Brief Description

A dark, mysterious woman with "looks that kill". Her innocence and fragile beauty from long ago have been replaced by a menacing and dangerous raw and exotic sensuality. Having failed to succeed as an outsider within the world of Talingarde and Mitra, she's rebelled against them. Tall and powerfully built, with an hourglass figure but more than a little muscle behind it, she wears her black hair long, sometimes done up in a ponytail. She's trained herself to physical perfection, enhancing a few exotic features that hint at a frightening resilience to her. She is still devastatingly attractive to those who like the type; intimidating, dominant, and powerful. Iulia takes an almost narcissistic pride in her appearance. Her features are sharp and concise, no softness in her visage. Her eyes are large, and they smolder, set off against olive skin.

Personality

Iulia is a coldly cunning and calculating woman, with any traces of her naive youth long purged through a hard life. She's been forced to reinvent herself at least twice betrayed by the powers that be in Talingarde and the Church of Mitra each time. She hates the ruling class for their pompous inflexibility, their hypocrisy, and the way they keep women down and subservient. While her pride is her greatest sin, she practices others regularly; lust, greed, but lately she finds herself especially drawn to wrath. Despite this she is no stranger to working with others to achieve a common goal. She is charming in the conventional sense, but tough and ruthless. Despite her quest for revenge and ascendance, she is extremely loyal to those she cares about, or those who are devoted to the same cause. She knows from painful experience she can't do anything on her own. She beautiful but in a very unconventional way, hard and utterly ruthless and she will have her revenge.

Brief History:

Born to a prosperous merchant, Iulia was the eldest of four siblings and the only daughter. Childhood was good for her and she was trained as a proper young daughter in the classical fashion with lessons in dance, music, languages and needlepoint. She wasn't much of a student, but oh, how she danced. She loved to move, sinuous and serpentine, it was her passion and escape. Much was expected of her in the family. While her father worked long hours building his business for his sons to inherit, and her mother sank into melancholy, she was the surrogate mother for her younger siblings, caring for them while her mother spent more and more time in her room, in her bottles, in black moods.

It took its toll on the family, and by the time she was sixteen the family business had failed and her parents had split. Her father remarried and as her mother was in no condition to care for anyone, not even herself, the children were sent to live with a family friend and Mitran priest. Iulia studied to be a teacher and worked to take care of her younger brothers, but when her father's friend began to make inappropriate advances towards the young Iulia, she fled to Ghastenhall, with a hatred for the faith and its self-righteous, hypocritical priests that festered through the years.

Struggling to earn a living in the big city as a young woman without any real artisanal skills, she kept herself as a tavern serving girl, posing as an artist's model and other less savory jobs. It was a hard life and she grew hard and bitter living it. Then she found a lifeline in her squalor. She found a place where she could dance. Not the proper, graceful dance she'd learned as a girl, though those skills came in handy. This was much more exotic, bawdy and involved a lot less clothing. But it was a respite from the grubby streets and let her be a star, if only a minor one.

Promiscuous, flirtatious, and openly flaunting her body, she captivated her audiences and was an overnight success. She posed as a foreign princess of priestly status birth, pretending to have been trained in the art of sacred dance since childhood. With her exotic looks and a few props, as well as the fact that few from Talingarde knew anything at all about the land she claimed to hail from, she sold the masquerade.

Establishments that featured women dancing and removing their clothes were more than frowned upon in lawful good, Mitran worshiping Talingarde, but they existed if you knew where to look. And the clientele were often people you would least expect, the most self-righteous bishops and ministers became fans.

As she developed a following, it became clear that some of the patrons were very attracted to her powerful build, exotic features and dominant style. She built a relationship with some special clients who she would entertain outside of the tavern. She discovered that some men, and a few women, had the desire to be disciplined by a powerful woman, and here she found a role she truly relished, and soon she found she was spending more time entertaining these select few at her home than dancing. She had a gift for inflicting pain mixed with pleasure and it was remarkable what a trusted, highly placed minister might tell his mistress to impress her.

And so she found she knew too much, which led to her downfall. Secrets came to her, secrets she had no business knowing. A man who came to her for her unique talents shared too much of himself, that he was a personal guard for the heir to Talingarde. And so she found herself recruited by a handsome, noble man for a heinous plot, a plot to overthrow the King himself.

But her handler was nowhere near as clever as he seemed. Their cell was infiltrated and all of them arrested. She was the only one to survive the capture, the only one who could look forward to the privilege of being drawn and quartered.

She's not sure her father even knows she's been arrested. Devoted to his new family he's nearly forgotten the old, and his fickle love wasn't anything she wanted any longer. Her lovers have conveniently forgotten she ever existed and her three younger brothers were in a difficult spot. They were two young merchants and a soldier now, and in no position to help her, she asked them all to forget her, rather than be dragged down with her in the morass of High Treason.

And so, as she finds herself taken to Brandenscar, she is building a long list of people she wishes revenge on, despite that fact that she will be dead in a few days. She wants to see Talingarde burn for the way it betrayed and destroyed her, but knows she'll need allies.

What Crime Did you Comment: High Treason - though if that seems too much of a stretch from her back story, Sedition might work

How did you try to pull it off?

Recruited into a revolutionary cell by a man who wasn't as smart as he thought he was, Iulia's crime was doomed before it began. Their plan was to turn a guard tasked with protecting the King's heir, and use that to kidnap them. It was Iulia's job to seduce and recruit the guard to their cause.

How did you get caught?

It should have been easy enough, the guard was already hopelessly smitten by her, but they couldn't pull it off. Royal inquisitors sniffed out the plot and crushed it mercilessly. The rest of her group went down fighting, Iulia is the only survivor. And now on her way to Branderscar.