A set of tired and piercing eyes framed by masculine features, Irvine would be considered a reasonably attractive man if he kept his mouth shut and put effort into his appearance besides the bare minimum hygiene required for work. His hair is dramatically slicked back to be out of the way and formal.

Irvine Wellington

29 / M

Human

Medic

The Saltaire district and the land around it have yet to make any large strides in the refinement of health and medicine, and many practitioners have been forced to accept brutish methods for what they are and hope for the best. Except for Irvine. One of the best medics in his town, Irvine isn’t just satisfied with his work, but downright gleeful about it at times. To Irvine, nothing beats putting people back together the good old fashioned way. He’s certainly talented in healing through magical means, but prefers to fall back on it as a last resort. Why mess with strange powers when bone saws and musty tonics are so readily available?

Irvine is an extroverted and curious man who struggles to socialize appropriately, often oversharing or overstepping boundaries. He doesn’t find anything about the human body disgusting and is fascinated by it to the point where it concerns others. He is friendly and eccentric, talking for the sake of talking.

Irvine grew up comfortably with two busy parents and an abundance of unsupervised leisure. His mom was a butcher and his dad put things together as a carpenter, and before long the fascination of both of their worlds coagulated into an intense appreciation for surgery. Despite murmurs of his satisfaction having roots in the darker pleasures of life, Irvine remains adamant in insisting that he just enjoys repairing what's broken. Irvine's claims are honest, and much like a tailor enjoys the craftsmanship of sewing swaths of cloth together to form a finished piece, he enjoys stitching skin and sinew to assist his patients.

He is no stranger to the world of adventuring having been one himself in his younger years, albeit as a cleric rather than anything more heroic in nature. Some of the older adventurers in town are still able to recall their encounters with Irvine and his reluctance to rely on magic despite its benefits. This former job and the frequent quarrels that it caused left a bitter taste in his mouth, leading him to live a more independent and stationary lifestyle as a local medic. Through a combination of hard work and incredible passion he has grown into a definite professional, although there might be a sense of hesitation in asking for his assistance.

In his youth Irvine had brief stints of working as a cleric for hire with mixed results. A set of drab robes the color of dying straw are still in his possession. They are quite resistant to magic and allow him to cast spells more effectively, at the cost of offering no protection against physical attacks. A personal notebook with shorthand scrawls indecipherable to anyone but himself is also in his possession, intended to assist him in magical endeavors in case he forgets a word here or there. This is backed by a steel rod the size of an arm used as a magical staff.

He unsurprisingly carries basic medical supplies with him, his favorite bone saw included.

Irvine has carved out a niche for himself with the vast amount of knowledge he has amassed over the inner workings of the human body throughout the years, including the magical and non-magical ways to mend it. He has a dextrous pair of hands and a very high pain tolerance, as well as the ability to sneak around undetected. Like many talented medics, the occasional grave robbery for the sake of education is sometimes needed to develop his craft.

Irvine is able to magically heal wounds, but prefers to stitch them up or repair them as much as possible beforehand through traditional methods to conserve his energy. His healing spell is his primary and strongest spell. He is also capable of casting a minor spell that muffles noise, but prefers to keep it to himself to not raise questions.

N/A

Tall and slight of frame, Adrian displays all the elusive qualities of someone from the frozen northern wastes. Her skin is pale, but pasty - her eyelashes and hair are a carrot orange, with the shock of hair being cut just above the nape and left to its own devices. Her eyes were a piercing green; again, not in the way of conventional beauty but bordering on the unsettling, two pinpricks boring into whatever they settle their gaze onto. Her figure is nigh-androgynous. Though she leans to the feminine, her raspy voice and odd demeanour make it difficult to pinpoint the gender.



Her outfit is just as baffling as her features. She is wearing a T-shirt, so large and baggy that the sleeves reach her elbow and the V-neck cuts to the bottom of the breastbone (though it appears someone has made a rudimentary lace to protect her decency). This obvious hand-me-down is contrasted sharply by a pair of perfectly tailored britches made out of leather. The seams are worn, and appear to have been stitched and re-stitched several times over, but the qualities of the material suggest that this was their primary purpose - to be taken apart and put together again, a thousand times over. All around her ankles are strips of sturdy linen, wound over and over and then once under her heels to hold on some very oddly-made footwear. They look like normal shoes, but leave the achilles tendon exposed from the back of the ankle to the base of the heel.

Adrian or Ade.

She’s definitely a woman, but the age is...hard to determine. She has the height of an adult but childish features. Her comportment is strange enough to make it tricky to put her into any fixed age-range, but you can tell she is either a very tall teenager, or an immature young adult.

A Skinwalker.

The simplest classification would be a Hunter.

...Strange.

In brief, Adrian’s behaviour is strange. Her movements are long, slopey; she takes long strides, frequently wanders off, and often becomes fixated upon the most inane of objects. She stares - a lot. She learns through observation and carefully replicates what the people around her are doing. She is more than content to be left on her own for extended periods of time, she doesn’t like to be touched by people she doesn’t know, and she’s shy in the sense that she gets uncomfortable when people address her.

Aside from that, she has absolutely no concept of personal space. Manners are quite disassociated from her behaviour and speech. All the subtleties of average conversation and interaction have to be learned, and though she knows some, it is apparent that Adrian doesn’t know how to properly function in a social setting.

All these would have been quite suspicious were it not for her accent. It is glaringly obvious that she isn’t from Heston. She probably isn’t even from the same region, or country. She frequently (and frustratedly) has difficulties expressing the more complex thoughts that come across her mind and it’ll put her into a bit of a sulk. And yet - when she does speak in her native tongue - it’s none you’ve ever heard of. Northern, for sure, but very old. It’s the accent and the language barrier that helps to excuse her eccentricities as being ‘foreign’.

The weary woman stared hopelessly down at the ivory clump of flesh pressed to her breast, watching it meekly as it suckled, drawing the milk with such fervour that it started to run pink with the blood drawn from the beginnings of sturdy teeth. The start - and the end - of little Andrina, from a desolate tribe of natives who lived in the tundra plains. She looked up at the two arguing in the hut with her, their shadows cast large and monstrous by the flickering bonfire.

“{...-absolutely a risk to the tribe, especially when she discovers her true potential. I’m not asking you, priestess, I’m begging you - can they take her or not?}” pleaded the man, his red beard quivering with anxiety. The old woman he was talking to bridled. She cast her stony gaze down onto the weary woman, her features as inscrutable as always.

“{It was no mistake that the Gods chose her,}” the Priestess pointed out - no sense of hostility, no judgement, merely stating a fact. “{Our druids could have taken her in, many years ago, but there simply aren’t enough...}” Pity broke through the wrinkles. “{I do not know what you would have to give to make them take her.}”

The weary woman stared into the flames. “{...They can take me,}” she mused. Both faces turned to gawp at her with bemusement.

“{You? What use would the Fey have with a seamstress?}” Scoffed the husband, shaking his head firmly. “{To leave would be an embarrassment - to return, rejected, would be a disgrace. Stay with me. We can raise her ourselves. She needn’t find out about her power.}”

The weary woman’s gaze returned to the baby and the growing bruise around her areola. “{I’m the vessel of a million unspoken words,}” she murmured. “{My voice was drowned and given away at birth too - to you, to the tribe. I sat and I listened. I filled myself with knowledge - I have no life of my own but I clasp the lives of countless others near me.}” Her hands drew the baby closer still, peering into her freckled face and those slits - bright, bright green ever since the bite. “{I am a maker - of children, of clothes unimaginable. Give me materials and give me time, and I shall endlessly spill forth dresses and new creatures to amuse themselves with. Allow them to use me until my usefulness dries up.}” She wasn’t asking the man, but the Priestess before her. The Priestess glared back down at the impetuous woman.

“{They will devour you and everything you once were. They will take more than you could possibly consider. When the Pixies and the Nymphs have had their fill, you’ll be less than nothing. Is this the fate you want to prescribe yourself to, knowing that if they find you to be an unreasonable sacrifice, you will have to stay at the shrine and beg until the cold snatches you and the child?}” The Priestess hobbled over to the weary woman and crouched so her own pebble-grey eyes watched for any flicker of doubt.

Andrina’s mother had no doubt - no emotions were left. The babe had sucked her dry. “{The tribe thinks I am an adulteress. I am already less than nothing.}”

Few considered the weary woman’s bargain to be sufficient, so fewer still weren’t surprised when the mysterious Fey folk took her - baby and all - into the standing stone, where it rippled like water and engulfed the mistake and the maker of the mistake. They landed in a wooded glade and forced the weary woman to rear her child, regardless, as penance for her negligence. She taught her little girl the language of her homeland and how to sew. She tried to teach the rest - the traditions, the songs, the stories - but they weren’t as strong in Andrina’s memory as the first two. Whilst in the home of the Fey, the First World, they changed their names - Mother, and Adrian. Bad things happen to those who willingly pass on a name to a Fey Creature. Their treatment to Mother was excruciating; it siphoned every pore and pocket of energy within her and she seemed to shrivel and shrink in on herself. In return, the Dryads took care of the child when the moon hung wide and full in the sky. They took one of Mother’s lives every time Adrian took one of theirs by accident. When Adrian was just reaching puberty, Mother had no more lives to give and explained how she must go away now, forever.

“{When you are old enough, and these creatures have shown you what they will, find home.}”

Adrian had always mused over what Mother meant by that. Over time, her teachings began to fade into memory - patchy and inconsistent. The Nymphs would speak to her in her native tongue and also another language, newer - softer and rounder than the jutting consonants she was accustomed to. Adrian picked that up as well, but in pieces. It was harder to learn now that she had outgrown speech.

The Pixies also taught her the way of the world she lived in - the nature of a hundred thousand plants and how to use them so she can look after herself wherever a leaf or stem poked through the earth. How to navigate the duff without making a sound, and how to use the boughs of trees as handholds to leap and swing from. They taught her how to tickle fish and follow the tracks to the doe in the clearing. She learned, with time, how to evade the Satyrs’ thieving fingers and never to follow the echo of a Nymph. But, Fey-like as she was, she was set apart from them - regarded with wariness and treated with mistrust. She did not learn the ways of man.

They all taught her about her powers. It was a link - the only link - to the beasts around her so she treated it with respect. Many, many years passed within the First World and she grew and became better at controlling her body but her mind was impulsive, chaotic from all the games and pranks of the Fey Folk. One day, Adrian felt she knew all she was going to know from them and asked to leave. They warned her she will never return - and she took the promise solemnly, knowing that the Wildlings do not use their words superfluously. She left all the same and wound up a long, long way from Home.

On the edge of the forest, she found herself a human man, dressed oddly in coloured cloth and leather stripped of its fur. She asked him for help to find Home, and the man reluctantly agreed, presuming his way to be northwards anyway. This man, she would come to find out, was Victor Strade; a hunter of monsters, ghouls and all manner of beasts that the normal settler couldn’t handle. Victor quickly discovered Adrian’s condition and decided that the safest way to deal with her was to keep her close, so she wouldn’t be detected. He was a ‘hunter’ in the sense that his version of having ‘dealt with’ something was to find an alternative to slaughtering the beasts. Killing only sparked vengeance within a monster, and entices it to kill even more. Adrian followed him and watched him work. She learned. She listened.

Their journey took them wherever the coin would flow, because each strip of wilderness between one town and another needed resources to last them out - resources that they bought with coins in the preceding village. When the Prince called upon Victor, it was only natural that Adrian would follow. She knew they would receive more coin than usual, which they could set aside to build up the equipment needed to breach the snowy north. The call took them to the city of Hestor - a new sort of environment for Adrian, who had never set foot in anything larger than a village.

Adrian herself doesn’t carry much; it’s Victor who keeps track of the inventory they share. She has her special outfit, replicated two or three times for washing. She sometimes carries a bag of edible plants to snack on. In terms of weapons, she technically owns a shortbow and a quiver full of arrows, but Victor is the one who keeps a hold of it and only gives it to her when necessary. She has a hunting knife on her at all times.

Adrian excels immensely in two things and is pretty much useless in all others. She is a child of the forest, which means she is absolutely brilliant at foraging, tracking, hunting and identifying all things natural. She can stalk even the flightiest of deer. She’s light footed enough to give a ghost a fright. Furthermore, the sheer quantity of clothes she goes through and her mother’s teachings have made her into a fairly decent seamstress. Anything outside of that realm, however, is a hopeless endeavour. She can’t quite pack a punch when she’s just a girl, nor is she too well-read; in fact, she’s barely literate as it is and that’s for her native tongue. She’s not at all charismatic. She doesn’t have a lot of stamina.

Skinwalker: Adrian can transform, at will, into something not-quite-human. She becomes taller, stronger, with flaps of skin sloughing off her muscles and a wrinkled snout full of teeth. Her skin toughens and erratic sprouts of ginger hair protrude from odd angles around her body. If anything, she most resembles a naked mole rat with a mouth full of carnivorous teeth.In this form, Adrian has a peculiar quirk; whenever she eats the heart of a magical being, she takes on a fraction of its abilities - now mutated and better suited for her beast form. Since she has only ever had access to the hearts of Fey creautres, Adrian has the following abilities:
Touch of Bloodletting (This spell causes existing wounds on a target to bleed profusely)
Keen Senses (Heightened Perception and Low-light Vision)

Adrian originated from another fantasy RP that me and DinoNuts (AKA Victor) were in. The art is mine.

A thin man sporting the beginnings of a pot belly. Victor has dark hair, scraped back into a ponytail and a bushy moustache. Depending on how long it’s been since he’s been to a barber, he’ll also have the makings of a beard starting to grow in. His face is weatherbeaten and his body covered in scars. His nose has been broken and reshaped. Age lines have started to show on the creases of his brow and the corners of his eyes.

Victor Strade.

Male, 43

Human

Monster Hunter

Victor is world-weary. He has seen most of what he needed to see in order to mature, has suffered enough, and consequently understands the strife others go through. He has a temperamental nature, but his aggression is held back by his level-headedness and common sense. He knows how to pick his battles and is very aware of his limits. He carries himself with stoicism but there’s a faint warmth to his personality that makes him a little more welcoming than the an adventurer of his stature. He still operates under his own strict set of morals though, quick to be disapproving or to congratulate people for doing what he saw as ‘the right thing’.

Victor had a rather middle-class upbringing. Born to a merchant father in a town nestled safely amongst the core territories of the North, Victor spent his childhood assisting his father with his travels for sales or covering the homestead with his mother. Although he wasn’t admitted to higher forms of education, he was luckily taught literacy and competency.

The constant traveling with his father was something he enjoyed, not due to the nature of his profession but due to the occasional adventurers they met or sometimes just glimpsed preparing for a expedition. He was truly in awe of not only their status but also often heroic deeds.

Years passed and he was granted the choice of picking up his father's mantle which he obliged to, forcing himself to appease his parents. Luckily his miserable behaviour wasn’t ignored by them, prompting up discourse whether he’d rather pursue a different career. Victor was adamant with his want to chase after the career of an adventurer, something his parents weren’t keen on due their more realistic understanding of the skills that would require. Nevertheless his persistence convinced his parents to trial him, something he eagerly accepted and began preparations for.

After his fitting for barebone armor purchased from the cheapest smith, Victor joined a small party to start his journey with. He began completing miniscule contract after contract, racking up measly pay. The job was tough, and he had to hop from group to group due to the disbandment or loss of the previous one.

As time passed, Victor was met with the harshness of the world they lived in. Failed contracts with loss of life left him and whatever adventurers he joined up with not only without pay but emotional, physical, and eventually financial scars. As the work he took up began increasing in difficulty, failure turned from a farmer losing his tools to the villages losing their loved ones, families being destroyed, homes being annihilated. Every escape from death turned into luck, the feeling of control over the outcome of his tasks slipping. All these surging discoveries caused Victor to begin distancing himself from family and friends to allow him to more focus and dedicate his time to preparing and succeeding with his contracts. Then, his peers and their attitudes began displeasing him too. Their behaviour turned lacklustre and their desire for fame and glory trumped over the genuine need to help those who require it. This disgusted Victor and encouraged him to distance himself further from group work.

As such, Victor was left to his own devices. Dedicating so much time to this craft drove him to adapt and continue by taking contract after contract on his own. He started to find that avoiding needless bloodshed kept his health and his nerves in check. Most monsters had some capacity for sentience, and he tried to solve issues peacefully. This was not always the case, which meant he needed to be prepared for anything.

Many years have passed. Early mistakes made when contracting alone, even with permanent damage done to his body, were seen as valuable lessons. He picked up alchemy to accommodate for his lack of magic. He relied on tools and traps to compensate for his lack of party members. He invested in scrolls and trinkets to trivialise certain monsters. Large gashes and scars that taught him which limbs to plate and armor and which to free up to allow agility. All these lessons and more are what allowed Victor to survive this long and hopefully continue surviving.

Of course, life had a way of complicating things when everything starts to get simple. When a girl came headlong from the forest, begging Victor to help her find her way back home, Victor was hardly aware of the task that lay before him. The girl barely knew the Common language and didn’t even know which way was home other than ‘north’. Still, Victor relented, and within the week he accidentally discovered her status as a Skinwalker. Fearful of the needless attention and worried about what those powers would do if she mistakenly helped the wrong people, Victor decided to keep her with him at all times.

They are both recent arrivals to Heston, after Victor received word from the Prince himself that his skills were needed to investigate a disappearance. Although Adrian was not invited, she could not be left alone. They both ventured into the city the night before the start of the RP.

As a hunter, Victor's kit is never constant and is pre-prepared and set specifically for each hunt.

One of the truly constant items he has on his person at all times is a rather large encyclopedia detailing information about common monsters in primary regions.

Obviously the book wasn’t designed for hunters, but it allows him to piece together information about specific species he hasn’t encountered before. The book is rather large too, so it’s only ideal purpose is to be read while encamped in safety.

An adventurer's kit, an advanced one in his case, is a must have for anyone in the monster hunting business. Whetstone, bandages, torches, maps of the local region, mortar and pestle, sleeping sack; every common item that someone in the wild would need to survive is always strapped to the sides of his mount.

Basic potions, tonics, and poisons. A man physically much less capable than the foes he faces requires special medicinal boosts to grant boons in certain situations. The alchemical solutions he carries on him are minimalist at best and cause clutter, forcing him to only carry the bare minimum and craft any specifically necessary ones beforehand.

Due to most of his fights facing him off against beasts and monsters, the combat training he had accumulated over the years have been molded to best deal with them. Traps, tools, lures, makeshift rituals, and caution have helped him achieve victory more so than sword play.

Years of monster hunting have taught him important lessons to take into account when chasing a or fleeing from a monster. He possess the basics of dealing with common creatures.

Tracker. Years of experience have granted Victor the art of reading prints, scents, droppings, and rituals to help him understand the behaviours and movement of common monsters.

Information gathering. Victor is no clairevoyant. Most of his hunts force him to not only interact with nature, but the people affected by the monster. Talking to the commonfolk to piece together information to paint the bigger picture is second nature by now.

Alchemy. Due to his lack of magical affinity Victor was forced to adapt or fall behind with the hunting of monsters. To counteract this Victor began dabbling in alchemy at an early age. This has now left him with a mediocre understanding of crafting and consuming mixtures that either benefit him or harm his target when applied.

Victor possess no magical skills, forcing him to rely on trinkets and scrolls he might purchase or identify in the wild.