Profile
"I know what it's like / To love what ruins you."
compassionate ✦ brave ✦ loyal ✦ reckless ✦ self-effacing
Empathetic and kind, Rusalka sees the good in people first and foremost, and she’s easily able to put herself in others’ shoes. When you fall, you get back up. You dust yourself off, you try again. It only seems to strengthen her stubborn optimism about the nature of the world.
Rusa habitually tailors her own likes, dislikes, and personality traits to best mesh with those who stick by her. This makes her a good peacekeeper in situations when two parties are at each other’s throats, and a good friend to most types of people. However, it has also gradually caused her to devalue her own desires. If she has an interest or a personality trait that contradicts those of the people around her, it’s buried deep, so as not to clash or cause conflict.
Rusa works hard to be the type of person who always knows what to do. Those with problems know that they can come to her for safety, for advice, or a good cry – even if it's 3AM, even if it's raining or the commute is an hour and a half.
That being said, she flat-out ignores red flags in dangerous or unhealthy people, even when they are directly harming her. Focusing on the silver lining keeps her peace of mind intact. Not to mention she's curious, fascinated, and feels secretly flattered when they notice her at all.
Her need to seek peace and her need to help others often clash with each other, creating a tangled knot of flaws. Rusa actively self-sabotages by overextending herself to help others, numbing herself to her own pain and suffering by living in a state of denial. When someone else is hurting, she becomes impulsive, ready to leap into danger without forethought. She ignores her own issues until they become too much to bear. Subconsciously, she thinks of herself as worthless unless she's useful.
I, the undersigned, hereby agree to follow the charter of walpurgis and all rules therein:
Magic
Area of Expertise
Rusalka is a Conduit, or a person with the specific ability to store, manipulate and expel raw energy in their body. Most often this involves electromagnetic energy and force, as those are in abundance around her, but she can store and expel elemental energy as well, given a source to pull from and proper training.
Abilities
STORE ENERGY: Rusalka can draw electromagnetic or elemental energy from a source within 20 feet of her and store it within her body like a magical battery. This drains the energy from that source, causing lights to dim, fires to go out, shock to be absorbed, etc. She can currently only store two types of energy at once (light and force, or fire and ice, etc.) This causes cracks of bright white light to form on Rusa's skin, their abundance and concentration dependent on the amount of energy she's taken in. She often does this on accident, as it's subconsciously triggered by spikes of emotion: fear, great delight, anger, etc.
EXPEL ENERGY: Rusa can't hold energy within her body for very long; sooner or later, it has to go somewhere. Most of the time, it will slowly emanate from her over the course of minutes to hours depending on how much energy she's stored. However, as a defense mechanism, when Rusa experiences heightened fear, anger, or surprise, she often expels all of the stored energy at once in an explosive sphere around herself. The size of the sphere and what it does depends on the type and amount of stored energy she's expelling, and she does not yet know how to do this on command.
MANIPULATE ENERGY: Experienced Conduits can take the energy they've stored and expel a certain amount, manipulating its shape and moving it around. Rusa isn't even close to learning how to do this: she still doesn't know how to control what she can do.
Limitations
As mentioned above, Rusa has very little control over her Conduit magic. Most of the time, storing and expelling energy happens when her emotions spike, and she hasn't learned how to use either ability at will. The specific types of energy she can manipulate follow the same sort of categories as D&D magical damage types: radiant, cold, force, fire, thunder, and lightning. This excludes poison, necrotic, psychic and acid damage. Additionally, she cannot actually cast spells without a spell scroll or something else that lets a non-spellcaster do so.
It also can be difficult to use her abilities without hurting herself. Rusa doesn't have the endurance of a master conduit. Intaking too much energy, and/or expelling too much, drains her and sometimes burns her skin as the light leaking through becomes too intense to bear. An overzealous attempt could certainly kill her.
Familiar
Rusa, having decided to ignore the fact that she has innate magical abilities, has not looked into getting a familiar.
Personal Lore
History
Give us your character's backstory! You can start with a small summary or go right into details. Feel free to add any additional sections you need.
Early Life
Born into the same pod of selkies as her sister Lelyah, Rusalka was the slightly-younger of the two. She came out different from Lelyah despite their striking physical similarity: small and timid, but endlessly kind, her parents and their aunts doted on the girl. However, Rusa was also born a Conduit, her body a natural magical battery that could cause great damage if she threw a tantrum (and did, especially as a toddler.)
Rusa and Lelyah were never close growing up. Rusa was family-oriented, always looking to help their aunts hunt or bring food to their elders, while Lelyah, born with more cunning and less empathy, visited the surface to play around with humans. Rusa was particularly close with their mother. She was one of the pod's matriarchs, practical over all else but blessed (or cursed) with a heightened empathy she passed down to Rusa.
Conduits are rare for a reason. A magical battery is many things: a tool for research, an experiment to dissect, a weapon, an artifact to increase a wizard or sorcerer's power. Additionally, their souls shine bright on radars that detect magical beings, breaking through cloaking spells and alerting hunters to their presence from miles away. A run-in with a hunter close to the surface caused Rusa's abilities to react to her fear, expelling stored sunlight far enough to alert the hunter's outpost and sending them after her pod almost faster than they could flee.
There were casualties – two elders, an uncle, a family friend. The pod's matriarchs met. Lelyah, with hurt and anger at her sister festering over decades, voted to kill Rusa for the safety of the pod. Their mother reacted strongly to that decision, and to the way it seemed to sway her fellow matriarchs. Her vote was final, and her vote was to exile both of her daughters. Rusa, for her conduit soul and the danger it posed to the greater safety of the pod; Lelyah, for her cruelty.
Rusa was sent to the surface. Her pod pooled their magical energy to cast a transmutation spell and turn her into a human, severing her connection to the seal pelt she once wore. The spell was not strong enough to rid her soul of its Conduit magic, unfortunately. They gave her false memories: a mother back in Ireland, a fight that left her a runaway. They gave her British money and left her in the coastal countryside to make a new life. Lelyah – now Layla – was cast out with no such safety precautions, only the warning that she would be considered a threat if she tried to come back.
Moving to Walpurgis
When did your character join the town? How did they find out about it? If they grew up in Walpurgis, why’d they stay? If they didn't, where were they before?
It took a few years for Rusa to get back on her feet. She stayed in a youth hostel in London, worked at a tailor's, a florist's, a teamaker's. Over the decades she moved around England, leaving a town when her magic caused issues, picking up many skills that excited her and some that didn't. Time passed; technology progressed. Rusa had heard whispers of Walpurgis from a witch family whose house she cleaned, from a client at the tailor, from a widow buying flowers, but she never felt the need to leave her busy lifestyle and go find it.
At least, not until an outburst of Conduit magic nearly killed one of her friends, and the fear and shame drove her into hiding.
The city wasn't too difficult to find for one of the magically-inclined, it turned out. She didn't have much by way of possessions. She tried not to make a big splash when she arrived, moving into one of the motel rooms to make Pip's life as easy as possible.
Present Day
Where is your character currently in life? What does their usual day entail? Do they have a job? Where in town do they live? Who do they live with? Do they have any burning rivalries? Any unrequited loves?
It's been about three months since Rusa arrived in Walpurgis. She's finally opened her teahouse, The Tea Rose, and has only just started scuttling around to try and make friends outside of business connections. Opening an establishment takes up so much time!
The teahouse is a small, squat one-story building saturated with flowers and greenery. Built from white stone brickwork and pale mouse-brown roof tiling, the building itself allows its floral decorations to take the spotlight: an archway of small pink roses frames the door, the nameplate hanging above it. Rusa has planted and landscaped a flower garden out front. The tea leaves grow in a small greenhouse in the back, sectioned off magically by climate. Inside, flowers drip from cozy wooden beams on the ceiling and twine around arched window frames. Thick, treelike vines grow around the tearoom's vertical supports.
While the flowers are decorative, Rusa's primary concern building out the Tea Rose was a harmonious environment between patrons and plant life. She consulted and extensively worked with anyone she could find who had a connection to greenery, making sure each and every growth thrived where it was. (Truly, Rusa would give her left arm to be able to talk to plants.)
Now that the teahouse is open for business, she's begun to realize that her consultants are the only people she's interacted with on a regular basis since moving in. Oops... time to make some more connections, then!
Race Lore
Rusalka was once a selkie, but has since been transmuted: no longer of the sealfolk, but still not a human, she hangs in the balance –– a call to the sea in her soul, an empty space where something, something should be, and an inner restlessness that she cannot seem to shake. As a Conduit, her body and soul have a slightly different arcane makeup than that of a human or a witch, allowing her to act as an arcane battery.
Additionally, the spell her pod cast to modify her memories has begun to cause touches of forgetfulness in everyday life. Sometimes Rusa will lose important memories for a short time, and sometimes it'll just be something from her grocery list, but it's begun to trouble her, and she's actively counteracting it by writing things down in her journal whenever possible.
Miscellaneous
relationships
Lelyah [ sister ]
Rusa doesn't know her sister is in town with her yet. Layla has very much noticed, and has spent the last few weeks panicking as she figures out what to do about this.
Items
Adder Stone
A green stone pendant in the shape of a naturally occuring hollowed-out circle. Rusa can't remember how she got it.
Wicker Basket
Rusa's very first purchase in Walpurgis, from Rhys. It's her favorite basket for grocery trips.
Journal
A small, but very full, leather-bound book. Rusa's forgetfulness has her fretfully writing down important things: she'll jot them down on post-its first, then copy them into the journal.
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