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Naeko

Physical

Appearance: Tall, and somewhat muscular for a shadow elf, especially one of magical profession, Naeko is a healthy young woman of charcoal-black skin, although due to some magical experimentation in her family history, she has feline ears and tail with fur of the same dark green as her chin-length hair. She usually is seen wearing some portion of the Izwaldian Floral Brigade uniform over a heavy leather and metal harness of her own design that she is generally loathe to explain the details of, and prone to violent outbursts if she is asked to remove. In addition, she wears heavy metal gauntlets and greaves which she appears to be sufficiently accustomed to as to not find her dexterity notably impeded, and a rather crudely made half-mask over the upper half of her face with rotating lenses of varying tints. Few are aware of the fact that the mask's significance is not in fact because it uses rare materials, or would be difficult to reproduce, but in fact because it is the first thing she ever built on her own.

Statistics

Strength 12 (+1); save +1 (non)
Dexterity 11 (+0); save +0 (non)
Constitution 14 (+2); save +5 (good)
Intelligence 14 (+2); save +3 (low)
Wisdom 13 (+1); save +3 (avg)
Charisma 19 (+4); save +6 (avg)

Armor Class: 13 (+3 armor)
Special Defenses: Advantage vs Charm, Immunity to magical sleep

Attacks: xxxxx

Racial Features:

Low-light Vision.
Shadow Magic: You know the dancing lights cantrip. When you reach 3rd level, you can cast the faerie fire spell once per day; you must finish a long rest in order to cast the spell again using this trait. When you reach 5th level, you can also cast the darkness spell once per day; you must finish a long rest in order to cast the spell again using this trait. Charisma is your spellcasting ability for these spells.

Proficiencies:

Bonuses: Low +1, Average +2, Good/High +3

Skills:
Good: Arcana (int +5), Thaumaturgy (int +5)
Average: Biomancy (wis +3), Intimidation (cha +6), Transmutation (int +4)
Low: Bluff (cha +5), Engineering (int +3)

Feats:

Ritual Caster: Wizard casting. See belongings for spells within.
Keen Mind: Your intelligence increases by +1. You can always discern north, and you can tell time precisely without a clock.

Class:

Sorcerer (Orgonne) 3rd

Features:
Font of Magic: 3 spell points.
Can expend spell points to regain spell slots (2 points for a 1st, 3 for a 2nd, 5 for a 3rd, 6 for a 4th, and 7 for a 5th), or spell slots to regain spell points (points gained equals level of slot).
Metamagic:

• Extended Spell – When you cast a spell that has a duration of 1 minute or longer, you can spend 1 sorcery point to double its duration, to a maximum duration of 24 hours.
• Quickened Spell – When you cast a spell that has a casting time of 1 action, you can spend 2 sorcery points to change the casting time to 1 bonus action for this casting.

Kitbashing: Can produce magic items at a discount equal to five plus her sorcerer level as a percentage. This discount is doubled for adding additional effects to an existing item. In addition, she may recoup magical material from wondrous items for its crafting cost (usually half the item's value) and spell requirements for use in crafting further magical items.
Spellcasting: 4 spells known;

Belongings

Orgonne Accretion Harness, Projector Gauntlets, Grounding Boots.
Battleaxe (emotionally significant). Smithing toolkit. Reagents and materials from original lab.
Coinage: 40gp, 30sp, 20cp
Ritual book: Wizard spells, uses intelligence for casting

Background

Family Life

Naeko was born into one of the shadow-elven clans in the Broken Lands, called at least by Naeko's family "Neo-Blackmoor." A distant branch of the clan, their feline attributes and abnormally dark skin evidently heritable, and tracing to a single ancestor's magical experiment gone horribly awry. Hers is something of a large family due to her mother, the current head of their branch of the family, resolving that the solution to notoriously low shadow-elven fertility and birth rates is simply to keep trying, as often as possible. She has many siblings, some of whom she even knows by name rather than simply recognizing them by sight and running away.

It was a rather unsupportive family environment, Naeko's mother encouraging her children in the sort of ruthless competetivity more apropos to gladitorial arenas full of slaves, with an individual child's 'grace period' ending a few months after they have learned to walk, it being presumed at this stage that they will have learned also to run. Naeko herself was both advantaged and disadvantaged in this, born with an unusually strong constitution for a shadow elf, having bitten the midwife almost immediately, rather than the traditional shadow-elven birth process of then attempting to magically recussitate the sickly and near-deceased newborn. The difficulty came in her siblings' reaction to this, which was to cut her open while her bones were still somewhat soft, and install spacers in her sternum so that it would have two distinct halves, so that if her abnormality continued into later childhood, it would be easier to biopsy her organs without risking damage to them while opening her ribcage. To say that memory of this event largely colours Naeko's perceptions of what family means as a concept is something of an understatement. It is also why when left alone she made sure she knew very well how to run, jump, and hide, before letting anyone see that she had learned to walk.

The primary mechanism of the competetivity was research and warfare. Whichever among them succeeded best at rediscovering and reinventing old blackmoorian technologies and magic would be more capable of attacking and either killing or capturing the others (capture generally being rare.) There were a plethora of temporary truces and alliances that kept equilibrium maintained in the husk of the subterranean Blackmoorian city that the family called home. Any who showed a likelihood of growing powerful enough to be a threat to the majority could immediately expect alliances to form against them, and for them to fall apart as soon as it was time to loot their lab over their cooling body (or in the case of Nedalia, warming body. She had taken an immolation potion rather than suffer interrogation about her projects). As such, each put the majority of their time and resources into fortifying their labs, and probing attacks to look for exploitable weaknesses among the others.

Naeko's involvement in this was minimal, upon finding out that she was capable of withstanding substantially greater densities of the environmental contamination lower in the ruins, she spent as much time as she could well below the threshold where her siblings could no longer safely travel, and as such, difficult enough to reach that they had more pressing problems than her. This eventually allowed her to find a still somewhat sterile (less radioactive) ancient operating theatre, and this is where she made her base of operations, fortifying from this base a passage to one of the ventilation shafts directly to the surface, a semi-secured means of getting outside while bypassing most of the more internecinely militarized areas. Her elder siblings were prone to making cross-border raids on villiages in order to kidnap and procure test subjects for their experiments. Naeko made it a habit to take their departure as an opportunity to sneak into their labs and steal anything neglected enough to look like it wouldn't be missed, whther notes, materials, or on very rare occasions, surviving test subjects.

It was, and remains, a point of pride for Naeko that she is the only member of her family never to have used her family's 'crater filing system' in which an experiment becomes labelled by which of the many permanent pockmarks on the terrain surrounding the subterranean complex's entrances it blew up in. This is not to say that their experiments were over-prone to failure, nor her track record in any way perfect. Only that her failures were never terribly catastrophic, her own work generally on a much smaller scale than that of her siblings. Also, with a family tradition of working magically in terms of Conjural Pneumatism does tend to lend itself to any failure being somewhat detinatory, Naeko's own work focussed elsewhere, having found obscure old texts detailing means by which energy might be extracted instead from providing stimulus to a living, conscious body.

Naeko's attempts to harness this Orgone Energy were somewhat fruitful, resulting in the much-altered over the years harness she wears with which she powers her own spells, but also in her attempts to make an Orgone Generator, an enclosure in which someone thus placed would be stimulated to produce energy at a greatly amplified rate that could then be siphoned off for a variety of uses. It was this research that saw her stealing test subjects as well as nonliving materiel from her siblings. The seventh such prototype was the only true success, and from Generator Seven's stabilization, Naeko's capacity to use what she could scavenge from the ruins greatly increased, as well as her comfort in living in her hidden away lab, both facts about which she was quite verbal in expressing her satisfaction about, as while certainly Generator Seven could not talk back, merely capable of the occasional hypersexed moan, Naeko did in fact consider Generator Seven to be "someone to talk to."

Exile

For reasons truly unknown (though claiming to be because of Naeko's adamancy in pursuing a nontraditional school of magical and scientific research), Naeko's mother chose to evict and exile Naeko from the family's territories. For roughly a year she wandered largely at random, ending up in Izwald finding erratic work as either an adventurer or a machinist, until a chance encounter with the harpy Ran led to her finding employment as the head engineer/researcher of the Izwaldian Floral Brigade. And later, its logistical officer. She remains somewhat perplexed as to how having prior to the last year hidden from any sort of contact with other beings whenever possible, her only companionship being either talking to herself or to Generator Seven, she is the most skilled member of the Floral Brigade at the arts of subtle persuasion, and is loathe to consider the notion that she might just be that stimulating a conversationalist as to have developed herself that way, she is aware of her tendency to let her ego run away with her, and it doesn't need any more encouragement.

She is ecstatic at Generator Seven, called just "Genny" by most of the brigade, being returned to her, though the circumstances of this, as well as Genny's speed of convalescence from having spent nearly twelve years with her only movement being respirational or gastrointestinal, have Naeko extremely worried about the nature of the mysterious Enemy that they face.