Clara Vale

The Dread Necromancer, The Smiling Necromancer, The Pale Wizard, and The Grave-robber*

25

Clara stands just above average height, and possess the physique of an unexpectedly active wizard. Her skin is an ever-shifting shade of light brown, and an observer would be hard-pressed to limit her to any single race or ethnicity. A fact that Clara takes great pleasure in and only the faintest hint of an English accent gives any suggestion of her true origins. Her soft face is framed by a forest of springy coils that dance with each movement that she makes. Her eyes are diamonds cast in midnight that sparkle equally with arcane light and boundless curiosity. Lips painted with violet rest most often in a warm smile.

Living her best Goth life, Clara prefers to wear alternating shades of gray or black. She pairs black jeans with plain black t-shirts only occasionally superseding the colors of the void with a collection of band t-shirts almost always depressing in nature. Clara wears minimal jewelry, her left wrist is adorned with three bangles of gold and she wears a silver ankh on a chain around her neck. Canvas sneakers are her jam and she vibes in a perfectly midnight pair of sneakers. To sanctify her coolness, she wears a black leather jacket at all times.

A necromancer hailing from a cyberpunk future, Clara is a fast-thinking spellslinger out to save the world. She is strange, enigmatic, and oozes with arcane energy from every pore. A modern necromancer in every way, Clara believes that it is her mission in life to show the multiverse that necromancy is a force of great good.

While steeped in death and the occult, Clara is intimately fond of people and the dead in equal measure. She is a vivacious creature full of life and warmth who does best when surrounded by others. She is generous in her disregard for money and values having fun above having a healthy bank account. She does best in loud places that are full of people, greasy food, and brilliant drinks. Left to her own devices she is prone to melancholy, long naps, and arcane experimentation that can threaten entire cities

Dishonest, but in the kindest way, Clara cultivates an air of mystery about herself, telling vague and ever-changing stories about her origins, travels, and adventures. The only recurring hints to her past are buried beneath cheerfully told noise.

A research rebel, Clara enjoys filling the margins of her grimoire with sketches of people she meets and badly written poetry that a friend once described as "the sort of fan-fiction a thirteen year old girl would write as a joke."

Clara is alarmingly willing to read her poetry to recite her poetry at the merest mention of her mad scribbling.

A wizard in a cyberpunk land, Clara is necromancer from a reality long since lost to technology and the promise of the future. The culmination of a particularly strong and noteworthy line of magicians, Clara practiced magic far beyond the printed expatiation date specified by the demands of her universe.

Planted in the binary sea of the digital matrix, Clara grew up in the sprawling megacity that had once been the Eastern seaboard of the United States of America. A gifted necromancer from her youth, she studied under the few great masters that remained. Brilliant in her capacity to harness horror for good, Clara occupied a niche in a world that had abandoned magic as impractical and neglected defenses against what had been deemed to be nothing more than idle superstition. Vanishing into the sprawl as soon as she was able, Clara cut her teeth as an arcane consultant operating in the shadowy realm outside of the corporate world.

Where others found darkness and lost themselves to hopeless cruelty and endless greed, Clara found purpose and came to believe that necromancy represented a novel way to bring great good to the world. Finding others like her, Clara became a legendary figure. The Smiling Necromancer who appeared from the shadows, not to murder cities with her armies of undead monsters, but to do what good she was could and to make the world a better place.

Eventually, Clara wandered across what remained of the United States after the megacorporations had taken over on a storied quest once posted on the electronic boards of her world. She traveled into the Walmart Economic Zone from the ExxonMobil Industrial Cities. She crossed the Ford Empire, traveled through the Hewlett-Packard Federation, and eventually arrived in the Western Kingdom of Apple. When asked by members of the party, she claims with a wry smile that she was simply searching for an old friend, the wizard FastSpell, last seen in what in the megacorporation glassed desert that had once been Silicon Valley.

Clara was said to have received an electronic chip from King Steve Wozniak XXI himself after saving the city from a demonic invasion. However, despite growing accolades she remained aloof and unaffiliated with any guild in the Western Kingdom of Apple. For a necromancer, she managed to maintain a surprisingly positive reputation despite her unapologetic status as a paid-by-the-hour mercenary. Not all trusted the necromancer however and many citizens of New Jobs City did not take kindly to her practice of the deathly arts and her habit of reanimating the recently dead. As her arcane power grew, the few wizards remaining on the Western Coast began to chafe at the many interesting ideas that young necromancer proposed.

Clara nonetheless established herself as a skilled mercenary and fearsome mage. Generally viewed as an affable, even kind figure, Clara maintained a surprisingly positive reputation for a necromancer and paid-by-the-hour criminal. However, not all the residents of New Jobs City had taken kindly to her fondness for the school of necromancy and her habit of reanimating the dead.

Despite the modest support of the royal court, Clara found herself fighting a losing political battle with a powerful cable of wizards that remained in New Jobs City. When the subject is mentioned, Clara explains with great indignation that her colleagues were offended by her alarming lack of greed (threatening the market value of magical services was widely seen as a most heinous crime) and to a lesser degree as a result of what she called misguided compulsions against necromancy that existed even among wizards. What began as a political battle, soon turned to bloodshed, and Clara found herself fighting for her life. Objecting to rumors that filled the net, Clara maintains that she killed other wizards strictly in self-defense.

It was a spell of seeking cast in the heat of battle that saw the young necromancer summoned before the first door. Clara remains uncertain why exactly it is that she was tasked with joining the party in their current quest to defeat the final boss. Especially given the low view of necromancers that she has discovered prevails across almost all of the multiverse. However, Clara harbors a suspension that her current situation might have something to do with her relatively recent reanimation of the Dread Empress Joanna IX.

Nonplussed, Clara has embraced the present dungeon dive as chance to do further good and redeem the proud school of magic known as necromancy.

Clara's shining moment of heroism came when she saved the party from the clutches of a lich that had managed to incapacitate everyone but the necromancer. She feels that saving her comrades from being turned into hideous mockeries of the living eternally enslaved to the wills of a mad undead wizard can be widely concerned a big win for Team Necromancy.

It was either that or the time she taught a settlement of space primitives to read, resulting in the formation of en early society of Space Vikings.

Clara's moment of tragedy involves her role in the destruction of a small village the party had encountered after passing through one of the strange dimensional doors. Faced with five chapters of corrupted crusaders, the party was faltering when Clara resorted to an arcane ritual forbidden since time immemorial. The horde of undead spirits that Clara summoned consumed several armies worth of enemies and turned the tide of the battle. However, pushing beyond the her limits, Clara lost control, and the entire village was devoured by the ravenous spirits before she could banish them.

You're a Necromancer, Clara: Clara is a talented wizard focusing on the much feared and reviled art of necromancy.

Cyberpunk Survivor: Born a spell-slinging wizard in a dystopian cyberpunk city ruled by merciless megacorporations, Clara knows how to survive in environments filled with high-tech weapons, gangsters, corporate assassins, and enough pollution to kill a planet.

Friend of the Dead: Guided by the whispers of the dead, Clara has a knack for navigating dangerous environments and hostile situations despite her own disregard for pragmatic concerns. Some might call it a supernatural sixth sense, but Clara calls it game of necromantic instant messaging.

Hard to Scare: Dealing with the undead on a frequent basis has left Clara with a remarkably casual attitude towards all things related to horror and death.

Speaker of the Dead: Clara has a knack for conversing with the dead, managing to successfully interpret their often disjointed thoughts and understanding the strange, long dead languages that seem to be in vogue among the deceased.

Not a Physical Combatant: Clara feels that whacking someone with her staff is too much work and prefers to leave physical combat or gunplay to her allies and undead servants.

Easily Tempted: Clara can resist temptation, she really can, so long as it's not very tempting, and so long as it doesn't involve ancient stores of necromantic knowledge or tasty pastries.

Hero of Horror: Clara is deeply saddened by the negative stigma that necromancers have acquired and their inevitable association with the forces of evil. As a result, in her haste to change the world for the better and to prove that she is a force of good, Clara often forgets to consider the safety or wisdom of her actions. She is impulsive, unceasingly kind, and prone to committing suicidal acts of heroism at the drop of a hat.

Bone Staff: For self-defense purposes, Clara wields a polished and enchanted staff shaped from brilliantly white bone.

Ancient Necromantic Grimoire: An ancient tome of arcane knowledge that Clara carries on her person at all times. Chiefly necromantic in nature, Clara jealously guards, religiously maintains, and frequently updates the horrific looking book. It is easily the young necromancer's prized possession and she would kill without hesitation to protect it.

Nokia Idoru Commlink: Clara carries a state-of-the-art, for 2077, electronic communications device in the pocket of her leather jacket. Stuffed to the brim with futuristic tehcnology the so-called commlink is an electronic device that is part-PDA, part-personal computer, part-cyberterminal, and part-global communications device running blazingly hot technomancer code powered by the souls of the dead. Beyond serving as a gateway for Clara to both the Augmented and Virtual Reality of the Wireless Matrix, she also uses it to blast her Gothic jams.

A slightly cursed item that bound itself to the character that the GM will give you ha.

Ampere

20

Ampere is rather small, given that he's a ratfolk, that shouldn't come as a surprise. He stands at 3" 1' (about one meter), and is completely covered in white fur, save for his tail, hands, and feet. His eyes are a strangely bright red, marking him as an albino of his kind, and he's wearing a red hat with similarly red robes that occasionally glow when they can still reflect a spell. He somehow managed to find boots that fit him, and they're a rather normal brown color.

Ampere is brash, rash, and often tries to act as fast as possible... often to his own detriment, as seen with the quote above. Despite his electrical powers, his preferred beverage is water, of all things, and while he does enjoy cheese, he hates it when others point out how stereotypical that is. He joined the party after finding out that they were at least willing to occasionally spare his kin, but whether his joining was a good or a bad thing... still remains to be seen.

To Ampere, just about everything looks like it's weak to lightning, and that's usually his first suggestion for fixing a problem. He's also occasionally seen trying to put together some strange, broken device, though his lack of patience means that he'll give up for a while once it inevitably breaks again while he tries to fix the thing. The small, brass, spherical device is occasionally even thrown against a wall, any wall, during his fits.

Ampere lived in a country where magic was hated, feared, and a world where his kind were generally looked down upon. It was assumed that ratfolk lacked the intelligence to use magic, at least, ever since it was confirmed that they could speak. Ampere didn't believe that for a moment, however, and he always tried to sneak a look at some magic book, or just try something on his own once he read enough. While he wasn't necessarily gifted in magic, he managed to learn a few spells before he met the party.

A few days before the other adventurers found him, Ampere took an interest in the seemingly endless reign of the country's leader. It seemed like whoever challenged him would end up tired, and beat up before the fight began. He also took notice of the water, and the generally low attendance of these recent fights, noting that the water would make his magic more effective, and the low attendance would allow him to not get caught. Ampere started trying to think of a plan, but then the adventurers arrived through some strange door, and they actually agreed to help him dethrone the leader, even helping him fight off the thugs that the leader hired to try to beat up Ampere, and they kept the other ratfolk from actually attending the fight, letting him use his magic without being seen as a magic-user.

As described in his 'moment of heroism', he actually defeated the former leader, however, rather than staying with his people, he decided to tag along with the other adventurers, with his first and only act as the rat king being to set a limit on how long someone can rule over the country.

Soon after Ampere joined the party, he challenged the corrupt leader of his people to a one on one fight, and, using the water in the arena, his electrical spells, and his ability to heal himself, he managed to deal with said leader, who used hired thugs to beat up anyone who challenged him before this, just so he'd stay in power forever.

While Ampere was at least able to topple his corrupt ruler, he was unfortunately too late to stop the execution of a would-be party member by his own people. He still doesn't forgive himself for that.

A Bit of Everything: While he's not as strong as a dedicated knight, or as good at casting his spells as a dedicated mage might be, he at least does decently well with his both his magic, and physical strength. That is, not to mention his healing spells which include a situational revival spell.

Lightning Immunity: As he's zapped himself so many times with his own spells, either on accident, or on purpose, Ampere is completely immune to electricity, whether it's from his own spells, or an enemy's attack.

Magic:

Low Defenses: Ampere is, unfortunately, rather frail. He has about the physical defenses of a mage without a whole lot of the magical defenses of one. This makes him a bit of a glass cannon in battle. He can dish out pain, but he can't take it.

Elemental Weaknesses: Ampere is actually weak to both ice and earth-elemental attacks due to his lightning powers.

Punch Gloves DX: Gloves that increase the wearer's strength, adding to their attack power. They also increase the wearer's speed by a decent amount, but do nothing for their magic power. Honestly, rather basic endgame weapons.

Robes of Reflection: It provides much less defense than most endgame armor, but it naturally reflects the first three spells cast on the wearer, sending said non-healing spells back to the caster... for better or worse.