Shetani Delacourte

The woman is small, not at all overly impressive. If anything can be said about Shetani it is that she is scrawny. Her hair is dirty blonde, and it hangs in her eyes a lot of the time. But despite her scrawny size and overall unintimidating appearance, the woman has a soft dignity to her; walks with her head high, and her shoulders out. There is nothing pronounced about her (to the scale, she ranks about a seven out of ten attractiveness wise, and is accepting of this) and she does look quite average, all things considered.

But it is to her advantage that she looks this way. Shetani’s back is laced with vertical scars, thin like the remnants of a willow whip, and across her shoulders lay the marks of a knife. Both sets given from different people, one from her father and one from a lover who went near-mad with possessiveness, but Shetani hides away the scars (literal) of her past life with a sense of propriety. She must keep them hidden. Her history is her own.

The woman’s clothing leans towards classy and expensive, though truth be told a good friend makes most of her clothing. She wears dresses and blouses and nice pants, and often puts flowers in her hair, flowers that offset her eyes.

She's never been much, dear Shetani; it's to her advantage that she's been nothing and spent most of her time being nothing, aggressively being nothing (except for the Best Cook In Hryst. She's become that by word of mouth and celebrates it quietly in her own fashion.) because every other member of her family has been something, and that Something has been fatal. She is the last of her family's name, and that knowledge is quiet and unsettling. It'd be for anyone, but her especially. She never wanted violence, or a rush, or anything like that, but her father got his sorry hide killed, and Hush has kept to herself. She's the Living, when her family's mentioned she gets uncomfortable.

Crime rankles her. Shetani has spent years escaping from the shadow of a notorious thief father, and it has now become her worst-kept secret. Populace Awareness indeed: they know she's the daughter of a bandit but her nose is squeaky-clean, as it always is. Fact: Shetani is survivor type and hides that beneath the veneer of a shop owner and a chef who can't stand that she has to slaughter her own meat.

Shetani’s gift has served to give her a little bit of confidence. Once upon a time the girl quivered at the slightest noise, and now, she’s still afraid (don’t mistake that, she’s still easily flustered and distressed, but it is merely a little hidden), but she can counteract that. The gifts she’s been given serve her well, and Shetani is…proud of them. She is proud. Years ago she wouldn’t have been. She isn’t bold, or overly brave, but she is, to say the least, courageous. As her mother told her the day before she was murdered by her father, “Courage is standing up when you’re afraid”. Shetani has yet to make a courageous stand, but then again, she’s not had the chance to.

She likes to think she would.

Awareness: understanding of the situation around her and what will be needed to get out alive. Shetani isn’t ashamed of herself for having lied and quivered to escape a robbery or two, when she was a traveler. Survivor Type, she calls herself, when she gets down in the dumps about not being good enough and doubts what she has done with herself, and Survivor Type she is. Number One is who must be looked out for. Herself, herself, herself. Shetani will cut and run if she needs to, and this lends itself naturally to:

Shetani doesn’t trust well at all. Her father stole and near the end of his life he murdered (her mother) and her siblings bungled right into their graves. All along the way people came in and out of her mouth smiling and happy, offering their hands in alliance and care. Shetani herself was the arm candy of a rather belligerent thief of a woman, a member of a gang of thieves, and Shetani refuses to recount that experience to a soul, for why should she, it is her own experience, her own scars all across her shoulderblades (violence comes from thieves when they fail too much, and Shetani is a coward enough to let the violence sweep across her because if she doesn’t, it may well take her life, at least, when it’s threatened directly). This leads into:

Acquiescence: play the obedient dog role until the moment is right to finally stand up and declare solitude and independence. It’s worked once or twice and Shetani has begun to rely upon it for her regular well-being.

Shetani is a master chef. She whips up pastries and meat dishes and vegetable cakes with no issue at all, and it has been said that she is a wonderful devil with a knife, in the kitchen. She loves it, and loses herself to her cooking, a deep joy filling her once her work is completed. Nothing makes her feel better than the completed dish.

Shetani’s gift provides her with the following perks, as her senses are enhanced.

enhanced reflexes: shetani’s reflexes give her half the reaction time of a normal person. If someone has extremely enhanced reflexes they may be faster than her, but as it is, Shetani can consistently react faster than an aggressor, but the trouble is she must activate the ability, as it is the only of her gifts that is not constantly ‘on’, shall it be said. It enables her to throw accurately, and it is not at all implausible that Shetani could accurately nail someone between the eyes with a knife. Shetani’s ‘enhanced reflexes’ skill is active for three posts. If the skill is used for all three posts, that is the only post it may be used for in the thread. If, however, the skill is used for ONE or TWO posts, then it has an equal post cooldown, and then can be used again, until total thread usage equals three posts.

enhanced smell: She is able to smell well enough to track a four-day-old scent through many other scent trails—it is for this reason that Shetani is one of the best cooks, for the sense of taste ties into the sense of smell, and shetani can use this to her advantage.

Unfortuately for Shetani, she can also smell disease upon others. People who are sick reek of illness, and those with tumors stink of rotting flesh and pain—and the one or two times Shetani has happened upon a corpse, have wreaked havoc upon her olfactory system.

Shetani has the ability to follow single scents in the surroundings of the average market square. In addition, once she 'locks on' to a smell, she can track it down for a great distance. She cannot smell things a mile away, but she must be within the aforementioned 'market square' distance to even get the scent in the

eyesight boost: Shetani is capable of seeing minute details in her environment. She has the eyesight strength equivalent to several animals and has used this to her advantage more than once.

More importantly? Vision is enhanced with the presence of light. As long as there is a light source, Shetani can see perfectly, as if it is daytime.

Shetani is born to a woman who marries a man out of lust and not love; she is young and he promises her adventure with a roguish smile and a smirk that makes her go weak at the knees. She is not the first to be born, for the man and his wife had children, and she was the final one, born a full three years behind her closest sibling in age. She is a precocious child, headstrong, until she is cornered at a young age by a man from the Hryst guard who demands the location of her father (she does not know where her father is at, at the time, and smiles and offers to tell her father later that he has someone looking for him), and finds out about the legacy her family has.

It makes her sick when she realizes that her father is a cut-throat thief. He kills if someone sees him stealing, and they want his head—or at the least, to throw him in jail. Shetani will give him up herself, if she can, but she can’t. She can’t, because her story really begins as her siblings start to die in ridiculous ‘last stands’ to gain the approval of the father, and the father begins to lash out at them. She is ten when her first sibling dies, and she is eleven when her father demands she join his business.

Shetani, of course, refuses; she does not want his legacy for her own, even at that tender an age. So he beats her until her back is raw and Shetani realizes then that there is no better route than cowardice, for it is her quiet nature that keeps the aggressors away, and when she tries to stand up, they harm her. She takes no part in protecting her father's locations. The rest lie and bluff, but Shetani merely exists, while refusing to mention him at all; she is the ghost child of the family, and is shunned for it.

She is sixteen when her father murders her mother and then gets himself killed with his own stupidity (it is often said that a fool and his money are soon parted, but a fool who threatens someone with a family, when that person is also a guard for Hryst, is swiftly parted from his life), but by then, they are nothing to her. She has rather callously turned away from her family; the world knows who she is, the daughter of a cutthroat and a mother who knew and did nothing to stop the cutthroat's business, but she doesn’t mind that, because they also know that she is an honest girl. At seventeen she falls in with a thief by way of Wilde who sweeps her off her feet, and Shetani, though she doesn’t participate in the lifestyle of the woman, finds herself in love. Or at least what she believes is love.

When Wilde’s big heist fails, the woman takes her anger out on Shetani and the girl in turn stands up, and packs her items, and leaves, with shoulders cut near to the bone, and it is the night she sleeps restless and alone in the wild that she gains her gift, a touch from Brynne, and it is that morning she begins construction on her little cabin where she now lives, far from civilization (or as far as she feels comfortable) and now, Shetani’s reputation reaches all along Hryst. She is a solid chef, able to make complicated meals with ease, and her reputation is golden. Her faith in the goddess is absolute, even if sometimes she wonders if Brynne plans out their misfortunes. Perhaps, she muses, it is to make the people as a whole stronger through suffering (even though she hopes that isn't so, and maybe the goddess just cannot help everyone, and the gift was compensation).

Sometimes, men and women whisper about her bloodline, but Shetani pretends to be deaf to it. She is not so petty as to fall for tricks.