[list][*][b]Name[/b]: Signe Amundsen
[*][b]Age[/b]: 189
[*][b]Gender[/b]: Female
[*][b]Appearance[/b]: [img]http://safebooru.org//images/485/24884c79472bbd246e1203c36b634b3268d57b1c.jpg[/img]
[*][b]Personality[/b]: In short: 'foul-mouthed, misanthropic sociopath'. Raised to be a 'proper' mage, then disowned for her inadequacies, her sight was set on rectifying this--and attaining the Origin both for its own sake and to rub the faces of everyone to dismiss her in it. Over time, the veneer of gentility and morals have faded, as everyone she actually liked has died or moved away, and even her own family became tools. On the plus side, she's unshakeably confident without actually being arrogant, and has no fear of... well, anything.
[*][b]Abilities[/b]: Signe is an Alchemist by training, though nowadays quite firmly a normal mage (despite her knowledge), with the Affinity of Isolation. Mostly, in practice, this has tended to mean magically sealing areas off--but also a particular like for designing rituals and complicated procedures that should normally involve multiple people, but only use one... or start with a vast pool and reduce the affect to a single person.
Her spells also tend to be things that are in description mild, having been useful for alchemy and various crafts--like heating water, or sewing something shut, or even an effectively magical pair of scissors. Then, when her power grew, Signe altered them to be more offensive. The minor water heating distorted into something capable of boiling blood, the joining more than able to lock your legs together (though if you're wearing trousers joining them works perfectly well without the boost), and the scissors simply larger. Simply adapting well-practised but useful spells for all-out fighting was much easier than learning an entirely new skill set just because of the White Night.
[*][b]Skills[/b]: Through a long lifetime of alchemical expertise and a stubborn dislike of having to rely on anyone else, Signe has learned to create just about anything that can be made by hand. Whilst her arms make it easier, the fundamental skills are all earned from a lifetime of doing it herself--from forging, clockwork, and making clothes down to simply making all food from scratch even as culture turned against it. If you want something, and don't mind dealing with an amoral murderer, Signe's a good choice.
[*][b]Equipment[/b]: Signe's most obvious 'equipment' is her arms, which she's consistently replaced her actual organic arms with every time she was large enough for it--in order to have arms that can directly work with red hot--or even molten--metal and intricately shape. They're durable and reinforced enough that most things [i]can[/i] be blocked with little damage. Not that she cares, since she can replace them.
Otherwise, she owns rather a lot of devices--many of her own creation, along with as many of her deceased family's as reasonably seemed useful. It's a large collection, with a wide range of items... but impractical yo carry around more than one or two, leaving the rest safely hidden.* The only device she's guaranteed to carry is her dress... which simply repairs itself when damaged or dirtied. It's also effective as a blacksmith's apron.
[*][b]Brief Backstory[/b]: Signe was, in times past, foremost a skilled Alchemist--and later the head of a family similarly skilled, industriously working to compensate for their magical deficiencies through skill. Yet this never satisfied her, as the disowned progeny of a 'proper' mage family, she still had every desire to achieve that ultimate goal--the Origin. Yet, with her power level, that could never be done within a single lifetime. Yet the more powerful routes to immortality were beyond her, and the 'common' one chosen by Alchemists was beneath Signe's pride--how could you aim for the Origin if you bought the time to do it?
News of a strange event from the Orient gathered her attention as she aged and the alchemist turned her attention to homunculi. With her own creations and those of her children and grandchildren to sustain her funds, she made several, testing and refining her theory, until Signe deemed it acceptable to complete the final job. Creating a homunculus that was intentionally how she looked as a child, she altered the ritual to make the sacrificed soul her own... and retain her full consciousness at the same time. An extremely complex method of retaining immortality yet, with enough skill, drawback free aside from cost and--if required--something that could be tuned to your own short-term needs. Plus, in her case, the nuisance of having to replace her arms once she'd grown enough for it.
Drawing away from close involvement with her family--except to insure that they answered to her in the end, give advice when required, and make wide-ranging decisions--the alchemist returned to the fundamental problem: accessing the Origin would need more power and more options than her devices could provide. Various downside-free methods were fruitless and experiments in more risky methods revealed little more. Frustrated, Signe returned to one of the basics of rituals: sacrifice something to gain something. It was a widely used principle, and the unscrupulous would never look away from using humans as components.
Investigation into the subject, via various proxies and ignoring when one of her descendants found themselves in trouble by acquiring her reading material, tended to suggest only immediate gains. This prompted further experiments to a permanent power boost, scrapping moral boundaries entirely in favour of just getting the [I]answer[/I]. With vast preparation, and as the 20th century was beginning to draw to a close, Signe completed her current Magnum Opus--a ritual targeted to provide a permanent power boost but at fatal cost to those singled out via sympathetic magic and sealed forever via a high degree of compatibility and intricate preparation. That is, instead of using human sacrifice to power a spell, Signe chose to 'absorb' the magical potential of every last one of her living descendants and many of her other relatives, regardless of family or politics.
It worked, and she paused only to gather all the resources that she could before withdrawing entirely, intent on reaching the Origin more than ever, now that she'd jumped from a lowly alchemist to a powerful mage with no loss in skill or intellect. Only... over time, problems began to present themselves. Her arms sometimes failed to respond as they should, magic would go awry without reason, and even internal damage would present itself. A problem not recorded, with no clear solution, that Signe's analytical mind could eventually identify: a body and devices only meant to hold her meagre magical ability, forced many times beyond its limit... and too unreliable to perform the immensely complex procedure of making a new one.
So, with time running out, Signe has turned to the only source of a solution: hijacking someone else's plans and getting at the Origin through the White Night, then altering the body whilst inhabiting it. With death or glory being the only options, she has no intention of backing down, even if this wasn't how she wished to achieve her goal. She'll just have to go back to her previous experiments when finished.[/list]

*Essentially, she has a lot of items to choose from, with GM permission, but not carrying around an entire arsenal. It would be a bit impractical to list everything that a well-prepared alchemist brought along.