Lizaveta

It wouldn’t be quite accurate to say that Lizaveta Medvedeva wasn’t born poor – the number of people in the Kingdom of Vini who aren’t born poor is a low one indeed. It’s more accurate to say that Lizaveta was born *less* poor than most people in the Kingdom. Lizaveta’s grandparents had worked hard to pool what little resources they could scrape together to make their childrens’ lives better. By the time Lizaveta herself was born, her parents (Arseniy and Agata Medvedeva) had begun to use those resources to try to prepare an enterprise for themselves.
By the time that Lizaveta was twelve, they had finally succeeded in putting together that enterprise, a merchant endeavor. Arseniy and Agata together took a wagon and headed out to the border with Perus, trading what Vinian goods they thought would be sufficiently exotic and novel to find a market within Perus. Perus’ particular situation led them to profits: Perus was wealthy enough and merchant-based enough to actually have something of a middle class able to buy luxuries, but the wealth was concentrated enough and the country draconian enough that most Perusians didn’t have access to other countries’ imports.
This was actually something of an illicit scheme – they really weren’t supposed to be there, and they really weren’t supposed to be going to and from the border like that, AND Perus didn’t tend to like merchants from its neighbors, well, existing. But they weren’t hurting anyone, so they figured it was fine, and they did quite well for themselves, overall managing to achieve that rarest of things in Vini: success. They ended up becoming some of Vini’s wealthier citizens (more and moreso as the years went on), and they used that money to improve the life of their beloved daughter in many ways.
In her younger teenage years, this took the form of both doting on her and lavishing her with nice things, making her quite the happy girl, and then they used this money to pay her way through one of Vini’s few universities. She had started off learning about dark magic and found that she had a natural aptitude for magical study, due to a curious and studious nature that let her understand how magic systems work quickly and easily.
And that’s when one of the merchant titans of Perus decided that Arseniy and Agata Medevedeva had become a threat to his economic monopoly and to his domination of his region of Perus, and took action, capturing the two when they crossed the border, coming up with twisted charges, and then having them hung and displayed at the border with Vini.
Lizaveta was completely crushed by the loss of parents that she’d loved very much, and for a period of time she withdrew from her classes and from life in general, curling in on herself and having no idea how to process the very large hole in her life where her family had been. She was adrift, lost, and grieving, and the once-studious girl didn’t even leave her room for days, her whole world shattered. When she did begin to return to her life, albeit still quite depressed, her interests shifted.
She neglected her magical work in favor of finding out more about the world, learned more about the way that Vini, and for that matter people of all of the world’s kingdoms, had been victimized, ground into the dust by the way the world worked. She learned about Perus, she learned about the way Perus made carefully sure that its neighbors would never eclipse it, and in the middle of learning about Perus’ economic domination in the moments she wasn’t too crushed to put up the effort, she stumbled upon a relatively new book written by an author in Vaa, the Manifesto of the Peasantry.
It is hard to overstate the effect of this book on Lizaveta. It changed her way of thought to an entirely new view of the world – a view of the world in three classes, and in three stages. The Manifesto spoke of the aristocracy, the merchantry, and the peasantry, classes whose histories were locked in conflict. It spoke of the aristocracy dominating the both through tradition, then of the merchantry overthrowing the power of the aristocracy via monetary power.  And it spoke of the merchantry gathering wealth among themselves, putting their foot on the peasants’ necks, and using dirty tactics and exploitation in order to keep their number as low as possible. And it prescribed a solution, a rise of the peasantry and of the workers in order to create a world with none of this unevenness, this class exploitation, this dominance.
It opened her mind to a group of people that she had long in her life been unaware of, the vastly poor, the majority of those in Vini, who were so incredibly poor that they never had the opportunity to even make their children any richer, those who spent their lives toiling and struggling. It filled her heart with compassion to them too – thanks to a combination of newfound empathy about what it was like to be oppressed, and with a naturally loving heart, Lizaveta became inflamed by the plight of the poor.
She also found a reason why her parents had been executed, a reason why her family had been so greatly destroyed. She took on a worldview that gave her something to fight against, gave her a vision of the world where no one would end up like she had ever again. And she took on a worldview that gave her a direction in which to funnel the envy and hate that had been growing dark and bitter inside of her, a caustic enmity for those who wished so badly to keep their wealth to themselves that they’d kill and dominate, that they’d do what they’d done to the parents she’d loved so much.
This put the wind back in her sails, and it gave her a new purpose in life. She had been a studious girl when she started at the university, but now she threw herself not only into her dark magic with a renewed vigor but studied the world as well and received lectures from professors on how trade and merchants worked. She even began tertiary study in matters of anima magic. She had a goal in life now: she was going to be the one to begin the revolution of the peasants and the workers, to bring to an end the oppression and exploitation and monopoly which marked the world, and her country, in its current order.
As the state of the world got worse and worse, it only emboldened Lizaveta further. It became clear that the order that Perus kept the world in was getting worse and worse – the aristocracy killed each other, with the king of Vini being assassinated, and the merchantry of Perus tightening its hold on the world but inviting a blowback at the same thing. The world was ripe for revolution, for change, for a breaking of the order that threatened to tear it apart. Motivated by love for those peasants so crushed by the flaws of their kingdoms and by the grasp of Perus’ rich, for the people at threat by the suicidal machinations of the elite (and motivated by hatred for those that would cause such pain, had caused such pain for her just to keep their riches), Lizaveta was spurred to take action.
So when she became aware of the existence of Virtuous, she immediately did her utmost to seek them out – these were people who also saw the flaws of the world they lived in, and if there was any vehicle for her to spread the ideology of the peasantry, Virtuous would be it…