Lilit Adamma

A fortress on a steep cliff, high walls covered in spikes, courtyards lit by oil lamps, and a guard in front of every door.
Who do they take me for? A common thief? A savage raider? A blade in the night?
It doesn't matter, I claimed all treasures in the village below, so now only just one place to visit remains.
I never had a princess' teeth before... I hope she likes her present.
~Lilit Adamma

The myths and legends of the world are full of the exploits of cunning thieves and daring rogues who, by utilizing their skills, wits, and a seemingly endless streak of luck manage to perform grand deeds and brazen heists seemingly impossible for all but them.
Be it breaking into a king's vault to steal their weight in gold, escaping unscathed from a prison-fortresses guarded by a thousand men, or unearthing lost treasures hidden within ancient catacombs riddled with traps, these thieves of legends can be stopped by neither doors nor guards.
Yet even by the standards of these mythical figures, the woman by the name of Lilit Adamma stands out among them due to -depending on one's view- either being one of the most or least successful thieves in history.
As just like the thieves of myth, there seems to be no gate, guardian, or geography that can keep her from infiltrating even the most secure of locations and making off with her prize into the rays of the early morning sun.
But unlike her mythical colleagues, she steals neither gold nor pearls nor is she hunting for secret information or the lives of a house's inhabitants.
In fact most of the time she leaves a stranger's home poorer than when she entered it.

Physical Description

General Physical Condition

It is easy to stay in shape if one just has enough angry guards to motivate one to just keep running.
~ Lilit Adamma

Lilit possesses an athletic and well-trained body thanks to her intensive workout routine consisting of climbing walls, parkouring over unstable roofs, and outrunning guards, hounds, and angry mobs.

Identifying Characteristics

Like all other Ziugra, Lilit possesses an unmistakable identifying feature known as a "Universal Wound" upon her body, which is a permanent scar that indicates the manner in which she perished before reawakening.
Given that Lilit perished by being torn apart by a pack of guard dogs, her entire body is therefore almost entirely covered in canine bite marks, making her Universal Wound particularly easy to spot.

Special abilities

Why should I carry a ladder with me, if I can just make one out of mouths?

Lilit possesses a "Mu-ĝe" by the name of [Zú Za'lag] ("Gnashing Teeth"), which allows her to manifest several human-like mouths on any surface within her vicinity.
Depending on the number of mouths she has currently manifests and how close she is to an individual mouth, the size of these mouths can range all the way from the size of a baby's mouth all the way to a mouth close to 2 meters across.
While these mouths possess a fleshy and organic appearance and even feel soft and wet to the touch they possess a durability and bite force far beyond any organic creature, allowing them to effortlessly bite or crush stone, bone, or hardened bronze without apparent damage to themselves.
While the most straightforward usage of these mouths therefore unsurprisingly is to "take a bite" out of a nearby object or individuals, Lilit also discovered a number of additional properties and usages of her mouths, which greatly help her with her profession.
Firstly the mouths created by her Mu-ĝe are all capable of speaking or rather Lilit is capable of speaking through them as if her own mouth was in the position of a manifested mouth, which enables her to easily distract and mislead guards.
Secondly, all mouths possess an elongated, slightly forked tongue, which similar to the mouths themselves is far more resilient than its appearance would suggest. Therefore Lilit can use these tongues to manipulate objects that are in close proximity to the mouth, which significantly enhances the overall capabilities of her Mu-ĝe.
Thirdly Lilit also discovered that the larger versions of her maw also make for excellent, albeit quite cramped hiding places, as while she resides within a maw the doesn't disappear even when she fully closes it, leaving only a faint lip line on the surface she is currently hiding in. Just recently Lilit also found out that once she entered a maw she is able to leave from a different maw, allowing her a form of short-range translocation.

Apparel & Accessories

Despite the high visibility of her Universal Wound, Lilit generally wears rather short and sleeveless clothes, which is partially due to longer clothes being rather unpractical for her particular line of work and the fact that any long and flowing garment she wears will sooner or later have chunks taken out of it through the use of her Mu-ĝe.
The only exception to this rule is the sewn-together, blood-stained remains of her old clothes that serve as a makeshift cloak for Lilit, which flutters behind her like a pair of tattered demonic wings.
This frightening appearance is then further complemented with a pale white half-mask fashioned from the skull of a gazelle covering the upper part of her face, which Lilit wears as a makeshift sun hat.
In terms of accessories, Lilit wears a number of pouches and small containers made from leather, wood, and bone on a hempen rope tied over her shoulders and around her waist, in which she stores her belongings, food, water, and a frankly uncomfortable amount of human teeth.
Around her left wrist, she also wears a simple bronze bracelet containing the fragments of a broken dog tooth still buried deep within the bracelet's metal.

Specialized Equipment

Despite being a famous thief that managed to infiltrate numerous heavily fortified and guarded locations, Lilit doesn't really possess much in the way of specialized burglary equipment such as lockpicks or grappling hooks, as she is able to compensate for her lack of such gear with the powers of her Mu-ĝe.

Mental characteristics

Personal history

Once upon a Garden

Lilit Adamma was born as the daughter of a servant girl working in the palace of an Edylonian Noble. While the identity of her father was never revealed to her, based on the rumors circulating among the palace's servants it might very well be possible that her father was a person of notably higher social status than her mother, a fact that might explain why Lilit and her mother were transferred to work as gardener within the grand palace gardens of Edylon a few years after Lilits birth.
Yet regardless if this transfer occurred because of the support of her unknown father, or simply due to the gardens having just been expanded in size and needing more workers to be maintained, for Lilit there couldn't have been a greater gift, as Lilit quickly fell in love with the beauty of the green paradise she was now tasked to maintain.

To the Dogs

Given Lilits devotion to the care of the palace gardens, she likely would have continued this line of work for the rest of her life. Yet as fate would have it, this was not to be, as following a run-in with a young noble that in Lilit's eyes disrespected her garden, she was banished from ever working in the gardens again. While this may have been an unusually mild punishment for a disobedient servant, for Lilit it was a sentence worse than death.
Because of this, it is not all surprising that following her banishment Lilit started to sneak into the palace gardens night after night, using her extensive knowledge of the garden's layout to evade the armed guards' hounds patrolling the area.
Even though Lilit tried her best to leave no traces of her frequent visits to the garden, by the end of the day she was just a passionate gardener and not a well-trained infiltrator and so traces of her nightly adventures did remain, which cause the security of the garden to be drastically increased.
While Lilit initially managed to evade even these increased patrols and their drooling war hounds, on one fateful night her luck run out and she was discovered by the guards. Believing her to be a thief or enemy assassin the guards let the hounds of their chains, resulting in them chasing Lilit down and tearing her apart.

The Red Wanderer

When Lilit regained consciousness after what should have been her end, she found herself at the very bottom of the palace garden's east wall, with the guards simply having tossed the remains of her mutilated body into the streets below to be picked apart by the dogs roaming the lower city.
Yet even though she could still feel the burning saliva of the guard dogs upon her skin and her torn clothes being drenched in gore and viscera, Lilit had never felt so "alive" in her entire life.
And while she recalled the events that had transpired within the garden just hours ago, they seemed to her more like vague, distant memories, almost as if they had happened a lifetime ago.
Therefore she felt merely a faint stab of sadness as she glanced a last time at the garden she had spent years caring for before turning around and walking away into the early morning hours of the day, for within her chest a new calling had replaced her once overflowing love for her garden; the call of the adamantine treasure hidden within the jaws of every child.

Education

While Lilit due to her lower social status never received a proper or formalized education, her position as a palace gardener in her old life nevertheless enabled her to listen in on the lessons the noble sons and daughters received, as many of these lesions, particularly during the sweltering heat of the summer months where held within the cooling shade of the gardens.
Because of this, she possesses a notable albeit highly fractured amount of knowledge about various topics such as astrology, mathematics, and history and is even able to write a few rudimentary words.

Employment

In her former life, Lilit was a gardener tasked with the care and maintenance of the grand palace gardens of Edylon, a profession that she wholeheartedly enjoyed despite hard labour she performed day after day.
Following her banishment and re-awakening as a Ziugra Lilit changed her profession from gardener to thief, a career in which she quickly became highly adept thanks in larger part to her newfound powers.

Mental Trauma

Like other Ziugra the ordeal of dying and not remaining dead not only marked Lilit's body with perpetual scars but also left deep wounds within her mind that all contribute to her altered personality and behavior.
Out of these mental wounds, the perhaps most severe one is an underlying phobia of gardens, parks, and fields, caused by the conflation of the memories of her death with those of her beloved gardens, resulting in Lilit becoming increasingly uneasy when within the vicinity of any type of cultivated vegetation.
Due to this Lilit prefers to stay away from larger cities and settlements whenever she gets the chance to do so.
Unfortunately, however, this behavior clashes with the symptoms caused by a different mental injury of hers.
As just before her death, Lilit observed how one of the guard dogs that attacked her broke one of his teeth on the bronze bracelet she wore while biting into her forearm; and despite the pain and fear she felt at this moment, the distressed howl of the hound nevertheless caused a pang of guilt in her that followed her through the doors of death and into her new life.
Here this guilt then manifested itself as a compulsory desire to search and collect the discarded teeth of humans, in an attempt to repay the "teeth depth" she in her mind now owes to the guard dog, which in turn again causes her to seek out human settlements to acquire the teeth of their inhabitants.

Personality Characteristics

Motivation

Following her not-death Lilit is heavily driven by the desire to one day repay her perceived "teeth depth" to one of the guard dogs that killed her, which compels her to hunt for more and more teeth.
Luckily Lilit's demise largely left the morals and convictions of her former life intact, so she does not resort to violence or graverobbing in order to acquire new teeth, which leaves her with only one reliable source for new teeth; namely, the deciduous teeth that are naturally lost by young children.
Unfortunately, given just how dangerous the world has become, most young children rarely if ever leave their homes, which forces Lilit to frequently break into the homes of young families in order to "acquire" the teeth of their children.
The completeness of her former morals also compels Lilit to not just simply steal a child's teeth but to adequately compensate them for the teeth she takes, causing her to leave them an assortment of gifts and trinkets behind, which she either buys or crafts herself.

Personality Quirks

Likely as a side effect of her ability, Lilit frequently smiles and shows her teeth to people around her, which together with her powers and clothing creates a rather unsettling appearance.

Hygiene

Lilit generally tries to practice adequate hygiene, though due to her frequent travels and the fact that she tries to stay clear of settlements when not on the job, this is not always possible.
She is however quite thorough when it comes to her tooth hygiene, often cleaning and painting her teeth with various powders and tinctures made from crushed beetles, powdered minerals, and dried plants. In addition, she frequently chews on mint leaves or other aromatic leaves to freshen her breath.
She is in fact so thorough that she extends this behavior to the maws summoned by her ability, often painting their teeth in a different color scheme.

Social

Social Aptitude

Lilit possesses a charismatic, friendly personality that makes it easy to get along with her.
She is in particular gifted in causing children to almost immediately trust her and not scream in abject terror when she suddenly appears in their rooms in the middle of the night.

Wealth & Financial state

If teeth were an accepted currency in the world, Lilit would likely be the richest person in the world.

Lilit's Song

Current Status

Looking for teeth.

Ethnicity

Seregal

Age

~ 25 years

Eyes

Round, brown eyes

Hair

Long messy, unkempt blond hair

Skin Tone/Pigmentation

Red ocher-colored skin, covered in bite marks

Height

1.66 m

Weight

49 kg

The Myth, The Legend

Like many other Ziugra Lilit has archived a certain degree of fame/infamy with the people of the world, which has caused her to be known by quite a number of different names and titles, such as the Red Wanderer, the Smiling Thief or Toothsnatcher.
Often these names also indicated a blending of the real person with various mythological creatures or individuals, which often has a great influence on how the people of a particular region or settlement perceive Lilit.
This either makes it far easier or much harder for her to acquire new teeth from the locals, depending on if they see her as a friendly spirit that brings gifts to young children in exchange for their deciduous teeth or a creeping horror of the night that aims to devour all of a village's children.