Kraye Pitvil

Kraye is a short and frail looking woman, standing 159cm or 5'2 tall and weighing 53kg or 116lbs. Her body's very low in both fat and muscle, though she's got some muscle from work in her arms and legs. Her skin colour is a fairly saturated light red and is clear; she doesn't sweat very heavily and makes a big effort to stay clean. Her shoulders are thin, her hips of slightly below average broadness, and she has a high B-cup.

She's got brown-blonde straight hair at mid-back length and is worn in short bangs over her forehead and shoulder-length bangs over her ears. Like most demons, she has pointed ears of medium length, large and thick pale yellow horns that bend backwards slightly near the end, and a tail ending in an arrow-shaped point. Kraye's face is gentle looking and she's prone to smiling. She has a fine nose, fairly large brown eyes, and fatty cheeks with a thin chin.

Hell's economy is fairly harsh, which means its inhabitants own few outfits. Kraye nearly always wears a dress in Hell's typical tricolour style. The dress is fairly low cut with triangular shapes with a golden border covering her chest. Two black straps keep up the piece over her shoulders. The main body of the dress is black in colour with horizontal stripes reaching over the chest and belly. A red cloth starts at the middle of the chest and reaches all the way to her waist. Two golden cloths hang loose over her hips and cross each other over the waist. Red markings with a golden border decorate the lower part of the dress. Around her neck she has a red band and around her upper arm and wrist thick black bracers. Her tail's got four piercings, two on either sides of the bridge, and a black cover with a golden border. She always wears light brown slippers.

Colour palette

Kraye is a very soft-spoken woman whose philosophy in life is to make as many allies as she can without losing any of her respect for the ones she has. Though a bit childish and dimwitted at times, her kindness is mostly a voluntary choice rather than ignorance about the harsh reality that many people would gladly abuse other people's kindness, a fact she has encountered many times after her death. Despite her awareness, a small part of her personality is that way because of naivity and lack of experience in life.

Kraye has a persistent sense of optimism and goes to great lengths to keep her thoughts positive. She isn't easily broken, but there have been several times since her death where everything led her to believe it was all for nothing. After the penalty for her and Tamara's first escape attempt she understood the scale of things and with this giant of a hinderance in front of her now visible needed help from Tamara to slowly crawl out of it again. Even when that happens, she tends to come out stronger and more determined to face intense pain if only to ensure herself a future where none of the terrors of hell are within her reach.

Even in her current environment Kraye is an outgoing young woman who clings to Tamara as a best friend and tries to keep on good terms with everyone around her. It's an impossible task due to people being different and not always liking her, and it can lead her to give most relationships too little attention in an attempt to satisfy everyone that only few bonds remain strong. This aspect is also what causes seemingly short attention span; it was worse as a child and it happens less these days but it's still something that happens when she doesn't pay attention.

She may be trapped in a dark situation, but she believes that with hard work and good friends she can be happy once again.

❖ Kraye has close to no experience with weapons and only carries one with her when she believes there's no other way to be safe or the looks could scare of people.

❖ Before her death, finding her sister and parents again was her biggest priority and she eventually wanted to become an adventurer.

❖ While she used to be on-and-off together with Tamara, she finally settled on just staying friends.

[The shortened will be added after I edited what I wrote during NaProWriMo is completed!]

Kraye was born in Marlurk, a coastal war-ridden country by the south, in the winter of "784. Her mothers had another daughter already, Alena, who was ten years older than her. Her province was still sheltered from the war against the dragons pushing west thanks to its strong foreign military support, but everyone felt how tense life had become knowing that one day the military could fall. Kraye's parents, too, stayed prepared to flee their home should the dragon army break through.

Her family was very tight knit, with her mothers willing to sacrifice everything for their family. For the first few years, Alena was almost entirely in charge of taking care of baby Kraye, often carrying her in a basket on her back on the fields she and their mothers worked at to ensure that the adults could work as hard as possibly without the weight and responsibility of a baby weighing them down. The family got by relatively well, earning enough money for clothes and firewood from working on the fields and receiving just enough food from the soldiers to get by.

For three years everything went well. Kraye even got to help out with minimal tasks at the fields after she learned how to walk. In the summer of "787 the foreign guard was retracted without a word to the locals and word quickly spread about dragon troops murdering entire villages, looting them, and leaving them to burn in their path. The entire village's population fled, leaving behind most of their possessions they couldn't carry with them. Kraye's family fled too, trekking north headed for the only safe haven they knew of: the capital.

The family went through many camps along with thousands of other families, just getting by but suffering from famine and the terror of knowing the enemy was right behind them. Camps were very busy but her family was too tired to carry Kraye all the time. On a calm day in one of the camps they were staying at a blind panic developed after the crowd cried out that the edge of the camp was set on fire by dragon soldiers and Kraye got separated from the rest of the family in the chaos that ensued. It didn't take long for everything to calm down again, but Kraye was unable to find her family again in the unending number of refugees.

She searched for a day but eventually by nighttime collapsed from fatigue and was nursed back to health by single father and his daughter who happened upon her and couldn't bear to know that she could have died then and there. He couldn't understand the child very well as Kraye was still learning to talk, so he turned to one of the local city guards sent to the camp to keep order, who directed him to his village known for its many orphanages. He couldn't support Kraye for very long and prioritised his own daughter, and since the group was about to move on north again he asked the guard to keep the child and bring her to one of those orphanages.

Believing that she was gonna find her parents again, she went along with him, but when she ended up at the doorstep of a completely different family [something about three year olds and their reaction to abandonment by mommy and mommy]. As time went on she eventually stopped blocking off this new family as her family didn't come back and got to know them a little better; she learned the adult man's name was Raeges and the two older boys' names were Lyn and Seares. Seares had been the one who was most patient with her even though she was constantly having tantrums over her loss.

The patience paid off when she finally warmed up to him a little more and could see him as a replacement caretaker for when her family came to get her. She finally accepted with settling and was shown around. The town was quite poor, as was her temporary family, so she would have to help out as much as she could too. Both boys had a job at local fields just outside the town and Kraye joined them at this work.

Four years passed without a word from her own family and she was growing hopeless about ever seeing them again. Her new family had proven to be a great support, aside from Raeges' condescending attitude towards her, and she even managed to befriend Lyn and get him out of the cold, apathetic opinion he had of her at the start. That same year famine struck the village, condemning the family to live very busy and basic lives for the few years where they had to scrape just to get by.

They survived the famine and lived to reap the benefits of the fruitful harvest the following year. By that time Kraye had accepted she probably wouldn't see her own family again and that this was her life now, but she dreamed of once leaving the place and finding her family again once they had the money to do so and she was old enough. The thought and Seares' support were what kept her going at that point, and a lot of her optimism grew during the plentiful moments where she remembered and dreamt.

Though she had been told that only one kid would join the family again in one of the coming years, in "795 two kids did: an 11 year old kid and a 17 year old boy. The two were very distant from the rest of the family just as she had been, so she understood that they must've been in a similar situation as she was when she first arrived. She approached the younger one and although he was a very silent kid and distant at first, he eventually warmed up to her and became her new best friend to hang out with.

Over time the kid started talking to her more and accepted their mutual friendship. Kraye learned that he was separated from his sister just like she was, and that he really wanted to find her again but that there were no leads. Kraye promised him that they'd someday become amazing explorers who'd find both of their families again and have a big reunion. She recruited her best friend into her dreams and made the time he was young bearable for him.

In "800, Kraye was dead. At first she didn't realise it but when she got a look at how everyone dealt with it afterwards her death was mentioned and Lyn was accused as the killer. She wasn't sure what to believe herself since she knew that Lyn would never hurt another person but the circumstances matched the situation. Mostly she was too busy panicking over the fact that she was now dead. She ended up in Hell, where due to her young age her sin count was low enough that they didn't even bother to keep her restrained safely enough to carry out the time corresponding with her sin count.

She escaped and found herself lost in Hell's vast fiery plains. With the help of a few insubordinate employees who had duty in the plains, she found her way to the habitable zone, which resembled regular life scarily well. The illusion didn't catch her off-guard, though, as she knew for sure that she was still trapped in the zone against her will. She couldn't stay under very long as she was recruited to work on her very first day she explored the first city she encountered.

The tasks she had to carry out were small and menial; the days were long and the pay was almost nothing, but in a place where communal housing was free and food and water were just optional for survival money didn't make a large difference. It was obvious she was new in town due to her only owning her working clothes and thus always walking around in them outside her hours. Within her first week there she already got tired of her new situation and knew she had to make an escape back to the free world, if there was one at all, but stayed around as it was the only option.

One of her colleagues, an older woman named Tamara, befriended her and convinced her that during the few hours of free time they could squeeze between work and sleep, instead of going home Kraye go with her to a night out. The two went out drinking and Kraye discovered beer. What seemed like a dystopian void was turned better by the different ways to distract from the mundane; beer, sweetened drinks, a vast array of culinary experiences, magical powder that had to be sniffed, and burning sticks whose smoke had to be inhaled opened up a new world of excitement in the daily drag.

Tamara took Kraye there most of their free evenings, and eventually something grew between the two. On-and-off romance was another point of excitement in Kraye's life and when they finally were together, they started planning to get out.

[Attempt one: failed attempt close to the border, Kraye is made to carry out her time and both get to work overtime and get overworked for a few years but things go back to normal. Kraye loses motivation but Tamara can help her build it up again. Big breakup because Kraye doesn't feel like they're romantically compatible]

[Attempt two is years later with a small group but they don't end up getting far and I forgot where I wrote down the exact details about what goes wrong. The penalty is less steep this time but they are trapped once again]

[ Kraye decides they need more preparation time and that's what she's been up to in the past many (10?) years: planning, surviving, and not going insane by the extreme workload she has to carry out. Probably has some bad dependency on like beer or cigs after all that time, though luckily hell's lungs are always healthy. One day she'll strike]