Professor Kovalenko
Full Name: Oren Dariya Kovalenko
Nicknames/Aliases: Professor K., The Robot, The Snow Queen.
Age: 36
Gender: Female
Primary: Aquamancy (Cryomancy specialist.)
Professor of Aquamancy and Shadow MagicSecondaries[/size] Shadowstep, Blood Magic.
Description:: Oren stands at about 5'7, an angular-looking woman with blue-black hair, pale grey eyes. She has high, noticeable cheekbones and a naturally pale complexion.
She often wears black gloves and a dark blue duster, sporting a small grey band on the arm with an oval and concentric circles pattern laid in black print.
Oren is usually seen wearing black eyeliner, and a look of general humourless disdain. Unlike many of her war veteran peers, Oren appears largely free of visible scarring. She also has no tattoos.
An accomplished shadowstepper, Oren has learned how to move quickly, gracefully, and economically, and makes her way round the school with the stealthy surefootedness of a wild cat, and the pitiless piercing stare of a hunting owl.
Personality: A lot of people who know Oren have compared her to a robot. Except she is a robot programmed to hate everyone. The aquamancy professor is antisocial, unempathetic, and has very little sense of humour.
She holds everyone, including herself, to unreachable standards and is quick to express her contempt for people due to their inability to meet them. She either has no sense of tact, or has chosen never to express it, as she has no issues with insulting others, including students within her classes, and has a highly caustic mode of interaction which is sure to rub some the wrong way.
Despite this, it's clear that the woman is highly intelligent and very dedicated to her work, and puts a great deal of effort into educating the next generation...even if her methods are a little bit controversial.
The general view held in the student population is that Professor K is good at what she does, but is kind of....scary. She is quite inflexible when it comes to enforcing the school rules, has no issue meting out some kind of punishment for infraction, and to make it more intimidating is often doing so alongside Professor Byrne (something that has resulted in some slightly inappropriate graffiti about them in the ground floor bathroom.)
On top of that she rarely ever seems to sleep, as she can often be seen stepping out of the darkness in the early hours of the morning from...wherever she came from.
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Skills: -Very adept hydromancer. Oren tends to specialize particularly in cryomancy, or ice manipulation, and is experienced enough that she can form ice simply out of airborne moisture, rarely leaving her without any form of weapon.
- Oren is one of the most experienced shadowstep users on site. She is able to step in an out with near as much ease as strolling through the courtyard, and seems to be capable of appearing most anywhere. This tends to keep students on their toes and prevent them from being too quick to speak ill of the professor.
Weaknesses: - Oren has very little in the way of social skill, and tends to quite easily upset people.
-Oren cannot materialize ice or water in very dry air, meaning she will struggle round widespread fire or in very low humidity.
-She cannot stand unwarranted physical contact and is likely to lose her cool if grabbed or held for any length of time.
Brief History: Oren Kovalenko was the (very much illegitimate) daughter of Emil Kovalenko, a prominent and well known hungarian aquamancer. The birth of a bastard child was a disaster for the (married) mage, and her presence was the source of rumours and ridicule. As such, the young Oren did not have the most affectionate or understanding upbringing. She was pushed very hard for intelligence and academic achievement, and had little opportunity to make friends.
It was through formal gatherings that Oren was taken to that she first met Maeve Byrne. Their initial interactions hardly pointed towards them making a very meaningful bond, but through a twist of fate, it was the red-haired aeromancer from her childhood that Oren found herself teamed up with during the hardest fights of the civil war.
The war is not something Oren talks about in detail...not if she can help it certainly. She was part of the youngest generation involved in the conflict, and because of her strong aquamancy traits was placed in the position of a frontline soldier. Despite her promising skills in her primary, Oren, and those of her age group, fund themselves wholly unprepared for the ferocity of the conflict, and the initial casualties were massive. The young woman gained her skills very quickly, as she needed to do so in order to survive. And skill was something she ended up with no shortage of, ending up as the second component of 'Storm',working her freezing abilities in conjunction with Byrne's abilities to manipulate the atmosphere to cut swathes of destruction through enemy forces.
Afterwards her place as a deadly cryomancer was set into the public consciousness, at least as far as the council were concerned. As such she found plenty of work after the end of the war for them. Despite her reputation for not being the most pleasant person to work with, she seemed surprisingly invested in the creation of an academy for young magic users, and had a hand in the setup of the location of Marchand and the installation of its facilities.