#and she couldn't take her with her bc at that rate she might've died while the girl was still little.

[yardsards]

@thespaghettiman427 okay part 2!

adamellie's parents were named malthi of the house of wynd (her elf father) and merrimack bobs (her half-foot mother)

the house of wynd was a wealthy and well-respected elven family from the southern central continent. they weren't officially recognized as nobles by any royalty, but they were rich enough to live like nobles (and referred to themselves as such), and the wynd trading company was a household name

in recent decades, however, business has been on the decline, and their wealth and reputation has been slipping away.

malthi was the sole heir to the house of wynd. when he was given control of the wynd trading company, he made it his goal to return it to its former glory. he has since made many risky business deals and investments, rapidly cycling the company between massive profits and massive losses (and earning himself a reputation as a reckless businessman).

through it all, he acted like he was still fabulously wealthy with no concerns over the state of his business. anyone In The Know was well aware that it was an act, but others were fooled.

merrimack came from a family of artisans in the eastern continent. she was known as the wild child of her family, and had failed to pick up either of her parents' crafts. when she was 16, her parents had decided that merrimack should travel west with a family friend who had business there, in hopes that seeing the world would help their daughter mature and figure out what she wanted to do with her life.

while in a port city in the southern central continent, merrimack stopped at a tavern and met malthi, a charming young elven man. (and, even better, he claimed to be rich!) she was immediately interested in him, and he seemed just as smitten.

the two had a passionate affair. when merrimack realized she was pregnant, the two of them decided to elope.

malthi's parents were pissed. they had hoped their son would find an elven noblewoman to marry and bring fortune to their family. instead, he had married a *half-foot*, which was very taboo. 

merrimack's parents were upset that they weren't invited to the wedding, but were overall hopeful that their daughter had settled down wuth someone who could provide for her.

adamellie was born, and they were happy together for a while. but this wouldn't last.

the honeymoon period passed and differences in personality and opinion popped up between merrimack and malthi (differences they would have noticed if they didn't rush into marriage so quickly)

the two also bickered frequently about malthi's risky financial decisions 

as the years went by, the strain got worse. merrimack had matured a lot over the years, but malthi was still the same young man he used to be. the things merri used to find charming and fun about her husband now seemed infuriatingly immature. 

living in the southern central continent was also grating for her, as the majority elven population there tended to discriminate against her or treat her like a pitiful child. her in-laws were the worst about this.

(privately, she also found it frustrating to have spent nearly a decade raising a daughter who was still just a toddler)

so eventually, she left and went back to the eastern continent to live with her sister and help care for her parents. (she was too young to remember it, but adamellie spent weeks crying for her mama after this).

from then on, merrimack wasn't a very big part of her daughter's life, only contacting her through monthly letters, or a visit every couple years.

adamellie was her papa's little princess. she loved him, and he absolutely spoiled her. she was his pride and joy, and he'd do anything to make her smile.

she grew slowly, closer to an elven rate, for her babyhood as well as around puberty, but for most of her childhood she aged a bit closer to a half-foot rate. her mental maturity lagged a bit behind her physical maturity, but it was hard for elves to notice this, since her half-foot heritage made her look smaller/younger than an elf at a comparable physical maturity stage.

adamellie learned to view friendships as transient things. she'd befriend elven children, but the two would inevitably drift apart as she outgrew them. or, living in a port city, she'd befriend children and then have to say goodbye as their family sailed away again. she clung extra hard to her dad, she didn't want him to leave her life like everyone else did.

there were elven schools available, but due to adamellie's unusual maturity rate, malthi decided his daughter should be taught about academics and magic by private tutors, and learn the art of business from himself. he wanted to prepare her to inherit the wynd trading company, and frequently taught her the lesson "in order to reap great rewards, you need to be willing to take great risks".

she liked spending time with her dad, and was excited to continue the family business that her dad seemed to care about almost as much as he cared about her.

as adamellie began reaching her adolescence, malthi began courting a new woman, an elven commoner named swilda (no noblewoman would have him).

adamellie was NOT happy about her dad's new girlfriend. a bit for normal kid reasons, but a bit was because her father was paying noticeably less attention to his daughter in favour of his new partner- to the point where swilda herself would scold him and tell him to pay less attention to her and more attention to his child.

malthi and swilda married after a couple years of courting. (a short courting period by elven standards, but malthi tended to rush into things, and swilda wanted a stable way out of her parents' home)

swilda was nearly perfect as a step-mother. she was more stern than malthi and didn't spoil adamellie like he did (she was a more responsible person than her husband, despite being slightly younger than him), but her sternness was the loving and attentive type, rather than the controlling type. she showed near infinite patience towards her new step-daughter's antics (as well as to her husband's foolishness)

adamellie had complicated feelings towards her stepmother, but slowly but surely grew attached.

after another couple years, swilda got pregnant, and then adamellie's half-sister jubal was born.

adamellie was Not Having A Good Time with this. again, this was half childish jealousy, and half a reaction to how her father was acting. he seemed to forget she existed at times, too preoccupied with the shiny new baby. she even overheard him talking about leaving the wynd trading company to jubal ("after all, it's not like a half elf can continue our bloodline anyway"), even though he had spent years training adamellie to take over the company and jubal was still just a baby. (the company wasn't even worth that much at this point, but it was the spirit of the thing)

swilda, meanwhile, was exhausted and sick after her pregnancy, and was unable to provide much attention to adamellie either.

adamellie made sure that if she was having a bad time, then the rest of the family would suffer too. she caused a lot of trouble for everyone.

one day, after adamellie had acted out again, swilda said that she and malthi had agreed that adamellie should go to Far Away Boarding School For Noble Elven Adolescents.

adamellie cried and apologized and begged them not to get rid of her. swilda said that they weren't getting rid of her, they just felt like she wasn't thriving at home and that a change of environment might help her feel better. malthi said that since her growth had slowed down to a more normal elven rate, a normal school should be good for her, and allow her to make new friends.

adamellie felt like this was all an excuse to get rid of her now that they've replaced her with a perfect new daughter, but she gave up on arguing and agreed to go.

she had A Bad Time at boarding school. it was her first time away from her father and her first time in any formal education setting, having to follow so many rules. and her rich/noble elven classmates ostracized her, due to her half-foot heritage and the fact that her father wasn't a real nobleman (adamellie started and lost a lot of fistfights over this). worst of all, she was stuck dealing with her feelings of abandonment with no one there to support her.

it was a cycle, she felt bad, so she acted out, so her teachers punished her and her classmates ostracized her more, so she felt worse, so she acted out more. it was a miracle she didn't get expelled

during this time, letters from merrimack stopped coming. adamellie was afraid to ask if merrimack had died of old age and nobody bothered to pass the news onto her, or if her biological mother had finally decided to fully abandon her too. (if she didn't ask, she could just pretend the usually-punctual letters got lost in the mail somehow this time)

adamellie emotionally withdrew from her attachments to her father and step-mother. (she got letters and fairy calls from them, but kept her responses polite but distant). outwardly, this looked like she had stopped acting out and was seen as a good thing.

when she came home for a school break, her father and step-mother seemed a lot brighter and happier than they were before they sent her away.

they noticed that she was acting different, too. malthi praised her for this change in her behavior, but swilda realized something was wrong and pressed adamellie for details. adamellie said that she hated the boarding school and that the teachers and other students were mean to her, but did not admit how lonely and abandoned she felt.

swilda said that while she still thought adamellie should be in school with peers, she acknowledged that that school was not good for her, and said that she could come back home and commute to Nearby School For Common Youths instead. 

malthi disagreed and said that his daughter should stay at Far Away Boarding School For Noble Elven Adolescents because she shouldn't allow herself to back down when things get tough, but he gave in due to swilda's pressure 

adamellie had less of a bad time at Nearby School For Common Youths and finished her education there. she didn't let herself form any close friendships, but tried to make herself generally likeable.

at home, she was happy to be among her family (even, begrudgingly, her baby sister, though she was still a bit jealous), but she didn't allow herself to become fully re-attached to them like she was before they sent her away.

not long after graduation, she decided she wanted to leave home to try some business ventures of her own. she asked her father for some money to start her own venture and a ticket to the island where the dungeon was (she heard there was money aplenty to be made in that dungeon), promising that she'd bring a good profit to the family business. he agreed and gave her what she asked.

she's determined to prove to her father that she can be a brave and skilled businesswoman and can be a valuable family member. she mostly wants to make her dad proud of her, but a part of her wants to make him regret how he pushed her away.

BONUS STUFF:

-she is often mistaken as a gnome (albeit one with extra large low-set ears and proportionally long legs/short torso)

-if anyone asks what she is, she'll usually just say "half elf" or sometimes just "elf". partially because that seems to be the default with half-elves in this series (at least, with half-tallman half-elves). but partially because she's not got a lot of ties to half-foot culture and grew up among elves. possibly even has some internalized shame about her half-foot heritage because of how general elven society treated her.

-some people call half-half-foots "quarter-foots" as a cute nickname. a bit ironic, considering quarter-foots are generally bigger than half-foots

-one of the hundreds of things adamellie's parents cannot agree on is how to pronounce their own daughter's name. merrimack says "it's ada-mellie. we went with mellie because of my great aunt ellamellie, and ada because we both thought it was a pretty name". malthi says "it's adam-ellie. adam like adamantine, and ellie just because it sounds cute". merrimack is objectively the one who is remembering correctly here, but adamellie pronounces her own name adam-ellie due to spending most of her childhood with malthi.

-she likes to sort/organize things as a way to warm up/get in the right state of mind for spellcasting. since organizing her wares isn't always practical, she keeps a deck of cards on her that she likes to shuffle and then put back in order. (she used to have a pouch of marbles that she used for a similar purpose, but they made noise when she walked, so they were a bad idea to bring into the dungeon)

-she had kinda ratty hair growing up cuz she inherited her curls from her mother, and her dad had no clue how to take care of it, nor did most of her nannies

-unlike most nobility, she never had to serve in the canaries. a bit because the southern central continent isn't as directly under the control of the elf queen as the northern central continent, a bit because their family barely counts as nobility anymore, a bit because she's a half-elf and is thus seen as undesirable

sir you must tell me everything about adamellie at your earliest convenience.

as well as perhaps a visual depiction via art or picrew???

goobnight

okay so here is a picrew of her i made bc i have art block (it's not perfect like i think her hair is curlier than this, and i'm still unsure on certain details or her clothes, but Close Enough)

and here's an adventurer's bible style character sheet:

full name: adamellie of the house of wynd

age: 47

race/gender: half elf, half half-foot / female

birthplace: the southern central continent 

relatives: father, mother (likely deceased), step-mother, half-sister

build: 120 cm, 22 bmi

likes: custard, oysters

dislikes: anything with a visible face (i.e. fish heads)

first death: treasure insects

(though some of this may be subject to change, especially her age. half-elves tend to mature at unpredictable rates and idk what maturity timeline i like best for her. maturity-wise she's in her early 20s, though. like, she is definitely an adult but her prefrontal cortex isn't quite done cooking yet)

okay so adamellie's existence kinda came from three main different thoughts

1: the corpse collectors/revival office are fascinating, i wonder what other kinds of financial exploitation can occur in the dungeon, like "pay for my services or you will literally die without them" situations

2: teleportation magic is interesting, especially those scrolls like mr tansu used. i wonder how someone could take advantage of those sorts of mechanics in a story that is so much about traversing a physical space

3: we see half-elves that are half-tallman. and the adventurer's bible mentions that tallmen can have fertile offspring with ogres or half-foots, as can gnomes with dwarves. i wonder what other combinations could exist

so adamellie's thing is like. so teleportation scrolls work like this, right?

well she basically saw the "this technique shouldn't be used unless absolutely necessary" and was like "hm yeah but what if i did anyway?" (it's risky and dubiously legal but that ain't stopping her)

she's got a few storerooms on the surface that she packs absolutely full of adventuring supplies. mostly food and drinks and medicine and mana herbs, but a couple spare bedrolls and clothes and weapons and whatnot as well.

she's got a teleportation scroll hooked up to each of her storerooms, and when she needs something, she just unfurls one of her scrolls, reaches in, and pulls whatever she needs out from her storeroom. it's not quite a bag of holding, but it's pretty damn close

it's a pretty unstable technique, but miraculously she's managed to not die or lose any limbs from this method yet, so she sees no reason to change it. the main mishaps she's encountered thus far are

1: on occasion, the scroll she carries with her randomly loses connection with the storeroom it's linked to, meaning she loses access to about a quarter of her inventory. sometimes she's able to reopen it, but doing so is very costly in terms of time and mana, so she typically just counts it as a loss for this trip. this has happened many times

2: a few times, she's gone through the scroll, either to escape a dangerous situation or to try and grab something from deep in the storeroom, and the portal closed behind her. this meant she was forced to exit through the storeroom's actual door and return to the surface many weeks before she had planned

3: she found a corpse on a lower floor while she was out of mana, so she put it in one of her storerooms for safekeeping until she could recover her mana and revive him. the scroll failed while the body was in there, meaning the corpse was no longer part of the dungeon and was just in some random storage closet on the surface, so the guy was unrevivable. oopsie daisies! (she only made this mistake once but it was a real mess)

4: thieves on the surface broke into a couple of her storerooms, breaking the spell (and stealing her stuff). she's been very careful to avoid this since then, using very strong locks on the physical doors of the storerooms.

despite the risks though, this is a pretty effective strategy in a dungeon where one of the biggest obstacles is your access to supplies. so what is she doing with it? is she an invaluable asset to some party hoping to defeat the mad mage? nah.

she's not sure she believes in the golden kingdom prophesy (and she thinks other monetary ventures like gold stripping, monster-culling, and selling research are all oversaturated markets). and she thinks that a party would just slow her down and attract unnecessary monster attention (and take a cut of her profits) anyway. she's just in the game to make a quick buck with her unique strategy.

she is a merchant, selling wares from her storerooms to desperate adventurers on lower floors, for absolutely exorbitant prices. it's not like they're in any position to haggle food prices when they're starving, after all. (she also does occasional healing or resurrection magic when she finds someone injured or dead, demanding high fees afterwards. if they refuse to pay, she says "okay, then do you want me to undo what i just did and injure/kill you again?" (she is absolutely bluffing. she sucks shit at fighting.) and if someone cannot afford to pay her in the moment, she makes them sign a contract that they'll repay her later, and puts a tracking charm on them)

she plays it fast and loose in the dungeon, traveling alone and spending a lot of time in lower floors. she uses her stealth skills, supplemented with magic, to sneak past monsters. when she's in a really dangeous situation (whether because a monster noticed her, or because an adventurer got Really Mad at her) she'll hop through one of her scrolls to the safety of her storerooms.

every couple months (or more, often if/when her scrolls fail) she returns to the surface to restock her storerooms and reset/repair/replace her teleportation scrolls. then, once that's done, she returns to the dungeon, trying to reach the lower floors again as quickly as possible.

she calls herself heroic, bringing food to the starving and reviving people at levels that most corpse retrievers often avoid. adventurers have mixed feelings on her. on one hand, running into her when you're in need can be a literal life saver. on the other hand, she is exploiting people while they're at their lowest

i will tell more about her and her backstory and family later bc it is A Doozy and this post is already insanely long lol