Léonie Crouet's page

Docker nanny
With her parents absent most of the time, and often physically exhausted when they were around, she and her siblings were raised mostly by Auntie Sasha (no relation by blood), a Docker artist. Léonie still visits her from time to time to enjoy her sharp wit, though she is half-blind now.

Drowning
Her innocence was taken from her when her elder brother drowned - likely hit by a boat while swimming too far from the shore - when she was ten. To this day, she hates and is scared of large bodies of water.

Grifter
As a teenager she fell in with a bad crowd, youngsters loosely affiliated with the Family. She started small, like they all do: as a lookout or as a decoy instigating diversions, but she progressively evolved into a grifter. She was quite good at deception, and tricked money out of the pockets of neighbours and wealthy men alike. She still shivers with shame when she thinks back on those days.

The Mirror Moon
When she was fifteen came the Night of the Mirror Moon, and she headed to the waterfront in Bosum Strand to pick out some easy targets.
"There is much I don’t remember about that night. I expected to be able to grab purses or valuables left behind by people venturing into the sea; but I think some noblewoman’s guard caught me red-handed, and hit me hard on the head. After that, it gets all blurry. I remember the sea, and I was wearing the polished metal medallion my mother had gifted me… it was enough of a mirror, I guess? The world spun around me, the stars wheeling, and suddenly the colours were all different, exquisite but all wrong. Addled as I was, I think I talked to everyone I came across, not heeding any warning from the stories about the fae. Perhaps they took pity on me, thinking me a simpleton? Whatever the reason, they shared something of the Dreaming with me, is what I believe.

The next day, when I awoke on the shore, something of an eladrin’s command of magic started blooming in me, and my eyes were changed: they now shine whenever I draw from my inner well of power... like an eladrin’s.

It is over time that I came to realize that powers had awakened in me. The first time I teleported, while running away from an angry mark, it shocked my to my core. And again when I became evanescent and just crossed right through a gate."

She wants to say so much more…
More than that, I believe they awakened an eladrin’s soul in me; I’m no theologian, so I don’t know if it’s my soul, or another's that merged with mine.
And they taught me how to listen, and now I hear the voices of things. The boots I wear, the metal plates I shape... They speak to me.
But she knows from experience that they will think her crazy, so she clenches her jaw shut, frustrated that she can't talk about the wonders in her life.

Eladrinophilia
Fascination with the eladrins and their rich history ensued, and it hasn’t abated to this day.
She found someone to teach her rudiments of weapon combat, focusing on traditional eladrin weapons. She paid her master-at-arms with her ill-gotten gains, and over time she came to master one of the supreme eladrin weapons, the curve blade.

Engineering
As maturity came, she found herself wanting to get out of her crime life. She had always liked tinkering, at the feet of her parents, and her engineering skills offered an alternate path in a Flint where the demand for audacious younglings was ever-growing. She dove into it: she apprenticed to a half-crazed dwarf and began to hone her talent.

After a couple of years, she got an offer she could not refuse: to come work at Pemberton Industries. She embraced the opportunity right away.

She learned so much there, and the work conditions were better than she could have dreamt... yet she left after just 3 years, largely because of Benedict Pemberton. The culture of secret, the - perhaps justifiable -paranoia of upper management, and the disregard for the common good ended up being too much for her.

She is still not allowed to reveal much about what she worked on (the Pemberton contracts are no joke!), but her friends have sussed out that it was related to the android project. She never had the full picture, but she is proud of her contributions and awed that the Pemberton teams actually managed to achieve true artifical life.
As for herself, she has integrated much of what she learned into the design for her android-lite creations. They don't have the same capacity for self-perfection as the androids, but they are quite smart and capable in their own right.

Policing
After spending some months unemployed, she was starving for anything interesting to do, if only to pass the time. An unlikely opportunity arose in the form of an outreach program from the RHC towards Nettle-born citizens: the district, overpopulated, was becoming more prone to riots, and the RHC correctly recognized that they needed some people from there, to help with intelligence gathering and pacifying the riots.

Once she got there, she befriended the tech wizard providing the RHC's equipment, and managed to pivot to a full position hybridizing constable work and tech work.

She'd have never in a million years imagined herself working at the RHC, but she's really happy she landed there: she feels like she makes a difference, plus she gets to work with mostly nice people, and she gets her hands on fairly cutting-edge technology (though not as much as at Pemberton Inc).

She is great with people, but that comes with a tinge of guilt because she tends to find it too easy to manipulate them, and she sometimes does so without fully realizing what she is doing until after the fact.

She is intense, and with it comes a degree of obliviousness; compared to most of her constable colleagues, she is not the keenest observer of physical details.
(OOC Note: I intentionally left Perception unoptimized :))

Coworkers
Léonie has a lot of respect for Lady Inspectress Margaret Saxby, but for all of that tries to avoid her since they don't get along very well. Léonie often feels her skills are underappreciated, and Saxby mistrusts her unruliness.

Léonie is among those who openly treat Chloe as a person, and she appreciates the android's company.

Léonie goes along famously with Francesco Armani Salviato da Vendricce, at least until his temper flares up and their banter degenerates into a shouting match. Then they don't speak to each other for one week... then fall into each other's arms again, promising to do better but invariably beginning the cycle anew.

Enemies
Though they have never met, Léonie would like to meet Gale and attempt to turn her neutral, unlikely as it sounds. Otherwise she'd have to do her job and put the rabid Eladrin down.

She has no time no patience for racists who discriminate against eladrins and elves (or devas, for that matter).
<insert specific NPC here? To be discussed with DM>

Other NPCs
To Be Completed after selection

I'm envisioning her having an Eladrin mate... but I don't know how realistic it is, and at this point I don't intend to make it a central theme, so it can be discussed later.

Other PCs
TODO after selection

Player goals:
- for Leonie to contribute significantly to technological progress of civilization (it could be something taking place in the background!)
- to explore her connection to the Dreaming
- to have a blast with the awesome setting, and great setup you prepared ;) That includes trying out cool Tinker and Guile abilities, especially plans for the latter.

That she doesn't know:
- her mother is secretly close to the Vekeshi movement, though she is not an initiate of their deeper mysteries. She did have her children blessed in a Vekeshi right after they were born.

- "That man saved me when I got my head bashed in as a junior constable, ambushed by a nasty crowd. I thought for sure I was going to die. Instead I drowned in his shining, beautiful eladrin eyes.
I know, I'm corny. But I'm allowed to be!"

- Léonie often spaces out: in the street, in the middle of the conversation, ... It happens either when an object suddenly calls to her, or when she feels more strongly the influence of the Dreaming. Early in her career she was put on probation specifically because of that "weakness"; thankfully her regular RHC aptitude tests all come back spotless.

The Tale of Zin (a folktale hero who reverses time - Léonie's favourite when she was a kid; she's managed to emulate something smaller but similar in her companion Mika)

Gardo the Mechanoid

- Her most original abilities are her Plan talents, combined with the Time-Crossed Plots feat. She can just go "Oh, by the way... did we need this [key | piece of information | disguise]? I have it right there."

- She can be a team player by giving out some gizmos (e.g. for protection / detection), through the buffs her mechanoid assistant Mika can provide (e.g. Fate/The Hierophant to improve Will saves) or simply through her feints that deprive one foe of Dex to AC.
With Fate/Undo Harm, Mika lowers the need for healing.

- In combat, she hits hard whenever precision damage is possible, and she aims to debuff enemies (prone, ...). Her assistants can blast and debuff for a couple of rounds.