About Auriel MinickAURIEL MINICK CR 1
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Prestige:
Background:
Auriel was born into a respectable if unremarkable family in the Marches. Her father was a cobbler -- not the kind who made beautiful, fancy, airy designs for ladies' feet or tooled and embroidered leather riding boots for gentlemen, just the kind who made heavy and serviceable shoes for plain people to wear on plain days in plain parts of town as they went about their plain lives. Some of them had metal toes for clumsy workmen who tended to drop things. He sold a lot of shoes. A lot of boring, boring, cheap, boring shoes.
Most of the people in the Marches wore her father's shoes, or shoes that were so like her father's shoes as to be indistinguishable. Most of the people in the Marches were boring. Auriel felt strongly that these two facts were related. The only people in the Marches who did not wear boring shoes as a matter of habit were the Sczarni. Auriel's parents didn't like the Sczarni; they crossed to the other side of the street when they saw them out and dragged Auriel with them, but Auriel saw them nonetheless. She saw that their shoes, like their clothing, were flashier than that of most of the modest and content shopkeepers and craftsmen whom her parents considered their friends and neighbors. They spoke and laughed louder. They were obviously far more interesting than most of the people who lived in the Marches. One day, when Auriel was old enough that her parents allowed her out to run errands by herself, she saw a man with tall, black, shiny boots walking east, and she followed him. She followed him all the way to Lowcleft, where she promptly lost interest in his boots. All around her were people with shoes of all kinds, except the stolid, serviceable type her father made; people with tattoos and piercings and hair of all sorts of unnatural colors, people wearing bright-colored clothing in patterns and stripes, people walking the streets with daubs of paint on their hands or marble dust in every crease of their clothing, people on the streetcorners breathing fire and juggling balls and playing wild music. Auriel felt that, without ever having seen it before, she had come home. She spent every spare moment in Lowcleft after that, and a few of the regular street performers took the girl under their wing and taught her a few of their tricks in exchange for her working the crowd and passing the hat. She spent her portion of the take on scandalous clothing, gaudy costume jewelry, and dye for her respectable, mousy-brown hair. As soon as her skills and networking among the inhabitants of Lowcleft allowed, she left the Marches behind and began flopping with various friends and well-wishers and squatters in her new district, spending her days juggling and cajoling coins out of passersby and her evenings in the taprooms and theaters. A few months ago, Auriel was approached by the leader of a small gang of pickpockets and minor ne'er-do-wells. He had noticed her talent for distracting a crowd and proposed a business arrangement: she entertains the bystanders while his crew pulls a job, in exchange for a small portion of the take. She refused to help him knock over any businesses in Lowcleft, as she knows and is known by most of the locals and refused on moral grounds to harm them, so he suggested she take her show on the road to the Grand Arch district. Figuring the more well-to-do crowd there could stand to have their purses lightened by a coin or two, she agreed. The arrangement was mutually beneficial for several weeks: Auriel was the center of attention while a pickpocket worked the crowd, and the coin went back home to Lowcleft to be spread around the shops and taverns. But then the gang got greedy. Noticing all the seasonally-empty homes of the merchants, the leader decided to use Auriel's distraction to break into some of them and pull a bigger heist. Unfortunately, the Watch was already on heightened alert due to the rash of pickpocket complaints, and the gang was apprehended. The squealing crew fingered Auriel, but she denied all up and down having anything to do with their crimes, claiming that a girl has to eat and it's not her responsibility what other people choose to do while she's working. Without any hard evidence, they couldn't pin the charge on her, but Captain Percival used the cloud of suspicion hanging over her head to persuade the girl to help him out in exchange for overlooking her unfortunate associations. Appearance:
Auriel is a slim, attractive late-teenager who is relatively successful at looking older than she actually is. She dresses in eclectic if inexpensive clothing of extremely modern fashion, and her hair is dyed a shocking and entirely unnatural shade of red. |
