Anna Venus

There’s a saying: “An Anna adapts to her surroundings.”

Well, okay, that’s not actually a saying; nobody but Anna Venus says that. But if it were a saying, Anna Venus would be a very prime example.

As with all Annakind, Anna Venus’ earliest origins are shrouded in mystery. But by ten years old she was living with one of her older sisters, Anna Magnolia, in Nobilisse – smack in the manors of Pureteé, in fact. Anna Magnolia was particularly talented in finding ways to get preferential deals with very powerful people, and good at cozying up to them and getting into nice business relationships. This meant that Anna Magnolia, and therefore other Anna Venus, lived a life that was more than pleasant. Comfort was less the primary goal for Magnolia and her young assistant (assistant?) than money, of course, Annas being Annas, but things were nice nonetheless, and the two Annas were in fact raking in a lot of money.

Of course, Anna Venus was still a kid, so Anna Magnolia was doing most of the work, but if there’s one thing that could be genuinely said about Anna Magnolia is that she was a very sweet and (at least, as long as it didn’t undercut her deals) generous person for an Anna, so she was quite happy to let her younger sister grow up with her. Anna Magnolia generally tried to impart the traits she considered positive (kindness, savvy, and the right amount of obsequiousness in order to get those nice powerful people in your pocket) and she was halfway successful. Anna Venus became a sweet girl, even into her teenage years, and certainly a savvy one, but sucking up to people seemed never to be in the cards for her – she was always very willful, and occasionally, ever so occasionally, to a dangerous extent.

Things changed when Anna was 17 and the bloody revolution that turned Nobilisse into Paysanne occurred. Suddenly, the noble class was finding itself on the very lethal receiving end of a large quantity of angry people with a guillotine, and given that she had been carefully cultivating ties and a preferential position with many of the more powerful (and more hated) members of that noble class for years, Anna Magnolia suddenly found herself very much disliked by the people in charge (who, in fact, had the guillotine). Unlike the nobles, at least, Anna Magnolia hadn’t always been settled, and she drew on her nomadic merchant roots in order to get the hell out of dodge, taking Anna Venus with her on a fairly arduous journey out of Paysanne.

During this time period, Anna Venus began to study how to use magic. She was an able-bodied seventeen-year-old, now, after all, and she had always been less willing to just fold and back off than her sister: Anna Venus would follow Magnolia out of Paysanne, sure, but as time went on she found herself more and more willing to just fight if the revolutionary forces actually ever tried to stop them. Honestly, why should she give in, Anna Venus wondered? What was wrong with kicking a little ass if she had to? THEY were the ones who had the gall to try and hunt Magnolia and her down, so why should they have to run, why shouldn’t they just fight it out instead?

That wondering didn’t end up amounting to anything – Anna Magnolia knew what she was doing, and they got out of Paysanne pretty much unaccosted. But the place that they went, Cape Capital (Magnolia’s siding with Nobilisse as heavily as she did meant that good deals with Leocorian nobles weren’t terribly likely) was a bit of a different story. Anna Magnolia found herself unaccustomed to the day-to-day chaos and violence of Cape Capital, and as time went on, she withdrew more and more into her own home, setting the place up with just enough security to let her stay in there safely and withdraw from the world nearly entirely, conducting her financial business from inside her home and practically never leaving it.

But Anna Venus, on the other hand… well, Anna adapted to her surroundings. Whereas life in Nobilisse had discouraged that willful, increasingly violent mentality that Anna Venus had, Cape Capital sure as hell encouraged it – and while Anna Venus had taken mostly a secondary role to Anna Magnolia in the past, it was in Cape Capital that Anna Venus really came into her own. She would come into its primary marketplaces and offer deals and trades with aplomb. And if people tried to rob her or threaten her or take advantage of her in some way, she was perfectly happy to fight back.

In fact, not only was Anna Venus willing to fight back, but as time passed she found herself enjoying the adrenaline and the blood of battle more and more. She became downright bloodthirsty, and got into fights near daily, deciding that not only was she not going to let herself be cowed by the people who tried to intimidate her or coopt her via force or just go brigand on her, but it was actually a HELL of a lot more fun to fight than any other response, only vanishing from the public squares to recover sometimes when she got her rear end handed to her, which certainly did sometimes happen. Anna Venus even ended up getting into fights in her spare time, though these usually had a friendlier understanding to them of “hey, we’re here to fight each other” – and she became well-known among the more fight-inclined people of Cape Capital as simultaneously amiable, forgiving, and willing to work with almost anyone and also remarkably bloodthirsty. Anna Venus is always willing to chat happily with people, even during relatively banter-y fights, and it’s actually really difficult to get her to hold something against one, and she’s mostly free of prejudice (she DESPISES the revolutionaries of Paysanne, but with pretty much anything else, including Anne’s status, she will accept with open arms). But if there’s a fight to get into, she will pretty much always throw herself into it with bloody abandon.

She’s left Cape Capital to work with Anna Carnation for a while for three reasons. Reason One: she finally went and got in over her head in who she picked a fight with, and she kiiiind of needs to not be in Cape Capital for a while til she sharpens her skills some. Reason Two: Moving around the continent to get involved in AN ACTUAL WAR honestly sounds like a lot of fun to Anna Venus. Reason Three: Anna Magnolia has started to do really, really poorly in Cape Capital, now at the point of being a total shutdown, and Anna Venus wants to see if she can find some better opportunity for her big sister.