Pandora

Name: Pandora
Age: 13
Birthday: March 13th (3/13)
Gender: Female
Nationality: Plegian
Social Status: Varies drastically depending on her current benefactor, otherwise among the poorest. Currently the latter.
Occupation: Somewhere between a pet, a pet project, a soldier, and a renegade. Currently the latter.
Allegiance: None
Religion: Grimleal (nominally)
Affinity: Dark
Handedness: Left
Literate: No

Class: Dark Mage
Level: 10
Weapon Levels: Dark Magic of Truth C [1/5]
Spells:

Dark Magic (open) Dark Magic (close)

Thanatos Armor - Defensive, Potency, Disturb
A solid shell of black magic comprised of her emotions encases Pandora, protecting her from both physical and magical harm. The metaphysical weight of her own emotions slows her down as much as real armor would, but the extreme to which the armor magnifies and projects her emotions is nothing short of unnerving to foes, whether it's projecting maniacal laughter, tearful agony, or soul-searing emptiness.

Chains of the Abyss - Malady, Complex, Pestilence
Black chains spring up from the ground beneath the target, wrapping themselves around anything they can reach. Movement is difficult while a limb is bound in these chains, though just how restrictive these chains are is dependent on the target's magic resistance. This is commonly used as a setup for Pandora's wilder spells.

Grima's Breath - Corrode, Potency, Killer
Pandora's most powerful but most dangerous to use spell, Grima's Breath allows her to breathe forth a tempest of black flame that turns all it touches to ash. Perhaps it's not quite that absolute in its power, but given the short range it spreads its focus across and the amount of magical power backing it, Grima's Breath is devastatingly potent nonetheless. It's also a very wild and intense spell, and using it even once will wind her, so it is best left as a last resort when nothing else will do.

Shattered Void Mirror - Delay, Potency, Drain
Laying a trap upon her own body, Pandora has a way to punish those who would think to strike her. Should an attack strike her while this spell is active, the spell leaps out at the attacker along the path of the attack that struck her, siphoning off a portion of the attacker's life energy and healing the injuries they just gave her. It's not the fastest of spells to cast, though, so it's best laid before a fight, rather than gambling on casting it during one.

Black Soul Thunder - Potency, Area of Effect
The lone wide-area assault spell in Pandora's arsenal, Black Soul Thunder lays waste to an area spherical in shape, a black shell containing wild lightning lashing out in all directions. Its power is nothing to laugh at, but given her uncontrolled nature, it actually takes more energy to restrict its area than it does to let it loose at its maximum size. As such, it is not the most ally-friendly of spells.

Magic of Truth (open) Magic of Truth (close)

Blazing Scirocco - Corrode, Complex [Fire/Wind]
Launching a focused heat wave at an opponent, this spell squirms its way under any armor the target may be wearing. The actual damage from Blazing Scirocco is minimal, but it tends to heat up any armor the target is wearing, making it both uncomfortable and somewhat softer until it cools off again.

Dancing Desert Wall - Defensive, Complex [Earth/Wind]
The active defense counterpart to Thanatos Armor, Dancing Desert Wall grants Pandora telekinetic control over a quantity of dirt, soil, or sand sufficient to blunt incoming attacks with. Given the amount of concentration required to properly maintain this defense, though, it cannot be maintained alongside any other spell save Thanatos Armor, making it a fully defensive option.

Razor Gale - Potency [Wind]
The simplest spell in Pandora's arsenal, Razor Gale is simply a very fast, very sharp wind blade traveling along the ground. It's rather thin, so it can be sidestepped if one can see it coming, but otherwise the impact tends to hurt quite a bit. Given its lack of specialist properties or general downsides, Razor Gale is Pandora's go-to attack spell should she get into a fight that doesn't call for any of her other spells.

Experimental Spell: Tornado Aegis - Defensive, Potency, Area of Effect [Wind]
An improvised spell created during Finding the Lost, Pandora created Tornado Aegis for the purpose of gaining greater control over the battlefield. As a spell still in its experimental stages, the incantation is much longer than her standard spells, but this drawback will slowly begin to fade as she refines the spell. When cast, Tornado Aegis surrounds her with a vicious windstorm, slicing up anything that passes through it and turning lighter ranged weaponry and spells aside. The spell could in theory move with her, but in its unrefined state is locked to a location instead; that said, she does have control over the size of the eye of the storm, the area of calm at the center of the tornado.

Helix Flame - Delay, Potency, Area of Effect [Fire]
One of the simpler spells in Pandora's arsenal, Helix Flame creates an orb of flame that, at first, merely hovers in front of her, waiting for her to trigger the second part of the spell. Once she decides she has a good enough angle, she makes a punching motion at the orb, arm remaining extended on completion. The orb then transforms instantaneously into a fast-moving spiral flame drill, searing everything caught in the line of fire.

Experimental Magic (open) Experimental Magic (close)

Grima Takeover: Scorpion Form - Defensive, Complex, Martial
Unleashing her wild power, Pandora shapes her inner darkness into the claws and tail of a scorpion, attaching them to her arms and back. This allows her better defensive coverage from all angles, as both claws and tail are sturdy enough to parry weaponry attacks without harming the rest of her, and allow her to strike back using her magical potency to bolster her rather lackluster physical force. The tail also provides a third vector for spell deployment, providing her with extra angles of attack to exploit.

This spell is still in its developmental stages, as confining her magic to such a complexly-shaped area demands a lot of her energy, and as such it remains impractical for combat.

This spell is also considered an advanced form of Thanatos Armor, and combining the two would create a full scorpion carapace instead of just claws and a tail. This combined version would likely replace Thanatos Armor on her spell roster once it becomes practical.

Also it's totally not inspired by this, what are you talking about?

Grima's Fang - Corrode, Potency, Martial
A spell designed as a more practical variant of Grima's Breath, Grima's Fang shapes the annihilation flames of its breath weapon cousin into a blade extending from one hand, usually her left. This allows her a modicum of hand-to-hand combat capability, though due to her lack of training in such things, most of the capability comes from her ability to cut through damn near anything if she does actually hit rather than any skill in actually hitting with it. The blade is also generally terrible for parrying, as while it does corrode any blade or armor it passes through, the fact that it passes through such things rather than clashing with them means it offers her next to no protection.

As such, it remains highly impractical until she acquires training in hand-to-hand combat, at which point she can rely on dodging and striking enough to make the blade's offensive nature useful.

Threefold Moonbeam Assault - Complex, Area of Effect
Summoning up three orbs of darkness, Pandora then refracts the energy contained within them out across a spread of several beams, creating a devastating spread of dark magic lasers that scourges the battlefield before them. The main caveat to this spell is that it requires three vectors to aim the refraction from, which means the spell can't be properly cast at present outside of her Grima Takeover: Scorpion Form, and seeing as that spell cannot be practically shaped in combat yet, Threefold Moonbeam Assault remains off-limits as well.

Appearance:
Pandora is short. Standing at a mediocre four-foot-eight, pretty much everyone towers over her in height. This fragile slip of a girl has rather obviously been at a loss for both exercise and proper nutrition, but not quite to the extent of being bone-thin. The paleness of her skin doesn't particularly help that impression. Her eyes have a peculiar golden coloration to them, a certain sadness lingering in her eyes no matter her actual emotions; her hair is jet black, straight-ish, and reaching down to her shoulders; not exactly the best maintained either, seeing as it's not too hard for her to hide her eyes behind the bangs of her hair.

Her clothing choices lean very much on the modest side of things. Most of the time, she prefers simple, practical clothing, but given a preference for hiding her identity, her outfits consist of dull brown or black tunics and pants, often with a heavy hooded cloak of the same color worn over it so she can hide herself from the world when she wants to.

That's not to say she's completely without ornate clothing. She does have one outfit that does not fit the above, but she's loathe to wear it most of the time, mostly because it's glaringly obvious in multiple respects. Like her traditional outfits, it has a heavy hooded cloak, but unlike the others, it's accompanied by a simple in form but fancy in decoration long-sleeved, full-length dress. Both the dress and the cloak are still black in color, so one wouldn't think it too different from her normal outfit, if not for the various Grimleal sigils and imagery stitched in red all over both the dress and cloak. She pays only lip service to the cult, if even that, and doesn't want to be recognized for it outside of Plegia.

The results of a laborious and not entirely successful after-the-fact attempt at picture-hunting for her (open) The results of a laborious and not entirely successful after-the-fact attempt at picture-hunting for her (close)

Personality:
The one word that would not describe Pandora's personality would be sane. She has very little control over her emotions, and tends to wildly swing back and forth between them as circumstances change, with next to no ability to rein them in willingly. This is a quality that she might resent in the future, but as things stand, she lacks the clarity of mind the vast majority of the time to recognize it as a problem.

She's very sheltered in her upbringing, and it shows. As such, she has a very poor understanding of most of the world outside of her magic and a handful of metaphorical gilded cages, and even then, the former is mostly a subconscious thing. Pointing out her lack of practical experience tends to get her spiraling into frantic apology and anxiety, but sometimes it's so glaringly obvious that it's hard not to notice: her worldly comprehension is roughly on par with someone about half her already young age.

On average, though, her speech patterns are quiet and shaky, and she tends to be rather submissive when faced with authority, or something that at least sounds like authority. One of the few things that does not scare her, oddly enough, is combat. She's seen more than enough already, and is numb to it... or if not, is at least very good at distancing herself mentally from it. It's also worth noting that because of a mix of all of the above, she really does not like being touched, and doing so will generally spark sudden recoiling by several steps at the very least.

Backstory:
The timing of Pandora's birth was lucky, if anything in her life was. Born shortly after the end of the last major Ylisse-Plegia conflict, Pandora did not have to grow up fearing the crusades as her parents did. Both were devoted followers of Grimleal; her mother was a wielder of the Magic of Truth of modest talents, while her father had some talent with Dark Magic. If asked about her parents, though, Pandora would not be able to answer much more than that. Not their names, not their faces, not even details of her time spent with them.

This is because of a chain of events set in motion around the time she turned five. Having seen her parents practice with magic quite often, the young and childish Pandora of the time thought to try and imitate her parents, not exactly knowing the significance to what she was doing. It scared the crap out of all three of them for completely different reasons, then, when her childish imitations actually produced black lightning. Pandora scared herself because the accompanying thunderclap was loud, she scared her mother because she had accidentally used dark magic somehow, and she scared her father because she had managed something like that despite being five years old.

From there, the disaster dominoes began to fall one after another. News traveled fast through all the wrong channels, and it was scarcely two months later that she had been abducted by servants of one of the Mad King's retainers, who had become very curious about this girl's early-blooming talents. It did take him a while to properly comprehend how her talents worked -- an early attempt at locking her in a room with a stack of magical tomes just resulted in one very cold, very scared little girl curled up in one corner of the room and none of the books touched, because he had failed to consider that she couldn't read, and had been too frightened of him to mention that earlier.

He did eventually figure out that she seemed to learn by mimicry, and once that had been deciphered, he had her tutored by a mentor in the magical arts. After a few months or so, her mentor came to him and informed him that there was nothing more he could -- or rather, would be willing to -- teach Pandora. Some of the spells he had seen her cast under his tutelage were both not the spells he had been teaching her and of a caliber of firepower that isn't often seen even in casters twenty years her senior. Power untempered by control or wisdom is just asking for trouble, he reasoned, and it would be wise to abandon this pet project before someone gets hurt.

Unfortunately, even if the retainer did have good intentions and was planning on tossing sanity into the mix, news travels fast, and the disaster dominoes continued falling. Another of the king's retainers heard about this little pet project, and decided to take Pandora for herself. This began a ridiculous sequence involving several of the king's retainers in turn discovering the last one had Pandora, taking Pandora for themself, whether by trickery or business, trying to teach her magic, some of them making the same basic mistake of locking her in somewhere with a bunch of books, and eventually being advised that what they are doing to her is a bad idea, followed by the next retainer in line acquiring Pandora before anything can be done to calm her sanity.

By age twelve, she was something of a sheltered emotional wreck. Having been passed around for the dozenth time and subjected to almost the exact same thing every time, Pandora's typical emotional state had degraded into somewhere between uneasy laughter, silent crying, and just being outright emotionally blank and dead inside. This might have been about to have had something done about it, but the disaster dominoes just kept on falling, and the incident with the Shepherds and their assault on King Gangrel took place.

Pandora took the chance to sneak out amidst the chaos and disarray that followed that incident. She's currently a runaway, the property of someone else on high, property that doesn't want to be property and is escaping as best she can to avoid ever going back to that life.

Nothing can possibly go wrong with this scenario. Nope.

Notes:
For when I actually make one of those little GBA-style stat-sheet things, even if just for fun, Pandora basically sacrifices all other stats for a stupidly good Magic rating, and her spells (Grima's Breath in particular) tend to lean very much toward the Devil Axe in stats and nature. She's very, very powerful, but sheltered, naive, and altogether Unskilled But Strong.

Levels and Weapon EXP Log:
Level 10, Dark Magic of Truth C - Starting levels
0 levels, Dark Magic of Truth +1/5 - 6th Ylissean Lottery (December 2013)

Approved by Darth