Force and Fury

Code Vein (Closed)

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Lysandra looked up from the telescope control console, twisting partway around to address the question. It was a perfunctory one, of course, but the kind that you always asked as a leader, and of course she had thoughts. She always had thoughts. "I mean, can we really afford not to?" she asked rhetorically. "I don't want you guys turning all bloodlusty on me." She continued. "Besides, with the way Mistle's drying up these days, I should probably get out to it if you can take my gimpy ass along. Hopefully do some salvage with Pops, but at least sample return if it's beyond saving."

As she spoke, her body language might've looked casual enough: twisted partway around, forearm draped over the back of her wheelchair. Yet, there was a definite nervousness about Lys. The fingers of her other hand flicked at one of Marsh Sage's props as the drone rested on her lap. She could feel a tightness building in her shoulders and settling atop her stomach. She furrowed her brow. "You got some coordinates, chief? I see that big scary red 'LOST' in your chicken-scratch." She craned her neck. "Makes me nervous."

“Is it really that bad?” Erik leaned in toward the word scribbled on the map with a pensive expression. It was a rare face he made that never appeared for too long. In fact, he was already beaming again. “Thanks for pointing that out. When I get the time we can redo the map so it's legible for the others!”

Murdered, Lys thought, by kindness. She blushed. "It isn't that bad," she quickly added. "I just like pulling your leg."

Erik was still smiling. "Oh, and your coordinates," he replied, face turning pensive again for a moment as he scanned the map. He was in mission mode now - always friendly and helpful, but professional: focused. Lys admired the way that he could switch gears. It reminded her of her father. Erik stuck a pin through the map, into the corkboard beneath it. "N 50.91721° E 5.91775°," he announced almost... cheerily. "Hope I got that right."

"So do I," she responded with a hint of a grin. "Or this is gonna be quite the adventure. Thanks chief." She let her smile fade. N 50.91721° E 5.91775°... N 50.91721° E 5.91775° Lysandra repeated mentally, pulling the lever that unlocked the telescope's mounting and cranking the handle that opened the dome. With a shudder, the great metal orifice, with its canvas of patches and rust, grated open. The mighty old Victorian-era instrument at its centre groaned on its bearings, swinging into place as she entered the coordinates.

Releasing the brakes on her wheelchair, she rolled up to the eyepiece and peered through. Nothing. She didn't like seeing nothing when there was clearly something. She adjusted the view a bit, manually, arm aching a little as she turned the control wheel. She'd been at archery practice all morning. Then, she spotted it. Lys' eyes widened. Sure as they were about to go on a mission, there was a great big pack of Lost passing through her field of view. They loped, stalked, and shambled by. She counted at least a dozen and suppressed a shudder. "Well, this is pretty," she announced, looking up and twisting a bit. "Lotta Lost there." She swept some hair from her eyes. "Low level, but lots. I counted thirteen, but I think we can count on more." She released her brakes again and backed away. "If anyone wants to take a look, you're welcome to." She gestured towards the eyepiece momentarily before rolling up to the table, apprehension nibbling at her insides.

It had been a few months since Lysandra had gone into the field, but this wasn't just a normal supply run that she could twist Akaia's rubber arm into doing. There was actual research and sample retrieval. Back in the walking days, she'd have been jonesing to go: filled with more anticipation than apprehension, but that was neither here nor there. You're part of a team, she scolded herself. You pull your weight or you're deadweight. You're deadweight, you're dead... or someone else is because of you. She rested her elbows on the table's smooth stone edges. The part without the corkboard and map was always nice and cool. "That said, I think we can handle it." She forced a confident smile that was only half-fake. She trusted these people, and they'd picked up quite a few useful new members over the past few weeks... who she trusted less, but there was safety in numbers, at least. "Let's... roll, Commune?"

Imperium Mortuorum: A Zombie Apocalypse RP in Ancient Rome

Not gonnna lie: I'd love to continue this, but I'm already GMing The Hourglass Order and involved in Code Vein, so taking on GM duties is going to be beyond what I can currently handle in terms of workload.

Code Vein (Closed)

Lysandra Tran

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| AGE |

Lysandra is 32 years old. Her birthday is on October 5

| APPEARANCE |

Archery Practice (current)

Casual (3 years ago)

The first (and often only) thing that people remember about Lysandra is her wheelchair. It's a simple, sturdy, lightweight manual chair and, as a paraplegic of four years, she uses it from dawn to dusk in order get around. Otherwise, she's a more or less baseline human: a fairly pretty Asian woman in her early thirties with tanned skin, dark hair and eyes, and a businesslike bearing. She is not and never has been much for dressing up and would rather dress for functionality and comfort. Layering is a rule to live by. It's easier to take something off than to put it on. To that end, her usual attire consists of a light t-shirt over a sports bra, jeans or leggings - the latter sometimes paired with jean shorts - and knee or thigh-high socks. Sometimes, she'll toss on some flats, but shoes are pretty irrelevant. Sturdy gloves - usually fingerless to allow her to work with touch screens - are more important, as they protect her hands from blisters. On colder days, She'll complete the outfit with a jacket. She has two and both have a striped patch in mint, seafoam green, and white sewn onto them: the flag of the settlement that she used to live in and where her brother still resides. Finally, though she rarely actually wears it as intended (because that'd be both inconvenient and goofy), is the supergirl medallion that she received from her mother as a girl. It's usually tucked into her bag or a jacket pocket as a kind of good luck charm. She tells herself that she doesn't believe in 'luck'; everything is probability. Yet, on the day when she broke her back, she didn't have it on her.

Mission (5 years ago)

As a human, Lysandra doesn't require a mask, and this gives her one less thing to worry about, especially when she goes into the field. Of course, that doesn't happen often anymore. Much to her chagrin, the post-apocalypse isn't very wheelchair accessible. When fieldwork is necessary for research or intel, though, she brings along some sturdy cycling gloves, trades her handbag for a large backpack with seemingly endless pockets, and usually swaps out her indoor wheels for some with thicker, grippier treads, as well as larger front casters. In the past, she'd often wear motorcycle armour, hiking boots, and either athletic leggings or a baggy pocket-filled jumpsuit with elbow and knee pads. It was all about getting as deep into trouble spots as possible and quickness and durability were paramount. Nowadays, Lysandra usually forgoes anything that could hamper her already-limited mobility unless it clearly and directly helps her get more fieldwork done. Her primary goal is maximizing her returns on those brief outdoor sojourns and minimizing the physical liability that she represents. If enemies ever succeed in actually reaching her, she knows that the jig is pretty much up. Still, she's held onto her body armour, just in case. It's sturdy, lightweight, and can go under her jacket. She still has the knee pads too. Maybe she can't actually feel a knock to the knee, but it's also not like they'll hamper her movement. Besides, she kind of slips things in behind them. Why oh why do women not get usable pockets in most of their clothing!?

| PERSONALITY |

Daring ~ Unsentimental ~ Hyper-aware ~ Bitter ~ Clever ~ Assertive

At her worst, Lysandra can come across as a 'bossy know-it-all science lady'. She can seem cutting, acerbic, and pushy. A lot of this, however, is just frustration and barely-suppressed insecurity. The significant gulf between what she knows needs to be done and what she can accomplish on her own is an open wound, regularly picked at by circumstance. The other major factor is simply that she is used to being the smartest person in the room and it grates upon her to entertain other people's stupid ideas when they could be making progress towards their (read: her) goals instead.

That said, she's a genuinely decent human being beneath it all. Lysandra is an absolute encyclopedia of both general and esoteric knowledge. She is a human calculator, a problem solver, has an amazing eye for detail, and is a natural-born storyteller. She is genuinely one of the most interesting people who you will ever talk to and, on her better days, her cutting wit, self-deprecating humor, and straight-faced delivery can have you - instead of her - rolling with laughter.

| BACKGROUND |

Lysandra's mother was an engineer. Her father was a biologist. Both were born before the Great Collapse and were not young parents (forty one and forty, respectively). Her childhood was full of diligent work and research. It was full of movement and stories while on the move. She learned about the world that was: the great open green fields and forests, the safe, cozy homes, and the shining universities: beacons of learning and opportunity. Most of all, however, she accrued skills: she studied the nature of living and unliving things with her father. She learned the wonders of robotics, sensors, computers, and mechanics from her mother. Instead of playing with Lego, she hand built her first drone when she was seven. The family settled in the mid-sized and fiercely independent outpost of Fresh Haven. Lysandra and her slightly older brother, Daniel, grew up and their parents aged, so they took on increasingly important roles as scouts, field researchers, and even soldiers. In particular, she was quick and stealthy: an excellent scout and climber, with a natural aptitude for surveying and understanding her surroundings, using them to her advantage.

For all of the world's dangers, her father fell prey to a flu in his 61st year. Daniel, who'd become more of a soldier than his sister, was gone for long periods of time and their mother increasingly withdrew into tinkering with her dwindling supplies. Lysandra, telling herself that her mother's work was valuable in more ways than one, began roving ever further afield in search of parts. She conducted her own research while out there. It was frightening, but challenging. In some ways, it was invigorating, and better than just sitting in some hole waiting to die. She begun to feel as if she could get to the bottom of how and why mistle worked, the role of the Sidhe, and how the Earth might be healed. She begun to feel as if she had some agency in her life. Further she went, scouting ahead with her drones, infrared sensors, and binoculars. She saw and found things that most humans couldn't. She knew a little bit of martial arts and learned more. She taught herself how to shoot. There were close calls - hairbreadth escapes from death - and tense moments. She hid out, she climbed, leapt, and scampered from one safe place to another, and then plunged back into the lab after days or weeks out in the world. Her parents' stories of the years before she was born had instilled in her a wariness towards revenants. Their kind had feasted on humans, once. The only thing needed for them to return to it and become Lost was a short period of time without consuming human blood.

Her mother was in ill health when Lysandra went out that day, but she tried to put aside her worries. At a steady jog, she made quick progress through the well-mapped regions near Fresh Haven, fists clenched around the straps of her backpack and breath wispy and white in the cool air. Perhaps she was preoccupied with thoughts of her family. Perhaps she was just careless, but she ran smack into a pack of Lost. She took one out of the fight with a well-aimed shot to the head, but then there was no option but to do what she did best: run, climb, and hide. She dropped her backpack and took off, through the labyrinth of a ruined city. After what seemed like forever, two more fell off the pace. This was a bad situation - worse than the usual 'bad situations' - but she had escaped many times before and would again. Thirst clawed at her parched throat but one final Lost - a monster of a man - stayed doggedly on her tail. Further up a crumbling building she went, leaping nimbly from sagging staircase to rotting floor to support beam, and he started to falter. The jump is still burned into her memory: over a gap in a staircase. It was the type that you dismiss in your head as a 'ninety percent chance I'll land it'. She'd made ones like it plenty of times before and she doubted her pursuer would be able to follow. She'd be safe. The thing is, if you roll the dice enough times, the odds will catch up to you eventually. The floor had looked solid on the other side but it wasn't. It gave way instantly and Lysandra can still recall with absolute clarity those two seconds where her stomach just folded in on itself in terror. Then she hit.

She was told that a handful of revenants who'd been surveying the area had heard her gunshots. As a gesture of goodwill, they'd rescued her and brought her back to Fresh Haven but, in the weeks and months following that fateful fall, as people kept telling her that she was a 'warrior' and would surely walk again, as she had to relearn how to do basically everything, and as her elderly mother cared for her as if she were still a child, Lysandra began to wish that they hadn't. Mother passed away eight months after the accident and, officially, the strain of having to care for her grown daughter hadn't been a contributing cause. Daniel stepped away from his duties temporarily and she moved into his unit with his family, but it wasn't much more accessible than hers. The entire settlement was built in what had once been a vertical farm crisscrossed with staircases, scaffolds, and prefab walls that had formerly comprised her playground but that now meant that she couldn't go much of anywhere without assistance. Wracked with guilt and regret, Lysandra threw herself into her engineering pursuits, sitting in front of a work table for hours each day, hammering away at her mother's machines, digging through the endless piles of scrap that she had accumulated on her sojourns, and constructing drones to map, guard, and scout, water filters to help grow food and provide drink, and devices to supplement her broken body and make her remaining family's lives easier.

Soon, Daniel could not afford any more time away from his duties and so her nephew, niece, and sister-in-law became her protectors. This, Lysandra could not permit any longer. As she had hoped, she'd rediscovered a sense of purpose - an imperfect one, for it still hurt so much to not be whole - but enough to push her forward once more. This place, however, was holding her back. She was holding her family back. The revenants had saved her. She had judged them too harshly, she decided, on the basis of childhood fears and stories from people who were no longer alive. She was, though, and saw little point to living for herself alone. There were vanishingly few people with skillsets like hers and, even if she couldn't conduct much of her own fieldwork anymore, her skills were valuable - key, even. With the sort of bold decisiveness that had defined much of her life and a new unsentimentality that she had developed more recently, she bid farewell to Fresh Haven and joined civilization proper. She has been here for three years since, in an uneasy sort of alliance that allows her to shed some of her grating dependency while saddling her with more of a different nature. This arrangement may yet allow her to reach her goals, however: an end which justifies any means.

| SKILLS / EQUIPMENT |

💡Bigbrain: Lysandra is just honest-to-goodness smart. She seems to regularly be a couple of (figurative) steps ahead of everybody else in most situations. She has a wealth of scientific and practical knowledge that can benefit her allies.
💡Mechanically Inclined: If there's a macguffin needed and anything that could possibly count as a tool, you can count on Lysandra to provide said macguffin, one way or another. She also creates numerous helpful devices, drones, and non-autonomous robots.
💡Tools of the Trade: The 'bossy know-it-all science lady' caries a backpack of wonders. It contains a first-aid kit, two-way radios, a multipurpose mask, dehydrated food, flashlights, thermal packs, wiring, glue, screwdrivers, pliers, and a dozen other travel-adapted, lightweight, well-machined tools that used to be her mother's. If you need something, chances are that she has it. She can also patch you up pretty well, though she definitely doesn't give much thought to pain management.
💡Crack Shot: Lysandra knows how to shoot - by God does she know how to shoot. She can usually calculate things like bullet drop, wind effects, and ricochet angle too. If forced out into the field, she carries one pistol in her bag (or on her lap if she finds herself in a hot zone), and a spare duct-taped to the underside of her wheelchair close to one of her wheels. She can pull it out or fire it unexpectedly with a quick sleight-of-hand when it looks like she's just reaching down to wheel herself.
💡Fledgling Hawkeye:Lys often carries a composite compound bow, which is quite compact and strapped to the back of her wheelchair. She's been working tirelessly (the only way that she knows) with Erik on archery and has equipped her arrows with all sorts of interesting payloads. In addition to good old-fashioned arrowheads, there are adhesive yields, high explosive, taser, smoke, sonic trap, hollow point, trackers, and barbed expanding heads. She generally carries two of each in her quiver. While Lysandra's nowhere close to Erik's elite level, she's respectable, helped along by her natural situational awareness, sense of aim, and fantastic upper-body strength. She is consistently able to hit a moving target or a small/faraway target, but not always as reliable if the target is both of those things.
💡Human Shopping Cart: It seems like a small thing but, as long as someone's willing to help push her, Lysandra can easily carry a couple hundred pounds worth of equipment, specimens, a bound and gagged prisoner, or even a lazy or injured ally. Revenants don't recover immediately, after all.
💡The Immortals: Four robotic helpers serve as Lysandra's agents both when she stays behind and in the uncommon instances when she goes into the field. They can operate either autonomously with limited AI capabilities (results may... vary when used this way) or be controlled one at a time via joystick and VR headset. She's working on a neural interface, but 'working on' is very much the operative term here. Loosely themed after the Four Immortals from Vietnamese legend, her agents are:

The Immortals

• Mountain Man: A multilegged tumbling and walking robot with a flexible body about the size of a small cat, Mountain Man is able to traverse almost any terrain, slip into small spaces, climb, dig, swim, and perform basic scouting, rescue, delivery, and sample return operations. He has a taser, tranquilizer, and scissors too.
• Marsh Sage: Primarily defensive in nature, Marsh Sage is a blindingly quick, maneuverable, and quiet coaxial quadcopter drone that can lay smokescreens, strobe blinding lights, and dispense nerve, mustard, and other poisonous gases. It is also quite handy for spying and scouting.
• Iron Horse: A series of wheels on articulated arms, this is Lysandra's supplementary mobility aid and latches onto her wheelchair. It can propel her, hands-free, at high speeds, stabilize and protect her from recoil or being pushed against her will, clamp itself magnetically to metallic surfaces, and boost her over curbs or flights of one to three steps. It can also act as a bridge, platform, or supply carrier on its own.
• Sky Princess: Lysandra's main offensive tool, Sky Princess is a large purple hexacopter drone that can lay down smokescreens, fire paralytic poison darts, release high-frequency sonic blasts that are extremely painful and induce headaches, dizziness, and nausea, and launch micro-rockets similar to the 'Whistling Birds' from Lucasfilm's The Mandalorian.
• Unless they don't have to go far, she cannot bring all of these with her at once. For extended missions, the maximum is two or three if she doesn't take her bow. Only Mountain Man and Marsh Sage are small enough to be carried together comfortably on her person. Sky Princess can be swapped in solo or strapped to her wheelchair in place of her bow.

| LIMITATIONS AND WEAKNESSES |

👩‍🦽Headset: When directly piloting one of the Immortals or her other creations beyond her sightline, Lysandra wears a VR headset linked to the drone's on-board camera. This leaves her detached from her immediate surroundings and vulnerable to attack unless she is safely away from a hot zone (where she knows that she should stay) or has an ally to watch her back.
👩‍🦽No Signal: Much of her utility is linked to her Four Immortals or other remote-controlled minions. If they stray out of signal range (about 3 miles or 5 kilometers) or if their signal is jammed somehow and they're forced to operate autonomously, she is much less effective and - if she is brave/foolish enough to be in the thick of things - much more vulnerable.
👩‍🦽Limited Charge: While she carries extra battery packs and a solar panel charger, these can only do so much. Once her Immortals are out of power, they're deadweight until they can get more. The same goes for the offensive ones' ammunition. She has a few refills, but extended missions can be...challenging.
👩‍🦽Limited Ammo: Space in Lys' bags is at a premium, and she doesn't carry many bullets. The same goes for her arrows. They take up quite a bit of space and are valuable with their unique payloads. They are best used only situationally, from long range or at pivotal moments when they can have the largest impact. By no stretch of the imagination is she a front-liner.
👩‍🦽Obstinate: Lysandra is used to knowing better. She will often dig in and insist upon the rightness of her opinions and preferred courses of action. She tends to aggressively prioritize her projects and ideas unless yours align with them.
👩‍🦽Fragile: At the end of the day, for all of the tech that she carries, the 'bossy know-it-all science lady' is human. She is not as physically capable as revenants and sidhe, which is compounded even further by her disability. Lysandra is painfully reminded every time that she watches a revenant recover from either fatal or crippling wounds that she is unable to do so herself. She gets one body to play the game of life with. Whatever happens to it (including death) sticks.
👩‍🦽Paraplegic: As a paraplegic, Lysandra has no feeling or movement below her waistline. This has the following effects:

This is Wheel Life

• Limited Mobility: She needs to use a wheelchair for mobility and, even with its assistance, is severely limited in this regard compared to able-bodied people.
• Terrain Dependent: While quite quick over flat ground and in open space, and with excellent stamina on flats or downhills, she is very terrain dependent.
• Obstacle Course: Things that we would not even think to consider, such as sand, gravel, curbs, cobblestones, and warped or cracked pavement cause Lysandra significant difficulty.
• Planning is Not Optional: Routes have to be carefully planned: shallow downhills maximized, extended or steep uphills and downhills minimized, and obstacles, rough terrain, and climbing avoided.
• The Anti-Parkour: She is incapable of strafing to the side or jumping. The closest that she can manage to the latter is to pop a wheelie.
• A Real Handful: While pushing herself, her hands are occupied, making her unable to move and shoot or move and pilot any of the Immortals.
• Inflexible: She has a lower sightline than other people, takes up a larger footprint, and cannot squeeze through small spaces.
• Temperature Control: As a paraplegic, regulating her body temperature can be a problem. When she gets hot, she gets very hot. When she gets cold, the problem can snowball.
• Wheelchair Dependent: If somehow separated from her wheelchair, Lysandra isn't realistically going much of anywhere on her own.

| NOTES |

• If humans get colour codes, hers is 7FFFD4.
• Lysandra is, low key, a huge science fiction nerd, particularly with regards to Star Trek. She gets that from both of her parents. They had a flash drive with old recordings and she used to watch them as a kid. She has, with only slight self-consciousness, told people to 'Live long and prosper'. She also has a soft spot for comics, even though most of them are kind of low brow. She read them as a kid and those were happy times.
• She appreciates some good Pho. Seriously, ethnic foods are a dying thing. She's trying to learn how to cook, but... revenants don't really need human food all that much.
• She strongly dislikes having to give her blood up for revenants. For pragmatic reasons, she'll do it, but it's just a reminder of her (and other humans') helplessness compared to them and it rankles. She sees it for what it is: an increasingly unsustainable practice.
• Lysandra's had romance in her life before. She had a couple of boyfriends, years ago in Fresh Haven, but they bored her before long. One, in particular, wanted to settle down, but she has always made it clear that she does not want to have children. Not only would it take time away from her responsibilities as a researcher, she worries that she'd be unable to properly care for them and that bringing a child into a world like this, just to live in constant fear and be food for others, would be grossly irresponsible. She tells herself that she doesn't like children anyways: they're loud, disruptive, and annoying. She'd be lying, though. Secretly, she's a big kid at heart. That was half the reason she used to go gallivanting around the ruined cities, running, jumping, and climbing.
• She loves the animals that nobody else does... except for frogs. She cut far too many of those open as a girl in the name of science to not be unnerved by them now.
• Because of her immense inner nerd, Lys would love to function on 'rule of cool' when it comes to making her various gadgets, but practicality trumps pipe dreams given the sort of world that she lives in and what she believes is the difference that she can make.
• Four years on from her accident, Lysandra has more or less adjusted to her altered reality and reached an understanding of what her abilities and limitations are. However, twenty-eight years of life experience before then have hardwired into her an approach of bold, independent action, a boundless curiosity best satiated firsthand, and the self-image of someone who can handle herself and get out of tough scrapes. Rationally, she knows that much of that is no longer practical, but hanging back, being cautious, and letting others do the work still causes occasional moments of dissonance.

Lysandra's Network

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L Y S A N D R A

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Role in the team: The Bossy Know-it-All Science Lady

💔 Poor // ♥️🤍🤍🤍 Neutral // ♥️♥️🤍🤍 Friendly // ♥️♥️♥️🤍 Strong // ♥️♥️♥️♥️ Bonded // ❤️‍🔥 Lovers

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Erik

Apparent: ♥️♥️♥️🤍
Actual: ♥️♥️♥️♥️
Erik was part of the group that saved Lys' life four years ago. Sometimes she struggles with feelings of obligation towards him, but he's just such a ray of sunshine that, despite those moments where she finds him cloying and exasperating (such as, occasionally, those morning 'walks' around the garden), she values him greatly: more than she's ever likely to admit, and worries that he takes on too much. Erik's her neighbour and also the other mechanically-inclined member of the group, so they often end up working together. Both are such conversationalists once they get going that they can easily pass hours in chit-chat. In some ways, despite appearing her age, he reminds her of her father. Were anything to happen to him, Lysandra would be so ruined inside that her tough facade would almost certainly crack.

Dallas

Apparent: ♥️🤍🤍🤍
Actual: ♥️♥️🤍🤍
Lys has only had about a month to get to know Dallas. At first, he represented a personal triumph for her, as she took it as proof that her leaflet-dropping drone recruitment drive had paid dividends. She's started to appreciate him for his genuine uncomplicated nature, handiness, and good heart, but his recklessness has already driven her to frustration and worry a couple of times and she feels like she has to play stricter with him than she would actually prefer for his own good and safety.

Ionna

Apparent: ♥️🤍🤍🤍
Actual: ♥️🤍🤍🤍
New people are always a double-edged sword and there have been quite a few lately. They're exciting and bring new skills, perspectives and potential for new friendships. They also bring fears and baggage and represent a risk of discord or potential loss. Ionna is very new and she looks very young. Lys is trying to reserve judgement. After all, Revenants are often much older than they look. She's been trying to set aside her hidden soft spot for kids, instead waiting and seeing how things go, but it's nice not having to look up someone's nose for once when talking.

Ajax

Apparent: ♥️♥️🤍🤍/💔
Actual: ♥️♥️♥️🤍/❤️‍🔥
For the past two years, Ajax and Lys' tit-for-tat has been one of the defining aspects of the team dynamic. It's usually lighthearted, but occasionally seems a bit loaded. They always seem to end up on opposite sides of things, but that might be more because they both care, are used to being in the right, and actually want to do their due diligence. Deep down, she values him... in potentially more than just a platonic way. There are deep and meaningful similarities between them that she senses and she wonders if he senses them too. Perhaps, if she acts harshly towards him, it's because she's frightened of exploring those feelings and the insecurities and vulnerabilities that come with them.

Akaia

Apparent: ♥️♥️♥️🤍
Actual: ♥️♥️🤍🤍
Akaia is a useful person to Lysandra, and Lysandra supposes that the reverse is true as well. The Sidhe often goes on the kinds of long scouting and scavenging missions that Lysandra used to undertake herself. She brings back useful parts and the two of them are easy, friendly, and regular collaborators. However, while there is nothing deeply amiss with their relationship, they may not be quite as close as they appear. Akaia is... awkward to talk with and, besides, they simply don't have much to talk about outside of the professional. There is also a tiny hint of jealousy on Lys' part. Sometimes she feels like Akaia is a better version of what she used to and can no longer be.

Lysandra

Apparent: ♥️♥️♥️♥️
Actual: 💔
Lys often appears to be in love with herself and, particularly, her own brilliance. Not only can she drop some profound knowledge on those who will listen, she can also tell the most incredible stories - which usually feature herself as the central figure. Those stories are getting old, though, and she feels like she hasn't really made many new ones in the four years since she lost the use of her legs. That frustration at what she views as a 'reduced role' in life, coupled with the feeling of being a liability means that she can't help but sometimes feel like a stranger in her own body. Lysandra works hard to keep fit and active, but it's out of duty instead of desire or joy and she is happiest in those moments when she can just lose herself in a task or interaction that doesn't remind her of what she's lost.

Vincent

Apparent: ♥️🤍🤍🤍
Actual: ♥️🤍🤍🤍/❤️‍🔥
New people are always a double-edged sword and there have been quite a few lately. They're exciting and bring new skills, perspectives and potential for new friendships. They also bring fears and baggage and represent a risk of discord or potential loss. When Lysandra looks at Vincent, she's still forming an opinion, but she doesn't sense much of the last two. He seems like a wandering vagabond and that kind of wanderlust is something that she has a double-sided relationship with. On the one hand, it seems badass and romantic and she can appreciate living without attachment. On the other, it smacks of nihilism, having no future and nothing to fight for. It sounds... lonely.

Desmond

Apparent: ♥️🤍🤍🤍
Actual: ♥️♥️🤍🤍
When the group pulled in Desmond a few weeks ago, it was a moment of outsized importance for Lysandra. For the first time since she had left Fresh Haven, she had another living, breathing, aging human to interact with. Desmond was a mystery and largely remains so but she can see the scars that he has, even if they've had less physical impact than hers. She tries to counsel herself to take a figurative step back and let him do what he wants with his life but she is terrified for him and the danger that he puts himself in. There is no ignoring his sister who was recently turned into a Revenant and has not yet awoken. Secretly, she wonders if he might be headed for the same fate, perhaps intentionally. Even more secretly, she wonders if she is too.

Cerise

Apparent: ♥️♥️🤍🤍
Actual: ♥️♥️♥️🤍
Lys often feels like she's too tough with Cerise, but she'll be damned if she lets anyone see that. The girl is just so innocent, kind, and... docile that it's hard not to ask things of her, even if those occasionally stray a bit too close to demands and orders. For what it's worth, she can recognize someone else who's hurting inside and who struggles with the sheer physicality of their world. Lys has come to recognize that they just sort through their feelings in different ways. Deep down, she sees Cerise as a good-faith actor and appreciates her deeply. She also appreciates someone else who can play piano, and much better than she can.

Poppy

Apparent: ♥️♥️🤍🤍
Actual: ♥️♥️♥️🤍
Lysandra appreciates the team's other (better) healer. While the two of them don't seem to be family-level close - not explicitly hanging out and chatting on the regular - it's more because of their natures and responsibilities. Lys considers Poppy a friend and is very grateful for someone else taking some pressure off of her to be the 'team mom'. They sleep in rooms right across from each other and often spend time in similar areas. Finally, while everyone is aware of Lysandra's aching arms and shoulders, the chronic pains in her lower back are something that she hasn't told anyone but Poppy about. Lys knows well the addictive qualities of laudanum and avoids it except in circumstances where she is essential and would be non-functional without it.

Power Rankings

Lys' Totally Unofficial, Well-Informed, Unbiased, and In-No-Way-Binding Power Rankings of Commune Members

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Ajax
Strength: ★★★★★★★✰✰✰
Skill: ★★★★★★★★★★
Speed: ★★★★★★★★✰✰
Stealth: ★★★★★★★★✰✰
Resilience: ★★★★★★★✰✰✰
Ranged Combat: ★★★★✰✰✰✰✰✰
Melee Combat: ★★★★★★★★★✰
Intelligence: ★★★★★★★✰✰✰
Utility: ★★★★★★✰✰✰✰
Temperament: ★★★✰✰✰✰✰✰✰

Akaia
Strength: ★★★★✰✰✰✰✰✰
Skill: ★★★★★✰✰✰✰✰
Speed: ★★★★★★✰✰✰✰
Stealth: ★★★★★★★★★★
Resilience: ★★★★★✰✰✰✰✰
Ranged Combat: ★★★★✰✰✰✰✰✰
Melee Combat: ★★★★★★✰✰✰✰
Intelligence: ★★★★✰✰✰✰✰✰
Utility: ★★★★★★★★✰✰
Temperament: ★★★★★★★★✰✰

Cerise
Strength: ★★★✰✰✰✰✰✰✰
Skill: ★★★★★★★★✰✰
Speed: ★★★★★★★✰✰✰
Stealth: ★★★★★★★★★✰
Resilience: ★★★★✰✰✰✰✰✰
Ranged Combat: ★★★★★★★★★✰
Melee Combat: ★★✰✰✰✰✰✰✰✰
Intelligence: ★★★★★✰✰✰✰✰
Utility: ★★★★★★✰✰✰✰
Temperament: ★★★★★★★★★✰

Dallas
Strength: ★★★★★★★★✰✰
Skill: ★★★★★✰✰✰✰✰
Speed: ★★★★★✰✰✰✰✰
Stealth: ★★★★★✰✰✰✰✰
Resilience: ★★★★★★★✰✰✰
Ranged Combat: ★★✰✰✰✰✰✰✰✰
Melee Combat: ★★★★★★★★✰✰
Intelligence: ★★★★★✰✰✰✰✰
Utility: ★★★★★✰✰✰✰✰
Temperament: ★★★★★★✰✰✰✰

Desmond
Strength: ★★★✰✰✰✰✰✰✰
Skill: ★★★★★★★✰✰✰
Speed: ★★★★★✰✰✰✰✰
Stealth: ★★★★★★✰✰✰✰
Resilience: ★★✰✰✰✰✰✰✰✰
Ranged Combat: ★★★★★✰✰✰✰✰
Melee Combat: ★★★★★★✰✰✰✰
Intelligence: ★★★★★✰✰✰✰✰
Utility: ★★★✰✰✰✰✰✰✰
Temperament: ★★★★★✰✰✰✰✰

Erik
Strength: ★★★★★✰✰✰✰✰
Skill: ★★★★★★★★★✰
Speed: ★★★★★★★✰✰✰
Stealth: ★★★★★★✰✰✰✰
Resilience: ★★★★★★✰✰✰✰
Ranged Combat: ★★★★★★★★★★
Melee Combat: ★★★★✰✰✰✰✰✰
Intelligence: ★★★★★★★✰✰✰
Utility: ★★★★★★★✰✰✰
Temperament: ★★★★★★★★★★

Ionna
Strength: ★★★★★★★✰✰✰
Skill: ★✰✰✰✰✰✰✰✰✰
Speed: ★★★★★★✰✰✰✰
Stealth: ★★✰✰✰✰✰✰✰✰
Resilience: ★★★✰✰✰✰✰✰✰
Ranged Combat: ★★✰✰✰✰✰✰✰✰
Melee Combat: ★★★★★★★✰✰✰
Intelligence: ★★★✰✰✰✰✰✰✰
Utility: ★★✰✰✰✰✰✰✰✰
Temperament: ★★★★★✰✰✰✰✰

Lysandra
Strength: ★★✰✰✰✰✰✰✰✰
Skill: ★★★★★★★✰✰✰
Speed: ★✰✰✰✰✰✰✰✰✰
Stealth: ★★✰✰✰✰✰✰✰✰
Resilience: ★★✰✰✰✰✰✰✰✰
Ranged Combat: ★★★★★★★✰✰✰
Melee Combat: ★✰✰✰✰✰✰✰✰✰
Intelligence: ★★★★★★★★★✰
Utility: ★★★★★★★★✰✰
Temperament: ★★★★★★✰✰✰✰

Poppy
Strength: ★★★✰✰✰✰✰✰✰
Skill: ★★★★★★✰✰✰✰
Speed: ★★★★★★★★✰✰
Stealth: ★★★★★★✰✰✰✰
Resilience: ★★★★✰✰✰✰✰✰
Ranged Combat: ★★★★★★★✰✰✰
Melee Combat: ★★★✰✰✰✰✰✰✰
Intelligence: ★★★★★★★★✰✰
Utility: ★★★★★★★★✰✰
Temperament: ★★★★★✰✰✰✰✰

Vincent
Strength: ★★★★★★★★★✰
Skill: ★★✰✰✰✰✰✰✰✰
Speed: ★★★★★★✰✰✰✰
Stealth: ★✰✰✰✰✰✰✰✰✰
Resilience: ★★★★★★★★✰✰
Ranged Combat: ★✰✰✰✰✰✰✰✰✰
Melee Combat: ★★★★★★✰✰✰✰
Intelligence: ✰✰✰✰✰✰✰✰✰✰
Utility: ★★★★✰✰✰✰✰✰
Temperament: ★★★★✰✰✰✰✰✰

*All ratings are based solely on Lysandra's perception of people and subject to her biases, insecurities, and desire to meme. Some ratings are more informed than others. Ratings of newer members are based on very limited information and early impressions.

Other Character Concepts (Feel free to NPC)

Redwood

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R E D W O O D

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| AGE |

Appears about thirty

| APPEARANCE |

Redwood's name is a child of his appearance. The first thing that people notice about him is his exceptional height. Very tall and fairly slender, though solid enough, he towers over other people and... well, low ceilings and hanging light fixtures are the bane of his existence while indoors. His skin is dark and somewhat leathery, making him look older than he is, and his hair is dark and curly. If people had to ascribe a human race to him, they'd call him Black. Finally, come his tendrils. Six of them sprout from his upper back, shoulders, and flanks (just below his arms) and it almost feels like a misnomer to describe them as tendrils, since they are unusually thick and strong. Despite his intimidating size, there is a gentleness of appearance and manner to Redwood. His eyes are large, dark, and keen: always watching, sometimes almost unsettlingly but never threateningly. He has a long face with a strong jaw, but fairly soft features. He most often wears either a gentle smile or a slight, determined scowl, but most of his expressions seem somewhat muted.

In terms of clothing, he wears what used to be basketball shoes, since they're the only ones he's found that'll fit his abnormally large feet. They've been patched, strengthened, and modified so much that they're scarcely recognizable anymore. He wears loose deep green shorts over black leggings that only make it about 2/3 of the way down his shins. His upperwear has been modified with holes for his tendrils. It consists of a green Timberland t-shirt with the logo in the center of his chest. Unusually, the t-shirt actually fits him. The ensemble is completed by the pair of black fingerless cycling gloves that he wears, with tough plastic guards over the knuckles. On colder days, he swaps the shorts for jeans and supplements the t-shirt with a brown leather bomber jacket.

In general, Redwood doesn't see much need to dress all that differently whether he's in combat or out of it, though he sometimes wears a motorcycle vest, along with elbow and knee pads in the former. His mask is a simple, practical thing: mostly brown leather and a pair of hoses leading to a backpack with an air canister and a few other useful items (like a first aid kit, multi-tool, and a knife) inside.

| PERSONALITY |

Helpful - Easygoing - Determined - Judgmental - Ferocious

| GROWTH/CAMOUFLAGE |

Tendrils: He has six of them and, as mentioned earlier, they are unusually thick and strong, perhaps as a side effect off Redwood's size. At a slow rate, they produce a sticky sap that can inhibit the movement of enemies if well-placed, adhere things to walls, and temporarily seal wounds and prevent blood loss. He uses them for a variety of purposes, their long reach and adhesive sap allowing him to control, impede, and delay enemies when in combat, setting them up for teammates or his own weapons. Enough of his natural adhesive will allow equipment and allies to hang from walls or ceilings, but he does not produce it very quickly and he is too heavy to make use off this ability himself in any case. Redwood also has some medical training and pairs this with his gift to provide emergency care when necessary. When not being used, he often wraps his tendrils around his midsection and over his shoulders.

| BACKGROUND |

Redwood's history is largely a mystery and you get the sense that either he would like it to stay that way or perhaps he does not remember it clearly himself. He has mentioned having associated with a small, independent human colony in the past, though he hasn't spoken of why he is no longer there. In general, one gets a sense of goodness and kindness from this sidhe, but purposeful distance, almost as if he fears attachment. The intensity with which he approaches the Lost certainly seems to stand in contrast to his generally laid-back nature.

| SKILLS / EQUIPMENT |

• 🙖 Specialized Combat: Redwood is quite skilled in mid-range combat, often using his tendrils like an extra set of longer limbs to hold enemies off, strike at them, catch allies, help push off for mighty jumps, and anchor himself against recoil and pushback.
  🙖 Skewers: When in combat, Redwood wears sharp steel skewers on the tips of four of his tendrils. These can cut reasonably well, but are specialized in stabbing and pinning. Generally, it takes at least two of them to really hinder and enemy, and all four to definitively hold one down. That sets him up to deliver the coup de grace with...
  🙖 Fat Mac: his trusty .950 cal rifle. Cumbersome, deafening, and dangerous, this colossal weapon can deliver a blast capable of piercing walls, concrete or cinder blocks, and vehicles. What it'll do to flesh and blood is... grisly. Lost might be immortal, but they'll be... out of action for a while after eating a round from this monster.
  🙖 First Aid: It's almost obligatory for sidhe to be healers, and Redwood is no exception. He carries a kit in his backpack and can deal with all sorts of minor to moderate illnesses and injuries. He can also seal and staunch wounds with his sap.
  🙖 Kinder Surprise: These are fragile ceramic vessels that look like large eggs and are kept in a padded container within a side pocket of his backpack. In fact, they are filled with Redwood's sticky sap (collected over an extended period of time) and have a very low-yield contact explosive inside. When they land, they shatter and spray their contents over a roughly two-to-three meter radius.
  🙖 Intimidation: It might not be much good against the Lost, but Redwood's towering height and powerful tendrils can definitely lend him an intimidating air when he wants to cow uncooperative types. Generally, he is loath to use this, but if it saves him or his allies a fight, then he will.

| LIMITATIONS AND WEAKNESSES |

• 🙓 Saviour Complex: Redwood will often try to take on too much at once, put himself in danger, or step in to handle things that other people have under control out of misplaced concern. One gets the sense that he is used to being the protector of those much weaker than him as opposed to a member of a legitimate team, and he may need to be reined in.
  🙓 Limited Stamina: When going all out, the big guy tires pretty quickly. He is best saved for an opening salvo, critical moments, and a big finishing move, and will almost always need a rest to recuperate if he overexerts himself. Of course, due to his saviour complex, he will rarely be open about this and it usually needs to be inferred.
  🙓 Precious Ammo: It takes quite a while to replenish his Kinder Surprises when he uses them, so he can sometimes be a bit stingy with those. Similarly, ammunition for Fat Mac is heavy, so he doesn't carry too much at any given time. It's also hard to come by, so he tends to use it sparingly.
  🙓 Boy Scout: While he can be ferocious in combat against the Lost, he tends to really hold back against other enemies.
  🙓 Pollution: When exposed to it for extended periods or inn high dosage, this can prove lethal to him. There aren't many places where Redwood can safely remove his mask.

| NOTES |

• I'd love to include some better reference and thematic pics, but it hasn't been easy finding any.
• In terms of his combat role, I view him as fairly versatile. To use gaming terminology, he's mostly mid-range crowd control, with some healing and one big occasional nuke. It's tempting to view him as a tank, and he's reasonably tough, but doing so in all but the most desperate of situations would be a mistake.

Hemlock

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H E M L O C K

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| AGE |

Appears to be in her late teens or early twenties

| APPEARANCE |

If your name is Hemlock, you're obviously going to have an aesthetic that fits. This strangest of sidhe looks like nothing so much as an edgy college student in a hoodie and black nail polish. Despite appearances, she doesn't actually have any tattoos. They're drawn on with marker and regularly replaced or embellished. However, beneath the persona, Hemlock isn't really all that special: just a lanky, dark-haired, and vaguely pretty young woman with an aversion to letting anyone see her smile. She carries a faint musty odor everywhere she goes, as if death follows her. Indeed, those who have spent extended time around her without a mask have often fallen ill, almost as if some of her toxicity somehow leaks out.

Stylistically, she leans goth or punk. Occasionally, it's the latter, but generally trends more Edgar Allen Poe or just generally grim. At their nadir, her sartorial efforts bottom out in the form of a loose dark hoodie and cargo pants with a studded belt and (maybe) wristbands. However, she can usually be counted on to put some effort in. Her mask, when she's outside, is themed after a plague doctor's and her clothing is often self-modified. On the surface, it looks like typical goth gear or rocker girl shtick, but there's motorcyclist protective gear underneath, emergency supplies tucked into hidden pockets, and lots and lots of knives, because she's nothing without that cutting edge. When she's not actively doing things, Hemlock wears a simple gas mask (pictured above), designed to cover the lower half of her face. She mostly just doesn't want to mess with her grimdark image by letting you see her smile. That's not 'on message'. The truth is that Hemlock is deeply self-conscious and disaffected about her spores' very strong tendency toward the toxic and dangerous as opposed to useful and healing like most of her species.

| PERSONALITY |

Edgy ~ Angsty ~ Curious ~ Vainglorious ~ Sadistic ~ Innocent

A sidhe whose breath seems to almost exclusively produce spores of violently toxic and poisonous plants such as yew, nightshade, and water hemlock and whose gift is camouflage, Hemlock is not at all comfortable with herself and her role, so she puts on a mask every morning and plays a character instead. She feels as if she should heal the land, but instead, her gifts lend themselves to death. In combat, as one would expect, she is a stealthy killer in the mold of your stereotypical assassin.

In attempting to embrace what nature has given her, she has become rather sadistic towards enemies, though it still doesn't come one hundred percent naturally and she's, in turns, glad of it and annoyed. Hemlock is edgy in what usually appears to be a self-aware manner, though she can often cross over into cringe territory. Most of all, however, she's just unhappy with the hand she was dealt as an atypical member of her species, and makes a big show of irreverence and 'not giving a shit™'. She genuinely doesn't understand what the reason for her existence and 'misfit' gifts might be.

| CAMOUFLAGE |

Hemlock's ability hasn't manifested itself as a growth. Instead, she has the gift of camouflage and is quite good with it, easily able to creep up on opponents and especially effective in the dark, because darkness is the colour of her soul.

| BACKGROUND |

Hemlock likes to be all brooding and mysterious about this and hint at something dark and monstrous in her origin story. The truth is that there just ain't much to tell. The way in which sidhe age (or don't) is the real mystery, and she's actually both very young and rather old at the same time. She's just always dealt with dissonance, for as long as she can remember: a supposed healer who's only really good at killing. There was a human settlement that she used to associate with, and she remembers watching a lot of late 1990s and early 2000s movies from an old flash drive there. Much enamoured with the dark, brooding antiheroes and brash, punkish hacker types that she saw on the screen but equally aware of the laughter and eyerolls that they regularly received, she adopted her present persona - Edgequeen evolved: cleverly self-memeing - upon arriving a few months ago at her current location. Secretly, she wants to be a hero. She gets songs stuck in her head and imagines her own soundtracks and battle scenes. In them, she's unironically awesome, just like Lobo, and Venom, and Elektra, and Wolverine.

| SKILLS / EQUIPMENT |

• Tortured Artistic Soul: Hemlock is quite the artist. Her preferred media are spray paint, markers, and carving tools, but she has a natural aesthetic sense and good technique. She can use this not only for purely creative production, but also to camouflage, confuse, and create decoys.
• Cutting Edge: lots of knives, including sharp ones, jagged ones, long ones, short ones, throwing ones, and... you get the picture. She has knives that pop out from the tips and heels of her boots at the press of a toe. Sometimes, they pop out by accident and she nearly trips on them, but Hemlock turns it into a roll, because rolls are almost as cool as unnecessary spins during a firefight on Tatooine.
• Student of the Blade: While you were partying, Hemlock studied the blade. To this end, she often carries twin katanas, because they give her a bit more range and can lop off a head in a single swipe. That's not only effective in combat, it's a damned cool visual.
• ToxXxic: Every blade that she has is coated in deadly poison that will stop your respiration, kill your nerves, clot your bloodstream, or induce any number of painful potential deaths.
• Leveled Agility: Hemlock is almost preternaturally agile. Lithe and graceful, she is very difficult to hit accurately, and that's when she isn't camouflaged. She can close or open distance with sudden speed, slip or contort through small spaces, and... *teleports behind you* "Nothing personal, kid."

| LIMITATIONS AND WEAKNESSES |

• Style Over Substance: Hemlock kind of lives and (hopefully not) dies by the 'rule of cool'. She isn't as strictly effective or dialed in as she should be. Whether it's a dramatic pose after a kill, the need to call out the names of her 'attacks', an unnecessary flourish, flip, or spin, or a complete refusal to use guns because they're 'dishonourable', she is honestly, hinderingly flaky. You're never quite sure if she's laughing at herself, inviting you to laugh, or actually completely unironic. The only thing that's certain is that she'd be much more effective if she was just... normal.
• Garbage Healer: She's a sidhe, but you'd be foolish to rely on Hemlock for any sort of healing or nourishment. Doing so will not only result in some snarky comment and zero actual benefit, it will also send her into the first stages of an existential crisis played out in the space beneath her persona.
• Waif: Hemlock isn't winning any contests of strength or durability. It can be almighty frustrating to lay a finger on her, but once you do, she's out of the fight.
• Crippling Insecurity: For all of her bluster, Hemlock is young, different, and unsure. She makes errors in judgement, she doubts herself, and she's sensitive beneath the facade that she wears. She wants you to like her and think that she's cool and useful but, confoundingly, she's kind of unable or unwilling to recognize, accept, and value genuine praise and regard. Sadly, that may be most of her reason for trying to save the world. She has to prove something to herself and to everyone else out there, but she doesn't really believe that she can.
• The Fumes - They Burn!: When exposed to it for extended periods or in high dosage, this can prove lethal to her. There aren't many places where Hemlock can safely remove her mask.

| NOTES |

There really could only ever be one theme song for her.

The Hourglass Order

The Conclave of the Five Thrones

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Pandes, Vardes 29, Dami-Zept 54, 2:00 HS - 1:25 HE

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Location: Campus & The Arboretum ~ Potential Interactions: all students

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The clouds that seemed to cling to the towers of Ersand'Enise by night usually disappeared during the early hours of Shune but, this time, they did not. The day dawned cool and cloudy. A slick, smothering wetness hung dank and limp in the the sky, somewhere between rain and a heavy mist. From multiple points within the city, liveried carriages and solemn processions - rendered more so by Ahn-Oraff's mourning - wound their way towards Arc en Ciel Hall.

Of course, the students of this storied place did not live in a bubble. They knew very well what was to take place today and, despite their youth, had at least some idea of its importance. There was a nervous anticipation to the day's gossip as they attended their classes, and it was announced by their first period instructors that all and any were invited to attend the conclusion of the Conclave of the Five Thrones in the area of the gallery that had been reserved for students. Seats, however, were limited.

Perhaps it was unsurprising, then, that they had trouble focusing on their classes. Indeed, some of the more academically inclined among the faculty grumbled about the holding of the Conclave in the city every fifth cohort. There were other disturbances afoot, however. Rumours flew about that many students had woken up the previous morning to find aberrations on their nightstands. Even worse was the fact that some had almost certainly absorbed them. The rest had since been dealt with, by what means, the Academy was tight-lipped. They claimed that they were hard at work getting to the bottom of the matter and that the knowledge was kept privileged for the youths' safety.

First Period: Conversion with Sienna Afraval

When students entered the class, they found all desks cleared to the edges and five items on stands in the middle. Their instructor had an intricate watch and a platter full of candy apples. The five items were: a blast furnace, a giant, whirling boulder on an axle, a vat of bromine with strands of a silvery metal poised to drop into it, a cluster of tightly-coiled springs, and a lightning rod by the open window. It was clear that the maddest science was about to take place. Their instructor greeted them all. She shook all of their hands and asked them to rate their skills in conversion on a scale of one to ten. She advised any truecasters to come to her in private after class, as she'd be dismissing everybody ten minutes early. Then, they commenced drawing. She didn't ask them to convert yet. It was diagnostic, she explained. She wanted to find their most comfortable sources, so she asked them to draw as fast and hard as they could, just to the point where they started to feel the effects of drawing to capacity. They then received candy apples for their trouble.

Second Period: Mathematics with Luria Colloy

They walked in, sat down, and were given a test. Their Zeno only said that is didn't matter at all how they came to their final answers, so long as those answers were correct. She then gave them what she described as an 'elementary' problem to take home: you have six feet of ribbon and you need to make bows. Each bow requires 5/6 of a foot of ribbon. How many bows can you make?

Third Period: Cooking with Hamir Zemana

For those who had Cooking with Hamir Zemana, they were treated to a wonderful post-luncheon dessert. He asked them how they would describe cooking as a skill or discipline before providing his own philosophy: "It is easy to cook passably, but it is the most difficult skill in the world master cooking, for the work of the chef is neither art nor science. It is both and much more." He outlined if for them thusly: "You are combining parts to make a whole, but it is not so simple as a puzzle. Each part interacts with and changes the others. The ingredients work on a chemical level both with each other and application of heat: where, when, how, and how much." He wasn't finished, however. "Then there is the subjectivity of it to consider, the psychology of taste and texture, and the aspect of visual appeal. You can have two dishes that taste the same, but the one with superior presentation will almost-universally be considered to taste better." He was a friendly man with a big, booming laugh, but he made one thing clear towards the end: "If you you came here hoping for an easy class, you still have time to transfer. This will be a space for rigorous learning... and not a bit of sampling the delectable fruits of our efforts. We will create our own rewards."

Third Period: Athletics with Zander Mozaru

Jomurr was an arrogant little prat and asked why an athletics class was not gender-divided. He expressed dismay at being unable to engage in more physical sports without having to worry about 'hurting the women'. The Zeno acknowledged these concerns by agreeing that he would rethink the class if the boys were able to beat the girls in a challenge. He divided the class by gender and put them through a grueling obstacle course that prioritized flexibility and balance early on and then worked them to exhaustion and beyond. The boys fell behind early, caught up quickly, and faltered in the end. No clarification was needed at the end of the class.

Third Period: Painting & Drawing with Born-on-Solstice

Given the inclement weather, one would think that Zeno Solstice would be forced to retreat indoors for a painting and drawing class. Instead, had them gather in one of the Arboretum's shelters and create watercolours of their surroundings, noting how people's postures, behaviours, and paths changed due to the changed environment. "A good artist not only captures a moment in time, but also implies what has come before and teases what still might be."

Third Period: Drama with Fades-in-Moonlight

In her usual almost-flippant manner, Zeno Moonlight divided her class into five groups and tossed five copies of a script at them. She said it had been written by a student from the previous cohort and that it was the worst one she had ever seen. Indeed, it was tragicomically awful. She gave them fifteen minutes to memorize it and make any changes that they wanted. Then they would have to perform and attempt to make something more of it. Leon, Marlijn, Linah, and Penny fund themselves together, along with a girl named Seriana, who wore a very revealing dress. Some groups did...better than others.

Fourth Period: Natural Sciences with Randan Kedd

As his students walked into the class, Randan Kedd drew from the reactions causing lactic acid to build up in their muscles. He used this energy to enhance everyone's mood and energy. Their first unit was to be on the human body. Mastering magic involved understanding the body profoundly and intimately. He had five plaster skeletons. He made five groups. He broke the skeletons into 206 bones and mixed them up using Kinetic Magic. He told the groups to put them together. He said that they would do this task each week until every group was able to finish, without mistakes, in ten minutes. "Fundamentals," he exhorted, "fundamentals! If you don't know, find out! If you're not good, practice! If you need my guidance, ask!"

Fourth Period: Statecraft & Leadership with Alcaster Serra

Zeno Serra promised to break them in easily and, after having everyone share their reasons for joining he class, conducted a case study. He broke them into groups of five and assigned them the roles of figures within the Joruban Revolution. They were to assess the performance of their assigned figure and discuss their findings with peers. Then they were to prepare to present, during next week's class on what their figure had done right or done wrong and come up with one significant change and the effects it may have had.

Fourth Period: Astrology with Born-on-Solstice

Karim was fortunate enough to walk to the astrology room with his Zeno, since he'd been in her third period art class. She was, indeed, a sunny personality: bright, funny, and relentlessly, infectiously positive. Class itself consisted of learning about different sets of astrological beliefs and how each interpretation made different use of a common set of natural symbols. She spoke of how the light of the moons affected the moods of people, the patterns of the ocean, the places where fish congregated and ships moored, and the way that animals behaved, slept, and hunted. She had a certain knack for asking questions that allowed them to do more of the speaking and yet still learn.

---

Pandes, Vardes 29, Dami-Zept 54, 2:00 HE - 1:00 HD

---

Location: Campus & The Arboretum ~ Potential Interactions: all students

---

Those students who chose not to take the school up on its offer to attend the evening session of the conclave would've found the campus and, indeed, the city eerily quiet and empty. It was theirs to wander and do as they pleased, though what there was to do comprised a fairly short list.

For those who attended, however, they hurried to pack their dinners into half an hour. Some simply lived with the hunger, wary of not getting a seat. In any case, they thronged into the enormous theatre, clamouring for space just as the dinner entertainment came to an end. The chamber quartet bowed and the audience clapped as the students shuffled in. If some of the smaller girls shared seats and a couple perched awkwardly on armrests and steps, nobody scolded them for it today, a breach in the school's normally-rigid discipline temporarily permitted. The balconies positively bulged with human life.

The heads of state of the current holders of the Five Thrones sat on five large chairs onstage, each painted so as to denote what they were. Behind them sat the six Arch-Zenos of Ersand'Enise, the Paradigm, and the Zenith herself in a large semicircle. Other dignitaries and world leaders were gathered in front in what was usually the orchestra pit. The clouds had cleared somewhat and the sun's light filtered in through the massive stained glass windows, its beams reaching across the seats and one, in particular, striking the pipe organ at just the right angle to make its steel pipes gleam faintly.

Zenith Upta rose and gave a brief recommencement address. Her bearing was as dignified and professional as ever, but one couldn't help but sense a hint of tiredness at this point in the daylong proceedings. The leaders' speeches had already been given, including those who did not hold one of the thrones. Those few students who'd had a fourth period spare had been able to catch some of what had been said as well as getting up to speed on what had taken place earlier. They now endeavoured to catch their fellow students up. While it was inconceivable that either Revidia or Perrence could lose its throne (indeed, the latter had never lost it), and highly unlikely that Torragon or Belzagg would be in any danger, Eskand appeared much as it had for the last couple hundred years: weak.

It looked as if Rouis of Perrence had recognized this too. Indeed, he and Horik had been at it for most of the day: a powdered little man in gold-embroidered clothes and cape and a great grumpy bear who made, in turns, exasperated and threatening noises. Then, however, it was time to vote, and as the leaders and the Arch-Zenos walked up one by one to slip their ballots into the simple wooden box, a hum of conversation raced through the audience. Truly, there wasn't much to talk about. It was Perrence first. Eskand would come second to last and there were rumours that Queen Silke of Kerremand was in line to take Horik's place. That she could for once depend on the support of her longtime enemy, Rouis, was almost comically evident.

Then, it was Roderick's moment. The crier's voice had recovered admirably from three days prior and was crisp and clean. "Our opening matter is that of the Crystal Throne," he announced, his voice kinetically enhanced and carrying an air of dignified disinterest. "The first vote confirms Perrence." He placed a paper in a small tray on the table marked with the Fleur de Lis of that country.

"The second vote proposes Kerremand." A titter worked its way through the audience. That would be Horik's spite vote. The mammoth of a man grinned, self-satisfied. The paper was duly dropped into a tray marked with the dragon that was a symbol of that country. "The third vote confirms Perrence." So did the fourth. People began speculating on whether Revidia, next, would receive any spite votes against it. "The fifth vote confirms Perrennce." Rouis certainly wouldn't be above spite voting.

Then, however, something happened. "The sixth vote proposes Kerremand." Surprised murmurs rippled through those gathered. Horik's smile grew large and toothy. He leaned over in his chair, the overburdened piece groaning, and looked right at Rouis, who appeared annoyed. Prospero Malatesta steepled his fingers, stonefaced. "The seventh vote proposes Kerremand." The murmurs became exclamations. There was a concerted effort to gain Kerremand the throne, at the expense of mighty Perrence!

"Votes for the Crystal Throne stand four in favour of Perrence, three in favour of Kerremand. There are six votes remaining." Perrench observers and students, in particular, began to speak in more than just whispers. Roderick unfolded the next ballot. "The eighth vote proposes Kerremand." Rouis leaned forward. His eyes darted about. There was a genuine play being made here. The danger was real!

"The ninth vote confirms Perrence." The king sat back in his chair, stroking his goatee nervously. "The tenth vote confirms Perrence." The ship seemed to have been righted: one more vote. Yet, it came for Kerremand. Eyes turned to Queen Silke. She was calm, poised. "The twelfth vote proposes Kerremand." An electric silence prevailed. "Votes for the Crystal Throne stand six in favour of Perrence, six in favour of Kerremand. There is one vote remaining."

Roderick's face gave it away before he read it, but his voice remained measured and professional. "The thirteenth vote proposes Kerremand." He paused. "The motion for Kerremand to replace Perrence as holder of the Crystal Throne is carried."

What followed was chaos. There was no amount of kinetic amplification that Roderick could've done to prevent it. He must've known as much, because he didn't even try. Silke began her walk up the few steps. Stiffly, stunned, Rouis rose from his seat. He looked out across the audience, an unreadable look crossing his face. Was it fury? Apology? Determination? Regret? That this was a bald-faced ploy of politics and bribery was clear to all. The Five Thrones were supposed to belong to the five greatest nations of the twin continents and Perrence was arguably the greatest of them all. It was, quite frankly, ridiculous for them not to be there. The king paused for a moment, and then something happened. One Perrench girl stood up. Perhaps she had used Sound Enhancement, for her voice rang loud and clear: "I have heard of a place - have you? - it is written, it is said." People craned their necks to look her way. She continued, and a handful of voices joined her. "Where every woman has her wine and every man his daily bread." The Perrench began standing.

"The streets are paved in stone," they sung,
"The fields green, the lords are good.
I would live in such place.
Yes I would. Yes I would." There were hundreds of them. They rose. They added their voices.

"Green Perrence, motherland, you have raised me up from new.
Under Oraff's watchful gaze, you have shaped me strong and true.

Your forests filled with game,
Your shoppes are stocked with finest goods.
I would live in such a place.
Yes I would. Yes I would." Rouis' hand was over his heart. He sung the song of his people.

"I see your fields stained with blood, shed to keep me safe and free,
Where the poppies grow up thick, but I would give my life for thee.

My children: they will live here.
They will prosper by your hand.
Green Perrence: my home forever.
Green Perrence: motherland."

Over a thousand strong, their voices reverberated for a moment after they finished, filling the cavernous interior of Arc en Ciel. Solemnly, King Rouis removed the hat from his head and bowed before his subjects. They bowed in return and when he straightened, he seemed taller than he had moments before, more certain. With an almost sinuous grace, he bowed deeply and deferentially before Queen Silke and motioned her towards her new chair, yet she seemed marginally less inclined to gloat than she had mere moments before. That Rouis had glanced in the direction of the Doge of Revidia and nodded respectfully was noticed by many as well and they took it as a sign that l'Anguilla, true to his name, had been up to his slippery tricks once again. Rouis had saved some face here, but it was still a master stroke.

The next two series of votes almost didn't matter. Revidia was confirmed, as was Torragon. Sancho gazed out over the crowd, face unreadable, but he was uneasy. It wasn't a stretch to imagine. A few more Zenos had surreptitiously filtered into the hall, just in case they were needed, but Rouis XI seemed disinclined to make any sort of trouble. Briskly, he made his way out a side entrance, escorted by the dauphin, also Rouis, and his royal guard. Those of his people who wanted to follow him were judiciously held up at the doors and filtered through slowly enough that they would not be a problem. The second prince, however, who'd been in attendance, was not among them. He remained seated in the front row. Arcel, some may have remembered.

Now that Perrence had been felled and Kerremand had its seat, the anticipation for Eskand's reckoning had faded to a low ebb. There were no more monarchs present and Horik, traditionally the neutral vote among the five, had seemingly aligned himself solidly now with the Doge and Revidia. The first two votes went as expected, but then the attendees found themselves in for their second big shock of the day. A vote came in for... Joru, and then a second. Horik's fat face grew pink and his cheeks puffed out as he turned to glare at Silke, Sancho, and Prospero. The first did not give him the satisfaction of her attention and neither did the last, but the Torragonese ruler looked at him and nodded solemnly, almost as if in apology. It was nine to four - for Joru, and President Atundo Yibozo stood. So did Horik. A hulking mountain of man, he glowered at the rulers and the Zenos who had betrayed him. "Eskand will have blood," he warned, turning to face the incoming president. "Enjoy your poisoned throne, king of the Joru." He leaned in and Yibozo was forced to take a step backward, but he did not flinch. He regarded Horik steadily. "I have no desire to rule as a king. My power comes from my people, and the throne we make shall be there for all to sit on should they choose."

"Hah!" laughed Horik, "we'll see how long that lasts." He stalked away. That the rulers were speaking amongst themselves, inaudible to the crowd, which had once again erupted in conversation, was clear to any who would care to look their way. Great Jobanzaggah, now alone without his allies, had clearly made a play to keep Belzagg's position on the council, and he managed it in a close vote, but what he'd had to suffer was unknown to all but the other people on that stage.

When the dust had settled and students filtered home into the warm, ripe night, the political order of their world was vastly different than it had been that morning. If they imagined, for even a single, naive moment, that they would remain untouched, then they were sorely mistaken.

---

Summary

1. It was drizzling and overcast for most of the day.
2. The second day of classes happened. Everyone here shared the same first and second periods. Look under the hiders for what happened in your third and fourth periods and feel free to add whatever your character does.
3. The conclave finally happened. Despite some late-night scheming and clandestine stuff, it appears that Perrence was outsmarted and toppled from the council.
4. This didn't sit well with everyone and the Perrench people, along with their king, experienced a moment of solidarity. If your character is Perrench, this would probably effect them in some way. It is a direct attack on their home country and fundamentally unfair.
5. Eskand, as well, was booted from the council and betrayed by its erstwhile allies, Revidia, Kerremand, and Torragon. It was further humiliation for the proud nation, and Horik has promised blood.
6. Joru is now on the council and President Yibozo, despite his insistence that he has no desire to become a monarch, appears to have been part of politicking.
7. There is a strong chance of war and the strife between major nations leaves the door open for The Traveler to act...
8. For those who did not decide to attend the Conclave, the city is as empty, quiet, and unguarded as it'll ever get. If you really just want some peace and quiet or are looking to do something sneaky, now's the time!

The Hourglass Order

Reserved for future use.

The Hourglass Order

Manfred Hohenfelter von Meckelin-Thandau

---

When Manfred had awoken in the morning, he'd been greeted by a hole - pitch black - in the fabric of reality. He'd heard of aberrations, of course. They were a growing problem. He'd never actually seen one before. He'd considered absorbing it, to be honest. He'd been told all sorts of bad things by the people in charge of magic, which usually meant, from his experience, that this thing threatened their dominance. It would not do to draw suspicion, though, and perhaps there was some truth to their consistently dire warnings. When he arrived downstairs for breakfast, Zeno Zemana was just getting back in from his morning run to Balthazar Hall. Karim was already downstairs, chattering excitedly about a shipment of cloudmelons coming in from his parents. They exchanged greetings and he cast about for the others. Mayu, he could only hear: muttering and scolding Cumin from somewhere upstairs. Eun-Ji, too was there, and she was often somewhat quiet and pensive, but even more so today. She was not her usual self.

The Tan Keoulean was already downstairs, sitting down on a chair absently. Her mind seemed like it wasn't really focused, with her staring at nothing in particular while being completely silent. She did notice Manfred after a while, and gave a simple nod in greeting. It didn't look like she was in the mood for conversations at all, as if she was too bothered with something or simply too tired for it. After that simple nod, she returned to gazing absently at practically nothing.

Definitely out of sorts, Manfred thought, and he wasn't one to pry. He nodded in her direction as well and that was the entire scope of their interaction. He'd made up his mind to tell the Zeno about the aberration and wondered if she'd already done the same. Busy pondering, he marshaled the awareness to at least rise and help set the table.

As he was doing so, however, he noticed Karim slide towards their master and speak in a low voice in Virangish. The Kerreman furrowed his brow. Zeno Zemana looked surprised and then concerned. His eyes moved quickly past Eun-Ji, however. "Manfred, my boy," he exclaimed, in his trademark manner, "can you watch these strudel for a moment?"

"Of course, Master Zeno." Manfred rose and stepped dutifully towards the cooking area, too proud to admit that he had no idea how to cook strudel. Just don't burn, little buddies - delicious little buddies - and we'll be good here, he thought at them. Eun-Ji out of sorts, Karim wanting a private audience with the Zeno, Mayu unusually cross about something. Had they, too, seen aberrations on their nightstands?

In the event, Manfred didn't burn the strudel, mostly because the Zeno swooped back in with perfect timing and took over. When he had a moment, he mentioned that he, too, had seen an aberration this morning. It was still there and he did not know what to do with it. He received a pat on the shoulder, some assurances, and a lovely breakfast. He fed a bit of it to Kurbis. Now that he thought about it, the cat had seemed skittish this morning. Something was undoubtedly wrong. The question was "what?"

---

When he lined up outside of Balthazar Hall, Manfred was loath to gossip, but also more motivated than ever to start making someheadway against the mysteries that this place had thrown at him. Aware of the effect that he could have on certain women, he found a group of Perrench girls and eventually got them to admit to having seen aberrations on their nightstands as well. They'd made a sort of game out of making each other reveal whether or not they'd absorbed those. Two had even admitted to receiving the Blood Magic Course invitations and one, he recognized from the previous day: the one-legged girl, Penny, who'd spoken with Eun-Ji, who was perhaps not to be trusted. Standing next to her for an extended period, there was something that stuck him as familiar. He wasn't sure what. Her face... reminded him of Nina, somewhat, were she a few years older.

---

His courses were...courses, for the most part. Mozaru was a disciplinarian, but one of those offbeat types. Manfred managed not to stand out. Alcaster Serra's word game bored him. He managed not to stand out. Luria Colloy worked them hard and gave them these little rods. Karim was there and there was a short boy in a heavy bascinet helm who seemed amused, but Manfred had no use for lightning and decided that he would learn next to nothing in the class. It was Jurgen Mendenhoffer's class that he'd been looking forward to. He knew the Zeno, of course, though he found that he received no special treatment. This man, at least, was a magusjaeger, and Manfred did his utmost to perform to the best of his abilities. He noticed a similar commitment from Eun-ji, who seemed to be doing a little bit better than she had in the morning.

---

Manfred's evening, however, was fairly mundane. He settled Kurbis into his dormitory and the cat was less than happy at being moved again, but it couldn't be helped. The Kerreman found himself next door to a studious Torragonese named Selio who he exchanged polite greetings with but little else and across from a boastful and obnoxious Belzaggicman - Jomurr Ikon - who he took an instant disliking to. Being at the very end of the boys' wing, he was close to the girls, and a pair of Eskandishwomen - Marlijn and Anesin, in particular. The both were... rather distracting and he was almost glad of the usually-locked door between he and them. This is not time for the wolf to be loose in the hen house, he scolded himself. He had hoped to reconvene with Eun-Ji in the evening, but she was over in the commons dormitories and had seemed very much in her own head today. So be it. He wasn't exactly sure why he'd found himself caring so much about what she would or would not do. In fact, he found himself mildly annoyed at his preoccupation... but still a bit disappointed that they had not met up. He thought about making the trip over, but decided that she would do what she would do and they would reconvene when either of them had anything worth sharing.

The Hourglass Order

Penny Pellegrin

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Pennedi, Verdi 29, Dami-Zept 54, 1:12 HI

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Location: Girls' Merchant Dormitories, Room 105 ~ Potential Interactions: Carmillia Carbonneau @Animus

---

It was during the first hour of Ipte that a letter slipped itself beneath Penny's door. She moaned and rolled over in bed, thinking it some more foolery from her neighbours. They were good fun and she'd spent a couple of hours with them earlier, but Madeleine also fancied herself a wit and did not know when to quit. Still, there was the possibility that it had to do with Arcel. He was in town, though they hadn't had the opportunity to speak like she had with father.

She started swinging an arm out to grab one of her crutches, but stopped short and looked over first. After the morning's incident, it was hard not to be paranoid. Satisfied, she slipped it under her arm, rose, and made her way to the door.

"1201A Brandenmeier Place," she murmured, reading what was on the envelope as she picked it up. "Mr. Gaston Normand."

The teenager scowled, body language almost pouty. She knew those codes. The first one meant that this was to go to the Eskandish contact. She did not know his name. The second one meant that it needed to be done immediately. Was it truly so urgent? She sighed. She knew that it was. It was politically sensitive. She took a couple of steps back, fixing her hair into a semblance of order and already starting to change clothing. The walk was not particularly long, but it was late, she was tired, there were stairs, and... by the Pentad, yes, the girl with one leg had been someone's first choice to bear this message. Penny did not know what was in it and told herself that she did not want to, yet she burned with curiosity. Presently, she finished shrugging into a simple dress and riding cloak. She did up a few buttons and fastened a tie around her waist. Best not to know, she told herself, taking a moment to slip into her shoe and out of the door as quietly as she could.

The nighttime air was cool and clammy on Penny's skin and an almost-unnatural mist hovered amidst the great shadowy spires and towers of Ersand'Enise, shimmering and ethereal in the light of three pale moons and one in blood red. She stopped to rub away some goosebumps and pull her cloak tight around herself, continuing onward. The eyes of animals watched her in the darkness, gold, lime, and orange. Once every minute, the beam of St. Elmo's Light swept across distant rooftops, brightening them before continuing out across the sea. Yet, it was not that light which concerned the young Perrenchwoman most, for looming there over the city of the Mages like a great watchful eye was that lone light blazing in the highest window of the Forked Tower.

The Hourglass Order

---

---

Teldi, Verdi 28, Dami-Zept 54, 1:45 HS

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Location: Zeno Afraval's Townhome ~ Interactions: Linah Aranda @SilverPaw ~ Referenced: Anesin Bjelke @Noxious

1. Penny Pellegrin Isn't as Smart as She Thinks She Is

Penny felt the sting of consciousness. Abruptly, it invaded her dreams and they were gone. The youth lay there in bed for a moment, head heavy and throbbing. She'd had too much to drink. That had been irresponsible with her first day of classes about to start. Big hazel eyes fluttered open and were accompanied by an almost inaudible groan. She was going to spend the day hungover and, on top of that, her monthly visit from Auntie Eshiran had started yesterday. There was something else, though, too: almost... a hunger. She stared at the ceiling. The early morning sun was starting to brighten her curtains. Reaching up and rubbing tired hands over her face, Penny forced herself to sit up. With years of practiced habit, she reached out blindly for the crutch leaning against her nightstand and then...

She felt the sickeningly sweet magic rush of an aberration. In horror, the Perrenchwoman recoiled, stumbling out of bed and ending up on the floor with a thump, but its energy had latched onto her. It poured into her. Her head screamed. Her temples throbbed. She pressed her palms against them and her vision blurred, but it was so good, too. It burned away the hangover, it soothed the period cramps. It filled her with so much power that she felt as if she could fly all of the way to classes, she could take Atomic Magic and Blood Magic and every magic and scream everything that she had ever wanted to scream at her cursed mother.

Then it was over and the aberration on her night table was gone: a part of her now. It was like she had drawn to nearly full capacity. She was strong and full of power - as she stood, her nightgown fluttered about her and the air hummed with energy - but she felt heavy,too: big, weighty. The headache was different now, and her eyes seized with predatory hunger on another pair of aberrations in the room: one on Anesin's nightstand and one, closer, on Linah's. The craving was so intense that she was unsure if she could fight it, unsure if she wanted to. That's when she noticed that Linah was awake... very awake.

The transition between sleep and wakefulness was a swift one, as ever. One moment, Linah was deeply asleep, the next, she was aware - though her eyelids remained down, breath as even as it had been. At the sounds of an unexpected commotion nearby, however, she grabbed a dagger under her pillow and rolled out of bed and into a fighting crouch in record time. What she saw was...not at all what she'd expected. Penny stumbling right into aberration, then her pupils widening as much as any addict's she'd ever seen. "The one time you wake before me," she grumbled quietly, almost to herself. Then she stood up, though her stance was still tense, her dagger barely lowered. She stared at Penny hard, and waving her free hand, put kinetic barriers around the other two aberrations the girl'd been eyeing. "Don't even think about going after the others," she said quietly, intently. She remained watchful, to discern if the Perrenchwoman would return to her senses, or if she'd have to be incapacitated.

"Sacre merde," Penny hissed, chest heaving, eyes bugged out. She pried them away. "Do not fight me, Linah. Please, do not." Her voice rose into a snarl. Her hands were shaking. It was like when Arcel had absorbed that aberration on the road, only she was Arcel this time. She wanted those aberrations. She wanted them. She wanted them. They would be so damned delicious. They could make her so incredibly powerful. She knew that she could obliterate those barriers. She could sweep Linah aside and have them and... that was crazy. Linah was... well, maybe not quite a friend yet, but more than an acquaintance. Penny took a couple of deep, unsteady breaths. An apple and a melon. They were right there and they looked so warm and delicious and inviting. Linah had a dagger out. Her face was hard and her eyes flinty. A fear welled up inside of the Perrenchwoman then: a fear of being hated. She didn't want Linah to hate her. It had been an accident, a stupid accident! She twisted and glanced at her crutch, still leaning against her nightstand in its usual, unassuming way. The aberration had been right by it. Trembling, she hopped back a step and sat on her bed. "Please," she said, a bit more calmly, "put the stupid knife down. I'm alright now." She paused and knitted her fingers in front of her. "Well, in control, anyways." She shook her head. "I was reaching for my crutch. I didn't even look. That.. thing just latched onto me and there was no stopping it." For a split second, her eyes flashed in the direction of the other two aberrations. She quickly averted them.

Linah didn't relax until Penny retreated onto her bad. "Alright," she said calmly. Yet, instead of putting her weapon back into its previous place, she merely blunted its edges magically, then stashed it on the inside of the bottom part of her nightgown, where a strip of fabric had been attached obscurely for exactly such a purpose. Her body language and expression were no longer quite so predatory, but tension still coiled in her belly. There was a seriousness about her that indicated she could easily return to her previous state. "Let's get you out of here, first." She drummed her fingers against her legs, considering. "I realize you might not wish to, but it would best to inform the Zeno about those," she tilted her head at the remaining aberrations. "If you wish to conceal your accident, I'll back you up, though. As long as your symptoms don't get out of control," Linah informed the seemingly cowed girl.

"Oh gods." Penny breathed. She stared down at her foot and then up again at Linah, wrapping her arms around herself. "That thing is... potent," she warned. She stood and used a tiny fraction of the energy that burned inside of her to call her crutch over and tuck it under her armpit. "You don't think I took it on purpose, right?" She gulped. "I didn't, Linah, truly. I just didn't even look and then..." She trailed off, feeling tears welling up. How badly she wanted to explain why her reaction had been so extreme, how her brother had persuaded her into helping him absorb one before, how it was supposedly the duty of high nobility to protect others from these things, how it filled her with such power and she'd been told it could be done responsibly. She couldn't say any of it, though. This evening, she was going to meet with father, secretly. She couldn't share that either. Secrets grew up around her like weeds, blocking out the sunlight she so desperately needed to grow. She breathed. "Then what happened happened, I guess." She shook her head tightly and looked between Linah and the door. "But you're right, I should be away from the remaining two, and you with me." She took a step and blinked. "What about Anesin, though?"

"I saw you fall into it," Linah didn't sigh, but it was a near thing. Her tone was friendlier ever since this whole event had occurred, though not quite to her usual levels of casuality. "If you'd wished to take it on purpose, you'd have hidden it, not made a scene. In that regard, I do trust you. But wilfull or not, aberrations are dangerous, thus my caution," she explained. She'd thought there was no need to do so, but Penny was so shaken up, she might appreciate her nearly-calm reasoning. "As for Anesin, we must wake her up, of course," she shrugged lightly. Just in case, she put two more barriers around the abberations, the third spaced away from the first two and rigged to sound an obnoxious alarm if it was messed with. "Then...we hope the masters here have a safe way to remove these," she drawled the last sarcastically. Honestly, if she'd been the first to wake and notice the aberrations, things could have gone much differently. What was, was, though.

Penny had calmed down considerably. Such was her nature of emotional peaks and valleys. In fact, she had calmed enough to start analyzing the situation, even though she still craved that sweetness. She had grown up around masks and... perhaps she was imagining it. Perhaps it was the temporary aberration madness. She is wearing a mask, the youth thought. Sure as father, mother, Reldine, and Arcel wear them, so is Linah. Penny wasn't completely sure, however. She forced a thankful smile and made her way towards the door. Anesin had stirred but was not yet awake. The Perrenchwoman turned on her heel and her eyes darted about. "Yes," she agreed, lowering her voice, "They are dangerous, and we need to be careful, but do not worry so much, my friend. As you can see, I took one but am quite well now. In fact, I have much energy to burn off and some that I daresay will stay with me permanently. I think I shall go burn it off on my own ahead of you." With another smile and a significant look, she curtsied briefly and exited the room.

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Teldi, Verdi 28, Dami-Zept 54, 4:35 HO

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Location: Giacomo Giarrone's Binding Class ~ Interactions: Yvette Chamonix ~ Referenced: Carmillia Carbonneau @Animus

2. Penny Pellegrin Makes a Friend

Penny sat behind a desk, swinging her foot idly back and forth and munching on a quite delicious macaroon. A day that had started so eventfully had quickly died down in terms of its excitement. One of the tradeoffs of being a blueblood was that her prodigiously high capacity came with a far lesser ability to actually contain what she'd drawn for extended periods. Most of the aberration's energy had dissipated quietly into the girl's surroundings as she'd gone about her morning routines. What was left, she'd used to lighten her steps as she walked to campus. She still retained a mild headache, however, and had found herself thinking of that sweet, warm feeling more than once. Penny scowled and let her foot fall for a moment. You're on a precipice, you stupid girl, she warned herself. She hadn't meant to absorb it this morning, but now that was two sizable ones in the past week. She would have to resist temptation. She did not want to lose her reason. Unbidden, the Perrenchwoman wrapped her arms around herself.

Zeno Giarrone was nice - grandfatherly. She remembered so little of her own grandfather - he had died when she'd been just a toddler - only his beard: greyish brown and prickly on her little hands. She wished she could've known him, or that he'd become king like he was supposed to have been. Then father wouldn't have so much pressure. He wouldn't be so busy and anxious and imperious, for she'd known him all her life and she knew that wasn't his nature. It was what circumstance and position demanded of him. "Hey Penny," whispered one of the other girls in the class, pulling her from her reverie. It was Yvette. They'd sat together, four Perrenchwomen, all ostensibly merchants - Penny, Yvette, Carmille (or was it Carmillia?), and Madeleine - in the plaza the other day. Yvette had a bit of a mean side, though. She was gossipy. Best not to get in her bad books. "Hey Yvette!" she whispered back.

The blonde chatterbox held up a key. "What room are you? I'm 106. Carmille's 108. Maddy's 107." Penny blinked. "I'm..." she fished around in her bag for a moment and pulled her key out. "105," she replied. "Looks like we'll be seeing more of each other."

Yvette smirked. "Yes indeed. Us Perrench girls are gathering tonight. You're going to be there, right?"

Penny was supposed to meet with father tonight. It likely wouldn't be for long, but she'd probably be late for this meeting. How much truth can I actually tell? She wondered for a moment, getting the sense that, with Yvette, the answer was 'not much'. "Of course," she replied slightly belatedly. "I have some business in town around dinnertime, but I shall be there as soon as I can, cross my heart."

"Business in town?" Yvette inquired conspiratorially and it became clear to Penny that she had just appetized the beast. "What sort of business, pray tell?"

The taller girl nodded, trying to cover her annoyance with an air of nonchalance. "Oh, just meeting with some business partner of my father's. Boring stuff."

"Not boring," Yvette scolded. "Take it seriously. Perhaps he is grooming you to take over the family business. You know it is hard enough for us women."

Penny flicked at the empty side of her dress and raised a skeptical eyebrow. "Unlikely," she replied, "but a nice thought." She sighed, liking Yvette just a little better now. "I shall give it my best."

Yvette nodded. "Just so. Know that you are an inspiration to us all for doing what you do even as you are." Then, the Arch-Zeno's eyes turned their way and both girls snapped to attention, good students that they were.

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Teldi, Verdi 28, Dami-Zept 54, 4:05 HE

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Location: Private courtyard in the Cathedral District ~ Interactions: Rouis XI of Perrence ~ Referenced: Prospero Malatesta

3. Penny Pellegrin, Papa, and a Plan

The sun had just dipped below the line of rooftops and city walls and the air was ripe with the chirp of crickets and swarms of midge flies that swirled in the dying light. Those things mattered little to her, however, when her father stepped out from the carriage. It was a nondescript one and he was dressed down - in clothing more appropriate for a lower noble or prosperous merchant - but he was unmistakably father to her nonetheless.

"Papa." She curtsied and kept her voice even and formal, forcing herself not to run to him.

He flipped back his cloak and the moonlight shone on his face. His hair, long, dark, and wavy, shot through with a few streaks of silver, still looked just like it did on all of the portraits on the walls. He took a couple of steps towards her before enfolding his daughter in an embrace. "Ma petite poulette." He squeezed a bit tighter and Pénélope nestled into his warmth. He kissed her on the top of the head, for father was just tall enough to do so, and they broke apart to arms' length. "Look at you." His eyes took her in and he smiled. "So much a woman grown, so much your own person. You look well, ma bichette. Are you?"

She nodded quickly, to reassure him. "Better than ever, Papa. Better than I've ever been cooped up in that room." She clasped her hands in front of her and glanced down for a split second before looking him in the eyes. "It's been scary," she admitted, "being on my own." She breathed, in and out of the cool dusky air. "I was not certain I could do it, but I have, and I've made friends, and learned, and seen and done!" Her voice rose perhaps a bit too much on the last couple of words. She bowed her head slightly. "I am sorry for my excitement."

His eyes studied her and he squeezed her shoulder gently. "No need, precious one. 'Tis the flame of youth that burns inside of you. Kindle it while it lasts." The skin was soft and smooth for she was still as much a girl as a woman, but there was a taut firmness - muscle and strength - and he knew she had been walking in the only way that she could all day long. How it was a struggle for her, he knew, feeling a flash of anger at the Gods - at himself - for having made his child this way.

"I will show everyone," she continued, "even mother, that I am not a disappointment, that I am not a liability. You will see, Papa, even if I can't do it using our real name."

In truth, he knew that Mathilde despised Pénélope. The girl stood perhaps two feet from him in the moonlight, in the same private courtyard where her mother had once stood, the same way, across from him, only the context had been vastly different. He found it the greatest irony that, of all four of their daughters, Pénélope looked the most like her mother. Curse aside, she was a near mirror-image of Mathilde at the same age. Perhaps, he ruminated, that was part of the reason for his wife's strong reaction. In any event, he could see by the suppressed bitterness in his daughter's eyes that the hatred was now mutual. Mathilde would never love Penny and the girl had stopped seeking her mother's love. "You will never be a disappointment to me, little one," he assured her.

She blinked, looking at him, and glanced away, hand closing around her crutch handle again. "Thank you," she replied softly, and he released her. "And how have you been? I know the approach of the conclave must be weighing on you."

He took his hands back, clasping them behind his back, and motioned for her to walk alongside him. "Heavy is the head that wears the crown," he sighed, smiling wanly.

"Your neck is strong, Papa," she replied, and he let out a snort of laughter. That someday she might wear that crown had never really crossed Pénélope's mind. There was no reasonable chance, nor did she particularly crave it as her brothers did.

"That it is, daughter." He flashed her a smile. "The vipers will be out tomorrow. I am sure they have prepared their poison for me."

"It's that ghastly anguille," she replied matter-of-factly, lips twisting in a sneer at the mere mention of the man.

"The same." He paused, and it took her a moment to do so as well. "He will make his big move," continued Rouis XI, "as I have been goading him into doing for years now. He thinks me a fool."

"He is the fool."

Rouis began walking again, and he shook his head. "No, my precious, he is no fool. He is cunning, cruel, and greedy, but he is a man the same as me, and he will fall into my trap just the same."

"But he will thrash in it," she concluded. "Mightily."

Father nodded. "I may fail," he admitted, "and if I fail, we will fail. I am sorry that the gods have tied your fate to mine, but that is the way of family and nobility." Anxiety nibbled away at the confidence of his expression as he regarded her and it occurred to Pénélope that her father - the King of Perrence - felt as much of a disappointment as she sometimes did. "There is nobody else I would rather be tied to," she assured him, and it drew a slight smile. "Nobody, hmm?" he replied.

The youth pursed her lips. "Save perhaps a handsome boy with wit and wealth to spare." She bit her lower lip. "I could be... persuaded."

"Well, you're in the right place to find one," Rouis replied. He marveled at how much she had grown into herself in only a week. "But anyhow, I think I should succeed. I think I have caught him blind, for once. So many years of playing the blunt instrument to his dagger and now it is he who has dulled somewhat."

"I truly hope so," she replied. "It will be quite a performance."

"And I will play my part well." There was a twinkle in his eye and she smiled at that. It was good to see father looking forward to something once. She had not understood it at the time for she had been so young, but he had been broken in so many ways during her early childhood. "Now, let us move onto some lighter fare," he recommended, "hmm?"

"Oh, this wasn't the hors d'ouevres?" she chirped. He laughed and asked her about the parade, her classes, her Zeno, and any friends she'd made. She avoided any mention of the aberration this morning. She would stay away from those and there was no need to worry father. He had enough to worry about as it was. They sat under the gazebo and chatted for the next twenty minutes, easier in each other's company than they had ever been back home - easier now that Pénélope was maybe a bit her own person and less a shadow around the palace.

Too soon, however, it was time for goodbyes. They both stood, the girl only now starting to take note of the aches that a day on foot had wrought upon her. How much she had called upon binding, kinetic, and chemical to help. "My precious one," father said, hands clasped around her shoulders. "Know that I am so very proud of you and the person you are becoming. Know that I love you with all of the filial regard Ipte has given me."

Penny blushed, feeling her eyes well up. It occurred to her that it might be a very long time before they could meet each other again like this, as father and daughter. "Know that I, too, am proud to have you for a father and also a king, for you have a heart, unlike so many others who wear crowns upon their heads. I mean it, Papa, I truly do." They enfolded each other in another embrace and Pénélope squeezed as much as she could, as if trying to imprint some sort of memory of him into herself. That this was no normal goodbye she was certain. "I love you," she sniffed into his shoulder before they broke apart. It was the light of the moon that made his face shine that way and not tears, the youth knew. Kings did not cry, of course. Only she had struggled to contain her emotions. They both took a couple of steps back, the girl's left arm aching acutely after a day of walking. Rouis half-turned, but then he paused, reached out, and rested a hand atop her head. He let it slide down the side of her face before drawing it back. "Goodbye, Penny Pellegrin." They turned and went their separate ways.

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Penny Pellegrin Summarizes the Day

Le Matin (The Morning): As if waking up with a hangover and your period isn't bad enough, I swiped straight into the aberration on my nightstand this morning and almost went insane. Linah was a gem and brought me down gently, but she was hiding a reaction. I could tell. Maybe she wanted to absorb her aberration. I don't know, but I left her to do what she would. I may have to watch out for her as much as myself. I'm craving. It's too much. I'll have to tread lightly and yet... I wonder. This is two aberrations now. I would keep a journal about this, but then I'd risk having someone uncover it. If I can regulate my intake so that the cravings and aggression subside completely before the next, can I boost my capacity indefinitely this way, or does elapsed time not matter. This is dangerous ground. I'm well aware. Yet... there has to be somebody else out there who's trod it. Perhaps I should endeavour to find them.

Le Jour (The Day): Classes were... an experience. It was intimidating being around that many people. They all acted nicely enough, but there was no missing the stares and not a murmur or two. Perhaps I shall be less of a novelty in a couple weeks' time. I seem to have made a friend of Yvette Chamonix, quite accidentally. There is rather more to her than there had appeared to be and I should accept her invitation to join her, Madeleine Marchand, and possibly Carmille Carbonneau tonight. I also rather like most of my instructors and their approaches, but the work already strikes me as simple - far too simple. I shall seek out challenges on my own or from Sienna my master, Zeno Afraval. Perhaps the unlisted course that I signed up for with Anesin will hold more interest, though I'm wary of something so... shadowy and dark. I do not trust... that type of magic.

Le Soir (The Evening): I met with father and cried like an infant. I've been so caught up in the whirlwind of my journey, arrival, and then settling in that I'd forgotten how much I missed my familiar people... well, some more than others. Papa was... Papa, always juggling the crown with the rest of his life, switching between those two hats as best he could. For the first time, today, I got a sense of him that I hadn't before: he is just like me. He feels people's eyes upon him every day, judging him harshly for matters beyond his control and he is quietly determined to prove them wrong. Dare I say that my regard for my father has increased. He also has his plan in place. He's been goading the Doge for years, acting week and predictable, and he hopes that tomorrow will be the day that Prospero l'Angulla springs his trap, only to realize that he is the one being fooled. I can only pray to the Pentad tonight that it will come off as planned, for those arrogant Revidians and Kerremans have taken pleasure in humiliating my people and my family ever since I was a child. Rarely have I been much for patriotism, but tomorrow, I shall wear my fleur de lis pin. Vive la Perrence!

Force and Fury's Emporium of Faces

BIPOC & Older Characters

Black, Indigenous, & People of Colour tend to be either underrepresented or else represented in very stereotypical (or ham-fistedly anti-stereotypical) manners within the roleplaying community, though it is somewhat improving nowadays. Trying to be as sensitive towards issues of race an identity as I can while not focusing strictly on those, I aim to introduce diverse characters into the RPGs that I play and run without preaching. They're simply there, as they should be: a normal part of their worlds.

To some extent, I've also noticed a reticence among the roleplaying community to play characters over thirty as mains. They appear in world as mentors, parents, enemies, and authority figures, but rarely as central PCs. It's almost as if we idealize youth and its possibilities and seem to hold a subconscious belief that life's opportunity, fun, and promise disappear by age thirty. Hence, I also try to tell the continuing stories of people whose stories are already partly written and not necessarily just beginning.

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Redwood and Lysandra are two of three potential characters that I've made for Code Vein, inspired by the game of the same name. Lysandra was always going to be Asian, but I've noticed that people tend to gravitate towards the 'cool' Asian ethnicities: namely Japanese and Korean. I almost made her the latter, but a reference pic was hard to find and gave me some time to think. It was also fun to base her four robotic agents on figures from Vietnamese mythology. As for age, I think that she finds herself at an interesting crossroads. Your late twenties to early thirties are a time when a lot of people start to become ossified in their life patterns, but her disabling injury and move from familiar surroundings have forced her to adjust and grow or else fail as a person. Redwood is just because it'd be cool to have a bit of a more modern druidic-themed character and to have that character be Black instead of Celtic, North American Indigenous, or Nordic.

Redwood

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R E D W O O D

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| AGE |

Appears about thirty

| APPEARANCE |

Ain't No Anime-Style Pic Here, Folks

Redwood's name is a child of his appearance. The first thing that people notice about him is his exceptional height. Very tall and fairly slender, though solid enough, he towers over other people and... well, low ceilings and hanging light fixtures are the bane of his existence while indoors. His skin is dark and somewhat leathery, making him look older than he is, and his hair is dark and curly. If people had to ascribe a human race to him, they'd call him Black. Finally, come his tendrils. Six of them sprout from his upper back, shoulders, and flanks (just below his arms) and it almost feels like a misnomer to describe them as tendrils, since they are unusually thick and strong. Despite his intimidating size, there is a gentleness of appearance and manner to Redwood. His eyes are large, dark, and keen: always watching, sometimes almost unsettlingly but never threateningly. He has a long face with a strong jaw, but fairly soft features. He most often wears either a gentle smile or a slight, determined scowl, but most of his expressions seem somewhat muted.

In terms of clothing, he wears what used to be basketball shoes, since they're the only ones he's found that'll fit his abnormally large feet. They've been patched, strengthened, and modified so much that they're scarcely recognizable anymore. He wears loose deep green shorts over black leggings that only make it about 2/3 of the way down his shins. His upperwear has been modified with holes for his tendrils. It consists of a green Timberland t-shirt with the logo in the center of his chest. Unusually, the t-shirt actually fits him. The ensemble is completed by the pair of black fingerless cycling gloves that he wears, with tough plastic guards over the knuckles. On colder days, he swaps the shorts for jeans and supplements the t-shirt with a brown leather bomber jacket.

In general, Redwood doesn't see much need to dress all that differently whether he's in combat or out of it, though he sometimes wears a motorcycle vest, along with elbow and knee pads in the former. His mask is a simple, practical thing: mostly brown leather and a pair of hoses leading to a backpack with an air canister and a few other useful items (like a first aid kit, multi-tool, and a knife) inside.

| PERSONALITY |

Helpful - Easygoing - Determined - Judgmental - Ferocious

| GROWTH/CAMOUFLAGE |

Tendrils: He has six of them and, as mentioned earlier, they are unusually thick and strong, perhaps as a side effect off Redwood's size. At a slow rate, they produce a sticky sap that can inhibit the movement of enemies if well-placed, adhere things to walls, and temporarily seal wounds and prevent blood loss. He uses them for a variety of purposes, their long reach and adhesive sap allowing him to control, impede, and delay enemies when in combat, setting them up for teammates or his own weapons. Enough of his natural adhesive will allow equipment and allies to hang from walls or ceilings, but he does not produce it very quickly and he is too heavy to make use off this ability himself in any case. Redwood also has some medical training and pairs this with his gift to provide emergency care when necessary. When not being used, he often wraps his tendrils around his midsection and over his shoulders.

| BACKGROUND |

Redwood's history is largely a mystery and you get the sense that either he would like it to stay that way or perhaps he does not remember it clearly himself. He has mentioned having associated with a small, independent human colony in the past, though he hasn't spoken of why he is no longer there. In general, one gets a sense of goodness and kindness from this sidhe, but purposeful distance, almost as if he fears attachment. The intensity with which he approaches the Lost certainly seems to stand in contrast to his generally laid-back nature.

| SKILLS / EQUIPMENT |

• 🙖 Specialized Combat: Redwood is quite skilled in mid-range combat, often using his tendrils like an extra set of longer limbs to hold enemies off, strike at them, catch allies, help push off for mighty jumps, and anchor himself against recoil and pushback.
  🙖 Skewers: When in combat, Redwood wears sharp steel skewers on the tips of four of his tendrils. These can cut reasonably well, but are specialized in stabbing and pinning. Generally, it takes at least two of them to really hinder and enemy, and all four to definitively hold one down. That sets him up to deliver the coup de grace with...
  🙖 Fat Mac: his trusty .950 cal rifle. Cumbersome, deafening, and dangerous, this colossal weapon can deliver a blast capable of piercing walls, concrete or cinder blocks, and vehicles. What it'll do to flesh and blood is... grisly. Lost might be immortal, but they'll be... out of action for a while after eating a round from this monster.
  🙖 First Aid: It's almost obligatory for sidhe to be healers, and Redwood is no exception. He carries a kit in his backpack and can deal with all sorts of minor to moderate illnesses and injuries. He can also seal and staunch wounds with his sap.
  🙖 Kinder Surprise: These are fragile ceramic vessels that look like large eggs and are kept in a padded container within a side pocket of his backpack. In fact, they are filled with Redwood's sticky sap (collected over an extended period of time) and have a very low-yield contact explosive inside. When they land, they shatter and spray their contents over a roughly two-to-three meter radius.
  🙖 Intimidation: It might not be much good against the Lost, but Redwood's towering height and powerful tendrils can definitely lend him an intimidating air when he wants to cow uncooperative types. Generally, he is loath to use this, but if it saves him or his allies a fight, then he will.

| LIMITATIONS AND WEAKNESSES |

• 🙓 Saviour Complex: Redwood will often try to take on too much at once, put himself in danger, or step in to handle things that other people have under control out of misplaced concern. One gets the sense that he is used to being the protector of those much weaker than him as opposed to a member of a legitimate team, and he may need to be reined in.
  🙓 Limited Stamina: When going all out, the big guy tires pretty quickly. He is best saved for an opening salvo, critical moments, and a big finishing move, and will almost always need a rest to recuperate if he overexerts himself. Of course, due to his saviour complex, he will rarely be open about this and it usually needs to be inferred.
  🙓 Precious Ammo: It takes quite a while to replenish his Kinder Surprises when he uses them, so he can sometimes be a bit stingy with those. Similarly, ammunition for Fat Mac is heavy, so he doesn't carry too much at any given time. It's also hard to come by, so he tends to use it sparingly.
  🙓 Boy Scout: While he can be ferocious in combat against the Lost, he tends to really hold back against other enemies.
  🙓 Pollution: When exposed to it for extended periods or inn high dosage, this can prove lethal to him. There aren't many places where Redwood can safely remove his mask.

| NOTES |

• I'd love to include some better reference and thematic pics, but it hasn't been easy finding any.
• In terms of his combat role, I view him as fairly versatile. To use gaming terminology, he's mostly mid-range crowd control, with some healing and one big occasional nuke. It's tempting to view him as a tank, and he's reasonably tough, but doing so in all but the most desperate of situations would be a mistake.

Lysandra Tran

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L Y S A N D R A T R A N

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| AGE |

Lysandra is 32 years old.

| APPEARANCE |

A Squishy Human

The first (and often only) thing that people remember about Lysandra is her wheelchair. It's a simple, sturdy, lightweight manual chair and, as a paraplegic of four years, she uses it from dawn to dusk in order get around. Otherwise, she's a fairly baseline human: a vaguely pretty Asian woman in her early thirties with tanned skin, dark hair and eyes, and a businesslike bearing. She is not and never has been much for dressing up and would rather dress for functionality and comfort. Layering is a rule to live by. It's easier to take something off than to put it on. To that end, her usual attire consists of a light t-shirt over a sports bra, jeans or leggings, and knee or thigh high socks. She'll usually toss on some flats even though shoes are irrelevant. Sturdy gloves - usually fingerless to allow her to work with touch screens - are more important, as they protect her hands from blisters. On colder days, She'll complete the outfit with a jacket. She has two and both have a striped patch in mint, seafoam green, and white sewn onto them: the flag of the settlement that she used to live in and where her brother still resides. Finally, though she rarely actually wears it as intended (because that'd be both inconvenient and goofy), is the supergirl medallion that she received from her mother as a girl. It's usually tucked into her bag or a jacket pocket as a kind of good luck charm. She tells herself that she doesn't believe in 'luck'; everything is probability. Yet, on the day when she broke her back, she didn't have it on her.

As a human, Lysandra doesn't require a mask, and this gives her one less thing to worry about, especially when she goes into the field. Of course, that doesn't happen often anymore. Much to her chagrin, the post-apocalypse isn't very wheelchair accessible. When fieldwork is necessary for research or intel, though, she brings along some sturdy cycling gloves, trades her handbag for a large backpack with seemingly endless pockets, and usually swaps out her indoor wheels for some with thicker, grippier treads, as well as larger front casters. In the past, she'd often wear motorcycle armour, hiking shoes, and athletic leggings with elbow and knee pads. It was all about getting as deep into trouble spots as possible and quickness and durability were paramount. Nowadays, Lysandra usually forgoes anything that could hamper her already-limited mobility unless it clearly and directly helps her get more fieldwork done. Her primary goal is maximizing her returns on those brief outdoor sojourns and minimizing the physical liability that she represents. If enemies ever succeed in actually reaching her, she knows that the jig is pretty much up. Still, she's held onto her body armour, just in case. It's sturdy, lightweight, and can go under her jacket. She still has the knee pads too. Maybe she can't actually feel a knock to the knee, but it's also not like they'll hamper her movement. Besides, she kind of slips things in behind them. Why oh why do women not get usable pockets in most of their clothing!?

| PERSONALITY |

Daring ~ Unsentimental ~ Hyper-aware ~ Bitter ~ Clever ~ Assertive

At her worst, Lysandra can come across as a 'bossy know-it-all science lady'. She can seem cutting, acerbic, and pushy. A lot of this, however, is just frustration and barely-suppressed insecurity. The significant gulf between what she knows needs to be done and what she can accomplish on her own is an open wound, regularly picked at by circumstance. The other major factor is simply that she is used to being the smartest person in the room and it grates upon her to entertain other people's stupid ideas when they could be making progress towards their (read: her) goals instead.

That said, she's a genuinely decent human being beneath it all. Lysandra is an absolute encyclopedia of both general and esoteric knowledge. She is a human calculator, a problem solver, has an amazing eye for detail, and is a natural-born storyteller. She is genuinely one of the most interesting people who you will ever talk to and, on her better days, her cutting wit, self-deprecating humor, and straight-faced delivery can have you - instead of her - rolling with laughter.

| BACKGROUND |

Lysandra's mother was an engineer. Her father was a biologist. Both were born before the Great Collapse and were not young parents (forty one and forty, respectively). Her childhood was full of diligent work and research. It was full of movement and stories while on the move. She learned about the world that was: the great open green fields and forests, the safe, cozy homes, and the shining universities: beacons of learning and opportunity. Most of all, however, she accrued skills: she studied the nature of living and unliving things with her father. She learned the wonders of robotics, sensors, computers, and mechanics from her mother. Instead of playing with lego, she handbuilt her first drone when she was seven. The family settled in the midsized and fiercely independent outpost of Fresh Haven. Lysandra and her slightly older brother, Daniel, grew up and their parents aged, so they took on increasingly important roles as scouts, field researchers, and even fighters. In particular, she was stealthy and an excellent scout and climber, with a natural aptitude for surveying and understanding her surroundings, using them to her advantage.

For all of the world's dangers, her father fell prey to a flu in his 61st year. Daniel, who'd become more of a soldier than his sister, was gone for long periods of time and their mother increasingly withdrew into tinkering with her dwindling supplies. Lysandra, telling herself that her mother's work was valuable in more ways than one, began roving ever further afield in search of parts. She conducted her own research while out there. It was frightening, but challenging. In some ways, it was invigorating, and better than just sitting in some hole waiting to die. She begun to feel as if she could get to the bottom of how and why mistle worked, the role of the Sidhe, and how the Earth might be healed. She begun to feel as if she had some agency in her life. Further she went, scouting ahead with her drones, infrared sensors, and binoculars. She saw and found things that most humans couldn't. She knew a little bit of martial arts and learned more. She taught herself how to shoot. There were close calls - hairbreadth escapes from death - and tense moments. She hid out, she climbed, leapt, and scampered from one safe place to another, and then plunged back into the lab after days or weeks out in the world. Her parents' stories of the years before she was born had instilled in her a wariness towards revenants. Their kind had feasted on humans, once. The only thing needed for them to return to it and become Lost was a short period of time without consuming human blood.

Her mother was in ill health when Lysandra went out that day, but she tried to put aside her worries. At a steady jog, she made quick progress through the well-mapped regions near Fresh Haven, fists clenched around the straps of her backpack and breath wispy and white in the cool air. Perhaps she was preoccupied with thoughts of her family. Perhaps she was just careless, but she ran smack into a pack of Lost. She took one out of the fight with a well-aimed shot to the head, but then there was no option but to do what she did best: run, climb, and hide. She dropped her backpack and took off, through the labyrinth of a ruined city. After what seemed like forever, two more fell off the pace. This was a bad situation - worse than the usual 'bad situations' - but she had escaped many times before and would again. Thirst clawed at her parched throat but one final Lost - a monster of a man - stayed doggedly on her tail. Further up a crumbling building she went, leaping nimbly from sagging staircase to rotting floor to support beam, and he started to falter. The jump is still burned into her memory: over a gap in a staircase. It was the type that you dismiss in your head as a 'ninety percent chance I'll land it'. She'd made ones like it plenty of times before and she doubted her pursuer would be able to follow. She'd be safe. The thing is, if you roll the dice enough times, the odds will catch up to you eventually. The floor had looked solid on the other side but it wasn't. It gave way instantly and Lysandra can still recall with absolute clarity those two seconds where her stomach just folded in on itself in terror. Then she hit.

She was told that a handful of revenants who'd been surveying the area had heard her gunshots. As a gesture of goodwill, they'd rescued her and brought her back to Fresh Haven but, in the weeks and months following that fateful fall, as people kept telling her that she was a 'warrior' and would surely walk again, as she had to relearn how to do basically everything, and as her elderly mother cared for her as if she were still a child, Lysandra began to wish that they hadn't. Mother passed away eight months after the accident and, officially, the strain of having to care for her grown daughter hadn't been a contributing cause. Daniel stepped away from his duties temporarily and she moved into his unit with his family, but it wasn't much more accessible than hers. The entire settlement was built in what had once been a vertical farm crisscrossed with staircases, scaffolds, and prefab walls that had once been her playground but that now meant that she couldn't go much of anywhere without assistance. Wracked with guilt and regret, Lysandra threw herself into her engineering pursuits, sitting in front of a work table for hours each day, hammering away at her mother's machines, digging through the endless piles of scrap that she had accumulated on her sojourns, and constructing drones to map, guard, and scout, water filters to help grow food and provide drink, and devices to supplement her broken body and make her remaining family's lives easier.

Soon, Daniel could not afford any more time away from his duties and so her nephew, niece, and sister-in-law became her protectors. This, Lysandra could not permit any longer. As she had hoped, she'd rediscovered a sense of purpose - an imperfect one, for it still hurt so much to not be whole - but enough to push her forward once more. This place, however, was holding her back. She was holding her family back. The revenants had saved her. She had judged them too harshly, she decided, on the basis of childhood fears and stories from people who were no longer alive. She was, though, and saw little point to living for herself alone. There were vanishingly few people with skillsets like hers and, even if she couldn't conduct much of her own fieldwork anymore, her skills were valuable - key, even. With the sort of bold decisiveness that had defined much of her life and a new unsentimentality that she had developed more recently, she bid farewell to Fresh Haven and joined civilization proper. She has been here for three years since, in an uneasy sort of alliance that allows her to shed some of her grating dependency while saddling her with more of a different nature. This arrangement may yet allow her to reach her goals, however: an end which justifies any means.

| SKILLS / EQUIPMENT |

💡Bigbrain: Lysandra is just honest-to-goodness smart. She seems to regularly be a couple of (figurative) steps ahead of everybody else in most situations. She has a wealth of scientific and practical knowledge that can benefit her allies.
💡Mechanically Inclined: If there's a macguffin needed and anything that could possibly count as a tool, you can count on Lysandra to provide said macguffin, one way or another.
💡Tools of the Trade: The 'bossy know-it-all science lady' caries a backpack of wonders. It contains a first-aid kit, multipurpose mask, dehydrated food, flashlights, thermal packs, wiring, glue, screwdrivers, pliers, and a dozen other travel-adapted, lightweight, well-machined tools that used to be her mother's. If you need something, chances are that she has it. She can also patch you up pretty well, though she definitely doesn't give much thought to pain management.
💡Crack Shot: Lysandra knows how to shoot - by God does she know how to shoot. She can usually calculate things like bullet drop, wind effects, and ricochet angle too. If forced out into the field, she carries one pistol in her bag (or on her lap if - God forbid - she finds herself in a hot zone), and a spare duct-taped to the underside of her wheelchair close to one of her wheels. She can pull it out or fire it unexpectedly with a quick sleight-of-hand when it looks like she's just reaching down to wheel herself.
💡Human Shopping Cart: It seems like a small thing but, as long as someone's willing to help push her, Lysandra can easily carry a couple hundred pounds worth of equipment, specimens, a bound and gagged prisoner, or even a lazy or injured ally. Revenants don't recover immediately, after all.
💡The Immortals: Four robotic helpers serve as Lysandra's agents both when she stays behind and in the uncommon instances when she goes into the field. They can operate either autonomously with limited AI capabilities (results may... vary when used this way) or be controlled one at a time via joystick and VR headset. She's working on a neural interface, but 'working on' is very much the operative term here. Loosely themed after the Four Immortals from Vietnamese legend, her agents are:

The Immortals

• Mountain Man: A multilegged tumbling and walking robot with a flexible body about the size of a small cat, Mountain Man is able to traverse almost any terrain, slip into small spaces, climb, dig, and perform basic scouting, rescue, delivery, and sample return operations. He has a taser, tranquilizer, and scissors too.
• Marsh Sage: Primarily defensive in nature, Marsh Sage is a blindingly quick, maneuverable, and quiet coaxial quadcopter drone that can lay smokescreens, strobe blinding lights, and dispense nerve, mustard, and other poisonous gases. It is also quite handy for spying and scouting.
• Iron Horse: A series of wheels on articulated arms, this is Lysandra's supplementary mobility aid and latches onto her wheelchair. It can propel her, hands-free, at high speeds, stabilize and protect her from recoil or being pushed against her will, clamp itself magnetically to metallic surfaces, and boost her over curbs or flights of one to three steps. It can also act as a bridge, platform, or supply carrier on its own.
• Sky Princess: Lysandra's main offensive tool, Sky Princess is a large purple hexacopter drone that can lay down smokescreens, fire paralytic poison darts, release high-frequency sonic blasts that are extremely painful and induce headaches, dizziness, and nausea, and launch micro-rockets similar to the 'Whistling Birds' from Lucasfilm's The Mandalorian.
• Unless they don't have to go far, she cannot bring all of these with her at once. For extended missions, the maximum is three or sometimes two. Only Mountain Man and Marsh Sage are small enough to be carried comfortably on her person. Sky Princess can be too, in a pinch.

| LIMITATIONS AND WEAKNESSES |

👩‍🦽Headset: When directly piloting one of the Immortals or her other creations beyond her sightline, Lysandra wears a VR headset linked to the drone's on-board camera. This leaves her detached from her immediate surroundings and vulnerable to attack unless she is safely away from a hot zone (where she knows that she should stay) or has an ally to watch her back.
👩‍🦽No Signal: Ninety percent of her utility is linked to her Four Immortals. If they stray out of signal range (about 3 miles or 5 kilometers) or their signal is jammed somehow and they're forced to operate autonomously, she is much less effective and - if she is brave/foolish enough to be in a dangerous area - much more vulnerable.
👩‍🦽Limited Charge: While she carries extra battery packs and a solar panel charger, these can only do so much. Once her Immortals are out of power, they're deadweight until they can get more. The same goes for the offensive ones' ammunition. She has a few refills, but extended missions can be...challenging.
👩‍🦽Obstinate: Lysandra is used to knowing better. She will often dig in and insist upon the rightness of her opinions and preferred courses of action. She tends to aggressively prioritize her projects and ideas unless yours align with them.
👩‍🦽Fragile: At the end of the day, for all of the tech that she carries, the 'bossy know-it-all science lady' is human. She is not as physically capable as revenants and sidhe, which is compounded even further by her disability. Lysandra is painfully reminded every time that she watches a revenant recover from either fatal or crippling wounds that she is unable to do so herself. She gets one body to play the game of life with. Whatever happens to it (including death) sticks.
👩‍🦽Paraplegic: As a paraplegic, Lysandra has no feeling or movement below her waistline. This has the following effects:

This is Wheel Life

• She needs to use a wheelchair for mobility and, even with its assistance, is severely limited in this regard compared to able-bodied people.
• While quite quick over flat ground and in open space, and with excellent stamina on flats or downhills, she is very terrain dependent.
• Things that we would not even think to consider, such as sand, gravel, curbs, cobblestones, and warped or cracked pavement cause Lysandra significant difficulty.
• Routes have to be carefully planned: shallow downhills maximized, extended or steep uphills and downhills minimized, and obstacles, rough terrain, and climbing avoided.
• She is incapable of strafing to the side or jumping. The closest that she can manage to the latter is to pop a wheelie.
• While pushing herself, her hands are occupied, making her unable to move and shoot or move and pilot any of the Immortals.
• She has a lower sightline than other people, takes up a larger footprint, and cannot squeeze through small spaces.
• If somehow separated from her wheelchair, Lysandra isn't realistically going much of anywhere on her own.

| NOTES |

• Lysandra is, low key, a huge science fiction nerd, particularly with regards to Star Trek. She gets that from both of her parents. They had a flash drive with old recordings and she used to watch them as a kid. She has, with only slight self-consciousness, told people to 'Live long and prosper'. She also has a soft spot for comics, even though most of them are kind of low brow. She read them as a kid and those were happy times.
• She appreciates some good Pho. Seriously, ethnic foods are a dying thing. She's trying to learn how to cook, but... revenants don't really appreciate human food all that much.
• She still strongly dislikes having to give her blood up for revenants. For pragmatic reasons, she'll do it, but it's just a reminder of her (and other humans') helplessness compared to them and it rankles. She sees it for what it is: an increasingly unsustainable practice.
• Lysandra's had romance in her life before. She had a couple of boyfriends, years ago in Fresh Haven, but they bored her before long. One, in particular, wanted to settle down, but she has always made it clear that she does not want to have children. Not only would it take time away from her responsibilities as a researcher, she worries that she'd be unable to properly care for them and that bringing a child into a world like this, just to live in constant fear and be food for others, would be grossly irresponsible. She tells herself that she doesn't like children anyways: they're loud, disruptive, and annoying. She'd be lying, though. Secretly, she's a big kid at heart. That was half the reason she used to go gallivanting around the ruined cities, running, jumping, and climbing.
• She loves the animals that nobody else does... except for frogs. She cut far too many of those open as a girl in the name of science to not be unnerved by them now.
• I'd love to find a more anime-like reference pic, but... resources are scarce on that front.
• Four years on from her accident, Lysandra has more or less adjusted to her altered reality and reached an understanding of what her abilities and limitations are. However, twenty-eight years of life experience before then have hardwired into her an approach of bold, independent action, a boundless curiosity best satiated firsthand, and the self-image of someone who can handle herself and get out of tough scrapes. Rationally, she knows that much of that is no longer practical, but hanging back, being cautious, and letting others do the work still causes occasional moments of dissonance.

Both of these characters are NPCs from The Hourglass Order, a fantasy magic school/mystery RPG that I'm GMing set in an original world with its own extensive lore. The first, Jomurr, has a fairly important role to play in the story along with his three fellow NPC students, Marlijn, Penny, and Manfred. In a lot of ways, he represents a departure for me: he's young and kind of mouthy. One archetype I've noticed that we don't usually see Black characters filling is the 'snooty noble', so I decided to make him one of those. There's depth there, too, though. He's more than he appears to be. Joshe Intaba is a bit of a wise old master type, but he's also got an irreverent streak to him and isn't in for all of the politics of his office.

Jomurr Ikon III

Jomurr Ikon III

I don't think I'm better than other people. I know it.

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16 | Male | Belzaggic | Noble | 8.26

P E R S O N A L I T Y

❖ Confident
❖ Competitive
❖ Shameless
❖ Showman
❖ Snobbish

Jomurr's a second son and he has complexes. He's powerful, rich, and handsome, but he's a second son. His father is an arch-conservative duke under Emperor Jobanzaggah IV and the mindset has rubbed off on him. To some degree, his snobbishness is reactionary and a response to the threat of the other classes' rise. A lot of it stems from a genuine belief that Dami chose people like him to govern, though. Jomurr looks at himself and rightly perceives that he's better at magic than 99.9% of the population. He's healthy, he's smart (even if it's more due to a good education), he's good-looking, and he's physically capable, perhaps even more so as he gets older. In a sense, he feels as if Ersand'Enise is a battleground where the lesser classes are trying to challenge the nobles' right to rule and that, if they win, the consequences for society will be genuinely disastrous. It is also a place where he can let loose. He can learn and unleash his full potential without restraint or compunction, and he can prove himself the better heir to his father. Zemon's RAS is only 7.82, after all.

L A N G U A G E S

Belzaggic: native
Avincian: fluent
Joruban: fluent
Perrench: fluent
Revidian: passable
Azjulish: passable

C H A R A C T E R A P P E A R A N C E

Look at the pic. There's your answer. He dresses in light, loose cloths, like most Belzaggic people. He'd show off his muscles if he had a bunch, but he's still a bit scrawny. Impeccably dressed, though. He just screams 'noble'.

T H E G I F T

Jomurr is a prodigy with the Gift and has the goal of either becoming an Arch-Zeno someday or returning to his house and usurping his firstborn brother to rule over the Duchy of Zowenga in his stead. Jomurr practices with all schools and knows the fundamentals of all. However, his favourite is Chemical and he's learning Atomic from a Zeno hired to be his tutor. He also has a thing for Kinetic because it's just so damned fun tossing plebs out your castle window with but a flick of your finger. Alas, this school only allows for two specializations. He should have his father talk to the Zenos about that. Arcane is pretty dope too. Binding? Hah! Binding magic isn't used for offense, and who needs healing? You have some pleb to follow you and heal you, of course!

B A C K G R O U N D

Jomurr's a second son and he has complexes. He's powerful, rich, and handsome, but he's a second son. His father is an arch-conservative duke under Emperor Jobanzaggah IV and that mindset has rubbed off on him. To some degree, his snobbishness is performative and a reaction to the perceived threat of the other classes' rise. A lot of it stems from a genuine belief that Dami chose people like him to govern, though. Jomurr looks at himself and rightly perceives that he's better at magic than 99.9% of the population. He's healthy, he's smart (even if it's more due to a good education), he's good-looking, and he's physically capable, perhaps even more so as he gets older. In a sense, he feels as if Ersand'Enise is a battleground where the lesser classes are trying to challenge the nobles' right to rule and that, if they win, the consequences for society will be genuinely disastrous. It is also a place where he can let loose. He can learn and unleash his full potential without restraint or compunction, and he can prove himself the better heir to his father. Zemon's RAS is only 7.82, after all.

M O T I V A T I O N

"I wanna be the very best, like no one ever was!"

In all seriousness, see the above bit on 'background'. Basically, like everyone else, Jomurr's here to become the person he's going to be for the rest of his life. He's also here to flex, though.

I N V E N T O R Y

Tons of outfits, a coinpurse full of Kizans, Coronas, and some Neskals because that's what all of the cool kids are paying with. There's no bigger flex than rolling up to some merchant, purchasing a papaya, and asking if he can make change for your Great Neskal. Jomurr also carries the signet ring of his house and a Teddy Lion that he sometimes sleeps with.

S T R E N G T H S & S K I L L S

❖ Magic prodigy
❖ Quick and athletic
❖ High noble and well-connected. He can pull some strings when he needs to.
❖ Quick with words, usually.
❖ Good liar

W E A K N E S S E S & F L A W S

❖ Honestly just kind of a jerk
❖ Insecure, deep down
❖ Overconfident
❖ Not quite as quick with words as he thinks he is
❖ Does not handle failure well initially

M I S C E L L A N E O U S

Unless they're from Belzagg and/or a high noble from at least a neighbouring region, other students are unlikely to know that Jomurr is a second son.
Colour Code: 800080

Joshe Intaba

Zeno Joshe Intaba

"A Zeno's business is the Gift... and only the Gift."

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64 | Male | Medrilaner | Noble | 8.86

D E S C R I P T I O N

Joshe Intaba is a living legend and one of the most powerful mages alive today. Master of the Magical Pentad, Hero of the Nashorn, Warden of the Lantern of Shune-Zept, and Lion of Medrilan, he is in possession of a virtually unparalleled resume as a practitioner of the Gift. Yet, for all of his accomplishments and sublime talent, he is a mere Zeno, as he has been for the past thirty years.

Joshe has never liked politics. He has never cared to play them. He believes strongly that a Zeno should be a practitioner of the magical arts and only the magical arts. To this end, he has refused every honour and promotion that has come his way but a handful that he found to be meaningful. While many have sought to garner his support and use his renown for their own ends, he always replies with a sad, friendly smile and a tired shake of his head. "I am sorry, friend, but it cannot be so. A Zeno's business is the Gift, and only the Gift. I wish you luck." It is said that he sees with far more than just his eyes, and that he sees all. Many feel themselves judged in his presence and found wanting, but there is never any malice or disdain.

While others have risen further and faster on the strength of their ambitions, Joshe has been content to remain a teacher, researcher, and - in times of trouble - arguably the academy's mightiest weapon. He eschews the ostentatious silks, laces, and jewelry of many of his fellow mages, in favour of a simple dark robe of excellent cut and quality. In his younger years, he was known for his boisterous celebrations, generosity, and many lovers (including the current Zenith, some whisper), yet he is in every way now, a wise and wizened master, if not with a bit of a twinkle in his eye.

Ironically, his hard stance on the duties of a Zeno and his steadfast dedication to his craft has grown this old Medrilaner a sizable following - one that he has never sought to leverage. The Academy, too, has recognized this. He is considered their foremost active instructor. To be apprenticed to Zeno Intaba is generally considered an honour and a privilege reserved for only the most gifted and promising of students. Yet, such is his cachet that he is given free reign to choose his own pupils, and his choices often raise eyebrows, as do his methods. Yet, none can argue with his results.

Both of these character sheets were submitted for the same RPG (which I was really into): Oh My Gods. They were all descendants of deities. Sadly, this one didn't last long. The GM was cool but didn't provide much in the way of guidance or IC worldbuilding so I got kind of lost and never really found a footing. Matthew was kind of an evolved version of my much earlier Rintor: modern world, older, and less edgy. I really wish I'd had the chance to play him. Selena was also older than your average character: approaching middle age and with a family, but she was a badass. I also tried to make her ethnic (Latinx) and religious (Catholic) identities relevant to her character.

Matthew Roderick-Wright

Name: Matthew Roderick-Wright

Gender: Male

Age: 68

Appearance: Matthew is an older man of mixed African American and Caucasian ancestry, still fit and in good shape into his late sixties. He has a full head of thick grey hair, kept close-cropped and professionally short. He often dresses in jeans, a golf shirt - always tucked in - and a comfortable pair of running shoes. He can often be found wearing a US Army pin and sometimes a Chicago Cubs baseball cap.

Sexuality: This is even a question?!

Godly ancestor: Mars

Son/daughter or further removed: Grandson

Relationship with godly ancestor: Matthew grew up knowing of his unique ancestry and sought to live up to it. In the jungles of Vietnam, he was fueled by thoughts of doing this legacy proud. As a soldier, he excelled in waging war and indeed, Mars looked with pride upon this mortal grandson of his. Shying away from the less... martial aspects of his ancestor, he remained in the army following the end of the war, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel and commanding an armoured division during Operation Desert Storm. Having retired with full honours a handful of years ago, he decided to pursue his interest in his family history by moving to New Celestia and meeting with Mars for the first time. There was no emotional outpouring - just a heartfelt handshake and a long conversation between two professional military men who shared a deep respect for each other - exactly the way that Matthew had always pictured the encounter.

Relationship with mortal family: Matthew's parents are long gone, though he is in occasional contact with his brother Lawrence, who is a corn farmer in southern Illinois. The two of them go to see Cubs games together at least a couple of times per year, and Matthew occasionally dotes on his great nephews and nieces, though he thinks that they're being raised to be soft and indulged and that a bit of discipline would've done them good. He has no wife or children of his own, though he was briefly married to a woman named Costanza in the early eighties. His stepson, Roger, was a disappointment to him, and the two of them do not speak to each other at all.

Powers: At age 68, Matthew is still absurdly fast and strong, and has 20/20 vision and excellent hearing. He knows his way around multiple types of weapons and can figure out how to best use them instinctively. He is incredibly tough and difficult to injure in spite of his advanced age, and possesses mildly superhuman endurance. He has a natural tactical acumen that extends past the battlefield into virtually any situation involving conflict. Matthew also has a green thumb, but has never really developed this talent. He keeps a nice cactus garden, he supposes.

Personality: Matthew is a tough, no-nonsense retired veteran and a career military man. While he is deeply socially conservative in most ways, he is a firm backer of civil rights and a quiet but unflinching warrior in the fight against racism. He believes strongly that attitudes help to shape reality and as a result, you will never hear him drop an 'N-bomb' under any circumstances. Matthew has an oldschool sense of honour and duty, but he can also be aggressive and a bit of a bully. He is used to a chain of command and does best when part of one. Matthew will not complain about what he sees as 'petty concerns', nor will he 'stand for any special snowflake bullshit'. As a result, he holds a lot inside, and he's a bit of a lonely man with his share of regrets, standing on his pride and military service as the sun begins to set on his life.

Bio: Matthew and his younger brother Lawrence were born during the baby boom in Chicago to an African-American mother and a mixed-race father who had served with distinction during the second world war but been prevented from rising above the rank of captain due to his race. His parents both worked: his father in a factory, and his mother doing room cleaning at a hotel. Matthew wasn't old enough to remember much of the first phase of the civil rights movement, but he still remembers where he was and what he was doing when he heard about the death of Martin Luther King.

Matthew was an average student during his high school days, but he was an incredible natural athlete, especially as a football running back. Only a fiery and violent disposition and a lack of discipline prevented him from being offered multiple tier one scholarships. In any event, he still ended up playing in the NCAA for a year before the Vietnam War draft was held and he was called to service. Though he considered refusing, like his hero Muhammad Ali, he decided to answer the call in order to honour his father, who had fallen ill and been forced to take a leave of absence from his job.

In the jungles of Vietnam, Matthew truly came to life for the first time. He was cited for numerous acts of personal bravery well above and beyond the call of duty. He proved to be excellent at sniffing out ambushes ahead of time, thwarting enemy plans, and extricating himself and his fellow soldiers from impossible situations. It wasn't long before the medals, commendations, and promotions came flooding in. Whatever he may have felt about the flimsy justifications for the war, Matthew pushed it all aside. His job was elimination of the enemy in the name of his country, and he carried it out with loyalty and gusto. The conclusion of the war was something that he had seen coming, but at this point, he was already firmly entrenched in the military life. During the relatively conflict-free eighties, (despite the incendiary rhetoric being tossed about between cold war rivals) he made an attempt to settle down with the widow of one of his Vietnam buddies who he'd kept in touch with. However, her teenaged son was a delinquent, and Matthew's attempts to set the boy straight drove a wedge between them and resulted in the marriage failing after only a couple of years.

After that, he dedicated his life to serving his country, and did so as a captain and then a lieutenant colonel in the conflicts of the eighties, nineties, and early twenty-first century. That there was something more than human blood running through his veins, Matthew was certain, and he'd been told the family secret by his father upon his passing from cancer at age 56. Upon his retirement, Matthew decided to pursue this interest all of the way to New Celestia, half expecting it to have been little more than some elaborate last joke of his father's.

Selena Casillas Ochoa

Name: Selena Casillas Ochoa

Gender: Female

Age: 38

Appearance: Selena is a petite woman with tanned skin, and straight black hair with bangs cut to shoulder length with lazerlike precision. She often wears a full skirt suit in either white or black, with a thin pencil skirt and high heels that add a forbidding click to every step that she takes. He makeup is always perfect and her nails are always painted blood red. On sunny days, she will wear a pair of aviator sunglasses that make it impossible to see her eyes.

Sexuality: straight

Godly ancestor: Thanatos

Son/daughter or further removed: Daughter

Relationship with godly ancestor: It used to be very strained, though it has improved in recent years.

Relationship with mortal family: Selena's mother died during childbirth, and she was raised by her aunt and uncle as if she were one of their many children. In fact, while growing up, virtually nobody knew that she wasn't one of theirs. Time and distance have separated them somewhat, though they're still on good terms and she regularly visits on holidays. Of more consequence are her husband, Michael: the son of a minor Chinese water deity, and her daughter Victoria: a synthesis of the two sets of powers. They are her everything.

Powers: Selena has always been deeply uncomfortable with her powers, since she was raised as a devout Catholic and they come from a Greek death god. The most peculiar of these is her apparent age. Though she's approaching forty, she doesn't look a day past her early twenties. Of course, as the offspring of a death god, she possesses the ability to call people into the afterlife with nothing but a touch and intent. In some circumstances, she can also return them to the mortal plane. However, the ability that has made Selena the most uncomfortable is her power over pain and grief. With but a look and a thought, she can inflict immense amounts of it upon people, but conversely can relieve it. She herself can move at will from one plane to the other. Though while she is in the land of the dead, her body remains behind in the living world and is completely vulnerable. Finally, just like her father, she can sprout a pair of ethereal wings from her back and use them to fly. They look almost exactly like angel's wings except for the fact that they're pitch black.

Personality: Selena is a warm and caring individual by upbringing, but it contrasts with the detached and distant yet coolly benevolent nature bequeathed to her by her father. Every day of her life she remains locked in a struggle against that side of herself. Selena can laugh at a good joke, but she's not very good at making any herself. Her marriage has been blessed with genuine passion as well as understanding and a great many common interests. In most ways, Selena is utterly typical of an upper middle class woman in her late thirties, from her taste in media to her set of interests, to her social and political opinions, which lean conservatively left but little more.

Bio: Selena grew up cursing her father, whoever he was, for leaving. She always assumed that he was some no good gangbanger. She was raised by her aunt and uncle and it was a largely happy upbringing, though they were rather poor and often struggled. Just having her in the room often made them feel better.

Taking this a step further, she got into medicine and after years of schooling, eventually became a doctor. It was right after her graduation that she was told the truth about her birth by her aunt. The old woman was rather skeptical herself, but she had never known her sister to lie. Upon investigating New Celestia herself, Selena was contacted by her father and was horrified to find out that not only was he real, but he was the very epitome of a cool, handsome, emotionless death god. She wanted nothing whatsoever to do with him, not understanding (or perhaps not wanting to understand) that he saw it as his job to ease pain as well.

Moving her practice to New Celestia, she did well for herself and eventually fell in love with one of her clients, a man named Michael Xu, the son of a Chinese water deity. Before long, they had gotten married and Selena had gotten pregnant. She worked for as long as was medically responsible, before temporarily referring her clients to another physician while she went on maternity leave. Her daughter, Victoria, is the light of her life, and was born seven years ago. That was also the time that her father picked to come back into her life. They talked rather openly about her resentment. He admitted that he had probably inadvertently killed her mother. There was nothing that could be done to change the past. However, they could attempt to have a future.

A CS for a superhero/metahuman RPG from years ago called 'Collateral Damage'. Sadly, it never got off the ground. I really see China as a way underrepresented nation of origin for RPG characters despite it having such a large population. Maybe people just shy away from the political dimension? I also wanna see some Asian dudes kicking ass, an no, not just because they know martial arts (though that is pretty badass)

Gary Xu

Name: Gary Xu

Gender: Male

Appearance: Gary is a middle aged Chinese man of below average height, solidly built but not carrying any extra weight. He’s clean shaven, with lightly tanned skin and a full head of straight black hair worn professionally short and just starting to grey around the temples. His teeth are unexpectedly perfect, and though he sometimes wears glasses, he generally looks somewhat younger than his 41 years – perhaps mid-thirties. He can usually be found wearing a collared shirt in a hue of pastel with the top button undone, as well as a pair of business slacks and dress shoes. When not working, he prefers a pair of comfortable, slightly worn blue jeans and a golf shirt, or a tracksuit with blue Air Jordans. As one might imagine from this description, he’s fit and in good shape.

Age: 41

Alias: (The Indestructible Man)

Alignment: undecided (he is leaning towards hunter, though likely as more of a facilitator)

Identity: Private and recently discovered

History: Gary was born in 1976 in the small mountain village of Wulingyuan in scenic Hunan province, south-central China. It was the final, violent spasm of the Cultural Revolution, and his parents, who were shop owners, were forced into hiding until a degree of sanity returned. In 1982, the nearby mountains were designated a protected area, and over the following decade, morphed into a significant tourist attraction. Gary’s father, a shrewd and intelligent man, soon expanded his business to provide beverages, tours, and lodging. He used his savings to purchase a second home in the nearby city of Zhangjiajie, and the young family split their time between the two places.

With Deng Xiaoping’s open door policy picking up steam, the area witnessed its first western tourists, and Gary’s father was of the opinion that there would be many more to come. The boy was enrolled in English lessons (which were not easy to come by in those days, especially in a provincial backwater), and given the English name that he still carries. Being able to speak the language of international business proved to be a huge boon to his prospects, and as a teenager, he earned a good deal of extra cash acting as a tour guide and bootleg interpreter to curious Americans, Europeans, and others who came to visit.

By the time that Gary was 20, he decided to make the move to Shanghai, a decision fully supported by his parents. The city was on the precipice of a major boom, and both Gary and his father could sense it.

Living on the cheap in rough and ready Baoshan, a former port town in the process of morphing into an industrial suburb, he paid the bills for most of his first year by working construction jobs. During this time, Gary was involved in more than his fair share of barroom brawls, and found that he could take a punch better than anyone else either he or his new friends knew. However, he didn’t remain in his lowly position for long. With international companies beginning to move their manufacturing to Shanghai, his ability to speak passable English was a major asset and he was soon moved to international customer liaison.

1997 was a huge year for Gary, as he was promoted and used his newfound time off to moonlight as a student at Shanghai’s prestigious Jiao Tong University. While he didn’t have the money or education to formally attend, he bought clothes to look the part, became a regular in the library, and managed to sneak into lectures. There, he not only furthered his knowledge of marketing and economics, but he also made many friends from influential backgrounds. Before long, this young group began formulating plans and studying the marketplace, looking for investment opportunities. Gary worked two jobs, scrimped and saved in order to invest along with the others. Also, in the world at large, a couple of important things happened. Firstly, China opened up to Western media, with the box office hit Titanic becoming a massive cultural phenomenon there. Second, and more importantly, the presence of metahumans became publicly known, resulting in intense interest, debate, and official ambivalence.

Gary had little time to worry about the actions of superheroes and supervillains so long as they didn’t affect him. Over the next three years, he and his group of ‘Young Tigers’ invested in ever larger projects, gradually amassing a fortune. Despite having been promoted again, Gary left his job to focus on becoming a fulltime investor. By 2002, he returned to his former employer, having purchased it outright. With an eye to the future, the young tycoon purchased shares in up and coming social media and online banking platforms as well as local distributors of cellphone technologies. His construction firm thrived during the boom and was able to buy out a number of its rivals. He eventually married and became a father of two, willingly paying the government-imposed fine for having a second child. Over the next decade, Gary managed to get his fingers in a number of industries: English training schools, entertainment, banking, and insurance.

It was in the case of the latter that the metahuman issue impacted Gary the most. His firm was among the first to offer metahuman insurance, but this proved to be a difficult and unpredictable field, prone to losing money. Working closely with the government, he pioneered a public-private approach that combined compensation with both market prospecting and law enforcement. On a personal level, Gary was deeply disturbed by much of what he witnessed, becoming convinced that human beings with such power were inevitably bound to misuse it even if their intentions were good.

Gary himself had become something of a renaissance man by the time that he celebrated his fortieth birthday. He spoke seven languages, was a black belt in Tae Kwon Do and Jeet Kune Do, as well as an avid hiker and cyclist who could also pilot personal aircraft. He maintained a large garage, as well as interests in history, physics, and geology. He attempted to learn guitar but found that he wasn’t particularly talented.

It was shortly after his forty-first birthday that an incident took place which would profoundly alter his world. He was in the middle of a meeting when a fight between a pair of local metas – Suprasonic (a deliberate – though flying – knockoff of Supersonic) and The Mountain – erupted nearby. Gary was in the process of evacuating when the metas did serious damage to the office tower that he was in, causing the elevator cables to snap. The tycoon and two of his long-time associates plunged over four hundred feet to their deaths – except, Gary didn’t die. In fact he was completely uninjured while his colleagues were killed instantly. Removing himself from the building before it collapsed, dazed and confused, he quickly invented a story to account for his survival while the Chinese government cracked down harshly on metahuman activities.

Over the past two months, he has been on leave from his many business ventures, rethinking a number of incidents in his past that he had originally put down to good luck, a strong constitution, and sheer toughness. His father always liked to recount the story of how Gary had fallen into a steep ravine as an infant while his family was running from the red guards, only to be found completely unscathed. Then there had been the time that a carelessly handled i-beam had struck him as a young man working on a construction site, sending him tumbling over forty feet to the ground below. He had dusted himself off and resumed working later that same day. His youthful brawls where he’d been able to swing for the fences while brushing off opponents’ punches had to be reconsidered, as did a waterskiing incident a few years back where he’d hit the water going nearly 100km/h and been completely unharmed. When Gary really thinks about it, he realizes that he can’t remember a single significant injury over the course of his life. The inescapable conclusion is that Gary Xu has been a metahuman the entire time. He is what he has come to hate. How he will deal with that going forward, only he can know.

Personality: Gary’s a man who has lived a lot. He is very competent in a number of areas and possesses a deep – though slightly cynical – understanding of human nature. He enjoys making dry jokes and wry comments, and isn’t afraid of being self-deprecating, though his humour is almost always situational. In general, he’s a friendly guy and a good communicator, with a large circle of friends. However, his relationships with other people are best described as ‘friendly but somewhat distant.’ This extends to his own family. That doesn’t denote a lack of caring, however, just a desire to maintain a healthy distance between himself and other people and a lack of involvement in their everyday and quite frankly mundane affairs.

As one might expect, he’s extremely motivated and determined, almost obsessively so. When Gary sets his mind to something, he will systematically break it down, examine it in detail, and execute a carefully-laid plan. He’s not entirely averse to risk, though he does try to minimize it. Perhaps due to his success in life, Gary is not easily impressed and has little sympathy or use for people who complain or make excuses, especially if they have a background or talents that give them a head start. Though he tries to see the world for the subjective thing that it is, and to always keep his own ego in check, he can be unintentionally arrogant at times.

Skills: Gary is in good though not exceptional shape. Though fairly small, he is a skilled and experienced hand-to-hand fighter, schooled in multiple martial arts, as well as possessing elementary training with some traditional Chinese weapons. He has never fired a gun before and hopes that he’ll never have to. He has, however, piloted personal aircraft and boats up to the size of a small yacht. He enjoys racing his collection of exotic cars at the track.

Gary’s also perceptive and a good negotiator, able to read people and situations quickly and thoroughly. Finally, he is fluent in Mandarin (including his local Hunan dialect), Cantonese, English, and Korean, as well as passable in Italian, Japanese, French, and Spanish.

Abilities: Gary hasn’t really had the chance to become familiar with his metahuman abilities, though he seems to possess only one: he is completely indestructible. Beyond that, he is a bog-standard human.

Equipment: Gary doesn’t really have any special equipment right now, except for an extensive garage full of exotic cars, aircraft, and boats. Obviously, he can’t bring this with him. Beyond that, he has a name that means something in business, dozens of high-level international contacts, and a credit card with no limit. Maybe he’ll build a batcave?

One of my first characters was for an RPG called Through the Portal that had a really interesting premise but a too-large cast and got bogged down in interpersonal (IC) strife before folding. Rintor acted as an inspiration for Illusion Arcanists in The Hourglass Order, however. I'd noticed that, within the large cast, there weren't any characters of colour and almost none over the age of thirty. Hence, this guy was both. I think a lot of times, we become focused on having lots of fantasy races while forgetting the variance in human ones.

Rintor Otorik

Name: Rintor Otorik, aka. The Smiler, The Blade of Boshir

Age: 33

Race: Human (Sub-Saharan African in appearance)

Appearance: Rintor is a smallish, very dark-skinned man in his early thirties, wiry but muscular. He has dark grey-brown eyes and is vaguely handsome. However, he suffers from Alopecia Universalis, which renders him completely hairless across his entire body. He usually dresses in a simple black robe, with black leather boots, loose black pants, a handful of fur pelts, and a thick brown leather belt with a trio of leather satchels around his waist. In his youth, he would often wear a mask that covered most of his face. However, he doesn't wear it anymore.

Rintor during his 'glory days'

Role: Linguist, assassin, scout

Bio: Rintor comes from Boshir, a powerful fiefdom in the south, where he was the third son in a family from his country’s equivalent of the landed gentry. His father and grandfather had both served with distinction in the king’s army as armed scouts in previous conflicts, rising to become commanders. Rintor seemed destined for the same path, and indeed demonstrated considerable aptitude as a child. However, he manifested somewhat unexpected magical abilities upon puberty and was sent for schooling in the arcane arts. He showed little promise with higher magicks, but excelled at what was called ‘lightbending’, which, in short, allows him to bend the visible light spectrum so as to appear all-but invisible. Before long it appeared that he had reached a dead-end. While lightbending was a useful skill, people who trained at the academy of thaumaturgy were strictly forbidden from using the abilities learned there for violent ends.

When war erupted with a neighboring Elven kingdom, Rintor, then only seventeen, remained at the academy. He had flourished during his years there and grown into a thoughtful young man. However, after a year, the military situation turned for the worse, and he was personally pulled out of the academy upon orders of the king and placed into the army as a commissioned officer. Whatever his moral qualms, Rintor served as his father and grandfather had before him. If his swordsmanship was subpar for his station, he had little use for it during scouting missions. However, one can only last for so long in a war without resorting to violence. Forced to kill an enemy scout who would have revealed his army’s position, Rintor had shed his first blood. Surrounded by martial culture, his guilt was quickly assuaged.

From that point onward, he became the leader of an advance party that quickly became infamous for its lightning strikes, guerilla warfare, and sabotage. His lightbending skills made him almost absurdly effective, and before long Rintor was doing more than scouting. Assassinations came next, followed by long missions deep into enemy territory. His initial moral objections having become a thing of the past, and fed a steady diet of awards, honours, propaganda, and berserker mushrooms, Rintor became a gleeful killing machine. Gifted a pair of finely honed daggers by the king himself, the lightbender’s trail of bodies grew until he was feared, revered, and loathed across much of the continent. It became something of a legend that he would always appear out of nowhere a bare moment before striking the fatal blow, smiling like the devil himself.

His high (or low) point, came when he infiltrated the bedchambers of the Elven king and murdered him and his entire family in cold blood. This plunged the country into civil war and forced their interim leadership to sue for peace terms. Back home, Rintor was hailed as a hero, but with the war over and the accolades, drugs, and honours drying up, he felt increasingly hollow. He longed for purpose, which he attempted to find in hunting, bloodsport, and horse racing. All were dead ends. The academy had long since severed all ties with him and he was not allowed to return there. At some point, he disappeared from society altogether.

Nobody is entirely certain where he went for seven years, but when he reappeared, he was able to speak six new languages and he seemed to have found his peace. He sat outside of the academy in meditation, drinking only one bottle of water each day, for twenty-six days and nights until he was finally granted an audience with the provost. The price that he paid for readmission to the academy was considerable: all of his lands, honours, titles, and possessions save what he had carried with him, as well as a solemn vow of non-violence to be broken upon pain of a degenerative curse that will slowly and painfully cause him to waste away.

For the next three years, he ensconced himself within its hallowed halls, re-emerging at around the same time that the opening of the portal was announced. He appeared before the king, dressed in his simple black robes, and requested that he be the first of his nation to step through the portal. Given his status as a war hero, it was a request that could hardly be refused. Nobody knows what his motivation is except for Rintor himself, though one would assume that it has to do with the fascination of exploring a new land and finding redemption in the process.

Skills: Rintor can move with the utmost stealth and silence. Even elven ears struggle to detect him. He is almost ridiculously proficient with knives and daggers, though he has sworn never to use them for violence against another sentient being so long as he lives. He is able to draw maps and describe topography in considerable detail, though perhaps not as well as he might’ve in his youth. He is adept at sabotage, guerilla warfare, and has some tactical abilities, though these are qualities that he tries not to advertise. Rintor is a skilled horseman and reasonably proficient with a bow, though not what one would call 'naturally talented'. He can fast for an extended period of time and possesses basic survival skills. He has an innate ear for languages and has studied linguistics over the prvious handful of years, though he tends to speak with a thick accent.

Magic: Rintor is able to bend light so that he blends in flawlessly with his surroundings for extended periods of time when still and short bursts while moving. This effectively makes him able to turn invisible. However, the ability only extends to the visible light spectrum, and requires considerable concentration. He also struggles to blend into backdrops with especially intricate patterns or with many colours and a great deal of motion.

Equipment: Rintor has the clothes on his back, a flask of water in one satchel, some parchment and a quill in another, and some dried fruits, jerky, and nuts in another. He also has a pair of wickedly sharp daggers gifted to him by the king, but he wants nothing to do with them.

Other: Rintor is quiet and reserved – some would say aloof and subtly arrogant. He never shows his teeth anymore when smiling. He seems to be highly intelligent, though he will rarely correct people’s mistakes. He also appears to have little to no interest in women. Though he has tried hard to train it out of himself, he harbours a degree of suspicion towards elves and many near-human beings. Before Rintor went through the portal, the king gifted him his old daggers back and bade him take them through the portal. Rintor could not disobey with so many eyes on him, but he plans to drop them the moment that he steps through, and not just for his own sake. Given his past and his distinctive appearance, I'd assume that he would be known to many of the other characters, at least by name and reputation.

Force and Fury's Emporium of Faces

Mobility Impairment, Femininity, and Strength

Another theme that I'm drawn to in terms of RP is that of mobility impairment. While I haven't lived with one myself, I have known and been close to multiple people who have and it has been an eye-opening experience. We create such dynamic worlds when roleplaying, and these are often coupled with physically dynamic characters who move about them constrained only by the rules and practicalities of the games. What if there were more to consider, however? What if there were extra challenges? I also find myself thinking about female characters when I consider our notions of 'capability', 'independence', and 'strength'. I'm struck by the importance placed on a very traditional, martial, masculine definition of these things. How about characters who'd realistically struggle to access that? Is telling their stories worthwhile? I strongly believe so.

Not only are characters with significant, visible disabilities underrepresented, when they are, it's almost always in the background, in (unintentionally) condescending ways that sometimes make the disability the entire focus of the character, or in ways that minimize the role of their disabilities and make those largely irrelevant. A disability is a meaningful part of a person's story but it is not their entire story. This is a monkey and it's on my back. Hence, it's such a recurring theme. I also just find the problem-solving and social dynamics involved in storytelling disability to be interesting and rewarding to play through. Someday, maybe, I'll have grown tired of this theme. I hope not, though.

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Lysandra is one of three potential characters that I've made for Code Vein, inspired by the game of the same name. She's also my third try at making a 'disabled STEM girl' after the first two were 'meh' and part of RPGs that died early (if I have to make another, it'll probably be a dude). She's perhaps a bit more angsty than I'd like, so she may receive some tweaks, but you can hardly blame her, living in the sad-sack world that she does.

Lysandra Tran

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L Y S A N D R A T R A N

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| AGE |

Lysandra is 32 years old.

| APPEARANCE |

A Squishy Human

The first (and often only) thing that people remember about Lysandra is her wheelchair. It's a simple, sturdy, lightweight manual chair and, as a paraplegic of four years, she uses it from dawn to dusk in order get around. Otherwise, she's a fairly baseline human: a vaguely pretty Asian woman in her early thirties with tanned skin, dark hair and eyes, and a businesslike bearing. She is not and never has been much for dressing up and would rather dress for functionality and comfort. Layering is a rule to live by. It's easier to take something off than to put it on. To that end, her usual attire consists of a light t-shirt over a sports bra, jeans or leggings, and knee or thigh high socks. She'll usually toss on some flats even though shoes are irrelevant. Sturdy gloves - usually fingerless to allow her to work with touch screens - are more important, as they protect her hands from blisters. On colder days, She'll complete the outfit with a jacket. She has two and both have a striped patch in mint, seafoam green, and white sewn onto them: the flag of the settlement that she used to live in and where her brother still resides. Finally, though she rarely actually wears it as intended (because that'd be both inconvenient and goofy), is the supergirl medallion that she received from her mother as a girl. It's usually tucked into her bag or a jacket pocket as a kind of good luck charm. She tells herself that she doesn't believe in 'luck'; everything is probability. Yet, on the day when she broke her back, she didn't have it on her.

As a human, Lysandra doesn't require a mask, and this gives her one less thing to worry about, especially when she goes into the field. Of course, that doesn't happen often anymore. Much to her chagrin, the post-apocalypse isn't very wheelchair accessible. When fieldwork is necessary for research or intel, though, she brings along some sturdy cycling gloves, trades her handbag for a large backpack with seemingly endless pockets, and usually swaps out her indoor wheels for some with thicker, grippier treads, as well as larger front casters. In the past, she'd often wear motorcycle armour, hiking shoes, and athletic leggings with elbow and knee pads. It was all about getting as deep into trouble spots as possible and quickness and durability were paramount. Nowadays, Lysandra usually forgoes anything that could hamper her already-limited mobility unless it clearly and directly helps her get more fieldwork done. Her primary goal is maximizing her returns on those brief outdoor sojourns and minimizing the physical liability that she represents. If enemies ever succeed in actually reaching her, she knows that the jig is pretty much up. Still, she's held onto her body armour, just in case. It's sturdy, lightweight, and can go under her jacket. She still has the knee pads too. Maybe she can't actually feel a knock to the knee, but it's also not like they'll hamper her movement. Besides, she kind of slips things in behind them. Why oh why do women not get usable pockets in most of their clothing!?

| PERSONALITY |

Daring ~ Unsentimental ~ Hyper-aware ~ Bitter ~ Clever ~ Assertive

At her worst, Lysandra can come across as a 'bossy know-it-all science lady'. She can seem cutting, acerbic, and pushy. A lot of this, however, is just frustration and barely-suppressed insecurity. The significant gulf between what she knows needs to be done and what she can accomplish on her own is an open wound, regularly picked at by circumstance. The other major factor is simply that she is used to being the smartest person in the room and it grates upon her to entertain other people's stupid ideas when they could be making progress towards their (read: her) goals instead.

That said, she's a genuinely decent human being beneath it all. Lysandra is an absolute encyclopedia of both general and esoteric knowledge. She is a human calculator, a problem solver, has an amazing eye for detail, and is a natural-born storyteller. She is genuinely one of the most interesting people who you will ever talk to and, on her better days, her cutting wit, self-deprecating humor, and straight-faced delivery can have you - instead of her - rolling with laughter.

| BACKGROUND |

Lysandra's mother was an engineer. Her father was a biologist. Both were born before the Great Collapse and were not young parents (forty one and forty, respectively). Her childhood was full of diligent work and research. It was full of movement and stories while on the move. She learned about the world that was: the great open green fields and forests, the safe, cozy homes, and the shining universities: beacons of learning and opportunity. Most of all, however, she accrued skills: she studied the nature of living and unliving things with her father. She learned the wonders of robotics, sensors, computers, and mechanics from her mother. Instead of playing with lego, she handbuilt her first drone when she was seven. The family settled in the midsized and fiercely independent outpost of Fresh Haven. Lysandra and her slightly older brother, Daniel, grew up and their parents aged, so they took on increasingly important roles as scouts, field researchers, and even fighters. In particular, she was stealthy and an excellent scout and climber, with a natural aptitude for surveying and understanding her surroundings, using them to her advantage.

For all of the world's dangers, her father fell prey to a flu in his 61st year. Daniel, who'd become more of a soldier than his sister, was gone for long periods of time and their mother increasingly withdrew into tinkering with her dwindling supplies. Lysandra, telling herself that her mother's work was valuable in more ways than one, began roving ever further afield in search of parts. She conducted her own research while out there. It was frightening, but challenging. In some ways, it was invigorating, and better than just sitting in some hole waiting to die. She begun to feel as if she could get to the bottom of how and why mistle worked, the role of the Sidhe, and how the Earth might be healed. She begun to feel as if she had some agency in her life. Further she went, scouting ahead with her drones, infrared sensors, and binoculars. She saw and found things that most humans couldn't. She knew a little bit of martial arts and learned more. She taught herself how to shoot. There were close calls - hairbreadth escapes from death - and tense moments. She hid out, she climbed, leapt, and scampered from one safe place to another, and then plunged back into the lab after days or weeks out in the world. Her parents' stories of the years before she was born had instilled in her a wariness towards revenants. Their kind had feasted on humans, once. The only thing needed for them to return to it and become Lost was a short period of time without consuming human blood.

Her mother was in ill health when Lysandra went out that day, but she tried to put aside her worries. At a steady jog, she made quick progress through the well-mapped regions near Fresh Haven, fists clenched around the straps of her backpack and breath wispy and white in the cool air. Perhaps she was preoccupied with thoughts of her family. Perhaps she was just careless, but she ran smack into a pack of Lost. She took one out of the fight with a well-aimed shot to the head, but then there was no option but to do what she did best: run, climb, and hide. She dropped her backpack and took off, through the labyrinth of a ruined city. After what seemed like forever, two more fell off the pace. This was a bad situation - worse than the usual 'bad situations' - but she had escaped many times before and would again. Thirst clawed at her parched throat but one final Lost - a monster of a man - stayed doggedly on her tail. Further up a crumbling building she went, leaping nimbly from sagging staircase to rotting floor to support beam, and he started to falter. The jump is still burned into her memory: over a gap in a staircase. It was the type that you dismiss in your head as a 'ninety percent chance I'll land it'. She'd made ones like it plenty of times before and she doubted her pursuer would be able to follow. She'd be safe. The thing is, if you roll the dice enough times, the odds will catch up to you eventually. The floor had looked solid on the other side but it wasn't. It gave way instantly and Lysandra can still recall with absolute clarity those two seconds where her stomach just folded in on itself in terror. Then she hit.

She was told that a handful of revenants who'd been surveying the area had heard her gunshots. As a gesture of goodwill, they'd rescued her and brought her back to Fresh Haven but, in the weeks and months following that fateful fall, as people kept telling her that she was a 'warrior' and would surely walk again, as she had to relearn how to do basically everything, and as her elderly mother cared for her as if she were still a child, Lysandra began to wish that they hadn't. Mother passed away eight months after the accident and, officially, the strain of having to care for her grown daughter hadn't been a contributing cause. Daniel stepped away from his duties temporarily and she moved into his unit with his family, but it wasn't much more accessible than hers. The entire settlement was built in what had once been a vertical farm crisscrossed with staircases, scaffolds, and prefab walls that had once been her playground but that now meant that she couldn't go much of anywhere without assistance. Wracked with guilt and regret, Lysandra threw herself into her engineering pursuits, sitting in front of a work table for hours each day, hammering away at her mother's machines, digging through the endless piles of scrap that she had accumulated on her sojourns, and constructing drones to map, guard, and scout, water filters to help grow food and provide drink, and devices to supplement her broken body and make her remaining family's lives easier.

Soon, Daniel could not afford any more time away from his duties and so her nephew, niece, and sister-in-law became her protectors. This, Lysandra could not permit any longer. As she had hoped, she'd rediscovered a sense of purpose - an imperfect one, for it still hurt so much to not be whole - but enough to push her forward once more. This place, however, was holding her back. She was holding her family back. The revenants had saved her. She had judged them too harshly, she decided, on the basis of childhood fears and stories from people who were no longer alive. She was, though, and saw little point to living for herself alone. There were vanishingly few people with skillsets like hers and, even if she couldn't conduct much of her own fieldwork anymore, her skills were valuable - key, even. With the sort of bold decisiveness that had defined much of her life and a new unsentimentality that she had developed more recently, she bid farewell to Fresh Haven and joined civilization proper. She has been here for three years since, in an uneasy sort of alliance that allows her to shed some of her grating dependency while saddling her with more of a different nature. This arrangement may yet allow her to reach her goals, however: an end which justifies any means.

| SKILLS / EQUIPMENT |

💡Bigbrain: Lysandra is just honest-to-goodness smart. She seems to regularly be a couple of (figurative) steps ahead of everybody else in most situations. She has a wealth of scientific and practical knowledge that can benefit her allies.
💡Mechanically Inclined: If there's a macguffin needed and anything that could possibly count as a tool, you can count on Lysandra to provide said macguffin, one way or another.
💡Tools of the Trade: The 'bossy know-it-all science lady' caries a backpack of wonders. It contains a first-aid kit, multipurpose mask, dehydrated food, flashlights, thermal packs, wiring, glue, screwdrivers, pliers, and a dozen other travel-adapted, lightweight, well-machined tools that used to be her mother's. If you need something, chances are that she has it. She can also patch you up pretty well, though she definitely doesn't give much thought to pain management.
💡Crack Shot: Lysandra knows how to shoot - by God does she know how to shoot. She can usually calculate things like bullet drop, wind effects, and ricochet angle too. If forced out into the field, she carries one pistol in her bag (or on her lap if - God forbid - she finds herself in a hot zone), and a spare duct-taped to the underside of her wheelchair close to one of her wheels. She can pull it out or fire it unexpectedly with a quick sleight-of-hand when it looks like she's just reaching down to wheel herself.
💡Human Shopping Cart: It seems like a small thing but, as long as someone's willing to help push her, Lysandra can easily carry a couple hundred pounds worth of equipment, specimens, a bound and gagged prisoner, or even a lazy or injured ally. Revenants don't recover immediately, after all.
💡The Immortals: Four robotic helpers serve as Lysandra's agents both when she stays behind and in the uncommon instances when she goes into the field. They can operate either autonomously with limited AI capabilities (results may... vary when used this way) or be controlled one at a time via joystick and VR headset. She's working on a neural interface, but 'working on' is very much the operative term here. Loosely themed after the Four Immortals from Vietnamese legend, her agents are:

The Immortals

• Mountain Man: A multilegged tumbling and walking robot with a flexible body about the size of a small cat, Mountain Man is able to traverse almost any terrain, slip into small spaces, climb, dig, and perform basic scouting, rescue, delivery, and sample return operations. He has a taser, tranquilizer, and scissors too.
• Marsh Sage: Primarily defensive in nature, Marsh Sage is a blindingly quick, maneuverable, and quiet coaxial quadcopter drone that can lay smokescreens, strobe blinding lights, and dispense nerve, mustard, and other poisonous gases. It is also quite handy for spying and scouting.
• Iron Horse: A series of wheels on articulated arms, this is Lysandra's supplementary mobility aid and latches onto her wheelchair. It can propel her, hands-free, at high speeds, stabilize and protect her from recoil or being pushed against her will, clamp itself magnetically to metallic surfaces, and boost her over curbs or flights of one to three steps. It can also act as a bridge, platform, or supply carrier on its own.
• Sky Princess: Lysandra's main offensive tool, Sky Princess is a large purple hexacopter drone that can lay down smokescreens, fire paralytic poison darts, release high-frequency sonic blasts that are extremely painful and induce headaches, dizziness, and nausea, and launch micro-rockets similar to the 'Whistling Birds' from Lucasfilm's The Mandalorian.
• Unless they don't have to go far, she cannot bring all of these with her at once. For extended missions, the maximum is three or sometimes two. Only Mountain Man and Marsh Sage are small enough to be carried comfortably on her person. Sky Princess can be too, in a pinch.

| LIMITATIONS AND WEAKNESSES |

👩‍🦽Headset: When directly piloting one of the Immortals or her other creations beyond her sightline, Lysandra wears a VR headset linked to the drone's on-board camera. This leaves her detached from her immediate surroundings and vulnerable to attack unless she is safely away from a hot zone (where she knows that she should stay) or has an ally to watch her back.
👩‍🦽No Signal: Ninety percent of her utility is linked to her Four Immortals. If they stray out of signal range (about 3 miles or 5 kilometers) or their signal is jammed somehow and they're forced to operate autonomously, she is much less effective and - if she is brave/foolish enough to be in a dangerous area - much more vulnerable.
👩‍🦽Limited Charge: While she carries extra battery packs and a solar panel charger, these can only do so much. Once her Immortals are out of power, they're deadweight until they can get more. The same goes for the offensive ones' ammunition. She has a few refills, but extended missions can be...challenging.
👩‍🦽Obstinate: Lysandra is used to knowing better. She will often dig in and insist upon the rightness of her opinions and preferred courses of action. She tends to aggressively prioritize her projects and ideas unless yours align with them.
👩‍🦽Fragile: At the end of the day, for all of the tech that she carries, the 'bossy know-it-all science lady' is human. She is not as physically capable as revenants and sidhe, which is compounded even further by her disability. Lysandra is painfully reminded every time that she watches a revenant recover from either fatal or crippling wounds that she is unable to do so herself. She gets one body to play the game of life with. Whatever happens to it (including death) sticks.
👩‍🦽Paraplegic: As a paraplegic, Lysandra has no feeling or movement below her waistline. This has the following effects:

This is Wheel Life

• She needs to use a wheelchair for mobility and, even with its assistance, is severely limited in this regard compared to able-bodied people.
• While quite quick over flat ground and in open space, and with excellent stamina on flats or downhills, she is very terrain dependent.
• Things that we would not even think to consider, such as sand, gravel, curbs, cobblestones, and warped or cracked pavement cause Lysandra significant difficulty.
• Routes have to be carefully planned: shallow downhills maximized, extended or steep uphills and downhills minimized, and obstacles, rough terrain, and climbing avoided.
• She is incapable of strafing to the side or jumping. The closest that she can manage to the latter is to pop a wheelie.
• While pushing herself, her hands are occupied, making her unable to move and shoot or move and pilot any of the Immortals.
• She has a lower sightline than other people, takes up a larger footprint, and cannot squeeze through small spaces.
• If somehow separated from her wheelchair, Lysandra isn't realistically going much of anywhere on her own.

| NOTES |

• Lysandra is, low key, a huge science fiction nerd, particularly with regards to Star Trek. She gets that from both of her parents. They had a flash drive with old recordings and she used to watch them as a kid. She has, with only slight self-consciousness, told people to 'Live long and prosper'. She also has a soft spot for comics, even though most of them are kind of low brow. She read them as a kid and those were happy times.
• She appreciates some good Pho. Seriously, ethnic foods are a dying thing. She's trying to learn how to cook, but... revenants don't really appreciate human food all that much.
• She still strongly dislikes having to give her blood up for revenants. For pragmatic reasons, she'll do it, but it's just a reminder of her (and other humans') helplessness compared to them and it rankles. She sees it for what it is: an increasingly unsustainable practice.
• Lysandra's had romance in her life before. She had a couple of boyfriends, years ago in Fresh Haven, but they bored her before long. One, in particular, wanted to settle down, but she has always made it clear that she does not want to have children. Not only would it take time away from her responsibilities as a researcher, she worries that she'd be unable to properly care for them and that bringing a child into a world like this, just to live in constant fear and be food for others, would be grossly irresponsible. She tells herself that she doesn't like children anyways: they're loud, disruptive, and annoying. She'd be lying, though. Secretly, she's a big kid at heart. That was half the reason she used to go gallivanting around the ruined cities, running, jumping, and climbing.
• She loves the animals that nobody else does... except for frogs. She cut far too many of those open as a girl in the name of science to not be unnerved by them now.
• I'd love to find a more anime-like reference pic, but... resources are scarce on that front.
• Four years on from her accident, Lysandra has more or less adjusted to her altered reality and reached an understanding of what her abilities and limitations are. However, twenty-eight years of life experience before then have hardwired into her an approach of bold, independent action, a boundless curiosity best satiated firsthand, and the self-image of someone who can handle herself and get out of tough scrapes. Rationally, she knows that much of that is no longer practical, but hanging back, being cautious, and letting others do the work still causes occasional moments of dissonance.

Penny Pellegrin is an NPC in The Hourglass Order, a fantasy magic school/mystery RPG that I'm GMing set in an original world with its own extensive lore. She has a fairly important role to play in the story along with her three fellow NPC students, Marlijn, Jomurr, and Manfred. In a lot of ways, she's an evolution of my much earlier Simona Ricci: sneaky one-legged chick with a saucy mouth, hidden pain, and her own agenda. Second crack at this type and I feel like I've gotten her mostly right so far.

Penny Pellegrin

Penelope 'Penny' Pellegrin

"I admit to being more than a little distracted by the...wit and depth of the conversation at this table."

"It seems mother wishes to turn me into some sort of lifelong penitent for sins I've not committed."

17 | Female | Perrench | Royalty | 8.11

P E R S O N A L I T Y

❖ Sardonic
❖ Pessimistic
❖ Good-hearted
❖ Pampered
❖ Insecure

Most of Penny's life has been defined by being the family disgrace. She was born without a left leg and with a moderate form of ectrodactyly in her left hand and this was cause enough for her superstitious mother to see her birth as divine punishment for the sins of her and her husband. This would be quite a bad state of affairs in most families, but is only magnified due to the fact that Penelope's parents are King Rouis XI of Perrence and his wife, Queen Mathilde. Unallowed to attend balls, public functions, or even to venture past the palace gardens, Penny is a young woman stifled. She reads, she paces (crutch in hand), she grows things and draws and writes. She pretends to hate those formal family dinners when both father and mother are home, but secretly, she loves them. She is a forgotten middle child in many ways, with no prospects for marriage despite her station and no hope of amounting to much, so she is not one to hold back on pithy observations and cutting commentary and it is oh so amusing (often not only to her). The Gift is sometimes her plaything. When she's bored or sucky, she uses it to play tricks on her siblings, particularly if they're being obnoxious (at least one always is). A laugh at someone else's expense is still a laugh. Besides, they deserve it.

However, deep down, beneath many layers of snark and resigned cynicism, there's a curious, big-hearted girl who has dreams of seeing the world, meeting new people, and being valued instead of either pitied, stared at, or avoided with whispers, stolen glances, and sad shakes of the head. Because you place your right hand on your left hip, pointing to your left leg when you honour Oraff (the creator) while making the sign of the Pentad, religious superstition holds that Penny's missing limb is a mark of that God's disfavour. She does not believe it. She refuses to. She has a private tutor and she practices Binding Magic for hours on end, quietly determined to prove that she isn't what they say she is. On some warm Dorrad nights, though, as she lies awake in bend, staring at the swirling patterns on her ceiling and wishing for sleep, she worries that they're right and that she'll fail. She wonders why she couldn't just be whole and normal. She tries to dream that she is, but even in her dreams, she remains stubbornly the same person who she knows and does not love.

C H A R A C T E R A P P E A R A N C E

Were it not for her birth differences and their prejudices, most people would consider Penelope quite pretty. Tall and statuesque, with bright green eyes perhaps just a bit too large for her face and a resting smirk, she is the spitting image of her mother. Her hair is a rich chestnut brown and, when not styled in the fashion of the courts (even though she does not attend them), can usually be found pulled back in a Perrench braid. Since she was young, it has displayed a remarkable resistance to maintaining any sort of cohesive style or form for long and appears almost preternaturally tousled.

Penny wears long, light dresses. They vary in colour and she has many - some, hand-me-downs from her older sisters. She likes things that are lacy but feel solid and protective, so lacy hems and collars abound but not much else. She enjoys buttons, for whatever reason, and will often fiddle with those running down her sleeves. She also wears gloves. The left one is modified to fill in the gap in her palm and it has a dummy finger attached by a thin string to the one beside it. Out of habit, she does not take her gloves off unless sleeping or bathing. She has a pair of crutches (a handful of pairs, actually), but doesn't like how they fill her hands. As a result, she often gets around with only one. She's rarely in a hurry anyway. There's nowhere to go and not all that much to do.

L A N G U A G E S

For a noble lady of Penelope's station, languages are a must. For her, they're also something to do, and she has numerous correspondents all across the twin continents who she writes to. She is fully fluent in Perrench, Avincian, Revidian, and her mother's native tongue of Kerreman, and at least conversant in Eskandish, Torragonese, Joruban, and Belzaggic. Once you learn one language from a family, the others come easily. She sometimes practices her calligraphy and is looking to correspond with someone in Oiyac or Mycormi, but yasoi are so much more reticent in real life than they are in all of her old books.

T H E G I F T

Penny approaches prodigious levels in her use of the Gift - unsurprising for a blueblood of her pedigree. With little else to do but read, write, and learn, she also trains all day, memorizing focus words and inventing little spells of her own that she gives funny names to. While she's practiced with all five canonical schools, it is Binding that she puts most of her effort towards. She spends a considerable amount of time on Arcane as well, mostly the illusory branch, works with Kinetic to help ease the difficulty of walking long distances, and with Magnetic because it's her tutor's favourite and there's something peacefully destructive about watching fingers of electricity writhe and snap. Guiltily, she dabbles in internal Chemical spells and tells herself it isn't so that she can make people like her. That's what a madwoman would think. Penny isn't mad and will not let herself go mad. She simply won't. Besides, Binding Magic is her preferred school. If she can't heal herself, she reasons, she can at least heal other people. Then, she cringes at the thought of how melodramatic and self-indulgent such a statement would sound aloud.

B A C K G R O U N D

Penny remembers the looks most of all: the first looks when people see her or the second ones when they make sense of her. It first really registered when she was around four years old. Until then, she was blissfully unaware of her differences and what they would mean. She grew up playing with her siblings - there were many and they were close in age. There were servants' daughters and cousins too. They always told the most wonderful stories and she used to like to hear them until she realized that those were stories of a world that was being kept from her. They're now a weird, resentful kind of addiction. She still needs to hear them, but they no longer bring her joy.

When she was seven, her parents attempted to arrange for her a marriage with the second son of a Torragonese lord, but instead of making arrangements by proxy, he decided to visit. Penny played with the boy and they laughed and smiled and she teased him that they'd be married someday and that he should listen to his wife. Then, he and his father left.

One time, when she was ten, there was a ceremony at the Catherdal de Ste. Defrois. She rode in a carriage through the streets of Relouse, listening to the clatter of the horses' hooves and the church bells ringing. She remembers leaning out with her little tiara and waving with her right hand at the commonfolk. They were loud and dirty and shouted, and she was a bit scared, but they waved back, and there were kids her own age in there too.

She hasn't traveled since. She hasn't done much of anything since and wasn't going to be allowed to. That is, until her brother Arcel intervened. She is to attend Ersand'Enise under an assumed name, as the invented daughter of an unremarkable merchant paid a sum by her brother. She is to be his agent there. She is to meet with people and exchange letters with them. She knows Arcel: he is not vile, but he is ambitious and underhanded. Penelope - Penny Pellegrin now - doesn't much care. It's a species of freedom, at least, and she'll take it, even with all of the risk and the fears.

M O T I V A T I O N

More than anything, Penny wants to spread her figurative wings. She wants to live an actual life. She wants to prove to herself, at least, that her mother is wrong about her. There is a deep well of bitterness there, though she shakes her head to clear it and simply tries to appreciate that she has never hungered nor wanted for any physical need a day in her life.

Penny is eager to be at Ersand'Enise and to make something of herself, but she is deathly afraid of the real, actual, wild people out here. How will they react to her? Will they laugh at her jokes? Will they just see her: Penny - a girl from Perrence, or will it be pity, awkwardness, or avoidance? She knows it will. It'll have to be, like it always is. What if anybody finds her out - or learns of whatever her brother is up to? Will she be able to play a merchant's daughter convincingly? She feels like a fraud when it comes to life. She hasn't lived very much and knows it. Still, sometimes she takes a deep breath and counsels herself that she can do this. She is a princess of Perrence. Her forebears earned the crown at some point. They were capable people. So is she... she hopes - she really, really hopes.

I N V E N T O R Y

Penny almost always carries a satchel slung across one shoulder, with some basic jewellery, a small journal, letters and wax, and a comb (partly as a joke) inside. She uses one crutch the majority of the time, to keep a hand free, and two when she knows that she'll have to do a lot of walking that day. They're made of light, lacquered wood with soft pads on top for her armpits. She'll never be found using a wand or staff as a focus object, having practiced freecasting from a young age. For spells absolutely requiring one, a crutch is very much like a staff when held a certain way. Penny's recently taken to wearing a spare garter even though she already has one to hold up her stocking. She uses it as a strap to tuck secret correspondence for her brother into and spends the next while paranoid that it'll slip out and Black Rezaindians will come for her in the night.

S T R E N G T H S & S K I L L S

❖ funny and clever
❖ grudgingly kind-hearted
❖ excellent courtly manners
❖ good memory
❖ skilled in language and literacy

At the end of the day, Penny falls on the side of being a good person. Her acerbic comments are more than just a cover, but also not her entire story. She's well-heeled and it shows. She can wield etiquette like a weapon if need be and generally has very good recall for obscure trivia and details. This carries over into languages and the written word, where she can speak seven languages, at least to a degree...at least usually.

W E A K N E S S E S & F L A W S

❖ anxious and insecure
❖ not very worldly at all
❖ proud and paradoxically judgemental
❖ tires quickly when walking
❖ questionable self-awareness and victim complex

Penny's upbringing and the constant feeling of being unwanted has done a number on her mental health. She's not a wreck or a basket case, but she struggles with intense flashes of anxiety and self-doubt. She worries about how people will perceive her and tends to assume the worst, though she actively counsels herself not to. She can be a bit of a stepford smiler at times.

M I S C E L L A N E O U S

Penelope of Perrence is here incognito, as a lowly merchant's daughter named Penny Pellegrin. It would be unusual for anyone but the high-ups in the school establishment to know who she really is. Also, see here for a demonstration of how she walks on one crutch. Beware that I may have had to go into the weird part of YouTube to dig this up.
Colour Code: F7976A

This CS was developed for a fantasy RPG called End + Sleep that sadly died out before it could really get going. In retrospect, I feel like playing the 'eccentric tinker' type could've been fun, but the character also sparkled a bit too much for her supposed race and background. She was my second try at a 'disabled tinkerer' and I still didn't quite have the formula right.

Kaeli Aldavere

Kaeli Aldavere

Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety percent...OUCH! Argh!! Goddammit that hurt...

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27 | Elf | No Mage-Eyes

P E R S O N A L I T Y

❖ Inquisitive
❖ Ballsy
❖ A bit odd
❖ Meticulous planner
❖ Brilliant
❖ Enthusiastic
❖ Flighty and easily distracted
❖ Occasionally academically haughty

Kaeli is an oddball and eccentric to the very core, especially by Elven standards. Sometimes stereotypes are exaggerated and sometimes they fit to a tee. Put simply, she's one of those people who wants to know how everything works, can usually give you an educated guess right off the bat, and - given enough time - can usually replicate it. In general, she is obsessed with technology, preserving it, repairing it, and improving it, a passion which goes far beyond her people's rather practical and uninspiring relationship with things mechanical. On projects of great import or that have struck a particular chord with her, Kaeli will work tirelessly, with near-boundless enthusiasm, an eye for detail, and a need for perfection that borders on the insane. Social interaction, sleep, and most anything else be damned.

If a given goal is not a project but an endeavour, then she will go to great lengths, often at not-inconsiderable personal danger, in order to see it through. Otherwise, she is curious and inquisitive but flighty, branching off tangentially at once in terms of ideas, conversation, and projects. She enjoys meticulously planning more than she does following through, and collects and keeps things that most people would consider junk simply because she sees them as works in progress, interesting, or simply because she wants to be prepared for any eventuality. In particular, she enjoys solving the problem of her own strange body and finding ways to do things that would seem to be beyond her physical capabilities.

Just as Kaeli can lose herself for hours in a project, she can lose herself for hours when talking about a subject or with with a person whom she finds genuinely interesting. This tendency, alarmingly aberrant among elves, has only grown more pronounced since she left her homeland. When engaged in these fits of passionate gabbing, she has been accused of talking 'at' people as opposed to talking 'with' them. Her standards in terms of 'interesting', however, are higher than she probably realizes. People are usually just surroundings as opposed to being genuine 'company'. They're an audience for her genius, a sounding board for her ideas, and the source of interesting problems and opportunities to be solved or seized. Some also make great guinea pigs.

In terms of romance, Kaeli thinks about it from time to time just as any red-blooded woman might. Then she shuts it out of her mind. She is keenly aware that society at large does not consider her attractive. Like most elves, she also can't 'do' smalltalk and flirting, and she isn't even any good at the social rituals expected of her own people, let alone the more elaborate and frighteningly involved ones so beloved of humans. She often ends up simply lurking and dreaming. In many ways, she's a dreamer. In many ways she holds delusions of grandeur and achievement on an epic scale. However, she's self-aware enough to see some of these for what they are. There's a thin streak of bitterness that runs through her thinking and it's a product of the subtle but ever-present discrimination that she has faced growing up with a very visible deformity. Elves are not a warm, fuzzy, communal people by any stretch of the imagination, but her upbringing was marked by complete disinterest from even close family, often tipping over into utter neglect.

A P P E A R A N C E

The first thing that stands out about Kaeli is the fact that she looks like half a person. The result of a rare birth defect, she was born completely without legs, not dissimilar to Kanya Sesser or Jen Bricker. Beyond that, she's rather unremarkable: petite and pale, with white, wavy, shoulder length hair often pulled back into a sloppy ponytail. It's all-but preternaturally unruly, though sometimes she can fuss it into place. Kaeli's facial features tend towards 'mousy' but actually somewhat attractive, though she doesn't put much effort into her appearance. Indeed, the closest thing to makeup that she's known to wear is the series of oil stains and smudges that can be found on her hands, cheeks, and clothes. These compete with a number of small nicks, burns, and scars from too much tinkering. She's also considered quite stocky and muscular by Elven standards due to the upper body strength that she needs in order to get around.

Kaeli's clothing reflects both necessity and her eccentricity. Both of her pointed upper ears are pierced in multiple places, and she's not averse to self-adornment, though it's rarely with the shiny jewellery common to her race. Rather, she owns a necklace made from a very light silver chain, some old screws, a handful of bolts, and a couple of washers. She can also always be found wearing either a pair of round-rimmed tinted shades or goggles that she uses to protect her eyes from the harsh sunlight or hold back her unruly hair. Kaeli wears a custom-made garment on her truncated lower body made of a rough, sandy-coloured fabric, with a thick, cushioned leather pad at the bottom that she uses to sit and 'walk' on. Generally, she dresses in a form-fitting shirt in either purple, forest green, or crimson with a row of buttons running up the middle. Its sleeves are invariably rolled up. A brown leather belt with a prodigious number of pouches, clips, and various doodads rests snugly upon her hips, and a second, thinner belt encircles her upper waist. Filling out the ensemble is a bandolier with several pockets running from her left shoulder to her right hip, where it's clipped into her belt. A pair of elbow pads adorns her arms, and tough, worn out fingerless gloves with protective mitts that flip over complete the outfit. Kaeli usually carries a backpack that seems slightly too large for her, and when it's cooler, she bundles up in a sandy-coloured hooded hip cloak that effectively covers her whole body.

H I S T O R Y

Kaeli Kinseld was the second girl as well as the third and final child born to parents of high standing. Her father was the town recordkeeper and brother of the thane while her mother was a jeweler of some repute. Due to her startling deformity, her birth was a bitter disappointment and it was hoped that she would die quietly in infancy, lest she grow up to be a burden. In the event, she not only survived, but grew into a curious, lively, and (with the exception of her missing legs) healthy child. Unlike her older siblings, Kaeli was not groomed for an advantageous marriage or a lofty position, either political or professional. As a result, her education was sparse and was piggybacked upon that of her slightly older brother, Heddenrad, who was privately tutored in - aside from instruction on recordkeeping - what were considered the classical Magdalenese subjects: linguistics, smithing, hunting, mathematics, natural philosophy (science), and jewellery-making.

In the event, while her brother approached his studies dutifully and at times diligently, Kaeli tore through her books with an appetite for learning that - while it was somewhat selective - bordered on the obsessive. The walls of her bedroom were often filled with drawings and partially-completed sketches, and her young mind was filled with ideas. In particular, she gravitated towards all things mechanical and electrical: understanding them, disassembling and reassembling them, and making them function. If she was hopeless at hunting, too small for smithing, and unenthusiastic about crafting finely filigreed and delicate jewellery, she had nimble, dexterous fingers, an eye for detail, and a keen intuition for the workings of anything with moving pieces.

For the most part, however, people paid little attention to the girl, except as a curiosity, and she was left largely to her own devices. The one exception was Kaeli's (really her brother's) natural philosophy and mathematics tutor, a prematurely cantankerous academic named Tasten Aldavere. He spent extra hours fostering what he believed was a brilliant young mind, and his attitudes, mannerisms, and methods had a profound impact on her development. In her mid-teens, she was betrothed to him, even though he was nearly twenty years her senior. In reality, it wasn't a marriage founded on love, since Tasten was rather clearly homosexual. Rather it was a union of kinship and mutual respect, carefully calculated by the pair to afford Kaeli both some independence from her family as well as some monetary attention.

For a handful of years, things went well. Kaeli continued to educate herself and earned the respect of a notable portion of Magdalene's academic community. Even her father, who had advocated for exposing her to the elements during her infancy, came to appreciate her gifts and even fund some of her pet projects. Then her uncle, the local thane, made the grave mistake of defying the Alfking of Magdalene. Exactly what happened is not something that she will ever talk about, perhaps because she has never taken much interest in politics. A ruler who had for Kaeli's entire life seemed distant and mildly benevolent struck with sudden, ruthlessly efficient ferocity, purging her entire family. A harmless and somewhat useful curiosity, she was spared, inherited a small portion of her family's fortune, and placed under house arrest. Driven to depression by the restriction on her ability to move about freely and to tinker and scrounge outside of the confines of her home (where literally all of the best stuff was) and sensing that Tasten was likely to protest (thereby putting him in the line of fire), she slipped out of her cellar in a small wine barrel, and arranged to have herself smuggled out of town.

With no choice but to end up far away from home and, to a lesser extent, curious about the mysteries of the world outside of the deep forests of Magdalene, she began traveling the roads of Invernier. Kaeli learned quickly and out of necessity how to cover large distances, where to hide, as well as who and what to avoid, while gradually using up her coin. She earns a sporadic income by repairing simple things well below the level of her expertise whenever she sets herself down for a handful of weeks as well as occasionally appearing in performances similar to sideshows. She doesn't particularly enjoy those jobs, but they put coin in her purse and provide her with free and easy travel.

I N V E N T O R Y

Kaeli carries a small, lightweight, and finely-crafted tool set with her at all times. She has a handful of semi-functional electrical lights, a magnifying glass, her wedding ring, various replacement parts for common mechanical items, a needle and thread, a few changes of clothes, a switchblade, and a couple of cans of something like improvised pepper spray, with different varieties effective in repelling different common threats. She's working on auditory weapons as well and on extending the range of the sprays. She swears that she'll finish eventually.

O T H E R

Even with legs, Kaeli would be considered small. Without them, she's absolutely tiny (maybe 2'6" and 55 lbs) and excellent at hiding in places where most people wouldn't even bother look. She can hold her breath for an extremely long time, remain still and quiet for extended periods, and go for longer than most without food and water. Conversely, she obviously moves at a slower pace than most people, expends more energy in doing so, struggles with tasks that require size, and tends to have her skills met with a certain skepticism in most places that she visits.

Candace was made for Oh My Gods and was, quite frankly, not the best of the six (yes, six!) CSes that I wrote. She was my first try at the 'disabled STEM girl' type. That was something I'd return to a couple more times.

Candace McMorran

Name: Candace McMorran

Gender: Female

Age: 22

Sexuality: Bisexual, but leans more towards women

Godly ancestor: Hephaestus

Son/daughter or further removed: daughter

Relationship with godly ancestor: Hephaestus has not fathered quite as many children as some of the more attractive Greek gods, so he is decidedly invested in the children that he does have. He intervened to help Candace and her mother when she was very young, and she has known about her parentage since her mid-teens. He admires her work from a distance.

Relationship with mortal family: after a period of pointed rebellion against her mother and stepfather, Candace has come to appreciate the loving and open minded upbringing that they provided her with. She hasn't lived at her parents' house since leaving for college in the US, but has always returned for major holidays and twice for summer vacation. She is six years older than her next-oldest half-sibling, and has never been especially close with any of them, though that's not to say that there are any issues between them. They're simply too far apart in age to share very much in terms of friends or common interests. She keeps in touch with her mother and her sister Virginia through various online means and, whenever she visits, likes to initiate lively discussions around the dinner table. She tries to influence her younger siblings (particularly her sister) where she can, and steer them in what she believes is the right direction.

Powers: Candace's powers reflect those of her father in almost every way.

- Candace can create and manipulate fire and is more or less immune to its effects.
- She has a talent for creating machines and gadgets to solve problems and serve specific purposes. These are often highly unconventional, idiosyncratic in design, and difficult to reproduce, but extremely effective.
- Candace can imbue things with force and motion that would otherwise remain static.
- She is able to make inanimate objects that have either a face or the form of a living thing come to life, in a sense. They will possess memories of what they have witnessed and will remain staunchly loyal to her.

Personality: Candace is strong willed, aggressively independent, and bullish when it comes to her sense of morality. Perhaps she just has stronger convictions than most people, and perhaps she's trying to bury some deeply held insecurities. In any event, as a visibly disabled person living in a world that is fundamentally at odds with her sense of agency, she feels as if she has no choice but to try harder, reach farther, and react with more force and fury than others do in order to be treated as an equal.

Beyond that, she is best described as conventionally unconventional, subscribing with zeal to the trends and belief systems that define modern left-wing campus culture. She smokes weed and has experimented with a handful of psychadelic drugs, but isn't what one would ever consider a 'stoner'. Candace enjoys gaming (though not the thinly-veiled misogyny that runs through much of gamer culture) and is reasonably good at it, but makes a point of being active and challenging herself physically. She regularly plays wheelchair rugby and basketball and tries to remember to spend some time outdoors away from her workshop. She has dabbled in slam poetry, was active in a number of student bodies while in university studying engineering (with a minor in women's studies) and regularly attends protests and rallies. When not out and about doing something, she can often be found tinkering in her shop or at least using a CAD app to render her future projects on her iPad.

Bio: Candace was born in Glasgow, Scotland and raised by a single mother who was working as a waitress at the time. She doesn't remember much about her early years, but now understands the severity of the poverty that she and her mother lived in. For the first couple of years, there was a seemingly endless carousel of surgeries to lessen the effects of a particularly serious arteriovenous malformation of the spinal cord that left her paralyzed from the waist down. Though children of Hephaestus have often exhibited ambulatory difficulties, hers were particularly severe. The medical costs above and beyond what the NHS covered must have been significant, but they were handled by a mysterious benefactor. For many years after, she had a vague memory of him as a huge man with a bushy auburn beard, receding hair, and a severe limp who leaned heavily on a cane. When she was three years old, the girl's mother was able to return to university and complete her degree in early childhood education thanks to a generous grant from the bearded man. While there, she met, fell in love with, and married the man who Candace would grow up with as her father: Shane Coburn. It was a rather whirlwind love affair, and within less than a year of their marriage, had produced a child: Candace's younger sister Virginia. Two more would follow: twin brothers Neil and Brandon.

Candace's way with mechanical things was plainly evident even during her childhood, as she would often complete Lego sets intended for much older children with perfunctory ease and enjoy them for a couple of weeks, before taking them apart and building entirely new creations of her own imagination. Indeed, the floor of her bedroom would often be a minefield of sharp Lego pieces that only she (not having to worry about stepping on any of them) could navigate with ease. She dabbled in minecraft and roblox, but was drawn more towards creating things in the real world with her own hands. Robot Wars was a near-obsession, and she still has some of her crayon drawings of her favourite competitors and orginal concepts. Trips to science fairs followed, as did subscriptions to magazines like Popular Mechanics (which soon turned into online subscriptions). She confounded many of her teachers because she didn't seem to have a particular aptitude for mathematics, being no more than slightly above average. It seemed as if her engineering abilities were intuitive in a way that other people couldn't understand.

While she featured in a number of human interest articles (often with a well-intentioned but somewhat condescending tone) as a young prodigy and an inspiration, Candace's teenaged years were particularly difficult. She struggled not only with her self-perception and confidence as somebody with a disability, but also with her budding sexuality. She found herself mostly, though not solely attracted to other girls. She tried to ignore these feelings for a few years, and her parents, thinking that her withdrawal stemmed from a lack of confidence, attempted to push her towards healthy heterosexual relationships. They also sent her to a summer camp for other disabled children and enrolled her in a wheelchair basketball program. Candace enjoyed the activity, and it provided an outlet for some of her energy, but she still wasn't all that comfortable with her feelings and was beginning to understand that she just wasn't going to fit the norm. Compounding these issues were the emergence of her latent powers. Candace found that sometimes, when she was working on an engineering project, the pieces would move as she visualized them. At first, she was afraid. She wondered if she was going crazy. Then, she studied the phenomenon and began using it to her benefit, though she became somewhat reclusive in her tinkering for fear of anybody finding out. Combined with her insecurities about her sexuality, Candace went through a year or two of being deeply reclusive.

Enter her father. It was a particularly cool April morning when Hephaestus appeared in front of her. She almost instantly recognized him as the bearded man from her infancy. The first thing that he said to her, with all of the tact and good grace in the world was "You're a lesbian, kiddo, or at least something close. Also, I'm your father." It wasn't the easiest of conversations. One party was confused and terrified and the other had never had much of a way with words nor much use for etiquette. However, her immortal father not only explained the extend of Candace's abilities, he also taught her how to control them, by demonstrating them himself. Further conversations followed, eventually involving her family. Disbelief turned into acceptance, and even into embrace. Candace, more sure of herself, reemerged from her shell and graduated with a scholarship that allowed her to attend MIT overseas.

In campus life, she found her calling, The stories of other people who had struggled growing up resonated with her, and she became strongly committed to setting the world right, aware that she had been gifted more power than most by the unique circumstances of her conception and birth. She was active in student groups, campus politics and social life, and int he social movements of the day. Her long red hair was cut to shoulder-length, the left side of it buzzed, and its tips died all colours of the rainbow. Following graduation, driven by curiosity, she decided to take a couple of years off before starting her Master's and visit the city of New Celestia that her father had told her about.

As CS for a WW2 Heist RPG called Band of Bastards. This thing died a bit early, but this character acted as some formative inspiration for Penny from The Hourglass Order: basically, a sneaky one-legged chick with a saucy mouth and her own agenda.

Simona Ricci

This is potential character one of two. Maybe we can see which one people like better once I've posted Yuri (the other one). Anyway, sorry if this is a bit long. She's partially inspired by Virginia Hall, who was a legendary badass.

Name (or known Aliases): Simona Ricci, aka. Gianna Verdi, Margarethe Vonlanthen, Hopper

Age: 23

Nationality: Italian

Affiliation: Italian Red Cross, works personally for Princess Marie Jose of Italy when she's not looking out for number one.

Role: Nurse, thief, infiltrator

Appearance: (shitty pic coming soon) A slim and petite (maybe 5'2") lightly-tanned Caucasian woman in her early mid-twenties, with shoulder-length straight black hair, blue eyes, and a nose that's just a bit too large, Simona skews to the 'pretty' side of average. She has dimples when she smiles (though it's usually more of a grin or a smirk), and a slight case of buckteeth. However, these things are usually not what people notice about her first. Instead, it's the pronounced limp that she walks with or - when she's not wearing her prosthetic - the fact that she's missing nearly her entire left leg. Due to the height of her injury, she moves better on crutches, though she'll often use her artificial leg to blend in more easily. Indeed, when she's just standing in a crowd, she tends to fade into it. Simona's not exactly open about the cause of the injury, mostly because it's a touchy enough subject that she risks getting emotional.

She usually wears her Red Cross uniform, which looks just a little bit like a nun's habit. Otherwise, she prefers knee-length dresses or skirts. She's unlikely to be seen in a revealing or provocative outfit except when she's drinking. Simona usually carries a large brown backpack stuffed full of first-aid equipment, clothes, a flask of Limoncello, a small satchel of tools that look like scalpels but are really for less legal uses, and sometimes her prosthetic leg. It really is amazing what she can fit in there. The leg itself is actually useful for holding things, as it’s hollow and she uses it to smuggle letters and contraband when necessary. That’s dangerous works, so sometimes, she also wears a leg holster with a small Beretta under her skirt/dress. She knows how use it, but that doesn't mean that she knows how to use it well. It’s more for her own sense of agency.

Personality: Simona is whatever she needs to be at the moment, whether that be a dutiful Catholic girl and committed nurse, a sophisticated and creative young woman from a wealthy family with contacts in the government, a physically and emotionally broken victim of war, or a loud, irreverent, warm, and somewhat uncultured rural Italian stereotype. Exactly which of these is closest to her genuine personality is up for debate, and the truth may be that she’s a bit of each.

The final one, however, is undoubtedly the face she wears easiest. Simona can talk. She loves spinning a good story, sharing a good laugh (sometimes about rather crude subjects), and engaging in frank, witty, and often quite incisive verbal fencing. She can appreciate a good pun, though she hasn’t mastered the art of making them herself (at least not in English), and will readily make self-deprecating jokes about her one-leggedness. Having witnessed a great deal of death and suffering, at some point she ‘got over the hump’ with regards to emotional attachment and simply learned to accept that people come and go and that they’re still worth investing in. She’s quick to get close with anyone who’ll allow it, and can be almost uncomfortably touchy-feely at times, though she will never make romantic advances, nor will she be stupid enough to trust them.

In general, Simona calls upon the powers of sympathy, stereotype, friendliness, and caricature to ensure that she’s seen as a complete non-threat by enemies and most friends alike. At best she’s plucky and admirable, at worst she’s either a vacuous and annoying chatterbox or a pity case.

Outside of the social aspects of her personality, Simona is intelligent, quick-thinking, and surprisingly competent (mainly due to sheer moxie) at a number of unrelated skills. Conversely, she can be impulsive, pushy, and Quixotic in terms of her personal quests and goals. She’s flighty but ambitious, and profoundly confident in herself on a basic level, though the loss of her leg has undermined this somewhat and occasionally leads to bouts of overcompensation. Regardless, Simona is used to succeeding and regularly getting her way. When she doesn’t, it can be ugly, both personally and professionally.

If she’s a bit materialistic, it’s not for the sake of having pretty things, but rather more practical reasons. She believes that money and resources can buy both safety and happiness to some extent and that accruing them will benefit her and her family. Despite this, the war has touched her profoundly, and Simona has come to genuinely care about those affected by it. She wants it to be over, and she would go so far as to die romantically and heroically to that end. What comes next is no concern of hers. She’s pointedly apolitical, though socially somewhat liberal, and she distrusts communists and political radicals of any stripe. Her primary loyalty is to her superior and patron, Princess Marie Jose of Italy, and it comes second only to herself and her family.

Service History: Simona joined the Italian Red Cross as soon as Italy entered the war and her brothers, Giacomo and Vittorio, were deployed to Southern France. She has never been one to simply sit idle, especially not when others are out doing what is expected of them. Sent to the African theatre, she served in field hospitals and POW camps for the better part of two years, often working in collaboration with British and American Red Cross units in the area. This is where she picked up most of her English, though she has some cousins who live overseas. Most of these places were chronically underfunded, so she had to find...creative ways to finance them at times. Whether it be pickpocketing the dead and dying, skimming supplies intended for military garrisons, or stealing officers’ bonuses right out of their safes, If her superiors disapproved of her methods, they never had the chance to voice that disapproval, because that would've involved catching her first.

She was working in a field hospital just outside of Addis Ababa when the forces of her own country strafed the entire compound (this is based upon a real historical incident). While attempting to evacuate the wounded, she was shot high up on the left thigh with a heavy-caliber round from one of the aircraft and she passed out almost instantly. Simona awoke minus a leg and fell almost immediately into a serious depression, partially due to the injury and partially due to the fact that her own country's forces had been responsible for the monstrous attack. The government, of course, vehemently denied such absurd rumours, and the incident was quickly buried, though not before it was brought to the attention of the head of the Italian Red Cross, Princess Marie Jose. When Simona was shipped back to Italy to convalesce, she was personally visited by the princess, who was something of a personal enemy of Mussolini and was looking for ways to bring the war to a close as soon as possible. Though it was officially supposed to be little more than a courtesy/publicity visit, the princess was eager to confirm the rumours that she had heard, and the two women ended up speaking for hours. Simona was deeply impressed by the patron of her organization, and it inspired a degree of personal loyalty that she previously hadn't felt towards anyone outside of her immediate family. They talked deeply and frankly, and she must've made an impression herself, because Princess Marie personally paid for her rehabilitation and prosthetic leg. Not to be outdone, the Italian government, under Mussolini, awarded her a medal for bravery and being wounded in service (despite the fact that she was wounded by them and was in the service of an international NGO).

Unwilling to simply return home and collect a disability pension, Simona returned to her duties, albeit in what were considered safer, more 'home front' areas. However, with the allied invasion of Italy beginning in 1943, the home front became a front in the true sense, and not only was her brother Giacomo one of the early casualties, but her upper-middle class family’s finances were devastated when the bombing campaign destroyed her father’s auto factory. As the situation worsened, Marie Jose stepped up her anti-fascist activities, and Simona, in secret correspondence with her superior, offered her services above and beyond the call of the Red Cross. When Mussolini's regime collapsed and he fled to the north of the country, Simona followed, albeit as something of a mole. She's been working tirelessly for the last six months in hospitals and POW camps in North-Central Italy, not only healing and feeding, but also working clandestinely with POWs and wounded fighters from various partisan groups to subvert the new puppet regime. A couple of days ago, a critically wounded republican fighter, remembering that another member of his cell had told him that "you can trust the one-legged woman", pressed a message into the palm of her hand with a mysterious address in Ulm, Bavaria.

Other: Simona's a lot stronger than she looks, able to lug around her backpack/prosthetic/crutch(es) without complaint and despite her small size. She’s a generous 5’2” and weighs all of 78 pounds. Combined with her natural flexibility, this allows her to squeeze herself into extremely small spaces if need be. She’s picked up a number of other useful skills over the course of her relatively short life: She can play the flute and violin reasonably well thanks to lessons during her childhood; She speaks passable Swiss German as a result of growing up in Northern Italy not far from the border; She’s also picked up some English and some Ethiopian from her postings during the early part of the war and learned to swim while undergoing rehabilitation. Picking locks and pockets were further skills learned while in theatre. She also became pretty good at table tennis from playing with wounded soldiers in the various hospitals that she served in, though she’s not as good as she thinks she is.

This tendency to overestimate herself extends to drinking. Her tolerance for alcohol is much lower than she’s convinced it is (this is partly due to her being smaller than she used to be), and she is liable to make a fool of herself when drunk. In the past, this didn’t extend to throwing herself at men, as she was saving herself for marriage, but after becoming an amputee, she decided that her marriage prospects were slim to none and that waiting for something that would never come was a daft idea. She’ll still never outright make the first move, but she’ll definitely respond. The truth is, Simona doesn’t really know how to act around a man who she finds legitimately attractive. In particular, she has a thing for Americans, American culture, and motorcycles.
Culturally, she’s far from traditional, with a love for Big Band Jazz, fast cars, days at the beach, and late nights out dancing, though she’s a bit self-conscious about the latter two now. She’s eager to squeeze everything that she can out of life, she’ll make sport of anybody, and she can sometimes come across as a bit of a misandrist. She has a nickname, Legnoso (which means ‘Woody’ in Italian), for her prosthetic leg, and sometimes talks about it as if it’s a person with a will of its own.

Ultimately, as an Italian in late 1943, Simona knows that she can play either side if need be. As a nominal member of a neutral organization, she can gain access to people and places that might be impossible otherwise. As a small disabled woman, Simona knows that she won't readily be viewed as a combatant or any type of threat but also that it's not exactly easy for someone with such a visible difference to be inconspicuous if her cover is ever blown. She's never looked a man in the eyes and shot him, but she's certain that she could do it if the need ever arose.