Lysandra Teraviel
163; this is rather young for elves, as they can live for millenia.
Elf
Female
Unknown due to her shyness and hesitance to open up to others
Lysandra is an elf, sporting a thin, shapely frame that carries with it an otherworldly sense of beauty. Standing at a slightly less than average height in comparison to normal humes, the main difference between Lysandra and a hume are the elongated, pointed ears that rise up several inches above the top of her head. She has long, flowing blonde hair and vibrant green eyes; these seem to stand out even more against her blood-red robes with golden trim. Lysandra also carries with her a staff topped with an unknown crystal, an artifact that, as she claims, helps to focus and amplify her magical prowess.
What most people never find out, however, is that Lysandra is actually hiding something from them in plain sight. Most would call her billowing sleeves part of elven fashion, but they serve another purpose. Some time ago, for unknown reasons, metallic, crystalline growths began to literally sprout from Lysandra's right arm, protruding from her flesh and causing her pain. While they themselves look and feel like crystals, they seem to be almost fused to her flesh and bone, and Lysandra takes great care and precautions in making sure that these stay hidden from view by anyone.
Lysandra is a studious young elf, very interested in magical arts and the arcane, and given the opportunity, she would prefer to spend time in a library or archive than socializing with people. She takes her work very seriously and is trying to focus on becoming the best mage that she can be in the several millenia she has on the world. If there are ways for her to acquire knowledge of the arcane, she can get somewhat excitable and energetic depending on what it is she may be learning.
Being interested in the arcane arts, she is usually seen with some tome of knowledge and enjoys taking notes of her own for later study and review. When it comes to these, she is rather meticulous and is somewhat overprotective, only willing to share with those that she deems worthy of accelerating the study of magic. So far, she has yet to find anyone she feels has earned that distinction; then again, she is rather young for an elf, and this sort of thinking could be considered normal from a younger, potentially more naive member of the species.
Normally, however, Lysandra is rather withdrawn and shy, preferring to keep to herself whenever possible. This is to say, however, that she does not completely reject the company of others--she will, however, remain rather guarded and come across as selfish and standoffish. This is mostly due in part to the growths on her arm; she has become extremely self-conscious about these and goes to great lengths to ensure that people never learn of them. She often thinks less of herself than others might give her credit for, believing that these growths somehow make her subelven; perhaps this is why she buries herself in magical research--to find a cure for what afflicts her.
--Lysandra is rather interested in magical artifacts, as she is constantly looking to improve her control on magical energies.
--She also very much enjoys being outdoors, due to her being an elf, and she prefers forests over all other environments.
--Libraries and archives are also places where she enjoys frequenting, and she enjoys researching potential leads on magic and harnessing control of the world's mana.
--Lysandra is most comfortable being left alone; due to her growths, she prefers staying away from people that might otherwise be rather nosy.
--Ever since the onset of her condition, Lysandra is terrified of anyone finding out about her deformity and will go to great lengths to ensure that no one finds out about the growths. She is comfortable with giving people the cold shoulder if they seem to be pressing the matter further.
--In addition, she is somewhat uncomfortable around weapons and people that are proficient in melee combat. Not very skilled in the use of these sorts of weapons, Lysandra is wary of anyone that might know something about her and use them against her.
--Being around too many people all at once makes her nervous, and then her paranoia also begins to kick in as well.
Lysandra carries with her a staff topped with a rather robust crystalline structure. It seems to change color depending on what sort of spell she casts, but its default seems to be a reddish-orange color, almost as if there were a flame inside it. Her red robes are rather distinctive as well, and she has made certain that her sleeves are billowy and rather flowing; extra rippling fabric does wonders to hide her arms, something that she is very sensitive about. She also carries a book of her own, one with a compilation of notes from her studies and travels (written, of course, in elvish).
Elves are naturally lithe and agile creatures, and Lysandra is no exception. While her reflexes are not astronomical by elven standards, they are considerably improved over a standard hume's. With more training in this area, Lysandra could have become an expert bowman and hunter; while she knows how to use a bow and does know how to hunt, Lysandra has only about an average skill level in both of these areas.
Having been on her own for quite some time, Lysandra knows a bit of surviving in the wilderness. She knows how to distinguish edible plants from toxic ones, can start fires without flint and steel, and knows how to create makeshift shelters given the right materials. This is most pronounced in forested regions, as this was the environment in which she grew up.
Her greatest strength, however, is in her magical abilities. Elves are naturally in-tune with nature magic, and this is where Lysandra has spent a majority of her focus. Due to her studies and elven affinity, Lysandra is most comfortable casting spells that encompass the magics of her people. She has also dabbled in elemental and spiritual magics; however, in comparison to her skill with natural magic, these leave something to be desired, and she is currently attempting to find ways in which she can strengthen her abilities in these affinities without sacrificing any skill from her natural affinity.
--Lysandra has great skill in her magical abilities, especially in the realm of nature magic. This is quite possibly her greatest strength, and she studies and meditates as much as she can in order to focus on becoming the best mage that she can be.
--She has a natural dexterity that is greater than that of a normal hume. This is due mostly to her elven upbringing and the natural abilities that come with the species.
--Lysandra has some skill with a bow and knows how to hunt with it. Nearly all capable elves are able to use a bow to some degree, and she is no exception.
--She is more than capable of surviving out in the wilderness. Due to her history and her people's affinity for nature, she is just as capable of getting along fine in the wild.
--Lysandra has a crippling phobia of her growths being discovered and will do anything to keep them hidden. She has no qualms about pushing people away in order to do so, both due to the physical pain they could cause her and also due to potentially being cast out as a pariah.
--Due to her studies of magic, she is not nearly as physically strong or hearty as members of her own race. While her magical abilities are strong, her years of rigorous studying and training have left her physical strength and constitution something to be desired.
--Because the crystals are growing from her skin, even a bump against something solid can cause her arm tremendous amounts of pain. Unknown to the rest of the group, Lysandra has attempted to go as far as to remove one of her growths for further study, but attempting to do so had caused such intense pain that she had nearly blacked out.
--Lysandra has very little experience with melee combat and hand-to-hand combat, so she is vulnerable to these styles. While she knows what swords and other weapons are, the fact of the matter is that she had never received any sort of training with them.
Lysandra's people group themselves into small, close-knit communities where they can work together to live peacefully with the land. Very rarely do these communities exceed one-thousand people, although very large communities strung together from several smaller ones are not unheard of. The largest of these communities is known as Puruvae, and this city is populated with nearly forty-thousand elves. This is actually her people's first attempt at true urbanization, and so far it seems to be viewed with mixed results. While these elves manage to live in a sort of luxurious lifestyle previously unknown to them--Puruvae being built with gorgeous ivory spires and towers and almost dream-like architecture--the others that still live in the forests feel as if they have betrayed their culture and generations of their ancestors that have made the ancestral lands their home.
Lysandra lived in a small community known as Illuvae, a hamlet of elves living off of the land like her elders. Here she learned most of the ways of her people--how to hunt and live off of the land. However, when her affinity for magic suddenly blossomed around her one-hundredth birthday, she realized that she needed to travel to Puruvae in order to figure out how to keep this newfound power in control.
Lysandra has always had very few people she can truly call friends, and this number has dwindled down to perhaps one other that she could potentially trust: her former headmistress, High Mage Ximne. However, her paranoia has, time and time again, prevented her from going back and asking for help with her current situation; fear of being isolated and treated as nothing more than a test subject for experiments prevents her from returning, especially after leaving abruptly without leaving any sort of notice for anyone as to where or why she was leaving.
She does not wish to talk about her family or friends from Illuvae, nor does she speak of her fellow apprentice magi from Puruvae.
Lysandra grew up in Illuvae, a small elvish community of about five-hundred elves. Like the rest of her kin, she grew up in a relatively normal elvish forest community, learning the ins and outs of hunting, archery, and wilderness survival. Her people require a particular coming-of-age ritual that involves spending a year away from civilization and other communities and living as a hermit, living off of the land in order to appreciate the community they live with and to further test their skills of living in the wilds. Lysandra was no exception, and on the eve of her ninety-ninth birthday, she set out into the wilderness, alone with only her wits and her skills.
During that year, something remarkable happened to her. While traveling through the forests, Lysandra came across a pond whose waters had become toxic and clouded. Dead fish and amphibians were found floating on the surface, and the water had a sulphrous odor emanating from it. Unknown to her, an underground sulfur deposit had been exposed at the bottom of the pond and contaminated the water, killing the wildlife. Taking a nearby strip of bark and using that as a makeshift cup, Lysandra was about to offer a quick prayer to the well-being of the water when she felt a bizarre sensation in her arms. To her surprise, the water in the bark sparkled with light before becoming crystal-clear, the odor disappearing. from her sample entirely. Curious, she took a sip and realized that the water had been purified, making it clean and safe to drink. This was her first experience with magic, and for the rest of her year in solitude, she continued to practice and experiment with different magic, attempting to see what her capabilities were with no formal training.
Upon her return, she shared this information with her community, and the people of Illuvae immediately began to see her in a different light. Many were treating her with a rather cautious respect that they had never before displayed. Her elders were somewhat concerned about what she might be capable of doing with this knack for magic, but Lysandra was focused on ensuring that she could use her power for the betterment of her community. With nowhere else to go, the elders hesitantly suggested that Lysandra head for Puruvae where she could join an academy and further hone her skills. The next day, she was gone.
Puruvae was a completely different place for Lysandra than Illuvae had been; the city was so vastly different from her hamlet and the woods that she grew up near. Still, after arriving and proving to the academy that she was not only interested in magical studies but could also cast spells, she was accepted. Her headmistress, an elf known as High Mage Ximne, quickly became an inspiration to Lysandra, and she continued to strive to one day utilize spells as well as she could. Her studies at this academy had also exposed her to basic elemental and spiritual magics, and this is where her skill in these schools comes from.
However, one bizarre morning a few years before the present day, Lysandra awoke in the middle of the night with a crippling pain in her right arm. Examining it closely, Lysandra was both surprised and horrified to discover a crystal seemingly embedded into her arm flesh. From this moment on, Lysandra would become extremely withdrawn and closed-off, not wanting to place herself in the limelight at all for fear of being treated as nothing more than a medical and magical anomaly. High Mage Ximne noticed this sudden shift in personality and approached Lysandra one day, wanting to know more about why she had suddenly closed herself off from everyone. The apprentice mage, however, only further alienated herself, not wanting to be hurt by her role model at all, something that greatly concerned the headmistress.
Not wanting to take any more chances, Lysandra ran away from the academy and from Puruvae, spending the last few years of her life hiding away from people and other creatures. She did not know why these growths had manifested, nor why they continued to grow across her arm, but she was determined to figure out a way to stop the spread of these growths at any cost. Lysandra became a drifter, spending only a small amount of time in different places collecting information about magic. It is this search for answers that brings her to the festival, completely unaware of the events that have occurred with the humes' discovery of orichalcum and the panic that soon followed...