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Empathy. Rhesca is an empathic healer. She cannot heal wounds directly on other people, but she can transfer other people's wounds to herself, leaving her patients whole and healthy. Her abilities allow her to mend her own wounds quickly at the expense of energy/stored magic. Alternately if she has the spare time to spend on recovery, she can wait a wound out, letting it heal more naturally over time while doing a bit of minimal internal restoration to help the process along.
Medicine. Unfortunately her abilities are inherently limited by her body's own endurance, and Rhesca can easily overwhelm her ability to heal herself with taking on too many wounds at once (which she has done in the past, and come near to death from doing so). She has also learned that taking a truly fatal wound from another person feels almost as if her own life is somehow shortened in exchange. These lessons have guided her to learning to employ more traditional methods of healing, in cases where prolonged tending of a patient would be needed in order to reduce the severity of their injuries before attempting any sort of empathic mending. She has since acquired a hodgepodge education in everything from crystal manipulation to modern medical sciences from her time traveling the cosmos (admittedly she views the clinical, dispassionate forms of modern medicine with some distaste and tends to prefer a more herbal or holistic approach where possible).
Madness. Though Rhesca is genuinely a helpful, gentle, and caring creature, years and years of enduring the pain and suffering of countless injuries and ailments of other living souls has left her just a touch... unhinged. Normal folk most often find her a bit unsettling (at best), as she has a habit of staring openly and hovering very close with zero regard for personal space or comfort. Her speech is slow and breathy, as if everything she's saying is incredibly secret and shouldn't be said aloud. A proper diagnosis requires Rhesca to be touching a person, so she is already prone to being handsy, something that is made doubly unsettling by the way her (rather large) eye crest seems to focus directly on a person during her ministrations. When not specifically tending to a wound, she carries an air of distracted aloofness about her which many people find off putting when trying to communicate (mostly she gets deeply lost in thought about herbs and crystals, but truly she is still listening to you I promise).
As she has grown into her middling years, Rhesca's enthusiasm for healing has only grown, sometimes giving the impression of someone chasing an obsession. She has never crossed the line into being forcefully aggressive with her offerings to heal, but she has long ago crossed the boundary of 'polite proposition' into the realm of 'wide-eyed, barely contained glee' at the prospect of taking someone else's pain away. Occasionally people assume she's acquired some form of masochism, but her closest friends (surprisingly she does have a few who are like family to her) know that it stems from a deeply seated desire to soothe the suffering of another living creature.
( Based on a beloved text-based mmo character named Rheveri Yulunesca that I used to play when I was... I wanna say I played from 10 to 14-15 years old before I was whisked away by life dramas xD. She was precious to me, because in a lot of ways that game introduced me to the wonders of fantasy worlds and the joys of roleplaying games. <3 )
