Character you have created: Djarrawi Hunter
Alias: Sleepwalker, Dingo Girl, Today Girl (These aren't codenames, just nicknames from her people)
Speech Color: Dark Orange
Character Alignment: Hero
Identity: Known
Character Personality: Djarrawi is quiet, watchful, and aloof, but quite friendly if you actually engage her. She loves playing with animals, tending plants, and watching children, and is an extremely adept storyteller. She loves creativity in all its forms and will actively encourage anyone she sees struggling with a hand on the shoulder, hug, and warm smile. Her concepts of personal space and ownership are a bit off from Western values, but she is quite firm in her beliefs. If she didn't have the status she had, she'd probably have been arrested for numerous misunderstandings. John also helps with this, as does Tree.
Theft, oppression, and mistreatment of nature will probably be met with anger, if not physical force.
Origin Info/Details: Djarrawi is the daughter of Samantha and Powa. Samantha was part of the Stolen Generation, born in 1978, but found her way back to her roots with the Djabugay in Queensland and settled there as a farmer. Djarrawi is their only child. As a young girl, she was curious and playful, and very quick on her feet. Showing a keen awareness for the world and for spirits, Djarrawi began to learn her trade as a medicine woman by the time she turned seven, though training isn't necessarily the best word.
When she was fifteen, she went on walkabout, and journeyed out into the Outback for some distance, saying hello to other tribes and the ranchers and farmers out in the scrublands. Out there, she chanced upon a nest of vipers along the edge of a cliff, and she dodged their bites, only to jump and land on a loose rock, which sent her careening down the slope and off the edge, a hundred feet below. Normally, this would have killed her, but Djarrawi was clever, and twisted enough to catch a branch sticking out of the cliff to slow her fall. It snapped, but allowed her to land with only a broken femur and spine.
As she lay there paralysed, a voice came to talk to her. She looked around and saw a dingo, watching her carefully. It told her that she had killed it, as well as herself, because she had gone and broken the sacred branch that he was. But there was a way to save them both, if she was willing. Since she did not want to die yet, she agreed that they should do this thing. The dingo directed her to shove the piece of branch she held into her leg, where the bone was sticking out. It took many minutes for her to work up the courage to do so, but she did. She immediately passed out from the pain.
When she woke up, it was night time She could stand, and, better, she could move much better than she had before her fall. She could see in the dark just fine, and breathed easier than she ever had. And the dingo's voice, barely a whisper, taught her all the ways of the ancestor spirits and how she could effect bulurru now. This took several weeks, during which time her family assumed she was still on Walkabout.
When she returned, and showed what she could do, her tribal leaders convened. Then the entire regional council conveneed. Phone calls were made, other shamans from as far away as the Great Western Desert came to see her. Eventually, over the course of a month of poking, prodding, and questioning, she was instructed that she must tour to all the other peoples of the continent, and see the whole of the place and check on the land. She did this for four years, during which time, to keep her company, she made Tree.
Last year, when she was twenty-five, the full council tasked her with travelling off-continent, to seek any evidence of sacred sites outside of the lands they had lived on forever, and to return any sacred items that might have been stolen by Englishmen. She agreed to do so, on the condition that she be supported by someone with actualy diplomatic powers so she could have authority. This led to John Mulvaney going on his first trip by sailboat, and his first trip to America, accompanying a strange girl in traditional clothes and face paint and a giant man who stood too still to be normal.
Hero Type: Acrobat/Supernatural
Power Level: Street/???
Powers:
Physical Stuff: Aside from just the physical strength and toughness growing up in the Outback gave her, Djarrawi's unique spirit and training allow her to accomplish astonishing feats. She can run at nearly sixty miles an hour for half a day, leap up to twenty feet vertically, hit like a kung-fu master, and twist in ways professional gymnasts would be jealous of. She's resistant to disease and venoms and toxins, but not to a metahuman degree. She is just Australian.
Bulurru: Bulurru started the world, but hasn't ended. But Djarrawi, with her newfound powers and responsibilities, can shape some aspects of bulurru to suit her needs. She can, when physically touching any solid object of any make, mold it as if clay, and while doing so transform the material to anything else she wishes. This cannot however, create man-made materials, only naturally occurring things. For example, she can turn sand into iron, but not into steel.
Living creatures, upon being touched on the forehead with her fingers, or simply held if they are small enough, are turned into whatever other living creature she wishes. This is temporary, the length of time depending on the willpower of the person in question and how much effort Djarrawi put into it. At a maximum, the most weak-willed person that Djarrawi thinks should be changed permanently will stay in their new form for a week. Animals and plants effected by this, however, are only changed back when she wants them to, and she can accomplish that simply by willing the change to go away. This change has no detrimental effect on the subject, and sentient beings keep their minds, though if she turns you into something without speech parts, you cannot speak. Subjects inherently know how to use any part of their body as if they had been born that way. Interestingly, once returned to normal, some bleedover effect remains, and dreams often tend to be from the view of the thing the subject was turned into, and ever after there is an unwillingness to hurt aid creatures.
Water can be instantly cleansed of pollutants, and food of the same, upon her touching it. Any air she breathes is subconsciously cleaned of everything except naturally occurring elements. All the soil she walks on is cleansed out around an acre from her footprint. Sticking her hand in a river will cause everything downriver from her to be cleansed at a rate somewhat above just the water she is touching, as if the effect was spreading. She doesn't seem to be able to effect seawater.
Witch ochre paints, Djarrawi can draw something on a surface, and then breathe life into it. For example, if she draws a kangaroo in red ochre and gives it life, a full, real red kangaroo leaps from the surface she drew it on. This only works for things she paints, and it has to be ochre. She cannot create sentient life from paintings.
When Djarrawi plays her didgeridoo, it doesn't just make music. Any and all spirits within earshot wake up from their slumber and come to see her, and the whole world inside this zone takes on a dreamy, unreal quality for any normal people inside. Trivial and material things seem less important, and the natural world seems suddenly painfully vibrant. This effect persists for a few minutes after she stops playing, as the Bulurru settles back down, but can leave lasting impressions on people.
If Djarrawi names something, then it becomes more real. (This is a very difficult concept to explain, so bear with me). When an ancestor spirit gives something a name in bulurru, they give it form. Sometimes this requires trading objects with other spirits to learn the name it needs, but the name was simultaneously already there and not. The act of naming something out loud gives it a truer form than it had, since it now exists in bulurru where before it might have just been pretending. Physically this has no effect at all on, say, mountains or skyscrapers or people or anything. It does make them more spiritually a part of the fabric of the land around them, but this isn't even really perceptible except to Djarrawi and other spirits.
Attributes:
Height: 5'11”
Weight: 132
Strength Level: A bit over what you would expect from a well-trained human
Speed/Reaction Timing Level: ~Four times as fast as peak human
Endurance at MAXIMUM Effort: ~Twelve hours
Agility: Can tie herself into knots and dive through holes just wide enough to fit.
Intelligence: Higher than average, but not a genius
Fighting Skill: Raw talent, very little real training
Weight: 132
Strength Level: A bit over what you would expect from a well-trained human
Speed/Reaction Timing Level: ~Four times as fast as peak human
Endurance at MAXIMUM Effort: ~Twelve hours
Agility: Can tie herself into knots and dive through holes just wide enough to fit.
Intelligence: Higher than average, but not a genius
Fighting Skill: Raw talent, very little real training
Resources: Zero, except the stipend she gets from the Australian government
Weaknesses:
She staunchly refuses to ride in anything powered by gasoline, oil, coal, or nuclear power, and thus is restricted to walking, sail, paragliding, horseback riding, etc.
Despite her exceptional physical abilities and her powers, Djarrawi is still vulnerable to bruises, lacerations, gunshots, etcetera.
Technically, her left femur is made of hardened wood, instead of bone.
She has a tendency to just wander off, even if others need her. A byproduct of her connection to bulurru, there's not much to do about this.
Her powers over bulurru come with extreme moral limits, and as such what she can do with it is far more expansive than what she will do with it. She will never kill or destroy with these powers, though she may change for what she sees as a benefit to the world. She may do things which seem cruel to some, but which are learning opportunities she feels are necessary. But many, many actions others might conceive of are completely anathema to the ways she has been taught. Material gain, corruption, bridging the dead: None of these will ever be done.
If Djarrawi ever loses control of herself, through mind control or otherwise, her power over the Bulurru stops working. Forever.
If Djarrawi doesn't get enough sunlight, fresh air, and outdoor time, she begins to weaken, slowly turning into a normal human. In addition, she must visit spiritual sites at least once a month, or risk her powers disappearing for an unknown amount of time.
Supporting Characters (Does your character have a significant other? A mother? Friend? Who are they, what do they have to do with your character?):
Tree is a walking man, Aboriginal, seven feet tall and powerfully muscled. He looks very old and weather-beaten. He is, in fact, a tree, animated by Djarrawi. She affectionately refers to him as her grandfather. Tree isn't necessarily intelligent, at least not like a human. However, he seems to know what he needs to do without being told, and can speak in simple sentences.
John Mulvaney, 42. a Special Envoy diplomat from Australia, tasked with travelling with Djarrawi in order to keep her safe and enable her to do her job. He really has no idea what to expect, and since he was otherwise doomed to a desk job, has determined to have fun with this. He is a nervous, pale man, though quite friendly.