Water Genasi Swashbuckler Rogue - Hali Brookes

[Medium Sized Model - 25mm Base]

A Water Elemi woman born and raised in Velandria, Tradver’s sister city to its south. Once the manager of a shady tavern and inn, Hali was forced out of her home and workplace after it was aggressively acquiesced by the Dusty Dirks in a territorial feud with the Rossa Cartel. In the scuffle, Hali watched several of her friends lose more than their jobs. In vengeance she pursued the Dirks to Tradver, where she fell in with a group investigating the gangs attacks on convoys outside the city. The trail led her to discover that the Duke of Tradver himself was behind the attacks, and her target shifted to him, earning her a reputation as a hero across Belfrie, her days as a criminal outlaw dwindling behind her.

Hali was born native to Belfrie, her mother being a water Elemi and her father being a half-elf. She often found herself moving between the cities of Volosvio and Velandria, owing to her father’s work as a mason. It wasn’t until Hali was a young woman that she learned in truth her father was not a mason, but a smuggler for the Rossa Cartel. When she learned she was heartbroken; infuriated at her father, she took a stash of gold and left, planning to sail to her ancestral homeland of Abunor, far from the reaches of her father and the criminal syndicate he worked for.

But she found no love nor reprieve in Abunor, being outed as a foreigner with a child’s understanding of her mother tongue of Magyar. Her Elemi kin rejected her, though for years she would remain there, adopting their fashion, facial markings and jewellery in an attempt to integrate within the culture, but to no avail. She returned home after three years, defeated and dejected.

It was then, in the shadow of her disappointment, that she found herself drawn into her father’s world. She learned the art of smuggling, the thrill of the illicit, and the dangers of the underworld. Her father’s tavern, a facade for their smuggling operations, became her realm, and she became its queen. But fate, cruel and unyielding, struck again. The Dusty Dirks, a ruthless small-time gang trying to gain its footing against the Cartel in Velandria, slew her father in a territorial dispute. Though Hali was distraught, she decided to continue laying low, protecting her mother and working at the tavern left to them by her father. There she grew close to her staff, and for a time it seemed the life of crime would be behind her, yet all that glitters is not gold in the gilded city.

The tavern, too, fell prey to the Dusty Dirks’ expanding terror. With nothing left to lose, Hali set her sights on Tradver, fueled by whispers of the Dirks’ ties to the city’s duke. Vengeance became her sole purpose, her guiding star. She would avenge her father, her friends, her shattered life. Hali’s journey, once a quest for belonging, had morphed into a path of revenge, and she walked it to its very end, in the depths of the forests of Nan Thalias where the orchestrator of her loved one’s deaths had morphed into a putrid mass of chitin and rot. Duke Conrad had taking many forms, and it was appropriate to Hali that his last one would be one that truly reflected his inner being: a wretched worm snivelling and begging for its life.

With him defeated her purpose dwindled. She cared little for the affairs of Belfrie, nor to be hailed as a hero. She was too high profile in her homeland to remain a smuggler, and for several months she began running trade routes for the Rossa Cartel exclusively in Draksborne’s north. Fate would have it that Artemis would call on her in this time as a delivery brought her to Eredel, and reluctantly she rejoined with her companions. The tug of her to leave her life of crime pulled at her once again, feeling as though her father from the afterlife spurred her on, to live a life better than he did, and die peacefully in a bed than in the arms of a weeping daughter, like he did.