CynisBelarAramia
Cynis Belar Ara'mia
Background
Ara'mia is the personification of everything bad about the Dragon-Blooded and the Realm in general. She is vain, arrogant, overbearing, more than a little megalomaniacal, promiscuous, violent, vindictive, narcissistic, and cares not one jot for anyone other than herself. To make her even more loveable, she is totally convinced that one day she will become Empress (because Hesiesh told her so in a dream when she was five!), uniting all of Creation under her divine and glorious rule; all will worship her and cower in awe of her majestic presence! She acts, much of the time, as if this 'prophecy' has already come to pass.
Ara is the only Exalted daughter among 11 siblings of a very prominent line. She is the youngest, and born long after most of her relatives; some of her childhood playmates were her grandnieces and grandnephews. Miamar and Seba, her parents, regarded her birth as nothing short of a miracle; as a result, Ara was spoiled rotten throughout her entire childhood, and it only got worse after she Exalted at a very young age. Her parents' miracle, however, was tainted; by the age of 11 Ara was already responsible for the deaths of two siblings and several of their descendants due to 'accidents.'
Ara was a tyrannical child who virtually ruled her home. Her mother, whose health was never good after bearing her at the advanced age of 246, eventually died when Ara was 9. Her father treated her like a virtual deity afterwards, a perfect little angel who could do no wrong. Ara had shown skill with martial arts, and so he used his not-insubstantial monetary holdings to secure her a position at the Cloister of Wisdom.
Bad. Idea.
Ara'mia did not take well to the lifestyle of the monks, the pre-eminence of the Immaculate Faith (which she regards as hogwash, except the parts about Dragon-Blooded being better than everyone else), nor the discipline to which she had never been exposed. As a result, she was dismissed in her second year at the Cloister. Thanks to her father's connections, her official record reads that she was dismissed "without reason"; rumors fly about what it was she actually did to be thrown out, and range from "She seduced the entire population of monks!" to "She burned down half the library!" The following year, her father, by flexing his bank accounts, managed to gain Ara'mia entry to the House of Bells, figuring that she would do better there than at the Cloister.
Nope.
As at the Cloister, Ara did not adjust well to discipline (are we seeing a pattern emerge here?) and was thoroughly insubordinate to everybody who dared to think themselves better than her. Her father's connections with the faculty and longstanding contributions to his alma mater are all that enabled her to withdraw "for medical reasons" after a near-psychotic reaction to military discipline which resulted in the deaths of no less than 7 servants, one of the younger security personell who tried to stop her rampage, and the gutting of several barracks by an Ara-powered inferno.
At his wits end, financially crippled, and in failing health due to stress from having to clean up after his beloved little angel Ara'mia, Seba finally called in one of his last favors, gaining her entry to the Resplendant Southern Bonfire School of Martial Arts, a minor secondary academy run by one of his old comrades, Cathak R'lawa. R'lawa took Ara on as his own student and began to teach her the Crimson Pentacle Blade style. Unlike at the Cloister or the House of Bells, Ara did not snap under discipline; R'lawa's methods are the only ones that have ever worked on Ara'mia. He let her do whatever she wanted, and also made sure that he got laid regularly, mostly by himself. While there was a certain amount of collateral damage resulting from this laissez faire approach, R'lawa found that it was minimal compared to the fantastic progress Ara made in CBP style martial arts. She quickly became one of the school's finest students, enthralled with the movements and acrobatics of the Southern Scythe Style.
When Seba finally died, he went happily, knowing that his daughter had found her true calling. To her, he left most of what remained of his treasury, which was heavily depleted from 24 years of cleaning up Ara's rather spectacular messes. He also left her his heirloom scythe, Rotschreck, a powerful and old artifact weapon that engendered absolute terror in those who faced it on the battlefield. Ara, never much one for downers like funerals, took the money and ran with it, debauching herself on a hedonistic orgy of truly epic proportions. In the midst of this, however, she truly crossed the line; she even pissed off her own Family, the Cynis, which speaks to the truly gargantuan proportions of her debauch. Ara herself isn't quite sure what it was that got everyone so mad at her, as she was up on about 3 barrels of ale and probably at least three different psychoactives at the time, but she seems to recall mentioning Mnemon's "nice rack" and slapping her ass in public....or was it the orgy in the Immaculate Temple..?
In any event, Ara'mia's associates (those few who weren't massively inebriated, anyway) realized what was afoot and deicided to get her the hell out of the Realm until things cooled down for her. That's how she ended up on a boat to a filthy rathole of a tributary kingdom in the Threshold where they probably don't even speak LOW Realm, let alone HIGH Realm....*sigh* Life is hard...
(and this is where the game starts!)
Stats
Later, I don't feel like it now. :D
