Linah

Name:  Linah [pronounced Lee-nah] (At least for now.)

Species:  Immortal

Age:  Around 4500-ish, although time measurements have changed over the centuries, so Linah can't be one hundred percent accurately sure entirely how old she is.  Forty-five hundred seems like a round enough estimate, anyway.

Gender:  Female, mostly.  She has masculine days, on and off, but largely identifies as a woman.

Profession:  World's oldest whore and proud of it.  Formerly a high priestess of Aphrodite, currently a wanderer.




Appearance

Linah is a bombastic specimen of a woman standing at about 5'7" tall, sporting the kind of curves that come from developing in a time long before restraining undergarments like bras and corsets were ever invented.  Her brass-colored hair is shoulder-length and curly, she's got a spray of freckles across her nose and cheekbones, and her eyes glitter a mischievous hazel.  She changes her clothing style with her moods, but rarely if ever wears a bra -- her loose, full breasts grew in before bras were a Thing, and she can't wear one comfortably now.  Her skin color betrays no specific ethnicity, too pale to consider her a "person of color", but also too brown to call her "white".

She's most often found wearing a camisole of some color, a pair of blue jeans, and occasionally a long black duster to hide her weapons.  Around her neck hangs the coin she was almost buried with, the first time she died, the one her temple sisters placed under her tongue so that she could go to the afterlife.  It's her good luck charm and her ward against permanent death.  She lost her shoes in the transition from Earth to Planet and never replaced them before reaching Teragaia, so she's found barefoot more often than not.  Her daggers are usually tucked into her back waistband and the sword she's picked up mysteriously vanishes into her coat with the same slippery secrecy most Immortals are known for.  Or not known, as they prefer.


Personality

Linah is a rare type amongst her kind.  Immortals live forever, or until they're beheaded, and often get jaded, bitter, and cynical within a few centuries.  Linah has been around for at least forty five centuries, if not more, and still hasn't lost her sense of wonder for the beautiful, the strange, and the delightful aspects of the world.  She inhabits her sexuality, owning it in spite of the oppressive places and times within which she's lived.  Men, women, and non-binary Others are all beautiful to her.  She also uses seduction as sword and shield, if she has to, because she severely dislikes violence.  Her distaste for violence has not dulled her skills, however.  She has not lived more than four thousand years amongst other Immortals -- who routinely behead each other to take their fallen enemies' power -- by being a pacifist.  She avoids Challenges when she can, and wins when she can't, wielding a pair of ancient Egyptian daggers instead of or sometimes in addition to the more traditional sword.  Challenges and Quickenings aside, however, Linah enjoys seeing new things, meeting new people, and generally experiencing everything she can to the fullest.  She loves life.  No amount of time on Earth is ever going to change that, no matter what happens to her in the meantime.




History

No Immortal has ever known his or her true parents, or even if there are true parents.  Linah was left as a nameless foundling on the steps of a temple dedicated to Aphrodite, goddess of love and sexuality.  Linah was raised by the priestesses there to become a priestess herself, mastering the arts of seduction and lovemaking.  Being a prostitute in the temple was a high honor back in her day, one of the few ways a woman could wield true power.  She had never been given a name, so she went by whatever she was called at any given time.   An incident with a patron at the temple was her first death, the end of her mortal existence.  A man stabbed her through the heart to avoid paying the temple for Linah's services.  When she gasped back to life two hours later, it was widely assumed that Aphrodite Herself had sent Linah back to the world of the living to continue working in Her name.

And it continued.  Wounds would heal supernaturally fast.  No death could keep her dead.  And from her first death at the age of twenty four, she never again aged.  Without a teacher to show her the ways of Immortals, she assumed as everyone else did that she was simply blessed by her Goddess.

As a high priestess of Aphrodite, Linah has served some truly memorable patrons.  Even, once, a Pharaoh and his queen.  The daggers she now wields were a gift in payment for that truly spectacular week she worked in Egypt.

Eventually another Immortal found her, and instead of taking her head -- which, at the time, would have been terribly easy -- he trained her in the rules of the Game.  Decapitation is the final death, wherein the winner takes the loser’s Quickening.  One on one fights only, no interference.  No fighting on holy ground, no matter whose holy ground it is.  In the end, there can be only one.

Linah parted ways with her teacher just after the Bronze Age, grateful for everything he'd taught her but always questioning one thing.  Why must there be only one?  As such, Linah has never been an active player in the Game, as she has never believed that there's some mythical Prize waiting for the last Immortal standing.  She accepts only the Challenges that she can't somehow avoid, because life is precious.  Everyone's life.  If she can seduce an opponent and then escape, she will.

When being a prostitute was no longer her occupation, she became simply a world traveler.  She still takes on sex work when she's bored, but given how vast and beautiful the world is, boredom is fairly rare.  Currently she calls herself an adventurer and greets the world with an unending sense of wide-eyed wonder.

Her name, Linah, isn't really a name.  She's gone by hundreds of names over the years, a basic necessity for any Immortal that's been around even a fraction of the time she has.  "Linah" was the result of her randomly pulling five tiles (I, N, L, H, A) out of a Scrabble box and arranging them after three bottles of wine and a tequila chaser until the resultant noise came out passably name-sounding.  It never occurred to her she could throw the extraneous H back into the box, so she tacked it onto the end.

Sometime in the late months of 1997, Linah took a Quickening that went... unexpectedly, and she found herself pulled through a dimensional wormhole to a little place called Planet.  She made friends, bonded native creatures, started a tavern/inn called the Sleeping Shamrock, even adopted a daughter.  But then Linah mysteriously vanished from Planet, and no one was able to locate her, her creature companions, or her daughter.

Little did anyone know, her path was leading her here to Teragaia.


Powers and Abilities

Regeneration -- Linah, being an Immortal, heals insanely fast from almost any source of damage.  Cuts to her flesh sizzle shut in seams of lightning almost as quickly as they're inflicted, broken bones crunch back to wholeness in minutes, and sprains and tears are fairly inconsequential.  This has the side effect of making her more than a little incautious about her actions and prone to interposing herself between other people and danger.  Logically, shouldn't the person who doesn't stay hurt long be the one who takes the most hits?

Resurrection -- An Immortal's life only truly begins when he or she first dies, as counterintuitive as that sounds.  And it's really no strain on an Immortal to keep dying, because so long as one singular condition is never met...an Immortal can never actually die completely.  Give Linah a couple of minutes and she'll gasp back to life, unhappy and uncomfortable but very much alive.

The One Singular Condition -- If Linah loses her head, it's game over.  The only death an Immortal cannot ever recover from is decapitation.  Should anyone succeed in removing Linah's head from her body, the nearest Immortal to her will take her Quickening and that will be that.  Theoretically lost limbs should fall under the same category, but Linah has come to find that if her severed limbs are mashed back onto her body as she revives from death, they can, in fact, reattach.

Knowledgeable Combatant -- Linah's weapons are not (thus far) magical, nor does she have any superpowers that extend beyond her superior healing and aversion to staying dead, but she's been using her daggers (and the occasional sword) for a few thousand years to keep herself alive when many, many people have wanted to kill her, mostly other Immortals after her Quickening, though the occasional spurned mortal has made the attempt.  Linah fights with an eclectic combination of recklessness and honed skill, and despite her conscious distaste for violence, she's actually quite good at it.




As with Jacien's, Linah's post-marker was crafted by the ever-wonderful Tidesweep! ♥