Apothic Carrie

Carella Fidelis, the eldest child of Demarco and Luna Fidelis, came into this world twenty-six years ago in Vinovia, an Ionian town on the marshy border of Castrerus (commonly known as the Shattered Empire). Her father served as regent of the town for the Republic, keeping the peace and making sure taxes flowed into the treasury without incident. She enjoyed the trappings of wealth, but had a hard time with authority. A tomboy in her youth unconcerned with traditional gender roles, she drifted toward tougher crowds as the years passed. She has a wicked tongue in her head, equally proficient with puns and insults, but she had the strength and tenacity to hold her own against the local bullies, eventually earning peace if not respect from them.

She still passed as a boy in her late teens, so she convinced her father to pull some strings and allow her to serve a son's civic duty to train and spend two years in the legions before returning home to help with running Vinovia for the Republic. She served in Legio VI Victrix, a training legion filled with new soldiers, building forts and border fortifications on the finger of Ionian land between Alfinwald and the Okulari Empire. She worked with the support teams mainly, fascinated by the concoctions flung by the siege equipment, especially fire bombs. She told jokes and puns to the siege teams to soften them up and learned all she could about siege chemistry from them, until her life changed on the day the Republic killed her family.

The then-new Consul of the Republic (Justinian Lucretius) pushed to increase taxes in the borderlands five years ago, forcing the local regents to make a choice to support the Republic or the people. The Republic decided to take a hard line and make a grisly example of Carella's parents (and potentially her two younger sisters; the rumors were unclear on this point), who chose their friends and neighbors over the Republic. Since her parents were no longer in the picture to vouch for her, Carella's secret came out and her comrades in arms tried to imprison her. She escaped by flipping her leadership the bird, setting all the explosive siege munitions alight, and running east.

She arrived in Fellport six days after escaping with her life, determined to reinvent herself. She stole knowledge from the College and parlayed that into a career as an alchemist, taking the name Apothic Carrie as an alchemy pun before realizing a lesser-known definition of apothic referred to an epic doom. That suited her "burn it all down" mentality well, so she embraced it. Ionia killed her family, so Ionia should pay the price. She hates Ionia to this day, gleefully throwing fire bombs on their troops during the Ten Days' War, and she pushes back against new laws and restrictions imposed by the Fellport Council whenever she can.

She's happy to sell healing potions to the masses from her modified Ionian legionary backpack graffitied with a vast collection of graphic insults in Latin, Common, and Okulari, and a large red triangle (the Healer's Symbol), but she loves a well-placed vial of alchemist's fire more than anything, usually carrying a dozen or so in case things get interesting. She trains incessantly with liquid-filled projectiles, compensating for their shifting center of gravity with instinctual precision. She wanders the streets of Fellport during the day and sleeps at Highwater House at night, where she (illegally) works with her portable alchemist toolkit to replenish her spells and make potions and other concoctions to sell.

She defends any cause for freedom that she hears about, from resisting new tariffs in the Harbor to physically interceding with the Watch when they overstep their authority. She keeps up with the laws in Fellport to find both legal lines to toe and ridiculous edge cases that fly in the face of common sense. Almost everyone on the Watch has detained her overnight at least once, and the Caps shake her down every so often when something explosive goes missing from the College.

She wears her hair short and bleached pale, exposing four silver studs in each ear (one for each family member killed by Ionia) connected with fine silver chains. She wears a gold nose ring on her right side and a determined expression, her brown eyes flecked with dancing gold flames. She's on the short side with a wiry strength, quick reactions, and a wolf-hungry demeanor.

Carrie acts as an agitator, punk, and protestor, a ball of righteous anger looking for a target. She developed her punster talent to actually damage people using vicious mockery. She's trained with a spear, and she usually wears her breastplate in case a riot happens to incite itself around her. She heavily relies on prestidigitation for distractions, sword burst for close quarters crowd control if needed, and true strike to precisely place potions and alchemist's fire. She has special vials on a bandolier that she throws when casting most of her spells, including Melf's acid arrow.

Apothic Carrie
Human (Ionian) Alchemist Artificer (Level 5) (She/They)
(Soldier Background; Grenadier, Magic Initiate (Bard) Feats)
Str 12  Dex 14  Con 10  Int 16  Wis 10  Cha 14
Arcana +6, Athletics +4, History +6, Intimidation +5, Performance +5

Part of T.W.Wombat's Fellport project, detailing the city and the world of Beneterra.
For all city posts, see the Fellport Index. For posts about the wider world, see the Beneterra Index.