"It's just good practice."
Name:
Lyra Bay Mauritania
Nation of Birth:
Illiserev
Height:
5' 7"
Race:
Human(?)
Personality:
The word that best describes Lyra is eccentric. She maintains a cool, aloof demeanor, but is not a person to refrain from getting down and dirty. Inquisitive, studious, and overly logical, Lyra is the type of person that you might find nose deep in a book in the deepest of Dansila's libraries. Indeed, if shown any non-fiction title, she has probably already read it and memorized its contents. In fact, her memory is nearly impeccable to point that she can repeat facts and immediately cite their sources down to the page of a book. This was often produced much to the irritation and ire of others, but she gradually has come to realize that she should tone things down.
With her great intelligence and memory comes a great ego, and she makes no effort to hide such fact. Lyra walks a fine line between pride and arrogance, but somehow manages to err on the side of char more than annoy. This pride is also a factor in why she remains human. With her marriage to a vampire, she could achieve immortality at any time, but desires to find her own way before settling on the aid of another.
Despite all of her intelligence, she is actually quite incompetent socially, and often makes little more than a fleeting effort to rectify her shortcomings. For all of her textbook experience, almost none of it translates to real-world experience. This often lends her a disadvantage in political or business situations, where she may not understand lingo or jokes and can sometimes bring conversations to a dead, awkward halt.
Lyra has an obsession for knowledge and research. She fears the day she dies like any other normal human would, but for a completely different set of reasons. She believes that she could accomplish and learn so much more were she not human with a short lifespan of a mere hundred years. Her thirst for knowledge, and perhaps power is insatiable. As such, she holds great respect towards the inhabitants of Talze Utera, namely to the witches and the pure blooded vampires that inhabit it. She formally kept such thoughts to herself, but after the peace and recognition of Talze Utera as a sovereign state, Lyra has been more vocal in her thoughts and opinions to the point that she openly sympathizes and works with its inhabitants.
Biography:
Lyra was born to the Mauretania family, an influential noble house in the kingdom of Illiserev. The Mauretania family was well known for its massive overseas and domestic trading operations. The Mauritania company was a massive organization that imported thousands of gross tons of product each week. Within the family, Lyra was regarded as a black sheep for most of her life. While any other noble family would leap at the opportunity to have such an intelligent and capable daughter, the Mauritania family was nearly indifferent to her skills. They only cared if their sons and daughters were good businesspeople or politicians, and Lyra seldom showed any interest in supporting family business.
Despite their disdain, her family was not so narrow sighted to spite her own indifference towards the family operations. While she was cast aside and out of relevance in the noble world, they saw her potential and allowed her to indulge in her addiction for knowledge. They still saw her education as a form of investment, and paid for her books and schooling in Dansila, where she graduated early from one of the great schools at the top of her class.
In Dansila, Lyra's penchant for magic grew even stronger. The scholarly nature of Dansila and their schools were a boon to the young mage, and as she learned more and more about magic and the arts, the more inquisitive she became about utilizing different ways to use magic. After graduating from Dansila, she returned not to the capital of Illiserev, where her family maintained the headquarters of their company, but to a small coastal city on the Illiserev named Wayford.
It was in Wayford that the young mage was set on perhaps the most fateful voyage of her life. Chad Howard, a childhood friend and a merchant captain under the employ of her family, had recently returned from a voyage up the coast of Illiserev and was bound for the archipelagos of Illiserev. By chance, Lyra had received a letter from a noble on the archipelagos concerning magical artifacts of unusual nature, and the Mauritania girl found herself on the merchantman's vessel bound for the islands.
The voyage was an unusual one, with the discovery of a stowaway, and the subsequent interception of the vessel by a certain vampire by the name of Rilolia, in search of said stowaway and another certain individual… By the name of Vance. Lyra was persuaded to aid the vampire's cause in the pursuit of her own interests, taking them to the archipelagos and then to the mountains of Astopol by airship in their search for the imprisoned God Slayer.
It was on the mountain of Hanzen that Chad lead a party against Astopolian knights to rescue a man that he had never met, and fell, betrayed at the insane hands of the stowaway that had joined their party.
It was Lyra that rallied the remnants of their group and succeeded in aiding Rilolia in freeing Vance. But in her naïve attempts to aid a Talze Uteran, she had started the very machinations for all-out war between Talze Utera and the three nations.
Defeated and disillusioned, the mage returned to Wayford, where she shut herself in her house, second guessing her decisions as war raged on. The facts seemed clear: Chad was killed, war was started, and Vance, the man she had helped free, was destroying everything that stood in his way. Perhaps, she reasoned, she shouldn't have meddled with the affairs of Talze Utera.
But as suddenly as it had started, the war stopped at the death of Vance, and peace talks began with the aid of Rilolia. With the result of the peace talks having recognized Talze Utera as a nation and the political situation perhaps better than it ever was, Lyra began to believe that her actions were for the better, after all. The mage saw a field of opportunities open in Talze Utera. Using her experience and relation to Rilolia as leverage within her family, Lyra rose to relevance within her family as an advocate for business and education opportunities within Talze Utera. With the help of the young scholar, the Mauritania family expanded their operations into Talze Utera, opening a branch of their company in the recently founded Dedegear, with Lyra as the regional officer of the new station.
Not long after, the Mauritania family sought and secured a strategic marriage for Lyra with a noble vampire house.
She didn't object.
Her actions had produced more than she could ever have hoped for.
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Skills:
Memory. Lyra has a photographic memory. She remembers almost everything she sees.
Academia. Get on her level. She'd kill for knowledge.
Business. Her whole family is experienced in
whooping peasants' asses the matters of money, and Lyra is no exception.
Tactics. One of her closest acquaintances was the late Chad, a military officer and merchantman, and he imparted a good deal of practical and booksmart education.
Sword Skills/Arts/Magics/Other:
Lyra is more of a utilitarian magic user, and often uses magic for the mundane in addition to the usual matters. She aims to be as efficient as possible when executing spells, using the least amount of mana when possible and aiming for more practical spells. She has had a penchant for stringing together spells on the fly to create single large ones, preferring those to smaller spells in combat. This can occasionally lead to cumbersomely long spell sequences that can leave her defenseless. Almost always, however, she is still protected. Lyra specializes in defensive magic, and at the sound of combat, she'll already have some manner of passive defensive ward or spell already in action.
A few examples of her spells include:
Lance Battery. Similar to artillery, this spell takes an extended period of time to set up, but has magnificent range and accuracy of a sniper when fully executed. The only significant siege weapon in her arsenal, it is made up of several smaller spells. She can conjure and fire up to three of this projectiles in this manner, but the spell can be used purely and quickly as a "broadside" of conjured lances without guidance. This fire mode is very mana intensive and is not something that can be spammed for very long.
Aegis. As the name suggests, this is a defensive spell. It is a quick-action spell that materializes a small translucent hexagonal plate of about similar size to a knight's shield and has a mitigating power equal to a little over a knight's shield. It can be cast multiple times to create up to six plates that can be locked together to form a single large shield, and moved around in a radius around the caster. The rigid structure of the shield, however, means that if one shield is broken while in formation, all the others are.
Manaward. This is an area of effect defensive spell. It creates a full invisible dome around a large area around the caster, in which incoming magical effects, hostile or otherwise, are significantly reduced or even mitigated completely. Unlike Aegis, the dome will form patches and holes if hit in the same spot repeatedly, and does not catastrophically collapse.
Areaward. This is also an area of effect spell. This spell must be created within a defined area, such as a house or room. It allows the caster to keep track of all individuals within the area of effect. It also alerts the caster and all individuals inside it if it is approached or significant mana expenditure has been detected.
Equipment:
A tome bound with talentium. It is thick and leatherbound, and full of useful verses, incantations, and notes. The spine is bound with talentium, and excellent for its amplification effects and use as a makeshift bludgeoning weapon.
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Likes:
Knowledge, Talz Utera, Dansila, books, the unusual.
Dislikes:
Airships, flying, ignorant people.
Fears:
Death, amnesia, loss of control, another war.
Love Interests:
She's married to a goddamn vampire.
Theme Song(s):
Mutha fuckin theme songs
