yrae | Not a NaNo 17: Alias Magnolia (Reply)

Chug chug chug. Another of the assassins, just another four to go after this one.

Wrinkled people are the most fun to draw, seriously. I'd make the entire Bouquet 40+ if that was realistic.

NAME Efisa, alias 'Magnolia'
WHO IS THIS PERSON One of the current Bouquet, the personal assassination squad of the Kazinian empress. Magnolia is the Sinazi connection. She's also, when events in Tarnish start taking shape, the Bouquet's 'leader', such as they have one.
GENDER Female
AGE 41

BRIEF BIO Efisa was born into the life of an assassin. Her mother was an assassin in their home city and, though she didn't plan Efisa's birth (shh don't tell Efisa that. She knows it but you'll probably get stabbed for mentioning it around her), she fell in love with her little girl before she was even born. She started off trying to hide her profession from Efisa, but when her enemies came to the house and tried to kill Efisa when she was only a child, her mother decided defence was the best option. Not giving up being an assassin, for some reason.
So Efisa learned from the tender age of three how to defend herself, and later, how to attack. Her mother didn't let her start taking contracts until she was about 16, which Efisa found very unfair since she'd been training all her life, but when she finally did make that first kill, she understood. Her mother didn't want her to lose herself, and wanted her to have at least some sense of what she was doing.
Efisa took that lesson to heart. She wasn't a cold-hearted killer. She only took the contracts she agreed with, and even then she gave her intended victims the chance to defend themselves. It was this compassion (...sort of) that made her known among the authorities, but her mother's training kept her in the field for the longest of all the current Bouquet. She wasn't caught until she was 33, at which point she was dragged up in front of the empress and given the death-or-money option. Efisa chose death, so Shizaaqa threw her to the dungeons. A few weeks (or days, or months, who knows down there?) later, Efisa's mother joined her in the dungeons. It was at this point that Efisa realised just whose death she had chosen, and begged for the money option instead, which Shizaaqa happily gave her.
So in the eight years Efisa, now Magnolia, has been under Shizaaqa's thumb, she's been trying to work out a plan to break out, save her mother and leg it. With the combined help of her spy (the Bouquet has two arms--the flowers do the killing, the leaves do the spying to find the next target, and each city has one of each) and also Yan, she managed to find all the members of the Bouquet and what makes them tick. Basically, what would bring each of them into her plan to knock off Frangipani.

CHARACTER Magnolia is determined. She has very strict morals for herself, and made sure to establish herself as the Bouquet's leader so that they would keep to her morals, too. She's a natural leader, making her years as Shizaaqa's killing tool the most unbearable of her life. Magnolia hates to be controlled, and could be a bit of a control freak, but she knows people too well to come across that way. She knows exactly how to get on anyone's good side, not only how to make them follow her, but how to make them want to follow her. She even thinks she's got Yan following her, poor girl.

POINTS OF INTEREST

Magnolia always wanted kids. She was always telling herself 'once I'm out of this mess, then I'll find someone' but there was always something new to keep her from that.

Sinazi is pretty much Kazin's most desirable location. It's the place all the Bouquet wishes they could be assigned, but Magnolia's had dibs there for YEARS. She hates it because her position in the Bouquet has forever ruined her view of what Sinazi should be.

Despite her handsome income (thanks Frange), Magnolia has never lived a lavish life. She keeps as much of the money from her contracts as she can, to better fund her eventual plan to kill the empress. Mmm, irony.