Planning to do the thing in Vacuo.
OHEYLOOK IT'S A DIFFERENT PERSON NOW
CHARACTER
Name: Maena Nadir
Age: 17, born 31st of Saule 63 AC
Species and Gender: Female human
Symbol: A series of lines of various sizes, the same colour as her Aura, radiating from a common center.
Occupation: Shade Academy student, first year
Appearance: Clocking in at 172.7 cm/5'8" and about 59 kg/130 lbs, Maena's muscles don't really show, albeit she looks quite lean and healthy. Her C-cup chest's not especially noteworthy, either. Her face is a set of soft, smooth features. Her voice is somewhat high - at least, a bit higher than average for women her age. She sports a naturally tanned skin with around shoulderbone-length, straight and black hair usually kept in a bun. Her eyes are of a deep, rich hazelnut. She writes with her left hand.
More often than not, Maena can be seen wearing bright yellow work boots, finding it an excellent all-rounder that still breathes enough to be comfortable in the desert. Not too bright, though - the sand is already blinding enough as it is. While her favourite clothes are a pair of beige jeggings and a white t-shirt, she doesn't shy away from switching at a moment's notice, depending on the weather. When going out into the sun for a prolonged amount of time, she'll bring along a legionnaire's cap, desert-coloured in most cases. She has some rare clothing adapted to cooler climates, but they're deeeeeeep in her wradrobe. Her more formal attire is a black dress with a smooth, straight skirt that goes down to her ankles alongside some black sandal-type shoes. Her sleeping stuff could be briefly described as 'the minimum', although not the bare minimum. Come on. Her combat attire is pretty much just a large pouch/sling bag on her left for ammo, a few holsters and an attachment point to keep the halberd form in her back and ready to use.
History: Maena's parents are - well, were, but more on that later - scavengers operating to the south-west of Vacuo, moving around with the small tribe they were part of in a nomadic fashion. They'd both been born (and raised, for the most part) in Vacuo and had decided to strike out to see more of the world and challenge themselves. One day, though, the unexpected happened - a child was accidentally conceived due to the failure of an important component. This didn't really upset them, they were even ecstatic about it. However, they chose to go back to Vacuo for the child's safety, the Academy being the only semblance of a law-enforcing group around these parts. Thus, they bid farewell to their companions and went back.
Still, Lien didn't just fall from the sky, they needed to make a living somehow. They settled on opening a sort of liaison office between scavengers and potential buyers. They'd met a few people over the years, so there wasn't exactly a zero amount of people willing to trust them. It became better over time, though, word-of-mouth spreading a good reputation to sellers and buyers alike.
It's in this environment that Maena was born. Right from the get-go, pretty much anyone who spent more than 30 seconds with her could tell she was quite the energetic baby. As she grew, that energy became more and more focused. Even before kindergarten, she would gladly take on any chores assigned by her parents with an intensity seldom seen in children her age. As she grew, this tendency, this focus, affirmed itself further. Whether it was helping a friend, cleaning her room, doing the laundry or her homework, once she'd started a task, she would put lots of her energy into it and wouldn't stop until it was completed, barely taking any rest - bar emergencies arising. While decidedly tiring, her ample energy combined with dedication gave her first place in academics several times. She was known as somebody you could count on and her friends protected her from those who would seek to exploit this good will.
She had decided, since long before entering the path to become a Huntress, that she would help and protect others. She loved doing it and it seemed to be a nice fit for it. Her trend of deeply focusing on the current task didn't stop by the time she enrolled into Oasis. She studied everything that was thrown at her with a genuine thirst for knowledge and the desire to better herself. Although the competition was undoubtedly fiercer than in, say, elementary school, she managed to come out as one of the best-performing students in academics as well as being among the upper echelons in terms of battle prowess. Backed with these, she passed the Shade exam with a very high score in academics, and ranked in among the top in both sparring and live combat.
Personality: Maena is a bright and energetic young woman, possessing a surprisingly vast sense of humour - mind you, she's not the one to cracks jokes most of the time. She refrains from being overtly mean to others unless they themselves are being overtly mean to someone. If (somehow) angered, she will more often than not make a mess before swiftly departing to prevent further escalation, then come back when things have cooled down to settle the litigious matters.
Her most glaring quality - and defect - is her dedication to the task at hand. We're not merely talking about being studious, here. We're talking about studying until dropping from lack of sleep, or in more complex terms, working towards her current intended goal with an abandon rarely seen. Thus, while she's friendly to (almost) all, she has few people she considers as "actual friends", every single one being extremely precious to her. This also makes her have stunningly excellent scores and grades at the cost of, well, sleep and whatnot.
Her hobbies are pretty much nonexistant - having a hobby would make her too focused solely on the aforementioned activity, which would be highly detrimental to her grades and general well-being. She therefore fills her free time with whatever aids her goals - learning to cook the perfect crepe, studying the finer points of Dust properties or even just practicing combat.
Aura and Semblance: Maena's Aura is a somewhat silvery blue - if that even makes sense. It can be clearly seen when coalescing.
Her semblance is Emission: She is capable of emitting her Aura in a variety of light-like ways, where power, 'wavelength' and emission method can be changed. Using her semblance requires significant concentration, making Maena almost completely immobile while she does so - unless she's using very low power. To be clear: it is light-like, and far from travelling anywhere close to relativistic speeds.
Power: Maena can effortlessly keep a continuous emission of very low power (high-power laser pointer) in directional mode and the equivalent of a bright lightbulb in omnidirectional/non-directional mode. Unless you happen to get the directional mode's low-power emission right in the eye, these are entirely harmless. As a general rule of thumb, however much 'battery' she uses is directly proportional to the power emitted. Pulsed mode is approximately twice as efficient as continuous mode, charging taking twice as many seconds as the amount of capacity she's using. Omnidirectional uses significantly (~10 times) less capacity due to the enormous amount of power that needs to be funneled into the far larger surface area to induce similar effects (high brightness). The maximum she can dish out, as of now, is 2% capacity continuous and 20% instant.
Wavelength: At the moment, Maena can only emit a single 'wavelength'/'colour' at a time and cannot reverse the emission's direction in omni mode (superpose emissions of the same wavelength at different phases). She can currently go from about mid-infrared to Neon red-ish.
Method: There are two sub-methods that must be chosen at once.
- Continuous/Pulsed: In continuous mode, the emission is, as implied, continuous. Think of a laser (pointer), but with varying power (width is currently fixed and small). Pulsed, however, requires her to charge her emission: using (X/2)% capacity requires X seconds of charging. Pulsed releases in a brief flash, packing far more instant power than continuous.
- Directional/Omnidirectional: Directed emission creates a correlated stream of of Aura (in other words, a laser-like emission of Aura, but not necessarily out of visible or IR light*). This isn't as easy to aim as you may think; getting it to hit the target right off the bat is notably difficult. Add to that the fact that she's generally rather mediocre at aiming and you get a good-accuracy range for pulsed at 50-ish m or less. She can only create one beam at a time. Omnidirectional emits the Aura from the surface of a sphere surrounding Maena, making her briefly look like a glowing, featureless ball of light if pulsed. Unless it's, y'know, not optical light, in which case you don't see shit. Continuous isn't powerful enough to obscure her. Also noteworthy, it isn't really capable of doing much damage, if at all. IR will feel like 'HOLY SHIT THAT'S HOT' but won't actually burn Aura-protected things for various reasons.
*Gaussian beam mechanics apply. Don't bother about this if you don't know what that means as it's not very important.
Combat Behavior: Maena tends to follow a certain pattern when commencing a battle: start with Sositi in halberd form to test out the opposition and, depending on the verdict, remain with the pole's superior reach or split her weapon for added mobility at the expense of some power and lots of reach. Every now and then she'll 'spice things up' by blasting the enemy with the shotgun form, mostly when significant damage is needed.
Her greatest weakness is change - she lacks foresight due to her fixation on the ongoing battle. While she'll still react to a change, say, a trap springing up, she won't see it coming until it's almost right on top of her. Same goes for an ambush; she'll adapt to the sudden influx of enemies but will not have seen them coming.
When using the halberd form, she will have a higher tendency to use large, powerful attacks, be they piercing or slashing, to make full use of the halberd's greater power. In split form, she'll make great use of her augmented mobility to dodge around the attacks and enemies, aiming to land hard blows in every opening she can take advantage of. She rarely fires the shotgun at anything but close range, her aim being... rather sub-par, let's say.
WEAPON
Name: Sositi
Primary Form: Sositi's more readily handled form consists of a large stick/small staff, a tonfa and an axe, the three of which all have distinct holsters. The axe looks a bit odd; apart from the spearhead-like extension of the middle shaft, the blades are hollow. That is, if you look at the blades from the side, they're only about a few centimeters of metal taking the shape of an arc on either side of the central shaft. The purpose of these voids is to ensnare enemy weapons and potentially disarm opponents.
Secondary Form: The axe fits on one end of the stick, while the tonfa's handle folds in and locks in on the other side. Minus the fiddling of assembly, which takes a few seconds, voilą, you have a working halberd. Do note that it is much faster to disassemble than it is to assemble.
Tertiary Form: The spearhead splits into two and moves to the unoccupied sides of the central shaft, 90 degrees relative to the axe blades. Just like that, a shotgun is ready to fire. It holds a max of 6 slugs at a time. Packs a rather heavy punch, with decent (read: not too large) spread, enough to still be pretty damaging right outside of close range and into mid-range - at least, with buckshot. Deershot packs a harder punch, flies better (requires decent aiming well to hit anything beyond close range) and has a longer max range. She carries around 6 standard deershots and 36 buckshots in her bag, possibly more depending on the mission.
Dust Functions: The shotgun is capable of accepting Dust ammo of the buckshot or deershot type, although she rarely has more than 2 deershot slugs per Dust type, which she prefers anyway because they have a bigger oomph than Dust buckshots.
- Fire: Explodes into a fireball.
- Kinetic + Fire mix: Explodes more like C4 and less like 'oooooh sudden heat'.
- Ice: Freezes stuff.
- Lightning: Zaps stuff. Hard.
- Kinetic: Hits much harder than normal due to increased projectile speed.
- Gravity: Multiplies the projectile's apparent mass by lots. Hits even harder, but the recoil is beyond atrocious.
Buckshot versions are more like concentrated sprays of Dust than projectiles. Gravity and Kinetic have, in this instance, a narrower spread and more speed, but not nearly as much as in deershot form.
History: Made when Maena started exploring weapon options during her time at Oasis. She decided on the design because it was simple (low failure rates, low costs), polyvalent and powerful as well as fitted to her strengths and weaknesses.
Topic: Maena Nadir (completed sections, taking feedback before bringing to CC) (Read 5759 times)