Sherry Rosefinch's page

Finch is a young halfling woman dressed in black-and-red motley, vaguely reminiscent of Chelish courtly attire: an oversized tailcoat, a shirt with a ruffled collar and lace cuffs, and padded hose. Cheap jewellery—bracelets and hoop earrings—jangle with each movement, made effortless due to the practical cut of the costume. She goes barefoot, save for a pair of spatterdashes. Her cherubic face is covered in white greasepaint with a red nose and red mouth, black eyebrows and a dash of rouge on the cheeks. She also paints a mouche above her lip, alternating from left to right at her whim. She carries two long dirks on her belt, as well as an assortment of throwing knives, all ostentatiously filigreed and worked into her outfit.

Without her usual face-paint and costume, Finch is utterly unremarkable: ruddy-skinned with brown eyes and hair, of average height and weight, with no outstanding characteristics whatsoever. She rarely wears pedestrian clothing, so even those closest to her would struggle to recognise her plainly dressed in a crowd. Though she does go undercover from time to time, much of her identity is tied to her accoutrements—in truth, she feels naked and insecure without them.

Finch's general demeanour is lively, and while in character she displays a bright, almost childlike persona. This is contrasted by her off-stage disposition, which tends more towards crudeness with a penchant for petty cruelty. Not even her friends are safe from her constant needling and verbal jabs, though she can be companionable in her own twisted manner. However sardonic her repartee, she is unflinchingly loyal to her troupe—sometimes murderously so. Aside from her fellow halflings, Finch views all misfits and outcasts as potential allies in misfortune. While she holds to a loosely might-is-right world-view and has few scruples about potential "work," she abhors oppression and slavery. She is happy to serve as a minion to even a villainous patron, but does so only as long as she is properly respected. Any effort to instil her with discipline or force her into servitude are met with open contempt, and she will not hesitate to violently sabotage attempts to do the same to others. That her rash acts of vengeance sometimes lead to collateral damage worries her little—it is far better to be dead than a slave.

Though outwardly irreligious and irreverent to a blasphemous degree, Finch does hold faith in Norgorber and Thamir Gixx. She makes secret offerings to both the Gray Master and His Shadow, and never insults either of them, even in her most drunken tirades. This respect does not necessarily extend to the servants of either deity, who she knows to be just as dishonest and self-serving as herself. Due to their secretive dogmas, she rarely interacts with other adherents regardless.

Aside from clownery, Finch's act consists of acrobatics, knife-throwing, and general sleight-of-hand. Her personal sense of humour tends towards the darker side, though she knows how to read a crowd and adjust accordingly.

Sherry Fiorella Rosefinch was born into slavery in the Archduchy of Ravounel, the northernmost province of Imperial Cheliax. As is so often the case, she was separated from her parents as a child—her name is all that she retains of them, aside from vague memories tinged with heart-ache and longing. Young Sherry was sold to the Kintargan branch of House Sarini, who are known as staunch supporters of the Thrune regime. She was brought up communally by the slaves at the noble family's country estate, though the high turnover meant that she never had a reliable parent figure. She grew to rely on safety in numbers, rather than individual people, and remained emotionally distant from her peers, using jokes to deflect unwanted attention.

As one of the indoor slaves, Sherry's tasks mostly consisted of housecleaning, cooking and serving food, as well as assisting human retainers in their duties. Even amongst the Chelish aristocracy, the Sarinis are known for their cruelty and dedication to diabolical ideals. The best way for her to stay alive was to indulge her masters' sadistic whims, making sure the entertainment provided by her suffering outweighed the alternative. She learned to make herself seem harmless, to redirect her masters' wrath through sly words and self-deprecating humour, and to roll with the punches when all else failed.

Though she did survive, the constant belittling and harassment—as well as the guilt over the loss of fellow halflings to cruel punishments—wore away at her psyche with each passing year. She found solace in her faith: amongst the other halflings she had heard the whispered word of Thamir Gixx, the Silent Blade. He was only called on in quiet prayer during times of extreme anger or greed, and otherwise shunned by halfling society as something of an embarrassment. However, for Sherry, his teachings of opportunistic thievery and violent revenge rang true. She soon took to making small offerings of stolen valuables to the shadowy god, as well as his partner in crime, Norgorber, in hopes for improving her fortunes. To silence the voices of her dead peers, she took to daydreaming about vengeance, but never acted on those reveries—at least not for some time.

One day, much like any other, Sherry was assigned to wait on Marius, a young scion of House Sarini, in the study. A sharp-tongued young diabolist, he was just as demeaning and hurtful as the rest of his family, and barraged her with abuse regardless of how well she carried out his orders. Hours passed in miserable drudgery, until something in her snapped. There was no plan or method to her actions then, simply the opportunity and the impulse to act: with Marius' sat down and his back turned towards her, Sherry grabbed a letter opener and slit his throat from behind. Palming the keys to the house—including the slave quarters—she went around the house, freeing her fellow halflings and setting small fires around the estate as a distraction. The murder and arson led to a small-scale revolt, as much as a self-defence against the Sarini guards' reprisals as any real seditious intention on the slaves' part. Many of them died, some escaped, and those who survived without being emancipated no doubt suffered worse for it.

Sherry cared little, for she was free.

For a couple of years, Sherry—now going by "Finch"—lived the life of an outlaw in the outskirts of the Barrowood, killing and stealing as she needed to survive. Eventually, she made contact with a member of the Bellflower Network in Senara, who helped her escape the country. Having been smuggled to Andoran through Isger, she embraced a vagabond lifestyle: she travelled with various circuses, freak-shows, troupes of entertainers, as well as Varisian caravans and the like. During her wanderings, she found that the abilities she had honed during her bondage and escape lended themselves well to such a lifestyle, and that the company was much better than that of bandits and cut-throats. Her travels took her from Andoran to Taldor and then to Absalom, where she joined the Celestial Menagerie.

At first, she was quite impressed by the circus' pomp and Mistress Dusklight's grandiosity, but soon grew to resent her tyrannical ways. When Myron Stendhal and his friends broke off to form their own troupe, Finch was quick to join—after surreptitiously unlocking the cages of a few deadly critters, of course. The audacity of the breakout ringleader has already won her respect, and though she would not admit it, she finds the fledgling company and its ideals to be worth protecting.