Post by Brandwyn on Mar 22, 2009 13:37:19 GMT -5
Age: 25
Gender: Female
Profession: Acquisitions Expert of the SWC - trainee
Appearance:
Gender: Female
Profession: Acquisitions Expert of the SWC - trainee
Appearance:
At only 5' 3" and 115 pounds, Lea is small and agile. She has a thin frame and is very flexible along with a perfect sense of balance, which makes her an exceptional acrobat. She keeps in excellent physical condition and is able to climb nearly anything exceedingly fast. She has short blond hair that generally sticks up on the top and she keeps it cut only long enough to cover her ears and the back of her neck. She has blue eyes, but they change to a stormy gray when she is angry and are more of a steel blue when she is in a good mood.Personality:
She is not particularly pretty with a face that people tend to forget after she is gone, but is one of those faces that always remind people of someone else. She wears tight fitting clothing most of the time in dark blues and greens or black. She has knife sheaths in all sorts of places, usually carrying 8 to 12 knives on her person at all times.
She doesn't use a sword and is only moderately accurate with a bow, but is deadly with a knife. She wears a very dark brown cloak, which is useful for both daytime and nighttime operations to blend into her surroundings. She also carries some other specialized climbing and scouting equipment.
Lea has a quick wit and is highly intelligent, but not educated beyond some rudimentary reading and math skills. She loves a good fight and a challenging stealth job. She lives life on the edge, taking risks, being reckless and even being a bit of a dare devil as long as it doesn't risk her teammates. She loves heights and swinging through trees or from a rooftop to the street on her silk rope.History:
She flirts with just about every man she comes across and will take the flirting as far as the man wants to go with it. She has no qualms about one-night stands. In fact she prefers to keep her relationships without any strings attached.
She does not trust people when she first meets them and is suspicious of everyone's motives. She has come to rely on her team in the SWC, but is having issues with trusting them completely. She is often accused of being insane or at least slightly imbalanced and has a bit of a bloodthirsty, ruthless streak that will come out when she is furious at someone.
She has an obsessive-compulsive type personality, but has managed to stay away from alcohol or drug addictions. She doesn't like to loose control, so that is why she rarely drinks. Her obsessions are stealing, playing with knives, adrenaline rushes and sex.
Lea lost her parents and siblings to a plague that wiped out most of her village when she was 12. She never got sick from it and spent days burying the dead with the few others that survived the disease. She left the village and headed into Caraway, living on the streets.Additional Information:
She had to work as a whore to survive the first few years but eventually learned to persuade men to take care of her. Lea kept moving from city to city and fief-to-fief as she conned men to take her around the Kingdom. She has lived in almost every fief's capitol city at one point or another and knows her way around all of Araluen.
She learned to steal from a particularly adept thief's guild in Drayden fief and it was there that she honed her climbing skills too. In Greenfield fief she took up with a master knife fighter for almost a year when she was 16. He taught her how to throw knives and do hand-to-hand combat. Lea would have stayed with him, but he was killed in a street fight one night when a deal went badly wrong. He took four of them with him before they got him. She killed two more defending him, but in the end there were too many and she had to flee and leave his body behind. She made her way back to Araluen fief after that.
She got into trouble for stealing, caught by a ranger at age 17 and was given a choice of going into the army or going to prison. She chose the army. She figured she would hate army life, but was surprised to find out she actually liked it. She rose quickly through the ranks because she followed orders precisely and swiftly and she took chances. She found the men in her unit often turned to her for guidance, though she really didn't seek out to command them. Her superiors noticed it too and promoted her up to corporal at an early age of 22 in spite of her coming into the battleschool later than most.
Lea could not keep her old habits in check, however, and often performed some nighttime operations of her own. Sometimes she purloined items from supply for her bunkmates. Often she went scouting around the city, keeping tabs on the lowlife's activities, and sometimes she eavesdropped on her superiors. She usually found out very interesting tidbits of information about the army and learned a lot about its internal politics that way.
That is how she found out about the Special Warfare Corps, the secret group of elite scouts headed up by a large man named Captain Dougal. She snooped some more and found out as much as she could about them before she confronted the Captain. She was determined to join them, but wanted to make sure he wouldn’t turn her away because she had also found out he was very distrustful of women. She had applied for the job through normal channels, but was turned down because she was a woman. So far he had not chosen a single woman to be in his Corps and she had decided that she would be the first, whether this Captain Dougal liked it or not. She spent weeks setting up her plan and waiting for the Captain to come back to Araluen to report to Commander David or the King.
She finally got her chance late one night when Captain Dougal and two of his men entered the city and got a suite at one of the seedier inns in a bad section of town. Lea took out his first man who was keeping watch on the door by dropping on him from the ceiling of the hallway when he opened the door to her "knock." She hit him upside the head with the butt of her knife and rendered him unconscious. The only sound was of his body hitting the floor.
It was enough to alert the other man inside the room, but she didn't give him a chance to react. She did a series of back flips across the room, stood on her hands and wrapped her legs around the man's neck and flipped him sideways head first into the wall. He too slumped to the floor unconscious.
She swiftly picked the lock on the door to the inner room where Dougal was presumably sleeping. She figured he would be awake by now and so pushed the door open and rolled into the room down low. Dougal was waiting for her, but his swing went way over her head as he was expecting a man standing upright. She swept her leg out and brushed him off balance, but he didn't fall all the way down. She'd given herself just enough time to regain her feet and pull her long knife in one hand and a thick bladed heavy knife in the other hand. She used the long blade as a shield, keeping the flat of the blade along her forearm and striking out at Dougal with the hilt of the knife, not wishing to truly injure him, but showing off that she could be slicing him up if she chose to.
"The name's Lea Goldsmith." She said as they did a dance around each other, exchanging blows. "You should have chosen me." She said evenly and punched him in the stomach with her knife. He landed a blow on her cheek that made her reel, but she moved with the punch, spun around and hit him in the kidney with the butt of the heavy knife. "You should have chosen me." She repeated. And so the fight went for several minutes, neither of them was gaining the advantage, neither trying to kill the other. With every blow she repeated, "you should have chosen me." With every blow from Dougal, he left a serious bruise, but the beating didn't seem to faze her much.
Finally Dougal growled at her, "No women in my unit," as he punched her hard in the stomach. At least he tried, she had already done a back flip and landed just the right distance from him for a good kick - right in the groin. As the kick landed, she said, "why? Can't you handle one woman?" She smiled sweetly at him. Dougal fell to the floor, clutching his groin, but Lea was already gone out of the room, the echo of her voice came back to him, "you should have chosen me."
A week later, still nursing some severe bruises all over her face and body, she had her transfer orders into the SWC.
That was when her life really got tough.
Now she was past the halfway point in her training and still holding her own against the men in the SWC. Captain Dougal was twice as hard on her as any of the other recruits, but she welcomed the challenge.
Lea's Gear:
In addition to the normal scouting gear, Lea carried the following:
Grappling bow:
This is a mini crossbow with a special grappling hook that folds up to look like a cross bow bolt with a string tied to the back end, but when the bolt begins to drop, the air forces the three hooks open so it can grab onto things like window ledges. The rope is a thin, strong cable made from silk threads. It is strong enough to support Lea's weight and a bit extra, but probably not strong enough for a very large man.
Lock-pick set:
This is a set of tools useful in opening a variety of locks and defusing traps on locks.
Make-up:
She carries a special make-up kit that contains dark green and tan colored make-up so that she can camouflage her face, or darken it so her pale skin does not show up at night.
Climbing shoes:
These are special soft boots with supple reinforcement in the toes so that she can grip stone walls with her toes without tearing up the toenails and they give her added traction when scaling just about anything. The big toe is separate from the rest of the toes in the shoes. They are made of layers of soft doeskin.
Skull cap:
She has a black, tight fitting hood that she pulls down over her light hair and neck for nighttime operations. The hood is made from linen.
Rope:
She carries a hundred foot long silk rope that is a quarter inch in diameter. It is normally coiled up around her torso from one shoulder to the opposite hip when she is on a mission.
She can ride a horse, but is not exactly comfortable on them. She normally prefers to walk or run instead of riding.