Suriya Talvek
knife
Suriya Liyana Talvek
| Age | Early 20s |
| Species | Human (Marindi) |
| Gender | Female |
| Height | 5'6" | 168 cm |
| Weight | 115 lbs | 52 kg |
| Force Sensitive | Yes |
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION
Small and slight enough to vanish as easily into a shadow as into a crowd, Suriya Talvek is all wiry muscle and coiled intent. She has a lean, tensile build honed with a lifetime of running, climbing, dodging, and leaping. Her skin is a warm, deep brown, and her hair and eyes are so dark brown as to be almost black. She is over average height, around 5'6", and lean and narrow-framed, with long, wiry muscles rather than bulk. Something about her bearing gives itself to motion, as if even when seated she looks and feels like she could bolt at any moment.
Her skin is rich, warm brown with golden undertones, and is marred occasionally by faded nicks on her limbs. Suriya has thick, almost black hair, naturally straight with the slightest suggestion of a wave in the humidity of her native archipelago. She wears it long and almost always wears it in one or more braids, pinned close to her head to allow freedom of movement. She wears her hair down only around those who she trusts, or when she has no other option. In the field, there is an almost ritual precision to the way Suriya binds it, as any loose hair would be an unforgiveable indulgence.
Her eyes are dark brown, again almost so dark as to be black. Her gaze tends to be still, steady, weighty rather than fluttering or expressive. Suriya watches people and watches around people, cataloguing exits, noting weapons and places where weapons might be, and the expressions of those around her. She is slow to smile -- genuinely smile, not the court-appropriate curve of her lips but something real and unguarded -- her eyes are where it shows first: creased at the corners, suddenly warm.
Her face is something both oval and heart-shaped, with high cheekbones, a finer jaw, and a slightly pointed chin. She has a straight nose, a little stronger and longer than would be considered conventionally pretty, but in her opinion it helps anchor her features and guards against the likelihood that, because of her large, dark eyes, her smooth skin, and her subtle cupid's bow lips, she might look somehow childish.
Suriya's posture is naturally straight-backed, but she often unconsciously tucks herself into smaller shapes, angling her shoulders slightly, shifting her weight to one leg, folding her arms around her slim frame. In front of nobility or hostile eyes she may drop her chin half a degree, happy for the hoity-toity to think of it as respectful submission, but really as a measure of defensively narrowing her profile. Her gait is invariably soft-footed, having trained her entire life to make her footfalls small. Her movements are graceful but efficient; she rarely blunders or bumps into things or people -- unless that's her aim.
Suriya favors dark, muted colors in her wardrobe: black and charcoal when in the field, dark blues and (ironically, perhaps) deep greens when not in the field.
INVENTORY
Everyday Carry:
- A comical amount of knives: Throwing knives, utility knives, belt knives, knives that look like hairpins. Knives, knives, knives.
- Hairpins that aren't just hairpins: one doubles as a lockpick, another as an improvised knife, etc.
- Chalk and charcoal: for leaving quick marks on doorframes or misinformation to distract followers.
- Datapad: with stylus.
- Coin purse: containing coins, tokens, a casino chip, other bits and bobs.
- Needle and thread: repairs clothing, stitches a wound in a pinch, or pins a note.
- First aid kit: because accidents happen.
- A concealed hold-out blaster: because sometimes knives only go so far.
- A tiny flashlight/laser signaler combination.
At her core, Suriya is quiet, intense, and sharply self-controlled. She prefers to observe first and speak or act last. Her first impulse in any new room is to melt into the periphery, map exits and vantage points, and wait until the opportune moment to enter a conversation. Suriya is difficult to read, spare with words, and very dry in her humor. She is reluctant to show affection or fear where anyone can see it, viewing these actions as giving hostages to fate. Despite this outward restraint, Suriya feels deeply and fiercely. She does not think of herself as a good person, necessarily, though she struggles to reconcile her role as an assassin and spy with that of her religion as a devotee of the Great Pattern.
She takes her faith seriously, but not uncritically. The Pattern, she believes, is real, and she believes in the teachings of the Faith, that each person is a thread that can either sit cleanly within the design that seeks to rightly order the duties and obligations, loves and hatreds, powers and mercies of life, or else tear and rot the weave around it. For some, the Great Knots of Binding, Temperance, and Grace are abstractions or catechisms to recite at Temple but without a bearing on everyday life. For Suriya, they are a grid she uses to judge herself. The tensions between intrinsic morality and the vagaries of the Pattern are uncomfortable for her. For instance: taking the life of another without benefit of court proceedings feels wrong on all levels, but a binding vow to the man who ordered the murder has the capacity to overcome such objections, for how can a tapestry woven keep its pattern if the knots that make it are undone?
Her sensitivity to the Force -- called the Hidden Thread in her religion -- is something she treats with extreme suspicion. She has not explored the possibilities of it, yet, but she is wary of the teachings of the Faith on its abuse to pressure and coerce minds, to overpower bodies. Suriya has seen what unrestrained power looks like in the hands of creditors and petty lords, and she is loathe to leverage it against others, even in a different, subtler form, even for the greater good, even in service to her binding vows.
Professionally, she is required to be cold, but Suriya would never intentionally be cruel. It is no easy thing to take a life, to double-cross a compatriot, or to condemn men to ruin merely for choosing the 'wrong' side in a civil war. But pain for pain's sake, sadism -- even to prove a point or send a message -- is a major unraveling of the knot of Grace, and she is already quite sure she is pushing her understanding of the other knots quite enough for the Pattern's liking. Inwardly, she is haunted by these contradictions, worried of her ultimate fate, and hyper-aware of the dangers of power. Of late, she has been drawn to random acts of altruism, as if she can undo some of the more complicated and damaging knots of her past by pouring goodness on her portion of the Pattern.
STRENGTHS
[+] Ghost: Suriya is exceptional at moving unseen in urban and semi-urban environments like docks, alleys, fortresses, and camps. She reads traffics and sightlines instinctively and can cross a busy courtyard without being the most noticeable person in it.
[+] Parkour!: Years of running roofs, beams, rigging, and scaffolds makes her a natural climber. She is lithe and light, with well-trained legs and arms to jump, climb, and otherwise traverse above the fray.
[+] Cold Blooded: When things go wrong, Suriya's pulse barely ticks up (metaphorically, of course). She thinks clearly in a fight, during interrogations, and when things don't go to plan. She is capable of prioritizing, triaging, and going into action without freezing, catastrophizing, or spiraling. And she always, always has at least escape plan.
[+] Precise Mercy: She is capable of wielding targeted and strategic kindness to undermine the injustices that the system is built on.
WEAKNESSES
[-] Martyr Complex: Whether because of her conscience or her faith, Suriya is convinced at a bone-deep level that she should pay for the things she has done. However justified the orders, however much she can convince herself that it is in the greater good, it's still wrong and this guilt pushes her to take on too much, accept disproportionate blame, and volunteer for the most dangerous assignments -- calling it a death wish would be an overstatement, but death apathy would be apropos.
[-] Chronic Self-Erasure: Suriya is good at convincing herself that her wants and wishes don't matter, that only duty and atonement do.
[-] Attachment Conflict: Her tangled history with the power players in her system's government acts as a live wire. Guilt, loyalty, and duty to nation are a potent and complex cocktail can cause her normally-excellent judgment can falter, causing her to hesitate when she should act.
HISTORY
Suriya Liyana Talvek was born in the dockside warrens of Jantipor, a tide-stained port in the blazing and humid tropics of Diadrys. Her family were low-born but hard-working in the trades that flourish in such a place: stevedores, tally-clerks, runners, weavers, and sailors. Her father took whatever the quays would give him in a part of the world where laborers were seen as expendable and dime-a-dozen rather than a resource in which to invest -- a porter one week, a warehouse hand the next -- while her mother kept a stall in the markets and did mending to stretch every coin.
The Great Pattern was part of her upbringing as the background noise that subtly channels one's childhood. There were knot-charms over doorways, chalked diagrams on stall-fronts, and expensive, rarely-used candles occasionally lit during important vigils and rituals. Her childhood was sparse but happy and loving. The family had no abundance, but they did not go hungry. She was one of four children, the eldest and the only girl.
One bad year changed everything. First, an expected cargo shipment failed. Then her mother came down with a devastating illness. The family had to take out a loan that seemed survivable when Suriya's father signed on the dotted line. But as misfortune compounded, the fees and interest piled on until the numbers in the ledger left no way out. Under Janitpor's predatory lending laws, the creditor was within his rights to convert arrears into years of service. On paper, it was a Binding undertaken freely, but in practice it meant that Suriya became an entry in a ledger book, an indentured asset that could be bought, sold, and traded until her indenture was paid.
Thus, at fourteen she left Jantipor. Her indenture passed through several hands: first, the trading house office, where she swept floors, carried messages, and helped with other office work; then, she was traded to a trade master, where she worked in a warehouse and a trading caravan, which involved a lot of heavy lifting and travel. Later, as Diadrys became tenser and trade blurred into smuggling and protection work, her contract ended up with rougher men. She ran messages through bad districts, kept lookout, and snuck in and out of places to fudge books, steal secrets, or plant evidence.
By the time the old ruler of Diadrys died and succession intrigue evolved into open civil war, her indenture belonged to a contractor who supplied provisions and information to one of the claimants to the throne. On paper, Suriya was still just an indentured assistant, keeping tallies, escorting wagons, carrying sealed packets between camps, but in practice she had sharpened all the stray skills that came with her work. She could traverse hostile streets without being noticed, read the morale of a camp at a distance, and spot where the Pattern around a supply line was beginning to warp.
In that role, the Marindi, Jantipor-born, legally indentured but dangerously competent on the fringes of a growing power that Suriya first came to the attention of the war-leader that would one day buy out her indenture and Bind her to a very different kind of life.