Post by Verena on Apr 29, 2015 12:20:14 GMT
Basic//
Name: Verena Rosalba
Nickname(s): N/A
Age: 23
Gender: Female
Occupation: Traveling healer and performer, former priestess, former mercenary
Birthplace: Cael, Solis
Nation they're currently in: Sidus
Race: Human
Appearance//
Verena is a young woman of medium height, standing about 5'5" with a slender figure. She has fairly light skin with a smooth complexion and deceptively soft, youthful features. At the same time, she looks far from innocent and childish, as she lacks the wide eyes of childhood and carries herself in a manner that appears confident and sometimes aggressive. Her hair is a shade of dark red some more refined audience members have compared to red wine, and a little more than shoulder-length. In past days she would take care to keep it short, but lately she's left it to run a bit wild. Her eyes, in contrast, are violet in color and slightly narrow. The rest of her frame is lithe and athletic. She has a few scars on her forearms left over after a botched self-healing attempt, and rather rough hands, but her body is otherwise free of permanent wear and tear.
Verena has abandoned her old priestess robes entirely in favor of two distinct outfit styles. The first is a form-fitting outfit style consisting of a tunic-styled top falling to her hips over top tight pants slitted open at the ankles to in turn fall over thick riding boots. The second is a more elaborate outfit consisting of a fancy top and skirt (pictured here). Though there is some color variation between them, her first, 'riding' outfit is usually brown or rust-colored, while her second, 'performing' outfit is usually a deep red like her hair. She still owns an icon of Liane she was once required to wear, but lately prefers not to, instead keeping it in her bag. She keeps her staff strapped to her back when not using it, so that it's always readily on hand.
Clothing/Armor:
Personality//
Verena's attitude is, at a first glance, a meeting of opposites. Friendly, yet aggressive. Caring, yet potentially violent. She is an energetic and outgoing young woman with a positive worldview, yet at the same time is anything but naive. She is very knowledgeable about what even people that claim to live good lives and follow Liane's teachings can potentially do, to the point that her view of the faith she left behind has been permanently skewed by it. She has seen what happens when people take leave of their senses, whether because of alcohol, a berserk staff, or other means, and has taken from this the lesson that any good person can become something else entirely under the wrong circumstances. Yet at the same time, she believes that people are inherently good, and will usually try to appeal to this side.
In person, she is fairly upbeat and often contrary, sometimes going so far as to be flippant and rather sarcastic. Despite this, she is friendly and good-natured, and rather quick to apologize if she thinks she has offended someone. She will sometimes come off as standoff-ish and aggressive to people that she doesn't know, an attitude that doesn't quite fade even when she warms up to someone. She doesn't like being outright antagonistic toward anyone, however, and thus most of her aggressive nature she believes to be all in good fun. If she doesn't like someone, however, her favorite way of letting them know is losing any and all sense of humor when talking to or about them. Though there are several ways of getting on Verena's bad side, the easiest of these is being senselessly evil. Evil with a purpose? That's a bit of a gray area.
She loves fighting, much more than a staff user probably should. If she had her way, her favorite way to greet people would be picking a fight with them, and any time she needed to let off steam she would do so with a good old-fashioned brawl. Unfortunately for her, quite a few people in the world fight for keeps, putting her at a disadvantage. She would very rarely intentionally kill anyone, even the worst of bandits, unless pushed too far. On the other hand, when the situation calls for it, she has no qualms with knocking them out, breaking kneecaps, hitting them with a sleep staff, or other means of incapacitation. Despite her love for fighting, her skill at it is limited by her field of study and lack of physical strength. This, however, contributes to her enjoyment of it, making achieving victory more of a challenge and thus more of a thrill. And hey, in the worst case scenario, there's always magic.
She also loves music, both hearing it and playing it, enough to make a profession out of it after leaving both her faith and her brief stint as a mercenary. At the moment, she wouldn't willingly give this up for anything, though she laments that at the moment she can only find work in taverns. While capable of reading and to a lesser extent writing music, she isn't terribly good at it, and instead makes up most of what she plays on the spot.
Likes: Tea, wine (in moderation), a good scrap, music, jolly tavern atmospheres
Dislikes: Senseless violence, whiners, hypocrites, death, bar fights
Greatest Strength: Patience
Worst Flaw: Aggression
Hobbies: Performing, riding, hanging out in taverns, picking non-serious fights.
Goals: To get more work as a musician.
Quirks: Has a rough, extremely casual way of speaking.
History//
Verena never knew her parents. From what she could tell, her father was a drunken man looking for a one night stand, and her mother was a drunken woman who accepted but couldn't afford to raise a child afterwards. When she was born, the mother left her in the care of the Liane shrine in Cael, as opposed to less humane methods of ridding herself of the child she had no means of taking care of. There, Verena spent most of her early life, first as one of a few children also left in the shrine’s care then as a priestess to be.
Verena, however, never quite grew into the sheltered life at the shrine. She wandered out a lot, even from an early age, and explored the town beyond. On one of these ‘adventures’ at the grand age of seven, she heard a rumor from other local kids about a witch living in a forest grove outside of the city. Lacking the courage and ability at first to get between the church and the rumored grove without being caught, she built up slowly on subsequent trips, first working her way to the edge of th city, then to the edge of the grove, then taking a few steps inside. On the farthest she went, she thought she saw a house barely visible through the foliage, but never dared to approach it.
The next time she ventured out, she was instead waylaid by a brash teenage criminal-to-be, intent on roughing her up and taking her money. Verena insisted that she had no money, but this didn’t deter the boy, prompting her to pick up a stick nearby to fight back. Soon after, the boy did the same, and though Verena managed to land a couple good hits she was still left to stumble back to the shrine beaten and bruised. The clergy chastised her, both for sneaking out and for picking a fight, but she didn’t pay the scolding any mind. Picking fights, her seven-year-old mind thought, would be fine if she could do it better.
Despite this, for a few years to come, she stopped wandering off. She soon entered proper priestess training and picked up staff magics, which she found herself to be rather good at but never quite interested in at the time. In secret, she trained herself to the best of her ability in fighting, which ultimately amounted to swinging a heal staff through the air and hoping she was doing it right. For the most part, she knew she wasn’t but also acknowledged that beyond using the staves properly it was all she had at the moment. After a time, she would eventually learn anima magics, but that wouldn't come until after several years of trying to tach herself to fight. She also learned the scriptures of Liane and the lessons it was supposed to teach. For awhile, these lessons were lost on her, but as she began to grow up they gradually took hold. Some of them, even as she got older and began to understand them, still made no sense to her, presenting contradictions that she couldn’t puzzle out even on nights when she was too tired to practice swinging her staff around and sat in deep thought instead. Others, she took at face value. Others still, she took as being metaphorical, as while the passages themselves made no sense the lessons they taught were valuable on their own. Eventually, she began to see her faith's teachings not for what they were but for what they represented. This sometimes put her at odds with other initiates and priestesses, who took Liane's teachings literally, but at the same time it allowed her to feel better about her own life.
However, by looking deeper rather than following it blindly, Verena began to see holes in the scripture, and especially in the priests' interpretation of it. In particular, she began to question the apparent inequality of humans and beastkin (something, she noted during a few later trips away from the shrine, was not present in rival kingdom Lunae's faith) and the desire to follow a goddess that seemed to put victory in battle above all else. Deciding it was in part a result of being cooped up too long, she begun sneaking out again. Being fifteen and able to take care herself better, she no longer feared the city or the forest grove, or the seemingly endless roads beyond. At first, she just explored Cael and interacted with the people, finding more pleasant company in the southern half of the city. Sometimes she helped people when the need came up. One time, she ended up healing people who had been injured by bandit attacks on the road but were averse to visiting the church for various reasons that she took note of without realizing it. Another, she borrowed a sleep staff and used it to knock out some would-be thieves. She ended up using a small portion of the reward money (the priests of the shrine confiscated the rest) from that to buy a walking stick which she would then turn into her own self-defense tool. The walking stick, which Verena jokingly called the Staff of Beating, was considerably weaker than a proper weapon, but Verena quickly figured out how to use it in an emergency, either to knock someone over, cause damage to kneecaps, or just plain keep someone at a distance. A couple weeks after, she took it in hand and chased the rumor she had first heard eight years before. As she found out, however, the woman living in the forest grove was not an evil witch as she had thought, but a human woman with Beastkin ancestry and a lot of magical ability who claimed to have created the grove herself. On speaking to Vasudha, as the woman called herself, Verena was forced to confront one of those points in Liane's teachings she had never been able to understand: the fact that Liane was claimed to only be a goddess of humans but not Beastkin. Upon leaving the grove, she could only conclude that something about that particular point of scripture was wrong.
On the way back, a pair of bandits waylaid her, forcing her to try out her new staff. Fighting real opponents, as it turned out, was considerably more difficult than swinging at empty air. After struggling with them for a couple minutes she managed to knock one out, but was forced to flee from the other after a cut across her forearms prevented her from continuing to fight effectively. Rather than immediately return to the church and be forced to explain just what had happened, she ducked into an alley and tried to heal herself with her own staff. The result was partially healed wounds that would later form lasting scars, and the knowledge that self-healing didn’t work as well as she had hoped. When she went back, she was forced to explain what had happened anyway. The damage of her outing, however, had already been done, and she couldn’t look at the teachings of the shrine the same way again.
Before that outing, she had seen plenty of holes in what she was being forced to learn. Afterward, these holes became larger and more obvious. Once she had been convinced that one thing was more than likely flawed, everything else began to be cast into doubt. She also began to notice some of the hypocrisy of the ordained clergy. One night, a priest would sneak out to spend the night with a prostitute. Another, a different priest made off with an appreciable fraction of donation money and returned the next day with a debilitating hangover. While healing was supposed to be a free service, asking for donations before providing it was apparently okay. The worst part to Verena was not that this was happening though, but that it was always swept under the rug and the next day they would always act like devout servants of the goddess. By the time she was ready to be officially ordained and take her vows, she was so jaded by what she had seen that she couldn’t bring herself to believe in what they represented. Instead, the night before she was to be ordained, weeks before her eighteenth birthday, she simply left, deciding to live her own life, her own way.
Lacking anything except the staves she had managed to take with her and a cheap horn that she had taught herself to play during the down time, she could do little but heal and play for spare change until she ran into a mercenary team looking for a staff user. She joined up with them for a couple years, learning how to ride a horse and gaining a few tips on fighting properly in the meantime. The mercenary captain, a lance knight named Lorenzo, had started out using a quarterstaff and being trained by a man who didn’t trust him with sharp weapons, and was able to pass on some of that original training once she got her hands on a new quarterstaff of her own. Using her cut of the mercenary band’s earnings, she was eventually able to buy a horse of her own rather than always borrowing one, and after that a proper horn to satisfy her growing desire to play music.
After two years, her own interests had diverged from the mercenary band enough that she parted ways with them. By this point, Solis was starting to leave a sour taste in her mouth, and she decided to move elsewhere. She found that by not being obvious about her ancestry and saying the right things, she could fit in among the common folk just about anywhere except the isolationist Calligo. Rather than finding more mercs to join up with, she eventually started focusing on her horn and looking for work as a traveling performer. To her dismay, most of the work she found in that field was in taverns, often ones frequented by especially rowdy drunks that started fights on most nights. Many nights, she would end up pulling double duty, both performing and standing by to break up fights to the best of her ability, usually by her preferred method of beating them until they backed off or were knocked out. When that didn't work (and considering her lack of physical strength, that was often the case) she would occasionally resort to the magic that she had started to pick up over time. On especially violent nights, she started providing healing for the ones she dealt with in that manner, unless they were especially troublesome.
She also refused to cure hangovers.
Battle Info//
Class: Troubadour
Weapon(s): Heal Staff
Items: (Leave blank for the time being.)
Skill(s): Gifted Aura - Anima Tomes gain a 10% boost in power. (Magic Tier 1)
*hugs Witch tight*