Name: Nissa
Gender: Female
Age: 20
Animal: Owl
Appearance: Nissa is a small girl, relatively short for a full-grown woman and not particularly hefty or busty either – instead fairly slim and light. She has long, smooth black hair, and dark eyes whose irises seem to blend in with the pupils completely, and her skin has grown pale from avoiding sunlight for so long. She always dressed plainly, and in more recent years that has become especially evident, as her life in the wild has forced her to dress mainly in crudely-put-together animal skins that she drapes around herself in whatever fashion necessary to keep herself covered and warm.
When she transforms, her most definitive feature is her large, black wings which protrude from her back, large enough to carry her in the air and, as expected from the wings of an owl, don’t make even the quietest sound as they move, allowing Nissa to fly with an almost ghost-like silence. Additionally, while her owl hearing doesn’t cause any visible changes, her owl eyesight does, as her night-vision causes her pupils to grow to almost the size of her entire eye. And lastly, her hands swell and re-shape themselves, five fingers blending together into three, as her fingertips harden into fierce, hooked talons, used for hunting and self-defense.
Bio: Nissa never really felt like she belonged in society, even before she was seen as an outcast. Prior to discovering her abilities, she could still be described as what some would call a “night owl”, being quite active during the night hours while she seemed to barely stay awake for good chunks of the daytime, always seeming to be tired until the moon rose. Additionally, she always seemed to be less of an emotional thinker than her peers, instead more of an inquisitive type, preferring to step back and look at things logically rather than act rashly. Add this to her soft-spoken nature and she really never felt like she belonged with the rest of her village.
Once she discovered her powers in her mid-teens, nightly escapes from the village became a regular routine. Her new night-vision and flight made navigating the nearby wilderness easy and comfortable, and her sensitive hearing and silent wings helped her make her escapes without being noticed. Once outside the village, she found the wilderness far more comforting to be in. It felt nice to be alone and left to her own devices, plus she could be active during the night without worrying about disturbing anyone. Additionally, she started to develop a fondness for hunting. Gifted with the owl’s keen senses, noiseless flight and talons – the creature’s best hunting tools – Nissa didn’t have much difficulty targeting and killing small animals. The logical part of her brain sometimes thought it was strange that she found hunting so easy, especially since, in her village, hunting was typically performed by the men, and typically with a lot more gusto and a lot less stealth than Nissa was capable of, but hunting seemed so natural to her, and so she didn’t pay much mind to that strangeness. Still thinking herself above a savage, though, she did like to clean and prepare her midnight snacks to the best of her ability, often building small fires in the woods to cook her food with. She heavily disliked how hard it was to hide a fire, though, as the light and sounds of crackling wood made her feel like she might as well have been shouting to alert her presence to everyone nearby, so she often had a hard time building a fire far enough away from her village so as to feel secure about it.
It was the presence of these fires, in fact, that eventually broke the secret of her powers to her village. Knowing what she was, the people there called her a “savage” and a “monster”, and forbade her from coming back to her daytime home – threatening to attack with torches and pitchforks, otherwise. While Nissa was at first upset by this, she soon realized that she didn’t have much reason to be. She already felt more comfortable in the wild, and already knew how to hunt her own food, so it didn’t take too much adjusting to live out in the wild completely. In the years since, she’s been doing just that – wandering the forests at night and living out her daily (or rather, nightly) routine of hunting and flying silently through the night.
