Name: Anise Page
Race: Tiefling
Age: 18
Gender: Female
Appearance:
Anise is thin, but not scrawny. Having spent much of her time hefting heavy books from one end of the library to another and climbing ladders, she has actually put on more muscle than many would realize. She may not heft a great sword as easily as a fighter, but if she punched you, it'd leave a mark. She has curly red hair, and her eyes are completely milky white. She dresses very plainly, not due to any lack of confidence in herself, but rather as she just has her mind set on other things. The most notable aspect is her purple-hued skin and ram-like horns that adorn her head. She is not tall, but not short either at a simple 5'7 with her shoes lifting her another inch. She usually has two books at her side at all times: Her Spirit Tome as she calls it, and whatever other book she is reading for her own leisure.
Class:
Wizard
Personality:
Anise is open and an extrovert in spite of her choice of expertise. In fact, she might be a bit too open, willing to speak her mind on most matters, even if they can come across as rude. But typically these are accompanied with jests or muses. Whether that lessens the blow is dependent on who is the target. She is far too curious for her own good, and after spending most of her times with Crampernap, she also lacks tact. No question is too embarrassing for her, and she is more than willing to share whatever knowledge she has to the point of growing giddy, speaking too fast for most to follow her train of thought.
More than anything she loves learning whatever she can. Knowledge if indiscriminate. It doesn't care who you are or what you look like. It only cares that you listen. Having been neglected by most of her piers due to her birth and appearance, she finds comfort in study. Almost as if it is a friend of hers.
Strengths
-An outside the box thinker. Many mages will often force their magic as the solution, but frequently a mechanical solution is better.
-Versatile caster, capable to altering or modifying the properties of certain spells to create slightly altered effects (Creating Ball Lighting rather than fireball, or make a fly spell a grounding spell)
-Magical Tome filled with Spirits of Curiosity allow for quick searches in her spellbook and quick Rune Casting
-A more capable lifter than most would imagine. Allows for more of the aforementioned mechanical solutions
Weaknesses
-Though physically fit, she has a weak constitution, being more susceptible to illness or disease.
-May occasionally watch an enemy or monster for too long because she wants to observe them longer
-The tome from before will try its best to absorb knowledge from other sources without much regard for the consequences if she's not watching
-Her bluntness and willingness to speak plainly can frequently cause issue with her companions or others she's speaking with.
Biography:
Most wizards who claim tutelage seek the grand ivory towers of arcane universities. They seek the massive campus of statues and crystals all standing proudly as monuments to say “Look at us! Look at how great we are!” But to Anise all she saw was an attempt to see which member had the biggest member. It was all once massive showboating competition, not truly a place to study and learn. She found better tutelage at the base of a tree.
In the base of this tree was a tiny door, one that she was quite a bit larger than. She could fit, but the fit was tight. However, once she was inside, the hollowed-out trunk grew, or rather she shrunk, so that it encompassed the space of a huge library, leading all the way to the top of the 6-foot-wide stump. There lived her teacher, Crampernap Fiddlefen, an elderly (and crabby) Gnomish man who was ostracized by the academic for his… cantankerous attitude and platitude of eccentricities. He was simply not the refined visage that the colleges wanted to uphold, though according to him, “Makes no difference to me! Poppycock and cockledoodle to them I say! When they realize who they let fly the coop, I’ll just give them the bird, heHA!”
Anise first discovered this strange world when she was just a child. Due to her unfortunate nature of birth, parents often warned their children to be careful around her. “She’s devil-blooded… Best stay away from her… She’s a liar and a deceiver…” As such, the other children often would spread rumors behind her back, and find excuses whenever she wanted to play. She knew what was going on, but she wanted them to listen. One day, she caught some children playing hide-and-seek. After she asked if she could play, they made her “it” and ran off to leave her by herself. She searched for a few minutes, hoping that just maybe she had found a group, but much to her dismay, and not at all to her surprise, they had left. Frustrated she kicked the tree that she had counted behind. From inside she heard the sound of books falling, and a man yelled out in surprise. Then something slammed against her foot, as she noticed a tiny door, and beside it a tiny man sticking his head out from the doorway. “Hey!” he cried, “Yes you! Were you the one kick at my library?!” Before she had a chance to reply, she was grabbed by the old tiny man and quickly shrunk in size. Everything happened so quickly. The next thing she knew she was staring at a massive pile of books lying on the floor, and the same old man (now only half her size) conjuring a spectral hand to place books back on the shelf. “Well? Are you just going to stand there, or are you going to help me?”
This was how she met her teacher. From that day on, she kept on coming back to him, in spite of his incessant complaints. However, he was a funny old man, and perhaps the first person not to see her as a fiend in the making. She had never thought herself the scholarly type, but watching the old man perform magic was fascinating. She asked questions all the time, and as a method to keep her quiet, he kept directing her to books that should have been far beyond her level. But quite the contrary, instead of discouraging her, she came back with more questions, and he came back with more books, unwittingly fueling her curiosity to an extreme level. After a while, he finally began to tolerate her. She was keeping the library organized, and helping keep things in place. While the books had been placed on the shelves, they had been done rather haphazardly in a somewhat random order, but she had taken the time over the years organizing them and keeping them neat and tidy (after she read them of course).
Things were going rather well, until one day…
“Assistant, have you seen the tome I have been studying? It’s a large brown leather-bound book.”
“No sir, I can’t say I have.” Anise was putting away a few tomes that she had finished herself. Clearly upset, Crampernap walked off muttering a few things to himself. As he walked off, Anise put her hand on a book that she hadn’t read yet. It was small, easily held in one hand. Its cover was a deep purple, with pictographs emblazoned in gold. It was remarkable. As she opened it up, she felt herself suddenly lose consciousness, as she read the few words in the book.
FREEEEEE!!!
“ANIIIIIIIIISE! WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO MY LIBRARY!” She was awoken by the outrage of her mentor. Quickly she looked around her. But… everything seemed normal. “I’m sorry sir what’s the-“ Suddenly he shoved an open tome in her face “Look! Look! All the words, all the knowledge drained from the very page! I’ve seen this once before and-MY TOME!!!” He pointed at the tiny purple book held in her hand. She had seen him studying it though, this could not possibly be it. This one was tiny, his was easily the largest tome in the library. She quickly explained her side of the story. After she finished, he told her what happened.
“I see… As much as I hate to admit it, this is as much my own fault as it is yours. I never took into consideration that these beasts could alter the appearance of their book to others. They couldn’t have moved far, be quick now there ought to be at least one more nearby.”
Confused, she obeyed her mentor’s instructions. Not long after she found a tiny little beast eating the words from a book. And yes, it ripped the words right out of the book and ate them. She caught it, and called her master as it twisted and cried. “Don’t just stand there, squash it!” She turned her face away as her hands sparked with energy killing the beast. As it stopped squirming, it dispersed into black ink which stained her hands, and the words from the book that it was eating had returned.
“Sir, what is this thing?”
“Simply put, it is your voracious curiosity given physical form. Spirits actually. Though don’t worry, they have no desire to possess you. Instead they merely wish to be fed. They feed off of knowledge and books, and the more they feed, the more they learn, the bigger they grow, the smarter they become, and the more dangerous they are. Unfortunately, it seems the rest have slipped out. They are not evil, just very driven to learn as much as possible, and they hoard that knowledge. I once let them out myself as a matter of fact. And they stored all the information they learned inside the tome I was studying. However, it seems it’s your tome now. Now then, what are you standing around for! Fix my library!”
The door was suddenly slammed behind her, and she didn’t even know when that happened. Armed with a quest, she set off to restore her master’s library and gather even more knowledge in the process. This of course led her to the best place she could think of for searching for these creatures. She had her misgivings about it, but with such an emphasis on adventuring, it proved acceptable.