"He what?" Veronica couldn't quite believe what she'd just heard about the samurai. Granted, she'd not known him well in the slightest, but he'd always seemed enthusiastic... over the top even. What could have driven him to do such a thing? "Was there no evidence of foul play?" She grimaced. "Could someone have used magic to make him end himself?" she asked Solomon, glancing around furtively and idly checking that her brown cloak still hung concealingly on her body, before shaking her head. "I suppose it matters little now." Honestly, that would be the worst, to suddenly have to worry about being hunted and picked off by that sort of magic. She wasn't sure if she wanted her spurt of paranoia to be right or not, because the alternative was the ronin had committed suicide for... no reason she could honestly begin to guess at or understand.
She was highly tempted to run back to find and inspect Chonan's corpse herself to see if she could uncover any further clues in the area, but who knew how much precious time that might waste. The priority now was getting the prince safely home. Everything else was secondary.
"No objections from me." The vampire nodded Jazdia's way and did as she bid, slipping into the carriage with the Prince and Matilda. She didn't see any sense in delaying things with arguments over positioning, and let it never be said a vampire would turn down the chance to stay out of the sunlight. While her magic could protect her, there was something to be said for the simple mental security of taking cover enough to not explicitly need to use it.
"Here." Gold Experience strode closer to Jotaro and held out the adult king snake, which was currently winding around its left arm. "A snake this big won't go ignored easily in the open... and certainly not if everyone but us basically sees it flying down the halls. I can't carry this out, so you take it." Certainly, Kasumi could have pulled the snake into her hidey hole in the walls, but that would have both revealed her presence and more than likely made the other two Stand Users think she was trying to run away on them. Giving the snake to Jotaro would be a show of "trust" or -if not that- then at least the acknowledgement that she was willing to put the crux of the investigation in his hands and not run away. "You look like you've got some big pockets, so that'll have to do."
Idly, Gold Experience retracted the life energy it had stored in the autopsy room's doorway, removing the risk of an... "incident" when the other two left the room. Turning to go, it walked towards the wall next to the door, before pausing and glancing over its shoulder. "Just keep a gentle but firm hold on it and watch where its head wants to go. You can take point; I can sense my life forms anywhere they go." And it naturally went unsaid, but it was a warning that if they tried to run away with her lead, they would fail.
"Oh, and one last thing," it added almost as an afterthought, a note of warning in its tone. "Be very careful not to cause any harm to my life forms. I can't control what happens next, but I guarantee you won't enjoy it." After all, at the end of the day, she did not have any direct power over her creatures. While they might have been loyal to her and never hostile, she couldn't actually control them, couldn't stop them from instinctively lashing out in response to things that tried to hurt them. They were just animals and plants; they just wanted to survive.
Gold Experience phased through the wall, and the second it was out of sight of the other Stand Users, it faded away, remanifesting at Kasumi's side. The pinkette quickly began to scramble down her tunnels back the way she came, sprinting ahead of the other two as best she was able without looking. Behind her, Gold Experience began reverting transformed matter back into what it had once been, erasing the evidence of her passage.
Making it to the elevator passage, Gold Experience punched the floor of the shaft, causing a tree to erupt from it. Hitching a ride, Kasumi shot up to the elevator car resting a floor above. A quick check with life sense that no one was inside, and she was morphing the floor open into vines, scrambling inside and reverting both the floor and the tree beneath the car. A touch on the ceiling, and Gold Experience was hefting her back out the top and then helping her scramble into the tunnel she'd made through the first-floor ceiling of the station. A hasty shuffle down that, a pitstop in the bathroom and down into the floor again, and Kasumi was once more outside the New York State Police Forensic Investigation Center.
Tunneling back through the earth, she finally exited her tunnel in the same place she had initially entered it, well out of sight of the police station, glancing around with narrowed eyes. The rest of the tunnel finished closing behind her, finally erasing her path in totality, as she brushed her shoulders off and smoothed out her coat, straightened her tie and tidied her hair.
A thin smile crept across her mouth.
It had been touch and go a couple times, but she would call this result a nearly flawless success. She had her lead, and her identity was safe, the two most important factors. Sure, the lead wasn't in her hands directly, but she could still follow at a distance. And better still, if the enemy did happen to be a Stand User, she most likely wouldn't be the one taking the brunt of their attention from the get-go. She could continue pretending her Stand was a long-range type and attack from concealment, getting the drop on that bastard. In some ways, this result was even better than her initial plan.
Kasumi's smile bared teeth, as she strode without hurry to the end of the alley and casually leaned against the wall. In the corner of her vision, she eyed the front of the police station, watching for Jotaro and paying attention to where her snake's life force was emanating from. One hand patted her large right pocket, inside which a small turtle lay quietly retracted into its shell.
Kasumi turned her car into a turtle before leaving home, just in case she needed it. Most usefully here, it will allow her to comfortably tail Jotaro if he uses a vehicle himself.
50,000 years ago, the world came to an end at the hands of an unstoppable calamity, a hostile existence beyond true comprehension. Yet, from the ashes of its victory, humanity rebuilt from scratch, rendered ignorant of the foe they had once opposed till the very end. It was as it had been for countless ages, the purging of a failure and birth of a new cycle, a fresh start and the latest perpetuation of a twisted Samsara. Empires rose and fell, humans lived and died. Civilization waned and flourished. And all the while, the overseer exerted their pressure. Natural disasters, plagues and hoards of monsters. It sent them all, presented challenges, and as humanity united and adapted, tempered by trial after trial, so too did it increase the pressure time and again. And so it would remain until they finally inevitably stumbled and failed. All was as had been seen... and would surely be seen many times to come.
But this cycle had a bit of a hiccup...
The previous Samsara, the Previous Era, had come close to defeating it, closer than any before them. Tenacious, talented and lucky, failsafes were developed by humanity, and so it would come to be that the aftershocks of their work affected the Era to follow, not only in the form of technology, but in hibernating survivors... and even modifications to the very gene pool of humanity itself. They had not won, but they had laid the groundwork for their successors to perhaps succeed where they did not. The 50,000 year Samsara had not been broken... but it had been cracked.
The year is now 2011, and humanity is at war. Though you'd often hardly know it. Civilization flourishes upon the planet of Earth, and the global national and political scene remains a familiar one to a far less supernatural one, just about all the countries you'd expect where you'd expect to find them. In this day and age of the Current Era, normal people still live normal lives and remain the majority. Yet, underneath the surface, all is not as it seems.
It has been millennia since the first whispers of the term "Honkai" were spread across history by remnants of the Previous Era. Nowadays, it is nearly a household name, something most people don't wish to think about but certainly something that can be researched and discussed online. What was once responsible for mere disasters now assaults settlements of all sizes with heartless monsters from beyond reality, along with a supernatural sickness with a horrific fatality rate. Against this foe, from amongst the sheep and the ignorant, humanity has long since marshaled its forces, creating organizations and supersoldiers to combat this global and ever escalating threat.
You are one of those soldiers, a Valkyrie, infused with the Honkai's own power in order to fight against it... with all the benefits -and risks- that entails. Whether by passion of misfortune, you have found yourself one amongst many under the banner of Fire Moth, one of the premier Anti-Honkai organizations and global peacekeepers. Though they are rumored to have had many less than moral dealings in the past, the results of their work cannot be denied, and so you are one of many who -for their own reasons- have thrown their lot in with them. Now, all but freshly graduated from Valkyrie training, your latest test results have deemed you worthy of field work, and you have been placed upon a new squad with other fresh graduates.
While none of you are considered particularly strong -as fresh off the presses as you are, there is something to be said for safety in numbers, and those that survive long enough to prove themselves something other than cannon fodder will come out the other end tempered into fighters more than capable of facing the forces of Honkai alone.
The world before you is wondrous and dangerous in equal measure. The Honkai looms omnipresent, as shadowy interests pursue their own ends behind closed doors. It is a world on the brink; yet very few are aware. It is a world in need of saving, but that naturally begs the question of who can do it. You? Hah. Who knows? Such things are for the future. In the now, perhaps before trying to save anyone else... you should worry about saving yourselves.
EXPECTATIONS
For those familiar with the setting, this is not the Current Era you may know. Though, it does have some connection to it. Instead, this AU asks what would have happened if Kiana and the crew failed, Project STIGMA collapsed and the Honkai won yet again and reset the world.
This, players, is the Third Era.
Due to the nature of the Finality Samsara effectively being a time loop, however, some events, organizations and people have at least managed to come into existence again, in name if not actions and personality. Naturally, however, as this is a disturbed time loop with remnants of the previous eras having made it past the end times, the world developed accordingly. So, yeah, there's probably a few canon characters from the Second Era out there in some form or another. In fact, I guarantee it. They aren't intended to be a focus, but the possibility of meeting them is there.
This RP will be run primarily on narrative with a supplement of a custom stat system to provide a framework for PC capabilities and maintain balance amongst the team (at least early on). To simplify things in a post-by-post format, I also intend to have a mandatory header that will contain certain critical information to keep track of during battles and such. Making sure that's tracked and displayed will make things much simpler on me and other players, avoiding the need to constantly comb through character sheets over every little detail. The inclusion of stats is in the pursuit of stakes, as I find hard "numbers" to be a reliable way of keeping things honest. Narrative will perhaps take a stronger lead over stats later on, but starting out, I feel it's appropriate for a bunch of rookies to be more "grounded" compared to the supernatural titans of the series.
In regard to plot structure, you'll start in a team that gets sent of various missions, some of which you may get to choose, which will otherwise generally be sandbox within that framework. And at some point, the "main plot" will creep to the forefront instead. Between missions, expect downtime periods where the plot allows to give PCs more chances for character interaction and provide an opportunity to allow training and other methods of self-improvement to incrementally increase PC's capabilities.
If that all sounds good to you, then welcome aboard.
I plan to take on roughly 8-10 players at most before cutting things off.
For those new to the setting, see the Honkai Impact wiki here for where I am primarily drawing core info for this setting. Of course, as this is an AU, not all of this is useful, but as an overview of the setting lore, it's pretty good if you want to dig in. There will also be a Discord to facilitate better OOC communication and discussion. I do have potential plans to have that available for character building if anyone is interested in working on it on there.
INFORMATIONAL
The birthplace of the multiverse and a higher dimensional construct, the Imaginary Tree is responsible for the creation of most universes and is the source of the Imaginary element. This all-powerful tree holds the worlds of the multiverse in its branches, each one represented as a leaf. If a leaf falls, it is considered the end of that particular world; though, some worlds manage to persist for a while beyond that as Bubble Universes.
The Imaginary Tree -at some unknown point in time- first emerged from the Sea of Quanta and immediately began an unending rivalry with it, determined to consume the Sea and continue growing. The Sea of Quanta protested. And so the Tree would continue to extend its roots and drink deeply of the Sea, and the Sea would swell and attempt to reabsorb the Tree. This rivalry would persist for an unfathomable amount of time, during which, a branch of the Tree grew a new bud. This was the birth of human civilization. Time flows in the trunk of the Imaginary Tree and branches out into an infinity of worlds. Every branch is a form of civilization, while every bud is their past and present etched onto the dimension of time. Each twig is a world timeline, and each leaf is a universe. The Imaginary Tree is, in part, a construct of time that brings order to chaos, providing a way for time to flow linearly where it wouldn't otherwise.
Some speculate that the Honkai is a form of natural "pruning" mechanic in the Tree that helps breed, nurture and test worlds to determine which are worthy of expending the Tree's resources to maintain, but this is only speculation with no particular certainty behind it. Regardless of the truth, the Honkai's influence is practically omnipresent and inescapable, and humanity has no choice but to press on or else fail and become wilted shadows in the Sea of Quanta.
A churning kaleidoscope of existence, the Sea of Quanta is the primordial soup of reality. It is from it that all things ultimately emerge, and it is to the Sea that all things eventually return to be recycled for the new. The Imaginary Tree was born from the Sea of Quanta. Since these two were the only living things in the multiverse and diametrically opposed to the other's purpose, they quickly began an eternal rivalry. The Tree wishes to absorb the Sea, while the Sea wishes to drown the Tree. In order to facilitate this cycle, worlds "grow" as leaves of the Tree, and when they fail to persist, "fall" from the Tree and into the Sea, becoming bubble universes. Being exposed to the raw energies of the Sea of Quanta has the potential to leave a defining mark on the recipient's existence, changing them irrevocably, which can be a source of the Quantum Type.
Much of the Sea's chaos and erosion effect can be traced back to the lack of linear time flow. If the worlds of the Imaginary Tree are like multiple overflowing glasses of different drinks, then the Sea of Quanta is the puddle of mixed liquids, a chaotic amalgamation of mixed data and ideas flowing in all directions at once, cast adrift by the loss of connection to the Imaginary Tree. Unlike the Tree that has order and can sustain data, the Sea lacks the one-directional time flow required to give any sense to it. Hence, it has no form or properties of its own and requires an observer to make any sense of it.
The Sea of Quanta is also known to manifest beings called Quantum Shadows to deal with particularly resilient invaders or other existences within it, taking the form of starry voids in the shape of various Honkai beasts, complete with similar and enhanced abilities. These creatures normally exist in a "superposed" state of various "Quantum Layers" that makes them incredibly resilient. This state can be collapsed by the skilled usage of Quantum energy or with timely use of Time Fracture, collapsing the creature to a single dimensional layer and rendering them decrepit and vulnerable. If this weakened state isn't capitalized upon, however, the Shadow will eventually reconstitute its superposed state.
When a leaf "falls" from the Imaginary Tree into the Sea of Quanta, it becomes a fragmented version of itself, called a bubble universe, with some having more stability than others. No matter what level of stability they appear to have, however, their time is ultimately finite under the wear and tear of the Sea of Quanta, which forever seeks to chew up and assimilate them back into its primordial soup. Being now cut off from the Imaginary Tree's direct supply of energy, in order for them to continue to exist, bubble universes must either have a surplus of Imaginary energy to fall back on or attach themselves to more abundant worlds and feed off the energy in those ones to sustain themselves. Otherwise, they will falter and dissolve under the Sea of Quanta's erosion.
Within the Sea of Quanta, bubble universes do not always follow conventional sense or contemporary rules. Some people's memories are enough to create entirely new bubble universes, and creating such bubble universes is even a skill that can be learned with enough exposure to and experimentation with the Sea. Some can be artificially created and maintain stability through an Ether Anchor. An Ether Anchor is what tethers and holds a bubble universe together. It holds the world in place but cannot do much to combat the lifespan of a bubble universe. It is possible for a bubble universe to be disconnected from the Tree yet held out of the Sea of Quanta's reach for a time, but this is an especially unusual phenomenon.
Based out -and encompassing most- of Europe, Schicksal was founded by three families that carried Stigmata Bloodlines: House Apocalypse, House Kaslana and House Schariac. Together, these Three Houses have led the organization for centuries with House Apocalypse as the hereditary leader -lacking power but blessed with intellect, and Houses Kaslana and Schariac as their knights -blessed instead with extraordinary strength. An organization of legacy and prestige, they have existed long enough that their founding escapes much of human record, dating back to an unknown BC period. While at one time, they masqueraded as a religious organization that had presence across nearly the entirety of Asia as well, corruption and ambition led to a crusade that would heavily damage their forces and reputation, driving their presence back to merely European territories. Since then, ambitions checked, they have come under more reasonable leadership and are working to restore public trust. With their focus on Stigmata bloodlines, Biologic fighters often hail from here.
In their constant "holy war" against the "demons" of Honkai, Schicksal is historically perceived to be highly associated with the Catholic Church, and their motifs and generally acknowledged religious authority support this. While this aids them in some ways, in others, it only leaves them stained by the association of such events as the Crusades. In the 1400's, they were acknowledged as the largest Anti-Honkai organization in the world, and even to this day, that perhaps remains the case.
There is something to be said for the idea that success smooths over all sins, however, as no matter their past mistakes, it's undeniable that the "protection" they offered -and still offer- is genuine in quality. They are the largest source of Valkyries on the planet, whether they wield Natural or Artificial Stigmata, boasting staggering superhuman manpower and no small quantity of S-Rank Valkyries. Combined with their possession of a large number of "holy artifacts" they have unearthed over the centuries to arm their greatest warriors with and otherwise study to create lesser derivatives of, they are truly a titan on the world stage and wield massive influence just about anywhere they go, even if it's often begrudging outside Europe.
Schicksal has a rather chilly relationship with Anti-Entropy, many members seeing them as deserters and "rebels" that abandoned the pride of their heritage and "holy bloodlines"; as a result, they tend to be rather condescending towards them. By contrast, the School of Taixuan is treated cordially, to the point you might even call if sickly sweet, and naturally, the Taixuan have remained suspicious at nearly all times, no matter what mask of cordiality they wear in return. World Serpent is respected as a competitor and rival... and simultaneously eyed with greed and hunger for the ancient knowledge they possess.
Factional Benefits/Knowledge: To hail from this faction is to have the potential to hail from any of the bloodlines of the three Noble Houses. If you are part of this faction, have a Natural Stigmata and decide to choose one of these bloodlines, your stats are altered in different ways than normal. Kaslanas gain +2 Endurance. Schariacs gain +2 Honkai. Apocalypses gain +2 Intellect. They do not gain any other stat boost in exchange for a single massive boost to a one stat. In addition, due to the unusual commonality of Natural Stigmata here within bloodlines, you don't count against the normal limit of Natural Stigmata in the party. Outside this, Schicksal has the greatest access to Divine Keys, weapons forged from Herrscher Cores in the ancient past, along with the Sacred Relics -weapons developed through study of the former, and if your character proves themselves worthy and hails from this faction, they could be bestowed with one.
Compared to their competitors, Anti-Entropy is a fairly young organization amongst those that hunt Honkai. Nonetheless, it has more than 60 years under its belt and is no less effective for it. Originally founded by dissatisfied elements of Schicksal, who were becoming increasingly disillusioned with the corrupt titan, they used their experience in that organization to build their own and sever ties. One of the biggest catalysts of this eventual severance would be the discovery of the Core of Reason... and the influence of the Herrscher consciousness still preserved inside. More attuned to modern sensibilities and technologies and largely lacking the "legacy" of old and established Stigmata bloodlines, they style themselves a "forerunner" of human ingenuity, sporting a high focus on Mecha-type methods of fighting the Honkai. Their arguably peerless laboratories and reputation draw intellectuals for all over, looking to seek greater heights of learning and make their own mark in the war against Honkai. Mecha type Valkyries often hail from here.
Anti-Entropy has a reputation as something like arms dealers in the public eye. With their heavy focus on mechanized and cold unfeeling infantry to blow up the enemy in a firestorm of ammunition, they sacrifice reputation for effectiveness in many respects. It doesn't help that they are based in the United States and get associated in more than one respect with the global superpower's penchant for "peacekeeping". As such, their leadership perhaps spends an inordinate amount of time having to court high political society to ensure their backers remain nice and secure while also making their own investments on the technological patent spheres.
Anti-Entropy generally holds mistrust and thin tolerance towards Schicksal. Similarly, they are wary of World Serpent but not outright borderline antagonistic they way they are towards Schicksal. They are, however, generally very accommodating and respectful towards the School of Taixuan and -by extension- are more inclined to friendliness towards World Serpent for also managing to stay in Taixuan's good graces.
Factional Benefits/Knowledge: AE are led by the Herrscher of Reason from the Second Era, Bronya Zaychik. Through this, behind closed doors, the higher ups have learned much of what has been and what is doomed to come, and they are scrambling to make preparations for it. For this reason, they are also the least prejudiced faction against Herrschers and the most willing to attempt to save and recruit the humans possessed to create them. They also have in their possession several Herrscher cores from the Second Era or otherwise have some idea where to find them, just waiting for the right trustworthy hosts to take up their power in defense of humanity. Anti-Entropy also hold control over a special undersea facility known as The Deep, which contains a portal to the Sea of Quanta, something that can facilitate the justifiable acquisition of the Quantum Type for those that seek it.
An organization that once worked from the shadows and engaged in less than moral activities, the revamp of its leadership has seen the modern iteration become a figure upon the public stage in the fight against Honkai. Even so, some roots of their clandestine nature remain, with high-ranking officers often operating from behind masks and animal code names. Founded once upon a time by the being known as Grey Serpent, in this Era, it's initial reformation was at the hands of the ELF, Klein, having survived the destruction of Earth twice over through stasis. The ELF rebuilt what was lost, keeping some things that were useful and discarding some things that were less... palatable.
While the organization has seen a complete turnover with the death of even Grey Serpent, the legacy of the past members has remained in the borderline fanatical devotion of even today's followers towards the Thirteen Flame Chasers. Klein has done her best to temper this, but her efforts have seen little success in the face of the survival and eventual leadership bestowed upon two of the surviving Flame Chasers. Both now ancient beings that have survived planetary annihilation twice over, they are seen as borderline gods by most members of World Serpent.
On the world stage, World Serpent makes an interesting habit of being almost philanthropic, acting as a source of a steady trickle of advancements and improvements to quality of life across the world. As such, despite their name and less than heroic aesthetic, in the public eye, they are perhaps ironically one of the most trusted of the factions, their formerly clandestine methods leaving them with no untoward history to stain their reputation once they went public.
Factional Benefits/Knowledge: With access to the vast archives of the Ark, World Serpent has the greatest leg up on uncovering the ancient technologies of the First Era. For example, while others like Schicksal have inklings of the process and even limited success, no other faction shares even half the mastery WS does at creating MANTISes. And should one wish to submit themselves for candidacy for the project, no other faction is more likely to accept, nor as likely to succeed. World Serpent has spies planted in both Anti-Entropy and Schiksal, and so key members are generally aware of what they know should a member seek classified info derived from another faction. Unbeknownst to the other factions, the current Overseer of World Serpent, Mobius Ormr, and her second in command, Griseo Ormr, are both legendary MANTISes from the First Era. Between the former's unrivaled ambition to improve humanity in any way possible and the latter's altruism and positive influence on the former, these factors have pushed World Serpent from the shadows into... some semblance of light.
A supernatural martial arts order, based out of Asia upon Mt. Taishan (commonly referred to as Mount Taixuan after the primary occupants), the School of Taixuan boasts 7 different sects spread across China, India and Japan, each one led by one of the seven disciples of the Celestial Emperya, who resides upon Mount Taixuan and only leaves to address major threats to the land. These disciples, in turn, each manage derivative schools that host between 100-200 students apiece, around a third of which are accomplished enough to be considered graduates ready to face the Honkai. For indeed, that is the primary purpose of the School of Taixuan, to teach humans to defend themselves against and exterminate Honkai beasts.
The order teaches a form of highly efficient Honkai manipulation that's purpose is to get the greatest effect for the least amount of risk of corruption. To do this, they use the legacy technique from the First Era, SWARA (Subliminal Weaponization & Artificing Of Reflex Arcs), to radically increase the muscular strength and neural responses of candidates, allowing them to carefully cultivate increased Honkai adaptability and utility. The true beauty of the subliminal hypnotic therapy inherent to SWARA is that it is something that can actually be taught, despite originally originating as merely the modifications applied to a single person. Through martial arts and teaching students to identify the Honkai energy within them as "Ki" and carefully and gradually stoke and master it over time, students learn to alter the flow of Honkai energy in their bodies, forever changing them into superhumans that cannot be technically considered "Valkyries", even though the vast majority of people do not perceive this distinction, given that there is functionally no difference between them in combat.
That being said, in order for this training to work, students must be taken on as early as possible and dedicate just about their entire lives to the Art. A potential student that has already passed puberty is considered a lost cause, and only those experiencing -or yet to experience- puberty are seriously considered and taken on as acolytes. If a student shows consistent promise and improvement, on average, they are considered a "graduate" of the school by age 18, becoming known as a Disciple of Taixuan. Greater mastery still sees them worthy of being promoted to a Blade of Taixuan, which is equivalent to being considered a Master. Disciples are considered accomplished enough to face Honkai beasts without risking being corrupted and comprise the majority of representatives you'd expect to see in Fire Moth, such is the adventurous and often foolhardy nature of youths.
Despite the traditional nature of the order, they have a surprisingly cordial relationship with World Serpent. Though their ideals do not always match up, the two factions usually take extra care not to come to blows and generally stay out of each-other's way. Similarly, they are generally warm towards Anti-Entropy but neither offer nor tolerate interference in the other's business. Conversely, they treat Schicksal with thinly veiled distaste, long memories far from pleased by the territory disputes they've shared in the past. On the world stage, the School of Taixuan has a relatively positive reputation. Given the tangible and public results of their training, they cannot be dismissed as kooks or crazies, and their oath to fight against the Honkai and defend the helpless associate them with the legends of mythological heroes, getting by with hard work and righteous hearts. Whatever some may say about them being "outdated", their results cannot be denied, and global acclaim and admiration belongs to their members as a result, with them widely regarded as the most difficult but safest path to obtaining the power to fight Honkai.
Factional Benefits/Knowledge: If you're part of the School of Taixuan, you are no Valkyrie. You have no Stigmata and instead receive stat boosts from your SWARA training in the Taixuan Martial Arts. Even without a Stigmata, the "Ki" flowing through your veins grants you equivalent abilities. The Celestial Emperya is also known as the Immortal Phoenix and -by close acquaintances- Fu Hua. Despite her reclusive and traditional nature, she is known to be unusually positively minded towards the leaders of the technological behemoths, Anti-Entropy and World Serpent.
Otherwise known as MOTH (Myrmidons of Taskforce Honkai), this organization was developed as a form of compromise between competing interests. Overseen by such entities as the United Nations and ASEAN and endorsed by all the major Anti-Honkai organizations, it is a place where they pool their efforts, comprised of members from all walks of life and organizations. In Fire Moth, politics are (ostensibly) tossed to the wayside for practicality, no other concern to remain than the collaborative extermination of Honkai. For this reason, MOTH has global presence and influence, sending teams anywhere and everywhere that they are needed to face humanity's long-time enemy. Ostensibly, through membership in Fire Moth, you can access the resources of any of the three factions that act as its patrons. In practice, however, they still keep many of their cards close to their chests, not sharing all their trump cards and individually feeling out the other members of the trio's intentions, always wary of untoward interests.
Fire Moth's primary headquarters is based out of England in the United Kingdom. Given their relatively chilly reputation with the other factions, this was one concession made to Schicksal to encourage trust and earn their agreement to contribute to the collaborative project with their support. The area it resides is considered to be United Nations territory and is under similar diplomatic protection, bolstered by the raw firepower of so many invested parities.
Factional Benefits/Knowledge: Being a member of Fire Moth is more than just being a defender against the apocalypse. It also means being a representative and agent of whomever might have sponsored your entrance into the organization. Usually, this is one of the big names, like Schicksal, Anti-Entropy, World Serpent or the School of Taixuan. As long as you remain in good standing with your faction and pursue their interests, your deeds may earn you enough trust to not just avail yourself of the more high quality resources and assets of your faction, but to also vet outsiders -like other members of Fire Moth- to also recieve similar accommodations, even if they hail from competing factions. As a member of Fire Moth, you otherwise generally recieve respect and accommodation in most places you go worldwide just by having your insignia and identification on hand, your duties acknowledged as being of utmost importance as long as you don't make a nuisance of yourself.
Powerful warriors, who have high Honkai resistance and who either have natural or artificial stigmata. Due to the constant exposure to the volatile Honkai energy and Honkai Beasts, many Valkyries are at risk of losing their lives not only in battle but due to the possible Honkai cascade as well, which is a phenomenon when a human with mild adaptability is corrupted by the Honkai and turns into a zombie, mindlessly seeking to destroy humanity.
Valkyrie ranks run from D to S. D-Ranks are generally relegated to a support role at HQ and do chores, support and logistics duties far from any real fighting. C-Rank is the minimum required to go on missions to fight even the lowest level Honkai beasts (usually under the supervision of a higher-ranking mentor/watcher Valkyrie. While B-Rank and above is an acknowledgement that you're strong enough to fight on the frontlines of major incursions, most often in teams but even solo. S-Rank is assigned to only the most powerful Valkyries, who are often in some ways more comparable to forces of nature than mere superhumans.
No matter what rank they are, all Valkyries are explicitly superhuman to some degree, the vast majority of them capable of easily overpowering even peak human combatants. Trained to use Honkai energy to enhance themselves and empower their weapons and battlesuits, Valkyries can massively outperform any mundane soldier in stamina, strength, agility and durability by leaps and bounds, able to shatter materials that might otherwise take a bullet's and artillery to penetrate, leap buildings and take inhuman punishment. The average B-Rank completely nullifies most mundane weaponry through sheer speed and reflexes or durability alone.
Massively Augmented Neo-Tech Integrated Soldiers, abbreviated to MANTIS. A procedure once thought lost to time and remnant of the First Era, it was rediscovered and revitalized in the Third Era. In a way, this can be considered the precursor to the far milder procedure that creates Valkyries. In the Present Era, while the project has been refurbished, it has seen far less success compared to the Previous Era, largely due to -of all things- an overall drought of sufficiently powerful Honkai beasts to be worth using for it.
The procedure involves extracting DNA from Honkai beasts and integrating them into human soldier using ICHOR (Intra-Chromosomal Honkai Gene Repeats) in order to grant them superhuman abilities and innate Honkai resistance. Before they were wiped out nearly to the last by the Herrscher of Binding, the First Era had been successful in making dozens -even hundreds- of MANTISes to defend humanity. There is a balance to play, however, as those that survived having truly powerful Honkai beasts integrated were vanishingly rare, and even when they did, often times, it came with some form of consequence or imperfection, including physical or mental mutations.
A successful MANTIS becomes generally superhuman all around to a similar degree as a Valkyrie. They have a strong innate resistance to Honkai radiation, able to naturally feed upon it, and in most cases, they stop aging, only known to perish due to being slain or from complications with their Honkai DNA. All MANTISes gain some measure of power from their beast, usually able to use any unique abilities the beast once possessed to some degree or another. It is for this reason that powerful Honkai beasts of at least Emperor-class with unique abilities are preferred for the costly and dangerous procedure. After all, if you only have one shot, best to gamble on the best possibility each time. Of course, weaker beasts are possible to use too, but the mediocre results are often considered to outweigh the risk.
The Active Honkai Reaction (AHR) is the final ability all MANTISes possess. It transforms them into a beast-like form either identical to -or drawing traits from- the Honkai beast that was infused into their DNA. Doing so, however, reveals a MANTIS's true nature, that they are no longer truly human but rather a Honkai Beast in the shape of a human that just happens to have a human mind. Unleashing this form, however, destabilizes that balance, the surge of Honkai power and instincts being allowed to run wild, as the alien DNA is brought to the forefront. Furthermore, unleashing this form risks heavily irradiating the area with Honkai energy, which can be dangerous to anyone with little to no Honkai resistance, like mundane allies. Most MANTISes cannot control this form and so avoid using it, lest they go on a rampage and need to be put down like any other Honkai beast. Those that can control it consist largely of those with iron will and focus.
An alien force of nature not incomparable to a living (and hostile) law of reality. The Honkai is not just the monsters it creates but a force that provokes apocalyptic disasters, and it was responsible for both the black plague and the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. The Honkai scales its attack to the resistance before it, with each following attack adapting to counter the counter or attack from a new devastating angle, increasing in both frequency and intensity over time.
It spreads monsters, heralds (known as Herrschers) and influence through invisible, one-way gaps in reality, corrupting whatever it can reach with a miasma spread by the selfsame monsters and heralds, which also empowers Honkai creatures in the area as the corruption grows. The radiation spread by the miasma is aggressive, contagious and deadly to non-Imaginary beings, which as it happens, is generally everything except the Honkai. Even a brief encounter (as in, merely passing a monster on the street) is enough to be infected with the deadly Honkai Radiation, which rapidly induces fatigue, crippling pain and irreversible organ failure. Once contracted, the sickness painfully kills most patients in days if they are "lucky", if not hours or less with continued exposure. For the unlucky, sufficient exposure can transform them into zombie thralls, lesser beasts of the Honkai and puppets of destruction.
The only real defense against the infection is immediate amputation of the corrupted flesh/limb. Outside that, the only known proper cure is a vaccine that needs the condensed antibodies of 1,000 subjects, a one-shot miracle cure that can purge a normie victim of the corruption... or even lessen a Herrscher's power enough for the human consciousness within to take over once more and have a fighting chance.
Former humans granted godlike power by the Will of Honkai, they possess both a True Stigmata and a Herrscher Core that grants them control over an individual concept or otherwise defined word, their abilities being only roughly limited to their imagination and what they can justify falling under their Authority with mental gymnastics.
When humanity simply is becoming too organized and tough a nut to crack, the Honkai can make these special heralds, called Herrschers, who are former humans at their lowest, offered power and then possessed by the Honkai to enact genocide in a more direct fashion as generals, beacons and summoners for the lesser Honkai beasts. Herrschers usually result from a cumulative series of misfortunes and tragedies, culminating in "one bad day" and then being imbued with the power and will to end all life. Preferred candidates are those that didn't just have "one bad day" but those that have grown to actively hate the world and humans around them, which is then extended to encompass everyone else and turn them into zealot godling harbingers of the Honkai collective. It's possible for the human consciousness to take back control and usurp the Honkai power they've received to fight for humanity instead, but it tends to be no simple task and often requires outside interference.
Interference which, mind you, will have to succeed while not getting slaughtered by a being that commands a fundamental concept of reality. The 7th Herrscher of the First Era wiped out the entirety of Australia in a week with its control over "molecular acceleration" with a focus on flame and plasma. The continent burned. The Herrscher of Earth of the same era one-shot a whole continent with a black hole. Meanwhile, the Second Era Herrscher of the Void hurled apocalyptic meteors at the earth by making portals to deep space and could have destroyed humanity with just that if they weren't sadistically playing around. This is without even mentioning that they are each massive living power plants of Honkai Radiation, to a degree that can accidentally wipe out a city just from their presence if they lack either control or the desire to hold back.
Generally speaking, Herrschers (assuming one simplifies things to the pre-existing rotation used by the Will of Honkai) follow a set series of concepts. They do not necessarily appear in any particular order except for whichever of the set seems most appropriately devastating for the target civilization.
Known Are:
1st - Herrscher of Reason/Truth - Instantly (de)construct any creation that a civilization has ever achieved. Superhuman mental processing. 2nd - Herrscher of the Void - Portals, control over void-space, flow of time, distance. Ability to control/bend the imaginary space. 3rd - Herrscher of Lightning - Can control and generate all forms of electromagnetic currents. 4th - Herrscher of Wind - Manipulation of molecules in the gaseous state. Weather control. Can create the ideal fluid. 5th - Herrscher of Ice - Can de-energize matter, slowing movement to near absolute zero temperature. May be able to freeze time. 6th - Herrscher of Death - Can deconstruct/disintegrate and compose/regenerate matter. 7th - Herrscher of Flames - Can accelerate atoms to high speeds to generate massive amounts of heat, flames and explosions. 8th - Herrscher of Sentience - Can read and manipulate minds on a grand scale. Illusions, dreams and even memetic mind plagues. 9th - Herrscher of Earth/Stars - Can control and manipulate mass/gravity and can create black holes large enough to one-shot a continent. 10th - Herrscher of Domination - Can spread self/power among 1,000 bodies. Can manipulate/mimic/redirect other Herrscher powers. 11th - Herrscher of Binding - Can create a field that nullifies opposing Honkai energy and affects other energy forms to various extents. 12th - Herrscher of Corruption - A sentient infection that can corrupt/possess/hack anything, be it biological, artificial or psychological. 1st13th - Herrscher of Human Ego/Origin - A "mistake" that allied with humans. Has no innate "authority" but does have broad talent/capacity to manipulate Honkai energy. Eventually developed the capacity to personally restore a Herrscher's human ego/consciousness to primary control over the body. Doesn't need a human host/body to manifest and is self-sustaining until slain. 14th - Herrscher of Finality - Has/is the source of all other Herrscher powers. Meant to end an Era and reset for the next. Can control time.
Given that they are ultimately created with only the knowledge of their hosts for the most part, Herrschers don't tend to start with full mastery of their powers. While they have an innate understanding of what they can do, there's still a learning curve and certain amount of gaining experience involved. A young Herrscher is one at its most vulnerable, often drunk on power and arrogance. It is in their earliest days that is the best time to slay or otherwise remove a Herrscher from the board. As such, they have a bit of a defense against this. A newly born Herrscher most often unleashes an initial, wild burst of their power, which causes mass devastation and mayhem, attracting and spawning Honkai beasts to act as diversions/minions, along with corrupting the land and killing/corrupting any living being it can into zombies with Honkai radiation.
This devastating event, the initial awakening of a Herrscher, is what is known as a "Honkai Impact" namedroptitlecardhoh or "Honkai Eruption". Though, a Honkai Eruption can still occur without a Herrscher due to the usual escalation from Finality, a Herrscher's awakening usually integrally initiates one.
WIP, so be aware that any stat ratings are subject to change.
Honkai Beast Sizes/Classifications:
As terrifying as it might be to consider, there exist even beasts above Judgement-class. These creatures are closer to a force of nature than a mere monster and can rival a Herrscher in power. Standard Variant Threat Grades: [Error: Standard Grading Unavailable]
Power: NA
Endurance: NA
Agility: NA
Intellect: NA
Honkai: NA
NA.
Varying in size and form, these Honkai beasts are walking calamities that have the power to end an entire nation or civilization, usually created in response to instances of unusually accelerated and widespread advancement of Humanity. Standard Variant Threat Grades: [Error: Standard Grading Unavailable]
Power: NA
Endurance: NA
Agility: NA
Intellect: NA
Honkai: NA
Benares:
Chiyou
Typically tower over ten meters in height. Anti-tank weaponry levels of force are the required minimum to penetrate their armor. Can shrug off multiple hits from a main battle tank gun. Standard Variant Threat Grades:
Power: B+
Endurance: B+
Agility: B+
Intellect: D
Honkai: B+
Ganesha
Son of Dawn (pink)/Son of Darkness(blue)
Assaka (pink-blue)
Imperator/Queen/Flame Emperor(orange)/Frost Emperor(blue) A singular Flame Emperor is tough enough to take on an army of 10,000 fully-armed mundane soldiers, including tanks, and slaughter half of them before dying to attrition.
Towering up to 4-5 stories tall, these beasts are armed with a massive tower shield on one arm and have a spear for their other. They can levitate above the ground and despite normally being slow moving are agile enough to leap into the air. Standard Variant Threat Grades:
Power: B
Endurance: S (A from behind)
Agility: C
Intellect: E
Honkai: F
Storm Templar: A variant with even greater defenses and paralyzing attacks, rippling with electricity.
A horse-like creature that carries a Honkai zombie on its back, which is in turn armed with a lance capable of punching giant holes straight through armored mecha. Highly mobile and best avoided in a head-to-head confrontation. Standard Variant Threat Grades:
Power: C (B if charging)
Endurance: C
Agility: C (B if charging)
Intellect: E
Honkai: F
WIP
The most common Honkai beast, these gorilla-like beings are generally slow and clumsy but strong, pummeling victims to death. Stands about 1-3 stories tall. Standard Variant Threat Grades:
Power: C
Endurance: C
Agility: E
Intellect: F
Honkai: F
Chariot Slow & clumsy standard, but strong enough to bulldoze through a stone overpass.
Alloy Chariot Has a highly mobile pounce and can release a roar powerful enough to deafen a Valk for over 2 weeks.
Blazing Chariot Explodes on death. Passively releases enough heat to cripple armored mecha.
Frost Chariot Mostly spotted in cold areas. Fighting it up close risks severe frostbite.
Their thin yet ultra-dense silicon-base carapace is tough enough to make them virtually immune to small-arms fire. They typically appear in large numbers and attack with their sharp wings. They can fly at high speeds and are able to release short-range energy blades from their wings that can cleave through solid brick. Standard Variant Threat Grades:
Power: D
Endurance: D
Agility: C
Intellect: F
Honkai: E
Archangel/Cassiel(armor)/Scarlet Uriel/Baradiel
The result of a human with some resistance to Honkai radiation that is overwhelmed by it or a Valkyrie that experiences cascade, these creatures possess none of the intellect and humanity they once had, merely seeking to destroy and kill like any other Honkai beast. Standard Variant Threat Grades:
Power: E
Endurance: E
Agility: E
Intellect: F
Honkai: F
WIP
1.) Cooperative storytelling comes first.
2.) I won't tell you not to godmod within the bounds of reason, as this setting's power system is rather... flexible at the upper levels, and you'll need every advantage you can get. However, I will warn you that your primary enemy basically has godmod countering built into it. So, you know... play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
3.) In principle, auto-hits/successes that are not mechanically backed are not allowed. Declare your intent, and the receiver's post will decide the result, whether that be the GM or another player. To avoid this devolving into constant games of "can't touch me", however, there will be a mechanic for determining if your opponent falls within autohit/autododge territory; if they qualify, you do have otherwise unspoken permission to style all over them unless specifically told otherwise. This will go both ways, however, so play it careful.
4.) A backstory that fits various 'story beats' doesn't make your character good if their purpose is to defeat everyone and establish themselves as a superior top dog in an RP arms race. If you're not going to use your backstory to make a good story, expect to be retaliated against appropriately IC. Assuming it isn't just vetoed before it ever hits the IC.
5.) Powerful characters will be permitted (eventually), as the PCs grow to match stronger foes and learn and adapt from each battle. Various special items and circumstances may also provide individual PCs a boost, provided they take the appropriate steps IC-ly to not have it blow up in their face. The expectation is that power will be granted down the line, so don't be in a rush.
6.) Keep it cordial OOC. Nothing complicated.
7.) Post length is 2-3 multi-sentence paragraphs minimum, but longer posts are encouraged and welcome. That said, bear in mind, a shorter post is better than no post at all, just as long as it moves your character along and responds appropriately to the most critical IC stimuli.
8.) GM's ruling is final, but that goes without saying. Polite negotiation is one thing, but if I don’t budge, that’s that.
9.) I’m generally flexible on posting speed, but posting at your easiest convenience is preferred. Strictly speaking, the IC will move as fast as works for the majority, and anyone that's holding up the party will get passed over or sockpuppeted as necessary to move along. I don’t like doing this, so I’ll only resort to it if necessary. And I will inform the relevant player when doing so, if at least to give then one last chance to make a short post.
Stats: Generally speaking, regarding physical stats, F is roughly human, with E-rank as clearly superhuman with a minimum of peak human. D-rank is more blatantly superhuman, boasting feats like being able to shrug off small arms fire with only bruises most of the time. At C and B-rank, it's getting genuinely questionable if mundane means even have an answer to you. And at A-rank and beyond, it's probably easier to pray. More ethereal stats like Intellect aren't quite so simple, but it's a good rule of thumb.
Health: Your HP is equal to your Endurance stat with a minimum of 1 at F-Rank. At a C-rank, you would have 4. At A-rank, you'd have 6 and so on. Losing a health point is a big deal, not something a superhuman like you will lose from little things like cuts and bruises or even necessarily getting smacked around, but from a major injury like a lost or broken limb, gunshot wound, or other blow to a part of the body that would typically be considered lethal. You regain lost HP with appropriate medical care and downtime.
Being at 0 HP: Being at 0 HP doesn't necessarily mean you are dead, but it does mean you're incapable of continuing to fight/resist. So, you could potentially be conscious, but the most you can do is drag yourself away. Until someone helps you regain your strength, you're out of the fight. So, going to 0 isn't an insta-kill unless someone basically executes a finisher on you after the fact (which is still possible, of course). For most enemies, 0 is still insta-death, however.
Taking/Dealing Damage: Outside narrative influence and conditional circumstances/extenuating factors, as a rule, damage is a simple contest of Power vs Endurance. As long as you have equal Power to the Endurance you wish to overcome, a successful strike can by default deal a single point of damage +1 for each additional point that you Power exceeds the defense. This is, of course, mitigated by how well the participants write out their responses. While, on the surface, a C-Rank Power could not harm a B-Rank Endurance, if the attacker is smart and/or the defender careless, they can use such things as weak points to still harm them as if they were an equal rank. That said, if the rank difference is 2 ranks or greater in the contest, it is a gap that simply cannot be closed or overcome without exceptional circumstances.
Stat Contests: This goes for pretty much all contests, whether it be damage, dodging or status effects. Equal stats and a successful hit from an attacker grant an effect worth 1 point.
Status Effects: A contest of Honkai vs Endurance. To inflict a status effects, you must build up successful stacks of your element on the target. This can happen even if you otherwise deal no damage to them. On a successful hit with your weapon/attack/element of choice, you can attempt to inflict your elemental effect. If your Honkai is equal to the opposing Endurance, you automatically earn one stack, along with another for each level further that you exceed their Endurance. Once the target has accrued stacks equal to their maximum Endurance/Health, they are afflicted with the status effect. Status effects can be inflicted as a team effort, with multiple users of the same element able to contribute their stacks to the same attempt to inflict the effect,
Honkai Corruption/Exhaustion: Tracked separately from your health, you have a threshold at which your body simply cannot risk intaking more Honkai energy without experiencing a Honkai cascade and becoming a mindless zombie or otherwise simply burning up from strain. Once you reach your threshhold, you begin to cascade, becoming completely incapacitated, either through unconsciousness or a failing body. If this corruption progresses to completion, you die, full-stop. You gain a point of Corruption whenever you are overexposed to Honkai energy, either as a result of the environment or from your own abilities, and you are cleansed of points either via specialized treatment or extended downtime, allowing your body to filter out the excess. Higher Endurance grants you a hardier constitution against this, but the risk is always there. Death or madness. Pick your poison.
Honkai Miasma: When you fight the Honkai, often times, the area will be irradiated by Honkai energy. This will be noted by such things as "Miasma Level 1", and while inside such an area, your effective resistance to Honkai energy is lowered, as your body will already be occupying part of its resistance fighting against the passive area effect. Where normally, you might could use your Burst without any risk to yourself, in such an area, you may be vulnerable in ways you weren't while training.
Totally aped from Exalted: Essence, but it's way too perfect for my needs. This is how distance will be treated in combat and for abilities. If some effect modifies "range" or "area of effect", it is based in these narrative measurements. Generally speaking, Agility determines how efficiently you can close or make distance, with every point difference, allowing you to close or gain distance on a target by that many distance degrees, regardless of their desire.
At close range, characters are close enough to quickly engage. They aren’t necessarily touching already, but a simple shift of stance or two-step forward will get you there. Melee happens at close range.
At short range, characters are too far apart to swing a sword, but near enough to close the distance with a few fast steps.
At medium range, characters are far apart. One would need take a concentrated action to get to the other, and conversations must be shouted to be heard. This is the range band that covers the maximum distance for thrown weapons.
At long range, characters are so far apart that while they can see to one another, they cannot speak without a device or signal. The characters are too far apart to get to in a single movement action without supernatural assistance, and the only way to engage in combat is with ranged weapons.
At extreme range, characters are effectively so far away from each other that they cannot engage in any meaningful way. They can barely see each other, even the longest ranged weapons cannot reach a target. Combat is effectively impossible without supernatural assistance.
Character Building
Please keep in mind that you are playing Valkyries in a team of roughly equal individual strength (specialties depending). You should be generally new on the block, none of you old or overtly experienced. About the most remarkable achievement to your name is the fact that you actually have Stigmata at all. You are humans and novice psychics. Herrschers and MANTIS/ICHOR soldiers are not allowed (at least starting out).
Regarding lore information your PCs may know, generally speaking, the true nature, goals and functions of Honkai and Herrschers are completely unknown to the public, and those that do know have kept that information classified at the highest levels, as the Honkai has historically retaliated extra hard against information being dissiminated about its biggest secrets. Pretty much all you know as the average person and Valkyrie is that Honkai is bad and has been around for centuries, super monsters kill people, and Honkai radiation is no laughing matter. Herrschers are disasters that have been hushed as an existence, and the average Valkyrie isn't even aware they exist or what they are, since they don't appear very often.
If you have ideas regarding anything that hasn't already been addressed or are looking for a slight exception for the sake of a good idea, don't be afraid to ask questions. I can't promise satisfactory results, but I'll try to consider them. Honkai Impact 3rd has an incredibly high power ceiling and a power system with ridiculous potential for shenanigans. I would like to use every aspect of it and have those aspects available to players in some form down the line, but I'd like to be careful and generally fair how I go about it.
Appearance: An image is preferred, along with a physical description in text.
Name: You know the drill. Any monikers should also be here as alternate names.
Nationality: Valkyries operate globally and draw their talents from just about anywhere as a result.
Faction: Schicksal, Anti-Entropy, World Serpent, or School of Taixuan. Choose your faction and have your resources (and perhaps reputation) determined accordingly. This will likely be where you primarily received your Valkyrie training. You may also choose "other", and we can hash out the details of a custom option. However, be aware that it will be inferior to any of the major factions. You are also automatically assumed to be part of Fire Moth, no matter what option you pick.
Age: The work of a Valkyrie is not a profession for the old. The wear and tear of Artificial Stigmata has a nasty habit of killing the host as much as any monster they're fighting. As relative newbies, your age should range from somewhere between 16-19 years old. Age is barely a consideration in determining who is old enough to fight in the perpetual struggle against Honkai, but pure rationality dictates avoiding sending out those that aren't fully physically developed. 16 is therefore the absolute minimum to enter battle, no matter what "genius" traits or talents they might hold, but the majority of new fully-fledged Valkyrie range closer to 18-19 as graduates.
Valkyrie or Chevalier: Valkyries can be female or male, but due to the fact that Stigmata are more attuned to female genetics, females are generally noted to be more compatible with Honkai energy. If you play a male, you will be in the minority, and a cap will be enforced on how many male PCs can be in the whole party to reflect this rarity. Generally speaking (at least statistically for this), only 1-3/10 Valkyries are male. It will generally be first-come, first-serve on playing a male PC. If you're going for female, you can ignore most of this and do as you will. A male Valkyrie is instead known as a Chevalier. If you are from the School of Taixuan, this limitation still applies, and -though it is not technically correct- you are still referred to by one of these two terms.
Origin: Human, Psychic or Disciple of Taixuan.
If Human, your supernatural abilities most likely stem entirely from your Stigmata; you were born with a natural resistance to Honkai energy that makes you one of the precious few that can survive this process and (relatively) safely use the powers it provides afterwards. Unlike a psychic, it's possible that you have a Natural Stigmata, but the trait is still very rare and will be treated as such.
If Psychic, you are still human and still likely use an implanted Stigmata, but you are a distinct variant of human. You may have a unique psychic ability or talent of some type, the details of which should be hashed out with the GM, but if your ability is anything other than unrefined and/or weak, your Type will automatically be Psychic to reflect this focus in your training. Psychics are about as rare as male Valkyries and will be restricted similarly in number.
Disciple of Taixuan: It's also possible that your abilities are derived from receiving SWARA training and that you have no Stigmata at all. You are still human. You have simply undergone extensive training to cultivate the natural Honkai adaptability of your body. If you choose this, remove your Stigmata section entirely and use the optional SWARA section on the sheet.
Rank: You start at C-Rank and will have opportunities to be classed higher later, upon proving your metal. Playing a higher rank or "experienced senior" type is explicitly disallowed. You are all rookies. You may choose to play a D-Rank if you wish, but be aware that it will severely limit your combat opportunities until you rank up.
Grades: How you were ranked upon your last testing period, the score that said you were ready for field work. Grades for the typical Valkyrie run from F-A with particularly exceptional abilities being worthy of the S (Special) grade. You start with an average of "points" enough to have a D in every statistic, which you may adjust as you like. To have a "passing grade", you must have at least some semblance of competence in just about all areas, so only a single stat can be dumped further than an E. Conversely, no stat may be higher than C (unless the bar is raised by your Stigmata).
Power: Governs physical strength or weaponry. The general capacity to do damage. Contested by Endurance.
Endurance: Governs damage resistance, overall "health pool", resistance against status effects and constitution. Also governs how resistant you are to the corruptive properties of Honkai energy.
Agility: Governs a combination of swiftness and precision. Generally contested by the selfsame, but can be used to get around Endurance to a degree through sheer skill and/or weak point targeting.
Intellect: Skill with knowledge-based pursuits. Governs psychic strength if the user has the potential. Also partially governs mental fortitude against certain types of trials, contributing to resisting mental influence and attacks, like from a Herrscher Ego or a MANTIS AHR.
Honkai: Governs manipulating Honkai energy, energy pool and inflicting status effects. Displays how skilled at manipulating Honkai energy you are with or without gear. This effects how much Honkai energy your body naturally gathers and can safely hold on the day-to-day, and the higher the rank, the more you have to work with at the start of combat. When battle starts, you get a one-time discount on the rounds needed to use your Burst at a rate of 1 round per rank above F.
Burst: How often you can use your "Burst" with a base of 5 rounds. A lower rank than D increases the required rounds. Higher than D decreases them. This stat also governs your Burst’s potency. Every point above F grants a “modifier point” for the Burst, representing the release of suppressed power, and you have one modifier point by default for a minimum of two. Your Burst stat limits how far effective boosts from it can go, and your burst cannot raise any stat beyond a single rank higher than your Burst level (ie. A D-Rank Burst can raise a D-Rank stat to C temporarily but no further, no matter how many points are dedicated to it). The same applies to your other stats. You cannot raise them directly more than one rank above their base using your Burst, as your body can only contain so much power. You can’t use your Burst to increase your Burst stat, and you can’t use it to raise your Endurance for the purposes of defending against Honkai corruption caused by your Burst; the corruption applies first, before any buffs.
Type: Choose from among Mecha, Psychic or Biologic. Quantum and Imaginary are not necessarily absolutely restricted starting out, but due to their exotic nature, they cannot be taken casually, requiring a sufficient lore-compliant justification for them that doesn't overstep other character creation restrictions. Your type determines the delivery method of your element.
If you're Mecha, you probably use machinery and other pure high-tech; you rely on your equipment and have the training or some other capacity necessary to maintain and repair it.
If you're Psychic, you've likely got the rare natural trait that allows you to manipulate things with your mind and naturally tap into a sort of spiritual energy; you rely on your mental stamina and intellect.
If you're Biologic, you fight with primarily physiological traits, being the most physically dominant type of Valkyrie; you rely on your honed body and physical training to get by, fighting with brute force, agility and skill.
If you're Imaginary, your abilities draw from a closer connection to Imaginary Space and the Imaginary Tree. Imaginary is exactly as it says: literally imagination wielded to impose a personal view on reality, usually subconsciously. In a lot of ways, they have many similarities to other types, but the fundamental reason behind your abilities is different. However, all Honkai energy is generally Imaginary in nature, so what separates a true Imaginary type from the crowd is that they usually look at the world in an unusual or inhuman way. It might not even be incorrect to call them "deluded", except that the nature of Imaginary imposes the user's own reality, thereby making them not delusional. Suffice it to say, this type is very strange and extremely uncommon. Fundamentally, Imaginary abilities hew towards a nature of "creation and control", and it is the type closest to the nature of the Honkai itself.
If you're Quantum, you have been exposed to the Sea of Quanta in some capacity and been changed by the experience. It is quite possible that you are no longer entirely "grounded" in reality, attuned to the nature of things that exist in more than one place at once. To say the least, the opportunities for this to occur are vanishingly rare, but the results speak for themselves. Like the Sea of Quanta, your abilities hew towards destruction, chaos and dimensions. You rely on manipulating space in some fashion.
Element: Choose from among Fire, Ice, Lightning or Physical and theme your other abilities appropriately. Each element provides appropriate utilities and advantages. Fire can set things on fire and generally inflict additional damage over time, able to inflict a searing heat that can ignore Endurance. Ice can freeze enemies (or parts of them) solid and provide breathing room, slowing or stopping foes. Lightning can paralyze foes with a large enough shock or enough cumulative blows. Physical can inflict bleeding wounds and lower physical integrity in a supernatural way, dealing damage with raw brute force. These are not the only things these elements can do, but they are the primary and simplest ones when channeling them with Honkai energy.
Discipline: Dual Pistols, Blade (short/katana), Heavy (cannon), Two-Handed (greatsword), Cross, Fists (gauntlet), Scythe, Lance, Bow or Chakram. Your character may have competent skill in the usage of a single one of these disciplines, which comes with an innate understanding for handling any weapon that falls under that type with either equal skill or an intuitive understanding of its operations at minimum. You can wield any weapon from your discipline with at least a bare minimum of competence if you so much as pick it up, and with time to study its functions, you can use it as well as any other you've acquired. By contrast, you are unable to use weapons outside your discipline efficiently, and you won't be able to use their unique supernatural abilities, only wield them in their most basic surface capacity as a weapon.
Weapon: Choose or otherwise create your weapon. Your weapon will be equivalent to a three-star in-game. It's possible for it to have a unique ability of some stripe, but nothing crazy. You can pick an in-game weapon (this is preferred), and I will help decide what that weapon's ability translates to in narrative, rather than stats. Or if you want to go completely custom, we can perhaps work something out. Available weapons can be found on this wiki.
Stigmata: Choose from among Artificial or Natural Stigmata (if qualifying). Stigmata (singular Stigma) are the visual indicator that a human has mutated to have Honkai adaptability. Your Stigmata may potentially provide narrative abilities, based off in-game abilities altered to equivalent benefits or from a standing lineage, like Kaslana or Schariac. Your Stigmata is the primary source of your ability to manipulate Honkai energy, making you inclined to a specific element, and you recieve stat changes based on which one you have. This stat change effectively lowers and raises the maximum starting threshold for certain stats. For example, an Artificial Stigmata means the maximum starting Endurance is D instead of C. Conversely, however, a +1 will allow you to overcome the normal statistical threshold for your rank, and it can allow you to have a starting stat at B if you wish to invest that far. Even if you don't use the increase to go above the threshold immediately, it is still raised, and you can invest a point later into that empty spot. Mark any alterations of this sort as (+1), (-1), (+2), etc in your stats section.
Artificial Stigmata: Developed to mimic natural stigmata, these imperfect stigmata are made through DNA sampling and artificial DNA of a compatible bloodline infused with Honkai energy. While this method does allow for higher Honkai energy adaptability, allowing people to fight that never could otherwise, it significantly shortens the life of the user and also has a higher risk of cascade as time continues. It is only used on Valkyries that are not Stigma Awakened. You do not gain any stat boosts from your Stigmata, as your starting stats are assumed to already be partially the result of it. +1 to a stat of choice other than Endurance; +1 to Honkai; -1 to Endurance.
Natural Stigmata: These stigmata are naturally found on individuals with high Honkai adaptability. They are often passed through bloodlines, such as the Kaslana or Schariac families. Those that naturally develop a Stigma are known as Stigma Awakened. Those with these Stigmata are immune to Honkai cascade, able to live normal lives with regular lifespans if they wish. That said, they can still be burnt out by the overuse of Honkai energy; the only thing their mutated blood really defends them from is a fate worse than death. Psychics do not develop Natural Stigmata. +1 to Endurance; +1 to Honkai.
True Stigmata: These stigmata are granted to humans who have the potential to become a Herrscher. A True Stigma acts like a visual marker but can cause pain and emotional instability at high concentrations of Honkai energy. Owners of these do not experience normal Honkai cascade but instead fall prey to their Herrscher Ego, who may take over the body until suppressed. True Stigmata are often mistaken for Natural Stigmata. In fact, it's quite possible for a "Natural" Stigmata to turn out to have actually been a True one, awakening and becoming more powerful under the right conditions. They are generally restricted entirely and may be privately discussed/bestowed or otherwise granted upon appropriate candidates at GM discretion. In addition, your cascade threshold instead scales off the average of Intellect and Endurance, rounded up, as for you, Honkai energy is not at all harmful but rather a highly intoxicating substance. +1 to stat of choice, +1 to Endurance; +1 to Honkai; +1 to Burst.
SWARA: If you aren't a Disciple of Taixuan, remove this section. Otherwise, delete the Stigmata section instead. If you have SWARA, your martial training has taught you to manipulate the "Ki" inside your body to gradually cultivate and improve your natural adaptability to Honkai energy. Through extensive hard work and mystical teachings, you learned to alter the flow of Honkai energy within you, forever changing you into a supernatural existence. As a benefit of allowing your body to gradually adjust, you suffer none of the reduced lifespan issues Artificial Stigmata inflict. Conversely, however, your more grounded human nature leaves you more vulnerable to Honkai corruption than a Natural Stigmata would provide, and you are -generally speaking- a lot more "squishy" than a Valkyrie, relying far more on skill and not getting hit at all to carry the day. +1 to two stats of choice other than Endurance or Agility (cannot be the same stat), +1 to Agility, -1 to Endurance.
Honkai Arts: This covers your ability to -broadly speaking- freely manipulate Honkai energy in a number of ways. Each "Art" generally covers a category of capabilities and represents your capability with them. To learn Honkai Arts, you recieve 2 points per level of your Honkai stat past F. You also receive a third point that is automatically allocated to your chosen starting element each level. At E-Rank, your points are automatically assigned to the basics, your element, Time Fracture and Honkai Sensing. Beyond that, you can use points to unlock new Arts or upgrade a current one, and no Art can ever be more than one rank higher than your Honkai stat, demonstrating a specialty. Using Honkai Arts requires your battlesuit or that the relevant Art be rank B or higher. Not wearing your battlesuit treats your Arts like they are 3 ranks lower than normal, which is why B is the minimum, and they will always be weaker in that state.
Arts are usually less like a single "spell" and more like and collective practice of multiple techniques. You can propose new ones beyond the base set to be judged by GM discretion. You can also use this as your way to attain the ability to use more than one element.
F-Rank indicates total ineptitude in an Art, unusable; E-Rank indicates basic usability, allowing the infliction of status effects for example; D-Rank indicates an increase in raw power to the basic usage; C-Rank displays the beginnings of flexibility with its usage, allowing one the creativity to -for example- actively shape fire rather than merely generate it and display basic "kinesis"; B-Rank edges further into flexibility, allowing one to perform greater and more elaborate feats; A-Rank demonstrates conventional mastery; and S-Rank demonstrates being a cut above.
Pyrokinesis, Cryokinesis, Electrokinesis or Bleed: ? (whichever matches your starting element)
Time Fracture: ? (Every two ranks in this Art grants another use of Time Fracture in battle, the first use unlocked at E. Time Fracture is unique in that it is completely unusable outside the battlesuit and inflexible compared to other Arts, as it is the act of accessing a very narrow portion of the [Authority of Void] or rather [Finality]. All Herrschers are innately capable of it.)
Honkai Sensing: ? (Your range and finesse with this Art follows the Range Grades. Higher ranges allow you to not just locate and track areas of Honkai corruption but also to eventually detect the presence of individual beasts and even determine their species before ever encountering them. This applies to anything with Honkai running through its body, allowing extreme skill to pick out the nuance of Honkai flow between a Valkyrie or a SWARA practitioner, for example.)
Battlesuit: Where the Stigmata acts as the power source, a Valkyrie's battlesuit provides the structure for their abilities, channeling the Honkai energy flowing through their bodies in the ways they desire. Whether it was developed in a lab or summoned from the Imaginary ether, your battlesuit is always on hand, able to be stored in a form of subspace while not in use and summoned back onto your body at a moment's notice. Battlesuits are rather unusual in the capacity of "armor", as they are less focused on protection and more on channeling Honkai energy safely. This, as a result, tends to mean they come across as "skimpy", as they are often designed to leave "breathing space" for excess energy to escape to not cook the wearer alive inside them like a microwave oven. After all, what use is there in protection from outside threats if the wearer suffers cascade from their own power? Of course, this is simply the commonality rather than an absolute rule, but the results speak for themselves, leaving most Valkyries to come across as rather eccentric in appearance. Your battlesuit provides no statistical benefits, being more like a work uniform than armor. Whatever protection it could provide is assumed to be inferior to the Valkyrie's own durability. However, most Valkyries cannot use their elemental supernatural abilities without donning it.
Features: Outside its ability to channel Honkai energy, your battlesuit is typically possessed of a conglomeration of other utilities, including communications, GPS and sensors to measure local Honkai Miasma levels. Whatever weapons or other tools you use can be stored within or retrieved from your battlesuit's subspace storage, which can hold a limited amount of possession and automatically absorbs the wearer's normal clothes and possession into it when the battlesuit is summoned. Most modern battlesuits also grant you access to the Time Fracture ability.
Time Fracture: A legacy ability from a past Era, this technology and technique was developed after extensive study of the core of the Herrscher of the Void, eventually culminating in a mimicry of a single aspect of its abilities. Time Fracture partially displaces the user's temporal and spatial profile, casting the world around them into shades of purple from their viewpoint and -furthermore- into slow motion while leaving the user -from their perspective- moving at normal speeds. When a Valkyrie uses this ability, they effectively increase their Agility by one level for a single post or about 5-10 seconds, whichever is shorter IC, giving them the opportunity to dodge some form of peril and potentially retaliate in the same timeframe. Time Fracture accrues a very particular kind of strain, and as such, it has a large enough cooldown that it can usually only be used once per battle.
Burst: The special move of your battlesuit, a release of power that can typically only be pulled off sparingly. Your burst is a custom move or ability over which you have full creative freedom (within reason), either releasing the normal safety constraints upon your battlesuit or otherwise using a gathered excess of power to exert a higher tier of ability for a short time. You gain points of Burst modification for each point of your Burst stat, which you can use to determine how your burst strengthens you. This is typically a very draining effort that takes a toll on the body and puts you at greater risk of Honkai corruption. Your burst energy reserve charges over time, requiring preparation. Typically, it charges by post and is available (or otherwise held in reserve) approximately every five rounds, so use it tactically. This length can be modified by your Burst stat. Your Burst does not begin recharging until a previous use has fully resolved. Be warned that if your Burst rank is higher than your Endurance rank, every time you use it, you will take points of Honkai Corruption equal to the difference. You can mitigate this by deliberately casting your Burst at a lower rank, weakening it but subsequently making it safer. This way, it is available to you in some form even in areas with extremely high Honkai Miasma lowering your effective resistance to corruption.
Rank: Equal to your Burst stat.
Duration: 1 round +1 for each Burst rank above F. You can sacrifice rounds of duration for more modifier points, creating a more powerful but short-lived burst. You can lower this to a minimum of one round.
Modifier Points: 1 point +1 for every rank above F. A point is required to be spent for every "notable feature", which will be determined by GM review.
Effect: Describe your custom ability here. Keep in mind, your ability should stay "on brand" for your type and element, and anything that strays into the domain of outside ones will likely be vetoed.
Psionics: If you have chosen the Psychic race, this is where any talents derived from your nature will be described. While broadly speaking, you have creative freedom, your abilities here should remain within the bounds of the typical "cerebral" abilities you'd expect from a psychic. That means stuff like telekinesis, empathy, telepathy, remote viewing/scrying, and even perhaps precognition. Of these things, you are innately inclined to one or two and no others. Psychics are specialists that individually access only a limited few "skill trees" from amongst those available to their kind. Your rank of investment in the Intellect stat will partially influence what level of power and flexibility your abilities may have. It's also worth noting that psychic abilities are considered "useless" against the Honkai in most cases, so be sure to account for the fact that you can only fight Honkai with them indirectly. Psychics are best at anti-human operations over anti-Honkai. That being said, however, this means they have a potential niche use against Herrschers, who are simply humans empowered by the Honkai. If you didn't choose the psychic race, delete this section.
Skills: List any notable mundane skillsets or talents you might have, but do keep them within reason. As a rule of thumb, I expect your backstory to explain or otherwise easily imply exactly where each skill originated from. Example skills could be wilderness survival, cooking, piloting planes, any languages you know (at least passable English should be among them as a mandatory skill), and any particular acumen with technology (whether constructing or manipulating it).
Gear: Include notable assets, utilities and other equipment here. You are free to draw from any existing Present Era tech from the series within reason. Keep in mind you are low-ranking Valkyries, and the resources you can requisition for your missions are limited until you prove your worth. You should typically keep this within what you can carry on your person, either on hand or in your battlesuit's subspace.
Personality: You know the drill. Give us an idea of what they are at least like at a casual impression. What drives them? What annoys them? Likes? Dislikes? Dreams? Consider the Kakashi introduction as a template for the absolute minimum. A single paragraph is fine, of course, but more than that certainly wouldn't go amiss.
Biography: A couple paragraphs preferred. You don't need a novel, but this section should answer such questions as: What lifestyle did they grow up under? Why did they become a Valkyrie? Please note that whatever your backstory, your character should remain by the end of it a relative rookie to fighting the Honkai, pretty much freshly graduated/ranked up to a point where you're allowed to fight. Playing an "experienced senior", "ancient hero" or other archetype that would narratively only justify exceptionally honed skills and abilities is not allowed.
Other: Anything not covered by the rest of the sheet that you'd like to add, like interesting trivia or theme music.
Jessica Richter
American | Anti-Entropy | 19 y/o | Valkyrie | Human C - Rank | Natural Stigmata | Quantum-Type | Ice | Blade (short/katana) POW - D | END - C (+1) | AGI - C | INT - E | HON - C (+1) | BUR - D
Appearance: A tall young woman at 5'10" with ashy-grey hair and oddly purple eyes, her perpetually pale skin often brings into question how much sunlight she gets, yet does not seem to burn under its light. This nearly doll-like pallor is accompanied, however, by most every other sign of exceptional health, her honed and shapely body speaking to an appreciation of hard work, the genetic lottery or some combination of the two. Her armored dress of a battlesuit gives off the image in battle of a black knight, as she zips around to slice and dice her foes.
Element: Ice. Ice can freeze enemies (or parts of them) solid to hinder movement and provide breathing room. It can also counter the burning condition and counteract the effects of extreme heat. These are not the only things it can do, provided some creativity is exercised, but they are the primary and simplest ones.
Ability: Channeling a practically trivial trickle of Honkai energy through this weapon, it launches 6 ethereal blades, each blade dealing Ice DMG and greatly slowing enemies struck with them for a single post or 2.5 seconds, whichever is shorter. The ice creeping through their veins lowers their Agility stat by one rank for the duration of this effect. While this duration isn't impressive, the negligible Honkai energy cost and relatively "okay-ish" damage makes it plenty useful if well timed. This ability counts as a status effect and can be resisted with Endurance contested by your Honkai.
Honkai Arts:
Cryokinesis: C
Time Fracture: E (1 use)
Honkai Sensing: C (medium range, honkai corruption level detection)
Quantum Manipulation: D (Space-time sensory capacity and manipulation solely in regard to the Sea of Quanta. Allows the countering of the Superposed state and Quantum Layers of Quantum Shadows. Allows the creation and maintenance of Bubble Universes in the Sea of Quanta.)
Battlesuit: Void Knight
Features: Communications, GPS, subspace storage, and sensors to measure local Honkai Miasma levels. While this battlesuit was once normal, after exposure to the Sea of Quanta, it became an ethereal mantle fused to Jessica's existence like the superposed layers of a Quantum Shadow. Thankfully, she can remove it as easily as rearranging her superposed state, shuffling it off to subspace, but it will never truly leave her. It seems to naturally reconstitute and repair itself over time as a result of this new state, but as a result, it is very difficult to modify or improve. Only Jessica or others touched by the Sea of Quanta are capable of interacting with it properly and making lasting alterations.
Time Fracture: An ability that increases a Valkyrie’s Agility by one level for a single post or about 5-10 seconds, giving them the opportunity to dodge some form of peril and potentially retaliate in the same timeframe. Can usually only be used once per battle.
Effect: Calls forth a chilling cold by opening her body as a gateway to the Quantum void, coating her vicinity in frost out to a MEDIUM distance. This gate to the void has a special effect in that zone, as the radical temperature drop can counteract Honkai corruption, the rapid decrease in thermal energy "freezing" the particles to halt the imminent cascade and drawing them away. Her connection to the Sea of Quanta allows her to do as it does and consume and shunt Imaginary energy. For every round that an ally remains in her zone of cold, a single point of Honkai corruption is cleansed. This also effectively lowers the Honkai Miasma level in her vicinity by 1 for the duration.
Skills: Speaks fluent English, Spanish and Chinese. Her cooking skills are... existent, enough to follow the instructions on a package and make military rations seem edible. She can drive a car, pilot Anti-Entropy aircraft and operate AE mech suits and drones. She's skilled at first aid and quick on her feet when it comes to treating Honkai corruption. She also has enough competence in engineering and Honkai tech to perform maintenance on her weapons and battlesuit, though not modify them without assistance. She has firearm training, but nothing quite comparable to a Valkyrie gun specialist, and similarly, she is highly skilled in unarmed combat, though not in the operation of Fist discipline weapons. She's pretty good at video games.
Gear: A bundle of tech items, including a smartphone, power bank, charging cords, USB drives and tools enough for light maintenance on her gear. She also carries her car keys, wallet, a lighter, a small flashlight and her handheld gaming console with a charger. She never leaves for duty without a medical kit, which contains all the essentials, including bandages, splints, disinfectant and tools for stitches (with a special needle for piercing Valkyrie skin). She additionally keeps a number of survival items on hand in the chance that a worst-case scenario occurs, including ration bars, water, dehydrated food, and a mess kit with eating utensils, a bowl and a lid that can double as a plate or frying pan. She also carries a FN High Power handgun as a sidearm that she usually keeps strapped under one arm, along with two spare 17-round magazines.
Personality: Determined and congenial, Jessica is not exactly the social sort, but she tries her best regardless. With little ego to be found, she tends to carry a natural ease about her, not making friends with everyone around her per-say but easily getting along with most people she meets. Her relatively humble nature expresses itself in a habitual politeness, a sort of "treat others as you wish to be treated", and while she does have a temper, rare is the situation where it is allowed to take the wheel. She cares about doing the right thing for as many people as possible and prefers not to take sides unless there is objectively clear wrongdoing or foolishness to oppose.
In contrast to her friendly attitude on the daily, on the battlefield, other traits boil to the forefront. Her concern for the lives of not just civilians -but her comrades as well- is often seen in the form of almost great caution and cold efficiency. At no other time is it easier to earn her harshest words than to behave recklessly or otherwise put the team at risk for personal reasons. When her ire is raised, her fury typically does not burn, but rather chills, filtered through a harsh, calculating rationality guided by a framework of morality, as she channels her rather unnerving talent for killing her emotions for the sake of her goals.
When she isn't training or fighting, Jessica is a bit of a lazybones, taking any opportunity she can to goof off and absorb herself in her hobbies, among which number reading, playing video games, and eating junk food. She dislikes waking up early, being hassled by extroverts and getting saddled with extra work. Her dreams... she's considered the matter at length, and she's no certain she could say she has any. Whenever she considers what she'd like to do with her life... what she'd like to do for the world, she always finds those thoughts crushed by rationality and relegated to daydreams. So, if she had to say she had a dream? It's to keep living, to always pursue the next sunrise, day by day. Whenever she can get away with it, Jessica doesn't like to think about the future and simply lives in the present.
After all, she hasn't found a better cure to existential dread yet.
Biography: As long as she can remember, Anti-Entropy has been Jessica's home. Her parents were -and are- Valkyries under their banner, primarily conducting experiments in Honkai energy heavy zones, and their little girl grew up with an admiration for the organization's ideals and fight against the Honkai. More times than she can count, she recalls spending her days following her parents around squeaky-clean headquarters, annoying a janitor and rifling through unattended stacks of paper and widgets. She admired her parents and -like many children- wanted to be just like them.
Unfortunately, as she grew up, she found she didn't have the same talents they did, hard work or not. Intellectual pursuits generally didn't suit her, but she had more than enough energy for other ones. And when her Stigmata finally manifested, it seemed as sure a sign as any that her future didn't lay within the tech divisions. Instead, she would use her rare gift to be a Valkyrie in the field and direct her energy towards fighting the enemy at humanity's doorstep. She would be one of many fighting on the front to ensure their backline had more time to develop a solution for the greater benefit of all.
Outside this training, Jessica, unlike many of her more zealous peers, did not experience great tragedy or hardship. Often surrounded by trainees with fires of revenge burning inside them or barely concealed traumas, Jessica felt strangely alone and guiltily relieved, not for the least of which reason because she felt almost apathetic to their struggles. She lived a life free of burdens on her heart, and she was glad for it. Her first condoned forays into the battlefield went well too, not a single time experiencing overt misfortune.
Until one day, very shortly after being deemed combat capable, she found herself assigned to The Deep. An expedition into the Sea of Quanta was to be taking place, the goal classified above her paygrade, but she wasn't concerned. After all, she wasn't going down there. She was just one of many being assigned to guard Anti-Entropy's side of things. They weren't expected to face any combat, barring the potential for a few Quantum Shadow stragglers that they would wildly outnumber. Everything was in readiness, every precaution taken...
It went wrong immediately.
Almost as if the Sea of Quanta had been waiting for them, chaos ensued. Hordes of monsters, a gateway refusing to be shut again, and many finding their footing disturbed. Jessica was one of many to fall into the Sea. In many ways, she isn't entirely certain how she survived in the place between worlds. She was trapped there for weeks, navigating the realm of Bubble Universes, trying to reconnect with as many of her comrades as possible. And eventually, she did. Not all of them were alive... and more than a few weren't quite sane, but most managed to pull themselves together enough to turn a disparate band of weaklings into an organized band of world raiders, taking whatever they needed to survive. And after two months, fortune decided to shine on them again. Finally, they made contact with reality again. With communications reestablished, it was only a matter of time before they were directed onto the right path to escape back into The Deep, the gateway closed behind them.
As with all those who had fallen with her, Jessica did not come away from the experience unchanged. While she had endured it mentally better than most, there was a harsh edge to her now at times. And more drastically, her body had been changed irrevocably, hair leeched of color, eyes bubbling with strange energies and skin nigh-on as porcelain as a doll. Her very existence had been altered in ways the doctors still didn't quite understand even months later, only able to tell her she was "stable" and seemed to have adapted to the changes relatively smoothly... something not all of the returnees could claim. Some suggested she step down from battlefield operations, concerned about potential side effects, but she rejected such nonsense without hesitation.
For many, such an event would have been... traumatizing, to say the least, but Jessica found herself in the strange position of almost feeling nostalgic whenever she thought back on it, when she remembered cavorting around strange lands and fighting weird things, adrenaline thundering in her veins whenever she and her comrades survived by the skin of their teeth yet again and only due to their sheer numbers. If anything, the most unnerving thing to her was to realize just how unconcerned and blithe she felt about what had happened. Not even a month after escaping The Sea of Quanta, and she had already practically shrugged her shoulders in a "what can you do?" and moved on. There was no use crying over spilled milk, no use fussing about the past. Again, her nature as a person that lived in the present first and foremost took the reins, and Jessica found herself easily adapting to the way her life had changed.
So what if she had been altered in unfathomable alien ways? So what if she had almost died? Regardless of her body, she was still herself, wasn't she? She hadn't died, and she didn't plan on that changing any time soon. She wouldn't stop being a Valkyrie. She wouldn't even consider it. Giving up was to admit that the Sea of Quanta had won... Well, not necessarily the Sea, but she simply had this feeling that she could accept the idea of giving up. It felt like losing, even if she couldn't say for sure what she'd be losing to.
Only months after her life had been made so much stranger, she was back in the field, acting like nothing had ever happened. Maybe that earned her some strange looks, but she didn't care, not as long as she was living her life the way she wanted. And only a few months after that...?
...she found herself being recommended to Fire Moth.
Other: Anything not covered by the rest of the sheet that you'd like to add, like interesting trivia or theme music.
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Health: ?/? (Maximum equal to your Endurance stat. This starts out full.) Honkai Corruption: 0/? (Maximum equal to your Endurance stat. This starts off empty.) Burst Charge: ?/? (Maximum determined by your Burst stat; your starting charge determined by Burst and Honkai stats) Time Fracture: ?/? (List the number of uses your Honkai Arts grant you)
War at Sea, Blockade Runners, HMAS Stalwart - 10/11/2022, 19:00 UTC+8
As the radar returns from above changed to something... interesting, Qingshe's brow rose in amusement.
"Oh, you're approaching me?" she murmured. "Even after witnessing my deterrence measures, you wish to continue?" Snorting, her shadow writhed across the deck of the Stalwart, the naval guns retracting back into its depths.
Broadcasting to the supply ships and distraction fleet, she said, "The enemy Arms Master is currently attempting to ram the supply ships. Requesting distraction." Honestly, she hadn't thought it would be necessary, because what sort of moron just charges someone unloading that much firepower into them? They should have retreated. But clearly, this "Mei" figure was both nihilistic and stupid, judging by Myron's description of her. Not that the latter wasn't inherent in the former. Whatever, Qingshe could handle this, even if that Noble Arm in the shape of a ship was more resilient than expected.
Broadcasting to the supply ships, she issued her best advice. "Ram is rapidly imminent. All supply ships, hard turn to port. Kill the lights and go dark. The flying ship most likely doesn't have radar, so we can duck them in the night." In the meanwhile, her shadow began to spill forth from the deck and down onto the water's surface, shakily managing to manifest atop the surface tension of the waves.
From her shadow, Qingshe began to deploy unmanned vessels, a dozen copies of the supply ships with their engines on full blast and their rudders locked and fully turned to port. Each of the ships was armed with remotely detonatable explosives, so if Mei mistakenly rammed one of the decoys, Qingshe was prepared to light it up in a fireball. Qingshe wasn't certain how Mei was actually targeting them in this lighting, but with these red herrings, if it was receiving directions from its allies or someone aboard, this should scramble both radar and eyesight of the actual supply ships.
Qingshe launched another broadcast to the distraction fleet. "Yuanyuan's opening barrage targeted the supply ships as much as the distraction fleet. Somehow, despite her ship being too archaic to carry radar, they can see us, could see us from the start. They must be receiving communications from spotters. We need to target the enemy radar." And unspoken was that if that didn't work, then it meant Mei's ship must have an Arms Master aboard that could parse the darkness.
"Now then..." she turned her attention back to Mei's ship. "If you're going to make yourself such an easy target... why not try this on for size." Her shadow sprouted naval guns again, only six this time. She altered her ammunition a third time, loading it with a chemical compound.
Thioacetone, considered to perhaps be the worst smelling substance on the planet. With a stench serious enough to cause nausea, vomiting and outright unconsciousness. An unstable red oil that stunk relentlessly and unbearably, a smell offensive enough to send people fleeing in terror and panic evacuate an entire town. A reek of such putrid indescribability that it could make someone suspect evil supernatural forces were at work.
For a moment, Qingshe hesitated to deploy such a measure, as the stench would be... truly something unpleasant to behold, to put it lightly. If even this didn't dissuade Mei, then that mad dog would carry the colossal stink with her right up to the supply ships. This, of course, would be a bad thing, such was the sheer strength of the chemical, the nausea it would induce from even the proximity of a missed ram would be potentially disabling. In short, if she used this and it didn't take Mei down, it would probably backfire on her own allies. Not a great look.
Pouting, Qingshe altered the ammunition again. "Fine then. We'll do this the boring way."
Her naval guns barked again, their muzzles giving off no flash to indicate her position, as she hurled exploding shells filled with napalm at Mei's ship, one final parting shot before she went dark as well. Since the ship was diving at her, Mei was now presenting her new targets to fire at, so she angled her shots over the hull to impact the main deck of the ship outright. While the ship was a Noble Arm and therefore wouldn't catch fire conventionally, napalm could still set everything ablaze just by sticking and burning.
And as a bonus, with the ship on fire, they should be plainly visible and targetable to all allied firepower.
Sison Auditorium, Municipality of Lingayen - 10/11/2022, 9:26 UTC+8
The hour was late by the time Qingshe had managed to wrap up her consultation with Lotus Squadron, but in the end, she was mostly satisfied that they had squeezed in the bare minimum of considerations for modifications and sufficiently simulated tests done. A part of her would have liked to have gotten around to meeting some other members of this new "Task Force Obsidian", but she knew they would all most likely be getting what little sleep they could right now.
For her own part... Hah. Sleep was for the weak.
For now, she had a more pressing issue to attend to.
How should she overcome Myron's Noble Arm?
A lyrically haunting lullaby hummed from her lips, as she idly sashayed through darkened and sparsely-populated halls. What few inhabitants were awake at this hour in preparation for the mission in only precious hours' time generally steered out of her path, as she contemplated this little hiccup. For, indeed, it seemed as though she might be put in a position where the "big tough Rear Admiral" would have to call her to task to get his way, and they couldn't have that, now could they~? After all, she didn't want to make it abundantly clear how much her participation was entirely at her whimsy than any pressing fear of consequences, and she was hardly looking to shake up the command chain.
So... how to get what she wanted?
Well, in theory, easy.
Finding a secluded place to experiment wasn't too difficult, and Qingshe soon procured herself an otherwise unused room, sending her shadow rolling forth. Bubbling from the ooze, a familiar body, identical to her own lurched up into existence. Same predatory air. Same slitted eyes and coy smile. Same countless modifications bristling beneath the skin.
But ultimately... lifeless. "Upstairs" anyway.
The body was perfectly biologically sound, after all.
"The Noble Arm is a reflection of the soul, they say," Qingshe mused to herself, as she inspected her work. "And I suppose they aren't incorrect, but there's more to it, right?" She hummed. "Not that what I'm trying to do is dabble with souls, now is it, Ouroboros?" She grinned coyly, threading metaphysical fingers over her eternal partner, caressing it mentally with the surety of someone that practically knew everything about it, right down to the barest 1's and 0's.
Her silent partner didn't answer, not that she'd expected anything less from her deliciously agreeable Noble Arm. It wasn't sentient, not like some other fascinating test subjects she could name. Ouroboros was a pure extension of her will, her ambition... and her fathomless hunger for knowledge and advancement. It had always answered to her whims with an ease and... lack of strict "adherence" to silly things others might like to call "limits" or "points we should have stopped".
Case in point...
She was about to feel very foolish if this somehow worked.
So, what did she know about her ability's core form?
Firstly, that it did not center on her Noble Arm. No, the Noble Arm still used her body as a conduit to deploy and expand her shadow from her position. She had taken that at... mostly face value as long as she'd had it. That was her hard limit, her finite -if impressive- range in that respect. She could only make a single gateway, centered on herself, and she could only make it so big.
But... what if one of those facts was less absolute than the others?
The question remained: was her shadow centered on her, on her consciousness?
...Or was it centered on her physical body?
Time to find out.
Her shadow withered away entirely, and for a moment, Qingshe shivered at its absence, staring at the meat-clone of herself intently, until eventually...
A thrumming, bubbling ooze began to boil forth from the clone's lips, the portal forming inside one of the places with the most assured absence of light. Qingshe ignored the horror movie-esce sight, as she hummed in consideration, a bubble of excitement curdling in her chest. Rapping her false-clawed fingers on her left arm, she decided to test another theory.
Glancing down, her brow furrowed, as she attempted to summon her shadow from her own position without closing the gateway centered on her clone. A sharp spike of aimless electrical energy was her response, setting her nerves on metaphorical fire, as the formation of the gateway seemingly collapsed as soon as it could congeal. Muscles twitching haphazardly, Qingshe wrenched her body back under control again, as she shook her head and moved to tidy her now somewhat frizzed, curly hair.
Alright, so, that didn't work.
But why?
She pondered the answer, tapping her lip in thought, as a new theory rose to mind.
Alright, so let's say that Ouroboros wasn't to be discarded entirely in regard to shadow formation. Ask herself, what did Ouroboros provide that allowed it to open one portal... but not two? Hardware? Yes... that sounded about right. The Noble Arm did the heavy lifting, and her body was the beacon and channel through which it acted, but that didn't change the fact that it only had the ability to support a single portal, no matter how big or small. The strain was the same. Which meant... what, then?
She'd have to modify or duplicate Ouroboros in order to access more processing power.
Challenge accepted.
Her shadow whirred to life, as she got to work, a template and mold beginning to form in the depths that she knew all too well. She would not, she decided, do something as reckless as haphazard modification at this time without serious consideration, so duplication would simply have to do. As the new Noble Arm took form and existence, Qingshe couldn't help but inhale sharply at a feeling like a great weight settling briefly onto her shoulders, nearly sending her crashing to trembling knees, before the moment passed, as she shakily straightened back up, feeling somehow... heavier in a metaphysical sense.
The Snake grimaced and rubbed her sternum, running a self-diagnostic that came back with results that generally read as "overworked" and "stretched thin". Her body was rapidly beginning to adapt to a point where she'd be able to function normally, but even so, it was clear that she wouldn't be doing that again any time quite so soon.
Still rubbing her aching chest, she glanced down and tried again.
This time, obligingly, her shadow spilled forth beneath her feet, and glancing to the side, she could see the shadow by her clone still remained perfectly intact. Well, she no longer needed that. With a click of her fingers, the shadow violently swallowed the clone in a very Ouroboros-like manner, collapsing in upon itself, before whispering away into nothing.
Qingshe's own shadow expelled a computer monitor and keyboard that she began to rapidly input data into. Doing so manually wasn't necessary, but the kinesthetic movements were nostalgic and soothed her with their rote nature. She noted everything she had observed so far about her experiment, the good, the bad and the unknown. She wondered about the sense of strain she had felt and posited a few theories, both why it took so much out of her and why she was able to pull it off.
Looking at it one way, she had essentially created a second Noble Arm entirely, and the only reason it was probably compatible with her was because... well, it was hers, after all. But even if it was hers, there was some price to be paid. Even if the Noble Arm were to be her biggest fan, it would hardly matter if her body couldn't actually handle its raw power. She was starting to grow more confident that the only reason she could maintain two of her already very strong Noble Arm was the extensive modifications she had made to her body. Without her pursuit of evolution, without her extraordinary resilience, there was no small chance that doing what she just did might have killed her outright... or worse. She honestly couldn't say which.
"The Noble Arm is a reflection of the soul, they say," she muttered again, before shaking her head. Pulling back from the screen, she allowed the construct to collapse back into the goo, pursing her lips in consideration. The temptation to push her luck, to create a second copy of Ouroboros, was... strong, but common sense prevailed for the time being. She needed to test this carefully, allow her body and soul to adjust to the new weight of her power. There was no sense in getting greedy, not in matters like these. While the progress she'd made wasn't what she'd wanted, it was still better than she'd expected, and she would accept that gladly.
Smiling slyly, Qingshe's expression of joy was a predatory thing, as her shadow split into two beneath each foot.
The pre-mission briefing was proceeding apace, and Qingshe sat amongst the small audience of Arms Masters with an expression like the cat that caught the canary written all over her demeanor. She had to make an effort -well deserved, she felt- not to send Myron and the Rear Admiral both looks filled with her most smug satisfaction, as she fiddled with one of her tablets, making notes of critical mission details.
The briefing quickly began to wrap up, as the operation began properly. Titling her head and spying on the breadth of allied communication, Qingshe could see that Chinese resistance was already making things... troublesome. As much as she'd have preferred to stay on the backline, this was no time to play coy. This was for all the marbles, and it was time to earn her pay as a member of the QRS and demonstrate exactly how much their faith in her was worth.
Shooting a smile in the direction of Privates Kaitlyn and Hannie, she wriggled her fingers in a parting wave and stood, eying the sight of the disappearing First Lieutenant Noel, rolling her eyes lightly at his own parting words. Striding up to Myron and the Rear Admiral, she said firmly, "Send me to the Australian supply ships. Either will do, but whichever is closest to the enemy would perhaps be prudent." She smiled glibly. "I will conduct a concrete and extensive defense of our mission's critical center. Also..." Her shadow bubbled up underfoot and to an area slightly to the side of the sitting area. "I'll be leaving that here. I had a bit of a.... Eureka moment with my abilities over the last couple hours, and I can now provide a slight solution -in case it was overlooked- to the fact that Myron's shield can only transport those it can touch. Notably, he cannot retrieve anyone he sends." She grinned, as a second Qingshe poked up from the surface of the shadow, lounging halfway submerged with a coy look her eye, like a mermaid resting their arms upon a rock... if the "rock" was the surface of her shadow. "My shadow can, albeit only from wherever I presently am, and I can only maintain a single gateway in this manner. Deployment and exfiltration will be possible with ease from the supply ships as long as I remain deployed."
She touched Myron's shield and grinned predatorially. "Beam me up, Scottie~." War at Sea, Blockade Runners HMAS Supply and HMAS Stalwart - 10/11/2022, 18:37 UTC+8
Qingshe's clone manifested aboard the Stalwart with a glint of anticipation in her eye. Through her gaze, her real self, lounging back at the Lingayen base, explored the puppet's senses, making note of any delays in performance or overall strain... not that there was any, as she opened her shadow at the clone's location, now providing her a direct line to its position. As far as any should be concerned, there might as well have been no space between her puppet and her other body in Lingayen at all.
As the thunder and flash of gunfire echoed through the night, Qingshe immediately got to work.
From beneath her clone's feet, her shadow rolled over the deck of the Stalwart in a rippling, inch-thick wave of harmlessly crackling ooze, the buzz of static beginning to fill the air around her. Spilling from the ooze, several devices quickly began to interconnect wirelessly to the allied fleet, tuning her into communications, radar and sonar alike, quickly forming for her an image of the allied and enemy situation.
Cannon fire rained down from above with a peal of thunder, but Qingshe was ready for it. Her shadow flashed up the outside of the Stalwart, angling itself against the attack, and any missiles or projectiles that actually would have hit would instead be swallowed into her shadow's depths, nullified and deconstructed into nothingness in moments. She clicked her tongue in annoyance at only being able to protect a single ship at a time in this way, hoping the Supply had gotten off lightly in the exchange without her cover.
Feline, golden slits illuminated the darkness in her vision sharply, as she gazed upward into the distant night sky. Her shadow began to spill forth further devices, including high-quality range-finders and cameras, both technological... and biological in nature. She avoided anything that might immediately give away her position; though she felt that might already be a lost cause, depending on if Mei had fired at the supply ships for any particular reason.
Consulting both what her own sensors could acquire for her and the readings coming from the allied ships, Qingshe quickly put her creations to work building a movement profile of the obvious Arms Master-based ship currently soaring through the sky. As she did, her shadow began to bulge and crackle more intensely, as long, thick gun barrels began to boil forth from the abyss.
Gleaming ebony metal thrummed with inner, eldritch power, as crackling green sigils and lines accentuated their forms with The Snake's aggressively cyberpunk aesthetic. A deep thrum briefly could be felt vibrating in the chests of those aboard the Stalwart, as the battleship-worthy main guns finished forming and angled towards the sky, guided by the data Qingshe was still collecting and calculating even at this very moment. And soon enough...
"Target locked," Qingshe spoke with a thrumming echo to her voice over the ship's comms. "Distance judged. Vectors of evasion calculated. Durability: under assessment. Confirming intent to engage with enemy Arms Master." The clone eyed the flying ship for a moment longer, confirming that it was staying its calculated course, and then... "Returning fire."
All along the starboard side deck of the Stalwart, protruding high into the air -somehow without adding any weight to the side of the ship, twenty separate 20-inch main guns opened fire in a cataclysmic roar of full broadside, sending a hail of massive shells hurtling on course with Mei Yuanyuan's Sloop-of-war. Somehow, in the doing, the barrels did not give off any flash of light to accentuate their position, the shadow having already swallowed the blasts of gunpowder to only allow the shells to fly free. Nor did the shockwave of the blasts harm the crew of the Stalwart, the propelling explosions again swallowed before they could ever escape the barrels alongside the shells. All that was left was the thundering, bone-deep roar of noise that shook the air with Qingshe's counterattack.
Even after the first salvo had been fired, Qingshe didn't stop, the guns being loaded with a different kind of ammunition. The first round of shots had been armor-piercing, but as the guns roared again, this time, they were loaded with high-explosive. Another full broadside of twenty guns bellowed into the night air, sending explosive projectiles shrieking towards the flying ship.
Qingshe still didn't let up, determined to unload so much unpleasantness into the enemy Arms Master that they wouldn't even be able to consider firing back. With any luck, they might even wither so much under her assault that they retreated far enough from the supply ships to be useless as a threat to them.
The guns were loaded again, and this time, Qingshe decided to get a bit nasty. The ammunition was changed again, and this time, the shells she unleashed were not designed to do damage to the ship directly... but rather the crew. These shells were targeted towards the front of the ship, aiming for maximum misery, as any impacts would see the shells violently explode into massive chemical clouds of blinding, burning and blistering capsaicin. The clouds would flood through the ship, as it flew right through them. And just to be doubly sure, Qingshe made these shells into timed explosives. If they didn't detonate from an impact at the moment they were calculated to hit, they would explode anyway in the ship's general area, like a flack curtain of chemical irritation.
Staring at the dark sky, Qingshe finally let her assault halt, eyes narrowing, as she waited to see what fruit her labors might harvest.
Gold Experience scoffed openly at Alison, both at her demands and her foolishness in actually revealing her name. "You don't get to make demands of me. This isn't a negotiation, and my identity isn't for sale. If you want my name, you can earn it. For now, just call me Sakura," it said without a smidge of compromise. Kasumi could already understand thoroughly that for this woman, information was power, and she had no intention of handing any regarding herself over if and until absolutely necessary. Besides, it wasn't like this so-called "Alison" couldn't also be lying about her own name. So, an alias is what she'd be getting, and she'd just have to be happy with it. "I'll work with you, but I don't need your resources or your skills, just your pact of non-hostility." It glanced at the corpse on the table.
Gold Experience clicked its tongue at Jotaro's words but nodded. "You're not wrong. I'd say my actions speak for themselves, but skepticism is justified." Folding its arms behind its back, it stepped over to the table, not making any sudden movements and keeping an eye on Jotaro's reactions. "As much as police oversight would be a pain in the ass, I'll allow it if that's really the price to get what I need." Glancing down at the corpse that it now stood beside, its expression wrinkled at the smell. "As for what I need from the corpse... Nothing. I do not need something from the corpse. I need the entire corpse, period. Don't worry," it assured Jotaro. "My ability will not tamper with the corpse's integrity. The 'evidence' will remain exactly the same when returned as it was when I removed it."
Unfolding a hand from behind its back, Gold Experience reached out, ripples of golden light beginning to spill from its fingertips. "The ability of Gold Experience is simple in concept, yet broad in application," it explained for the benefit of its audience. "My Stand has the ability to imbue life energy into anything it touches. Upon doing so, for a non-living target, that life energy gives it life." It touched the corpse, and ripples of gold pulsated into its form. This was all quite a bit more showy than Kasumi preferred to be with her ability, but she figured it was for the best in this case. The corpse of the murder victim began to physically bulge and morph, suddenly shrinking down several feet in moments... before wriggling to life as a harmless king snake.
Gold Experience reached down and gently scooped up the reptile, which rather docilely took the treatment, its head darting around, as it slithered in Gold Experience's grasp. The Stand let it be, letting it coil around and travel up each limb in turn, before providing the other for it to climb back on, and as it did, the snake would occasionally pause and dart its head up, consistently gazing in approximately the same direction each time. "All life retains connections... bonds," Gold Experience continued. "When I create a living creature, that creature instinctively understands when it is not... 'whole' and seeks out what it's missing... the remainder of what it once was." The golden Stand smiled. "And that is where we get to the meat of my plan, because this mass murderer, fool that they are, has been taking physical trophies." It chuckled darkly. "The Cobbler's foot fetish will be their undoing, because now that I have the part of the corpse they left behind... I can use this snake to track the feet they kept."
Its grin was filled with eager teeth, as it chuckled. "And if this corpse doesn't work out? Well, all I need to do is try again with the next newest victim and so on. The fresher, the better. Eventually, that rat bastard will have nowhere to hide."
"Tch," Golden Experience clicked its tongue in annoyance at the voice that range out behind it. "Don't be ridiculous. Those are my lines." With the transformation on the door prepared, this room was already one step short of a death-trap if things went sour, after all, not that she was going to boldly declare as much. Perhaps it was a preemptive assumption but... "I wasn't sure before, but I think I am now." Gold Experience grinned. The invisible Stand user might have had some inhuman strength, but the fact that they resorted to ranged attacks implied they were much less threatening than she'd first feared. Even if they had the element of surprise, their range was clearly short, and they could seemingly only attack with mundane projectiles, useless against a Stand. They would have to use that strength directly in melee, and unless they could ensure their first blow was a total KO, all they would do is reveal their truest position and open themselves up for her superior speed to retaliate. Even if she had to attack blindly, she was sure she could at least make sure the score was even. And only one of them could presumably heal from the results of such gambles.
"Even if you both allied against me, I doubt you'd prevail. That I even bothered to so much as show my Stand's face is proof enough of my own... preferably amiable intentions." Its expression turned fairly dry, as it repositioned to keep in sight both the area containing Jotaro and the place the invisible Stand user's voice had rung out from. "And that I'm the only one here that hasn't attacked first -or at all- for that matter." Because like hell she was going to let that go so quickly. The kind of shitshow they had almost devolved into because of this other woman's actions...
Subtly planting dormant life energy into the floor-tiles as it walked, Gold Experience backed up until it was lounging against the door again, crossing its arms and favoring Jotaro with a huff of amusement. "Destroy the evidence? Don't be absurd. If I wanted to obstruct the investigation, I wouldn't have revealed myself. I'm no fool." It tilted its head, favoring him with a condescending sneer. "What a useless threat. Jail me? In your dreams. No mundane containment can hold me, and unless you've got other Stand users in the force, you've got to sleep sometime..." Gold Experience chuckled. "This, of course, assuming you could even get my actual body in a cell to begin with, but I digress. I will get what I want today." That this would be so whether she had approval or not was left without saying.
Shaking its head, Gold Experience rapped its fingers on its elbows. "As for what I want? A lead on the serial killer, this 'Cobbler' or whatever moniker you prefer. My ability will allow me to create a fairly reliable one, and all I need..." It pointed a finger at the slab of a table. "Is that corpse to make it."
@Lewascan2 For starters, inducing early noesis is a quick way to make manaburn barbeque out of your kid, assuming one understood the process enough to even try, and soul alteration in general rarely leads to anything positive for the one being altered. Seems like a massive risk to take for a mere ~3-4 years of extra magical training that's probably wasted on a 7 year old that won't understand any of it anyway.
The magic section is also well beyond what an 18 year old mage would be capable of; even expert necromancers have a hard time finely commanding scores of undead beyond giving vague directions to the entire shambling horde at once. Same with unraveling other mages' spells and reshaping biology, which are other schools of magic entirely and usually have a High Magic component. As for the whole ghost part, trying to pull a spirit or some semblance of a lingering essence from a dead body only works if it has freshly died, otherwise the soul would have vacated its earthly fetters by then and be unretrievable. Spirits rarely linger unless acted upon by magic designed to do so. Likewise, the rest of her skillset is way too broad and developed for a teenager, let alone one that was a child soldier. Only so many hours in a day and whatnot.
As for the items, the whole crypt is pretty much out the window in terms of enchantment complexity. It'd take a team of archmages to run something like that long-term and it definitely wouldn't be portable. The staff's fine, but the part about self-maintenance doesn't work. Luckily staves are pretty hardy and only substantially degrade after prolonged use or in absolutely massive spells that are probably worth melting a staff or two in the long run.
Alright, I think I've handled the designated problem areas. Forced noesis chucked and a minor age bump added with other parts of the sheet adjusted appropriately; will simply say she experienced early noesis, since that's not unheard of. Crypt is out, removed self-maintenance thing on staff, and added a different second magic item; since you mentioned the mask before and I did really get inspired at the time, decided to do something with that. Magic section reworked and slimmed enough that the whole thing can now actually fit in a single screenshot.
By the time Rear Admiral Adrián Abasolo had returned order to the meeting and started quietly consulting with Noel, Qingshe was already heading for the door. While a part of her was glad to see the breakdown of the command structure had been nipped in the bud and no further intervention on her part necessary, she couldn't help feel some curdle of dissatisfaction.
Shooting a final glance back, slitted golden eyes narrowed at the form of Myron, before the door shut behind her.
Clucking her tongue, she mulled over what just happened, as she strode the halls of the repurposed auditorium. Again, that dissatisfaction pervaded her thoughts. The actions of the First Lieutenant... Admittedly, they made her worry. Not for herself, particularly, but for the rest of the Task Force.
She couldn't shake the feeling that Obsidian was going to be in over their head, that ASEAN, particularly the Philippines, was putting too much of their hopes on a group comprised mostly of glorified mercenaries and volunteers. Oh sure, the Task Force had mundanes among them, like the impressive Lotus Squadron, but the real meat of things was clearly the Arms Masters...
Hrmm...
Perhaps she could do something about that.
Sending out a thin thread of her shadow with an eyeball peering from it, she quickly cast her gaze back along the way she came, navigating the barracks until she came across the Vietnamese pilots.
Bingo.
Casting her thread of shadow out of sight, the shadow at her feet expanded, and she dipped into the bubbling depths. Only a moment later, her head broke the surface of a spot just outside of eye-witnesses. No need to rile up observers after all.
Retracting the majority of her shadow, she turned the corner and smiled brightly, approaching the pilots with a languid, inviting stride. "Gentlemen of Lotus Squadron, a distinct pleasure~. I come with a proposition."
The Russian man was not the first one closest to the snake lady, but he was the first to approach her quite freely and openly, the one least likely to be fazed by the presence of neither Noble Arms masters nor the fact that she was inadvertently introduced as a Chinese defector. He too stepped over the presence of another individual, his squadron captain Tuan, but the man didn't put his foot down. It was good to have subordinates who took initiative.
"Ladies too. But we digress." Nikolay extended a handshake standing straight with confidence. "We're glad to be worth your attention. Let me grab my buddy first."
Nikolay briefly remembered seeing his friend speaking to this white-haired girl presumably from the Task Force, so he went back into the auditorium, seeing his black neat hair from a distance away, standing out from the very 'interesting' and exceptionally diverse hairstyles everybody sported. He made sure to wave for his attention and signalled him to come over.
"Alright, Ms. Qingshe. What do you have for us?" Nikolay said, once Cuong arrived by his side.
Smiling wider with a glint of teeth, Qingshe's eyes squinted pleasantly, as she clasped Nikolay's hand and shook firmly. "The pleasure's all mine, Mr. Phan~." She waited patiently, releasing the shake, while the Russian called over Cuong.
As soon as they returned and her intentions inquired after, her posture became a touch more business. "To be forthright, gentlemen, what happened in that briefing room wasn't pleasant to watch, and I shall admit, as much as I wish I could trust such a flub to not happen again, I can't shake the idea that it won't... in a much more high-stakes environment next time."
"Therefore, I find myself compelled to 'hope for the best and prepare for the worst'... as they say." Cupping her chin with her right palm, she asked, "What do you know of my Noble Arm?"
"Well, we're all ready to die here, aren't we?" Cuong made a sort of morbid joke, which while receiving mixed responses, everyone were relatively onboard with Qingshe's mentality, nodding along. When the question regarding Qingshe's Noble Arms came up, the rest of the squadron, including the captain and Cuong looked at Nikolay, seeming to egg him to answer, with smug looks. They knew...
"You people." Nikolay rolled his eyes before looking at Qingshe. "As far as our intelligence go, you have a tower shield, lots of sharp edges, works like hoverboards too. You control your own shadows, snatch people and create fancy stuffs with it." He said rather vague descriptions, some of them were on propaganda before it got tore down due to her defection, but some could be deduced as works of military intelligence. To which extent though is quite unknown.
Qingshe chuckled at Cuong's morbid quip. "Some more ready than others. Resigned even. Personally, I've never subscribed to such an 'it can't be helped' mentality." Fighting until the bitter end, flipping the bird to the dying light. She could honestly say she valued humanity's spite and defiance far more than she'd ever appreciate those useless louses that decided to accept the end was near before it was already upon them.
Turning her attention to Nikolay, she chuffed in amusement at the description of her ability. "Well, I suppose that's not incorrect data. Incomplete by far, but ultimately not flawed." Rapping the fingers of the hand cupping her face upon her cheek, she smiled. "While I don't feel quite at liberty to explain its every nuance, Ouroboros allows me to manage a sort of... workshop space. I can create anything I sufficiently understand, and anything I drag into my shadow's workshop space long enough becomes something I understand in due time."
The greenette gestured vaguely in the direction of where the medical area of the base had been established. "You may have seen the line provoked by my work before, but among other things, this 'understanding' allows me to heal or repair with a bit of individual study. And, more relevantly to my proposition specifically, I can modify and improve things I understand, whether they be a person or the weapons they wield."
Raising a brow, she grinned congenially. "I suppose you might have an idea where I'm headed with this, but before we go any further, I suppose I should inquire. Are you authorized to requisition Arms Master-derived equipment or modifications of either a technological or biological nature?" She chuckled. "I'd hate to think I did something too overt and caused you trouble in the long run."
Both pilots looked at each other, stroking their chin upon the idea. Their immediate response that came to mind would be yes. As weird as it sounded, Noble Arms military members weren’t this group of juggernauts completely separated from the main body of the army, at least for the Vietnamese’s. In fact, a large amount of equipment maintenance and resupply were done by one of their own Noble Arms, a surprising decision to put one of their scarce high-ranks into logistics work rather than the glamour of open-battle. But in this case, it was more dubious, as not only she had the baggage of being a defector, the QRS had not proven themselves much in terms of loyalty or even capability just yet, having barely declared their alliance to ASEAN.
But for the boots on the ground, or in this case the joysticks in the air, they knew of Qingshe’s feat in the Lingayen battle, and her efforts in tending for the army afterwards. It’s at least worth hearing what she had to say.
”Yes, but then again, you’re you. It’s a bit more complicated.” Cuong said, laying out the premise with as much neutrality as possible. ”Maybe if you can let us in further on what you want to do to our equipment, it’ll help us figure out if we can.”
Qingshe gave a tiny little patter of claps at the positive answer, before giggling mildly at Cuong pointing out, indeed, a notable hiccup. "Indeed, I am me. I won't claim I'm not, nor that I've had some dramatic heel-face turn as a person. What I did under China was not entirely under orders... but past a certain point, the lines they crossed went beyond even the idea of a greater good for humanity or even their own people. Our differences became irreconcilable, and so... here I am." She shrugged, as her grin sharpened. "Naturally, that's why I cannot condemn Agent Myron without it being frank hypocrisy. My misgivings are personal."
"As for potential modifications?" She smirked, tapping her pouting lip for a moment in contemplation. "Among others, improvements to handling, structural integrity, and a more... generous fuel supply are certainly on the board, but I figured you gentlemen would know best~!" She chuckled. "And if you're feeling like taking the biological plunge, then, personally, that's where I think we can get much more exciting. Bodies more resilient to G-Forces, vision and reflexes brought to the peak of human performance -if not beyond- and even more still if you but pose the idea. The sky's the limit really; after all, I like to think the biological is my specialty."
Slitted eyes squinting amiably, she elaborated, "Who else should I ask what could use improvement than those for whom those planes are but extensions of their bodies? For all their uniform production, I'm aware to some degree that Occult Programming Language has been used, given their performance. And with that, there are bound to be some... 'quirks'." Rapping her fingers on her cheek lightly, she asked, "So, then, I figured before all else, what would you like to see improved if you could?"
"Wow, sounds ambitious. Personally, I’m down for both, but…” Nikolay glanced over to his two colleagues, who were pretty clear from their countenance alone. ”Maybe the equipment for now, because that’s easier to get used to in such a short period of time that we’re allowed to prepare for this operation. Our high command definitely would have questions, but easier to ask for forgiveness than permissions, am I right?”
Especially if it came from the nation’s top fighter squadron, it’s a bit hard to put much disciplinary action on them without coming off looking bad.
"We’re down for all those upgrades, though if we’re going for those body upgrades, there is one thing for our aircrafts that at the very least I’m down for.”
“That would be for later though, Nikolay.” Finally the squadron captain, Tuan, spoke up. “Structural integrity, handling, fuel capacity is good yes, but also armaments too. There is a certain ratio of fuel/missiles that we maintain, so as not to use too much precious fuel reserved for our troops.”
“As for the biological upgrade, that’ll have to be consulted. Likely the high command wouldn’t refuse you, but will be sending someone to observe the work, so as not to, you know.”
Qingshe nodded easily, her smile unwavering. Any improvement at all was improvement worth celebrating. Even if Lotus Squadron's high command ended up turning down the idea of biological modifications, just upgrading their armament would be a net win in the long run.
"I can certainly help with getting used to any changes made," Qingshe replied. "I should be able to manufacture some form of simulators, so you don't need to go through the inconvenience of scheduling full drills in what limited time we have before tomorrow's operation." Humming to herself, she nodded. "Yes, I think that would do nicely. We can test-run modifications as they are considered, find what's most comfortable for you."
"As for what upgrades are practical..." Her emerald brow pinched in thought. "Well, without biological improvements to handle more extreme performance, what I can do for handling and speed will be limited. Otherwise it would just endanger you due to the aforementioned G-force stress. So, I suppose you'd rather prioritize structural integrity, fuel, and armament?" Her lips pursed, before she tacked on, "Maybe a bit more power to the thrust, just in case the other improvements add a bit more weight than preferred."
"A simulator? That's quite a convenience eh?" Nikolay remarked, glancing at Qingshe up and down. "Thrust certainly works. The less work we need to adjust, the better. But..." Cuong's eye-roll already gave hints to what crazy idea this guy had. "If we're going for biological improvements later on, I'm gonna want more of that thrust capability."
"Well, anymore of the talk would just be theoretical at this point." Tuan waved his hands to get the attention on him. "May we introduce you to the women of our dreams then? My Sukhoi is still under repair from the last fight, but it's the final steps and should be ready when the operation commences."
"I'll toss some ideas around, but I think I can cobble together something passable," Qingshe replied airily, a cheeky grin betraying the more casual nature of her confidence. Giving it some thought, perhaps if she utilized a bit of Occult Programming Language, she could simulate flight conditions inside some... pods? Booths? "Perhaps something akin to those arcade games, but a little more... elaborate." She chuckled to herself, mind still whirring with possibilities. She couldn't quite recall making something like this before specifically, so it would be a brand new project, off the cuff and with limited time to experiment, a thought that raised a bubbling of earnest anticipation in her chest.
Nodding to Tuan, she gestured broadly with a sweep of her left arm. "By all means, lead the way~! Let's get your ladies spruced up in the latest fashion, shall we? There's a party on the horizon that they can hardly afford to miss. Ah~, and..." Her lips curled impishly, eyes squinting in mirth. "I do believe I should have no trouble expediting Sukhoi's repairs should she be in timely reach of us."
Armament: Missiles have been given dual Active-homing and Semi-active-homing capabilities. A trifeca of infrared, visual locks and onboard missile radar used in tandem work to counter various forms of interference. Minor AI helps missiles differentiate targets. Of special note, the visual lock has been upgraded with the capacity to recognize, snapshot and pursue a single biological target, like an individual person, allowing enemy Arms Masters -for example- to be targeted directly; though, this is not as accurate or protected against interference. (Blueprints provided.)
Structure: D30 variant non-newtonian kinetic armor, layered under the surface of the main body. Effective against most plane-mounted cannons and non-missile AA. Also rated against physical impacts/stress in general. No use typically against mundane elemental/exotic effects. Doesn't shield areas like the flaps, windshield and thrusters. (Blueprints provided).
Power: Liquid fuel system completely chucked and replaced with electrical. The jets are now off-brand Teslas with high-efficiency solar panels on either side of the spine. Internal battery good for 12 hours of high/active combat performance and can be recharged at coasting/traveling speeds or less. OPL has been primarily utilized here to lower the weight of the new system and protect against EMP attacks. Also allows the recharging to occur at night, generating electricity in the absence of other sources. (Blueprints provided.)
Qingshe can be assumed to provide replacement ammunition or repairs to modified sections between battles/missions where feasible until a line of resupply can be attained from Vietnam now replicating those improvements.
"Fear of unexplored knowledge is merely weakness by another name, worthy of nothing but contempt."
Name:
Veronica von Vielhaber
Age:
19
Gender:
Female.
Appearance:
Veronica is a young woman of moderately tall height at 5'8". Her jet-black shoulder-length hair framing a healthily heart-shaped face, set with dull blue eyes. Her skin has the light dusk of a tan but is pale enough to indicate outdoors is not her favored place to be. She is, however, surprisingly athletic in spite of that initial impression, her body lithe with muscle beneath her usual garb, unmarred by any form of blemish or body hair outside her head. She favors clothes that balance comfort and style, unrestrictive and easy to move in, primarily in hues of black with white and silver accents and dark purple supporting colors.
Finding the militaristic school uniforms to be constricting and at odds with her self-image (and the military iconography a source of unpleasant recollections), while she wears the doublet, it is left open at the front with her own shirt worn under it, treating it more like a jacket. The uniform belt is worn beneath the doublet and equipped with spell-casting and personal odds and ends. The doublet is modified with inner pockets, within which she can conceal small items. Any part of the uniform that interferes with her personal comfort and convenience is promptly ignored or modified.
Personality:
Sardonic and sharp-tongued, Veronica is a stubborn person with a mind towards her goals and disregard for opinions that contradict them. While she can play the political game of nobility, she loathes it with every fiber of her soul. And in spite of her willfullness, her pragmatism tends to keep it in check, channeling her ambition into a more calculating and patient route with higher chances of success. Her mind is sharp as a whip, peeling apart information with a sort of obsessiveness that could be called "overthinking".
Veronica is fairly private, emotionally reclusive and has little respect for nobility or any structure of authority over her, and any sign to the contrary is generally a facade meant to make her path smoother. To her, the pursuit of knowledge and personal power takes precedence over most else, and individual improvement is the ends and reason in and of itself to be sought. The only thing that overrides even this deep-seated power-hungry nature is the desire to preserve her own well-being, a value that has tempered her from the day she could first use magic.
That said, she does have a sense of justice, a personal code, lines she considers best uncrossed. She is not needlessly cruel or entirely desensitized, and her hunger for knowledge is often channeled towards altruistic pursuits, like solving murders or allowing the living to get a semblance of closure from the shade of a lost one. She doesn't possess the sense of superiority over non-magi that mages tend to, and she values the concerns of peasants fairly higher on average than any jumped-up spellcaster. She does, however, value the stability of the mageocratic Republic insofar as its continued existence is beneficial to her living an unfettered life of learning. She sees war and anarchy as fundamentally wasteful things, and she is rather opposed to the idea of more... if for no other reason than to avoid being bothered fighting in it personally.
Background:
Deep in the north, the name of Vielhaber holds interesting sway. Though they have been long-established for centuries, the family has remained stalwartly simplistic, almost "humble" by the standards of legacy mages. Though technically nobles, their line governs over but the single mediocre piece of northern territory, Jarkov, not small by any means but far from large enough to be monumentally influential. For as long as they have been members of the Heptarchy, the Vielhaber have nonetheless been necromancers, skirting or outright defying the laws quietly with little regard for restriction. Under the leadership of the family's century-old, wizened matriarch, Gothel (known in certain circles as the "Dark Mother"), the family has refrained from making waves worth quelling and maintained their position in a sort of political stasis. Under Gothel’s guidance as the Prefect of Jarkov, the Vielhaber integrated and ingratiated themselves amongst society, becoming coroners, grave keepers, funeral directors, sources of manpower, detectives and public defenders, all through means supposedly forbidden. It would only be once the civil war broke out 8 years ago that this state of affairs changed.
With most of the family dissatisfied with the state of the Republic and the ruling against necromancy in Belworth's landmark case, the Vielhaber family was drawn inexorably into the war in some form or another, either due to internal motivation or mounting pressure from surrounding political interests of the North. Matriarch Gothel protested stubbornly, however, maintaining that the war would do more harm than good, and instead of participating directly, she would take those she could convince to abide to continue maintaining the civilian sector and focus on defending the family's holdings and people above and beyond all else. Thinking long-term, Gothel sought to maintain the family's positive impression amongst the commonfolk and beyond, running a "PR campaign" of sorts to ensure at least one part of the family could be perceived as reactionary pacifists instead of warmongers. In the predicted case that the rebel faction's effort fell through, this should ensure the Vielhabers could still sit at a cordial negotiation table and get away with comparatively light punishments.
In the meantime, however, the main incited bulk of the family joined the war with zeal, eager to finally put their knowledge into practice and their skills to a true test. Amongst these necromancers were Veronica's parents, both a match made in hell with a hunger for power and glory, who merely saw the war as an excuse to shirk the binds of law over their "art". Against the Matriarch's strong suggestions, the depraved duo (that honestly should have never been allowed to reproduce) had brought their 12-year-old daughter into the field.
Even amongst the family of legacy necromancers, Veronica's parents were known for pushing at the boundaries of what was acceptable, chafing under even the most trivial of restrictions. They expected greatness from their daughter, who had undergone early noesis at age 9 and been educated magically since, and had gone so far as to thrust her into war at their side. In the field, she learned of necromancy in all the most practical and horrifying of ways. The world was her meat locker, and her parents were her guides to using it.
Thankfully, though she picked up their hunger for knowledge and power, this unfettered immorality did not take root in Veronica. She did not spend all the time under her parents' watch, as the two warmongers often had enough sense stoked by their comrades to leave their inexperienced daughter behind while they stormed the frontlines. In her time away, Veronica earned an appreciation for the "healing" arts, further educated herself in topics beyond war, talking to patients and other rebel soldiers. And looking out across many sights of devastation and death, she came to the slow but inexorable revelation that her grandmother, whom her parents had long complained about, had been right from the start. War was ugly and wasteful, of time, of resources, of lives. Every civilian death was another life and family cut short before its time. Every mage extinguished was centuries of potential accolades and contributions to the world's collective knowledge thrown in the garbage. She had possessed some comprehension before, but she became more certain every time she reunited with them. Her parents were monsters, and she wanted out. She wanted to live for herself. She wanted to thrive.
And as the war raged on, she began to pursue this ambition to escape and survive. Pushing for a more permanent backline position, refining her capacity as a healer and increasing her value in positions other than the front. Slowly but surely, she drifted away from her parents' radius of influence while carefully stoking their reckless passion to send them into distant danger more often. Veronica spent the last 2 years of the war pursuing this strategy, always watching for a chance to present itself... and in time, she got it.
In the aftermath of the Siege of Pontaion, Veronica's parents were hunted down and slain alongside many other master necromancers by Auristel and his cohort. With the war going south for the rebels, Veronica would finally take the opportunity to flee a lost cause. Abandoning her position and traveling back to the northern Vielhaber territories, Veronica linked up with her grandmother, telling her of her parents' fate and all that had transpired to her at their hands. In the wake of those horrifying revelations, Gothel bestowed a regency on Veronica over her parents' property and took guardianship of her until she was of a position to manage it.
Finally sundered from the trudge of the war she had lived for the past 6 years, Veronica settled into a quiet, studious life under her grandmother's tutelage as an apprentice, further refining her magic in preparation for potential trouble to come. Though the war had ended and "peace" been reestablished, Gothel smelled unrest and sought to prepare her family to respond in a manner that would see them on the right side of the conflict next time. As such, once she was satisfied with Veronica's refurbished and supplemented education over the course of the next year, Gothel insisted the young woman attend Glynwood, and unable to find a polite way to refuse, Veronica agreed, feeling she owed her grandmother this much. It was Gothel's wish that Veronica begin to make inroads with the loyalist factions, to begin to mend bridges and showcase necromancy's potential as a productive and tolerable force in society. As for if Veronica would succeed in this task?
Only time will tell.
Attunement:
Tellurian.
Aura:
As a primarily Dark Magic practitioner, Veronica's aura heavily reflects this. Her aura has a hazy navy hue at its center but quickly turns a smokey grey and then oily the further from her body it reaches, eventually transitioning into an almost bubbling, thick smog with a liquid, tar-like consistency, fizzling to the touch like an acidic chemical reaction and thick enough to actually physically conceal Veronica from normal sight while it billows around her body (though, she seems to have no trouble navigating it). For those that pay attention, her aura emits low meaningless whispers, taunting listeners with nonsense no matter how closely they focus. All the while, there is the sensation of being watched intently just outside the corner of one's vision wherever the aura is present. Due to the Dark Magic nature of her aura, it is prone to growing much larger than the average and lingering even when she moves, leaving trails of swelling smog across any place she unleashes it and potentially obscuring vision for those without sensory magic.
Magic:
Necromancy: Her primary magic and specialty, Veronica has been educated in this even pre-noesis. Cantrip usage includes protecting against rot/degradation and killing the tiny organisms that create odors or make food/drink unsafe. Upwards, she can do the typical necromancer things, able to animate and command undead up to about a score in number. Though, once things get to that point, coordinated fine control becomes an issue beyond general orders. In a practical strategic sense, she can manage about 10 undead with organized coordination. Among the undead she can create, there are zombies, skeletons, and several spirits. She is able to telepathically command them; though verbal orders can get better results. She is also able to give them simple standing orders to perform upon "x-condition" occurring, like things a dog or 3-year-old could follow.
Veronica can perform a variant of "spirit" calling that creates a faux intelligence to relay information from a corpse. The spirit is not sentient, knows only what it can draw from the physical remains of the brain and cannot speculate on information, only providing objective answers. This limits the spell, as natural degradation rapidly ruins the brain with rot. This spell's greatest use is as a last resort if the user is too late to bind the original spirit, but it can also be used to that effect if they are fast enough. In that case, the results are vastly more useful, able to also draw on the spiritual repository of knowledge.
Biomancy: Her secondary magic focus, flesh-sculpting allows her to perform magical triage and manipulate biology to "heal" by accelerating and enhancing natural bodily processes, and she can integrate replacement body parts. Veronica also uses this to piece together mangled corpses for undead raising. On a basic level, this magic can be used to perform sensory biological diagnostics.
Conjuration: A supporting magic in which she has rather narrow capacity, Veronica uses this to conjure simple equipment for undead, like weapons, and to call undead/objects to her side from within a prepared summoning circle. Cantrip use consists of conjuring temporary mundane trinkets.
Other/Daily: Veronica has a small variety of miscellaneous cantrips. Minor works for cleaning, warming, and making small harmless illusions. She has used biomancy to build off her normal physical training, accelerating the recovery of her muscles to make much faster progress. This makes her fairly adept in athletic and acrobatic pursuits. It's not unusual for Veronica to enlist undead for menial tasks, like carrying luggage or performing simple errands. In terms of magic she has yet to delve into seriously, Concealment/Stealth magic holds the top spot for her interest, right alongside attaining the capacity to enhance the rest of her repertoire with High Magic.
Arcane Items:
Staff: Once owned by her mother, Veronica has somewhat mixed feelings over this tool of greater spellcasting. At a meter long, the staff is fairly short but no less effective for High Magic casting, composed of arcanoconductive material. It is resilient enough to be used as a melee weapon; though it is not ideal for it.
Funerary Mask: A tool sometimes employed by the Vielhaber family in their capacity as morticians and crime investigators/law enforcement, these full-face masks (appearance in fc image) alter the user's voice, blunt strong smells (like the stench of corpses) and conceal the eyes via one-way lenses. Normally, it would be paired with a hooded shroud or cloak to also conceal the hair. All this, traditionally, is to present an image of an inscrutable Reaper-like manager of death-related matters while limiting the ease with which wearers may be identified for retaliation by malignant interests.
Other:
Despite being physically weaker, Veronica prefers skeleton undead over zombies, due to the lack of smell. They are to her also the most "elegant" form of undead, faceless and nameless, vastly muting the horror of their existence.
Due to self-modification/healing experiments, Veronica's sense of "pain" is rather redefined. She feels pain in a fairly clinically detached way and treats damage to her body as something closer to a troublesome inconvenience than anything else.
Veronica is a fairly adept biologist and medic, as is necessary for her flesh-crafting and healing to perform optimally, and if she really wanted, she could probably make it in the magical doctor profession. It's a future she has considered at least once.
Veronica actually carries an -if not respect then- limited form of gratitude towards Renault Auristel for killing parents. That they were on opposite sides of the war makes her reasonably wary, but she holds no personal grudge.
Souls: In a foundational sense, while souls take up the same metaphysical space as magic, a soul is different structurally from just mana meant to animate something in the sense that it’s more of a cohesive whole rather than just energy that will disperse whenever whatever the magic equivalent of thermodynamics dictates it does so. As far as containment goes, nothing is more stable/suitable than a living (or previously living) vessel. Hence why, when you have a vessel driven by a soul, the real maintenance is upon the physical form, rather than the self-perpetuating force that is the soul inhabiting it.
Necromancy: While necromancy is the art of manipulating the forces of life and death, its most notable applications are the raising of undead. This is not necessarily difficult in an energy intensive sense, but it does require a certain level of concentration to manifest the consciousnesses of the undead and take control of them. A low level necromancer might take about a minute to raise an undead; whereas a high level might flick a wrist at a graveyard and casually raise an entire hoard.
As a Dark Magic, necromancy is capable of the manipulation of souls, and in fact, is grounded on it in various aspects. All undead creatures must be driven by a soul. For an undead, a soul acts as the "will" and "drive" that propels the being into motion. It is what allows it to think, to follow orders and make informed decisions without the addition of complicated programmed behaviors. A necromancer usually has various ways of attaining a soul to do said driving. If not a lingering or bound spirit of a once living person, a necromancer can manifest a "false soul" wholesale to act as the artificial intelligence of the creature.
Undead with physical bodies in general will persist indefinitely until the body is too degraded/damaged to house the soul. Maintenance is not an issue outside of ensuring the undead remain under your control. By contrast, an ethereal undead like a wraith can persist in several different ways. If bound in a phylactery or other artificial vessel, they’re similar to dark magic golems and need maintenance. If using a corpse as a storage vessel like a bog body, they’ll hold up the same way a zombie would, just without animating the body. Otherwise, with no vessel, a spirit shall dissipate the moment the caster dies unless they created some form of focus to outlast them.
Controlling undead is, in concept, high-tier multi-tasking and the hardest part of managing them. The level of fine-control a necromancer can exert over their hoards is typically proportional to how close they are to reaching their maximum control potential, at which point they can do little more than send their corpses forth in a mindless tide of flesh and frenzied hostility. Undead can be given standing commands, and the commands can be given to all or only part of the hoard, but they exert a mental influence the necromancer has to exert, even if it's in the back of their head. Most necromancers reach a point where commanding an undead is as simple as moving an arm; though this gets complicated when you have 500 of them. Contextually a low level/first year student necromancer could be expected to control 10 undead on average and about 20 if pushing their boundaries, with appropriately rock-bottom control in the latter case.
xVampire3go
esqueleto
Guardian Angel Haruki
Neziul
Dane
Auz
Dark Cloud
