 Character History:
Born into a power hungry family whose fanatical desire was to gain more contacts within the Black Sun, Amani was not given the luxury of being a child like most children. She spent most of her younger childhood being trained by her mother and father in the basics such as reading, writing, and mathematics, along with instilling a deep love for Rhysol within her. Up until the age of 9, most of her life was spent in constant study, except for the few treasured moments that she was able to go and play with the other Ravokian children while her parents may have been away. After her 9th birthday, her parents slowly began to submerge her into their darker aspects, molding her into what they hoped to be the perfect tool to help better their station in life.
Her father was a thief, a master of his element, and began to teach his young daughter the fine art of disguise, almost turning it into a game for the young girl. While some days were filled with many lectures and demonstrations, other days were filled with her trying to pick out her father in a crowd full of people. Sometimes she won, and sometimes she lost those “games”, but to a young child trying to learn and earn the love of her parents, those games were what she would look back on the most as her fondest memories. Also at this time her mother began to teach her more…”womanly” things, teaching her to appreciate the finer things in life and to never settle for anything less than the absolute best. Her mother was an ex courtesan, dismissed for getting pregnant with a child that was clearly not the nobleman’s that she was employed for, and she held a deep resentment for that. So while her mother played dress up with her daughter and taught her all about perfumes and makeup, Amani could also feel the deep bitterness that resided in the woman, making these lessons the ones that she tried the hardest to perfect.
Years seemed to pass by like this, their routine never ending it seemed to Amani, who started to wonder if this was what really life was all about, being a puppet to her parents. The moment that she shared this to her parents she received a bitter scolding and beating, both of them utterly denying her accusations before they dried her tears afterward, showing a loving side to her that she had never received from them before. Their actions confused Amani, not understanding what was going on, but she never brought it up again, instead letting it fuel the fire that seemed to be slowly simmering in her gut. She was 13 then, and shortly after this incident her parents came home with a young slave girl, Neryl was her name. The girl was only about 9 at the time, not that much younger in Amani, and the girl began to receive training in the less than savory arts that Amani was not trained in. This only added to the fire in her gut, for Neryl was to be more or less Amani’s aid, a tool to help her which in turn would help her parents. Resentment slowly started to build inside of Amani, and even though she cared for Neryl as if she was a younger sister, Amani was jealous of the sudden attention the young girl was getting from Amani’s parents, causing Amani to slowly withdraw inside of herself and hatch a few plans of her own.
It was about when she had turned 16, that Amani made her first debut to the public as a “wealthy” young debutant, her first real attempt at disguise. Amani had blossomed from the thin and gangling young girl, into a well rounded woman who knew how to get a man to come to her. She had watched her mother plenty of times to know what she needed to do to get a man’s attention, or anyone’s in fact, and with a carefully place smile and brush of her fingertips she found that she could get her way in most situations. This opened many a door for Amani, and helped her hatch her own plan to put her parents in their place. The resentment continued to fester inside of her, a slow poison that continued to spread throughout her body. Why should she continue to be the puppet in their petty games? She was a grown woman now, and was able to make her own plans and goals for what she wanted in her life. Why not better her own station instead and leave her parents in the dust? The idea was an appealing one to Amani , and so began the extensive process of bringing her parents down. They were not the only one with contacts, for Amani was well liked among the gentlemen community, and so developed a network of her own, slowly gaining information about certain investments that could quite possibly bring her parents to ruin if she played her cards right.
So she continued on for a few years gathering her contacts and feeding her parents information about certain businesses, letting them gain and lose money through her endeavors to make it seem like they were actually getting somewhere, while all of it was carefully planned out to the very end. When she turned 20, all of her plans had finally come to a fruition, leading her parents to financial ruin after several long years of careful planning and ear whispering. She had gotten her parents to invest into a failing merchant family, the Beumont’s, who were steadily failing. After putting all of their money into the business in hopes of it succeeding, Amani’s parents were now hopelessly bankrupt and unable to flounder out of the mess that they had landed in. Amani, being the socialite that she was, was at the Studio of Yae Varone, enjoying a beverage with a lovely young man, all of this planned of course. Amani had left specific instructions for Neryl to carry out, wishing for her to present her parents with the news of their bankruptcy along with a very specific bottle of wine and a letter she had written herself, its contents for their eyes only. The wine was poisoned, something that had required many favors to produce, but all of it worth it in the end if her plan went smoothly, and Amani was confident that it would.
After a few hours at the Studio, Amani felt it was time to head home and see if her labors had paid off….and to her utmost delight upon returning to their two story home in The Merchant’s Ring, her parents lay dead on the floor, wrapped in the sheets that Amani had laid out for Neryl to put them in. She ended up picking up the letter she had written along with the poisoned bottle of wine and headed upstairs to her parents bedroom, flinging the bottle out into the canal below and placing the letter into her mother’s dresser…well hers now. So to add the icing to the cake, with help from Neryl she flung the bodies into the canal below, watching them float away with a kind of spiteful glee. She had accomplished something that she had planned for years, a betrayal that she was quite proud of, for it had worked perfectly, and she was now able to get on with her own life. So after a few says of getting rid of things that she did not need and tailoring her mother’s clothes to fit her own form, it was like none of it had ever happened.
This was also the same year that she had met her lover, Raenfae. A man that seemed to ensnare her senses just as thoroughly as Rhysol had. They ended up meeting at a masquerade ball that she had managed to talk her way into through several of her contacts, securing her an invitation. This was the start of the beginning of her life, not knowing that a few years from then that the two of them would be sharing her home together along with Neryl, spinning plans of their own that they continue to do to this day. |
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by Amani on April 16th, 2012, 10:09 pm 
