Annie
Apr 9, 2012 10:00:57 GMT -6
Post by Annie on Apr 9, 2012 10:00:57 GMT -6
Name: Anna Liese Aude
Class: Mage --> Sage
Hair Color: Teal
Eye Color: Blue
Age: 17, but she's been known to fudge it by a year or four
Affinity: Darkness
Appearance: Annie is no fragile Etrurian noblelady studying magic at an academy, and she's very proud of her upbringing. Slightly tanned and having built up some muscle for household tasks, it would be hard to mistake her for one in the first place. She stands at only 5'4", and weighs 132 pounds. Her figure is well developed where it
counts, if very thin all around. That figure and her teal hair are the only things she inherited from her mother, whom she considers to be the most beautiful woman in Elibe. She take immense pride in both, washing and brushing her hair every night even if she leaves it in a practical ponytail during the day.
Clothes: Annie's normal outfit consists of a white dress knee-length dress with short billowy sleeves. Over that goes a leather tabard tied on with a red cloth around the waist. She wears not so much a cloak or scarf as a pink piece of cloth with a hood about her shoulders. If they weren't so high, her boots would be practical dark brown things made for heavy travel. She wears even higher white socks underneath because she likes the way they look with her skirt. If she needs to lie low for whatever reason, she switches to a dark blue tunic, black slacks, and a brown jacket, and puts her hair into twin braid to give the appearance of a random lazy farm girl and facilitate night travel. Around her neck is another thing inherited from her mother: a small metal plate on a chain, with an inscription too small for human eyes to read. Annie is aware that the necklace is very important, although she doesn't know why, as her grandmother died before getting to tell her mother. Regardless, she only takes it off when she really needs to hide her identity.
Born in: Bern
Story: To understand Annie's psychology, one would first need to understand her family. The women in the line dropped their surname and set out on a quest to prove their superiority to the opposite sex a long time ago, only deigning to touch one when they needed an heir. According to her mother's story, this is because when the future marquesses were dividing Lycia up, they refused to give their sister Marie her fair share, and so she left her brothers and husband to raise a little girl who hated men as much as she did. ("And that's where you came from!" "Mom, you're married." "Except your father. He's not so bad sometimes.")
Eventually, Lilie was the latest progeny, and left home on her 16th birthday. She was injured whilst defending a village from some surprisingly well-armed bandits, and fell under the care of Lyall Aude, local healer and runaway Etrurian noble. Several more injuries and even more arguments found them traveling together. Less than five years later they were hastily settling down near Bern's Pheraen border when their daughter was born.
And thus were the circumstances under which Anna Liese Aude came into the world. She spent her life in the abandoned farmhouse with her parents and eventually her grandmother. The people in the nearby village knew them to be a farm family with a patriarch who also happened to be a healer; Admittedly, a rather belligerent farm family who'd kicked out any stray bandits during the war, but simple folks nonetheless. Annie grew up happy, healthy, and not nearly as misandrous as her female kin. To their further dismay, she took after her father in nearly every possible way.
Around 9, she questioned why she had to best men at swordplay, when she could learn magic; After all, why fight harder when you can fight smarter? Annie never quite did pick up the light magic her father tried to teach her and, for a while, went back to swords. And then she got her hands on a Fire tome, managed to teach herself how to use it, and never touched a sword again.
When she was deemed to have enough mastery over her weapon, Annie left on the traditional journey to travel the world, getting stronger and righting wrongs made by men. She's starting with Lycia.
Personality: Saying that Annie isn't as misandrous as her mother is like saying a mage isn't as powerful as a shaman. She can hide her disdain a bit better, and has little difficulty working with men to achieve her goals, even if she does use them as meatshields in battle("Not because I'm a woman, because I'm not wearing armor!") Regardless, she never completely trusts them if they haven't given her very good reason to. She can play up the 'perky, innocent teenage girl' act to get what she wants, but is avoiding seduction and actually using her body until she gets older. Though she delights in ideas of romance and true love, she has never thought of it as something even tangentially related to her, since she can't picture herself in love. She doesn't feel that sad about it, and sometimes questions whether she would even know what a normal relationship looks like, considering her parents' frequent verbal sparring.
It should go without saying that Annie's far nicer to other women. They find out that the cute, innocent act is not a huge exaggeration. She actually is very optimistic, energetic, and places herself squarely in the 'heroine' category. She never had many friends, but is stubbornly loyal to those that she does possess. She also enjoys talking to other mages, if only to find out how they do things; Having learned how anima magic worked by making educated guesses has left her with an disconcerting feeling that, even though it works, she's somehow doing it wrong. For all the times she's made fun of fragile Etrurian noble mages, she becomes unexpectedly self-conscious and even defensive when faced with anyone who's studied magic formally, and tries to incorporate their ideas into her own style.
Her parents' influence on her fighting style is obvious to anyone who's seen it. She's constantly moving, as if she was a swordfighter, and her casting stance is more reminiscent of light magic than anima. That said, Annie is is still her own person: She's not lazy and pessimistic like her father, and not aggressive and bitter like her mother. Assertive and confident, yes, but she's not a miniature version of either parent.