3/9
Campaign: Fly By Night
The youngest Daughter of Flowers, and quite possibly the happiest of them all. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a more joyous soul in the North, even while hiveminded. Shan has lived her whole life connected to her sisters, but her personality is still the most striking of the bunch. Shan has a child-like whimsy about her, and is generally known for her playfulness in an otherwise overly stoic monastery the Daughters of Flowers call home. Despite standing out, Shan is actually the most rooted into the hivemind’s effects, and struggles to function without it even moreso than her sisters. After being taken over by Spielascor, Shan’s mirth corrupted into a fervor to tear apart the North, with nearly nothing of her own motives and mind remaining besides a relentless desire to pursue whatever another told her to chase after.
Shan is a half-elf, of sorts. Shan resembles her human sisters in most ways, except being notably younger-looking and more splindly than the other two. Shan wears her hair cut short, and sports a more tom-boyish look to her as opposed to the regal bearing of the rest of the court. She wears the pale red robes and white jewelry that her sisters wear, emblazed with the sign of two birds encircling each other. Her entire body is tattooed with birds, which she takes great pride in, and re-inks continuously.
Shan’s role on the battlefield is typically to serve as part of the hivemind. Her specialty is finding openings and weaknesses in enemies, and then helping allies exploit those. As such, she takes a much more passive role in battle, hanging back and waiting for openings, rather than actively managing combat through the Sifstring. Shan’s martial capabilities are limited, but she typically fights open-handed, with the aid of her dragonscale bracers. Shan’s bracers help her catch magic or slashing attacks and redirect the force away from her body, and they aid in offense as well, bolstering her punches and scratching up enemies who get into close combat.
Shan’s father, the Red Monk, took charge of managing the courts of the North, and helping settle desputes. During his time as a judge, he earned great renown for his rulings and fairness, and even the gods came before him to ask for his guidance in their own affairs. One such day, Loki and Freya appeared and asked for the Red Monk to pass judgement as to who should have ownership over a portion of the undead.
Freyja knew the Red Monk to be a fickle man, however, and bribed him with a powerful artifact prior to the trail. The artifact was known as The Sifstring, and was a means to bind together the minds of many into the mind of one, and it was a very enticing gift indeed. The Red Monk ruled in her favor, and excitedly attempted to use the Sifstring, but was frustrated to find that he was incapable of doing so. His own mind caught on the snares of others, and he was unable to fathom how to use such a device.
Freyja saw his predicament, and offered a solution: immortal beings such as herself struggled to use the Sifstring, and mortal men seemed the face the same difficulties, but surely a child born with the Sifstring in hand would be capable of using it. Their malleable minds would not be overwhelmed by the influence of others, and they would grow up knowing only the presence of another in their mind.
With a solution settled on, Frejya gifted the Red Monk three flowers for his garden, and the Red Monk watered them with the blood from three women and his own. The flowers grew and bloomed into three young women, each born a year apart, and each born into the mind of the one prior.
Shan was born of the blood of a Ljósálfar queen, a tricky woman who had only visited the Red Monk once before, and had sent a vial of her blood at his request, in return for a favor. Shan’s mind became fused with the Sifstring, and she only knew of herself as Three. Her older sisters and herself were one and the same, and she never went anywhere without them. They decided that Shan should be the happy, youthful younger sister, and so she displayed those emotions, and held those thoughts.
Shan served in her father’s monastery, and was as rebellious as her sisters. The Daughters of Flowers became well-known for being everything that a monk ought not be: heavy drinkers, lustful dancers, prostitutes, and generally difficult and either unpleasant or too pleasant to be around. The Red Monk attempted to coerce his daughters into obedience by assigning them difficult tasks, but they pulled off everything with ease. The Daughters of Flowers were as hated as they were feared and loved by the monastery.
As they grew up, Maragan was appointed to manage the Red Monk’s army, and Tai was appointed to serve as a future judge in the courts, but Shan was not given a job. While her sisters toiled away, Shan remained the epitome of a senseless daughter, running around the monastery grounds and causing trouble for any who crossed her path.
The daughters were recruited into the Nine at the behest of Preston, but their motives for joining were always clear in trying to undermine the other Chaotic Lords. While the Daughters of Flowers doted on Lady Parhelion and her band of demons, most of their talk was trying to whittle down the guards of the other children, in preperation for a potential assassination.
However, a few years into working with the Nine, thoughts of killing the other members began to fade, and the Daughters began to simply embrace their role in the group. Their defeat at the hand of Spielascor was devestating in a way they had never imagined before, not only with the sheer agony of bearing three bodies worth of wounds, but also in the power of the Sifstring being stifled in Spielascor’s domain. Shan slowly, but surely, lost connection with her sisters, and went insane as a result.
As Lady Parhelion’s bard mastery grew, one of her first tasks was loosening the bonds that bound the Daughters of Flowers. Maragan, Tai, and Shan were given enough freedom to assist Lady Parhelion in her dance against the Jade Fortress, but Lady Parhelion’s bardic magic also shook the strength of the Sifstring, and gave each sister a chance at individuality. After Tai committed suicide, Shan lost her mind, unhinged by the idea that her sister would do such a thing rather than return to the hivemind.
However, as the Sifstring slowly returned to the two remaining sisters, and Tai was brought back as a Drifter, Shan stayed connected to Tai and regained herself as she watched her sister grow and change. As Tai’s life began to change, and she began to develop her sense of self, Shan became worried and desperately broke out of her own mind, attempting to project into the body of someone else outside of the realm in order to find and talk with Tai.
Shan first appeared among the Drifters as a fellow inmate by the name of Sharyn-Anne, a young woman who had scribbled bird tattoos all over her arms. While the group deals with Lucielle Johnson and the Cthulu-esque horrors of the event, Sharyn-Anne demonstrated a general lack of understanding for what was going on, a knack for conversation, a sunny disposition, and a strong sense of fear for everything happening. Sharyn-Anne cowered in the face of many of the terrors the group came across, including developing a phobia of octopi while a part of the group. At the brim of conflict with the townspeople, Sharyn-Anne panicked and kicked a bomb into the crowd of people, which failed to detonate but drew attention to her. She was shot and bled out.
The shock of being connected to a dying body was too much for Shan to handle, and her real body collapsed into insanity following the death of her host. Spielascor was able to manipulate the young girl easily after that point, restoring the fragmented mind of Shan into a version of herself that was ready and pleased to serve Spielascor. Spielascor’s bardic abilities granted him the ability to hex people for long periods of time, but Shan’s mind-control would allow him to not only torment the people of the North, but permanently corrupt them into turning on each other.
Shan began to show up and follow the Drifters after they began interfering with her work in the North. She appeared as various NPCs, such as a Snowy Owl and Merit, after she had taken control of them. Her hosts often were treated badly, with most augmenting their body with technology or magic for the explicit purpose of serving out their role in whatever task Shan had. Despite her dire predicament, Shan always appeared as wisful and longing, and retained a sense of playfulness about her, unable to comprehend what she was doing as wrong or getting explicitly mad at those who interfered. Her one, burning desire to reunite with her sisters was cut short when she finally came across Tai in the North, who attacked her and admonished her for all the pain and death she had caused.
In the end, Shan broke down completely and Spielascor built a new mirror-like body for her, explicitly for trying to kill the Drifters. Shan attempted to kill them once and for all, stealing the minds of the Chaotic Lords to destroy all civilization in the North, and controlling Kyurikom into aiding her in battle. While most of the North was destroyed, the Drifters prevailed in battle, and Tai killed Shan, who was revealed to have been barely alive in the first place, and without any sort of real awareness for reality anymore.
While Tai claimeed that Shan could be brought back, as she was simply just a facet of the hivemind that Tai and Maragan still share, Tai seems to have reservations.
The Red Monk: Shan’s Father. The two have a strenuous relationship. Shan hopes to be doted on, but the Red Monk knows that she’s mostly trying to manipulate him into getting what she wants.
Maragan: Shan’s eldest sister. Shan can’t imagine life without her, but is incredibly jealous that Maragan once lived a life without her. Shan is very insecure about this, and tries to coax Maragan deeper and deeper into the hivemind as a result.
Tai: Shan’s older sister. Shan and Tai are opposites, but in a complementary way, and both have spent their entire lives connected to the Daughters of Flowers. After Tai commits suicide, Shan becomes hysterical and thinks that Tai had made a mistake, and refused to ever believe that Tai would want a life of her own.
Yez & Sawyer: Shan hates the Gold Master and his minions with a furious passion, often teasing and belittling them.