Post by Alina Rybalka on Feb 22, 2020 14:17:22 GMT -5
Alina Tarasivna Rybalka
"Violence breeds violence... but in the end it has to be this way."
 | Age 21 Gender Female Faction Kerch Kozaks (Faction Lead) Tier Huntress Face Claim Lappland from Arknights OOC Name Wolfe |
Character Traits
Date of Birth: Febuary 14th, 5AV
Species: Faunus
Romantic Orientation: Demisexual
Aura Color: White
Height: 162cm
Weight: 60kg
Color Naming Rule: Alina has the association with bright light, as in with torches. Rybalka is a Ukrainian surname derived from the occupation of a fisherman, evoking blue.
Species: Faunus
Romantic Orientation: Demisexual
Aura Color: White
Height: 162cm
Weight: 60kg
Color Naming Rule: Alina has the association with bright light, as in with torches. Rybalka is a Ukrainian surname derived from the occupation of a fisherman, evoking blue.
Combat & Inventory
Flash (Signature Skill)
Rank of Semblance: A
Semblance Type: Manipulator (Manipulation/Creation)
Primary Category: Combatants (+9 base, +2 for specialization for +11 total.)
Secondary Category: Combatants (+2 to all rolls due to specialization semblance at A rank.)
One Sentence Summary of Semblance: Alina has the manipulator semblance of Flash that allows her to create and manipulate fire.
Description of Semblance: Flash enables Knight to create and shape the element of fire in a range roughly equating to the length of a giant sequoia tree (75-80 meters). The fire created is much hotter than any natural flame and peaks at over 5000 degrees Celsius, and can burn through armored vehicles and other forms of reinforced steel in less than a second, and is able to melt even thick carbon steel like is present in bunkers and other military fortifications in mere moments. The fire, when created, is a dazzling white, but loses heat very quickly once it is not being actively manipulated. It starts off as white fire that burns hot enough to melt thick carbon steel and remains so for as long as it is actively being kept that hot by Alina's semblance. Flash at anywhere close to full power burns orders of magnitude too hot on to ignite anything else, as anything combustible less durable than carbon steel would just turn to ash or completely melt on contact. The temperature of the semblance can be lowered enough to cause fires, but that would also lessen the damage caused considerably when used in combat and any heat past what is achievable naturally for fires would dissipate after her semblance is no longer being used.
Drawbacks of Semblance: Flash is a manipulation semblance, so drains aura on use proportionate to the amount of fire created or manipulated. The user only gets the full range of Flash if they are able to snap the fingers of either hand, and if prevented from doing so the range drops to the range of a small room (5-7 meters).
Szabla/Modified Boots
Rank of Weapon(s): D
Category: Combatants (+2)
Description of Weapons(s): Alina carries a Great War era sabre modeled after the 1934 Pattern Szabla with a blade length of 82.5 cm, a hilt length of 10.5 cm, a weight of 0.91 kilos and a metal sheath with oiled fur lining on the inside weighing 1.2 kilos. It is a true old model weapon with no dust enhancements or transformation capabilities, with the only even slightly odd thing about it being that unlike most other blades it rests almost completely horizontally when sheathed and can additionally be laid down almost completely flat for easy attachment to gear.
As a secondary weapon she wears modified combat boots with metal inserts in the front, heel, and sole that allow it much greater striking power than it would otherwise have at the cost of additional weight.
Non-Combat Abilities
Name of Non-Combat Ability: Pickpocketing
Rank of Non-Combat Ability: E (+1)
Category: Social
Description of Non-Combat Ability: Knight, for better or for worse, has picked up light fingers over the years and has a lot of practice of removing items from other people without them noticing. A light touch means that the theft of ID cards, police badges, and scrolls is pretty routine. So is the practice of reverse pickpocketing, where incriminating items are given to a subject without their knowledge so they can be framed for something and cause a ruckus that can act as a distraction.
Name of Non-Combat Ability: Stealth
Rank of Non-Combat Ability: E (+1)
Category: Mobility
Description of Non-Combat Ability: Whether it's scouting and not wanting to be seen or an escape through the crowds of an urban city center, Knight is adept at breaking lines of sight and blending in with her surroundings. Getting away cleanly is the hardest part of any assignment, and the faunus much prefers an escape over fighting her way out any situation.
Combat Abilities
Name of Combat Ability: Napalm (Dust Enhancement)
Rank of Combat Ability: B (+6)
Category: Combatants
Description of Combat Ability: Knight has several special sets of plant dust infused gloves that allow her to produce a sticky and highly heat resistant jelly that can either be excreted from the glove itself to rub on something or fired off alongside her semblance in a ranged attack. This jelly allows the fire to stick on a target for far longer than it otherwise would. Mechanically, this ability when combined with a semblance attack causes the target to take B rank damage over the course of two posts so long as the semblance attack it is attached to hits. This ability can only be applied to one target or area per post, but can be used any number of times.
Name of Combat Ability: Endless Aura (Durability)
Rank of Combat Ability: B (+6)
Category: Hazard
Description of Combat Ability: Alina's aura reserves are far beyond what anyone would consider normal. If the average huntsman trainee had an average battery of 100 with, say, 50% efficiency then this faunus has an a battery of 1000 with 20% efficiency. It's markedly better than average in totality, but the enhanced effect is due to having much more aura to work with to compensate for a horrifically bad control over that aura in a defensive sense. The Hetman's durability with her aura up rivals that of a bleeding edge Atlesian armored tank, and just like that sort of tank it took a much higher class of weapons to even make a dent in that armor.
Name of Combat Ability: Survival Instinct (Agility)
Rank of Combat Ability: B (+6)
Category: Hazard
Description of Combat Ability: Her previous life as a bounty hunter and a soldier were nothing compared to the level of targeted assault she started encountering from all angles as the leader of the upstart Kozaks. Professional Huntsmen with semblances counter to hers have been sent with thousands of lien worth of dust and backup to ambush her once, and there was no guarantee it wouldn't happen next time with more people. A backstab would come at some point given the fact the upstarts were forced into tenuous and temporary alliances frequently even with other factions that they fundamentally despised, and Alina had to be ready for that. Nobody was going to underestimate her anymore, and she had lost the anonymity she had upon joining the country. She needed to survive the initial onslaught of everything she had, and the former soldier had successfully enhanced her reaction time and ability to move out of the way of potentially lethal attacks enough to be effectively unable to be hit at all except by the most skilled enemy combatants. Years of intense fights with warlords, huntsmen, Grimm, and even recently a Grimmified huntsman allows her to read her opponents like a book and respond appropriately to nearly any physical attack, because the muscle twitches give anyone away.
Name of Combat Ability: Heat Exhaustion (Semblance Enhancement Exhaustion)
Rank of Combat Ability: D (+2)
Category: Social
Description of Combat Ability: The combination of the supernatural heat of Flash’s fires and the reduced amount of oxygen that people can breathe at extreme altitudes creates the perfect conditions for another application of fire. In the midst of an attack, the fire sucks all of the oxygen out of an area and leaves extremely little left for the victim to actually breathe. With repeated usage, this can lead to suffocation of the target. In addition to that, the extreme heat of the attack means that aura is not able to fully protect the body from getting burned and the body from having its temperature raised at the same time, so the heat tends to cause the victim to sweat and their body temperature to rise. Mechanically, Heat Exhaustion causes one full post of stamina to be removed from a target hit with Flash if the target’s stamina is equal to or less than the rank of Heat Exhaustion. If the enemy’s stamina is higher than the rank of this ability, then it has no effect.
Name of Combat Ability: Boundless Energy (Stamina)
Rank of Combat Ability: D (+2)
Category: Hazard
Description of Combat Ability: Knight is in very good shape, and is able to run 15 kilometers without stopping and keeping a steady pace throughout. She's very slow, so the top speed isn't very fast... but she can maintain her version of a sprint for a very long time regardless!
Name of Combat Ability: Memories of Fort Castle (Martial Arts)
Rank of Combat Ability: C (+4)
Category: Combatants
Description of Combat Ability: Knight is comfortably at the level of the average Huntress when it comes to melee combat. While she specializes in bladed weapons, she is also adept at hand to hand and can use most martial weapons with at least some effectiveness. Since it is impossible to use Flash and not immediately ruin any pretense of stealth or subtlety, it pays to have alternative means to deal with situations as they arise. Her time in Mistral has allowed her to get much better at melee combat, making it extremely rare for her to be required to use her semblance.
Rank of Semblance: A
Semblance Type: Manipulator (Manipulation/Creation)
Primary Category: Combatants (+9 base, +2 for specialization for +11 total.)
Secondary Category: Combatants (+2 to all rolls due to specialization semblance at A rank.)
One Sentence Summary of Semblance: Alina has the manipulator semblance of Flash that allows her to create and manipulate fire.
Description of Semblance: Flash enables Knight to create and shape the element of fire in a range roughly equating to the length of a giant sequoia tree (75-80 meters). The fire created is much hotter than any natural flame and peaks at over 5000 degrees Celsius, and can burn through armored vehicles and other forms of reinforced steel in less than a second, and is able to melt even thick carbon steel like is present in bunkers and other military fortifications in mere moments. The fire, when created, is a dazzling white, but loses heat very quickly once it is not being actively manipulated. It starts off as white fire that burns hot enough to melt thick carbon steel and remains so for as long as it is actively being kept that hot by Alina's semblance. Flash at anywhere close to full power burns orders of magnitude too hot on to ignite anything else, as anything combustible less durable than carbon steel would just turn to ash or completely melt on contact. The temperature of the semblance can be lowered enough to cause fires, but that would also lessen the damage caused considerably when used in combat and any heat past what is achievable naturally for fires would dissipate after her semblance is no longer being used.
Drawbacks of Semblance: Flash is a manipulation semblance, so drains aura on use proportionate to the amount of fire created or manipulated. The user only gets the full range of Flash if they are able to snap the fingers of either hand, and if prevented from doing so the range drops to the range of a small room (5-7 meters).
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Szabla/Modified Boots
Rank of Weapon(s): D
Category: Combatants (+2)
Description of Weapons(s): Alina carries a Great War era sabre modeled after the 1934 Pattern Szabla with a blade length of 82.5 cm, a hilt length of 10.5 cm, a weight of 0.91 kilos and a metal sheath with oiled fur lining on the inside weighing 1.2 kilos. It is a true old model weapon with no dust enhancements or transformation capabilities, with the only even slightly odd thing about it being that unlike most other blades it rests almost completely horizontally when sheathed and can additionally be laid down almost completely flat for easy attachment to gear.
As a secondary weapon she wears modified combat boots with metal inserts in the front, heel, and sole that allow it much greater striking power than it would otherwise have at the cost of additional weight.
--------------------------------------------------------
Non-Combat Abilities
Name of Non-Combat Ability: Pickpocketing
Rank of Non-Combat Ability: E (+1)
Category: Social
Description of Non-Combat Ability: Knight, for better or for worse, has picked up light fingers over the years and has a lot of practice of removing items from other people without them noticing. A light touch means that the theft of ID cards, police badges, and scrolls is pretty routine. So is the practice of reverse pickpocketing, where incriminating items are given to a subject without their knowledge so they can be framed for something and cause a ruckus that can act as a distraction.
Name of Non-Combat Ability: Stealth
Rank of Non-Combat Ability: E (+1)
Category: Mobility
Description of Non-Combat Ability: Whether it's scouting and not wanting to be seen or an escape through the crowds of an urban city center, Knight is adept at breaking lines of sight and blending in with her surroundings. Getting away cleanly is the hardest part of any assignment, and the faunus much prefers an escape over fighting her way out any situation.
--------------------------------------------------------
Combat Abilities
Name of Combat Ability: Napalm (Dust Enhancement)
Rank of Combat Ability: B (+6)
Category: Combatants
Description of Combat Ability: Knight has several special sets of plant dust infused gloves that allow her to produce a sticky and highly heat resistant jelly that can either be excreted from the glove itself to rub on something or fired off alongside her semblance in a ranged attack. This jelly allows the fire to stick on a target for far longer than it otherwise would. Mechanically, this ability when combined with a semblance attack causes the target to take B rank damage over the course of two posts so long as the semblance attack it is attached to hits. This ability can only be applied to one target or area per post, but can be used any number of times.
Name of Combat Ability: Endless Aura (Durability)
Rank of Combat Ability: B (+6)
Category: Hazard
Description of Combat Ability: Alina's aura reserves are far beyond what anyone would consider normal. If the average huntsman trainee had an average battery of 100 with, say, 50% efficiency then this faunus has an a battery of 1000 with 20% efficiency. It's markedly better than average in totality, but the enhanced effect is due to having much more aura to work with to compensate for a horrifically bad control over that aura in a defensive sense. The Hetman's durability with her aura up rivals that of a bleeding edge Atlesian armored tank, and just like that sort of tank it took a much higher class of weapons to even make a dent in that armor.
Name of Combat Ability: Survival Instinct (Agility)
Rank of Combat Ability: B (+6)
Category: Hazard
Description of Combat Ability: Her previous life as a bounty hunter and a soldier were nothing compared to the level of targeted assault she started encountering from all angles as the leader of the upstart Kozaks. Professional Huntsmen with semblances counter to hers have been sent with thousands of lien worth of dust and backup to ambush her once, and there was no guarantee it wouldn't happen next time with more people. A backstab would come at some point given the fact the upstarts were forced into tenuous and temporary alliances frequently even with other factions that they fundamentally despised, and Alina had to be ready for that. Nobody was going to underestimate her anymore, and she had lost the anonymity she had upon joining the country. She needed to survive the initial onslaught of everything she had, and the former soldier had successfully enhanced her reaction time and ability to move out of the way of potentially lethal attacks enough to be effectively unable to be hit at all except by the most skilled enemy combatants. Years of intense fights with warlords, huntsmen, Grimm, and even recently a Grimmified huntsman allows her to read her opponents like a book and respond appropriately to nearly any physical attack, because the muscle twitches give anyone away.
Name of Combat Ability: Heat Exhaustion (Semblance Enhancement Exhaustion)
Rank of Combat Ability: D (+2)
Category: Social
Description of Combat Ability: The combination of the supernatural heat of Flash’s fires and the reduced amount of oxygen that people can breathe at extreme altitudes creates the perfect conditions for another application of fire. In the midst of an attack, the fire sucks all of the oxygen out of an area and leaves extremely little left for the victim to actually breathe. With repeated usage, this can lead to suffocation of the target. In addition to that, the extreme heat of the attack means that aura is not able to fully protect the body from getting burned and the body from having its temperature raised at the same time, so the heat tends to cause the victim to sweat and their body temperature to rise. Mechanically, Heat Exhaustion causes one full post of stamina to be removed from a target hit with Flash if the target’s stamina is equal to or less than the rank of Heat Exhaustion. If the enemy’s stamina is higher than the rank of this ability, then it has no effect.
Name of Combat Ability: Boundless Energy (Stamina)
Rank of Combat Ability: D (+2)
Category: Hazard
Description of Combat Ability: Knight is in very good shape, and is able to run 15 kilometers without stopping and keeping a steady pace throughout. She's very slow, so the top speed isn't very fast... but she can maintain her version of a sprint for a very long time regardless!
Name of Combat Ability: Memories of Fort Castle (Martial Arts)
Rank of Combat Ability: C (+4)
Category: Combatants
Description of Combat Ability: Knight is comfortably at the level of the average Huntress when it comes to melee combat. While she specializes in bladed weapons, she is also adept at hand to hand and can use most martial weapons with at least some effectiveness. Since it is impossible to use Flash and not immediately ruin any pretense of stealth or subtlety, it pays to have alternative means to deal with situations as they arise. Her time in Mistral has allowed her to get much better at melee combat, making it extremely rare for her to be required to use her semblance.
Biography
Vitals
Primary Drive: Knight’s primary goal is to create a better Mistral. She wants to go back to the roots of the country, where it was more autonomous and self-sufficient regions rather than a monarchy or the Council having absolute power. She wants to create a societal structure that doesn’t rely on Huntsmen and in fact does not need the model of hoping someone with superpowers comes in and decides to save your village and home because they felt like it that day.
People shouldn’t have to rely on chance or random kindness to save their skin. They should be given the tools and resources to forge their own path forward, independent of a system that forces them to be beholden to a group of heavily armed and powerful outsiders with no code of conduct or reason to help them. It is only through true autonomy, the ability to be truly self-sufficient, can a community truly be called ‘free’.
Laws are written by those in power and reflect their interests, discouraging behavior they don’t want to see with the threat of overwhelming force. It’s extortion, because the threat of violence is the thing that makes the entire system hold together. People should be free to take the threat or leave it but are ultimately responsible for the effects of that overwhelming force when it comes. Knight herself is not worried about that particular threat and does not account for laws at all in her decision-making process.
Knight firmly believes that a systematic change in political structure must occur, and that systematic change will be fought by the current regime. Bloodshed is expected and the price that must be paid for freedom and justifies that bloodshed under the context of self-defense for the community.
Fears: Knight’s biggest fear is losing entirely the person she used to be. As the years have gone on she has lost friends, family, and comrades in almost equal measure. People come and go from her life all the time and that’s their right, but death is final. With each one, memories that used to be shared become hers alone and she becomes a bit colder and more bitter of her lot in life.
Left to her own devices, she has no idea what she’d become and that legitimately scares her. The thought of someone like Knight truly unfettered by morality or emotional attachment would be most people’s worst nightmare. Without anyone there to hold her back from slipping into full pragmatism, she knows how precarious her mental state would be.
More mundane fears include losing access to funding, accidentally eating/drinking something really spicy and making a scene in public, and a strong dislike of the creepy crawly sort of bugs touching her.
Style of Self-Expression: Knight is someone who for better or for worse is not afraid to speak up. She’s someone who’s used to being in a position of authority and carries herself like it, being unafraid to give orders and commands to even those she has never met before when any sort of dangerous situation is going on. She firmly believes in her own abilities in any combat, and will always go with her own gut instinct over anyone else’s and aggressively fight for her course of action to be taken even in mixed group engagements. Failing that, she goes and does what needs to be done herself. Instinctive and near instantaneous decisions with no room for second-guessing or turning back are a hallmark of hers when the stakes are high, because she’s a firm believer that doing the wrong thing with full conviction is better than half-assedly doing the right thing when lives are on the line.
In normal life, she’s much more reserved and much less aggressive. When the stakes are not high, she has no reason to be invested in what is going on around her. Knight is a firm believer that everyone has the right to choose their own path in life, and she is more than willing to let that play out even if that freedom leads to self-destruction. “Not my people, not my problem.” Is a common phrase, and she’s usually seen as flippant or apathetic in her normal state. Flakey and unreliable in both social gatherings and getting around to chores, she’s basically the model of a young person who never learned many critical life skills such as time management who doesn’t have her shit together except when absolutely forced.
Words are nice, but actions speak louder. If she had a lien for every time some hammed up weirdo thinking he was the next great savior of Remnant rolled up all proud of their moral integrity rolled up and became a two bit gangster the next week she’d be a millionaire. Every deranged psychopath is the hero of their own story, and everyone does an insane amount of mental gymnastics to make their amoral and selfish scheme seem like the objective right thing to do.
Knight lived her early life as a peasant, and her teenage years in the Mistral National Guard. She wasn’t taught the normal and correct way to present herself socially, and defaults to either overly casual or overly formal greetings depending on the circumstance due to military address being her preferred and most comfortable. Rigid and structured days was how she was used to living life, but once free of that routine she is much more aimless and flippant than the average person due to not knowing how to conduct herself or live life without that structure in place planning her day for her.
Most Important Thing: The most important thing to Knight is the historical memory of the Mistral National Guard and those who risked their lives in order to fight in it. Many of the people she’d declare to be the closest to her out of everyone she met in her life lived and died in the Faunus Rights Revolution, and tarnishing the Mistral National Guard’s memory is the same as spitting on their graves. Honoring her old friends, family, and comrades and carrying out the spirit of their sacrifice is the main thing that keeps her laser focused on her goals. There were many people who died trying to pave the way for true freedom for the faunus, and their efforts did not lead to the outcome that everyone hoped for.
If nobody picks up that mantle, then their sacrifices were for nothing. If that utopia is not worked towards, then the dreams of those heroes turned to ash with their deaths. Big dreams can only be achieved with the work of a multitude of people who share that dream, usually working long after the first person with that vision died to honor their memory by creating the world they wished to see one day. While she cannot bring her loved ones back, Knight can do her best to lay the groundwork for the world that they had prayed all their lives to see for their children to live in. Even if that utopia is not possible in her lifetime, the act of working towards it means it could be possible in the next.
That act of building upon the world that your predecessors have left you is the essence of a just and good life and really the essence of making a difference in the life you are given due to the fact that it is impossible to create something significant and long lasting truly alone. Spitting upon those same predecessors and their dreams is the highest offense that one could cause to Knight. Regardless of time and place, there would be an immediate and aggressive reaction to that act and it would be something that she would never forgive or forget.
Personality/History Freeform
The defenders of humanity.
What an apt name, with the institution of Huntsmen being used and perpetuated to defend humanity… and only humanity. The Faunus War had many so called heroes on both sides, but it was the huntsman that truly caused the most damage. With their auras strong enough to shrug off sword slashes, bullets, and semblance blasts of all types like a stiff breeze they whirled through the battlefield and slaughtered dozens or sometimes even hundreds with practiced ease. White hot lightning, bursts of light that solidified into spears, near-unstoppable tanks of human beings ripping people limb from limb were all sights that any veteran of that conflict would have had seared into their brains for the rest of their lives.
The Faunus War started when Knight was twelve, and it was then that she and her family were driven violently out of the capital by the constant threats of violence. They moved to the slums on the far outskirts of the city where the police stopped pursuing them and tried to take up farming, but it wasn’t long before ‘credible threats’ from the area caused the Council to send huntsman to raze the shantytown and drive them further away from the capital. By the time she was almost twelve, after several long months making exceptionally slow progress overland and nearly starving, they had settled down in Kuchinashi to the South and she and her family worked in a purely support capacity for the War – making blankets and winter clothes for the soldiers to wear. The Council sent more huntsmen by the time she was almost thirteen, and they installed ‘law and order’ by bringing forward those caught in the factories sending supplies to the enemy.
It was clear that they were going to be jailed or executed, so Knight’s family ran. They were tracked by one of the human huntsman who had a rifle that they used to blast the auraless forms of her parents – but Knight kept running. She managed to dodge a bullet or two and disappear into the trees and kept running in terror for nearly two entire days. She never saw her parents again and could never find any records of what happened to them, but people are seldom shot in the back just to be dragged back for a free and fair judicial process.
She, by chance alone, stumbled upon a Faunus patrol and they took her in. She worked in a support capacity making food and making clothes for the next six months, and then after that from the ages of thirteen to fifteen worked as a courier, delivering messages between officers with no easy means of communication. By the time she was roughly fifteen, she was trained enough to actually be serviceable in a fight and transferred from the 46th Reconnaissance Company to the Eighth Infantry Regiment shortly before the Battle of Fort Castle in the Mistral National Guard.
It was in this capacity that she fought in the Battle of Fort Castle. The humans came in the night, and it was during this battle where Knight's semblance finally activated for the first time due to the same sword slash that gave her the scar on her left eye. Escape routes into the wilderness were easy to eliminate, even by accident, with uncontrollable fire generation mostly aimed at the enemy. When the morning came there were dozens of charred bodies littering the surrounding area of underbrush and trees, burnt and twisted beyond all recognition. It was not something she was proud of in hindsight, but the image of a young Knight covered head to toe in blood and cackling in unhinged glee at the screams of the damned was one of the many images of the war that exemplified what ordinary people might be capable of when pushed hard enough. One year later, the war ended when Knight was 16 with the Battle of Fort Castle being the only major battle she was involved in.
She spent the next few years after the War with the White Fang in Menagerie, getting the schooling she never got before and making an earnest attempt to re-integrate back into society. The young woman was smart and took to her studies extremely well, but always found herself more reckless and violent than her peers in the White Fang. Whereas they would passively sit back while abused, Knight was always spoiling for a fight and was exiled when she broke the ribs, nose, and jaw of an official representative from Atlas during a fight where the details were fuzzy. There was a shouting match and due to the fact there were no witnesses there is no way to tell for sure who threw the first punch, but Knight came out with a bloody nose and the Atlas representative came out with a rush trip to the emergency room. Too much heat on Menagerie by the four kingdoms would doom the experiment, so exile was the best option to make sure tensions didn’t flare.
Knight was 19 when she left Menagerie and has been a mercenary ever since to pay the bills. She spent over a year in Vacuo working as a bounty hunter with a fearsome reputation as someone who was the best of the non-huntsmen options for getting a job done. Her trademark was turning everything except for the head and the insignia of the mark to ash in a show of consistent and lavish brutality that got the attention of certain individuals. An old acquaintance from the War was looking for a fixer who wasn’t scared of a little skullduggery and was willing to pay equal to what she was making in Vacuo with hazard pay bonuses if she was willing to relocate to her childhood home of Mistral City.
She could also run missions on the side, so long as she refrained from making herself famous in the process. Knight waffled, as business in Vacuo was booming and the pay was rising astronomically as her reputation grew… but Nyx had a compelling vision for the future that someone with so many grievances against the Council couldn’t exactly ignore… and in the discussion about pay the hours were reduced to ten a week before overtime kicked in with a downside guarantee of the same salary she made working her ass off working bounties all year in Vacuo. The fact that she had described a few of the heavy hitters she would be able to sharpen her skills fighting against also helped, but it was mostly the money. Hard to argue with the potential of lifelong stability for only a year or two of work, even if everything went to shit along the way. The low hours also made sure there was plenty of time to train to get stronger, as well, as well as do another part-time job to supplement income once she was known enough in Mistral to command a decent salary from someone else on the side as well.
The organization, Asche, fell apart within a year... as could be expected, it was always a bit too good to be true. The leader stopped calling, and Knight found herself a new project and goal as a result of her role in the invasion of Kerch. She and Red had saved as many villagers as they could, and led them back to the capital themselves. Haven took the credit, of course, because they killed the leader of the invasion... but Knight found herself with a long line of hangers-on all of a sudden and blew her accessible savings and resources to build them a place in the Ground District where they could at least have basic needs met and gave herself and this new group a goal that would become the rallying cry for the near future: Regroup, Rearm, and Retake Kerch from the Grimm because nobody else will.
Primary Drive: Knight’s primary goal is to create a better Mistral. She wants to go back to the roots of the country, where it was more autonomous and self-sufficient regions rather than a monarchy or the Council having absolute power. She wants to create a societal structure that doesn’t rely on Huntsmen and in fact does not need the model of hoping someone with superpowers comes in and decides to save your village and home because they felt like it that day.
People shouldn’t have to rely on chance or random kindness to save their skin. They should be given the tools and resources to forge their own path forward, independent of a system that forces them to be beholden to a group of heavily armed and powerful outsiders with no code of conduct or reason to help them. It is only through true autonomy, the ability to be truly self-sufficient, can a community truly be called ‘free’.
Laws are written by those in power and reflect their interests, discouraging behavior they don’t want to see with the threat of overwhelming force. It’s extortion, because the threat of violence is the thing that makes the entire system hold together. People should be free to take the threat or leave it but are ultimately responsible for the effects of that overwhelming force when it comes. Knight herself is not worried about that particular threat and does not account for laws at all in her decision-making process.
Knight firmly believes that a systematic change in political structure must occur, and that systematic change will be fought by the current regime. Bloodshed is expected and the price that must be paid for freedom and justifies that bloodshed under the context of self-defense for the community.
Fears: Knight’s biggest fear is losing entirely the person she used to be. As the years have gone on she has lost friends, family, and comrades in almost equal measure. People come and go from her life all the time and that’s their right, but death is final. With each one, memories that used to be shared become hers alone and she becomes a bit colder and more bitter of her lot in life.
Left to her own devices, she has no idea what she’d become and that legitimately scares her. The thought of someone like Knight truly unfettered by morality or emotional attachment would be most people’s worst nightmare. Without anyone there to hold her back from slipping into full pragmatism, she knows how precarious her mental state would be.
More mundane fears include losing access to funding, accidentally eating/drinking something really spicy and making a scene in public, and a strong dislike of the creepy crawly sort of bugs touching her.
Style of Self-Expression: Knight is someone who for better or for worse is not afraid to speak up. She’s someone who’s used to being in a position of authority and carries herself like it, being unafraid to give orders and commands to even those she has never met before when any sort of dangerous situation is going on. She firmly believes in her own abilities in any combat, and will always go with her own gut instinct over anyone else’s and aggressively fight for her course of action to be taken even in mixed group engagements. Failing that, she goes and does what needs to be done herself. Instinctive and near instantaneous decisions with no room for second-guessing or turning back are a hallmark of hers when the stakes are high, because she’s a firm believer that doing the wrong thing with full conviction is better than half-assedly doing the right thing when lives are on the line.
In normal life, she’s much more reserved and much less aggressive. When the stakes are not high, she has no reason to be invested in what is going on around her. Knight is a firm believer that everyone has the right to choose their own path in life, and she is more than willing to let that play out even if that freedom leads to self-destruction. “Not my people, not my problem.” Is a common phrase, and she’s usually seen as flippant or apathetic in her normal state. Flakey and unreliable in both social gatherings and getting around to chores, she’s basically the model of a young person who never learned many critical life skills such as time management who doesn’t have her shit together except when absolutely forced.
Words are nice, but actions speak louder. If she had a lien for every time some hammed up weirdo thinking he was the next great savior of Remnant rolled up all proud of their moral integrity rolled up and became a two bit gangster the next week she’d be a millionaire. Every deranged psychopath is the hero of their own story, and everyone does an insane amount of mental gymnastics to make their amoral and selfish scheme seem like the objective right thing to do.
Knight lived her early life as a peasant, and her teenage years in the Mistral National Guard. She wasn’t taught the normal and correct way to present herself socially, and defaults to either overly casual or overly formal greetings depending on the circumstance due to military address being her preferred and most comfortable. Rigid and structured days was how she was used to living life, but once free of that routine she is much more aimless and flippant than the average person due to not knowing how to conduct herself or live life without that structure in place planning her day for her.
Most Important Thing: The most important thing to Knight is the historical memory of the Mistral National Guard and those who risked their lives in order to fight in it. Many of the people she’d declare to be the closest to her out of everyone she met in her life lived and died in the Faunus Rights Revolution, and tarnishing the Mistral National Guard’s memory is the same as spitting on their graves. Honoring her old friends, family, and comrades and carrying out the spirit of their sacrifice is the main thing that keeps her laser focused on her goals. There were many people who died trying to pave the way for true freedom for the faunus, and their efforts did not lead to the outcome that everyone hoped for.
If nobody picks up that mantle, then their sacrifices were for nothing. If that utopia is not worked towards, then the dreams of those heroes turned to ash with their deaths. Big dreams can only be achieved with the work of a multitude of people who share that dream, usually working long after the first person with that vision died to honor their memory by creating the world they wished to see one day. While she cannot bring her loved ones back, Knight can do her best to lay the groundwork for the world that they had prayed all their lives to see for their children to live in. Even if that utopia is not possible in her lifetime, the act of working towards it means it could be possible in the next.
That act of building upon the world that your predecessors have left you is the essence of a just and good life and really the essence of making a difference in the life you are given due to the fact that it is impossible to create something significant and long lasting truly alone. Spitting upon those same predecessors and their dreams is the highest offense that one could cause to Knight. Regardless of time and place, there would be an immediate and aggressive reaction to that act and it would be something that she would never forgive or forget.
Personality/History Freeform
The defenders of humanity.
What an apt name, with the institution of Huntsmen being used and perpetuated to defend humanity… and only humanity. The Faunus War had many so called heroes on both sides, but it was the huntsman that truly caused the most damage. With their auras strong enough to shrug off sword slashes, bullets, and semblance blasts of all types like a stiff breeze they whirled through the battlefield and slaughtered dozens or sometimes even hundreds with practiced ease. White hot lightning, bursts of light that solidified into spears, near-unstoppable tanks of human beings ripping people limb from limb were all sights that any veteran of that conflict would have had seared into their brains for the rest of their lives.
The Faunus War started when Knight was twelve, and it was then that she and her family were driven violently out of the capital by the constant threats of violence. They moved to the slums on the far outskirts of the city where the police stopped pursuing them and tried to take up farming, but it wasn’t long before ‘credible threats’ from the area caused the Council to send huntsman to raze the shantytown and drive them further away from the capital. By the time she was almost twelve, after several long months making exceptionally slow progress overland and nearly starving, they had settled down in Kuchinashi to the South and she and her family worked in a purely support capacity for the War – making blankets and winter clothes for the soldiers to wear. The Council sent more huntsmen by the time she was almost thirteen, and they installed ‘law and order’ by bringing forward those caught in the factories sending supplies to the enemy.
It was clear that they were going to be jailed or executed, so Knight’s family ran. They were tracked by one of the human huntsman who had a rifle that they used to blast the auraless forms of her parents – but Knight kept running. She managed to dodge a bullet or two and disappear into the trees and kept running in terror for nearly two entire days. She never saw her parents again and could never find any records of what happened to them, but people are seldom shot in the back just to be dragged back for a free and fair judicial process.
She, by chance alone, stumbled upon a Faunus patrol and they took her in. She worked in a support capacity making food and making clothes for the next six months, and then after that from the ages of thirteen to fifteen worked as a courier, delivering messages between officers with no easy means of communication. By the time she was roughly fifteen, she was trained enough to actually be serviceable in a fight and transferred from the 46th Reconnaissance Company to the Eighth Infantry Regiment shortly before the Battle of Fort Castle in the Mistral National Guard.
It was in this capacity that she fought in the Battle of Fort Castle. The humans came in the night, and it was during this battle where Knight's semblance finally activated for the first time due to the same sword slash that gave her the scar on her left eye. Escape routes into the wilderness were easy to eliminate, even by accident, with uncontrollable fire generation mostly aimed at the enemy. When the morning came there were dozens of charred bodies littering the surrounding area of underbrush and trees, burnt and twisted beyond all recognition. It was not something she was proud of in hindsight, but the image of a young Knight covered head to toe in blood and cackling in unhinged glee at the screams of the damned was one of the many images of the war that exemplified what ordinary people might be capable of when pushed hard enough. One year later, the war ended when Knight was 16 with the Battle of Fort Castle being the only major battle she was involved in.
She spent the next few years after the War with the White Fang in Menagerie, getting the schooling she never got before and making an earnest attempt to re-integrate back into society. The young woman was smart and took to her studies extremely well, but always found herself more reckless and violent than her peers in the White Fang. Whereas they would passively sit back while abused, Knight was always spoiling for a fight and was exiled when she broke the ribs, nose, and jaw of an official representative from Atlas during a fight where the details were fuzzy. There was a shouting match and due to the fact there were no witnesses there is no way to tell for sure who threw the first punch, but Knight came out with a bloody nose and the Atlas representative came out with a rush trip to the emergency room. Too much heat on Menagerie by the four kingdoms would doom the experiment, so exile was the best option to make sure tensions didn’t flare.
Knight was 19 when she left Menagerie and has been a mercenary ever since to pay the bills. She spent over a year in Vacuo working as a bounty hunter with a fearsome reputation as someone who was the best of the non-huntsmen options for getting a job done. Her trademark was turning everything except for the head and the insignia of the mark to ash in a show of consistent and lavish brutality that got the attention of certain individuals. An old acquaintance from the War was looking for a fixer who wasn’t scared of a little skullduggery and was willing to pay equal to what she was making in Vacuo with hazard pay bonuses if she was willing to relocate to her childhood home of Mistral City.
She could also run missions on the side, so long as she refrained from making herself famous in the process. Knight waffled, as business in Vacuo was booming and the pay was rising astronomically as her reputation grew… but Nyx had a compelling vision for the future that someone with so many grievances against the Council couldn’t exactly ignore… and in the discussion about pay the hours were reduced to ten a week before overtime kicked in with a downside guarantee of the same salary she made working her ass off working bounties all year in Vacuo. The fact that she had described a few of the heavy hitters she would be able to sharpen her skills fighting against also helped, but it was mostly the money. Hard to argue with the potential of lifelong stability for only a year or two of work, even if everything went to shit along the way. The low hours also made sure there was plenty of time to train to get stronger, as well, as well as do another part-time job to supplement income once she was known enough in Mistral to command a decent salary from someone else on the side as well.
The organization, Asche, fell apart within a year... as could be expected, it was always a bit too good to be true. The leader stopped calling, and Knight found herself a new project and goal as a result of her role in the invasion of Kerch. She and Red had saved as many villagers as they could, and led them back to the capital themselves. Haven took the credit, of course, because they killed the leader of the invasion... but Knight found herself with a long line of hangers-on all of a sudden and blew her accessible savings and resources to build them a place in the Ground District where they could at least have basic needs met and gave herself and this new group a goal that would become the rallying cry for the near future: Regroup, Rearm, and Retake Kerch from the Grimm because nobody else will.
