Jester
Posted: Wed Jun 10, 2009 8:10 pm
Name: Jester (real name: Anise Fleming)
Age: 32
Race: Human
Height: 5’6”
Weight: 138 lbs
Physical Description: The first thing anyone notices about Jester is her clothes. She stands out in any crowd with her tunic of red and white diamonds, blue leggings, and gold-striped green cape. The cape has a two eared hood attached, with bells on the end of each ‘ear’ that jingle as she walks. All her clothes, though from a distance bright and new, are at a closer glance well worn and patched with various like-colored fabrics – only some of which are necessary, as Jester’s idea of a respectable jester is one with as many patches as possible. Her walking shoes are sensible leather boots.
Jester’s face is a mixture of general handsomeness and odd traits she inherited from her mother. She has a straight, prominent nose and short, dark blond hair, but a round face and slanted, almond-shaped brown eyes that hint at Tian Xian ancestry. All of her features together are striking rather than attractive. She has a full, stocky figure that seems at odds with her acrobatic ability, although she is in fact quite flexible. Her brown skin and thin cheeks are the result of days spent traveling out in the sun and rarely having enough to eat.
Possessions: Traveler’s pack: used but kept in good condition, containing an ordinary dress and scarf, a pair of tight-fitting, laced leather shoes, eight brightly painted wooden balls, six sheathed throwing knives, four decorated batons, a sealed pouch of oil, a candle, flint and steel, a lump of tallow, a cookbook, a knife, sowing supplies, and a plain white handkerchief. Strapped to her pack are a small, shabby-looking lute and a cooking pot.
A small amount of Bishani: hidden in a pouch sewn to the inside of her outfit.
Powers or Strengths: Miscellaneous Skills: because a traveling performer’s income is never certain, Jester has had to learn other skills to survive. She is somewhat proficient at cleaning, cooking, very basic carpentry, serving food, digging, and tending to small children. She is also an accomplished seamstress, as long as it’s not anything more complicated than attaching one piece of cloth to another.
Fluency: traveling across the world, Jester has learned enough to get by in, or at least recognize most languages.
Performance Art: Jester can carry a tune and knows a variety of songs. Her music making ability on the lute is mediocre at best; the instrument is mainly for show. She can do acrobatics such as flips, handstands, and rolls, and is generally agile and quick on her feet. She is an expert juggler, and can perform simple sleights of hand.
Convincing Smile: Jester has a performing persona that is cheerful, vocal, and outgoing. It takes several minutes of concentration to get into it, but she is pleasant to be around until the act is over. Occasionally she gets headaches as a result.
Stubbornness: Jester is extremely stubborn and will follow through with her goals unless the other party is very persuasive, or wields a blunt object. This can be both a strength and a weakness, as it leads to ignoring people with reasonable advice.
Literacy: she is mostly literate.
Cantrips: Jester, at times, can use minor magical skills in her acts. She doesn’t consider them to be real magic, however, and will deny it if the subject is brought up.
Telekinesis – the power to levitate an object no bigger than an apple and move it around. The object can’t be moved very far from its original position, about half a foot in each direction, and the magic will last at most five seconds.
Quick! Look Over There! – the ability to draw attention away from an object or person. The power only works if the audience is sufficiently distracted, and the caster can't distract people from herself. The object is visible during this period, but those affected by the spell ignore it. If the audience focuses on the object, the spell won’t work. Anyone passing after the spell takes effect can see the object normally.
Compel – lends magical strength to her voice. Everyone within hearing distance will feel an urge to gather around her, the urge stronger for those closer to her. If the audience is especially distracted or entranced, they can be convinced to part with money or take part in a play. No one with a stronger than average will will be affected, and listeners cannot be compelled to do things they don’t want to do.
Weaknesses: Contrasting Beliefs: one of Jester’s major weaknesses is the constant internal conflict between her religious upbringing and her experiences abroad. As a native of Shim, she believes that magic is evil and manipulative, and avoids it as much as possible. On the other hand, her travels have taught her that not all magic is wrong, and some of the most accomplished performers she knows use magic heavily in their acts. These opposing views lead to hesitation and stress, most noticeably affecting her magic. Any spell Jester tries to use has a spotty chance of working at best, especially if she is in a particularly realistic mood.
Hydrophobia: despite being a fisherman’s daughter, Jester can’t swim and has an almost paralyzing fear of water. This is due to an incident when she was ten and almost drowned in the Ofriyu Mar, and may have led to her choice of career.
Easily Shamed: Jester hates to look ignorant, and will make up information or pretend she knows the answer rather than ask for help, ironically leading to further ignorance. She will become angry if confronted about her lack of knowledge.
Snobbery: though looked down on as a country bumpkin in the cities, Jester nonetheless views herself as more intelligent than others regardless of circumstances unless they very obviously prove her otherwise. This leads to arrogant behavior on her part.
Scrappy without a Sword: Jester can throw a punch and knows how to fight dirty, but she has no weapon training at all, and would likely lose against an armed opponent.
History: You could say (and Jester’s family often did) that the trouble started with her old fool of a grandfather, Patrick Stolson, who fell in love with a bard named Qing from Daloyxiu and was just handsome enough to convince her to marry him. There must have been some faerie blood in her family, because she wasn’t exactly normal, or, for that matter, entirely human all the time. The rest of his family grumbled about it for a while, but Qing was a good cook and had a nice voice, even if her food had odd names and odder ingredients and she sometimes sang in two keys at once.
They had two daughters, and that, as her grandfather would say, was where the trouble really began. It’s fine to marry a foreigner, but having children with one is like putting your money on a gnomish horse; you never know when a spring will fall loose and the damn thing will turn green before exploding with you on it.
The loose spring Qing brought to the Stolson family turned out to be an incurable case of wanderlust; their first daughter, to the family’s horror, bought a boat and, determined to discover unknown lands, sailed down the Ofriyu Mar never to be heard from again. The second daughter, a quiet, smiling girl by the name of Emilia Huan, married a fisherman named Godric Fleming, of the highly respectable Shim Flemings, and settled down to life as a fisherman’s wife. The Stolsons, satisfied she had inherited nothing more than her mother’s eyes and skill in the kitchen, declared the matter closed.
Godric and Emilia Huan were contentedly married for some time, and as a result had three children: Godric the Younger, Coriander, and Anise (Emilia Huan loved to cook and had very persuasive arguments.). The first two were normal, dependable Flemings, despite Godric the Younger’s tendency to stare dreamily off into the distance if left alone long enough.
Anise Fleming thought she was a perfectly normal Fleming too until she was eleven years old. An accident a year earlier involving a dare about an old fishing boat, the overturning of said fishing boat, and two quarts of river water inhaled via her nasal passages had ended her desire to be around water in general, and so she was sent to the city with the fish wagon instead. Marn was a delightfully confusing place to her eleven-year-old senses, and she could’ve happily wandered among the shops and brothels forever if the circus hadn’t caught her eye.
It was a sad spectacle of a circus, in all honesty. The acrobats were tired, the Fantastic Marvels were a mangy monkey and a purple sheep, and the crowds weren’t biting. Bendrilio’s Kirkus of Amazing Splendor must have missed the announcement about the people of Marn’s general suspicion of anything Fantastic, Marvelous, or Splendor-shaped. But the ringmaster, perched on a barrel on the stage behind the Drunken Rat Tavern, announced each of their three acts with appropriate huzzah, and there was music, of a sort.
To Anise, it was magic. Not the bad magic, which killed people and cursed naughty children who stayed up past their bedtimes, but the good kind. The childhood kind, which created castles out of mud, dragons out of badly-disguised boats, and lent wings to those who dreamed that ancient dream of reaching the sky. The kind of magic, Anise decided, she wanted to make too.
She announced it at dinner after telling her parents all about the amazing purple Beast from Beyond.
“Absolutely not,” said her father.
“Let’s wait until you’re older and see about it then, okay?” said her mother, who was wiser about that sort of thing.
“Anise is going to become a mage? Does that mean she’s going to sneak into our beds and eat us?” Coriander asked, more concerned with the immediate aspects. Godric the Younger stopped staring dreamily at the wall long enough to look alarmed.
“Only if you don’t stop being a baby,” Anise snapped back. A frank discussion of character traits ensued until Coriander used a word they weren’t supposed to know, and they had to go clean out the fish wagon, which, as Coriander pointed out, wasn’t even dirty. The conversation was forgotten, but the sense of wonder was not. A tiny spring had slipped loose in the dependable Fleming mindset, and it was only a matter of time until something exploded.
It exploded, metaphorically speaking, seven years later. In that period of time Anise had learned to juggle, if wobbily, using three roundish rocks, mastered the handstand, pestered any suitably amazing looking traveler for tricks until she was banned from fish wagon duty, and made such a nuisance of herself that her parents almost offered to send her off themselves, just to get the neighbors to stop talking.
There were some closed-door discussions about marrying John from next door, who she did like, but they were half-hearted at best. No one, not even another Fleming, could change a Fleming’s mind, and the Fleming’s knew that better than most.
She ran away on her eighteenth birthday, more for the spirit of it than any real parental objections. With her came a sack filled with dried fish, romance novels, and other necessities of life, and the cookbook and clean handkerchief she found waiting on the dining table. They made her wonder for a moment if her mother hadn’t had dreams of magic when she was younger, if Emilia Huan wasn’t her mother’s daughter after all. It could have been the little bit of faerie still alive in their blood, but it was most likely the mother’s intuition that came from keeping three kids out of trouble at once.
She hitched a ride on a merchant’s wagon and headed west. The outside world, Anise quickly learned, was just as mean and dirty as everyone had said. Her first week in a city – not even a major city, but one of the trading route’s new growths – stripped her of most of her Bishani and all of her confidence in herself as a human being. Only her stubbornness (and the lack of traveling funds) kept her from running home. She found a series of menial jobs to keep her in food and romance novels, practiced when she didn’t flop exhausted on the straw pallet that passed for a bed in civilized lands, and lived. Somehow, she managed to survive.
Then things got a little better. A traveling band of performers stopped there for the night, and though it wasn’t the circus of her childhood, the hats they passed around came back with money in them, which was a feat Bendrilio and all his Fantastic Marvels hadn’t been able to manage. She asked (begged, really. But with dignity) them to let her join. They saw what she could do, laughed themselves sick, and let her join if she agreed to do dishes as well. Being the comedy part of the act stung Anise’s pride more than a little, but she bore with it.
She stayed with that company for six months until she felt she had learned all she could, then jumped to the Will-o’-wisps in Keltaris. The world was still intimidating, and the other countries not as advanced and idea embracing as she had hoped, but she wasn’t the same girl who paid 20 Bishani for a drink of water. She was learning to be tough: she only paid five Bishani in Keltaris.
Magic was the performer’s bread and butter, she learned. Tricks and acrobatics could draw a crowd, but showing them something they couldn’t quite believe was where the money lay. Many of the performers were people shunned for their abilities, who joined the troupe to pass them off as just fancy moves. She almost quit after that, but a night of soul-searching (and, again, a lack of traveling funds) left her with the conviction that magic could possibly be okay, maybe, in small doses every now and then.
From Keltaris they traveled north to Zaltev, hastily fleeing from there to Tian Xia, where the welcome varied from place to place. The traveling circus’ life was a hard one, and they often had to depend on other sources of income, or, failing that, the ever-popular Bark Stew, seasoned with whatever non-poisonous herbs were around. Anise was called Jester by then, and the comedy routine was her magic. She learned to loved that life, bark stew and all.
She found herself walking down the road to Shim one day, fourteen years after she had left by it. Jester wasn’t the same girl who walked out of Shim all those years ago, and she was determined to prove it. Admittedly, she once again didn’t have sufficient traveling funds (hence the walking) but she didn’t pay anyone for her drinks of water. She came back with a goal, too, one born of many nights sleeping in the cold after being turned away by suspicious townspeople: to become Jester to the aristocrats of Marn and use that influence to turn the city into a safe haven for the unwanted and bring happiness and prosperity to all its people, even the magic ones. All she needed to do was explain to them what a jester was, and why they needed one. And not be sent to the asylum or killed in the process, or, the worst fate of all, let her family know she was still alive.
But she was confident things would work out.
Age: 32
Race: Human
Height: 5’6”
Weight: 138 lbs
Physical Description: The first thing anyone notices about Jester is her clothes. She stands out in any crowd with her tunic of red and white diamonds, blue leggings, and gold-striped green cape. The cape has a two eared hood attached, with bells on the end of each ‘ear’ that jingle as she walks. All her clothes, though from a distance bright and new, are at a closer glance well worn and patched with various like-colored fabrics – only some of which are necessary, as Jester’s idea of a respectable jester is one with as many patches as possible. Her walking shoes are sensible leather boots.
Jester’s face is a mixture of general handsomeness and odd traits she inherited from her mother. She has a straight, prominent nose and short, dark blond hair, but a round face and slanted, almond-shaped brown eyes that hint at Tian Xian ancestry. All of her features together are striking rather than attractive. She has a full, stocky figure that seems at odds with her acrobatic ability, although she is in fact quite flexible. Her brown skin and thin cheeks are the result of days spent traveling out in the sun and rarely having enough to eat.
Possessions: Traveler’s pack: used but kept in good condition, containing an ordinary dress and scarf, a pair of tight-fitting, laced leather shoes, eight brightly painted wooden balls, six sheathed throwing knives, four decorated batons, a sealed pouch of oil, a candle, flint and steel, a lump of tallow, a cookbook, a knife, sowing supplies, and a plain white handkerchief. Strapped to her pack are a small, shabby-looking lute and a cooking pot.
A small amount of Bishani: hidden in a pouch sewn to the inside of her outfit.
Powers or Strengths: Miscellaneous Skills: because a traveling performer’s income is never certain, Jester has had to learn other skills to survive. She is somewhat proficient at cleaning, cooking, very basic carpentry, serving food, digging, and tending to small children. She is also an accomplished seamstress, as long as it’s not anything more complicated than attaching one piece of cloth to another.
Fluency: traveling across the world, Jester has learned enough to get by in, or at least recognize most languages.
Performance Art: Jester can carry a tune and knows a variety of songs. Her music making ability on the lute is mediocre at best; the instrument is mainly for show. She can do acrobatics such as flips, handstands, and rolls, and is generally agile and quick on her feet. She is an expert juggler, and can perform simple sleights of hand.
Convincing Smile: Jester has a performing persona that is cheerful, vocal, and outgoing. It takes several minutes of concentration to get into it, but she is pleasant to be around until the act is over. Occasionally she gets headaches as a result.
Stubbornness: Jester is extremely stubborn and will follow through with her goals unless the other party is very persuasive, or wields a blunt object. This can be both a strength and a weakness, as it leads to ignoring people with reasonable advice.
Literacy: she is mostly literate.
Cantrips: Jester, at times, can use minor magical skills in her acts. She doesn’t consider them to be real magic, however, and will deny it if the subject is brought up.
Telekinesis – the power to levitate an object no bigger than an apple and move it around. The object can’t be moved very far from its original position, about half a foot in each direction, and the magic will last at most five seconds.
Quick! Look Over There! – the ability to draw attention away from an object or person. The power only works if the audience is sufficiently distracted, and the caster can't distract people from herself. The object is visible during this period, but those affected by the spell ignore it. If the audience focuses on the object, the spell won’t work. Anyone passing after the spell takes effect can see the object normally.
Compel – lends magical strength to her voice. Everyone within hearing distance will feel an urge to gather around her, the urge stronger for those closer to her. If the audience is especially distracted or entranced, they can be convinced to part with money or take part in a play. No one with a stronger than average will will be affected, and listeners cannot be compelled to do things they don’t want to do.
Weaknesses: Contrasting Beliefs: one of Jester’s major weaknesses is the constant internal conflict between her religious upbringing and her experiences abroad. As a native of Shim, she believes that magic is evil and manipulative, and avoids it as much as possible. On the other hand, her travels have taught her that not all magic is wrong, and some of the most accomplished performers she knows use magic heavily in their acts. These opposing views lead to hesitation and stress, most noticeably affecting her magic. Any spell Jester tries to use has a spotty chance of working at best, especially if she is in a particularly realistic mood.
Hydrophobia: despite being a fisherman’s daughter, Jester can’t swim and has an almost paralyzing fear of water. This is due to an incident when she was ten and almost drowned in the Ofriyu Mar, and may have led to her choice of career.
Easily Shamed: Jester hates to look ignorant, and will make up information or pretend she knows the answer rather than ask for help, ironically leading to further ignorance. She will become angry if confronted about her lack of knowledge.
Snobbery: though looked down on as a country bumpkin in the cities, Jester nonetheless views herself as more intelligent than others regardless of circumstances unless they very obviously prove her otherwise. This leads to arrogant behavior on her part.
Scrappy without a Sword: Jester can throw a punch and knows how to fight dirty, but she has no weapon training at all, and would likely lose against an armed opponent.
History: You could say (and Jester’s family often did) that the trouble started with her old fool of a grandfather, Patrick Stolson, who fell in love with a bard named Qing from Daloyxiu and was just handsome enough to convince her to marry him. There must have been some faerie blood in her family, because she wasn’t exactly normal, or, for that matter, entirely human all the time. The rest of his family grumbled about it for a while, but Qing was a good cook and had a nice voice, even if her food had odd names and odder ingredients and she sometimes sang in two keys at once.
They had two daughters, and that, as her grandfather would say, was where the trouble really began. It’s fine to marry a foreigner, but having children with one is like putting your money on a gnomish horse; you never know when a spring will fall loose and the damn thing will turn green before exploding with you on it.
The loose spring Qing brought to the Stolson family turned out to be an incurable case of wanderlust; their first daughter, to the family’s horror, bought a boat and, determined to discover unknown lands, sailed down the Ofriyu Mar never to be heard from again. The second daughter, a quiet, smiling girl by the name of Emilia Huan, married a fisherman named Godric Fleming, of the highly respectable Shim Flemings, and settled down to life as a fisherman’s wife. The Stolsons, satisfied she had inherited nothing more than her mother’s eyes and skill in the kitchen, declared the matter closed.
Godric and Emilia Huan were contentedly married for some time, and as a result had three children: Godric the Younger, Coriander, and Anise (Emilia Huan loved to cook and had very persuasive arguments.). The first two were normal, dependable Flemings, despite Godric the Younger’s tendency to stare dreamily off into the distance if left alone long enough.
Anise Fleming thought she was a perfectly normal Fleming too until she was eleven years old. An accident a year earlier involving a dare about an old fishing boat, the overturning of said fishing boat, and two quarts of river water inhaled via her nasal passages had ended her desire to be around water in general, and so she was sent to the city with the fish wagon instead. Marn was a delightfully confusing place to her eleven-year-old senses, and she could’ve happily wandered among the shops and brothels forever if the circus hadn’t caught her eye.
It was a sad spectacle of a circus, in all honesty. The acrobats were tired, the Fantastic Marvels were a mangy monkey and a purple sheep, and the crowds weren’t biting. Bendrilio’s Kirkus of Amazing Splendor must have missed the announcement about the people of Marn’s general suspicion of anything Fantastic, Marvelous, or Splendor-shaped. But the ringmaster, perched on a barrel on the stage behind the Drunken Rat Tavern, announced each of their three acts with appropriate huzzah, and there was music, of a sort.
To Anise, it was magic. Not the bad magic, which killed people and cursed naughty children who stayed up past their bedtimes, but the good kind. The childhood kind, which created castles out of mud, dragons out of badly-disguised boats, and lent wings to those who dreamed that ancient dream of reaching the sky. The kind of magic, Anise decided, she wanted to make too.
She announced it at dinner after telling her parents all about the amazing purple Beast from Beyond.
“Absolutely not,” said her father.
“Let’s wait until you’re older and see about it then, okay?” said her mother, who was wiser about that sort of thing.
“Anise is going to become a mage? Does that mean she’s going to sneak into our beds and eat us?” Coriander asked, more concerned with the immediate aspects. Godric the Younger stopped staring dreamily at the wall long enough to look alarmed.
“Only if you don’t stop being a baby,” Anise snapped back. A frank discussion of character traits ensued until Coriander used a word they weren’t supposed to know, and they had to go clean out the fish wagon, which, as Coriander pointed out, wasn’t even dirty. The conversation was forgotten, but the sense of wonder was not. A tiny spring had slipped loose in the dependable Fleming mindset, and it was only a matter of time until something exploded.
It exploded, metaphorically speaking, seven years later. In that period of time Anise had learned to juggle, if wobbily, using three roundish rocks, mastered the handstand, pestered any suitably amazing looking traveler for tricks until she was banned from fish wagon duty, and made such a nuisance of herself that her parents almost offered to send her off themselves, just to get the neighbors to stop talking.
There were some closed-door discussions about marrying John from next door, who she did like, but they were half-hearted at best. No one, not even another Fleming, could change a Fleming’s mind, and the Fleming’s knew that better than most.
She ran away on her eighteenth birthday, more for the spirit of it than any real parental objections. With her came a sack filled with dried fish, romance novels, and other necessities of life, and the cookbook and clean handkerchief she found waiting on the dining table. They made her wonder for a moment if her mother hadn’t had dreams of magic when she was younger, if Emilia Huan wasn’t her mother’s daughter after all. It could have been the little bit of faerie still alive in their blood, but it was most likely the mother’s intuition that came from keeping three kids out of trouble at once.
She hitched a ride on a merchant’s wagon and headed west. The outside world, Anise quickly learned, was just as mean and dirty as everyone had said. Her first week in a city – not even a major city, but one of the trading route’s new growths – stripped her of most of her Bishani and all of her confidence in herself as a human being. Only her stubbornness (and the lack of traveling funds) kept her from running home. She found a series of menial jobs to keep her in food and romance novels, practiced when she didn’t flop exhausted on the straw pallet that passed for a bed in civilized lands, and lived. Somehow, she managed to survive.
Then things got a little better. A traveling band of performers stopped there for the night, and though it wasn’t the circus of her childhood, the hats they passed around came back with money in them, which was a feat Bendrilio and all his Fantastic Marvels hadn’t been able to manage. She asked (begged, really. But with dignity) them to let her join. They saw what she could do, laughed themselves sick, and let her join if she agreed to do dishes as well. Being the comedy part of the act stung Anise’s pride more than a little, but she bore with it.
She stayed with that company for six months until she felt she had learned all she could, then jumped to the Will-o’-wisps in Keltaris. The world was still intimidating, and the other countries not as advanced and idea embracing as she had hoped, but she wasn’t the same girl who paid 20 Bishani for a drink of water. She was learning to be tough: she only paid five Bishani in Keltaris.
Magic was the performer’s bread and butter, she learned. Tricks and acrobatics could draw a crowd, but showing them something they couldn’t quite believe was where the money lay. Many of the performers were people shunned for their abilities, who joined the troupe to pass them off as just fancy moves. She almost quit after that, but a night of soul-searching (and, again, a lack of traveling funds) left her with the conviction that magic could possibly be okay, maybe, in small doses every now and then.
From Keltaris they traveled north to Zaltev, hastily fleeing from there to Tian Xia, where the welcome varied from place to place. The traveling circus’ life was a hard one, and they often had to depend on other sources of income, or, failing that, the ever-popular Bark Stew, seasoned with whatever non-poisonous herbs were around. Anise was called Jester by then, and the comedy routine was her magic. She learned to loved that life, bark stew and all.
She found herself walking down the road to Shim one day, fourteen years after she had left by it. Jester wasn’t the same girl who walked out of Shim all those years ago, and she was determined to prove it. Admittedly, she once again didn’t have sufficient traveling funds (hence the walking) but she didn’t pay anyone for her drinks of water. She came back with a goal, too, one born of many nights sleeping in the cold after being turned away by suspicious townspeople: to become Jester to the aristocrats of Marn and use that influence to turn the city into a safe haven for the unwanted and bring happiness and prosperity to all its people, even the magic ones. All she needed to do was explain to them what a jester was, and why they needed one. And not be sent to the asylum or killed in the process, or, the worst fate of all, let her family know she was still alive.
But she was confident things would work out.