Name: Alice Blackwood
Gender: Female
Age: 21
Shifter Form: Valkyrie
Appearance: Alice is a somewhat short, heavyset, muscular girl, 5' 4" and 190 pounds, to be exact. Her skin is somewhat pale, mainly due to spending most of her daylight hours indoors. Her muscles, while not grotesquely large, are big and as hard as whipcords. Her hair is jet black, and about midway down her back when left alone, though she ties it in a ponytail to keep it out of her eyes, which are a steely grey. It's impossible to tell what her legs look like, as they're covered 24-7 with a pair of heavy, black, military cargo pants completely covered in pockets and other things. Under one of those pant legs is a sleek and shiny prosthetic, top of the line and if anything better than the organic limb it replaced. Her face and steely blue eyes appear to be locked in a semi-scowl. Due to her less than feminine form, many people would and will frequently mistake her for a man with long hair, mainly when her figure was obscured by something, either a jacket, or weapons and armor (armor, weapons, etc-cetera).
Shifter Appearance
Use the image as a reference, not as an accurate representation of her appearance.
Her hair shifts along its length from black at the top to pure silver at the bottom, but remains the same length. She gains several inches in height, and her already muscular build only becomes more so, with the muscles visible standing out like steel cables rather than whipcords. The prosthetic disappears, replaced by a "regular" leg that's just as muscular and powerful as the other. Any change in "Feminine assets", if any, is small. A pair of glossy, jet black wings spreads from her back, with two small holes in her armor permitting their use in battle. When she shifts, she gains a set of elegant but futuristically angular armor, also in varying shades of black and silver. The breastplate juts out slightly in a single point, with several overlapping plates angling downwards to deflect blows, and similarly in the back. A helmet in similarly angular but deflective style rests on her head, and more armor of the same style covers her arms and legs. Her face, while not exactly loving by any stretch of the imagination, nonetheless softens noticeably.
Abilities: Has extensive training in both armed and unarmed combat- (Unarmed: Kapap and Tai Chi. Armed: Kapap, some dabbling in HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts), and training at The Academy)
Even while unshifted, she’s strong. While she wouldn't be able to beat a steroid guzzling power-lifter, she’s no slouch in the strength department.
Fast, in the sense of a sprinter. Excels at quick bursts of speed
Basic knowledge of field medicine,
Strong self discipline. It takes an awful lot to set her off, and by contrast she’s excellent at masking her feelings and essentially isolating herself in a personal fortress. (Not to say she does so all the time.)
Speaks Russian, more or less.
Powers: Greatly increased physical abilities (Faster, stronger… tougher)
Can use a powerful short range offensive blast with her magic, mainly to let her catch a breath or exploit an opening
As she’s a Valkyrie, she does have the ability to bolster her allies’ strength and fortitude, and can heal wounds to an extent
Can fly
Can further augment her abilities and those of her weapon with magic, the more magic she pours into it, the more her abilities are strengthened.
Background: Alice Blackwood was born to a militant family. Not military, militant.
From a young age, her highly competitive single father (her mother died shortly after her birth from an accidental overdose of pain medication) pushed his also competitive, but not pathologically so, daughter to her limits. While one might've expected her to resent it, she saw it as a competition against her father- one she was determined to win. Occasionally however, he broke those limits so much that she actually wound up with a prosthetic leg and a policy for a discounted upgrade to a top-tier version upon adulthood. She didn't mind too much, well, she didn't mind the prosthetic as it fascinated her to no end; the fact that her father was the reason she needed it severely damaged their relationship. The prosthetic was paid for of course, by her father’s company, or at least the company he worked for, a private military company which stipulated that she work for the company upon her reaching 21, circumstances permitting.
And so, her already intense training increased even more so, with her learning things at the age of thirteen that no normal young teenage girl would've really wanted to know- things such as small unit tactics, where to stab or shoot to kill an opponent hopped up on drugs, and first aid. As the company was in fact Russian based, another part of her training was Russian with a native speaker, also from the PMC, though this was more of a formality, she still took it seriously. Her school began to take notice, especially after she walked in one morning after a prolonged absence with a whirring prosthetic limb. They took umbrage with her father’s practices and how they rubbed off on his daughter, her impressive knowledge of ways to kill people or occasional remarks about how “That position would be untenable in [Insert a situation here]”.
This extensive training left little or no room for a social life, and though she tried on multiple occasions, the closest she ever came to real friends were other students of HEMA. She chose to go into HEMA because it was one of the few things that her father would approve of, and his controlling nature lead to her slowly developing an intense dislike for him.
After much arguing and many letters of pure vitriol, she was pulled from public school and was enrolled at a private institution for aspiring military officers- where she mastered the art of keeping a straight face and hiding emotion behind an impenetrable mask.
The public school was thrilled to be rid of her truthfully- having brought up several other issues with her father. Incidents such as the time she’d “accidentally” forgot to return to classes after lunch, and released hazardous materials into the building after managing to trip over several valves and crash an electrical line into flammable material. While she had had some inkling they were hazardous, she hadn't been as aware of where exactly they would go. While there were no fatalities, her voice never recovered from her brief exposure and remains horribly raspy to this day.
When she was seventeen a large legal battle commenced with child protective services and her father, and her father lost. It wasn't the government that took custody of her, but rather the company her father worked for, and they took over the training role. In fact, she enjoyed her time there more than with her father, largely because they weren't technically able to subject her to anywhere near the same regimen as her father, and partially because the director of the American branch of the company had in fact been shocked when he learned of what she’d been trained to do from a young age and had essentially reduced her training to a classroom.
At age 18, with a brand-new, top-of-the-line, bleeding edge prosthetic limb she made a spur-of-the-moment decision to see if she was mythically compatible. It was either fight against superior forces as just another soldier, and likely join a list of statistics, or fight superior soldiers as a shifter and maybe stand a chance of not dying horribly- there wasn't really any decision.
At a facility run by the CDC in Atlanta, flurries of people- humans, shifters, and mythics alike poked her, stabbed her with needles, et-cetera. Suddenly it was the next day, and lo and behold, she was compatible with the Demon class, a Valkyrie. So she got to stab things and mess stuff up, make everyone else feel like they could stab things and mess them up, and help them do so a little.
Well that didn’t seem too hard.
She’d left herself on a sort of autopilot for the next bit, the actual transformation itself more of a blur than anything. Her mind was primarily occupied with how to make things work with the company and her contract (which she had technically agreed to anyway).
She does remember appraising herself after the transformation with approval. Prominent muscles more so, impressive wings that would… well, she wasn't sure what exactly to do with them. Oh, and the armor, she had no idea at all where that had come from, but she certainly liked it.
She’d not really done much experimentation with what powers she’d been granted as a Valkyrie, and didn’t do so until she arrived at the Academy later. Her primary concern had been potential issues with the company, though surprisingly they proved fairly reasonable, though she suspected her new status had something to do with it. Not many PMCs could brag that they technically had a shifter working for them.
She progressed through The Academy much like she had prior, though this time there was the new variable of socializing, that she’d actually be able to participate in, maybe even make a real friend!
Or not, she progressed through The Academy exactly like she had previously, and was completely baffled by all the social niceties she encountered.
While she’d been fully expecting to have her ass kicked when she arrived, and was not disappointed, it happened a lot less than she’d been expecting. Her familiarity with strict physical training and regimens certainly helped.
She learned many things over the next three years. She made a runic blade, and learned how to use it better than any amount of HEMA could’ve done. She learned to augment her abilities and those of her blade and other with magic, and while not as blisteringly fast or agile as other Demon classes, she far exceeded them in strength and endurance. She learned to apply the wings she gained when shifted to their fullest extent, able to quickly cover ground or rapidly brake. She also learned to apply her magic in a more active manner, with varying results.
Perhaps the biggest glaring error in her training was her disdain for the healing and support capabilities of a Valkyrie, her logic always being “If the enemy is dead fast enough I don’t need to heal them, now do I?”
Something she’s well aware of is the fact that she’s theoretically still going to be fighting as an employee of a private military company, and not of one of the different governments of the world.
Personality:Alice predominantly has a cold, almost distant disposition to most people, though that will change depending on whether the person she’s speaking to is someone she likes (not a whole lot of people on that list) or someone she dislikes (lot more people on that list). To someone she likes, she can still seem distant, though it’s more a confusion with how to interact with them rather than an intentional barrier, nonetheless she will at the very least greet with a smile as opposed to the half-scowl. With someone she
dislikes her attitude also changes considerably, the best term being “Bitchy”, though luckily it actually isn't easy to get oneself on the list of dislikes.
She can be very patient, up until a point when everything will explode, though if this does happen one must consider themselves supremely unlucky; she once waited four hours while standing to wait for a store to find something, only to discover they had in fact forgotten she was there after something happened, and they were able to bring it out shortly after.
Privately, she has an almost poetic way of looking at things, and can be very romantic in the 18th century Romanticism sense, and were someone to catch her in the middle of well, not being the hardass military chick, it’d be hard to gauge her reaction beyond “Flustered”.
Other:I suppose this’d be a theme song, mainly when she’s not around other people.
She refers to her sword as
Umbrae, Latin for "Of Shadow".
Jackets were mentioned earlier, she wears a military styled one wherever she goes when not shifted, for an idea of what I'm talking about: http://www.polyvore.com/cgi/img-thing?.out=jpg&size=l&tid=570499
If I think of anything else later I’ll put it here.
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kapuchu
