<div class="floatleft">(http://i.imgur.com/a40gm.jpg)  </div><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 16pt;">Vashti, Specialist (http://plothook.net/RPG/profiler/view.php?id=9031)</span><br/><br/>The Duchess of Amonleigh was an independently wealthy noble.  Widowed and childless by her twentieth year, she devoted her days to charitable deeds, scholarly pursuits, and secretive indulgences.  She was suited after by a number of aspiring lesser noblemen, who wished primarily to usurp her wealth and lands.  She rejected many of these suitors, and it seemed perhaps that she was determined to become the youngest spinster in history when, much to the surprise of her advisers and servants, she began hosting the company of a 'friend'-- Chevarra Voss, an emissary and courtier from a reclusive kingdom to the far south-- who was never seen at the temple, dressed and behaved oddly, and was almost never reported to be about during the daylight hours.<br/>Gradually, the Duchess changed; she grew less kind, less public.  She ordered any matter of indulgences of food, drink, traveling performers-- soon, a plague of rumors spread through the bawn that the duchess was engaging in any manner of behaviors, like drunken parties, night-long orgies with nothing but out-of-town women like Chevarra, cruel games of tormenting local beggars, chains of strapping mercenary men were shown in and out of the keep...  She grew paler, stranger, and-- eventually-- quit rising for mornings in favor of night's shadow alone.<br/>Soon thereafter, she remarried.  Quite suddenly, in fact, and some rumored that she was already pregnant-- her lady-friend from the south seemed utterly fascinated by the Duchess' condition, doting on her each night in public and often being seen with her head pressed to the Duchess' growing belly, while her husband-- a trade-baron with no real fortune, set about building and ruining trade endeavors in a ruinous chain.<br/>When the Duchess' daughter was born, they named her Vashti.  The new duke suddenly disappeared, the kingdom went into a show of mourning.  Duchess and Chevarra lived in that castle for sixteen more years, seeming not to age or stray from its gates except to wander the lawn or towns by night, their daughter in tow.<br/>*<br/>Vashti was raised among cruelty and vice.  Her mother and 'step-mother' used the girl's half-vampiric condition to seek new ways to emulate mortality, but their experiments were consistently unsuccessful.  She was instructed in deception, courtly ways, battle, assassination-- and for decades she served her mothers obediently.  When it became clear that, despite her mortality, the Dhampir would age slowly over the centuries, her mothers became fixated with breeding a new army of half-bloods-- to no success.  The girl had been made as a fluke during the Duchess' transition into vampirism.<br/>She finally stole her independence from her mothers and their servants, hunting a life of self-indulgence that was far from her mothers' wishes<br/>She became an adventurer, and put her teaching to work in bettering her own position.  She was as mercenary as they come, seeking the tutelage of assassins and cut-throats until, true to their form, a particular band betrayed her and left her skewered, bleeding, and dying in the workings of a sprung pinion-trap.  She was left with nothing but her conscience and memories to keep her company in death.<br/>After three days, she was dying of dehydration and sepsis when she was found by an adventuring company.  Halmas, a cleric from the dust-wastes of the East, took pity on her.  She learned kindness from him, quite unexpectedly, and became something else...<br/>