionally as a weapon, though most frequently it is utilized for its intended purpose.<br/><br/><strong>History:</strong> A child of Row, Millicent was born as the sixth daughter in a five child household. With no male heir and little interest in another daughter, her father considered her more an obligation to be fed and clothed than a daughter to be loved. The family name of Stokes was legendary for one thing amongst the smiths of Row, and that was ornamentation. No great forger of weapons and armor himself, her father was noted instead for his fine gold inlay and keen eye for detail as he etched epic battles across the canvas of the finest armor and blade. He was less adept at planting a male seed in the belly of his wife, a canker sore that had grown ever more troublesome to him with each child. <br/><br/>A man troubled by the details of life more than its simple pleasures, he needed a son to carry on the name. And this relegated Millicent into just another detail of his day that had to be dealt with. Her next sister, Margolynn was two years her elder, and had suffered much the same fate as they grew. With no money for dowry or interest beyond meeting his obligation to keep the youngest girls alive, they lived in the outskirts of the Stokes family vision. Just a couple more mouths to feed, they were a burden best ignored.<br/><br/>And so, ignored by the family and even the township, the two became each others world. They would giggle at all hours of the day, taking care to do so quietly in the hopes they would not disturb anyone or remind their father of their existence. Two against a hostile and uncaring world, it was when Millicent turned eight years of age and Margo ten, that things truly began to sour. <br/><br/>Their mother passed on, leaving the burden entirely in the lap of the father. Forced to take on the chore of sustaining his family only briefly, it was scarcely a few weeks before he was again wed. A woman as heartless as she was lovely, his new bride was quick to make changes within the Stokes household. No fool, she knew that fewer mouths to feed meant more pocket money for the rest, and so... she formed a plan.<br/><br/>Millicent began to feel ill, her appetite ever dwindling. This was true of all of the youngest, but it was Margolynn's illness that concerned Milly the most. Ever the frail one, Margolynn was the first to succumb to the mysterious illness that had afflicted the youngest amongst the Stokes household. It was Millicent who discovered the secret of the so called Stokes curse, when the family cat died from consuming the girl's frequently uneaten meals. <br/><br/>Alshline, a common local plant that their step mother had been grinding into their food.  <br/><br/>She confronted her new mother with this knowledge, only to be thrown back against the wall of her father's workshop. A mere child of eight, weakened by weeks of poisoned meals and bereaved over the death of her only companion, she was no match for an adult. Struck about the head by a tinkerer's hammer, she fell unconscious to the ground. Her step mother claimed that she had fallen in her weakened state and injured herself mortally. And so it seemed when they sent for the apothecary. <br/><br/>Millicent Stokes stopped breathing in the middle of her examination. No tears were shed.<br/><br/>Hauled away in the death cart for a pyre, the two sisters road their last few minutes on earth together. Or so it would have been but for the screams when they threw Millicent upon the flames. Still alive, she rolled free, her back horribly burned by the pyre, her lungs had begun working again with a vengeance. With her sheltered childhood and her addled mind sluggish due to her head trauma, there were none who knew precisely which home she had come from. The plague was rampant in the lands and the dead numerous.<br/><br/>When the task of retracing their steps proved impossible, it was considered the proper and humane thing to put her up for adoption. It was also the most financially rewarding to the Row orphanage. After months of healing, she was taken in by a whore house in Vale, its mistress having a keen eye for beauty in an flower that had not yet blossomed. But there was more beneath the surface than even the Madam could see. The blood of kings and beasts flowed through her veins... and though it could not heal her wounds, it certainly tried. <br/><br/>One morning, hours before she was due to perform her chores, she awakened to Margolynn sitting at the foot of her bed. Her sister, dead for months, had miraculously come back to her! Depressingly it seemed she was the only one who could see her. Worse still, she began to see other things that simply could not be. Demons in the faces of the midnight callers. Shadows would caper and speak to her. And giant serpentine eyes would peer at her from outside the windows. <br/><br/>In short... she was going mad. There was an old saying, "If you were mad... would you know it?" In Millicent's case, the sad answer was a resounding, yes. A hard headed and stubborn young woman, she knew that what she was seeing were spectres of her damaged mind. And at the end of the day, she didn't entirely care. To some extent, her sister was returned. <br/><br/>It didn't matter that she was a figment of a broken mind. Well... it did matter, but it was the best solution to the aching hole that was left in Millicent's soul. Margolynn served as mentor and conscience to Millicent, whose viciousness grew on a daily basis. Strangely though, Millicent found through some fantastic trick of will, the spectre could move things. Though Margolynn had the tiny fingers of a ten year old, she could crush stone and rend steel at the behest of her "little" sister.<br/><br/>Millicent continued her life within the brothel, and as the years passed, her chores became ever more "adult". She learned much of the desires of men and had little interest in meeting them, beyond the money it provided. Not for the sake of greed did she grasp at gold, but for the sake of freedom. She could feel herself changing with the onset of puberty and not in ways that a mortal born should experience. Terrifyingly strong, she found that somehow she was much more powerful than a woman of so frail a form could possibly be. Unbeknownst to her, her latent telekinetic skills gave her a frightening strength, bolstering her own feeble physique with a power that was inhuman. <br/><br/>These revelations of her flesh, she shared with no one but her sister. Her poor dead sister. No matter how old Millicent grew, Margolynn remained ever youthful. Eternally ten years of age. Millicent tried to imagine what sort of woman her sister would have grown to be, but the image of her companion remained ever static. With time, she came to accept this, and so the years passed, with Millicent learning the skills of a courtesan, while keeping her inhumanity and madness hidden from her peers. When Millicent Stokes did at last succeed and purchase her freedom, there was only one thing that motivated her... <br/><br/>Justice.<br/><br/>Life was not fair. It was never meant to be, perhaps. But she felt that despite that, if she could balance the books, and make good upon the imbalances that had ruined her life, then maybe it would make life worth living again. As a woman tainted, she could not be allowed to join the paladial order of sword maidens. But that did not mean individual knights would not teach her for money and... favors. It was during this time she discovered her affection for the fairer sex, catching the fancy of a number of the "Most Revered" knights within the order. Though her time between the sheets with these pious harlots was spent to achieve a greater goal, she would be lying if she said she didn't enjoy it. She always insisted Margolynn stay outside, though sometimes she thought the girl was peeking through the keyhole.<br/><br/>With her own natural abilities coupled with paladial training, she rapidly became one of the more dangerous trouble contractors of Vale, finding great satisfaction in the dispensation of justice as she saw it. But ever was her eye upon the city of Row. Though almost a decade had passed, she remembered still the corruption that had blossomed in her home. Her studies were not limited to the blade and sex. She became well versed in herbology as well, and as such, she hatched a plan that would see justice met. <br/><br/>She sent a tainted vessel of wine to the Stokes forge, knowing the greedy whore that had supplanted her mother would take it for her own. It would not kill... that would be far too great a mercy. No, the herbs she mixed with the fermented grape caused the flesh to burn, the bones to sizzle, and the muscles to tear. Not literally, of course. The damage was entirely to the nerves. It was not fatal. Not even harmful. Most diabolically though, it was not temporary. Word of her step mother's suicide some weeks later came as no great suprise to Millicent, though Margolynn refused to talk to her for a few days.<br/><br/>She would have prefered to crush the woman's skull, but Millicent wanted to remain dead to her family. They had shed no tears for her passing, and so she felt she owed them nothing. Not even pride in the accomplishments of the youngest Stokes girl. They had contributed nothing to her life but disdain. Feeling there was little left to life now that she had had her final revenge, it was Margo who suggested to her that perhaps they were not the only ones who needed justice. There was always imbalance in this chaotic world. To just right it in only their own lives was selfish. In this manner she began her career as a righteous blade for hire, working as an accountant of sins, ever trying to make things more fair in this cruel and unjust land.<br/><br/>Two against this hostile and uncaring world.<br/><br/><strong>Personality:</strong> Righteous to a fault, she sees the world without any moral grey area. Psychologically damaged from her upbringing, she has grown into a fierce woman, her willpower and determination forged by years of abuse. She lacks her full measure of fear, empathy and compassion, instead seeking only to punish. Dangerous in battle, she does not readily tolerate the company of men in social situations either, finding it difficult to be comfortable around them.<br/><br/>That said, she has progressed to the point that she recognizes why she feels as she does, and is able to reign herself in up to a point. She is not naive in the ways of immorality, feeling that human's baser needs, though entirely natural, must be policed by those who are strong willed and beyond reproach. Thusly, she only resorts to lethal force when faced with the truly irredeemable. Most often she prefers permanent injury or crippling. She likes more than anything to prove a point to those she finds lacking, believing that only through such forced attrition will people become greater. Millicent seeks to teach more often than punish, though the two often seem to be too tangled together to separate.<br/><br/>To speak of her constant companion, Margolynn is not the ghost of her departed sister, but rather a hallucination that embodies much of Millicent's empathy and compassion. Brought about by her traumatic injuries (physical and psychological) as a coping device, Margolynn serves as Milly's conscience and confidant. Protective of her "big sister", Milly often takes Margolynn's council though she may not always agree entirely with it. <br/><br/>It is also Margolynn through which Milly most effectively utilizes her telekinetic powers. When called upon, Millicent's "sister" is a terrifying force to behold. Despite her nature as a mere figment of Millicent's fractured mind, the dragon kin's impressive telekinetic abilities lend a physical presence to her hallucinations. Though no one else is able to see Margolynn... they can certainly feel the "elder" Stokes sister, when she is called upon in battle.</div>