Askari

Player: Sol

Character Name: Askari Ambershine

Character In-Game Name: Askari

Nicknames: Kari, “Scarry”

Associations: Herself.

Race: Blood Elf

Class: Rogue

Skills and abilities: Kari has an unpleasantly thorough knowledge of humanoid anatomy, something she uses to her advantage both in combat and in her nominal occupation as a professional interrogator. Beyond this, she has in her repertoire a small variety of sleight-of-hand tricks and a limited knack for enchantment.

Age: 145

Sex: Female

Hair: Cut roughly short, dyed scarlet, crudely spiked up with muck and grease.

Eyes: Hard, intense, alight with a dim green fire.

Weight: A hundred and forty pounds of taut, trained muscle.

Height: 5'8”

Appearance

Situational. In Silvermoon or somewhere where some degree of politeness is expected, she tends to wear a dress of decent quality with long sleeves and a collar up to her neck. It seems polite enough, but she wears leather boots and gloves underneath. In the rain, the cold, or when travelling, she wears a long coat of studded leather and fur. When elsewhere, she dresses more casually in leathers and linens, selecting clothing for its practicality. In spite of this, she does prefer to wear a black mask whenever possible.

Other: Her body is covered in parts with hideous old burns and scars, most notably covering almost all of the left side of her face. What flesh is spared from this – and some of it that isn't – is typically covered with black and red tattoos. She twitches, limps, wheezes as she breathes and speaks in little but a strangled whisper.

She's in constant pain from her old injuries and drinks heavily to numb herself. However, she's also addicted to a mental stimulant to keep her awake during her unusual working hours.

Personality

An abrasive woman with a sardonic sense of humour and very little in the way of manners, Kari makes acquaintances freely and friends very slowly. She seems amiable enough in her twisted way, but a nihilistic worldview means she's naturally wary of the intentions of others. She's convinced that when it comes down to it, people only look out for themselves. She's fine with this, mind you. After all, it's exactly what she does, and while she's convinced that everyone manipulates everyone for their own ends, she's sure to return the favour at every available opportunity.

She's morally unscrupulous and ethically flexible, as you might expect of one in her line of work, and is thoroughly utilitarian in everything she does. She seeks to maximise results while minimising effort, which basically translates to her seeming lazy and languid except for short, decisive bursts of action. While she consciously misses the woman she once was, she ultimately prefers the freedom afforded to her by her new self. She thinks she hit rock bottom a long time ago and has no real intention of climbing back up. After all, it's strangely cosy down there in the dirt.

History

Born from a coupling of a surgeon and an enchanter, she got some early practice in both her parents' professions at a young age. She was apprenticed to a doctor in her early adulthood, but when her entire family was eventually bankrupted through a years-long decline in their finances, she ran off and joined the Farstriders. She spent many years tending to the rangers' wounds, picking up tips and tricks along the way, until by the time she was fifty she was a fully-fledged ranger in her own right. She made many friends over the years, including one man in particular – her direct superior in the Farstriders, who she eventually fell in love with (and vice versa). After many years together as an informal item, they were engaged to be married.

The engagement went on perhaps longer than it should have, their paramilitary lifestyles preventing them from settling down. They managed to marry just before the second war, but when the Horde came to Eversong, their situation only seemed grimmer. Later in the war, she was trusted to carry a message of paramount importance on a path behind enemy lines from one Alliance camp to another. The message was committed to memory rather than written down as per the Farstrider fashion. Too bad, really – if she'd just been able to hand the orcs who captured her a letter, they might have given her a merciful way out.

Taking an arrow through the gut, her wound was crudely mended and she was hauled back to the orcs' camp. There, she would undergo many long months of torture at the skilled hands of a multitude of experts, orc, troll and goblin alike. She didn't hold together long and gave them her message after a week, but the torture continued. They may have suspected she was trying to dupe her, or perhaps they simply enjoyed it, but they continued to ask questions and demand answers. Along the way, Kari learnt a few things about asking questions herself.

When the Horde lines collapsed with the Alliance victory, the camp was left to fend for itself. It was eventually stormed by Farstriders led by her husband, but they barely recognised her when they pulled her out of the cells, caked in her own blood and filth, gibbering and mewling like an animal. Her husband waited at her bedside while she recovered, but he slowly came to understand that the woman he had dragged out of the camp was not the same one he had sent off with a message months before. Likewise, the man who Kari had once found charming and engaging now seemed arrogant and presumptuous. The discovery that the arrow she took to her stomach had left her barren sealed the deal – or rather, finally broke it – and by the time Kari was on her feet again, she and her husband had agreed to separate. The marriage was only officially annulled when he died in the Fall of Quel'thalas, and she shedded no tears for him.

She resumed working for the Farstriders, but the people she'd known before her disappearance couldn't look at her in the same way, nor could she them. To them, their former friend was cold, distant and perhaps a little unstable. To her, her former friends were weak and full of themselves. When she “forgot” to administer anaesthesia during the stitching of an awful wound a rookie had received during a freak training accident, this determined her final discharge from the Farstriders, one she was all too glad to receive.

With no legitimate source of income, though, she quickly turned to crime. Starting with muggings and burglaries, she gradually found her own little niche in the Thalassian underworld: that of a professional torturer. It was discovered that she had a knack for extracting secrets, as the orcs once had from her. She emulated their techniques, using them in conjunction with her medical knowledge to coax information out of people the hard way when she was paid to.

After a few years, her expertise had such a reputation that she was being hired by particularly unfriendly sorts to simply torture for the sake of torture – to teach people a lesson, as it were. She was beginning to take issue with this and may have drawn a professional line at some point, but Quel'thalas came under Scourge attack before she could. The underworld collapsed when the kingdom did, and she was left to wander, scavenging.

When Prince Kael'thas rallied many survivors under the banner of the Sin'dorei, she naturally drifted amongst them, even marking her body with an abundance of commemorative tattoos to honour her people's loss. But she was not so dedicated to Sunstrider's cause to follow him to Outland. Instead, she remained in the city of Silvermoon, and an odd choice of drinking partners one night led her to somehow acquiring a job working for the government, specifically Silvermoon's judiciary.

They gave her questions to ask and people to ask them to, and she got to work diligently. It became her duty to extract confessions from criminals, but she started taking issue when she found she was viciously interrogating people who'd done little more than loiter, or break curfew. Perhaps coincidentally, she lost her job shortly after the Sunwell was reignited, when martial law in the city was relaxed.

Since then, she's wandered, getting work as often as she can and getting drunk in between.