Monica Jasmine is a 32 year old Naga assassin.

background

Early Life

Monica was born in 1667, in the village of Shiwa, on Durgi-Veda-Ashar in the Sunset Islands. Her mother was Cordelia Corvallyn, a woman banished from the City-on-the-Flat for unlicensed prostitution. Her father was an Azhua expatriate named Kichi'huatatl. Their love affair, though dedicated, was reviled as an interacial abomination by the largely human population of Shiwa and when Monica was eight, her father was captured and tortured by an angry lynch mob. The Firelord, Septimus Rafiel, intervened but only ended the torture so that Kichi'huatatl might be burned to death.

Heartbroken and fearing for the safety of her child, Cordelia fled north, back to the lands she had been exiled from. The journey took nearly three years and during that time, Cordelia caught a wasting illness. When Monica was 11, her mother died on a roadside leading up out of the Whitelands. Monica fled to Ivortown, the nearest large city at the time where she was lauded for her sleight of hand and wary gaze. She was quickly recruited into a street gang of pickpockets and rose to become their leader.

Teenage Years

Urban life disagreed with Monica, and her manner became increasingly defiant to cover her homesickness.  In particular she was tortured by the greenhouses kept by wealthy burghers of Ivortown, which reminded her of her home in Shiwa.  At fourteen Monica was discovered by a minor aristocrat, Markus Horen, sneaking into one of Horen's greenhouses.  Threatened by Horen with a drawn pistol, Monica overpowered Horen in desperation and murdered him.  Being a minor aristocrat, Markus Horen's death caused a significant stir both in the social circles and criminal underbelly of Ivortown. The head of the Ivortown Assassin's Guild, James Gray demanded to know who had done him in and his contacts soon brought him Monica. She was recruited immediately into the guild. Having left a jasmine flower she had plucked from the greenhouse on Horen's corpse, she took to calling herself Monica Jasmine or simply "The Jasmine," which very quickly became a name of silent dread in the Ivortown rumor mill. In six years Monica had risen from a neophyte initiate to one of Gray's chief lieutenants and, in many ways, a surrogate daughter.

Arrest and Escape

When Monica was in her early 30s, Gray gathered his lieutenants to meet with his superior, a shadowy figure long hinted at. When it was revealed to be none other than High Judge Lord Horaytio Glasfish, there was a great deal of dissension. Glasfish shot and killed the aging Gray, who had been becoming incresingly unruly. Monica, in an act of desperate revenge attempted to shoot Glasfish and succeeded only in maiming and disfiguring him. She was apprehended a few moments later by Glasfish's personal guard and left to rot in a cell beneath Ivortown. She lingered there for the better part of six months, awaiting execution, though she was fairly certain Glasfish had something far more painful and humiliating in store.

To her surprise, she was given a cellmate, Juliette Kustinof with whom she developed an instant connection. That evening, she and Juliette along with Kelein Follendorfer, Gerund Lennaire, Heroe Adoria and Haryld Jonsyn were given amnesty by Lord Dorian Savage. Savage recruited them to travel south and discover what precisely had occured in Bogenhafen between Johannes Tugen and his old schoolmate, notorious Purple Hand cultist, Heimdall Leiberung. From that moment on, Monica was a member in good standing of the party, and, along with Gerund Lenaire, the closest thing to a de facto leader.

  appearance

Monica stands 5'2" and weighs 115 pounds.  Her skin is dark purple in color and covered in scales.  Her eyes and eyes are a glossy black.  She cuts her own hair, which is typically worn in a rough shoulder-length cut trimmed shorter around the temples and bangs to avoid falling into her face while shooting.  The last three fingers on her right hand are stumps, lost when her grenade launcher malfunctioned facing Fauntleroy Mathers.

In general Monica disdains ornamentation.  Her clothing is typically simple and pragmatic: breeches and a close-fitting shirt.  Since her escape from prison Monica has taken to wearing padded linen versions of this basic outfit covered in black silk to prevent penetration by edged weapons, her naga physiology allowing her to stand the heat of such garments better than a full human.  On the rare occasions Monica dresses up, she typically includes some subsersive detail to ruin the effect.  At Festivale, for instance, she has been seen at several parties in a ripped and torn black evening gown.

Monica does not think of herself as physically attractive, although her "exotic" looks have aroused an unsavory interest in several males, including Ralaen Lafarel.  Such expressions have historically disgusted and alarmed Monica.  On the The Day of Death she met Amit'Ahtab Vrai, prince of Bhut'Dakkar, who seemed honestly disarmed by what he called her good looks.

personality

On the streets of Ivortown Monica became an angry, embittered teenager.  Sick and angry at the world for her mother's sad life, she particularly despised prostitution.  While many of her teenage friends turned to prostitution in desperation or as an extra source of revenue, Monica resolutely refused to give in to an institution she saw as the root not only of her mother's death but all the hardships in her life.  This visceral disgust at prostitution would manifest undiminished much later in life, even at prostitution of a much higher class than she was exposed to as a girl.  Her decision not to follow her peers in this regard alienated Monica from other children her age, deepening her early sense of having been abandoned by the world at large.  It also forced Monica to turn to thievery in order to feed herself.

By the time she killed Markus Horen Monica was sullen, defiant, arrogant, and nursed a cold fury at the world that she viewed with increasingly clinical detachment.  Early in her career as an assassin she adopted the practice of coating her musket balls with a poison that was not fatal but wracked the victim with pain once it entered the bloodstream.  Her killings became a bleak kind of psychological drug, a cold expression of her anger at the world without any real hope that they would bring her solace.  Other assassins considered Monica's penchant for needless cruelty to be a professional liability, and her disinterested cruelty in the face of the most intense suffering a sign that she was becoming dangerously unhinged.  Gray tolerated her actions because they enhanced the terror of her reputation.

Beneath her nihilistic anger, Monica nursed a few cherished memories of domestic life with her mother and father before his lynching.  She would manifest a powerful maternal instinct when she met Juliette Kustinof.  Seeing herself in the young drifter, Monica immediately took Kustinof under her wing.  Her need to believe in a better life for Juliette would eventually awaken a seed of hope for her own future.

equipment

Monica favored the arquebus as an assassin, a choice that reflected her particular approach to killing.  The arquebus was a complicated mechanism, the emblem of the urban and technological Harkanian society she loathed.  It was loud and inflicted a large, obvious wound that was usually fatal but rarely killed instantly.  Monica relied on its ability to kill from afar, and took a perverse delight in revealing her position only to be gone by the time authorities arrived at her blind, leaving only a dried jasmine flower in her wake.  At the time of her arrest Monica had mastered the unwieldy weapon to a degree few would have believed possible, able in good conditions reliably to hit victims up to seventy-five yards away - a feat most arquebusiers would have sworn was beyond the physical limits of their weapons.  Her mastery of the arquebus extended to a large degree over other black-powder weapons, including the pistol, blunderbuss, and Harkanian grenade launcher.

At some point in her mid-twenties Monica began to see herself with dark sarcasm as a kind of avenging rogue musketeer.  She took up the art of fencing with a fine steel rapier and clockwork parrying dagger she took from one of her victims, weapons she would carry with her for the rest of her life and wore conspicuously among assassins of the guild.  The rapier and dagger, emblems of a politer sort of violence, expressed her disdain for the underworld of the guild in much the same way that her arquebus expressed her disdain for society at large.  In later life she would take to wearing a tattered wide-brimmed hat with a ragged black ostrich feather to complete the look.  She also sometimes dressed as a travelling woodswoman complete with crossbow, with a heavy traveling cloak and quiver that concealed a short blunderbuss.

After her escape from prison Monica commissioned a large padded wooden box she could wear across her back, which contained several arquebuses, a grenade launcher, and other tools of her trade - from a clockwork spider harness that she had once used to find high ground from which to shoot to simple spools of wire and lengths of black cloth.  Her complete personal arsenal consisted of her rapier and dagger, a medium-barreled pistol in a holster at the small of her back, a blunderbuss concealed in a hunting quiver, the arquebus from her time with the Ivortown Assassin's Guild, another purchased with funds provided by Dorian Savage (these two would later be combined into a simple two-barreled version of the Harkanian volley gun), the skull-muzzled musket taken from Avicenna Banecaller (later rifled), and a grenade launcher also purchased with Savage's money.  After the misfire incident fighting Fauntleroy Mathers and coming into Shi's patronage, Monica purchased a more advanced thaumically enhanced spring-loaded grenade launcher to reduce the chances of future misfires.  Monica also kept a pair of witch hunter gauntlets that had formerly belonged to Rene Dubois.

religion

Cordelia Corvallyn was a member of the Phael Church, while Kichi'huatatl worshipped Azlotl and Huatza.  By the time Monica was born her mother was largely uninterested in religion, so Monica's early religious instruction was almost exclusively at the hands of her father.  After his death Monica, like her mother, lost faith in her gods.

In adulthood Monica's religious interest awakened again.  She rejected both the rational, uninvolved god of her mother as well as the lizard gods of her father, whom she felt had failed him.  Instead she turned to Tyrako, the dawn god of justice.  At the time she viewed Tyrako as the patron deity of her assassin's work, which she had come to view as a kind of extralegal justice worked upon the agents of an unjust society.  She has since added a growing fascination with the god of the man who killed her father.  Monica wears an amulet of Tyrako around her neck at all times, which both imbues her attacks with fire and serves as a reminder never to forget the gods in adversity. 

relationships

Monica's first friend in the party was Gerund Lennaire, whom she believed to be a traveling bard.  Gerund's skill at arms and willingness to take direct action made him a natural ally for Monica.  For the same reasons, she often clashed with Heroe Adoria, whose scruples she took for weakness, naivete, or both.

Her travels with the party challenged parts of Monica's personality that she had not questioned for many years.  She began to look at Juliette Kustinof and Terra as surrogate daughters, and preserving the teenage girls' innocence became her primary reason to oppose the spread of Chaos within the League.  Doing so forced her to admit that she did not much like the person she had become, a realization that softened her stance toward Heroe and drew her closer to Gerund, whom she began to suspect might be the first true friend she had had in her adult life.

It was only natural, then, that Gerund's apparent death at Castle Wittgenstein should devastate her.  In many ways, however, his return was far worse.  The slow reveal of the prince's many secrets had long been a source of internal conflict for Monica, but those doubts had been suppressed by her desperate need for a friend and grief over his death.  The mutation of Gerund's hands after his "death" shook her, and her relationship with Gerund grew more distant over the course of Festivale as the old doubts prodded at her.  The same period saw a crisis in her relationship with Juliette and Terra.  Monica's efforts to protect Juliette from the horrors of the world had instead inspired the girl to become more like her.  As Juliette became more self-confident in her ability to protect herself, Monica's maternal attitude began to grate on her.  Terra, on the other hand, recoiled from the realization that Monica was not the rock she had thought.  The knowledge that "her girls" were slipping away from her further drove Monica into depression.

On the night between the Day of Shadow and the Day of Ecstasy, these threads came to a head.  Reeling from an unexpectedly sincere attempt to woo her on the part of Rallane Lafarel, punch spiked with a Slaaneshi aphrodisiac by Prusilla Chasefield, and a long night chasing Taelric Glasfish, Monica allowed herself to be seduced by Pru under the influence of her Slaaneshi amulet.  Though the two exchanged only a kiss, Pru's encouragements to relax and let go struck a chord within Monica.  She realized, or strongly suspected, that Pru was under the influence of Slaanesh, but she wanted and needed to believe that somebody could care for her for a change.  Their unexpected relationship prompted Gerund to profess his love for Monica, which deeply confused her.

Pru and Monica spent the Day of Ecstasy in each other's company, and over the course of the day it seemed that Pru's feelings for Monica might become genuine.  What will happen to their relationship after Pru's disfigurement at the hands of her rejected former patron following the destruction of the Jade Scepter, only time will tell.