@ArenaSnow Last week ended up being much busier than I imagined, but I finally finished. XD

another goddamn pyromancer [+]

Name: Sharadur

Physical:
Sharadur is slightly above average height for a woman by human standards, with amber eyes and red-orange hair cut relatively short. More often than not, she goes around wearing armor. While her gear is of decent craftsmanship, she usually seems awkward and uncomfortable in her mail, as if unaccustomed to wearing such garb. She typically feels warm, almost feverish, to the touch. It is not uncommon for there to be a heat shimmer or few small curls of smoke wafting around her person, particularly after she has been using her magical talents.

Abilities:
Phoenix sorcery-
Supposedly, somewhere in her some unnamed blood relation did some deed or performed some favor and was blessed by a phoenix as a result. Every now and again, this blessing manifests itself in her bloodline, with Sharadur being the current recipient of the immortal flame- at least, that's the story she is going with for the moment. It seems plausible enough. Still, what is beyond doubt is that Sharadur is a talented pyromancer. She can invoke this power to channel all manner of fire-related magic: from the basic and traditional "lighting shit on fire", to making existing flames grow and shrink and even wreathing herself in a mantle of flame at need. Unfortunately fire is rather unpredictable by nature, which sometimes leads to Sharadur unintentionally lashing out with her power- especially when blood runs hot and emotions are on edge.

Starting Gear:
Breastplate, chain shirt, leather armor, daggers, rapier. Most of her armor is a recent purchase and while the craftsmanship is plain, it is clearly well made.

Personality/Goals:
Sharadur is a rather impulsive, stubborn, quick tempered and not very well spoken. Being born to common merchants, she has no proper family name and has spent the majority of her life around boats and near sailors. As a result, she knows very little by way of courtly decorum and has a vulgar vocabulary and rough manner to boot. Not having a completely solid grip on her own magical talent, when her temper flares, so do nearby flames.

All her life she has had a thirst for adventure, which is part of the reason she is currently so far from home. Unfortunately, she has also spent an entire life hearing and believing derogatory remarks made about city-folk and mainlanders (they're all a bunch of pasty-faced sheep fuckers after all- everyone knows that). This has left her with a rather negative impression regarding the people she now finds herself surrounded by and an outright hostility towards any fancy-pants noble she runs into. When she does find herself in the company of the latter, she often becomes suspicious of their motives and assumes they are out to manipulate her in some way, since none of them know how to stand and fight like a decent person. Even the ones who do carry swords at their side are seen by Sharadur as a pack of fools with wealthy enough parents that they could afford extra sharp toys to play with, with their plethora of pretentious titles thrown into the deal.

That being said, when she is around those she likes and trusts, she lets the more positive aspects of her personality shine through. In her eyes, true family consists of those who you can count on to have your back rather than being strictly confined to those who you are related to by blood. She would be willing to put her life at risk to protect those she regards as family. Also, though she is well-accustomed to putting in a days worth of hard labor, she has no compunction against cutting loose and having a good time when among family. To her, a raucous tavern with good drinks and good company is the ideal way to end a long day.

As for her goals, they are quite simple: get work, get paid, don't get the rest of her family mixed up in all this magic shit.

Backstory:
Sharadur was born on a ship in the middle of the ocean west of the mainland to a pair of moderately successful merchants. As both her parents worked aboard ships for a living and couldn't afford to just leave their jobs to raise a family, the first decade of Sharadur's life was spent aboard her parent's vessel as they traveled from port to port up and down the coast of the mainland and between the island provinces plying their trade. When it came to her parents, they ran a tight crew and considered anyone physically capable of doing work as a crew member in need of useful tasks to be given, even if they happened to be a child. With that in mind, the tasks they assigned were always reasonable ones that took into account stature and capability. Though not the most entertaining of childhoods, thus ultimately ended up providing Sharadur with a plethora of useful life skills from a very young age. Perhaps her favorite task to be set to was cooking. After all, the captain may ostensibly be the one in charge, but no one wants to get on the wrong side of a ship's cook, lest the gastric consequences be dire.

From as young an age as she could remember, Sharadur had a healthy love for the wild stories sailors told whenever they stopped at a port. As soon as she learned to read, she began to acquire books of lore for the small library she kept in the quarters she shared with her parents. Though she loved tales of adventure most of all, she never was very fond of those involving the high seas- given her lifestyle, it just seemed an unrealistically romanticized version of her perfectly mundane life. Her favorite tale was one she heard from her parents, something about her great-great-great grand-whatever having done some big favor or rendered some grand service for a legendary phoenix (the exact nature of the deeds were reliably inconsistent between each re-telling), who had then blessed their family line with his mighty powers. To a young Sharadur, those sorts of stories were fanciful enough to fill her childish imagination with images of how awesomely badass she was definitely going to be one day.

It wasn't until the midst of her adolescence, well past when she realized that bedside stories were nothing more than nonsense and that she was never going to be destined for any awesome powers that her powers began to awaken (oh man what a twist no one ever expected super surprise okay?). Even as a small child, she had always borne an unconscious fascination with fire, racking up several instances where she accidentally scorched more than a few of her parent's belongings as a result playing around with candles. It was considerably more significant of a surprise when fire seemed to begin reacting to her presence, with candles seeming to burn brighter whenever her she was around. This culminated one day at sea when their vessel was caught off guard by a band of pirates. In the midst of the conflict was the first time she truly unleashed her power, resolving itself in a blast of fire that set the other ship's rigging ablaze. As a a result of the pirate's subsequent frantic efforts to douse the flames and save their own ship that Sharadur and her family slipped away. Unfortunately, they hadn't gone entirely unscathed and while leading a sortie against boarding crews, her mother had taken a wound to the leg. The injury became infected before they could get proper treatment and left her mother with a permanent limp. After that incident, her parents decided that their lifestyle needed to change and set aside their current line of work, deciding instead to put their accumulated wealth and connections towards starting and managing their own shipping company.

Thus shore-bound, her parents were also able to attend to the matter of Sharadur's burgeoning magical talent. There was some brief discussion along the lines of simply discouraging her from using magic and convincing her that suppressing her powers was for the best, yet those plans were quickly discarded. Consult pretty much any storybook ever if you wanted evidence for just how poorly that usually ended up going. Besides, telling a child to simply not do badass awesome magical things that no one else around them could do was almost certainly a failed venture from the outset. Instead, they did their best to try and find one tutor or another who had some scrap of magical skill with which to teach their daughter how to keep her powers as firmly under control as possible. For a while, things seemed to be good, yet Sharadur quickly found her daily life becoming quite monotonous. It was right around the time her parents began regularly spouting off obnoxious sayings like: "owning one percent of one-hundred ships is better than owning one-hundred percent of one ship!", she knew that counting coppers and balancing ledgers was not the life for her.

Setting out on her own, for a time she took to mercenary work. The idea was a bit of inspiration brought about by memories of the day her magical powers awakened and she began selling her services to ship captains thinking of doing the particularly risky and lucrative trade runs. Often these involved smuggling in one form or another or took else took the ship through waters with bad reputations for piracy. As it turns out, fire is an immediate and powerful deterrent for would-be plunderers. For a couple of years, life was a bit more exciting again. Unfortunately, hiring a pyromancer with only loose control over her magic is a bit of a double-edged sword. Sure, it meant that anyone wanting to seize your vessel found themselves quickly converting their entire crew into a bucket brigade, yet it also meant that there was always the chance your own cargo accidentally went up in flames. In a world where mages were often looked at with deep distrust even in the best of scenarios, her growing reputation began to hurt more than help. For some captains, the risk was still worth the potential payout, yet it only took one or two major incidents to slow business down to a crawl.

Eventually, it became clear she needed to turn to a different line of work, preferably before too many people began to throw out labels along the lines of "rogue mage" or "unwitting destroyer". She also didn't want to take any chance that her family get caught up in the backlash of any trouble she would end up making for herself. Fortunately, news travels swiftly along the shipping lanes and the rumor mill was always churning out potential opportunities for people of every imaginable skill happening across the Bytanian mainland. With a bit of gold borrowed from her parents, she acquired some proper arms and equipment to take with her as she set out to start on a new line of work, which would probably just involve lighting lots of shit on fire. The usual.