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.
