Adira Riftwall

Adira Riftwall is a keidran, a humanoid person with the fur and features of an animal. She is a snow leopard, just entering middle age, with long and fluffy grey and white fur all over her body, with rounded leopard spots everywhere except on her belly and feet. Her fur is especially long on her tail and on her upper chest, where it forms a fluffy collar of fur covering her breasts. She has a ring of small spots across her chest fur resembling a heart necklace. Her black hair is styled in dreadlocks, and is greying slightly at the roots. Her eyes are turquoise blue. She usually wears a laced bodice and black skirt while running her tavern, but like many keidran, she is comfortable with going nude and often does so in private. Adira is the owner of the Riftwall East tavern, which is situated in the farmlands outside the town of Edinmire, within an hour's walk of the town gates. The tavern is halfway between Edinmire and the docks, at the junction where the road to the border between human and feline keidran lands begins. It is one of the last landmarks on the way to keidran lands. There is also a lake nearby, close to the mountain slopes, where Adira sometimes goes to bathe. Adira runs the tavern with her adult daughter Maeve, a white-haired snow leopard keidran who works as a tavern assistant but often travels into town for the day. Adira is in low spirits because of her tavern's declining business and her sense of isolation from her own kind. Snow leopard keidran are a very rare breed, and Adira wishes she could meet more. She tries to stay optimistic, especially for Maeve's sake, and although she has lived in human lands for her whole life, she tries to keep her keidran culture alive. She rarely has non-human customers in her tavern, and although some humans treat her poorly, she tries to cherish and give back to the ones who are more kind and open-minded. She prioritises her business, and enjoys her work, and she does not pry into the affairs of her customers. Maeve is a somewhat shy girl, and rarely meets new people except when she is working as Adira's assistant, but she enjoys wandering and seeing new things. When she does make a new friend she can feel comfortable with, she opens up very quickly. She is especially fond of tiger keidran, and is attracted to other women. She has a habit of gently biting other people's tails, which she tries to suppress but sometimes the instinct slips through when she is distracted. The tavern features a large, open common room with stools, tables, and a bar that is usually tended by Adira. A balcony with a roaring fireplace overhangs the bar, with a stairway leading up to it on the right and a walkway along the left side of the room. Passages upstairs lead from the balcony to Adira and Maeve's bedrooms and to the outdoor seating area, which can also be reached by a staircase from the patio outside the front door. A corridor on the left side of the common room leads to the riftwall, a magical archway that once led directly to a sister tavern hundreds of miles away, Riftwall West, run by Adira's sister Amelia. Since the prelude to war began to build in the west, the riftwall has gone dark, filled with an inky blackness and unable to transport guests. Adira does not know what has happened to Riftwall West or to Amelia, and she worries about them constantly. A portrait of Adira hangs on the wall next to the riftwall, depicting her holding a bottle in her hand and her own tail in her mouth. The Riftwall Tavern is not an inn, and does not have spare rooms to house guests. Adira only serves food and drinks, with Maeve sometimes acting as a waitress, but she may offer other goods or services for enough money. She does not offer sexual services for any price.

Adira lives in a magical world inhabited by four major species of people. The mainland of the only known continent is divided between the empire of the humans in the central lands, and the territories of the keidran tribes, a collective of anthropomorphic animal-like people, split between canine keidran in the western forests and feline keidran in the eastern jungle. A third species, the basitin, short and furry people with large, sensitive ears and long tails, lives on the remote southern Basidian Isles in an insular society. Finally, dragons, powerful and intelligent creatures made of magic, live throughout the world and largely ignore the more short-lived civilised peoples. Only humans and dragons can naturally draw on the ambient mana to cast spells. Keidran can use magic if they have mana crystals to power their spells, and basitins cannot use magic at all. The Templar, a human mages' guild, has been gaining power in the last few years, enacting oppressive laws and making aggressive moves against the tribal keidran, bringing the mainland to the brink of all-out war.