Character Information
Sep. 4th, 2025 11:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bluetestamentCharacter's Full Name: Baroness Auravei of Mount Holly, formerly of Trinsdale (she never uses a surname in canon, even in legal documents where it'd normally be present)
Character's Pronouns: she/her
Character's Canon: Blue Prince
Physical Description:
Baroness Auravei is an elderly white woman. Her hair is wavy and mostly silver, with some remaining brown hair mixed in. She tends to wear blazers over long dresses, prefers circular stud earrings, and is almost always seen with two signature pieces of jewelry: an emerald bracelet on her right wrist, and a pendant necklace portraying an inneclipse (an astronomical event where the small, red "rogue moon" of Mora passes in front of the large crescent "devoted moon").
The remaining sections of this profile contain spoilers for the endgame of Blue Prince; while they don't reveal any puzzle solutions, they do go into lore that a blind player would only discover at the deepest level of the iceberg. If you haven't decrypted a 'core' message about water, then you haven't gotten to the relevant part of the game yet... and to learn some of the lore in question requires finishing that chain of puzzles and finding the 'fourth path'.
Character's History:
Lady Auravei was born sometime in the late Fifth Era of Orinda Aries to minor nobility, and was probably only a few years old when Fenn won the Realm's bloody civil war.
We know nothing more of her parents, but we do know that Auravei chose, when an adult, to attend university abroad, where she would learn the art and science of Corarican architectural drafting (the principles behind designing, building, and taming the type of spooky non-Euclidean house that rearranges itself when you aren't looking and has too much square footage for its dimensions).
She returned to her homeland a Grand Architect, and had a successful career in that field before settling down, marrying Baron Tomas Sinclair, and buying 80 acres of land near Mount Holly in 1912. She spent the next year designing her magnum opus: a collection of 45 floorplans meant to encompass all the needs of a dwelling, which she eventually decided to use as the basis of a Drafting House she would build on the Mount Holly estate to be her home.
In 1920, Baroness Auravei gave birth to her eldest son Herbert Sinclair, who was followed by another son (Simon Sinclair) three years later. To educate them outside the control of the new government (which Tomas and Auravei both disliked, for different reasons), Auravei drafted a makeshift schoolhouse on the grounds, which would be used by the children of nearby Reddington for the next 30 or 40 years.
Over the decades to follow, Auravei would continue to practice her art, as well as assist in some capacity with Tomas's company SYNKA... and would gradually grow distant from her sons and increasingly disillusioned with both the politics of the Realm and the narrowness of its citizens' vision (including her own). This led her, in 1952, to write a new will, in which her family received only a token inheritance. Instead, she built an intricate spiral of puzzles and clues, leading to the atelier in which she'd originally designed the Mount Holly manor... and left the vast bulk of her personal possessions, including her most treasured works, to whoever could successfully navigate that labyrinth and reach its core.
Several years later, Grand Architect Auravei quietly passed away.
Character's Personality:
Lady Auravei is, at her core, an idealistic visionary with a sparkling intellect, tarnished by unrealistically high standards and a bad habit of scorning people who don't live up to them.
Her most formative years were away in Corarica, studying at their famous – and notably egalitarian, for the setting – universities. She learned from the era's greatest minds, and interacted with students and teachers from all over the world, developing nuanced political and religious viewpoints from her experience there. In particular, central to her values is a deep respect for the twin virtues of truth and creativity. An architectural blueprint can't pretend that the soil is looser or more packed than it is. It can't claim that there are more than 360 degrees in a circle and get away with it. That which is built without facing and respecting the truth will collapse. But without imagination, nothing new can be built at all, no new truths uncovered; one becomes trapped in the old, small box of what one's predecessors considered "normal".
The union of these two facets – imagination/creativity as a tool in the search for truth – also reflects another lifelong passion of Auravei's: her love for puzzles, riddles, and other tests of wit, going back to the Mora Jai puzzle boxes of her childhood. There's nothing she respects quite so much as someone willing and able to pick through an elaborate enigma to find the thread that led from question to answer.
Unfortunately, the energy that once animated her on these topics is much more difficult for her to conjure up at her canon point, trained out of her by experience. Living in a social circle where the only live political question was "are you loyal to the new king's red banners, or secretly loyal to the old king's black ones", how was she to discuss her more fundamental skepticism of feudal hierarchy, or her religious beliefs about Orinda being the final paragon rather than the first? The few times she tried, she was written off as eccentric or misunderstood completely. Worse yet, she lived in a nation whose rulers had no respect for truth or imagination at all, whose policy was increasingly to bury any evidence or creative expression inconvenient to the City of Fenn's hold on political power.
Even her family was no refuge. Her eldest son's imitation of her (his love of riddles, his own tour of study in Corarica) was entwined with a lack of ambition that made her feel like he'd taken that path "by default" rather than choosing his own way. Meanwhile, her younger son, whose imagination and passion for reading endeared him to her, proved susceptible to exactly the kind of black-and-white (black-and-red?) thinking that frustrated her from her countrymen... a worldview that would eventually cost him his life.
In the end, that's how her intellectualism turned from a strength into a flaw: it became a vehicle of scorn. She rarely tries to discuss her beliefs anymore, because she's used to nobody exercising the necessary grey cells to understand them. Her once-playful cleverness now manifests as aloofness because she's had no-one to play with. She struggles to dream with the idealism she once showed because she expects reality to rudely wake her up. She bears this scorn even for herself; in her latter years, she's characterizes her religious beliefs as "foolish superstition" and privately laments a career that, no matter the concrete success it achieved, failed to create anything truly new since the 1910s.
But beneath it all, even on her deathbed, there's a part of her that still believes in her ideals (that is, in the power of truth and creativity to manifest a better tomorrow than what seems imaginable today)... and we know this because, despite her prickly exterior, that hope shows up again and again in her art. It's the part of her that keeps returning to the symbolism of the "inneclipse" – the Rogue Moon passing in front of the Devoted Moon – which she associates with the victory of the new and imaginative over the old and predictable. It's the part of her that crafted one last puzzle despite having no expectations that her sons would succeed at solving it. She has faith, somewhere deep inside her, that another world is possible, even if none of her contemporaries (not even herself) have proved capable of reaching it.
Character's Pronouns: she/her
Character's Canon: Blue Prince
Physical Description:
Baroness Auravei is an elderly white woman. Her hair is wavy and mostly silver, with some remaining brown hair mixed in. She tends to wear blazers over long dresses, prefers circular stud earrings, and is almost always seen with two signature pieces of jewelry: an emerald bracelet on her right wrist, and a pendant necklace portraying an inneclipse (an astronomical event where the small, red "rogue moon" of Mora passes in front of the large crescent "devoted moon").
Character's History:
Lady Auravei was born sometime in the late Fifth Era of Orinda Aries to minor nobility, and was probably only a few years old when Fenn won the Realm's bloody civil war.
We know nothing more of her parents, but we do know that Auravei chose, when an adult, to attend university abroad, where she would learn the art and science of Corarican architectural drafting (the principles behind designing, building, and taming the type of spooky non-Euclidean house that rearranges itself when you aren't looking and has too much square footage for its dimensions).
She returned to her homeland a Grand Architect, and had a successful career in that field before settling down, marrying Baron Tomas Sinclair, and buying 80 acres of land near Mount Holly in 1912. She spent the next year designing her magnum opus: a collection of 45 floorplans meant to encompass all the needs of a dwelling, which she eventually decided to use as the basis of a Drafting House she would build on the Mount Holly estate to be her home.
In 1920, Baroness Auravei gave birth to her eldest son Herbert Sinclair, who was followed by another son (Simon Sinclair) three years later. To educate them outside the control of the new government (which Tomas and Auravei both disliked, for different reasons), Auravei drafted a makeshift schoolhouse on the grounds, which would be used by the children of nearby Reddington for the next 30 or 40 years.
Over the decades to follow, Auravei would continue to practice her art, as well as assist in some capacity with Tomas's company SYNKA... and would gradually grow distant from her sons and increasingly disillusioned with both the politics of the Realm and the narrowness of its citizens' vision (including her own). This led her, in 1952, to write a new will, in which her family received only a token inheritance. Instead, she built an intricate spiral of puzzles and clues, leading to the atelier in which she'd originally designed the Mount Holly manor... and left the vast bulk of her personal possessions, including her most treasured works, to whoever could successfully navigate that labyrinth and reach its core.
Several years later, Grand Architect Auravei quietly passed away.
Character's Personality:
Lady Auravei is, at her core, an idealistic visionary with a sparkling intellect, tarnished by unrealistically high standards and a bad habit of scorning people who don't live up to them.
Her most formative years were away in Corarica, studying at their famous – and notably egalitarian, for the setting – universities. She learned from the era's greatest minds, and interacted with students and teachers from all over the world, developing nuanced political and religious viewpoints from her experience there. In particular, central to her values is a deep respect for the twin virtues of truth and creativity. An architectural blueprint can't pretend that the soil is looser or more packed than it is. It can't claim that there are more than 360 degrees in a circle and get away with it. That which is built without facing and respecting the truth will collapse. But without imagination, nothing new can be built at all, no new truths uncovered; one becomes trapped in the old, small box of what one's predecessors considered "normal".
The union of these two facets – imagination/creativity as a tool in the search for truth – also reflects another lifelong passion of Auravei's: her love for puzzles, riddles, and other tests of wit, going back to the Mora Jai puzzle boxes of her childhood. There's nothing she respects quite so much as someone willing and able to pick through an elaborate enigma to find the thread that led from question to answer.
Unfortunately, the energy that once animated her on these topics is much more difficult for her to conjure up at her canon point, trained out of her by experience. Living in a social circle where the only live political question was "are you loyal to the new king's red banners, or secretly loyal to the old king's black ones", how was she to discuss her more fundamental skepticism of feudal hierarchy, or her religious beliefs about Orinda being the final paragon rather than the first? The few times she tried, she was written off as eccentric or misunderstood completely. Worse yet, she lived in a nation whose rulers had no respect for truth or imagination at all, whose policy was increasingly to bury any evidence or creative expression inconvenient to the City of Fenn's hold on political power.
Even her family was no refuge. Her eldest son's imitation of her (his love of riddles, his own tour of study in Corarica) was entwined with a lack of ambition that made her feel like he'd taken that path "by default" rather than choosing his own way. Meanwhile, her younger son, whose imagination and passion for reading endeared him to her, proved susceptible to exactly the kind of black-and-white (black-and-red?) thinking that frustrated her from her countrymen... a worldview that would eventually cost him his life.
In the end, that's how her intellectualism turned from a strength into a flaw: it became a vehicle of scorn. She rarely tries to discuss her beliefs anymore, because she's used to nobody exercising the necessary grey cells to understand them. Her once-playful cleverness now manifests as aloofness because she's had no-one to play with. She struggles to dream with the idealism she once showed because she expects reality to rudely wake her up. She bears this scorn even for herself; in her latter years, she's characterizes her religious beliefs as "foolish superstition" and privately laments a career that, no matter the concrete success it achieved, failed to create anything truly new since the 1910s.
But beneath it all, even on her deathbed, there's a part of her that still believes in her ideals (that is, in the power of truth and creativity to manifest a better tomorrow than what seems imaginable today)... and we know this because, despite her prickly exterior, that hope shows up again and again in her art. It's the part of her that keeps returning to the symbolism of the "inneclipse" – the Rogue Moon passing in front of the Devoted Moon – which she associates with the victory of the new and imaginative over the old and predictable. It's the part of her that crafted one last puzzle despite having no expectations that her sons would succeed at solving it. She has faith, somewhere deep inside her, that another world is possible, even if none of her contemporaries (not even herself) have proved capable of reaching it.
