Description:
Oriana is a tall woman with a waist-length mane of blonde hair. Her eyes are brilliantly blue, and she's got a very athletic, muscular build and habitually dresses in jeans and sweaters in blues and golds.
Background story:
Oriana Falk ("Ori" for short) was born and grew up in a Shadow called Isbrann. The Shadow itself is one of near-perpetual ice and snow; "summer" is when the mile-and-a-half of ice surrounding any land mass breaks up, the snow melts and the underlying ground turns muddy for about three months. Technology levels are mid-range; industry and metallurgy are easily 1940s American level, but gunpowder doesn't function, nor do cars, and there is no television, cinema, or recorded music.
Shipping is a tricky concern in Isbrann; the shores are rarely accessable due to the oceanic ice, which regularly freezes solid for at least a mile and a half from shore. During the winter months, shipping camps are set up where the ice turns to ocean. Some of the camps are quite sophisticated; they've had generations of practice setting them up and tearing them down. The camps keep the way clear for ships and transport cargo across the ice to (and from) shore.
The major employers in Isbrann are the shipping camps, the ships themselves, and the heavy industrial concerns. Metallurgy comes in a close fourth, followed more distantly by agriculture, textiles, etc. Most of the food comes from the southern continent, which is much more Mediterranean in climate.
Oriana's mother, Sofia Falk, is a shipping magnate, owning a half interest on a massive shipping conglomerate (Sofia's brother Jessie owns the other half). Rumors make the rounds every few years that not a few of the ships in the fleet are pirates, but nothing has ever been proven. Oriana herself has shown no interest in ships and the sea, despite several attempts on the part of her mother, and Mom eventually just let her stay out of running of the family business. During Ori's childhood, either her mother or uncle would be out of town nearly every week on business, but in recent years, the trips have decreased in frequency (if not in length).
The family home is on the outskirts of the town of Southshore. The town borders one of the strips of mountains that crosses the continent, and the Falk house rests on one of the lower outcroppings. The shore passes - unsurprisingly - less than a quarter mile south of the southern edge of town. The ocean near Southshore is one of the colder in the region, freezing out to sea for as much as three miles in particularly cold winters.
As a child, Oriana was friendly with a wide range of other children, from other rich heirs to kids whose families were scraping by. She wasn't inclined to stay safely at home when there were ice fields to explore and games to play - or watch - and her uncle was usually inclined to indulge her. Her fascination with hockey began shortly after she turned 9; she and Jessie happened across a lesson that needed an extra student for the day, and Ori volunteered.
After that, her mother and uncle were hard-pressed to keep her in other lessons; whenever there was a spare moment, Oriana was off to the ice again. She met Boris Reinheart in her third "official" lesson - six months after that first lesson, her mother finally relented and started paying for lessons. Boris was the quiet kid in the class, Oriana the outgoing, daring one. The common denominator was skill. They were both quick learners and pretty skilled at what they'd already learned, so the instructor frequently paired them up during practice. From pairings in lessons, they moved on to hanging out after lessons, and eventually to spending time at each other's houses. Eventually Boris's younger brothers (Wyatt, Darius, and Kendrick) joined both the lessons and the group of friends.
Despite her stubborn attempts to avoid it, she did receive a reasonable grounding in the topics thought appropriate for a rich heiress: dancing, how to dress, etiquette in general, literature, music, art, accounting... Not that she shows it most of the time; she knows how to dress, but she wears dresses with an air of awkward self-consciousness. Her dancing has more power than grace to it, and she could care less about the math and literature.
The only parts of her Society curriculum that interested her were music and art. She has a lovely singing voice, and has been known to both patronize and perform in theater productions and concerts.
During her teen years, Oriana had a series of short romances with an assortment of heirs and hockey players, but they were generally only a few weeks long and definitely not "true love." As she moved out of her teens, these became longer and ended worse, but were rarely more intense than affection and lust.
Sixteenth birthdays in Isbrann, much like on Earth, allow for greater freedom. The tradition is to take the teen out into the high mountains to select one of the horses kept there. They aren't wild - there are entire towns in the mountains dedicated to breeding and raising these horses. Oriana's choice was a big buckskin stallion with a golden sheen to his coat that she promptly dubbed, "Offsides."
The week after her 18th birthday, Oriana (with her mother's approval) purchased a modest house across town from the family home. It has three bedrooms - one of which she's turned into a study - two bathrooms, a large living/dining room area, kitchen (of course), and a small barn (four stalls) butting up to the house where she keeps Offsides.
Her life settled into a nice routine for a few years. She slowly gathered additions to her group of friends and teammates - Byron, the goalie with lockpicking skills; Carlo and Cortez, two best friends who have a few years on the rest of the team; Robbie, quick and lithe and dark like an otter; and Valentine, friendly and affectionate and flamboyant.
She also accumulated her fair share of rivals, simply by being the best. Although she (and her team) were and are generally gracious in defeat, there is one man that gradually became someone they didn't so much hate as love to beat: Dane. Dane usually has a hard time keeping a steady team, simply because he is apparently convinced that his worth in life depends on beating Oriana and her team as often as possible. Things get so rough on the ice when the two meet that it often resembles a disorganized brawl more than a game.
Some time after she turned 21, she would have walked the Pattern. After her return to Isbrann, she began her summer trip habit. It's not unusual for the Isbranni to take trips during the summer thaw; sometimes it's intentional and sometimes it's just an effect of the difficulty in getting a ship to a stable shore during the summer.
Oriana's summer trips started as simple exploration and ended up centering on one in particular. Majaninchi is the polar opposite of Isbrann; it's always summer there, a hot, dry summer that keeps the grass half-dead and golden. Winter brings monsoon rains for three brief months. The culture isn't so far advanced as Isbrann's; it's more Renaissance than industrial. It's also much more feudal than Isbrann (which is essentially a committee-governed democracy); the lords and ladies are usually at war or conducting war games, which leads huge portions of the populace to turn to mercenary work. The mercs go by trade names instead of their real names, letting them blend back into the population a bit easier once winter or retirement comes. Oriana found herself a place among these mercs, going by the trade name "Rising Sun." The only real friend she's made thus far is a merc called Blade, a ruggedly handsome individual with a stubborn streak a mile wide and an almost creepily quiet demeanor.
Her team also picked up one more addition, after a string of terrible teammates: Hunter. Hunter was smaller than most of the rest of the team (Boris and his brothers alone start at 6 feet and go higher the younger they are), but quick. He was also cute, with silver-gray hair and a winning smile - although Oriana would never have admitted she felt that way, since she'd decided that sleeping with teammates was Trouble.
Then the Black Road happened, and life for Oriana got a bit more complicated.
In Isbrann, the Black Road manifested as massive corruption of a local factory. It happened suddenly, with no warning, and it happened to be the place where both Boris and Kendrick worked.
Oriana, being young, headstrong, and perhaps a bit overconfident, headed in after them. The vast majority of the factor workers had already been infected with a mutation of sorts, turning them almost zombie-like, but extremely fast and unusually strong. She had to fight several groups of these creatures; the last pack nearly overwhelmed her by sheer force of numbers, but Hunter - of all people - mysterious showed up and gave her a hand.
After a conversation cut too-brief by circumstances, Oriana let the fact that he was even there in the first place (and why he asked her if she had any cards with her) lie. She did make it excruciatingly clear to him, however, that she felt she was owned an explanation as to who he was and why he was in Isbrann.
The sorcerer in charge of the whole mess was in the heart of the factory. The workers he had yet to transform were hanging from tube-like objects and existing pipes around the center; all of them were unconscious due to a fluid in the tube structures. She had to pull off some tricky navigating across the network of pipes, but she was able to extract both Boris and Kendrick from their suspended prison. Passing them off to Hunter with the stern admonition to get them out safely, she headed for the ground and the master of the place.
It's safe to say that the battle didn't go well. Oriana was overwhelmed by both numbers and magery fairly quickly, stunned, and shortly found herself strapped down to a conveyor belt. Certain pieces of machinery had been converted to produce the mutated beings; these were fed by conveyor belt. A certain amount of posturing on the part of the mage occurred, and then the conveyor rolled Oriana into the apparatus.
Understandably, she was somewhat panicked about this situation. The only thing she could think of to do was wield Pattern against it, so she did. And that was the last thing she remembered of the day.
Somehow it worked. She survived, as did the brothers, and presumably Hunter as well. When she woke up late the next afternoon, it was in her own bed.
There was a note on her nightstand from Hunter. It didn't explain everything - in fact, it explained very little, only that he had been hired by someone in Amber to keep an eye on her. With his cover blown, he had to leave. Oriana hasn't seen him since.
Dealing with her friends who had been trapped inside was another matter. Kendrick is much more laid-back than Boris and was happy to chalk it up to the noxious fumes the authorities blamed as the cause. Boris - was not.
It took a couple of weeks of prying, as friends do, for Oriana to get him to talk to her. When he finally spoke, it was to unleash a torrent of questions: what had happened? How had she rescued him and his brother? He'd seen some of the final battle before Hunter could drag him out of the factory, and what he'd seen didn't jibe with what the authorities were saying.
She tried several times to explain what had happened in ways that didn't reveal her heritage as an Amberite. Those all failed; Boris had known her for too long to fall for lies. Eventually, out of frustration, she hauled him off to another Shadow.
She didn't go far, but it was sufficient to impress on Boris that neither one of them had gone off the deep end. Her final explanation was short and to the point: her dad's side of the family was unusual and had the ability to walk through worlds, and it was a big secret that she needed him to keep.
He gave her his word, and that was that. The subject rarely comes up even when the two are alone; every once in a while she'll ask if he wants to go anywhere, and he usually declines. He's taken her up on it once; she took him to Majaninchi for a week. With some coaching, he fit in fairly well; hockey wasn't the only lessons he shared with her.
Other than that, life in Isbrann tends to follow particular patterns - the same easy patterns it's followed for years. Oriana still doesn't have a job, and she's still just a rich heiress with a passion for hockey there.
In Majaninchi, Oriana is just one mercenary out of a hundred thousand or more - and she's okay with that.
Her first experiences with Amber were likely after Patternfall and the return of the family from Chaos; she spends most of her visits either exploring sections of the city or taking time to get to know any family member willing to spend a few minutes (or hours) with her.
Offsides, her horse
Isbrann, her home Shadow
Majaninchi, her pet Shadow
