“A silent fury who no torment could tame,”
Basic Information
Name: Aibhilin of Bhilinai’s Tear (Ah-ve-linn; Ve-linn-ah’s).
Alias: The Lady in Blue.
Title: Doctora of the Australos Fight Camp.
Sex: Female.
Age: Thirty.
Class: Post-Apocalyptic Pit Fighter/Gladiatorial Drill Sergeant.
Alignment: Lawful Evil.
Brief Description
Height: Five Foot Ten.
Weight: One Hundred Fifty Four Pounds.
Measurements: 34-24-34.
Build: Athletic, Muscled.
Skin Tone: Fair, Pale.
Eye Color: Steely Blue.
Hair Color: Rich Auburn.
Narrative Description
Aibhilin escaped the worst of the ravages the Wastes inflict upon those who call them home, though as compared to a person from the old world she would still be visibly too pale from a combination of naturally fair skin and the absence of the sun from the new world. This is not quite the reticulant green-grey pallor of the less well-nourished wastelanders, however, and in her time and place she is possessed of a skin tone which would be viewed as quite healthy as compared to the average considering the circumstances. Most visibly obvious of course is her prodigious height and size as compared to the starving masses of the world post Sky is Over. Standing at five foot ten and weighing one hundred fifty four pounds of toned muscle and potential energy she is more cave lion than human, something out of place and out of time in this place of death and desiccation in the lonesome sand, and even in the old world she would have been like someone out of a fitness infomercial than a regular human being, full figured and fit to a degree most humans never reach even with the advantages of a healthy diet and proper training regimen.
She would have been beautiful were it not for the way she has lived her life and the traumas she has almost entirely willingly subjected herself to, and even underneath it all she still strikes quite the figure. Powerful, with a musculature that lends itself to a professional athlete more than a model, perhaps stronger in jaw than would be found to be conventionally attractive but otherwise gleaming eyed and aesthetically appealing, though a veneer of scars and poorly attended to wounds and breaks is the most immediately noticeable aspect of her outward appearance. Cosmetically she would be more likely to be found in the paints and dyes of clay and blue-blooded reptiles than the charcoals and chemical pigments favored by ladies of the Empire lending heavily to the fight name given her by the overly appearance concerned fight promoters of the Crimson Throne, and when in battle a mask of blue dyed clay and paint covering her jaw, mouth and cheeks is almost guaranteed to be all the accouterments she allows herself save her battle garb, itself left largely unadorned or made up beyond that which is mechanically necessary for its function, and if she has ever worn decorative jewelry none would attest to it.
Personality
Aibhilin was raised to savage purpose, and in this she excelled where most fell short. It came naturally and easily to her to understand that life was primarily a quest for meat. Those strong enough to take it from the weak did so and thrived further at their expense, and those who were weak attempted to catch so many snakes and rats as they could in the ever dark below the surface of the planet to feed themselves without being seen or noticed by those stronger than themselves. She spent the majority of her life excelling at this practice, and only as the years went on and she grew stronger did she begin to understand the thrill of the fight. This was far different than the experience of the hunt, a true competitor who could give her a run for her leather and bronze, and she loved the experience. It would never again be satisfying to live as a casual hunter of the weak, not anymore, and so she trained. She fought. She chose to make the sacrifices, the payment in flesh and bone that it required to feel the satisfaction of a true opponent left bleeding and broken at her heel, to see the light fade from their eyes inches from her own gleaming orbs.
More cave-lion than human the Bhilinai are said to be, and though they are without question human their culture lends much to the story. They have a complicated and often obfuscated religion which demands the hunt, and more specifically demands the hunt of the lesser and the promotion of the stronger. You don’t get ahead where they’re from by being pretty, by being good with numbers or by being an excellent tailor or smith. They excel only by force of will and skill at arms, the inheritance from parent to heirs going only to the one who has proven themselves the most prolific hunter of humanity, and the spiritual protections of the elders from the outsiders they say lurk just beyond the veil and occasionally come out seeking to bring death to the living are not given to the meek but to the strong. She has adapted this philosophy first from its roots as a hunter of the week to a combatant facing the strong and on into her current life as a Doctora, she who molds the clay of inexperienced aspirants seeking championship into the death dealing potential energy of the warrior. Hard, stern, detached from her pupils, but dedicated to their success with the fervent passion shared by all those who wish to see their own glory days relived through the bloodletting of the new champions.
Narrative Description of Equipment
Though Aibhilin has acquired a significant amount of arms and armor over her several years of professional fighting and paid training of potential new champions of the arenas of the Wastes, her most prolific and common garb will be described here for convenience.
Though her people are known for several aesthetic choices in arms and armor only three of these traditions have stayed with Aibhilin into the modern day. First and foremost the use of a snakeskin leather jerkin which leaves the shoulders, neck and clavicles exposed and is fastened in the front by snakeskin laces, in her case being plated in horizontal steel lamellar plates over which a separate pixane of thick snakeskin plated in bronze and faced in ratskin with the hair left on is worn. Second, the inclusion of a hollow ring parallel to the guard of her sidearm on its pommel, whose significance to the religious beliefs of the Bhilinai is ambiguous but considered by them to be very important, in this case forged of steel and placed on an arming sword of similar construct. Third, the wearing of a riding skirt, usually constructed of snakeskin patches faced with ratskin with the hair left on though in her case worn in a manner similar to cuises at the hips and thighs, and layered with bronze plates in that fashion while left otherwise unchanged. This is in her case worn over regular chauses plated in bronze lamellar scales in the Imperial fashion.
At the arms she is generally not wearing any armor, or even thick cloth or leather, choosing to favor an easier time at handling polearms in the ring, though she does own armor which could be used for this purpose. It is important to note that the leather and cloth worn as an armor platform for the arms is considerably more thick than a simple leather jacket, more comparable to wearing four at once, and that several late 15th century halberdiers and doppelsoldners in brigandine, as well as Conquistadors and the Swiss in Munition Armor made the same choice. Her polearm of choice is a bronze hafted halberd wrapped in leather at several points to be more easily handled, with a steel axe-type head opposite a steel spike and topped with a spear point around eight feet long from butt end to spike tip, and besides her arming sword she carries a bronze dagger in the seax subtype and a punch dagger on her right hip. She wears snakeskin boots and has a coat of bronze scales floating from her shin to their arming points across the sides of the heel of her boots for added protection, meager as it is when compared to plated sabbatons, for strikes at her feet from above.
Narrative Description of Combat Abilities
Though hardly a super human, and less capable now with collected age and injury than she was several years ago Aibhilin is still one of the most dangerous women alive in the Wastes as of 100SIO. A prolific duelist with a history of sixteen confirmed kills in the arenas of the Empire of the Crimson Throne and a well-documented training regimen that would kill lesser beings, to challenge her without forethought would be unlikely to go in your favor. The sheer value of her armament collected piece by piece from those laid low by her blade and the number of scars and missing bits and pieces across her body tells a story of someone who has taken, lost, been knocked down and gotten back up to put the offending party in their graves more times than she has remaining fingers. More hard knock than properly educated fencer, she learned to parry a low horizontal slash that suddenly cut high and diagonal across her breast with a flick of the wrist and a pivot of a foot from an opposing duelist by having been taken advantage of with just that strike, costing her a pinky, most of a ring finger and a very visible scar from her xiphoid to her right shoulder.
She learned to sprawl from an opponent who used the same tactic against her and landed a blow with a dagger to her back that left her coughing up blood for three months and near dead for the first two weeks of that time, having only learned to take an opponent’s legs in a grapple by having been taken down in just that way in response to a high horizontal slash of her own having been countered as such from an earlier opponent, that experience costing her a vicious beating at the hands of an opponent who managed to pin her arms with his knees while raining death down onto her from above with his fists. Had she not put a punch dagger worn at her hip into the back of his groin in the process she would have died that day, the same punch dagger which had once buried itself into her left shoulder, having been aimed for her heart and narrowly avoided by quick footwork and quicker thinking by an opponent whose left arm and back she had taken in a knife fight without having given enough thought to what might be on her right hip or how fast she might be able to pull down and away with her left, pivoting with her right hip while bending towards her with her right knee and launching a blow at near zero distance.
Backstory
The Wastes are not kind to most who inhabit it’s alien landscapes of harsh desert sands, unforgiving expanses of barren rocky peaks and eternally ashen sky. Above ground there isn’t a drop of liquid water to be found in a thousand square miles, and below the surface of their dead world nothing subsists save the rats, the snakes, the crawling things of the world that once was, along with those desperate few who have managed to meek out a living amongst the dying world’s forgotten places. Bhilinai’s Tear is no exception to the rule of the new world, and Sky is Over crippled her once thriving society just as it sent the rest of the world descending into a cacophony of madness, constant near starvation and crippling depression brought on from the new life spent underground, in the darkness. The culture survived, and like the others who did so adapted. Their new normal became more primal, increasingly savage and bloodthirsty as the years passed and no salvation arose to greet them from the ever expanding sands. No doubt it would be the end of life as a whole, but not before breeding a new kind of savagery into those poor beings still clinging to life among the world-wide necropolis.
Aibhilin was born into this underworld of death and starvation, and in it thrived. None do this entirely of their own power to be sure, this is not the kind of world that one emerges into at birth and becomes instantly successful. She was born of prolific hunters of humanity, and from this beginning grew strong while those around her grew weak. Where the others starved and fought for scraps of snake and rat she learned early on that the more efficient way to eat is to take by force those choice catches, for whatever that term is worth in this dead world, that she could from those around her too weak to keep her from her taking from them. It’s what her parents did, what their parents did, and to all outward appearances this is how it had always been here. The elders spoke of a time when this was not the case, in the before time, when the world was green and the sky blue. She didn’t much care. This old world wasn’t hers, had never been, her’s was a legacy of death and meat, and into this she devoted the majority of her years on the dying planet.
As she grew she inherited an increasing responsibility to fend for herself, and watched as her parents and siblings grew older and died or became stronger, all the while training, fighting, becoming what she was destined to be. She was a warrior, and a good one. It wasn’t long before she had grown into her full height and size, several inches taller than the average in this world of malnourished and starving scavengers that deigned to call themselves humanity, and possessed of far greater size and physical strength than any woman, and most men, in her Freehold. Humans do not grow especially large when deprived of a healthy and consistent diet, nor do they stave off sickness, defect of body nor deficit in mental faculty when fighting day by day to get the handful of morsels necessary to simply be able to get up and do it all over again in the morning. She belonged to the caste of takers of life, hunters of meat, and since the rise of humanity from the primordial forest never had the stark contrast between the powerful and the weak been more visibly apparent. She and her kind were as Gods in comparison to these reticulant, dessicated non-entities, and if they went hungry so that she might eat twice her share it was of no concern to her.
It was at this time that she knew she would go on to be more even than an honored warrior of the Bhilinai. There was much bronze and leather to be had by testing one’s mettle in the forge of the Arenas of the Empire of the Crimson Throne, and though they were less inclined to favor her as a warrior woman, for their’s was a fickle culture focused on superficial notions unrelated to ones valor as a taker of life, it was all the same to them in the end. The show was all that mattered once the blood started flowing. She traveled further across the Wastes than any in her tribe had ever gone so far as she was aware and threw herself into the fray as soon as she was able to get a camp to take her seriously, accomplished by running a blade through one of their premier pit fighters after an extended bout that cost her two fingers on her left hand and a long scar across her right clavicle. She excelled at this, too, reveled in the competition of meeting a fellow warrior across the sand and delivering them to their final end to the roar of the crowd.
She had taken sixteen pairs of ears in the ring and received a commission from an Imperial owned fighting camp to operate as one of the very few Doctoras in the Empire by the time she was ready to retire. The wounds accrued in her bouts had taken their toll by the time she was twenty six, the lifespan of professional killers in the arena being one of the shortest of all professions, and she would be remembered as the Lady in Blue by the Arena viewing public for an age. Her’s was a mask of clay died in the off color blue blood of under dweller reptilians, and a mantle of steel plates scarlet not from rust but from intentionally poorly polished human blood, no longer would she need to prove herself to anyone, and the second phase of her life began. As her parents had done for her and her siblings all those years ago she now shaped the new generation of killers, blood-letters, pit fighters and fortune seekers who risked the blood and sand for a chance at greatness and a coat of plated bronze and steel, and in this task her next chance at greatness presented itself. To train a champion was to live vicariously as a champion once more through her pupil.
