Anja

[Anja]

Name: Anja (Ahn-yah)

Age: 340

Proportions: Four feet tall, with a four foot long body. Up to eight feet if up on her hind legs, but this position is difficult to hold, and utterly pointless beyond scare tactics.

Weight: 80 pounds

Race: Arach-Dwarf (Jewel Spider of the Orb Weaver family, daughter of an unwilling and terrified Dwarven male from the frozen north, and of the poor dwarf’s defiler, the Greatweaver Gwyllyn.)

http://www.spiderzrule.com/jewelspider.htm

Personality:

Evil, in the cleanest, most technical sense of the word. She is a complete psychopath. Anja has absolutely no conscience, nor can she come anywhere close to comprehending the concept of morality. She will use those around her for personal gain at every opportunity, and she expects those around her to behave in the same manner. She finds it truly shocking and confusing when they don’t. The only thing she loves is weaponry: The moulding and crafting of physical matter and energy into a device that is perfect for the bearer, an enhancement, an enforcer, an extension of one’s ambition! She will build weapons until her arms give out, and then she will lie down and die bitterly on her cave floor, friendless and full of hatred.

Quirks of her personality include a mild paranoia, an eye for detail, and a penchant for precision, perfection, and absolute exactitude in all that she does. She is slow to anger, instead quick to find sick, black humour in what would offend most others. She seems to do it almost out of spite…

Habitat

Anja has, for a century now, lived in the sewers under Marn. She mostly survives by sorting through the runoff and waste from the city above, or by eating whatever aquatic life slips through the grate from offshoots of the Ofriyu Mar. She has covered the waterways in tough, sticky webbing, and occasionally catches a lost human or creature that, for god knows what reason, has decided to take a day trip through the faeces of the populace.

Before this miserable existence, She lived in an expansive cave with her mother in the mountains north of Marn.

Physical Description:

Anja is somewhat of an aesthetic enigma. The jewel spider features of her body are repulsive and downright horrifying, yet strangely beautiful. Her Dwarven features are hellishly ugly, but much less frightening. She is divided centaur-like, with a jewel spider’s body, and the upper body of a dwarf where the head of the spider ought to start. In addition, her Dwarven upper body sports some very distinct arachnid features. Beneath the surface, there can be seen thick, pulsating veins of black, as though her spider body is creeping up and through her insides. These grasp and entwine her neck and chin, one touching through her left eye and discolouring the crystal blue iris a waspish deep red.

Her Dwarven torso is about two and a half feet from head to navel. She is bare-breasted, pale, saggy and wrinkled, like a rubbery, moist raisin. Despite this, her arms are frighteningly muscular and strong, and she has been known to literally tear a man limb from limb. She is no fighter, though, and this strength is begotten of, and given to, her passion for weapon crafting. Her face is crumpled and ravaged with age, yet her eyes vibrate with hatred, passion, magic and knowledge. Her hair is a dirty, cobwebbed white, and seems to spool out interminably, draping itself over the floor and walls of her lair and getting in everywhere. One would think that it would continuously get caught in the webbing, but it seems to just glide right off when it comes in contact with her nets. Not having left her little grotto in over a century, she has made its continued growth somewhat of a pet project.

As for her lower body: Her main core is a glistening, deep black, and adorned with six wild and beautiful spiked gems of blue, three on either side. These are sharp and vicious, but the bulbous mass of flesh around them is soft and vulnerable. Her underside is a hard exoskeletal core, embracing her thread sac and egg sac. She has, in addition to her Dwarven arms, eight thick, black legs that were once incredibly strong and fast, but at this venerable stage in life, she has difficulty even walking for long periods. Her front legs especially grow weaker, having borne her girthy Dwarven body for 340 years. This frailty is visible in the form of tremors and uncertain steps, and an increasing need for rest and inactivity.


Possessions:

Anja does not believe in money, for she has seen that it is a fickle mistress. She is, however, somewhat of a collector of useless items. Knickknacks and favours are the only payment she will accept for her services. She also has collected a goodly amount of furniture in the century she has spent living under Marn. To date, a cast-iron table with two matching chairs, for her humanoid acquaintances, a chest of drawers in which she keeps a wide assortment of collected items, like hairbrushes, pocketbooks, and whatever else she has found on the unlucky suitors of her webs.


Powers & Strengths:

Beefy Arms
Anja's arms are the only useful part of her body. She has been known to tear an adult male human apart in her younger days. Her strength has decreased mildly since then, but she still has more than enough strength to carry out the difficult tasks her work demands of her.

Weaponsmith
Anja’s greatest passion and strength is weaponry. She can make a weapon perfectly suited to almost any customer, and it will be of a greater calibre and quality than the product of any other smith she has every encountered or heard tell of in her 340 years. Her aptitude for weaponry goes beyond skill: Anja has a spiritual understanding of a creature’s bond to its weapon, an understanding stricken with deep reverence, engrained in her soul.

“Sousing”, or “Webforging”
Her mother was the last of the Greatweavers, and, from the day Anja was born, the bitter and lusty old jewel spider worked to teach her the secrets of a binding process, called Sousing. It involves wrapping two pieces of matter, one living or containing active energy of some sort, and one dead, on the same web, and weaving out between them, in correct sequence and type, the myriad letters of Sousing. This mantric plaiting of energy and matter, if performed expertly, will infuse the two entities irreversibly together into a temporarily malleable state that allows the Souser to shape it as she wishes. Items in this state are referred to in the Great Orb Weaver tongue as Druiznn, or in the common tongue, Ephemerae.
They appear first as little spores in the centre of the web. As the Souser works the spore without touching it, all the while speaking the letters of Sousing, the stronger materials from each cocooned object will win over the weaker, and the energy of the one will envelop the whole, becoming it and submitting to it completely, entering the spore through encoded strands of varied light energy. The leftover bits of matter left in the husks can form any random little thing, invariably useless and ugly, such as a large, self-sufficient zit, or more often than not, a pile of ashes or dust.
Anja, to her knowledge, is the only Souser left in the known world, and her skill is formidable indeed. It has proven to be a forging method vastly superior to fire. Its possibilities are great. If a customer wishes to have a magical weapon created, Anja needs only have an item of any sort, somehow saturated in the desired magic energy, with which she can Souse the raw weapon material. It is a dangerous procedure, and it requires a deft hand to perform safely. If some forms of saturated magic were to be “spilled”, or if they came into contact with the wrong thing, the potential for disaster would be unthinkably great.
Other possibilities depend greatly on the materials used, and not least, the order/type of Sousing letters drawn and uttered. For example, if a water-filled prism is webforged with a live whip scorpion, and Soused with the letters of Protection and Fire, it will create a hard, diamond-like substance that unleashes a flood of water when nearby fire threatens its owner. However, if the same substances are Soused with the letters of Reaction and Love, the owner's new sword might spew water every time he's around a girl he likes. Embarrassing...
There is one other catch: A webforged item will invariably require some form of signature from its intended owner. Anja’s creations are living entities, and will only submit to one in which it recognizes itself. While the newly Soused form is still an Ephemera, the customer must touch one part of it, thereby marking it with the customer’s own imprint. This often creates a form of local energy burn that permanently weakens the affected area to a small degree (usually greater than mere discomfort, but rarely so great as to be crippling). This burn is referred to among Sousers as Dwailyith ac Swuovn, or in the common tongue, the Bridler’s Stigma. The greater the burn, the greater the connection between master and slave. However, opening one’s energy up to a Druiznn (or Ephemera) for any longer than a brief tap, is extremely dangerous, and can result in all manner of grotesque occurrences: Immolation, loss of all bodily fluids, possession of one’s soul or body by the Druiznn, or heaven knows what else. If a Bridler’s Stigma does not appear after one such brief tap, then the energies of the intended master and slave are not compatible, and under no circumstances should another tap be attempted while the weapon is still Ephemeral.
A weapon leaves the Ephemeral state and becomes "real" once it has given someone the Bridler's Stigma. Once "real", the weapon will be bound to its Bridler in accordance with the depth/power of the Stigma. For example, a Bridler's Stigma that cripples someone's arm permanently, covering it entirely and causing the Bridler to endure abominable pain for years afterwards, would bind the weapon to its Bridler to such a degree that the two are practically one entity. It might fly into its Bridler's hand when he reaches for it lying on the floor, or it might, if it has some kind of offensive function, perform that function when it is picked up by somebody other than the Bridler. It will also greatly increase the Bridler's expertise in handling his weapon, as it has become, essentially, an extension of the self.
This degree of Bridler's Stigma would usually require more than a fleeting contact with the Ephemera, something that is extremely dangerous, and very likely to lead to one's demise, or worse, possession by the Ephemera.
Most "Bridled" weapons do not have such a strong bond to their Bridler that they cannot be used or touched by others. They are merely more suited to their Bridler than to any other being.

Longevity
Anja’s heart, lungs, and other organs are tough as nails. Her arachnid heritage has mixed well with her Dwarven blood, allowing her to live long past a Dwarf’s usual 300 year life span. Although, anybody that took a look at her infirm and disgusting upper body would say that she should have been dead decades ago.
The other obvious advantages of an increased life span are that she is much wiser and more knowledgeable than she once was, and that she has managed to establish for herself a comfortable, hermetic, and peaceful life, supported by a tact and circumspect array of business partners and clientele.

Camouflage/Stealth
Anja moves in near-perfect silence, lives in darkness, and she knows her cave better than the back of her hand. Spending most of her time nestled into her webs, with her cobweblike hair draped everywhere around, even one with the means to pierce the darkness would probably not lay mark to her until she moved.

Vibration Sense
Her spider lineage has given Anja a 6th sense of sorts: A finely tuned inner meter for measuring vibrations in her webbing. Her threads span the sewers in strategically arranged architectures, so that she can, by feeling their vibrations, determine an incredible array of facts about any living being that comes near them: Exact proximity, weight, height, general shape, footfalls, even the rhythm of their heart and cardiovascular systems. Through her webbing, she can even glean such facts from those wandering the city above. In this way, she can, to some degree, keep track of the movements and doings of those with whom she is acquainted (a fact to which they are not privy).


Weaknesses:

Frailty/Slowness
Anja is very nearly crippled, so her brawny little arms would be of almost no use to her if it came down to a hand-to-hand fight, because the rest of her is far too slow to ever catch or overpower a moving, resisting target. Sometimes, her front legs give out on her, and she buckles to the floor. The only time she ever catches anything is when it runs into one of her webs, and most creatures are deft enough to step around them, unless she’s absolutely filled the area with them. She spins the webs slowly, and her thread sac does not spew out her thread like a projectile, so this cannot be used as an effective weapon either.

Out of Touch
Anja hasn’t been out of the sewers in over a century now, and, though her connections keep her well informed of technological advances, political movements, and other information that might affect her business, she really is quite out of touch with the outside world. She relies heavily on her translator, Puck, on the rare occasion that she entertains or allows visitors. She only speaks haltingly in the Common Tongue, having been raised to speak the Greatweaver Tongue of her ancestors.

Fear of Azomiy
Azomiy, the Pythoness, is such a great threat to Anja that she has not left the sewers since the passing of her mother and protector, the Greatweaver Gwyllyn. Even the mention of Azomiy’s name will cause Anja to jump and scuttle for sanctuary in the darkest conduit. This fear is a secret she has shared with nobody but Puck and Benjamin.

Fuck-Ugly
Anja is so horrendous-looking, and so offensive to the eyes, that she would surely be beaten, chased out of town, and most likely savagely stomped to death were she to show herself in town. Even her Dwarven features seem more a mockery of the two-armed, humanoid form, and most Dwarves would probably rather take their own lives than see her lineage confirmed.




NPCs:

Puck
Puck, Anja’s most trusted associate, almost never leaves her side, and lives with her in the sewers. Puck is an elvish scholar, a Master of Linguistics educated at Marn University, during a time in which there was very little demand for that sort of thing. He was almost, a century ago, one of Anja’s victims, back when she was in her prime, a veritable demigoddess of wrath and destruction. However, with her mother recently dead, and her own education in the common tongue sorely insufficient, she came to realise (after a brief interrogation) that the middle-aged elf would be of more use to her alive than dead.
She offered him wealth and freedom, in exchange for absolute secrecy, and permanent services as a translator, and Puck immediately took the deal, partly out of fear of death, and partly because it was a tremendously good deal, given the hard times Thar Shaddin was in just then. Anja, following the death of her mother, continued her heritage of weaponsmithing, now taking on the business end of things in addition to the craftsmanship. When the sellers and clients would come around, or send their emissaries over, it was now Anja to whom they spoke, and it was through Puck that Anja spoke back.
This arrangement continues today, both Puck and Anja now a century older. About seven feet tall, lanky, quiet, and extremely well-mannered, Puck does his job extremely well, and in return, he is well taken care of. He is still somewhat put off by Anja, and he is sometimes caught looking at her with vaguely masked disgust, especially now that her body has deteriorated so.

Benjamin
Anja would have no clientele were it not for the affable and well-connected Benjamin. The old elf was originally a friend of Puck’s. Puck recommended him for the job, and was sent out to find him and bring him back. This was eighty years ago.
At first, Benjamin was terrified of the “nasty little abomination”, but he trusted Puck implicitly, as he always has and always will. Since that first meeting, Benjamin has been responsible for bringing Anja customers from far and wide throughout Pal Tahrenor, and, thanks to his swift travels and his wise and careful dealings, Anja has developed a steady and trustworthy customer base.
Benjamin is tall and thin, like Puck, extremely well-dressed, jovial, and outgoing. Everyone around him seems to like him instantly, and his suavity and respectful carriage only serve to reinforce this first impression. He has a good heart and a nose for business, a rare combination that requires a great deal of personal strength to pull off successfully.

The Pythoness Azomiy
Slayer of the Greatweaver Gwyllyn, Azomiy is a trickster and a murderer of the worst sort. Thirty feet long she is, with a head like a sledgehammer. All of the animals for miles around run from her, for her stare causes one to black out in fear. One that has escaped the clutches of her eyes says that they are gateways to hell itself. Beyond this mystery, she does not seem to be supernatural in any way.
She makes her home in the mountains to the North, as far as Anja knows, but nobody seems to have seen nor heard tell of the Pythoness since the death of Gwyllyn. Anja believes that the snake is out to murder her as well, as she is the last remaining creature with the blood of a Greatweaver in her veins, and furthermore, the daughter of Gwyllyn, her archenemy.




History:

To properly trace Anja’s path, one must start at its root: the Greatweaver Gwyllyn, the last of the Great Orb Weaver spiders known to stalk the earth in the aftermath of the Changers’ War. Fourteen feet tall she stood, and she was a veritable warlord in her domain. She lived to be nearly one thousand years old, and her jewels were fit to dazzle an Empress. In a cave in the mountains to the north of Marn is where she made her home, and it was in this cave that Anja was conceived.

The young dwarf had presumably been on some kind of treasure hunt. A post-murder inspection of his wares revealed that he had borne with him, besides all the usual necessities for travel, a pickaxe, a point chisel, a crack hammer, and a scale. As the fates would have it, he picked the wrong cave. Gwyllyn knew that she was growing old, and she could not be sure of how much time she had left. She had also long planned on breeding with a dwarf, for their excellence in craftsmanship was a trait she desired for her offspring.

And so she took him, violently and quickly. After this, she dispatched him without mercy. Once she had been fertilized, she used her Sousing to ensure a successful hatching. The result was an abomination the likes of which Pal Tahrenor had never before seen, and hopefully would never see again. She looked at the thing fondly, and named it Anja.

The cave was Anja’s home for 240 years of her life. Gwyllyn raised her to carry on her trade of weapon crafting, and taught her the secrets of Sousing, to that end. Anja was always cold and emotionless, which Gwyllyn saw as a sign of great strength. The young dwarfspawn grew quickly, and learned even more quickly. Her Dwarven hands were well suited to both the menial tasks of metallurgy, tanning, etc., as well as the more esoteric art of Sousing weapons to create superior, webforged masterpieces.

One thing her mother always taught her was to beware the Pythoness, the ghoulish Azomiy. Long had she been the archenemy of the Great Orb Weavers, and she had slain all of Gwyllyn’s kin. It was told that she could move faster than even the great Widow warriors to the north, those creatures of fable that had died out when the Ice came. The Jewel clan, it seemed, was even easier prey…

Gwyllyn often told Anja a story of how, centuries past, she had once tricked Azomiy, and lured her into a farmer’s cattle pen, where she was nearly trampled to death. On that day, Azomiy had vowed to murder her. But Gwyllyn was not afraid of anything…

One hundred years ago, The Pythoness Azomiy bore down through the cave entrance, and murdered Anja’s mother in her sleep. Anja, who was supposed to have been there by her side, keeping watch, was instead out closing a deal with a cowardly nobleman for an enchanted fencing rapier. She returned in time to see Azomiy roiling away from the cave entrance, and quickly hid behind a bush until the great pythoness was gone. All of the beautifully orchestrated skeins of the Greatweaver Gwyllyn had been riven asunder, and inside, she lay in perfect stillness. Anja felt no sense of loss. What really stung was that a proud Greatweaver had fallen to trickst’rous assassination at the fangs of a coward. Her mother, like her, was heartless, and she had raised her spawn accordingly. Besides, Anja knew better than to go after the Pythoness.

Instead, she fled south until she met the Ofriyu Mar. This winding river she followed until she found an entrance duct to the sewers of Marn, still far away from the town. This she crawled into without hesitation, and made the waste and drainage system for the town her new home and her new base of operations. There, she met Puck, an elf that had wandered into the sewers looking for his father, and ended up wandering right into one of Anja’s webs. It was only with an exceptionally smooth tongue that Puck managed to escape death that day. Since then, he has served faithfully as Anja’s translator, and even brought in a friend of his, Benjamin, to help with Anja’s business.



(To the mods: I’m guessing that I won’t be making very many weapons for PCs. I mainly just love the idea, and I want her on the boards as one of the many colours of Marn. I intend to use her as a quest-jogger, basically giving other characters something to do by fulfilling one of her “favours”, and I also intend to play out the Pythoness story a little more. I put the above conditions in here in order to limit the powergaming potential of the “customer” character, and, in this interest, I also propose that all PCs that wish me to make them a weapon be in communication with a mod as the story is played out. I, for one, promise not to make insane WTFPWN weaponry, it will usually just be weaponry with very unique properties in exchange for a little energy burn. See my writing sample for an example of how I’d like to play Anja, and please let me know if you think of any better ways to limit the Sousing concept.)


Writing Sample

Cold rain descended in a sombre, uniform sheet from the gutter above, ending in a grey-green, foamy tribute to the muck and mire that trickled between Puck’s toes, and warming up to a sickly bathwater as it began its journey through the waterworks of Marn. The sallow light from the grating faded quickly in a dusty gradient along the cool, moist brickwork, emphasising the dust that clung to patches of mould and day-old blood. The stench of faeces was omnipotent here, permeating every minute of every day. After 100 years, it still bothered the old elf from time to time. He impatiently prodded his companion, wishing this excursion to be over.

“Anja, what of it?”

It was a dark corner that received his words, and a long, steep tunnel, their echo. In said corner perched Anja, peering shrewdly down into the recesses of fog that danced slowly round the descending shaft. “Nothing, my friend. Yet it might be wise to set a few precautions. We know not where it leads, therefore we know not what might come to visit from its depths.”

Of course, Anja was worried about Azomiy. Fear of the Pythoness was the only thing that had ever caused her to part from rational thought. This was a case in point. Puck sighed.

“Anja, she is not going to crawl from the depths of the sewers, through the shit and the piss and the unborn foetuses of Marn to find you. Remember how she tore the skein of your mother like it was cloth? Nay, if she comes, she will come from the Ofriyu Mar runoff, and your webs there will do little to stop her. There is no point in wasting webbing on this - hole.”

But Anja had already set to work, covering the shaft entrance with layer after layer of thick, tough cord. Her little frame scuttled diligently and feverishly back and forth, clutching the edges of the pipe for support. Suddenly, she dropped to the ground. Her quaking legs had given out on her for the third time that day. Puck shook his head as he spoke.

“It’s time to go home, Anja. You are weary and need rest.”

As they made their way back to their usual corner of the sewers, Anja stopped occasionally to feel the ground beneath the tips of her legs, and place a web in a carefully chosen corner. Through this network of webbing, she would be able to feel it from any part of the sewers when something was disturbing the shaft.

Soon, they were back in the region where Anja was most comfortable, the northwest end, directly beneath the scrapyard. Her finely tuned sense for vibrations gave her the spoor of Benjamin in the city above. The elf was making his way through the industrial district, towards the sluiceway behind the power plant, and, judging by his footfalls, would be with them in ten minutes or so. …and he had Rivey with him! Lucian Rivey, a young nobleman with a penchant for cutting older women up with surgical precision and making artwork of them.

‘Yes, young Lucian, quite the bucket of psychology you are,’ thought Anja. ‘Well, no matter. It’s none of my business what the little shit chooses to do with those weak, spoiled sluts.”

From within a little chest of drawers that she kept against the wall, she took out a finely crafted, mahogany box, acquired in town by Benjamin for a week past. Inside the box, set in velvet, were seven spaces for tools of capture, murder, penetration, and incision, with which the twisted Mr. Riley could fulfil his questionable desires. Setting it carefully atop a cast iron table, Anja turned to an array of webs splayed out around the room. There were seven little webs in total, each with two cocoons of thick, sticky silk embedded on either side. In between, in the center of each web, the letters of Sousing that had whispered red and black for two weeks now lay cold. In the middle perched a spore. This spore was a newly birthed Druiznn: An Ephemera. Seven in total. Within a few minutes, under the expertise of Anja, each one would become a callous tool for rape, murder, and creative butchery.

She began on the left. Force of habit, perhaps, for it really made no difference. Reaching in with her Dwarven hands, almost touching the spore, she uttered the letters in the Greatweaver tongue, in an ancient and terrible dialect known only to the master Sousers. One after the other, they flowed from her lips. The cocoons fell away at the edges of the web, one collapsing into dust, and the other becoming heavy and landing in a pile of bubbly sludge on the floor. As they collapsed each into their states of refuse, they released a long series of barely visible strands of light, each flowing through the web and into the spore. The light was blackish, in accordance with the energies used in the Sousing, and as it penetrated the Ephemera, one could see the little speck growing and growing, spilling out and expanding in a membraneous glow. Anja trilled her fingers, caressing the Druiznn without touching it, continuing to mutter the secret language of her ancestors. Soon, under her graceful plying and kneading, it shrunk to a diminutive size, and there it sat before her, clutched by the skein around it, a glistening cruel little needle, four inches long, and black as night. She left it there, moving on to the second web. It would remain an Ephemera until it had been removed from the net.

In this way she worked, focusing deeply, and never looking up. She was busy on the sixth web when Benjamin entered the room with the delightful Mr. Riley, and Puck motioned them to silence. He knew better than to allow anyone to disturb Anja while she was working. Quietly, they sat down in two cast-iron chairs by the table. The young pervert gazed at the mahogany box on the table in front of him, and his fingers trembled ever so slightly.

Soon, Anja looked up from her work and motioned for Lucian to follow her to the first web. She spoke haltingly in the common tongue, her voice thick and gurgly. Even the psychotic nobleman felt queasy at her two simple words. “Touch it.”

He reached out to touch it, and Puck came in and stopped him quickly. “Not with the fingers, sir. Perhaps the forearm, or the temple, or the shoulderblade.” Puzzled, Lucian touched the needle with his forearm, and then jerked back his arm suddenly. There was a black abrasion there, and the smell of evaporated flesh around it was sickly and forbidding. He yelped in pain, then laughed in an odd way. The pain was not going away.

“Fuck, that hurts!” He was stretching the arm back and forth, grimacing and trying to hold himself together. Anja saw this, and gurgled a slithering handful of words at him in the Greatweaver tongue. Pock translated for her:

“She says you’ll get used to it. The needle is now yours entirely. Pluck it from the web.”

Mr. Riley picked up the thing with his thumb and forefinger, gingerly, and ran his fingers up its smooth surface. Thin as a stitching needle, yet hard and impervious. He gripped its length in both hands and tried with all his might to bend or break it. Red in the face, he grinned in exaltation. “And this will burn deeply when it pierces the flesh, you say?” Images sprang into his mind: A submissive noblewoman, a lusty housewife cheating on her husband with him, suddenly going into spasms of pain as he slips it easily into her thigh…