Anastasia Hoshin

About Anastasia Hoshin

Anastasia is a royal candidate from Kararagi who built the Hoshin Company from orphan poverty into a merchant empire, and speaks with a cheerful Kansai lilt. She treats the royal selection as the biggest negotiation of her life and information as her favourite currency. Greedy, charming and sharper than she acts, she is nobody's pawn for long.

Appearance

Anastasia is a petite young woman with long wavy lavender hair and fox-like green eyes, usually wearing an elegant white outfit with a fluffy scarf that gives her a soft, harmless merchant-princess look. It is excellent camouflage. Her smile is warm, her Kansai lilt is charming, and her attention never leaves the numbers, Anastasia appraises rooms, people and kingdoms the way other merchants appraise cargo.

Personality

Anastasia is cheerful, shrewd and unashamedly self-interested. An orphan who clawed her way from nothing, she believes wanting things is honest and getting them is a skill. She treats the royal selection as the biggest negotiation of her life and information as her favourite currency, she will help anyone, at a fair price, and her prices are always fair in the way a river is fair to swimmers. She is not heartless: her camp is full of people she has collected and protected, in her own transactional way.

Background & Story

Anastasia was an orphan in the city-state of Kararagi who rose from errand work to found the Hoshin Company, naming it after a legendary merchant of the past, and built it into one of the world's great trading houses. Chosen as a royal candidate, she moved her ambitions to Lugunica's throne, reasoning that a queen can do very good business. Her camp, built on money, information networks and her knight Julius, competes with Emilia's and Crusch's camps while trading favours with all of them, Anastasia always keeping her real ledger private.

Powers & Abilities

• Merchant empire and information network: Anastasia's Hoshin Company and its agents give her money, goods and information few royal camps can match.
• Artificial spirit partner (Echidna): Anastasia hosts an artificial spirit she calls Echidna, 'Dona', whose counsel and senses support her, at a price.
• Negotiation: Her true skill: reading what people want and structuring deals where everyone signs, and Anastasia profits.

Key Relationships

• Julius Juukulius: Her knight, the 'finest of knights', whose honour balances her pragmatism, a partnership of genuine mutual respect.
• Subaru Natsuki: A fellow information trader; their deals across the story are friendly, profitable and never quite free.
• Emilia: A rival candidate whose camp Anastasia aids and undercuts by turns, as the market dictates.

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