The Fairy Werewolf Girl, in all her glory.


[hider=Adrian Westley]
[b]Name:[/b] Adrian Westley
[b]Titles:[/b] N/A
[b]Age:[/b] Hard to tell. She looks young, barely reaching adulthood.
[b]Race:[/b] Human (Werebeast)
[b]Training:[/b] N/A
[b]Equipment:[/b] At the moment, Adrian has no proper equipment. She has yet to acquire any.
[b]Affiliation:[/b] The Faerie Court

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[b]Spell skills [/b]
[i]Curse of the Werebeast:[/i] In moments of great distress, or on the full moon, Adrian struggles in vain to hold back the beast that she becomes. It appears like an amalgamation of a dog and a girl with leathery skin, coarse and wiry patches of hair, cloudy eyes, and a deformed half-face which slopes into some sort of muzzle with crowded sharp teeth and slits for nostrils. Flaps of skin hang off the dense packs of muscle across her body, which twists itself into the general shape of a beast whilst still retaining that uncanny human appearance to which a werebeast is easily identified.
[i]Fae Sight:[/i] After spending such a long time in the land of the Fae (and eating the hearts of some of its inhabitants), Adrian has absorbed its magic. She can see what the faeries see, allowing for improved vision and the ability to detect magic. She cannot cast any, but she emits an aura of fae magic that can be detected.

[b]Other skills[/b]
[i]Life In The Woods:[/i] perhaps Adrian’s strongest talents lie in her intimate understanding of nature. This ranges from exceptional tracking, hunting and foraging skills to a well grounded knowledge of medicinal chemistry, as if she has lived in the great outdoors for her entire life - several times over.
[i]Flighty:[/i] Adrian is built for speed, in both of her forms. She may be a fair deal weaker than the typical human or werebeast, but what she lacks in strength, she makes up for with speed, agility and a decent measure of stealth, banking on the idea that if she is hard to catch, she is hard to kill.

[b]Personality[/b]
In short, Adrian is a human who pretends to be a human.
Adrian exudes a sense of the uncanny. She has those quiet, contemplative looks, ones of such serenity yet also such intensity that they’d make even the hardiest knight a little bemused. Her gait is uneven, bouncing from leisurely stroll to awkward shuffle, to a sort of frantic scurry depending on how far away the person she is meant to be walking with has gone. She has a reserved and dreamy demeanour and when she speaks, it doesn’t sound natural; as if she had placed great thought into some phrases and blurted out some more.

Adrian works carefully to perfect her manners but it is clear that, wherever she came from, she isn’t from around here. Sometimes jokes fly clean over her head. Idioms are lost to her. There are some mundane quirks of life that nobody would ever think about, from frying an egg to using a catapult, that manage to enrapture the little waif. She has a fixated curiosity over whatever manages to grab her attention the most and a compulsion to follow.

That said, do not think that Adrian is a dreamy airhead; the young woman is closely guarded about her secrets, jumpier than a cricket and difficult to befriend. As if her previous oddities didn’t make her suspicious enough, she stubbornly holds on to her past like a mithril lockbox and there’s only one soul in Telduria who’s been lucky enough to get the key. She gets uncomfortable around strangers, crowds...general unfamiliarity tends to set her on edge. Unfortunately, everything is unfamiliar. She is always on edge. 

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“Stay as long as you like, little one, but remember: you may never return once you have left, and the world will not be as kind as we.”

Adrian Westley was born in a land of cold, hard earth. Food was scarce in this frigid plain, but the small cluster of huts seemed to know how to get by - which lichens should be scraped from the frosty stones, what bait to use to lure in those shaggy white bison that roamed the tundra when the days were long and bright. Adrian grew up on cheese and tough slips of flesh - warm cabins that smelled of peat smoke with the sounds of drums and whistles, dancing by the fire. She lived in a world of tradition carefully documented, meticulously followed. Rituals and superstition gripped her village like the chilly fog that rolled in from the mountains. She remembered the war paint and the flint hatchet. The sacrifices that pinched their bellies in order to appease their gods. These memories are foggy, indistinct, but lodged deep in her heart and her unconscious mind. They torment Adrian with their alluring glimpses into the world before the demon war. She does not remember the name of this village. The names of her parents evade her grubby hands whenever she plunges into recollection to find it again. Wherever she came from, it was ancient and surely lost to the ebb and flow of the winter winds and layers of snow. At this point, it could not matter less where she came from - Adrian’s life revolves around how she came to where she is now. 

As with many ancient tales, it began with a land far away, and it involved a monster.

Coherent memory started with the demon war. Her village had evaded it for a very long time, but the inevitability of their spread had brought their beasts and monsters onto the snowy plains. Life was always a hardship where Adrian lived, but this was torture. Her people were condemned to a slow starvation, or a quick butchery at the hands of the twisted aberrations that lurked in the shadows. Adrian was too young to understand that this was happening but their fear seeped into her heart. The first attacks were brief and easily won by Adrian’s hardy neighbours; the demons and their ilk were merely testing the waters, seeing how efficiently they could wipe out and claim the little village for their own. When the first true onslaught was due to roll in, Adrian’s kin would be completely eradicated.

Adrian’s parents were quick to notice this. A mother’s blood is attuned to danger and they knew that watching their child die before they succumb to the monsters was a fate worse than butchery or starvation. They turned to their supposed deities at this time - more offerings were sent to the standing stones. They sang and danced and left merry trinkets, and sometimes received bushels of berries in return, or earthy vegetables that could never survive in such a climate. This was the undeniable proof of their patrons’ existence - it gave Adrian’s mother and father a hope that could not be extinguished by all the demons in the land. Unfortunately, the beings that watched over the Westleys were not omnipotent - a flurry of werebeasts leapt upon the family as they returned from one of these rituals.

Adrian does not know what happened between the sight of these hulking behemoths lunging across the plains and her first glimpse of the lush woodland grove she awoke in. Her fragile memory covered it up to save her sanity - all she had of the event was a throbbing wound in her side, packed with poultices and wrapped in a cloth so sheer and soft that no shaggy bison could have provided the threads for it. She cried and slept for several days, left alone in the patch of mossy grass with nothing but the birdsong and the warm breath of the sun on her face. She believed she was dreaming. She did not know how death worked, but assumed that this might have been the afterlife she had heard so much about. She wanted to see her family again.

When the crying abated, the creatures that saved Adrian crept in and started to feed her and bathe her. They would never give any of her questions a straight answer, and prefered distraction over discussion. Through increments, she came to understand what was happening - an evil force was sweeping over her world, and these creatures took her away at the behest of her parents. She would be safe in this land, and free to stay as long as she pleased. It was a far cry from the rocky expanse Adrian was plucked out of - a dense forest, with trees larger than any she had ever seen. The emerald canopy was speckled with golden patches of light, and a great manner of fruits hung from the boughs high above. The world was populated with a whole host of animals she had never even heard of before - not to mention these strange creatures, which could only be seen when they wanted to be seen, garbed with pieces from the woodland they inhabited. They varied in size, stature and beauty, but none were harmful and few were helpful. It took a long time to learn of their names, and longer still to learn the ways of this great and dense forest. But Adrian had all the time in the world to become accustomed to her new life.

Adrian grew at a snail’s pace, the changes so slight and indistinguishable that she could barely tell when she was taller than those little flower-studded playmates she hung about with. The only changes that she was aware of were the dark ones. The pains and cramps that seized her body like clockwork would imbibe her with an overwhelming sense of fear and anger. Memories of the world that she came from were torn up from the hazy depths of her mind - she had only felt pain like this once before her time in the Grove. Her life from before and these ritualistic transformations that she underwent were invariably linked. When she awoke, it was always difficult to forgive herself. Animals lay in warm red pulp and ribbons. On the worse occasions, some of her little friends were dismembered, their delicate ribcages peeled apart and a sticky crimson chasm left in the wake of whatever horror had taken over her body. She was always forgiven, for her friends knew that it was never truly her fault. She had learned, once, that there were others like her but she had been kept away from them because of this condition.

It marked Adrian. It changed her perspective of the Grove. She could not fully enjoy herself, nor could she lose herself to the games and the fruit without inevitably circling back to the frozen village and the pains and the butchery. For the longest time she forestalled her return to whence she came because she knew in her heart that she would be utterly alone. Adrian did not know much about that world, but she knew enough to understand that monsters were feared and cut down - and that she was human no more. As naivety gave way to reasoning and contemplation, she started to figure out that she was no true resident of neither the Grove nor the snowy world of her distant past. All the while she would play games and learn the names and habits of the fish in the stream. She would light fires when the cold of the night settled in, and make shelters out of branches and downy feathers. She would transform and then withdraw for days afterwards, wracked with self loathing. Soon she could climb those enormous trees as easily as her playmates did. She knew how to hide in the gorse and the heather, and how to make the call of the wood pigeon or the swallow. Life in the Grove came as naturally as breathing.

One day, Adrian knew it was time to leave. She felt it with an absolute finality that left her with no time to waste, no goodbyes to be said and nothing to pack, Adrian ran resolutely out of the world that had kept her safe for so long. She kept running until the trees shrank and dissipated into a pleasant, but cool meadow, and ran headlong into the legs of a man in a patchy black cloak. “Please,” she panted, barely able to keep her lungs and her heart in check, “I need you to help me find my parents.”
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