Tempest – tiefling berserker barbarian
I spent literally an entire day working on this. Building a pose with body parts seems easier than trying to fit together chunks of clothing, although it’s still a lot of fiddling to make everything fit together properly. I’m quite happy with how it came out, and proud of myself for coming up with some creative solutions to problems that probably nobody but me would notice. (Wait, are those fingers technically missing a joint? Yes, yes they are. Well, we can’t have that.) Once again masking is my friend. I went super kung-fu on highlighting and shading, and I’m glad I did because she looks super buff and badass now. None of the scenic backgrounds really worked for me (I wish there were more townscapes that aren’t modern or Asian) so I went with a frame thing that looks pretty cool.
Tempest was born into a tiefling slum and raised by whores in a brothel after her father was shanked in an alley and her mother died of consumption. The brothel owner, who had taken Tempest and her mother in off the streets, allowed the orphaned girl to stay there as long as she made herself useful. At first that meant taking care of menial chores, but as she grew older and more capable her duties tended toward thievery and the collection of debts from some of the brothel’s more delinquent clients. As she began to mature, she knew it was only a matter of time before she became the brothel’s newest exotic attraction.
When she was 16, a night visit to collect from an aspiring politician turned violent when he tried to coerce her into sex. Overcome by rage, Tempest brutally stabbed the man to death before slipping away into the darkness. The local constabulary, looking for a quick fix to the scandal raised by the man’s murder, brought Tempest in for questioning and urged her to confess to a botched robbery without making the man’s connection to the brothel public. When the brothel owner decided his exotic toy wasn’t worth the potential fallout from protecting her, and the town guard tried more forceful means to secure her cooperation, Tempest left a bloody trail behind her to gain her own freedom and repay her “benefactor” for everything he had put her through.
She spent the next couple of years on the run, until it seemed like the city’s authorities had lost interest in pursuing her. In the 20 years since that fateful incident, she’s been drifting from town to town supporting herself with (usually unsavory) odd jobs and the occasional brawl for money. She never forgets the way the world looks down on her kind, and while her temper simmers just below an outwardly calm and calculating surface, she will never lack for motivation to get angry and slash things up.
