Appearance:Juniper walks a strange line between large and feminine. She’s about average height at 5’9”, and there isn’t an ounce of fat on her, her size coming from the amount of muscle she has. Her legs and torso are obviously toned, but most of her muscle mass is found in her arms. Her shoulders are wider than one might expect on her frame, and her arms are bordering on cartoonish in size compared to the relative averageness of the rest of her build. She usually wears a sleeveless overcoat with a collar high enough to cover her face up to her nose, and has her dirty-blonde hair tied into a ponytail that hangs down her back. She brings a backpack with her wherever she goes, with spare parts, schematics and spare rune batteries for emergencies.
Name:Juniper Greycastle
Age:27
Brand:None
Weapon & Rune (if they have one):“Lizzy”, an oversized monkey wrench engraved with Stone and Storm runes, and a large rune battery in the shaft to facilitate her use by non-casters. She’s used not only as a weapon, but also as a last-ditch tool for repairing machinery. The Storm magic can send a jolt of energy to kick-start a dead motor, and the Earth rune turns it into something of a multi-tool, able to shape itself into almost anything. June has also learned to harness the Stone rune to manipulate magnetic fields, capable of shifting ferrous metals back into position with either a careful, well-placed probe, or a solid smack.
Faction:Universal Machine
Personality:A strange combination of humble and self-confident, June knows that she’s worked hard and earned her place in the UM, but also realises that even with all her hard work, she never would have made it without help. Spending most of her time around casters, she’s learned to be comfortable being the weakest and least self-reliant person in a group. At the same time, her relatively high station, considering her lack of magic, has imparted upon her an infallible sense of capability and self-worth. She’s outgoing and sociable, liking to think of strangers more as potential allies than potential enemies. Always excited to talk about her projects, she can be a bit overbearing in a conversation, however. All in all, she is everything exemplified by the UM’s motto: “Hard work pays off”.
Background:Born as the third generation of Greycastles in New Wickborough, with both of the previous generations having worked for the Universal Machine, Juniper’s upbringing was about as one would expect. Going to public school, with private tutoring by her parents and other in the UM in the ways of technology, she was a studious youth, wholeheartedly throwing herself into her studies, both general and UM specific. Despite her parents telling her not to get her hopes up, young Juniper always expected that she would manifest a rune during puberty, like so many around her had. She believed this so strongly that she found herself taking this assumption for granted. In her late teens, she started to take interest in the small, semi-autonomous robots that the UM used for performing mundane tasks. Most of her late teens, then, were spent studying and working on these and waiting for her rune to appear.
The more years went by, the more June’s parents tried to help her come to terms with the fact that she might just not be getting a rune, but she was having none of it. “So what if it’s coming late, it’s still coming” was her explanation. The waiting, and her parents, eventually did wear her down though. A week before her 20th birthday, she had a breakdown, the truth she had known for a while finally coming to the forefront of her mind. She didn’t have a rune, and she would never have one. After so long safe in the assumption that she’d be a caster, this wave of realisation was too much for the now young adult. That night, she ran. Ran from the UM, ran from Ammonia Avenue, and ran from her parents. Not knowing what she was doing, and still in a very strange state of mind, she found herself amongst some Drekka. It was very different from what the rest of her life had been, but at that moment different was everything June was feeling. She ended up staying with the Drekka for a while, using her intellect to do some alchemy for the group. Then, a few weeks later, things changed again. June had settled into the criminal life, finding herself acting as nasty and aloof as the worst of them. Aloof, as she found out, was not how you want to act around dangerous chemicals. A wayward glance, an arm flung out, and Juniper found a bottle of acid splashed onto her lower jaw. The pain was like nothing she had ever experienced before, so sharp that she couldn’t think about anything else. She turned to those she had been with for help, but unsurprisingly, the Drekka had little sympathy for her. Agony forcing her mind into clarity, she went the one place she knew there would be people who still loved her. Not long after, her parents rushed down, in response to an alarming summons, to find their daughter that had been lost for weeks, lower jaw mostly destroyed and tears streaming down her face.
UM doctors spent days on Juniper, removing all traces of the acid and doing their best to regrow and reattach both skin and bone. Their expertise was enough to salvage the girl’s jaw, but enough damage had been done that the pale, scarred and pockmarked skin had to be something June would wear for the rest of her life, as a reminder. Times were tumultuous for another year after that, but things did settle down. June came to terms with her lack of magic, and returned to her study of the automated robot assistants. She decided she’d compensate for her runelessness by having a rune weapon made for her, that would be powered by rune batteries. She has spent most of her time since then as a devoted member of the Universal Machine, improving her skills and advancing automata technology.
