Editing Quest:Lamia Daughter Quest (section)

== Other Characters ==

=== Allies ===

The Citadel Kingdom is deeply entrenched, but the Caligo Clarus are not alone in fighting it.  Most of these people violate some stereotype that Citadel attempts to enforce, which Citadel reacts to by making people mistrust and shun them.

* '''Isen the Audacious''', a flirtatious bard who gets on our nerves, but is on Ssen's side.  He is the one who made sure that the party got the credit for saving Purple Sands, and nicknamed the party the "Beautiful Nightmares" and called Ssen in particular the "Savior of the Sands". It turns out that he's actually Prince Itzak Solomon Elegante Newgate, a member of the royal family (11th in line for the throne). His ego and libido are completely out of control, but he has a good heart deep down.
* '''Tara''', a Half-Minotaur girl and an arena fighter. She went through a very painful surgery to make her face less like a minotaur's and more like a human's ideal of beauty. She's not the brightest torch in the dungeon, and she has a short temper, but she's a good person. She's also in love with Isen.
* '''Princess Mumei''' of the Phoenix Empire (read: totally-not-Asia).  The royal families of the Phoenix Empire and Citadel Kingdom have arranged for her and Isen to marry, but after being taken out of Citadel, she's not been nearly as passive as she was during her Citadel-forced "courtship" of Isen.  Through her, the party has learned what can happen when fighting Citadel-like "Land Spirits" goes wrong: the Phoenix Empire is a rigid, authoritarian state, to the point that she has asked Ssen to kill her rather than allow her to be re-captured by the Empire or Citadel (according to the Empire's religion, dying by snake-bite results in reincarnation, while suicide does not).  At the moment, it's not certain if or how her marriage with Isen is going to go forward, given that his heart belongs to Tara and she was never really interested in him romantically.
** "Phoenix Tongue" uses lots of bird metaphors, so the names she uses are based on birds -- e.g. "loon" for Isen, and "cuckoo" (a kind of bird that lays its eggs in other birds' nests) for Ssen.
* '''Lord Julian Graves''', a [[paladin]] who was basically Ssen's uncle, though he was too busy fighting a war against the Fey Court to show up to her father's funeral.  He also wrote a book about lamias based on watching Ssen growing up; it's a little creepy that Ssen only learned this after finding the book in a library, and it goes into quite some detail about how to kill a lamia.  Still, it's a very thoughtful work that doesn't paint lamias as monsters, and Ssen also realizes that her father made her armor specifically to protect the weak points identified in the book.  He's one of the few paladins the party can trust to generally do the right thing.

=== Ghouls ===

The '''Ghouls''' are not literal undead ghouls; rather, they are human bandits who practice ritual cannibalism, consuming flesh of others to gain traits from them (i.e. eating flesh from a [[troll]] to gain regeneration, or from a [[wizard]] to gain magical power).  Mage is apparently the child of someone high up in the Ghouls, and was going to be cannibalized for his magical powers, but when the ghouls ambushed Ssen and Tricia, they ended up losing and Mage was rescued.

==={{anchor|Fey Court}} The Fey Court ===

'''The Fey Court''' is a group of Elf terrorists who fight the Citadel Kingdom.  Their grievance is that human culture is slowly destroying their old elven ways.  Because of the nature of Citadel, they are actually right, though their attacks harm a lot of bystanders, and to be honest, some aspects of elven culture really aren't worth saving.

* '''Donovan''' was the leader, and Peri's boyfriend and lover.  When Peri got pregnant, she chose not to carry the child to term, which, under elf law, meant that Peri's fate was in Donovan's hands; he chose to hunt her down (with her mother's help) and force-feed her a sterility potion.  Ssen learned this when she took confession from him -- though he didn't so much "confess" to forcibly sterilizing Peri as declare that he was fully within his right to do so, and that he was being merciful for not killing her.  This caused the rest of his cell of the Fey Court to abandon him to Ssen and her party, who took him to the Paladin force fighting the Court.  He was imprisoned, and is likely being tortured at Citadel.

==={{anchor|Dramatae}} The Dramatae/The Humors ===

The '''Dramatae''' are (were) a group of masked men that were the party's primary antagonists throughout Book One. They wore masks which represented the four temperaments of humanity, or the four aspects of all stories.  They serve the Citadel, and are in turn empowered by Citadel via their masks.  Each was a powerful opponent, and capable of controlling other people through "Passion" masks.  However, once their masks' power was exhausted and the masks removed, they quickly reverted to whatever their natural age would be.

The main plot of the Dramatae was to fabricate Lightbringer stories.  They start by creating a villain, who then kills everyone but a single child in a particular town; that child then is directed to companions, and they all become Lightbringers, fight the villain, and then, somehow, get sacrificed to "feed" Citadel.  The most recent iteration of Lightbringers didn't do so well, which is caused some strife among the Dramatae.

* '''Rage''' was the most rational of the Dramatae, and chief plan architect.  The party stumbled on his workshop in Tragedy's basement and found his notes -- he had an odd way of thinking, but he was very perceptive.  When the Lightbringers failed to save Stone Gate from the Ghouls (losing three of their number in the process), Rage expressed regret for having instigated the Ghoul attack, as he was born there; for this, he was killed.  Jeremy Sandover would have been his replacement, but the Dawnchasers foiled that plan.
* '''Tragedy''' was the "money man" of the Dramatae.  He was Lord Darius Holting, a man who transferred his and his wife's soul into his children to become immortal.  Mari was next-in-line for supplying a body, but the process was interrupted, which is how she got stuck in Peri's body.  Tragedy was not a clever man; he secured his room of powerful artifacts with the password "Tragedy", he kidnapped Robin and Company (''after'' they had been made to work for Citadel) and attempted to hold them hostage in exchange for Rage's notes and his mask (both of which the Dawnchasers had stolen from his mansion), but when he realized that either way, he was going to have to explain his mistakes to Peace, he killed Robin and friends out of pettiness.  The party next encountered him in First Wood, where he summoned a giant ball of corpses to fight them.  Ssen spat acid at the ball of corpses and blew it up (methane is a ''fun'' gas), and then the Dawnchasers fought him personally at the portal out of First Wood.  Ssen poisoned him with her bone-dissolving venom, and after letting him stew in that for a few seconds, she beheaded him.
* '''Comedy''' was the Dramatae's enforcer.  She used to be Princess Thistleblossom of the Elves, daughter of the very first Queen Mab, but between teenage angst and her love for the entity who turned out to be Peace, she ran away from home and joined the Dramatae.  She was a very messed-up person; she organized parties where people were on the menu, and when the Dawnchasers visited First Wood, she reanimated relatives of each of the party members.  She died with Peace, when Ssen removed her mask -- even elves cannot live for seven Ages.
* '''Peace''' was the leader of the Dramatae, and generally a nasty piece of work.  She often masqueraded as a messenger of the Light to "guide" the Lightbringers.  Comedy loved her; Peace "reciprocated" by stimulating her, but otherwise held and showed no affection (though she did offer to help Tricia get through the pain of metamorphosis in exchange for a promise from Ssen that Comedy would not be harmed).  The Dawnchasers confronted her as she was enacting a ritual to plant a Citadel-egg inside Her Illuminated Self, and then Ssen killed her with a lucky shot from an arrow.  Seriously, she was building up for this boss fight where she would feed our souls to Citadel, and then Ssen put an arrow through her heart.  Without her control, Citadel's instincts  -- to care for the people within its borders -- ran wild, transforming the city into a sealed dome.
* '''The Fifth Dramatae''' (or just "Fifth") is otherwise unnamed.  He showed Ssen visions of the meetings of the Dramatae and the progress of the Lightbringers, and seemed to be more on her side than not, but then he turned out to be the original land spirit of the continent, who was deposed by the Dragon Who Was As Shadow (which was later cast out and replaced with Citadel).  He wanted to be restored by having Citadel's power transferred to him, but because he was a tremendous jerk who wanted monsters to stay monsters, Ssen refused him.  Killing Peace and unleashing Citadel threw his plan for a complete loop.

=== Citadel ===

The '''Citadel Kingdom''' itself is actually a mildly sentient and tremendously powerful genius locus with the personality of a young, spoiled child.  It demands stories that fit the stereotypes (e.g. monsters are always [[Chaotic Evil]], "protagonists" are always the last survivors of destroyed hometowns, the male lead has spiky hair and an impractically huge sword), and it can exert some influence over the creatures living within its borders, and especially those within its capital, to enforce them.  It does provide for the humans, ensuring that winters are never too harsh, harvests are always bountiful enough to feed everyone (everyone who toes the line, anyway), and so on, but it has kept the land in a near-stasis for seven "Ages" (inventors and freethinkers are poorly treated by all) and those creatures on the "outside" are entirely out of luck -- for example, Citadel-corrupted monsters will kill their children when confronted with adventurers, to remove any potential moral conundrums from the adventurers' minds (in fact, Ssen only survived because she was the fourth child of her family -- the other three had been killed by the time Liam killed her mother).  Ssen, having grown up in a tower built of a material that happens to have strong anti-magic properties, is basically immune to Citadel's influence, and her father's paladin medallion seems to help ward it off from those near it.  Most of the party is mildly resistant to Citadel, though this is partly thanks to Ssen keeping everyone level.  Isen is also immune to Citadel thanks to his massive ego.

There is a running joke that Citadel actively interferes with dice; we seem to roll high when we need to roll low, and vice versa (though we do well enough in combat).  Particularly disastrous rolls are usually greeted with cries of "CITADEL!"

* The (current iteration of the) '''Lightbringers''' are the "designated" heroes of the story, having been chosen by the Dramatae to run around, fight monsters and villains, and eventually get fed to Citadel.  Ssen gets visions of their progress every so often.  They are every inch the stereotypical RPG party, and if the discussions of the Dramatae are any indication, they are the ones who should have been following the path taken by Ssen and company and fighting the same enemies, but the main party's actions have disrupted the Dramatae's scripted events, which cause things to go awry; the "muscle man", "smart girl", and "Would-Be-Traitor" all died during the attack on Stone Gate, leaving only Adahn ("the boy") and Ava ("the girl").  The Dramatae eventually got so fed up with the Lightbringers' failure that they resorted to tying them up and bringing them along for the attack on the Old One, hoping to kill the dragon, wake up the pair, and make them think that they had done it.
** '''Adahn''' is the designated lead hero, and he is a spiky-haired, minimally-armored jerk with a big sword, who makes the angstiest of JRPG protagonists look positively friendly (his favorite word seems to be "Whatever").  After the rest of his party either died or defected to the Dawnchasers, Adahn was reformatted into the designated villain, as a "fallen Lightbringer".
** '''Ava''' used to be '''Lilly''' before becoming the designated love interest (though there wasn't any chemistry between the two, and it seemed that Adahn was a little ''physical'').  Lilly was plain, while Ava had impractically large breasts, impractically long hair, and impractically revealing clothing.  She turned out to be a little more level-headed than her companion; Ssen gave them Lea's Caligo Clarus medallion, hoping to disrupt Citadel's influence over them, and while the boy threw it away, the girl kept it.  Eventually, she broke out of the mold at the Old One's cave, though she was poisoned shortly thereafter.  She could have been totally healed on the spot, but that would have meant becoming Lilly again; at first, she tried to push the decision onto Ssen, but eventually she chose to stay Ava, asking to be brought back to Bronze Peak and get healed there.  She recovered, and while she is no longer as talented as she was as a Lightbringer (presumably, the Dramatae's enchantments faded), she has finally been able to realize her dream of becoming a hairdresser.