Profile
Eloise cuts an appropriately imposing figure: tall, tough, scarred all over, and always looking like she's squinting at you kinda funny due to the damage from her misshapen nose. While she certainly looks every inch the mighty mercenary she works as, she's got a personality more like your pet golden retriever. Excitable and gregarious, Eloise is by and large just here for a good time. She takes on jobs that excite her and makes short work befriending her clients, who will very quickly figure out that she's a hugger, a talker, and an idiot.
To her credit, Eloise knows she's an idiot—she has few in the way of book smarts, and does a poor job at gauging other people's intentions with her. Still, she doesn't let it put a damper on her happy-go-lucky, live-in-the-moment attitude. It's actually part of why she takes pride in her rough appearance; she can trust that people won't cozy up to her over her looks like they did in the past, and instead come to her purely for her skills, which, of course, are nothing to sneeze at.
Her happy-go-lucky eccentricity belies a certain wisdom; no one turns to mercenary work on a whim, after all, as much as it seems like Eloise may have sometimes. She's long since come to terms with knowing that all she's done for pocket money precludes her being a good person, and that her chosen path means that she will fight until the fight is lost. While there are things she wishes had gone differently, she has no regrets; she hasn't the luxury of room for the extra weight.
tbaaaaa
- Dark blonde hair, tanned white skin, bright green eyes.
- As mentioned, her nose was broken once and didn't heal quite right, so it's got sort of a wonky shape that squishes her right eye into a squint.
- She's pretty busty, and very mad about it, so she always has her leather armor covering her chest to lessen the effect. Barring that, she wears all the layers she can get away with.
- Bandages ever-present on her right arm, from her hand up to just below her elbow. They conceal an especially nasty burn scar. The edges of it sometimes peek out, which she doesn't much mind. Of more concern is the tattoo underneath, the crest of a family thought long dead. It's been distorted by the burn, of course, but Eloise prefers not to take any chances.
- actually the daughter of a vaguely important count & countess, the latter of whom married into her status
- fuckin that's right folks 64%-useful dipshit idiot eloise is a fuckign NOBLE
- she's always been tall and looked older than she is, and between this and her father's status (he had a lot of enemies, but also a lot of wealth and power), she grew up having a lot of suitors calling for her and no small number of them were pretty gross about it, especially considering she was young—it's one of very few things she holds any bitterness about and so she gets pretty genuinely mad about any attempts made to woo her
- her dad was a wonderful parent but a SHIT politician who kept making bumbling power grabs that made him more enemies than anything, with or without his awareness
- eventually what those enemies did was come storm his house to murder him and his whole family because he fucked up THAT BAD with the WRONG PEOPLE
- only eloise, approx. 16, and her mother were there which didn't stop anyone
- her mother was killed, eloise got clipped in the face with an axe—see: broken nose and cool scar—but managed to kill the guy coming after her with a display sword mostly just through dumb luck. she grabbed the blade itself and fucked up her right hand in the process
- partially on accident, partially out of sheer adrenaline, and partially to get the rest of the would-be assassins away from her, eloise started a fire and burned the whole manor to the ground, and burned her right arm real bad in the process
- she managed to stumble her way far enough out to be taken to the nearby church, where she was healed up. she wasn't recognized as the count's daughter right away, in part because she looked like hot garbage, but word spread pretty fast about what had happened
- eloise fucked off more or less as soon as she was all healed up; she didn't feel like she had much of a right to be in the church's care after killing all those dudes, and, having just a vague idea of her father's entanglements, thought she'd better get out of the area
- her father wasn't ever especially well-known to anyone too far outside the immediate area who wasn't otherwise embroiled in politics, so even going by the same name, no one was especially apt to recognize her
- this is the part where i just kind of go ??? AND SHE'S A MERCENARY NOW I GUESS
- i haven't decided the absolute specifics but i'm thinking a fellow lady mercenary took a lost scarred spitfire of a girl under her wing and taught her to fight then brought her into her mercenary troupe, but her mentor died because mercenary work is dangerous
- eloise has been freelancing since and has adopted an attitude of, she could very easily die at any moment so she's going to live each moment full of laughter instead of wasting the time she does have being miserable about it
- Her nose was broken once and never healed quite right, so, besides the aforementioned weird squint and the weird shape, it's resulted in a completely lost sense of smell, and a severely dulled sense of taste. You can put basically anything in front of her and go "Hey Eloise, eat this," and she will.
- Despite her book and social smarts making her appear dumb as a sack of bricks (not unjustly), Eloise is quick on her feet, adaptable, and impressively observant—necessary skills for someone always out on the battlefield, and her scars prove how many scuffles they've gotten her to the other side of alive.
- Her fine motor skills are fuuuucked. Her grip is fine, but Eloise struggles to get her fingers to do anything more delicate than open from and close into a fist; all that axe-swinging and a few specific injuries have wreaked havoc on her hands.
- She used to be able to sew, embroider, and cross-stitch at a high professional level, but her hands wouldn't allow it if the emotional associations to her mother didn't completely stifle her desire to return to it already.
- Given modern language and culture, Eloise would probably identify as a he/him or they/them butch lesbian, but as things are, she just sort of identifies as something vaguely woman-adjacent. She loathes to be referred to as a "lady" or to have her beauty or femininity focused on (she's ugly and unfeminine and she LOVES it), and being mistaken for a man brings her a brief giddiness in the vein of "ah, good, my furious rejection of traditional femininity is working," but continuous errors frustrate her, because men are the worst. Being a woman is good enough for her, but she doesn't have a whole lot of attachment to womanhood.
- All animals are dogs so far as Eloise is concerned, and all dogs are puppies, and she treats them accordingly. This especially applies to wyverns. She has nearly gotten herself killed this way at least once. It has not stopped her.
