[hider=Sonia Fallows][b]Name[/b]: Sonia Fallows

[b]Race[/b]: Human

[b]Gender[/b]: Female

[b]Age[/b]: 32

[b]Appearance[/b]:
[url=http://jonhodgson.deviantart.com/art/Barding-Wanderer-253577186][img=http://cl.ly/YELg/sonia.jpg][/url]

[b]Height[/b]: 5'8"

[b]Weight[/b]: About 140 lbs

[b]Class[/b]: Warrior mage?

[b]Skills[/b]: Travelling unseen—or at least unharmed—on Sironde's lonely roads fosters a certain set of skills. While quite proficient at fighting, both with sword, spear and fists (and, at least until losing her right eye, bow), Sonia's true talents lie in tracking, trapping and surviving in the wilderness. She's also a fairly skilled rider.

[b]Powers[/b]: Sonia's an illusionist, albeit not a very powerful one. Without providing an extensive list of her capabilities, her powers don't extend much further than creating a distraction, hiding in plain sight when camping in the woods, turning away a pack of dogs, stuff like that.

[b]Weaponry[/b]: A battered steel sword, an axe, an oaken bow rarely used these days.

[b]Other equipment[/b]:
Knife
Flint and steel
Two bedrolls
Provisions for a few days
A water skin
Flint and steel
Two coils of rope

[b]Apparel[/b]: Sonia's armor is the most expensive thing she owns. It's a light chainmail armor (well, relatively light. It's chainmail after all), with shoulder pads and everything, over a plain leather jack. Cost her four months of bodyguard work.

Beneath her armor, Sonia's clothes are plain—a long wool shirt, a pair of hide trousers, belts, pouches, a large green cloak, and a pair of boots, well-worn to a greyish no-color. And, of course, her eye patch.

[b]Personality[/b]: Sonia meets the world around her with a brisk geniality. Though good-natured, she doesn't have much of a sense of humor. She enjoys the companionship of other travellers; as long as she's not on the road, anyway. As such, if possible, she often spends time between jobs in taverns and hostels where there's company (and work!) to be found. On the road, however, she prides herself on her independence, and she doesn't like having to defer to the judgment on others. In her eyes, her intuition and experience are all she needs.

She's fiercely protective of those she guards, especially if they're women and children.

[b]Bio[/b]: If you need to travel the roads of Sironde, and you don't have the luxury of travelling in large numbers, you're an easy target for bandits. That goes double if you're a woman. For the eight or so years Sonia's been a sellsword, her primary business has been providing safe passage for those who would be preyed upon alone—for a fee, of course.

Almost twenty years earlier, she was the last person to suspect this would be her life. In the small farming community known informally among its inhabitants as Wayholt, she was considered quite the catch. A fairly good-looking, strong young woman with a touch of the Gift to boot? Now that was something. As such, it was to nobody's surprise that at the age of fifteen, she was long since married. Her betrothed, Jarod, was no sentimental or loving husband, but he was a good man, and Sonia was satisfied. She'd gotten a better deal than many other girls her age.

Then came the war. With the Dominion otherwise occupied, enterprising criminals had the run of the land, as long as they stayed away from towns and villages large enough to warrant Vanguard protection. In Wayholt, the villagers had been torn between sending men to fight for the Dominion and keeping everyone here to tend and protect the farms. In the end, they sent half their able-bodied men, one of them Jarod. The rest stayed behind, keeping a wary eyes in both directions of the dirt road that joined the loosely knit farmsteads. And of course, towards the end of the war, when the bandits came, it made no difference. They were too many, they were too well armed, too experienced. Sonia had heard rumors about how the bandits treated the women of the villages they raided, they all had, and she had no intention of sitting around waiting to be raped and murdered. Or worse, raped and sold to some orc warlord. She and one of the men—Petre, only a year younger than Sonia, gathered the younger women of the village and led their escape through a field yet to be harvested. He and Caroline Jent took arrows to the back, went down in the tall crops. Sonia led the rest of the girls at a sprint to the edge of the forest, drawing hasty runes in the air to mask their true position. In the cover of the trees, they hunkered down until darkness fell, not daring to light a fire or even lie down for fear of breaking the brittle spell Sonia'd cast over them. One bandit came close to stepping on them. Scared and furious, Sonia buried a sickle in his throat. When the sun set, they saw the bandit heading south, flames rising from Wayholt, and they dashed in the opposite direction. They weren't followed.

They walked for two days before being picked up by a heavily armed trading caravan heading for Esminster. They took just about everything the girls had brought with them but the clothes on their back, but in return, they took them to the city with them. Some of the girls had distant family in the Esminster, and there they laid low for a few months. Something nagged at Sonia, though. She and the girls had gotten lucky, finding a caravan full of fairly honest people who took nothing but their scant possessions. Other women would be out there, less fortunate. They'd need safe transport as well. Sonia seemed to have a skillset to facilitate that (and if she had to be perfectly honest, she felt a sort of crazed joy at getting her girls away mostly unharmed). She played the role of bodyguard for a couple of women who needed to leave the city quickly, and found she did quite well.

Thus, she found her new calling: protecting unaccompanied women and children (and the odd frightened scribe) travelling though Sironde. It's cost her many scars—and an eye to a particularly stubborn bandit—but she likes to think the women of Sironde are a little bit safer these days. She hasn't seen Jarod in nine years. She rarely thinks of him.[/hider]