Azereiah

What were the first three video games you played?

Windows 95 and the Sega Genesis here.

Elemental Academy [Currently Accepting!] -closed-

Not sure if we should wait for @SouffleGirl123 or not. Probably should.

@Dark Light

Elemental Academy [Currently Accepting!] -closed-

"Mostly?"

The gears turned in Brunhilde's head, each click sending a jolt of information and understanding. She didn't need to refer to the journal (as much) for this one. "I also wanted to meet other people like myself. It's much easier to make new friends if people don't think you're a witch. Anyway, I'm pretty sure we're running a bit behind on schedule."

"Well then if you are ready to start you are going to need to free yourself of all your things first!"

Brunhilde placed her sack on the ground, happy to be rid of it for the time being. The stupid thing had at least a month's worth of supplies in it, courtesy of her parents, despite the fact that it was only a three day trip. She kept her journal and pen, as they were more or less a part of herself. If they didn't like it, oh well.

"alright then, can you please demonstrate to me all of your elemental skills?"

She nodded once, and first demonstrated on a loose page the degree of precision that she could attain with air manipulation by quickly and roughly sketching the tree behind them without touching the pen.

Her second display was simple hovering, three feet above the ground - completely motionless, as a further display of precision. In addendum, she created a fairly large and weak gust of wind that rustled the tree's leaves a fair bit.

"I've been working on this last one for... I think seven years or so. Maybe eight. I'm pretty sure I've hit a wall with it, though."

For the third and final display, she returned to her pack and pulled out an 8x8x2" oak panel, and aimed away from any people in the area. She tossed it high into the air, spinning it around its flat axis, and dropped into a forward stance, defensively holding her journal across her chest. As the panel dropped, she threw a single punch, striking it dead center. The sphere of air around her fist broke forwards on impact, sending a narrow spray of coarse sawdust and splinters out of the other side of the board. The piece of wood fell to the ground with a vaguely fist-shaped jagged hole in the middle and cracks running along the grain of the wood.

Before she could say anything further, she was interrupted by the older man. "Enough. Atop the tower is your supplies for the class, you will need them for the first lesson."

She stood at attention politely and nodded once.

"Sorry, I should have mentioned it before, as a first year student of 'Air' you may only take the stairs of the tower, use none of the other methods. That is one of the few rules I must be adamant about."

"Reasonable. I expect untrained students would have... 'accidents', were they to try anything faster. I'll be back shortly."

After writing their words in the journal, she retrieved her bag and stuffed the remains of the oak panel back into it, then made her way towards the tower. She spotted the base of the staircase and walked up very carefully. She wasn't used to heights, having never seen a tower in person before, so she was as careful as she possibly could be. Good god, this was a tall tower. The walk was a lot more exhausting than it should have been, owing to the forty-odd pounds of junk she carried with her.

At the top of the stairs, she came to the air elementalists' dormitories, reopened her journal, and searched for an empty bunk that appeared to be designated for first year students. Not many students were there, and there was nobody she felt such a strong urge to speak to that she would risk angering the older man near Avy. Dumping all of her unnecessary things on what she claimed as her own bed, she found that she had forgotten to ever throw away any of the beefstick wrappers she'd accrued over the past few days of traveling, and quickly stuffed them into a trash can. Sadly, the beefstick wrappers had made most of her things smell utterly delicious, and she marked in the journal that she would need to wash everything thoroughly.

She searched the dormitory for first-year students' supplies as the journal instructed her and found a single set, which she claimed and shoved into her bag. Not once did she bother examining what was in the supplies, as she trusted whoever had put the label on them. She hoped that there would be other students at the lesson when she returned, and made her way back down the stairs.

@Dark Light

Elemental Academy [Currently Accepting!] -closed-

Brunhilde's pen made a wild flurry of markings across the journal page it was opened to - detailed sketches, descriptions, feelings, sounds. A volume of information condensed into an image, with all relevant knowledge strewn across it in an extremely easy to understand manner. She seemed slightly unfocused as she wrote, hardly seeming to care at all about the older man's very short response, except for that it revealed a small sampling of his personality.

Many moments passed as she completed her initial reaction entry, and she flipped back to a much later page, where further notes were scrawled in relation to the current day. She had been doing this every hour of every day for years, and the practice combined with the subtle enhancements via wind manipulation that sped her pen made it quite obvious. Further page flipping occurred at Avarius's first question and she scanned the pages almost instantly - and her eyes lit up with a vague sense of sadness for a split second before her smile reappeared.

She looked up again, seemingly looking through Avarius, and responded.

"Education, mostly. I'm from up north, family sent me here so I could learn in a less hostile environment."

Brunhilde took Avarius's hand and gave a firm and friendly handshake. The whirlwind around her hand weakened as she did so, but Avarius could still feel a very heavy pressure from it regardless. Were he to look, he would notice, in very ornate red lettering upon a white spiral, the message 'Check the Journal' on the back of her hand.

At his last question, Brunhilde flipped the journal's pages backwards with a small puff of air, and a look of mild surprise crossed her face. "Seventeen, apparently."

Elemental Academy [Currently Accepting!] -closed-

@Azereiah I realise my mistake, there is actually only two under the tree, one of them a teacher. :)

@Dark Light

I'll edit it, then. Thanks :P

Elemental Academy [Currently Accepting!] -closed-

Brunhilde

A tiny girl carrying at least half her weight in a large leather travel pack silently and quickly slid through the gates to the courtyard, looking rather dazed - with a hint of curiosity. Light very slightly bent in small spheres around her hands, which any experienced wind elementalist would be able to identify as tiny, violent cyclones of semi-stable compressed air. Tucked under her arm was a book the size of a library dictionary. The girl seemed to be skating across the ground - her feet hovering just an inch above it, lightly tapping the pavement with her toes to keep moving.

She stopped in the middle of the courtyard, standing firmly on the paving stones, and opened the book. She smiled, realizing that she had reached her destination. She could get settled in a room later - for now, judging by the position of the sun, she was probably slightly late to her first class, and she searched for a teacher of air. Preferably one who seemed competent. Meeting the other students could wait until later, as could getting her schedule in order.

The air smelled like people and power in all directions, and she felt that she had missed something very impressive. Further in one direction, the air smelled more energetic in a different way - as though it was being actively tampered with, and the motions of some trees caught her eye. Their leaves were swaying in the wind, counter to the other trees in the area. Two people appeared to be under one tree, and she assumed one of them was a teacher of Air elementalism. Not seeing other students in their direction, she breathed a sigh of relief - she wasn't quite as late as the sun indicated. As she skated towards the tree, she noticed one last, extremely subtle hint just before reaching who she assumed to be the teacher and two aides - a narrow trail of loosely rustling grass.

She felt that she would like these people.

"Hello. I'm Brunhilde, and I'm new around here. Is one of you a teacher?"

@Dark Light

Elemental Academy [Currently Accepting!] -closed-

Brunhilde Vigmundsdottir

---

---

Age: 17

Element: Wind.

Appearance:

4'10", 85 lbs. Absurdly small and narrow. She has short, straight auburn hair atop a short and wide face, with low and prominent cheekbones. Her ice blue eyes appear dull and vacant - almost lifeless.

Most of her garments consist of an earth-tone tunic under a sleeveless doublet, with earth-tone pants tucked into perfectly fitted, dark-green boots.

A tattoo is visible on the back of each hand. Both are reminders. On the left is the message "I have amnesia.", and on the right is the message "Check the journal."

Personality: Brunhilde is generally friendly to those around her, often very cheerful, and extremely confident in herself. She speaks very clearly and carefully to avoid being misinterpreted. Around people she's comfortable with, she tends to be much less careful with her choice of words, which often backfires. She is fiercely (and often violently) protective of herself and the things she cares about. Since coming to the Academy, she has been pushing herself much, much too hard, which has been problematic, to say the least.

She suffers from anterograde amnesia, constantly forgetting that she has ever met people or that events in her life have occurred. Generalized knowledge, facts, skills, and the like seem to be completely unaffected, thankfully - and she's able to remember certain things about herself if she reads it like it doesn't pertain to her. On account of this forgetfulness, she continually finds herself in unknown situations, and when she doesn't have several clear lines of escape, this puts her on edge.

She despises and fears cows, and because of this, she has dedicated her culinary preferences to taking revenge one delicious bite at a time.

Key words: Friendly. Confident. Periodically insensitive.. Aggressive. Amnesiac. Fearful.

History: Brunhilde's childhood was, for the most part, good. Her parents were farmers on an island nation somewhere between Greenland and Nunavut, just a couple miles south of a moderately large (if very poor) fishing village. At the age of 6, she was identified by her family as having some elementalist tendencies, but was forced to keep her abilities hidden from her friends from the village, out of fear that she may be barred from ever entering the town again. Her parents' fear for her safety led them to enroll her in a local martial arts school for two years, where she met a number of good friends. The school taught what was merely referred to as 'self defense', and incorporated techniques and philosophies from a wide range of other martial arts. She eventually lost interest in formal martial arts training, however, and left the school just a few months before she would have taken her exam to become a black belt. Her parents were satisfied that she could protect herself.

At the age of 10, she was playing and practicing her elementalist skills out in her family's fields when disaster struck. One of the cattle was afflicted with Mad Cow Disease due to a farmhand's incompetence and lost control, trampling crops and chickens alike. Brunhilde took a hoof to the head before the cow was put down, and although she made a full physical recovery, she had lost the ability to form new biographical memories. Her parents brought the farmhand in question before a tribunal to seek retribution for her injuries and the lost livestock. Brunhilde was brought to the witness stand, and when questioned, she was unable to recall anything had happened at all. This, of course, was used as evidence that she had been altered as a result of her head injury. The farmhand was found guilty and forced to repay the family with one cow and one goat, as well as serving a two week sentence in the stocks for gross negligence.

Her parents scrounged up what money they could for her to be seen by a psychologist from down south. Money was tight, but they managed fine regardless, and through years of therapy, she began to be able to cope with her disability by means of keeping journals and by identifying the ghosts of feelings of familiarity as reminders. Eventually, she even started learning to recognize whether or not she knew her friends or not. Their identities were still usually a mystery to her until she checked her journal, but a vague sense of deja-vu caused her to check in the first place.

During the seven years after the accident, she continued learning wind manipulation in the safety of her own land, until she made a single mistake. She didn't realize that her parents had company one day, and was spotted hovering three feet above the ground by one of the town's butchers, who had come to take one of the cattle. He said nothing to her family, but brought this news to the town hall. The local government recognized that she had not been a threat to the town, but that elementalists were abominations that must be removed, and they held a vote. The decision was 5-4 in favor of banishment over imprisonment. One courier later, her parents pulled her inside, helped her pack her things and many days' worth of provisions, and wrote two words on the most recent page of her journal: "The Academy" before sending her southwards on a plane. Under this, she wrote a reminder to herself to stay in contact with her parents as time went on.

Her arrival at the Academy was, unfortunately, too late for her to observe the opening ceremony for the semester.

Equipment: An enormous travel pack with a mess kit, a sleeping bag, several sets of clothes, a large heap of empty Slim Jim wrappers at the bottom of the travel pack, an enormous journal with a steel cover, and more pens than any normal person would know what to do with. Her only weapons are her fists.

Initial Wind Talents: Hovering a short distance above the ground, creating small breezes, cow tipping, and putting some extra force behind her fists.
Adjusted Wind Talents: A bit of focus in the classroom is leading Brunhilde to become increasingly creative with what skill she does have, and she is currently learning airsense, which will both allow her to feel her environment and control the wind more effectively.

Academy Wars: Rituals and Technology in the Modern World, a Magitech School RP

Applyin'.

Hope you don't mind the lack of a picture - never been very good at finding them.

Jack Emerson

Student

Name: Jack Emerson

Age: 17

Gender: Male

Appearance: 6'0", 200 lbs.

Jack has mid length, wavy blonde hair that reaches his shoulders, and a goatee of the same color. His narrow, steel-grey eyes give an impression of great vitality. He has a thick bone structure, as evidenced by a square face and cheekbones so forceful they appear to be bulletproof.

Years of molding metal and lifting boxes for his family have given him a very heavy muscular structure - not that of a body builder, but that of a worker or a warrior. This, combined with a very heavy skeletal structure, give him a rather imposing look - and it's often joked that he's the lovechild of a garbage truck and a rhino.

Personality: Jack is the epitome of confidence - but he is not brash or aggressive. He knows his strengths and his weaknesses intimately, and has no need to prove himself to anybody but himself. Every day, he challenges himself to improve himself further, and periodically he succeeds. He places little value on idle banter, but is willing to make small talk to meet new people if absolutely necessary. He very much enjoys spending time with others, though - even if he isn't always talking.

His grades are somewhat lacking, and he simply doesn't care. His test scores are fairly decent (typically hovering between 85 and 95) despite his lack of completion of most homework assignments (as he finds most of it to be a complete waste of time). He dislikes studying.

He is somewhat internally arrogant, and secretly feels that he is superior to many of his peers - and he absolutely hates this part of himself. But try as he might, he cannot get rid of those feelings, and he forces himself to hold his tongue in front of others. Humility is a virtue he was taught of from birth, and despite his efforts, he feels that he has never truly been able to achieve it.

While he shrugs off insults towards himself with ease, if somebody makes one of his friends cry, that person gets a swift fist to the face.

Skills: Blacksmithing. Engineering. Hand to hand combat - a mixture of capoeira, taekwondo, and street fighting. Dancing.

Jack is gifted in creating weaponry and defensive devices. He is very strong and extremely agile, but because of his flat feet and heavy musculoskeletal structure, he isn't suited to running quickly.

Equipment: Mirror Coat - a near totally custom Divine Gear full-body suit of armor loosely based on the myth of the armor of Beowulf. The suit was constructed in a flash of inspiration during a period of meditation on the meaning of divinity, and he came to the realization that mythological artifacts are only divine because of the force of the legends of those who made them and those who wielded them. The armor was constructed as a shrine to both Odin and to his own future.

Visually, the Mirror Coat is a skintight jumpsuit, with a segmented torso piece, elegant (if pointy) boots, a pseudo-medieval style greathelm with modern optics and an air filter, and a pair of enormously thick and heavy gauntlets. The metallic armor is polished to a mirror finish, and the Light Engine is located beneath a thick armor plate between the shoulderblades.

The Mirror Coat is, in Jack's opinion, incomplete - but its power is currently already stretched to the limit by its offensive and defensive effects.

Abilities: The Mirror Coat, due to its source of inspiration, provides a great degree of defense, capable of shrugging off damage that would maim unarmored fighters. The suit's gauntlets and boots provide greater defense even than the main body of the suit, in order to protect the user while striking a target. The Mirror Coat amplifies striking force to a dramatic degree, even being capable of tearing apart rolled steel, with a condition: the user must truly intend to destroy the target when striking, or else it provides no boost.

Brief Backstory: Jack is a westerner. Very much a westerner. Previously, he had been enrolled in an academy in northern California, but boredom caught up to him, and he felt he needed a real challenge. He learned of an academy that, despite its success early-on in each tournament, is defeated every year in the finals: Otsuki Academy, of Japan. A perfect place to better his skills, under threat of failure. Some courses in Japanese later, he boarded a plane crossing the ocean, and enrolled in Otsuki Academy for what would have been his Senior year.

In his earlier childhood, Jack was mystified by the concepts of magic and engineering. His parents, who were involved in medieval reenactment, heavily influenced his views of the world and of the divine, and he decided that when he grew older, he would become an adept Ritual Technology user. He wanted to make his mark on the world as not only a user of Ritual Technology, but also a creator, and so he learned basic metalworking - then advanced metalworking - and eventually made his way up the technology ladder to materials engineering. His earlier childhood was marked by years of martial arts programs after school, as his parents worked long hours and did not leave work until several hours after school let out.

He had a very happy and normal life, free of any sort of notable disasters.

Political Standing of the RoleplayGuild.

Pretty common viewpoint here.

Results

Elemental Academy [Currently Accepting!] -closed-

Applyin' for wind.

Brunhilde Vigmundsdottir

Age: 17

Element: Wind.

Appearance: 4'10", 90 lbs. Absurdly small and narrow. She has short, straight auburn hair atop a short and wide face, with low and prominent cheekbones. Her ice blue eyes appear dull and vacant - almost lifeless.

Most of her garments consist of an earth-tone tunic under a sleeveless doublet, with earth-tone pants tucked into perfectly fitted, dark-green boots.

A tattoo is visible on the back of each hand. Both are reminders. On the left is the message "I have amnesia.", and on the right is the message "Check the journal."

Personality: Brunhilde is generally friendly to those around her, often very cheerful, and extremely confident in herself. She speaks very clearly and carefully to avoid being misinterpreted. Around people she's comfortable with, she tends to have somewhat of a caustic wit. She is fiercely (and often violently) protective of herself and the things she cares about.

She suffers from anterograde amnesia, constantly forgetting that she has ever met people or that events in her life have occurred. Generalized knowledge, facts, skills, and the like seem to be unaffected, thankfully. On account of this forgetfulness, she continually finds herself in unknown situations, and when she doesn't have several clear lines of escape, this puts her on edge.

She despises and fears cows, and because of this, she is more or less addicted to Slim Jims.

Key words: Friendly. Confident. Caustic. Aggressive. Amnesiac. Fearful.

History: Brunhilde's childhood was, for the most part, good. Her parents were farmers on an island far to the north, just a couple miles south of a moderately large (if very poor) fishing village. At the age of 6, she was identified by her family as having some elementalist tendencies, but was forced to keep her abilities hidden from her friends from the village, out of fear that she may be barred from ever entering the town again. Her parents' fear for her safety led them to enroll her in a local martial arts school for two years, where she met a number of good friends. The school taught what was merely referred to as 'self defense', and incorporated techniques and philosophies from a wide range of other martial arts. She eventually lost interest in formal martial arts training, however, and left the school just a few months before she would have taken her exam to become a black belt. Her parents were satisfied that she could protect herself.

At the age of 10, she was playing and practicing her elementalist skills out in her family's fields when disaster struck. One of the cattle was afflicted with Mad Cow Disease due to a farmhand's incompetence and lost control, trampling crops and chickens alike. Brunhilde took a hoof to the head before the cow was put down, and although she made a full physical recovery, she had lost the ability to form new biographical memories. Her parents brought the farmhand in question before a tribunal to seek retribution for her injuries and the lost livestock. Brunhilde was brought to the witness stand, and when questioned, she was unable to recall anything had happened at all. This, of course, was used as evidence that she had been altered as a result of her head injury. The farmhand was found guilty and forced to repay the family with one cow and one goat, as well as serving a two week sentence in the stocks for gross negligence.

Her parents scrounged up what money they could for her to be seen by a psychologist from down south. Money was tight, but they managed fine regardless, and through years of therapy, she began to be able to cope with her disability by means of keeping journals and by identifying the miniscule ghosts of feelings of familiarity as reminders. Eventually, she even started learning to recognize whether or not she knew her friends or not. Their identities were still a mystery to her until she checked her journal, but a vague sense of deja-vu caused her to check in the first place.

During the seven years after the accident, she continued learning wind manipulation in the safety of her own land, until she made a single mistake. She didn't realize that her parents had company one day, and was spotted hovering three feet above the ground by one of the town's butchers, who had come to take one of the cattle. He said nothing to her family, but brought this news to the town hall. The local government recognized that she had not been a threat to the town, but that elementalists were abominations that must be removed, and they held a vote. The decision was 5-4 in favor of banishment over imprisonment. One courier later, her parents pulled her inside, helped her pack her things and many days' worth of provisions, and wrote two words on the most recent page of her journal: "The Academy" before sending her southwards on a bus. Under this, she wrote a reminder to herself to stay in contact with her parents as time went on.

Her arrival at the Academy was, unfortunately, too late for her to observe the opening ceremony for the semester.

Equipment: An enormous travel pack with a mess kit, a sleeping bag, several sets of clothes, a large heap of empty Slim Jim wrappers at the bottom of the travel pack, an enormous journal with a steel cover, and more pens than any normal person would know what to do with. Her only weapons are her fists.

Initial Wind Talents: Currently limited to hovering a short distance above the ground, creating small breezes, cow tipping, and putting some extra force behind her fists.