[hider=Veronica von Vielhaber]
[center][img]https://i.imgur.com/utufSz2.jpg?1[/img]
[color=0072bc][sub][i]"Fear of unexplored knowledge is merely weakness by another name, worthy of nothing but contempt."[/i][/sub][/color][/center]
[color=0072bc][b]Name:[/b][/color]
[indent]Veronica von Vielhaber[/indent]
[color=0072bc][b]Age:[/b][/color]
[indent]18[/indent]
[color=0072bc][b]Gender:[/b][/color]
[indent]Female.[/indent]
[color=0072bc][b]Appearance:[/b][/color]
[indent] Veronica is a young woman of moderately tall height at 5'8". Her jet-black shoulder-length hair framing a somewhat narrow face, set with dull blue eyes. Her skin has the light dusk of a tan but is pale enough to indicate outdoors is not her favored place to be. She is, however, surprisingly athletic in spite of that initial impression, her body lithe with muscle beneath her usual garb, unmarred by any form of blemish or body hair outside her head.

Finding the militaristic school uniforms to be constricting and antithetical to her self-image, while she wears the doublet, it is left open at the front with her own shirt worn under it, treating it more like a jacket. The uniform belt is worn beneath the doublet and equipped with various spell-casting and personal odds and ends. She has even modified the doublet so that it has inner pockets, within which she can conceal small items. Any part of the uniform that interferes with her personal comfort and convenience is promptly ignored or modified.[/indent]
[color=0072bc][b]Personality:[/b][/color]
[indent] Sardonic and sharp-tongued, Veronica is a stubborn, prideful person with a mind towards her goals and disregard for opinions or obstacles that contradict them. While in an outward sense, she can play the political game of nobility, she loathes it with every fiber of her soul. And in spite of her pride, her pragmatism tends to keep it in check, channeling her ambition into a more calculating and patient route with higher chances of success. Her mind is sharp as a whip, peeling apart information with a sort of obsessiveness that could be called "overthinking".

Veronica is fairly private and does not make genuine positive emotional attachments easily, no matter what guise she might wear to imply otherwise. She has little respect for nobility, the military or any structure of authority over her, and any sign to the contrary is a facade meant to socially smooth her path over. To Veronica, the pursuit of knowledge and personal power takes precedence over most else. She cares not for legacy, family or noble alliances and structures, not in a personal sense. For her, personal improvement is the ends and reason in and of itself to be sought. The only thing that overrides even this deep-seated hunger in her soul is the desire to preserve her own well-being, a value that has tempered her from the day she could first use magic.

That being said, she is not wholly apathetic to all but her own interests. She has a sense of justice, a personal code, lines she considers best uncrossed by herself or others. Even as a necromancer, she is not needlessly cruel or entirely desensitized, and her hunger for knowledge is often channeled towards altruistic pursuits, like solving murders or allowing the living to get a semblance of closure from the shade of a lost one. As someone that sees little value in nobility, she doesn't possess the innate sense of superiority over common-folk that her peers tend to. The desires and concerns of peasants to her are valued, in fact, fairly higher on average than any other noble or spellcaster. She does, however, value the stability of the Republic insofar as its continued existence is beneficial to her living an unfettered life of learning. She sees war and anarchy as wasteful ventures not worth humoring seriously, and she is rather opposed to the idea of another kicking off... if for no other reason than to avoid being bothered fighting in it personally. Though, in that respect, she has no intention of graduating into the military upon leaving Glynwood, barring extenuating circumstances. Instead, a life as an independent, traveling mage, divorced from the squabbles of politics and rebellions and able to pursue her studies in peace and quiet, appeals much more highly to her.
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[color=0072bc][b]Background:[/b][/color]
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Deep in the north, the name of Vielhaber holds interesting sway. Though they have been long-established for centuries, the family has remained stalwartly simplistic, almost "humble" by the standards of legacy mages. Though technically nobles, their line governs over but a single mediocre prefect of northern territory, not small by any means but far from large enough to be monumentally influential. For as long as they have been members of the Heptarchy, the Vielhaber have nonetheless been necromancers, skirting or outright defying the laws quietly with little regard for restriction. Under the leadership of the family's century-old and wizened matriarch, [url=https://i.imgur.com/kpJO8Fu.png]Gothel[/url] (known in certain circles as the "Dark Mother"), the family has refrained from making waves worth quelling and maintained their position in a sort of political stasis. Under Gothel’s guidance, the Vielhaber integrated and ingratiated themselves amongst society, becoming coroners, grave keepers, funeral directors, sources of manpower, detectives and public defenders, all through means supposedly forbidden. It would only be once the civil war broke out 8 years ago that this state of affairs changed.

With most of the family dissatisfied with the state of the Republic and the ruling against necromancy in Belworth's landmark case, the Vielhaber family was drawn inexorably into the war in some form or another, either due to internal motivation or mounting pressure from surrounding political interests of the North. Matriarch Gothel protested stubbornly, however, maintaining that the war would do more harm than good, and instead of participating directly, she would take those she could convince to abide to continue maintaining the civilian sector and focus on defending the family's holdings and people above and beyond all else. Thinking long-term, Gothel sought to maintain the family's positive impression amongst the commonfolk and beyond, running a "PR campaign" of sorts to ensure at least on part of the family could be perceived as reactionary pacifists instead of warmongers. In the predicted case that the rebel faction's effort fell through, this should ensure the Vielhabers could still sit at a cordial negotiation table and get away with comparatively light punishments.

In the meantime, however, the main incited bulk of the family joined the war with zeal, eager to finally put their knowledge into practice and their skills to a true test. Amongst these necromancers were Veronica's parents, both a match made in hell with a hunger for power and glory, who merely saw the war as an excuse to shirk the binds of law over their "art". Against the Matriarch's strong suggestions, the depraved duo that should have never been allowed to reproduce had brought their 10-year-old daughter into the field.

Even amongst the family of legacy necromancer's Veronica's parents were known for pushing at the boundaries of what was acceptable, chafing under even the most trivial of restrictions. They had gone so far as to use the soul-warping effects of Dark Magic to forcibly induce neosis within their daughter long before puberty and used it to artificially accelerate the growth of her magical capacity. Having felt a pain that redefined her world and pumped with arcane education from nearly the moment she could reason coherently, Veronica was thrust into war without a care by her parents. In the field, she learned of necromancy in all the most practical and horrifying of ways. The world was her meat locker, and her parents were her guides.

Thankfully, though she picked up their hunger for knowledge and power, this unfettered immorality did not take root in Veronica. She did not spend all the time under her parents' watch, as the two warmongers often had the sense to leave their less experienced daughter behind while they stormed the frontlines. In her time away, Veronica earned an appreciation for the "healing" arts by way of necromantic means, further educated herself in topics beyond war talking to patients and other rebel soldiers, and looking out across many sights of devastation and death, she came to the slow but inexorable revelation that her grandmother, whom her parents had long complained about, had been right from the start. War was ugly and wasteful, of time, of resources, of lives. Every civilian death was another life and family cut short before its time. Every mage extinguished was centuries of potential accolades and contributions to the world's collective knowledge thrown in the garbage. She had possessed some comprehension before, but she became more certain every time she reunited with them. Her parents were monsters, and she wanted out. She wanted to live for herself. She wanted to thrive.

And as the war raged on, she began to pursue this ambition to escape and survive. Pushing for a more backline position whenever she could, refining her capacity as a healer and increasing her value in positions other than the front. Slowly but surely, she drifted away from her parents' radius of influence while carefully stoking their reckless passion to send them into distant danger more often. Veronica spent the last 2 years of the war pursuing this strategy, always watching for a chance to present itself... and in time, she got it.

In the aftermath of the Siege of Pontaion, Veronica's parents were hunted down and slain alongside many other master necromancers by Auristel and his cohort. With the war going south for the rebels, Veronica would finally take the opportunity to flee a lost cause. Abandoning her position and traveling back to the northern Vielhaber territories, Veronica linked up with her grandmother, telling her of her parents' fate and all that had transpired to her at their hands. In the wake of those horrifying revelations, Gothel bestowed a regency on Veronica over her parents' property and took guardianship of her until she was of a position to manage it.

Set adrift of the bustle of the war she had lived for the past years, Veronica settled into a quiet, studious life under her grandmother's tutelage as an apprentice, further refining her magic in preparation for potential trouble to come. Though the war had ended and "peace" been reestablished, Gothel smelled unrest and sought to prepare her family to more appropriately respond in a manner that would see them on the right side of the conflict next time. As such, once she was satisfied with Veronica's refurbished education, Gothel insisted the young woman attend Glynwood, and unable to find a polite way to refuse, Veronica went along with it, feeling she owed her grandmother this much. It was Gothel's wish that Veronica begin to make inroads with the loyalist factions, to begin to mend bridges and showcase necromancy's potential as a productive and tolerable force in society. As for if Veronica will succeed in this task?

Only time will tell.
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[color=0072bc][b]Attunement:[/b][/color]
[indent]Tellurian.[/indent]
[color=0072bc][b]Aura: [/b][/color]
[indent] As a primarily Dark Magic practitioner, Veronica's aura heavily reflects this. Her aura has a hazy navy hue at its center but quickly turns a smokey grey and then oily the further from her body it reaches, eventually transitioning into an almost bubbling, thick smog with a liquid, tar-like consistency, fizzling to the touch like an acidic chemical reaction and thick enough to actually physically conceal Veronica from normal sight while it billows around her body (though, she seems to have no trouble navigating it). For those that pay attention, her aura emits low meaningless whispers, taunting listeners with nonsense no matter how closely they focus. All the while, there is the sensation of being watched intently just outside the corner of one's vision wherever the aura is present. Due to the Dark Magic nature of her aura, it is prone to growing much larger than the average and lingering even when she moves, leaving trails of swelling smog across any place she unleashes it and potentially obscuring vision for those without sensory magic.
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[color=0072bc][b]Magic: [/b][/color]
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[*][b][u]Daily[/u][/b]:
	In terms of magic that doesn't typically risk manifesting her aura, Veronica's daily spellcasting consists foremostly of her capacity to perceive the spiritual, which she has intermixed with a sense for magic that gives her a more tangible perception -other than the visual- of what sort of magic is before or around her. She is a bit of a "people watcher" in this sense, often spectating magical contests or duels not just mundanely but magically. On a more drastic level, she has used necromantic procedures to physically hone her body to levels that should normally be impossible without extensive training. Rather than "wasting valuable research time" training physically, she instead "cheated" by manually reconstructing aspects of her body to reach near peak performance for her age and build. To say the least, this makes her, in athletic and acrobatic pursuits, much stronger, faster and more agile than she looks. It's not particularly unusual for Veronica to enlist undead for menial manpower tasks, like carrying luggage or moving large amounts of materials; she may even send them on errands or have them act as mouthpieces to send messages. Veronica also often prefaces most magic she uses by first using concealment magic to obscure the manifestation of her aura.
[*][b][u]Necromancy[/u][/b]:
	As her primary magic, learned at the knee of her parents during the war and then as her Grandmother's apprentice, this is Veronica's specialty. She can do most things you'd expect from the "vile fiends" of her kind, able to animate and finely command corpses in the scores of numbers without issue. Among the undead she can create, there number zombies, skeletons, ghouls, and various spirits. She is able to remotely share her undead's senses and telepathically command them. She can interfere with hostile necromancy, either repulsing it from taking purchase on her own minions or disrupt, unravel and dispel other works of necromancy in return.

Though it is arguably the realm of blood magic, she is also able to use necromancy for flesh-sculpting, able to create and animate "custom" corpse abominations with materials from multiple subjects. She can also use this to "heal" in a manner that might offend a traditional holy healer by using glorified magical triage to manipulate and reshape biology outright. This can also be used to create and quell various diseases and plagues.

Veronica has a capacity to hear the whispers of the spiritual, and one of her simplest magic feats is to be able to passively perceive such phenomenon. Where others might hear vague whispers, she hears clear and concise speech. She can even push this trait to an extent of conjuring shades from corpses that can imitate and reiterate what the corpse knew in life to some degree, a valuable ability for solving such crimes as murder or simply identifying a mangled body or contacting a cadaver ask for "permission" to use it for necromancy post-mortem.
[*][b][u]Concealment[/u][/b]:
	Her secondary magic, Veronica learned the basics of this during the war and expanded her expertise in the wake of it while with her Grandmother, pursuing ways to remain beneath notice as much as possible with tensions still simmering nationally. Veronica can use this to eliminate the presence of herself or other targets from sight and sound, and she can even conceal the swell of her aura, allowing her to prepare and cast greater feats of magic without warning or hide her casting from sensory magic that might detect her at a distance. And in a personal necromantic capacity, she can eliminate herself from the perceptions and hostility of undead wholesale, even if they are commanded by someone else, able to easily safely traverse areas otherwise impassable from the presence of such creatures.
[*][b][u]Transmutation (various)[/u][/b]:
	A supporting magic usually used in tandem with her primary focuses, Veronica channels this magic in several necromantic ways. Foremostly, she uses it to create weapons and equipment for undead. She can also use it to mimic undead traits, like zombie resilience or transforming her body and possessions into a spectral, ghostly state that allows her to pass through attacks or barriers. She can take up "undead" traits that make her more resilient to poison or disease or even remove her need to breathe for a time. She has also touched upon magics to convert inanimate targets into biological ones, allowing her to effectively conjure unending legal materials for necromancy given time to stockpile.
[*][b][u]Other[/u][/b]:
	Veronica has a small plethora of other spells in her capacity of the cantrip variety, some of the homely sense but more of the practical. Minor works for cleaning, eliminating smells, tidying herself up in the mornings, minor telekinesis, warming, preservation, sending a whispered message a short distance, making small illusions, conjuring temporary trinkets, purifying food/water, lighting a small fire or making drinkable water number among them. While her studies remained too focused to branch out drastically, Veronica has long harbored a desire to learn how to fly, something she is yet incapable of. The sense of freedom inherent in it appeals to her highly, even outside the raw utility.
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[color=0072bc][b]Arcane Items:[/b][/color]
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[*][b][u]Portable Crypt[/u][/b]: To ensure she would never lack for support for her primary magics far from home, Veronica was given an enchanted statuette of a stone archway with a set of double-doors engraved with the [url=https://i.imgur.com/YhV15ns.jpg]Vielhaber family crest[/url]. The archway is very resilient, laced with arcanoconductive material, and "eats" most hostile magic levied against it; it feeds off ambient mana while inert to perform self-repairs over time. This archway can be commanded to grow to a size up to 10 meters across and opened with a command word spoken by a member of the Vielhaber bloodline.

Once opened, the doors lead to an expanded space of a crypt, first to a main hall and then to three primary branching wings/rooms from the left, right and far center. The main hall acts as a garrison, forward line of defense and beachhead for troop deployment, able to comfortably "seat" up to a hundred human-sized undead standing in formation in two rows of twenty-five on either side of the hall with room to walk down the middle. The first door on the left is an expansive "meat locker", fit for the organized (or haphazard) storage of biological materials. The second on the right is a laboratory, mortuary and place of funerary rites. The third door on the far end serves the purpose of a basic living area with bedding and space for storage of personal effects, gear and valuable objects, along with a food pantry and lavatory.

The inside of every room of the expanded space contains an enchantment that stops rot and biological degradation from taking hold. Undead and "materials" will remain preserved, and food will remain palatable and safe to eat no matter how long it has lingered or become room-temperature. The temperature inside most of this crypt is always cool like a brisk spring day; though the living quarters are comfortably warm enough to sleep soundly.

[*][b][u]Staff[/u][/b]: Once owned by her parents and since collected from the battlefield, Veronica has somewhat mixed feelings over this article of greater spellcasting. At a meter long, the [url=https://i.imgur.com/hii29HF.png]staff[/url] is fairly short but no less effective for its purpose of High Magic casting, composed of arcanoconductive material. It is resilient enough to be used as a melee weapon; though it is not ideal for it, and damage it sustains is repaired over time using ambient mana.
[*][b][u]Funerary Mask[/u][/b]: Traditionally worn for funerary duties, a mask that when worn obfuscates the wearer’s voice along with changing their hair color to a bone white and concealing the wearer’s eyes with one-way lenses.
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[color=0072bc][b]Other:[/b][/color]
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[*]Veronica is an exceptional biologist and doctor, as is necessary for her flesh-crafting and healing to perform optimally, and if she really wanted, she could hack it in the mundane profession or even enhance her effectiveness with magic. It's a future career she has considered at least once.
[*]For when things get unfortunately close and personal, Veronica possesses a fairly solid grasp of hand to hand “street-fighting” when needs must, a talent cultivated in practice rather than theory. She has never taken formal instruction but rather learned on her feet and “ad-libs” in a fairly pragmatic manner.
[*]Contrary to what one might expect, Veronica actually carries in her shriveled heart an -if not respect then- limited form of gratitude towards the war hero and necromancer slayer, Auristel. For the act of ensuring Veronica’s parents would not trouble her or anyone else ever again, Veronica can only be appreciative, no matter that they were on opposite sides of the war. Not like she was much personally invested in that mess anyway…
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