Jurita ex Tremere at Gauntlet

Retired Play by Post Campaigns Ars Magica 5th Edition: Via Experimenta
1

Hermetic name: Jurita Tremeris filia Yonka Anahita
Pater: Yonka Anahita Tremeris filia Graecina
Vulgar name: Rákóczi Eszter *
Origin: Szekely Magyar province of Hungary

  • Hungarians place the family name ahead of the given name

Appearance

Small, lithe woman wearing a burgundy dress of crushed velvet. She wears her dark hair long and adorned with an amber comb. She walks with confidence, keeping up an amicable conversation.
A petite equestrienne on a steppe pony, dressed in tooled leather clothing. She carries a horsebow in the Scythian style on her saddle and a whip in her belt.

Age: 27 (due to her Gentle Gift, she was only discovered in her 12th year)
Characteristics: Int +2, Per +2, Str -2, Sta +1, Pre +1, Com +2, Dex -1, Qik 0 (Total 7 points)
Height: 5'4'' Weight: ? lbs Gender: Female
Hair: dark brown and long, often worn with an amber ornament in it
Eyes: green
Skin: Caucasian, slight tanning from outdoors activities over the years

Casting Sigil

A rustling sound as of leaves, feathers or the pages of a book.

Voting Sigil

A birch wand with her name written in Szekely runes. It is held by her parens, naturally.

Seal

A large falcon in flight, against the moon at night, carrying the House Tremere symbol in it's claws.

Virtues

The Gift, Hermetic Magus, Skilled Parens (minor), Minor Magical Focus [Certamen] (free from House), Vernacular Education (minor), Book Leaner (minor), The Gentle Gift (major), Puissant Art [Intellego] (minor), Leadworker (minor), Affinity with Mentem* (minor), Self-Confident (minor) (Total 10 points)

  • I am not sure whether to replace this with Potent Magic (ghosts). Either way, it is what her blood inheritance translated to through the Awakening of Arts. Mythic Blood, being hermetic, is incompatible with the Gentle Gift. This way, I also had room for Leadworker, which fit with her background within House Tremere too well to ignore.

Flaws

Higher Purpose [elevate Domo Tremeris to governance] (major), Visions (minor), Small Frame (minor), Study Requirement (major), Malediction** (minor), Animal Companion [saker falcon named Turul] (minor) (Total 10 points)

** The Malediction is that she cannot control her own emotions at all when subject to a possession. She wholeheartedly believes that the spirit of her Vrykolakas ancestor will take over her identity should she lose control of her own mind and will. This would manifest itself as uncontrolled Manes. Exact game consequences to be determined. She is also uneasy around Corpus necromancers. Zombies give her fits.

Personality Traits

Agnostic*** +2
Ambitious +1
Curious +3
Loyal +2
Protective [of those under her aegis] +2

*** She was baptised a Catholic in a Roman church, but she actually isn't much impressed with religion at large, other than as a source of political leverage (which she doesn't like engaging in herself). She is essentially a non-religious Scholastic, a philosophical descendant of Aristotle more than Plato or Socrates.

2

Abilities:

General

Area Lore: Hungary (trading routes) 1
Animal Handling (falconry) 3
Awareness (spotting animals) 2
Charm 2
Concentration 1
Etiquette (Byzantine) 2
Folk Ken (desires) 1
Hunt 1
Living Language: Magyar (Szekely) 5
Living Language: High German (Saxon) 2 *
Living Language: Greek (formal) 3
Living Language: Vlach 1
Organisation Lore: Byzantine Empire (politics) 2
Ride (cross country) 2
Stealth 1

  • There were Saxon settlers in south-eastern Hungary at the time.

Academic

Artes Liberales (rhetoric) [knows Latin and Greek writing systems, working on Szekely runes] 2
Dead Language: Latin 4
Philosophiae (Moral Philosophy) 2

Arcane

Code of Hermes 1
Finesse 1
Organisation Lore: House Tremere 2
Organisation Lore: Order of Hermes 1
Magic Lore 1
Magic Theory (Intellego) 3
Parma Magica (Mentem) 1
Penetration 2

Martial

Bows (horse bow) 1
Single Weapon (whip)* 1

  • She fancies the style of the Vardariotai - the Byzantine equivalent of the RCMP. They carried a whip as their badge of office.

Arts

Forms

Animal 8
Corpus 4
Imaginem 4
Mentem 7

Techniques

Creo 3
Intellego 8+3
Rego 8

Spells (150 levels total) - Mastery (5 xp)

CrAn 20 - True Rest of the Injured Brute
InAn 25 - Opening the Tome of the Animal's Mind
ReAn 20 - The Unfaithful Favor
InCo (Me) 15 - Whispers through the Black Gate
InCo 20 - The Inexorable Search
ReCo 20 - Abstine [from De Domo Tremeris]
InHe 10 - Intuition of the Forest
InMe 20 - Posing the Silent Question

3

"Gabble, gabble."

The monks shuffled by in their long gowns, one carrying a heavy book. She glanced around for her father, but he was still busy outside with the other traders. Good!
Eszter ducked around the corner of a wall and stood on her tiptoes, arms upstretched as she imagined the moon overhead. Sure enough, she felt the tingling and grinned. Off she went, following the monks. Moments later, she stood in their library, surrounded by many of them. None seemed to pay much attention to a little girl dressed in the clothes of a Magyar. She peered around their sleeves and admired the pictures.

Moving her lips, she frowned and tried to pronounce the words. She was very proud of knowing her letters! These words were strange, though.

"Quin-tus Cur-ti-us Ru-fus," she mumbled. A picture of a pretty boy with a strange helmet on a horse. She didn't think that was his name, though. Maybe he was the writer of the story?

"Prae-ter vic-tum per The-bae."
Ha! She knew that word. Thebae was a city her father travelled to, sometimes. It was in Greece. So maybe this boy was from Greece? She sighed happily. She loved books! So many stories. Maybe her father would teach her more words when they were back home for the winter.

She rode hard over the Pannonian plains, the hooves of her pony kicking up snow. It was bitterly cold and she shivered in her furs. With the winter sun low over the horizon, she didn't have much time to find the colts that escaped before it was too dark. Shading her eyes against the glare, she found a small hillock, a league or so away. It had a dead tree on it. Perhaps she'd be able to see a bit more from there; vantage points were infrequent on the steppes. The tracks were long lost in this morning's fresh snowfall, but the foals should stand out against the stark whiteness if they were around at all.

Hrm. Far off, dark shapes in the sky were darting, twisting and turning. It looked a bit like a dance, she thought. Smiling for a moment, she thought of the Karikazo. She wasn't much of a dancer herself, but oh! - the stories the dances told. She wondered whether the birds told stories, too. Nudging her pony with her knees, she set off over the whiteness. Time to go look for a witness, perhaps. Let's hope it wasn't wolves.

Tomorrow was All Hallows and she was moving like a ghost through the castle. Her father had taken her along on another journey, selling one of her sakers to a nobleman that lived three days away from home. She was not sleepy yet, so she'd slipped out of their rooms once she heard her father snore. Softly moving through the stone halls, she followed the route she had overheard the servants talk about. The nightwatchman ignored her of course as she moved up the stairs, down the hallways with the rich red tapestries, until she stood before the massive oaken doors she knew would be here. They were very heavy and she barely reached the metal ring set in the right half.

Biting her lip for a moment, she peered around. No one. Well, nothing gambled, nothing gained. There was an actual library in there! Grasping the ring with both hands, she heaved with all her might. Not a budge - it was as if she was pulling on a wall. Once more.
"Hng!," she panted. She collected her thoughts and thought of what it would be like in there. She could see it, so clearly... Her eyes roved over the shelves, mental fingers plucking at a leather-bound volume idly...

She came to with a terrible headache and a tall bearded man looming over her. She fearfully looked up, but he looked surprised more than anything.

"Are you alright, young lady?"
He pulled her up on her feet and gave her a silver flask from under his leather vest. It was hot and made her throat burn. She coughed as he grinned.
"Careful there, that's just to get you back on your feet. Don't make a habit of it."

She needed to get out of here. Her father couldn't know of this or she'd be in so much trouble. Looking up at the big man a little nervously, she stretched, tip-toe, hands to the sky.
"C'mon," she thought. "I belong here, things are just fine."

A thoughtful look came over the tall man as he looked at her appraisingly. Slowly, he formed his words.
"What was it exactly you were trying to do, young lady?" She felt his eyes not just on her, but in her, searching - listening. Choking, her hands shaking, she lowered her arms and looked into his eyes.

"Won't you tell my father?", she asked.

4

She stood in the chapel; alone with the stones and the ghosts of past masters. She breathed deliberately, calming her nerves. Her parens
had chosen well, she admitted. Had he asked of her, "What is it you seek?", had she answered "The truth behind the story, and the story
behind the truth." He had smiled, then, and told her to prepare for this day. She had not known for what exactly, of course - a loyal
family member, a soldier of the House, had to be ready to serve in whatever capacity was required of her.

So, here she stood, naked but for a shroud she was wrapped in and with the story of the House all around her. Each of these statues
lining the walls told a story: of honorable struggle and the travails of government, of those deeds necessary when all else fails, of the
grand schemes and the small details. Each had been a mage of powers well beyond her ken and each had died in turn. Where she was
standing had been the resting place for their biers before they were carried through the Black Gate.

Closing her eyes, she saw it. Four robed mages, brother and sisters in the art and the lineage. The coffin, draped in black. She pictured
the lid with the sigil on it. Hers would be Turul - the legendary falcon of the Szekely. Would the four tell her story to those who
remained? Would she be remembered for her deeds, for her service, for her goals?

With closed eyes and arms held loosely apart, she reached out, then. Her mind touched upon the living ghosts and the cold stones. It was
her on that bier of course and she whispered, "I was one of you. Forget my name, forget what I did - but remember why." Did she see Mars
Incised raised over Byzantium? Did the long nights on the steppes meet the greatest city in time?

She opened her eyes, then, and found herself surrounded by four mages in black robes. The cold of the chapel had sunk into her, it
seemed, and she stiffly moved a little. In her mind she felt the voice of her parens, the somber baritone an echo of many winters and
long nights. "Little bird, you will learn to fly. Tomorrow you will have a dance of me, if you know the steps." She stood tall then, her
tiny frame no limit to her will. "I will dance with you, Master. You will lead and I will bring no shame upon these halls."

5

Jurata Tremeris filia Yonka Anahita was born the first child of a Hungarian horsetrader of the Rakoczi family, in the year 1153; her name was Eszter, after her mother. Her father was doting on both and secretly hoped his daughter would go against tradition to follow him into his trade. Although young Eszter was good with animals and she took to her letters quickly, she never seemed all that enamoured of the barter and the ledger that went with it. Still, he took her around on his routes when the weather was good.
Disaster struck in 1161, when an influenza epidemic struck mother and their youngest child, a baby boy not 4 weeks old, with the bitter cold of January. Young Eszter's father continued his business and travelling, but his heart was no longer in it. He started to look for a new life for his daughter, his only child.

One night, on a trip to sell one of her falcons (for she had become a capable trainer of the birds, notwithstanding her young age), they stopped for the night at a mansion on the outskirts of Varna on the Euxenian Sea. Overcome by her curiosity and her love of books, Eszter slipped away at night to take a peek around the house, for it had a library. In the morning, her father was delayed for an extra day as he received a wholly different offer than he had been bargaining for: his daughter would gain an education with the renowned, if somewhat mysterious, philosophers of Coeris, for she had managed to enter the sacred rooms in this outpost, the mystical riddles
notwithstanding. Although baffled, he was secretly very glad and tearfully wished his daughter all the best.

The year was 1165, and Eszter's own life had began. Her parens was a very tall woman that was born many years ago, in the lands beyond the mountains beyond the self-same Sea where they had met for the first time. Still she did not seem that old and she was kind enough. The hours were long, but they were filled with books and mysteries and puzzles, with training for service in Domo Tremeris, her liege.
Early on, she had noticed that mistress Yonka Anahita held some very strange ideas regarding the workings of the world. She had travelled in many of the domains of the East, as well as Syria, Hungary and the lands of Constantinople, so it made sense that her perspective was much wider. Being a curious child and not afraid, Eszter engaged her in many discussions when her chores were done and she learned many things of how Empires really worked and how faith was often a pretext. Although heretical, this didn't shock her much; the admittance more so than the belief. The fact that her teacher spoke with the spirits of the dead was something that took getting
used to, to put it mildly, but this, too, was something she could learn. She drew the line at working with the bodies of the dead, buried properly or not, and when Yonka Anahita discovered that one of her forefathers had in fact been some kind of spirit living in men's bodies himself, she fled in a fright. It took a forthnight before she would talk about any spirits again. Even now, she has a terrible time controlling herself when even the topic of possessions rears it's ugly head.

Her ambivalence towards the art of spiritbinding notwithstanding, Eszter proved a gifted pupil and one easily led to adopt the doctrines of Domo Tremeris. Of course, she would never be strong enough to fill a frontline role in battle, but she had the talents to become a valuable scout and her interests and Gentle Gift marked her from the earliest days as a candidate for the Assessores. More importantly, she took to her new home's cause with a gusto that was unusual in a House where loyalty was already encouraged. Although her old dreams of Constantinoples and the miracles of the ancient Greece had become ground in a new realisation of political common sense, she still felt strongly about a structure where her Home could govern the people not granted the gifts of the spirits (ambivalent as those might be at times), as well as her fellow mages. The latter would have to be handled by wiser heads of course - she was just a servant on the first steps of a long road. But it didn't hurt to set out your life for the grand schemes from the start.

PS. Yonka Anahita, from De Domo Tremeris (a free fan-published pdf), was a ridiculously good fit for Jurita. Gentle-gifted with puissant Intellego and various other strong hooks - it made the Skilled Parens virtue I had pencilled in already make perfect sense. Just ignore the numbers they put down in DDT for various characters, as they assume wholly different rules for learning arts and abilities than the core game.