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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rystil Arden" data-source="post: 2637145" data-attributes="member: 29014">Background:Cassandra Durai--Cassandra is the daughter of a Nimbran Skyknight who went out on a Flying Hunt and a Halruaan expatriate living in the Misty Vale.  The Halruaan eugenicists would never have allowed this coupling, had they known, as the swirling eddies of eldritch energies within her caused the awakening of intense psionic powers at an early age.  Unfortunately, the psychic echoes of her uncontrolled telepathic emanations attracted the attention of a colony of illithids living under the Wyrmbone mountains.  With Cassandra's father returned to Nimbral even before the child was born, her mother Hekyve was unable to hold off the attacking mind flayers that came in search of the child, and Cassandra never saw her mother again...Intrigued by Cassandra's innate talent, the illithids decided to use her as a host-body for a new illithid, but since such an action normally destroys the mind of the host, which would put her psionic powers to waste, they carefully incubated a symbiont that would attach to her mind and convert her into an illithid more insidiously, retaining and augmenting her psionic powers.  Fortunately for Cassandra, a githzerai rrakkma destroyed the illithid colony before the symbiont could convert her body and mind, and one of them performed a Psychic Chirurgery that cleared it from her mind.  Even so, her psionic powers remained augmented and her skin retains a very subtle lavender tint, the colour of the tips of an illithid's tentacles.  The githzerai, a group of monks and psions, noticing Cassandra's innate talent, raised her and trained her in a monastery on Limbo, where they indoctrinated her in the strict teachings of Zerthimon...But even so, the chaos-stuff of Limbo seemed to sing to her from just beyond the grounds of the monastery.  When the githzerai allowed her to leave, deciding that she had come of age and no longer needed their training to keep her discipline, she decided to return to her homeland, but she was too young to really know anything about her forest home, so when she returned to Faerun, she wound up in the Misty Forest instead (an understandable mistake).  As she tried to meditate, saddened and alone in the wrong forest (the Astral Caravan that brought her had long since departed), she had a vision of a smiling, loving woman with fiery red hair, who enfolded her in her arms and whispered to her that she should head northwest.  Heeding the woman's advice, after many days of travel, she reached the city of Waterdeep, where she was drawn to the house of Sune.  Gazing upon the images of the goddess within, Cassandra realised that this must be the voice that had spoke to her, and she became an acolyte of Sune, renouncing the asceticism of the path of Zerthimon.  She spent some time training in Waterdeep, but eventually, she grew weary and longed for the open road once more, where she could feel Sune in her own way, rather than through organised prayer, and where she could spread the love that she had finally found after all these years to those she encountered.  These journeys led her to the Silver Marches, but on the way, she became lost in the Nether Mountains.  Perhaps it was her natural curiosity, perhaps it was the mix of pure Netherese bloods within her veins, but she found a cache of powerful items in those mountains dating to the time of Netheril, though they were guarded by powerful magical guardians and traps.  On her way back to the surface, she encountered a drow slaving party that was bringing a group of captured humans, svirfneblin, and dwarves back to Ched Nasad to sell as chattel.  Outraged at this affront, Cassandra single-handedly defeated the drow with her new magical gear, surprised at just how easy drawing her psionic power was slowly becoming--even her psicrystal Sibyl was growing a reservoire of her own.  As Cassandra surfaced near Sundabar, returning the captured humans and dwarves safely to their homes after already saying farewell to her new svirfneblin friends, she did so as a newfound champion of freedom Why Cassandra kicks ass will follow soon <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Edit:  Oh, I added more <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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