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corvuscorone) wrote2016-04-04 05:09 pm
corvuscorone) wrote2016-04-04 05:09 pm
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User Name/Nick: Siobhan
User DW:fiercebadrabbit
AIM/IM: blitztsunami
E-mail: israfel1030@gmail.com
Other Characters: Todd, Chime
Character Name: Zevran Arainai
Series: Dragon Age
Age: 27
From When?: After his old partner Taliesin returns to complete the contract on the Grey Wardens, Zevran agrees to help him with the assassination and is killed in the attempt. In game timeline terms, this occurs in 9:31 Dragon, shortly before the Landsmeet.
Inmate: Zevran kills people for a living, and has been trained to since early childhood. While able to admit that this might be sort of wrong, in the abstract, it’s the life he knows and the one he’s good at. Satisfaction in the chase and the kill, pleasure at his own cleverness, the heady thrills of victory… He takes great professional pride in his successes and will happily regale semi-willing listeners with sordid tales of exciting times he poisoned people. It’s nice to get paid, but he has no compunctions about removing inconvenient people on his own imperative if the need arises. Assassinations aside, he’s a profoundly manipulative and selfish person with empathy that doesn’t work too well. While he does have a highly specific sort of personal honor (he won’t take a bribe from a mark, no matter how high the bid, for instance), the ends justify the means, and the ends are usually getting paid, or praised by higher ups in the Crows, or just feeling really cool. He frequently has sex with or at least seduces targets, taking advantage of a common human predilection for pretty elves, and doesn’t exactly beat himself up about collateral damage. Only one murder ever bothered him. He was tricked into believing that his partner and lover had betrayed the Crows and slit her throat himself, trained to loyalty at all costs. He mourned Rinna and blamed himself and their other partner when they discovered the information was faulty, but it was the discovery that the Crows didn’t care about the loss of any expendable tool and that they had been set up to fail as much as the wrongful death of the woman he loved that drove his remorse. Zevran has never addressed his own demons or known much kindness or understanding, and his worldview is fundamentally broken, living as an abused child soldier and an expendable pawn, and he needs to confront his past as much as change his ways. The mere existence of someone to talk to who isn’t a member of the guild of assassins that runs his life will go a long way.
Abilities: Zevran is a skilled assassin, for certain definitions of skilled. He’s very good at poison, seduction, and going unseen. He’s tolerable at shooting or stabbing people and inventive about improvising ways to do that when a bow or dagger isn’t immediately to hand. He can make clever conversation, throw together a decent disguise, and lie like a rug. He’s a pretty good cook—the better to disguise the taste of whatever poison he’s using. Anything in pursuit of the mark.
Personality: One wouldn’t know on meeting him that Zevran just murdered the woman he loved on faulty information and had every hope pulled out from under him. He doesn’t let on when he’s tired, let alone what state his feelings are in. He’d really prefer if the entire world, including himself, would believe he has no feelings and that those are stupid. Zevran’s surface persona is polished, flawless, and absolutely controlled in every moment. He is witty, shameless, teasing, and calm, frequently setting out to offend and discomfit others but refusing to let it show when and if he’s ruffled himself. He can be charming and even subtle, but he often chooses to be outrageous, offensive, and obnoxious, instead. It’s more fun, unless he has something to gain from being sneaky. Zevran refuses to be made uncomfortable or seem not to know what’s going on even when that would be a reasonable response, and he’ll do or say outrageous things to preserve the veneer. Especially if they’re unnecessarily flirtatious. He takes his master of seduction angle very seriously. Either it ends in amusing banter and/or sex or he wins the conversation. Both are acceptable outcomes. (Though Zevran would insist this is always the case, he can, in fact, be disarmed by people being outrageous back at him. It’s not good for his image to let that get around, so he chooses denial.)
While this coldly combative and transactional approach is most definitely an act, he’s not playing against type. Zevran really is brash, a bit hedonistic when he can manage it, playful, and witty. He’s not even really aware himself where the game begins or ends some of the time, and he’s been especially addicted to the performance since Rinna died. He has never actually been able to trust people. Even his friends among the Crows, other children purchased and brought up alongside him, had to be colleagues, not friends. Never really close. He deeply mistrusts any relationship that goes deeper than innuendo and funny stories. He learned early to take refuge in sex, which simplifies so much, often gets him what he wants, and can turn into positive attention or at least a kind of negative attention he understands. Born and raised in a brothel (and not a nice one) and purchased as a child in part specifically because elves are considered pretty, he certainly has some uncomfortable issues that he has chosen to ignore. Sex is fun and gives him a good way to mess with people and stay distant, and he’ll certainly never let anyone get under his skin again like Rinna did. He’s very sure about that.
He’s actually not nearly as good at being cold hearted as he believes he is, but so few people ever made the effort to get under his skin that he’s not aware of it. He certainly fell in love once, and he knew better than to do that. Having been burned deeply by what happened to Rinna, though, he’s even more paranoid about feelings than he learned to be from early childhood. It is possible to get past the cool, wicked, teasing exterior to discover a cool, wicked, teasing interior. It takes close observation to pick out the little honesty and unguardedness there is. With people he likes a little bit, he’s more playful, less dismissive, but he still treats all interactions like a contest to win, with bonus points for not giving anything away. It’ll take a lot of work (or at least alcohol), though, for him to even begin to talk about meaningful subjects with a bit more seriousness, never mind confess to the fact that he might have feelings and tender memories.
It’s not just to curious others that Zevran refuses to consider things seriously. His own history is an endless parade of miseries, abuse, neglect, and loss, both sinner and sinned against. He agrees to all this readily, tending not to conceal anything about the slavery and abandonment, manipulation and torment visited on him by the Crows and by the generalities of life for an elf without resources in Thedas. He’ll even concede that killing people is wrong and that, ideally, he shouldn’t have been bought from a brothel for training as an assassin when he was seven years old. He just doesn’t allow himself to have any opinions on the subject beyond “eh, what can you do?” He tends to think it’s funny to horrify people with basic details from his life, but he doesn’t think about them beyond that, or why it works so well. Zevran is, to the core, utterly incapable of objecting much to anything terrible that happens to him. Following what happened to Rinna he became self-destructive bordering on suicidal and believes he deserves whatever comes, but getting angry about anything, trying to change it, implying a duty to try to change it, makes him prickly and uncomfortable at best, angry at worst. It’s a coping mechanism. Life would be a lot harder to live if it weren’t inevitable. He’s at a low point even for him, utterly loathes himself, longs for oblivion, and doesn’t believe any possibility of redemption is possible, but most of the time it doesn’t show. He didn't need to kill Rinna to hate himself, after all. He considers his mother's death in childbirth his first murder. Self-hatred is the background noise of his life.
Carefully prepared and polished as his performative version of his own personality is, Zevran’s moments of strong emotion are more telling than many people’s. If it’s on another’s behalf, Zevran can get angry, can defend the defenseless and prove he’s not absolutely a depraved monster. All the time. Despite claiming he identifies as an Antivan more than an elf and a generally dismissive attitude, he gets fiercely defensive of the abuses heaped on his people, whether he wants to hang out with them or not. Women being preyed upon bring him back to the brothel where he was born, mistreated children to his time as a Crow recruit (where being one of the small percentage to survive childhood meant you got to start real training), and so on. Beyond being protective of people he sees himself in because he couldn’t possibly defend himself for real, his ethics are strange and ruthless, as the murder for hire habit might indicate. He has a deep disdain for noble sacrifice for its own sake and a sensible belief that sacrificing some for the sake of many is often the right choice. He openly despises sentimentality and quietly extends that hostility to any sincere expression of feeling. He lies freely, but when he really gives his word, he won’t break it for anything. He’s even fairly religious, in a way that involves confessing all his murders to the prophet Andraste on at least a weekly basis. He’s self-serving in his reasoning, but there are always rules. Being beholden to the Crows (even if they did betray and destroy him) always gave his life structure, reinforced by the fact that stepping out of line inevitably meant death, and a black and white world is much easier to live—or die—in.
Barge Reactions: Zevran’s first reactions will be overwhelmed by the sheer strangeness of the barge. He’s from a world without indoor plumbing, and as a fan of luxuries, most of the philosophical questions will be put off until the novelty of light switches and synthetic fabrics has worn off. And that hedonistic streak will remain. He’ll be entirely happy to bury himself in indulgence whenever he’s overwhelmed, which will be often, given his state of mind when he died. Meeting new and strange people (and probably occasionally killing them) isn’t new to Zevran, and his admittedly piecemeal knowledge of the fade and magic will soften the impact of some of the stranger aspects of the barge. He won’t be comfortable with floods and breaches, but he has enough context of illusions and demons and the Fade to be able to reason his way through it and at least pretend not to be horrified by the very idea. Individual events will certainly get under his skin, but he’ll be at least as shocked by hot showers on demand as having his life briefly overwritten by someone else’s. His attitude about the imprisonment itself will be complicated. He no doubt deserves it, and worse, and he was trying to get himself killed all the while, and the barge will feel more like a baited trap to mistrust than a prison. He’ll actually be more comfortable once he has his first bad event or crosses the wrong inmate. Being tortured seems about right.
Path to Redemption: Zevran may, at first, seem like a very easy inmate, happy to agree to anything, talk to anybody, nod his way through serious conversations. And then he’ll wander off completely unchanged. Actually getting under Zevran’s skin requires dedication and a high tolerance for deliberate obtuseness (and being ogled), and once that’s accomplished, finding a way to make him really face his demons. His first aim will have to be accepting what happened to Rinna. He’s faced his own culpability and the guilt has left him suicidal, good as he is at hiding it. The betrayal surrounding her death has also ripped away what little he ever believed about his place in the world, and his outlook is completely bleak and hopeless. Addressing this is mostly a matter of showing him kindness and understanding, introducing him to the concept of trusting someone and believing in something. He needs to forgive himself without excusing himself before he can move on, but dealing with one specific murder out of hundreds and not addressing any of the underlying causes is not going to result in real change. Zevran also needs to accept that the world he lived in was gruesome and cruel and unfair, that he was both victim and culprit, and that making things better, however impossible, however much more he has to hate himself, is required to actually be a good person. He knows already that he shouldn't have killed Rinna, but it hasn't even occurred to him that he shouldn't have thoughtlessly snuffed out life after life for his own convenience and that of the more powerful. He needs to learn an actual concern for both himself and people he doesn't already know and like, their lives and not just their deaths.
History: History overview
Zevran was spared by the Grey Wardens after his first assault on them failed spectacularly. He gave his oath specifically to Elissa Cousland, a Fereldan noblewoman with good intentions but little imagination. Cousland arranged to crown Bhelen in Orzammar, saved the mages of the tower, saved the Arl of Redcliffe but not his mage son, and cured the werewolves, acquiring the army she needed but not much more. She would go on to spare Teryn Loghain and arrange Alistair’s marriage to Anora, but Zevran was dead before that point. Despite attempts to be friendly with the woman who’d spared his life, Zevran found her judgmental and dismissive, and they never became close. When accompanying the warden through Denerim, following her directives as he had sworn but feeling generally dispirited, his old partner Taliesin appeared, offering to help Zevran complete the contract on the wardens and return to his old life. Zevran didn’t really believe it would work—he had seen the wardens and their companions mow through darkspawn and demons. A few elves and humans with swords weren’t going to stop them. But he had set out to find a way to end his miserable life, and feeling no particular connection to the warden, it was as good an exit as any. He died at the end of her sword, succeeding at last in finding himself a way out of his wreck of a life.
Sample Journal Entry: This… is not how I pictured the maker’s bosom.
[The room on camera is small and dingy, the rough wooden walls stained with smoke and probably worse, the furniture, such as it is, simply several small, shoddily constructed bunks and storage chests. It doesn’t look like a pleasant place to be, and for Zevran, it’s a pretty special sort of hell. This was the apartment he shared with as many other Crow recruits as they could fit—Tali and Rinna included. He’d rather be in the Deep Roads, spiders and all.]
Then again, the good chanters were always a bit imprecise about the afterlife, no? And I have certainly done nothing to earn any sort of sweet rewards. But I would not have imagined the Dark City quite this way, either. Altogether, I suspect somebody has been misinformed.
[He shifts uncomfortably, the twitchy discomfort evident in the movement belying, for a moment, the cavalier words.]
Especially as, when I think back on this place, I am very sure there were knives hidden in every bedframe, as well as a few other interesting places. That was always my favorite thing about the recruit apartments. Well, that and the smell of the tanneries. Nothing like rotting flesh and leather processing chemicals to wake one up in the morning, no?
Sample RP: No weapons for inmates. A quaint notion. Zevran has generally operated as part of a cell with as much backup as the Crows choose to provide, but nobody could call themselves an assassin and not be prepared to improvise. So very many marks are uncooperative about standing still in the middle of a field alone on a dark night. And as the small, slight poisoner with pouty lips and a gift for charming people despite themselves, jobs that demanded infiltration and the risk of being caught with a dagger often fell to hm. No, this is not new. At least this barge seems to have left him the pout and the charm.
The best improvised garrote is a bowstring, in his opinion, but a sturdy bootlace would do in a jam. Stocking full of copper pieces—noisy, messy, not really suited to him, but decent in a pinch. A painstakingly bent belt buckle isn’t going to actually wound anyone, but sufficient slight of hand and a panicked enough soul could probably be convinced that the cold metal they felt was something dangerous. And in short order he is sure he could palm a kitchen knife or two.
But what you really want in a situation like this—uncertain, with few recourses for defense—is poison. And they have a greenhouse, do they not? And what could seem more natural to a bunch of humans than an elf wanting to spend time in among the plants? True, this particular elf despises nature, but they’ll believe just about anything about the pretty little knife-earred folk if it suits their preconceptions. And it’s a rare garden that doesn’t have something a bit deadly, if only because so many pretty flowers have a bit of a sting to them. Which is an excellent metaphor. He’ll have to make use of it. Either way, he’ll feel so much better when he has killing people options on hand.
Special Notes: Zevran comes from a game with a potentially branching storyline and the events canon to his story will probably not specifically match that of other Dragon Age characters in all respects.
User DW:
fiercebadrabbitAIM/IM: blitztsunami
E-mail: israfel1030@gmail.com
Other Characters: Todd, Chime
Character Name: Zevran Arainai
Series: Dragon Age
Age: 27
From When?: After his old partner Taliesin returns to complete the contract on the Grey Wardens, Zevran agrees to help him with the assassination and is killed in the attempt. In game timeline terms, this occurs in 9:31 Dragon, shortly before the Landsmeet.
Inmate: Zevran kills people for a living, and has been trained to since early childhood. While able to admit that this might be sort of wrong, in the abstract, it’s the life he knows and the one he’s good at. Satisfaction in the chase and the kill, pleasure at his own cleverness, the heady thrills of victory… He takes great professional pride in his successes and will happily regale semi-willing listeners with sordid tales of exciting times he poisoned people. It’s nice to get paid, but he has no compunctions about removing inconvenient people on his own imperative if the need arises. Assassinations aside, he’s a profoundly manipulative and selfish person with empathy that doesn’t work too well. While he does have a highly specific sort of personal honor (he won’t take a bribe from a mark, no matter how high the bid, for instance), the ends justify the means, and the ends are usually getting paid, or praised by higher ups in the Crows, or just feeling really cool. He frequently has sex with or at least seduces targets, taking advantage of a common human predilection for pretty elves, and doesn’t exactly beat himself up about collateral damage. Only one murder ever bothered him. He was tricked into believing that his partner and lover had betrayed the Crows and slit her throat himself, trained to loyalty at all costs. He mourned Rinna and blamed himself and their other partner when they discovered the information was faulty, but it was the discovery that the Crows didn’t care about the loss of any expendable tool and that they had been set up to fail as much as the wrongful death of the woman he loved that drove his remorse. Zevran has never addressed his own demons or known much kindness or understanding, and his worldview is fundamentally broken, living as an abused child soldier and an expendable pawn, and he needs to confront his past as much as change his ways. The mere existence of someone to talk to who isn’t a member of the guild of assassins that runs his life will go a long way.
Abilities: Zevran is a skilled assassin, for certain definitions of skilled. He’s very good at poison, seduction, and going unseen. He’s tolerable at shooting or stabbing people and inventive about improvising ways to do that when a bow or dagger isn’t immediately to hand. He can make clever conversation, throw together a decent disguise, and lie like a rug. He’s a pretty good cook—the better to disguise the taste of whatever poison he’s using. Anything in pursuit of the mark.
Personality: One wouldn’t know on meeting him that Zevran just murdered the woman he loved on faulty information and had every hope pulled out from under him. He doesn’t let on when he’s tired, let alone what state his feelings are in. He’d really prefer if the entire world, including himself, would believe he has no feelings and that those are stupid. Zevran’s surface persona is polished, flawless, and absolutely controlled in every moment. He is witty, shameless, teasing, and calm, frequently setting out to offend and discomfit others but refusing to let it show when and if he’s ruffled himself. He can be charming and even subtle, but he often chooses to be outrageous, offensive, and obnoxious, instead. It’s more fun, unless he has something to gain from being sneaky. Zevran refuses to be made uncomfortable or seem not to know what’s going on even when that would be a reasonable response, and he’ll do or say outrageous things to preserve the veneer. Especially if they’re unnecessarily flirtatious. He takes his master of seduction angle very seriously. Either it ends in amusing banter and/or sex or he wins the conversation. Both are acceptable outcomes. (Though Zevran would insist this is always the case, he can, in fact, be disarmed by people being outrageous back at him. It’s not good for his image to let that get around, so he chooses denial.)
While this coldly combative and transactional approach is most definitely an act, he’s not playing against type. Zevran really is brash, a bit hedonistic when he can manage it, playful, and witty. He’s not even really aware himself where the game begins or ends some of the time, and he’s been especially addicted to the performance since Rinna died. He has never actually been able to trust people. Even his friends among the Crows, other children purchased and brought up alongside him, had to be colleagues, not friends. Never really close. He deeply mistrusts any relationship that goes deeper than innuendo and funny stories. He learned early to take refuge in sex, which simplifies so much, often gets him what he wants, and can turn into positive attention or at least a kind of negative attention he understands. Born and raised in a brothel (and not a nice one) and purchased as a child in part specifically because elves are considered pretty, he certainly has some uncomfortable issues that he has chosen to ignore. Sex is fun and gives him a good way to mess with people and stay distant, and he’ll certainly never let anyone get under his skin again like Rinna did. He’s very sure about that.
He’s actually not nearly as good at being cold hearted as he believes he is, but so few people ever made the effort to get under his skin that he’s not aware of it. He certainly fell in love once, and he knew better than to do that. Having been burned deeply by what happened to Rinna, though, he’s even more paranoid about feelings than he learned to be from early childhood. It is possible to get past the cool, wicked, teasing exterior to discover a cool, wicked, teasing interior. It takes close observation to pick out the little honesty and unguardedness there is. With people he likes a little bit, he’s more playful, less dismissive, but he still treats all interactions like a contest to win, with bonus points for not giving anything away. It’ll take a lot of work (or at least alcohol), though, for him to even begin to talk about meaningful subjects with a bit more seriousness, never mind confess to the fact that he might have feelings and tender memories.
It’s not just to curious others that Zevran refuses to consider things seriously. His own history is an endless parade of miseries, abuse, neglect, and loss, both sinner and sinned against. He agrees to all this readily, tending not to conceal anything about the slavery and abandonment, manipulation and torment visited on him by the Crows and by the generalities of life for an elf without resources in Thedas. He’ll even concede that killing people is wrong and that, ideally, he shouldn’t have been bought from a brothel for training as an assassin when he was seven years old. He just doesn’t allow himself to have any opinions on the subject beyond “eh, what can you do?” He tends to think it’s funny to horrify people with basic details from his life, but he doesn’t think about them beyond that, or why it works so well. Zevran is, to the core, utterly incapable of objecting much to anything terrible that happens to him. Following what happened to Rinna he became self-destructive bordering on suicidal and believes he deserves whatever comes, but getting angry about anything, trying to change it, implying a duty to try to change it, makes him prickly and uncomfortable at best, angry at worst. It’s a coping mechanism. Life would be a lot harder to live if it weren’t inevitable. He’s at a low point even for him, utterly loathes himself, longs for oblivion, and doesn’t believe any possibility of redemption is possible, but most of the time it doesn’t show. He didn't need to kill Rinna to hate himself, after all. He considers his mother's death in childbirth his first murder. Self-hatred is the background noise of his life.
Carefully prepared and polished as his performative version of his own personality is, Zevran’s moments of strong emotion are more telling than many people’s. If it’s on another’s behalf, Zevran can get angry, can defend the defenseless and prove he’s not absolutely a depraved monster. All the time. Despite claiming he identifies as an Antivan more than an elf and a generally dismissive attitude, he gets fiercely defensive of the abuses heaped on his people, whether he wants to hang out with them or not. Women being preyed upon bring him back to the brothel where he was born, mistreated children to his time as a Crow recruit (where being one of the small percentage to survive childhood meant you got to start real training), and so on. Beyond being protective of people he sees himself in because he couldn’t possibly defend himself for real, his ethics are strange and ruthless, as the murder for hire habit might indicate. He has a deep disdain for noble sacrifice for its own sake and a sensible belief that sacrificing some for the sake of many is often the right choice. He openly despises sentimentality and quietly extends that hostility to any sincere expression of feeling. He lies freely, but when he really gives his word, he won’t break it for anything. He’s even fairly religious, in a way that involves confessing all his murders to the prophet Andraste on at least a weekly basis. He’s self-serving in his reasoning, but there are always rules. Being beholden to the Crows (even if they did betray and destroy him) always gave his life structure, reinforced by the fact that stepping out of line inevitably meant death, and a black and white world is much easier to live—or die—in.
Barge Reactions: Zevran’s first reactions will be overwhelmed by the sheer strangeness of the barge. He’s from a world without indoor plumbing, and as a fan of luxuries, most of the philosophical questions will be put off until the novelty of light switches and synthetic fabrics has worn off. And that hedonistic streak will remain. He’ll be entirely happy to bury himself in indulgence whenever he’s overwhelmed, which will be often, given his state of mind when he died. Meeting new and strange people (and probably occasionally killing them) isn’t new to Zevran, and his admittedly piecemeal knowledge of the fade and magic will soften the impact of some of the stranger aspects of the barge. He won’t be comfortable with floods and breaches, but he has enough context of illusions and demons and the Fade to be able to reason his way through it and at least pretend not to be horrified by the very idea. Individual events will certainly get under his skin, but he’ll be at least as shocked by hot showers on demand as having his life briefly overwritten by someone else’s. His attitude about the imprisonment itself will be complicated. He no doubt deserves it, and worse, and he was trying to get himself killed all the while, and the barge will feel more like a baited trap to mistrust than a prison. He’ll actually be more comfortable once he has his first bad event or crosses the wrong inmate. Being tortured seems about right.
Path to Redemption: Zevran may, at first, seem like a very easy inmate, happy to agree to anything, talk to anybody, nod his way through serious conversations. And then he’ll wander off completely unchanged. Actually getting under Zevran’s skin requires dedication and a high tolerance for deliberate obtuseness (and being ogled), and once that’s accomplished, finding a way to make him really face his demons. His first aim will have to be accepting what happened to Rinna. He’s faced his own culpability and the guilt has left him suicidal, good as he is at hiding it. The betrayal surrounding her death has also ripped away what little he ever believed about his place in the world, and his outlook is completely bleak and hopeless. Addressing this is mostly a matter of showing him kindness and understanding, introducing him to the concept of trusting someone and believing in something. He needs to forgive himself without excusing himself before he can move on, but dealing with one specific murder out of hundreds and not addressing any of the underlying causes is not going to result in real change. Zevran also needs to accept that the world he lived in was gruesome and cruel and unfair, that he was both victim and culprit, and that making things better, however impossible, however much more he has to hate himself, is required to actually be a good person. He knows already that he shouldn't have killed Rinna, but it hasn't even occurred to him that he shouldn't have thoughtlessly snuffed out life after life for his own convenience and that of the more powerful. He needs to learn an actual concern for both himself and people he doesn't already know and like, their lives and not just their deaths.
History: History overview
Zevran was spared by the Grey Wardens after his first assault on them failed spectacularly. He gave his oath specifically to Elissa Cousland, a Fereldan noblewoman with good intentions but little imagination. Cousland arranged to crown Bhelen in Orzammar, saved the mages of the tower, saved the Arl of Redcliffe but not his mage son, and cured the werewolves, acquiring the army she needed but not much more. She would go on to spare Teryn Loghain and arrange Alistair’s marriage to Anora, but Zevran was dead before that point. Despite attempts to be friendly with the woman who’d spared his life, Zevran found her judgmental and dismissive, and they never became close. When accompanying the warden through Denerim, following her directives as he had sworn but feeling generally dispirited, his old partner Taliesin appeared, offering to help Zevran complete the contract on the wardens and return to his old life. Zevran didn’t really believe it would work—he had seen the wardens and their companions mow through darkspawn and demons. A few elves and humans with swords weren’t going to stop them. But he had set out to find a way to end his miserable life, and feeling no particular connection to the warden, it was as good an exit as any. He died at the end of her sword, succeeding at last in finding himself a way out of his wreck of a life.
Sample Journal Entry: This… is not how I pictured the maker’s bosom.
[The room on camera is small and dingy, the rough wooden walls stained with smoke and probably worse, the furniture, such as it is, simply several small, shoddily constructed bunks and storage chests. It doesn’t look like a pleasant place to be, and for Zevran, it’s a pretty special sort of hell. This was the apartment he shared with as many other Crow recruits as they could fit—Tali and Rinna included. He’d rather be in the Deep Roads, spiders and all.]
Then again, the good chanters were always a bit imprecise about the afterlife, no? And I have certainly done nothing to earn any sort of sweet rewards. But I would not have imagined the Dark City quite this way, either. Altogether, I suspect somebody has been misinformed.
[He shifts uncomfortably, the twitchy discomfort evident in the movement belying, for a moment, the cavalier words.]
Especially as, when I think back on this place, I am very sure there were knives hidden in every bedframe, as well as a few other interesting places. That was always my favorite thing about the recruit apartments. Well, that and the smell of the tanneries. Nothing like rotting flesh and leather processing chemicals to wake one up in the morning, no?
Sample RP: No weapons for inmates. A quaint notion. Zevran has generally operated as part of a cell with as much backup as the Crows choose to provide, but nobody could call themselves an assassin and not be prepared to improvise. So very many marks are uncooperative about standing still in the middle of a field alone on a dark night. And as the small, slight poisoner with pouty lips and a gift for charming people despite themselves, jobs that demanded infiltration and the risk of being caught with a dagger often fell to hm. No, this is not new. At least this barge seems to have left him the pout and the charm.
The best improvised garrote is a bowstring, in his opinion, but a sturdy bootlace would do in a jam. Stocking full of copper pieces—noisy, messy, not really suited to him, but decent in a pinch. A painstakingly bent belt buckle isn’t going to actually wound anyone, but sufficient slight of hand and a panicked enough soul could probably be convinced that the cold metal they felt was something dangerous. And in short order he is sure he could palm a kitchen knife or two.
But what you really want in a situation like this—uncertain, with few recourses for defense—is poison. And they have a greenhouse, do they not? And what could seem more natural to a bunch of humans than an elf wanting to spend time in among the plants? True, this particular elf despises nature, but they’ll believe just about anything about the pretty little knife-earred folk if it suits their preconceptions. And it’s a rare garden that doesn’t have something a bit deadly, if only because so many pretty flowers have a bit of a sting to them. Which is an excellent metaphor. He’ll have to make use of it. Either way, he’ll feel so much better when he has killing people options on hand.
Special Notes: Zevran comes from a game with a potentially branching storyline and the events canon to his story will probably not specifically match that of other Dragon Age characters in all respects.