Planescape
PERSONALITIES IN THE HARMONIUM
Violet and Angel spend a grueling eight weeks in the training camps of Arcadia, in weapons drills, parade drills, cliff-climbing, bog-marching, trench-digging, WC-cleaning, potato-peeling, bed-making, uniform-cleaning, mock combat, midnight attack drills, endless lectures, inspirational rallies, and so forth. Their hair is shorn to a buzz as soon as they arrive and they are issued uniforms ... there's some consternation when it becomes clear Angel can't wear armor and cast spells (a full mage joining the Harmonium is extremely rare) but they eventually find a crimson fabric uniform she can wear instead of the usual red-enameled platemail. They are praised one day and chewed out until nearly in tears the next, with nobody they can talk to or rely on except each other and their three other line mates ("bar"). As a result, by the end of the training session, Angel, Violet and their three other bar members have been forged into a nearly unbreakable team, them versus the world. (Their same emotion spreads out to the entire Harmonium, which shares an us-against-them comradeship and loyalty along the lines of that of the Green Berets, Marines, or LAPD.)
A bit of dark: while in Melodia, Violet and Angel hear whispers that there are other "training camps" in Arcadia ... where chaotic prisoners are being trained to be lawful. They also hear even softer whispers about the third plane of Arcadia ... but the conversations always stop whenever anyone notices that there are recruits close by.
Adalwolfa von Ubelstein (female human planar, 19 years old): Adalwolfa comes from the gatetown of Glorium outside Ysgard. She's a tough warrior dedicated to Odin, but no paladin; she fights to win and gives no quarter. She has strawberry blonde hair (that she intends to grow back into its braids when she gets out of boot camp) and grey eyes (ch: 15) and prefers a battleaxe and shield in her fights. Violet quickly found out Adalwolfa speaks fairly good dwarven, so dwarven has become a "secret language" for the bar. The three girls have been teaching it to Vencel and Leod.
Vencel Csabacz (male tiefling planar, 24? years old): Vencel is a native of Jangling Hiter in Minauros of Baator. His tales of the city send shivers down everyone else's back; a city build from chain strands that disappear into the inifinite sky above, the smell of decay and old, greased metal, the feel of a rust-slimed chain slithering across one's neck.... Vencel hated the place but is loyal to it at the same time. Vencel has black skin and black eyes with no whites, black hair and nails and teeth, and a long, thin prehensile tail (ch: 12). He uses a longsword and dagger when he fights and has the ability to surround himself with Darkness once a day, which he uses to give himself an edge. Violet detects evil on him, but Vencel does nothing against the bar or Harmonium, and demonstrates no evil tendencies in boot camp, at least ... except lying to protect Violet from punishment that time she was suspected of talking during drill (which she had been).
Leod MacNachtan (male human prime, 20 years old): Leod is a prime from a land he calls Nairne. He isn't certain how he got to Sigil -- there were mists on the moors, and then a terrible land he had to fight hordes of living corpses to escape from, and then he found himself in a ghostly place where a kind but strange-looking being led him to a gatetown and from there to Sigil. Thoroughly lost and confused, he was quickly befriended by members of the Harmonium and decided to join, liking the honest warrior culture of the faction and believing that the multiverse does, indeed, need to be made more orderly. He fights with a two-handed sword and grumbles about armor. Leod has black hair and brown eyes and a homely face (ch: 9) and seems a bit leery of Angel's magical abilities.
