Lavyla was born into a nomadic clan of moon elves who informally called themselves Warmwoods, due to their tendency to migrate during warm seasons and settle in during the cooler ones. The Warmwoods were primarily traders, with Lavyla’s family specifically selling jewelry, leading her to pick up charismatic and persuasive tendencies after decades of assisting her parents and two brothers in the trade.
Appearance
Lavyla is a petite young woman with a slender figure. Her moon elf heritage makes her skin pale, but with an ethereal blue tinge to the color.
Contrasting the paleness, her hair is dark grey with an indigo sheen, and kept shoulder-length in messy locks. It is seldom tied back unless a task at hand deems it absolutely necessary.
Like many moon elves, her eyes are in the shades of blue. The blue in her irises almost appear periwinkle.
History
Starting around the time she first started walking as a child, for almost two decades she suffered from an undiagnosed and unexplained illness, causing frequent fevers and seizures, and often leaving her weakened after an episode to the point of being bedridden for several days. Her parents took her to many doctors and healers over the years in her youth, but her illness couldn’t be explained, although certain healers were able to identify her illness was caused by magical origins, not biological. For a while, it was presumed she was cursed, and destined to be disabled and feeble, until her illness spontaneously cleared up when she got into her 20s.
While the source of this magical plague was never determined, it seemed her body was able to somewhat suppress and control it in the following years, leading to an innate sense of chaotic magic within her that she still doesn’t fully understand even to this day.
Yet, despite her illness resolving and the next 80 years of her childhood being marked by good health, her family continued to fret and dote over her as if her illness could flare up again at any moment.
While with good intentions, her family insisted she shouldn’t need to focus on working before her hundredth birthday, so she was often given light task work and not allowed to lead many trades with the family’s goods unless neither her parents or brothers were available, which cultivated a sense of frustration and a desire to be more independent. Part of her felt trapped to the Warmwoods clan, where she felt like everyone would never see her more than a sickly child, and she felt like she couldn’t break away from her clan and support herself even if she wanted to.
Around 90 years old, instead of continuing her attempt to join the family trade, she decided to instead pick up odd jobs from the settlements and communities her clan visited, often housework or nannying for wealthy families. Her family tried their best to dissuade, but ultimately did not force her to stop, despite their vocal disapproval.
At one of these towns, she began a secret relationship with the man of the household she was employed at, a wealthy retired wizard who was aware her kind didn’t stay in one place for very long, and saw an opportunity for a brief affair that will naturally break off within a year when the Warmwoods head out onto the road again. He fostered her desire to feel important and capable when he taught her simple magic and sorcery, and always insisted that she was very mature for an elf her age. It was a partially self-serving narrative, but nonetheless she not only fell in love with magic, but fell in love with the married man who employed her for housework.
So when the Warmwoods were preparing to migrate again for the summer, she was heartbroken when he didn’t want her to stay, nor did he have any intentions to leave his wife. In fact, he wanted her to keep the whole affair under wraps, and offered to pay her a whole week’s worth of gold if she quietly left with her clan without making a fuss.
She accepted, but not without a bitter sting from the whole incident. When Lavyla’s clan resettled into a new town for the year, she decided she was fed up with doing odd jobs— if a man was willing to pay her a week’s worth of work to keep an affair under the table, then perhaps there was more lucrative goods she had she didn’t realize she could be selling. Thus, while under the guise of continuing to tell her family and clan she was doing odd jobs for the townsfolk, she began engaging in occasional prostitution, using her ethereal elven appearance combined with her skills of persuasion to chat up lonely men and women around town.
Eventually, as an adult at 110 years old, her family learned of her secret side hustle, and immediately tried to reign in her behavior. They refused to let her out into the town without one of her older brothers chaperoning, and she was no longer permitted to hang out or befriend any locals. Feeling like she was being treated as that sickly kid again that was never trusted to support themself, she broke off from the clan she was born and raised in, officially leaving the Warmwoods and venturing forth on her own.
Old habits die hard, however, and like her people are known for, she never felt content whenever she tried to settle down in a town or city. Not even a year of being out on her own, Lavyla eventually was taken aback when she suddenly dropped in the middle of the street one day with a seizure, and was rushed to the town’s infirmary with a dangerously high fever. However, once she was coherent, she recognized the chills of the fever felt familiar, like how her body felt when coursing with raw magic when that retired wizard taught her cantrips and simple spells.
And, just like the sensation of concentrating the magic within her to summon energy into this world, she felt herself get a grip on the chaotic energy inside her, feeling both the invigorating power she could draw from it, as well as the weakness of her fragile grip around it, always threatening to spill out from her uncontrollably whenever she tries to use her magic.
But Lavyla was certain, she was going to learn how to control it. Over the next two years, she refined her capabilities, but now found herself more prone to those childhood fevers and seizures she thought were long in her past. But with the money she made during the evenings as a working girl, she spent her days working towards finally controlling the illness that seemed to have held her back all her life.
It no longer will hold her back; now, it will drive her forward.
Personality
Lavyla has a naturally friendly and charismatic personality, and can get people so wrapped up in a conversation with her that they lose track of time. She also has persuasive and convincing ways when she wants something out of someone, and is not above flirting or using her sex appeal as viable strategies to get what she wants.
Like many moon elves, she is very friendly and good-natured towards most other races, and is very naturally sympathetic to outsiders or outcasts. On the flip side, she harbors a natural distrust of organized authority or governments, in part due to being raised in a fairly happy clan with a very loose democratic structure. Thus, she suspects corruption and ulterior motives to be controlling many authorities and governments, and dislikes the power they wield over large populations, finding they are often discriminatory and too restrictive on personal freedoms.
As a young adult by elven terms, she feels the need to assert and prove her independence and self-sufficiency to those who doubt her capabilities. Although she will often underperform in many tasks she’s not familiar with, she will try to laugh off or brush off when it’s obvious something is outside her skill set.
Trivia
- Lavyla gets uncomfortable around doctors and healers because of the lack of help they gave her as a youth, and thus is admittedly very skeptical towards most forms of medicine other than her clan’s folk medicine (which in and of itself sketchy and pseudoscientific most of the time) ((maybe give this gal a natural -1d4 debuff on medicine? She deserves it))
- Due to her family and her clan being nomadic, Lavyla has not written to nor communicated with them since she split off.
- Lavyla‘s favorite color is periwinkle.
- Lavyla likes to pick flowers and pretty stones while wandering, and will idly braid them with twine and beads in traditional moon elf jewelry or flower crowns.
- Lavyla gets disoriented and lost in heavily urban settings very quickly, and is not adept at navigating them solo.
- Lavyla’s family had two blink dogs named Mossy and Twitches that she was both very close with before she left her clan.