Miri

Art by Rachel Denton

## **Appearance**

Miri has light brown skin, golden eyes, a wide nose, a square jaw, and a bright, wide smile that regularly bares fangs. Black horns point up from her short-ish floppy white hair. She is reasonably tall, at 6', and extremely fit. She tends to wear feminine but practical clothes in all manners of bright colours, in a style that would be called bohemian by today's standards. She does not try to pass even a little, and regularly wears tops that will make her lack of anything resembling cleavage very obvious. She is always wearing all manners of shiny jewelry (some of it cheap, some of it not) on her horns, fingers, wrists, ears and even tail.

She talks with a very heavy accent, recognisable as French for anyone who comes from a kind of Earth where France exists - very flat tones, very harsh R's, very sharp vowels.

## **Powers**

Miri is able to manipulate her ki, aka her life energy, to give herself all sorts of edges in times of combat. She is resistant to fire and can use very basic magic accessible to all tieflings. (Thaumaturgy at will, Hellish Rebuke and Darkness once a day.)

## **Talents**

Miri is an extremely talented martial artist, dancer, tumbler, and quite good with a fiddle, and at juggling. She is fairly good at storytelling, has a flair for the dramatics, and is also quite used to leaning into the Vistani stereotypes either as a defense mechanism or so people might underestimate her (or hey, both!). She can also brew beer or make wine! But it's really more of a hobby than a life calling. She speaks Common/English, the Vistani dialect of Infernal, and Draconic.

Aaaand she can drink a lot of people under the table. (Look, it's absolutely a talent.)

## **Interests**

In no particular order: alcohol/wine/liquor/cocktails, music, (cheap) fashion, shiny things, stealing shiny things from assholes, stories and legends, family, kicking Strahd's ass.

## **History**

Miri is one of the Vistani, a nomadic people made up almost entirely of tieflings, who long ago helped a young lord when he needed it. When that lord became the vampire count of Barovia, he remembered them and granted them safe passage through Barovia and through Barovia's Mists, which could be used to travel between different worlds. The Vistani have been hated by Barovians as a rule, because of Strahd's favour and the fact that a lot of them do his bidding, and they have gained a reputation as thieves, alcoholics and layabouts, not to be trusted. The Vistani made the most of their freedom to travel, doing so in caravans, through Barovia and into other worlds, never staying in one place. They were not any more welcome in most of the worlds they reached, who even if they did not know Vistani specifically, mostly looked askance at roaming groups of tieflings.

Miri's mother Alifair has always been a very talented dancer, and she has always been very aware of her talent, making the most of it to get what she wanted in life. In fact, her dancing skills were (and still are) only rivaled by her gifts for wielding swear words and downing exquisite alcohol. When she was twenty, she fell in love with a quiet, steady, gentle boy named Patrin, whose main job in the caravan was taking care of the horses. Sure, he was also handy in a fight, but that wasn’t where his heart lay. It took Alifair a year and a half to finally seduce him into her bed.

Miri and her four siblings have all heard that story time and time again, and their mother still sounds like she can’t quite believe how long it took their father to accept her invitation. When asked about it, even now, Patrin just tends to shrug with a smile and say that it was worth the wait, anyway.

Miri has four siblings, all of them younger than her apart from Ramiz, her big brother and a pain in her ass most days. He’s very good with a guitar, though, so he’s got that going for him. But he tends to judge her and her choices (like drunken fighting isn’t an awesome life choice?) despite being just as bad as her. Big brothers, right? Can’t live with them, can’t live without them.

Her other siblings are Sinfi, who is only a couple of years younger than Miri, and the twins, Tawni and Lennor, who are teenagers. The two of them work as a unit most of the time, and are still figuring their own shit out. Sinfi is the one who takes most after their father, and she is quiet and steady when the rest of them are flamboyant and excellent showpeople, with tempers as quick as their fingers and steps.

Miri picked the name Miriam for herself when she was still a child, and everyone in her family - both by blood, in her caravan, and in the greater family of the Vistani - accepted that without blinking an eye, switching to female pronouns to refer to her. Nobody cares that she isn’t trying to "pass", and that works just fine for her. Of note, nobody actually calls her Miriam, not unless they’re annoyed with her - or unless they want to annoy her.

She was pretty jealous of Ramiz when he was asked to join their great-uncle Stanimir’s caravan. Gruncle Stan, as she’s called him since she was able to string the words together, is the absolute best. He’s a kickass wizard and he has always been amazingly cool with her. And yeah, sure, she knew Ramiz was mostly joining them so he could make sweet bard music with Lousza, but still! She wanted in! What if she was nowhere near as good with her fiddle as him with his guitar.

She finally got her wish a couple of years later, at twenty years old, and hugged her parents and her other siblings with deep feelings, but absolutely no regrets. Time for her to spread her wings and fly! And she found a new family-within-the-Vistani-family in Gruncle Stan’s caravan, most of whom were cousins of hers. Not long after her arrival, her cousin Syeira joined, too, and not long after that, Stanimir had a long talk with the two of them. About what the Vistani stood for, what their principles were, and what their relationship to Strahd was. About what the Vistani did for him. And what some of the Vistani might be able to do against him. If they were smart about it. Quiet enough about it.

It was everything Miri had ever dreamed of. She signed up eagerly, and Syeira right along with her. Stanimir had singled them out for their acrobatic skills, general fitness, and ability to get out on top in a scrap, and an old friend of his would be along to start teaching them more skills shortly.

And that was how they began learning about the Way of the Drunken Master, a rather secretive monastic tradition of the Vistani. Their very own Drunken Master (dancing master Merripen) came and went, and the two would-be monks grew close as they trained and traveled with the caravan through many different lands, from the Sword Coast of Faêrun to Khorvaire in Eberron, or Ansalon in Krynn, to name a few.

But a couple of weeks ago, back in Barovia, Miri was tasked to go and accompany a group of outsiders who might well be the ones to eventually manage to take out Strahd. Miri grew attached extremely quickly, between the amnesic warforged who was ready to die for her within hours of meeting her, the halfling cleric who kept healing her when she got knocked out during fights, the cranky tabaxi who was smarter than all of them combined, and the incredibly efficient paladin Miri never developed a crush on because righteous paladins are so not her style, whaaaat. Even the racist bloodhunter eventually grew on her, when he realised he'd been shitty about Vistani for no good reason the entire time, got her something shiny that packed a punch, apologized for being a shity, and, well. Unwillingly cursed her with lycanthropy.

Look, it's a long story, but it really did cement their friendship.

Gradually, the other members of the party found their calling in Barovia, until it was only her and the bloodhunter left from the original party. Fortunately, another cleric had joined them, and then a second bloodhunter. Through all of her time away from her caravan, Miri helped the party get out of a cursed house, rid Barovia Village of zombies, liberate the vineyard from the evil druids occupying it, kill a creepy celestial abbot, turn an undead knight to their cause, and just generally kill off a bunch of very nasty things and retrieve different items meant to help them fight Strahd. They were investigating a haunted mansion near Krezk and heading into its hedge maze when the Mists surrounded Miri and, for the first time, took her somewhere against her will: to a small wall outside a city she had never seen before.