Nerrala Athrana

---

At a glance: To strangers Nerrala may come across as distant and aloof, and she will rarely look at someone and speak to them at the same time. She has a peculiar habit of dying every garment she owns as black as possible, a habituation borne out of sentiment rather than any attempt to conceal herself. The quality of Tamriel’s dye stuffs mean her wardrobe can range from properly oppressive blacks to a brackish griege melange. Though she wears a range of different garments, her preferences tend towards clothing that conceals or obscures her body. She and her clothes tend to smell like incense and cedar.

For most of her career in misappropriation, Nerrala had used armor stolen from a Breton military cache. Time and zealous overdyes have left its hides curled and toned to a splotchy near-black. This armor is a step large, and its fasteners are over-tightened and wrapped or lopped short and hastily re-capped to fit her. Though she has a lot of sentimentality for this suit, enough to have kept it during her travels in Vvardenfell, she’s sometimes seen in more specialized chitin armor. If she’s wearing armor, then she almost certainly has a long, slender recurve and quiver on her back and a dagger with a pronged cross guard on her hip.

Nerrala eschews jewelry and tattoos, but has a habit of blackening her eye sockets with greasepaint or eyeshadow.

In her pockets: Lockpicks, a collapsible spyglass, smooth quartz pebbles, a small bound notebook and conte pencil, and a small knife.

---

Personality

Nerrala is an anxious and attention-short mer who seems to never stop fidgeting. She is bright and creative intellectually, but is also a chronic flake and prone to choosing and acting too quickly, misinterpreting people's actions or intentions or failing to notice significant details about jobs and situations that leave her flat-footed. Nerrala can have a short fuse, and has maladaptive and avoidant reactions to difficult people and scenarios.

---

Backstory

Born to Dunmer expatriates living in Wayrest, Nerrala was driven out of the home in early adolescence and turned to larceny as a survival tactic, rolling with ad hoc groups of street youth. In her free time, Nerrala was and remains an avid reader, a habit initially encouraged by her parents and kept alive by reading every text that passed through her hands on the way to the fence. This mixed upbringing left Nerrala with a strange melange of cultural values, scraped together from her immersion in the cultures of the Covenant and learned Dunmeri values through her parents and readings on Morrowind. In many ways it’s also left her emotionally immature, an overgrown feral child of the streets who grew into adulthood largely without older role models.

As Nerrala came of age, she resolved to travel back to Morrowind. This quickly found her broke in Evermore, where she joined up with a local chapter of the Thieves Guild. This was her first foray into a professional sort of larceny, and her skills blossomed from exposure to a new class of thief, but her tenure here was short. Within a few months she left once more for Morrowind, variously chartering or smuggling herself aboard ships and carts before making landfall in the ass end of the province. She trudged her way to Ebonheart, caught a boat to Vvardenfell, and signed up with a minor Hlaalu house, working on contract for a short time before the House was consumed in intrigue. This left her jobless and without contacts in the notoriously punitive lands of the Temple, fencing to strangers on woefully slim margins or working the odd and disagreeably dangerous freelancer contract.

At the same time that Nerrala was washing out of mainstream Dunmer society, she found her letters to Evermore going unanswered and found it to be as convenient an excuse to call her Morrowind experiment off as any. She began her journey West, largely through Skyrim and the northern passes of Cyrodil, where she was poached in an outlaws’ den by Cutter Wade. With the prospect that Evermore might hold nothing for her, and without any other home to return to, signing on to his new chapter of the Colovian Thieves Guild was an obvious choice. Here she really proved herself, rising swiftly to the rank of Prowler, then Shadowfoot.

Guild business saw Nerrala chasing a lead to a dead end back to Morrowind. Here she met a khajiit, Wraesha, with whom she squatted near Vvardenfell's western coast while trying and failing to reignite her investigation. Her work was less glamorous than in Colovia and involved a lot of kwama mine theft before she and Wraesha joined a group of other adventurers in a messy but generally successful abolitionist mission. Ultimately this chapter would quietly close as she followed Wraesha to Grahtwood.

Approved, 9/6/2018