Halfear


 * "He used to be his own worst enemy. Now he was everyone else's."
 * - Joe Abercrombie: Best Served Cold


 * Hal's obvious themesong is [This Life] by Curtis Stigers.

Description
Sturdier than the average elf (though still a scrawny halfbreed by any other race's standards), battered in the way of old soldiers, missing most of her left ear - the scar starts just where the ear connects to her skull and is old and uneven, not from a blade. Has the hard look of a world class cynic, which does her no favours.

Carries herself with a middle-agedish manner. She is most comfortable with a blade and shield, but supplements her weapons with minor fire charms and petty battle magic to hinder and distract the enemy. She knows practical field medicine, but tends to leave doctoring to others as her remedies are on the brutal side. She rides (mostly horses and hawkstriders) like she could do it in her sleep, and seems to know rather more than honest people should about demonology, necromancy and bandit operations.

She is a halfbreed, but it isn't all that obvious when she isn't swearing in Common or grumbling about elves as "you people". Her slightly heavier build could just as well be muscle and her Thalassian isn't especially accented, just features the occasional odd turn of phrase.

Occupation
Mercenary, currently freelance. Dabbles in metalwork from weapons and armour to jewellery. Associated with Winterspark Investigations, though not presently employed by them.

Family, blood and otherwise
Hal is a foundling and a bastard, with no clue about her parents and no interest in finding out. She romanticizes the idea of family to an extensive degree, since she never had one, but counts her own by loyalty rahter than blood. Practically speaking, "family" means the people Hal thinks of as being actual human beings with actual rights she cares about, whether they are blood or not.

Drew - her 9-year old son, in custody of an ex/enemy/client of hers (Valdreas Thundereye)) for protection. Drew's murdering sociopath father Dow Grim died before he was born; his adopted father Will Grey, died violently last year. Given a choice between her son and anything, Hal believes she'll choose Drew every time.

Nikeya of the Darkspear tribe - Hal knows Niki from "before"; troll or not, she claims to owe Niki her life and trust her implicitly. Nikeya just says the loa say some day she will need Halfrat, so till then, she will stay near.

Kife Emberwing - Formerly a colleague at Winterspark Investigations, still the one man in Silvermoon Hal trusts without question. To the shock of anyone who's ever heard them flirt, Hal and Kife sincerely have no intent of ever sleeping with each other.

Tharien Andaal - Also a Winterspark contact, cause and accomplice of many a hangover. Also the colleague Hal really wishes was something else.

Veste "Winri" Windreaver - A painfully cheerful young hunter who for reasons beyond Hal's ken refuses to consider her a bad person. Because Winri believes it, Hal regularly catches herself trying not to disappoint too badly.

Dog Company and Winterspark Investigations - Companies Hal has worked for, and has an emotional attachment to even after the contract.

Background
Born in Arathi, never knew her parents. Presumes she's the bastard get of some Quel'dorei adventurer - grew up with street kids and bandits, starving and stealing and angry as all hell at being cheated out of the glamour she imagined life in Quel'thalas to be. By semiadulthood, like a lot of pretty but poor girls, she ended up whoring.

Turns out the brothels did her good. The need to keep clients curbed the worst of her violent temper, and a particularly notorious madame, Trisha, took it on herself to groom a scrawny halfblood to play an exotic Elvish exile. Semipainful training for a higher paygrade turned out to make a comfortable living - as Hal puts it, there isn't a man alive who doesn't secretly want to do something vile to a pure Elvish princess (or, occasionally, the other way around), and given her cynical outlook, it suited her well enough. Trisha's place was the first time Hal felt safe or comfortable, and she had no intention of leaving.

It didn't last - eventually Trisha died, and a still very temperamental Hal had a dramatic falling out with her successor. She left and made for Silvermoon, with the vague idea of finally finding out where she came from. No such luck, of course. She spent about a decade in the city, made friends and enemies, mixed with high and low society, created scandal on a friend's behalf, learned some magic - and finally realised she has no patience for elves at all. Her departure from Silvermoon was sudden, and involved swearing to never return. She returned to Arathi and for reasons she usually doesn't discuss, chased down a familiar mercenary captain to enlist in his company. She picked up the name Halfear around this time - odds are she lost the ear in Quel'thalas.

She has been a mercenary most of the century since. Her record is both long and inglorious, including everything from honest guard and bodyguard work to blackmail, thuggery and outright murder on various people's behalf. Mostly she has worked as part of company, because "freelancing is a mug's game". She confesses no regrets and carries herself with the disinterested competence of a soldier who believes in work ethics, not morals or causes. She has no problem with other people's dirty work, so long as it comes with full compensation and disclosure. She's spent a little time in jail for assorted crimes, but swindled, threatened or paid her way out of more. Most would call her a thug for hire - Halfear calls herself a professional, with exactly as much scruple as she's paid not to have.

She returned to Silvermoon some time after the battle of Undercity, by her own telling because since the Horde stepped up hostilities with the Alliance, it's become flatout dangerous for a mercenary with a Sin'dorei face to operate anywhere else. In truth, it was due to finding herself, her son and her friends the target of a murderous vendetta. Though the killer was hunted down and killed by Winterspark Investigations, the necromancer who sent him is still at large - while he is, Hal reluctantly trusts her son to the protection of an ex/enemy/client, the notorious warlock Valdreas Thundereye.

She still takes jobs from private clients, handled up front or discreetly via message drop at the infamous Wayfarer's Inn ((send IC mail, the bartender will relay the message to Hal)). Though she was on retainer with Winterspark and even managed the office with Kife Emberwing in Dorath's absence, she has for now decided she's better off as an associate than an employee.

Privately, Hal has a world of dislike for Silvermoon and elves and magic, and no end of cynically unflattering things to say about all things good and glorious. Her youthful temper has long since given way to dry cynicism and ruthless pragmatism. When the mood takes her, she can philosophise at great length (and with surprising eloquence) about the fictions of innocence, justice, patriotism and honor, and of the actual value of life, blood and family you choose, rather than just get born with. She claims to have no heart or feelings like real people do, and is genuinely unphased by violence - except, perhaps, when it comes int he form of lasting physical damage to people she cares about.

Perhaps surprisingly, she's also a firm believer in there being no such thing as casual, no-strings sex, at least with people you know. She takes an especially dim view of screwing people you work with, which she calls asking for trouble.

Criminal Record
Across various human kingdoms, named on warrants for theft, arson, manslaughter, murder, grave robbing, assault, lewd conduct, random war crimes, banditry and so forth. Some jail time, some hard labour, some fines paid, more settled privately or just skipped out on until the magistrate died or retired. Copies of records may exist in Undercity, but most are decades or more out of date. The most recent are 15 years old, dating from Lordaeron, arrest warrants for involvement with a group called Black Dog Bandits.

In Silvermoon, a citation for assault on a member of a noble house over a century ago. Charges dropped at the request of the Thundereye family, also involved in the same dispute.

Random character factoids
Hal was rolled when paladins were the only belf tank class - IC, she is a plain soldier and all the pally spells are weak-ass pyromancy. She'll laugh at anyone calling her a mage, and to a mage her very limited charms are kiddie hexes.

Hal refuses to be called Miss, or worse, Miss Gillawyn, by anyone. The lone exception is Winri, who gets away with Miss Gil - possibly because she's a teenage girl rather than a grown man.

Hal has a liberal collection of minor scars, the norm for someone who's been fighting for a century without access to healy magic. The severed ear is impossible to hide, but the other major ones she covers: a mauled right thigh under normal clothing and old thick burn scars covering most of her hands under leather gloves.

Though Hal knows no healing magic, she's quite handy with the field medicine and combat drug area of alchemy. She makes liberal use of a particular compound of dreamleaf and gromsblood, which lasts about an hour and works roughly like an opiate/amphetamine combo - pain relief, focus, and enough stupid to keep a badly wounded soldier fighting, then a hard crash into tired and depressed after. Addictive in longterm use, naturally.

She hates cats, but tends to kindness with both whores and street kids.

Inspirations and concept
Inspired in equal parts by Gemma Teller, the fiercely maternal Queen of Bikers in the excellent TV-series Sons of Anarchy, and by Joe Abercrombie's sociable but sociopathic Northman killers, Logen Ninefingers and Caul Shivers. Somewhere along the line she also picked up a bit of Deadwood's Trixie.

The half-elf bit is for two reasons. First, because it fit the personality template better than pureblood. Second, because I'm tired of seeing it played with emo inferiority complex, loving parents who braved the interspecies romance gap and died tragically, and bonus "imma extra badass because imma cool halfblood". Get over it already - Hal's a my experiment in what might become of a person determined to survive and win, in spite of being persona non grata to two species.

The core idea of Hal as a character: a manipulative and amoral sociopath who nevertheless has long since decided that hating people, for any reason at all, is about as useful as hating gravity. Since emotion is so very hard to come by it shouldn't be wasted on enemies, and since kindness is unnatural every scrap of it is important, and revenge is the most pointless thing there is because then you've been victimised twice - first by the deed and then by the things you push yourself to do to get "justice". The design is mostly because the player is endlessly tired of the ever-escalating revenge-dramas RP'ers so often get into, and takes an evil pleasure in sabotaging them with characters who just refuse to play for very long. While Hal falls squarely in the evil camp because of her failure to appreciate basic human rights and decency, that same failure makes her a strong supporter of forgiveness and rational responses.

Stories
Winterspark uses Livejournal instead of forums - Hal's stuff is here. A few storyline specific tags:

My Shadow - Ending the vendetta that Hal came to Silvermoon to escape

The Bad Old Days - Hal's nasty past with Dog Company

The Client - Striking a deal with a demonologist is maybe not the smartest thing to do

Thunder - About that cannibal troll shaman that follows Hal about