Sella Tallow
| Sella Tallow | |||||||||
| Factor Tallow · the Tallow factor · the Yuan-ti Physician | |||||||||
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| Character | |||||||||
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Sella Tallow is the current factor of House Tallow, the Velkris merchant house that dominates the city’s refined alchemy — medicine, perfume, contract wax, embalming oil, legal poisons, expensive inks, antidotes, preservation fluids, and reagents. A yuan-ti woman, she carries a physician’s calm and a poisoner’s patience. As one of the five factors who sit on the Council of Factors in the Silent Hall, she holds the chair whose catalogue touches every other house’s work. The house’s saying is: “If Tallow made the cure, ask what else it treats.” She has not appeared in transcripts. World-brief canon.
Overview
Sella Tallow is the current factor of House Tallow, the Velkris merchant house whose business is what comes out of a still, a press, a retort, or a sealed flask. The Tallow catalogue is the city’s medicine, its perfume, its sealing wax, its embalming oil, its legal poisons, its inks, its antidotes, its preservation fluids, and the upstream reagent supply for almost everything else. As one of the five factors on the Council of Factors, Sella sits in the Silent Hall and votes on the city’s taxes, trade rights, and inter-house arbitrations. She has not appeared on screen.
The world brief describes her as a yuan-ti woman with a physician’s calm and a poisoner’s patience. The two qualities are doctrine. The Tallow catalogue includes the cure and the killing in the same satchel; the factor who presides over it is reputed to embody the same combination. The house’s saying — “If Tallow made the cure, ask what else it treats” — is the city’s recognition of what the doctrine produces.
Appearance and demeanour
Yuan-ti, female. Velkris’s merchant register includes yuan-ti among the city’s accepted ancestries; her seat at the Council is unremarkable on that ground. She presents as a senior physician — clean cloth, the small visible kit of a working practitioner, the house mark worn discreetly. Her public manner is the calm of a physician who has seen too many beds to be hurried by any single one. Her private manner, in the Silent Hall, is reputed to be the same calm transferred to longer-running matters: she does not push, she does not posture, and she rarely speaks more than necessary. She is reputed to note things.
Role on the Council
Sella’s seat handles the questions that touch what people put in or on their bodies:
- The catalogue. What Tallow is licensed to produce, what requires Veil registration, and what crosses into the unregistered private-laboratories work, is shaped by her chair.
- Clinic policy. The interface between public Tallow clinics and the rest of the city’s medical economy is hers. When the Council decides what kinds of cases the clinics must accept and what kinds they may decline, Sella frames the position.
- The reagent supply. Tallow is the upstream supplier for much of Velkris’s alchemical and ritual economy; supply-side decisions affect every other house’s costs.
- Mortuary supply. The upper-district undertakers depend on Tallow’s embalming oils; the Council’s responses to high-profile deaths in the upper districts pass through Sella’s office for supply availability.
Reputation
In Velkris, Sella is the most ambivalent public figure of the five factors. The clinics are loved and her position presides over them. The factor is respected as a competent physician. The catalogue is trusted by every merchant in the city. The private laboratories are not discussed. Her name is therefore spoken in three different registers depending on which part of the house’s work the speaker is thinking about.
Among the other factors, she is regarded as the most quietly capable. Tor Brask’s standing relationship with her — Brask escort companies move Tallow reagent shipments — is the most reliable inter-house operational arrangement on the Council. Lysa Marr’s relationship with her is heavily operational at the clinic-loan interface. Iven Orlan underwrites Tallow’s medical loans and the perfumery’s prestige financing. Elian Vaunt is the closest aesthetic partner; the Perfumery is a Vaunt-Tallow joint prestige project, and the two factors share an upper-district sensibility.
In-campaign references
None. Sella Tallow has not appeared in any transcript and has not been named in any in-fiction dialogue through session 16. She is a world-brief NPC.
Posture toward the party
Unknown; no on-screen contact. The party has not visited Velkris.
The party’s earliest plausible Tallow exposure is medical. Any clinic visit in Velkris — for injury, illness, or magical complication — enters them into Tallow paperwork and, depending on the case, a Tallow loan ledger. The party will meet junior staff long before they meet Sella. A more serious complication would be exposure to the Private Laboratories: if any party member’s injuries, ancestry, or behaviour interests Tallow’s research staff, the contact will be polite, the offer will be specific, and the consequences of declining will be invisible and patient. The party should be aware that the same factor who would discreetly extend that offer is also the city’s most respected practising physician. Both roles are real.
Status as of session 16
Alive (presumed), seated as factor of House Tallow, holding one of the five chairs at the Silent Hall. Off-screen.
See also
- House Tallow
- Council of Factors
- Velkris
- Silent Hall
- Tor Brask
- Lysa Marr
- Iven Orlan
- Elian Vaunt
- Order of the Veil