Ash

[Ash]

Player Name: Zina
Name: Ash
Age: 15
Race: Shifter
Height: 5' 0"
Weight: 95lbs

Physical Description: Composed with a thin, delicate frame and skinny stature, Ash looks her age or even younger. She is relatively short compared to the rest of her family, but she insists she isn't done growing yet. Her face is sharp with large, dark eyes the color of stained pine and a relatively large nose with a small bump in the middle. Her brows and lashes are thick and full with thought and understanding. Her facial structure could be described as fervent, spirited, and focused. The cheek bones rise high to give her face an overall pointed look, while her skin burns red-brown like the iron-rich clay in the soil, just as the rest of her tribe.

Her hair is thick, black, and usually long enough to brush past her shoulder blades. Ash often keeps it in a single braid to keep it out of the way and prevent it from tangling. The hair is very course and healthy, but it often appears crimped or wavy when she takes it out of the braid, despite it being naturally straight.

Ash is normally in a small dress made of animal skin, but she is also naked relatively often because her clothes do not shift with her.

As a raven she is smaller than her brother, but larger than more common city crows.

Ash also have a half-raven form. In this form, she has a narrower, shorter face and a black beak. Her hair juts out like feathers and crawls past her scalp down to her shoulders and even parts of her back. Her skin is grey and darkened in places and hardly has any look of a human at all. Primary feathers poke through from the skin of her arms and wrists and her fingers are neither claw nor feather. There are few people who are aware that she can take this form aside from her immediate family, most notably her brother.

Possessions:
Ash does not often carry things with her. When she does, she gathers them into a basket she weaved from thick grass. She does not carry a weapon or even a knife for cutting, as Soot generally does that for her.

She has a collection of dried fruits and flowers.

Powers or Strengths:
Shifting - Ash is able to shift at will into a common raven. She also has a half form that she almost never appears as because it is mostly useless and looks strange. Unfortunately, she cannot always control her shifting and when she is very stressed, surprised, and sometimes in her sleep she will change into her half-form. She is ashamed of this form and it is part of the reason why she is so reserved.

Knots - Either due to her smarts, her thin fingers, or perhaps her fascination with logic problems, Ash can untie almost any knot given to her. It's something of a talent of hers. She and Soot used to make a game out of him tying knots for her to challenge her untying abilities.

Smart - Ash is good at contriving elegant, often creative, solutions to different problems. She is more rational than her brother and practical, and handles abstract concepts easily. She likes to analyze and hates guessing. Although not fitted with formal education, having never had interaction with Eyropan society, Ash learns quickly and adapts readily to changing situations, unless they put any emotional strain whatsoever on her. In this case, she folds easily.

Soot - Her brother acts as a compliment to her. He gives her emotional strength where she might otherwise fail, and she is tied to him very deeply. Soot can show her how to do things outside of Ash's scope of knowledge. He is also good at helping her with physical tasks, and his care for her ensures that she is never alone for long.

Weaving - Like nearly all women from her tribe, Ash knows how to weave certain kinds of fibers and plants together to make baskets and certain garments. She doesn't excel at this, and weaving anything still takes a very long time to complete.

Direction - Ash has a very good sense of direction, especially when flying. It is a common trait amongst her people.

Understanding of Nature - Spending so much time in deep thought and observation, Ash has a deep connection and understanding of plants and the environment around her. She knows what eats what, which animals go where, and what is normal on the island. She would be quick to figure out when something in the environment is amiss or changed.

Empathy - Ash understands people for the most part, especially those she is closest with. Even when others are mean to her, she has a tendency to favor their side of things rather than pay attention to her own. This makes her prone to blaming herself for things she didn't do, but it also means she is soft and often willing to help others.

Weaknesses:
Shy - Ash is a very quiet and very reserved girl. Most people who meet her tend to get the impression that she is either dull, stupid, or make the correct observation that she is bookish. She is constantly thinking about everything; her attention span is quite short on any individual subject, but in a different way from her brother. She can concentrate on a single plant or tree or animal for hours, deep in observation. Her brain thinks about different aspects of the subject and never lingers on a single one. She is bashful, and will rarely speak her mind in the presence of stronger-voiced people.

Social skills - As a quiet child, Ash has a difficult time making friends, partially because she doesn't feel the need to be social even at her age. Some people find this to be a crude or snobbish part of her personality but she rarely thinks lowly of other people. She does not appear to show interest in boys, but it's impossible to know what she's thinking at a given moment unless you're Soot. Ash is concerned about things other than her social life and is happier sitting on the seaside than being with friends. Her best friend is her brother, and everyone else feels more like an acquaintance to her.

Dependent - Ash is not the independent type and though she is intelligent, enjoys time alone, and is reserved, she is very dependent on her family and what few friends she might have. She does not do well when on her own for longer periods of time and it would be dangerous for her to live alone for any amount of time due to her age and the place she lives. The raven shifters are a very social, tightly knit group of people and survival depends on this group strategy.

Sensitive - Girls, most notably teenaged girls, can be emotional beings. Ash is no exception to this. She is very sensitive to criticism about anything, with the exception being if the criticism comes from Soot (in most cases). If Ash is left alone by herself for too long, her thoughts will send her into a negative cycle and she cannot stop thinking about her perceived failures and weaknesses. She is especially sensitive around her menstrual cycle, where any comment, even from Soot, can make her cry. Her family knows that she is prone to these little outbursts, but with the absence of her mother they have become a lot worse. Mood swings are not uncommon, but are usually predictable because of her complete silence and shakiness prior to them.

Blame - Being empathetic, she has a tendency to misjudge the actions of others and read too much into them. This makes her believe that almost everything is her fault instead of theirs.

Soot - While her brother is her best friend, he is also her weakness in many ways. Anything mean he might say to her hurts her a bit extra in comparison to other people. She is also constantly worried about his physical and emotional well-being.

Ice - Ash is mildly afraid of ice and dying of cold.

Crowds - Crowds are problematic for her. Within a crowd of twenty people or more she becomes very uncomfortable, especially if they are all strangers. She is very disturbed by large free-forming crowds most of all, and will avoid them, leave them, or have an anxiety attack.

History:
Ash was laid as an egg by her mother, Wren, as part of a clutch of six. The Hazanyii people of Kohya are a group of raven shifters who live on a small island in its center. Shifters are common along the gulf, affected by magic leaking through the Astral seal long ago. So long, in fact, that many display what could be considered unnatural or problematic behaviors. Inbreeding on their island of habitation has worsened this magical issue. But this tie also grants them with the knowledge and need to become part of the animal world, and part of the natural balance. Unfortunately, the side effects of this privilege can be devastating.

For the ravens, laying eggs instead of giving birth to live young is troublesome for a number of biological reasons, and often results in low hatch rates and a high percentage of handicapped infants. For Ash's people, the handicapped play an important role in society and are often blessed with special mental abilities, as if to compensate for their problems.

In her mother's clutch, only three eggs survived because of these problems: Ash, Soot, and Ember. Ash's brother, Ember, was born with a malformed body and mental problems. For the Hazanyii people, life is considered a most precious thing due to the low hatch rates of their offspring. In particular, those born handicapped are often seen as a sort of link to the natural world. Ash's family raised all of their children with utmost care, and Ash grew to have a strong bond with her disabled brother. Still, when the children grew old enough to play without their mother's watchful eye, Soot and Ash would run off together without their brother.

Youthful Ash idolized Soot, who seemed stronger than her in every way. He could run faster than her as a boy, and seemed to have a head start on everything physical. He flew before she could muster the courage to get off the ground, he crowed louder than her, he could fly higher and farther and faster, and she wished she could do the same. Soot was always the more social of the triplets, and when they were young, Ash wished many times that she could be a part of a larger play group. She had a habit of following her brother everywhere he went, tagging along with his boy friends much to his annoyance. As they grew, everywhere Soot went Ash was sure to follow. This distanced her a bit from Ember, but she has always loved him and cared for his well-being.

For the Hazanyii people, childhood is a preparation for adulthood, not a time of wreckless play. The ability to fly is considered a major milestone in this development, but it is not the only one. Children learn to read the landscape for danger of any kind, they learn which plants are good and which are bad. They learn what foods are safe to eat and which are not. Males even learn how to track larger prey; hunting is an important natural concept to the Hazanyii. Ash was always stuck to Soot's side during these lessons, taught by relatives and elders of the island. She was always the one to pick up the signs of the landscape faster, always knowing when hawks and eagles were in the sky. Soot, on the other hand, would often wander without care. She was almost always with him for these adventures, and was always the one crying and trying to bring help when he would stumble and bleed or stampede through prickling brush.

When they learned to fly, she became the navigator for their escapades because of her ability to read the land better than her brother. She was always able to find them alternate routes in the case of bad weather or dangerous animals in their usual path. However, it was around this time that she began to show signs of womanhood. Although Ash had always been very quiet, she soon developed moodiness and became prone to depressed or anxious outbursts.

One evening, when she was nine, Ash ran in the woods alongside Soot. They found a patch of prickle root, named aptly for the poisonous spines on its vine-like roots. Soot pretended to touch the vine, in order to stir up his sister. He succeeded, and Ash became all at once an explosion of tears and yelling. Even after Soot revealed he had not been pricked by the toxic plant, Ash would not relent. She became angry with herself for being unable to save Soot from a nonexistent foe, and shifted into her half form for the first time. Disgusted by herself and the appearance of her feathered, clawed hands, Ash ran away from her family for a day. Soot and her parents had to look for Ash all day and well into the evening hours, finding her eventually curled inside of a tree trunk.

Episodes like this became relatively commonplace, and the family learned to deal with them, sort of. Ash's coping mechanism was primarily to cling to Soot when she felt unhappy, which became problematic when he reached his "cool kid" phase. Soot was a popular boy among their age group and gained friends faster than Ash could meet people at all. He began venturing with their peers, including girls, more than he did with Ash. Feeling ignored and unimportant, Ash assumed that she had done something wrong and her episodes increased in frequency and intensity. Ash began to spend more and more time alone with her thoughts and with nature. Then, she noticed something was wrong.

The fish in the gulf weren't jumping. The nets weren't catching. The scent over the water had changed. Fewer birds patrolled the shorelines and Ash knew that something had changed for the worse. She brought her concerns to Soot, but he pushed her worries to the side. Ash knew that if the tribe did not do something about whatever had caused the changes, they would gradually get worse, and something terrible could happen. She told the elderwoman Wilka about these changes, and Wilka said that she too had noticed the cold water and sharp winds. Wilka brought this to the revered shaman elders, but it was too late. Something terrible had already happened.

Ash's mother had gone with a group of other woman to gather food from the sea and shorelines with their canoes. She split from the group as usual to cover a wider area, and then vanished. A woman vanishing so suddenly was a very rare occurrence. The event shattered their father, who believed her to be dead. Ash believes that her mother lives, but is terrified of the possibility that she may have been killed. The bitter truth to her concerns had risen. The shaman elders were to convene in the center of the island to discuss the island's future.

[Stella]

omg this thing is done.