Mortal Peril/Lambent Waves
Bio
Lambent Waves grew up poor but smart, in a family that was deeply obligated to the Guild in various shady dealings. In a frantic adolescent effort to avoid being sold into slavery, she learned how to smuggle goods and concoct drugs at an early age, and got hooked on opium by her "uncles" in the Guild. She's been trying to steer clear of opium since -- it's one of the reasons she's on a smaller island instead of a big metropolis, but it hasn't always worked out, since some of the various patrons she's worked for since have been determined to use her skills to ply their drug trade.kl To get out from under the thumb of the Guild, she was convinced by a Tya friend to sign on and ship out. She had heard that the shellfish toxin infertility was somewhat optional in many groups of Tya, but a particularly vindictive captain saw to it that she didn't slip through the cracks. Resentful, she started plying her alchemist's trade among the Tya, providing them with substances and with a concoction of her own devising that could harmlessly mimic the effects of the shellfish toxin. The Tya elders tolerated her until her surreptitious drug-dealing wound up with her hiding in a bilge during a confidential discussion about Tya Eldareth and the Storm Mothers. Lambent Waves knew she had heard something she wasn't supposed to, but when the Tya elders realized that she had overheard something, their suspicions landed hard on her illicit substance dealing and quickly escalated to veiled threats. She fled the Tya, which only increased the appearance of her guilt in many of their eyes. She's been bouncing from patron to patron ever since, often turning an embittered and blind eye to abuses and heinous criminal exploitation of locals, but she grows more and more sick of it every time. Her pattern leads her to flee to a different island in the West -- and as often as not, that means she runs afoul of the dark side of the underworld business, either before or after trying to run away. She's sick of it all.
Description
Late 30s, greyish-blue hair and dusky skin, Tya tattoos, and chemical burns. She's a very unfriendly type who doesn't make friends easily and prefers to be shut up in her lab. She tends to wear a buff jacket with a bandolier stocked with vials of various kinds, including a pouch of 8-scream devil powder and half a dozen vials of Ardent Embrace Resin... just in case. For more formal occasions, she has some fine clothing, but tends to keep it simple -- no silks or fancy stuff.