[quote=@GiovanniCarter]
I apologize for the absence. Doing this on mobile gives me no notifications. But here you go, one of my more physical characters[/quote]

Alright! He seems pretty fun. How about this for an opponent?

[hider=Lyra Gwynn]
[b]Name:[/b] Lyra Gwynn
[b]Age:[/b] Around 60 years
[b]Height:[/b] 5'7''
[b]Weight:[/b] 125 lbs
[b]Race:[/b] Shroudwalker

[b]Appearance:[/b]
Lyra looks much younger than she really is: she was twenty-two years old when she died, and her body has stayed that way ever since she returned to life. She has a slim and bony build, with jet-black hair that extends down to her shoulders and eerie yellow eyes. Her skin is a darkened gray that blends perfectly into shadows, making her almost invisible in low-light conditions.
For clothing, she favors a sharp black coat with long tails, and a pair of well-ironed formal trousers. She does not wear shoes.

[b]Weapons and items:[/b]
[u]- The Shroud:[/u] Lyra is bound to a floating mass of dark particles, a living cloud of unnatural smog that follows her wherever she goes. In more casual settings it will lie hidden in her shadow, compressed and passive, but in combat she deploys it in full force, and it can grow large enough to fill a small house. The Shroud has been intertwined with Lyra’s very soul since her first resurrection, and she can manipulate the size, shape, and position of the cloud as though it were part of her body, giving her excellent fine control over its form and density.
Other than being movable, the Shroud possesses three dangerous properties. The first is that it absorbs and stores light and sound waves, including frequencies such as ultrasound or X-rays that would normally be invisible to the human eye. This renders it perfectly black to outside observers, and masks any noise passing through it. Light and sound it absorbs can be gathered and later redeployed offensively, as wide bursts or tightly concentrated beams.
Secondly, it relays sensory information directly to Lyra’s neurons, beginning with the patterns of light and sound coming into contact with its outer edges. It also keeps her aware of its contours, allowing her to effectively 'feel' anything in contact with the cloud. The Shroud differentiates between her own thoughts and those born of other powers, obeying only those that are truly hers, and she can use it to detect foreign incursions into her mind.
Last but not least, the Shroud will resist any and all movement within itself not initiated by Lyra or her abilities. Its minuscule particles originate from a far-flung universe devoid of all life, and their presence in other planes of reality will bend physics around them slightly, slowing down other matter and energy passing through areas where the particles are gathered. This effect works more powerfully against faster movements: walking through the Shroud is merely uncomfortable, running through it is like pushing against a wall of molasses, and bullets or anything similarly fast will face resistance strong enough to slow them to a crawl. The more spread-out the Shroud is, however, the less powerful the slowing effect becomes, and tight concentrations are required to fully exploit this property.

[b]Abilities:[/b]
[u]- Physical parameters and training:[/u] Even before she died, Lyra was considered an exceptionally talented warrior. While her strength and endurance are better than one would expect from a person her size, it’s in speed and mobility that she truly excels. She can outrun the fastest of beasts, react quickly enough to avoid gunfire, and traverse even the most dangerous and chaotic terrain with impeccable balance and poise. Her skill with the spear is the stuff of legend, and she’s also known to wield daggers and shortswords in close combat, fighting with an inhuman precision that has only grown sharper since her resurrection.

[u]- Shroudwalker physiology:[/u] The Shroud has infested her unliving body, changing her once-human form into something strange and unsettling. Though she still moves and talks and thinks the way a living person would, most of her biological functions have simply stopped: she no longer breathes, eats, or consumes any known form of chemical energy. Medical examination reveals that even her brain and nerves are electrically inert, though evidently some form of information transfer is still going on. Some otherworldly power seems to animate her now, preserving her from all forms of aging and decay while enabling thought and motion. It seems to be tied to the Shroud itself, which permeates her entire form and has infused itself within her lungs and bloodstream.
Notably, Lyra can synthesize Shroud particles within her body into a solid form, extruding them as pitch-black spines of varying thickness and length. While Lyra can wield these without issue, they don’t seem to be fully affected by external sources of kinetic energy, requiring exceptional amounts of force to damage or knock aside.

[u]- Cryopsionics:[/u] Psionic abilities have long been known to manifest in various individuals across the many universes, and during her human life Lyra was one such person. While her powers did carry over after death, however, they were irrevocably altered by the manner of her resurrection: her mind is no longer the lively thing it once was, and only barely feels what could be described as human emotions. Due to her psychic nature, this emptiness manifests itself in the physical world as well, with her very presence dropping the surrounding temperature by several degrees. By exerting her will, Lyra can shape and focus this effect, bleeding thermal energy from select areas and sapping the drive and resolve of sentient beings. The closer she is to her target, and the more narrow her focus, the faster the resulting drain occurs. Lyra can channel these psychic attacks through her Shroud spines while wielding them, which sharply raises their potency.
Like many psychics, she possesses a form of telekinesis, which exclusively affects matter frozen in crystalline form (such as ice and snow). While this specialization restricts her in some ways, it also grants her firmer and more precise control, and allows her to spread her influence like a virus. Once she's seized control of a fragment of ice, Lyra can shatter it at will to flash-freeze an area up to four times its width in radius, and gains control over any new ice created. The larger the shattered ice fragment, the colder the resulting freeze.


[hider=Backstory]
Lyra's earliest memories are of hard times, of dust and dirt and exile. Her people were forced out of their ancestral homelands several years before her birth, whole cities laid to waste when an ancient and powerful dragon decided to seize their mountainous nation as its territory. Faced with the wrath of a monster no mortal could challenge, the indigenous population was left with no choice but to flee. Even as they left their lands behind, however, they vowed to one day win them back.

From a young age, Lyra and her fellow children were trained in the arts of war and magic. Their elders told them stories of their homeland, instilling within them a burning will to defeat their common enemy and return to the life of old. Year by year, they trained relentlessly, eventually leaving their parents behind to travel the world and seek new skills and powers to help them succeed.

Lyra had never been particularly talented with conventional magic, so she sought out an order of psychics, and learned to channel her mental strength as a means of attack and defense. She wasn't satisfied with this, however, and ventured further still, seeking dangerous and forbidden secrets well beyond what others would dare. She traveled further than any before her, through burning deserts and dense jungles, across steep mountain ranges and into dark ravines teeming with hidden predators. She saw landscapes that dwarfed anything she'd ever dreamed of, and came to know of peoples and creatures whose vibrant diversity fascinated her, but still she wandered further, always fixed on her goal.

In the end she sought out a rumor, a ghost. Whispers of an abomination from another universe, a being that warped existence around it wherever it appeared. She walked out across a frozen sea, to the distant point where it was said this being sometimes passed through her world.

To this day, Lyra had never told anyone what she found there. What is known is that she came back with the Shroud.

There was no more need for training or exploration. She made her way back to her people’s homeland, and, rather than waiting for her old comrades to gather their forces, walked straight into the dragon's domain and challenged it alone. It was barely even a fight, for the beast soon tore through her defenses and snapped her up with its massive jaws, swallowing her in a single gulp.

It went exactly as she'd intended. Out there on the icy sea far away from all trace of civilization, Lyra had made a deal with the devil: she'd give up her mortal life, and receive in exchange a rebirth, a physical resurrection via a permanent joining with the Shroud. Thus, trapped within the corrosive, poisonous interior of the dragon's stomach, the fragile human quickly died—and then woke up, gathered her strength, and tore the beast apart from the inside, slaughtering it as one-sidedly as it had done to her.
As soon as the news reached her people, they rejoiced. Scattered families flooded back to reclaim their lost cities, and the many would-be dragonslayers arrived to find their life’s greatest battle already won. Lyra herself was honored and celebrated, showered in gifts and offered the title of High Queen.

For Lyra, however, something had irrevocably changed. She had returned from death with all her intelligence and skills intact, moving and speaking just like a living person… But she’d left something behind, as well. Her kindness. Her empathy. Her intensity of feeling. When she looked at her people now, she saw only scurrying creatures of flesh and bone, puppets to their own primitive instincts and desires. They might as well have been ants, for all that they mattered to her now.

So she spurned the glories offered to her, and left her homeland behind. The Shroud whispered to her of far-off worlds, entire different universes filled with people and creatures she could scarcely have imagined before. There was a great game afoot, with entire planes of existence hanging in the balance, and now that Lyra had achieved her personal goal, it was time for her to uphold her own end of the deal.

To serve as harbinger, and bring about the end of all things.[/hider]
[/hider]

If you think she'll do, then feel free to pick a battleground for us and/or post up a fight thread. If not, then just let me know and I can check my roster for someone higher- or lower-powered.