[hider=Subira Anenih] [b]Name[/b] Subira Anenih [b]Species [/b] Tekeri [b]Appearance [/b] Subira’s plumage is a paler black than many Tekeri, approaching an almost chestnut complexion all over in bright light. She is of average build and height, somewhat toned from her history of dancing and extensive martial arts practice. Jet black pupils disappear into the darker feathers on her face, which comes to a point in her typical yet short beak. Amongst Tekeri, she would be perceived as plain if not a bit stern of countenance. Capriciously dressed, her wardrobe and manner of accessorizing ranges from the unnoticeable to the perplexing. The details are always tended to, in one way or another. [b]Magical affiliation[/b] Force Domain [b]Occupation [/b] Stoneworker and Surveyor [b]Key skills[/b] -Unarmed combat: a desire for greater autonomy and security navigating the new and bustling lands of Mythadia’s capital region combined with a history of dancing, led her to train extensively in martial arts -Construction surveying: a surprise obsession with cartography in general narrowed down over time to the art of land and construction surveying -Masonry (engraving): an eye for detail and a pre-existing interest in construction brought her, at length, to the quarries supplying Mythadia’s grand construction projects as an engraver and tailor of construction stone [b]Personality[/b] Subira is eager and transitory. She develops fascinations on a whim but lives them with deep seriousness. She is ludic, finding the game in everything, yet reserved. She is generous and flowing but maintains picky, hard-headed tendencies, especially with others. Towards herself, she can be unforgiving—only her forgetfulness and detached demeanor soften this. She is overly compassionate (at least in her head) and can get lost in daydreams. She gets lost quickly and easily in her work, at times neglecting other aspects of her life. She doesn’t hesitate to ask things of others but fears others’ dependence on herself. If pressed, she would reveal that she is dismissive of grand narratives and has trouble believing in much of anything. [b]Backstory[/b] Tending towards [i]elsewhere[/i], Subira never saw herself in what others related to her as “homesickness.” How could she, when her upbringing left her no real home to be sick for, anyway? Long, quiet days, mulling over the aimless complexities of all the plants that, despite the changing scenery, remained a reassuring consistency in her many homes. Tracing the veins kept her company. Her parents had always wholly subscribed to Ascendancy ideology, caught up in all sorts of complexes about endlessly getting ahead, proving and reproving themselves, climbing ladders and so on. A branch of the contemporary experience whose significance escaped Subira entirely. Perhaps well-learned, at least on paper, the vapidity of her various trainings as a petty gentry child did little to quench her erratic nature, little to box up her fluidity and ludic aspect. Is the devil in the details, or is it in our relationship with those details? Subira was constantly browsing through textures, floating in and out as the moment took her. It wasn’t for her precision that her day-to-day life materialized as anything resembling order, at least not in the sense of properness. As many objects pleased her for many reasons, she often found herself at the center of immediately illegible object-galaxies of her own making. Frantic, flirty obsessions with newcomers in her life played off of her reserved tendencies to construct someone bubbly yet inconsistent, unreliable. Having had little lifelong friendship, she bloomed in anonymity. Barely fulfilling the Ascendancy’s secondary training requirements, her general disillusionment coupled with a desire for that elsewhere fueled Subira’s flee towards anything but that which she already knew. She was able to pick up odd jobs for a few years, relishing in the bits that nourished her picky interests and merely bearing the (far more frequent) onerous periods. In a few of these time-killers she took especial pleasure. A tavern off a busy trade route near the village of Pescit in Mythadia found her and a group of traveling traditional dancers crossing paths by chance one cold autumn night. Subira’s parents, demanding as they were, hadn’t forgotten to have her train in certain traditional arts, and although it had been many years since she had danced with any sort of regularity (and under an entirely different tradition), she caught herself mesmerized by the flowing motions, rhythmic skin. Discovering they were looking for new dancers only pleased her more, and she traveled with them for some time, never tiring of the careful balance between order and chaos in the dancing body. Subira etched a slow, meandering path through Mythadia towards its illustrious capital, encountering more varied and seedier milieux the closer she got. The kaleidoscope markets of the larger cities got the better of her, mysterious and exciting wares presenting themselves to her as though in a gallery. In these bustling spaces, an inevitable mugging and other close encounters pushed her towards a martial artist recommended by a fellow dancer. Simultaneously, a particular obsession was overtaking her in the form of old cartography, in no small part sustained by a vendor she encountered often in the markets. This Glen vendor traded in these antiquities while primarily an active researcher in the history of cartography; Subira’s overt fascination for the matter brought him to introduce her to his work, and she offered her time and energy without hesitation. It was in this way that detail-oriented yet marginal Subira found a first material craft that checked a lot of boxes for her. Having left the dancers, she focused for a while on martial arts and cartography, specifically the history of surveying. Deep in her work in the cozy basements of the vintage cartographers’ guild of Evenis, a busy town outside the capital, she encountered a nearly incomprehensible map, the likes of which she had never seen. Disturbingly well-preserved, the document mixed pictorial and geometric descriptions of a site that, through much study, Subira was able to determine must be outside the city in a meadow. Her curiosity piqued by the specificity and apparent banality of such a map, she took it upon herself to venture out to the spot, naïvely unequipped. Cloudless dawn illuminated a snowy clearing; Subira, frigid and sharp, noticed the dark, floating cloak and the twin dripping blades orbiting it too late. Shot with terror, she stood frozen to the spot, eyes wide as the desolate apparition floated breathlessly. She understood quickly that if she moved backwards, it moved twice as close. Choosing the freedom of the clearing over the mess of the woods for once, she stepped into the being’s arena, nerves fraught. Limbless and empty, the cloak and blades suddenly moved on her, stimulating Subira’s self-defense combat reflexes, the inherent deep control. Too many close calls. The otherworldly blades, even just grazing her nimble body, nipping at her dancing feathers, sent obliterating pain coursing through her every vein. Subira was bloody and near defeat when the merciless enemy became locked in place; the ripples on the cloak died out and the fabric hung lifeless. Fighting just to stay conscious, she remarked through the haze of pain that the blades, too, floated in the air mere inches from her chest, unmoving. Deep within her, an essential reorganization and series of reconnections was taking place as she discovered an ability to, with great concentration, remove the blades even further, to maintain an even greater lock on the silent cloak. At once, the pitch fabric crumpled lamely upon the soft snow below, and the sleek blades exploded outward like overturning click beetles, landing dozens of feet away at the foot of the trees. Sleep claimed Subira. She awoke in a glacial state hours later; collecting the perplexing cloak and blades, rejoined the warmth of the city. She knew not how to recount any of what had happened at the clearing to anyone she knew, choosing to keep the battle a secret, but was ecstatic to announce her sudden revelation that she had stepped into magehood to those around her. Her work studying surveying and attention to detail led, at length, to an interest in the finer arts of construction. With some scattered references and recommendations, in her 27th year, she found herself tailoring stone in quarry ateliers on the outskirts of the capital. Detailing and engraving the local limestone, often with the help of the force magic she was slowly learning to handle, she maintained a curious position in the quarry’s hierarchy, being trained and traveled but with little to show for it, an immigrant in a strange land but still better off than the quarriers below. [/hider]