Another one for my RPG Blog Carnival; where’s the fun in staying out of this?

Esemeli was one of my more interesting projects, probably because she managed to be completely villainous, stay somewhat dubious, and not be one of the group’s “to be watched closely” entities. People who’ve been following me for a long time might recognize her as the figure swathed in so many red veils one would have trouble telling her body type, let alone anything else about her, who pops up in my characterization exercises every so often.

She was one of my first-arc antagonist’s three children (if you can call people who have lived for the better part of a millennium children)–the brainy one, as opposed to her socially adept older half-sister Rukan or her physically adept twin brother Krata. Her father was very much aligned with the demonic, and unlike her siblings, Esemeli bore rather distinctive marks of it; her eyes were quite literally little portals to the demon realm. (I later learned that this explained quite a bit about Krata’s fighting prowess; he had to protect his sister somehow.) Hence the veils; hence also her complete lack of social skills. What’s the point of interacting with people who all considered her a walking curse, anyway? The end result was heavy misanthropy, a preference for the company of demons over those of other humans, and an all-consuming interest in the pursuits of the mind, mostly along the lines of creating hybrid creatures or understanding the demonic mindset further.

Esemeli was also responsible for one of the few times I ever managed to surprise my then-assistant. Partway in, he’d decided he wanted to go for a full PC, and the result was Lua, an amnesiac girl mind-bonded with (and with a few physical traits, like the ears, of) a very large wolf. He’d known Esemeli existed and was into arcanobiology, as he was playing Krata at the time (one of the fun things about running a set of characters like those two online is when you and the other person are in the same room and carefully coordinating finishing each other’s sentences), but the revelation that Lua was a result of one of Esemeli’s failed experiments? Threw him for a loop. It also led to some interesting character development on Esemeli’s part, when they captured the group a few sessions later; here’s this failed experiment of hers, her enemy no less, trying to treat her like a parent. Esemeli encountered logic errors.

Then there’s her relationship with her older sister, which is rivaled in convoluted dysfunctionality only by the social dynamic between her father and the target of his last major plot (explaining the latter two to a friend of mine once took me two nights’ worth of IM conversation, and he had background in this game). What it boils down to is equal parts envy, resentment, respect, and loyalty. Envy, because Rukan was favored for her ability to get along with people, and there was no way Esemeli would have had the chance to learn to compete. Resentment, for the time they had first met, when Rukan stepped in to talk down the people making nuisances of themselves to her younger sister (though neither of them have committed to me on whether she was aware of their relationship at the time, or just being Rukan). Respect, because Esemeli respects people who are good at what they do and who get what she does. And loyalty, because Esemeli is like that about her family (as she explained during the confused escape attempt scene near the end of the first arc, turning to fight the PC who’d just knocked Rukan out from ambush, “Nobody is allowed to pick on my family but me.” Fortunately for both of them, he wasn’t trying to kill her.)

Esemeli’s connection with the PC group is a tad odd. They ask her for favors a lot, usually hanging onto prisoners for them (I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of named enemies they’ve actually killed, and most of those were demons), as the home she inherited from her father is very good for containing people. This has turned into a running joke: “Friend, or guest?” she asks, every time the group comes to her place with someone new. Occasionally, she asks them for favors as well, and always gets them, even when the favor is as potentially dangerous as a request to speak with the soul-remnant of her father. The group owes her, after all, and she makes sure they know it. And then they go on their merry way and leave the mad scientist to her own devices. Nobody asks what she’s up to. It’s probably just as well.

(Fun fact: unlike her older sister and most of the cast, Esemeli was given a name that was a straight reference to a book rather than chosen for its meaning—even more amusing when you consider that the meaning the name took within the book fits Rukan better than it fits her.)