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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gideonpepys" data-source="post: 7355607" data-attributes="member: 79141">#metooYes, he has a certain knack for colourful window-dressing.  And a weird predilection for the clergy.  He sided with them in the stand-off with the weretigers and was pretty disappointed when Korrigan solved the issue without violence.  He doesn't like eladrin at all, it turns out.Mine too. Her keyword (or descriptor in Cypher System) is 'relentless'.  While all of the characters are by now extremely capable, the unit always needs to have one dedicated damage-dealer.  Way back when it was El Perro.  Since then (after a brief period when the position was empty) it has been Matunaaga.  But now (as you will see from the next post) Matunaaga is leaving the seat vacant.  Hence, Quratulain:The RHC head honchos know her background now, but the rest of the players don't, but for the purposes of this thread, I thought I might share it now, rather than deliver it piecemeal over time:She hails from the region of Lanjyr east of Saha.  At the height of the clergy Empire, well over five-hundred years ago, that land was conquered, much as the Middle East was during the crusades.  Quratulain's father was an inventor of clockwork machines far in advance of their time. He was bullied by the clergy into building new weapons with which to defeat the eladrin. Unhappy with his progress (as he deliberately dragged his feet), the clergy accused him of heresy and when he refused to cooperate further, threatened to execute him. A second motive lay behind this mock trial. The leader of the hierarchs who now governed the land had become smitten with Quratulain - "bewitched by your beautiful blue eyes; so piercing against your olive skin" - and promised to free her father if she submitted to his lascivious designs. Her horrified father learned of this and forbade her from doing so, as he could not live with himself if she did.  Quratulain obeyed her father and he was burned alive.Unbeknown to the clergy, the real genius behind these incredible inventions was Quratulain herself, who hid her talents from a patriarchal society. Full of anger against the heirarchs who killed her father, she travelled to Crisillyir with an incredible new machine: a clockwork, counting automaton that was so mathematically adept it could deduce extraordinary facts and even predict the future. (In fact these abilities were all Quratulain's, and the machine a mere toy.) She used the machine as a 'fairground attraction' at first, before its fame (or notoriety) brought it to the attention of the same hierarchs who had persecuted her father - engineering the circumstances to suit her scheme.  Once in their public presence, with her own face disguised by a porcelain mask, she had the machine reveal each of their darkest secrets (corruption, murder, and worse) and caused an enormous scandal.But the priests weren't to be fooled twice: They arrested Quratulain, broke her automaton, tried her for witchcraft and, on finding her guilty, threw her into a freezing river in winter time - in a perverse joke, based on the meaning of her name, and in revenge against the eyes which had bewitched their leader. This might have been the death of her, had she not already programmed the automaton to rebuild itself and come and find her.  It did so, and pulled her out of the ice and snow where she had come to rest.  Almost dead, horribly frostbitten, she used parts of it to rebuild her broken body, then gradually augmented herself to become a fearsome war machine - still wearing her porcelain mask to hide her blackened, disfigured face.  One by one she tracked down and killed the hierarchs, before the clergy succeeded in capturing her and placed her in stasis in the Crypta Hereticum - unable or unwilling to destroy her, hoping one day to control the technology themselves.It was in this condition that Nicodemus and Kasvarina found her and the rest, as they say, is even more complicated history.  (Ashima-Shimtu's choice to bury her in ice was another cruel joke she had to suffer.)   Now the hierarchs are all long dead and she has transfered all her vengeful ire to Nicodemus. (But she's not terribly keen on men in general, so the man-killing machete is perfect for her. At another player's suggestion, it does bonus damage against males when she's wielding it.)</blockquote>

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