You know... I think that everything, from problems to people, tend to work themselves out in the end. Just give them a little time and a bit of support.
25 | Carnelian | No Mage-Eyes
P E R S O N A L I T Y
❖ Anxious
❖ Optimistic
❖ Patient
❖ Meticulous
❖ Sensitive
For someone from the Wainwaters, Araigne has no business being so nervous. She isn’t what you’d expect from those dark and gloomy marshes; adverse to conflict in all of its forms and with feelings more fragile than glass, the only thing that seems to be holding this gangly little Carnelian together against the all-encompassing desolation of Invernier is an ungodly amount of tolerance, forgiveness and hope. Most would call her naive or delusional but Araigne prefers to call it an “alternative outlook on the situation” and, as a result of her optimism, is best described as an overall amiable companion. A productive side effect of her patience is her ability to take on long and arduous tasks with something that isn’t quite determination but a sort of slow-and-steady approach. She has a LOT of patience and doesn’t mind if something takes a few days, weeks or months to complete.
A P P E A R A N C E
Averaging at around 6’3”, Araigne is much like her kin in the sense that she is tall and lithe. However the way she carries herself makes her seem a bit gangly and awkward, more like a newborn foal than a delicate spider. Her skin is pale and covered with black chitinous plating, only revealing the pointy elbows and sharp jawline and little flashes of sallow skin between the plates. She’s missing two toes - the third and her pinky - on her left foot and the plating is somewhat disfigured around the injury. Her eyes are a bright green.
Araigne’s beauty lies predominantly in her outfits. Most of them carry the practicality of a nomad but also have the professionalism and detail that only bespoke craftsmanship can replicate. She wears predominantly cloth and leather outfits with decoration and muted colours. Some jackets and tunics have delicate embroidery whilst others have stitching that’s only meant to keep the clothing together. The only constant within her remarkably varied wardrobe is the way they move on her body - each and every garment fits perfectly and flows across the stiff plates on her body in the most flattering way possible.
here are some examples of varying degrees of complexity. (All of these links lead back to their respective artists.)
H I S T O R Y
Deep in the foggy marshes of the Wainwaters, a smattering of stilted houses were reconstructed, clustered together against the efertide. There had to be no more than 50 people living in this tiny, tiny ‘village’ tucked away amongst the gnarled treetrunks and rustling reeds. There was only one path - if you could call it a path - that duck and wove through the wilderness towards safety, towards the Tempesta. This settlement creatively named itself “Bogtown” and received no visitors save for the beasts that lurked on its borders who dared to attack.
Compared to the rest of Invernier, Bogtown was a very strange place to live in. An odd mixture of tribal, primitive survival and the remnants of high culture from the diverse origins of its settlers, mixed incongurously with the rural life of farmers and countrymen. There were fields of weird crops to eat and teams of hunters who knew how to swing from branch to branch to kill monsters and bring their carcasses back to the town. You had oracles and soothsayers alongside professors and philosophers, who all talked with blacksmiths and tailors. Most of them knew how to fight; all of them knew how to hide. Every month or so a team of scouts would take that winding road to The Outside and trade their (obviously rare and difficult to acquire) crops and furs with travelling merchants before tackling the insurmountable task of bringing carts full of supplies through a deadly swamp to their relatives.
Araigne Dorvina lived with her grandparents in one of the stilted huts in Bogtown, descendant of two craftsmen who mysteriously vanished one night when she was too young to remember their faces. Not that Araigne minded; she had her duties to take care of. Like every other craftsman in Bogtown, Araigne’s life consisted mainly of staying indoors and working tirelessly on her job because going outside meant plunging yourself into danger. Her Grandmother Trinira was an incredibly skilled seamstress who passed down all of her skills to her grand-daughter. Araigne learnt how to make incredible things out of cloth and yarn - boots that never lost their soles, tents that never leaked, big wooly sweaters so warm and colourful they could ALMOST hold back the efertide itself.
“The secret,” croaked her grandmother midway through embroidering a travelling cloak, “is knowing what the fabric likes. Put stitches just like so, speak to the cloth, cut it gently and follow my teachings. You’ll be a natural before you’re twenty.” Araigne listened and spoke words she did not understand to bits of fabric year in, year out. She memorised patterns and could knit in her sleep if she had to. A little over a decade of doing nothing but tailoring had that sort of effect on people; you learn much more in a much shorter period of time. It also had other effects, like instilling fear of ‘The Outside’ into her and making her godawful at social interactions. It made her weak and thin and pale, unfit for going outside in the first place. But most of all, it denied her the chance to learn from life - it made her naive and childish, idealistic and unable to accept the true horrors she lived in.
She was nineteen years old, three months away from her twentieth birthday, when a pack of beasts broke through Bogtown’s defences and started tearing down the stilts holding their houses in the air. Araigne did what she was told to do and she ran as fast as her bony legs could take her, tearing through the trees and wading through waist-deep pools of mud and silt. Other people were running with her, running away from her, away from the monsters in any direction they could get to. The scouts and hunters were bunched up in the town in order to stave off the beasts. They all split up and Araigne kept fleeing until she no longer heard the screams of her neighbours echo across the marshes.
Araigne kept running, then stumbling, then wandering until she was cold, hungry, afraid and lost. The Wainwaters weren’t kind on lost wanderers and Araigne knew this all too well. She also felt the chill of night start to settle in as the sun sank under the Wainwater’s dense canopy. She knew of the efertide and she knew that if she did not find light or shelter soon then she’d surely die. Just as the orangey glow on sunset started to dim, a flickering fire roared into life a few leagues off from her position. She eagerly approached it, oblivious to the threat of a trap. What she found was, to some, much worse than death.
Shuffling around the impromptu campsite was a short, stocky goblin in heavy robes wearing a dark cowl over his head. He looked up briefly when Araigne stumbled into view and ultimately ignored her to continue whatever it was he was doing to prepare for night. Araigne wasn’t afraid of goblins, nor was she frightened by his mage-eyes. She begged and pleaded with the warlock to let her into his tiny tent, promising she’ll be extra quiet and stay out of his way as much as a six-foot Carnelian could in a goblin-sized tent. It took some convincing but the last thing this hooded stranger needed was a missing local last seen near his campsite, so he relented and let her stay the night.
By dawn he pegged onto the fact Araigne was utterly useless and wouldn’t last two minutes on her own. Since he was also searching for settlements within the Wainwaters for reasons he would not disclose, the Goblin took Araigne along with him to find her home again. They wandered for weeks and weeks, but all the shacks and hovels they came across weren’t even remotely familiar to the Carnelian. Almost a month had passed when the two travellers surprisingly found themselves at the very edge of the swamp. Araigne was understandably terrified; she had been born and raised in damp, muggy bogs surrounded by tall trees. Everything outside of the Wainwaters was too bright, too sparse and open. It put her on edge. However with no way to go back to where she came from and no idea where to go from here, she had to once again beg the mysterious Goblin to keep her around for just a little while longer.
It was actually during their trip to a nearby village that the Goblin finally picked up on Araigne’s knitting, some weeks after she traded some herbs in for a ball of yarn and some knitting needles. He noticed what he thought to be an incantation flowing out of Araigne’s mouth as she merrily stitched away and took an interest in whatever it was she was making. She proudly announced that she could do things with fabric that others could not, and was making a pair of woolen socks that dry really quickly. All of a sudden Araigne’s travelling companion was more than happy to keep her around, provided she worked hard at making new clothes - enchanted or otherwise - and he’d manage all those difficult financial affaires for her so she didn’t have to worry about money.
Initially, the goblin warlock fleeced Araigne and used her talents for his own benefit. He took the lion’s share of the profits and bought Araigne all she needed but rarely gave her enough to buy what she wanted, whilst he indulged himself on the back of her hard work. Then one day, out of the blue, Araigne received a sudden and unexpected pay rise from her ‘boss’. His mood gradually shifted; he was less scathing and rude to Araigne as the days passed by and even went so far as to defend her from time to time. He started to treat her less like a labourer and more like a person.
They still travel together to this day. Araigne is the sales front; her tailoring can be done weeks in advance in standardised sizes for the general public, or she can make more money by taking on commission work from well-to-do individuals. The goblin works behind the scenes, managing the money, ordering supplies and ensuring they have enough to make it to the next settlement.
I N V E N T O R Y
(NB: This list is exclusive to what she carries on her person at all times. She USUALLY has access to a small wagon containing mediocre/good quality tailoring materials such as leather straps, threads, large rolls of fabric, shoe soles, etc. Whether or not she’s able to access said wagon all the time in the RP depends on what we’re doing.)
❖ Wolf-bone carved knitting needles
❖ Blunt one-handed Iron Sword
❖ Small warped Wooden Shield
❖ Pincushion with a myriad of hat pins and needles of various sizes poked into it
❖ Roll of sturdy thread
❖ Rations
❖ Large tent with bedroll
❖ Small ball of yarn
❖ Rags for patches/quick repairs
❖ Several outfits
❖ Money (Small amount for necessities)
O T H E R
❖ Owns a mountaineering yak which Araigne affectionately calls ‘Gertrude’. It carries her tailoring supplies in a small wagon behind it, with some materials strapped to the saddle. (It is too small for Araigne to ride.)
❖ Whilst not wholly illiterate, reading is more of a ‘work in progress’ for Araigne. She cannot understand longer words and has difficulty focusing on small print.
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Mixtape Ghost N
