Helena_Baasch

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BACKGROUND
Do you know whom the worst bullies are? Those that have been bullied themselves.

Helena was always picked on growing up. A lot. But she kept her head down and soldiered through life, as unpleasant as it was. She was discovered to have a knack for alchemy early on, however, and was apprenticed to a learned master. After almost a decade as an apprentice and four more years as a journeyman, she completed her masterpiece and opened up shop for herself.

But.

Helena harbors a hate in her heart. She doesn't like people. This doesn't stop her from being polite and friendly, and supplying adventurers with whatever potions, tinctures, and tonics that they need to survive the rigors of the life that they lead. She'll gladly take their money. But she doesn't like most of them.

Helena does not harbor any grand ambitions, no particularly epic designs... she just wants a little petty revenge for all those years of suffering at the hands of others for no damn good reason. And so she has a tendency to take her unhealthy frustrations out on random people, using alchemical mixtures to shrink them, or to grow their breasts so large that they can't move, or to turn them into stone... or any number of other unpleasant things. She has a habit of keeping people to use as toys, furniture, or art objects. Sometimes she shrinks people simply to feed them to frogs, snakes, or other such small animals. Whatever she thinks she can get a personal rise out of, she's willing to try at least once. She's incredibly cruel, toying with her victims for hours, trying to break them mentally before she breaks them physically.

Originally, Helena would only prey upon those that 'have it coming'. But over time, the criteria for those that 'have it coming' has gotten broader and broader. Now, Hel goes out actively looking for reasons to disapprove of people to help justify the sick things that she has very much come to enjoy doing. After all, if someone 'deserves' what's being done to them, then her conscience is clear and it helps her sleep at night, even though deep down she knows that what she does is ethically unjustifiable.

Helena is a highly skilled alchemist and is confident in her abilities to the point where she's not only willing to drink her own potions, she's confident enough to do it without experimenting on other people first nine times out of ten. Helena has made many cosmetic changes to her body, most notibly in her bust line, but in other was as well, changing her hair color, complexion, skin tone, height, weight, and two dozen other details to suit her current whims.