Raineh Daze

Sword and Dungeon: An Adventurer's Guild-based Fantasy RP

@Taka No, a character from Akitsushima is not going to be accepted.

Sword and Dungeon: An Adventurer's Guild-based Fantasy RP

-Cracks neck-

So, right, elves. Elves have gotten a lot of interest, so I feel it's a good time to dump some more history that goes way beyond the basic stuff in the intro and how this leads to the current elf situation.

Back when the world was young, the elves were an undifferentiated group, taught the first magic – astromancy, the magic of starlight and still considered the purest part of the art – by the goddess of magic and many things besides by their own deities. Although mostly they lived in the western continent, over time some spread eastwards towards the lands covered in the opening…

And then there was Hidroroth, the first dark lord, and in his rage and hatred, most of that continent was destroyed and sunk, the veil thrown up to contain the devastation and the lingering magic from spilling over. But still, they were a united people in anger and purpose, for a time, the Elf King even challenging him (unsuccessfully, but impressively enough to buy time for everything else that happened) in combat. Not many of the true firstborn survived, although enough hung around here and there.

That was what broke them. Some remnants of their armies took to trying to eliminate the remnants of Hidroroth's forces, but the ever-worsening weather caused them to spend more and more time underground. Through ritual, they managed to grant themselves the darksight they have now, and those are the dark elves. Some took their leave of the continent entirely – desert elves, and those high elves that might consider themselves sea elves. The high elves and wood elves… well, there wasn't that much distinction, things were more continuous even with the veil.

Cue Dark Lord #2, even more destruction, and much more prominence of the humans, plus the diminishment of the forests. That set up that split.

In the end, due to slow generational drift, the fact that the old generations always keep around, and a still-considerable amount of contact and occasional intermarriage, it's more ethnic and cultural differences; the various forms of elven are still arguably dialectical and (sometimes with effort) mutually intelligible. They're also not too terribly dissimilar when it comes to knowledge or technology, it's more… well, resources and adapting to their surroundings. It does help that the wood elves are also very close to the great dwarven kingdoms.

Sword and Dungeon: An Adventurer's Guild-based Fantasy RP

Dark Elf Hunter - Quille

• Name: Quille. The E is not silent.
• Age: ~300; like many elves (and dark elves in particular), tracking a year of birth has never stood out as necessary or helpful; once you’re old enough then everyone in the community is just used to your being there and a contributing adult. For those who live underground, there’s even less point and religious ceremonies tend to be celebrated on the basis of events rather than the calendar.
• Gender: Female
• Race: Dark Elf. This means, like all other dark elves, that Quille can see in complete darkness, although without true colour, but makes her extra susceptible to sudden changes in light level.
• Rank: Steel. It has been officially noted that this is not an accurate reflection of Quille’s skill or experience, but rather a limitation due to unfamiliarity with (and continuing adaptation to) surface environs. She is, in the event an adventure somehow winds up deep underground and in true darkness, to be officially considered silver rank for its duration.
• Appearance: Like all dark elves, Quille has a comparatively unusual skintone; in her case, the purple hue is slightly more dominant than the grey, giving her complexion more of a pale lilac appearance than anything. Definitely pale for a dark elf. This goes for her eye colour, too, a pleasant amaranth pink. Her hair, quite unsurprisingly, is also white rather than some shade of silver, something all too easy to examine as even the tightly-wound braid reaches nearly to the floor. One unflattering comparison was that she looks like a normal dark elf that’s been washed one too many times.
  
  In terms of physique, she has the usual slender athleticism associated with almost all elven warriors or hunters, albeit at a rather unusual 6’2, an eyebrow-raising height for one of the firstborn – who, as a rule, very rarely stray from a range of 5’ to 6’, without difference by sex or race.
  
  For the most part, Quille’s attire is surprisingly light, given Estival’s usual climate: thin spider silk, oddly lacking in much of the way of dye and their natural pale grey, but with surprisingly elaborate patterns sewn into them in silk or – often – some metallic thread. It’s not that she doesn’t have cold-weather clothing – the fur scarf that remains wrapped around her lower face at all times shows that – but as she tells anyone who wonders: the frigid chill of the far north extends deep, deep below the surface, and the climate here is positively balmy in comparison. Dressing like she’s near some geological source of warmth is the only sensible option.
  
  From what little of her face remains uncovered, she almost certainly has the usual refined elven beauty, it’s just hard to see much beyond “those are some mighty pretty eyelashes you have”. Quille’s quite embarrassed by her teeth; like a small minority of her kind, they’re all noticeably sharp. And her ears are, of course, long and pointy – yes, they're also on the long side, that doesn't mean that overly touchy adventurers should play with them.
• Personality: Quille isn’t just quiet physically, she’s a quiet person in general, leaving the business of starting conversations to others and often needing to repeat herself because she’s just not speaking loudly enough. That’s not to say she’s rude or disinterested; the elf watches other people keenly and always answers politely when spoken to.
  
  As is typical for a dark elf found wandering around further south, she’s quite interested in new experiences and new sights, although this only infrequently extends to the local cuisine. As much as she’d want to eat with others, the diet frequently disagrees with her, and exposing her teeth… well, she got more than enough attention when she first arrived.
• Brief Backstory: Dark elf society, despite the harsh environment, isn’t as hostile or uncultured as some southerners like to imagine, and elves that choose to become hunters are actually a minority – a prestigious minority, but not a massive contingent either. Nor is it something that tends to be pushed from parent to child, unlike many other specialisations; it demands a certain natural talent and inclination that can’t be forced.
  
  Quille was one such child with this talent, and rather than follow her parents’ more domestic specialisations – and such things really are specialisations, not careers, with an elf’s endless life and the way the tunnels of the north enforce a migratory lifestyle – she was picked up by the older hunters and taught their ways. How to move silently, how to track and find prey in the deeps, how to kill – and how to do all of these while running away, or fighting for her life when it went wrong.
  
  It was something that she got very good at.
  
  And then, as occasionally happened, she wondered about the warm and sunny lands in their cultures’ songs and stories; the stars and other celestial objects that they can almost never see; the great constructions on the surface and in the dwarves’ halls. So she made sure to find someone to learn the necessary languages from, replaced her worn set of knives in their entirety, and went through the long journey up to the top and then steadily south, through Barukstaed and then into Estival.
  
  This… didn’t go perfectly. She, after all, had nothing in the way or money or tradeable goods on her, and there were some extremely difficult misunderstandings involving livestock that needed to be resolved before she was pointed at the adventurers’ guild as a way to both pay the restitution necessary – a much more practical punishment than imprisoning a baffled and heavily armed elf – and gather the funds she needs before continuing her journey in full.
  
  Quille hasn’t been in the guild long at all, only just starting to find her place amongst the other adventurers and learn about Estival in detail.
• Equipment: Given her background, Quille operates lightly equipped for an adventurer planning to get in the thick of a melee at some point: soft leather, and a very thorough assortment of knives. Armour, in her prior profession, is almost useless compared to not getting caught in the first place, and it’s more a matter of wearing something that can deal with scrapes and sharp rocks and go under actually warm clothing.
  
  Fully half her knives are tools of one kind or another, but the rest cut a neat split between very thin and very pointed daggers, and wicked single-edged things. Interestingly enough, only half of the full set appear to be metal, the others are reworked teeth of some underground monster.
• Skills: First and foremost, Quille was – is, despite her interest in the surface – a dark elf hunter. This is not the skill set and job of someone who tracks and stalks herbivores or fowl that they don’t want to scatter and run, or a grand hunting party to bring down more aggressive quarry. It’s the skills of someone who expects, given the slightest slip, to be in a fight for her life against a raging lithovore that could grind her to dust, against a predator eager to eat her just as much as she wants it, or the mushroom eaters that can somehow survive this environment.
  
  Her movements must make no sound, mustn’t disturb the environment at all; she cannot even be a glimpse in the vision of those creatures that have sight – whether by speed or by remaining in a blindspot. Every strike must be a killing strike into somewhere vulnerable, no matter how protected or hidden. The floor might be too dangerous, or not even there, but there are walls and ceilings too.
  
  And then begins the process of butchering and taking everything back home.
  
  These skills… mostly translate to the above-ground world, but outside of the perpetual snow and extended darkness of the northlands, there are always things that she’s still accounting for and not used to. Leaves. Foliage in general, in all honest. Things not echoing, a sense Quille has never fully accounted for. Shadows are a big one that she slips up on, that she can be seen without being seen, and worked stone is a lot harder to get a grip on (let alone wide open spaces, although caverns and the occasional above-ground hunt don’t make that too crippling).
  
  Although she knows magic, it’s all of a practical bent: cleaning, cooking, creating fires that burn with no fuel to save on things too precious to waste. Some measure of her normal silence is magical, and the ease with which her knives can carve through rock and metal, but the spells are something she uses so constantly and with such ease that to catch her ever casting them in a big display would never happen. Only when a dark elf can cast these spells with a word and keep them going for the length of a hunt are they truly considered a hunter.
  
  Quite unsurprisingly, although she knows Elven (in all its major dialects) and the languages of Barukstaed and Estival reasonably well (enough to puzzle through Veltish), Quille knows nothing of Talderian or its daughter languages, like Ithillane.

Signup Fun

For guild receptionist Ervan Seliac, it had been a slow day. There had been the usual early morning rush of junior adventurers picking up the local tasks but on a rainy day like this things tended to be quiet, and the quiet, bookish man was never the most popular of the receptionists to go up to. Fine by him – it gave more time to catch up on his studies: they could always use more healers and it paid much better than manning the desks.

With the polished tile approaching the counters and the well-lit main hall, it was easy to tell when someone was coming, even with his nose buried in a textbook. There was just a distracting drip, drip, drip…

When he looked up and adjusted his glasses, there was someone standing there, an awkward-looking figure with a slight frown marring what was visible of her features. An elf, obviously an elf with those long ears, figure swallowed under a rough, leathery mantle, the drip coming from the rain pooling off of her cloak.

“Ah… how can I help you?” How long had she been standing there waiting? Ervan leant forward slightly to try and gauge from the size of the puddle. That long? How had she crept up?

Her response was a quiet murmur. “I’m sorry; I didn’t catch that.”

“The guard have advised me to become an adventurer. The magistrate gave me this,” her voice was still soft and distinctly accented, but a pale hand carefully emerged and placed a sealed scroll on the desk.

Ervan took his time checking and breaking the seal before reading the contents – nothing unusual, dock a fraction of the bearer’s pay as fines, or report back to the authorities if they quit early – and tried to ignore the way her eyes seemed to constantly bore into the top of his head.

“This all seems to be in order. There’s some paperwork and an assessment to complete, if you don’t mind following me, miss…?”

“Quille.”

The short trip through to one of the guild offices, normally overboard for a simple onboarding but necessary with the additional legal complexities, was unnerving. More than once, the receptionist felt the need to stop and check that she was following, only to find the tall figure exactly one pace behind. It was just too silent.

Most of the paperwork was simple: name, agreeing to the pay garnishment, and so on. When it came to skills…

“We’d normally start any newcomers at copper rank, but if you have any prior experience or applicable skills, we can take that into account and arrange an assessment,” he explained, giving her a smile.

“I am a hunter,” there was a definitive tone that hadn’t been present in her previous answers.

“Ah, like deer? Or perhaps elk, maybe mammoths…?” Ervan clarified. She had been apprehended for poaching, and it was clearer in the office’s magical illumination that her heritage was of the northern folk. Definitely not a complete novice, but…

“When visiting the surface. I normally hunt anything beneath it, but I like karakmeli the best.”

“That would be…?”

“I think the translation is… rock eater?” Quille dug about beneath her cloak and carefully placed a cleaver on the table. The blade was odd, with a distinct metallic gleam to it despite being otherwise a creamy ivory; the blade and handle were carved from a single piece, leather roughly wrapped around it to provide more grip, “Teeth are better than steel for blades, very long lasting. But hard to work with.”

That was not a creature that he had realised could exist – one where a single tooth could be reworked into such a sizeable implement with a ready cutting edge. Definitely skilled enough for monster-hunting work, if that was Quille’s normal prey, but they would need a full assessment.

“I’ll see who we have available to test your skills.”

---

The assessment was easy to arrange; the Venne branch always had a few silver ranks hanging around and even a gold-ranked adventurer today, and they were happy to give up a little bit of time in exchange for some free drinks later. Despite the weather, they filed out to a nearby common, a few bored city folk lining up to watch what was going on.

When Quille shucked her cloak, one of the adventurers let out a low whistle. “That’s a lot of knives.”

But nothing really in the way of armour, which went some way to explain the hunter’s silent movement… even if the knives ought to offset it somehow.

As a self-professed stealth specialist, the direct test of her combat ability was postponed, starting with an actual test of those stealth capabilities. One or two at a time acting as prey, while the others performed as examiners – and a mage they had wrangled doing her best to fake some cover or interesting features without ruining the common beyond their ability to restore.

The results were odd. Quille’s skills were clearly polished, refined, and tracking her was a veritable headache; if she started in someone’s blindspot it was very hard to catch a glimpse. But she’d get caught out by the oddest things. A novice might not notice the sudden crunch of leaves or the snap of a twig, or the slight hint of a shadow when the sun started to come out, but the more experienced adventurers in this rank could reliably pick it up in time.

When the roles were swapped, there were similar oddities, occasions where she might instantly pinpoint where someone was approaching from, but have to take longer to narrow it down when the terrain was open or muffled wood. Not a problem for your average expedition, but in a high ranked one…

There was a frustrated cast once again to Quille’s brow when they concluded after the combat assessment – her knife fighting skills, at least, were much above the expectation for a stealth specialist concentrating on instant takedowns, although much of that was a slipperiness and difficulty in pinning the woman down rather than out-and-out engagement.

“Does your guild have a large basement?”

Ervan scratched his head. It had several – there was lots to store, even if you only counted the beer and wine cellars. “It does, why?”

“One more test. There, in the dark.”

All the odd flaws finally came together once – after a promise of another round of drinks – the assessment was repeated, down there amongst the wine racks. It wasn’t completely perfect; they didn’t have an equally subterranean group to really contest her, only old Hjalmar. But with much more controlled light sources, or true darkness, and no plants…

Ervan’s wallet suffered at the extra round of drinks he’d had to pay out to make sure his girly scream was forgotten.

The strange, quiet elf was admitted to the guild as a steel rank that evening, as many of the usual crowd as possible making sure to buy her drinks and get to know her.

Against alcohol, she barely even rated a copper.

Sword and Dungeon: An Adventurer's Guild-based Fantasy RP

@SilverPaw Healing is just another branch of magic to learn; it's not something that's the purview of the gods. And nor is magic a requirement for the Reonite and Mayonite clergy* or paladins; it's entirely possible to be a priest or paladin with no magical talent at all – the head of the Reonite church in Thaln is a Hundi former paladin and she's completely devoid of magical ability.

The difference between a paladin and your standard priest is that they specifically learn to fight, rather than how best to deal with the temporal or spiritual issues someone might bring to them, or how to run services more, provide guidance, etc. Quite a sizeable chunk of paladins do, in time, retrain and settle down, though.

As a profession, it rather depends on the nobles, but for the most part they follow your standard noble attitude: the profession of nobility is to be a noble. Ruling. Administrating. When it comes to it, war. It's not the act of learning magic, it would be making of oneself a mage-for-hire. Being an adventurer, so long as it doesn't interfere with other duties (heirs would definitely be discouraged), is probably a reasonably well-regarded thing to do, like taking part in tournaments and so on… as long as you don't disgrace yourself in the process.

*Caveat, there is a magic goddess, it probably is for her.

Sword and Dungeon: An Adventurer's Guild-based Fantasy RP

Before I get into bio responses, I'm going to remind people to please ask if they have questions about some facet of the setting; as anyone involved in Vita's other ongoing RP would know, there's a lot of information to answer most questions, and we don't expect anyone to sift through 70-odd pages of IC information to find it. xD

And for ranks, another rough approximation is that while copper ranks are for novices, iron is perfectly competent, and steel is your experienced, reliable work force, and the majority – not just of players here, but in general – are in these ranks. Silver and above are where you start getting comparisons to prestigious knightly orders or invites to the same.

@Rune_Alchemist Accepted

@Mas Bagus Rejected. While having information hidden from other players is one thing, not contacting myself or Vita and telling us first is a big no-no. This goes double for applying for the higher ranks, triply when the character's entire backstory gives no reason for her to be this strong.

Beyond those reasons, the reference to HP percentages in her spells makes no sense. This is not a LitRPG. What's more, there's a whole host of things in the abilities section that suggest some reaction to blood that should really be covered under personality; it's not adequately explained at all.

@Ti Also rejected – again, the stances thing reads more like something out of an RPG manual, but beyond that it's particularly sparse on detail. Is she good at everything? Something better?

Backstory-wise, things don't really add up. She's a peasant who's gone off to prove herself as a paladin, but… just became an adventurer instead rather than approaching the church. And, despite the background suggesting someone who's gotten training but not experience, you've got a thoroughly mid-ranked and experienced skill set.

A very key point that we'd have raised if asked: paladins are priests, not just holy warriors (the training a paladin and your standard village priest undergoes only diverges along practical lines) or heavily religious. Trying to become one by skill at arms wouldn't be a goal.

@Eisenhorn Accepted

@Thunder999999 Not enough detail; the actual biographic detail is barebones and the abilities appear to have been selected by playing boggle until combat-adjacent terms came up. One particular area of sparseness is… so he's a miller's son (which would be pretty wealthy, for a peasant) who left home only in adulthood to learn magic. But he's only been taught disjointed spells with combat applications? That's not something that happens by accident.

---

Final note for everyone – the characters accepted so far were ones that had some discussion before posting to clarify any hazy points. We really don't mind helping. :T

Sword and Dungeon: An Adventurer's Guild-based Fantasy RP

Here we go, dark elf hunter:

Elf

• Name: Quille. The E is not silent.
• Age: ~300; like many elves (and dark elves in particular), tracking a year of birth has never stood out as necessary or helpful; once you’re old enough then everyone in the community is just used to your being there and a contributing adult. For those who live underground, there’s even less point and religious ceremonies tend to be celebrated on the basis of events rather than the calendar.
• Gender: Female
• Race: Dark Elf. This means, like all other dark elves, that Quille can see in complete darkness, although without true colour, but makes her extra susceptible to sudden changes in light level.
• Rank: Steel. It has been officially noted that this is not an accurate reflection of Quille’s skill or experience, but rather a limitation due to unfamiliarity with (and continuing adaptation to) surface environs. She is, in the event an adventure somehow winds up deep underground and in true darkness, to be officially considered silver rank for its duration.
• Appearance: Like all dark elves, Quille has a comparatively unusual skintone; in her case, the purple hue is slightly more dominant than the grey, giving her complexion more of a pale lilac appearance than anything. Definitely pale for a dark elf. This goes for her eye colour, too, a pleasant amaranth pink. Her hair, quite unsurprisingly, is also white rather than some shade of silver, something all too easy to examine as even the tightly-wound braid reaches nearly to the floor. One unflattering comparison was that she looks like a normal dark elf that’s been washed one too many times.
  
  In terms of physique, she has the usual slender athleticism associated with almost all elven warriors or hunters, albeit at a rather unusual 6’2, an eyebrow-raising height for one of the firstborn – who, as a rule, very rarely stray from a range of 5’ to 6’, without difference by sex or race.
  
  For the most part, Quille’s attire is surprisingly light, given Estival’s usual climate: thin spider silk, oddly lacking in much of the way of dye and their natural pale grey, but with surprisingly elaborate patterns sewn into them in silk or – often – some metallic thread. It’s not that she doesn’t have cold-weather clothing – the fur scarf that remains wrapped around her lower face at all times shows that – but as she tells anyone who wonders: the frigid chill of the far north extends deep, deep below the surface, and the climate here is positively balmy in comparison. Dressing like she’s near some geological source of warmth is the only sensible option.
  
  From what little of her face remains uncovered, she almost certainly has the usual refined elven beauty, it’s just hard to see much beyond “those are some mighty pretty eyelashes you have”. Quille’s quite embarrassed by her teeth; like a small minority of her kind, they’re all noticeably sharp. And her ears are, of course, long and pointy – yes, they're also on the long side, that doesn't mean that overly touchy adventurers should play with them.
• Personality: Quille isn’t just quiet physically, she’s a quiet person in general, leaving the business of starting conversations to others and often needing to repeat herself because she’s just not speaking loudly enough. That’s not to say she’s rude or disinterested; the elf watches other people keenly and always answers politely when spoken to.
  
  As is typical for a dark elf found wandering around further south, she’s quite interested in new experiences and new sights, although this only infrequently extends to the local cuisine. As much as she’d want to eat with others, the diet frequently disagrees with her, and exposing her teeth… well, she got more than enough attention when she first arrived.
• Brief Backstory: Dark elf society, despite the harsh environment, isn’t as hostile or uncultured as some southerners like to imagine, and elves that choose to become hunters are actually a minority – a prestigious minority, but not a massive contingent either. Nor is it something that tends to be pushed from parent to child, unlike many other specialisations; it demands a certain natural talent and inclination that can’t be forced.
  
  Quille was one such child with this talent, and rather than follow her parents’ more domestic specialisations – and such things really are specialisations, not careers, with an elf’s endless life and the way the tunnels of the north enforce a migratory lifestyle – she was picked up by the older hunters and taught their ways. How to move silently, how to track and find prey in the deeps, how to kill – and how to do all of these while running away, or fighting for her life when it went wrong.
  
  It was something that she got very good at.
  
  And then, as occasionally happened, she wondered about the warm and sunny lands in their cultures’ songs and stories; the stars and other celestial objects that they can almost never see; the great constructions on the surface and in the dwarves’ halls. So she made sure to find someone to learn the necessary languages from, replaced her worn set of knives in their entirety, and went through the long journey up to the top and then steadily south, through Barukstaed and then into Estival.
  
  This… didn’t go perfectly. She, after all, had nothing in the way or money or tradeable goods on her, and there were some extremely difficult misunderstandings involving livestock that needed to be resolved before she was pointed at the adventurers’ guild as a way to both pay the restitution necessary – a much more practical punishment than imprisoning a baffled and heavily armed elf – and gather the funds she needs before continuing her journey in full.
  
  Quille hasn’t been in the guild long at all, only just starting to find her place amongst the other adventurers and learn about Estival in detail.
• Equipment: Given her background, Quille operates lightly equipped for an adventurer planning to get in the thick of a melee at some point: soft leather, and a very thorough assortment of knives. Armour, in her prior profession, is almost useless compared to not getting caught in the first place, and it’s more a matter of wearing something that can deal with scrapes and sharp rocks and go under actually warm clothing.
  
  Fully half her knives are tools of one kind or another, but the rest cut a neat split between very thin and very pointed daggers, and wicked single-edged things. Interestingly enough, only half of the full set appear to be metal, the others are reworked teeth of some underground monster.
• Skills: First and foremost, Quille was – is, despite her interest in the surface – a dark elf hunter. This is not the skill set and job of someone who tracks and stalks herbivores or fowl that they don’t want to scatter and run, or a grand hunting party to bring down more aggressive quandary. It’s the skills of someone who expects, given the slightest slip, to be in a fight for her life against a raging lithovore that could grind her to dust, against a predator eager to eat her just as much as she wants it, or the mushroom eaters that can somehow survive this environment.
  
  Her movements must make no sound, mustn’t disturb the environment at all; she cannot even be a glimpse in the vision of those creatures that have sight – whether by speed or by remaining in a blindspot. Every strike must be a killing strike into somewhere vulnerable, no matter how protected or hidden. The floor might be too dangerous, or not even there, but there are walls and ceilings too.
  
  And then begins the process of butchering and taking everything back home.
  
  These skills… mostly translate to the above-ground world, but outside of the perpetual snow and extended darkness of the northlands, there are always things that she’s still accounting for and not used to. Leaves. Foliage in general, in all honest. Things not echoing, a sense Quille has never fully accounted for. Shadows are a big one that she slips up on, that she can be seen without being seen, and worked stone is a lot harder to get a grip on (let alone wide open spaces, although caverns and the occasional above-ground hunt don’t make that too crippling).
  
  Although she knows magic, it’s all of a practical bent: cleaning, cooking, creating fires that burn with no fuel to save on things too precious to waste. Some measure of her normal silence is magical, and the ease with which her knives can carve through rock and metal, but the spells are something she uses so constantly and with such ease that to catch her ever casting them in a big display would never happen. Only when a dark elf can cast these spells with a word and keep them going for the length of a hunt are they truly considered a hunter.
  
  Quite unsurprisingly, although she knows Elven (in all its major dialects) and the languages of Barukstaed and Estival reasonably well (enough to puzzle through Veltish), Quille knows nothing of Talderian or its daughter languages, like Ithillane.

Sword and Dungeon: An Adventurer's Guild-based Fantasy RP Interest Check!

@Dusty Yes. No gunpowder, weapons and armour are all over the place because sapient limits and magic themselves are pretty erratic.

The Metian Institute: Project Gungnir

Back to the cold, mountainous border… Cellica wished she could say it was the same as any other assignment, but that would be a lie. These mountains carried memories that other locales didn't and every sight of an Eryndreal border patrol put her on edge, her hands itching for her sword and her lack of armour leaving her feel uncannily naked. Every time there was a moment of confusion as they didn't come under attack, then reality caught up and she carried on with her day.

That wasn't to say that the elf outwardly showed this, natural stoicism and a proper upbringing leaving her expression unaltered as she went back to her tasks. Logistics, mostly; making sure supplies were moving properly and to where they were needed. It was all good having scientists and engineers and exploration experts; somebody needed to make sure that food was ready and the fuel to cook it. Especially in such a cold environment.

Warm coats if required, too. Her normal attire and the armoured undersuit beneath warded off the worst of the cold – mostly the underlayer, in all honesty – but not everyone was necessarily that equipped. It also did nothing for her head, but she had a thick scarf wrapped around her head. It couldn't entirely keep her ears warm but, well, that was nothing new to her.

It only took a few minutes after the instruction to meet up came through for Cellica to finish up her count, signing off on their current supplies before heading over. At least the interior was warm enough to present more to the others than a slit view of golden eyes and long ears.

… not that it made much difference. A sober Cellica wasn't an expressive one.

Sword and Dungeon: An Adventurer's Guild-based Fantasy RP Interest Check!

Co-GM here, considering my options. o7

The Metian Institute: Project Gungnir

Cellica

Name: Lady Cellica Elamenor

Age: 27

Gender: Female

Race/Place of Origin: Thalodreal

Appearance:

Pic

Despite being lean and slightly shorter than average at 5'2, Cellica still manages to have an air of looking down on her surroundings, an upright bearing and something in those golden eyes making her seem larger than she physically is. She's also athletic rather than skinny, but somewhat counteracts that by being possibly the only person stubborn enough to wear long skirts consistently in dangerous situations.

Scripts or Executables: An Executor – her affinity and interests lie primarily with Discordia, then Svarog and (unsurprisingly for a former officer) Metis. As might be expected for someone who's generally in tune with a goddess so… straightforward in her sphere, Cellica's boons are equally straightforward: she can very briefly enhance her strength or speed to surprising degrees – not long enough for more than one action, but for a sudden exertion of force or, say, a corridor of swinging axes…

From Discordia, she can also purify someone of poisons and their aftereffects. While this might seem to be useful for cleansing evil… no, it's mostly useful for sobering up in a hurry or eliminating hangovers.

Besides those, Cellica has a spell from Svarog that reduces the damage she takes… so long as she's physically interposed with someone she wishes to protect, a legacy from her time in the military and facilitating an evacuation, and a divination from Metis. Quite unsurprising given the conditions that prompted her to learn it, that one simply rates the danger of any given day – excellent with good scouting, terrible if plumbing a complete unknown.

In terms of names –

• Strength Burst
• Speed Burst
• Detox
• Guardian Interdict (It notably immediately stops having an effect if whoever she's protecting is out of danger… or if they hang around to try and continue the effect)
• Augury

Equipment: Consistently, Cellica has a laser sword – something she's surprisingly proficient in, if not exceptional given the conditions she 'practised' in, with a focus on teamwork and… well, fighting a modern war, and staying on as an officer doesn't give much advantage for practising. It's a particularly advanced model, collapsing to a slender tube when deactivated, easily kept in a deep, secure pocket out of sight – and then it turns into a full cruciform long sword of gleaming, glassy blue once activated. A present for retiring from active service to the reserves.

On the down side, her martial background and interests don't extend to keeping a full exosuit… that would be notably rather awkward to procure without good reason, regardless of funding. The compatible undersuit that replaces the traditional medieval padding, though? Oh, she definitely has that on under her normal clothes, although the only giveaway is really the gloves. It is, as she would point out, eminently practical for exploratory work: comfortable in most environmental conditions, tough and resistant to nicks and scrapes, and possibly the only clothing you can wear that can automatically bandage injuries.

Academic Qualifications: Cellica's pure scholarly background seems somewhat… lacking for someone part of the Metian Institute. She's an avid antiquarian, for certain, endlessly engaged by finding objects and traces from the past, but her attitude is clearly one of a collector with a particular interest in old military finds rather than a learned scholar, and she can't really tell you much of their inner workings. Oh, she also dabbles in clockwork – enough to clean up certain things – but that hardly counts either.

Her biggest academic contribution by far? Her family backs the institute quite heavily as one of their major interests in Orvalis. Enough that a scion only a few steps removed from a hobbyist was allowed to join, since her practical skills aren't half bad.

History: Elamenor isn't just a noble family, it's a noble family with a history stretching so far back that entire scholarly works have been written about it and their involvement in both Thalodreal's and the wider world's politics. Since the council's inception, they have regularly managed to secure a spot as the representative of the nobility, and are deeply entwined in the country's trading with Orvalis, either providing indirect patronage or heavy ownership in business in both countries.

But with this position has developed a certain… fatalism. It would ill-suit any of the house's heirs to not be the first to jump at a call to battle, to protect the country in actuality as they believe themselves to do in spirit. And so, after an excellent showing in the Solar Hunt through as traditional means as any – no less than expected of her position – Cellica joined the military.

She didn't find herself a lowly grunt, of course; her education was impeccable and she was fast-tracked as an officer… but even her background and education don't allow for straight entry to a general staff position, and nor would she have accepted it. Seeing frontline combat was inevitable, in all its modern lack of glory, and Cellica served to the end of the war with reasonable distinction.

On returning home, with no more military duties on hand, she promptly fell into an odd mix of debauchery interspersed with collecting anything pre-modern that caught her interest. It was something that threatened to become a problem, a young noble with nothing else on the horizon… but when working with the Metian institute was raised, Cellica jumped on it. Something that would satiate her desire for more conflict, her interests in the past…

And she still has plenty of time for parties.