About Melira ElenarielStat Block:
Melira Elenariel
Female elf unchained rogue (phantom thief) 9/warpriest of Ostara 1 (ACG 60, UI 46, Unc 20) NG Medium humanoid (elf) Hero Points 2 Init +5 (+8 on surprise rounds that involved Bluff or Sense Motive to determine surprise); Senses low-light vision; Perception +20 --------------------
--------------------
Ranged +1 adaptive merciful composite longbow +14/+9 (1d8+3 nonlethal/×3 plus 1d6 non-lethal) or
Special Attacks blessings 3/day (Community: communal aid, Protection: increased defense), sacred weapon (1d6, +0, 1 rounds/day) Spell-Like Abilities (CL 10th; concentration +9)
Warpriest Spells Prepared (CL 1st; concentration +2)
--------------------
Str 14, Dex 20, Con 16, Int 14, Wis 12, Cha 8 Base Atk +7.5; CMB +9; CMD 26 Feats
Traits beast bond, resilient Skills
Racial Modifiers +2 Perception Languages
SQ
Combat Gear
Other Gear
--------------------
Blessings (3/day) (Su) Pool of power used to activate Blessing abilities. Bullseye Shot You can spend a move action to gain a +4 bonus the next attack you make this round. Comprehend Languages (1/day) (Sp) With Intelligence 11+, cast Comprehend Languages once per day. Deadly Aim -2/+4 Trade a penalty to ranged attacks for a bonus to ranged damage. Detect Magic (1/day) (Sp) With Intelligence 11+, cast Detect Magic once per day. Detect Poison (1/day) (Sp) With Intelligence 11+, cast Detect Poison once per day. Elven Immunities - Sleep You are immune to magic sleep effects. Evasion (Ex) If succeed on Reflex save for half dam, take none instead. Fast Stealth (Ex) Move at full speed while using the Stealth skill at no penalty. Healer’s Hands (+10, 10/day) (Su) Full-rd to treat deadly wounds (no limit or kit needed), beat DC by 10 for extra healing. Improved Uncanny Dodge (Lv >= 13) (Ex) Retain DEX bonus to AC when flat-footed. You cannot be flanked unless the attacker is Level 13+. Low-Light Vision See twice as far as a human in dim light, distinguishing color and detail. Point-Blank Shot +1 to attack and damage rolls with ranged weapons at up to 30 feet. Precise Shot You don't get -4 to hit when shooting or throwing into melee. Read Magic (1/day) (Sp) With Intelligence 11+, cast Read Magic once per day. Sacred Weapon (Su) As a swift action, grant weapon enhancement bonus or certain powers. Social Sense +3 (Ex) Gain bonus on Sense Motive, Bluff and initiative with regards to surprise. Backstory (long):
Melira Elenariel's defining moment came early in her childhood; she was about the size of an eleven-year-old human child, though many years older than that. One day when she was playing hide-and-seek with her friends in the forest, she ran further from the seeker than usual. Well away from the others, and looking back over her shoulder to see if the seeker was coming yet, she failed to see a narrow hole in the ground, and slipped into it. It was not so very far down -- ten or twelve feet -- but she twisted her ankle pretty badly when she landed at the bottom of the pit.
That alone would have been a serious problem; but as she sat up, gritting her teeth in pain, she immediately discovered that the cave was occupied. Outside the dim area of light falling from the hole above, the floor writhed. It was covered from one end to the other with worms: thin, banded orange and black, and glistening with mucus. And they were moving towards her. She froze. That was what saved her -- that and a bit of luck: just as she froze, a rock that had been loosened by her fall plummeted from the tangled roots of the ceiling. As it fell, it struck the skeleton of some woodland creature -- a wolf, perhaps? hard to tell, there was not much left -- which lay against the far wall of the cave. From the claw marks, it must have been scrabbling at the wall trying to escape before the worms got it. A few of them still twined it, but the skeleton was all but clean of flesh. The stone's impact caused it to fall apart with a resounding clatter. All of the worms turned away from Melira and began to move towards the skeleton. Melira was a smart girl, and instantly put it together. "They can't see me," she thought. "No eyes." She cautiously started to get to her feet, and choked back a brief cry as she discovered that her ankle would not hold her weight. Several of the worms turned back towards her. She immediately snatched up a rock from the floor and flung it into the wolf skeleton, tumbling and clattering bone on bone. The worms turned away from her once again. "I can't move," she thought. "Or they'll hear me. I can't call for help. They'll hear me. I'm ... trapped." Above her she could hear the shouts and laughter of her playmates as they ran through the forest seeking one another, completely unaware that her own game of hide-and-seek had become deathly serious. Time passed. The calls of her playmates above changed from laughter and play to calls for her. "Melira!" they yelled. "Come on, Melira, game's over! It's time for dinner!" But she didn't dare answer. The worms were waiting for her to make even the tiniest noise. When they failed to find her, her playmates must have alerted the adults, because as the light began to fade she could hear them up there, calling for her. "Melira!" they called. "Melira! Where are you? Come out now! Melira!" But she couldn't. She couldn't. She could barely make out the worms in the gathering darkness, but they were absolutely still there. They didn't find her at all that evening. She spent the night determined not to cry, not to make even the tiniest noise, shivering from cold and terrified that the motion of her shivering would be enough to alert the worms. But it wasn't. Dawn came, and she was still alive -- hungry, cold, terrified, stiff, sore, in pain from her swollen ankle, but alive. It was the dogs that eventually did the trick. The grownups must have brought them in to track her. She could hear them barking and baying in the distance, growing closer and closer. "They'll find me!" she thought, immediately followed by "They're making so much noise!" She could see the worms stirring at the sound of the hounds' baying. And then the moment was there. A dog appeared at the hole above her, barking, and barking, and barking. She could hear the adults exclaiming. They were here! It was now or never. "OUT! GET ME OUT!" she screamed with a throat thick and raw with terror and disuse, and scrambled back against the wall. Her muscles twinged at the sudden motion after hours of tense sitting, and her ankle flared with pain. The worms reacted instantly, turning towards her and encroaching on the small circle of light. They were coming. The grownups weren't going to be fast enough. She scrambled back away from them as far as she could. And then there was a flash of grey fur before her as the dog launched itself down into the hole and charged in amongst the worms, snarling and biting. "Melira!" a voice called. She looked up. An unfamiliar elven forester gazed down at her. "Here!" a rope fell into the hole. She seized it and clung and pulled as hard as her sore, tired muscles would allow. In a moment she was up, out, safe! The forester pushed her back from the hole into her mother's arms. Behind her, she heard the hound give a pained howl and suddenly fall silent. She heard the forester curse from where he knelt looking down into the hole. And then she passed out. ---- The adults praised her afterwards. Told her that she had done everything exactly right. The worms were called Zhen worms, and they were mindless and blind, but dangerous in numbers. If she had yelled, or moved -- but she hadn't, she had recognized the threat and kept herself safe, and they were so, so proud of her! Melira nodded. They told her they'd burned the worms. That made her smile. And they told her the dog's name was Blue. That made her cry. They didn't have to tell her what happened to him. It would be a very long time indeed before she spoke another word. ---- From this experience, Melira learned several things: Silence is safety. Understanding what you see keeps you alive. Timing is everything. Dogs are the most noble creatures in the world. ---- During her years of self-imposed silence, Melira took to reading, voraciously. There were more scary things in the world than just Zhen worms, and many of them would be smarter. She needed to understand them, all of them, so that she would know what to do if she had to. Fortunately her town (Lywela) had a decent library, and her elders allowed her to indulge this curiosity. Perhaps they recognized the reasons for it; perhaps they were merely content for the strange, silent child to have something to occupy herself with. Regardless, as she worked her way through progressively more advanced texts -- bestiaries, histories, gazetteers, atlases, cosmologies, religious texts, and more -- the librarians took notice. Her parents investigated to see if she had a knack for wizardry; but the local wizard just shook his head and told them that if she wouldn't speak, then she can't cast spells, and that was that. After a few years, her parents insisted that she go outside and get some exercise. They were glad she liked reading, but she needed also to stay healthy. Melira was reluctant at first, but after she'd had time to think it over, it seemed reasonable to her. So she went outside and rejoined the elven race. She played with her friends much of the time when she wasn't reading, or walked around town observing people from inconspicuous corners. One afternoon she came across the elven forester who had rescued her. His name was Varen Eluthirion, and he was practicing with a longbow. She found a quiet corner to watch from. But after a few rounds he noticed her. "Who's there?" he asked. She said nothing, and he took a step closer. "Ah!" he remarked. "I remember you. Melira, is it? The brave little lass in the sinkhole." She wanted to dispute the "brave" part, but did not want to speak. Her inner conflict must have shown on her face. "That way, is it?" he said, as much to himself as her. "Well, never you mind, girl. You'll talk again when you're good and ready." She smiled and nodded. He returned her smile, and then held out his bow. "Care to learn to shoot?" he asked. She turned her head to one side and pursed her lips, considering. "Sometimes it's helpful to be able to hit something from far away," he said. Well, that was true enough. She came over and accepted the bow. It proved to be too heavy a draw for her, but he brought out another one more her size, and the two of them stood side by side for an hour, sending arrow after arrow down range at targets made of hay. She found that she enjoyed it. A few of her shots went wide of the target entirely, especially at first, but she managed to score some solid hits. "Not bad for a first lesson," he said when they were done. "Come see me once or twice a week and we'll keep working on it." She worked at it steadily, and saw steady improvement. Her parents were pleased at this development, imagining she might go into forestry, or the militia. Melira felt no calling in either direction, but -- as always -- kept her thoughts to herself alone. Both Varen and Melira concluded independently of one another, and without saying anything about it, that she would probably be competent with a bow -- but never a true master. In time, Varen also taught her how to craft bows and arrows of her own. This she liked even more than actually shooting them, and quickly proved adept at it. ---- In her reading, Melira came across a collection of fables and legends from human lands. They were like the stories of her own people, but -- not. The heroes of elven legends tended to triumph by mastery of magic, or superlative bladework, or by playing a longer game than any of their opponents. The human heroes depended on cleverness, on luck, and on outwitting more powerful opponents. They appealed to her on a deeper and more personal level than the tales of her own people. She started reading more about the shorter-lived races. ---- In all, it was twenty years before Melira finally started speaking again. She was never sure what finally brought it about, but it happened at the range with Varen. They were shooting at targets -- much harder ones than when she'd started -- and half-way through the round she stopped shooting and lowered her bow. Varen turned to face her, eyebrows raised. "I'm sorry about Blue," she blurted out, then dropped her bow, buried her face in her hands and sobbed. Varen put his bow down and drew her into a hug. "He was a good dog," he said. "Best I ever had. But don't you worry. It was his choice to go the way he did. He jumped down there before I even arrived. And all in all, I'm glad he got that chance rather than getting old and sick and dwindling away. It was a meaningful death." He held her until she quit crying. Now that she had her voice back, she found that she had about a thousand questions that had piled up in the long years. "Where'd you get him?" she asked. "Little human village," he said. "Brookside. Good stock there. Good people, for all they're short-lived." "Brookside," she said. "Sounds ... quiet." "Aye. That it was." ---- The remainder of Melira's youth followed the lines laid down at that point. Once she decided to start talking again, her life went a lot more smoothly. She regained full fluency of speech in short order, and (later, in college) learned a few extra languages as well. Under Varen's tutelage she became a fair shot, an excellent bowyer, and learned something of the forester's arts, particularly how to move quietly, climb, swim, and get by tolerably well in the wilderness (Resilient trait, some class skills). She also insisted on learning at least a bit about how to handle animals, as she admires dogs so much (Beast Bond trait). Meanwhile she continued to devour books by the dozen, and eventually enrolled in an academy. Not a wizard's academy; her long silence unfortunately left her with no real propensity for magic. It was a more mundane college. There she recognized and pursued her true passion: studying societies of the shorter-lived races, and particularly their folklore. When one of her professors suggested conducting fieldwork in the human lands, she immediately knew exactly where to go: Brookside. She even went to the trouble of mastering a few magical tricks that might help with her project, through sheer stubbornness, though she declared herself done well before approaching anything like an actual spellcaster (Envoy alternate racial trait). It's a fair ways from the elven lands to Brookside, and she knew she would be there for at least a decade -- elven research projects are long-term affairs. With fairly minimal funding for the journey, she decided to work her way there, taking on a series of odd jobs as she traveled slowly across the human lands (Breadth of Experience feat). She has now been in Brookside for just over a year. She takes care to disguise herself as a human -- not too difficult, so long as she keeps her ears covered with a hat, scarf, or hood. Her dissertation supervisor, Professor Galedir Limben, insists that revealing her elven background would unduly influence the behavior of the people she studies, thus spoiling her data. She's fairly short for an elf, and well within the normal range for a human female, so she can impersonate a fairly scrawny human woman with little difficulty. Her biggest tell is her speech: her L's tend to come out more liquid than most humans pronounce them (I'm guessing DC 20 Linguistics to note the slightly odd accent, DC 25 to identify it as elven). Since arriving in Brookside, she has been living in a hut in the forest and supporting herself as a bowyer. It has been difficult for her to strike a balance between engaging with the community and maintaining distance. She's settled for visiting town twice or three times a week to sit and listen to the conversations from unobtrusive spots. The townsfolk know her by the name "Mel". General opinion is that she's an odd one and a bit stand-offish, but that she makes fine bows and arrows. A couple of days ago, as she was returning from the village with some supplies, she found a group of orcs burning her hut to the ground. They didn't see her; she melted away into the forest immediately, and has been struggling to figure out what to do next. She is reluctant to go to the village for help; the habits of silence die hard. Because deep in herself, the truest and most lasting part of Melira Elanariel is the little girl who figured out that stillness and silence would keep her safe through the long night. Aliases: |
