Luciana García's page

Special Armour: Resist a complication for you or your coterie related to talking your way out of, or running from, trouble (when you are present).

Party Crasher: Once per errand, any flashback where you have arranged a distraction or employed mayhem costs no stress. When drawing attention to yourself take +1 effect.

• When you roll a desperate action, mark XP in that attribute.

At the end of each session, for each item below, mark 1 XP (in your playbook or an attribute), for a maximum of 4 XP.

• You addressed a challenge with evasion • and/or mayhem.
• You expressed your beliefs, drives, heritage, or background.
• You struggled with issues from your indulgences or scandals during the session.

△▽ Honor, an Orphanage Headmistress
△▽ Wren, a Jilted Lover
▲▽ Lucky, a Vicious Thug
△▼ Meifeng, a Temple Acolyte (whose efforts to bring a modicum of spirituality to the Twist by way of the Tallow Way mission were regularly undermined by Urraca's capricious meddling)
△▽ Benecio, a Gondoliere
△▽ _____, a Member of the Coterie's House

• Elisabetta and I used to run together back in the good old days. Look at us now!
• This isn’t my world. I look to Kyra when I need advice.
• Sasha sees me not as I am, but as I want to be. It means the world to me.
• The Twist is hard. Violetta wouldn’t last five minutes down there.

She knows that she was born beneath a full moon, the night air sweetly laden with the scent of angel’s trumpet and honeysuckle, but she never managed to learn who her father was. She has contrived to invite herself into a dozen bedrooms, by way of her silver tongue or her silent feet, but she never let herself know true love. Even at a young age she had already seen much of the world, walking amongst its people and availing herself of its secrets, but in turn the world itself has always kept her at arm’s length, mistrustful of her capricious roots and not necessarily wrong to judge her thus. Indeed, to some extent the feeling is mutual.

It is not easy, being Iberican. One is never quite assured a roof to sleep under, or the kindly welcome of strangers. But in the girl everyone called Urraca, “magpie” in her people’s tongue, this also bred a dogged self-reliance, a tenacity altogether alien to the soft folk she came across during her travels – qualities that saved her life when her wandering family-troupe tried to run a scam on the wrong person in Ilrien, a deceptively unassuming citizen with powerful ties to the Esultare who promptly brought the attention of the City Watch down on her little kin-band. The Watch’s response was as disproportionate as it was thorough: some of her kindred were imprisoned or ejected from the city, while others prudently fled far on their own. As far as she knows, she was the only one who managed to disappear in Ilrien itself.

Not quite out of her teenage years then, Urraca dedicated herself to keeping a low profile in the Groan. Or tried to, at any rate. Oh, she kept well clear of the Motley, their unbridled sound and fury nothing more than obnoxiously gauche to her sensibilities; she learnt to watch her back and avoid the Twistjacks, whose unrelenting dedication to “justice” never sat quite right with her. Yet merely doing what it took to stay afloat was not good enough for. She possessed a powerful drive to effect change in the world around her, were one to phrase it charitably. Urraca indeed was something of a hellion, a lone and frustrated kid acting out in clever yet frequently destructive ways, with a knack for talking herself out of trouble if caught.

These talents were far from useless in the Groan; less than civilised as the quarter was, times and places for mayhem abounded. And Urraca was cunning enough to ply her trade indiscriminately, never inciting any one party too badly. She wanted very much to remain alive, after all, despite needing to indulge her innate free spirit. It might be denied the open road for the foreseeable future, these bleak urban confines its cramped cage, but she refused to let it die.

That decade in the most cut-throat quarter of Ilrien left her with her share of scars; less visibly, it also left her with a degree of shrewdness and street smarts not every Iberican may boast. And while she soon realised that avenging her family-troupe was a pipe dream, it eventually transpired that rising above her current, piteous station was not.

In the event, it took very little for that to happen. A letter in a shabby envelope, purloined chiefly by accident from an individual of lowly outward seeming. But the letter’s contents… enough to get a rather important Ilrienne personage killed, or cast down from their lofty seat, or at the very least outrageously blackmailed. Of course, Urraca herself had no means of taking action that would effect change on such a scale. Nor was she much interested in it, truthfully speaking. What mattered was that this letter would be immensely valuable to the right person – and that made it her key out of the Groan.

She knew better than to leap at the first opportunity to parlay her precious letter into an improvement of her circumstances. No, she bode her time: asked careful questions, eavesdropped judiciously, sneaked beyond the Groan to keep tabs on persons of interest. All the while, she endured the deprivation and hardships endemic to the place she called home.

But sometimes, good things do come to those who wait. Urraca was in her early twenties when, in exchange for her letter quietly finding its way into the right hands at long last, she was lifted up into the Esultare as Luciana García, a formally recognised and legitimised member of a House Major. Not one of the more powerful Houses, perhaps, but Luciana does not really mind. For now…

Graceful yet resilient, delicate yet earthy – such traits are sometimes ascribed to the Iberican people (though not always in a favourable sense), and Luciana embodies them closely enough. Her tawny complexion, strong though rounded features, and aquiline nose lend her a somewhat “exotic” look that makes passing for a native Ilrienne a highly unlikely prospect. Not that she loses any sleep over this: Luciana likes to be herself, and after so many years of keeping her head down she now fairly delights in getting to stand out without fear of reproach. To a certain degree her wardrobe reflects this; her garb favours bold tailoring and unusual cuts, though it never entirely turns its back on the quality of being practical. Still, at the end of the day Luciana’s style is far more likely to buck trends than to set any, as is her quirk of going barefoot regardless of the circumstances; an expression of her innate wilfulness, perhaps, and a means of keeping in touch with her free-roving Iberican roots.

One might expect Urraca’s tribulations in Ilrien to have left her with a cynical, selfish streak, but she emerged from her ordeal a surprisingly well-adjusted woman who no longer glories in being a rascal and a mischief-maker… at least not openly. It is true that certain telling habits from her hard former life remain with her to this day: never leaving meals unfinished and occasionally pocketing morsels of food “for later”, say, or discreetly scoping out potential escape routes wherever she goes. All in all, though, Luciana has adapted well to her new existence as a member of a House Major. Is she a little snide at times? No doubt, but probably no more so than the average aristocrat. Does she occasionally conceal malicious thoughts behind a sweet smile? Indeed; yet if this be guilt, then surely scarce an innocent soul may be found amongst all the nobility of Ilrien – a view she readily ascribes to, for her part.

This somewhat pessimistic outlook notwithstanding, at any rate, she is not difficult to please, and generally unpretentious as a person. Her one flaw of note, arguably, is a weakness for luxury, particularly clothing and similar accoutrements. It is an appetite that Luciana manages to keep reined in most of the time – which is just as well, for she does not always act wisely in her pursuit of ostentatious things.