Name: Keket, Belle of the Brawl
Age: 18
National Origin: Bright Coast Covenant
Appearance:
Her back is almost entirely covered by scarring from lashings she received. The scarring, due to a few missed lashings, also extends to her hips, thighs, and sides. When wearing her bands, they would be on her biceps and thighs to apply pressure on relatively sensitive areas.
Personality: While absolutely not religious, Keket adopted a particular form of self-restraint from the Bright Coast. The bands have dulled studs that apply pressure and have a latchlike device on top to further press the studs in to cause pain. The original intent of the bands was to purify sin by pain, but this serves to help Keket remember to keep her temper down. Her temper, after the events surrounding her leaving Bright Coast, has gone from nearly nonexistent to a seething fury at all times. Without her bands, she is prone to going into a pure rage upon the first enemy or agitator, becoming almost rapturously aggressive.
Outside of her rage, she is generally pretty pleasant to be around. She is far from meek and quite fiery. She does not attempt to insult others and instead compliments them. She does not intentionally make jokes that talk directly about a person. She prefers to make fun of a situation or the things that happen to people. She cannot read nor write anything more than her signature due to the oral tradition and lack of writing in her culture. However, she is very eloquent when speaking and was originally groomed to be a storyteller. So, she is very much observant and uses her ability to observe for gathering information. Information she gathers that she feels must be preserved will be woven into either a story or poem, left in her mind for future use.
Most of her motivations center upon herself. She wants to find a place to finally belong, one that will not mistreat her again. She wishes to find a better means to keep her temper under control. Most of all, however, she wants to become strong enough to crush those similar to her abusers.
Bio: Born among a religious sect that believed sin was cleansed by pain and the shadows were people who did not cleanse themselves, Keket grew up originally intended to become a lorekeeping storyteller like her father. The first 16 years of her life were spent learning the lore of the sect and the tenets. She spent almost all day learning lore and tenets, only having a couple hours to go outside when night came. She was careful to take a lantern and spent it mostly sitting under a tree at the center of the town. After she turned 16, she began to question the tenets of pain to cleanse. It was not unusual for children to privately question the sect at some point before adulthood, but Keket went further and began to publicly question the methods of cleansing and even the need for cleansing.
This heresy drew the attention of the inquisitorial branch of the sect, called the Order of the Soul. They quietly kidnapped her from her home and put her into interrogation chambers. Their interrogating found her guilty of heresy and attempting to incite a split among the religion. As her punishment, she was lashed in the cell for weeks, barely kept alive on minimal rations and water, and frequently belittled and screamed at by inquisitors. Due to the dehumanizing treatment, some of the inuisitors did as they willed with her, raping her multiple times during the punishments. The final part of her punishment was public execution by exposure and flogging. They started by a day of flogging her back, leaving large bleeding gashes and almost unbroken bruising along the whole of her back. Then, they left her tied to a post in the outskirts of town without any light to leave her for the shadows to "welcome" her sinful soul to the fold.
Keket was half-starved, dehydrated, battered and cut, bound, gagged, and left to die in the night. She wept as the she watch the sun setting, knowing the shadows would find her soon after it became dark. She was too weak to fight the bindings. When she was on the verge of consigning herself to her fate, when the light was almost gone, sudden brightness appeared behind her. A cabal of dissidents apparently existed in the town and had found her execution spot. They brought lanterns and various items to help her. A woman from the ground untied her and carried her from the pole. The group went into a long forgotten mine nearby and began tending her wounds as well as feeding her. Keket remained quiet the whole time, less scared of shadows but now equally scared of the strangers.
The next day, she woke to find the group still there. It seemed it was their barracks. As she looked at each face, she recognized others who had been sentenced to execution. Knowing what a soulless was, she frantically tried to see if they had shadows. The group reacted calmly, showing off their shadows to calm Keket. Once sufficiently quieted, Keket let them continue tending to her. It took two years to finally get back into her peak condition. During that time, she helped save a few more people and participated in a few small operations to hinder the Order of the Soul from taking more innocent life. Shortly after she turned 18, the group went on a larger operation to stop a particularly bloodthirsty and zealous inquisitor that threatened to go into every home to root out even the smallest heresy. On this operation, her group was led into a trap by a traitor in their group. Keket, through some cunning and help from the woman who originally carried here, escaped the slaughter and fled the area. After a few months of mourning and fleeing the hunting groups, Keket found herself in another settlement and managed to get onto an airship. There, she regained some semblance of a life, though she still felt like an outsider again. Now, she is ready and almost itching to find her place in this world and become strong enough for the Order of the Soul and others like it to fear her.
Equipment:
Cleansing Pressure Bands: two fitted for thighs, two fitted for biceps
Prayer Beads: These are from a small religion unknown to Keket. They were owned by the woman who first helped Keket.
Barbed Scourge: This is her primary weapon, used to trip up, harm, and control opponents.
Dirk: Hidden in her boot and mostly used for eating or opening packages
Hatchet: Kept under her faulds usually, mostly used for utility purposes, though also used in combat if her guns aren't useful.
Brace of Pistols: She usually wears a strapped setup that holds up to 4 pistols. usually two are loaded with buckshot or flechette types of rounds and the other two with standard balls. The buckshot ones have a flared barrel and wider bore while the standard ball ones are triple barreled and able to be fired one by one or with all three barrels in one pull.
Armored Clothing: With the exception of her underclothes and undergarments, Keket's clothing is a mix of cloth layers mixed with plate to allow flexibility, negated armor sounds, and yet still provide decent protection. It is not as effective as normal plate, but it provides more versatility and comfort, allowing her to wear it at all times with minimal added bulk and weight.
Extra notes: Her time in the dissident group led Keket to learn survival skills as well as skills in hunting, stealth, tracking, guerilla tactics, and certain spy skills. She can function as a covert operative given resources and time.
The group also taught her how to fight in both bare fisted and armed manners, though much of her skills come from improvisation and learning as she goes.
Her nickname came from one night where she ended up in a tavern brawl. She was the only one unscathed by the whole brawl, yet she still took down five other people to defend herself. This tavern was on the airship she lives on currently.
