I always wondered what happened to Torihan. I never got to kill you and bury you next to your daddy like I promised I would.
Torihan was probably my favorite character ever (yes, ever). Unfortunately her story didn't get as climactic an end as I would have liked, but it's still so amazing. I decided to share it here, because it's been long enough, I think? But uh, March 2014 spoilers below, for the cautious.
Torihan began as a nobody who got a job in Tuluk working for Salarr as a weaponcrafter in order to feed her sick NPC father. Her daddy was a true Tuluki patriot and always pushed his daughter to be as good a little citizen as she could be, but Tori had a restless streak to her and resisted him. Her mother disappeared when she was young and her father would never speak of it. I'm sure you guys can see where this is going.
For a little over an IC year, Tori had a mostly normal and unremarkable life. She stressed about her job, she fell in love, she smoked spice when she could beg it off of someone rich enough to buy it for her. She bought a dingy hovel in the Warrens where she lived with vnpc dad. I kept her as poor as I could on purpose, because I wanted her story to be about struggle and loss, and it's hard to do that if you're flouncing around in silk. I probably got more deep into solo RP with Tori than I'd ever gone on any previous PC.
If people had been watching very very carefully, they may have noticed some things off about Tori. She was never, ever out of breath. Her hair would blow in the wind on days when there wasn't so much as a breeze. She wasn't a performer, yet had a pitch-perfect voice the few times she sang along to songs in taverns. Even Tori didn't notice this about herself at first, and then it kept happening, and she tried her hardest to just ignore it.
Then one day in the Firestorm, Tori witnessed Kradj-da Kurac get brutally murdered by an angry half-giant. The shock of the bloody scene gave her an overpowering need to flee. The Faithful showing up soon after didn't calm her at all, in fact it only strengthened the urge. For some reason, she started hearing the words of a lullabye in her mind, one her mother had used to sing to her. She couldn't get it out of her head. She went home, and smoked all the spice she could afford. It only helped to calm her a little. So she went up on the roof of her tenement building and started singing the lullabye to herself. She started floating. At first she thought it was just the spice, but it wasn't.
Tori was in a constant state of terror after that. She kept her mind walled as much as she could. She tried desperately to pretend nothing was wrong, that she was normal, to resist the magick she had awoken inside her. But of course, she couldn't hold it back. Every so often, she would sneak up onto the roof of that tenement in the warrens in the dead of night and whisper her evil spells.
Around this time, Torihan went along on a Salarri business trip to Allanak. Being a Tuluki in Allanak, she got the expected amount of harassment, and somehow even managed to attract the ire of Ellandris (Lana) Borsail, who would continually harass her via the Way thereafter. This becomes relevant in just a sec.
I can't exactly relate the circumstances of how on the GDB, but one night in her tenement, Torihan lost control of her powers and killed her father. (Taijan actually created an NPC father for me to kill, which was so absolutely amazing - I'd intended it to just be a solo RP scene.) After murdering her father, Tori was in a total panic, so she asked her lover (a fellow named Jak, played by a relative Arm newbie as I recall) to come over and save her. I basically was resolved to put my character's fate in Jak's hands at that point; if he had killed her, it would have been a more than fitting Tuluki end. But instead the power of love prevailed. Jak and Tori buried her father's body in the tenement room itself, since it had a dirt floor. From then on I left really incrimidating HEY THERE IS PROBABLY A BODY BURIED IN HERE ldescs in my apartment, but nobody ever broke in while Tori was still living there to my knowledge.
As one might expect, this whole thing basically turned Tori into a self-loathing, terrified, suicidal twisted mess of a person. My goal all along was to hit the emotional payload of being a Tuluki mage who experienced actual loss as a consequence of manifesting, and man, I hit it in spades. Tuluk was actually really scary to play in OOCly while knowing at any point I could be arrested and killed just for being a mage, but the conspiracy and murder angles of the story were just as fun to play. I kept Tori there because she had nowhere else to go, from an IC perspective, and also because I wanted to play out a scary and suspenseful story rather than go run to safety somewhere less threatening.
There was actually one point after all of this where Torihan was a witness to a death in the Sanctuary (some guy came in and attacked someone and was then pulverized by soldiers). Witnessing this actually got her a closed-room interview with not one but THREE Faithful Lords. I was pretty sure she was going to be discovered and die during this, but somehow she survived. Just a bit later one Faithful Lord Theron tracked her down in the Tooth with more questions, which Tori answered as truthfully as she could while leaving out the interesting parts, like how she murdered her own father, or how her mother was disappeared. Luckily, Faithful Lord Theron didn't press her hard - in fact, he seemed more interested in Tori's short trip to Allanak and her encounters with Lana Borsail. Apparently Lana had been telling the northern templars that Torihan was a southern spy as part of her vendetta.
Tori was strong enough by now that murdering a southern noble was a possibility, and she was crazy enough to do it, and had nothing much left to live for anyway. She believed Lana was the reason she'd attracted the Faithful's attention, and if she could just take her out, she could live in peace afterward. The first Ocotillo Festival was happening right around this time, so Tori began making plans to attack during that.
Inexplicably to me, the very next day Theron got into Torihan's head and told her something along the lines of "Hey, come meet me at the Heart. I know you're a magicker". Needless to say she was gone from Tuluk faster than you could say NOPE. I have no idea how Theron learned about her (but there were plenty of ways she could have slipped up by then, so it wasn't that surprising), and I also have no idea why he gave her such warning. It felt kind of like Theron wanted her to escape?
So, Tori fled Tuluk for good. At this point the only person she could speak to, ironically, was Theron himself (she was too afraid to speak to any of her old friends and acquaintances, as she didn't want them being killed for associating with her). She made her attempt on Ellandris Borsail's life, and failed (somebody nerf templars pls omg). At this point I was running out of things for Tori to do... she was lonely and isolated, afraid of both major cities, and unable to find anyone to connect with in Luir's or Storm or elsewhere.
I did think hard about having Tori return to Tuluk and let herself be executed, and it's possible that may have eventually happened. But, for RL reasons, I ended up having to store the character. So I guess, to answer the question, Torihan just sort of faded away into the wind somewhere. I still miss her.
Hopefully somebody else enjoyed reading this, but even if not, I really enjoyed writing it.
