Sister Vaneh Ompali, the Plague-Ward Apothecary
Alignment: Neutral Good
Class: Cleric (Order of the Wax Seal), 6th level
Race: Loxodon
Role: ally
Stats Ac: 13
Stats Cr: 3
Stats Hp: 52
Status: alive
Description
Sister Vaneh Ompali runs the plague-ward apothecary on the Duskvarren docks — a low stone dispensary that treats sailors, dockhands, and anyone else the upper city would rather not count. She is the healer a party goes to when they cannot afford a temple and cannot risk a question: she sets bones, brews antitoxin, sells fever-draughts at whatever the buyer actually has, and remembers everything. As an ally she is generous with medicine and stingy with certainty, and she is sitting on evidence of
Appearance
Twelve feet of grey loxodon in a salt-stained apron, stooping through doorways built for humans. One tusk is capped in tarnished silver; the other is snapped short. Her hands are cracked from lye and startlingly gentle, and she wears a bandolier of stoppered vials that chimes softly whenever she moves.
Motives
To keep the dockside alive through a winter the city has written off, and to be certain — not almost certain — before she accuses a noble house of murdering its own heir. She will not act on eleven weeks of evidence when twelve would be unanswerable.
Personality
Enormous, unhurried, and entirely unbothered by being shouted at. Remembers every patient by the smell of their illness rather than their face, and will greet a stranger she treated nine years ago by saying "the bad water, in the spring." Quirk: she counts on her fingers while she talks — not the conversation, something else, always something else, and she has been counting the same tally since midsummer.
Voice
Low, slow, and warm, with long pauses that people rush to fill — which is exactly why she leaves them. Never raises her voice. When she is angry she gets quieter and more polite, and the dockside has learned to be frightened of that.