Ruby K. Royal






Personality

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Ruby was never too much in the way of an honorable person when she had been human, and the vampirism only enabled her. She lies when it's convenient, and sometimes even when it's not. For her, a "code of honor" is something that only stupid people have, and she doesn't trust those that say they act purely out of kindness or the goodness of their heart. For the most part, she's highly cynical: even the most inherently good people are after their own interests and anyone would sell their mothers at a price. Despite this, she's seldom purposefully hurtful or even unfriendly, although sometimes she might miss social cues or misunderstand the feelings of others. When she isn't lying, she'll be incredibly blunt and will seldom sugarcoat anything, even at the cost of someone's feelings (alright... especially at the cost of someone's feelings).

However, her bluntness and her lying don't make her unlikeable. Ruby will go to great lengths not to do her own work. While she isn't exactly helpless on a battlefield -- she's a fairly talented spellcaster -- she would much rather have others do her work for her. As such, she knows exactly when to turn on the charm. She likes to manipulate others into doing things for her, and isn't beyond going to bed someone to get out of doing work -- or to get what she wants otherwise. She's not trustworthy, and anyone who is perceptive enough might be able to see past her glib and smooth-talking.

Her goal in life is to attain two things, ultimately: to never have to lift a finger, and to get all the gold the world owes her.

History

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Ruby Esmeralda Royal was born to a nomadic merchant tribe in Lo-debar. She was the youngest of two, having a brother four years older than she was. Her father died while his mate was pregnant, and Ruby's mother, already preoccupied with raising her first child, was quick to pawn her daughter off on her own mother, a high-strung woman named Esmeralda Royal who lived alone in a shack in the middle of nowhere. It was a small wooden structure built by her long-dead husband ages ago in the middle of a yellow field just north of the magical wastelands. She tolerated very little of her grandchild, being a devout worshiper of Sanctus who despised all things magical -- using the magical fallout just south of her home as evidence that all magic was dangerous and evil. She did not allow Ruby to play outside often and would lock her in her room, often neglecting to feed her if she didn't do her chores -- which were often unreasonable.

With her unreasonably high standards, however, came obvious rebellion by the time she was a preteen and that was usually when the beatings came. While they were infrequent and likely only painful to a child as frail as she was -- being that her grandmother was highly overweight and very, very old -- it was only when the beatings started that the real rebellion began. She would walk to the village a few miles away at night to scour the homes of the mages that lived there, taking their spellbooks and potions and stealing away with them back home where she would study the magic only to spite her old grandmother.

She practiced the magic in secret when she could, acting like the obedient little angel her grandmother loathed but couldn't reasonably harm. Come her teenage years, Ruby figured she would probably be able to overpower her grandmother physically if she tried to do more than she should have been capable of. But she didn't think that was necessary. She had a silver tongue and a natural penchant for lying, both to her grandmother and the nearly-familiar people in the village. They believed anything she told them, and it was the rush of manipulating people into doing whatever she would have them do that would plant a seed in her mind that she never really had to do anything for herself if she could make other people do it first.

On Ruby's seventeenth birthday -- or maybe around there, she hadn't been keeping track of the days very well -- she decided she was going to take off. Her grandmother was still pushing her around as though she was still a small child and despite her pleas for independence or mutual adult respect, her grandmother treated her like she was still some stupid child. Her grandmother tried to stop her, but Ruby was stronger, smarter, and -- most importantly -- faster, so she got out with her grandmother hobbling angrily in tow. She was shaken off easily.

Ruby wandered for a long time. She drifted from town to town, seeing how she could work the people there into giving her food and money for free before moving along. After seventeen years of hard labor under her grandmother's thumb, she was glad to get out and relax, just letting everyone bend to her will, playing them like marionettes. She hated work and didn't care as much for practicing magic now that she was free from the need to rebel against her. Ruby dropped her middle name and replaced it with a simple "K", deciding that sounded much better. She would make promises she knew she wouldn't keep, and by the time she was twenty she had made it to Bashar.

Bashar renewed her interest in magic. While she had been talented at it as a teenager, she had let go of most of what she had learned in lieu of honing her skills in manipulation. But after she had worked a fancy spell tome that would likely fetch a pretty penny off of some hapless loser, she figured she might as well practice a few little incantations and potions while she could. Her talent for the art was palpable, and it was only on her way to a little city somewhere called Onyx that she was attacked by vampires and left either to turn or to die.

Not knowing what was happening to her, she wandered her way into Onyx feeling sick but not willing to tell anyone what had happened to her. She slept for days on end. When she finally dragged herself out of her room, she felt different. Ruby left Onyx right away, hoping to get back to somewhere that was familiar, but the daytime felt like it was stinging her. She hated it. She wasn't human anymore. She felt like something different. She didn't know what it was, but something seemed off. And she was eager to find out how to twist it to her advantage.

Roleplay Sample

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Their little girl's new addiction to violence wasn't all bad, though. Although every day Chiasa would march in and shut the television off and take the horror tapes out of the VCR, Momoko would always somehow find another old horror film that her mother didn't even know they owned, and every day she would hear screams and the squishing sound of a knife plunging into flesh coming from the living room. And sometimes she would let Momoko sit there and watch, if only to keep the strange, scary child's somewhat more frightening tendencies at bay. The tape would always come out before Hachiro came home, however, just to maintain the sense of normalcy around her husband. Although he knew that their child was a little eccentric, he didn't know the extent the way Chiasa did.

As time wore on and Momoko would find herself sitting cross-legged in front of the television, eyes glazed over with wonder and joy as she watched unflinchingly as people were raped and impaled and gored in the worst ways possible, Chiasa began to give up. The child was absolutely addicted to the gore like it was a drug, and it was really the only thing she could find to keep the little girl's habits of being ill-tempered and poorly behaved at bay while at school. Her teachers reported later that her behavior had improved drastically and often sent home notes telling her parents to keep doing what they were doing. Although Chiasa eagerly trashed the notes so her husband wouldn't see, it wasn't always easy to hide. Soon enough, after Momoko had run out of their own films to watch and had tired of rewatching the ones they did have, she began to tug on her mother's sleeve and demand more.

Reluctantly Chiasa chose to appease the now-eight-year-old, deciding forlornly that it was better to feed her addiction than have a nightmare child at school. It was easier to cover up Momoko's interest in disgusting horror and gore films than it was to hide the school's opinion from her husband. The gore kept Momoko quiet and usually anchored to the ground in front of the television in the living room, and as long as she limited her viewing time to when Hachiro wasn't home, there was nothing wrong. She brought the child plenty of American films, and although Momoko didn't understand the English in them she watched them with bright-eyed excitement, watching film after film in English. The young child began to pick up on bits and pieces of the language but was told by her mother to tell her father that she was learning it in school. Her father was impressed with his child's improvement.

In conferences, her parents were told that Momoko was a shy, if not standoffish girl around her classmates. Under their voices, they would often mention that she was even a little frightening to her classmates, that she was having difficulties making friends. In fact, she was making no effort to make friends at all. At school, however, what they didn't mention was that she was making no effort to make friends. She would spend long periods of time just staring off into space, and she seemed to lack the motivation to put any effort into her schoolwork. She was an empty-eyed child, with seemingly no emotional recognition behind the eyes. While as a toddler there had been malevolence, but now there was nothing but hollowness. It was this hollowness that caused people to avoid her like the plague. She was unresponsive to any and all attempts to bully her for being strange, and seemed to have an unsettling knack to act like she was the only person in the room.

At home, Momoko took up a surprising hobby that gave her mother even a glimmer of hope that maybe her little girl wasn't going to turn out so strange. She began to show interest in cooking, sitting in front of the television when her father was home to watch cooking shows, to watch programs on fine cuisine, to watch smiling women put together beautiful dishes. And when her mother was outside gardening, Momoko and her father would sneak into the kitchen to turn the oven on and start putting things together. Her father pushed her to love this hobby, buying her cookbooks and letting her get absorbed in it. All she ever did was cook, constantly trying out some new recipe. And it was obvious from the start she had a talent for it. Her mother would urge her to make dinner for them, and it was always delicious. Putting aside her daughter's strange addiction to violence and gore, she pushed her daughter to constantly be pursuing bigger and better things in the culinary arts. She was excited that maybe she had a prodigy in the house -- if only Momoko would be more charming and more excited about her own skill, she could imagine that they might have a neat little media spotlight. But Momoko was too strange, so her talents were kept with friends and family, parents often boasting that their ten-year-old daughter was going to be a world-renowned chef.