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Belantar Vivalfin
STR
8
DEX
17
CON
14
INT
10
WIS
12
CHA
14
been on the surface 5 years; fuck the Underdark, I’m not going back
Bel is relatively good looking, and usually has at least a partial smile on his face, though it might be a smirk. He does have a scar on the bridge of his nose. He keeps his hair short and neat, occasionally uses cosmetics when not in the wilderness, and tends towards hats when outside. His clothing sense tries to balance utility with style.
positive
gregarious, witty, responsible
neutral
sarcastic, unorthodox
negative
paranoid, self-doubting, lacks self-reflection
personality;
Bel is a man very conscious of first impressions, and impressions in general. There is a good chance when you first meet him, he is masking himself as whatever persona he thinks would be most useful to a situation. There are common threads. Bel is a bit understated, with his main physical affectation is a love of hats. He speaks softly, but his voice is expressive and he has an ear for accents. He comes off as intelligent, though he’s willing to look ignorant. He is also aware of stereotypes about his people, and that informs his actions. Away from Faerun and environs, the personas he creates will be rougher until he adapts.See, Bel likes people and is gregarious, but he doesn’t actually trust most people or himself. Putting on a mask keeps people at a distance so they can’t hurt him, and he can’t hurt them. Bel’s cynicism also leaks through in some of the things he says. Unless he is actively trying to manipulate someone he sees as a threat, he will repeatedly warn others that he can’t be trusted if he keeps interacting with them. If he’s doing things for a seemingly altruistic reason, he will explain how, no, this is rational self-interest. If he reacts to suffering of others, there is a rational reason and not him having a soft heart.
Bel does like at least having a surface warmth to him. He likes using endearments for people and being flirty. He does modulate this to audience: anyone he considers under his wing gets zero flirting, and people who Bel wouldn’t want to bed but might want to bed him are not to be flirted with unless Bel is certain they understand the concept of ‘no’. He also tries to respect people who are turned off by his verbal affects. That being said, Bel rivals the stereotypical Southern lady with the amount of meaning he conveys by tone rather than word choice. Using a title like Madame/Master/Mistress can mean anything from ‘genuine respect’ to ‘I respect that you can kick my ass if I am not careful’ to ‘I see no reason to treat you as an authority, but you certainly do’.
Bel’s preferred problems solving methods are often round-about. If he can persuade someone to do something, or sneak around, he will. If he can find some clever way to unpick the Gordian knot, he will and be incredibly smug about it. While ‘brute force’ is always a tool in his arsenal, it’s one he brings out only if he thinks it vastly outweighs misdirection and subtlety. Bel notes he’s never had a long-term goal for himself and his life. Some of this is just because of long periods where he had very little say in his life, or periods when he had very little certainty. He improvises and focuses on the short-term because at this point, he’s convinced any long term plans he makes will be dashed to bits.
Bel will take the lead, but it’s not where he’s comfortable being. Because he is attentive to other people, he makes a good support, and steps up to do jobs he thinks need to be done for the group to function. His experience and pragmatism also mean he has much to offer, but Bel finds responsibility for other people stressful thanks to bad experiences, and Be’s methods of dealing with stress are… well, not the best. (Read: he hits the bars, looks for short-term hookups, and in one memorable case, allowed an acolyte of Loviatar to beat him because it gave him an excuse to scream out all his frustration. Belantar Vivalfin’s best decision while stressed is usually ‘find someone who is willing to play minder while I do something potentially stupid’) Bel has some large blind spots about himself — he is perceptive about others, but not terribly introspective, because he doesn’t much like himself.
Honestly, Bel needs some level of therapy to deal with childhood trauma. He was largely in charge of parenting his younger sibling, and certainly punished with said sibling when shit happened. As a result, he holds himself responsible for others that he does connect to, despite also fearing that any bad consequences are his failures. He has a number of triggers that will put him into ‘appease’ mode. He has a heightened alertness that is frankly probably exhausting, and he doesn’t always take care of himself unless he focuses on it. This is in the ‘looks well groomed, but may not have eaten breakfast’ taking care of himself — focusing on the surface rather than the core.
background;
Belantar Vivalfin is a drow, born in the Underdark some 120-odd years ago (circa 1370 DR) in the Underdark settlement of Eilsund. While Eilsund is a Lolth-sworn/Lolthite drow community, it was not a large city like Menzobezzaron. There were three 'Noble Houses' that would barely merit a mention in an actual city, and the settlement had a surprising amount of unity. The ethos was generally one of 'compete against your sister for the benefit of the House, compete against other Houses for the betterment of the settlement, compete against other settlements for the benefit of the drow'. In most cases, the last one is closer to ‘the wilderness and wandering monsters’. This was mostly useful for Bel as death rates for male drow were high enough that Eilsund did not practice the Lolthite custom of sacrificing extra sons at birth. While Bel has a complex about being the third-born son of his mother and growing up hearing about how his life was permitted only by the grace of his mother and the Spider Queen, he did grow up.
Bel's mother, Yausram, was the head of the House, and had a problem with a string of male births. Bel has two older brothers. A younger brother, Harlkyn, was born when Bel was about 50, and a sister was finally born when Bel was 90. It happens that Bel is not the son of Yausram’s consort, Valonim, but he considers Valonim his father as much as it matters. In reality, the men who raised him were his eldest brother, Xundus, his maternal uncles and various more distant relatives; his mother largely ignored her son except to enforce that he should both love and fear her. Harlkyn suffered the same fate, except that Bel himself was put in charge of his brother. It went about as poorly as you expect, when you have an emotionally-neglected teenager put in charge of a younger sibling who is even less wanted as part of the family. What Bel thought he was doing was trying to teach his brother to survive as a male in drow society, including how not to show weakness. What his brother saw Bel doing was being the most persistent of his tormentors, and the best Bel could usually manage was to make it clear this was at his mother’s command.
Harlkyn ran away about two decades ago, and Bel is pretty certain that his brother was eaten by something, and while he didn't expect anyone to mourn him, actually experiencing that was the straw that broke the camel's back. Bel basically got permission to do mercenary work, and fucked off, hoping that if he stopped writing, the family would assume he died. Bel has trouble actually breaking that last contact, for his surviving siblings and younger cousins.
Bel slowly worked his way surface-ward as he took jobs that weren’t strictly under Lolthite aegis. Five years ago, he was part of a ‘merchant caravan’ that definitely was involved in the slave trade, and generally trying to half-ass his way through life. He happened to be at the surface when a cult of Talona who were customers messily imploded. Bel decided to get the preteen human boy they were treating as a prophet out before everyone died of poison. Not sure what to do with a human child, and mindful of how raising his brother turned out, Bel immediately turned the child over to the nearest person taking in orphans, but did at least try to keep in touch and send money along and hope he had managed to choose trustworthy people (or at least put the fear of the drow into them).
Bel managed to unite with his foundling (now a teenaged cleric of Talona calling himself Nurgle), a surface-elf named River who had been keeping an eye on Bel for the local elf community, Nurgle’s fellow orphan, Wynn, and River’s teenaged traveler friend, Sylvia to go seek adventure and treasure. As the two who were the oldest (by far) Bel and River found themselves being the Team Parents to three teenagers who all had odd upbringings (Wynn had some kind of semi-possession/semi-imaginary friend, and Sylvia was secretly a kitsune and had little idea on how to interact with people she hadn’t known all her life.)
The group were hired to solve a string of murders in a town in the Moonshae Isles by the town’s mayor, supposedly caused by a dullahan (the malevolent ghosts also called ‘headless horsemen’). Early on, Nurgle and their NPC guide were kidnapped when the entire party blacked out, and Bel took it… badly. It did not help that the mayor’s son was fighting his father’s wishes on hiring outsiders, and when Bel attested to their skills, the son added ‘being sacrificed by priestesses of Lolth’ to the list. The group, up the sole survivor from their predecessors, Orva a half-orc raised by wolves, managed to contact the local supernatural threats (a hag and a vampire) to confirm that this was something new, but neither undead nor fae.
They got a break when River and Bel went to a local tavern because Bel decided the best way to cope with worry and feeling like he’d failed yet another child was ‘I am going to get drunk and/or get laid’, and River as Actual Team Parent decided Bel needed a babysitter. The next morning, a woman they had seen at the tavern turned up dead with her skull crushed… and her brain missing. Mapping the body locations suggested that they were being transported via the sewers, and the book they had been examining when Nurgle was kidnapped was in Qualith, which a very freaked-out town librarian told them was the written language of mind flayers. Thus: mind flayer in the sewers, hiding cause of death to cover their feeding habits. The party told the mayor immediately, as a ‘if we die or are enthralled, the next team needs this information’, and the local vampire in trade for what he saw of the last victim.
He tried to pull what River and Bel and seen and not thought about; Bel was unable to get his defenses down, but River realized the last victim had been seen walking out with the mayor’s son. It turned out the mind flayer had been using their psionic abilities to keep tabs on the town directly, and influence the mayor. This also meant the strike had to be sooner rather than later. To Bel’s immense relief, Nurgle had been enthralled but not eaten, experimented on, implanted with a tadpole, or even used as cannon fodder to stop the party.
Unfortunately, Bel fears this brought him some attention, not all of it good. After all, certain eyes might notice the tale of a mind flayer menacing a town, and the adventurers who solved the problem, and a drow on the surface is far more distinct than elves, humans and half-orcs.
abilities;
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