Elaine Marie Faux Pas de la Croich (Elle)

The story of Elle is short at best - a mere brief travesty of a thread in the grand tapestry of this particular mortal coil.

Elle, nee Elaine Marie Faux Pas de la Croich, a dark-haired, decidedly busty young woman, was the beloved and only daughter of Count Harrold de la Croich (ne Harrold Cross), and sole heiress to the de la Croich estate and title Comtesse de la Croich. As an only-child, and female to boot, her father Harrold doted upon her with a certain fierceness and voracity that only a veritably loving father attempting to compensate and overlook his daughter's shortcomings could. And truly, while Elaine herself was by no means any less lovely than her Lanencrestian peers, her headstrong nature left just a little something to be desired by men of a more noble birth. Now, let us take a moment to examine the particular nature of her "headstrong" attitude towards life. While certainly many fairy tales and epic ballads bespeak of women and heroines with a headstrong nature, Elaine's particular flavor of "headstrong" could be taken with a far more literal interpretation. In fact, one might say that Elaine had a tendency to solve problems with her head. Less in the figurative sense, and more in the physical. At a young age, Elaine discovered that many problems of an engineering nature could often be solved with a firm application of high-impact troubleshooting. This, she extrapolated to apply to all problems in her life (including, but not limited to undesirable vegetables at mealtime and undesirable suitors at teatime), much to the horror and chagrin of her father, who quickly reached the conclusion that the best remedy for his daughter's preference for bludgeoning her problems to death with her face and forehead was to provide her with a classical engineering education in hopes of introducing other "problem-solving" skills into her repertoire. This proved by far to be the single greatest influence in Elaine's somewhat sheltered life, for through her daily lessons with her tutors, she found an invaluable outlet for expressing her deep-seated desires for escapism: she learned to read. And while her classical education did eventually prove useful in reducing her need to pound the living shit out of things with her forehead by replacing it with more constructive methods of troubleshooting, by far the most important asset Elaine gleaned from her entire education was the gift of literacy.

Of course, the one thing that Elaine enjoyed shooting more than trouble was the beejeezus outta some of Kell's creatures. Alongside her classical engineering education, Elaine took advantage of her father's endless doting to develop expert marksmanship with various projectile weaponry. As a result, Elaine's particular fancy of projectile weaponry and her classical engineering background combined to a fuel her grand love affair with siege weaponry. Throughout the entirety of her developmental years up through her approach on womanhood, Elaine lived her small-world charmed life, studied classical siege engineering, and devoured libraries of books redolent of adventure on the high seas, charming elves, brutish barbarians, magical whales, and dashing mercenaries, all the while, a certain sense of dissatisfaction lingering within the bowels of her mind. Sure, she was living a comfortable life, but it all seemed so exceedingly contrived. And then there was Daddy, and his... er... peculiarities. Difficult though it was to live with him, Elaine did love him all the same. It just, well, it just didn't help that Daddy was something of a "classy" man. And by "class," we mean of the "low" variety. Oh sure, though he was more than well-equipped to wallow in his own richesse like any filthy Aquillonian pig, the malodorous stench of "uncool" somehow perpetually lingered about his person like a soft-ripened cheese.

It is often said that money itself cannot buy the love of a woman - in the case of Harrold de la Croich, such was perhaps doubly true. For all that he compensated in gifts and doting, his particular mannerisms and "fatherly" quirks failed to inspire a healthy sense of respect and admiration that arguably a man of his fortune and estate should have commanded, especially from his daughter.

However, to gain the most understanding of the semi-complex nature of Elaine's psychological state with respect to her father, and the consequent motivations behind her actions, it is perhaps best to include the story of her father before proceeding forward:

Despite her Aquillonian name, Elaine and her father both hail from the Arseborough region of Tor Lanencrest. Harrold de la Croich, or, Harrold Cross at the time, came from fairly humble beginnings as the son of a short-order-fry-cook at his father's greasy fish-and-chips tavern on the corner of Choadingham Street in the dodgier part of New Cretinsburgh, a bustling up-and-coming cultural center along the countryside. Little Harrold Cross, unlike his father, preferred the taste of a quick buck over an honest day's worth of hot, oily, manual labor. It was only a matter of time before Harrold fell in with one of the many seedy crowds that often gathered at his father's watering-hole. Ever the charismatic salesman, young Harrold exploited his position as the lowly son of a restauranteur to create a front for the largest Tor Aquillonian lingerie smuggling ring in Tor Lanencrest which later became known as the Under-World, right under his father's nose. Suffice to say, the ring made Harrold a pretty penny, and for many a year, Harrold amassed himself a small fortune. However, as Harrold grew older and became ever more entangled within the hierrarchy of his organized crime empire, the life of an illicit underwear-runner became ever more taxing on his sanity and conscience. How many innocents had died for the luxurious silk and lace on Queen's drawers? How many indeed. At the age of 30, it all became too much for Harrold to bear. Taking his fortune and the many secrets of the Under-world he had built up for over 15 years, Harrold fled to Tor Aquillon, where, upon arriving, he changed his name to Harrold de la Croich (Harrold, while being particularly business-savvy, was by no means a scholar of the Aquillonian language or culture, and as such, managed to bungle his last name so thoroughly in an attempt to directly translate "of the Cross" that it sounded nothing so much as "of the Crotch"). Utilizing the skills and connections he had amassed as the head of a lingerie smuggling ring, Harrold invested his ill-begotten fortune into a far more lucrative business of importing and exporting cheap goods, all the while keeping his identity a secret lest the lingerie mafia discover his whereabouts and bring him back into his former business. Of course, while his newly founded business empire brought with it much strife of its own, it never quite compared to the stresses of living in fear that the Tor Aquillonian lingerie smugglers were somehow onto his trail, and none too far away. From this fear stemmed a general paranoia and distrust that plagued Harrold's general demeanor to the point of slight neuroticism, amongst which was a certain unfounded fear of seedy Aquillonians and their offers to "empathically heal" him ("the bad touch"). This fear and paranoia severely detracted from Harrold's already waning manly appeal, much to the point that he himself could be classified as something of a prejudiced, sheltered, narrow man. These qualities, coupled with his constant habit of examining and offering helpful, often unsolicited advice to new acquaintances about their intimate apparel, made Harrold something of a trying man.

It was perhaps this lack of an admirable father figure, coupled with the dreadful doldrums of living like a kept woman that at last drove Elaine to secretly escape from the family compound one evening in search of the life of adventure she had read about in so many novels and fairytales from her father's libarary. By no means was this a mere mundane story of "escape from a forced marriage," no, Harrold was a modern man if nothing else. Mere propriety would not part him from his beloved daughter - for that matter, nothing seemed to be able to part him from his little pride and joy, the fruit of his loom.

And it was thus that Comtesse Elaine Marie Faux Pas de la Croich of Arseborough, gave in to her longing for adventures, pirates, whales, barbarians, and perhaps even a tall dark haired handsome mercenary as cocksure as she was headstrong. Gathering a variety of her favorite weapons, drafting materials, and a sturdy leather bustier from her extensive lingerie collection, in search of something more, Elaine disappeared from the castle incognito and into the wide world beyond the walls of the family estate with nary more than the pack upon her back, a great big lie about her past, and the simple appellation "Elle."

Honestly, Elle's backstory is by far more interesting than any of the contributions she ever made to the New Galen settlement... well... except for utilizing her brilliant invention, "Instant Al Hadim - just add underwear," to instigate a Boxer Rebellion and tactical pincher maneuver on the invading Al Hadim forces in the spring of 2005.