[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]19[/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 healthily heart-shaped 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. She favors clothes that balance comfort and style, unrestrictive and easy to move in, primarily in hues of black with white and silver accents and dark purple supporting colors.

Finding the militaristic school uniforms to be constricting and at odds with her self-image (and the military iconography a source of unpleasant recollections), 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 spell-casting and personal odds and ends. The doublet is modified with 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 person with a mind towards her goals and disregard for opinions that contradict them. While she can play the political game of nobility, she loathes it with every fiber of her soul. And in spite of her willfullness, 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, emotionally reclusive and has little respect for nobility or any structure of authority over her, and any sign to the contrary is generally a facade meant to make her path smoother. To her, the pursuit of knowledge and personal power takes precedence over most else, and individual improvement is the ends and reason in and of itself to be sought. The only thing that overrides even this deep-seated power-hungry nature is the desire to preserve her own well-being, a value that has tempered her from the day she could first use magic.

That said, she does have a sense of justice, a personal code, lines she considers best uncrossed. 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. She doesn't possess the sense of superiority over non-magi that mages tend to, and she values the concerns of peasants fairly higher on average than any jumped-up spellcaster. She does, however, value the stability of the mageocratic Republic insofar as its continued existence is beneficial to her living an unfettered life of learning. She sees war and anarchy as fundamentally wasteful things, and she is rather opposed to the idea of more... if for no other reason than to avoid being bothered fighting in it personally.
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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 the single mediocre piece of northern territory, Jarkov, 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, 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 as the Prefect of Jarkov, 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 one 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 honestly should have never been allowed to reproduce) had brought their 12-year-old daughter into the field.

Even amongst the family of legacy necromancers, Veronica's parents were known for pushing at the boundaries of what was acceptable, chafing under even the most trivial of restrictions. They expected greatness from their daughter, who had undergone early noesis at age 9 and been educated magically since, and had gone so far as to thrust her into war at their side. 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 to using it.

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 enough sense stoked by their comrades to leave their inexperienced daughter behind while they stormed the frontlines. In her time away, Veronica earned an appreciation for the "healing" arts, 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 permanent backline position, 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.

Finally sundered from the trudge of the war she had lived for the past 6 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 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 and supplemented education over the course of the next year, Gothel insisted the young woman attend Glynwood, and unable to find a polite way to refuse, Veronica agreed, 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 would 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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[list]
[*][b][u]Necromancy[/u][/b]:
	Her primary magic and specialty, Veronica has been educated in this even pre-noesis. Cantrip usage includes protecting against rot/degradation and killing the tiny organisms that create odors or make food/drink unsafe. Upwards, she can do the typical necromancer things, able to animate and command undead up to about a score in number. Though, once things get to that point, coordinated fine control becomes an issue beyond general orders. In a practical strategic sense, she can manage about 10 undead with organized coordination. Among the undead she can create, there are zombies, skeletons, and several spirits. She is able to telepathically command them; though verbal orders can get better results. She is also able to give them simple standing orders to perform upon "x-condition" occurring, like things a dog or 3-year-old could follow.

Veronica can perform a variant of "spirit" calling that creates a faux intelligence to relay information from a corpse. The spirit is not sentient, knows only what it can draw from the physical remains of the brain and cannot speculate on information, only providing objective answers. This limits the spell, as natural degradation rapidly ruins the brain with rot. This spell's greatest use is as a last resort if the user is too late to bind the original spirit, but it can also be used to that effect if they are fast enough. In that case, the results are vastly more useful, able to also draw on the spiritual repository of knowledge.
[*][b][u]Biomancy[/u][/b]:
	Her secondary magic focus, flesh-sculpting allows her to perform magical triage and manipulate biology to "heal" by accelerating and enhancing natural bodily processes, and she can integrate replacement body parts. Veronica also uses this to piece together mangled corpses for undead raising. On a basic level, this magic can be used to perform sensory biological diagnostics.
[*][b][u]Conjuration[/u][/b]:
	A supporting magic in which she has rather narrow capacity, Veronica uses this to conjure simple equipment for undead, like weapons, and to call undead/objects to her side from within a prepared summoning circle. Cantrip use consists of conjuring temporary mundane trinkets.
[*][b][u]Other/Daily[/u][/b]:
	Veronica has a small variety of miscellaneous cantrips. Minor works for cleaning, warming, and making small harmless illusions. She has used biomancy to build off her normal physical training, accelerating the recovery of her muscles to make much faster progress. This makes her fairly adept in athletic and acrobatic pursuits. It's not unusual for Veronica to enlist undead for menial tasks, like carrying luggage or performing simple errands. In terms of magic she has yet to delve into seriously, Concealment/Stealth magic holds the top spot for her interest, right alongside attaining the capacity to enhance the rest of her repertoire with High Magic.
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[color=0072bc][b]Arcane Items:[/b][/color]
[indent]
[list]
[*][b][u]Staff[/u][/b]: Once owned by her mother, Veronica has somewhat mixed feelings over this tool 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 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.
[*][b][u]Funerary Mask[/u][/b]: A tool sometimes employed by the Vielhaber family in their capacity as morticians and crime investigators/law enforcement, these full-face masks (appearance in fc image) alter the user's voice, blunt strong smells (like the stench of corpses) and conceal the eyes via one-way lenses. Normally, it would be paired with a hooded shroud or cloak to also conceal the hair. All this, traditionally, is to present an image of an inscrutable Reaper-like manager of death-related matters while limiting the ease with which wearers may be identified for retaliation by malignant interests.
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[color=0072bc][b]Other:[/b][/color]
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[list]
[*]Despite being physically weaker, Veronica prefers skeleton undead over zombies, due to the lack of smell. They are to her also the most "elegant" form of undead, faceless and nameless, vastly muting the horror of their existence.
[*]Due to self-modification/healing experiments, Veronica's sense of "pain" is rather redefined. She feels pain in a fairly clinically detached way and treats damage to her body as something closer to a troublesome inconvenience than anything else.
[*]Veronica is a fairly adept biologist and medic, as is necessary for her flesh-crafting and healing to perform optimally, and if she really wanted, she could probably make it in the magical doctor profession. It's a future she has considered at least once.
[*]Veronica actually carries an -if not respect then- limited form of gratitude towards Renault Auristel for killing parents. That they were on opposite sides of the war makes her reasonably wary, but she holds no personal grudge.
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[hider=Necromancy Mechanics and Souls]
[list]
[*][b][u]Souls[/u][/b]: In a foundational sense, while souls take up the same metaphysical space as magic, a soul is different structurally from just mana meant to animate something in the sense that it’s more of a cohesive whole rather than just energy that will disperse whenever whatever the magic equivalent of thermodynamics dictates it does so. As far as containment goes, nothing is more stable/suitable than a living (or previously living) vessel. Hence why, when you have a vessel driven by a soul, the real maintenance is upon the physical form, rather than the self-perpetuating force that is the soul inhabiting it.
[*][b][u]Necromancy[/u][/b]: While necromancy is the art of manipulating the forces of life and death, its most notable applications are the raising of undead. This is not necessarily difficult in an energy intensive sense, but it does require a certain level of concentration to manifest the consciousnesses of the undead and take control of them. A low level necromancer might take about a minute to raise an undead; whereas a high level might flick a wrist at a graveyard and casually raise an entire hoard.

As a Dark Magic, necromancy is capable of the manipulation of souls, and in fact, is grounded on it in various aspects. All undead creatures must be driven by a soul. For an undead, a soul acts as the "will" and "drive" that propels the being into motion. It is what allows it to think, to follow orders and make informed decisions without the addition of complicated programmed behaviors. A necromancer usually has various ways of attaining a soul to do said driving. If not a lingering or bound spirit of a once living person, a necromancer can manifest a "false soul" wholesale to act as the artificial intelligence of the creature.

Undead with physical bodies in general will persist indefinitely until the body is too degraded/damaged to house the soul. Maintenance is not an issue outside of ensuring the undead remain under your control. By contrast, an ethereal undead like a wraith can persist in several different ways. If bound in a phylactery or other artificial vessel, they’re similar to dark magic golems and need maintenance. If using a corpse as a storage vessel like a bog body, they’ll hold up the same way a zombie would, just without animating the body. Otherwise, with no vessel, a spirit shall dissipate the moment the caster dies unless they created some form of focus to outlast them.

Controlling undead is, in concept, high-tier multi-tasking and the hardest part of managing them. The level of fine-control a necromancer can exert over their hoards is typically proportional to how close they are to reaching their maximum control potential, at which point they can do little more than send their corpses forth in a mindless tide of flesh and frenzied hostility. Undead can be given standing commands, and the commands can be given to all or only part of the hoard, but they exert a mental influence the necromancer has to exert, even if it's in the back of their head. Most necromancers reach a point where commanding an undead is as simple as moving an arm; though this gets complicated when you have 500 of them. Contextually a low level/first year student necromancer could be expected to control 10 undead on average and about 20 if pushing their boundaries, with appropriately rock-bottom control in the latter case.
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