Post by Ze Flying Wraithetti Monstress on Apr 21, 2009 20:56:56 GMT -5
Name:
Remy Kamenwati
Age:
209 years
Race:
Elf
Appearance:
The most noticeable thing about Remy, first and foremost, is how incredibly feminine he is. His life rarely entails heavy lifting or really vigorous exercise, so he doesn’t have much muscle to speak of. He’s rail thin, especially compared to how tall he is at 6’2”, which doesn’t attest much to the stereotypical masculine figure. He weighs around 180 pounds, and his skin has only a mild tan since most of his work takes place either indoors or at night. His eyes are dark brown and his wavy hair is very pale blonde, and grows to his shoulders. Remy usually ties his hair up when on a mission, but otherwise leaves it unbound. Like most elves, his face is clean-shaven.
It’s very normal for Remy to be mistaken entirely for a woman, since his features are even more feminine than most other elves’ are. He has a very noble face, with high cheekbones, a sharp nose, and small, almond-shaped eyes framed by high, arched eyebrows. He also has full lips, long eyelashes, and a tall forehead. That, coupled with the fact that his skin is rarely blemished, gives him an almost unnatural, doll-like appearance.
This isn’t helped by the fact that Remy has to keep his appearance as naturally elf-like as possible- meaning, paying very close attention to his appearance. He wears well-made clothing during the day. The cloth is usually intricately designed and always neat. Remy also pays close attention to his appearance, and regularly brushes and washes his hair. Keeping his appearance in order is a complete pain to him, but is necessary in order to look as inconspicuous as possible to enemy eyes. When operating, Remy’s clothing can vary between his normal daily clothing for espionage at the Imperial palace to peasant clothing on the streets to leather armour while on a more secretive operation.
Remy is missing his left hand. He usually hides his stump of a wrist with a fake hand made out of wood, covered with a glove of varying material to connect it to the stump and to hide it from curious eyes. The matching glove that Remy wears on his right hand is to cover the gedwëy ignasia on his right palm, which despite his dragon’s death still shines very noticeably. Due to the fact that Remy only has one hand, he can only wield one-handed weapons. The one he uses most often is his sabre. The sword has a large hand guard, which covers the thumb, forefinger, and knuckle, and is made out of brass. The blade is one-sided and curved, making it a very effective slashing weapon. The scabbard is made out of simple leather. Nothing distinguishes it much from other sabres, but Remy holds it close for its effectiveness.
Remy also has another sword, one that was forged for him before the Fall of the Riders. It is a deep purple hand-and-a-half sword, with a yawë symbol both on the sheath and the blade. However, both because it brings back unwanted memories and to stay undetected, Remy has it hidden deep in his basement, where it has been allowed to rust and dull, losing much of its former beauty.
Personality:
Remy, unlike other elves, did not have the privilege to grow up in the safety of Du Weldenvarden. If he had, he’d likely be just like the rest of them- joyous, nature-loving, and carefree. Instead, Remy is the polar opposite of most elves. He takes life as something that simply needs to be survived, and can’t find any other meaning in it. He’s bitterly negative, and has no qualms about bursting someone’s bubble with a sarcastic comment or two. He’s also very strictly organized, and anything messy makes him jittery and upset. This is shown in his tidy appearance, and completely neat house and work area. Despite how irritated he often seems, it’s actually very hard to really get Remy angry. At the most, he just gets annoyed at anything irritable, especially when he’s mistaken for a woman.
Remy works for the Varden as a double agent, but he’s technically neutral. This is because he only sees the Varden as a kind of backing for his own personal goal of destroying Galbatorix, and not as anything really important. If the Varden were destroyed, he would simply find another small organization to back him, and it never upsets him much when one of his duties as an Imperial spy require him to sabotage the Varden. He also holds nothing against the Empire, but instead simply wishes to get rid of its king.
When with people, Remy is aloof and doesn’t divulge much about himself, which is necessary both for how top-secret his job is and because he doesn’t find people particularly interesting. He also doesn’t possess half the courtesy that elves are so famous for, and doesn’t hesitate to speak his mind. His werecat companion, Sthenno, is currently his one and only constant friend, since Remy prefers to keep a professional distance away from everyone he works with.
Remy has a huge interest in the unknown magical realms, which he explores in his day job at the Twin Lamps’ laboratories in Galbatorix’s palace. Magic is Remy’s only true interest and is also his most formidable weapon. Besides magic, Remy was exceptional with a bow, which is now obsolete due to the fact that he is missing his left hand. Remy is decent with his sabre, not terrible but not the most exceptional swordsman either. His true power lies in magic, which is extremely helpful when on one of his more stealthy operations. Remy’s favourite attacks include using elements like lightning, freezing cold, and fire, as well as mental assaults. Remy prefers to ambush an enemy, and attacks in a very calculated way rather than blindly throwing himself into battle.
Remy does have a few good traits about himself- for one thing, he’s very efficient in everything he does, and can always be trusted to get something done, since if he has something to do, he sticks to it. He has a very strong sense of duty, but if something is below his morals, Remy will do his best to try to avoid it. Remy is also very resourceful, although he is slow at thinking up things on the spot and generally needs to plan ahead to do something right the first time.
History:
Remy’s father, Marduk, was an elf of the lowest sorts. A decade or so before Remy’s birth, he persuaded Cytherea, an elf noblewoman from Ellesméra, to marry him. This was done so without Cytherea’s parents’ permission, and she was spurned from her relatives. Marduk convinced Cytherea to leave Du Weldenvarden with him, so they could make a life for themselves out in Alagaësia. Cytherea agreed, if only to get away from her furious relatives. The two of them went to Ilirea, now present-day Urû’baen, and settled in a middle-class manor. However, Marduk’s dreams of finding fortune soon went sour, and eventually he abandoned a pregnant Cytherea to try his luck elsewhere.
Still paying debts for the manor, Cytherea was unable to keep the house and had to move to a squat little shack at the edge of the city. When Remy was born, she sold her hair and then her front teeth to keep him fed, but eventually had to reduce herself to whoring when all the money ran out. Her sacrifices kept Remy from having a hungry childhood, although it was a lonely one. The other elves in the city refused to socialize with Cytherea due to her rather undignified job, and the one other elf child in the whole city was kept clear from Remy. Besides that, Cytherea kept Remy far away from the human children, as she thought that their mortal stupidity would affect her child. Instead, she taught him the Ancient Language and every elvish custom, in the hopes that one day she would have enough money to send him to Du Weldenvarden.
However, this dream was cut short when Remy was in his fifties, still a child by elven figuring. Cytherea had a nasty cough, which stopped her from properly satisfying a client. He hurled insults at her back when she left and threatened to take her money as compensation, prompting her to attack him. The fight left her badly injured, and she was barely able to drag herself home. Remy went out looking for a healer, and was able to get a Rider to tend to his mother. The Rider healed Cytherea’s wounds, but at the same time discovered a withering disease that was untreatable. It caused pieces of Cytherea’s lungs to come apart, which she would then cough up. The Rider gave Remy potions to ease her passing, and left.
Remy cared for his mother for several weeks, but didn’t decide who would care for her son until her death was agonizingly near. Since she still didn’t have the money to get him all the way to Du Weldenvarden, she handed over all her possessions and money to the innkeeper of the Oak and Crosier, Phlesh, in return for taking care of Remy. Cytherea died shortly after making her decision, and by then was so frail that Remy was able to take her all the way outside the city and bury her near an abandoned elven tower. Then he went home, packed up his things, and went to the Oak and Crosier.
Life there was unpleasant at best. Remy had to slave for Phlesh while she doted on her own son Jahar so much that he rapidly turned into a very obese child. Remy was also usually beaten by Phlesh, both for doing chores wrong and simply because she couldn’t understand the ways of the ‘feckin’ elves’. This was Remy’s unhappy life for a full decade until one day, while he was doing errands for Phlesh, he stumbled onto a parade in the main streets of Ilirea. It was the annual Riders’ festival, when dragon eggs were paraded through the streets for the children to hold. Remy snuck into the line of children, and, for several hours, simply held different eggs as they were given to him. When the festival was over, he came home late and was accordingly punished. Oddly, though, his spirits were a little higher when he went to bed that night.
That night, the eggs were taken back to the Ilirean citadel. One of the eggs, dark purple in colour, fretted for half the night over whether she was making the right decision or not in breaking open. Finally, she rolled off her cushion, hit the floor, and cracked open to allow a hatchling to crawl out. The hatchling shook herself, snuck out of the egg room, out of the citadel, and followed a strange mental tug all the way back to a shabby inn near the edge of the city. She crawled up to the second floor window, leaped in, and sat on Remy’s chest until he woke up. Remy, realizing what had happened, quietly packed his few possessions, took his new hatchling, and snuck out of the inn. At the citadel, Remy had a few elders woken up and presented his dragon. After a few physical check-ups to see if both he and the hatchling were in decent health, Remy began his training.
He named his dragon Vanyali, meaning ‘magic’ in the Ancient Language, and underwent basic training for several years. However, the two of them didn’t get very far fame-wise- Vanyali took several long years to get over a crippling fear of heights, and even then she was afraid of being especially high. Remy simply didn’t have the patience for the knowledge aspect of being a Rider and was slow in learning swordsmanship. However, he was exceptional in magic, and his archery skills were more than decent. Vanyali was also a particularly intelligent dragon, which was how they managed to keep up with the other new Riders.
Several long years later, Remy was hurrying to class when he heard someone talking loudly in the infirmary. He looked inside, and saw several Riders assembled around a badly injured young man, the one who was talking. His name was Galbatorix, and his dragon had been killed in an Urgal ambush. Remy listened to his story with rapt attention, and, when the elders later refused to give Galbatorix a new dragon, Remy was furious with them. However, Galbatorix beat the odds by getting a hatchling on his own, which Remy thought was only fair, and then murdering an elder, which Remy thought was right, since there were rumours that the elders were defunct. In truth, Remy started to look up to Galbatorix as a father figure, even though he was much younger than him. This was both because Remy had never had a male role model and because he admired Galbatorix’s ability to do things. Vanyali looked up to him as well, and the two of them joined many other Rider and dragon pairs in pledging themselves to Galbatorix by giving him their true names.
At first, the Fall of the Riders was slow to happen, but before Remy even realized it, a full-scale war was started. He and Vanyali flew throughout Alagaësia, attacking human civilians, burning Du Weldenvarden, slaughtering dwarves in their aboveground cities and killing Riders to boot. After some time, Vanyali realized that what Galbatorix was doing was wrong, which she tried to explain to Remy, but he was so bloodthirsty and trigger-happy that he became furious with her for thinking so. This caused a rift between them, which only grew bigger as time passed. Eventually, Vanyali was unable to stand Remy’s cold-hearted ways, and changed one thing about herself- her terror of tall heights. She allowed herself to fall from one of the Beor mountains, and didn’t open her wings until she nearly hit the bottom. Changing that one thing about herself slightly altered her true name, and Galbatorix lost his hold on her. Then she shut Remy out from her mind and abandoned him.
Unable to explain to Galbatorix how he had ‘misplaced’ his dragon, Remy had his mind invaded by him. When Galbatorix found out that Vanyali had betrayed his cause, he had Remy locked in the citadel dungeons and sentenced to a long, slow death by torture. Remy suffered for several very long days. However, Vanyali, from her hiding place in the Spine, was racked with Remy’s pain despite shutting him out. Unable to stand his being in pain, she flew to Ilirea, broke into the citadel and kidnapped Remy. She tried to escape back to the Spine, but was hotly pursued by Galbatorix’s other Riders and dragons. By the time she made it to the Spine, she was exhausted and wounded from their attacks, and was unable to stop a dragon from ripping out her Eldunarí, badly injuring her other organs, and knocking her out of the sky. She managed to hold onto Remy’s left hand to stop him from falling, but her claws accidentally severed his hand from his wrist, and he hit the ground, managing to have his fall broken by the trees. Vanyali crashed onto the forest floor right after him, and managed to heal his wounds before the other Riders magically sucked her conscience into her Eldunarí, therefore rendering her body dead.
Remy had no idea what an Eldunarí was, and still doesn’t, which led him to assume that Vanyali was dead. But the prospect was so horrifically painful that he simply couldn’t bring himself to understand that she was gone. He thought that was he was hallucinating, that he had passed out from losing blood and that the whole battle had just been a dream. Vanyali was just still not talking to him. However, when the ‘fake Vanyali’ didn’t go away, Remy furiously screamed fire spells until the whole area was ablaze and he had to flee deeper into the forest to escape it. When the fires went out naturally, he returned and was pleased to see that the hallucination was gone- along with everything else in the area. He was quite content to wait until Vanyali came back from wherever she was hiding, so he tore some cloth off his tunic, wrapped it around the stump of his left wrist, and hunkered down to wait. When she didn’t come back for several days, he forsook his elven vegetarianism and ate meat to keep from starving. No one had been sent after him, since Galbatorix assumed that Remy was already dead or would soon die in the Spine.
Several weeks later, Galbatorix lost his hold on Remy. This was because Remy had also changed his true name- except unlike Vanyali, who had lost her fear of heights, Remy simply went insane for a long period of time. Since Vanyali refused to come back from her hidey hole, wherever it was, he built a new Vanyali out of wood and stone using magic, declared her the queen and him the king of the Spine, and spent several long years in total dementia. Several years later, when Remy, having kept ‘Vanyali’ in a cave to shelter her from the elements, decided it was high time she got some fresh air and dragged her out during a rainstorm. It was only when she fell apart that the cold realization settled over him that she was well and truly dead. For a short time, Remy just hunkered down in his cave and went through several emotions- first, agonizing depression, then icy remorse, and finally a deep, simmering anger.
It was around then that Remy realized that he would go insane again if he didn’t do something to keep himself from thinking about Vanyali. So, he stole some proper clothing from a couple of trappers, having only worn leaves up until then, and managed to find his way into Therinsford. There, he managed to get a vague understanding of past events and how many years had passed- putting his current age at 129- before the innkeeper he was talking to saw his pointed ears and started screaming about an elf in the Empire. Remy, realizing that something must have happened to make elves unwanted in Alagaësia, fled to the borders of Du Weldenvarden. There, he was very hesitantly accepted into the forest, and settled in Osilon.
It had been Cytherea’s dream to see Remy live in Du Weldenvarden, but it wasn’t the utopia life she had always imagined for him. He had to keep himself far under the radar to keep anyone from recognizing him, and the elves were overly suspicious of him, being an ‘outlander’ in their midst. Remy only stayed in Osilon for a year or so before he heard about a tiny anti-Imperial rebellion known as the Varden. They had established connections with the elves, who provided them with supplies for their holdings in the Beor Mountains. Remy immediately signed up as a caravan guard, eager to escape the scrutiny of his fellow elves. And for a decade, he had the job of guarding supplies as they were ferried back and forth between Du Weldenvarden and the Beors. To him, it was just a way to pass the time. He never had much faith in the Varden’s survival, but when it flourished, he decided to join it for real. He realized that he wanted revenge for Vanyali’s death, and that the Varden was the easiest way of achieving it. After being inducted into the Varden and having his mind scanned, he joined a small training camp for spies.
For twenty years, Remy trained in the arts of secret warfare before being sent to Urû’baen as a sleeper. He disguised himself as a human at first, but after realizing that there were several Imperial elves serving Galbatorix, he went with his normal appearance. Since he was an inactive spy, he set about making a life for himself in Urû’baen. With money granted by the Varden, he bought himself a middle-class house in the city and then went to the palace to get himself a job. At first, he was terrified that Galbatorix would recognize him. However, Galbatorix kept himself shut in his private chambers day and night, so Remy eventually quit worrying. He went for a job that fit his talents, and joined the Twin Lamps, an organization of Imperial magicians that studied time travel, levitation, resurrection, and other mostly unknown realms of magic. Remy remained a Varden sleeper for twenty-five years, during which he got enough background information to suitably pass as an Imperial elf. Then, when he was 184, he joined one of the Empire’s many leagues of spies, the Tribunal, specializing in counter-espionage and ‘taking care’ of any captured Varden spies.
After Remy’s induction into the Tribunal, his life was mostly uneventful until about ten years later. Having kept his day job at the Twin Lamps, one of the experiments required physical information about werecats. A woman who worked in the dungeons below the palace, a Dr. Ramakrishna, happened to have a werecat available for a physical examination, so Remy was sent to study the animal. He took her from her cage, took her to an operating room, and took several harmless tests and notes. However, thinking that the werecat was just a half-intelligent animal, he left his mind unguarded, and received a nasty surprise when the curious werecat invaded his head. She found out everything about him- Vanyali, his ties to the Varden, and his spying- and presented Remy with a deal. If he busted her out of the dungeons, she would keep his secrets safe. If not, she would yap about him until he got caught and sentenced to the dungeons too. Remy grudgingly agreed and snuck her out of the dungeons, out of the palace, and dumped her into Urû’baen’s streets to fend for herself. However, she seemed to realize that she was unable to survive on her own, so she caught up to Remy as he walked away and demanded to stay with him. He shook her off and went home for the night. Unfortunately, the cat came back the very next day, sneaking into Remy’s room in the morning and pinching his nose until he woke up. Again, the werecat threatened Remy about giving away his secrets if he didn’t let her stay. Remy, in turn, threatened to kill her if she didn’t leave and keep her mouth shut, but then realized there would be no way of catching her if she let his secret out. So he gave the werecat, who introduced herself as Sthenno, her own room in the house while she acted as his ‘pet’ whenever visitors came around. She has lived with him since.
