Valkyrie Vekon

Valkyrie is a completely hairless young woman at the age of 23 who is a member of the Vekon family. She is permanently mute and has particularly developed abilities in air magic. She is related to the Vekon family as the great niece of Unkayi, its distinguished elder, and is very much a human. She is played by SsVivid. Valkyrie aligns directly with chaotic neutral characters.

Appearance
Valkyrie's body is entirely devoid of any hair and she is incapable of growing it back. As such, her head is a glossy, smooth oval with a feminine, pointed chin. Her lips are fairly full for a woman of her ethnicity and her eyes are long and dark, with pronounced eyelashes. Valkyrie's nose is small and up-turned.

Her skin is not pale, nor is it particularly tanned, and it has a pinkish base color. As for her body structure, she is an elegantly tall woman, only a few inches shorter then six feet. She is as slender as is healthy, and has only slight curves to her frame. (That is, there isn't all that much junk in her trunk.) In terms of muscle definition, she is largely lacking and has only the muscle that comes from everyday activity.

Equipment
Valkyrie typically sticks to her hands and her magic. Rather than carry a weapon around, she has grown to be swift both bodily and magically. She would rather shove a knuckle into a man's neck or kick his knee sideways than swing a sword, and she's confident with magic enough that she doesn't need a staff to help direct and control it.

When out and about, however, she does wear somewhat protective attire. She wears hardened, magically enhanced clothing formed out of a mix between cloth and hard leather. Its structure is inspired by ceremonial Lunar garments. For pants, she switches between this special cloth and the yak-hide of Neitiznot. The latter is more comfortable, but the former is more protective.

Personality
Valkyrie is an eternal optimist with a ferocious drive for her goals. In the occasional event that she finds that she wants something, she is capable of pursuing it with exhausting persistance and obsessive, migraine-inflicting focus. As a result, she is able to sit and work at a task for hours on end without pause, only to be pulled away by her bodily needs for food or drink. This trait is also helped by her optimism - when she made the choice to take catastrophe in stride, it bled into all areas of her life. Nowadays, there isn't much that can shake her pleasant mood and she's game for just about anything that you can throw at her.

In addition, her muteness has added new dimensions to her interactions with the world. Since it's sometimes harder to get attention from people when you can't speak their names or call out to them, she has, over the years, become used to observing most things around her - especially people. The notices subtle nuances in behavior and changes in the atmosphere of a populated room. In general, Valkyrie has become very attentive to details and aware of those around her.

Infancy
Valkyrie was born at night on Lunar Isle to Unkayi's nephew and his Moonclan wife. She had pretty, flaxen hair sprouting on her head and wrinkly, pink skin. There was a strong breeze rushing through the settlement that evening, and the Onieromancer predicted that the winds would play a critical role in the infant's life. Unsure of what this meant, her parents thought nothing of it and let it fall into the forgotten depths of their minds. This was just as well; there was nothing to be done about what would happen.

Youth
Valkyrie showed signs of magical talent early in her youth. Perhaps as a result of her languid attitude towards chores, she was able to use astral magic to sweep the floor and clean dishes as early as five years old. She also seemed to have a particular talent for air magic, but she neglected any real practice of the elemental spellbook in favor of playing "tag" with the Suqahs and joining other young girls for tea parties.

The Fire
By the time Valkyrie was 12, her parents - especially her mother - had worked her into a strict practice schedule for learning and priming her now-obvious abilities in magic. While she wasn't particularly keen on it every time, she didn't have much of a choice. Around this time, she went on a trip to Catherby on a fishing trip with her parents. Since they travelled on foot instead of by teleport, they camped in the woods just south of the Fremmenik Province twice - the night they set out and the night they travelled home. On the trip home, however, an ember from a fire in a camp site nearby blew with the wind while they slept. It landed on the animal-skin tent that Valkyrie and her mother slept in. Quickly, the entire tent was set ablaze.

It was almost too late by the time Valkyrie and her mother awoke. Their makeshift beds had caught fire and the seal on the tent's opening was too hot to touch. By the time the two females, by now with the help of Valkyrie's father, managed to break out of the fiercely sturdy tent (it was assembled to keep out curious wolves), both women had flames eating their clothing and hair and were half-suffocated on thick, black smoke. Valkyrie's father hurried out into the woods to contact help in Rellekka to heal the two victims and put out the fire.

While he was gone, they lay on the ground. Valkyrie's mother, her eyes wide and glossed with tears from the pain of her severe burns, looked at her daughter. Seeing the hair burnt away from her head and the gruesome wounds that would heal brutally, the proud Vekon woman couldn't bare to imagine allowing herself and her daughter to live as half-made cripples, deformed victims of an accident they couldn't overcome. This in mind, Valkyrie's mother told her daughter of her deep, maternal love and cast a powerful healing spell onto her daughter, using her own remaining health to restore Valkyrie as much as her living body was capable. In exchange, she gave her broken life.

The Aftermath
Weeks later, standing over her mother's grave, Valkyrie realized that she had a choice to make. She was newly motherless, completely bald, and her vocal cords never healed enough to return her ability to speak. Either she could allow the loss to cripple her and fall into a long, painful period of mourning like the past month, or she could accept the fate the winds had brought her family and take it in stride, coming out a better person for her losses. It was this moment that inspired what became Valkyrie's unhinderable drive to achieve and her interminable optimism.

Maturity
In honor of her mother's wishes, she began a ferocious, tireless practice of her magical abilities, growing her power over the air and winds at an exponential rate. She pressed on some level into any category magic she came into contact with, especially sacrificial healing techniques - though she never used them in real practice. She found creative ways to communicate when body language wasn't enough; words could spell out in the air with water or fire if she used a high level of delicacy and control over a low-level elemental spell. She came across traces of telepathic magic, though only enough to project mental images out to others and to safeguard her own mind and dreams. This could have been a critical magical genre for Valkyrie, but without a teacher, she could only learn what she found in texts.

Her arts weren't limited exclusively to magicks, however. She also took time with an instructor to learn certain martial arts for a number of years and found that, even without magic, she was a considerably talented cook. This was the skill that she primed to pad her coin purse - when she would later travel away from home, Valkyrie could easily pick up a meal and a handful of spending money by selling her services as a chef. It also made hunting food in the wild considerably more enjoyable, since she didn't have trouble turning a rabbit into a classy, respectable dish when she had the time.

Not long ago, Valkyrie resolved to leave her home and see the rest of her family, the Vekon, whose reputation and stories she had always wanted to be a part of and admired. She found them and bonded easily with Vari, the wife of one of her second cousins, Velix. As for now, she is in the process of finding her place in the family as one who would overcome great obstacles.

Trivia/Other

 * She is a very light sleeper.
 * She is mute.
 * She wears masks often, both for her amusement at the reactions of others and because her facial expressions are like her words - masks keep her quiet.
 * As a result of the masks, she tends to enjoy having a straw to drink with.