Caitriona Whelan

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Hel
Posts: 15
Character: Emma Averesch

Caitriona Whelan

Post by Hel » February 5th, 2019, 8:54 am

Do you have any prior experience with Requiem? If so, please detail when and what characters you previously played :

Yes, I played briefly years ago, and I have played various characters this act.

Briefly summarize your prior role-playing experience :

I’ve been roleplaying for a long time on a bunch of different mediums.

Why do you wish to play on Requiem, and what do you expect from the shard? :

I want a great story, and that’s what I expect from the shard.

What will your character’s name be? :

Caitriona Whelan

Please briefly describe the physical attributes of your character, including age, looks, height, weight and notable features :

Her flesh was a lunar pallor, supple youth stretched across an athletic frame of average height that was spotted with a ghost dusting of freckles most concentrated across her angular face and broad shoulders. Her eyes were emeralds deep set in wide sockets, and her thick tumultuous hair was a dark brown cut at the middle of her spine. There was nothing remarkable about her nose except for its subtle freckles, and her lips could only be described as moderate if not for the healthy pink stain of them.

Briefly state your character’s intentions for entering the First Province :

Caitriona smuggled drugs into the First Province to distribute them to various Republic forces for a payout that was meant to be her and her brother’s retirement so they could stop putting their lives on the line in the first place. Unfortunately, a mishap with a cow cost her a great portion of her stock, making an extended stay in the First Province necessary.

Briefly provide the pertinent details of your character’s history :

Most of Drolund’s gold was in its fields, great stretches of wheat that were harvested and traded to feed not only those who called Drolund home but also those in the surrounding territories. It was honest work, and the Drodains were an honest people. They were hardy folk, shaken but not overwhelmed even as the Torment laid waste to their crops and broke their families. It wasn’t a single battle that wore them down, but it had been many, a slow burning war against forces far beyond them. Caitriona Whelan’s earliest memories were of her family’s farm. Born in 1319, the fields were burnt and barren by the time Caitriona was old enough to walk through them. Her father, who had served the Republic as a soldier previously, joined the local militia to try to keep the family afloat, and her mother did her best to give her four children the best childhood she could, given the circumstances. In 1324, the children stood by while their father buried their mother and the world she’d wished for them all in a lonely field.

Even during the brief periods of time in which their father was home, the children were expected to raise each other and fend for themselves. In those days, it was such a common struggle among broken families that none knew quite how to dream of an easier life, but there were still days during which the children became so overwhelmed that they wept. It was during those hours of heightened vulnerability that the children betrayed what strong faces they put on for each other to expose what frightened children lay beneath. Caitriona was the third born of four, with two elder brothers and a younger sister. They were a resourceful bunch, each remarkably resilient in their own right. The boys hadn’t even seen ten years before they began to venture from the farm to visit the abandoned homesteads of their neighbors and take whatever provisions they could carry back for themselves and the girls.

Caitriona’s father was a broken man, but he carried on, however shattered he was, until one day he was slain in a skirmish with insurgents in 1329. The children had heard the stories of other orphans being gathered up and taken away or even separated from each other, and so when men with the best of intentions came to their door, the children all fled together to take refuge in a deserted farmhouse several miles away. Without any other feasible means to support themselves, the children turned to scavenging what ruins remained of their homeland for years. Caitriona’s eldest brother would occasionally utter a bitter remark about how they couldn’t count on anyone to look out for them but each other, but her younger sister always insisted that Decus was looking out for them, keeping them alive and together throughout all of their struggles.

As the children entered their teenage years and the state of Drolund fell into further decline, they decided to rejoin common society by making a home for themselves in a small village in the northwest of the province which enjoyed a profitable relationship with what Republic forces lay beyond the Godspine Mountains. Caitriona’s eldest brother became a courier, and her second eldest brother followed suit and graduated into the business of becoming a runner for all manner of goods that people on one side of the Godspine or the other wished for. Caitriona helped to move goods around from the eastern side of the Godspine, but she couldn’t bear to leave her younger sister alone so that she could assist her brothers until her sister married a preacher in 1334. From that point on, the trek through the pass to Kaduraas became a familiar one to Caitriona, and she and her brothers grew bolder together in their business.

The pass between Kaduraas and Drolund was fraught with Republic forces, all on edge for the state of the world and all that threatened it. What border protection lay between the two provinces was notoriously stringent, and there was a great inherent danger for any of those who dared to press their luck with them. Naturally, smuggling goods from one side of the Godspine to the other was tremendously lucrative then, and it was this practice that Caitriona and her brothers fell into. It began out of necessity and desperation, a need for food and shelter when neither could be afforded. In time, it became the work of a special set of skills that afforded each of the Whelan children enough compensation to no longer be at the whims of an unfair and failing world. They put wealth into the hands of militiamen, helpless widows, and orphans who had to endure all of the same struggles that they once had, and they knew relief at last for seeing the world turn as it should.

Their good works were not without their consequences. In 1339, Caitriona’s second eldest brother was caught smuggling what the men stationed at the pass deemed to be instruments to further the efforts of the Resolve. They had been books, some written in an old and unknown language, but each described by the contact Caitriona’s brother had used to be the original works of a Collatian historian. Harmless history. Caitriona’s brother had not struggled, offering himself up for arrest and being entirely under the impression that all charges brought against him would be dropped. After all, he had smuggled far worse things than books before. He was executed there in the pass for it. The remaining Whelan children were distraught for the loss of their brother. Caitriona’s eldest brother was so shaken by it that he ceased smuggling and became a fish merchant, work that proved so unfruitful that he subsequently began distilling moonshine and assisting in the movement of various drugs produced to be discreetly extended to the soldiers of the Legion to bolster their strength and energy.

Caitriona continued to smuggle goods from one side of the Godspine to the other, but her ventures kept her away for longer and longer periods of time. She told her sister that the fewer chances taken at the pass were down to deeper trips made into the West to acquire more profitable goods, but the wealth had stopped rolling in. Caitriona’s funds were running short; she was giving all she could away to the same causes she and her brothers had chosen in their earlier years in the business. Her sister had two sons by then, and however bleak the world seemed for all that had come to pass, there was hope for the future. Caitriona’s sister caught a fever in 1342 that wouldn’t pass until she was dead. The death created an unexpected distance between Caitriona and her surviving brother, yet she only began to involve herself in his side business at that point. As 1343 came to a close, one of the associates of Caitriona’s brother recruited her to smuggle some of their products into the First Province for one final job, one final reckless chance for which the payout could keep Caitriona and her brother both comfortable for the rest of their lives without having to put their necks on the line ever again.

Briefly write an in-character response to the following scenario :

It was a cold morning, and Caitriona traveled without the company of any but the faithful cow, Adelheid. The heifer thought herself a large dog, born and raised among Volgen hounds. Caitriona had traded a stone’s worth of Kaduraan Oil for her just a week prior, and Adelheid had slept by Caitriona’s side every night since while the ranch hand who had raised her flooded his veins with the dark drug that could take him away to the abyss for a while. Adelheid was a simple creature, and it hadn’t taken much of a courtship before Caitriona was in the woods with her, up to her elbow in the cow’s back end, planting a thick, oblong glass bottle as deep into her as she dared to go. She could only hope the glass would hold, and for the contents of the bottle, loaded with Kaduraan Oil and Drodain Dust, Adelheid had become Caitriona’s veritable cash cow.

Caitriona had torn the lining of her thick coat free at its seams and packed it with what remained of what drugs she carried before taking a needle and thread back to it. She lay a blanket over Adelheid’s back and tied a rope loosely about her neck to guide her to the Rumbling Pass as the sun rose over the Freemantle Range. Adelheid moaned more loudly to contest the cold as she and Caitriona waited in line to speak with the officiant at the entrance to the pass than she had to contest the prize she had packed up her backside. Caitriona patted the cow’s side reassuringly and spoke quiet praise while the vapor of her breath condensed in the frigid air to form clouds that drifted from the pair.

The officiant gave the woman and her cow his speech as he had given it to every other before them. Adelheid’s gentle brown eyes stared at him obediently until, towards the middle of his speech, a woman let out a loud wail some ways behind them in line. The cow startled, muscle tensing, and Caitriona was quick to wrap the end of the rope around her gloved palm a few more times before stroking the cow’s neck. The woman grit her teeth, and fresh red dripped from the cow’s back end. Caitriona spared a reluctant glance backward to try to spot what woman had caused such a scene, but she couldn’t see her; only the blood dotting the dirt under her cow. Her cash cow was as good as dead already.

Green eyes found the officiant again, and the Drodain cast him a sheepish smile as he continued on with his speech despite the cow’s own low groaning. She tugged her heavy coat tighter around herself as she breathed out an embarrassed laugh and reported in her thick brogue, “I’m awful sorry for de cow. She’s a roy coward. I’m after walking all dis way wid her from Drolund, and dere’s just no consoling her. My husband took her calf ahead of us wid de rest of de livestock, and she’s after beginning bleeding again...” The woman’s hand stroked the cow’s neck again, but she seemed unnerved still. “My husband, he wrote to tell me the Foundry’s needing more of us farmers to be keeping the Republic fed during their reclamation efforts, dat de Foundry wrote him a visa here at de pass. I’ll be glad to be joining him and keep de fields and yis bellies full.”

Adelheid had developed a newfound sense of urgency as the Drodain Dust got into her bloodstream. She turned her head and butted it hard against Caitriona’s shoulder, which earned a grimace and a shove back from the woman. “Settle down, ya great babe… You’ll be eating all de grass ya can soon…” Caitriona said aside to the cow, who no doubt was slowly becoming more exposed to the abundance of drugs in her colon by the second. She looked to the officiant then, eager to be motioned through, where she was pretty certain she’d have to put the cow out of her misery before she went mad or perished herself to an overdose.

Galg
Posts: 21
Character: Galgarious

Re: Caitriona Whelan

Post by Galg » February 5th, 2019, 2:27 pm

Wisps of cold breath escape from the man as he looks over the woman and her cow, a slight smirk caressing his lips, twitching them upward into a strange grin. "You and your friend may enter...just have it STEER clear of me. Don't need no blood on my uniform or they'll tie me to the STEAK."

A labored groan escaped from one of the other guards, clearly not amused at the first one's puns and the grin faded from his face as nobody else found the same joy in puns as he and he waves a hand to the pair, his eyes lighting up for another moment as he says..."Moove along."

"Can you cut it the fuck out? You're not funny!" The other guard blurts out, starting daggers at the first man as you walk past...

"Sorry I had to milk it for all it's wor-

"I...will...fucking...kill you."

"So I take it you haven't HERD the news..."

The voices trail off as you make your way through...never really knowing what ever happened or if there were any more puns to be had...though it wouldnt surprise you if you heard that they put that first guard out to pasture...



APPROVED! Sorry I butchered all those cow puns, I feel udderly ridiculous

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