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Sister Raya Vishel

Once you become who you are, you need no longer wobble between who you wish you were and who you fear to become.

Social Rank: 7
Concept: Faithful Fashionista
Fealty: Crownsworn
Family: Vishel
Gender: female
Marital Status: single
Age: 23
Birthday: 3/3
Religion: Pantheon
Vocation: Courtier
Height: average height
Hair Color: auburn
Eye Color: blue-green
Skintone: creamy fair

Description: With an understated touch of makeup, Raya's features truly come alive. She has a real knack for bringing out her lively blue eyes, beneath the high arch of eyebrows just a shade darker red-bronze than the coppery auburn of her long hair. Loose, that hair strikes in the midst of her shoulders, but often, it is woven into intricate braids or upswept into twists, highlighting the column of her throat, fair and swanlike. Her skin is smooth and fair, its pink glow almost blemishless but for a dark mole beneath one ear, and although there are a few freckles that the sun teases out upon the bridge of her nose, rarely does she permit them to be seen uncovered by makeup. Slim, clean lines define her youthful frame, as the fresh-faced brightness of her face, and there is a grace to her carriage that suggests a dancer's poise, studied and elegant, but not without the fulsome energy of her youth.

Personality: Grace, elegance, energy and verve: these combine, courtier-like, in Raya. Empathetic and warm, vivacious and bright, dedicated to aesthetics and a lover of fine things, she wishes for nothing more than to grow in the eyes of the public, to be a central figure for the Faith, to be _someone_. To perform dramatically would feed her heart and soul, to expand creatively would delight her mind and hands. She wants to be loved, and she gives freely of herself. But her everlasting drive will always be recognition. The thirst for identity runs deep, and hers may prove hard to quench.

Background: Raya Vishel was nobody. The daughter of nobody. She wasn't an orphan, no rags to riches story here. Oh, there were rags, actually. Actually there were a lot of rags. Her father collected them, and her mother seamed them into cheap clothing. She and her brothers and sisters worked together as launderers and patchers, and it wasn't really a great life, but it kept bread on the table and ale in the mug, and no one starved. Raya wanted more, but what did she want?

She was educated by the Solace, as many Arvani children are, and learned her letters, but more, her imagination was captured by the grandeur and pageantry of the Faith. The beauty (and wealth) on display in the shrines captured her youthful imagination, and so she went from carefully helping her mother with the laundry of the Boroughs to her lessons and prayers... and found that she was spending as much time as she could get away with at prayers. What a pious child, that Raya Vishel, always following the priests and asking them questions, trying to learn about Jayus and his crafts, trying to learn about Gloria and her honor, trying to learn about Gild and her charity.

When she grew older, she learned about how to behave herself, and she followed the priests with intent, and she insisted she wanted to be one when she grew up, and she was told to wait until she was older and that she'd want children when she grew up, and didn't her family need her? Of course, Father; of course, Sister; of course, of course, of course.

Raya went home to the Boroughs and worked on the laundry and worked on the sewing and worked on the artistry and dreamed of the life she could have as a devotee. When she was finally old enough, she went back to the Faith, and she worked as a disciple in the shrines, and she convinced the priests she did not want to have children, and that she wanted to serve the Church, where she could be someone; she could be a Godsworn Sister.

And she became one, and she was assigned a far-flung seraphy, far from home, where she trained with a Seraph in the Oathlands, learning everything that she hadn't already learned when she was a girl. But as she grew older and she grew wiser and she grew stronger in theology, she requested that she might return to Arx to study the Lost, for these new gods she could not learn so well in the Oathlands.

And so she returns, to take Arx as a humble Sister of the Faith: a striking, fashionable, elegant, courteous Sister of the Faith.

The capital will never know what hit it.

Name Summary