Iva
06-21-12, 02:16 PM
Name: Iva Lirquensul
Job: Predator
Race: Daywalker
Age: 10 | 1074
Gender: Female
Hair Color: Blonde
Eye Color: Blue
Skin Color: Light
Hgt / Wgt: 4'2'" / 62 lb
Languages: Tradespeak, Dark Elven, Elven, Dwarven
Weapons: Fan
Armor: None
From: Salvar
Appearance
She's slim-built, highly-toned, and silky-skinned. Her canines are just a fraction longer than the other perfect teeth and, in fact, are horribly ineffective at their alleged purposes. An extraordinarily light, voluminous cloak of golden blond hair dropped as low as her ankles, the bangs cut across at brow-height. Her face was frozen in that stage just between childish roundness and the angled facets of adulthood. The 26-19-25 body would have vanished into the typically shapeless dress if she didn't always insist on the best tailoring for herself. She favored an armless, satiny blue dress with the frilled hem at the knees in front and at the ankle in back, the neckline a conservative oval, and a wide, pink sash around the waist and tied in a hand-sized bow on the right. Her legs were in white garterless stockings right up to mid-thigh. Her flat black shoes each had a small blue-glass butterfly on the buckle. The shoulders were underneath a cape whose material looked like a hole into a starfield, secured at the neck with a red ascot. Both arms were in tight white sleeves and one hand held a large, white parasol. There is a tiny hairclip the form of a white eagle wing on the right side of her hair.
Personality
Morally speaking, she is a good person who is convinced that she is an evil person who is pretending to be a good person for evil purposes. Her first instinctual reaction is to unconditionally help someone in need, proactively if possible, but this gets squashed down immediately by a long habit of being a sadistic, evil monster who causes wanton destruction for the sake of seeing pain, terror, and despair in others. This is tempered with the idea that she should make efforts towards doing good in order to improve her standing in the eyes of the person whom she seeks. The effort is minimalized by pride in that she should not bow to anyone's will and therefore it would be acceptable to do a small amount of good provided that it is done in an evil way. The end result is something like saving a lost person from the elements while berating him the entire time loudly protesting that she was doing nothing of the kind and just didn't want a corpse in her house.
Motivationally speaking, she is single-mindedly trying to find the person who had sealed her because she seeks his affection and wants to get out from under the seal. She also wants to slap him for leaving her in the first place, but not very hard. Given that she has no leads right now, though, she has settled for wandering the world and hoping to run into some trace of his legend somewhere. On the small scale, she is looking for amusement, especially unpredictable amusement, because the years do wear on a bit when everything is predictable or the same. She looks for companionship but refuses to admit that she is looking for companionship, because companionship is not something that an evil vampire mage should be wanting. This results in a lot of contrived excuses. Since she prefers the taste of blood of the willing, this results in a significant amount of time spent on playing the pitiful card now that she no longer has the magical power to back up her usual plans.
Behaviorally speaking, she is a prideful, jaded elder vying for mental space with a lonely, friendly child. There are three layers to dig through in an order that varies somewhat. The first is that of an easily disappointed, short tempered, and prideful person who speaks callously, treats everyone as inferiors who should know their betters, and likes to lead people on with sprinkles of hope. The second is a regal noble who keeps everything behind a rather evil-looking smile and wants to appear that everything is going as planned to serve her purposes. The third is that of someone that just wants to be loved, accepted, and respected and is willing to make sacrifices to achieve it.
History
Technically speaking, Iva is a duchess. The local rules of inheritance state that in the case of the death of her father the duke, the title passes on to his eldest legitimate son, eldest legitimate daughter, eldest legitimate male relative, or eldest legitimate female relative, in that order of precedence. Her great-great-great-grandfather held particular views and was very insistent when he spoke with his liege about the letter of patent. Nobody else in the succeeding line ever dared to try to get the thing changed because there had never before been much trouble about it. She would have been Sixth Duchess White Haven of the Kingdom of Salvar.
What made everything rather difficult was that Father was riding in the same carriage as her brother when the carriage rammed into a moose, broke half of the suspension, tumbled off of the mountainside road, hit the river below, and then the traumatized moose fell on it. In the absence of living witnesses on account of everyone in the carriage being dead and the moose having run off minus one antler, the kingdom instead substituted with vigorous debating between lawyers. If the duke had died first, then step-uncle Tythes was rightfully the new duke. If her brother Hodge had died first, then Iva would be the new duchess. It was all very morbid and the king's efforts to be fair to both sides only prolonged the debate. In hindsight, this was probably so that the peers were distracted when he slipped through certain economic reforms.
Her mother, who had been keeping an iron grip on things, marched right into the palace one morning. That afternoon, the case was decided in favor of Iva. Three weeks later, mother went missing from her gardens and was never seen again. Iva was six.
A less protracted legal battle ensued. Tythes received custody of Iva and suddenly had to stop his plans to murder his way into a peerage when the king paid him a personal visit. The Crown was displeased about father's resistance and had no evidence previously, so Tythes got away with fratricide. However, the Crown was now making him personally responsible for the safety and well-being of his new adopted daughter. If anything should happen to her in his custody, Tythes' life would be forfeit. Iva was safe for ten years.
Tythes was old. He might not last ten years. The only path now remaining for him is to wed Iva to his son and convince her to transfer the title to his bloodline. She was spirited, resilient, headstrong, and clever, so for the next years Tythes devoted himself to increasingly arcane experimentations on methods of ensuring persuasion. Towards the end, he turned towards the knowledge of vampires and their mind-dominating means.
One cool October evening, Tythes finished his fourth attempt at making a potion to place Iva under his thrall. This one contained all the remaining essence of the unfortunate vampire that he had acquired. As before, he infused it in her nightly scalded milk, to be consumed while the governess read her something educational and entertaining at bedtime. He paced the hallway outside, anxious to hear his retainer's report on success. What he heard instead was a cut-off scream.
Upon opening the door, Tythes had a moment to see the governess, pale as death, slumped over on the bloodstained sheets. Then his niece was upon him, her jaws suddenly around his throat and her fingers upon - no, through - his eyes. His last moments were a desperate, blind flailing against the horrible, encroaching cold.
That night, the ten year old Iva arranged for her own disappearance. She put together a letter of ransom using blood and her old alphabet blocks, fixed it to the night-stand with Tythe's pocket-knife, dribbled blood over the sentence where it revealed the location of the supposed kidnapper, and then departed the castle by way of a rope out of the window. A massive manhunt ensued, turning up with supposed suspects several times over the next few years, but eventually the enormous estate went under a caretaker and the matter went into legend. The title went into abeyance and never has been successfully claimed.
Iva had immigrated to the capital of Salvar, landing there with little more than the clothes on her back, a suitcase containing half of the family jewels, a trunk full of more clothes, and a parasol. For the first time, she ran into the main problem of her independent existence: nobody takes her seriously because she didn't look it. About the only thing that she could do was to apprentice herself to someone and learn something while she came to better grasp with her new nature; the unorthodox entry had left her without any of the instinctive senses that a natural vampire possessed. For the next 430 years, she moved from town to town, spending ten or twenty years in each of them as an apprentice to a different craft. She fed very carefully but was still discovered several times, forcing her to flee into the night.
In the middle of her fourth century, Iva made a discovery on her own on the manipulation of magical power during an apprenticeship to a scribe and library curator. This was her third time apprenticed in that particular field. She had become bored of the mundane things in life and began immediately to experiment with the arcane sciences. This sudden, untutelaged delve into magecraft led to giggling, megalomania, and moving out to build a small fortress in the mountains.
Through experimentations on herself, she refined and modified the nature of her existence, eliminating many of the weaknesses. Iva even learned to laugh at the sun and raised her teacup to her first dawn in five hundred years from the balcony of her home. Through experimentation on innocents, she refined and modified the magic of shadows and darkness, cold and ice, thunder and lightning, mind and soul, and numerous other fields.
In the climate of royal weakness and feudal squabbling, Iva carved out a name for herself in her frequent raids for supplies and subjects across Salvar. She left the remains of the vampire hunting parties encased in blocks of ice that took years to melt. She flattened resisting villages with sudden blizzards in broad daylight. She gave no name but was called by various whispered titles. She claimed no land but she reaped from all lands. Then she met him.
He was a foreigner, supposedly a powerful mage who had come for the bounty on stopping Iva. When they met, she was instantly and for the first time smitten. To herself, she always looked back on that battle with fondness, embarrassment, indignation, self-loathing, and a warm fuzzy feeling. She tells herself that she had thrown the battle because she wanted him to be happy and to love her back. He didn't destroy her; at that point there was probably nothing in the world that could complete destroy her. Instead, he sealed her magical powers away, telling her that she can learn to be a better person. She didn't resist; she thought that this meant that he would take care of her now.
He left.
That was over a century ago. Iva has been looking for him ever since. It didn't matter if he has died in the time, because she will find a way to bring him back. When she finds him, she will... will... She wasn't sure what she would do. Slap him, probably.
Skills
Board Games [A] - Chess at [S]
Crafts [A] - Architect, Barber, Blacksmith, Broderer, Bowyer, Builder, Carpenter, Chemist, Clockmaker, Cook, Cutler, Dyer, Engineer, Farmer, Founder, Furniture Maker, Gardener, Glazier, Goldsmith, Herbalist, Herder, Librarian, Mason, Musician, Potter, Scribe, Sculptor, Sewer, Shipwright, Silversmith, Surgery, Surveying, Tailor, Vintner, Weaver, Wheelwright, Whitesmith
Card Games [A]
Magecraft [S+]
Martial Arts [S] - Aikido-equivalent, along with stick/staff applications. A century of practice.
Abilities
Reave Essence - Having her magical source sealed away led to Iva studying and creating a way to steal external magic. So long as she is not surprised, Iva may absorb and hold a magical effect within 5 feet of her. Iva has 4 uses per hour and it takes 2^(effect level - her level) uses each time, to a maximum of 2 uses spent on a single instance. She may rid them by either ejecting it back out again or by devouring them at her leisure. Ejected effects are under her control, retargeted, and durations resume from where they left off.
Avatar of Unlife - When destroyed, she evaporates into the form of a soft wind and disperses into the air. She slowly regenerates, taking about 1 day for ex nihilo. Body parts with no connection to the heart evaporate over a few minutes into nothing. She may evaporate and reform herself.
Magecraft [Sealed] - Her output is 10 MJ after 6 words incanted, increasing by 50% for every 3 additional words. Her recovery time is 5 seconds per word incanted. Her range and accuracy is diffraction-limited by her magic rune circle aperture of 10 meters and magic color of blue (455 nm). Her elements are: Cold, Ice (1 cubic foot summon per kJ), Lightning, Shadow (tangible illusions, 1 cubic foot per kW), and Wind. She is capable of delaying up to four spells and holding incantation on one spell.
Drawbacks
Dietary Requirement - Due to size, her blood requirement is 2 oz / day. She extracts the essence and may store up to 80 days' worth. This may be supplemented with Reave Essence. Running out of blood essence causes sleep. Running low causes an intense feeling of hunger. There is a swallow reflex while asleep.
Sunlight - Direct exposure to sunlight is unpleasant and fatigues her in several minutes. A parasol or more conservative clothing usually solves this problem.
Staking - A stake through the heart paralyzes her until the stake is removed. It also stops her dietary processing.
Strength - She is half as strong as the average person.
Reflections - She has a reflection, but cannot propagate illusions through them. She always reflects as her true self.
Equipment
Cape of the Night Sky - An elbow-length cape. The wearer is treated as if under a night sky. Iva doesn't need this anymore to resist the sun, but it is comforting.
Steel War Fan - This is a steel-ribbed folding fan one-foot in length. The edge is sharp and she uses as a club and as leverage. The front face is engraved and painted with the White Haven crest. The back face is engraved with a poem on comparisons between eternity alone and dying alone.
Sewing kit - A small one of high-quality tools. Contains complete tools, including scissors, needles, and thread.
Job: Predator
Race: Daywalker
Age: 10 | 1074
Gender: Female
Hair Color: Blonde
Eye Color: Blue
Skin Color: Light
Hgt / Wgt: 4'2'" / 62 lb
Languages: Tradespeak, Dark Elven, Elven, Dwarven
Weapons: Fan
Armor: None
From: Salvar
Appearance
She's slim-built, highly-toned, and silky-skinned. Her canines are just a fraction longer than the other perfect teeth and, in fact, are horribly ineffective at their alleged purposes. An extraordinarily light, voluminous cloak of golden blond hair dropped as low as her ankles, the bangs cut across at brow-height. Her face was frozen in that stage just between childish roundness and the angled facets of adulthood. The 26-19-25 body would have vanished into the typically shapeless dress if she didn't always insist on the best tailoring for herself. She favored an armless, satiny blue dress with the frilled hem at the knees in front and at the ankle in back, the neckline a conservative oval, and a wide, pink sash around the waist and tied in a hand-sized bow on the right. Her legs were in white garterless stockings right up to mid-thigh. Her flat black shoes each had a small blue-glass butterfly on the buckle. The shoulders were underneath a cape whose material looked like a hole into a starfield, secured at the neck with a red ascot. Both arms were in tight white sleeves and one hand held a large, white parasol. There is a tiny hairclip the form of a white eagle wing on the right side of her hair.
Personality
Morally speaking, she is a good person who is convinced that she is an evil person who is pretending to be a good person for evil purposes. Her first instinctual reaction is to unconditionally help someone in need, proactively if possible, but this gets squashed down immediately by a long habit of being a sadistic, evil monster who causes wanton destruction for the sake of seeing pain, terror, and despair in others. This is tempered with the idea that she should make efforts towards doing good in order to improve her standing in the eyes of the person whom she seeks. The effort is minimalized by pride in that she should not bow to anyone's will and therefore it would be acceptable to do a small amount of good provided that it is done in an evil way. The end result is something like saving a lost person from the elements while berating him the entire time loudly protesting that she was doing nothing of the kind and just didn't want a corpse in her house.
Motivationally speaking, she is single-mindedly trying to find the person who had sealed her because she seeks his affection and wants to get out from under the seal. She also wants to slap him for leaving her in the first place, but not very hard. Given that she has no leads right now, though, she has settled for wandering the world and hoping to run into some trace of his legend somewhere. On the small scale, she is looking for amusement, especially unpredictable amusement, because the years do wear on a bit when everything is predictable or the same. She looks for companionship but refuses to admit that she is looking for companionship, because companionship is not something that an evil vampire mage should be wanting. This results in a lot of contrived excuses. Since she prefers the taste of blood of the willing, this results in a significant amount of time spent on playing the pitiful card now that she no longer has the magical power to back up her usual plans.
Behaviorally speaking, she is a prideful, jaded elder vying for mental space with a lonely, friendly child. There are three layers to dig through in an order that varies somewhat. The first is that of an easily disappointed, short tempered, and prideful person who speaks callously, treats everyone as inferiors who should know their betters, and likes to lead people on with sprinkles of hope. The second is a regal noble who keeps everything behind a rather evil-looking smile and wants to appear that everything is going as planned to serve her purposes. The third is that of someone that just wants to be loved, accepted, and respected and is willing to make sacrifices to achieve it.
History
Technically speaking, Iva is a duchess. The local rules of inheritance state that in the case of the death of her father the duke, the title passes on to his eldest legitimate son, eldest legitimate daughter, eldest legitimate male relative, or eldest legitimate female relative, in that order of precedence. Her great-great-great-grandfather held particular views and was very insistent when he spoke with his liege about the letter of patent. Nobody else in the succeeding line ever dared to try to get the thing changed because there had never before been much trouble about it. She would have been Sixth Duchess White Haven of the Kingdom of Salvar.
What made everything rather difficult was that Father was riding in the same carriage as her brother when the carriage rammed into a moose, broke half of the suspension, tumbled off of the mountainside road, hit the river below, and then the traumatized moose fell on it. In the absence of living witnesses on account of everyone in the carriage being dead and the moose having run off minus one antler, the kingdom instead substituted with vigorous debating between lawyers. If the duke had died first, then step-uncle Tythes was rightfully the new duke. If her brother Hodge had died first, then Iva would be the new duchess. It was all very morbid and the king's efforts to be fair to both sides only prolonged the debate. In hindsight, this was probably so that the peers were distracted when he slipped through certain economic reforms.
Her mother, who had been keeping an iron grip on things, marched right into the palace one morning. That afternoon, the case was decided in favor of Iva. Three weeks later, mother went missing from her gardens and was never seen again. Iva was six.
A less protracted legal battle ensued. Tythes received custody of Iva and suddenly had to stop his plans to murder his way into a peerage when the king paid him a personal visit. The Crown was displeased about father's resistance and had no evidence previously, so Tythes got away with fratricide. However, the Crown was now making him personally responsible for the safety and well-being of his new adopted daughter. If anything should happen to her in his custody, Tythes' life would be forfeit. Iva was safe for ten years.
Tythes was old. He might not last ten years. The only path now remaining for him is to wed Iva to his son and convince her to transfer the title to his bloodline. She was spirited, resilient, headstrong, and clever, so for the next years Tythes devoted himself to increasingly arcane experimentations on methods of ensuring persuasion. Towards the end, he turned towards the knowledge of vampires and their mind-dominating means.
One cool October evening, Tythes finished his fourth attempt at making a potion to place Iva under his thrall. This one contained all the remaining essence of the unfortunate vampire that he had acquired. As before, he infused it in her nightly scalded milk, to be consumed while the governess read her something educational and entertaining at bedtime. He paced the hallway outside, anxious to hear his retainer's report on success. What he heard instead was a cut-off scream.
Upon opening the door, Tythes had a moment to see the governess, pale as death, slumped over on the bloodstained sheets. Then his niece was upon him, her jaws suddenly around his throat and her fingers upon - no, through - his eyes. His last moments were a desperate, blind flailing against the horrible, encroaching cold.
That night, the ten year old Iva arranged for her own disappearance. She put together a letter of ransom using blood and her old alphabet blocks, fixed it to the night-stand with Tythe's pocket-knife, dribbled blood over the sentence where it revealed the location of the supposed kidnapper, and then departed the castle by way of a rope out of the window. A massive manhunt ensued, turning up with supposed suspects several times over the next few years, but eventually the enormous estate went under a caretaker and the matter went into legend. The title went into abeyance and never has been successfully claimed.
Iva had immigrated to the capital of Salvar, landing there with little more than the clothes on her back, a suitcase containing half of the family jewels, a trunk full of more clothes, and a parasol. For the first time, she ran into the main problem of her independent existence: nobody takes her seriously because she didn't look it. About the only thing that she could do was to apprentice herself to someone and learn something while she came to better grasp with her new nature; the unorthodox entry had left her without any of the instinctive senses that a natural vampire possessed. For the next 430 years, she moved from town to town, spending ten or twenty years in each of them as an apprentice to a different craft. She fed very carefully but was still discovered several times, forcing her to flee into the night.
In the middle of her fourth century, Iva made a discovery on her own on the manipulation of magical power during an apprenticeship to a scribe and library curator. This was her third time apprenticed in that particular field. She had become bored of the mundane things in life and began immediately to experiment with the arcane sciences. This sudden, untutelaged delve into magecraft led to giggling, megalomania, and moving out to build a small fortress in the mountains.
Through experimentations on herself, she refined and modified the nature of her existence, eliminating many of the weaknesses. Iva even learned to laugh at the sun and raised her teacup to her first dawn in five hundred years from the balcony of her home. Through experimentation on innocents, she refined and modified the magic of shadows and darkness, cold and ice, thunder and lightning, mind and soul, and numerous other fields.
In the climate of royal weakness and feudal squabbling, Iva carved out a name for herself in her frequent raids for supplies and subjects across Salvar. She left the remains of the vampire hunting parties encased in blocks of ice that took years to melt. She flattened resisting villages with sudden blizzards in broad daylight. She gave no name but was called by various whispered titles. She claimed no land but she reaped from all lands. Then she met him.
He was a foreigner, supposedly a powerful mage who had come for the bounty on stopping Iva. When they met, she was instantly and for the first time smitten. To herself, she always looked back on that battle with fondness, embarrassment, indignation, self-loathing, and a warm fuzzy feeling. She tells herself that she had thrown the battle because she wanted him to be happy and to love her back. He didn't destroy her; at that point there was probably nothing in the world that could complete destroy her. Instead, he sealed her magical powers away, telling her that she can learn to be a better person. She didn't resist; she thought that this meant that he would take care of her now.
He left.
That was over a century ago. Iva has been looking for him ever since. It didn't matter if he has died in the time, because she will find a way to bring him back. When she finds him, she will... will... She wasn't sure what she would do. Slap him, probably.
Skills
Board Games [A] - Chess at [S]
Crafts [A] - Architect, Barber, Blacksmith, Broderer, Bowyer, Builder, Carpenter, Chemist, Clockmaker, Cook, Cutler, Dyer, Engineer, Farmer, Founder, Furniture Maker, Gardener, Glazier, Goldsmith, Herbalist, Herder, Librarian, Mason, Musician, Potter, Scribe, Sculptor, Sewer, Shipwright, Silversmith, Surgery, Surveying, Tailor, Vintner, Weaver, Wheelwright, Whitesmith
Card Games [A]
Magecraft [S+]
Martial Arts [S] - Aikido-equivalent, along with stick/staff applications. A century of practice.
Abilities
Reave Essence - Having her magical source sealed away led to Iva studying and creating a way to steal external magic. So long as she is not surprised, Iva may absorb and hold a magical effect within 5 feet of her. Iva has 4 uses per hour and it takes 2^(effect level - her level) uses each time, to a maximum of 2 uses spent on a single instance. She may rid them by either ejecting it back out again or by devouring them at her leisure. Ejected effects are under her control, retargeted, and durations resume from where they left off.
Avatar of Unlife - When destroyed, she evaporates into the form of a soft wind and disperses into the air. She slowly regenerates, taking about 1 day for ex nihilo. Body parts with no connection to the heart evaporate over a few minutes into nothing. She may evaporate and reform herself.
Magecraft [Sealed] - Her output is 10 MJ after 6 words incanted, increasing by 50% for every 3 additional words. Her recovery time is 5 seconds per word incanted. Her range and accuracy is diffraction-limited by her magic rune circle aperture of 10 meters and magic color of blue (455 nm). Her elements are: Cold, Ice (1 cubic foot summon per kJ), Lightning, Shadow (tangible illusions, 1 cubic foot per kW), and Wind. She is capable of delaying up to four spells and holding incantation on one spell.
Drawbacks
Dietary Requirement - Due to size, her blood requirement is 2 oz / day. She extracts the essence and may store up to 80 days' worth. This may be supplemented with Reave Essence. Running out of blood essence causes sleep. Running low causes an intense feeling of hunger. There is a swallow reflex while asleep.
Sunlight - Direct exposure to sunlight is unpleasant and fatigues her in several minutes. A parasol or more conservative clothing usually solves this problem.
Staking - A stake through the heart paralyzes her until the stake is removed. It also stops her dietary processing.
Strength - She is half as strong as the average person.
Reflections - She has a reflection, but cannot propagate illusions through them. She always reflects as her true self.
Equipment
Cape of the Night Sky - An elbow-length cape. The wearer is treated as if under a night sky. Iva doesn't need this anymore to resist the sun, but it is comforting.
Steel War Fan - This is a steel-ribbed folding fan one-foot in length. The edge is sharp and she uses as a club and as leverage. The front face is engraved and painted with the White Haven crest. The back face is engraved with a poem on comparisons between eternity alone and dying alone.
Sewing kit - A small one of high-quality tools. Contains complete tools, including scissors, needles, and thread.