character :: Emma Shaffer
There’s not too much to be said for a woman born in fury. For as long as Emma Shaffer can remember, she’s been fighting. For what, you ask? Before a certain moment in her life, she didn’t know either. But now that she knows the truth, there’s nothing in this world that could stand between what is rightfully the Shaffer’s glory.
Emma was born into a beautiful house in the downtown Coastal of the Gold Region. Or at least, that’s how she feels about her home! Her father, Vincent, is a quiet man – but very hardworking. Most of Emma’s earliest memories are of waiting in front of the thin metal door, doll clutched to her chest, waiting for daddy to walk in. He has a peculiar smell to him, something citrus and earth; but Emma lives for that smell. To say she’s a daddy’s girl is a wild understatement, even though he was often covered head to toe in black soot and had the roughest skin on his hands. Emma knew he worked hard, and any time she acted out-of-line all her mother had to do was threaten to let daddy know of her misdeeds. That’s all it ever took.
karma will repay for all ill deeds.
Emma was a wild child. Amelia, her mother, would chase her the best she could with her cane – but Emma knew how to keep just ahead of the poor woman. She took great delight to putting gray hairs on her parent’s head, and by the time she were a teen, there were a number of them! As a young girl she was never interested in reading books, even though she were one of the few village children who were literate (her parents insisted she learned how to read). While a lifetime in the mines seemed like a good job to her, Emma’s parents wanted better for the little girl with curly, untamable hair: at thirteen, she began apprenticing under the watchful (and cruel) eye of the textile fabricator in the center of the village. Emma tried to behave while at work – if she didn’t bring home a Flake or two for her labor that day, she knew her parents would suffer for it.
But, there’s a dark secret that Vincent and Amelia are desperately trying to keep from their witty daughter. It was hard to keep Emma’s eyes from wandering, figuring out things she ought not to figure out. The other children treated her different sometimes, and even grown-ups had a sour attitude toward her. Emma figured she were born a Rust, or an untouchable, but her parents could still do business in the markets so that couldn’t have been it. At least Emma had Giovanni – her best friend next door, similar in age. Her family and his family ate dinner together every night, and it was a boisterous crowd indeed. Her parents, the always reserved, and then Giovanni’s mother with her foul mouth and drinking problem. Not that Emma would ever tell Giovanni that she knew: after all, every family had their skeletons.
Emma would be seventeen the first day she begins to puzzle out something deeper than just surface disgust between herself and the other peasants. It was no secret that the hilltop held the most prominent homes: gleaming polished stone houses that shone so bright in the morning dawn that it cast dancing shadows on the village streets for hours. But the biggest and most secretive of all buildings was the Gold Palace: a glimmering marble spectacle so inlaid with gold that her very father could mine his entire lifetime and never generate enough gold for the front doors. It was disgusting. Emma hated the Gold Palace, and her parents did too: the look of utter disgust on their faces when the sun hit the gold shingles just right was easy to pick up on. Maybe it was a lifetime of conditioning, a curious recoil in her family’s reaction to the very sight of it…but Emma hated the Gold Palace. And she hated all it stood for.
Why did her father have to work himself to the bone? Why did her mother who could barely shuffle across their floor have to sew until her fingers bled? Just so that some pompous, entitled asshole could sit upon a throne, hoping that the village below them repopulated fast enough to keep the mines functioning? The idea of class was a concept far beyond her realm of society, but it was something that gnawed at her every day. It was around this time that Emma’s troubles truly began…
is karma? This is my role.
On the way home from the textile fabrication building one evening, Emma saw a rare sight: “Apprentice Wanted” emblazoned across the front window of the weaponsmith! Emma ripped the sign down and carried it with her, determined that it wouldn’t have to remain after she talked to the weaponsmith. He was a burly man, not used to working with women…and he did certainly raise an eyebrow at Emma’s hopeful face. Most people in the village did, after all, but the weaponsmith accepted her plea. She would finally do something worthwhile with her time! All she had to do was keep it a secret from her family…after all, the two of them would stone-cold die if they knew their teenage daughter wanted to work with guns.
And so, Emma went to work. She learned the ins and outs of building hand-crafted weaponry, and over the years she improved. But over the years, she also grew: and the stares and whispers behind her back grew louder. It was a late night of sneaking out with Giovanni for some illegal liquor that Emma learned the truth, and the realization struck her like a bullet: the Gold Palace hadn’t always belonged to the Fletcher family.
It had belonged to the Shaffer’s.
Giovanni had learned the information from his mother while she went on another drunken rant, and the intel was devastating. The woman who slept in the bed that rightfully belonged to her mother had been the very one who killed Giovanni’s father, the one who disabled her own mother, and then forced her father to work the mines that had belonged to him. The world was a very different place twenty years ago, apparently, even though the villagers still held resentment to the Shaffer family even with their fineries stripped and honor removed. Emma burst into the house that night and demanded answers; reluctantly, Amelia and Vincent came clean. The oddly expensive comb in Emma’s hair was the last testament to the luxuries that her family had once lived in: suddenly, the home she’d idolized her entire childhood didn’t seem so safe and comfortable anymore.
Emma’s life path, which was once meandering and without much direction, has suddenly gotten rocky. She wants to right the wrongs in the world, and her parents violently protest every step of the way. They are terrified of a revolution, and Emma finds herself leaning on the support of her only real friend in the world. In her battle, she will accumulate some unlikely help – from the twin children of Elizabeth herself, Evan and Ella – and even the wretched woman’s husband himself throws a few trinkets to aid her on her journey. There's a sailor and a storyweaver, then a slaver and a muse - all people that Emma keeps in her back pocket for when the time is right.
They said that change can bring about terrible things, and that it’s better to at least have her life: but they’ve got it all wrong. She doesn’t want the gold or the fineries for herself whatsoever. In fact, after she’s done with her task, Emma is preparing to take in the weapons’ shop as her own. No, it’s a much different goal that Emma has in mind: if she has to see her father cough blood into a hastily hidden handkerchief one more day, she’s going to lose her mind. And she’s got to start somewhere.
