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[img] https://i.pinimg.com/564x/90/ed/3d/90ed3d5d32076cdac2b3e2c4d6af09ed.jpg[/img][color=2E2C2C][sup]_______________________________________________[/sup][/color][/center][hider=// INFO][indent][sub][b]P E R S O N A L   D E T A I L S[/b][/SUB]

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[b]Full Name[/b][COLOR=white] – Rain on My Skin, Ice in My Mouth [/COLOR]
[b]Age[/b][COLOR=white] – 15[/COLOR]
[B]Gender[/B][COLOR=white] – Female[/COLOR]
[b]Vocation[/b][COLOR=white] – Warden[/COLOR]
[b]Nationality[/b][COLOR=white] – Scila[/COLOR]
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[hider=// PERSONALITY][indent][SUB][b]P E R S O N A L I T Y[/b][/sub]

[sup][COLOR=92278f][b]Angry—Like, Really Angry[/b]
[COLOR=white]Few are the people Rain doesn’t greet with a scowl, and it is only by the draconian training of her youth that she no longer compounds those scowls with threats and occasionally [i]acts[/i] of physical violence. Usually. Anger was what the Locke Institution wanted, and it’s what they got. They coaxed it out of her, stoked it like a hearth until it grew into wildfire and set it loose. Sure, sometimes it’s more than they bargained for, but she’s been taught well enough to direct her anger at what matters[/COLOR][/COLOR]

[COLOR=92278f][b]A Sharp Claw, a Dull Tool[/b]
[COLOR=white]Rain does one thing well, and a lot of other things very not well. Sic her on a voidbeast and all the stars, see, they just align. She can formulate plans on the fly and her reflexes could make a Ldrant warmaster blush; it’s when things deviate away from fury-murder that everything kinda blurs. Lacking pretty much any formal education, Rain is functionally illiterate and utterly oblivious to much of the world’s politics, aside from the fact that she was told often and loudly how cool and great Scila was. Doesn’t bother her, though. Let the nerds waste time scribbling stupid lines on maps and smooching with their precious equations. If it doesn’t bleed, scream, or threaten to engulf the world in cold oblivion, it can’t be [i]that[/i] important.[/COLOR][/COLOR]

[COLOR=92278f][b]Ironic Autophobe[/b]
[COLOR=white]You know what would be funny? What if you took this irate, unsociable, idiot child with exactly one purpose in her miserable little life, you teach her to conflate pain with affection, and you saddle her with this crippling fear of being alone and unloved. She won’t understand it, she won’t know how to deal with it, she won’t even know how to ask for help. She’ll just blindly seek companionship in people who are disgusted by her, or who can’t stand to be around her, and when they inevitably leave she’ll be stuck with this ruinous pit in her soul that just gets wider and wider and deeper and deeper until there’s nothing left but her and the empty loneliness she’s so afraid of. Oh my god. Holy shit. Hilarious.[/COLOR][/COLOR]
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[hider=// GIFT][indent][SUB][b]G I F T[/b][/sub]

[sup][COLOR=92278f][b]Furnace[/b] 
[COLOR=white]It’s going to hurt—endure it. That’s love.

There’s a reason Locke’s Hunters got their nickname and it’s not pretty. As a result of their streamlined creation, their embered souls sit a little closer to the surface than other Hunters’, and they all have the exact same Gift—they [i]burn[/i]. 

As a young pyromancer, Rain’s abilities were markedly unremarkable. As a hunter, however, things are a little different. See, turns out, fueling fire magic is easy as shit when you have an eternal engine pumping agony into your veins eight days a week. With her newfound resistances and her apparent inability to fucking [i]die[/i], Rain’s Gift sees her turning herself and the air around her into a whirlwind of searing hot misery. She’s made stone into puddles, swords into soup, and has on more than one occasion required excising from melted suits of armor, which was fun for literally no one. 

In addition, by building up and expelling heat, she can create bursts of flame to skirt around the battlefield, because what’s worse than a fiery, angry creature? A fiery, angry creature hurtling at you at [i]alarming speed.[/i]

There is one caveat. Being that she has to stoke her inner ember to fuel this Gift, usage enflames that natural, torturous burning all hunters abide with into a real whopper of pain. The longer she goes, the harder she pushes, the worse the pain gets. But that’s okay, she can take it. Pain means she cares. Like, if you aren’t a seared, shuddering wreck wailing in silent agony at the end of a fight, were you really even trying?[/COLOR][/COLOR]
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[hider=// EQUIPMENT][indent][SUB][b]E Q U I P M E N T[/b][/sub]

[sup][COLOR=92278f][b]Hunter’s Claws[/b]
[COLOR=white]Not exactly fancy, nor particularly expensive, but at least these babies can keep up with the heat. Utilizing a magically-receptive metal she can neither spell nor pronounce, and an enchantment for heat-resistance, Rain is able to channel her Gift into the clawed gauntlets to turn their razor-sharp edges white-hot; and, since she has to apply this enchantment herself, in theory it should be able to match her no matter how hot she goes.[/COLOR][/COLOR]
[/SUP][/indent][/hider]
[/cell][cell][b]Physical Description[/b]
[color=white][indent]Rain is an even 5’0”, but has only ever had it described to her as “short,” and “no, you’re probably not getting any taller.” She possesses the build of someone who spent most of her childhood kicking other kids in the teeth for scraps of meat, and the complexion to suggest there wasn’t a lot of sun where she was doing it. Aside from being a pallid, wiry imp, her hair is about waist-length and settled about as neatly as an avalanche. Many of her teeth, filed before her procedure, are much sharper than they ought to be. But hey, at least she’s hygienic. 

Rain prefers comfortable clothes, but that’s not really her call. As a representative of Scila [i](pause for the sound of Scila collectively grinding its teeth,)[/i] she can’t just run around wearing her old pit-rags smudged with dirt and grime and the blood of little rats that were pretty quick yeah but not quick enough. What she wears now isn’t a uniform per se, she still has to fight in it, but it lends her an air of formal conventionality that on literally anyone else might look nice, but she somehow manages to ruin that too. 
[/indent][/color]
[b]Character Conceptualization[/b]
[color=white][indent]Oh, Scila. Land of industry. Land of ingenuity. A land of people unbroken by slavery, and emboldened by their independence. Truly, if any nation could face the void and, in response, be dissatisfied with survival without power, it would be you. 

You bastard.

Then again, as someone who lived through thralldom and liberation, as well as the Great War and the world-ending Eclipse that followed it, Locke knew a thing or two about the value of power. He knew how it worked, he knew its many forms and the ways it could sway and influence others. He knew how easily power corrupted, but he also understood its necessity—without it no man, or king, or kingdom could stand. But most importantly, he knew what a power-play looked like. 

When the Kethiline Order created Hunters to fight against the void, and subsequently chose to keep its methods largely secret, Locke saw it for what it was. A damn good power-play. He didn’t know what angle those dusty old zealots were playing at, but he could respect it. He could also disrespect the hell out of it, and violently tear their secrets from their shriveled, grasping hands. Not real violence though. [i]Knowledge violence.[/i]

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. 

This isn’t Locke’s story, but he’s gone out of his way to make himself damn near inseparable from it so here we are. Locke didn’t just pop up from the ground one day and decide to open his own little Ember Farm, his rise began even before Scila broke free from Ldrant. As a young and immensely talented pyromancer, he helped solidify Scila’s national defenses, and later founded an institution—named after himself, of course—inspired by a Ldranti custom called “Ember Hunting.” His goal was to increase the number and quality of pyromancers at Scila’s command by studying the offspring of the magically-affluent. The research would take generations to complete, and necessitated the creation of a small academy to ensure that whatever pyromancers [i]were[/i] produced were also properly trained. Efficiency was key, after all. 

Unfortunately, Locke didn’t have decades. War erupted between Midnos and Aulrithia, and to the surprise of literally no one anywhere at any point, Ldrant set its sights on reconquering Scila in the chaos, as well as Prentis. The Ldranti were nothing if not ambitious. Things at the Institute are fast-tracked, lessons accelerated, and research stalled for what was optimistically referred to as, “as long as it takes to win this fucking war.” 

Now, it’s probably bad taste for someone to be [i]relieved[/i] about the apocalypse, but, really, that’s about as gourmet as things are going to get from here on. 

With the founding of the Algaeon Hearthfire at the Institute, Locke found himself suddenly inundated with both funding [i]and[/i] the opportunity to spend that funding on morally gray and ethically repugnant research. Kethiline created the Hunters, kept their secretes, blah blah we’ve already tread that ground. Here’s where the violence started. 

Getting his hands on [i]any[/i] information about the Hunter procedure was incredibly difficult, but Locke wasn’t simply resourceful, he was also, frankly, a genius. He didn’t need the whole picture, he only needed pieces of it, then he could damn well paint the rest of it himself. And with Hunters slowly beginning to crop up in other nations, it was clear that paint was going to run dry before too long. Sure, the world was ending, and perhaps on the surface that meant petty things like “wars” and “border conflicts” were pragmatically shelved, only a fool believed they couldn’t be just as quickly plucked up again. To Locke, the apocalypse was a backdrop, a stopgap between conflicts no different than any other time of peace, accept for the part where there wasn’t any. Kethiline had invented living weapons of mass destruction, and on the other side of this dreaded eclipse, whoever had the most would hold true power. 

And “most” was indeed the keyword for Locke. As far as he could tell, the success rate for Kethiline’s procedure was dramatically low, to the point that it was practically a death sentence for those who underwent it. That wouldn’t do. Inefficient. It also appeared that the process required mages from multiple elements, which was also inefficient. By and large, Hunters used [i]fire[/i] to fight the Void, it was [i]pyromancy[/i] at the forefront of things and though Scila didn’t have a surplus of aeromancers and geomancers Locke had ensured that it had at least a minor surplus of pyromancers. And a whole slew of their children, some of which could be useful. Others…

When all you have is a match, everything looks like kindling. [i]Nothing[/i] is as efficient as fire. 

There, we’re done with Locke now, we can move on to Rain. 

Though, technically speaking, before she was “Rain” she was “L.I.-23, Group Four, Number 13,” or, sometimes, “The one that keeps making the other kids swallow her baby teeth after they fall out.” But, for clarity’s sake, Rain will do. 

Thereabouts a decade into the Eclipse, Rain was born at the Locke Institute to exactly zero parents who would ever know her name or see her face, alongside a whole gaggle of similarly spawned lambs-to-the-inevitable-slaughter. Growing up, the rules were simple: kids who showed magical aptitude got to leave the “pit” and train to become super cool fire-throwing badasses. Kids that didn’t got to stay in the pit and hate each other. If you didn’t show some worth by the time you weren’t a kid anymore, you got the boot. Allegedly. 

By the time Rain’s match was struck, she was ten. She had to leave all her teeth-trophies and rat bones behind, but that was okay, because she also got to meet Papa Locke.

I lied, we’re not done with him at all. 

When he brought her up out of the dark, and gave her the first hug she’d ever received—that wasn’t a precursor to being thrown onto the dirt—Rain knew instantly that she loved her papa with all of her heart, and would do anything for him. 

The next eight years she spent training under the Institute’s best pyromancers and weaponsmasters. Some days she would make progress, and papa would tousle her hair and praise her and she would feel like a shooting star against the black sky. Then there were tough weeks, or months, where she struggled or plateaued and papa wouldn’t even look at her. It made her whole self shake, made her sick, made her never want to leave her cot. Eventually the bad lessons outnumbered the good ones. Eventually she stopped progressing altogether. The last years were lonely, and very, very hard. 

When she was eighteen, papa came to her after another failed lesson. He wasn’t upset, but he didn’t tousle her hair and didn’t have anything particularly nice to tell her. All he had was a proposition. “Undergo this procedure,” he said, and she didn’t even hear the “or,” or even what it was. The moment he asked, she decided to do it, she didn’t need to know. They strapped her to a table and the next thing she [i]did[/i] know was pain, pure and blinding and all-consuming. But in the back of her mind, she had her papa, and she knew that if she could just bear through it, he’d be so proud of her. He’d love her as much as she loved him—maybe even [i]more[/i]. 

No one seemed particularly happy when it was done, especially not Rain. The pain hadn’t stopped with the procedure, it had stuck with her. It was stuck [i]in[/i] her. Always. Day and night, burning, burning, burning it was like her blood was molten and even when it wasn’t awful it was still [i]bad[/i]. Drinking water didn’t do much, chewing ice was a little better. Whenever it stormed, she would stand out in the rain and that took the edge off enough that she was almost comfortable. Almost. 

Papa hadn’t told her about this. About the pain. He hadn’t even come to see her when it was done. He just went back to the pit, and the other kids just striking their matches, and she was taken off the institute’s hands along with all the others who had gone through the same pain and woken up on the other side. There were lots of them, all just like her. The pyromancers called them Hunters, and sent them off to fight the Void, because apparently that’s what Hunters did. 

They asked her name. She told them, and they said, “that’s not a name, that’s a bunch of letters and numbers,” which didn’t make much sense to her because that’s what all names were. They told her to pick, and she almost picked “Locke,” but then decided that, no, she didn’t like that name at all. In fact, she hated it. 

So they told her to pick something she [i]did[/i] like.[/indent][/color]
[b]Other Information[/b]
[color=white][indent]Rain and every other Hunter to come from the Locke Institute was created using the sufficiently-narcissistic “Locke Method.” Eschewing involvement of the other elements, the Locke Method focuses entirely upon pyromancy to meld soul and eternal ember together. The procedure is much quicker and carries an exponentially higher success rate than the Kethiline method, however, what it boasts in quantity it suffers in quality. 

These Hunters, sometimes referred to as “Melters,” are notoriously short-lived and are often the first to die on whatever battlefield they’re sent to. Their embers are unstable, and coupled with their generally lackluster training, it’s no wonder pyromancers, and even other Hunters, tend to view them as fodder. 

Still, their numbers and their propensity to die in place of other, more valuable Hunters has seen them begin to find a place in Scila's defenses in the handful of months they've been around.[/indent][/color]
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