Raineh Daze

Blades of Iron Roses: An Anime-Inspired Fantasy Knight RP Interest Check

Should be, we haven't closed signups in the OOC yet.

Arknights - E.R.R.A.N.T.

I'll get another post up tomorrow

Blades of Iron Roses: An Anime-Inspired Knight RP

Hider

• Name: Paladin Tyaethe Radistirin, First and Youngest of the Knights. “Yaya” to her friends, sometimes, or the excessively familiar.
• Age: 238. Physically, either 10 to the day or 20.
• Gender: Female
• Race: Human (Vampire)
• Appearance: At a first glance, one would never expect that Tyaethe is a knight of any capacity – she’s soft, fragile-looking, and absolutely tiny, only coming up to a height of128cm. If the wild mane of hair is tamed, her presence gets even smaller, save for the intensity of her eyes. Then one notices the vivid red characteristic of vampires and it becomes a lot more believable.
  
  She tends to wear ornate dresses when not actually doing something that requires her to dress the part of a paladin – the pink definitely doesn’t suit her, but while black does she ends up seeming quite a bit creepier. She’ll still dress up in it for social occasions.
  
  She does own a few lightweight pieces of armour, but they’re rarely used.
  
  
  Child

  
  
  
  
  When an adult, she gains a full 9cm in height, but nobody would ever mistake her for a child at that point – the bust is quite hard to ignore. It is, however, incredibly inconvenient for anything active, so she never fights like this.
  
  
  Adult

  
  
  
  As for when she’s armoured properly… well, it’s quite the appearance, so long as you don’t look into her eyes too deeply and realise that there’s no way her body should actually fit.
  
  
  Armour

  
  Obviously, more symmetrical, but you get the gist.
• Personality: The attitude that most associate with Tyaethe, those who only ever interact with her in her capacity as a knight or paladin, is that she’s a serious and no-nonsense veteran; reliable and straightforward when it comes to the troubles and difficulties of the world. They’re not wrong, per se, it’s just that this is much more a developed facade; a work face to present when acting in an official capacity.
  
  What the current knights associate with her, though, is a melancholic laziness; rare to stir on a day to day basis and seemingly content to just haunt Candaeln’s entryway from day to day, watching the world drift past without seeming to involve herself. While she will still religiously (sometimes literally) attend to her duties as required, she can seem to go for weeks or even months at a time without doing things for fun, weighed down by nostalgia for the past and loss.
  
  On the flip side, when the mood passes, or when stirred to battle, her apparent age seems to take over – the vampire enthused with life and energy that can almost make it impossible to be the same person: reckless and prone to somewhat questionable decisions where duty doesn’t compel her to act some way; reactive and far more irritable than she would normally be, even if the same iron-clad sense of duty keeps her from truly abandoning whatever she’s supposed to be doing. She even willingly takes part in the social life that she’s otherwise all but abandoned, sometimes throwing the junior knights for a loop because who ever thought that the sullen paladin was so used to the capital’s parties and society games?
  
  Possibly the most obvious but subtle sign that she’s moved you into the friend column is that she’ll actually allow jokes about her height or age to pass unchallenged.
  
  She’s also pretty terrible at lying or deflection; quite how her former relationship with Elionne has never become common knowledge is a mystery. Most likely, it’s because no part of the public has really thought to ask her since Elionne’s disappearance.
• Brief Backstory: At birth, Tyaethe was always expected to be a knight. Her father was a Knight of the Crown, even if nothing more than a baronet in other regards, and as such his eldest child would one day inherit the duty. Yet, she wasn’t raised with the living standards of such a position; firstly, her mother came from the Cazt and was commensurately accustomed to wealth, even after a love marriage like this, and secondly her father was extremely close to the Duke of Stalva himself – a position that ensured she was raised almost like the man’s own child, or at worst a favoured niece.
  
  Yet, it was also clear that she was terribly ill-suited for it. While she had inherited the magical talent of her mother’s family, even if her father was a spellsword of some skill, she was always a sickly child. With poor health, terrible vision, and a tendency to burn up as soon as exposed to any sunlight at all, she would have been better suited to a mage’s life, with the duty entrusted to a younger sibling instead. But her mother seemed unable to carry a second child to term and she was stubborn enough to make the attempt at it, rather than being a knight in name only.
  
  On her tenth birthday, she got the abilities that would allow her to make that vain dream a reality. Unfortunately, it came at the cost of her entire family. Unknown to her, her father had saved the duke’s life from the Marquess of Talderia – a particularly infamous vampire tolerated for keeping the western approaches to the Black Pit free of monstrosities. Infamous both for her abilities, as well as her temperament – a rejection of her hospitality or aggression would be repaid in kind.
  
  Any guards that stood in her way were summarily dealt with, and then the true targets of her ire – the duke, of course, as well as those who rose to defend him, from his own grown son to Tyaethe’s parents.
  
  And, in the end, the child herself, taking up her father’s fallen sword and actually wounding the ancient vampire, if only from sheer surprise that she had even made the attempt. Normally, such a thing would be a death sentence… but perhaps she took pity on Tyaethe for being the only child directly involved at this point, or maybe she was simply curious. Rather than definitely kill her, the Marquess instead left it to the girl’s own willpower: die, or accept vampirism.
  
  After the tragedy, the duchy passed to a distant cousin, and Tyaethe was taken in as a ward by her mother’s family, simultaneously traumatised and more determined to be a knight than ever before, and with a fresh hatred for vampires. Finishing her education in Aimlenn, she pledged herself to the Reon’s service as soon as she could persuade them to take her, stubbornly insisting despite the goddess’ known antipathy for her kind. It was a shared bond, after all.
  
  Ironically, by the time her status as a paladin was affirmed, she had lost much of that initial hatred, Damon having been dragged back to actually do something for the family for once and help her with the condition, even at the risk that he might persuade another one of their relatives to a life of hedonism. He never quite succeeded, though her certainly gave her more of an interest in living a comfortable life (and also introduced her to enough unsavoury types and gamblers that her later friendships in the knights were entirely unsurprising).
  
  Instead of committing herself to hunting down vampires, Tyaethe just took the path of the crusading knight-errant, the better to avoid comments on her age or dwelling on her own accursed immortality. Hanging out on the fringes of Thaln’s society tended to give her a regular stream of wild beasts and the odd true monster as enemies, and by the time she was regularly spending time in Aimlenn once again, she’d developed a reputation as a monster-slayer and one of the few people willing to tangle with dragons, even if she’d not yet felled one of the beasts.
  
  As for why she spent more time in the capital? Having finally gotten so frustrated with her age as to develop her ability to change it, parties and the like were no longer so annoying to attend, and Damon had done a lot to leave her curious. As Tyaethe quickly decided, she wasn't at all interested in anyone pursuing a more involved relationship, but if friends or even acquaintances wanted something physical…
  
  It was on one of these trips back that she was witness to Elionne’s saving Falthir, in doing so impressing her so much that as soon as she heard that she was not only to be knighted but allowed to raise an order in the church’s service, Tyaethe swore her service to Elionne before all others and, in doing so, became the first member of the Iron Roses aside from their captain.
  
  In those early years, she was as likely to go off for a time as she was to stay and help Elionne with her training and organising the nascent order, occasionally bringing along a knight she knew from somewhere or other – this was how Cyrus was brought over from the Crown Knights. Eventually, though, she settled in Candaeln for good, having somehow found herself finally falling hopelessly for someone and in a lasting relationship with the captain that was kept as reasonably quiet as such things could be, particularly after the woman became a saint. A saint, dallying with a vampire… well, that was a scandal right there.
  
  When Edwin betrayed the knights, it ultimately fell to Tyaethe to kill her friend, the only one in the end that was aware of how much he regretted it, how miserable he was even before his final words.
  
  If losing almost everyone in her life a second time wasn’t bad enough, barely any time had passed before Elionne disappeared – and with that, seemingly much of the motivation Tyaethe had to do anything. Although by now a dragonslayer in her own right, she became more a fixture of Candaeln than an active participant in the knights’ governance, save to push back against the nobility’s attempts to take control with her own irritatingly secure position – after all, her vows are to Elionne alone, not the post of captain.
  
  And for two hundred years, little has changed.
• Equipment: Tyaethe’s only real equipment is her sword – a blessed zweihander longer than a normal man is tall that has enchantments to make it effectively impervious to damage in normal situations and weigh nothing for its wielder only. It’s not the first such sword she’s owned, but it can still withstand a horrendous amount of abuse.
  
  She’s also surprisingly wealthy for her station; living at Candaeln since the Iron Roses were founded gives her essentially no living costs, and the occasional reward for this monster slaying or other combined with what she can draw on as a Knight of the Crown…
  
  There’s also the income from her mother’s dowry, which isn’t insubstantial – while the last remaining Cazt could probably try and contest that it’s been inherited by a vampire in the end, the parcel of land in Stalva just isn’t worth the fuss and none of her ancestors ever tried. Even the traitor had other things on his mind than picking a fight over it.
• Skills: First and foremost, Tyaethe is a vampire, which comes with its own parcel of abilities and liabilities:
  
  
  Vampirism Brief

  The core of vampirism is a ritual modification of the bearer’s soul that gives the ability to convert ingested blood into mana at the cost of no longer independently producing much of what it otherwise would. As mana is tied to life, this means they need to consume blood in order to retain any level of health. This modification also enforces an affinity for blood magic, even if the vampire formerly couldn’t be a mage at all. On the other hand, it changes nothing for the individual’s maximum capacity for channelling mana; those who weren’t mages beforehand aren’t going to be working any great spells, while someone with immense magical ability can still call upon as much at the same time.
  
  Of course, there’s more that comes along with it than that: for one, a vampire can magically revert their body to its former state; this is how they can perfectly heal body parts that have been entirely destroyed (although it’s always faster and more efficient to simply reattach them) and a likely source for their eternal youth. Secondly, any vampire has an instinctive ability to boost their physical attributes by the same mechanism, likely worked into the state in the distant past to make it possible to get the blood from unwilling victims.
  
  That it’s essentially a parasitic state by default is, undoubtedly, why Reon in particular has such disdain for them and why the majority of vampires will burn to death if left in the sun for much time at all. Although, as this is the goddess’ conscious decision, she can and will ameliorate it to simply burning horribly if she likes you sufficiently – for instance, being one of her paladins. Same for whether Reon’s blessings are dangerous or not.
  
  The process makes a few physical changes, too. Aside from getting paler (if that’s even possible; Tyaethe was already practically colourless), all vampires develop red eyes and slightly pointed ears – suggesting, perhaps, that an elf is the responsible party for their existence. This isn’t purely cosmetic; a vampire can see with no light at all, hear heartbeats, and smell blood rather like a shark. They also, contrary to their status as pseudo-undead seem more alive in some ways, running unusually hot and with an extremely rapid heartbeat. And everyone knows vampires for their fangs.
  
  The process of becoming a vampire requires both ingesting their blood and exsanguination, as well as a desire to live that actually catalyses the process. The would-be vampire’s own magic is normally required to effect the changes, but an external source can be provided if someone wants to make a vampire out of someone otherwise ineligible – for instance, a dwarf. Given that you need to maintain this desire while effectively dying, making it is very much not guaranteed.
  
  Given that the ritual essentially kills you while simultaneously animating your body, whether they’re truly undead is a matter of ongoing academic debate, or whether they’ve more in common with life-extending magic. What is clear is that they’re extremely hard to kill; complete destruction of the brain, clean decapitation (usually), and directly piercing the heart all do it, but an incomplete job will be healed nigh instantly.
  
  
  In terms of her personal abilities, she is first and foremost a swordsman. Although it would seem that someone who mostly developed their skills as a vampire and monster-slayer isn’t the type, she’s actually remarkably good with the blade and was even when the knights were founded, without the benefit of over two centuries of extra practice. While she can fight normally (especially armoured), her normal approach to combat is much flashier and more acrobatic than entirely practical… but very good at getting out of the way of, say, angry dragons. She actually takes pride in winning without needing to fall back on vampirism, accepting it as a handicap to make most for-fun matches more even, but insists that using magic to keep up with the best doesn’t detract from the achievement of it; others can do the same with sufficient training, but her body is static and would get nothing out of exercising.
  
  In fact, without using magic, she’s every bit what she looks: soft, huggable, and (without her particular sword on hand), entirely harmless and easily harmed. But, of course, she’s a vampire who took no outside assistance to turn, so she’s never without magic, possessing a channelling capacity that’s nothing less than terrifying. Standing next to her at full exertion is to witness a bonfire of mana that could throw around siege spells like it’s nothing.
  
  However, she’s always refused anything in the way of proper magical education; while she finds the theory more than interesting enough to learn and research, she doesn’t actually know much in the way of spells, only the most basic exercise to convert mana into light or a simple spell to light a fire. Unsurprisingly, her natural affinity is for fire – and it’s extremely useful for one of Reon’s paladins, as the right liturgy can convert it into Reon’s holy flames.
  
  She also, like many vampires, has an unusual talent tied into her blood – in her case, it can be perfectly and instantaneously converted into mana even once outside her body, which makes it a particularly potent fuel for rituals. Not that she exercises this any more than absolutely necessary, i.e. when holy fire is probably the only thing that’s going to work.
  
  Despite not wanting to be a mage, her natural aptitude for it has spilled over into two semi-spells that she’s much more willing to use. One, driven by nothing more than not wanting to be treated like a child initially and now her own certainty that it works, instantly ages her by a decade (or down by a decade, as the case may be). Given the completeness of the transformation and its lack of maintenance, she’s been told it must be tying into how vampires heal and avoid ageing under normal conditions; some aspect of their self-identity. Tyaethe doesn’t really care, except to be vaguely annoyed that she would’ve grown into such a small adult.
  
  The other spell is the one to encase herself in magically-generated armour that’s completely at odds with her actual dimensions. The few times it’s been cut into reveals nothing but writhing shadows and blood rather than her body, the usual evidence of vampiric healing, so it’s obviously some sort of blood magic. Given the amount of mana swirling around and being consumed to maintain it, the armour ahs extraordinary magic resistance – often the main reason she’d use it.
  
  Aside from combat, she’s got a hobby of learning new languages. While it started to hide her native Stalvan dialect and accent (a somewhat Thalnish-influenced branch of Ithillane with a country bumpkin reputation in both countries), she does genuinely enjoy it.
• Other:: Her eyesight is outright terrible. She has glasses, but given they would easily get broken or obscured in battle, she’s not going to be spotting much when out and about doing knight things.
  
  While she is a baronetess, the order of precedence actually places that below her status as a crown knight – indeed, the ranks of hereditary crown knights mostly are baronets, simply the closest of the lot to the higher nobility. And the correct address is the same as a knight.

Blades of Iron Roses: An Anime-Inspired Knight RP

• Name: Paladin Tyaethe Radistirin, First and Youngest of the Knights.
• Age: 238
• Gender: Female
• Race: Human (Vampire)
• Appearance:
  
  Default

  
  Average knight for scale:
  
  
  
  Adult

  For obvious reasons, she doesn't exactly fight like this:
  
  It's not even that much taller:
  
  
  
  Armoured

  Standing over six feet tall, it definitely doesn't match her height out of armour...
  With sword:
  
  A better look at the armour:
  
• Personality: The opinion of those who only have to interact with the Iron Roses in their capacity as knights is that Tyaethe is a serious, no-nonsense veteran. This is completely true provided that she's acting in her capacity as a knight of the church, off rescuing people or doing simple military work--she's quite serious, if prone to taking the aggressive and faster option. When there's a real fight on hand or something strong to oppose, she gets more hot-headed... and in general is quite prone to an "ATTACK ATTACK ATTACK" mentality, prone to forgetting that most people do not share her ability to disregard physical injury.
  Off the battlefield, outside of religious matters she's quite lazy. There's no equipment for her to upkeep, no physical exercise to keep in shape, no family matters to attend to, and even the captain only needs so much assistance in a day. It leaves her plenty of time for either emulating a cat and finding somewhere inconvenient but comfortable to nap, or playing tricks and teasing other members of the Iron Roses. Or helping them as the case may be. At times, the vampire can actually seem her age, bored of the repetitiveness of time and duty--but still obliged to be here.
  Unless she respects you, making fun of her height or age is quite a way to set her off.
• Brief Backstory: Coming from a minor noble family, Tyaethe was always expected to carry on her family's duty as knights of the crown. Yet due to favours owed by a highly influential and religious duke to her father, the standard of education that the girl received was much higher than her family would have expected--until the duke's own outspoken nature and the cause of the original favour came back. Having made enemies with a vampire of some age, and defied death once before, they came back for vengeance during a feast. Perhaps the vampire recognised Tyaethe as the child of one of its enemies and wanted to make a more ironic point, or maybe they just didn't want to kill a child in training--but of the attack, she was the only survivor, and quite confused at that.
  With her teacher dead, but his influence still felt, the girl went to the church and pledged herself to training as a paladin and to become a knight in Mayon's service--with no idea of what she had been afflicted with. When this became apparent, it was already too late to back out... despite Reon's virulent hatred for vampires in particular, Mayon had no such compulsion against intelligent but unwitting undead and showed no signs of displeasure. So, even though the church would normally have resisted accepting the undead into their ranks, Tyaethe completed her training as best as possible despite the lack of ageing and became a paladin.
  Hot-headed and somewhat hard to work with, Tyaethe spent most of her time as a crusading knight-errant and working on her magical abilities--not wanting to go to yet another social function made doubly awkward by her apparent age, or snap at another companion for bringing attention to the fact. Her tendency for long trips away from most paladins helped with forgetting what she was, and Tyaethe developed a reasonably good reputation for her abilities.
  Which is about when Elionne prevented the assassination of Falthir and impressed the older paladin so much that she was the first to swear her service--before the Iron Roses had even been founded--and was something of a teacher. This, combined with her apparent age, is the source of the "First and Youngest" title... which she still hates hearing. Unfortunately, it's open knowledge, along with her condition, leaving Tyaethe with a very strange reputation.
  When Elionne disappeared, the vampire didn't know more than anyone else, though she certainly took the news hard. In the end, Tyaethe stuck with the knights, though she's become touchier about her apparent age over time, and has a tendency to act as a stumbling block to changing tradition. Occasionally, nobles looking to advance their control over the knights have been dismayed to learn that the circumstances of Tyaethe's original vow to join the knights more or less require Elionne to be the one to make her leave or be proved dead. Of course, that's outweighed by the people who are glad she hasn't gone anywhere; finding someone willing and able to fight dragons when they intermittently show up, let alone one so gleeful about it, would be... difficult if the paladin were to retire or go travelling.
• Equipment: The only piece of "real" equipment that Tyaethe possesses is her sword--a blessed blade enchanted to have no weight to the wielder, so that even someone in her situation can wield it without any difficulty, and as resilient to damage as it could be made. Everything else, aside from her scarfs, is nothing more than a magical construct created as needed.
  Though it isn't really equipment, she also has two hundred years of accumulated money left over for whatever might need the investment--not a bad amount.
• Skills: As one would expect of the most experienced knight in the order, Tyaethe's greatest asset is her swordsmanship, despite the link between vampirism and magical power. She takes pride in achieving victory through nothing more than the mundane application of skill, now honed over entire lifetimes, and insists that using some magical enhancement hardly detracts from the achievement; there are enough people around physically monstrous enough to achieve the same effects regardless. Some people have disagreed with this. Whatever their opinion on magically assisted swordsmanship, her skill is sufficient that she only gets excited when prodigies join the knights and provide some decent competition until they leave, or age catches up.
  Of course, as a vampire, there is no avoiding the massive raw magical power requirement to survive the process, one Tyaethe seems to have naturally exceeded by a considerable margin despite her development. Although dependent on regularly feeding to be able to fuel this level, the point that the paladin considers to be satiated and not a danger--and therefore maintaining something approaching her natural capacity--is akin to standing next to a bonfire of mana.
  All of this energy is regularly redirected into one of the least efficient spells possible, generating an illusion and enforcing its reality through stubbornness and sheer magical energy. In practical terms, it amounts to a minor capacity for shapeshifting and conjuration, no matter the mechanism behind it. This, of course, is how the paladin maintains an adult appearance as needed, or actually armours herself as a knight--ageing up or conjuring armour as appropriate. Due to its nature as little more than raw magic, it protects even better against magical attacks than physical, although it also provides the (rather unnecessary) protection of normal armour.
  With the illusions requiring constant investment, there is a limit to how long they can be maintained, with the armoured one being particularly extreme and reserved only for combat itself. Merely looking how she would if she had grown normally can be kept up with little difficulty, as long as she's awake.
  Then, of course, there are the abilities that stem directly from being a vampire. Using mana for physical enhancement is the most obvious, and where even the weakest vampires get a dreaded reputation: unless starving, even the least combat-trained vampire can boost themselves to scary levels. The other one is that inflicting damage that can't just be healed away is a matter of some difficulty without holy blessing or a talent for decapitation. It also has a few minor talents that are occasionally handy--obviously, seeing in the dark is a big one, but her other senses are quite sharp, although not to extreme levels. Except for two exceptions: heartbeats and the smell of blood. Quite hard to sneak up on, this one.
  Having pretty terrible unaided eyesight isn't a skill, but it's noteworthy.
• Other: Yes, drinking blood is required--blood becomes mana, mana sustains life. Yes, the sun is dangerous. It isn't quite lethal, though: Reon hates vampires but she's aware it's not a choice.

Blades of Iron Roses: An Anime-Inspired Fantasy Knight RP Interest Check

Hej, this looks rather familiar... I take that it is a reboot of the one that's currently running?

@PigeonOfAstora

With a posting schedule. And a few revisions to stuff.

Arknights - E.R.R.A.N.T.

It's driving through long expanses of nothing in particular between major settlements with no traffic. Being good at it isn't a requirement, just that someone actually be doing it. xD

Arknights - E.R.R.A.N.T.

Someone has to be driving this thing. xD

Blades of Iron Roses: An Anime-Inspired Fantasy Knight RP Interest Check

Heyo, here as always.

Arknights - E.R.R.A.N.T.

The trip to Columbia was not, by any stretch of the imagination, the most comfortable one that one could imagine. Oh, it could certainly have been worse--simply walking the entire way was an option that was on the table, but far from preferable when time was of the essence. At the same time, it would have been hard to make the trip by air. Instead, the entire journey had been done by far more conventional land-based transport. This was where it got uncomfortable.

After all, their captain simply wouldn't fit inside any conventional vehicles. Even if she managed to squeeze herself into the seat well enough, there was no escaping the required headroom to fit antlers. Or extra horizontal space, those things spread out. The only solution, as a result, had been to use a pickup with enough seating for everyone else in the back... and have Wisteria camp out in the bed like a piece of cargo, along with all the actual equipment they were bringing. Terribly unsafe, if you weren't the type to walk out of an accident with mostly bruises.

It did mean that the ride, at least for her, had been plenty uncomfortable--and everyone else had been forced to take turns driving and crammed in a small metal box for the entire journey. Still, at least they were nearly there, the plates of a mobile city coming up over the horizon.

"Here we are, Béziers," the wendigo said, leaning against the cab and the open sunroof to make sure that the others could hear her, "One of the few mobile cities in Columbia that owes its existence to Gaul rather than Victoria.

"We've had a branch office here for over a year, but recently all communication cut off. Not so much as a call for help, or something sent through the Catastrophe Messengers. It could be corporate espionage that took a turn for the worse, or some sort of local disturbance, or maybe they sold out to one of the local conglomerates. Whatever the case, we're here to find out what happened, try to stop any of our technology from spreading too much, and assist with any local troubles that have been cutting off communication--in that order. Any questions before we get there?"

@VitaVitaAR@Operator Luna@Spin The Wheel

Realism no Mononoke: An Urban Fantasy RP

Akari watched the proceedings with a sense of relief. Having an actual child around made her position much more secure... otherwise she was sure that their club leader would have taken some far more drastic measure to force her to act much younger than she actually was. And that would be a disaster! Aside from not wanting to be bait, or put on the spot like that, there was no way anyone, even a youkai, would have bought that. Right?

"Handy? Um... okay..." she nodded, polishing off the bottle. Right, ghost hand. She could do that.