Name: Peleps Sepeta Arlun
Aspect: Water
Age: 26
School: Cloister of Wisdom
Height: 5'2"
Anima: A hypnotic, swirling whirlpool, beckoning the eye to the inky blackness at its center.

Description
Peleps Sepeta Arlun is a short, athletically built water aspect dragonblood. She usually wears a simple Peleps naval officer's uniform, but goes totally barefoot to let her feel the deck of her ship beneath her feet. Her ebon-dark hair appears perpetually damp, and billows curiously when not tied back in a tight braid. She has light green skin that darkens to teal in moments of great exertion or passion.


BACKGROUND
Peleps Sepeta Arlun was born during a time that many later came to view with nostalgia and envy. The years just before the Empress disappeared, when the Dynasty's power was at its height. Her father, Peleps Sepeta Zurin, was one of the most famous Immaculate preachers in the world, and a distant object of admiration and wonder to his young daughter. She aped him in all things, from her piety to her admiration of martial arts, though she could never master her father's abstemious diet of rice and vegetables.

The last anyone heard of Zurin, however, was when he disappeared on a trip to convert the Mask of Winters to the Immaculate Faith. At first shocking, the incident later became a popular subject of jokes that only became better when Dynastic society heard that his newly-exalted daughter had followed her father's footsteps in enrolling in the Cloister of Wisdom. Luckily, she could not hear the cruel jibes about "father-daughter shared torture rooms" from her initiate's cell.

The Cloister was a time of great joy to Arlun. She tamed the appetite that had plagued her since childhood, built an edifice of learning on her faith, and became initiated into the Water Dragon style, greatest weapon of the Dynasty in the fight against Anathema. Upon her graduation, she had planned to become a full monk, but the sumptuous graduation gala thrown for her convinced her that she was not entirely ready to surrender earthly desire, yet.

When Arlun graduated, the civil war was in full swing, and the tide had begun to turn against the Mnemon-Peleps-Ledaal axis. Sensing that backup plans would be prudent, Arlun's grandmothers denied her a place in the legions or the central navies. Instead, she was to be sent to Wavecrest, to help run the Peleps holdings and clear the sea of the pirates who had crowded in since the war started.

Arlun spent the long trip to Wavecrest on the Shorebane of Captain Peleps Teqar, a disreputable unexalted patrician. Despite the mismatch of the young shaven-pate exalt and the salty mortal captain, she was an eager and dedicated student. She clambered up and down the rigging like a monkey, tutored the crewmen who cared to learn in basic martial arts, and carefully paid attention to how Teqar managed his crew. By the time they landed at the Sepeta plantations on Wildbow in the Wavecrest Archipelago, only the most exacting taskmaster would have found her lacking as a sailor.

On Wildbow, Arlun found a gorgeous locale. White sands, tall green mountains, and endless orchards bulging with exotic fruits. Still, there was little time for relaxation. Bereft of direct Peleps attention, things had begun to fall apart. Pirates seemed to hide in every shoal, boiling out when anything smaller than a trireme went to sea. Inland tribes had ceased tributes and even begun to raid Peleps towns and plantations. Even the slaves had begun to grow discontent.

Feeling her essence boiling within her, Arlun seized the challenge with both hands. She took charge of the plantation guards herself and lead expeditions inland, using her terrifying martial skill to force them to surrender all they owed and more. As a guarantee, she took captives from the children of tribal nobility. They would be treated well and educated, but executed instantly in the event of further disloyalty.

To deal with the pirates, she used the now-obedient tribes to scout out the locations of their coves and secret harbors. Those without capable land defenses she simply stormed when they slept, seizing the men and ships both.  If their hideout was well fortified, she would start by swimming in herself, secretly breaking rudders and tearing holes below the waterline. Those who didn't surrender would be starved out. Beyond the loot seized, she was also able to make valuable commercial connections by selling the pirates en masse to Denzik slavers. Upon the last of the pirate coves being cleared, she held a gala for local nobility, celebrating the return of safe waters and easy commerce.

Throughout this process, Arlun depended heavily on the help of Chozoe Nor, a thin-blooded dragonblood of the local Wavecrest patricians. Having lived all her life on Wildbow, Nor knew the local dialects, bigwigs, and customs. In Nor, Arlun found someone she could share her doubts and fears with, without the judgment of dynastic society. In Arlun, Nor found someone with the willingness to enact the changes she had always thought necessary, and the power and wealth to see it through. Working together day and night, their dedication slowly turned to friendship, then passion. They were so often together that the Satrap of Wavecrest gave Arlun the nickname "Nor's Bride".

Still, nothing lasts forever. Just as their work was finishing up, the war ended in a humiliating defeat for Peleps. Stripped of most of their fleets outside the West, a tidal wave of displaced Peleps patricians, exalts, and elders poured into the Wavecrest archipelago. Now just small fish in a big pond again, Arlun found herself removed from administration of Wildbow and assigned as a "Scalelord of Marines" aboard a Peleps trireme.

Disappointment compounded indignity as Arlun's request to be allowed to marry Chozoe Nor was denied. Nor was to marry a widowed Peleps captain, while Arlun's new fiancee was Tepet Corino Shen, a sorcerer spirited off the Isle as part of a secret agreement with the Roseblack. Though broken-hearted, Arlun did her duty and accepted the marriage.

Luckily, despite very different careers, the new husband and wife found they got along well. Both were bookish and introspective, less inclined to the titanic displays of emotion common in young exalts. After only a year of living together, Arlun gave birth to their first child, a boy named Goemon. Though disappointed by the child's sex, Arlun's grandmothers were pleased enough to release Arlun's inheritance to her: a vast fortune in fisheries and plantations, brought to her by the severe casualties suffered by her land-based branch of the family.

Flush with cash and having years before she would be expected to produce another child, Arlun embarked on a new venture. She used her Guild contacts to commission a three-masted Denzik galleon she christened the Black Marlin, to be used for pirate hunting and as a roving addition to the Peleps fleet where needed. Best of all, she was able to swing Nor's assignment to her ship as the quartermaster. Arlun doesn't know where she'll sail, just yet, but she knows that she has everything she needs to be happy doing it.

EXALTATION

Arlun's exaltation came on relatively early in life, when she was only 10 years old. After much begging and months of good behavior, she had been allowed to go with her nursemaid to one of the nearby Immaculate shrines to see a martial arts tournament.

The competition, held on a platform over a rushing moat fed by a nearby river, was a friendly competition between the greatest students of two rival shrines. As one bout approached its climax, the young Arlun got too close to the rope railing off the edge and toppled into the moat, which sucked her into a roaring drain.

The shrine monks lowered the competition platform as quickly as they could and rushed to the retaining pool where the moat emptied, but they knew there was no chance she could survive the long, waterlogged drain. Thus it came as a great surprise when they came to the pond and found her laughing and swimming like a fish in the water, her skin now as green as river-algae!

By next month, Arlun had been sent off to a prestigious seminary to begin her education in earnest, and the shrine found itself with a rich donation from her grandmother Sepeta.