A bead of sweat rolled down Andras's forehead as she saw the attack that destroyed her angel. 'Haaah... I was expecting something less violent.' The smoke hadn't even cleared before she knew full and well that her summon was defeated. 'I think now might be a good time to open up some more options...'
Andras began to speak as she heard her teammates follow to her position and form up. "Okay, I'm going to cast something, so be- Huh?!" Andras had turned her head just as Aram punched through, or rather into, the wall. "At least let me give out a plan before you attack!"
Andras groaned and grabbed one of her cards. 'It doesn't matter if he attacks right now anyway, I guess. I better use this now and hope we can strike before the enemy can figure it all out.'
She could feel the spell swelling as she began to cast it, the card growing into a blue glow. Andras's voice reverberated through the arena, heard by all, as the card's glow enveloped the whole arena for a brief moment. "The knowledge of magic overflows fourfold... Grant us our Prosperity!" As though flower petals from a fruit tree, the cards fluttered across the arena, eventually distributing to each person in the arena. Everyone got four cards from the Root... Even the enemy.
Andras could barely keep up with all the new spells. It actually kind of hurt her head just to see so many cards at once. Nevertheless she quickly studied her allies' spells. "Y-You guys have awful luck!" She snatched up the cards, studying them briefly. iThey were all... bad, mainly. "I hope the enemies didn't draw anything too good... At least Aram drew something we can use." She nodded towards Aram. "If the time comes, I'll help summon the hellion."
Andras considered her other options. 'I can also use the fog spell to stop any hits, and grab the flag once I get an opening.' She decided to wait for the perfect moment.
Name: Stella (Actual name scratched out with hardlight knife)
Age: 18
Physical Description:
Stella has a primarily robotic body, though at the core she still is a human. She has messy brown hair that goes past her shoulders. Her robotic body is easily betrayed by the exposed joints of her various points of articulation. She usually carries an expression of disdain on her face, though she is not really aware of it.
Some aspects of her were changed to help make her harder to identify at a glance, but overall she looks about the same as before Proxima. Her hair is much longer than it used to be and her skin tone is much less pale.
While operating, she wears her sneaking suit. In reality, she prefers to wear it all the time, as it covers most of the robotic joints that betray her true nature.
Pardon the art. Probably will get a less rough image down some day.
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Important items:
Sneaking Suit: This skintight suit is customized to be similar to the type that Stella used during her "service." It was designed to cover her joints and minimalize any noise from movement that her new body may have given. On certain spots there are formed pieces of metal giving a slight bit of armor that can be further enhanced with Stella's Hard Light spell. It also features sheathes for her knives and pouches for other tactically relevant items.
Weapons:
Combat Knives: While they can be used as conventional knives, these sturdy weapons are usually enhanced by Stella's Hard Light spell. It was said that they were the only things that she managed to keep until the bitter end.
Spell List:
Mastered Spell: Cloak - Stella is able to use magic to render herself invisible to the unaided eye. This only affects the visual senses.
Mastered Spell: View - Stella's affinity with energies allows her to see things that would normally be impossible. Stella can see electric currents and signals with a large degree of precision - even down to living being's biological electricity. This sight can penetrate most non-magical materials up to 30 feet. Stella can switch this on and off at will, and works even in zero-light complete darkness.
Spell: Hard Light - Stella can create temporarary barriers of hardened light. These objects are hard but translucent, and can be seen through similarily to glass, as well as giving off a bright light. However, Stella is unable to create them without an achoring point of metal, and only at a thickness of a few inches max. Hard Light is as hard as high-level armor plating, and offensively features a self-maintaining edge that can cut through most mundane metals and body armor. These barriers will shatter similar to ceramic armor when stressed, and must be re-made. Because this captures existing light, this spell cannot be used in total darkness.
Spell: Pull - Stella can magnetize metallic objects, even if they are not normally magnetic. However, she must be touching the object in question to mangetize it and cannot control what is attracted to it magnetically. The strength of the magnetization is enough to hold her weight even if she is upside down or on a wall. Due to her metallic skeleton, she can use this skill to walk on metal walls or ceilings.
Spell: Spark - Stella can manipulate and generate electricity. However, this control is fairly weak and cannot be excercised for more than a few inches away from her body. However, she can use this ability to temporarily boost her body's power output, massively improving her strength, agility, and reaction times. However, this cannot be sustained for more than a few seconds at a time before exhausting her electricity reserves. She can also use it to deliver non-lethal shocks to anything touching her.
Spell: Flash - Stella can catch and disperse light into a blinding flash of light. However, this requires a light source of some kind, similar to Hard Light. The light is powerful enough to blind anyone caught off-guard for a minute or two, while those prepared for it will only have impaired vision for a few seconds. Technology or magic that screens bright lights can ignore this entirely.
Misc. Abilities:
Full-Body Cyborg: Stella is only 10% human. This has many implications. Due to this Stella has: -Reduced heat signature -Reduced nutritional needs (about 20% of what a normal human would need) -Metal skeleton (affected by magnetism such as her spells) -Ability to charge off of standard pattern robot charging stations -Ability to regulate her senses manually -Modular body parts that can be replaced if broken or destroyed -Vulnerability to EMPs (They don't kill her outright, but it disorients her significantly) -Increased chance for existential crises
Weapons Training: Stella is trained in use of most standard issue military weapons. In addition, she has mastery in fighting with knives.
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Personality:
Stella is shaped by her loss of a childhood. She never really had a chance to develop as an individual, so now that she is given her freedom she is unsure of herself. Her method of coping with her situation as a child soldier was to retreat within herself behind a guise of an emotionless killer.
The irony of acting like a cold robot all of her life up until Proxima is not lost on her. Now that she is free from the Commonwealth's child soldier program, she turned her focus towards revenge. Her suppressed anger at what was done to her has manifested into a cold and cruel agenda to kill every individual that had a hand in her lost childhood. While she tries to bring back her old emotionless guise while fighting, her emotions now have a habit of slipping out.
Her grim outlook stems from a life marked by fighting, pain, and death. Perhaps she could be taught about the other things life could offer her, in time.
Short Bio:
Stella is fairly silent about her past before being drafted. She was said to have had fairly strong promise as an athlete, even at an early age. In particular, she enjoyed gymnastics. Maybe due to her potential, she was abducted and drafted into the child soldier program.
Without much of a choice in the matter she was trained to fight. During the entire time she was trying to find a way to escape - but there was no opportunity at all. She would end up killed if she even tried.
In the waning hours of the war, Stella was ordered to fight in the pivotal Battle of Proxima. As the tides turned against the Ascendancy, Stella found her chance. Stationed in an outpost threatened to be overrun, she took her chance to slay her captors and desert - though she sustained horrific injuries as a result.
Due to luck, or maybe the amount of fight she had put up, but Stella had survived long enough for the Rau've to descend onto the wreckage of the outpost. She was recovered, but her body had sustained so much damage that it was unlikely she would live without immediate action.
Stella had considered herself dead. She didn't have time to come to terms with the idea, but she had accepted that it was coming. But she awoke, somehow. Her body felt cold, and she couldn't feel her own heartbeat in her chest. She had been asleep for a long time. Even after waking, it took her a week to be able to move all her limbs.
Her body could not have been saved, she was told. But her mind was still intact. The part that could be saved was housed in the shell of a humanoid robot. An artificial heart pumped synthetic blood to keep her human brain intact.
Left to come to terms with her sudden change, she could only come up with one plan of action. She knew the party responsible for all of her misfortune. The ones who had stolen her life, and forced her into despair, and then shot her in the back when she turned to run from a fight she couldn't win. She joined the rebels the moment she was able to after waking.
(I could go line-for-line with this song but I feel like that might be going overboard. But to summarize: Stella witnessed what a real war is, and doesn't have much hope for the future. All of the Acheron album has a lot of thematic overlap with Stella's character but this one is probably the most dramatic.)
Stella grit her teeth. Now it was bringing up Proxima. 'Bastard.' She figured if she thought it hard enough, maybe it might prod into the cloaked figure's mind just as it had done to her. She wasn't a fan of having her knives stolen. At the same time, maybe Stella's overall anger that she had kept down was boiling back up now that she had a clear threat to work towards.
Stella didn't have much time to work over the situation, so she went with something she knew would work. Magnetizing the floor the knives were passing over, she made sure that if there were any metallic objects passing above it, their trajectory would be deflected to the ground. Amongst the illusion copies, her true knife pulled downward and clattered against the hallway.
Reaching out her arm, she called the knife back to her with magnetic force quickly. She didn't want to leave her knife out in the open, even if she had one to spare. As it touched her hand it turned invisible with her, seemingly disappearing entirely. Stella was ready for another attack when the wind burst from the runes.
She was already magnetically attached to the wall, but in order to stay on without being thrown she had to increase her grip. Almost clawing into the wall, she managed to stay on. At the same time, she couldn't advance forward to pursue the cloaked figure. "It's getting away!" She shouted, though she doubted that anyone could hear her through the wind.
Partially due to a natural human instinct, and partially due to her strong magnetization, Stella ducked her head down to keep the wind off of her face. In that moment, she could have sworn she saw something strange amongst the streaking wind. A crystal, and it was using some sort of magic as well...
'Yeah right.' Her eyes were giving no errors, so it must have been her imagination. She stayed put, riding out the wind until it was all done. Stella knew when she would bring her head back up, she wouldn't see anything like that at all.
Andras nodded to Brutus. "I've got responses for anything!" She lowered her voice and added, "I can also just send summons forward without ever endangering myself..." She struck a triumphant pose. "I leave the defense to you, Aram!"
Inhaling deeply, Andras rose her voice to a yell, starting with a loud peal of laughter. "Kuhahaha! You foolish mortals would be best off surrendering now! Lest ye suffer the terror of a demon's magic firsthand!" Pointing dramatically with her holy spear, she ordered her angel towards the corridor exit, into enemy territory. "Be careful. They will be waiting for you."
The angel stepped into the doorway, on alert for any sudden attacks.
Stella was slightly relieved that the killings became more creative as they continued. She thought that the work looked similar to what she did, but by now it looked closer to some kind of cultist murder-suicide party. Only missing a large assortment of poisoned drinks.
Though it was certainly a change from what she was used to, it was just another pile of bodies in the end. She had seen plenty of that already. The instant replays of the deaths was novel at first, but it had began to wear thin for her. She regulated her senses to tune things out as best she could without compromising her awareness.
She stopped at the sight of the robe. It was floating, with no points of contact with the ground at all. 'Ah. One of them didn't get to the "suicide" part of "murder-suicide."' Stella kept still, even when it turned with its red eye glowing. She had trained herself to not react to the sudden movements of people when she was invisible - a lesson she learned very early on in her life. Falling over in surprise or losing her footing would ruin everything.
She didn't have enough training to not react to a voice in her head. She instantly checked her hearing, but she knew before she even got the data that it was a voice that made no sound. Stella grit her teeth. It angered her. Nobody was allowed to touch her mind. It was all she had left now.
She gripped one of her knives. Under less distressing circumstances she may have waited for another party member to give an intention to fight, but this was over the line. There was no way this... thing at the end of a hallway of mutilated bodies was a friendly. She sheathed the blade of her knife in hardlight, and with a flick of her arm, she threw the knife towards the center of the robe. As it left her hand, the glimmering light of the knife lit up the corridoor briefly as it streaked towards the figure.
Stella nodded at Kelan's goodbye. She felt like she should have said something more - probably complaining about being so sneaky about what the 'gift' was - but she couldn't think fast enough for that.
Stella clicked her tongue at Natasha's use of the word "kids." She wanted to snap something at this space hotshot, but she was on a mission. Arguments were the opposite of stealth. Stella after all preferred to end arguments before they began. She regarded Eldrid's statement instead. "A mage... Not our problem, as long as we grab Realist."
Stella felt a pang of apprehension. 'No doubt this mage will make himself our problem, though.'
She melted back into the scenery, turning invisible as the group began making their way through the ship. She took advantage of the metal corridors to walk on the walls. Being invisible was good, but not walking the same way as anyone else made someone much harder to detect. 'Another perk, then. I used to have metal plates in my shoes and gloves so I could do this. Now my entire chassis-' Stella caught herself saying something a human wouldn't say. 'Skeleton is metal.'
They didn't get far before they started seeing blood. As they progressed close to the core, the blood escalated into bodies. Stella dropped from her place on the wall to examine the scene. "This..." she muttered to herself.
'Looks like my work.' Stella finished her sentence in thought only. The sprays of blood, slashing and stabs...
"Looks like Kelan was right about there being others here." Stella spoke, not bothering to drop her cloak. The dead guard's arm briefly rose up, then dropped with a soft thud. "Do we have any ideas on who would be interested in this ship other than us?"
Stella nodded. 'This guy is at least more professional than some of the others. Kind of a mixed bag on this ship...'
"I'll take point then. As for anything you need to know about... I don't think so. Unless you've got stuff inside you that is magnetic. I'll warn you if anything else comes up." Stella had already checked out the approach before finalizing the mission plans. Even though she didn't account for the extra person, that one could fly and stealth like her, so it was just a matter of leading by example. "We're starting the operation." Stella said calmly to her team.
Even without her stealth, Stella figured she could make it to the ship without being spotted by anyone. "If we see anyone on our way to the AI, make a note of their position and move past them if we can. No point in starting a fight until it's absolutely necessary." With that, she showed a quick demonstration of her cloak for Cole to reproduce before setting off. Even with her invisibility, she had to stay aware of other things. Her footsteps, breathing, disturbances of the environment. It was just like old times. Stella felt herself slipping back into the mission mindset.
It was fortunately fairly clear in this area and Stella managed to lead the group to the gaps in the ship's armor. Keeping her voice as low as possible, Stella spoke up. "This is it. Looks like they didn't even consider this as a potential ingress point." She attuned her palms and feet to magnetize to the armor, and climbed into the gap with ease.
Dropping down onto a steel floor, Stella looked around quickly. "It's clear... Enough." She didn't have any scanners or anything, so she couldn't be certain. Being able to turn invisible had changed Stella's perspective on what a "clear" room is, after all.
'Better plant this.... thing before anyone shows up.' Stella wasn't sure what the device she was holding in her hand was. She only hoped that if it exploded, it wouldn't go immediately. She primed the device and planted it once she was sure her team was in with her.
Stella clicked her tongue, slightly annoyed. "I suppose it's fine, but... This isn't something you just say 'Oh by the way,' about!"
She pushed aside her exasperation with a sigh. 'I guess not everyone operated like I did... To be fair, I rarely worked in pairs, let alone threes.'
Stella briefly pulled Kelan's "gift" from her bandoleer and showed it to the two. "The plan is to sneak aboard the ship and deliver Kelan's device to the hull breach in coordination with the decoy team, and use the distraction to extract that target. If you can replicate my stealth, then we should be fine with you coming along." Stella went over the plan again in her mind. Another person added to it wasn't much of a change, so this would work just fine. Perhaps her brother in arms could even offer something useful for the mission. "Flight could help with this, I suppose."
Stella turned to Reisus. "So, will I be on point, or will you?" Her hand instinctively rested upon her sheathed knives. "I'm not sure if everyone else is ready to start, but I definitely am."
Stella had managed to rifle through the lockers until she found something she could wear. Not much in the way of armor, but at least she wouldn't have to worry about the mechanics of a skirt or her casual clothes. She pulled over the black tank top and fastened the bandoleer that Kelan gave her, then rolled up the over-large pair of shorts that she had procured. Though she was pretty sure they wouldn't get caught in her cybernetics, she didn't want to test it. Especially if she had to run from something like a tank.
After the touch-down, Stella maneuvered over to Reisus. She actually felt a slight bit of apprehension as she stepped up to the man. He was a little imposing to someone as young as Stella. 'A little different from Kelan, huh... I guess that's an understatement.' She averted her look when she realized she was staring at him. Stella took a deep breath. 'It's a mission. Get a grip.'
"Ahem. Reisus." Stella made the sound of clearing her throat. "Have you been briefed on the infiltration plan?" She patted the pocket where she was holding Kelan's gift absentmindedly.
Dezuel
Bartimaeus
BrokenPromise
Nallore
Yankee
The Savant
Mjolnir
Fetzen