Name: Amihan Lehane
Age: 29
Occupation: Assistance Fence at Grasshopper’s, a pawnshop and fencer
Appearance:
An unassuming, mousey beauty with an ivory face, hazelnut eyes and tawny brown locks flowing down the middle of her back, Amihan’s diffident demeanour camouflages her in larger crowds. But in smaller, personal settings, many will notice that despite her reservations, Amihan has a lithe, athletic frame, potentially hiding a latent strength.
Typically dressed in modest merchant smocks, tunics and skirts in varying shades of blue, sand and mica, Amihan keeps her garments well-pressed and sanitary. But during her working hours at the shop, she dons her merchant father’s mottled indigo denim apron, stained and encrusted with years of running a fencer’s shop.
Personality:
Both her fathers are strong-willed and personable, but in sharp contrast, Amihan is mild and non-confrontational. She will usually defer leadership and decision-making to larger personalities, and authority figures at any capacity. But when she’s in her family’s shop Grasshopper’s, Amihan is quite skilled in interpersonal communication, suggestive persuasion and conflict resolution; her merchant father’s entrepreneurial zest and her swordsman father’s healthy delusion is infectious. The shop experience encourages a healthy amount of historical, cultural and reliquary knowledge, and so, Amihan is an avid reader, with her interests leaning towards anthropology, archeology and mythology.
Amihan’s relishes her opportunities to wander her city of Ettermire, particularly within the bowels of the Ankhas Library. Her fathers’ mantra was: “as long you came back smarter than when you left” – a by-product of the way of information dealers, and the Alerian pride in education. This open-skied meandering molded within her strong sense of freedom, and so whenever Amihan feels the quicksand of a bad situation, she may respond as a terrified animal, recklessly and erratically.
Equipment:
• a modest wardrobe of merchant garments like smocks, tunics and skirts,
• steel katana, a family heirloom that's a bit rusty and needs some metallurgic work (42 inches, including a 10 inch hilt of dark green cord and gold lacquered whale iconography)
• katana scabbard, deep glossy jade with a black ceremonial cord
• her father’s weathered denim apron (two sizes too big)
Skills:
• Katana swordsmanship, advanced technical with no battle experience
• Acrobatics and agility, advanced technical with no battle experience
• Antiquarian and cosmogenic knowledge, advanced
• Speechcraft and persuasion, expert communication but lacking in conviction
• Languages: fluent Tradespeak, conversational Drow and Dwarvish
Abilities:
Psychic roar – a latent ability triggered only in times of duress, so far only once before . Emanating from Amihan herself, a deafening roar (like a mad garbling of crocodile grunts and whale song) can be heard both psychically and physically by persons and creatures within ten feet. Anyone or thing within a foot distance of Amihan is blown back, as if pushed by an adult human, and suffer piercing migraines, which do subside with minutes. As a result of triggering the ability, Amihan also suffers a lecherous migraine.
Background / History:
Amihan Lehane is the adopted daughter of two gay fathers, Oboro Natsuki and Mikael Alhazared. Natsuki is a washed-up Akashiman swordsman who had never left the shores of Scara Brae, and Mikael is a rogueish trader who fell in love overnight, during a coastal expedition to said shores. The couple married and adopted Amihan from a Scara Brae orphanage within the year, after very little deliberation. The two were barrelling into the throes of harmonious, high-speed love.
Opening up Grasshopper’s, a shop for adventuring odds and ends (and also fencing, of the slightest kind) in the Scara Brae markets, the young family enjoyed a peaceful genesis. Six years later, Mikael received a kind word from some fencing clients of a potentially lucrative retail space. Open-concepted and located inside an actual building in the marketplace, the space was a ship’s ride away, to the city of Ettermire, in Alerar. And so the family rolled the dice, uprooting Grasshopper’s business, with the promise of financial success and a bright education for Amihan, one of Alerar’s main cultural touchpoints.
The roll was a good one – Mikael found marginally larger success with the Alerar incarnation of Grasshopper’s. Amihan relished in the move, bolstered by her new katana swordsman training with Natsuki. A handful of sessions with her father proved him to be a better parent than sensei. Instead, she was placed into katana and acrobatics lessons at a local Ettermire community centre, sponsored by liberal politicians heralding multiculturalism and outreach. She was a natural swordsman and athlete, participating regularly in market and community square exhibitions and finding reward in the art of learning a craft. Admittedly, she enjoyed her acrobatics much more than the sword; Natsuki’s waxed poetic on intention, a seed of which she did not lack but needed to water. The community programs were eventually cancelled (sensei retirement, tech modernity, political agendas, etc.), so at 18 years old, Amihan began helping out at Grasshopper’s, under the cheerful, scatter-brained tutelage of Mikael. Evolving from niche odds and ends to a general goods store (still operating as a fence the kinder scoundrels), she provided much relief at Grasshoppers, to the immense joy of her bumbling, aging parents.
An uneventful decade flew by, with Amihan bruised and beautified by the simple pleasures of serving her Ettermire community as a local shopkeeper. On a day both her fathers were out gallivanting the town on their weekly daytime date, a cryptic customer in greying, tattered robes came into the store. Referring to himself as Zampano, he peddled a simple wooden chest, containing musty tomes, torn scrolls, and a glimmering black diadem of unknown material. A misty black onyx jewel sat within the open mouth of what looked to be a fish or a whale, crowning the thing. Amihan couldn’t place the language written within the pages nor pinpoint what culture or faith the diadem sprung from. She considered herself a mercantile antiquarian, being that she’d worked at Grasshopper’s and frequented the Ankhas Library for over a decade. Zampano gave no concessions on the chest’s origins. Further questions sent him into a craze, with him storming out, leaving the chest and its contents to the bewildered Amihan.
Confused, Amihan inspected the diadem, placing a single finger on the rippling jewel. Then, a malignant vision of oiling flesh, pulsating filaments and cilia, and deep, black waters. Unbeknownst to her, Amihan emitted her first psychic roar. The shop exploded with a thunderous bellow, throwing down three shelves worth of Grasshopper’s merchandise to the floor. Amihan fainted, awaking seconds later to a migraine to end all migraines and merchant assistants of her marketplace neighbours, furrowing concerned brows. She was able to shoo away her spectators to clean the mess. Chalking up the curious incident to a spell of hunger or thirst or some other biological function, Amihan tucked Zampano’s chest somewhere in the shop’s basement storage room. She never bothered to relay the incident to her fathers.
Currently, Amihan is still working away at Grasshopper’s, with old Zampano’s withering visage blistering the strange incident with the dreaded diadem.
