@Device(PostScript)
@Make(Report)
@Style(Spacing 1.5, Leftmargin 0.75 inch, Rightmargin 0.75 inch,
       SingleSided, Font = TimesRoman, Size 10)

@comment(Set these values appropriately for each character profile)

@string(name="Holly lle-Arriz Bluemist ")
@string(realname="Holly lle-Arriz Silverwing Bluemist ")
@string(playername="Player Name")
@string(id="346678")

@include (/mit/abstract/Characters/Sheets/cover.mss)



@MajorHeading(@value(realname))

What's in a name?  Well, in your case, Holly lle-Arriz Silverwing
Bluemist, quite a bit of inherent contradiction.  "Holly Silverwing"
is a Clan name, but you have severed your relationship with the Clans
by choosing to become a Realm mage.  You know enough about the Realm
to know "lle-Arriz" means something similar to "child of Arriz," in
your case "apprentice to."  Truth is, you took the honorific when the
wizard Arriz agreed to be your sponsor for the Time of Trials, but
you've never been his apprentice, really -- you learned your magic
from Kalerege.  And "Bluemist" -- well, maybe that's what your family
has had to call itself for a dozen generations, but your parents
taught you quite well that it was pure deception.  You are a
Clearstone, as your parents before you, and if that is sufficient to
brand you traitor and OutClan then, by Mishael himself, let them do
so!

How @i(dare) they?!?  You worked hard to become a mage, you have the
talent, you have the drive--hell, you've even been trained by one
Great Wizard and sponsored by another -- you deserve magehood!  And
you'll achieve it, no matter what they do to keep you away from it, or
what laws they pass.  

An empty boast, perhaps, from anyone else -- but not from you.  Magic
has been your life practically since you were born... even though you
spent most of your life in the Clanlands, where the teaching and use
of magic was completely illegal.  Your father Drake taught you the
summoning and binding of deva almost as soon as you could speak.  When
you were old enough, and had announced your desire to become a mage,
he somehow managed to get you apprenticed to a Great Wizard --
Kalerege, the lord of the legendary Castle in the Sky.  You were on
your way to magehood, you thought.

The only other person on Kalerege's Castle was Benjamin, his
manservant.  You never did establish exactly why Benjy (he hated being
called that, so of course you did so at every opportunity) stayed with
Kalerege, but there was no love lost between them.  In any case, Benjy
was about as much fun as spent mythril, so you finally got tired of
making passes at him; he just wasn't interested.  You would have been
insulted, if it hadn't seemed to all the world like he simply wasn't
responding to @i(anything)--you've never met anyone so without
emotion.  On the other hand, he was a great source of information, and
seemed to know an awful lot about Kalerege's life.

In fact, it was through Benjamin that you discovered the source of
Kalerege's power, although you've often wished you'd never found
out.  Somehow, through what evil ritual you do not care to know, he
had managed to imprison and bind the Goddess Tualoha, the Creator of
All, with an artifact called the M'kraan Crystal.  It was that power
he used to maintain his position as a Great Wizard, that power which
-- channeled through the portal between our realm and Hers he called
the Creation Gate -- was responsible for keeping every deva on this
Castle functioning smoothly and at his command.

You broke into Kalerege's library to do some more research, and
discovered the nature of that Gate.  It seems that about 500 years ago
or so, a mage and/or priest of Tualoha named Kiel conducted a ritual
to increase the power of the Goddess in the World by opening such a
portal.  He soon realized, though, that in so doing he had doomed the
World to a degree of rampant creation that no life could survive, that
in essence he had destroyed the World as he new it, and rather than
allow that to happen he sealed the portal and used its power to
suspend the Castle in the sky.  His last written words, at least as
far as you could discover, were a warning -- to those who would tamper
with the seal on the Gate, for even closed, an unsealed Gate was
enough to destroy the balance of forces in the World.

Further notes revealed that even sealed, the Gate had leaked enough
power to throw World out of balance in favor of Creation, thus
precipitating the Realm's Holy War, and that the Gate had then been
unsealed, some thirty-five years ago, by Kalerege and the M'kraan
Crystal.  It was only his successful binding of the Goddess that kept
the World from being overrun.

You confronted Kalerege with your knowledge, and he admitted that he
had known about the Gate and was in fact drawing his power from it.
But he refused to undo the binding spell, since -- in his words --
"The world has no place in it for the workings of gods."  Maybe it's
your half- Clan heritage, but you've never had any stomach for magical
double-talk -- what he MEANT was that he didn't want anything more
powerful than he was remaining a threat to him.  And the more you
thought about it, the more obvious it became that some day, that would
include you.

You considered trying to sever the binding spell, but the odds were
that it would backlash unpredictably.  Besides, Kalerege probably ran
it through his Orb, like he did every other important spell on the
Castle, and he kept that in a special chamber in the Castle's lower
level.  You had managed to eavesdrop on Kalerege when he used the
teleport portal to enter the lower levels, so you knew the
portal-deva's Truename, Krishna -- that was how you managed to do all
the unsolicited research you had, in the special libraries below --
but you could never enter that chamber, even with magic.  The Orb and
the binding spell, it seemed, were out of your hands and out of your
league.

But you @i(could) ensure that he could never perform the binding
again, if the spell ever failed.  You had heard of the Three Tomes of
the Elder Gods: Chthon's Darkhold, Gaea's Blackbriar Tome, and
Tualoha's Book of the Vishanti.  You also knew that Kalerege had the
Book of the Vishanti in his library, arranged together with a number
of tomes on the binding of deva of various sorts.  Putting two and two
together, you concluded that the Book was involved in the binding and
decided to destroy it.  No one person should have that sort of power at
their disposal.

You almost didn't get the chance.  After your confrontation with
Kalerege, he informed you he was "no longer in need of the services of
an apprentice."  Well, @i(that) came as no surprise!  So you left, but
you took the book with you and left an illusion in its place --
satisfying, but it left you back where you started, a mundane.  Sure,
you had been trained by two capable wizards, but without someone to
sponsor you through the Time of Trials you couldn't get the link to
the Orb, and without the Orb, you would quickly die if you tried to
practice true magic away from a source of power.  It was tempting to
change your mind and use the Book of the Vishanti yourself, but you
resisted the temptation -- @i(no) one person should have that sort of
power at their disposal.  When you arrived home, you tossed the Book
into your fireplace, where it exploded in a multicolored flash.

That was almost a decade ago.  You spent most of your time practicing
what skills you had been taught short of actual spellcasting, and took
odd jobs in the Bluemist Lands, eventually becoming a Clan Observer.
The job was boring; it was your task to read through contracts and
legal paperwork for Clansmen, it was your signature that made the
contracts binding, but you weren't interested in that--it was the
magic that was your true love, though you could never tell your
siblings and cousins that without risking death.  When the Realm-Clan
wars began, your last chance to achieve that love seemed gone.

But you discovered other interests.  The skills you learned and
practiced so diligently to increase your dexterity and mental agility
turned out to have other applications; to put it bluntly, you turned
out to be an exceptional pickpocket.  Eventually, you came to the
awareness of the Right Hand, a powerful underworld organization with
its fingers everywhere, and were "asked" to join.  You did.

It turned out to be useful.  You had a place to barter the items you
stole, and occassional bits of information you obtained in your line
of work, in exchange for mythril stones, which you could use to power
some of your weaker spells ... not a link to the Orb, by any means,
but useful nevertheless.  Life went on.

And then things got a little weird.  The Realm-Clan war was put on
hold, so that the Clasp and the Realm's Peers could get together for a
peace summit.  At the same time, ironically enough, you received a
message from the Right Hand's leader that a territory war between the
underworlds of the two nations had begun.  You were appointed to one
of the early observation teams that went over to the Realm (you don't
know how he pulled that off!), and you stayed there, with instructions
to unearth, infiltrate, and cause trouble for the Realm Thieves'
Guild.

Returning to the Realm turned out to be the answer to your prayers.
You discovered that Arriz, the Heirophant of the Wizard's Conclave,
had recently lost his apprentice David in a hunting accident, so you
approached him and asked him to take you as his apprentice.  He
accepted!  The truth was, he didn't really need to teach you anything,
but you had to keep up appearances.  He didn't seem to mind much,
being busy on some special project.

In the meantime, of course, you were making subtle inquiries on the
street.  If the Guild functioned the way the Hand did, by absorbing
any promising thieves into itself and becoming a business enterprise,
then it would be nearly impossible to keep it a secret.  Sure enough,
you quickly made some contacts, and finally met a rather crude young
man named Adam.  He ran into you while escaping the Guard of the
Realm, clutching a Star-laden purse ... a clumsy oaf, but you managed to
help him escape.  He offered, in his own words, to "repay you with the
honor of his bed."

You nearly bit through your lip keeping from laughing in his face, but
figured Adam would make a good first step in your climb through the
Guild.  You questioned him, subtly, about the Guild and its structure,
but he didn't know much -- he knew a few fences, a few enforcers, a
few local bosses, but nobody important.  He also told you ridiculous
stories, mostly while drunk, about a Shadowlord who had run the Guild
for centuries and was immortal. 

You were about ready to dump Adam and go on to bigger fish when he
received a message one night: you heard him whispering with another
man, whose name you couldn't catch, about a big job they were going to
pull.  Over the next several days he became extremely furtive, and you
took to following him -- one night, about a week ago, he met with two
other men and they made their way to the Capital City Art Gallery.  

Whoever the leader of the expedition was, he had some knowledge of
magic.  Somehow he nullified all the alarm spell-deva, entering the
gallery unnoticed.  You followed quietly, and eventually Adam and one
of the two (the leader had slipped off somewhere) removed one of the
paintings and slipped it into a silvery tube.  You saw Adam slip the
tube into the special pocket of his cloak you had noticed days
earlier.  

While you were wondering what your next move should be, Adam turned
and walked right past your hiding place.  Well, that made it obvious:
you picked his pocket (clumsy oaf never even noticed), turned on your
heel and took off.  You didn't mean to trigger the alarm on your way
out, but it turned out for the better, since the Guard showed up and
arrested your erstwhile lover and his compatriot.  (You never did
figure out what had become of the third man.)  

@comment(recognition envelope for Tuvan)

You returned to Arriz's sanctum that night, intending to inspect your
prize, but never got the chance -- Arriz called for you, told you the
Time of Trials was being held at the end of the week, and offered to
sponsor you at them.  Your dream had finally come true!  Of course you
knew the Trials being held on Kalerege's Castle might get sticky,
particularly if he had noticed his Book was missing, but the risk was
worth it.  At last, you were going to be a mage! 

Surely someone or something out there has it in for that notion.  Less
than a week before you were planning to head up to the Castle, who
should arrive at Arriz's door but his old apprentice David, asking to
be sponsored for the Time of Trials.  You followed them both and
eavesdropped on their conversation, most of which you couldn't catch
(although there was a lot of incoherent screaming from David,
something about his mate dying, and his having been responsible for
it, but you couldn't catch the details).  You heard quite clearly,
though, when Arriz agree to sponsor him.  @i(Him, instead of you!)

That was the last straw as far as you were concerned.  Bad enough that
the history of your entire homeland and the machinations of
power-hungry priests centuries dead had conspired to prevent you twice
from achieving your rightful status as mage; by no means were you
going to allow a stripling boy to take away your last chance!  

You followed David from Arriz' Sanctum, intending to confront him when
he arrived at his home.  He didn't seem to be going anywhere, though,
just wandering the city.  You followed him for hours, but lost him
when the sun set -- he seemed to panic and started running, and it
took you a few moments to follow suit; you turned a corner and spotted
someone running into an alley about a block away.  You heard a scream,
and then another, and something you couldn't identify.  When you got
there, there was no sign of David but his clothes, torn and shredded
on the floor.  On the other hand, you couldn't say the alley was
empty.  Several yards further in, you saw the bloodied corpse of a
Nisaku, doubtless a vagrant or vagabond of some sort, still spouting
blood from the gaping hole where his throat used to be.

You followed the trail of blood, and the occassional glimpses of
something running away, for that entire night; it was hard to lose.
Along the way, you lost count of the vagrants and passers-by who lay
mauled and bloody in the streets and alleys.  But the last body you
saw in that bloody trail was alive, though perhaps not well; it was
the naked, blood-caked body of David, curled up and retching on
someone's front step.

You had never really thought of yourself as a killer, but by that time
you had managed to put two and two together.  You didn't wait for that
butcher to see you there, didn't wait for him to kill you the way he
had slaughtered so many others.  Instead, you slipped a dagger into
the back of his skull, and another through his left eye, destroying
his brain and ensuring he would never come back (at least, that's what
the legends say.  Had you had a wooden stake, you would have used that
too...).  

You were considering burning the body, or burying it, or something,
when someone started unlatching the door.  You took off like a
lightning bolt, and didn't even slow down when you heard a hoarse,
grief-stricken male voice screaming "David!!!"  You just went home and
shivered for about a day.  For the rest of the week, you busied
yourself in preparations for the Trials and for your trip to the
Castle, and tried @b(very) hard to avoid thinking about that night.
For the most part, you've succeeded.

You were amazingly lucky, getting up here before the teleport
platforms broke down -- most of your fellow apprentices didn't make
it.  Currently there are only three apprentices on the Castle: you,
Arrani Moses (an interesting fellow, if a bit reserved), and Clerrik
Jani.  Jani was at first an entertaining friend, clearly the product
of a sheltered and repressed childhood.  As you got to know him,
though, you realized there was a born troublemaker in that repressed
body.  The two of you became good friends, and among other things, you
taught him some of the basics of lockpicking.  He seemed really
interested, although a little worried about his father's disapproval
-- still, there's some great potential in that boy, if you can just
get him over the parental thing.

Of course, you not only have to worry about passing the Time of
Trials, but also making sure Kalerege never figures out what you did,
and making sure none of the Clansmen manage to interfere with your
success.  Even the Right Hand, although it's probably in your best
interests to do what you can to help them.  You have to be very
careful around both the Iron Gauntlet and the Guard of the Realm, the
two law-enforcement groups on the Castle.

On the other hand, with a little bit of luck, who knows what can
happen?  Surely, you aren't the only Clearstone descendant to remain
aware of her heritage; if you can establish yourself as a Realm mage,
you may go down in history as having spearheaded the Clearstone
Resurgance... 

@newpage

@heading(Items, Abilities and Spells)

You begin the game with the following items:

@begin(itemize)

A lockpick.

An ebony-handled dagger.

A small crystal lens.

"The Summoning and Binding of Entities of Power, for Fun and Profit."

A long thin metal tube containing the stolen painting.

@end(itemize)

You have the following abilities:

@begin(itemize)

WEAPON SKILL Dagger 4: You may add 4 to your net Martial Attack
when attacking with a dagger.

LOCKPICK: You can use lockpicks (twisty pieces of metal) effectively.

SEARCH: You may find Hidden objects.  To use, search the area and
contact a GM.

MAGIC, LEVEL 1: You have a basic understanding of magic; can solve
simple problems and answer simple questions.  Contact a GM to use.

SPEAK MAGICAL JARGON: After discussing magic with someone whose
knowledge of magic is less than your own, you may utterly confuse
them.  They will wander away and leave you alone.

@end(itemize)

You know the following spells:

@include(/mit/abstract/Lore/Magic/Spells/read_languages.minor.mss)
@include(/mit/abstract/Lore/Magic/Spells/detect_magic.minor.mss)
@include(/mit/abstract/Lore/Magic/Spells/disguise_item.minor.mss)
@include(/mit/abstract/Lore/Magic/Spells/light.minor.mss)

@include(/mit/abstract/Guides/lore.creation.mss)
@include(/mit/abstract/Guides/guide.clans.mss)
@include(/mit/abstract/Guides/guide.bluemist.mss)

@section(Organizations)

@include(/mit/abstract/Organizations/hand.right.mss)