Whirda Windstrom

[PepsiWhirda]

Post-Contagion Description:

After suffering a near-fatal wound at the hands of the shade Ahn'Thrix, Whirda was infected with a shadow contagion.  When she is holding the contagion at bay she appears much like normal, with dusky skin, pale gray eyes, and gray-white hair, except that her veins are black and seem to pulsate.  As the contagion spreads and she loses control that blackness spreads outward into her skin and floods the whites of her eyes (until she appears much like my avatar, without the pointy ears).  Whirda carries the dagger of Ahn'Thrix in her right hand and a buckler fashioned from a tarrasque scale fastened to her left forearm.  She wears black leather armor lined with chainmail, crisscrossed with the pockmarks and gouges of decades of combat.  Brown boots and bracers complete her ensemble.  

Note: Whirda has signed on with PepsiCo, along with Yuuka, to replace PepsiMan as the mascot and brand ambassador for Pepsi for Dante's Abyss.



Personality:

Since contracting the shade's contagion, Whirda is a frustrating companion, prone to dour moods and long bouts of silence.  When the contagion is held at bay she is quiet and observant, speaking formally when prompted but preferring to watch and listen.  Her humor is dry and sardonic when it makes an appearance.  It is quite difficult for anyone to get Whirda to open up, but with some prompting she will divulge details about her past and her struggles with the contagion.  However, when the contagion takes hold fully Whirda becomes a brutal killer who struggles to differentiate between friend and foe.

Fighting Style:

Whirda epitomizes the stealth and subterfuge fighting style.  Preferring to wear her opponents down and dance tantalizingly out of reach, it is rare that Whirda will engage in close combat (although she is no novice when it comes to sword play).  Combining the prudent use of Stealth, Suppression, and Teleportation with deceptive shadow clones to reposition and disorient her enemies, her guerilla tactics are best complimented by a brawler who can take advantage of the resulting confusion.  Whirda knows that frustrated enemies make mistakes, and uses this knowledge to her advantage.

Character History:

Born in the city of Waterdeep, the daughter of an influencial lord and his mistress, Whirda's life has always been a study in contrasts. On one hand, bred for a life of genteel aristocracy, schooled in politics, history, and etiquette, taught the final art of charisma and social engineering from a young age. Her father was protective, not of his daughter, but of the blow to his reputation she represented. She was cloistered, and told little of her past. She never knew the lord's wife, the woman she called her mother, was, in fact, not.

When Whirda was fifteen, and her father was embroiled in an election threatening to see him dethroned, the secret finally came to light. Her mother, an accomplished mercenary and battle-mage, returned to Waterdeep to see her daughter freed from a life of hollow pomp and circumstance. The illusion shattered, Whirda's father lost the election and descended into shame and social rejection.

When Whirda met her mother, she was enchanted. The sharp blades and battle-pocked armor, the complex spells calling the very wind to her mother's command, all of it fascinated her. Furious with her father's deception and desperate to escape the quiet refinement of life in Waterdeep, she chose to go with her mother to her home in Luskan, eight hundred miles to the north.

In Luskan, things were different. The city was ruled by pirate lords and thugs, a place of constant battle, suspicion, political treachery. Her mother taught her the way of the sword and of simple magic, and she proved almost prodigally apt. By seventeen, she was the agent of a powerful pirate lord, flitting over the rooftops of the city to carry out missions and deliver messages, often with a heavy dose of violence. She was in love.

Whirda and her mother, both separately and as a team, soon garnered a reputation as two of the most cunning, able mercenaries in the city. Still in her early twenties, for Whirda this was a blessing and a curse. She loved the notoriety, but it brought with it a fair share of envy and desire for vengeance from competing agents.

On her twenty-third birthday, disaster struck in the form of a poisoned crossbow quarrel. Whirda survived the attack, barely. Her mother did not. She was killed, and Whirda was forced to flee the city, cast into exile by the very reputation she fought so hard to cultivate.  Whirda came to find it was her father who ordered the attack, filled with ire at the loss of his daughter to a woman he considered a whore and a derelict.  He hoped her death would bring Whirda back to him.

She plans to return to her home, to the city, to topple the house of the lord who took her mother, to kill his agents and see his head on a pike on the city walls. For now, though, she answers a call to the Omniverse, to see what adventures lie in store for her there.