Ketziana Dimere
Race: Passive (Gioran)
Birthday: 15 Bethas, 2696
Age: 23
FC: Nastya Kusakina
Place of Origin: Giorite, Gior
Current Location: ORH, Anaxas
Occupation: Potter/sculptor. Her highest quality wares are sold to Hawke to help pay her debt, while her plainer wares are sold to the general public.
Physical Description
Ketziana Dimere is tall for a Gioran passive, at 5'11". She's clearly underweight, due to periods of time where she doesn't eat much due to her depression. She has white skin and straight, waist-length white hair. Her hated clear blue-green eyes are framed by luxurious white eyelashes. She's usually found in simple clothing, in neutral colors. She tends to avoid black, since the contrast when compared to her skin makes her stick out too much.
Her weak chin and cupid's bow lips combined with her coloration give people the impression of her being a naïve child who should be running back home to her parents or master or mistress. This makes it difficult for her to run her shop, though her work is starting to speak for itself as she refines the skills she learned from her adopted parents and experiments with new techniques.
She is almost always seen with a serious face, as she feels overburdened by her bad luck. She knows it might take the rest of her life to pay off her debt to Hawke, especially as he has a stranglehold on her supplies. When she smiles, though, her whole face lightens up and it's like the sun breaking through a snowstorm for a moment.
Diablerie
Ketziana's diablerie transmutes non-organic items into random stones or minerals. Her diablerie can impact an area within a 5-foot cube, transmuting the inorganic substances within it randomly for a random duration of time. It is not permanent, but items damaged, broken, or otherwise affected in shape by the transmutation will suffer those effects permanently even when they slowly change back into the original material. This diablerie has gone off once and, as a result, a part of one of Lacey Lovell's cannons was reduced to nothing but clay.
Personality
Ketziana is, in many ways, a naive child, though she's growing up rapidly under her new duties of running a business. She's still got a hot temper and is stubborn to a fault. But she's starting to realize that her situation is her own fault. Her adopted parents tried to prevent her from making bad choices, but she was too stubborn to listen to them. As a result, she's quickly becoming more willing to accept the blame for her faults and mistakes.
Ketzi's struggled with periods of deep depression throughout her life, periods where she struggles to get out of bed and do the basic things necessary to survive. But, as much as she struggles with depression, the periods of severe depression are becoming further and further apart as she explores the thing she's passionate about -- making ceramicware and statues. In a strange way, her forced servitude to Hawke has granted her the freedom she desperately needed.
Ketzi spends a lot of time alone, and finds it difficult to make friends. She's still adjusting to the culture in Old Rose Harbor, as she has never lived in a city full of humans and wicks. As a result, she often struggles with social anxiety and understanding how to interact with people. Social missteps often end up being played over in her brain ad nauseam, though she often thinks that minor social missteps are much more major than they truly are.
While Ketzi was very devout growing up, she's lost her faith. She goes to temple regularly, but often feels like she's just going through the motions when she is there. As a result, her visits to temple are becoming less regular. Instead, she'll often meditate while working with clay when she has the energy to do so, trying to tease out how to get her faith back. This is often the only time where she's truly at peace.
Racial Attitudes
Humans: Ketzi thinks that humans, in general, aren't much better than swine. The fact that she's forced to stay in a city that's overridden with the vermin occasionally overwhelms her and, during her worst depressive episodes, makes her want to run away and risk Hawke's rage. She hasn't quite shaken her superiority complex but is quickly learning to tone it down for her human customers and, indeed, she's slowly starting to come around and accept that at least some humans are better than swine. She has made a couple friends but, deep down, she'll never see them as her equals.
Galdori: Ketzi respects galdori, though the Anaxi attitude towards passives seriously grates on her nerves. She finds Anaxi galdori extremely backwards in their attitudes towards the different races. In her eyes, they give Anaxi humans too much freedom and their passives entirely too little freedom.
Other passives: She sees free passives as her equals, but judges enslaved passives as being "weak" passives who should fight for the respect they deserve.
Wicks: She finds wicks disgusting and unnatural. She treats them the same way that she treats humans, but is utterly unwilling to even entertain the thought of interacting with them socially.
Backstory
A forbidden child of two priests of Imaan, Ketziana feels she was cursed at birth. The fact that she was a forbidden child meant that she was immediately ripped away from her birth parents and adopted out to a galdori couple that was extremely devoted to Imaan, Kaius and Kalogara Dimere. (Kaius is Ketziana's biological uncle.) As dictated by the law, Ketziana's birth parents were exiled from Gior. It's assumed they both died.
Ketziana's family lived in an artisan village a few hours away from Giorite, with the other craftsmen who did crafts that were potentially too dangerous to have in the depths of the mountain city of Giorite. Ketzi was treated well by her adopted family, but she was extremely jealous of her cousins. Her cousin Tekina was 5 years older than her, while her cousin Konnyth was 2 years older than her. Tekina was born with the white skin and hair and pink eyes of a child blessed by Imaan and, though she did not test as a passive and was prevented from entering the priesthood, Ketziana was still jealous that her adopted sister could have been a priestess of Imaan, which was the one thing that Ketziana wanted more than anything. When Konnyth was tested, he tested at 8 and, upon entering the University of Gior, he proved to be a brilliant Physical Sorcerer.
Ketziana felt she was always "different" than her adopted brother and sister. When she was tested and her passivity was proven, she didn't feel like anything had changed. When her "parents" told her about her birth parents, she wasn't surprised at all. A friend of her uncle's took her on as an apprentice while she the University of Gior, where she was an fairly good student. She visited her family during breaks and spent her spare time learning everything she could about pottery. She was a quick study, but her master and parents only let her make the most simple and basic of pottery. It was one of the things that frustrated her most and, when she was 19, she started pushing her parents to let her leave Gior once she graduated. That pressure only became stronger after she graduated and she moved back home, feeling more and more stifled.
Kaius and Kalogara were adamant that Ketziana stay in Gior. They deeply cared about her and were afraid she wouldn't survive on her own. Shortly after she graduated, she decided to ignore their wishes and warnings. She was allowed to keep a part of her the profits from her sales, so she scraped together some supplies and money for her trip during her 20th and 21st year. She left Giorite shortly after her 22nd birthday, thinking she was fully prepared for her trip. She gravely underestimated the supplies she would need, though, and only made it to Qrieth before her food ran out. Determined to continue her travels, she bought what she thought would be enough food to get her to Bastia and managed to convince a group of human herders outside of Qrieth to allow her to travel with them.
Unfortunately, her whining and blatant racism against the members of the caravan caused the humans to get tired of her and they abandoned her seven days later, outside Drah Lie. Stubborn as always, Ketziana continued her travels. She didn't have any survival training, though, and by the time she reached the Bastia/Gior border around mid-Hamis, she was starving and ill with some sort of fever after being attacked by a wild animal outside of Ivenlath. Last thing she remembers of her solitary travel was collapsing on a beach as she was searching for something to eat.
That's where Lacey Lovell found her. She took the girl onto her ship and, by the time Ketziana came out of her delirium, Lacey was far from the coast. Stuck on the ship, Ketziana sulked until Lacey told her to get off her erse and help around the ship or she would be tossed overboard. Ketziana, deeply afraid of open water, agreed to pull her share of work. But, every time they docked somewhere, she tried to run off. Lucky for Ketziana, Lacey was determined to keep her "snowflake" around for some odd reason and found her every time.
Then the battle happened. Lacey ordered Ketziana to hide, and she tucked herself away in one of the cannon rooms. But her fear of the ship being damaged enough to sink caused her diablerie to be triggered for the first and only time, converting enough of the cannon closest to her into clay that it was rendered useless. This meant that the Lady couldn't defend itself as well and directly lead to the damage that grounded her.
The ship managed to limp its way to ORH, where it was grounded in Yaris, and Lacey's crew abandoned her. Rightfully blaming Ketziana for her part in the ship being grounded, Lacey told her to bugger off, in less kind words. Ketziana spent a few weeks on the streets, stealing food to survive. Then she heard rumors of the owner of a ceramics store that was looking for an apprentice.
The galdori storeowner, Gauthier Cholmondeley, noticed Ketziana's talent and took her under his wing, happy to pawn off his pottery work to the young girl. He also saw that she had a love for sculpture and allowed her to play around with the clay. The way he figured things, the worst that could happen was that they had to rework the clay. If Ketziana proved to have a talent with sculptures, he could make more money.
But, as Gauthier resented Hawke and was unwilling to pay the taxes that having an apprentice would incur, he hid Ketziana's presence. She wasn't allowed to leave the shop or Gauthier's apartment, which was fine with Ketziana, as there were entirely too many humans in the city for her taste. Gauthier pretended that he cared about Ketzi and told the girl that it was for her safety, since passives with her coloration were prone to being victimized. (The irony of the fact that he was victimizing Ketziana by abusing her naivety amused him.) Ketziana had heard of Hawke, but Gauthier told her that he was no danger to her.
As another insult to Hawke, Gauthier also skimmed money from the shop's profits, lowering the taxes he was supposed to pay. As far as he was concerned, Hawke was making more than enough money off the supplies he sold him, and Gauthier felt it was his right to take some of the money back.
Of course, Hawke wasn't stupid. He knew both about Ketziana and the fact that Gauthier was skimming. Unfortunately for Ketziana, Gauthier died of a massive heart attack a couple of weeks into her apprenticeship, before Hawke could confront him and relieve him of his apprentice. As Ketzi was getting ready to close the shop for good and return back to the streets, Hawke decided to make a visit. He looked at Ketziana's wares and, impressed, he told her that he would give her the shop. But she would have to pay off Gauthier's debts.
Ketziana tried to talk her way out of the debt. Hawke told her in no uncertain terms that she would pay off Gauthier's debt one way or another and Ketziana decided to take over the shop. She wouldn't have had much choice even if Hawke was kind enough to not force her to take on Gauthier's debt. By now, it was clear to her that she didn't have the wisdom needed to survive on her own.
Ketziana's only "owned" her shop since Vortas 2718, but she's settling into her new job as a shop owner. She hates that she's been forced to take on Gauthier's debt and she hates that she's forced to deal with humans and wicks, who buy most of her pottery. She's rapidly learning to not treat them like the animals she thinks they are, since she drove off quite a few of Gauthier's regulars with her attitude when she first took over the store. Galdori clients are slowly starting to realize that she has a talent for sculpture, though, and she's landed a few regular clients. Of course, Hawke gets the most ostentatious of her sculptures.
She also realizes that, if she had turned around and gone home when she ran out of supplies, her family would have taken her back. They would have watched her more closely but, right now, she would happily welcome their scrutiny. Now that she's aware that she might never see them again, things that annoyed her to no end growing up – Kaius and Kalogara's overprotectiveness, Tekina's pink eyes, Konnyth's love of magical experimentation – are now things she would pay anything to see again.
Aptitude Skills
Mental
Good
Physical
Good
Social
Poor
Good
Physical
Good
Social
Poor
Focus Skills
Career and Income
Housing and Inventory
Goals
• Short-term goals: Explore sculpting and find exciting things to try
• Long-term goals: Get out from under Hawke's thumb
