Write 5 background and concept elements that you feel are important to your image of the character.
1. Seraphina was born to a poor family in a small town near Riddleport, the third daughter in a disgraced scholar's horde of brat children. Her father was an abusive alcoholic who took to beating his wife and children on the least provocation. Slow to learn and meek, Sera, as her mother called her, was a frequent target of his rages. Despite her mother's best efforts, Sera and her siblings were mostly left to take care of themselves and run wild on the streets.
2. On one occasion, Sera's father beat her so badly that her arm bone broke through the skin. Since the family was unable to afford the services of the local Adabar priest, the task fell to an itinerant cleric of Cayden Cailean, who took pity on the family and healed Sera for free. From that moment on, Sera nurtured a growing curiosity about the Lucky Drunk, and as an adult, took up the proper worship of the god.
3. After Sera' mother died from illness, a family friend pulled strings to send Sera and her two youngest siblings to a distant Irorian monastary, rather than leave them in the hands of her father. Sera, having been made rebellious and aggressive after countless beatings at her father's hands over the years, made a poor novice monk. Between her temper and lack of interest in attaining mental perfection, it was impossible for Sera to gather her ki, let alone attempt to purify it. Unhappy with the monastery’s rigid daily routines, she was constantly making attempts to run away and showed little to no deference towards her superiors.
Sera was soon relegated to doing chores instead of attending novice training, in the hopes that the menial labour would sort her out. One of the monastery's oldest attendants, an ex-sohei monk called Rathi Baghera, took it upon herself to channel the girl's anger into proper martial training. It was only after much patience, stern affection, and kind words, that Rathi was able to soothe much of Sera's shattered self. Over the years, Sera grew to love and respect her mentor as the mother she'd lost too soon.
4. Following Rathi's passing from old age in Sera's seventeenth year, Sera finally left the monastery, carrying nothing but a few personal belongings, Rathi's old rosary, and a pair of worn kukris that the abbot was willing to spare. She has since been wandering Varisia and the surrounding regions, going by the moniker of "Red" and earning her living through a mixture of mercenary work and hard labour.
One of Red's first acquisitions once she obtained enough money was a massive tattoo on her back, in memory of Rathi. Over her years of wandering, Red has also sought out her siblings and keeps in cordial contact with them. On the other hand, she has no desire to see her father and doesn't care what becomes of him.
5. Red's wanderings have brought her to Korvosa many times. It was on one of her earliest visits to the city that she found a friend in Kristen Vian, an eager young recruit of the Sable Company, after the latter intervened in a bar brawl that Red was involved in. Over the years, the friendship between Kristen and Red developed into something more, with the two eventually becoming lovers. Red eventually began spending more and more time in Korvosa and the surrounding townships, doing her best to find employment within the city in order to be with Kristen. Kristen, on the other hand, was always careful to ensure that their relationship remained a secret from her superiors in the Company.
Red's world has recently fallen apart, however. A few weeks ago, Kristen was found dead in an alleyway, stripped of her valuables, the apparent victim of a petty theft while on her way home after patrol duty. Furious with the inability of the Korvosan Guard to find the thief and haunted by grief, Red has been frantically going through Korvosa's pawnshops and underworld for any clue that might tell her the identity of the one responsible. After days of searching, the chance discovery of Kristen's ring of protection in a local merchant's trinket shop has finally given Red a name to go on - Gaedren Lamm.
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Personality
All heart and not much head, Red is a quiet young woman, gentle and sweet-tempered by nature. Once roused into battle or provoked, however, she tends to get carried away and has no qualms dealing out massive doses of double kukri slicey death.
Appearance
Red is of mixed Tian-Min and Varisian blood, inheriting her looks from her father and her fox-red hair from her mother. She is fair-skinned, with her hair cut short and a trim fighter's body. She is also rather short for a human female.
Red prefers to dress like a man when out travelling, ostensibly on the grounds that it is easier to fight in pants rather than a skirt. She is never without an Irorian rosary tied to her right wrist. She also bears a massive black ink tattoo of two feathered angel wings that goes from the top of her shoulders all the way to her lower back.
