There are things that lie underneath the surface of Velvet's more open nature that would make most consider her only fit for the gallows. A few have even openly stated such to her when certain parts about about her actual nature are revealed.Yet despite whatever difficulties she's faced, there's a will to survive that continues to eke out, even when her situation seems impossible, and many of her circumstances have been considered impossible.She is not some god our outer planer being, and though she is technically mortal...she is also technically not. Voidweavers experimented on her over one hundred years ago, warping and twisting her aether to create something with the ability to live technically forever.....if the side effects can be managed.Though her aether bears the heavy mark of void corruption, her body remains pristine. Un-naturally so. Whatever the voidweavers did to her caused her body to enter into an animated stasis of sorts, unable to decay or change through aetherical manipulation or natural biological functions. Un-natural biological alterations still affect her(alchemy and the like), so she is not truly immortal in that sense.Unfortunately, the condition she's been placed in is also killing her, and she's doing everything she can to ensure such doesn't happen.
OOC NOTE:Everything written here can be considered potential Hooks for people, though keep in mind it's heavy heavy spoiler territory for what is going on with Velvet and her very personal story.That said, this doesn't reveal everything about Velvet, as the woman is fairly old with quite a bit of history to her, but it is decent amount of spoiler information that could lead to interesting interactions for those interested.Please DM if you see something you want to discuss!
The experiments done on her have left Velvet's aether heavily corrupted... turning it acidic, necrotic, in a sense.This corruption did not happen all at once, and those who experimented on her made sure she knew and had the ability to contain the aether inside of her as to not harm those around her unintentionally. As such was dictated by her "husband".She is a danger to those around her, but she was forced to be such by those who one held control over her against her will. She did not ask for such, nor did she desire it....and now she is doing everything she can to ensure she doesn't become a danger to those she does actually care for.This also makes Velvet essentially a soul eater, for she can in fact drain the vital aether out of an individual if she so chooses simply by infusing her own aether into them. Something she has, and likely will do if the situation calls for it.
Velve is what one may define as a woman walking ever closer towards death. One of the complications of what was done to her has made it so that she has far too much aether for any mortal body to contain long term. Though she contains her aether, it still absorbs bits of aether from the world around her, and this is constant, and never ending. It's one of the reasons many confuse her for being voidsent.Unlike a voidsent however, Velvet's body doesn't destroy aether that it consumes, and so all of that aether remains in her body unless expelled. However, expelling her aether is dangerous to the world around her, so she keeps it contained knowing well enough that having so much aether inside of her body is killing her.She has found ways to mitigate this, including forming a pact with a voidsent, but none of it is enough to keep her going in the long term. They're band--aid solutions at best.However, she is currently working on a solution which involves sealing her voidsent in a vessel on Hydaelyn/The Source, allowing the voidsent to consistently consume the aether she absorbs without the barrier that seperates the mortal world from the Void. Such barrier makes it...difficult for her voidsent to consume her aether regularly.So all hope is not lost...but even so, her fate is one many would consider rather grim, even if she herself never acts like it. Even in success, should something happen to the Vessel or the voidsent were to get free, things would only end up being worse...
Seperate yet tied to what's going on with her internally, Velvet was born a slave to a Hingashi Lord named Miyazawa Sumio. Lord Miyazawa was a slave trader who valued Viera for their long life spans, often using the fact that they will remain young and beautiful for a man's entire life as a selling point. Her mother was also a slave, breeded specifically for this purpose repeatedly.For a long time Velvet didn't even know what freedom was, and she was eventually given as a man to be his "pleasure wife" when she was only twenty summers of age.Her "husband", a Samurai and minor Lord himself named Yoshihara Takuma, kept her around specifically for the purposes of entertainment for him and his friends. He was also the one who made a deal with the voidweavers to have her experimented on, specifically for the purposes of turning her into his "cute little assassin bun" in order kill individuals who crossed him.Many would ask why she never killed her "husband", and the answer is simple...to someone who never knew what freedom even was, how would the thought ever cross her mind?It wasn't until much later that she was able to earn her freedom and become a full citizen of Hingashi. Making her a citizen and releasing her from her bonds was the last act her "husband" did....not out of compassion, but a twisted sense of feeling that giving her to anyone else would in some way make him feel lesser.Of course, he forced her to do some rather heinous things in order to earn her freedom, including but not limited to giving her life for Hingashi....which she did when she made her pact with her voidsent.
Velvet is a Reaper, but an unusual one to be certain. Obviously her pact isn't born out of a desire to gain power or hunt voidsent, but to help her survive and, in a way, to earn her freedom.Though she doesn't tell others this often or outright, one of the reasons she made her pact was to help protect Hingashi. She, in short, gave her life, her soul, to protect her homeland...a homeland that honestly had not been very kind to her up until that point.Of course, there are benefits for herself, in the fact that her voidsent keeps her alive(at least for the moment) by feeding on the excess aether that would otherwise have killed her by this point.As for the definition of the Pact itself, the terms were simple enough: Velvet is not to kill or harm her voidsent, Petra. She is not to interfere with Petra's actions in the void. Should she died, her body is to be inhabited by Petra. Ironic then that Petra seeks to keep her alive, but that's not something she's too willing to question.On Velvet's end, so long as Velvet's body exists in some capacity as a "living" thing, Petra can drain no aether from anyone other than herself and the voidsent Petra herself consumes in the void, and she can only come to Hydaelyn under the circumstances Velvet permits, if she permits it.This makes her pact a little more nuanced than that of other Reapers, but then, given that the pact was made in Hingashi, it had to be as such. Velvet is a Hingashi Reaper, recognized as such by the land itself it seems, and even the law of it.