[color=00a99d][h2]Brunhilde Vigmundsdottir[/h2][/color] 26, Master of Wind Magic. [color=skyblue]MARKED BY THE VIGILS[/color] A younger woman, apparently exceptionally tall, covered from head to toe in a heavy brown cloak and a masked hood, revealing only her grey eyes, and a few stray strands of auburn hair. The cloak is covered in stains, old and new, in a myriad of shapes. On her back is a truly gigantic rucksack, with various unidentifiable instruments of science hanging off of it and peeking through the pockets. In her hand is a scroll of parchment, upon which she is constantly scribbling notes and diagrams, and when she moves, she appears to be gliding across the ground rather than walking. Were one to catch a glimpse beneath her cloak, one would find that she is not, in fact, particularly tall. She's actually rather short and slender, and is hovering a foot and a half above the ground. Her clothing is a skin-tight set of leather armor, covered in pockets and pouches, and upon her back is a series of odd-looking knives with feathered wings sprouting from what should have been the grip. Upon her neck is a steel gorget. There are several differently colored inkwells and pens sticking out of her pockets. She is a royal scientist (specializing in geology, meteorology, magitech engineering, and alchemy) from Sorvir, an island nation far to the north, and has only recently arrived at what her people call The Witchlands, as part of an expedition. Every few minutes she glances at the back of her right hand, which is marked with a tattoo of odd characters and markings. In her native language, it reads "I must check my journals." The first entry in the most recent journal scroll details the crash of her steam-powered zeppelin and the resulting hydrogen explosion, which started a small forest fire and alerted some [i]very[/i] unfriendly natives. Her team was killed before she even realized they were under attack because they, against her advice, left the safety of the airship wreckage to set up a camp outside. The following entries are details of the compositions of soil, the air, and the various types of flora and fauna she's encountered thus far. The right-hand side of the journal scroll features a "To-Do List", written in bold, red lettering. The first entry is marked 'Practice Water Magic'. The last thing she can truly [i]remember[/i] was her home town, Valheim, being attacked by raiders. Specifically, she remembers a large brute of a man swinging a club at her head. This happened fifteen years ago. Every memory after that is foggy and blurred. The basic idea that something happened and the vaguest ghost of emotions past stays with her, but beyond that, she can't recall events. Thankfully, that is the only aspect of her memory lost, as she can remember certain facts and can still successfully learn skills, although she can't remember doing so in the first place. She is somewhat on the cheerful side, but is easily angered by a few things. Firstly, people who lie while implying that she doesn't know what she's talking about. Secondly, incompetence. Thirdly, anything attempting to harm herself or her friends. Her rage is something one should take care to avoid, due to her poor memory - it takes under a minute for her to forget what happened, but the feeling sticks with her, making it exceedingly difficult to reason with her. Her favorite things include automatons, golems, comprehensive tool kits, and most furry animals. She dislikes brutes and thugs, hates incomplete tool kits, and absolutely detests hamsters. There is a strange, writhing mark on her left hand. She can't remember where she got it, or when, and as far as she can tell, it's always been there. [hider=Histories] She was a wind magician in training starting from a young age, as her parents were both professors at the local branch of the Sorvir Mages' University. She made startling progress in the areas of wind magics as a young child, growing to be within the top ten of her county before she was ten years old - although she couldn't hold a candle to the dozens of masters in the Capital, as they were all just as exceptional as she, with an additional several decades of experience. Her education branched out into extremely basic biology and anatomy, mathematics, physics, problem solving... Not many fields were left untouched. The people of Sorvir prided themselves upon their education system, and even the least skilled of people were at least able to repair common machinery after leaving school for the last time, so this was not uncommon. Her parents were strict and held her to a very high standard - which she met. When she was eleven years old, a group of raiders set up a camp several miles up the coast, and started sending demands for food and money. Brunhilde's parents were out of town on business at the University's main campus, and so the villagers decided to send some of their strongest men to deal with the threat. They never returned, and a day later, the raiders attacked at late night. Brunhilde tried to help, but she wasn't a strong enough magician yet to move grown men, even with her strongest winds, and one of the thugs retaliated with a club to the head. Her skull was shattered, and the injury would have spelled certain death in most places, but Sorvir's University had provided an abundance of trained medical professionals, who saved her life with swift application of alcohol and re-placement of the broken plates. She faded in and out of consciousness for nearly a month, and it took eight months for her skull to heal properly. She screamed each time she awoke, as the last thing she knew, she was having her head split by an oaken club. This came to pass in a few short months, though, as the knowledge of having been struck down and having successfully have survived worked its way into the last vestiges of her memory, and the doctors were most puzzled. Some years passed, and her parents left the picture, grief-stricken that their daughter had been 'ruined', though she didn't particularly mind any time someone told her. It seemed like it was inevitable when she was a child anyway. Her doctors began to seem familiar, and the knowledge of their names started to stick as well, eventually, though this was unreliable at best. She seemed to handle new information best when it was provided in an informal manner, as if it were a lesson of some sort. Trivial knowledge that wasn't directly linked to her herself. The doctors eventually identified this as her having seen their name badges and faces so many times that the knowledge had become something of a fact of existence, much like the name and appearance of the Queen. University lessons continued, and each day, Brunhilde walked into her classes for the first time and excelled in studies she had felt she had never done before. Subconsciously, these feelings began to pool, and her self-esteem skyrocketed, though she couldn't ever identify her own accomplishments. It was just... A good feeling. It felt, tasted, smelt like success. She discovered she had memory problems when she was fourteen years old. And she didn't give a shit. A plan for helping her cope with her lack of memory was formed, and she was given a tattoo on her right hand, reminding her to check her journals. It took some time before the style of writing prescribed by the doctors set in, but it worked perfectly. Each new person would be drawn - their face the focus of the drawing - and described in great detail from a neutral voice, impersonal. Their relation to Brunhilde was listed under this information - friend, foe, that-asshole-who-stole-my-lunch, and so on and so forth. Each day's events and thoughts were written out in an impersonal manner, as though they were merely... Things that had happened, that could have happened to anyone, and she was just a character in her own story. Nothing was missed, except in times of great stress, which she never remembered afterwards anyway. The memories in her journal started sticking over time, and she habitually stopped questioning when she was with a new, strange person, because there was often some feeling of familiarity she subconsciously associated with knowledge. All of her doctors were present for her graduation from the University when she was twenty-two years old. Having had nothing better to do and nothing to distract her, she had managed to work through to a master's level in several fields important to the Crown. The graduation ceremony was recorded via a Time Crystal - an enchanted sphere that could lock in moving images from scenes past - and archived in the University's Hall of Records. It was the first time a student with grievous permanent brain damage had ever passed, and such a momentous occasion demanded recording via the single rarest and most expensive type of journalistic tool in Sorvir. Brunhilde was hired immediately into the service of the Queen, who recognized her skills as being of value. She was assigned as a research assistant in the National Laboratory of Magickal Technologies, though this position didn't last long. The promotions were handed down almost on a monthly basis as she consistently outperformed each of her colleagues simply by paying attention to and recording the smallest details in her work. Unfortunately, when she became the Head of the Laboratory, and thus Head Scientist of Sorvir, this put her into contact with the nobility. She wasn't particularly interested in the niceties of formal society, and many important officials didn't appreciate how she seemed to not remember any of them, no matter how much they worked together, and she had the tendency to speak her mind on political matters often. Too often. Politics never sat well with her, and she never sat well with politicians. The Queen, especially, grew to hate her. She had never stopped with her Wind Magick practice, and had been taking personal lessons from the greatest Wind Master in Sorvir- one of the four Wise Men of the land - and had, thus, grown to become one of the greatest Wind Magicians in the nation, although nowhere near as skilled as the Wise Man of the Winds who had taught her. As such, when knowledge of the Witchlands (known to southerners as The Continent) reached the Queen, Brunhilde was first on the list of people who absolutely had to go on the first expedition. The decision was widely ridiculed by the peasantry, but The Queen justified her decision, stating that Brunhilde was both one of the greatest scientific minds and one of the greatest magicians in the land, and that if anyone had a chance of returning with information vital to the future of Sorvir, it would be Brunhilde. It was a classical political lie, but it worked, and Brunhilde was packed onto a hydrogen zeppelin with several others, who (by order of the Queen) had absolutely no combat experience at all - a petty move to inflict suffering upon one who would not even remember it. [/hider] [hider=Habits] A journal scroll hovers just off to the side, within her line of sight, any time she isn't in a dangerous situation. She constantly writes in the journal scroll, which seemingly has no end. The scroll has several splotches of coffee, wine, and mead stains on it, though they do not obscure the text, drawings, or diagrams. Her cloak hides her height as she hovers, as she has always been ashamed of being as small as she is. Her head wrap hides her face, lest she pass a mirror and experience the sudden shock of her age. Deep down, she knows that she's not a child anymore, but the memories of having aged simply are not there. Whenever for whatever reason she isn't writing, she's fidgeting. Constantly. Not having a pen in her hand makes her nervous. On foot, she has a tendency to half dance rather than simply walk, as she never truly 'grew up'. [/hider] [hider=Personality, in greater detail] Somewhat cheerful, owing to her high self esteem. Nervous wreck, as she is constantly doubting her own actions and wondering if she's made the right decisions. Grows very attached to her friends very quickly, because even though she doesn't always recognize them at first, their presence eventually becomes one of the most comforting feelings of familiarity to her, amidst a void of nothingness. Inconsistent. Her actions sometimes lack true predictability on account of not following a "normal" chain of psychological causality. Other times, though, she falls into patterns on account of situations inputting the same variables into her constantly restarting mental machine, and repeats the same reactions to similar scenarios. Analytical. Everything she experiences is run across her mental bank of trivia before she checks her journal for similar phenomena. Facts that she learned in the University and the Laboratory stick especially well. Mildly inconsiderate. Still somewhat childish - never had the chance to grow up. Paranoid, and thus overprepared. She keeps powerful wind magicks at the ready for fight and flight at all times, and is constantly feeling the air for disturbances, lest she be ambushed. The attack on her village has been the only thing she could truly remember for the longest time, and every time she wakes up, she finds herself protecting herself from something like that happening to her ever again. Stoic, as a byproduct of her fear of her lack of memory. She wants to be accepted and loved, and so she fears being an annoyance or a burden. She generally refuses to comment on her own problems, in case she may have repeated it many times over already and thus inconvenienced her companions. [/hider] [hider=Quotes] "You ever have deja-vu? That's the feeling I get when I'm around people I know." "That feeling when you wake up from a dream, but you don't know what it was, and no matter how hard you try, it just keeps slipping away... It's like that for me. [i]All the fucking time[/i]." "You can plant flowers in soil. You can plant them in clay. You can even plant them in some rocks. They're all different kinds of dirt. Seawater and brine are two different things, too. It's the same way with the air. You breathe it all, and there are different kinds everywhere. Wind mages are trained to taste the difference." "Of course I don't have any money. What do I look like, some kind of famous lab director or something?" "Who are you?" "Hm. Looks like Dad's gone. Good riddance - jerk never really cared about anything but his work anyway." "Who are you?" "Oh my god. Is that a MAG-LOK service kit? I've wanted one for years! (I think). Thanks!" "It's missing the fucking pipe wrench. I'm swapping it for a new one." "Who the FUCK let hamsters into my yard?!" [/hider] [color=92278f][h2]Claudio[/h2][/color] A redshirt. Died of exposure shortly after waking up. [color=9e0039][h2]Arnor Kalthun[/h2][/color] A squidlike "god" from ages past. Immense regenerative powers. Four feet of terror. Beware, for this immortal seeks to enslave all that live.