Character History
Nov. 17, 2001
This is the background for my D&D character, we're playing a campaign with some people at Matt's work:
Yana (short for Shianna)
Hegrin and Andrea met in the cathedral school, where Hegrin was a master in charge of teaching theology and philosophy. Andrea, though an adult, female, and human, had always envied her older brothers their slight education, and was caught one day lurking outside the lecture hall, where she was listening, though she couldn't read the texts or take notes on the lecture. To her surprise, Hegrin didn't criticize her, but instead offered to teach her to read and write common, her native language. Both in their late twenties, the two fell in love over the tutoring lessons. They were covertly married in a small chapel at the cathedral by a personal friend of Hegrin's, who promised to keep the wedding a secret.
However, when Andrea had her first child and Hegrin had to move in with her to help her take care of it, all hope of secrecy was lost. Hoping that the school's patron would be understanding, Hegrin confessed the interracial marriage and asked for mercy, but he was publicly condemned for marrying a low-class human woman and lost his position on the faculty. Together the couple moved to *, a predominantly human town and one where no one knew their history. Although the human society was somewhat more accepting of the interracial marriage, they would not allow a prestigious position requiring education to be held by an elf, and so he began to work in maintenance at the local monastery. Eminently unqualified for such a job, he was kept on out of compassion until he eventually began to develop some skill. However, his love was still and always for knowledge, and denied sons or students, he taught his daughter all he could, Common, Dwarven, Elven, Halfling, and Gnome, including reading and writing.
Shianna loved learning from her dad and was very attached to him, until one day when she was about nine, when he went to work as usual one day and never came home. Neither she nor Andrea ever knew what had happened to him, but Shianna began to suspect that the "bad people" who had made her parents move when she was a baby might have something to do with his disappearance. Andrea disapproved wholeheartedly of such childishness and insisted that he must have left of his own volition. She went to the monastery and asked for his job in order to support herself and Shianna, and they agreed. However, the monks didn't want her to do heavy work, so they had her in the kitchen instead, where she served faithfully, if wistfully, and began to adhere closely to the religion.
Meanwhile, Shianna found that as she was a girl, she couldn't go to school. She began spending time on the street, always searching in the back of her mind for the cause of her father's disappearance. On the street, she began calling herself Yana. She picked up various unsavory skills before she was even old enough to know of the social stigma attached to them, and when she was 13 she met up with an 18-year-old boy named Timidus, also a half-elf. Though pretty incompetent himself, he ended up serving as a shield for Yana through a few half-hearted fights, and the two became friends. Theoretically, Timidus knew a lot and taught Yana what he could, though she refused to learn pickpocketing. Over the years, she began to forget about her father's disappearance and concentrate on discovering other kinds of information. Yana ran the streets with Timidus for four years, though she typically calls this time her "apprenticeship" and usually refers to Timidus as her "master". Occasionally she accidentally calls him her business partner, which is closer to the truth but has led a few people to guess the nature of her business. No spy needs that.
When Yana was 17, the turbulent feelings surrounding her father's death resurfaced in the form of some very disturbing dreams. In consequence of one of these, Yana broke into the monastery looking for information, but got caught by one of the monks. He half-believed her excuses, but still insisted on telling her mother. Between the break-in and some long-brewing anger about their different opinions of Hegrin, the two fought, and Andrea kicked Yana out of the house, calling her a thief and a slut, despite Yana's insistence that she wasn't either.
Although Andrea would have probably relented over time, Yana's impetuousness made her talk Timidus into fleeing town with her. The two left for another town (**) where both continued their chosen pursuits for 5 years. Yana learned patience from the difficulty of making a living and learned to tolerate, though she still disdained, straight thievery. However, in the end Timidus' relaxed nature and love of gold (which had always served them well) led to a huge fight between the two, and Yana left in anger for a new town, taking half the gold they had. On her way there, she ran into a whole bunch of strange adventurers, and the rest is history...