Ferring

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Information

Player: Moose

Character Full Name: Ferring Halloway

Character In-Game Name: Ferring

Nickname(s): N/A

Association(s): Daranassus

Race: Night Elf

Class: Rogue

Age: Mature, as far as night elves go, and probably older than your average fresh-to-the-hundreds elf--or at least, she seems that way thanks to her cynicism.

Sex: Female

Hair: A particularly sullen color, stringy and dark--some would say black, though others would call them fools because it's clearly midnight blue. Semantics. Most humans would find her hair interesting for the way it mimics ink and seaweed, a natural feeling without being overly soft or downy.

Eyes: Silverine and predatorial, constantly narrowed or otherwise closed in thought. She rarely wears a happy expression.

Weight: Ferring is fairly thin for a night elf, though not outright skeletal she has what could only be described as a smoker's build. It's hard to say whether or not the elf actually smokes, but it's not too far a stretch.

Height: Tall, but not exceptionally so.

Other: Tall, thin, and liable to smoke regardless of what it does to the environment, Ferring is constantly followed by a trail of ink, paperwork and fingerprints. Her busy schedule and tendency to work overtime result in her workplace following her everywhere; she's often not-altogether-there. Interestingly, she seems to enjoy hobbies besides her work in the spare time she allows herself--the elf has a penchant for travel, sailing, and poetry. She has a decent comprehension of rhythm and uses that to compose small pieces that she can sometimes be found playing; it seems the woman leads a fairly full, if solitary, life outside of work.

Alignment: Lawful Neutral

==Appearance== Ferring's angular features are usually hidden beneath the brim of her oversized hat, which she claims is very comfortable. There's a good chance she keeps something inside that hat, but no one has ever been able to get it off her head. Her usual ensemble is composed of a dress shirt, pants, tie and a black trench belted around her waist. All else she wears is suited to the environment and it seems her usual attire can undergo a lot of wear and tear before she has to replace it with a lookalike. Ferring is, however, a sensible person and doesn't typically wear her hat or her trench indoors; that wouldn't make a whole lot of sense.

Personality

To put it professionally, Ferring is business-oriented. She puts her work first and enjoys her job no matter what she may say. Unfortunately, this causes her to come off to others as cold and calloused thanks to the level of detachment her work requires. She studies crime and it's best to not get involved emotionally, because you never know what the answer will be until you get to the end--and it's better to be distant than totally wrecked when things don't turn out the way you want them to.

Dealing with Ferring can sometimes be frustrating as she's about as obnoxious in her views as every other night elf--slow to place trust and quick to judge. Unfortunately, this dislike extends to her own kind and the people who can hold a friendly, intimate conversation with her are far and few between. This isn't to say Ferring is uncouth or disrespectful, though--while she seems completely uninterested in warmth or relationships of any sort, she responds to everyone with civility and maturity. She's an excellent speaker and has a penchant for debates, though tends to remain emotionally distanced to avoid getting into arguments.

Though it's easy to assume Ferring a cold, cruel person, she's primarily looking out for herself. She isn't an incredibly altrusitic woman, but she's a hard, ethical worker and will rarely capitalize off of others' stupidity. She isn't out to do people harm, but it's difficult to tell her apart from your average greedy superpower thanks to her general detachment. Then again, her line of work requires a certain level of distance.

People who are fortunate enough to know her well would describe Ferring as an intelligent, work-oriented person with strong morals and ethics that she knows better than to bring up in casual conversation. She's also, oddly enough, a morning person and very vibrant when it comes to enjoying life--where one would assume her dull and disoriented because of her cynical attitude, she's actually quite enthusiastic. She just doesn't want to lend you money.

History

Born sometime after the War of the Ancients to a man who saw himself a prestigious druid and a woman who saw him a lazy good-for-nothing, Ferring grew up guided only by her strict and traditionalist mother. Her childhood was largely dull and blurred into itself as the years went by; she kept few friends and never formed close relationships with those around her. She preferred to keep to herself and only sought out social contact when she felt it necessary to further her own goals--even from a young age, Ferring was an incredibly clear, determined individual with obvious advantages in attitude alone. Most of the adults who came in contact with her were liable to shake their heads in secret and agree that that girl would go far--but would never be happy.

There's a good chance they were right, in retrospect. It's funny how one's childhood can be a precursor to the events that have yet to come. As a youth, Ferring was often tense and overstressed because of the weight of studying she took upon herself--more than the traditional studies imposed on her by society, she studied almost everything she possibly could in an effort to gain more. This caused her to neglect her body in other ways, often forgetting to consume anything more than a hot drink in the morning and staying up late in the night, reading by the light of her eyes. Her bad habits extended through adolescence and into maturity, running into bouts of addiction to both wine and cigarettes.

Ferring spurned her mother's urgings to avoid the path of druidism--her mother's reasoning being that she had silver eyes, though in reality it was a conflict between parents. As a fairly intuitive child, Ferring understood this and thus attempted to enter the Emerald Dream and train herself when she was of age, but it seemed she lacked the proper talents for even basic druidic practices and thus abandoned that line of thinking. It was around this point Ferring realized she was driven by revenge, not ambition, and through careful meditation and long, drawn-out sessions of thinking she was able to distance herself from the teenaged politics that followed her into maturity. She signed up to become a Sentinel-in-training as a quick fix that soon turned out to be her regular job.

Ferring liked the ability to protect others--or maybe to keep them in line--that came alongside wearing the uniform and wielding the customary circular blades. She wasn't a huge fan of fighting, but elven civilization was largely in a state of peace so she didn't have to worry too much. During her time serving the Sentinels, Ferring opened up to the more like-minded people around her; they failed to agree on everything but the civil debates that popped up were more than enough to keep the articulate woman entertained. She eventually started considering her co-workers to be friends, or at least something more than strangers, and found enough time to open up to them. This resulting openness ended with occasionally bad results that caused Ferring to withdraw; she couldn't handle emotional conflict with grace or respect.

Ferring met her first (and only) love during her service. He wasn't with the Sentinels and was in fact one of the few citizens she'd caught disrupting the law. At first he frustrated her with his odd manner of speech, talking her into circles and continually dropping the subject so she got absolutely nowhere with her interrogation, but Ferring eventually managed to catch on and beat the man at his own game. In the months that followed they developed a professional rivalry to see who could disorient the other first, soldiers of pens rather than swords. Through this rivalry grew friendship and an unspoken pact of trust, and though both business-oriented elves held on to principle as long as they could, they eventually made an exception to the no-relationship rule.

But just because she'd found someone just like her didn't mean Ferring could just ditch her obligations--she didn't necessarily need to work to live, but she wanted to work in order to help cement her place in society. After a series of continued leaves to visit her beloved and more than one broken law overlooked because of the culprit, Ferring decided enough was enough and she terminated the relationship--it was her job or her lover, and she didn't see reason to keep the latter around. Unfortunately, the lovestruck chapter of her life had left its mark, and Ferring was discharged from the Sentinels because of her misbehavior and health problems--some of her teenage habits had followed her into the military, and remained with her even after no matter how hard she tried to end them.

Looking back on it as she is now, Ferring would never say she was hurt in the slighest, but the truth is she went through a great deal of emotional pain thanks to those events--after recognizing she couldn't have her cake and eat it to, she succeeded in chucking the cake out the window. Desperate for work, Ferring ultimately made an appeal to a merchant she'd spoken with multiple times as a Sentinel. She appreciated his fiscal-mindedness and he appreciated her skill with words, so she signed on at a low wage. For a time, she was delighted to handle transactions and keep record of the exchanges of money that went on. Numbers delighted Ferring every bit as much as words did, and both mediums had a good deal of interest for her--but the merchant's goblinish mannerisms rubbed off on her, and one day the elf questioned exactly why she was working so hard for so little.

Unable to answer this question herself, Ferring removed herself from the merchant's presence and kept to her own instead. It's hard to say what she did for the next few years; she was unable to hold a steady job. She dabbled in rhythm, poetry and dance as well as mathematics, philosophy and natural sciences. She traveled, performed, offered a helping hand to those in need and gladly accepted compensation for her help. She spent her years in a relatively fulfilled state, happy if not necessarily making money, and it's hard to pinpoint exactly what ended this chapter of her life. There's a chance the end of the happy days came when she met back up with her obsolete lover, her being naive enough to think that maybe she hadn't hurt his feelings--after all, he had a businessman's head just like she did. But it seemed he sought her out just to lead her on, and after a passionate couple months Ferring realized she was being played a fool and was soon abandoned, left emotionally devastated--"Nothing personal; just business."

Ferring took the betrayal hard, blaming herself and obsessively scrutinizing the relationship for "what went wrong." But rather than face the truth, she sealed her heart away and settled into a mirthless life of numbers, debate and the occasional poem. Ferring vowed to never let another being affect her personally as she was convinced it would always end in disappointment for both sides. She buried herself in her work and bad habits, neglecting herself to the point she nearly died from a combination of starvation, lack of sleep, illness and stress--at which point she was taken into the care of a stranger on the street who had happened to be watching when she collapsed.

That stranger was a devoted priestess. She brought the nearly dead Ferring to her own home and nursed the wanderer back to health without asking for a single turn, an action which Ferring would later question in the privacy of her own home. The priestess did a lot for the strangely aimless night elf, though, who ceased to busy herself with pointless work and began to think about what she would really do with herself. The answer came in the form of a suggestion shortly before they parted ways forever, the priestess offering that Ferring could help to rebuild the recently destroyed Auberdine.

With nothing else to do and in a vaguely altrusitic mood, Ferring chartered a boat to Auberdine and traveled there to see if she could make herself useful, among a group of hopefuls that she regarded as childish and unrealistic. One particularly stubborn (and youthful) elf on the ship managed to convince Ferring otherwise over the days they were at sea, though she still refused to help the other passengers in their enthusiastic schemes to push back the various villains that troubled Darkshore. Having grown weak after the years of abuse and neglect her body suffered, Ferring was in no position to fight, and only offered an "I told you so" when it was reported back that half their party had been murdered during an ill-advised battle. In that group was the one elf who had almost convinced her otherwise, though, and it was at that point Ferring decided for herself that it was ultimately best to distance herself from all forms of emotion to minimize disappointment.

Ferring remained safe within Auberdine's walls, building connections with others and eventually settling down among the town's five thousand inhabitants. When the town was fully rebuilt she participated in a variety of activities, from speaking in public to volunteer activities to keeping the peace, but she remained largely unknown. Even then, she took to hiding her face beneath a large hat and concealing the rest of her body inside a floor-brushing trench--presumably to protect her identity, though if anything it just made her more noticeable in the crowd. She gained a reputation for doing odd jobs and being generally dedicated; she kept extensive records of everything she did and always left a paper trail in case something needed to be checked.

The work brought to Ferring grew in complexity as the weeks went on, going from simple errands to difficult tasks and daunting investigations that she was sometimes forced to leave unanswered. But even through the frustration of not having answers and the stress of getting up at the crack of dawn and working well into darkness, Ferring enjoyed her job--and that's exactly where she is today, sipping her coffee and chewing on a bagel while she hunches over the latest paperwork.