Lydia Dustbind

Information

Player: Rini

Character Full Name: Lydia Dustbind

Character In-Game Name: Lydia

Association: The Horde

Race: Forsaken

Class: Rogue

Age: 36 (27 at death)

Sex: Female

Hair: Purple (Ruddy red in life)

Eyes: None

Weight: 113 lbs

Height: 5'4"

Appearance

Usual Garments/Armor: Lydia often wears dark dresses or robes that conceals her decaying flesh. A silken scarf is wrapped around the bottom half of her face where a large portion of her jaw and skull is exposed.

Personality

In life, Lydia was a charming woman who had the ability to brighten a whole room by her cheerful presence. This talent of hers was permanently lost upon Lydia’s undeath. She took to a more reclusive way of life due to the fear she was overwhelmed with when she had discovered her fate. Now quiet and reflective, Lydia keeps some traits of her extrovert personality such as her aptitude to speak in a casual and almost friendly manner to strangers. With that being said, Lydia rarely inserts herself into conversations between strangers.

Lydia has shown empathy and kindness in multiple occasions after her death. She views knowledge and the ability to empathize as valuable traits. True to her word, Lydia would die in the name of a promise. Rarely does she act on cowardice or selfishness, though the two are not absent from her decisions. Lydia's actions in times of emergency or danger can best be described as recklessness.

History

Lydia Hughes was born in Lordaeron and raised in a comfortable but otherwise dull environment. Her fascination with spiders began at a young age during her idle time when she’d silently read to herself. One evening a spider fell upon ten year old Lydia’s book as she sat on a park bench. At first she was startled, terribly surprised and frightened by the sudden appearance of the spider. After watching it aimlessly wander across her book’s page, Lydia took it in hand and set it gently upon the ground.

She took to the scholarly way of life as she became a young woman. Pouring hours of her time over books, Lydia had wished to make a significant difference in the scientific world through her passion for arachnology. Her days spent in the libraries of Lordaeron made for her to become unintentionally anti-social. At the age of twenty one and well into her career as a poison researcher she met and years later married the love of her life, Collin Stockton.

Four years after the wedding bells chimed, Lydia Stockton had made headway with her poison research with little help from her colleague in the field. She was now twenty seven years old and her name was recognized by few, that small handful being anyone with interest in spider poison. Numerous research papers and books detailed the medicinal use of poisons as well as the deadlier and more popular side of the poisons. Her success in her career left for little recognition for her less successful college, thus budding hatred beyond a typical rivalry.

The plague descended upon Lordaeron a year later. Lydia left the room she conducted research in with her partner to eat her plagued morning meal, one she typically had at home. She was a punctual but forgetful woman and for the first time in years she had forgotten to tell her husband that she would be researching with her partner on a project. When she returned to the room half an hour later she was ready to work, yet her partner was nowhere to be seen. Sitting at her desk, Lydia pulled open the drawer beside her and placed her hand inside the drawer without needing to look, like any other day. As she felt around for her glasses, she felt an abruptly painful sensation in her hand. Lydia pulled her hand out and screamed.

For a second, Lydia casually wondered how the spider had found its way into the drawer she kept her glasses and spare pens. Lydia’s head spun as she leaned over to peer into the drawer, trying to identify the spider. “Theraphosidae,” she muttered to herself. She leaped from her chair and stumbled across the room. Tables and containers we bumped by her wavering body sending papers, pens, vials and droppers spilling onto the floor. Eventually she reached the cabinet which held the antidotes to the majority of the spider poisons Lydia and her partner had researched. Lydia stood holding open the doors of the cabinet, her head spinning as the light in the room began to ebb. “Theraphosidae. Theraphosidae.” Her hand snatched a vial and she quickly administered the antidote; the wrong antidote. “Theraph--…”

Lydia fell upon the floor as she slipped into unconsciousness. While the antidote was not for her poison, it was the cure to a different spider of the same family’s poison. What would have been a deadly coma became a long period of unconsciousness. Her partner slipped out from beside the cabinet they hid behind and assumed Lydia either dead or in a state of comatose. The presence of the sun in the sky made for the removal of her body a difficult task for her partner. Lydia’s husband intercepted her partner as he dragged her still body out of the building. Originally intending to check on the location of his wife, Collin was horrified to find her partner roughly dragging Lydia from the building. After a loud brawl that alerted a passerby, Collin killed the partner, assuming the partner had killed Lydia. He was swiftly imprisoned by authorities awaiting a trial that was fated to never happen due to the plague. Collin was assumed to have either been executed before the trial or to have been lost by other means. Lydia died hours after first being unconscious and rose as an undead.

Lydia later changed her surname to Dustbind. It took Lydia little less than a year before the reality of her situation was fully realized and accepted. Everything she had accomplished and lived for in life was now gone without anyway to recreate or reclaim it. Lydia finds herself patiently awaiting death since she treats her undeath as a physical state of purgatory. Despising the idea of destroying herself, Lydia burns away the waning years of her undeath by collecting and reading books. She affectionately views books as an escape from her reality while she patiently awaits her mindless state.