Age: One hundred years old.
Gender: Female.
Race: Drow.
Weapons and Armour: She wields several chakram - foot-wide rings sharpened to a fine point on the outer edge, thrown underhand to strike opponents as far as one hundred meters away with deadly accuracy. Varashi also wears a khanda on her hip - it is a long, basket-hilted sword with a thick blade sharpened on both sides but with no point to it. As a djinnate, Varashi uses no shield, but wields her weapon two-handed. She trusts her inborn agility to see her through a scrap.
Class: White Drow.
Height: A few hairs under five feet tall.
Weight: About a hundred pounds.
Appearance: Varashi is a slight figure beneath her thick robes and cordial appearance, even for a Drow. She can stand the sunlight better than most, but serves better as a repository for matters of Lore and intrigue rather than a brutal melee combatant - this does not mean, however, that she should be underestimated. She disguises her chakram as bracelets on her forearms, holding her billowy robes in check.
History: Varashi de Ugratara is the daughter of a Drow Magus and a Paladin of the Order of the Stricken Hammer, now Reformed. She was trained in the martial arts of sword and throwing-ring by her mother's family, and came to know and love the Light by her father's teachings. At age twenty, she was initiated into the djinnate, a post unique to the Reformed Order of the Stricken Hammer devoted to hunting out daemonic portals and blocking the way for more monsters of the Night to get through to Arsencia, as well as directly seeking out those daemons and exorcising them. Varashi served well in this regard for several decades, until she was given a new mission - she was tasked with serving as a White Drow in a human city, watching waiting for signs of daemonic activity among the teeming masses. She was in this position in the Maughold when it came under siege by the army of Vayu. Trapped between the friends of her father and the heretics of the Maughold, Varashi steeled herself and fought alongside the mercenaries of Paladins of Vayu. She survived the ensuing slaughter and came to the revelation that there was more than one interpretation of the Light - she then rebelled against the now-broken Old Order of the Palatinate, and joined her parents in the new Reformed Order of the Stricken Hammer. She is now on duty, once again a djinnate, as the power vacuum left by the deaths of so many Paladins has allowed many daemons to enter Arsencia.
Alignment: Varashi is a servant of the Light, and enemy of any who would oppose it.
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Name: Agrippus Belisarius Martellus, or "Martel".
Age: Mid-thirties.
Gender: Male.
Race: Human.
Weapons and Armour: Martel primarily uses a broadsword and buckler in combat, though like many Paladins of the Reformed Order of the Stricken Hammer, Martel uses the Dwarf-forged namesake of his Order as a symbolic, but utilitarian, weapon if needed. Like many other Paladins, Martel can manifest his faith in the Light in a powerful flash that can directly disable daemonic entities and otherwise severely injure enemies.
Class: Paladin.
Height: Six feet, four inches.
Weight: About two hundred fifty pounds in full battle gear.
Appearance: Martel is as imposing a Man as they come. He is tall and broad, and carries a monstrous sword on his hip. He shaves his head, like all Paladins of the Reformed Orders, and has skin the colour of undiluted coffee. His eyes are brown as the sand and teeth white as ivory.
History: Martel was born to a family of nomads in Nyasa. Initially it appeared he would be a merchant, like his father, but it was not to be. A band of raiders attacked the caravan Martel's family was traveling with, killing his family and many others in the assault and taking the rest for slaves. Martel spent several years as a servant to a rich man, until one dawn day when a group of Paladins assaulted them in turn. One Paladin, Narses, saw Martel rise up against his captors in the attack and took him under his wing as his squire. He was raised then in the Order of the Stricken Hammer, until he was judged proficient in the skills of combat, horsemanship, chivalry, and faith and knowledge of the Light, when he was interred as a Paladin himself, and given his hammer. Martel served with great distinction in rooting out the groups of desert raiders and highwaymen that had plagued his homeland, making the roads of Nyasa safe for travelers. This task complete, Martel - now known as Agrippus Martell for his services to the Order - was delivered by ship to the Minotaur Lands to hunt down the Drow that ravaged the countryside for their slave trade. He uncovered a massive cartel of gladiatorial-funded slave traders, captured their leaders and destroyed the daemon from whom they harvested power. This earned Martel the name of Belisarius, and several years later he slew another daemon, making him Martellus. It was at this great rank that he fought for Vayu in the Siege of the Maughold, and after seeing the error of his ways, he repented and Reformed the Order that had saved his life.
Alignment: Serving as a literal Hammer of the Light, it is quite simple to see where Martel's alignment lies.
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Name: Toru Isao (modernized version of his chosen name, Toruisao. Ironically, it's simply a linguistic similarity to Morion's surname, nothing more.)
Age: Sixty-two.
Sex: Male.
Appearance: Toru stands roughly five feet, five inches tall and is very muscular, given his 'rough and tumble' lifestyle. He wears a massive set of furs and homemade clothing, preserved by the ways of his people to blend in time with the seasons and region, to make a sort of artificial camouflage. Toru has very dark, almost black skin well-tanned by the Sun, and prematurely grey hair kept cropped close to his skull except for a few warrior braids.
Personality: Toru is a bit of a loner, having spent his entire life in the Mountains. He is descended from a clan of aboriginal trappers, hunters, and druids, which has been reduced to a handful of lonely individuals wandering the wilderness and keeping the old ways alive. Toru is acutely aware of this, and so has a unsurprisingly cynical, misanthropic take on the world.
History: See above.
Skills: In his lifetime spent wandering the eternally winter-bound mountains and surrounding regions, Toru has become an expert in surviving off of what little fat the harsh high-elevation climate will produce, able to glean whatever subsistence he needs so long as he is in his comfort zone.
Ethereal: Toru, having been raised in the ways of his clan, has access to multiple venues of what outsiders would call 'magic' but which are everyday tools to him. He is able to communicate with both his animal familiar, a massive wolfhound named Tur (pronounced like 'sure' (see Number One of this list for an idea of his appearance)), as well as 'bond' with him, when given enough preparation. Toru has a weaker, but still formidable, connection to most other mountain-dwelling flora and fauna. His own amount of mana is, while nothing to sneeze at in the solitary world of white he lives in, quite pitiful in comparison to that found among many other residents of the world at large. To supplement this, whenever he works something that requires mana, Toru is able to 'draw in' the life energy of the environment around him. While it could very well be fatal to the life-forms in question, Toru is careful to exercise appropriate caution when doing so and only taking enough to get by and accomplish the task at hand.
Equipment: Toru caries several fur blankets, sewn together with 'coldstones' in between. The coldstones, made by old secrets of Toru's clan, take the appearance of polished quartz - perfectly symmetrical, they absorb the cold air from one facet, and expound it out of the opposite facet in a slow wave of heated air. Putting them inside a blanket creates an effect exactly like that of modern thermal sheets. He carries several spare coldstones, which are very useful in the frozen wilds in a number of instances - replacing tender for lighting fires, and for cooking food, among others. Toru also carries a number of odds and ends, such as an icepick, crude compass (a magnetized rock hanging from a string, that leans slightly towards north), and maps of the mountain-passes and surrounding wilderness.
Weapons: He has also become quite skilled with the traditional weapons of his clan, the ruge (pronounced roog-ah (plural - rugel (pronounced roog-el (a sort of short halberd, featuring a blunted club on one face and a curved ax-blade on the alternate one)))) and the itwa spear (pronounced eet-wah (plural - itwel (pronounced eet-wel (a short-handled, long-bladed weapon almost identical to the Zulu 'Iklwa' spear)))).
Magic: Toru possesses multiple 'handy' quasi-magical techniques invaluable to living in the wilderness. They include:
-Silence. Toru can increase the mass of the snow, or water, in an area, making it almost impossible for anything inside the affected 'zone' to hear anything.
-Thaw/Freeze. Toru can manipulate the natural system of osmosis, except with heat rather than water. By changing the course of temperature, Toru can either flash-freeze or melt the ice or liquid of his choice. He can also 'stretch out' the process, making it less damaging to the object in question, but this requires more vital energy, time, and mana.
-Purify. Toru can purify an area of water, in any form, removing the molecules of substances neither oxygen nor hydrogen, making it clearer - he can use this on a patch of snow, blinding anything looking directly at it.
-Bonding. If near Tur, it is possible for he and Toru to link psychs - each coming to a higher level of awareness, able to function better as a team. It allows them to communicate by thought, and if one is injured (usually Toru), it allows the weaker of the two to maintain a certain level of awareness. However, both Toru and Tur must be able to be near enough to sense one another's presence through sight or sound for the bonding to work.
-Cellular Manipulation. In addition to the above specifics, Toru can manipulate water and oxygen in any number of unique ways, such as causing a small area of snow to melt into the air around something, the flash-freeze into molecular-thin crystalline shards to impale it a million times over.
Attire/Armour: Given the great temperatures of his climate, Toru declines to wear highly-temperature-sensitive metal armour, and instead depends on his wits and skill to survive when forced to combat.
I'll fill in that last slot whenever I get a more definite idea of what I'd like to do with a character... Thoughts? Opinions?
Edited by mike_, 03 June 2010 - 03:49 PM.
To add a badass old man!
