Two-Shot: Eir the Valkyrie

Character: Eir
Game: Shooting the Moon
Episodes: 2
Theme Song: The Sound of Silence by Disturbed
Keywords: Unfaltering, tenacious, unsettling

This week, while I was incredibly sick and still going to events to ensure they happened because I love launching new projects, Rob, Rach, and I decided to play Shooting the Moon from Emily Care Boss' Romance Trilogy. The three of us love urban fantasy fiction, and Rach and I had been writing urban fantasy fiction for Nanowrimo, which we're now reading, so we all had supernatural romance on the brain. But I didn't want to do something stereotypical, like a vampire or a werewolf fighting over someone, I wanted to do something different.

I've been prepping to play a valkyrie in an Urban Shadows game that I'm coming around to facilitating. So Valkyries have been on my mind a lot. I loved the valkyrie in Lost Girl, and so as I was sitting there, in my fevered snotty state, I decided I would try out playing a valkyrie in an urban fantasy setting. I made Eir, a dedicated, honourable, straight shooter of a woman. Her qualifiers ended up being Ethereal but Unsettling, Tenacious but Loving, Unfaltering but Merciful.

I knew what my other valkyrie was going to be like. I didn't want my love story valkyrie to be like that. Nor did I have much to go on besides those six words. Which, I suppose, was enough. I knew Eir was different in the sense that she was a very modern valkyrie. Fighting with honour was much more loosely interpreted now that battle didn't happen all the time. She saw legal fights without bribing as honourable as old battle.

Naturally this is a world where the unnatural was known to all. Her employer, a norn, was a member of parliament and she a bodyguard and attendee of the Norn. I decided she dressed like a powerful business woman, in pants suits that were very tailored. It was revealed in play that when she looks more like a valkyrie because she's intimidating someone, she gets misty and shadowy and the otherwordliness seeps through. There's a flash of a storm and lightning and the beating of wings.

As a challenge, I wanted to play a more masculine archetype for the romance story, as that's how I always wrote romance stories when I was in writing school. When I was told to make my women emotional and my men unemotional, I struggled. So Eir's a call back to that time. I know she's blunt about what she likes and what she doesn't, and she compliments anyone she thinks is worthy of it, friend or foe. I also know she has a limited patience for dishonourable behaviour and tends to see the world in the sense of command structures.

Why does she like this weird elven prince who can't keep control of his own subjects? That's the question I haven't quite figured out yet. I decided it was an immediate attraction because he had fought someone honourably. Physical fighting, with a god damn sword, wasn't something she was as much anymore. It piqued her interest. Plus he seems to fumble slightly and that's endearing to her in a way I didn't expect.

I'll be playing her as a person who enjoys what she's unfamiliar with. The men she knows are, well, vikings, and so she tends to enjoy thoughtful, perhaps quiet, and intense men who don't spend all their time drinking and marauding. I think she's a pretty straight up valkyrie though. She enjoys her duty and misses home dearly. The war brewing in London keeps her there, and she knows the Prince is someone she shouldn't trust because the war will be against his people.

But here she is, falling.