Post by Hermia on Mar 8, 2012 17:52:07 GMT -5
Player: 0173
Contact: (PM me)
Intentions: Neutral
Background
Name: Hermia
Race: Wildfey
Species: Fox-Faerie
Age: 26
Tier: 3
Social
Place of Birth: Arcadia
Allegiances: None
Aspirations: Create a philosopher's stone, become a High Fey, become the greatest hedge-witch in the world, toilet-train Trouble
Nicknames: -
Titles: Journeyman Hedge-Witch
Relatives: Gilded Jacob (Father), Thessaly Silverwind (Mother), numerous siblings, The Circle of the Waning Moon (adoptive family)
Significant Other: -
Mental
Personality: Hermia is a little girl with big ambitions, and she isn't going to let her small size keep her from climbing her personal mountains. She has a personal addiction to knowledge, as her peers are quick to warn newer acquaintances - a burning passion for its acquisition, verification and subsequent dispensation to all caught in earshot at the time. She knows a lot, particularly when it comes to magic, and she knows she knows - and she's not afraid to let everyone else know, too. Her serious, no-nonsense disposition is a constant feature of her behavior, boiling over into near-hysteria under excessive pressure, and crystallizing into sharp, driven focus when she's closing in on something she wants.
Likes: Gathering rare Materials, brewing complicated potions, learning magical theory, practicing spellwork, flying, convincing pixies to dance and collecting their dust, making or rediscovering useful magical formulas, overcoming challenges, Trouble
Dislikes: Slackers, laziness, misinformation, personal failure, toilet-training Trouble
Strengths: What Hermia's learned, which is already substantial, she's learned well - and she isn't about to stop learning. She goes about her endeavors with meticulous care, ready to root out and analyze the smallest detail from start to finish. With no background information to build on, she's willing to take a few risks to get an investigation going - but always has multiple backup plans from B1 through to Z5. She works hard, she works smart, she pushes herself to edge of her abilities, and where possible, she finishes what she starts.
Weaknesses: Taking everything into account is taxing on Hermia's time and mental faculties. In both departments, she has more than most, but she has limits and often drives herself past them in a fit of bloody-minded determination. When working on a personal project, as is often the case, Hermia's fuse is shorter than usual. She becomes terse and irritable, snaps at people, and has to struggle to keep from turning arguments into hexing matches. Personal mistakes drive her into sleepless nights of isolated research and double-triple-quadruple checking to see what went wrong, leaving her a run-down wreck. When dealing with others, it isn't common for her to stick an unasked-for helping hand into any situation that could use just a little more perfect, and her brusque attitude towards correcting people doesn't win her many friends. Being ignored irks her even further, and heightens her commitment to harass the miscreants into submission. It rarely works.
Physical
Major Details: Hermia's light brown fox ears stick out through her straight black hair, and she has three sand-colored, black-tipped tails.
Appearance: Hermia can shapeshift between two forms: that of a 2 ft gold-furred (animal) fox with multiple tails, and a slender, 4 ft almost-human girl with fox ears, gold eyes with slitted pupils and fox tails. She most commonly uses her humanoid form, though her animal form does see its utility for hunting with its improved senses. Her choice of clothing is simple, opting purely for function - a brown form-fitting tunic blouse, leggings and black shoes. A white ribbon ties her shoulder-length black hair in place.
Natural Abilities: Hermia is quick and agile in both forms, with an endurance built up from years of travelling on foot and living out in the field. Regular practice with knife, wand and pen has given her steady hands and precise motor control.
Natural Traits: Fox ears and eyes (in humanoid form); usual traits of a red fox (as the animal)
Strengths: Hermia is much less hesitant in hand-to-hand combat. She attacks quickly and precisely, and isn't afraid to fight dirty. In her animal form, her predatorial instincts come to bear with ruthless, efficient savagery. Her natural agility, boosted by frequent training and coupled with her stamina, can keep her dodging rings around opponents for extended periods of time, letting her wear them out or chase them down before finally moving in for the kill.
Weaknesses: Countless hours of practice can only go so far before physics and biology enter the picture too. Hermia's small, lightweight body can't put much strength into a blow without magic to augment it, and it certainly can't take damage as well as it dishes it out. One good haymaker punch from the average human adult can knock her off her feet and leave her reeling when she finally gets back up.
Magical
Specializations:
- Tier 1: Material (Night), Proficiency 4. Hermia can draw magical strength from the night and use it to power her spells or boost her stamina and focus.
- Tier 2: Written (Runes), Proficiency 4. Hermia can work magical effects by inscribing runes on a solid surface.
- Tier 3: Spoken (Latin), Proficiency 4. Hermia can cast spells by speaking incantations in Latin.
Visual Display: When Hermia's rune spells are live, they glow with a faint indigo light. The effects of her Spoken spells vary in color and form, and change according to the spell itself.
Special Abilities: Enhanced Speed 1, Insight (Eyes), Hypnosis, Familiar (Partial, Asagi Salamander: "Trouble")
Bonus Special Abilities: Animal Shapeshifting 1, Phasing
Unique Abilities: Hermia's fox ears and eyes, retained in both forms, grant her the sharpened senses of her species - hearing seven times more acute than a humans, and fairly clear vision even in low light. In her fox form, she has the sensitive nose and whiskers of the animal, which improve her sense of smell and touch as well. In either form, Hermia can project indigo flames of tier 1 strength from her tails and fingers or paws.
Strengths: Hermia knows a lot, and knows it well, giving her numerous options in and out of battle and at least decent mastery over all of them. She constantly shows up prepared for quick magic work, with potion vials and her wand in easy reach, nasty surprises up her sleeves and, if she can, a freshly revised knowledge of her opponents' weaknesses. Her runes are neatly inscribed, her incantations carefully enunciated and her Materials gathered, kept and prepared in the cleanest methods possible - if the question is magical in nature, she quite likely has an answer, and it's almost definitely a good one.
Weaknesses: All that memory work is a lot to keep track of, and the best theoretical plans are often the first to go down in flames on contact with reality. Hermia tries for some fluidity in her plans, but with so many good options open, choosing the best - and she would never settle for anything less - becomes almost impossible. Hermia often hesitates while going over options, if even for a split second - valuable time in which windows of opportunity open before promptly slamming shut.
Inventory
Mundane:
-A small metal cauldron , slightly more volume than a basketball, used for brewing magical potions.
-A clay cooking pot, the same size as the cauldron.
-A burlap satchel with separate components stitched into the fabric for carrying all her belongings.
-A pocket notebook labelled "Hermia's Fantastical Field Notes", filled with hand-written notes on Material ingredients, various locations, and general tips for getting by with Material magic.
-Various used textbooks on magic with notes by their former owners scribbled inside.
-Three silver daggers for self-defense, carving runes, or preparing ingredients.
Magical:
-Witch's Steed - Material/Written (Activated). A hazel broom with runes along the handle, and stiff bristles threaded with eagle feathers brushed with pixie dust. Once every twelve hours, the broom can be used as a transport, keyed to the user's mental commands, for flying at a maximum of seventy miles an hour. Performing a triple barrel roll causes the broom's flight speed to dramatically increase, but makes it difficult to maneuver and uses up its pixie dust supply much faster.
-Storm Wand - Material (Perpetual). A 10 inch wand made of mahogany wood, with a Veela hair at its core. Wind, lightning and water spells are amplified in strength by half a tier when cast through this wand.
History
Hermia's father was a nine-tailed fox faerie named Gilded Jacob; her mother a sylph named Thessaly Silverwind. Hermia's siblings were numerous, a fair number born to different mothers, but she never learned their names. They were simply people who existed at some remote distance; the first of the names rarely raised his own children, rather believing in scattering the seed and letting it grow for itself.
Hermia's family was the coven of fey Hedge-witches, her aunts and sisters and Grand Mother who raised her to value hard work, intelligence and self-sufficiency. Her upbringing was unsheltered, but not unkind. The Circle of the Waning Moon only accepted and fostered those born to survive, and Hermia was brought to them as a healthy infant with sharp golden eyes. She was given a position of respect as an adopted daughter of the coven, and then raised to be worthy of it.
Perhaps she was born to survive - to scrape through each day with barely enough prey in her stomach to see her to the next - but thriving was another story. The coven called themselves Hedge-witches for a reason, and even as she lived past her ninth winter, Hermia demonstrated barely an ounce of magical talent. She was still hunting with her claws and teeth, more often than not running wild as a fox with only a single tail, flushing rabbits from their burrows with weak yellow fires and chasing them down to rend and devour.
She was fast, and cunning, and fierce as a fox before fleeing prey, but when her aptitude for magic was practically non-existent, she was less than mediocre in a group which prized power and demanded talent. The Circle knew this, and she knew it too - and it gnawed at her, day and night, that she was inadequate to a family who needed more than sharp claws and sharper instinct to survive in the dangerous wilds of Arcadia.
She could barely stand, let alone walk, the day she was summoned to the Grand Mother. The old woman regarded the trembling child of nine years with calm, stern eyes, and laid out an ultimatum before her. Hermia, she explained, was the first fey-child of the Circle whose once-foreseen potential had remained dormant for so long. She was a disappointment, undeserving of the sisterhood and respect she had grown up with for all her life - and if she remained as such, what was undeserved would be taken away. She would learn and master some form of magic, even at its most basic level, by the winter of her tenth year, or the coven would abandon and forget her, leaving her to live on what little ability she had as little more than a common or garden fox.
This left Hermia terrified to no end - or rather, she was terrified to no end from the start, or perhaps she might have sensed the tickle of magic about her ears, or noticed the few knowing glances the attending witches failed to hide. Of course, no child of the Circle would have dared to believe the Grand Mother might lie, and no one saw fit to mention she was hardly the first whose magical talent arrived late, or that enough strong emotion might shake just a trickle of it free...
What she did know, that next morning after a sleepless night of heart-chilling terror, was that she overheard two of her younger aunts discussing a simple potion where they thought no one could hear. One of the most basic to be found, they said; the brewing process within easy grasp of even the most dimwitted human peasant, and yet a potent key to great power if altered with just the right ingredients, some of which were easily available from the open fields... the pair arranged a rendezvous later in the day, to delve deeper into the details of the potion's ingredients.
Hermia was present that evening, concealed in the shrubbery while the two witches talked, and she heard all the details. She sneaked back to the company of the other juniors, repeating the stolen secret until it was burned into her mind.
Her quest for redemption began the next morning. Armed only with the barest of equipment needed to gather reagents and turn them into a potion, she spent nearly the whole day searching for the ingredients she needed, only remembering to hunt down a meal when her stomach growled in the late evening.
The ingredients might have been easily gathered by a budding witch with prior experience, but to one with barely any knowledge beyond descriptions and locations gleaned from word of mouth, the task seemed all but impossible. Hermia was barehanded after the first week of searching, the ingredient list still fresh in her mind and taunting her. But there was still time, and if she could only search a little harder, she knew; she knew...
Months of searching yielded little; what ingredients she found and harvested or stole from nests, were often rotted and useless within a fortnight. She practiced creating her own 'potions' in private; learning to cook a stew, while hardly a magical endeavor, was something that might help her. If she failed to create the potion, as a despairing side of her contemplated more with each day, at least she wouldn't need to spend the rest of her life on a diet of raw mouse.
If the ingredients of that potion were to spoil soon, she tossed them into the pot and made an experiment out of the meal. Through repeated eavesdropping on the pair who had inadvertently shared that secret with her, Hermia learned which materials were safe to use, and which ones were likely to be fatal. An older, more learned individual might find it suspicious that the two met at least once a week to go over the ingredient list and procedure, but this never occurred to her. And the winter of her tenth year drew ever closer...
It was a late autumn midnight, a year after the ultimatum, and she was still no closer to her goal. Yet another aunt asked her to mind a cooking pot while she tended to more pressing concerns. Hermia sat by the bubbling cauldron, and looked over all the ingredients sitting in their jars and phials, all freshly gathered and waiting to be prepared and added to the pot, and her spine tingled in sudden recognition...
Hardly daring, hardly believing, Hermia set to work with knife and pestle and mortar. Constantly on the lookout, whirling around with a panicked glance at every noise that sounded like a footfall, she added the items to the pot, timing the next dose down to the last precise stir, feeling the darkness of the night around as it seemed to breathe strength into her veins, as her body seemed to breathe vitality into the brew...
She dipped a ladle into the fizzing, sparking blue mixture, and lifted it to her lips.
The Grand Mother managed to slap it away, snatch her clear and dash out of range in time.
Later, she would claim, that was one of the strongest Minor Blasting Potions she had ever seen in the last century. (Albeit somewhat unstable, itself the result of being prepared too hastily and by anxious fingers.)
At the age of ten years old, just months away from eleven, Hermia was declared a Hedge-Witch Neophyte, and placed under the tutelage of a hunter-herbalist Material mage. She proved an eager pupil, unafraid of rote practice and ready to listen and commit to memory. Where stolen lessons had taken months to pay off, new potions - learned, gathered for and prepared under minimal but ever-present guidance - were now learned in weeks, and then days...
Hermia was sixteen when her tutor brought her away from the Circle. They journeyed far to the west and north, further than they had ever gone in her life. Two months on foot tested her abilities as never before, their survival seemingly dependent on her quick thinking, preparation for danger and ability to salvage or improvise potion ingredients, and she rose to meet the test each time, though she was reeling from exhaustion and unhealed injuries when they finally reached the doors of a grand castle, and she collapsed as they stepped through the gates...
When she awoke in the infirmary, all that remained of her tutor was a message stored in a conch shell, declaring her a Journeyman Hedge-Witch, instructing her to complete the next course of her journey here in Camford School of Magic, and bidding her farewell.
The next nine years were a trial to her mind and spirit on a level she had never seen before. Her old life seemed a stroll in the gardens of Fleur, next to the challenges of school.
She was well prepared for Potions lessons, placement tests putting her several years ahead of a beginner, and she was able to branch out further into the field of magical crafting. Within three years of dedication and sheer hard work, she was able to set aside her generic trainee's wand for a personally crafted wand of her own.
Learning to read and write was a much harder task - and yet, in some ways, easier than most for her to pick up a regular language of communication, and a rune language for crafting spells. Her knowledge of the written word, up to this point, had been a blank slate. There was nothing to erase and rewrite, and no need to find small spaces on the slate to squeeze in more words. She only needed to fill that slate in her mind - and she went at it with a will, poring over her books and essays and dictionaries until the early hours of the morning.
Four years of concurrently studying Written and Material magic saw her rising to the top of her class in both fields, and left her secure enough in her mastery of both to attempt another field of study.
Picking up Latin as a spoken language, learning to understand it and channel magic through her voice to create a variety of different effects, resulted in many a sleepless night of muttering broken phrases, mispronouncing words, and causing all hell to break loose, on the off chance that anything happened at all. A three-year course took five years for her to graduate - her the first- and third-year final exams were dismal failures the first time around, the former leaving all students at ground zero unable to say anything more than the Fleurian phrase for "cheese omelette". To her eternal embarrassment, the Headmaster thought it was an ingenious spell and promptly reverse-engineered and mastered the devastation for his own entertainment.
But failure had never been permanent for Hermia before, and she wasn't about to let it begin sticking to her. She threw herself into her Latin studies with a concerted near-fury, and through five hard years of work, managed to beat the demons of mispronunciation and bad syntax over the heads until they curled up and died.
It was an uphill battle, all around, but Hermia had sixteen years' worth of experience to fall back on. It had shown that with enough hard work, failure would always be temporary. The nine years she spent in Camford only further cemented that belief in her mind.
Hard-earned academic success, in its usual way, drew attention. Several professors put in a good word for her, regarding her work ethic and dedication to excellence.
The same professors, and several more, also put in quite a few concerned words about her attitude toward everything else, and sometimes toward her studies as well.
No mortal made of flesh could spend forever studying night after night with barely an hour of sleep. Even the sentient elementals, and Camford had seen quite a number in its time, could go slightly insane with a diet of all work and no play. According to some of the Camford staff, Hermia might have gone through school considerably faster if she hadn't run herself down in mind and body. Her unconscious figure was a regular feature of the infirmary, appearing every few weeks to spend several days on the mend.
According to the same faculty members, Hermia would have made more friends, too, if she hadn't been so obsessed with excellence. She wasn't selfish about her knowledge; on the contrary, those who approached her for advice with their work found her all too willing to listen and help them out. She acquired a taste for helping others out, whether she was asked to or not - with her blunt, matter-of-fact assessment of others, mincing no words and pulling no punches, students began approaching her with extreme caution. A few avoided her outright. Several incidents began as advice offered free of obligation or tact, and escalated into shouting matches, then hexing matches, as fuses, tempers, and eventually castle fixtures were set ablaze.
Hermia graduated as an adept in the fields of Written, Spoken and Material magic, taking with her a strengthened belief in the value of diligence and a short temper for dealing with lazy mortals and their wrong opinions. Camford heaved a collective sigh of relief the moment she was off the grounds.
For her part, Hermia never looked back. She had a life of hard work ahead of her, with knowledge to gather and power to earn. Camford had served its purpose, but towards the end had only grated on her nerves - too many people to work with, and barely any of them diligent enough to be worth the trouble. She stepped out into the wilderness, onto her new path as a wandering explorer.
Ten months into her solitary journey, she acquired an Asagi Salamander egg off the black market. Plans to boil it down for a potion were ruined when it hatched, and the creature inside promptly decided she was its mother.
Learning to live with a travelling companion, even an unintelligent one that hung on to every word she spoke, became her new challenge. A hardy, fire breathing familiar, in the long run, would outweigh the benefits of a few draughts of fireproofing potion. He would be worth the effort - every ounce of the considerable energy she would invest to train him well.
Two months on, he still wasn't toilet trained. But Hermia had gone on without success for much longer, and she knew that even this, with enough patience, was only a matter of time...
Familiar
Name: Trouble
Race: Magical Beast
Species: Asagi Salamander
Tier: 1
Appearance: Trouble is a foot long from head to tail, with a slender body covered in hard bright blue scales. The scales form a sharp, broad ridge along the center of his back, guarding his spine from neck to tail base. His underbelly has a softer, cream-colored hide. His eyes are large and black, with a liquid quality to their appearance. His wide mouth contains rows of sharp teeth, perfect for piercing flesh with a little help from his strong jaws. Two large, sharp-pointed ears grow upward from the sides of his head, and two much smaller blue horns, only stubs at the moment, sprout between them.
Natural Abilities: Trouble has an acute sense of smell and the ability to sense heat moving from up to a yard away.
Natural Traits: Trouble has sharp claws and teeth, and hard scales on his back, head and limbs that can stop most mundane projectiles.
Specializations: Tier 1: Physical (Fire), Proficiency 1. Trouble can breathe indigo flames.
Special Abilities: Burn Immunity, Cold Immunity
Bonus Special Abilities: Enhanced Recovery, Chimerical Shapeshifting (Tongue Length)
Unique Abilities: Trouble can safely consume any nonmagical combustible or explosive material as a food source. The scales on his back are hard and sharp, able to deflect most mundane projectiles and pierce flesh.
Strengths: Trouble's strong jaws, sharp teeth, firebreath and utter devotion to his adoptive mother make him a much more durable, if straightforward, terror in a fight. Hermia is training him to curl into a ball and roll over opponents with his sharp back scales.
Weaknesses: Outside of a fight, Trouble is more of a handful than a help, as most long-lived pets might be at two months of age. He's just started teething again, which makes him more fond of biting things - strangers, furniture, rocks, trees, Hermia's tails - and his steadily growing appetite is compounded by an addiction to spices and explosives. His devotion has proven to be a double-edged sword at times - Hermia has to stuff him headfirst into her satchel just to hold a conversation for more than ten minutes without someone getting bitten, and she has to keep a close eye on her cauldron to make sure he doesn't come back from hunting and drop the half-eaten remains of his mangled prey into the concoction to share with her. And he isn't toilet trained.
Magical Items: -
Contact: (PM me)
Intentions: Neutral
Background
Name: Hermia
Race: Wildfey
Species: Fox-Faerie
Age: 26
Tier: 3
Social
Place of Birth: Arcadia
Allegiances: None
Aspirations: Create a philosopher's stone, become a High Fey, become the greatest hedge-witch in the world, toilet-train Trouble
Nicknames: -
Titles: Journeyman Hedge-Witch
Relatives: Gilded Jacob (Father), Thessaly Silverwind (Mother), numerous siblings, The Circle of the Waning Moon (adoptive family)
Significant Other: -
Mental
Personality: Hermia is a little girl with big ambitions, and she isn't going to let her small size keep her from climbing her personal mountains. She has a personal addiction to knowledge, as her peers are quick to warn newer acquaintances - a burning passion for its acquisition, verification and subsequent dispensation to all caught in earshot at the time. She knows a lot, particularly when it comes to magic, and she knows she knows - and she's not afraid to let everyone else know, too. Her serious, no-nonsense disposition is a constant feature of her behavior, boiling over into near-hysteria under excessive pressure, and crystallizing into sharp, driven focus when she's closing in on something she wants.
Likes: Gathering rare Materials, brewing complicated potions, learning magical theory, practicing spellwork, flying, convincing pixies to dance and collecting their dust, making or rediscovering useful magical formulas, overcoming challenges, Trouble
Dislikes: Slackers, laziness, misinformation, personal failure, toilet-training Trouble
Strengths: What Hermia's learned, which is already substantial, she's learned well - and she isn't about to stop learning. She goes about her endeavors with meticulous care, ready to root out and analyze the smallest detail from start to finish. With no background information to build on, she's willing to take a few risks to get an investigation going - but always has multiple backup plans from B1 through to Z5. She works hard, she works smart, she pushes herself to edge of her abilities, and where possible, she finishes what she starts.
Weaknesses: Taking everything into account is taxing on Hermia's time and mental faculties. In both departments, she has more than most, but she has limits and often drives herself past them in a fit of bloody-minded determination. When working on a personal project, as is often the case, Hermia's fuse is shorter than usual. She becomes terse and irritable, snaps at people, and has to struggle to keep from turning arguments into hexing matches. Personal mistakes drive her into sleepless nights of isolated research and double-triple-quadruple checking to see what went wrong, leaving her a run-down wreck. When dealing with others, it isn't common for her to stick an unasked-for helping hand into any situation that could use just a little more perfect, and her brusque attitude towards correcting people doesn't win her many friends. Being ignored irks her even further, and heightens her commitment to harass the miscreants into submission. It rarely works.
Physical
Major Details: Hermia's light brown fox ears stick out through her straight black hair, and she has three sand-colored, black-tipped tails.
Appearance: Hermia can shapeshift between two forms: that of a 2 ft gold-furred (animal) fox with multiple tails, and a slender, 4 ft almost-human girl with fox ears, gold eyes with slitted pupils and fox tails. She most commonly uses her humanoid form, though her animal form does see its utility for hunting with its improved senses. Her choice of clothing is simple, opting purely for function - a brown form-fitting tunic blouse, leggings and black shoes. A white ribbon ties her shoulder-length black hair in place.
Natural Abilities: Hermia is quick and agile in both forms, with an endurance built up from years of travelling on foot and living out in the field. Regular practice with knife, wand and pen has given her steady hands and precise motor control.
Natural Traits: Fox ears and eyes (in humanoid form); usual traits of a red fox (as the animal)
Strengths: Hermia is much less hesitant in hand-to-hand combat. She attacks quickly and precisely, and isn't afraid to fight dirty. In her animal form, her predatorial instincts come to bear with ruthless, efficient savagery. Her natural agility, boosted by frequent training and coupled with her stamina, can keep her dodging rings around opponents for extended periods of time, letting her wear them out or chase them down before finally moving in for the kill.
Weaknesses: Countless hours of practice can only go so far before physics and biology enter the picture too. Hermia's small, lightweight body can't put much strength into a blow without magic to augment it, and it certainly can't take damage as well as it dishes it out. One good haymaker punch from the average human adult can knock her off her feet and leave her reeling when she finally gets back up.
Magical
Specializations:
- Tier 1: Material (Night), Proficiency 4. Hermia can draw magical strength from the night and use it to power her spells or boost her stamina and focus.
- Tier 2: Written (Runes), Proficiency 4. Hermia can work magical effects by inscribing runes on a solid surface.
- Tier 3: Spoken (Latin), Proficiency 4. Hermia can cast spells by speaking incantations in Latin.
Visual Display: When Hermia's rune spells are live, they glow with a faint indigo light. The effects of her Spoken spells vary in color and form, and change according to the spell itself.
Special Abilities: Enhanced Speed 1, Insight (Eyes), Hypnosis, Familiar (Partial, Asagi Salamander: "Trouble")
Bonus Special Abilities: Animal Shapeshifting 1, Phasing
Unique Abilities: Hermia's fox ears and eyes, retained in both forms, grant her the sharpened senses of her species - hearing seven times more acute than a humans, and fairly clear vision even in low light. In her fox form, she has the sensitive nose and whiskers of the animal, which improve her sense of smell and touch as well. In either form, Hermia can project indigo flames of tier 1 strength from her tails and fingers or paws.
Strengths: Hermia knows a lot, and knows it well, giving her numerous options in and out of battle and at least decent mastery over all of them. She constantly shows up prepared for quick magic work, with potion vials and her wand in easy reach, nasty surprises up her sleeves and, if she can, a freshly revised knowledge of her opponents' weaknesses. Her runes are neatly inscribed, her incantations carefully enunciated and her Materials gathered, kept and prepared in the cleanest methods possible - if the question is magical in nature, she quite likely has an answer, and it's almost definitely a good one.
Weaknesses: All that memory work is a lot to keep track of, and the best theoretical plans are often the first to go down in flames on contact with reality. Hermia tries for some fluidity in her plans, but with so many good options open, choosing the best - and she would never settle for anything less - becomes almost impossible. Hermia often hesitates while going over options, if even for a split second - valuable time in which windows of opportunity open before promptly slamming shut.
Inventory
Mundane:
-A small metal cauldron , slightly more volume than a basketball, used for brewing magical potions.
-A clay cooking pot, the same size as the cauldron.
-A burlap satchel with separate components stitched into the fabric for carrying all her belongings.
-A pocket notebook labelled "Hermia's Fantastical Field Notes", filled with hand-written notes on Material ingredients, various locations, and general tips for getting by with Material magic.
-Various used textbooks on magic with notes by their former owners scribbled inside.
-Three silver daggers for self-defense, carving runes, or preparing ingredients.
Magical:
-Witch's Steed - Material/Written (Activated). A hazel broom with runes along the handle, and stiff bristles threaded with eagle feathers brushed with pixie dust. Once every twelve hours, the broom can be used as a transport, keyed to the user's mental commands, for flying at a maximum of seventy miles an hour. Performing a triple barrel roll causes the broom's flight speed to dramatically increase, but makes it difficult to maneuver and uses up its pixie dust supply much faster.
-Storm Wand - Material (Perpetual). A 10 inch wand made of mahogany wood, with a Veela hair at its core. Wind, lightning and water spells are amplified in strength by half a tier when cast through this wand.
History
Hermia's father was a nine-tailed fox faerie named Gilded Jacob; her mother a sylph named Thessaly Silverwind. Hermia's siblings were numerous, a fair number born to different mothers, but she never learned their names. They were simply people who existed at some remote distance; the first of the names rarely raised his own children, rather believing in scattering the seed and letting it grow for itself.
Hermia's family was the coven of fey Hedge-witches, her aunts and sisters and Grand Mother who raised her to value hard work, intelligence and self-sufficiency. Her upbringing was unsheltered, but not unkind. The Circle of the Waning Moon only accepted and fostered those born to survive, and Hermia was brought to them as a healthy infant with sharp golden eyes. She was given a position of respect as an adopted daughter of the coven, and then raised to be worthy of it.
Perhaps she was born to survive - to scrape through each day with barely enough prey in her stomach to see her to the next - but thriving was another story. The coven called themselves Hedge-witches for a reason, and even as she lived past her ninth winter, Hermia demonstrated barely an ounce of magical talent. She was still hunting with her claws and teeth, more often than not running wild as a fox with only a single tail, flushing rabbits from their burrows with weak yellow fires and chasing them down to rend and devour.
She was fast, and cunning, and fierce as a fox before fleeing prey, but when her aptitude for magic was practically non-existent, she was less than mediocre in a group which prized power and demanded talent. The Circle knew this, and she knew it too - and it gnawed at her, day and night, that she was inadequate to a family who needed more than sharp claws and sharper instinct to survive in the dangerous wilds of Arcadia.
She could barely stand, let alone walk, the day she was summoned to the Grand Mother. The old woman regarded the trembling child of nine years with calm, stern eyes, and laid out an ultimatum before her. Hermia, she explained, was the first fey-child of the Circle whose once-foreseen potential had remained dormant for so long. She was a disappointment, undeserving of the sisterhood and respect she had grown up with for all her life - and if she remained as such, what was undeserved would be taken away. She would learn and master some form of magic, even at its most basic level, by the winter of her tenth year, or the coven would abandon and forget her, leaving her to live on what little ability she had as little more than a common or garden fox.
This left Hermia terrified to no end - or rather, she was terrified to no end from the start, or perhaps she might have sensed the tickle of magic about her ears, or noticed the few knowing glances the attending witches failed to hide. Of course, no child of the Circle would have dared to believe the Grand Mother might lie, and no one saw fit to mention she was hardly the first whose magical talent arrived late, or that enough strong emotion might shake just a trickle of it free...
What she did know, that next morning after a sleepless night of heart-chilling terror, was that she overheard two of her younger aunts discussing a simple potion where they thought no one could hear. One of the most basic to be found, they said; the brewing process within easy grasp of even the most dimwitted human peasant, and yet a potent key to great power if altered with just the right ingredients, some of which were easily available from the open fields... the pair arranged a rendezvous later in the day, to delve deeper into the details of the potion's ingredients.
Hermia was present that evening, concealed in the shrubbery while the two witches talked, and she heard all the details. She sneaked back to the company of the other juniors, repeating the stolen secret until it was burned into her mind.
Her quest for redemption began the next morning. Armed only with the barest of equipment needed to gather reagents and turn them into a potion, she spent nearly the whole day searching for the ingredients she needed, only remembering to hunt down a meal when her stomach growled in the late evening.
The ingredients might have been easily gathered by a budding witch with prior experience, but to one with barely any knowledge beyond descriptions and locations gleaned from word of mouth, the task seemed all but impossible. Hermia was barehanded after the first week of searching, the ingredient list still fresh in her mind and taunting her. But there was still time, and if she could only search a little harder, she knew; she knew...
Months of searching yielded little; what ingredients she found and harvested or stole from nests, were often rotted and useless within a fortnight. She practiced creating her own 'potions' in private; learning to cook a stew, while hardly a magical endeavor, was something that might help her. If she failed to create the potion, as a despairing side of her contemplated more with each day, at least she wouldn't need to spend the rest of her life on a diet of raw mouse.
If the ingredients of that potion were to spoil soon, she tossed them into the pot and made an experiment out of the meal. Through repeated eavesdropping on the pair who had inadvertently shared that secret with her, Hermia learned which materials were safe to use, and which ones were likely to be fatal. An older, more learned individual might find it suspicious that the two met at least once a week to go over the ingredient list and procedure, but this never occurred to her. And the winter of her tenth year drew ever closer...
It was a late autumn midnight, a year after the ultimatum, and she was still no closer to her goal. Yet another aunt asked her to mind a cooking pot while she tended to more pressing concerns. Hermia sat by the bubbling cauldron, and looked over all the ingredients sitting in their jars and phials, all freshly gathered and waiting to be prepared and added to the pot, and her spine tingled in sudden recognition...
Hardly daring, hardly believing, Hermia set to work with knife and pestle and mortar. Constantly on the lookout, whirling around with a panicked glance at every noise that sounded like a footfall, she added the items to the pot, timing the next dose down to the last precise stir, feeling the darkness of the night around as it seemed to breathe strength into her veins, as her body seemed to breathe vitality into the brew...
She dipped a ladle into the fizzing, sparking blue mixture, and lifted it to her lips.
The Grand Mother managed to slap it away, snatch her clear and dash out of range in time.
Later, she would claim, that was one of the strongest Minor Blasting Potions she had ever seen in the last century. (Albeit somewhat unstable, itself the result of being prepared too hastily and by anxious fingers.)
At the age of ten years old, just months away from eleven, Hermia was declared a Hedge-Witch Neophyte, and placed under the tutelage of a hunter-herbalist Material mage. She proved an eager pupil, unafraid of rote practice and ready to listen and commit to memory. Where stolen lessons had taken months to pay off, new potions - learned, gathered for and prepared under minimal but ever-present guidance - were now learned in weeks, and then days...
Hermia was sixteen when her tutor brought her away from the Circle. They journeyed far to the west and north, further than they had ever gone in her life. Two months on foot tested her abilities as never before, their survival seemingly dependent on her quick thinking, preparation for danger and ability to salvage or improvise potion ingredients, and she rose to meet the test each time, though she was reeling from exhaustion and unhealed injuries when they finally reached the doors of a grand castle, and she collapsed as they stepped through the gates...
When she awoke in the infirmary, all that remained of her tutor was a message stored in a conch shell, declaring her a Journeyman Hedge-Witch, instructing her to complete the next course of her journey here in Camford School of Magic, and bidding her farewell.
The next nine years were a trial to her mind and spirit on a level she had never seen before. Her old life seemed a stroll in the gardens of Fleur, next to the challenges of school.
She was well prepared for Potions lessons, placement tests putting her several years ahead of a beginner, and she was able to branch out further into the field of magical crafting. Within three years of dedication and sheer hard work, she was able to set aside her generic trainee's wand for a personally crafted wand of her own.
Learning to read and write was a much harder task - and yet, in some ways, easier than most for her to pick up a regular language of communication, and a rune language for crafting spells. Her knowledge of the written word, up to this point, had been a blank slate. There was nothing to erase and rewrite, and no need to find small spaces on the slate to squeeze in more words. She only needed to fill that slate in her mind - and she went at it with a will, poring over her books and essays and dictionaries until the early hours of the morning.
Four years of concurrently studying Written and Material magic saw her rising to the top of her class in both fields, and left her secure enough in her mastery of both to attempt another field of study.
Picking up Latin as a spoken language, learning to understand it and channel magic through her voice to create a variety of different effects, resulted in many a sleepless night of muttering broken phrases, mispronouncing words, and causing all hell to break loose, on the off chance that anything happened at all. A three-year course took five years for her to graduate - her the first- and third-year final exams were dismal failures the first time around, the former leaving all students at ground zero unable to say anything more than the Fleurian phrase for "cheese omelette". To her eternal embarrassment, the Headmaster thought it was an ingenious spell and promptly reverse-engineered and mastered the devastation for his own entertainment.
But failure had never been permanent for Hermia before, and she wasn't about to let it begin sticking to her. She threw herself into her Latin studies with a concerted near-fury, and through five hard years of work, managed to beat the demons of mispronunciation and bad syntax over the heads until they curled up and died.
It was an uphill battle, all around, but Hermia had sixteen years' worth of experience to fall back on. It had shown that with enough hard work, failure would always be temporary. The nine years she spent in Camford only further cemented that belief in her mind.
Hard-earned academic success, in its usual way, drew attention. Several professors put in a good word for her, regarding her work ethic and dedication to excellence.
The same professors, and several more, also put in quite a few concerned words about her attitude toward everything else, and sometimes toward her studies as well.
No mortal made of flesh could spend forever studying night after night with barely an hour of sleep. Even the sentient elementals, and Camford had seen quite a number in its time, could go slightly insane with a diet of all work and no play. According to some of the Camford staff, Hermia might have gone through school considerably faster if she hadn't run herself down in mind and body. Her unconscious figure was a regular feature of the infirmary, appearing every few weeks to spend several days on the mend.
According to the same faculty members, Hermia would have made more friends, too, if she hadn't been so obsessed with excellence. She wasn't selfish about her knowledge; on the contrary, those who approached her for advice with their work found her all too willing to listen and help them out. She acquired a taste for helping others out, whether she was asked to or not - with her blunt, matter-of-fact assessment of others, mincing no words and pulling no punches, students began approaching her with extreme caution. A few avoided her outright. Several incidents began as advice offered free of obligation or tact, and escalated into shouting matches, then hexing matches, as fuses, tempers, and eventually castle fixtures were set ablaze.
Hermia graduated as an adept in the fields of Written, Spoken and Material magic, taking with her a strengthened belief in the value of diligence and a short temper for dealing with lazy mortals and their wrong opinions. Camford heaved a collective sigh of relief the moment she was off the grounds.
For her part, Hermia never looked back. She had a life of hard work ahead of her, with knowledge to gather and power to earn. Camford had served its purpose, but towards the end had only grated on her nerves - too many people to work with, and barely any of them diligent enough to be worth the trouble. She stepped out into the wilderness, onto her new path as a wandering explorer.
Ten months into her solitary journey, she acquired an Asagi Salamander egg off the black market. Plans to boil it down for a potion were ruined when it hatched, and the creature inside promptly decided she was its mother.
Learning to live with a travelling companion, even an unintelligent one that hung on to every word she spoke, became her new challenge. A hardy, fire breathing familiar, in the long run, would outweigh the benefits of a few draughts of fireproofing potion. He would be worth the effort - every ounce of the considerable energy she would invest to train him well.
Two months on, he still wasn't toilet trained. But Hermia had gone on without success for much longer, and she knew that even this, with enough patience, was only a matter of time...
Familiar
Name: Trouble
Race: Magical Beast
Species: Asagi Salamander
Tier: 1
Appearance: Trouble is a foot long from head to tail, with a slender body covered in hard bright blue scales. The scales form a sharp, broad ridge along the center of his back, guarding his spine from neck to tail base. His underbelly has a softer, cream-colored hide. His eyes are large and black, with a liquid quality to their appearance. His wide mouth contains rows of sharp teeth, perfect for piercing flesh with a little help from his strong jaws. Two large, sharp-pointed ears grow upward from the sides of his head, and two much smaller blue horns, only stubs at the moment, sprout between them.
Natural Abilities: Trouble has an acute sense of smell and the ability to sense heat moving from up to a yard away.
Natural Traits: Trouble has sharp claws and teeth, and hard scales on his back, head and limbs that can stop most mundane projectiles.
Specializations: Tier 1: Physical (Fire), Proficiency 1. Trouble can breathe indigo flames.
Special Abilities: Burn Immunity, Cold Immunity
Bonus Special Abilities: Enhanced Recovery, Chimerical Shapeshifting (Tongue Length)
Unique Abilities: Trouble can safely consume any nonmagical combustible or explosive material as a food source. The scales on his back are hard and sharp, able to deflect most mundane projectiles and pierce flesh.
Strengths: Trouble's strong jaws, sharp teeth, firebreath and utter devotion to his adoptive mother make him a much more durable, if straightforward, terror in a fight. Hermia is training him to curl into a ball and roll over opponents with his sharp back scales.
Weaknesses: Outside of a fight, Trouble is more of a handful than a help, as most long-lived pets might be at two months of age. He's just started teething again, which makes him more fond of biting things - strangers, furniture, rocks, trees, Hermia's tails - and his steadily growing appetite is compounded by an addiction to spices and explosives. His devotion has proven to be a double-edged sword at times - Hermia has to stuff him headfirst into her satchel just to hold a conversation for more than ten minutes without someone getting bitten, and she has to keep a close eye on her cauldron to make sure he doesn't come back from hunting and drop the half-eaten remains of his mangled prey into the concoction to share with her. And he isn't toilet trained.
Magical Items: -