Hesper

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Information

Player: Moose

Character Full Name: Hesper Loring Gailsberg

Character In-Game Name: Hesper

Nickname(s): Hes, Hesp, Helga, and I quote, "You're a . . . a monster!"

Association(s): None at current.

Race: Forsaken

Class: Warrior

Age: Apparent thirties.

Sex: Female

Hair: Steely blue, greying around the edges and constantly hanging in front of her face. Surprisingly soft, as well as thinning.

Eyes: Rotting in their eye sockets, lolling about and trying to face forward when possible. No glow.

Weight: A good amount, though most of it's in muscle. She doesn't have much squishy flesh left, only slowly deteriorating musculature.

Height: Somewhere around six feet, though it's difficult to tell exactly.

Other: She has very few scars on her person, oddly enough, and on a whole she's mostly kept together. There are a few patches, mostly on her legs and torso, that seem to have been sewn on as they don't always match her skin tone and the stitching is painfully obvious. Some might not even be flesh at all--the skin seems to have rotted off around her jaw, but closer inspection reveals that her jaw's been removed and replaced by solid metalwork. She has a very strong accent when speaking anything other than Gutterspeak, in which she has fairly good articulation. It seems she's adopted the language as her own readily, to the extent that she sounds stiff and unnatural in other languages.

Appearance

Blue things. She likes the color blue. And if you don't like the color blue, you probably won't like Hesper either.

Personality

Hesper is an incredibly kind, caring person who wouldn't hurt a fly unless the fly agreed to a brawl. She has a hangup about law and order, sticking to a firm set of values instilled in her from years of following the Light. In her mind, all fights are fair and sportsmanship is a virtue; she'll gladly participate in a fistfight so long as both parties are on good terms, as it's all in good fun. It's interesting to note that, though she actively joins in roughhousing in the name of sport, Hesper despises wanton destruction and killing. She declares it a waste.

While amiable towards most people, Hesper has a strong dislike for warlocks and other shadowy sorts. In her words, "I'd sooner rejoin the Scourge than befriend a monster of that capability." Most war-hardened veterans and bloodthirsty mongrels she also spurns, as well as a number of contract killers. To Hesper, death without reason is a waste and a disappointment. It's funny, then, that she seems to think undeath is something /everyone/ should experience.

There was a time, a while back, when Hesper feared the undead. But that was before she was left to her own devices, rotting away in solitude, where she developed a rather unique outlook on life: dead is better. Why discriminate if you're all the same shade of grey? Why fight over land and resources if you need none to survive? Why struggle with differences when you finally have common ground in the situation you're in? She's convinced that everyone would be better off undead, and always eager to herald more for her cause.

Hesper is surprisingly mum about exactly what brought her to this conclusion.

On the whole, Hesper is always willing to extend a helping hand to those she trusts, but she's also extremely stubborn. While she understands the need to communicate with living flesh and blood, she prefers less lively company regardless of the situation and will always seek the dead out first. Over time, when people consistently refuse to accept her way of thinking and indoctrinate themselves, she'll grow frustrated and resort to abandoning her friends or forcing them to agree with her. It's not a pretty sight.

History

A happy Andorhal peasant, Hesper was little different from the other grubby-fingered children growing up. She showed little to no aptitude for or interest in magic, and wasn't exceptional at sports or arithmetic. In spite of being an average child, though, the amiable, talkative girl grew up well. She made friends easily and was rarely the victim of bullies, often taking the time to help out her fellow civilians. The other children appreciated her presence and she was eventually trusted by the adults to handle herself alone, a privilige Hesper never abused. She grew up quickly but lonely, as her popularity fell with age. Friends she used to have started abandoning her when she failed to join in on their mockery of others, when she refused to break the city's laws just to cause mischief. The conscientious Hesper was soon left with no friends as she shifted into her teen years, and found herself taking solace in caring for the newborn boy a few houses down. It seemed to her as though his parents were never there for him, and even after he was sent away from the civilian town to study in a place she couldn't remember, the boy she'd helped care for lingered in her mind.

Hesper's compassion and adherence to law was not lost on the church, nor was the unyielding faith instilled in her by her parents. She was invited to train as a paladin and graciously accepted the offer, traveling to Stratholme to study and practice. As a fighter she was unremarkable, but she remained a true devotee to the Light and unwavering in her faith throughout her career. As a student she upheld all the rights she was taught to stand for and rarely, if ever, questioned her orders. She was accepted into the Order of the Silver Hand with open arms when she was of age, then returned to her home to say her goodbyes.

She ended up staying far longer than a few days, though, as one of Andorhal's alchemists invited her inside to show her some of his experiments. Hesper remembered the man just barely from when she was younger, some of her old curiosity resurfacing from her forgotten childhood. She found his potionwork fascinating; to understand that a force other than the Light could heal and do good was a jarring but not unwelcome realization--she abandoned her plans in the big city and remained in her hometown as a member of the militia and apprentice alchemist. It turned out that, though raised on magic and religion, Hesper had a fairly good comprehension of experimental research. Unfortunately for Hesper, though, her 'interesting' ideas that proposed a mesh between science and faith were rejected by priests and apothecaries alike. She remained a paladin and a hearty church-goer, but managed to earn the ire of a few more rigid pastors with her progressive ideals and was even cursed by one notably devoted soul. The dirty looks and insults bounced off her harmlessly, though, and she remained an alchemist right up until the day she died.

Hesper didn't die honorably in battle like she would have wanted to. No, she died on a bedroll while out camping, crying and screaming for her parents. She died feverish rather than lucid or pumped full of adrenaline, a slow, painful death full of agony--she was alone, too, with only a similarly ailing mentor to keep her company. She'd never been so grateful as blackness finally washed over her.

A gentle, soothing voice pressed firmly at the back of her mind. Hesper didn't know what it was saying, didn't remember anything about herself or where she'd been or who the man next to her was. She just stumbled on, doing what the voice said, letting it lull her into an inner haze where her mind and memories sat protected. She couldn't distinguish the voice from her own thoughts--if she even had any thoughts left to think--and the memories of her undeath and life before blurred all into one ball of fading silence.

Hesper was alone the next time she had a clear thought, standing in the forest and suddenly unmoving when before she had been shambling along erratically. It confused her at first, because all she found was a blur when she tried to remember what went on. Darkness throughout. She started to cry, though felt nothing leave her eyes--just dry, through and through. But then she wasn't alone any more, swept up in the service of a new Mistress and all-too-happy to just sit back and let someone else direct her again. Hesper fought without giving any consideration to who she was or what had happened, not even aware what she was fighting for--just that she was helping to purge the land of a great evil, that was all that mattered through her fervent desire to serve.

In the aftermath of the attack, once Lordaeron had been retaken--and filled with dead residents--Hesper realized something was missing. She wracked her fallen memories to understand exactly what was wrong, but understanding and rememberance didn't come until after she was posted in Tirisfal with a troupe of others.

It was broad daylight when the living appeared, the first living in a long time--Hesper had forgotten what it meant to be alive, locked up in the numb and unthinking feelings of following a nameless leader. A pack of wandering Scarlets happened upon their camp and the fight that ensued remained etched in Hesper's memory like a jagged scar down her subconscious, a testament to the debauchery of fate. Some of her companions protested, dodging blades and refusing to draw their own, insisting that they weren't tainted like the others. They were cut down, and Hesper saw in her own attackers the total lack of remorse and feeling for their victims what she had felt when destroying the legions of unthinking dead. But she wasn't unthinking. She had a life, right? A mind? She wasn't like them. This wasn't right.

Hesper fled with those ideas churning in her mind and remained in solitude. The Scarlets never found her again, secluded in some cranny of the Glades that was rarely traveled, if at all. She needed nothing to survive, having been embalmed and patched up shortly before being sent off to her post in Tirisfal; was left entirely to her own thoughts and person. Through meditation and prayer, two of the few things that stuck with her even past death, she slowly regained the missing bits of memory that helped her form a much clearer picture of the story she never wanted to know in the first place. She forced herself to accept what had happened and take it in stride rather than mope as she'd settled into doing, forced herself to assess the situation and think critically about what she was going to do next. The Light had left her in her time of need, ignored her pleas for survival and left her to rot as a . . . thing. But was that really so bad? She looked down at herself and seriously considered what she was asking, and in that brief moment Hesper's outlook changed forever.

What /was/ so bad about being dead? She couldn't feel a thing, and didn't really need the Light to do battle. She could go on without it, and that's exactly what she did.

When Hesper finally returned to the Undercity some time later, the state of the people around her was simultaneously appalling and appealing. Many of them were like she had been, not yet ready to face the truth of what had happened, whereas others were fully embracing undeath and working together like they had never known a different life. She saw those still dressed in the tattered rags of noblemen talking to brutish warriors, laughing alongside dirty peasants like they'd been best friends since childhood. She found the unity admirable, though often wondered if there was something sinister lurking beneath the outward conversation. She got her answer when she first signed on with the Royal Apothecary Society, presented with a myriad of painful and destructive ideals that her mind and body inherently rejected.

For some time, Hesper served as an alchemist in the Society but never felt comfortable among her power-hungry, vengeance-driven colleagues. They unnerved her with their talk of death, the ultimate silence that would stifle the mind forever. Death was a good thing, yes, but only so long as the person inside the brain continued to live--no other sort of death was allowed. The sort that wrecked and scarred and removed good people off the face of Azeroth was despicable, horrid and outright evil. It didn't take long for her to grow frustrated with her work, feeling that the end result wasn't right.

Hesper abandoned the Royal Apothecary Society and the Forsaken in general, politely distancing herself from the spiteful corpses that found unity in hatred. She wouldn't admit that maybe there was more to their acceptance than just being dead, though, and remained stubborn in her ideals as she moved shop to Booty Bay. She took the work that she'd been doing in the Society with her, performing countless experiments in an attempt to recreate the plague in a different, less 'destructive' form. One that would bring the living to understand death and accept it for the blessing that it was--finally, after all this time, Hesper understood.

The Light had never left her. It wanted her to be this way . . . because being dead was the only true way to be.