Appearance

Physical Description

Alethea is a short half-elf with a lean, climber's physique due to decades of working in a ship.

Body Features

Hidden underneath her hand wraps, there is a tattoo of the north star on Alethea's right wrist.

Facial Features

Alethea has sharp elven features that she inherited from her wood-elf father. She has a scar on her forehead (often hidden by her head wrap) from a training accident with her sailor corps.

Identifying Characteristics

Apart from her short stature, Alethea's most striking feature is her bright green eyes. (She is often mistaken for a human as her elf ears are often hidden.)

Physical quirks

Alethea spent most of her time at sea aloft, climbing the ship's rigging or swinging in between masts when attacking enemy ships. As a result, she has an incredibly light tread and is able to sneak up on people. She also has a good sense of balance and is able to climb quickly and with ease.

Apparel & Accessories

Alethea often wears light clothing that are easy to move in. She also wears only dark colors as her primary job as a sailor was to execute stealthy attacks, often in the dark of night.
 
She often travels with her long hair down, but she wears a head wrap and tucks her elven ears underneath it. She also wears silver hoop earrings. Attached to her left earring is a silver lucky charm shaped like a "W" to represent her ship Cassiopeia.

Mentality

Personal history

Alethea's father is a wood-elf who left his forest family for a life at sea. For as long as Alethea can remember, he has been the captain of the Summer Seas Trading Company's Cassiopeia. Her father's story always begins with Alethea's mother: after meeting a lovely woman in a port city, they have a daughter out of wedlock that they named Alethea. Alethea's mother was already married to a human sailor due to return soon, so Alethea's father took her to his ship and raised her there. There, her father raised her with all the gruffness befitting a captain and the adoration of a doting father. (Alethea would never admit this, but while she acts like a competent ship's officer, she will always be daddy's little girl.) Her father never revealed much else about her mother, but Alethea knows that he still longs for his human lover and will continue to do so for the remainder of his life.
 
Aboard Cassiopeia, Alethea spent her early years doing errands for the ship's crew or reading in her father's study. She was often a fly on the wall at his meetings, and thus learned a lot about the trading business. While her father ran a tight ship, the Cassiopeia crew was also her father's family, the only family Alethea has ever known.
 
At age 12, her father put her in the sailor corps to begin her training. She trained with the boarding party, spending most of her time climbing and swinging about to attack enemy ships. By 15, she officially became a member of this sailor corps. Her life at the corps revolved around theft; she was either retrieving goods stolen from the Summer Seas Trading Company or stealing for the Summer Seas Trading Company as retribution. Despite 75 years of service, Alethea never tired of being at sea; she has been traveling her entire life and always feels a strong sense of adventure. Her life is lived in cycles of working hard at sea and playing hard when they dock, and she is content with this.
 
On her 50th birthday, when her father was feeling particularly emotional, she learned more about her Fey ancestry. Her father revealed that before leaving the forest, he father had an elf lover that he left behind. Alethea also learned that her father had a child with this elf. Somewhere out there, Alethea has an elf half-brother. However, her loyalty remains with her ship and corps, and she has not felt the pull to search for her half-brother. (Alethea assumes that her human mother has been dead for some time at this point.) Although she has seen a fair share of people join and leave her crew due to her relatively long life (by human standards), she remains loyal to her ship and its people. She cannot imagine needing any other family than this.
 
Shortly after Alethea's 90th birthday, the Cassiopeia docked. It was one of the rare instances when their time at port was more work and no debauchery. Alethea sensed a new adventure for her at this port; an unknown force was beckoning her, promising to anchor her to this land. (This was especially strange considering Alethea never wanted for stability. The perennial threat of being knocked off her feet by ocean tides meant that stability was elusive, a state Alethea has to chase with every breath she took. She was more grounded at sea.)
 
The night before they were due to leave the port, Alethea's father asked her to stay and continue to search for the stolen goods. Much to her surprise, she was relieved to have an extended stay. Her father must have sensed that this port was pulling her heart away from the crew she loved so dearly. Before parting, her father told her that his mind belonged to the ship and its crew, his every waking hour preoccupied with their success and safety. His soul belonged to the sea, where he will happily live out his days until she claims his life and pulls him under. Half of his heart is with Alethea, his darling daughter who has brought meaning to his four centuries of life. The other half he left at the port where Alethea was born, buried six feet under a headstone he can never bring himself to visit.
 
Alethea suspects her mind and soul belonged in the same places as her father, though she still believes that her heart will always belong to her sailor corps. With a lucky charm to remind her of her family, Alethea set out to find out if there is a force strong enough to pull her from the sea.

Education

Alethea received no formal education, though her father taught her how to read and write. Since her father was also the ship's captain, she received informal education in maritime and trading laws. During her training with her sailor corps, she was educated in strategy and tactics.

Employment

Though Alethea began her training with her sailor corps at age 12, she was not employed by the Summer Seas Trading Company until she became an official member at age 15.
 
She has sailed in Cassiopeia for the past 75 years. In her ship, the only true leader is her father, the captain. (Alethea suspects that although her father identifies as "Captain of Cassiopeia," he is probably high up in the Summer Seas Trading Company, as their ship is more or less granted the freedom to do just about anything without answering to anyone.)
 
Specifically, Alethea's corps operates with a tiered structure, where senior members share leadership responsibilities and oversee junior members. As a senior member, Alethea most often leads raids and executes attacks, leaving the other senior members to work with her father in planning sailing routes and formulating attack plans.

Mental Trauma

Alethea often meditates and ponders how everyone around her will die eventually, regardless of how they live their lives.
 
The Summer Seas Trading Company mostly employs human sailors. Because they age faster than elves and half-elves do, Alethea has seen a fair share of her crew members grow frail and retire or die of old age. (Somehow this haunts her more than the crew members she has lost in battle, and she doesn't quite understand why.) The ship sees a constant cycle of crew members joining then leaving when their bodies fail to meet the demands of their job, so Alethea knows that any emotional connection she makes with an individual will be severed when people inevitably age out of the crew. As a result, her loyalty and affection are directed to the collective (the crew), where the grief from one loss can easily be overshadowed by the needs of many others.
 
To that end, although Alethea hides her elven ears to blend in at the ports and her (mostly) human crew, she feels a little ashamed of her human side... only because she knows she will die long before her father does and he will be left alone.

Morality & Philosophy

Alethea has spent almost her entire life sailing. As a result, she reveres the sea and stars—the sea because it often determines her ship's fate and the stars because it has often helped her find her way. Many of her nights were spent on the ship's deck or rigging, staring up at the stars. On these quiet nights, Alethea learned to meditate and feel at one with the universe, feeling an overwhelming sense of awe at the vastness of sky and sea.

person.sexuality

Heterosexual

person.gender_identity

Cisgender

Known Languages

Alethea speaks Sylvan.

Personality

Social