Elesia BEAR MAGE
Feb 10, 2012 23:05:00 GMT -6
Post by Elesia on Feb 10, 2012 23:05:00 GMT -6
Name: Elesia.
Class: Mage.
Hair: A vivid grassy green, long and messy. It hangs down her back even as chartreuse strands frame her face and shoulders; her bangs often cover one eye or the other. Elesia has a tendency to hide behind them as though breaking eye contact will instantly resolve any situation. She is extremely vague about whether the twin red flowers she wears as decoration are actual flowers, hair ornaments, or mind-controlling symbiotes that control her every movement.
Eyes: A brilliant malachite that matches her hair surprisingly closely, intelligence and innocence entwined in curious harmony. They tend to reflect anything she feels, further fueling her tendency to cover them when embarassed or confused; she is acutely aware of her total inability to hide emotions, and worse, her total inability to filter them.
Age: Appears to be somewhere in her later teens; the open questions of nutrition and natural growth make guessing her exact age fuzzy, and Elesia herself doesn't have any idea. If pressed on the matter, she tends to respond with varying answers ranging from sixteen to twenty - not so much a clever ruse as her honest attempts to give as accurate a guess as possible based off of her limited impressions of what people look like at various ages.
Appearance: Elesia is an odd combination of jungle waif and a walking bundle of palpable shyness, slipping into the background of any situation like a fish in water; if it weren't for her boundless curiosity it wouldn't hard to imagine her never talking at all. When she does, it is always quiet and stilted, hunting for the right words between each short stretch of speech, her unfamiliarity with verbal communication evident. She trips over the pronunciation of many longer words, pointing to her knowledge of the language being primarily lifted from the written word rather than naturally through listening and speaking.
As such, Elesia communicates more through touch and nonverbal channels than speech, drawing attention with the pull of a sleeve or a soft prod rather than addressing people by name and utilizing her natural expressiveness as a useful tool rather than solely a curse. She speaks even less in public, especially in the immediate vicinity of large groups.
Her natural stance, such as it is, comprises something between a crouch and a slouch - Elesia always seems ready to move at the slightest sound, not necessarily nervous so much as uncannily alert, ready to react to anything at a moment's notice. Her body is athletic, toned; while it is generally not obvious on immediate inspection, she is in extremely good shape, surprisingly resilient and quick.
Elesia has a grand total of one article of clothing to her name, a plain white dress that is somewhat the worse for wear, but in surprisingly good condition for how consistently she wears it. Stolen, presumably. It is clear that she takes good care of it, and the girl fills it out surprisingly well - while somewhat thin, she is quite curvy, though her nature and maturity ensure that she does not look beautiful. Cute might be a better word; Elesia looks almost trapped between childhood and maturity, a walking dichotomy of the two.
The only other apparel she wears would be the lengthy ribbon around her right arm, wrapped haphazardly with little apparent rhyme nor reason. It begins around her right bicep, something that looks like a makeshift bandage, but trails off into seemingly random twirls before ending in an abrupt but neatly-tied wribbon on her wrist. More hangs down, but the actual length of the remainder varies by the day; sometimes merely a few inches, whiel other days easily a meter drags along. Elesia tends to make utilitarian use of the cloth, but why she wears it around her arm is unclear and she makes no effort to explain it.
Born in: She answers with a vague shrug. Good luck getting anything more concrete.
Personality: An intense sense of raw curiosity serves to define her; it took her to magic, it inspired her to teach herself to read, and it brought her out of the forest, into civilization and all the mysteries of an unfamiliar world. Elesia is curious about everything - how things work, why people react the way they do, what this button does. She has an intensely strong sense of self-preservation, but only the barest context to attach it to; her curiosity has led her to engage in borderline-suicidal without any idea of the danger inherent to them - that she hasn't already gotten herself killed is really quite amazing.
Equally integral to her existence is Elesia's empathic nature - her ability to read someone's emotions and feelings borders on outright uncanny. Doing anything with that information is the issue; context rears its head once more, depriving her of the ability to actually understand what might have caused the given suite of emotions or offering any real support of her own. She tends to try anyways, but halting, unsure words can only get her point across so well, and the more complex the issue gets, the more her inability to help directly grows at an exponential rate. Elesia is often reduced to touch as a conduit to convey her feelings, a makeshift attempt at moral support that solves nothing more serious than the occasional bad mood.
Times like those are as often as she comes out of her shell of insecurity and quietness; completely overwhelmed by the world of man and acutely aware of her inability to communicate effectively, as well as ashamed of her own halting words and poor pronunciation, Elesia tends towards handling the stress by withdrawing inside herself; her curiosity is one of the two major things keeping her from just returning to the forest.
The other, for better or for worse, is sheer stubbornness. How much of what motivates Elesia is simple curiosity and how much is stubbornness is an open question that not even she could answer, but "giving up" is not a concept she likes. Elesia knows better than anyone that she isn't particularly strong as a person, that she isn't particularly courageous or well-adjusted or socially adept, and she is very vaguely aware that she isn't exactly a basion of moral magnificence either, but the mixture of her two defining qualities has ignited a fire in her that is not so easily quenched. Whether it takes her to mastery of magic, eventually becoming a legitimate member of society, or a tragic end remains to be seen.
While not in the least properly moral or brave, Elesia has a fiery sense of justice. Things that she would simply bear if visited on her will rouse her to the defense of others, even if she would never have been able to muster the courage to defend herself in that situation. This behavior clashes quite blatantly with her normal reservation about inflicting herself on those around her, making it all the more awkward and difficult for her, but stubbornness keeps her from backing down.
Magic is her greatest love, a hobby as well as a lifestyle. Her innate connection to magic makes it feel all the more natural to her; Elesia has always possessed a gift for it, though she had no idea how to cultivate it into anything useful whatsoever until the encounter with the mage that introduced her to magic as a discipline. Much of the reason for her eventually striking out on her own was a focused need to learn more, and that drive still propels her forward.
Extraordinarily quick of wit, Elesia is extremely intelligent; her mind works quickly, constantly passively mulling over issues and past failures with an eternal drive to understand and improve. This does not translate well to interactions with others: her intense natural difficulty with communication is only amplified by thinking even further along different lines than normal human beings, going so far as to make her seem even less approachable at times. Having learned to read from what the mage provided as well as stolen books and some time spent skulking, observing a human school, she is completely lost when it comes to proverbs, sayings, and local dialects.
Story: The forest has always been her home. Elesia doesnt remember her birthparents beyond vague impressions, has no idea what life was like before, and isn't entirely sure what events conspired to leave her stranded alone in the woods. It doesn't bother her as much as it seems like it should, and that disconnect bothers her more than everything previous combined. Perhaps it was simply that she found replacements for past constants so quickly, perhaps it was just that being forced to adapt so dramatically in such a short time purged her preconceptions entirely.
Being raised by bears can do that to a girl.
She doesn't really remember much about a life before the woods, nor much of her early experiences in that dusky world, nor does she understand all that happened in the interim. Elesia still has no idea what possessed her ursine companions to not just devour her on the spot, much less accept her into their family - nor where they eventually went, or how she survived after that. Sleeping in trees, spending her days sampling foods to see if they were ediable, scavenging for leftover meat, attempting poor traps. Second nature to her now, but learning those skills from scratch or refining them from natural processes she observed was life-or-death at the time.
As she grew, so did the complexity of her work: budding manual dexterity and massive quantities of attempts, trial and error in its rawest essence, took her traps from amateur to function, and from there into ever more complex directions. Pig stakes, deadfall traps, snares, pits; some more lethal than others, countless failures, but enough successes to provide her with food, sometimes even excess. Elesia learned the hard way that food does not last forever, and bereft of salt or other preservatives she grew to tends more towards the nuts, seeds, and often more easily stored foods to survive winters. She forgot the outside world for a long time, but that knowledge was always barely present, and despite her rigid independence and distrust she was curious.
Watching people was her hobby, an attempt to learn more about the world she knew existed outside her own. Farmers, from the edges of adjacent towns, travelers and adventurers who cut through her domain - more often than not Elesia was there to silently observe, a ghost amongst the greenery. That was also where her history of incessant thieving began; making off with the occasional knife or length of rope made her everyday survival dramatically easier, no longer forced to rely on her own makeshift tools, and it only took borrowed one knife to make her realize how absurdly useful more would be.
It only took one wandering mage to ignite the savage inferno within her, a drive for knowledge that devoured more and more of her consciousness until it ranked alongside survival itself. Elesia has no idea how she actually managed to force herself to approach him, to overcome her fear and awkwardness - only that the primal need, her desire to feed that arcane connection an unstoppable force of nature, consumed her entirely. Fortunately, he was willing to waste some time with a useless little girl. From him she acquired her first link to another world, one which called to her far more strongly than the human world, but also one through which she hoped to bridge the interminable distance between her world and that inhabited by others.