Post by Ava on Jan 10, 2014 11:12:37 GMT -5
Player: 0173
Contact: (PM me)
Intentions: Heroic
Background
Name: Gustava
Race: Magical Beast
Species: Moon Dog
Age: 30 in human years
Tier: 3
Social
Place of Birth: Woods of Ruthenia
Allegiances: Bearach and their pack
Aspirations: Vengeance
Nicknames: Ava, The Bitch
Titles: -
Relatives: Bearach (elder brother), their pack
Significant Other: -
Mental
Personality: Discretion over valor. Reason before honor. Cool, clear eyes and a little smirk reflect the devil's workshop that is Ava's mind. She is not human, and only makes a token effort to resemble one if need dictates. She is a wolf - fiercely loyal to her alpha and her pack, dedicated to their survival above all else, with zero qualms about using any means to skew the odds. To the ones who matter, she trades in tough love and blunt honesty, often playing the abrasive role of the devil's advocate - anything to drive them to be their best. Her pack has a beast to fight: Ruthenia's greatest, most monstrous creature, whose very existence haunts each moment of their lives, and she dreams of the day they tear it down for the slaughter.
Likes: Her brother, gathering packs of wolves to howl at the moon near human settlements, hunting, meditation, victory, freeing weres from captivity
Dislikes: Bearach trying too hard to play fair, bright days, non-aggressive negotiations, open warfare, honorable combat, human society
Physical
Appearance: Unusual for a Ruthenian woman but in keeping with her lupine origins, Ava stands at 5'4" (162 cm) and has a slender, wiry build with little obvious muscle on her form. She has blue eyes and pale skin, and silver-blonde shoulder length hair that she keeps in a tight braid.
Natural Abilities: Despite her underwhelming size, Ava is in peak physical condition. She excels in hand to hand combat, and has a high stamina and tolerance for pain to match her speed and precision of movement. In her wolf form, she gains the animal's powerful sense of hearing and smell.
Magical
Specializations:
- Tier 1: Mental (Shadow of the New Moon), Proficiency 3. Manifesting the Shadow of the New Moon, Ava can cloak herself and others from detection by scent, hearing, sight, technology and magic, create or amplify darkness and wield its extradimensional nature.
- Tier 2: Mental (Horrors), Proficiency 3. Ava taps into the plane of dreams to conjure solid constructs and nightmarish creatures under her control.
- Tier 3: Spoken (Dissonant Elegy), Proficiency 3.5. Ava infuses her howl with disruptive magical energy, weakening or neutralizing spells and temporarily suppressing Written magic within range of the sound. By changing the pitch and volume of her howl, she can selectively target different spells or sources of magic.
- Tier 4: -
- Tier 5: -
Visual Display: Ava's Horror constructs are typically pitch black in color, and her conjured creatures are pale with empty, pitch black eye sockets.
Special Abilities: Empathy, Telepathy, Enhanced Speed 1, Insight
Bonus Special Abilities: Humanoid Shapeshifting, Alternate Sense: Magic
Unique Abilities: As a Moon Dog of the New Moon's Shadow, Ava can sense weres, identify them, or track them by trail and scent.
Universal
Strengths: Ava is good at keeping a cool head, even under pressure. She channels her negative emotions constructively, turning anger and grief into plans for vengeance and fear into caution instead of letting them overwhelm her. While far more in tune with her inborn nature as a wolf, if she has to travel incognito she can pass for an undersized, poker-faced human. Whether they need to build up a plan, or stab it full of holes the weres of the pack know they can rely on her as their tactician. She can hold her own in close quarters, better as a wolf than as a human, but where she truly shines is in her magical talent. Her inquisitive mind drives her to examine her abilities and scour them to find their limits, and she lacks scruples that might hold back other mages from using them to harm.
Weaknesses: Ava is deliberately and unrepentantly abrasive, out of habit and perceived necessity. Even if she does it with the best of intentions, she remains very difficult to get along with or appreciate as a person. As wolf minds view privacy quite differently from human ones, she often treats all pack business as her own business - an extension of the idea that what she doesn't know may endanger the pack. When dealing with outsiders, in contrast, she is rarely gives information away for free. With enemies, her tactics have been known to invoke terror, outrage and nausea in survivors, inspiring some to greater efforts to smoke her out or put her down. Her knowledge of close combat doesn't include use of weapons. She prefers to fight with claws and fangs, but that may leave her at a disadvantage against the longer reach of a sword.
Inventory
Mundane: An assortment of grenades - concussive, anti-personnel, flash and smoke grenades, a few changes of clothing, false identity documents, all in her backpack (see Magical)
Magical:
Backpack of Holding - Written (Perpetual). The backpack's pockets are all several times larger on the inside, and whatever Ava is looking for inside immediately comes to her grip.
Fetches (3) - Material (Consumed). Straw dolls, each made with three of Ava's hairs and a drop of her blood. When activated by Ava breathing on them, they transform into duplicates of herself - with her appearance, and controlled by her will. Each lasts for two hours before disintegrating into ash, or until destroyed or dismissed.
History
Ava's tale began, much like her brother's, on the night of the winter solstice. The youngest and eldest cubs of the litter born that night, they were blessed by the silver light shining upon their family in a way that made them more than ordinary wolves. Stronger, faster, and sharper of mind, the pair of Moon Dogs spent their first years in the wilds, running free and learning and growing as wolves did. Their pack changed around them, some aging, some brought down by poachers, all dying, one by one, until out of the old scents that had first greeted them on birth, only one remained.
It was time to move on, so the pair, still young and healthy, left their pack behind and ventured beyond the borders of the forest where they lived. The remnants of a footpath, long since worn faint by weather and disuse, led them to a small village a short distance from their home. The pair had encountered the creatures who populated that village before, and had always opted to avoid the strange hairless, two-legged beings. That day was different, though. That day, they were looking for companionship. Instinctive magic in their beings crafted them new forms - human looking forms. They just weren't human enough.
The inhumanity of their appearances - silver-haired, naked, hunched like wolves and completely mute - was enough for the paranoid frontiersmen to act upon. The pair didn't know what was going on as they were dragged into town. They didn't understand the strange, guttural language that assailed them from all angles, not anymore than the humans understood the ragged, choked sounds the wolves tried to make through unfamiliar throats. "Proper authorities" were "shoved aside" as an angry, maligned populous had viable targets at last. Things escalated quickly. Ava cowered, slipping back into her wolf form and searching for an escape. Bearach's instincts drove him forward instead of back.
When the silvery white "werewolf" suddenly stood tall among the masses, swatting people aside like ragdolls, the mob was over. Then the authorities stepped in, armed with sorcery and cudgels that spat thunder and smoke, and the real fight began. Ava found herself in her brother's arms, held tight as Bearach tried to flee. She felt his body flinch every time a bullet found its mark. The lightning burned them both. Escape seemed impossible.
Bearach rounded a corner and almost collided with an old woman. Wrinkled hands touched them both. The harsh daylight and the narrow alley faded around them, and they left the noise and the danger behind. The authorities continued onward in their merry goose chase while the witch kept the two wolves safe in her home. She masqueraded as a simple herbalist for the town, but she was there for people like them.
The witch spoke to them, first in projected images and feelings, then single words and short phrases of the strange new tongue to give names to all those meanings, and finally in full sentences. She gave them names and shelter and clothing, and much-needed lessons about the state of Ruthenia beyond their sheltered forest.
Cowed by the mob, the guns and the lightning and everything else in this strange new world where they were far and away from the top of the food chain, Ava remained in complete awe of their savior for the first few weeks of their new life, especially on that fateful day when Bearach insisted on beating some justice into Ruthenian society and had to be forcefully counseled into a more discreet approach. Counsel, here, took place at the end of a solid, gnarled walking cane.
"You want to teach them a lesson? You can't even beat an old woman. How about you learn a few lessons yourself first, before trying to be a teacher, hmm?"
That Bearach obeyed, albeit with a scowl that lasted the whole evening, only built up the witch's reputation even higher in Ava's mind. While Bearach took to swordplay, Ava focused more heavily on developing her magical talents. She threw herself into her lessons, eager to please, desperate to grow stronger. She meditated on the darkness that had always been her cloak and her shield, that would now be her blade and fangs and claws. She tore nightmares into reality, glared them down and bent them into her puppets. Any terror they could have kindled in her was easily outweighed by the reality of a more powerful world that despised her and Bearach. There would be some nights when she felt the old woman's gaze upon her; when it felt like worry, not pride. But there was pride, and confidence, and it outweighed the strange, distant looks that sometimes came her way.
They stayed there for several years, without any real aim beyond learning. Their lessons even had them (reluctantly) getting to know the humans in the same settlement that had turned on them before. It was wondrous what the right accessories did for a person's disguise.
And then the werebear showed up.
The were hunters had captured it in the woods, restraining it by magical means and dragging it into the center of town for a good bit of fun, before intending to turn it over to the government. A familiar looking mob formed again, who took to baiting the helpless, angry beast. Twisted faces made a mockery of the last few years spent among them. The pair saw it as they were returning home. Bearach wanted to keep walking and never look back.
Ava looked back. She saw the creature in the cage, alone and in pain and helpless, no kindly old woman to rescue it from the mob.
She saw Bearach's fate. She saw her own.
She saw red.
Pushing and jostling and yelling, fighting to the front for their next turn with the beast, the crowd never noticed the spindly black hands that rose from the ground like vines. Fixated only on the snarling beast, they never saw the constructs twisting around the bars, catching at the hinges and tearing the lock free from the door.
Another sharp jab from an iron poker sent the bear stumbling forward. It crashed against the cage doors and tumbled out.
It was a massacre. The monstrous white behemoth lashed out, smashing the people to pieces with each swing of its arms. The were hunters were caught off guard, and the ones who weren't crushed immediately vanished to regroup. Ava kept to the shadows, just another dog cowering from the terrified screams and the roars that resounded above them, with her magic judiciously employed to shield it from the worst of harm. Burning lances were swallowed in flashing lumps of tenebrous energy. The odd bullet flew right through the hulking figure in a flicker of darkness, instead finding its mark in human flesh.
But then Bearach was there, surging through the crowd, catching the werebear's fist and driving it back.
After that, it was just dumbfounded authorities trying to restore order to a crowd of the battered and bleeding and dying. Ava slipped away to aid her brother, and found him standing over the bear. The other monster was looking back at him with human intelligence behind eyes that held sadness instead of rage.
Escaping to the forest was easy in the reigning confusion. Once there, all three of them had things to say to each other. Something about Bearach's unique magical nature had allowed him to enlighten the furious beast, giving him the control and intelligence he only knew in human form. All well and good for the man who wasn't really a man anymore, Ava conceded, but the two of them had been getting along perfectly well without his interference. Hadn't Bearach said he didn't want to get involved in the first place?
Ava and her brother fought, angrily, over whether the other's actions had been right. A dozen had been killed - hardly a dent in a village of hundreds more who were equally deserving of the pain they loved to inflict on those who weren't like them. The casualty count should have been higher, Ava insisted, and her brother shouldn't have stepped in so soon for the sake of some human's cub, even if the end result had given the werebear, Adrian, his life back, in more ways then one. The argument didn't get them anywhere, but it was one more lesson they had to learn - a lesson that the witch couldn't teach them.
This was typical treatment for weres across Ruthenia; so the witch had told them. To be caged, to be harmed, to be hated. She had given Adrian his freedom. She had claimed vengeance. She had taken the first step to replacing hate with fear - to reminding the humans that animals were not dirt to be trodden upon.
Bearach wanted a new pack; not of wolves, but of weres. A family that would last, not one that came and went in less than a decade. One that could stand, far stronger than two wolves alone. In this, at least, they were in agreement.
The three left early the next morning, as soon as they got Adrian a new set of clothes. The witch would have preferred to keep her "children" a bit longer, but she recognized it, too: they couldn't stay near that town anymore, after everything that had happened. They left with supplies, some magical, a handful of contacts to help build a support network, and her blessing.
Three became four, four became five, five became seven - they added to their numbers, saving what few weres they could before the government could do… whatever it did with people like them. Bearach quickly realized a position of spiritual guidance among the pack - he became their shaman and counselor, their friend who walked with them by moonlight and listened to their hearts. Adrian, formerly a leader in Ruthenia's military, took the central role of leadership.
Ava was their secret-keeper, their strategist, their saboteur, willing to strike where honor would hold others back, treading the abyss so they wouldn't need to. The others did their best. She would make sure of it. For her own part, she gave the best thing she could.
She gave them vengeance.
Contact: (PM me)
Intentions: Heroic
Background
Name: Gustava
Race: Magical Beast
Species: Moon Dog
Age: 30 in human years
Tier: 3
Social
Place of Birth: Woods of Ruthenia
Allegiances: Bearach and their pack
Aspirations: Vengeance
Nicknames: Ava, The Bitch
Titles: -
Relatives: Bearach (elder brother), their pack
Significant Other: -
Mental
Personality: Discretion over valor. Reason before honor. Cool, clear eyes and a little smirk reflect the devil's workshop that is Ava's mind. She is not human, and only makes a token effort to resemble one if need dictates. She is a wolf - fiercely loyal to her alpha and her pack, dedicated to their survival above all else, with zero qualms about using any means to skew the odds. To the ones who matter, she trades in tough love and blunt honesty, often playing the abrasive role of the devil's advocate - anything to drive them to be their best. Her pack has a beast to fight: Ruthenia's greatest, most monstrous creature, whose very existence haunts each moment of their lives, and she dreams of the day they tear it down for the slaughter.
Likes: Her brother, gathering packs of wolves to howl at the moon near human settlements, hunting, meditation, victory, freeing weres from captivity
Dislikes: Bearach trying too hard to play fair, bright days, non-aggressive negotiations, open warfare, honorable combat, human society
Physical
Appearance: Unusual for a Ruthenian woman but in keeping with her lupine origins, Ava stands at 5'4" (162 cm) and has a slender, wiry build with little obvious muscle on her form. She has blue eyes and pale skin, and silver-blonde shoulder length hair that she keeps in a tight braid.
Natural Abilities: Despite her underwhelming size, Ava is in peak physical condition. She excels in hand to hand combat, and has a high stamina and tolerance for pain to match her speed and precision of movement. In her wolf form, she gains the animal's powerful sense of hearing and smell.
Magical
Specializations:
- Tier 1: Mental (Shadow of the New Moon), Proficiency 3. Manifesting the Shadow of the New Moon, Ava can cloak herself and others from detection by scent, hearing, sight, technology and magic, create or amplify darkness and wield its extradimensional nature.
- Tier 2: Mental (Horrors), Proficiency 3. Ava taps into the plane of dreams to conjure solid constructs and nightmarish creatures under her control.
- Tier 3: Spoken (Dissonant Elegy), Proficiency 3.5. Ava infuses her howl with disruptive magical energy, weakening or neutralizing spells and temporarily suppressing Written magic within range of the sound. By changing the pitch and volume of her howl, she can selectively target different spells or sources of magic.
- Tier 4: -
- Tier 5: -
Visual Display: Ava's Horror constructs are typically pitch black in color, and her conjured creatures are pale with empty, pitch black eye sockets.
Special Abilities: Empathy, Telepathy, Enhanced Speed 1, Insight
Bonus Special Abilities: Humanoid Shapeshifting, Alternate Sense: Magic
Unique Abilities: As a Moon Dog of the New Moon's Shadow, Ava can sense weres, identify them, or track them by trail and scent.
Universal
Strengths: Ava is good at keeping a cool head, even under pressure. She channels her negative emotions constructively, turning anger and grief into plans for vengeance and fear into caution instead of letting them overwhelm her. While far more in tune with her inborn nature as a wolf, if she has to travel incognito she can pass for an undersized, poker-faced human. Whether they need to build up a plan, or stab it full of holes the weres of the pack know they can rely on her as their tactician. She can hold her own in close quarters, better as a wolf than as a human, but where she truly shines is in her magical talent. Her inquisitive mind drives her to examine her abilities and scour them to find their limits, and she lacks scruples that might hold back other mages from using them to harm.
Weaknesses: Ava is deliberately and unrepentantly abrasive, out of habit and perceived necessity. Even if she does it with the best of intentions, she remains very difficult to get along with or appreciate as a person. As wolf minds view privacy quite differently from human ones, she often treats all pack business as her own business - an extension of the idea that what she doesn't know may endanger the pack. When dealing with outsiders, in contrast, she is rarely gives information away for free. With enemies, her tactics have been known to invoke terror, outrage and nausea in survivors, inspiring some to greater efforts to smoke her out or put her down. Her knowledge of close combat doesn't include use of weapons. She prefers to fight with claws and fangs, but that may leave her at a disadvantage against the longer reach of a sword.
Inventory
Mundane: An assortment of grenades - concussive, anti-personnel, flash and smoke grenades, a few changes of clothing, false identity documents, all in her backpack (see Magical)
Magical:
Backpack of Holding - Written (Perpetual). The backpack's pockets are all several times larger on the inside, and whatever Ava is looking for inside immediately comes to her grip.
Fetches (3) - Material (Consumed). Straw dolls, each made with three of Ava's hairs and a drop of her blood. When activated by Ava breathing on them, they transform into duplicates of herself - with her appearance, and controlled by her will. Each lasts for two hours before disintegrating into ash, or until destroyed or dismissed.
History
Ava's tale began, much like her brother's, on the night of the winter solstice. The youngest and eldest cubs of the litter born that night, they were blessed by the silver light shining upon their family in a way that made them more than ordinary wolves. Stronger, faster, and sharper of mind, the pair of Moon Dogs spent their first years in the wilds, running free and learning and growing as wolves did. Their pack changed around them, some aging, some brought down by poachers, all dying, one by one, until out of the old scents that had first greeted them on birth, only one remained.
It was time to move on, so the pair, still young and healthy, left their pack behind and ventured beyond the borders of the forest where they lived. The remnants of a footpath, long since worn faint by weather and disuse, led them to a small village a short distance from their home. The pair had encountered the creatures who populated that village before, and had always opted to avoid the strange hairless, two-legged beings. That day was different, though. That day, they were looking for companionship. Instinctive magic in their beings crafted them new forms - human looking forms. They just weren't human enough.
The inhumanity of their appearances - silver-haired, naked, hunched like wolves and completely mute - was enough for the paranoid frontiersmen to act upon. The pair didn't know what was going on as they were dragged into town. They didn't understand the strange, guttural language that assailed them from all angles, not anymore than the humans understood the ragged, choked sounds the wolves tried to make through unfamiliar throats. "Proper authorities" were "shoved aside" as an angry, maligned populous had viable targets at last. Things escalated quickly. Ava cowered, slipping back into her wolf form and searching for an escape. Bearach's instincts drove him forward instead of back.
When the silvery white "werewolf" suddenly stood tall among the masses, swatting people aside like ragdolls, the mob was over. Then the authorities stepped in, armed with sorcery and cudgels that spat thunder and smoke, and the real fight began. Ava found herself in her brother's arms, held tight as Bearach tried to flee. She felt his body flinch every time a bullet found its mark. The lightning burned them both. Escape seemed impossible.
Bearach rounded a corner and almost collided with an old woman. Wrinkled hands touched them both. The harsh daylight and the narrow alley faded around them, and they left the noise and the danger behind. The authorities continued onward in their merry goose chase while the witch kept the two wolves safe in her home. She masqueraded as a simple herbalist for the town, but she was there for people like them.
The witch spoke to them, first in projected images and feelings, then single words and short phrases of the strange new tongue to give names to all those meanings, and finally in full sentences. She gave them names and shelter and clothing, and much-needed lessons about the state of Ruthenia beyond their sheltered forest.
Cowed by the mob, the guns and the lightning and everything else in this strange new world where they were far and away from the top of the food chain, Ava remained in complete awe of their savior for the first few weeks of their new life, especially on that fateful day when Bearach insisted on beating some justice into Ruthenian society and had to be forcefully counseled into a more discreet approach. Counsel, here, took place at the end of a solid, gnarled walking cane.
"You want to teach them a lesson? You can't even beat an old woman. How about you learn a few lessons yourself first, before trying to be a teacher, hmm?"
That Bearach obeyed, albeit with a scowl that lasted the whole evening, only built up the witch's reputation even higher in Ava's mind. While Bearach took to swordplay, Ava focused more heavily on developing her magical talents. She threw herself into her lessons, eager to please, desperate to grow stronger. She meditated on the darkness that had always been her cloak and her shield, that would now be her blade and fangs and claws. She tore nightmares into reality, glared them down and bent them into her puppets. Any terror they could have kindled in her was easily outweighed by the reality of a more powerful world that despised her and Bearach. There would be some nights when she felt the old woman's gaze upon her; when it felt like worry, not pride. But there was pride, and confidence, and it outweighed the strange, distant looks that sometimes came her way.
They stayed there for several years, without any real aim beyond learning. Their lessons even had them (reluctantly) getting to know the humans in the same settlement that had turned on them before. It was wondrous what the right accessories did for a person's disguise.
And then the werebear showed up.
The were hunters had captured it in the woods, restraining it by magical means and dragging it into the center of town for a good bit of fun, before intending to turn it over to the government. A familiar looking mob formed again, who took to baiting the helpless, angry beast. Twisted faces made a mockery of the last few years spent among them. The pair saw it as they were returning home. Bearach wanted to keep walking and never look back.
Ava looked back. She saw the creature in the cage, alone and in pain and helpless, no kindly old woman to rescue it from the mob.
She saw Bearach's fate. She saw her own.
She saw red.
Pushing and jostling and yelling, fighting to the front for their next turn with the beast, the crowd never noticed the spindly black hands that rose from the ground like vines. Fixated only on the snarling beast, they never saw the constructs twisting around the bars, catching at the hinges and tearing the lock free from the door.
Another sharp jab from an iron poker sent the bear stumbling forward. It crashed against the cage doors and tumbled out.
It was a massacre. The monstrous white behemoth lashed out, smashing the people to pieces with each swing of its arms. The were hunters were caught off guard, and the ones who weren't crushed immediately vanished to regroup. Ava kept to the shadows, just another dog cowering from the terrified screams and the roars that resounded above them, with her magic judiciously employed to shield it from the worst of harm. Burning lances were swallowed in flashing lumps of tenebrous energy. The odd bullet flew right through the hulking figure in a flicker of darkness, instead finding its mark in human flesh.
But then Bearach was there, surging through the crowd, catching the werebear's fist and driving it back.
After that, it was just dumbfounded authorities trying to restore order to a crowd of the battered and bleeding and dying. Ava slipped away to aid her brother, and found him standing over the bear. The other monster was looking back at him with human intelligence behind eyes that held sadness instead of rage.
Escaping to the forest was easy in the reigning confusion. Once there, all three of them had things to say to each other. Something about Bearach's unique magical nature had allowed him to enlighten the furious beast, giving him the control and intelligence he only knew in human form. All well and good for the man who wasn't really a man anymore, Ava conceded, but the two of them had been getting along perfectly well without his interference. Hadn't Bearach said he didn't want to get involved in the first place?
Ava and her brother fought, angrily, over whether the other's actions had been right. A dozen had been killed - hardly a dent in a village of hundreds more who were equally deserving of the pain they loved to inflict on those who weren't like them. The casualty count should have been higher, Ava insisted, and her brother shouldn't have stepped in so soon for the sake of some human's cub, even if the end result had given the werebear, Adrian, his life back, in more ways then one. The argument didn't get them anywhere, but it was one more lesson they had to learn - a lesson that the witch couldn't teach them.
This was typical treatment for weres across Ruthenia; so the witch had told them. To be caged, to be harmed, to be hated. She had given Adrian his freedom. She had claimed vengeance. She had taken the first step to replacing hate with fear - to reminding the humans that animals were not dirt to be trodden upon.
Bearach wanted a new pack; not of wolves, but of weres. A family that would last, not one that came and went in less than a decade. One that could stand, far stronger than two wolves alone. In this, at least, they were in agreement.
The three left early the next morning, as soon as they got Adrian a new set of clothes. The witch would have preferred to keep her "children" a bit longer, but she recognized it, too: they couldn't stay near that town anymore, after everything that had happened. They left with supplies, some magical, a handful of contacts to help build a support network, and her blessing.
Three became four, four became five, five became seven - they added to their numbers, saving what few weres they could before the government could do… whatever it did with people like them. Bearach quickly realized a position of spiritual guidance among the pack - he became their shaman and counselor, their friend who walked with them by moonlight and listened to their hearts. Adrian, formerly a leader in Ruthenia's military, took the central role of leadership.
Ava was their secret-keeper, their strategist, their saboteur, willing to strike where honor would hold others back, treading the abyss so they wouldn't need to. The others did their best. She would make sure of it. For her own part, she gave the best thing she could.
She gave them vengeance.