Genet Meseret Dereje
Race: Galdor
Birthday: 11th of Loshis 2683
Age: 37
FC: Hannah Pool
Birthday: 11th of Loshis 2683
Age: 37
FC: Hannah Pool
Place of Origin: Nutmeg Hill, Thul Ka
Current Location: Vienda, Anaxas
Occupation: Prefect
Player Name: Runcible Spoon
Current Location: Vienda, Anaxas
Occupation: Prefect
Player Name: Runcible Spoon
Physical Description
The prefect shorter than she looks, but taller than one would expect. Her straight, controlled bearing lends her the appearance, and importance, of height. In real terms she may be about five and a half feet tall, but anyone who tried to measure her would likely find themselves face down on the ground with their hands behind their back and a splitting headache. Approach her at your peril.
But if you were so inclined as to risk being thrown to the ground and interrogated, you would find that Genet Meseret Dereje is a rather attractive woman, past the end of her youth and entering into the full mastery of her being. A dark, spare woman with tightly coiling black hair, large inquisitive eyes and well controlled expression, Genet tries to give little enough away about her thoughts, or indeed herself. It seems as though she has discarded most unnecessary things. She moves with careful parsimony, few extraneous affectations, and she moves silently.
In dress, she favors well-made practical clothing that will bear repeated washings and show little wear. Kaftans, trousers, and loose robes in ocher-reds, saffron-yellow, or lapis-blue. The latter would seem out of place were it not for the number of blue doors on the narrow street where she lived for most of her career.
Personality
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Genet is a cynic, and not by choice. Years working in the tangled allies and dismal boarding houses of Three-Flowers have presented her with a steady stream of mystery, venality, and criminal deviance that have tarnished whatever optimism she one had. Still, she carries on. She has no illusions that her work, even her triumphs, will matter in the long scheme of history. There is a certain comfort in that. Even her worst mistakes will all be forgotten in the end. She is not looking to make a mark on history. She is looking, instead, to justify her existence to herself.
With few close ties, and only a small circle of friends, Genet tends to keep to herself, working long hours in a methodical, careful way. She does not mind this, for her work is her solace, both her profession and her passion. She hates mysteries. She loves to unravel them, to tease the knotted strands of events into a pleasing and understandable pattern. On the street she pulls the threads of events to find those who would rather not be found. Murderers, thieves, conspirators, gangsters. In court, she uses those same threads to entrap the guilty. Both give her joy.
She can be acerbic, prickly, and short-tempered, especially with those she regards as fools or who have no sense of context or decorum. Context is key. With her close colleagues and her friends she can be warm, friendly, and even relaxed. She loves a good joke, especially those of the long and rambling kind that twist and turn and then end on some feeble punchline. She is rather good at telling them.
Backstory
Never tell a lie when the truth will do
That was her aunt’s favorite proverb. A curious choice for a woman who kept secrets and dolled out shaded truths as grudgingly as a miser would coins. Genet picked up the knack for interrogation from trying to get anything at all from the old woman. Who her parents were, where they came from, how was this sad and private woman her aunt? Whose sister was she?
It took nearly twenty-three years for Genet to find out. And then the answer was predictably sordid and shameful.
In those twenty-three years, Genet lived a life of what might be called comfortable neglect. She wanted for nothing, yet there was little warmth in the house on Nutmeg Hill. Her aunt was distant, sorrowful, and prone to leaving Genet to her own devices, even as a small child. Some days she would leave the house at dawn and wander the streets of the district, playing imaginary games with the shadows in the arcades and porticos, or else with a small group of children who also played among the shadows and gardens of the Hill. One of the boys, Desta, was her closest companion, and two of them were nigh inseparable. For some years it seemed that she spent more time living in a guestroom at the home of Desta’s parents than in her own house with her aunt. It was more pleasant with Desta. Meals more joyful, the food better, and the servants were kind to the strange, often silent girl.
Yet she did go home, usually slinking in by a side door. The night porter had made a key for her. He claimed it was so she did not have to wake him. Genet was sure it was because the man had a soft heart.
In her sixteenth year, after an army of tutors had finished pouring all the knowledge they could into the girl’s head, she took herself off to Thul’Amat, again to lurk in cool and shadowy porticos, attending the debates and discussions of the learned scholars of the place. In the pale halls of the School of Truth and the School of Fictions, she set herself the task of learning both the art of Clairvoyance, and the application of rhetoric. Perhaps she could pry some more information from her tight-lipped aunt.
At least, that was what she told herself was the object of her studies. It was true, but it was not the whole truth. The fact was, Genet was nosy. She liked knowing things she should not, prying into private business, and gathering interesting facts. She learned to read people, their expressions and even some ghost of their thoughts. Useful during exams, even more useful in sorting out disputes among her fellow students. She was particularly good at the latter.
In the spring of her twenty third year, just as the crocuses were coming into bloom, Genet went back to the home of her aunt and confronted her. She was no longer a girl, but a woman of intellectual accomplishment, skilled in magic and learned in arguments. She would know her origins, the sorrows and protestations of her aunt be damned. She could handle whatever mystery there was It was no easy thing getting the information she sought, and in the end she was not sure it was worth the cost. A corrupt official for a father and a disgraced scholar for a mother had produced Genet, rather by accident. Both her parents were married, just not to each other. , The scandal of the affair broke both marriages, and her parents sunk into dull iniquity. Genet had been given up within a few months of her birth to her father’s youngest sister. This discovery drove a wedge between Genet and her aunt where it remains to this day. She had tried to protect Genet from shame. The protection had failed.
Barred from the house of her youth, she employed herself as a private untangler of affairs. It was tedious work, and it did not pay well. Divorces, runaway adolescents with no sense, interminable background checks where Genet’s bread and oil. Still, it brought her into the orbit of the magistrates, and they at least saw her worth. Or, at least found her to be an asset to be used.
One of the magistrates in the court in Three-Flowers, Nuru pezre Berhanne, extended her protection to Genet, and brought her properly into the porticos and arcades of the court as a Prefect. Genet knew the work, at least the investigation, and she could argue a case well enough. She rose fast in reputation, and was granted more investigative and legal powers. The criminals and blackmarketeers of Three-Flowers learned to be wary of the bright eyes, silent woman who turned up always at the wrong time.
Three years ago, at what she would later discover was the zenith of her career, she began to notice that counterfeit coinage was circulating in Three-Flowers and in neighboring districts. It was well made, efficiently distributed, and slowly wreaking havoc on the local economy. Further, bodies were being found in the river, their hands crushed by the presses that minted the false coins. With a handful of counterfeit coins, six dead bodies, and evidence of strange currents in the black market, Genet presented her case to pezre Berhanne. The magistrate agreed to grant Genet full authority to follow the case wherever it might lead. Where it led was disaster.
Two years of careful, methodical investigation had produced a mountain of circumstantial evidence, several convictions of minor players in the counterfeiting operation. But there were only tantalizing clues as to who was running the ring. The clues were dangerous in and of themselves. They pointed toward highly positioned people in Thul Ka, to political machinations. There was also a curious thread that, when she pulled it, led to Anaxas.
She brought her findings to the magistrates. She asked for more budget, more investigative powers. She was given neither. Something was amiss. Evidence began to vanish, trials of minor coiners produced no convictions, and in the end, the whole matter began to unravel. Someone else was pulling strings, but Genet had no names, only conjectures. Her inability to bring the case to a close, the rapidly spiral costs, the failed convictions, and other, darker matters, cast a shadow over her once promising career. Even pezre Berhanne was unable to fully protect her protege.
The magistrate did have one last desperate means of protecting Genet from utter disgrace, and to buy the prefect time. With the change in the Symvoul coming to Mugroba, it would be necessary to ensure that change went without a hitch, and a skilled investigator was just what was needed. So, Genet was hurriedly packed off to Anaxas, granted what prefectal powers she could still claim abroad, and seconded to the Seventen.
It was not a posting she would have wanted. Anaxas was cold, wet, and possessed flavorless cuisine. It was also lacking in proper porticos in which to lurk. Still, there was that lingering Anaxi thread. It might be easier to pull on this side of the border . . .
Aptitude Skills
Mental
Good
Good
Physical
Average
Average
Social
Poor
Poor
Focus Skills
Career and Income
Housing and Inventory
Goals
- Finally break up the counterfeiting ring
- find out who was undermining her case
- Survive her semi-exile
