Dakini Stardancer

Dakini's Description

Dakini grins lazily at you from behind the reflective blue-green shades which hide her eyes. Her hair is long and tousled, a bright, red-gold mane that occasionally hides her small pointed ears. She's a tall, slender, strong woman, with small but callused hands, and well-muscled forearms.

She wears a soft, comfortably loose, ivory silk shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Over that is a sturdy, quilted, sleeveless tunic of dark indigo blue embroidered with intertwined silvery stars and ivory-gold unicorns. It is belted off snugly with a wide, well-worn leather belt. On her right hip, tied down about the right thigh, rides a holstered flechette pistol. On her left hangs a decorated and runically embossed scabbard with the plain, worn-leather-and-wire wrapped pommel of a short sword protruding from it. Sturdy, worn dueling gloves are tucked into the back of the belt, mostly hiding a cross-holstered dagger.

Slung over one shoulder is her battered, padded leather airwoman's jacket, heavily decorated on the back with a rabidly snarling, eight-limbed, winged beast, and numerous other colorful decorations on shoulders, arms, and front. Her long legs are fitted with snug breeches, and her knee-high, well-used black leather boots and jacket smell pleasingly of years of quality leather care.

Writing Dakini's Biography

This was a bit of an experiment for me. I didn't feel I could really write much up for a supposed autobiography. After all, I've not played the character enough for her to have a past that's interesting to read about. So I decided to try something a little different. Any problems or difficulties reading the poetry on the following auto-biography page for Dakini is my fault alone, of course, and not to be blamed on the style of poetry.

There are four seasonally named 'stages' to her life. The first stage is when she was learning a martial art, mostly so that she would have a disciplined mind. Mental discipline was a necessity on this high gravity, dangerously poisonous world, for there were only the quick and the dead there. High gravity also caused her to grow into a strong body. The poetry style used here is a villanelle, with a deceptively simple, repetitive style to represent the deceptively simple, repetitive lessons she learned. The symbol at the end is the Tao, or the Way.

The second stage is represented with an Elizabethan sonnet. The ritualized, almost song-like sonnet demonstrates the age and elegant decadence of the empire world she lived on for that part of her childhood. It also suggests the subtle nuances of her training in social connection-making and leadership, as well as cutthroat business control behind a sophisticated façade. The symbol of the spiderweb ends this stage.

The third stage of Dakini's life occurred on a world with a culture that was somewhat Norse-like, and thus the poetry style is alliterative kennings, well suited to the short, swift, brutal weapon fighting style Dakini learned there. Closing this stage (for reasons personal to Dakini herself) is the rune Thurisaz, of contested meaning but probably associated with giants and/or thorns... definitely a rune of challenge, defense, and unpleasant circumstances.

Finally a haiku is used -- a simple, elegant poetry style which should suggest far more than it reveals. This denotes the ending of Dakini's childhood, and her emergence as an adult into the game of life. The labyrinth at the end of the haiku is the only symbol in color, to exemplify the flower blossoming into maturity. It also represents the inner journey of self-reflection and self-knowledge of the Seeker.