Blais Florimonde

Blais Florimonde was my player character in an original story Monster of the Week campaign called Lords of Irradiance, which began on April 9th, 2022, and ended on July 22nd, 2022. She was also used as a villain in post-campaign sessions that began on December 27th, 2022 and ended on January 27th, 2023.

Known to the general public of the city of Silmourn as a notorious assassin referred to as "The Shade," Blais worked for an organization of criminals called the Weeping Shadows, led by an enigmatic figure known as the Duke of Masks. In her daily life, Blais rented a room in the house of an old woman named Berry Reves, and attempted to put up a facade of being a depressed poet. When you live in a hole at the end of the world, there is no need to have a real job -- though it may have drawn suspicion where Blais got such a steady supply of valuable food and medicine.

Some years before the campaign properly began, Blais was assigned on a job to assassinate a man named Reuben De'Grille. When she attempted to kill him, he transformed into a horrifying beast made out of Godsmoke which resembled a werewolf, and slashed sharp claws across the right side of Blais' face, nearly killing her. She was left with a nasty scar of beast claw marks for the rest of her life, and barely escaped. At The Weeping Shadows headquarters, The Duke of Masks seemed not to care about Blais' failure to kill Reuben, but the Vati Larua, the maker of masks, was fascinated by Blais' story and asked her to describe the beast in as great of detail as she could manage. They took the shattered remains of Blais' assassin mask and constructed a second half to it made to resemble the beast Blais described. The mask came to be known as the Syzygy mask and it represented the dichotomy of Blais' ruthless approach to her work and her calm and impassive demeanor in everyday life.

As a result of her encounter with the werewolf, Blais became somewhat obsessed with monster-hunting and began to study the occult and supernatural. She kept herself always prepared to kill monsters, in case the werewolf should ever return, keeping her guns loaded with silver bullet and her knifeblades always made of silver. Blais was involved with the inciting event of the story of Lords of Irradiance, which was the disappearance of her landlord, Berry Reves. She put out a job posting looking for anyone who could help her figure out what happened to Berry, and met the Lords of Irradiance party. Together, they were the first to discover the presence of the smoke monsters in Silmourn.

After frequent run-ins with smoke monsters -- humans who had been transformed into terrible beasts by the power of the Godsmoke -- The Weeping Shadows put a pause on Blais' assassinations, and she had been instead assigned to investigate these monsters full-time, alongside the other individuals who had been having frequent run-ins with these monsters: Lavinia Lane: a schoolteacher and Blais' next-door neighbor, Reuben De'Grille: a janitor and incidentally, the werewolf who gave Blais her facial scar, although he suffered from amnesia and could not remember encountering her prior, Vivian Windham: a gargoyle-turned-human previously working with The Church, and Banshee: a self-employed monster hunter. Near the end of her life, Blais also worked briefly with Renard Saiger and Lady W.E. Lane, a pair of crackpot conspiracy theorists who believed The Shade was responsible for the Godsmoke monsters.

Blais did her utmost to prevent anyone from discovering her secret identity as The Shade. However, her efforts turned out to be for naught. Her lies eventually fell apart, and the rest of the party discovered that Blais was The Shade and that she worked for The Weeping Shadows. In a final confrontation against Blais and the Duke of Masks, the party slew them both, severing Blais' arm and shooting her in the back, leaving her corpse smeared across two rooms. Blais is now dead, and The Shade's days of assassinating are over.

...Or so it had seemed. In the year 1938, reports began to spread of a mysterious serial killer who targeted primarily members of the Silmourn Paradox -- the term used to refer to the events of the Lords of Irradiance campaign and the people who traveled 14 years into the past to prevent their timeline from coming into existence. The reporter of a reputable newspaper known as The Beacon, Renard Saiger, and his younger self, dubbed the serial killer "The Paradox Eater" for this reason. Following investigations by the Lords of Irradiance party and a fourteen years younger version of Blais, it was discovered that The Paradox Eater was hunting down the masks of members of The Weeping Shadows, and was in fact Blais Florimonde, who had been resurrected through yet unknown means.