Madam Shylock
From Mizahar Lore
| "She likes to deal with the young, see? Desperate folks with nothing left to lose. Hell, anyone willing to take what she’s got to give and not look too close. It’s a nice temptation; you got a dream, Shylock can make it real. But us old folks know that’s just the bait; we see that nasty hook on the other end. We know when it’s wiser to stay clear." - |
 It's Only Business | |||||||||||
| Race | Human | ||||||||||
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| Place of birth | Alvadas | ||||||||||
| Title | Shylock of the Triad | ||||||||||
| Skills |
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The eldest among the Triad, Madam Shylock is the only person of the three to lack any of the blessings of Ionu, and yet none doubt her place. She is very old and very used to power; an enabler, an investor, a decider of lives, she has held the livelihoods of men and women in her hands since she was very young, and is very comfortable with them.
Appearance
A woman who has grown far older than many other humans in Mizahar could ever claim and lived, Madam Shylock has been around for a while. Her skin is gray and sagging, her eyes the color of a cloudy day. Her hands are small and withered by time; but her smile remains kindly, and Shylock is far more able than anyone her age has any right to be. Time has compressed her, made her small and frail. She does not subscribe to the whims of Alvad's strange fashions; she is constant and practical, a businesswoman to the core, and dressed in somber dark colors.
Personality
She seems pleasant, but that is only a useful seeming. Madam Shylock is kind because people respond to kindly old women, they accept their offers and allow her inside. She has never been one to take action; not when she was young and spry and certainly not now, when she is very old and very weak. Confrontations, as it were, have never been good for her health; better by far to let someone else take care of it, to push, to hint, to make an offer to make another do her bidding.
Madam Shylock has great wealth and the influence of the Listeners at her disposal, and she has never been afraid to use that to earn the upper hand. She can grant many things with her resources; money, knowledge, power, and those who might want them come to her, as a moth to the light, and she turns them into tools toward her many purposes. Madam Shylock finds those who show promise, and she uses them. It is her nature.
Biography
Madam Shylock was born rich, with the rare spark of good sense and vision that let her rise; she did not waste her mizas of trivialities and luxuries, but invested it, used it to earn more. Shylock loaned out bits of her family’s fortune at interest—but what she truly wanted, what she really traded in, was favors. When they came up short and inevitably they did, she allowed them a chance to be free from it. They paid in treasures and artifacts from across Kalea, and even the rest of Mizahar, all pulled into her grasp through her network of debt and favors owed. If there is a trade done in Alvadas, she has a hand in it.
When she became a part of the Triad, the sort of favors she could grant grew ever larger, and her influence grew wider. She was a young and ambitious, and now she is old but no less driven. She has dedicated herself to ensuring the safety of her city, not out of faith, not out of the goodness of her heart, but because she has invested too much of herself to leave behind. She uses the tools she has mastered to further the city. She loans, grants favors and ties the pieces of her game in webs of debt and deals to further the Alvadas' influence, and her own.