Name: Iffalna Briarose of Slayer’s Keep
Sex: Female
Age: A young 58 years. She’s quite spry for her age. She blames it on clean living and lots of tea, though sometimes she wishes she were less spry so she could rest on her laurels a bit.
Occupation: Head Herbologist of the Slayer Order. When Zruti was constantly around, that title meant she was respected because the Slayer Order doesn’t confer many titles besides “Master”, but she was otherwise little more than a glorified gardener who happened to control the food supply. This did give her a position of power over the apprentices; somehow, they don’t quite figure out she won’t <i>really</i> refuse to feed anyone who crosses her until they become Masters. However, with Penril in Olencia, she’s quietly taken over the day-to-day running of the Keep, partly to keep things from falling apart, partly to take a burden off her former sometime-student. She still manages to get out of the Keep on occasion, mostly to help in a region with drought or blight, or to visit Penril, but the Keep is keeping her busier than she’d like.
UPDATE: Iffalna was recently appointed Ablest under EXTREME protest. She's still rather ticked off at Penril, but she'll get over it. Eventually. She's maintaining her position as Head Herbologist, at least at this point, partly because she hopes Penril will come to his senses and take the title back, and partly because she hopes it will annoy people.
Status and Rank: Ablest of the Slayers, even though she doesn't want the title. Head Herbologist of the Slayers, which is the title she feels she deserves. Slayer Master. All-Seeing Goddess of the Greenhouse. Knower of All Embarrassing Things Penril Did When He Was Young. Torturer of All Apprentices Who Misbehave on Her Watch. The apprentices call her “The Thorn” behind her back. She takes it as a compliment.
Roots and Origin: Zruti, rest his soul, who was a few years older than her and had his sources besides, told her after she’d twisted his arm a few times that she was born the sixth child to a poor peasant family in Maloren. They hadn’t resisted when the Slayers came to take their daughter, knowing she would at least be fed with them. Iffalna, after a bit of soul-searching, found she didn’t much care to find them and disrupt her parents’ and goodness-only-knows-how-many siblings’ lives, as well as her own. Her family is at the Keep with the Slayers, and that is all that matters.
Appearance: Iffalna is small and lithe, and in very good shape. She’s spent her life running around and farming, one would hope she was in good shape, but apparently she’s come from good stock, as the years of work have not yet taken their toll on her aging body. Yes, her back aches a little, and her knees are starting to creak on cold mornings, and she’s taken to drinking two cups of tea in the morning simply because holding the hot mugs takes the stiffness out of her hands, but overall she’s not doing badly, considering. Iffalna doesn’t much mind getting older, she figures it beats the alternative, and too many of the Slayers do not have the opportunity to get backaches and creaky knees and stiff joints. It’s an inconvenience to be dealt with or around, and that’s really all there is to it.
She’s short, which helps when she’s searching through thick underbrush for a rare plant specimen, and she has small bones, which helps when she’s climbing a tree looking for another specimen, but leads to a bad sprain or a break if she falls out of them. Fortunately, she’s in a position to just order an apprentice to find them, so she doesn’t have to risk breaking a bone at her age. She does wish she was taller just because she thinks tall women are more beautiful, but one can’t have everything, and she’s really much, much too old to be thinking about such silly things.
In her youth, Iffalna had dark brown hair, the color of ebony wood, but it’s lightened to a silvery, almost iridescent grey. Secretly she likes it, even if publicly she moans that she’ll have to come up with a hair dye soon. She likes to see the look on people’s faces when she asks them if they think she’d look good in red, and perhaps those blackberries would work nicely for a dye…In all honesty she’d look silly, but she won’t really dye her hair. She just likes to shock people from time to time. Her eyes are brown, they used to match her hair, but now they just sit beneath her dark brown eyebrows, which mysteriously refused to lighten with her hair. Iffalna was puzzled by this development, but decided she’d stick to plants and not investigate the discrepancies between eyebrow color and hair color in humans.
In the Keep she wears whatever is clean. She’s not picky, as long as it covers her unmentionables, she’ll wear it. Outside the keep she likes to wear black leather armor with engravings of plants on it. She wears a pendant with a Briar Rose engraved on it around her neck. It was a 50th birthday gift from Penril, and it’s quite pretty, so she wears it. She carries around a bag of herbs and tools no matter where she goes. What’s in it varies on what she’s doing, but always includes her favorite tea.
Her face is mobile and expressive, and her body language, also. If she’s angry, you can feel her frustration coming off her in waves. If she’s happy, you are infected by her smile. If she’s watching you, you can feel her eyes boring into your skull. Iffalna is an open book with little sense of diplomacy, and her body language reflects it.
Strengths:
+Knows a few things about plants. Has a bit of a greenhouse. Could help you out with some tonics, teas, potions, and other miscellany when you’re in a pinch. But only if she likes you.
+Connections. Iffalna is one of the oldest Slayers still active, and she runs an extensive enough operation so that all Slayers under the age of 40 have worked under her at some point in their lives. During that point, she managed to make it understood to them that it was best they not cross her, because if they did, all of their clothes would be moldy, moss and lichen would grow uncontrollably over all of their possessions, or, when she was older, that she might decide they weren’t worth accounting for when calculating the year’s food supply. Though they eventually figured out she was kidding about the whole “starving” thing, a vague sense of fear and a compulsion to do as she orders remains in the currently active generation of Slayers. She’s also traveled to various farming communities in trouble, making her a favorite with mayors and town heads everywhere. She’s even done the King a favor or two when his rosebushes got sick!
+Practicality. Iffalna has a mind for logistics, and if you have a big plan, you’re best off running it past her. She’s also able to take big abstractions and make them reality. It helps when she’s trying to feed all the Slayers and lay away food stores for hard years, besides.
+Wisdom. Iffalna did not get to be as old as she is by being stupid. Though she doesn’t realize it, she carries all sorts of little learned things with her, like how to listen, or how to tell a good person from a bad one, or truth from a lie, or when to give in.
Weaknesses:
+Temper. Iffalna makes enemies with that temper of hers, and it made it hard for her in her early days as Head Herbologist to get things done. Even now, with the older slayers dying off and the younger generation trained to listen to her, she still isn’t very good friends with her contemporaries, especially Elwin Markial. She doesn’t remember if he started it or she did, but they’ve been feuding ever since they were children.
+Practicality. Her motto is “Philosophy does not keep the rain out”. She has it engraved in the stone statue right in front of her greenhouse. She doesn’t have patience for grand schemes or large abstractions. She’s derailed plenty of projects that may have turned out beneficial to the Slayers in their planning stages, and paid for it later when Zruti got wind of it.
+Can’t fight. If she can’t draw magic, she can’t defend herself, simple as that.
+Physical weakness. She’s in good shape, but she’s tiny. Many people have asked her if she’s part Elf, but if she were, she’d probably be strong for her size. Iffalna is having a very, very good day if she can lift forty pounds and carry it more than six feet.
+Emotional. Like her temper, her emotions get the best of her. Occasionally it comes in handy, a passionate oratory here and there can get one all sorts of nice things, but mostly it means she can’t think for sorrow when a Slayer dies, which is all too frequent. Iffalna can be a moody woman, strutting about giving orders one minute, crying into a cup of tea the next. It’s exhausting and confusing, and Iffalna wishes she could get a handle on it.
+People skills? What people skills? Iffalna calls a spade a spade, and some people don’t like that, and she doesn’t care. If she weren’t so good at what she does, she’d have never been appointed Head Herbologist because she can’t keep her mouth shut when she needs to. And don’t even bother to have her go into a situation calling for diplomacy, she’ll only botch it up, as she has in the past.
Magic: On the brink of Extremely Strong. Perhaps even Extremely Strong. There are still whispers of that year when Iffalna was twenty four and Olencia had such a huge drought that she spent a month constantly channeling energy to pour into crops around Slayer’s keep so all of Olencia wouldn’t starve. It was thanks to her that the Great Drought wasn’t followed by the Even Greater Famine. Everyone was very, very sick of porridge and corn, but at least they were alive, and that was what counted. Iffalna herself spent the next three months bedridden and channeling small bits of energy into healing her poor abused body. Being a conduit for that much power is physically exhausting, and Iffalna doesn’t want to overtax herself.
Personality: From the cradle, Iffalna was an opinionated thing. She was forever telling the caretakers what she thought of their cooking, of the games they devised, and exactly what she thought of what they were wearing and their new hairstyles. Jokingly named Briarose for the bite in her tongue, Iffalna lived up to her nickname most admirably, leaving the caretakers wondering what under the three suns above they had unleashed on the Keep. Iffalna continues to be opinionated to this day, from how her apprentices keep their tools arranged to who should succeed the throne to just how stupid she thinks Penril looks when he’s flirting with women.
In almost opposition to this quality, Iffalna is kind and truly compassionate. Her tongue is the Briar, her heart is the Rose. She loves living things with all her heart, adores children (until they start messing up her greenhouse), and feels the pain of every Slayer in the Keep. When an apprentice dies in the Dragonlands, she takes it hard. When two apprentices are quarreling, she takes it hard. It might help if she weren’t so intimately involved with every aspect of daily life at the Keep, but she is, and she wouldn’t trade the joys of it for anything, even if she has to take the sorrows with it.
Iffalna is a good taskmaster, though. Through a combination of motivational speeches, respect, threats, blackmail, and simple “I’m Head Herbologist and your superior and you will do as I say because I said it”, she gets things done. She understands power in interpersonal relationships, and she knows how to get and keep it. She guards her secrets, keeps her ears open, and looks for the right leverage to apply what she wants. She’s shrewd, and she’s smart, and she can be a bit amoral when she wants, so it is best not to cross her.
Walking contradiction or efficient member of the Slayers, Iffalna simply is. Like the briar rose she was named after, one must take her good with her bad, her sweetness with her bite, and deal with the whole package neatly wrapped up in muscle, silver hair, and attitude. Good luck with it!
History: Brought to the Keep as an infant, Iffalna has never really wanted a home anywhere else. It’s rare, but it happens. Iffalna always had something to keep her from wondering as to where her “real” home may be, and when she found out, she realized her real home was with the Slayers in the Keep. Specifically, in the greenhouse.
Iffalna’s fascination with plants started as soon as she was allowed to toddle into the gardens under the watchful eye of her caretakers. She liked plants at first simply because they were pretty and smelled nice and sometimes tasted good, but later she became fascinated. Through trial and error (and the indulgence of the last Herbologist), Iffalna had a breeding program going by the age of fourteen for really, really large pumpkins. From there she went to corn, from corn to lettuce, from lettuce to the whole garden. Seeds of her first strain of pest-resistant wheat plants are found all over Olencia, and her pest-and-blight-resistant strain is so good wheat production all over Olencia has nearly doubled. She’s figured out a unique way to use her magic to go to the very, very small to see what characteristics are in a plant, and which plants would be the best match to breed them to get the desirable result. Though revolutionary for its time, it’s little more than using magic as a microscope. She’s taught it to all of her apprentices, and it’s now a common parlor trick in the Order.
Magically, Iffalna was a late bloomer. She was twenty two before she felt magic around her, largely due to her inner voice being especially snarky and not shutting up long enough to feel the magic in the air. Once she did feel it, she wondered how she had lived without it. Her magic is like oxygen, and she manipulated it almost as easily as she breathed. Zruti, who was a friend of hers and had already managed to progress through the ranks into a contender for Ablest, theorized that since she was older her mind was better prepared to manipulate the magic. Iffalna told him that was a stupid idea and asked him if he’d had too much to drink. Zruti countered that maybe it was simply that she bullied magic just as she bullied everything else to do her bidding. She told him that was much more like it.
When the time came for her to go into the Dragonlands, her plan was simple: Find the weakest dragon in the land, and kill it (or, better yet, stand by and wait for it to die. Iffalna wasn’t picky). She didn’t want respect, she wanted to stay alive! Thus, she found an old, sick dragon, used her magic to drop a bolder on on its head, waited for it to stop twitching, removed the crushed head, and returned back to the Keep in time for supper. It was a scandal, everyone cried foul, and Iffalna told them to shut their traps, they were just jealous they hadn’t thought of such a thing! There was a big debate over Iffalna’s trial and if it was legitimate (after all, dropping a rock on an old sickly dragon isn’t exactly defeating it), but law was law, and Iffalna had killed a dragon and brought back the head, so she was grudgingly given the title of Master and shunned until the Great Drought. That was her true trial: Channeling every drop of energy in that waterfall to grow acre after acre of wheat, corn, and other staples for an entire month with no rest. She nearly dropped dead from exhaustion and was just barely revived by Zruti’s magic, but she was respected after that. When the old Herbologist died shortly thereafter, it was decided unanimously Iffalna should take charge of the greenhouse, even if she was constantly stirring up trouble and scaring the apprentices sent to tend to her. Iffalna told them they damn well better give her charge of the greenhouse, and it wasn’t her fault those idiots couldn’t brew tea properly, and not to touch a blasted thing in that greenhouse or she’d have their heads.
The greenhouse gave her a niche in Slayer society to fill, and forced her to develop the barest modicum of people skills. Zruti had always been her friend, but now she was friends with Dersine, had taken that little slip of a girl Elmira under her wing because she was good with plants, and she had taken a liking to that young whippersnapper of a boy Zruti had apprenticed to him, Penril. Elmira remained distant and Iffalna never bonded with her beyond the bonding a student and teacher do, but Penril was exuberant enough to need two Slayer Masters keeping an eye on him, and Iffalna did. He was a good boy, if a little stupid in the way all young boys are, and he always worked hard in her greenhouse. She helped him with little, non-magical things, like how to talk to girls, how to cook well, how to get on a horse and not fall off, how to brew good tea, and how to tell good grapes from bad (and eventually, good ale and wine from bad). She taught him about money management, helped him with arithmetic, listened to his little gripes and woes about apprenticeship and life in the keep, and kept him from overdoing it when his friends died. Her greenhouse was his, he could come in and search for magic in there. Her plants were imbued with it, and it was in her greenhouse that his magic slowly came back to him.
But Penril was special. Other apprentices generally weren’t treated as nicely. She learned how to terrorize reluctant apprentices, and they normally were reluctant because working in the greenhouse and fields was considered dog-difficult work and channeling magic to make plants grow is one of the more difficult tricks Slayers do. She learned how to bully her plans through Slayer society. Through various incidents in which she punished apprentices who misbehaved on her watch, she earned her nickname, “The Thorn”. She rose through the ranks to become Zruti’s right-hand woman, just in time for the Penril blow-up to occur, and for her oldest friend to die. She was there when Penril was made Ablest, she was and still is one of his staunchest supporters, and she took over jobs that ought to be his responsibility in the Keep so he cpuld keep running that pub of his in Olencia.
However, when she went to visit him, an interesting series of events transpired: She acquired Blyth Snowstar, a charge of an old friend of hers, as an apprentice, and she got permission to call a meeting at the Keep, at which point she was appointed Ablest by Penril. She still isn't sure what she feels about either issue, though she's much more optimistic about Blyth than her new office. She's never had an apprentice before, but she's warming to Blyth. As for the position of Ablest, she just wants to break down and cry for a variety of reasons. But she also wants Penril's head, too, and with her new position, she's half-idly wondering if she has the right to demand it...But not just yet. There's too much going on in Olencia, and she can discuss the Ablest issue later...