Welp, I apologize for not posting last night; my computer crashed last night and wasn't booting afterwards so I couldn't type anything up. (School computer doesn't have Skype, otherwise I would just have said something there.)

Peasants pls.

Well, you would know what's going on if you were still a part of the chat. :P

No one ever bothered to re add me, not my fault*insert a really big fat dot here*

Wub

wub wub wub

Biography:
Lyra was born to the Mauretania family, an influential noble house in the kingdom of Illiserev. The Mauretania family is well known for its massive overseas and domestic trading business, a massive company importing and exporting thousands of gross tons of product a week. Within the family, Lyra is regarded as more of a black sheep. While any other noble family would heap copious amounts of praise onto their child for her intellect and superior magical skills, the Mauretania family didn’t give two shits. They only cared if their sons and daughters were good businesspeople or politicians, and Lyra wasn’t interested in any of that.

Despite being disliked, her family was not narrow sighted enough to spite her for her own indifference towards the family profession. While they shied away from directly associating with her, they saw her potential and allowed her to indulge in her addiction for knowledge. They saw it as an investment; in fact, they went as far as to pay for her books, her research, and for her time in Dansila, where she graduated early from one of the twelve great schools, top of her class.

In Dansila, Lyra’s penchant for magic grew even stronger. The scholarly nature of Dansila and their schools were a boon to the young mage, and as she learned more and more about magic and the arts, the more inquisitive she became about utilizing different ways to use magic. For one reason or another (read: stingy bastards), Lyra’s family only sent money to just cover tuition, room and board, prompting her to take up odd jobs. Much of her real-world experience came from hopping around the Dansila countryside killing wanted stuff. After graduating from Dansila, she returned not to the capital, where her family maintained their little political circlejerk, but to a small coastal city on the Illiserev mainland named Wayford.

Despite maintaining no official position in the family business, Lyra uses one of the branch houses as her personal home (much to the displeasure of the branch manager) and holds some political sway on the company and assets.

Magic:
Lyra always has magic at the tip of her fingers. She uses magic where convenient for her, and is often testing and developing new spells or different methods in which to use them. Lyra tries to be efficient as possible when executing her spells, wasting the least mana when possible and aiming for practicality above all else. She has an absurd penchant for stringing along simple spells to create more powerful ones, and she shies away from using single spells for a task in a combat scenario. This often leads to cumbersomely and long string of spells that can leave her guard open, something she mitigates and overcompensates for with quick-casting point-defense spells.

A few useful examples:

•Lance of Mauretania (or Lyra’s patent method for shooting down airships)
Akin to artillery, this spell takes an extended period of time to set up, but has magnificent range and accuracy when perfectly executed. The spell is made up of several smaller spells that would not normally be used in combat scenario: A spell that magnifies the air like an eyeglass, a spell that calculates distance, another that calculates angle and azimuth, and a simple funneled wind spell are all used to accurately propel a materialized lance (or a real one, but that’s a waste of money) at a distant target. It has an impressive absolute maximum range of three and a half miles.

•Aegis
As the name suggests, this quick defensive spell materializes a small translucent hexagonal plate of about equal strength to a knight’s shield. It can be cast multiple times to create up to six plates. These plates can be moved around in an oval-like fashion around the caster, or locked together to form a single larger shield.

•Light Wave Diffraction
Not necessarily diffraction, but a set of spells that aim to confuse, disorient, and disarm by manipulation the light around her. Bend light, double an image, distort, reflect –These are a couple of the spells that Lyra might use in a given situation.

Weapon: Lyra carries a single bound tome with her. It is not a weapon, per se, but it contains verses, incantations and notes that are useful in one way or another. Its spine is bound with a metal plate and talentium on the inside facing plate for its useful amplification effects. It could also be used as blunt weapon, but really, if she’s resorted to using as a weapon, she’s as good as dead. How would a leather-bound tome defend against a lance or a sword, anyway?
[/center]
[/hider]


Biography:
Chad was born to a simple family in a sleepy fishing village at the fringes of Illiserev. Within the confines of their small, tight-knit community, his family lived well, although their standard of living could have been considered near poverty in normal society. The region Chad lived in was a fairly lawless land, an area where soldiers and lawmen didn’t exist, and the people governed themselves. Although he was too young to take place in the time-honored tradition of self-policing, it allowed him to develop a keen sense of justice growing up.

Like the rest of the villagers, his father was a small time fisherman. From his father, Chad learned to fish, swim, and even hunt a little bit, and before long, he was just as good of a fisherman as him. Chad’s peaceful and sleepy life continued as his family continued to make their living off of salmon and big fish, and it seemed he was destined to continue the life of his parents and his forefathers. Although everything was stable and life was generally good, the young fisherman found himself wanting to do more. He was never the type to sit around and rot away in idleness; Chad was a person that wished to travel and see the world. He wished to leave the village.

Be careful what you wish for.

Chad’s monotonous life ended the day the rift beasts came. Within a day, all that he knew –His friends, family, livelihood—was erased from the face of the earth with little more than an unceremonious squish. The young boy only survived because he was inside his parents’ fishing boat, hidden from view as his fellow villagers were viciously torn apart. At the tender age of eight, Chad left the remains of his village.

It came to be that he was picked up by a patrolling company of men-at-arms. The group was ragged and battle worn, and it was from these men that he learned that the vile creatures that had killed his friends and family were appearing all over the nation. For his ‘safety’, Chad was placed aboard a refugee ship along with other survivors. It would sail away to the archipelagos, to wait out the destruction of the unholy monsters or for the when the monarchy would find a solution to the problem. It was a terrible concept and poorly executed, and indeed, conditions on the ship were less than desirable. The refugees were ill-treated and the vessel was rife with disease, although Chad received marginally better treatment for his prior knowledge of seamanship. On board, he lived off of fish, stale water and moldy hardtack, cut off from any news from the outside world. He had little else to do but twiddle his thumb and pray he did not catch a disease.

After a year at sea, the disease-laden boat unceremoniously returned to land, with much less fanfare than those aboard would have thought or liked to believe. Chad was placed in a crowded orphanage, where dozens of other orphaned survivors were looked after by a few people who didn’t give two shits about happened to the children. In kind, Chad didn’t give a damn being moved about like an unwanted child, so at age nine, he left.

The young boy traveled for a little while before making it to the large, but cozy seaside town of Wayford. Arriving at the end of August and with the winter season quick to follow, Chad found refuge in a large building by the docks. The building was the Mauritania Company’s local trading house, and as luck would have it, the Mauritania family themselves were in town for their extended summer vacation. There in that trading house, Chad met a young girl, Lyra, scion of the Mauritania family. As luck would have it, they became fast friends despite their age gap. They got along very well; the intelligent six-year old girl was more than capable of keeping up with the older Chad. Against all odds, her family took him in as a sort of servant for the girl, a playmate, during their stay in town. While Chad enjoyed the cushier life with the family (having a job of essentially playing), he felt that he should be doing more for the family in exchange for their hospitality. He insisted on a proper job, but nothing came of this until the family returned to the capital at the end of the year. Travelling by sea, the family’s ship encountered a severe squall that threatened the vessel and swept many men overboard. Quick witted and possessing the proper set of skills, Chad was able to jump in to secure rigging lines and fill in for the drowned crewmen, and the ship safely made it through the squall. Impressed and humbled, he was given a position as a cabin boy on a company vessel by Lyra’s parents.

As the youngest of the crew of about 150 on the boat Pendleton Castle, Chad was taught quite a lot by his fellow crewmembers. Although he was lightly teased for being the playmate of the Mauretania family, he gained valuable life skills from the experienced crew. He learned how fight competently from a few of the former navy sailors aboard, and general tips on how to not suck by some of the older sea dogs. As he grew more experienced, he transferred to other vessels, gaining credentials as a competent and hardworking individual of an influential noble family. Influenced somewhat by older navy sailors that he worked with and driven to become more than a mere seaman, he worked to apply to an Illiserev naval school. By the time he was in his teens, he was able to pull a few strings from some of his former captains and he was able to gain entry to an esteemed naval college.

Hathaway Academy was a rich kid’s academy. The young Chad had to pull a lot of favors from his former acquaintances, but he was able to obtain a fully paid scholarship through his former captain on the Pendleton Castle, a close friend to the school’s headmaster. Academy life was far from easy, however. Chad was one of the only people amongst the school’s student body that was not either noble or rich, and he got a lot of flak for that while he attended. The teachers were equally harsh in their requirements and he had to do many odd jobs to stay financially afloat, but he graduated the academy with full honors as a reservist navy lieutenant. Wonderfully decorated, he returned to work at the Mauretania company as a second or first mate on a few ships before distinguishing himself enough to make captain at age 18. As a captain, he was granted the fast but lightly armed merchant vessel, the Laurentine Castle.

As master and commander of his own vessel, he made speed runs to and from the Illiserev mainland and the isles, and occasionally diplomatic missions at the behest of the Mauretania family. Home ported in Wayford, he was reunited with his childhood friend Lyra who frequented the town more often than not. Maintaining their former friendship, he was the one who conducted her to Dansila for school, and was also the one to return her to Wayford when she graduated early. They kept in touch, being in the same town, and Chad often was the one to bring her pallet loads of books and interesting trinkets (which later forced the Wayford branch manager to buy more land and extend the trading house as the Mauretania main family ignored his pleas.)

While still directly working under the Mauretania company, Chad is able to do as he pleases as captain of his vessel as long as he makes money for the company. Although he plans his own routes and has discretion over the passengers he conducts and the goods he takes aboard, he still doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of money after tariffs, taxes, and payment to the company are all said and done.

Sword Skills:
Before he came into the employ of the Mauretania family, Chad’s fighting style was more akin to the rough garden variety sword styles and techniques. After getting a job with the trading company, he was trained in a manner not different from that of an Illiserev naval officer. Long past those days of training, Chad’s fighting technique is a mesh of those rough childhood skills and the more fine and elegant style of Illiserev’s finest. It is best described as a style emphasizing speed over power.

A few examples of his sword skills include:

• Mirage Dance
This is an attack that completely ignores elegance of the rapier and gets down and dirty. The attack starts out appearing to be a spin that leaves the wielder open to attack, but cuts short to hit the enemy with the pommel of the sword and then the finishing blow of a jab to the vitals.

• Defense Break
An exceptionally powerful sword thrust in the guise of a normal fencing jab; the unique torque of this jab is meant to parry a blade without extra movement while still aiming for the other combatant.

• Flash Squall
A sword skill that diverges drastically from the normal bounds of fencing, this is a tight spinning attack that can be used either conventionally or airborne. The weapon is held closely to the body with another sword or dagger in the other hand (to maintain guard) while the wielder spins his body in a controlled manner. Used correctly, it should disarm the attacker with the first pass and kill with the second.

Weapon: Chad wields a talentium alloyed colchimarde. A colchimarde is a direct, lighter descendent of the rapier, made for the purpose of outmaneuvering and out-parrying its elder. It looks nearly identical to the rapier, save for a slight wider blade section at the hilt that that tapers drastically to the point of the blade. Like the rapier, it is a well-balanced weapon that can stand up rigors of complicated swordplay. He also uses a steel dirk for those other situations.

Ship: [/CENTER]
[/hider]

So Skype is being a bitch, so I'll type all this here.

Sorry, computer problems. Thing crashed in the middle of my post, had to do the check disk function and after that was all done, I had to wait through an update, which I fell asleep during. Now, Skype is giving a white screen which my mouse flickers over, so I have to fix that.

tl;dr
I'm working on my post. =_=;

EDIT: Rodey, how is the red head noticing feminine attributes on a man who was mistaken as a man when she was female by practically everybody?

Because Riley didn't interact with any other females, only males who don't understand the intricacies of a woman's expressions.

Also because of female intuition, probs. But she's just assuming that he's homo for Escellar, not that she's a female in a dude's body.