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Ruinwen at a glance
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Pronunciation
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'rujnwɛn 'laxɛn
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Demographic
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Young adult female blood elf
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Work
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Mage, tailor, enchanter
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Alignment
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Neutral Evil
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Motivation
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Power
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Disposition
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Contemptuous and labile
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Comportment
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Blunt to the point of rudeness
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Family
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Grawdagnir (father), Bregedúr (mother)
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Ruinwen Lachenn is a Sin’dorei sorcerer, thaasophobic adventurer, and ferocious fashionista. She is famously contemptuous of ordinary people, and is rumored to secretly set commoners on fire with her magic when she has nothing pressing to do.
Background
Born into the wealthy and influential Lachenn family — her parents were Grawdagnir, a well-connected Sunreaver sorceror, and Bregedúr, a fearsome, devouring, vicious witch boss and icon of Silvermoon cool — Ruinwen grew up with a deep-seated and sociopathic sense of entitlement. She recognizes neither state nor moral law, but sees them as mere obstacles to be circumvented by manipulating or dominating those around her.
When she was still a child, her father took the family to Splintertree Post in Ashenvale, from which he and a like-minded troll named Zinjo hoped to launch safaris into Darkshore to capture some live moonkin hatchlings in an attempt to discover the secrets of druidical shapeshifting. The hunting expeditions were unsuccessful, but in the meantime Naurvellon, Silvermoon’s advisor to Splintertree Post, took a fancy to Ruinwen, and her parents agreed to marry her to him.
This was a politically advantageous arrangement to all concerned but Ruinwen, who found the much older Naurvellon repulsive, but scheme as she might, she could not wrest herself free of the impending nuptials. Worse, Ruinwen soon detected a pair of night elves (Isilyë and Yarralomë) watching her from afar, and suspected that they might try to assassinate her in order to prevent the union of Naurvellon and her family.
Worse still, her effort to discourage this by having one of the would-be assassins smitten by a love spell — which she had hoped would end up in one assassin turning against the other — backfired when the other assassin arranged a distraction while the smitten one snuck into Splintertree Post and had his way with Ruinwen, then held her down while the other assassin returned and used the wreckage of Ruinwen’s maidenhead as a gory inkwell to write a taunting message on the wall.
On the bright side, the wedding was called off on account of Ruinwen’s compromised virginity. But the justice meted out to the captured assassins — who were in fact there to kill Naurvellon, not Ruinwen — was wholly unsatisfactory to Ruinwen, who wanted them executed for what they had done.
(In fact, the punishment — which involved turning the assassins into breeding pairs of druidical animals and taking their young — had more to do with Grawdagnir’s interest in discovering the secrets of druidical shapeshifting than anything else.)
The rape had repercussions at home as well, where Ruinwen soon found that her social stock had plummeted now that she was no longer a tradable commodity. She was no longer invited to parties or other social functions, for example, and when she was, her parents were loathe to take her. And as she was an only child, her parents, too, found that their bargaining hand had weakened — and were not shy about telling her so.
Resentments built, and eventually Ruinwen’s home life became so intolerable that she drugged and set fire to her parents, may or may not have had something to do with a spate of unexplained deaths about Silvermoon City, then fled to the Ghostlands, where she took up the life of the freebooting adventurer, answerable to no one and nothing beyond her own ambitions and whims.
One day, she vowed, after she had made her fortune and could command the respect (and amnesty) she felt she deserved, she would return to Silvermoon to take her rightful place among the city’s elite — and revenge on all those who had snubbed or otherwise wronged her after her ordeal in Splintertree Post.
She has since avenged herself on her rapist Yarralomë, and has assembled a coterie of capable but unscrupulous characters (notably scam artist Tetzel, hyper-materialistic Wixee, and unspeakably savage Nasike) to keep her in money and raw materials to pursue her tailoring and enchanting interests — and to hunt down and kill Isilyë, whose continued existence is a daily affront to Ruinwen.
The R. Lachenn Label
Ruinwen has managed to combine her wanderlust, her sense of fashion, and her deep understanding of the arcane into the “R. Lachenn” brand of fashionable adventure wear and accessories, and publishes periodic catalogs noted for their extravagant prose describing the hard-to-find items:
The Bloodthirsty Embersilk Boot
The malaria was setting in. I groaned feebly and held out my hand against the sun as if I could keep Death away from me. That’s when I saw it: There, wedged into the river delta, was the object of my search. The Tol’Vir river market, fabrics and spices traded under a starlit sky. It was there that I discovered the Bloodthirsty Embersilk Boot.
I’ve taken the iconic boot, cast it in rugged waxed canvas, and partially lined it in my famous cotton chambray — details you won’t find anywhere else. Natural hand stitching. Leather laces with speed hook lacing system. Rust-proof nickel eyelets. Nonmarking rubber sole with grosgrain detail at interior back heel. A collector’s item. Sizes seven H medium through thirteen medium. Price: 140 gold.[1]
Personality
Blunt, rude, crude, and supremely secure, Ruinwen Lachenn decided early in life that she would never allow herself to be pushed around, but would do all the pushing herself.
She reacts easily and fearsomely to petty annoyances that interfere with her pleasure or inconvenience her.
She is consciously vicious: she attacks to clear a path for her own selfish interests.
She is occasionally lonely, but prefers loneliness to vulnerability
Ruinwen is a seductive temptress possessed of secret sexual knowledge, but doesn’t much like sex herself. It’s “messy” and “overrated”. She only uses it as a method of control. “A woman hasn’t got true control of a man,” she’s been known to say, “until her hand is on the dumb stick.”[2]
Sometimes that control is for her own security, sometimes for mean-spirited amusement: “There’s nothing I enjoy more,” she says, “than seeing a happy couple and coming between them”.
Another, all too frequent source of amusement: setting things on fire and watching them burn. Especially living things.
Her goals in life have been largely distilled to two things: revenge on a certain pair of night elves, the only people who had ever successfully breached the citadel of her integrity, and a career in “designing for gods” — that is, in designing performance-enhancing adventure wear suitable for the field as well as the catwalk.
Also, it’s never enough for her to succeed; others must fail.
Gear
References
- ↑ Adapted from a proposed entry in the J. Peterman catalog from “Seinfeld” and text from an actual J. Crew catalog.
- ↑ Ruinwen was originally conceived as a combination of characters played by actress Lucy Liu, particularly “O-Ren” from Kill Bill and “Ling Woo” from Ally McBeal. The quotes here (eg., the “dumb stick”) are all from Ally McBeal.