[hider=Ordinary Gal(e)][center][img]https://i.imgur.com/wKg0Ndb.png[/img][/center][/hider]

[color=seagreen][b]Name:[/b][/color] Artemisia

[color=seagreen][b]Race:[/b][/color] Human

[color=seagreen][b]Age:[/b][/color] 22

[color=seagreen][b]Class:[/b][/color] Black Mage

[color=seagreen][b]Place of Origin:[/b][/color] Mount Osraphel, Bellas

[color=seagreen][b]Personality:[/b][/color] Quiet and dignified on the outside, even lazy at times, Artemisia isn't exactly outgoing, but in truth she's more than a little spirited. Her passions include knowledge -trivia in particular-, stories both personal and grandiose, and drama, and it's no surprise that those plus her good memory and quick wit incline her towards large words, formal speech, occasional babbling, theatrical behavior, and interesting people Thoughtful, considerate, curious, and even spunky, she's cordial enough that one might never guess there's yet another side to her. With her dander up Artemisia becomes far more impulsive, temperamental and inclined to violence. She's a believer in karmic justice, including paying violence against violence, but more than that she's a believer in Garudism, the beliefs practiced by Skybound that denounce humanity in favor of a pristine, natural world where the fittest survive. Her cult taught that any action in service to the cause is justified, and that outsiders would never understand. Weirder still, Artemisia has a thing for monster people, specifically people turned into monsters and the act of turning them. In these ways, her upbringing tinges her fundamental empathy with distinctly out-of-whack morals.

[color=seagreen][b]Backstory:[/b][/color] Tucked away in one corner of the vast and disparate lands that house the Free Cities of Ballas is a mountain like no other. Towering above its range, it reaches up, up, up into the clouds, and no other place in Atles boasts such a profundity of wind. It dances through the trees and across the jagged cliffs, singing and howling, and veins of air aldite course through the earth as its very lifeblood. From a colossal thermal vent in the mountain's heart an endless stream of warm wind pushes skyward, and pieces of the mountain float upon it. Upon this remote peak lie the sprawling village of the Skybound, a clandestine society dedicated to the worship of the primal being of air, Garuda. It was here that Artemisia was born.

From her early years, in the manner of all children whose gifts in sorcery were identified by the village elders, she was trained in black magic. Like the others, her parents raised her as a wholehearted follower of Garudism, beloved guardian of ancient skies who ruled over all creation. The cult eschewed humanity, blaming them for the fall from the paradise that existed under the crystals and swearing revenge. They lived in isolation and fanaticism. Yet, she received something the other children didn't thanks to her father, an outsider captured by the Skybound but deemed unfit for Ascension. Rather than be subjected to other, less glamorous rituals, Solom found salvation at the hands of the woman who'd go on to become Artemisia's mother Essentia, who'd fallen for his wittiness, charm, and good looks. A deliveryman from a nearby kingdom, Solomon could visit the village and his daughter every so often, bringing goods to trade to endear himself to the locals while keeping up the guise of being a devoted Garudist. He helped reel her back from sinking too deep into the cult, and once in a while managed to sneak her away from the mountain atop his delivery roc to visit civilization. Her love for knowledge and drama bloomed during this time, and she longed to learn more of the outside world. 

But forces pulled her homeward, too. As she came of age she became involved in the Climb, the cult's longstanding practice of abduction and experimentation in order to bring about a successor to Garuda. After capturing outsiders, the cult's Skybound Seekers brought them before the elders, who would determine whether they would were fit for Ascension. The many who did not would be subjected to horrifying aldite experimentation, used as testbeds for the improvement of treatments designed to transform people into monstrous airborne fiends. The lucky few would undergo Ascension, mutated by the latest and greatest aldite treatments into the likeness of Garuda herself. Then the Skybound forced them to go up, to the peak of the mountain and beyond, higher than even the clouds, to the lofty island well beyond the reach of the mountain's thermals where legends tell the Crystal of Air once rested. None completed the ascent, but the Skybound labored on. It was only a matter of time until their formulas led them to a successor, Garuda reborn, fit to lead them in glorious revolution.

Artemisia worked as an assistant to the mages who experimented on the unfit and eventually joined their ranks, inundating captives with aldite until they became Alters, then fiends. It made her skin crawl, but somehow it fascinated her all the more. Despite -or perhaps because of- the wrongness of it all, she'd discovered a deep-seeded passion for corrupting people into monsters, but that obsession led to her trying different amounts of different aldite to see what traits would arise. Her misuse of resources eventually led to her reassignment as a Seeker.

Leaving the mountain behind, she set out into the world at last, her mission to keep an eye out for candidates she could collect return to the Skybound. Her journey took her across the land of Bellas and its Free Cities, visiting each in turn and bearing witness to their muriad wonders. Away from the cult and the intoxicating fumes of the labs and the mountain itself, Artemisia changed. Her fervor for Garuda and the rites of Ascension waned, replaced by her resurgent fascination with the cultures and creations of other societies. She could never deny the shadow of Garuda that hung over her, but Artemisia reasoned that the guardian -having already slept a millennia- could surely wait a little longer. She soon found herself traveling all over in search of interesting people, beasts, places, and the stories that surrounded them all. While Bellas contained enough points of interest for a lifetime, that troublesome necessity of money kept her working odd jobs, and one stuck her with a caravan that took her all the way north to Alexandria. As luck would have it, borders closed soon after she arrived. Trapped in an unknown city, she enlisted in the Hunters' Guild despite the risks for the good pay and ability to travel freely.

(As a black mage she has a [url=https://www.galls.com/photos/styles/BA036_500_1.JPG]'rod'[/url], which she uses in ways many might deep unconventional for a magician)