<div class="spoiler_container"><div class="spoiler_header" onclick="hideSecond (this);" role="button">"Laewynn"</div><div class="spoiler_body">http://www.myth-weavers.com/sheetview.php?sheetid=493657 (http://www.myth-weavers.com/sheetview.php?sheetid=493657)</div></div><br/><div class="spoiler_container"><div class="spoiler_header" onclick="hideSecond (this);" role="button">Background</div><div class="spoiler_body">Laewynn started life as an undesirable, her earliest memories of a crowded orphanage. However, the first concrete memories she really has are when she was six years old-- the fire. She had no friends, but she had only ever known the orphanage, and seeing it burn was traumatic. She does not know how many, if any, died that night: only that she ran into the night and took refuge in a cellar, wandering the streets for a week before returning to find the building an ashen ruin. She felt wholly empty looking at it, her lack of emotion something of a mystery to herself still.<br/><br/>The next several years of her life were formulated through rough living in the poor places of Waterdeep. A prosperous mercantile city it required a lower class to function, and if they lived better than anywhere else Laewynn could not say: she had only ever known Waterdeep and its streets. Quickly she began to steal and beg, and would have met a yet worse fate had she not the great luck to try and steal from Heliford.<br/><br/>   Heliford, himself a human, was a man about town of ill repute amongst the more respectable members of the community; he was known for grafting and trickery, and when the young fiery Laewynn attempted to swipe a loaf of bread from where he held it aloft he caught her wrist and laughed. She kicked him in the shin as she struggled to escape, and giving her a closer considering look asked her why she wasn’t asking nicely. By way of response, the seven year old spat at him. Amused, Heliford believed he might have found himself something even more laughable: a Rogue’s Apprentice. After he managed to convince Laewynn he would give her a home and teach her how to steal anything she wanted, she reluctantly returned to his abode with her.<br/><br/>   The next five years were the closest thing to a formative experience the still rather immature half-elf girl ever had. While he did teach her to steal in the traditional sense, pickpocketing and lockpicking a core curriculum of sorts, he taught her that there theft-- the art of self-fulfillment, as Heliford melodramatically described it-- had many forms. Why take with her hands what she could be handed with her words? Why rob a potential friend when there were so many potential people to rob, and so few potential friends-- true or otherwise? At the age of fourteen, the willful Laewynn had become subtle. Trained in the way of the rogue, the sixteen year old struck out on her own in the world. Mentally and physically, due to her bastard parentage, she was dissimilar to most of those her age. Having developed a sort of wanderlust, she wandered outside Waterdeep for a time: never making it as far north as Neverwinter or south as Baldur’s Gate, she mostly traveled the towns along the coast searching for something she could not describe.<br/><br/>   Dissatisfied, at the age of eighteen she was ready to return to Waterdeep when she met a charismatic young half-elf named Jalein. Jalein was a boy with high ideals, slightly older than herself but understanding, and he asked her to travel with him and his companions. Quickly accepting, swept off her feet by this handsome young man-- the only other person she’d felt close to was Heliford, and he was a far older man and human-- she soon realized she’d signed aboard for banditry. Jalein believed in scorning all gods and taking what was to be had, but the way he said it he made it seem like everyone’s birthright. He was not unkind, and in front of Laewynn always appeared merciful. They held up small caravans, something previously unthinkable to Laewynn, but there was never any killing.<br/><br/>   That changed in Skullport.<br/><br/>   Laewynn’s desire to return to Waterdeep, growing homesick for the first time in her life, was known to Jalein for a time. Finally, he found a job that would take them there-- someone needed something done by a rough group of fellows in the literal underbelly of Waterdeep, over a mile beneath its surface. Heliford always warned Laewynn against Skullport, saying it was a den of evil and death, but Jalein of course painted the portrait of their journey as liberators with abolitionist rhetoric; besides, she hadn’t seen Heliford for over two years.<br/><br/>   The Skullport job went south, fast. It was a trap, their employer likely not wanting to waste their own people for exactly that reason. Everyone but Jalein and Laewynn dead, Jalein took to desperate measures-- grabbing the slave girl they’d been sent to ransom, he held a blade to her neck. Laewynn was sure it was just a delaying tactic, but the fighting stopped. The enemy demanded she be let go, Jalein said they’d let Laewynn go first. They said it wasn’t an option and blood was drawn.<br/><br/>   The air increasingly tense, their lines opened and Laeywnn sprinted without second thought. They had been in a bulwark of wooden ramparts and beams that held up a corner of Skullport from the rock bearing down on it. When she looked over her shoulder, she could see Jalein’s eyes dance from the ever shrinking ring of foes to her. <br/><br/>   Seeing she was safe, he slit the girl’s throat and disappeared in a torrent of bodies and steel.<br/><br/>   Running down the rampart she saw another group-- likely the real agents of their unknown employer-- scaling it from another side. “Get the girl and kill their leader,” they said, “before the decoys get her killed.” They had been bait. Jalein had murdered an innocent young girl. If he wasn’t dead already, he was about to be-- and who was next but her? All of these thoughts dictated her next action. <br/><br/>Finding a barrel of oil near the base of the scaffold, she broke the nearest torch free of its moorings and gave light. She did not stop there, running about the base lighting anything she could catch. Soon, Skullport had its own blazing sun looking down on its sin and iniquity, and a disorganized general motion to quench the flames was made.<br/><br/>Stopping to catch her breath on a rock ledge far from the fire, she stood panting and watched as the fire consumed a segment of confused wooden railing and stockade. Rocks began to fall, and screams were evident. But she was empty, as empty as she had been when she saw the orphanage burnt. Having come full circle and not knowing what to do next, she made good her escape and searched for Heliford.<br/><br/>It didn’t take too long to figure out the guards had finally gotten tired of the man’s antics, built a case for him being a no-good bastard, and put him in jail. While she did not discover the sentence, she knew that the only people she had grown close to were forever out of her reach...<br/><br/>By nineteen she had found her employ as an exotic dancer, and worshiper of Sharess. Carnality in all its forms became familiar to her, but finding most employers of loose women repulsive and the diseases such women were subject to even more so she elected to keep her profession purely professional-- she would have sex on a case by case basis, but otherwise she was there to arouse rather than fulfill. She occasionally picked pockets as she distracted men with her body, particularly when their tips were lackluster, and generally continued to be a sly rogue despite her newfound distaste for legitimately criminal endeavors. Having spent two years in the profession and still young for one of elf parentage at twenty, she again grows restless. She still strips for money, but lately she frequents more and more places where adventurers (reckless soon-to-be-deads, more properly) tend to congregate in the hopes of meeting someone or finding something that will allow her to hone her skills that one day she might free Heliford. She has no idea where she might go with him, but the thought that he is wasting away in prison does not escape her mind for more than a week at a time. But she knows trying now would only serve to get herself captured or killed, and neither would serve the end of her former master’s freedom.</div></div>