Enid Olanschet

Public knowledge

Enid is the daughter of Ingrid Olanschet of the ill-fated Sisters of Grace hospice, but was spared when the hospice was destroyed. Five years later, she came to the attention of Vlad Drakov after she approached him with a child that was unmistakably his grandson: whatever passed between her and Vlad Drakov II on the fateful day of the massacre had left her with another heir to the Drakov line. Enid humbly asked for help caring for the gifted child, which Vlad Drakov gladly gave, to his eldest son's chagrin. Vlad II's relationship with Enid has remained cold, despite his father's encouragement towards taking the remarkable young woman as a second wife. Kara, on the other hand, recognized the young women's shrewd and resourceful behavior, and extended an invitation into Kara's Daughters, where Enid quickly rose to serve as Kara's executive assistant.

Enid is a woman of many talents, but boasts of nothing. Kara generally respects her aide's discretion, but has let slip from time to time that Enid's financial wizardry has allowed Kara's daughters to expand their shoestring budget by almost 50%. Enid also manages the mountains of bureaucratic paperwork for the daughters, arranging travel papers and military authorization to grant them the freedom they need to work.

Enid's current assignment is building an official branch of Kara's Daughters in Invidia, as part of the Falkovnian merchant enclave in the capital city of Karina. She has traveled there with Revka Regess and Katya Blutkalte as her personal guard, and a complement of four others who were to remain in Karina. They lost contact shortly after Kara's accident. At last report, one of their charges was a teenage girl with budding sorcerer powers, who would be joining officially after things had settled down.

Secret Lore

Over twenty years ago, Ingrid Olanschet was working in an infirmary when she made a horrifying discovery: while unconscious, her lone patient had taken the form of a grey-skinned, sexless humanoid--a doppelganger!

Despite knowing the danger the creature posed, Ingrid steeled her resolve and continued to care for the creature, firm in her resolve to save life if she could. As the creature lapsed in and out of consciousness over the next few days, it was shocked to sense the woman's depth of courage and compassion. By the time it was able to travel again, the creature had become fascinated by her remarkable outlook: that it was not an enemy unless it chose to be, and that she willingly put her life in its hands, prepared for any outcome. Most of all, Ingrid refused to believe that any race is simply born evil, and hoped that her kindness might be remembered in the future.

The creature was not entirely prepared for a full-fledged change of heart, no matter how intriguing the prospects. Rather, it wanted to give the woman a chance to demonstrate her convictions and test whether doppelgangers are truly evil by nature. To that end, it responded to her compassion with tenderness, and a child was conceived on the eve of its departure. She would have the chance to raise that child up with full knowledge of its parentage and destiny, and soften the terrible blows of the Wakening.

When Enid began her Wakening, her parent/mentor Treb arrived and agreed to teach her the ways of her kind. For the next month, they lived in the wilds of Falkovnia while Treb expounded on Enid's previous education. Towards the end of that month, Enid began to change her shape, at which point Treb dubbed her "Enol," a true Master. Treb guided her a little through the gradual loss of her body, and then took the form of a slave officer and left her in a remote mining camp. Enol cried for almost three days before Treb returned to her in the form of another slave and explained how this was the perfect place to practice her shape-changing. In the camp she was exposed to the thoughts of the taskmasters and slaves, and Treb took great pleasure in pointing out all the worst parts of weaker races. In the mines she learned to see in the dark, flex her shaping skills and browse through the thoughts of others. She learned to pick out the weakest minds in a group and use that person as leverage against the others. Though Treb disapproved, Enol also discovered that the long-lived races had long memories into the grand and diverse history of Falkovnia.

After six months in the mines, Enol was ready to take other shapes, and she and Treb blended into the anonymous mass of demi-humanity, even as the camp hunted for the two escaped slaves. Now Enol learned about intrigue, as the taskmasters sought to displace the blame onto each other. When Enol accidently slipped forms in front of a half-elven slave, she felt the woman's horror, followed by terror as Treb quickly throttled the life out of the woman. Treb briefly took the woman's place while Enol disposed of the body, and soon the entire camp was in an uproar about yet another escaped slave. Now the taskmasters were frantic, and their threats only stirred the slaves to anger. Treb spread a rumor that the Freemen of Falkovnia were coming to free them all, and Enol carefully tracked thoughts to see who would be open to joining a rebellion. Treb took the place of a clerk, and when the camp commander finally wrote a plea for assistance, in inexplicably turned into a normal report upon leaving the camp.

Over the next two months, they slowly dismantled the camp, until one of the officers fled to Lekar, hoping to blame the others and save his own skin. By the time the Talons arrived to put things right, the remaining officers had tried to round up the slaves and kill them, but the slaves were ready. They fought back and fled for the hills, where many of them joined resistance cells. Enol and Treb played dead and joined the corpses, finally making their way to the border and out of Falkovnia.

For the next stage of Enol's tutelage, Treb took her on a whirlwind tour of the surrounding domains, pulling every confidence game and swindle they could imagine. Enol learned how to gamble, to win and lose to avoid suspicion, to find a mark and lead thoughts with conversation, to play the major weaknesses (greed, lust, fear, hate, pain, hope, charity) and get out of town without a trace. They floated from place to place, never spending more than two weeks in any one area. Enol collected an assortment of details from every face they met, and when they killed someone, Treb always took the opportunity to strip the corpse and make her duplicate the entire body, right down to the death wounds.

It was during these exercises that the two had their first of many confrontations about Enol's preference for female anatomy. Treb had sensed her childish commitment to her old gender, but had hoped she would give that up over time. On the contrary, Enol insisted on androgynizing her male masks at the most intimate level, and even thought of herself as a "female doppelganger." Treb couldn't hide its disgust any longer, and berated Enol's childish commitment to a human sexual form associated with inferiority. Enol defended her choice, pointing out that it wasn't compromising the imposture to remain anatomically female as long as all the visible parts appeared male. The argument ended in an impasse, and an emotional rift began to widen between the two.

By now the two had spent just over a year together, and Enol was showing talent that was only matched by her stubbornness. She had glimpsed enough of Treb's thoughts during unguarded moments to know her upcoming lesson in Levkarest would be an assault on her choice of sexuality. She dutifully baited her target, exposing herself to the brute's lustful thoughts for hours while allowing him to manipulate her into a position of supposed weakness. She throttled him when her time came, taking advantage of the very measures the cutthroat had prepared for her own disposal. She took his place in the city, in the underworld, in the beds of his common-law wife and both his mistresses. She performed every act of masculine power-brokering, wallowing in the power afforded to men because of their anatomy...and when she was finished, she feminized her moniker to "Enola," and Treb abandoned her in Levkarest.

Enola made her way back to Falkovnia quite handily, and spent the next two years happily with her mother in the Sisters of Grace hospice. Just when they were thinking Treb gone for good, a dire situation forced the creature to find them again. Others of its kind had infiltrated Falkovnia on a mission from Paridon, and unless they all took precautions, Treb and Ingrid's little experiment would destroy them all. Enola and Ingrid were grateful for the warning--Treb could have simply killed them both and saved itself--but they weighed Treb's proffered solutions with some skepticism.

The most morbid of Treb's recommendations was received with aplomb: Enola gladly mutilated her ears to distance herself from her clan. Likewise, Ingrid acquired a ring to shield her thoughts, but Treb insisted that Enola's measures would have to be more elaborate, because its fellow Masters would immediately be suspicious of a doppelganger hiding its thoughts this way. Nor could Enola allow others to read any of her thoughts without betraying her gender bias. Treb's solution was to introduce Enola to the world of alchemical philosophy, where alchemical purgatives and concoctions could distill Enola's thoughts and feelings to disguise them from prying minds.

To accept Treb's assistance meant several more months of tutelage away from home, but here again fate intervened. Enola returned just as Talons were putting the entire hospice to the sword for crimes against Drakov. Enid was detained by the Talons and released after they confirmed she had no part in the Hospice's treason, but not before Vlad II had his way with the young woman. Being a doppelganger, Enola had total control over whether to conceive, but she saw this as an opportunity. She had always preferred her birth shape, and a Drakov child would allow her to move in powerful circles. Finally, there was the issue of her mother's mission, which this allowed her to continue. Thus Enid gave birth to Wulfgang Drakov, presented him to the Kingfuhrer, and came to the attention of Kara's Daughters.