Description

Personality

Stella’s a girl with something to prove. Having just been effectively exiled from her own home, she mostly keeps to herself, and is reluctant to speak generally. Smart, observant, and altruistic to a fault, she has a very defined sense of right and wrong, one which she is not willing to bend for much of anything. It might be hard to earn her respect and friendship, but once you have it, you have it for life, and few make for more fiercely loyal companions than she.

Alchemical Talents: Stella specializes in explosions, for the most part, which requires mastery of three distinct substances: sulfur, metal, and fire. She doesn’t do much with sulfur aside from infusing it into metals, so she’s only passable at it otherwise. Her skill with metals has been honed into her from an early age, but she has not yet completed the training her father began with them, and is best with steel-alloyed silver, though anything with steel in it is workable. Stella’s true brilliance lies with creating fire. The elaborate tattoo is actually designed to optimize the creation of alchemical fire. Stella did the calculations based on her own body’s chemical makeup specifically, and thus the transmutation of a flame costs minimal energy. When the scientific community did not believe that a young girl was capable of getting such a precise calculation correct, she had it inked on her body as proof, and it has served her well since.

She has gained an interest in light alchemy, most specifically the bending of light, which she believes she might apply to make something effectively invisible. She currently lacks the equipment or the will to experiment with this though and for the moment, her idea exists as notes scratched in the margins of the one notebook she carries with her.

Equipment

The knives and sulfur vials described above, plus a high-quality platinum pocketwatch with the alchemical symbol for fire engraved upon it, used to give those extra-difficult reactions a bit more kick.

History

Stella was born in the nation of Westmarck (think England), a much smaller area than Crossroads, where she now resides in Northgate. If anything, the socially stratified culture of Westmarck makes Crossroads seem like a pretty friendly place. Herself born into the upper class, Stella received a top-notch education in both alchemy and other subjects until a few months ago, when her theory that alchemical formulas could be minutely altered to achieve optimum harmony with individual body chemistries was put to the test. To prove herself, she took the formula she knew best (the one for flame generation and control) and did the necessary adjustment for her own person. When the community at large failed to accept her calculation alone as proof because of her age and gender, she was angry enough to take drastic measures, and had the entire thing tattooed on her body just to show everyone that it would work. When her public demonstration to this effect was a success, she was not met with the praise she would have expected. Instead, the upper-crust alchemists looked down on her as “barbaric” for her methods, and they likened her to the alchemists of the East that they reviled so much. Her parents, both famous alchemists themselves, considered her breach of societal standards and etiquette to be a personal shame, and disowned her, at which point she took her research and fled to Crossroads.

Having fled to Northgate, she now just generally wanders about without a purpose, occasionally finding work in inns or from people who pity the immigrant, whose accent is still quite heavy. She seldom speaks because of this. Recently, she was taken in by an old man who claims to own a rune shop, but is actually the guildmaster. He happened to see her notebook when she accidentally dropped it one day, and was interested enough in the calculations therein to try and figure out who she was. She does not have any knowledge of the Guild yet, but it is only a matter of time.