Name: Lavender. Her real name isn't common knowledge, nor is it easily pronounced.

Occupation: Financier, new owner and operator of the Well of Ecstasy.

Actual Age/Apparent Age: Lavender's actual age is hard to pin down even by herself, as her people tend to enter a hibernation-like state for long periods at a time. Certainly it's in the centuries at least. Physically she looks like she's in her early twenties.

Gender: Female.

Sexuality: Lesbian, although Lavender is known more for toying with people than carrying on sincere and mutual relationships.

Race/Species: Grand Weaver, which serves as both a species and family name. Her tribe are also known as the Merchant Spiders of Gennith or sometimes just "those creepy spider overlords."

Appearance: The name Lavender uses for traveling in humanoid lands clearly comes from the color of her very long, unusually soft hair. Her eyes are bright red, and two thick, off-white horns adorn either side of her head. Those strange details aside, she looks more or less like a young human woman. She's five foot two, with a thin and somewhat coltish build. Her features are delicate and lovely, deliberately so in fact since her humanoid form was magically engineered. She loves colorful ribbons, scarves, and bows, and tends to wear more of them than polite society usually allows for.

In spider form, Lavender is about ten feet long, with an off-white carapace with a hint of lavender, eight legs, eight red eyes, large horned protrusions, the works. Since she never shows it off, it's really more of a matter of curiosity to those with enough magical insight to see the large outline behind the small mask.

Personality: Lavender can be charismatic when she puts her mind to it, such as when negotiating in business, but she suffers from the combination of being easily bored and self-impressed. She often comes across with a smug, amused self-confidence that easily rubs people the wrong way. She's also pretty lazy, and with servants to tend to her needs, tends to spoil herself. She's not specifically misanthropic, but she tends to think of humans and other "lesser" races as purely financial units unless one of them catches her personal interest. She thus has no quarrel with slavery or owning an institution that runs on one. She's far less cruel than the Sisters, both philosophically and in practice, but since she still finds work for slaves they send people her way sometimes. When dealing with new people, she occasionally likes to feign absent-minded cluelessness instead, as she finds it amusing to be taken for the age she looks.

Lavender has two major weaknesses: curiosity and self-indulgence. She likes to know things, and can become cross if she thinks people are deliberately hiding information from her when they don't need to. She also likes eating desserts, especially chocolate, and dressing herself up in so many accessories that her fashion sense can come off as garish. It actually has more to do with her love of cloth and textures as a weaver herself, but either way she rarely comes off as understated. While she loves collecting money, it's something of a hobby rather than a compulsion, and she parts with it easily when it's needed for the sake of satisfying her other enjoyments.

Abilities/Skills:
*Seeing the Grand Web: While Lavender can't truly see the future, her intellect is hyperdeveloped around detecting patterns and extrapolating events to come from them. She can pick up mundane or bizarre details about the world around her and use them as fodder in her eternal quest for more wealth. These details usually come from following the news carefully and checking on markets herself, or through her magical weaving, though she doesn't dispel rumors about communication with an army of spider-spies or the ability to hear through earth and stone. She also has an incredible head for numbers, and can calculate profit, risk, and loss ratios with unbelievable speed, making her a confident if intimidating opponent in an unfriendly negotiation.

*Weaving the Personal Web: Even in her humanoid form, Lavender retains the ability to rapidly spin magical silk. The silk is of a very high quality, but she doesn't sell it save to those that know what they're getting into. All of Lavender's weaving remains connected to her through an invisible strand of magic, conveying information across those strands like anchor points of a web. She can also spin stiff, sharp, or sticky webbing, and animate and control it for use as tools or even weapons. The latter is rare, as she disdains personal combat and tries to avoid it.

While Lavender could theoretically buy a bunch of properties and spin a web across most of Al-Jalasa, she's opted not to. She doesn't want to antagonize Urhammu or any of the mages living within. Instead, she's limited herself to strategic anchor points across the Well of Ecstasy and mandating that its workers wear at least scarves or cuffs made from the material. As it is, those with magical senses now find a visit to the Well is like continuously walking through cobwebs, though she's willing to provide assistance in dampening those senses.

*Reputation Preceding: Unlike her homeland, Lavender has no force of law or authority backing her, so she relies on something simpler - her silver tongue is backed by actual silver. When she seeks someone out with a proposal, it's guaranteed, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, that that person will profit. Of course Lavender expects to profit too, usually more so, but anyone that would refuse an offer on that basis probably doesn't belong in business.

When people come to her with a proposal, though, all bets are off. She's been known to take on losing bets out of apparent caprice, or in service to larger plans that aren't visible to those lacking an eye on the big picture. Lavender rarely offers simple financial advice for money, since that would mean missing out on capitalizing on it herself, but she sometimes exchanges it for other services.

*Alternate Form: Lavender's true form is that of a large, pale, horned spider. She can shift to it when she wants to, but since most of her abilities work fine in her smaller form and she doesn't find that form restrictive, she rarely does so.

History: Lavender is one of the younger daughters of the ruling family of the faraway country of Gennith. Gennith is a small but peaceful and prosperous nation, but outsiders tend to view it as a disturbing and off-putting place. The mostly-human land is ruled over by a clan of far-seeing and far-thinking arachnoids, who mostly leave the day-to-day ruling to regents and elected offices. The spiders spend much of their time hibernating and listening for noteworthy twinges on their far-flung webs. When necessary, they act to ensure the land's peace and prosperity, but also sometimes for their own amusement when people disturb them in pursuit of personal gain. They're regarded in a similar fashion to some fae or djinns: harmless at a distance, but not to be trifled with lest one wind up on the wrong end of a deal.

Lavender, unusually for the Grand Weavers, left her homeland because one of those deals went south on her. Her family needed the services of a renowned foreign dragonslayer, who took on the quest to protect their land in return for an unusual request: that the spiders take responsibility for his son's safety, as he'd just been born under an extremely inauspicious sign. They agreed, and as the initiators of the deal, considered themselves duty-bound to go above and beyond to carry it out. Lavender was thus deployed as a family envoy after ritually being given a humanoid form. She served as a sort of very lazy bodyguard, as the boy faced no real outward hostility, and indeed Lavender soon became attached to him and took on a role akin to a rich, doting aunt.

Then, when the boy was in his teens, he vanished from his bed in the middle of the night. Even the Grand Weavers couldn't fathom how or why, and Lavender's connection to her charge's scarf was severed. They dedicated their collective brainpower to analyzing every possible sigil and sign, but could come up with nothing. It was as though the stars, disapproving of his birth, had at last simply unmade him. While there was agreement in the family that Lavender herself wasn't at fault, she nonetheless went into self-imposed exile rather than bring her shame onto them by association. She wandered until she reached Al-Jalasa, where she sensed enough curious things to make her decide to stay and settle in for a time. She quickly found success as an investor, middleman, and speculator, and soon had enough funds to decide to purchase the Well of Ecstasy as a headquarters.

Other information:
*Lavender's curiosity is easily piqued when it comes to people whose moves she can't easily predict. For some reason, Al-Jalasa is unusually full of such people, and Lavender has found herself with more of a sense of intrigued anticipation than she's had in quite a while.

*While one might think from her history that Lavender is in mourning or wracked with guilt over losing her charge, that isn't really the case. Certainly it's saddened her, but she trusts her family, and if they say there was nothing she could have done, then she considers the matter settled. She's thus living more like a wealthy hedonist on vacation until a few generations of short-lived people go by and her failure is forgotten among the subjects of her tribe. The incident did, however, have the effect of making her more guarded about becoming attached to people of the lesser species, which contributed to her involvement in the slave trade.