Here's a character of middling quality with writing appearing as I add it. [b]Updated: June 15th, Midday[/b] [hider=Clara the Heroic Modern Necromancer] [center]Clara [img]https://i.imgur.com/45fTxEW.jpg[/img][/center] [center][hr] [sub][b]"Look, just because I'm a necromancer doesn't mean I'm evil. Unleashing armies of skeletal warriors just happens to be a very effective solution to most problems."[/b][/sub] [hr][/center] [u][b]Name[/b][/u] [indent]Clara Vale[/indent] [u][b]Aliases[/b][/u] [indent]The Dread Necromancer, The Smiling Necromancer, The Pale Wizard, and The Grave-robber*[/indent] [u][b]Age[/b][/u] [indent]25[/indent] [u][b]Appearance[/b][/u] [indent] Clara stands just above average height, and possess the physique of an unexpectedly active wizard. Her skin is an ever-shifting shade of light brown, and an observer would be hard-pressed to limit her to any single race or ethnicity. A fact that Clara takes great pleasure in and only the faintest hint of an English accent gives any suggestion of her true origins. Her soft face is framed by a forest of springy coils that dance with each movement that she makes. Her eyes are diamonds cast in midnight that sparkle equally with arcane light and boundless curiosity. Lips painted with violet rest most often in a warm smile. Living her best Goth life, Clara prefers to wear alternating shades of gray or black. She pairs black jeans with plain black t-shirts only occasionally superseding the colors of the void with a collection of band t-shirts almost always depressing in nature. Clara wears minimal jewelry, her left wrist is adorned with three bangles of gold and she wears a silver ankh on a chain around her neck. Canvas sneakers are her jam and she vibes in a perfectly midnight pair of sneakers. To sanctify her coolness, she wears a black leather jacket at all times.[/indent] [u][b]Personality[/b][/u] [indent] A necromancer hailing from a cyberpunk future, Clara is a fast-thinking spellslinger out to save the world. She is strange, enigmatic, and oozes with arcane energy from every pore. A modern necromancer in every way, Clara believes that it is her mission in life to show the multiverse that necromancy is a force of great good. While steeped in death and the occult, Clara is intimately fond of people and the dead in equal measure. She is a vivacious creature full of life and warmth who does best when surrounded by others. She is generous in her disregard for money and values having fun above having a healthy bank account. She does best in loud places that are full of people, greasy food, and brilliant drinks. Left to her own devices she is prone to melancholy, long naps, and arcane experimentation that can threaten entire cities Dishonest, but in the kindest way, Clara cultivates an air of mystery about herself, telling vague and ever-changing stories about her origins, travels, and adventures. The only recurring hints to her past are buried beneath cheerfully told noise. [/indent] [u][b]Habits/Quirks[/b][/u] [indent] A research rebel, Clara enjoys filling the margins of her grimoire with sketches of people she meets and badly written poetry that a friend once described as "the sort of fan-fiction a thirteen year old girl would write as a joke." Clara is alarmingly willing to read her poetry to recite her poetry at the merest mention of her mad scribbling. [/indent] [u][b]Past[/b][/u] [indent] A wizard in a cyberpunk land, Clara is necromancer from a reality long since lost to technology and the promise of the future. The culmination of a particularly strong and noteworthy line of magicians, Clara practiced magic far beyond the printed expatiation date specified by the demands of her universe. Planted in the binary sea of the digital matrix, Clara grew up in the sprawling megacity that had once been the Eastern seaboard of the United States of America. A gifted necromancer from her youth, she studied under the few great masters that remained. Brilliant in her capacity to harness horror for good, Clara occupied a niche in a world that had abandoned magic as impractical and neglected defenses against what had been deemed to be nothing more than idle superstition. Vanishing into the sprawl as soon as she was able, Clara cut her teeth as an arcane consultant operating in the shadowy realm outside of the corporate world. Where others found darkness and lost themselves to hopeless cruelty and endless greed, Clara found purpose and came to believe that necromancy represented a novel way to bring great good to the world. Finding others like her, Clara became a legendary figure. The Smiling Necromancer who appeared from the shadows, not to murder cities with her armies of undead monsters, but to do what good she was could and to make the world a better place. Eventually, Clara wandered across what remained of the United States after the megacorporations had taken over on a storied quest once posted on the electronic boards of her world. She traveled into the Walmart Economic Zone from the ExxonMobil Industrial Cities. She crossed the Ford Empire, traveled through the Hewlett-Packard Federation, and eventually arrived in the Western Kingdom of Apple. When asked by members of the party, she claims with a wry smile that she was simply searching for an old friend, the wizard FastSpell, last seen in what in the megacorporation glassed desert that had once been Silicon Valley. Clara was said to have received an electronic chip from King Steve Wozniak XXI himself after saving the city from a demonic invasion. However, despite growing accolades she remained aloof and unaffiliated with any guild in the Western Kingdom of Apple. For a necromancer, she managed to maintain a surprisingly positive reputation despite her unapologetic status as a paid-by-the-hour mercenary. Not all trusted the necromancer however and many citizens of New Jobs City did not take kindly to her practice of the deathly arts and her habit of reanimating the recently dead. As her arcane power grew, the few wizards remaining on the Western Coast began to chafe at the many [i]interesting ideas[/i] that young necromancer proposed. Clara nonetheless established herself as a skilled mercenary and fearsome mage. Generally viewed as an affable, even kind figure, Clara maintained a surprisingly positive reputation for a necromancer and paid-by-the-hour criminal. However, not all the residents of New Jobs City had taken kindly to her fondness for the school of necromancy and her habit of reanimating the dead. Despite the modest support of the royal court, Clara found herself fighting a losing political battle with a powerful cable of wizards that remained in New Jobs City. When the subject is mentioned, Clara explains with great indignation that her colleagues were offended by her alarming lack of greed ([b]threatening the market value of magical services was widely seen as a most heinous crime[/b]) and to a lesser degree as a result of what she called misguided compulsions against necromancy that existed even among wizards. What began as a political battle, soon turned to bloodshed, and Clara found herself fighting for her life. Objecting to rumors that filled the net, Clara maintains that she killed other wizards strictly in self-defense. It was a spell of seeking cast in the heat of battle that saw the young necromancer summoned before the first door. Clara remains uncertain why exactly it is that she was tasked with joining the party in their current quest to defeat the final boss. Especially given the low view of necromancers that she has discovered prevails across almost all of the multiverse. However, Clara harbors a suspension that her current situation might have something to do with her relatively recent reanimation of the Dread Empress Joanna IX. Nonplussed, Clara has embraced the present dungeon dive as chance to do further good and redeem the proud school of magic known as necromancy. [/indent] [u][b]Moment of Heroism[/b][/u] [indent] Clara's shining moment of heroism came when she saved the party from the clutches of a lich that had managed to incapacitate everyone but the necromancer. She feels that saving her comrades from being turned into hideous mockeries of the living eternally enslaved to the wills of a mad undead wizard can be widely concerned a big win for Team Necromancy. It was either that or the time she taught a settlement of space primitives to read, resulting in the formation of en early society of Space Vikings. [/indent] [u][b]Moment of Tragedy[/b][/u] [indent] Clara's moment of tragedy involves her role in the destruction of a small village the party had encountered after passing through one of the strange dimensional doors. Faced with five chapters of corrupted crusaders, the party was faltering when Clara resorted to an arcane ritual forbidden since time immemorial. The horde of undead spirits that Clara summoned consumed several armies worth of enemies and turned the tide of the battle. However, pushing beyond the her limits, Clara lost control, and the entire village was devoured by the ravenous spirits before she could banish them. [/indent] [u][b]Strengths/Abilities[/b][/u] [indent] You're a Necromancer, Clara: Clara is a talented wizard focusing on the much feared and reviled art of necromancy. Cyberpunk Survivor: Born a spell-slinging wizard in a dystopian cyberpunk city ruled by merciless megacorporations, Clara knows how to survive in environments filled with high-tech weapons, gangsters, corporate assassins, and enough pollution to kill a planet. Friend of the Dead: Guided by the whispers of the dead, Clara has a knack for navigating dangerous environments and hostile situations despite her own disregard for pragmatic concerns. Some might call it a supernatural sixth sense, but Clara calls it game of necromantic instant messaging. Hard to Scare: Dealing with the undead on a frequent basis has left Clara with a remarkably casual attitude towards all things related to horror and death. Speaker of the Dead: Clara has a knack for conversing with the dead, managing to successfully interpret their often disjointed thoughts and understanding the strange, long dead languages that seem to be in vogue among the deceased. [/indent] [hider=Spell List] Animate Undead: Creates an undead servant from a pile of bones or a corpse. The spell imbues the target with a foul mimicry of life and raising it as an undead creature that serves the necromancer in a mostly mindless fashion. Casting the spell on a pile of bones results in a skeleton, while casting it on a corpse results in a zombie. If desired by the necromancer, the undead servant can communicate and if it still possesses a mouth, it is possible to converse with the unliving being. Summon Undead: An undead creature (humanoid) appears in a burst of smoke and fog. Once the vapor dissipates, the undead creature follows the commands of the necromancer until it is killed or banished to the grave once more. Spectral Hand: Using their own life force (or that of a close by creature), the necromancer materializes a ghostly, glowing hand. Despite being incorporeal in nature, the spectral hand is able to influence the physical world and can be used much like a normal hand. Insect Plague: A swarm of exceedingly violent and fierce insects surges from the caster's hand. Fanatical in their loyalty to the necromancer that summons them, these insects will ceaselessly attack any creature that stands in the way of their new master, stealing life essence from their victims, triggering anyone with a fear of insects, and disrupting the concentration of all but the most disciplined of combatants. Ray of Ruination: Enfeebles and exhausts a target with grim reminders of the inescapable certainty of death and a mountain of regrets. Vampiric Touch: Wreathing their hand in terrible shadows, the caster harms a foe by touch, causing necromantic damage and siphoning a measure of whatever force drives the creature into their own being. Blackfire: With dark words, a ray of necromantic black energy springs from the necromancer's hand, engulfing a target in chill black flames that feed on the fuel of their victim's life force and absorb any heat they contain. Crackling and hissing, the arcane flames emanate the smells of hot metal and sulfur, sickening the target, filling them with nausea and existential dread, and worse, it can spread rapidly to other creatures within range. The ghastly flames commanded by this spell cannot be extinguished by non-magical means (e.g., immersion in water or smothering) and any creatures killed by the spell are reduced to piles of nondescript black ash. Chill of the Grave: A pale ray of icy cold death that erupts from the pointed finger of the necromancer, accompanied by the crackling moans of breaking ice, this spell freezes a target causing great harm and potentially immobilizing them. Veil of Death: Flame-like shadows envelope the body of the target until the spell ends, wreathing them in all the aspects and vestments of true death and thus obscuring them from the senses of creatures that seek out the living. [/hider] [u][b]Weaknesses[/b][/u] [indent] Not a Physical Combatant: Clara feels that whacking someone with her staff is too much work and prefers to leave physical combat or gunplay to her allies and undead servants. Easily Tempted: Clara can resist temptation, she really can, so long as it's not very tempting, and so long as it doesn't involve ancient stores of necromantic knowledge or tasty pastries. Hero of Horror: Clara is deeply saddened by the negative stigma that necromancers have acquired and their inevitable association with the forces of evil. As a result, in her haste to change the world for the better and to prove that she is a force of good, Clara often forgets to consider the safety or wisdom of her actions. She is impulsive, unceasingly kind, and prone to committing suicidal acts of heroism at the drop of a hat. [/indent] [u][b]Items/Equipment[/b][/u] [indent] Bone Staff: For self-defense purposes, Clara wields a polished and enchanted staff shaped from brilliantly white bone. Ancient Necromantic Grimoire: An ancient tome of arcane knowledge that Clara carries on her person at all times. Chiefly necromantic in nature, Clara jealously guards, religiously maintains, and frequently updates the horrific looking book. It is easily the young necromancer's prized possession and she would kill without hesitation to protect it. Nokia Idoru Commlink: Clara carries a state-of-the-art, for 2077, electronic communications device in the pocket of her leather jacket. Stuffed to the brim with futuristic tehcnology the so-called commlink is an electronic device that is part-PDA, part-personal computer, part-cyberterminal, and part-global communications device running blazingly hot technomancer code powered by the souls of the dead. Beyond serving as a gateway for Clara to both the Augmented and Virtual Reality of the Wireless Matrix, she also uses it to blast her Gothic jams. [/indent] [u][b]RELIC[/b][/u] [indent]A slightly cursed item that bound itself to the character that the GM will give you ha.[/indent] *[sub]The villain who stole my grandfather's corpse![/sub] [/hider]