About Yamyra DemirYamyra Demir
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Fort +3, Ref +10, Will +2; +2 vs. fear Defensive Abilities danger sense +1, evasion, uncanny dodge --------------------
Melee +1 gladius +11 (1d4+6/19-20) or +10 (1d4+6+2) Special Attacks sneak attack (unchained) +3d6 --------------------
Feats Improved Initiative, Shadow Strike, Weapon Finesse, Weapon Focus (gladius), Piranha Strike Traits
Vengeance Was Mine You wanted someone dead Skills
Racial Modifiers +2 Perception Languages Common, Halfling Favored Class Rogue SQ debilitating injury: bewildered, debilitating injury: disoriented, debilitating injury: hampered, rogue talents (fast stealth, weapon training), trapfinding +2 Other Gear +1 leaf armor, mwk buckler,+1 gladius, Hairpin (hat) of Disguise, Mask of the Mantis, Traveler’s Any Tool, Spider’s Silk Rope (50’), 145 gp
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Debilitating Injury: Bewildered -2/-4 (Ex) Foe who takes sneak attack damage takes AC pen (more vs. striker) for 1 rd. Debilitating Injury: Disoriented -2/-4 (Ex) Foe who takes sneak attack damage takes attack pen (more vs. striker) for 1 rd. Debilitating Injury: Hampered (Ex) Foe who takes sneak attack damage has speed halved (and can't 5 ft step) for 1 rd. Evasion (Ex) If you succeed at a Reflex save for half damage, you take none instead. Fast Stealth (Ex) Move at full speed while using the Stealth skill at no penalty. Fearless +2 racial bonus vs Fear saves. Shadow Strike You can deal precision damage against targets with some concealment. Sneak Attack (Unchained) +3d6 Attacks deal extra dam if flank foe or if foe is flat-footed. Trapfinding +2 Gain a bonus to find or disable traps, including magical ones. Uncanny Dodge (Ex) Retain Dex bonus to AC when flat-footed. ======================================================================== Description:
Yamyra Demir is outfitted for infiltration and killing. The tall halfling woman moves with the deadly grace of a hunting cat, and is encased in black and red studded leather armor, with a wicked looking sawtooth sabre strapped over her right shoulder. A red mantis mask hangs from a lanyard at the back of her head, ready to be snapped on at a moment’s notice. Her face is beautiful, but scarred. An ugly pink line crosses it from cheek to cheek horizontally, just below both eyes. None of this is what you see of course. Thanks to the magical hairpin that is all she has left of her lost mother, Yamyra appears as a normal halfling woman. She “wears” an ankle length, low-cut dress in the Varisian style, mixed with scarves and sashes from Katapeshi and Vudrani coutures. Her facial scar is hidden by the illusion, and she appears unarmed save for her breathtaking smile. Backstory:
He was right. At first, the Demir family struggled as immigrants to a new land, but they were quickly able to integrate themselves into one of the halfling communities in the city. Her father changed their last name to Spicer, claiming it would be good for business. Delilah was suspicious but went along with her husband, putting it down as one of his eccentricities. Abyal found work with one of the more successful halfling trading concerns in the Foreign Quarter on the recommendation of a trusted mutual contact in Katapesh. He quickly worked his way up the organization’s hierarchy. He was a genuinely skilled negotiator, with a shrewd wit and plenty of charm. It was into this bustling life that Yamyra was born. When she was very small the “Spicers” were not that well to do, but by the time she was old enough to have a tutor they were living in a small villa and were members of the upper class of halfling society in the city. She enjoyed all the benefits of a bourgeois upbringing. Delilah never worked, and always had plenty of time and love for her only daughter. Yamyra didn’t see her father much, he was always busy working. When they were together Abyal showered Yamyra with gifts and love. The relative wealth and security of their new life in Absalom slowly wore down the sharp edge honed by his youth in the Golden City. He had relaxed over the years, thinking his debts to the Katapeshi guild were long forgotten. This time, he was wrong. One night, when Yamyra was fourteen years old, she awoke to a sudden noise in the house. She was sleeping in a bed with her mother, as was their custom when Abyal was away on business. She could feel the warm shape of her mother struggling to wakefulness beside her. The room was too dark for Yamyra to see, but she knew they were not alone. The sounds of breathing, and the feeling of eyes on her sent chills down her spine. ”Mom! Wake up!” she hissed quietly to her mother, shaking the woman. ”What’s wrong dear?” Delilah asked, not yet aware of the danger. ”There’s someone in the h..” Yamyra’s reply was cut off by an audible schtunk! sound, and the feel of warm liquid splashing onto her. ”Mom!? MOM!?” she screamed, reaching out to feel the sticky warmth of her mother’s blood spreading everywhere. A low, ugly chuckle filled the darkness from a few feet away, followed by a slick sliding noise as the assassin withdrew his blade from her mother’s corpse. A moment later, the room flooded with moonlight as her mother’s killer flung aside the heavy curtains covering the window. The half-light revealed a towering figure swathed in black cloth and wielding a bloody kris dagger. The man wore a turban, and clothing of Katapeshi style. The bits of skin Yamyra could see through his outfit were green-grey, and a pair of yellowed tusks jutted from the veil covering the assassin’s face. She would never forget the sight of those cruel, dead, red eyes staring at her in the mote of moonlight. The sight of the terrible killer, and her dead mother, undid young Yamyra and all she could do was scream as the orc-blooded murderer leaned over to finish his job. The kris’s wavy blade flashed through the dim light as the intruder swung it in a horizontal slash at Yamyra’s face. The next thing she knew, fiery pain, and explosions of stars coming from her face filled her awareness. Then everything went black. The next morning, Abyal returned home from his business trip early. The killer had planned the attack knowing as much. Eager to see his family, the halfling merchant fairly ran up the stairs to the bedroom, thinking to find his wife and daughter still fast asleep in bed. What he found drove him to madness. The sight of his dead wife (whose corpse had been mutilated) and “dead” daughter, along with the note that said, “All debts have been paid, Demir.” in ugly keleshite handwriting left little doubt in his mind what had occurred. Unable to face his shame and grief, he went to the main hall, and hung himself from the stairwell. It was three days before the groundskeeper found the family. Yamyra was miraculously still alive, though comatose. Her father’s business associates made funeral arrangements, and had Yamyra tended to by the best clerics of Abadar that money could buy. She recovered quickly under their care. Yamyra was close enough to the age of majority that the trading concern’s lawyers made arrangements for her to be declared legally adult, and to inherit what remained of her father’s wealth. Though her body was healed, the trauma of what had happened had broken something inside Yamyra. She sold the villa, and the remaining “Spicer” business interests, and changed her legal name back to Demir. All she kept was her mother's favorite hairpin (which she later had enchanted). For several weeks Yamyra retreated into a fugue of grief and terror, fueled by liberal amounts of wine. Every night she dreamed of those evil red eyes glaring down at her. As more time began to pass a cold rage grew in Yamyra’s stomach. She realized she would have no peace until her parents’ killer was brought to justice, or revenge, however you wanted to put it. She had money, and she had motivation, she only needed to act. Using her wealth, Yamyra hired the best trainers she could find an embarked on an odyssey of combat training. She vowed to never again be caught in her bed, a terrified little girl. She trained in unarmed combat, stealth, and weapons, developing fighting styles that were suited to her small frame and agility. Her residence in Absalom gave her access to martial traditions from all over Golarion and she freely mixed and matched what worked best for her. When she wasn’t training she paid informants for information on assassins who fit the vague description she had to offer. After a two years she and her trainers felt she was ready to start following some of the leads she’d turned up. Her investigations began with the sort of things one would read about in cheap silver piece pulp adventure stories. Yamyra snuck into all manner of unsavory locales and dens of villainy to intimidate and torture information from the parasites that inhabit such underworlds. Every ear she cut off, every threat of death, led her a little closer to the half-orc responsible for her pain. What she failed to realize is that she was becoming just like him in many ways. Another year of work yielded enough details for Yamyra to find the assassin. She had discovered his name was Hafaz Al-Feq, and that he was based in Katapesh. The half-orc was known for creating particularly grisly scenes of his victims in order to send a message. He would kill without scruple if the price was right, and was willing to travel if there was enough gold in it for him. Al-Feq worked alone, but enjoyed the protection of various allies in the Golden City. Yamyra began to plan how she would snare him. While she still had money, her escapades had reduced the Spicer fortune significantly. She would only have one shot at Hafaz before she would run out of resources. Based on her information, any attack on Al-Feq in Katapesh would have a much lower chance of success. Yamyra decided it would be best to lure him back to Absalom. To satisfy her own sense of irony, she planned to open a contract on her own life. Using hired third party agents, she created a price on her own head supposedly taken out by one of the scumbags she’d injured during her quest for information. She made sure that said scumbag’s agents (her agents) offered the contract to Al-Feq, and at a premium price. She knew the half-orc wouldn’t be able to resist the gold, or the added bonus of finishing the job he’d started so many years before. Yamyra knew that the katapeshi killer was a skilled combatant, and took pains to stack the deck in her own favor. She rented a small house and prepared it well with traps in her bedroom. Then she hired a wizard to cast permanent [i[alarm[/i] spells on all the doors and windows. She purchased a wide array of protective and enhancing enhancements in the form of potions, and kept them ready by her bedside. Under their influence she would , be invisible, see in the dark, move more quickly, and be harder to injure. With all the pieces of her plan in place, Yamyra waited. It was a full week before her trap was sprung. The house she was living in was a modest one in the Westgate district of Absalom. When she heard the bell of her alarm spell, she knew that Al-Feq had come for her. She began drinking potions as her sharp ears heard him creeping near-silently through the house. First, she became invisible. Then her eyes pierced the darkness as easily as if it were black and white noon. Next, she swallowed the grace of a feline, making her even more agile than normal. The final draught slipped down her throat as the door to her bedroom burst open. Her skin took on a hard bark-like appearance as Hafaz Al-Feq entered her room. ”Time to finish what we started toothpick,” he growled, lunging for the decoy Yamyra had placed under her blankets. This time the half-orc wielded a large falchion, and made no efforts at a slow kill. His powerful blow chopped the bed nearly in half, sending splinters of wood, and shredded bedding flying. In his rage Al-Feq failed to notice the tripwire he’d just run through, or the hand crossbow it was attached too in one of the upper corners of the room. The poisoned bolt hit the half-orc in his back as Yamyra watched unseen from across the bedchamber. Al-feq cursed a red streak, ripping the bolt from between his shoulder blades. Yamyra waited for the poison to take effect, dodging around the room as Al-Feq raged, destroying furniture and shouting at her to reveal herself. Once his movements became more slow and erratic she did exactly that. Yamyra leaped onto his back, wrapping her legs around the half-orc’s corded neck. ”I’m right here you pig f~!&er,” she whispered into his ear as she stabbed him in the temple with her short sword. Al-Feq’s skull was too thick for him to die from such a strike, but he screamed as his ear was sliced off. Struggling, the brutish assassin tried to reach behind his head to grab Yamyra. She slipped around his face like a spider-monkey, stabbing him again, this time in the throat. The orc’s shouts of rage became gurgles, as crimson blood began flowing from his mouth, but still Al-Feq did not die. He finally managed to grab Yamyra, and flung her to the floor. Raising his falchion, the bloodied Al-Feq made ready to strike Yamyra with a killing blow. As the heavy curved blade flashed towards the floorboards, Yamyra rolled to the side at the last second, and thrust upward with her knife. She felt a satisfying resistance as the blade pierced Hafaz Al-Feq’s heart, and killed him. Yamyra barely managed to scramble out of the way of the half-orc’s falling corpse as a wave of relief washed over her. It was finally finished. Her parent’s killer was dead. An upwelling of emotion filled the newborn assassin and she wept for joy, and for her lost humanity. She stayed there on the floor for a long time. She stayed until the sound of her front door opening, and the chime of the alarm spell drew her instantly back to reality. Her sobs cut off as she kipped nimbly to her feet, and stalked silently down the upstairs hallway, hugging the shadows. What she saw in her living room nearly made her piss her pants. A tall thin woman armored from head to toe in black and red leather, and wearing a mask that made her resemble a blood-red mantis stood in her entryway. Yamyra had been swimming in dark circles long enough to know what she was seeing - a Red Mantis assassin. They were the most dangerous hired killers in all of Golarion. The woman looked up, directly at her hiding place, and said in a curious accent, ”Come out little one. There’s no need to fear me.” Yamyra decided that she had little choice in the matter, and ceased her attempts at stealth. She went down to the living room and stood before the Red Mantis woman, her trembling hands still covered in Al-Feq’s blood. The halfling woman said nothing as she looked up at the much taller stranger before her. ”We have been watching you for some time. Tonight you were born again. You can never go back to what you were before, and there is no place for one such as you in normal society. The Vernai have judged you worthy of following He Who Walks in Blood.” Her words were measured and her tone serious. The woman in red crouched down in front of Yamyra and removed her mask, revealing pale blonde hair, and deep blue, killer’s eyes. The handsome woman held out one gloved hand for Yamyra to take. ”Come with me, child. I will lead you to a place where you belong.” Silence reigned in the room. Yamyra hesitated for a moment, and then slowly nodded. She reached out, and took the hand of the Red Mantis. Without knowing why, Yamyra began to smile. |
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