Lysabeth of Kanbery, Female Granbretan Noble/Scientist (Non-Player Character) A recurring character from a Hawkmoon campaign, a variant of the RPG Stormbringer, set in the “Tragic Millennium Earth” of Michael Moorcock’s novels. H3-4 – There is no way but death: “There is no way for you to leave Granbretan… No way but death!” Lysabeth spat while gasping for breath; her voice hoarse from screaming and her supple body bathed in sweat. “Then we don’t need you anymore,” Nykira taunted with an evil grin as her fingers hovered above the controls of the device whose torments she had experienced many, many times at the Granbretan noblewoman’s hand. “It is the truth,” Edwar pleaded, held in the mechanical grip of another torture device. His arrogance and superiority had been torn away be the torments he had inflicted on so many others, but now endured himself. “Your only salvation is death… as is ours.” His eyes turned to his lovely daughter’s face; she had been his pride and joy for all her life. Despite Granbretan custom he had raised her in his house, without the twisted touch of the Sisterhood, and had even allowed her mother, a French prisoner given to him to question, to live as his slave and tend to her until her fourteenth birthday, when he gave her to Lysabeth to torture to death. It had been his proudest moment; watching his cherished daughter inflict torments on her mother that he could never have imagined himself over a full month before she thanked her for all her love and care and sent her screaming in agony into death’s embrace. “Please,” Edwar begged, unable to watch his beloved daughter endure anymore or live with the shame of being unmasked. “Except your fate and let us die.” “No father!” Lysabeth hissed with venomous rage, turning her eyes to Nykira and then Syn. “You will suffer as you cannot possible imagine at my hand until you beg me for death… as you have so many times! While you, my dear Dragon Lord, will pay for your betrayal with agonies that no man has suffered before! I swear it upon my very soul!” “Many have made that oath,” Syn replied coldly as he stood over Lysabeth with a dispassionate expression, as if she meant nothing to him at all. “I still live... they do not.” “Fate is what fools call the events of their lives they do not have the will to direct themselves,” Syn sneered at Edwar and motioned to Nykira and Tarl; whose hands hesitated above the controls of the torture devices. A noble daughter of the twisted Dark Empire, Lysabeth hides her lovely features behind a mask of a viper’s head, the symbol of her order. As all Granbretans, her order determines her role in life, and for Lysabeth it is one of their infamous sorcerer-scientists. When Daeron Syn is cast on to the Tragic Millennium Earth, and captured by the Granbretans, he is placed into the care of lord Edwar of Kanbery, so that he and his daughter Lysabeth could learn the secrets of Syn’s sorcery. But, despite Lysabeth’s best efforts to entice Syn’s cooperation, the Lawful nature of the Tragic Millennium plane prevented her from understanding the Chaotic concepts of sorcery. When her seductions fail to pry the Dragon Lord’s secrets from him, she and her father try to impress upon Syn what the Dark Empire’s normal hospitality is like, by torturing a captured Norman noble-woman and warrior, Nykira Ammath, before him. However, their plan back-fires when Syn helps their prisoners turn the tables on Lysabeth and Edwar, and flees Granbretan with Nykira and the Viking, Tarl Bloodhawk, leaving them at the mercy of their own mechanized torture devices. Sorry for the delay in continuing this series... I got stumped trying to find something to work as her viper mask... I ended up distorting the head of DAZ's Morphing Python, but the eyes are still in the wrong pace for her to see through.