Current thots: I wish I hadn't had to drop this, the plot is so thick you have to stick it in a forge to shape it. Wonder if I could jump back in at some point.
Skills • Shhh! | Partially due to her diminutive size, and only added to by the years of quietly disappearing when she doesn't want to speak due to her wallflower personality, Amber has gotten very good at vanishing when she needs to. She's exceedingly stealthy, though when she's trying to sneak about she generally needs to cover her hair with a bandana or something; it's an obnoxiously bright color for stealth.
• Turn Of Phrase | Amber is reasonably skilled in social situations. While not outgoing, the combination of constant listening (she's a really good listener) and the requirements of her job (facing down angry customers on the phone, dealing with solicitors who just won't take 'please leave' as an answer, and so on) have made her proficient in reading the currents of any room she may be in and speaking in just such a way so as to take advantage of it.
• Bang Bang | In a surprising turn that not many expect of her, Amber is actually pretty good with firearms and other weapons of the sort. I wouldn't call her a crack shot, but she's got solid aim and instincts.
Weaknesses • Noodle Arms | By far Amber's greatest weakness in a sticky situation is her musculature; or, well, lack of it. Physically, she's very, very weak; when she tried going to the gym, she could barely even bench the bar and was so embarrassed that she slunk out and never went back. Stamina is the same; not great.
• Ow! | Pain tolerance has never been Amber's strongest suit; even when it's not that bad, she's prone to giving up instead of toughing it out.
• Sorry... | Amber has a bad habit of heaping blame on herself, even when doing so requires a Herculean leap of logic. As a result, she eats herself up with guilt on a pretty regular basis. Also, she's a bit of a coward, and thus gets scared easily and shrinks away from whatever it is that did so.
Inventory: • Colt M-2470 | Something that NOBODY really expects her to carry, Amber wears this pistol--a small, high-power, low-capacity handgun--on a waistband holster, concealing it as best as she can since she doesn't really want to advertise that she has it. As discussed above, she's a decent shot, but she carries it pretty much solely for self-defense, since she's a rather nervous young woman. As a modular weapon, it has the capability to take a number of attachments and accessories from other weapons as long as they fit the attachment points.
Appearance
Amber is a young woman on the smaller end of the spectrum. She's certainly not the tallest in any room, unless it's a particularly strange room. And this small-factor carries over to more than her height; she has fine bones and a fairly ill-defined musculature. She has a tendency to pull herself inward wherever she is; that is to say, make herself appear as small as possible. Consequently, she's generally found with crossed arms and, if she's sitting down, twined legs, as well as hunched shoulders. While the provided picture shows her with her hair tied back, she seldom does so; she thinks it's too short to look good tied back, so it hangs loose most of the time, revealing that it is predictably messy, and hangs a little shorter than her shoulder.
She usually wears the goggles pictured either around her neck (as shown) or on her forehead. She doesn't really use them much, but she likes the way they break up her silhouette, and they're important to her anyway. When she walks, it's less of a walk and more of a shuffle; her wide eyes are usually down to the floor, and she habitually avoids eye contact. While if she has her way she'll have whole wardrobes worth of clothing, in general, she prefers a lightweight shirt—tanktop, t-shirt, etc.—with full-length pants and a light cardigan. Her favorite colors are orange, red, white and pink, in that order.
Personality
Amber is a quiet girl who prefers being in the background. That's not to say, of course, that she can't stand being in a social situation, and in fact, she's very courteous and well-mannered when the situation calls for it; she's just shy, really. While she's a bit of a doormat and yes-woman, she does have a strong sense of self and very strong principles; if somebody tries to bully her into doing something that she really abhors, she won't hesitate to tell them what she thinks. That said, she probably won't tell them in very strong language; she refuses to swear, having been taught against it from a very young age. In fact, when somebody's really going at it with cursing, she just might cover her ears. She's insatiably curious, though it's a quiet curiosity, and love learning about everything she can. She doesn't like showing negative emotions like anger and sadness and always tries to project an aura of quiet positivity as best she can.
Unfortunately, as with many people of similar temperaments, she can only bottle up her feelings so much before they get a little bit much. In very stressful situations, it's entirely possible that she'll do one of two things (mostly depending upon the situation): blow up and scream out her frustration while pacing and waving her arms, gesticulating wildly, as her voice jumps an octave and a half, or break down and start sobbing uncontrollably. She's still capable of action in these states—it's not like they immobilize her or anything—but she's certainly not paying as much attention to her surroundings. These episodes don't happen often, typically; she really has to have been bottling up her emotions for a while to approach the flash point. Whenever she's struck with one of these, she ends up feeling terribly guilty and ashamed afterwards, and tends to withdraw into a shell that it might take her quite a bit of time to emerge from, depending on how intense the emotion was.
She has a very strong liking for cute things and sweet things, and also for alcohol (but only the soft kinds; anything more than 50 proof is too much for her sensibilities). She likes music a LOT, especially classical, but branching out to basically everything, and really enjoys talking about genetics, her main field of study in college. As for what she dislikes, conflict is the big one; she's a shy doormat as discussed above, so if someone yells at her enough, she'll generally roll over and let whatever's going on go on unless it's something she really can't let stand. She doesn't like the cold very much, and she also doesn't like horror films, preferring sappy rom-coms.
Biography
Amber was born to a pair of college professors on Earth; Geoffrey and Eileen Westbrook, to be specific. While this did serve to let her want little throughout her childhood and adolescence, the more major fundamental change it imparted onto her was to instill her with that aforementioned love of learning and curiosity. This carried her throughout her early life well. She was always the archetypal 'teacher's pet' in whatever class she was in at the time: quiet but polite, did her work every single time, and (perhaps not to her credit) always told the teacher when her peers were doing something they shouldn't have. So, her teachers adored her, and she took home report cards most parents could only dream of. Unfortunately, people her age weren't quite as fond of her due to her penchant to 'tattle,' or 'snitch,' or 'nark,' whatever the case might've been. Even without it, she was considered...weird. She was mercilessly picked on for her tiny stature in middle school, her quiet courtesy was markedly out of place in high school, and her tendency to bottle her emotions up, combined with her constant quiet positivity, had some people muttering behind her back that she was a sociopath or something.
When she entered college, it was with a resolution to be more social and outgoing and to not retract into a shell like a tiny turtle whenever any kind of conflict entered the scene. And while she did become reasonably well-liked as people matured and began to appreciate her polite and content nature more than mocking it, her social skills were still...well, not the best. And then, near the end of her freshmen year, she met Alexa Riviera, a fiery Hispanic woman, confident and go-getting, and fell quite madly in love with her. The next two years of her life--her sophomore and junior years--were the happiest she's ever had. The outgoing Alexa forcibly ripped Amber out of her shell and exposed her to actual social interaction for pretty much the first time in her life. She introduced her to the wonders of alcohol, and she scoffed at and ignored Amber's self-imposed strict bedtime of 10 P.M. with flagrant abandon. Under her guidance, Amber became a much more well-rounded individual.
And then Alexa's father died, and a lot of problems started arising.
All the debt that Enrico Riviera had built up burst like an undammed river onto the college girl, and she was forced to go into the workforce early, dropping out of college only seven months before finishing her degree; she simply had no way of paying for tuition. Before she left, she gave Amber her goggles--and old Riviera family heirloom--and a Colt MP-2470 pistol, telling her that she couldn't be there to protect her from creeps anymore. And with that, she flew off into the stars, getting a job as a worker on a cargo ship.
Amber fell into depression, and her social skills retracted back into an even thicker shell than before, one that only wore away when she went to the range to practice with the pistol she'd been gifted, like Alexa would've wanted her to. She graduated magna cum laude, double majoring in biotechnology and economics, but felt no real joy from it; she'd just gone through the motions in her last semester. Before anybody could stop her, she'd taken all the money out of her bank account, cut off contact with her family, and flown off to the first place in the system she could find a now-hiring job--any job--as long as it was away from Earth: Canaan.
Evidently I forgot to detail the ‘tek’ part of magitek, so I’ll be writing a loose explanation about airships, firearms, and technology at large in the imperium sometime this week. I realized it might be important. Oops.
"And here I thought you were competent," muttered Etoile as she watched Pagonia getting unceremoniously bashed into a tree by the giant krovar. Her eyes narrowed as she dispelled her platform and dropped to the ground. She shook her head at him. Getting close to it. What a foolish decision.
As the krovar turned its back to her, she sought out something, anything, to be a target, and her eyes locked onto the limb covered in ice. She thought for just a moment, then turned to its other forelimb and sliced two fingers through the air toward it. "Acer ventus!" There was a sound a bit like swishing fabric as a knifelike projection of air peeled away from her fingers and found purchase in a spot of corrupted, spikeless flesh near its intact shoulder. She smiled thinly as it howled in pain and stomped her foot against the ground, doing her best to draw its attention away from the tree-smashed man. She dove and rolled under a volley of needle-sharp spines that thudded into the forest behind her, then fired off another acer ventus before lifting an invisible wall of air in front of her and preparing to intercept a charge. She stomped her feet more and drew her sword, pointing it at the krovar in what she hoped was a very obvious threat.
"Come on, then! What are you waiting for? Come and get me!"
As she taunted the krovar, she peered over its shoulder and gave Pagonia a vindictive 'you owe me now' glare.
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