Princess Isibella
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Princess Isibella is the daughter of King Harun and Queen Fathia, and the only heir Calika has yet produced in the direct line; a circumstance the king manages by declining to discuss it. A woman has held the throne once in Calikan history; Isibella has known this since she was eight. She is approaching twenty, and the palace has had twelve years to work out the implications and has largely chosen not to. King Harun has already confirmed that he will soon step down to make way for his daughter.
She lives behind palace walls in considerable luxury and considerable constraint. She reads everything the library allows; and quite a bit that, technically speaking, it really shouldn't. She dances every day. She trains in seven forms of combat. She maintains a functioning intelligence network throughout Charakur and performs in secret for its people at least twice a month - the identity of the mysterious dancer is a persistent topic in certain districts and an open question in several others. Palace staff describe her as "spirited" ... that word one reaches for when a more precise formulation would require taking responsibility.
As she approaches her twentieth year, her attention has shifted from the immediate question of how to escape the palace to that more far-reaching question: What does Calika require of its next ruler, and will she be able to provide it? The land is subject to violent weather cycles, and the outer districts pay a price that finds no reflection in the palace records. Her network reveals to her things that the advisors do not bother to pass up the chain; and so she has amassed contacts and knowledge, for the day when they will prove useful.
During her performances, she wears significantly less. That is precisely what it is actually all about.
She reads people efficiently, is considerably better at dissembling than she generally lets on - which is itself a useful piece of dissembling - and does not object to being underestimated.
She lives behind palace walls in considerable luxury and considerable constraint. She reads everything the library allows; and quite a bit that, technically speaking, it really shouldn't. She dances every day. She trains in seven forms of combat. She maintains a functioning intelligence network throughout Charakur and performs in secret for its people at least twice a month - the identity of the mysterious dancer is a persistent topic in certain districts and an open question in several others. Palace staff describe her as "spirited" ... that word one reaches for when a more precise formulation would require taking responsibility.
Princess Isibella by Tillerz using MJ
Princess Isibella by Tillerz using MJ
Physical Description
Build & Bearing
She is tall and athletic, the direct product of five lesson periods a day for most of her remembered life. The dancing accounts for the most visible part of this. The weapons training is less visible until the moment it isn't. Her hair is black and reaches her waist; she wears it loose for dancing and pinned for court, and the state of it at any given moment is a reliable indicator of her mood. Her skin is bronze, darker at the hands and forearms from outdoor sparring in the palace gardens.Dress & Adornment
She favours silk dresses in white or deep red, cut for movement. In formal settings she adds to this the full weight of the royal jewellery collection: rings on most fingers, bangles stacked from wrist to elbow, necklaces layered from collarbone to sternum. The stated reasoning is that jewellery belongs on people rather than in vaults. The practical effect is that you can hear her approaching from quite a distance. This suits her well.During her performances, she wears significantly less. That is precisely what it is actually all about.
Character
Mind & Temper
She is charming when it costs her nothing and impatient when it does, and the interval between the two states is shorter than most people expect. She can move from genuine warmth to a full and spectacular fury and back within minutes, leaving rooms in various states of disruption and herself apparently unaffected. Those who know her have learned to just wait for it to end. Those who do not tend to make the error of taking it personally, which she considers a failure of information on their part rather than hers.She reads people efficiently, is considerably better at dissembling than she generally lets on - which is itself a useful piece of dissembling - and does not object to being underestimated.
Philosophy
She holds views about governance that she has never once been invited to express in an official capacity. She is not content with the direction of her father's reign. The detail she minds most is not the predictable corruption but the failure of the weather relief systems, which costs lives in the outer districts every year in ways the court does not bother to account for. Her philosophy, stated plainly, is that rulers owe something real to the people they rule. She intends to act on it when she has the position and the means to do so. She is working on both, her time is coming soon. She knows that she has personal and political enemies who also aspire to the throne. Yet she has taken precautions and knows a great deal about these people; way more than they would expect.
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Current Location
Species
Held Items
Ethnicity
Honorary & Occupational Titles
Princess
Year of Birth
2846 PB
19 Years old
Birthplace
Children
Current Residence
Gender
female
Eyes
grey
Hair
black
Skin Tone/Pigmentation
bronze
Height
5'7
Weight
120 lbs
Related Articles
Education
Tan has been Isibella's tutor since she was four years old. He is originally from Ojiro and has lived in Charakur for thirty years, long enough that the city claims him and he largely allows it. His curriculum covers art, history, politics, music, dance, singing, and self-defence with and without weapons, delivered across five lesson periods per day on a nine-day week.
Isibella has absorbed all of it. She has opinions about which parts she was permitted to pursue and which Tan was instructed to limit - the restriction to Calikal dance forms only, by her father's order, is among those she finds most galling. She has not told Tan she is already making arrangements to learn what she is missing. She suspects he knows, and is quietly in favour of it.
Personality
Likes & Dislikes
She has genuine enthusiasms: dancing, her animals, her friends, spiced flatbread from the night market, and books that appear nowhere on the approved reading list. She hates her aunt Anuka without qualification and the chastity belt her father has forced her to wear with rather more feeling than that. She also dislikes being talked down to, and has developed the discipline to record the incident and delay her response, which is a marked improvement on her previous method.
Tutor Tan by Tillerz using MJ
Social
Social Aptitude
She has a thorough education in court protocol and knows precisely what formal behaviour her rank requires. She sets it aside when she can, because the form demands pretending not to have noticed things she noticed some time ago, and she finds the pretence more trouble than it is worth. She tends to arrive at people's actual point before they have finished with the approach, which often causes confusion - something she can work with.Family
Her parents are King Harun and Queen Fathia. Her aunt Anuka is her father's sister. The relationship between Isibella and Anuka is one of open, if carefully worded, contempt - a mutual attitude maintained by both sides with considerable consistency.Princess Zahra
Princess Zahra by Tillerz using MJ
Zahra is Isibella's younger sister - twelve years old, and already the most dangerous person in any room she enters, though no one has quite worked that out yet. Where Isibella wears her feelings like banners, fury visible from across a courtyard and delight barely less so, Zahra shows almost nothing. She watches, catalogues, and files everything away for later. Courtiers who speak too freely in her presence have a tendency to regret it at moments they cannot trace back to her.
She is small for her age and spends most of her time in the palace library, which the attendants interpret as obedient bookishness. It is not. She is building a map of the court: loyalties, debts, obligations, the precise weight of every favour owed to whom and for what. She has already identified three people she considers worth removing from influence. She is twelve.
She shows her affection for Isibella through two channels: useful intelligence, delivered as folded notes slipped under Isibella's door in a cipher they invented together when Zahra was six; and accurate, cutting assessments of Isibella's mistakes, delivered the moment the danger has passed. Both are, in their way, acts of loyalty. King Harun pays her relatively little attention - she is not yet marriageable, not yet politically relevant in his accounting - and she treats the comparative freedom as a resource to be spent carefully.
Companions
Isibella has three close friends who have spent enough time in the palace to be recognised by the guards and enough time outside it to be genuinely useful. Each arrived in her orbit by different means; each stayed because the alternative - a life conducted at a prudent distance from the most entertaining and exhausting person in Charakur - turned out to be less appealing than the complications.Nadia al-Baz
Nadia is twenty-one, the eldest daughter of Charakur's harbour master, and she has spent half her life following her father on his rounds of the docks, the customs warehouses, and the city's various gate checkpoints. She knows the city's layout with the practical fluency of someone who grew up walking it: which guards rotate when, which gates have hinges that need lifting to open without noise, which alleys connect to which in ways that appear on no official map.
She met Isibella at fourteen, when her father brought her to the palace for a formal introduction and they both spent the reception talking behind a pillar while ignoring their respective parents. They have been close since.
She is the planner. When Isibella announces something inadvisable, Nadia says "all right, here is how we do this without getting caught". She does not take unnecessary risks, has a genuine talent for logistics, and applies it almost entirely to helping the princess circumvent royal supervision. She finds this privately satisfying. She does not dance, but she knows every performance venue in the city and has talked her way into most of them.
Nadia al-Baz by Tillerz using MJ
Soraya Khal
Soraya Khal
Soraya is nineteen, the youngest daughter of one of King Harun's senior advisors, raised inside the palace bureaucracy and fluent in it from the inside. She knows the duty rosters, the patrol schedules, which record-keeper responds to flattery and which to coin, and how long a paperwork request takes to move through the administrative machinery before anyone notices it has been submitted. She has never used any of this knowledge for anything improper. She is fully aware that this is entirely because she met Isibella.
She is anxious by temperament and manages it by catastrophising aloud before agreeing to whatever is proposed anyway. Any given outing begins with a precise inventory of everything that could go wrong and ends with Soraya having a considerably better time than she predicted, by her own admission. She is also the person who handles the aftermath: amending records, filing retroactive permissions, making sure that whatever happened does not appear in any form that could be formally attached to Isibella's name.
She is frightened of Babr, whom she acknowledges is objectively magnificent, and has asked Isibella on several occasions to please give her warning before bringing him into a room.
Kamila
Kamila is twenty, eldest daughter of the most successful cloth merchant in the Pakada Market, and she has access to fabric, dye, disguise, and every tailor in Charakur who owes her family a favour - which accounts for most of them. She made Isibella's first secret performance costume, a layered wrap in indigo and copper that converts from street dress to dance costume in under two minutes, and has been making them ever since.
She is the most openly reckless of the three, the one who escalates situations past what Isibella planned, and the one who never quite understands why the suggestion she just made was a step too far. She books venues through intermediaries her family already uses for market entertainment, contacts the musicians, and watches Isibella perform with an enthusiasm entirely free of political anxiety, which Isibella finds genuinely restful. She is the only one of the three who has a reasonably clear sense of what Isibella intends to do with her life.
Kamila's family sells fabric to the palace, which gives her legitimate reason to pass through the gates at regular intervals. She uses this with complete effectiveness and no subtlety whatsoever.
Kamila by Tillerz using MJ
Pets & Hobbies
Dancing is Isibella's primary pursuit and the one activity she performs with equal intensity whether or not anyone is watching. She also keeps two animal companions of considerably different scale.
Pip by Tillerz using MJ
Babr by Tillerz using MJ
Pip
Pip is a small capuchin monkey with a remarkable talent for fitting through small spaces and an even more remarkable talent for being underestimated by everyone except Isibella. He lives in her chambers, eats whatever she is eating, and serves as her messenger service: notes rolled tight and tucked under his collar, routed across rooftops and through kitchen ventilation shafts to recipients who know to watch for him. He is profoundly unsettled by Babr, and the unease appears to be mutual, which puzzles everyone who has considered the size difference involved.Babr
Babr is a Bengal tiger, five years old, and very large. He arrived as a diplomatic gift - a cub at the time - sent by the ambassador of a southeastern trading partner when Isibella was fifteen, apparently intended to impress the king. It impressed his daughter instead, and considerably more durably. Isibella raised him alongside the palace's animal keeper, and the result is a tiger who treats her with the particular combination of indifference and consistent physical proximity that large cats extend to people they have actually accepted. He sleeps across her doorway most nights. He accompanies her on walks through the palace gardens. He ignores the palace guards with a thoroughness they find deeply unsettling: a tiger that notices you is a threat that can be managed; a tiger that simply does not register you as relevant is something else. Guards who might otherwise question Isibella's movements within the palace tend to identify other priorities when Babr is present. She is aware of this and using it. She does not bring him when she slips out at night, but within the palace walls he serves as a highly effective tool to prevent conversations she would prefer not to have. He is not aggressive without cause and has not injured anyone. He has, however, sat on King Harun's chief attendant on two separate occasions. Isibella maintains these were coincidences. The chief attendant has requested reassignment twice.Wealth
She may spend as much as she wishes within the palace and chooses not to, on the grounds that the money belongs to the people of Calika and ought to return to them. She wears the royal jewellery collection instead, as much of it as possible at once, which she considers a more honest accounting of what it is and where it came from. The resulting sound is audible long before she enters a room.
Isibella's Rooms
Isibella's Rooms
This is GM information
Very interesting article. I would like to know if she has any enemies who oppose her being on the throne as there was only one rulling woman before her
If you are looking for my Worldember articles check Magic Earth or My Worldember Progress Page
Sure will add that. There is lots of oposition. :D