Alanis Sheneth

Name: Alanis Sheneth (Goes by Aln)

Physical Characteristics/appearance: Aln is short, reaching only 5’1”, and has a slight build. She’s 26 years old. She has short, slightly curly brown hair, and brown eyes. She wears a long brown coat (down to her knees) with lots of pockets, as well as a simple white button-up and tan trousers.

Investiture: Knight Radiant, a Truthwatcher of the 2nd Oath. She has also visited the Nightwatcher (see weakness).

Skills: She’s very intelligent/borderline genius, a very skilled scholar, and an excellent historian. She’s passable in sketching, but hopeless at every type of music (See weakness). Aln has no training in combat, preferring to observe rather than participate.

Equipment: She carries no weapons, although she does keep a small knife in a pocket for sharpening her pencils. She carries several small worn volumes from Roshar, each discussing Investiture, Shards, philosophy, or the nature of the universe, in a satchel at her side. In her pockets she has large numbers of pencils and reed pens, as well as a Spanreed pen in a case (linked to one back on Roshar, owned by her brother) and a few other spanreeds that link her to her guild. Several notebooks, filled with small, dense writing, occupy the rest of her satchel, and loose paper, coins, invested spheres, and other small objects fill her remaining pockets.

Weakness: Aln is completely deaf. However, she can still interact with others well, as her visit to the Nightwatcher granted her the boon that she can see speech. She has no way of noticing other sounds, but words appear as small black letters floating around the speaker, dissipating after a few minutes. These words have no substance, but are entirely illusionary, similar to lightweaving.  In addition to the boon, Aln was granted a curse; the better she knows someone, the harder it is to use Investiture around them. This includes her method of seeing speech, so the words fade over time, eventually becoming invisible. She tends to get lost in thought easily, pondering scholarly concepts, and can often be rather oblivious to her surroundings.

Family: Her brother, two years older than herself, is the only family member she’s in contact with. Her parents and younger sister survive, but she has not spoken to them since she was 15. However, she’s extremely close to her brother, Torenat.

Home Planet: Roshar

Backstory: Aln was born to a small darkeyed family of the second nahn in the Thanadal Princedom. She was born deaf, and as such was very socially isolated throughout her life. Her family was kind to her, but only her brother Trent made a real effort to connect, even learning how to read and write in secret so that they could communicate. She herself studied frequently at the ardentia, spending nearly all of her time reading, writing, and studying as a child. It was expected that she would become an ardent as soon as she was old enough. However, shortly before Aln’s 15th birthday, her parents discovered Trent writing with Aln, and were furious. Despite being darkeyed, Aln’s mother believed strongly in the lighteyed ideals of feminism and masculinism, and told Trent that he was no longer welcome in their home. He was also rejected by the nearby ardentia, and was so forced to leave the town and enlist in the military to fight on the shattered plains. Aln was left nearly entirely alone, unable to communicate with anyone around her. It was around this time that she discovered that she was a surgebinder.

She kept it hidden for nearly a month, but her parents eventually found out. Afraid of her powers, they contacted the Vorin church, but before Aln could be investigated she ran away, travelling for weeks, alone, to find her brother. Eventually she reached the Shattered Plains, and discovered that he had managed to acquire a job as a lookout, with terrible pay but relative safety. He told her of stories he had heard of the Nightwatcher, and they set off together to find her. She only hazily remembers the encounter, but her boon and curse are described above. She still could not see her brother’s words, but they still wrote, and finally she could understand people. The two travelled around Roshar for nearly a year afterwards, working odd jobs to earn the bare minimum to survive.

When they returned to the Shattered Plains, Trent was reassigned as a common foot soldier. He was wounded on only his second plateau run, and was left barely able to walk. He was deemed unfit for duty, but secured a job as a mediocre cook for his former troop. Not too long after, Aln discovered the Alleyverse, but was hesitant to leave her brother behind and enter what was literally an entire new world. Torenat urged her onward, using his savings to buy a spanreed, and she left, swearing her Second Oath in the process. She entered the Alleyverse with the mission to learn as much as she could about the true nature of the suddenly much larger universe.

She then spent nearly 10 years travelling the various worlds that surround the Alleyverse

Guild: She leads The Scholar's Guild

Psyche/personality: She’s very intelligent and scholarly, loving to ponder deep and complex problems. She’s very hesitant to make personal connections with people, but she converses freely with those that she doesn't know very well. She gets very involved in scholarly debates, and has a stubborn streak that makes her unwilling to back down in the face of adversity. She's very compassionate, but also very practical, and she tends to put her research above anything else.