Alina Drey
Posted: Tue Mar 02, 2010 12:40 pm
Name: Alina Drey
Age: 29
Race: Human
Height: 5'6''
Weight: 70kg
Physical description: Alina is stocky and muscular. She wears her brown hair cropped short and her green eyes are sharp and constantly scanning her surroundings. Her skin is tanned; Alina's appearance is not hideous, but nobody would describe her as beautiful, with her too-large nose and prematurely wrinkled skin. She usually wears her guard's uniform, but on the occasions that she is seen outside the house off-duty she wears nondescript, practical clothing, with no interest in frills or skirts except at rare formal occasions where her uniform is inappropriate.
Possessions: Alina rents a small house in Marn and has all the normal household possessions one would expect, as well as her issued armour and weapons. She has her own sword, which is slightly smaller than standard issue, and some savings. She also hoards a collection of small items, most of low or medium value, with no apparent connection to each other; scraps of cloth, old spoons, strings of beads, even an old chair is part of her collection. These are objects from which she can sense emotions or thoughts that she finds particularly interesting or pleasant. Her most treasured of these is a small brass pendant, that gives her a feeling of inspiration and courage when she touches it; she sometimes wears this between her shirt and armour.
Strengths:
Close combat
Alina trained in wrestling as a child, and her training as a guard has left her very competent at nonlethal close combat. She works best unarmed, or with a truncheon or mace; she is less efficient with her sword and only draws it as a last resort.
Magic -- object empathy
Alina has a magical ability to sense emotional and memory imprints left on objects. She can often sense the emotions or thoughts of people who have held certain objects at the time that they handled them. This could, in theory, be of enormous help in crime scene investigation, but she never divulges anything that she learns this way to her fellow guards for fear of her magic being discovered.
There appears to be no pattern to objects that she can and cannot sense from; strength of emotion, personal importance, and length of time of exposure have no effect on whether she can sense things from an object or not. There is no consistency in being able to sense things from one person and not another, or certain types of objects or emotions; it appears to be random. The only consistent thing that she has noticed is that she never reads her own emotions or thoughts from the past; thus, she can handle the same object many times without the risk of masking the sensations with her own thoughts and feelings as she touches them.
She must be in physical contact with objects to feel anything. She cannot sense things from living beings or from the air, but she sometimes can from, say, walls. Even a thin sheet of fabric will block her power (unless she senses something from the fabric itself), but contact with any part of her skin will work. She cannot block the ability except by physically covering her skin with something she doesn't sense from.
Weaknesses
Ranged combat
Alina has been trained to use a bow, but she's only just good enough to pass training. She cannot reliably hit a target in any stressful or time-limited situation and doesn't care for ranged weapons.
Interpersonal relationships
Alina has the potential to be quite charismatic, but it limited by two factors: her obsession with the job, making it difficult to get close to non-guardsmen, and her secret magic, making it difficult to get close to guardsmen. She also gets trouble from both sides as a female guard, and is aware that she has to work especially hard to keep up with her male colleagues. She subconsciously avoids making "girly" friends for this reason, making interpersonal relationships especially difficult.
Emotional instability
Alina is often hampered by unexpected waves of emotion or memory unrelated to what she is feeling. This can be very distracting and she can't always hide it, sometimes causing people to suspect that she might be emotionally unstable; a suspicion that isn't without justification. Alina is unhealthily attached to her collection of emotional stimulants and well aware that her power may be addictive and harmful in the long term, but she can't resist deliberately sampling others' thoughts and emotions occasionally. As of yet, such years have not adversely affected her job performance, which she holds as some kind of internal proof that she's fine, but she lives in fear of losing herself completely in the minds of others.
History:
Alina was born in Shim. Her parents own a small clothing shop, and she frequently helped out in the shop as a child, but was drawn to more active work from an early age, and would often chat with a guard who regularly patrolled her street as a child. She learned wrestling skills from a friend of the family as a teenager and enrolled in the City Guard as soon as she was old enough.
Alina's magical abilities did not become apparent until she was 14, and old enough to know to hide them. At first she was merely frightened of letting it be known how different she was and afraid of the government; as time went on, she became convinced that even such a harmless power could seriously harm her progress in her chosen career and became more determined to hide it.
She has been a guard ever since. She is careful not to let on that she knows anything that she learns via magic, so she has a reputation for being a little slow, but well-meaning and dutiful. She hasn't made any great leaps forward in her career, but performs her job relatively well, even if that is usually guarding a gate or patrolling quiet streets.
Age: 29
Race: Human
Height: 5'6''
Weight: 70kg
Physical description: Alina is stocky and muscular. She wears her brown hair cropped short and her green eyes are sharp and constantly scanning her surroundings. Her skin is tanned; Alina's appearance is not hideous, but nobody would describe her as beautiful, with her too-large nose and prematurely wrinkled skin. She usually wears her guard's uniform, but on the occasions that she is seen outside the house off-duty she wears nondescript, practical clothing, with no interest in frills or skirts except at rare formal occasions where her uniform is inappropriate.
Possessions: Alina rents a small house in Marn and has all the normal household possessions one would expect, as well as her issued armour and weapons. She has her own sword, which is slightly smaller than standard issue, and some savings. She also hoards a collection of small items, most of low or medium value, with no apparent connection to each other; scraps of cloth, old spoons, strings of beads, even an old chair is part of her collection. These are objects from which she can sense emotions or thoughts that she finds particularly interesting or pleasant. Her most treasured of these is a small brass pendant, that gives her a feeling of inspiration and courage when she touches it; she sometimes wears this between her shirt and armour.
Strengths:
Close combat
Alina trained in wrestling as a child, and her training as a guard has left her very competent at nonlethal close combat. She works best unarmed, or with a truncheon or mace; she is less efficient with her sword and only draws it as a last resort.
Magic -- object empathy
Alina has a magical ability to sense emotional and memory imprints left on objects. She can often sense the emotions or thoughts of people who have held certain objects at the time that they handled them. This could, in theory, be of enormous help in crime scene investigation, but she never divulges anything that she learns this way to her fellow guards for fear of her magic being discovered.
There appears to be no pattern to objects that she can and cannot sense from; strength of emotion, personal importance, and length of time of exposure have no effect on whether she can sense things from an object or not. There is no consistency in being able to sense things from one person and not another, or certain types of objects or emotions; it appears to be random. The only consistent thing that she has noticed is that she never reads her own emotions or thoughts from the past; thus, she can handle the same object many times without the risk of masking the sensations with her own thoughts and feelings as she touches them.
She must be in physical contact with objects to feel anything. She cannot sense things from living beings or from the air, but she sometimes can from, say, walls. Even a thin sheet of fabric will block her power (unless she senses something from the fabric itself), but contact with any part of her skin will work. She cannot block the ability except by physically covering her skin with something she doesn't sense from.
Weaknesses
Ranged combat
Alina has been trained to use a bow, but she's only just good enough to pass training. She cannot reliably hit a target in any stressful or time-limited situation and doesn't care for ranged weapons.
Interpersonal relationships
Alina has the potential to be quite charismatic, but it limited by two factors: her obsession with the job, making it difficult to get close to non-guardsmen, and her secret magic, making it difficult to get close to guardsmen. She also gets trouble from both sides as a female guard, and is aware that she has to work especially hard to keep up with her male colleagues. She subconsciously avoids making "girly" friends for this reason, making interpersonal relationships especially difficult.
Emotional instability
Alina is often hampered by unexpected waves of emotion or memory unrelated to what she is feeling. This can be very distracting and she can't always hide it, sometimes causing people to suspect that she might be emotionally unstable; a suspicion that isn't without justification. Alina is unhealthily attached to her collection of emotional stimulants and well aware that her power may be addictive and harmful in the long term, but she can't resist deliberately sampling others' thoughts and emotions occasionally. As of yet, such years have not adversely affected her job performance, which she holds as some kind of internal proof that she's fine, but she lives in fear of losing herself completely in the minds of others.
History:
Alina was born in Shim. Her parents own a small clothing shop, and she frequently helped out in the shop as a child, but was drawn to more active work from an early age, and would often chat with a guard who regularly patrolled her street as a child. She learned wrestling skills from a friend of the family as a teenager and enrolled in the City Guard as soon as she was old enough.
Alina's magical abilities did not become apparent until she was 14, and old enough to know to hide them. At first she was merely frightened of letting it be known how different she was and afraid of the government; as time went on, she became convinced that even such a harmless power could seriously harm her progress in her chosen career and became more determined to hide it.
She has been a guard ever since. She is careful not to let on that she knows anything that she learns via magic, so she has a reputation for being a little slow, but well-meaning and dutiful. She hasn't made any great leaps forward in her career, but performs her job relatively well, even if that is usually guarding a gate or patrolling quiet streets.