Katrianne

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Information

Character Name: Katrianne Weaver

Character In-Game Name: Katrianne

Nicknames: Kate, Katie, Katri, Kat, Anne and a smattering of other diminutives. She actively encourages people to address her by nicknames – apparently, she doesn't like her full one.

Associations: Not the Horde or the Forsaken, notably, but she makes friends freely and eagerly. She has a rather fixed emotional attachment to Elihanara and is technically employed by the Thalassian House of Seregon as a personal servant to Elihanara and a court musician.

Race: Forsaken

Class: Bard

Age: Forever nineteen, nine years dead.

Sex: Female

Hair: Long and scruffy down to her shoulders, with a colour and texture not unlike straw.

Eyes: Hidden by a blindfold. She says they're missing.

Weight: 76lbs.

Height: 5'0” (0.9 scale in-game)

Appearance

A scrawny, frail little thing, all skin and bones with no soft tissue in between and withered, stringy muscle standing out under what flesh is visible. She is -tiny-, almost comically so, and her movements are slow and deliberate, as though she's certain she's going to fall apart at any moment. Her skin – what's visible of it – is mostly devoid of rot, but has a waxy white pallor with a discoloured green tinge. This, and the strange, disjointed way in which her trademark smiles take shape on her face, are clues enough that she's dead, if her hunched posture wasn't enough. Her hair is stiff and stringy, brushed to hang partially over her face, and a simple black strip of cotton has been pulled around her eyes, obscuring them.

She typically wears a blue skirt and a matching sleeveless blouse with a long-sleeved white shirt underneath, all loose, limp and crumpled, too big for her tiny frame. She makes an effort to cover up every inch of flesh she can get away with, and thus tends towards gloves and high collars. The bony claws most Forsaken take for granted have, in Katie's case, notably been filed down to blunt. Her voice is generally soft and high-pitched, mostly neutral in the way of accents, but quickly becomes a shrill whine when she raises it.

Personality

Infallibly friendly and polite, Katie's just about the most chipper little corpse you're ever going to come across. Warm and outgoing, Katie's welcoming demeanour is nonetheless balanced by intense social anxiety. She stumbles over her words and has a tendency towards long, inarticulate rambles of sentences, punctuated with flailing hand gestures, smiles and giggles or hunches of her shoulders and dips of her chin, depending on how she's being addressed or how she feels. She seems acutely sensitive to the feelings of those around her, and thus never asserts anything she deems unfair about anyone, apologising profusely at the slightest suspicion that she may have caused offence. When questioned about her death or her undeath, she is quick to note her preference for the term “living-impaired” and withdraws into herself somewhat. Her lack of understanding surrounding the circumstances of both is abundantly clear. She has a habit of developing attachments very quickly to anyone who might show her kindness.

While many of her kind wear warm veneers to manipulate the living, Katie's is completely genuine. She really is that happy, that well-mannered, that friendly, and she cannot fathom behaving in any way different. Her tendency towards good deeds, however, is a little forced. Her logic behind it is simple: She believes that her undead state and her blindness, both lamentable curses in her view, are punishments from the Light for a perceived life of sin. She believes that the only way she can obtain salvation is by leading a comparably honest, charitable and gentle unlife – and indeed, she is convinced that one day, the Light will save her. Nobody has bothered to talk her out of this delusion, and if they tried to they'd probably be ignored.

Ultimately, Katie is a childlike creature robbed of her innocence by brutal circumstance and left clinging hopelessly to what she can of it.

History

Born into a travelling troupe of performers who trekked up and down the Eastern Kingdoms sharing their arts with whoever they could, Katie has no idea who her biological parents were, only that her mother, at least, was part of it. It never bothered her in the slightest, for she was raised communally by this rag-tag bang of musicians, singers, dancers, actors, street magicians and just about any form of performance artists you can think of, closely knit like a family in their own right. From each of them she learnt something interesting, and as she grew up, she was noted to show promise in a wide variety of their arts, but was always a musician first and foremost.

Growing up, Katie was utterly in -love- with music and sound of any kind. While they were travelling to the next settlement in their carts and wagons, a young Kate would often close her eyes and simply listen to the cacophony – the creak of rickety wheels, the clip-clop of horse's hooves, the chatter and the laughter of her contemporaries. It was a magical experience to her: indeed, it was oft remarked that Katie was the kind of kid who could make a magical experience out of anything. She was an eager and responsive student to each of the musicians of the troupe, practising as often as she could with whatever instruments she could get her hands on.

When she was ten years old, to commemorate her ascension to 'double figures', Katie was gifted a small yet expensive violin of Elven make which the troupe had been saving up for. This prompted her to focus more on that instrument in particular – she never put the damn thing down. When she slept, it was in a thick, reinforced case. When she travelled, it was in a sturdy leather satchel at her side. She cherished it and became immensely protective of it, and indeed, it hangs at her side in that same satchel to this day.

She saw many places and met many people, and the happy, safe and comfortable world allowed her to develop the idyllic worldview that would come to define her in her later years. However, stopping in Brill one year and accepting a gift of bread from a kindly baker would lead to an abrupt and deadly end to the troupe's travels. When Katie was nineteen, she fell victim to the Plague and was risen in the service of the Scourge. A year of blood and murder ensued, and the images clung in her head even after she broke free. In a fit of grief, she tore her own eyes out, wailing, and wailed even louder when she realised she didn't even feel pain doing the deed.

While the rest of the free undead of Lordaeron rallied around Sylvanas Windrunner and laid siege to the capital, Katie secluded herself in the wilds and did what she did best. She played her music. Although her hands were unsteady and her hearing was damaged, she would gradually rediscover her talent and skill through a lot of practice. Music, as it always had been, was her escape from the world around her. Eventually, bemused by the sound of a countryside ditty playing through the dark woods of Silverpine, a Deathguard patrol led by one Mr. Richter would discover her at practice.

Taking her back to the Sepulcher, these Deathguards spent a lot of time trying to figure out what made the girl tick, to little avail. It turned out that she was extremely pious in life, and remained so in death. She had convinced herself, in her hiding, that undeath was merely a temporary inconvenience for her, a penance she would have to live out for her sinful life. One of the Deathguards was a merchant's apprentice in life and had seen her play, spent time among the troupe, and he could tell her for a fact that there was nothing much 'sinful' going on in there as far as he could see, at least on Katie's part. She was as sweet and demure back then as she seemed to be now, but Katie was having none of it.

This Deathguard made it his business to integrate little Katie with Forsaken society proper, taking her to Brill and the Undercity to see the unlife they'd made for themselves. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this terrified Katie – the doings of the Royal Apothecary Society, the worship of the Shadow and this talk of genocide against the living particularly unsettled her, leading her to flee.

These days, Katie wanders, playing her music for all who'd hear it and giving what money she makes from it to charitable causes. She waits patiently for the day that the Light deems her suitably repentant, utterly refusing to consider the possibility that it'll never come.

Skills and abilities

Once upon a time, Katie was a prodigal artistic polymath. She could sing, dance, draw and paint, and play half a dozen instruments by ear. While she still has a pleasant enough singing voice at certain low volumes, death has made her songs hoarse and grinding, and being robbed of her sight has naturally left her incapable of working a canvas and too scared about tripping over something to ever try dancing. Most of her musical knowledge has slipped from her mind, too, but she's still a fantastic player of the folk violin, with dozens, if not hundreds of piecess almost perfectly committed to memory.

And while she can't fight worth anything, she can hide very well.