Player Name: Knight Thaniel
Character Name: Elvira Summers
Gender: Female
Race: Elf
Age: 18
Appearance: Torso-length dark brown hair, hazel eyes framed by long dark lashes, a petite frame (thin and short) like a little doll. Wears brown pants and a long-sleeved shirt, a long vest of a dark tan color fastened to her waist with a belt, on which is sheathed a single knife, and a dark green hooded cloak on top of that. There is a quiver of arrows and a longbow on her back, held by a strap that, on the front side, goes from her left shoulder to her right hip. She has a tattoo of a small black crescent moon on her shoulder which is usually covered by her clothes.
Class: Tree Scout
Strengths: Elvira is small and easy to underestimate, and knows how to use this to her advantage, often pretending helplessness until an enemy is unable to avoid an attack. She is light on her feet, good at not only moving quickly, but also moving quietly and staying hidden, especially in natural surroundings. She is a bit stronger than her appearance would suggest--strong enough to restring her bow, which is almost as tall as she is, and drive a knife into an enemy. Elvira knows a little of the tongue of beasts, mainly canines. She has the ability to magically cause plants to grow or appear, in particular the kinds of herbs that are good for healing or poison, and knows how to use many of these to either effect, including how to poison her arrows and knife. She is good with tracking, especially of normal herbivorous prey, and has a kind of instinct for direction that allows her to know her way around even unfamiliar natural settings. She has a good aim with her bow--nothing supernatural, but effective, and her use of the knife tends to land its tip in her opponent's vital organs more frequently than not. Her style with the knife is focused on stabbing, such that she could use a broken-off half of one of her arrows instead in a pinch.
Weaknesses: Being underestimated is not always a good thing--such as when one seeks allies, or is trying to intimidate someone. Elvira sometimes lets insults about her size, and even comments not intended as insults, get to her, making her a bit harder to get along with. Her magic is somewhat limited: creating a plant from scratch is quite tiring, much less so than regrowing something one has a piece of already. Rapid growth is also draining, but less so, better suited for small plants and herbs, which is what she uses it for, rather than trying to do things like turn a bit of vine into a useable rope or use a single seed to quickly grow a fruit tree--such feats as these are far beyond Elvira. Her understanding of animal language is rudimentary for anything but dogs, and better used for listening than talking. In general, animals prove relatively single-minded and even more difficult to persuade than people. Neither the arrow nor the knife is particularly good at piercing heavy armor, and since she was not formally trained with either and all of her practice has been on unarmored creatures, Elvira is not particularly good at finding the holes in armor one must stab or shoot through in order to be effective. Herbal healing is not as fast or effective as magical healing would be, and her knowledge of herbs is not perfect, allowing her to make a mistake here and there. One must simply hope to be lucky enough that such mistakes don't cause serious harm. Elvira is also illiterate and, as a result, not at all well-read or cultured. She can seem a bit odd at times, and rather uncivilized to anyone with a particularly noble upbringing. Her sense of direction is completely thrown off in highly man-made areas such as cities or castles, and she isn't nearly as good at blending in with a crowd as she is with hiding in bushes.
More: Elvira tends to be much more tenacious when it comes to nature than when it comes to other people. She could wait days to track down, hide from, and eventually kill some animal, but she could hardly wait a few minutes for someone else to prepare to leave on a journey with her. She isn't particularly good at manipulating a person who she isn't currently trying to kill; taking advantage of underestimation is about the extent of her real talent for deceit.
Personality: She is a cheerful and optimistic young elf, not possessed of the wisdom that older elves might have, but with a kind of hopeful friendliness they wish they did. Other than insults (or perceived insults) about her size, Elvira can tend to be rather tolerant of others' opinions of her, to the point of seeming apathetic about them. She hardly has any sense of femininity to her, fitting in far more easily with a bunch of hunters trekking through a dank and dirty swamp after an alligator than with a bunch of ladies shopping for dresses. Her knowledge of cultural norms is limited but present, making her flashes of ignorance on the matter a surprise to those who know her as an otherwise relatively normal person.
Morals: Elvira has a very strong sense of right and wrong, but not a prideful, unmalleable one. She sees the actions of people as wrong rather than the people themselves, holding to a belief that everyone has good in them, but circumstances and personal mistakes sometimes prevent it from shining through. She doesn't expect other people, even the people she sees as good people or herself, to be perfect, and is quickly willing to admit when she has made a mistake.
History: Elvira was born to a well-to-do family in a city somewhere, one of many children. Her elder siblings were spoiled rotten, and even as a very young child she came to see the way they behaved as wrong, and resolved not to be that way. By the time she was thirteen or so, she had come to perceive her parents as having much the same spoiled flaws as their other children, and the rest of her family regarded her as strange for being unwilling to partake in their luxury, at least to the degree that they did. So one day she ran away, out of her home, out of the city and well out of civilization. This might not have been the wisest thing to do: Only a few days from leaving home she ran into a pack of wolves in the middle of a forest.
That could well have been the end of her story, had the wolves not been called off. The one who did the calling off was an elderly human woman, a powerful nature mage and something of a hermit. At first she was going to bring Elvira back home, but the girl managed to persuade her to let her stay and learn from her for a while. She taught Elvira the language of beasts, and the magic she now knows; Elvira was never quite as good as the old nature mage at either of them, but certainly tried her hardest to learn. What the young elf picked up on most readily was the tracking and hunting. These were not taught by the mage herself, but rather by the pack of wolves that Elvira had met at the beginning, who the mage had made herself an authority over. Not having fangs and claws to kill the prey with, Elvira had to teach herself the use of the bow and knife.
After a few years of this, at the age of sixteen, the old nature mage informed Elvira that anything she hadn't learned by now from the mage or the wolves would be far better taught by experience. She sent the elf off with the bow, arrows and knife, and one final gift: The tattoo on her shoulder, magically inked, which she assured the girl would mark her as a defender of nature and make allies of certain groups of people. She has yet to meet whoever the mage meant, and rarely shows the mark to anyone, preferring to keep it as a memento of the mentor who taught her so much.
