Traits

Hobbies and Activities

It's kind of cliché for a Simirror to work with gemstones, but Nura loves the hobby and has set gems in both metal and glass pieces. She usually only makes small trinkets as personal or spiritual objects, but she's made a few commissioned jewellery pieces on request. Nura also adores gardening in windowsills and has a habit of trying to raise cuttings of plants she's identified from a planet trip. She also blows and shapes glass, likes the meditative experience of whittling, and occasionally tries her hand at pottery - though she has some bad associations with the latter.

Nura reads books more than she watches vids, but she indulges in plenty of screen time herself. Her favourites are serial dramas, space operas, and documentaries. She loves to collect figurines from her favourite sci-fi dramas and has an entire shelf dedicated to them. She has a soft spot for watching some sports, too; magic "dancing" is a favourite.

Beliefs and Motivations

Nura's greatest motivation is learning, which is something she's always trying to do. She wants to know things, and she's willing to get out there to find them out for herself. She's especially interested in other cultures and their knowledge; she tries to keep herself informed, as part of her commitment to social justice, and she considers speaking to the people involved to be the best way to find out their needs and thoughts. Nura values stability despite her adventurous spirit, wanting something consistent amongst everything that happens in her life, but she believes she can provide structure for herself and tries not to rely overly much on anybody else for it.

Nura is a spiritual person that relies on the stability of rituals to keep her grounded. Her sect, the Prism Glass Mirrors, is a more liberal branch of Simirror polytheism that draws influence from other Pop Starian cultures. She has many small trinkets that help her in her worship, but her favourite is her hand mirror, the first mirror she ever created with her magic as a child. Despite her spirituality, however, she's practical enough to disregard a lot of supersitition... though that doesn't stop her from wincing whenever she breaks glass.

Assets and Flaws

Nura is strong, both mentally and physically. She doesn't crack easily under pressure, and is often the first person to come up with a plan in bad situations. Her reliability and hardworking nature further cement her as a source of stability. However, this tends to make her stodgy, and she is usually the first person to dismiss ideas that are radical enough, even if they might ultimately be better choices. Her pride further means she dislikes being proven wrong and tends to be argumentative about it. She can also come off as judgmental, ironically one of the things she tries hard not to be... she's getting better at going with the flow with Taavi's help, but it's been something of an uphill battle at times.

Nura has the tendency to reflect emotional states of others rather than owning her feelings, and as a result can seem inscrutable and guarded. When she does own her emotions, it's often in a burst of poorly-controlled fervour that is hard to handle, even for the Simirror herself. And while she's usually polite, understanding and a good diplomat, she really has trouble making actual friends; her connections often feel shallow. She's working on that too.

Appearance

Nura is a dark-purple-skinned Simirror with pale pink glowing eyes and a prominent, curly cowlick of hair that extends partway down her face, usually covering one of her eyes. (The hair is a similar shade to her skin, making them seem as though they blend into one unit, but it is a little darker than her skin is.) The rest of her hair flows down the back of her head and kind of frizzes out at the bottom; if she grows it out a lot, it ends up looking like a fauxhawk. She's a little pudgy around her waist, but she has powerful arms with prominent muscles (for a Simirror).

Nura stands a whopping 11.1 inches/28.194 cm tall, towering over a lot of people, and weighs about 8.4 pounds/3.8 kilograms, which makes her a bruiser by puffball standards. (Assuming 8 inch tall average adult puffball standing height.) She favours her right hand for most tasks, including her magic, but she can use her left for some things.

Nura has some scars, but they're mostly concealed: her neck is a mess of scarring, and her chest and back have several areas of scars too. She doesn't really have many other skin oddities except for prominently calloused hands, but she's usually wearing gloves. Nura tries hard to keep clean, so her primary smell is soap, but she can get pretty ashy-smelling when smelting. (Magic use in my AU produces an ozone smell, so there's that too.)

Skills and Abilities

Mirror Magic

Nura has natural Simirror magical abilities which let her manipulate the structure of glass, stone and crystal with relatively little effort. She can form crystals and reshape them as though they were semi-fluid, as well as produce objects such as temporary walls, bubble-like "shields", and even crude weaponry. It takes focus and sustained effort, and Nura can't operate on substances more than a few feet away from her without severely exhausting herself; it also takes longer the larger the object she's working on, with objects double her size being impossible to operate on in a single magic session. Also, she has to be able to see the object to use her magic on it. She can do magic without her wand, but the wand lets her focus and direct her abilities in much more precise ways. Without it, it's kind of a diffuse, blunt power instead.

Strength and Shape

Nura has surprisingly powerful arms and can throw a mean punch or crush things in her fists. Her flexible joints and long reach give her an advantage against puff-style bodies in many fights, and she can pin them with her sheer body weight. Having individual digits can be useful too, when most of the people you know just have nubs... As well, she can actually turn her head without turning her body, which is a weirdly potent ability sometimes.

Air Tank Functionality

Nura's air tank acts as a filter and a secondary pump system, almost like an iron lung. While it means she's reliant on it to breathe well, this gives her a greater tolerance for poor-quality air. She'll take longer to succumb to airborne poisons or gases, and can "hold her breath" longer than the average person. It's also possible for her to load air canisters into the tank itself and override the atmosphere completely, but she usually doesn't do that.

Accessories and Weapons

Nura usually wears a loose robe; her trademark one is a powder blue robe that wraps around and secures with a small clasp on the inside. It's lined with pockets, including a dedicated one for her wand and a small closable pocket she likes to keep her favourite hand mirror in. She also likes to wear a wide-brim orange hat, with a large polished central six-pointed star gem and two smaller purple gemstones embedded in its band. The last typical part of her outfit is her purple neckerchief; this covers a very noticeable surgical site where her breather tank system is embedded in her throat. She's quite self-conscious about it, and will never expose the tubing willingly, but it's often visible outside her clothing; her tank is generally worn underneath her clothes and is strapped to her body.

Nura's only dedicated weapon is her wand, a short metal staff with a large indigo crystal orb on the end. It provides a focus for her powers by channeling Nura's magic, helping her to perform much more delicate procedures. With its help, she can manipulate very small, fine amounts of material into precise shapes, as well as amp up the potency of her existing magic. She can even reshape the crystal orb in a pinch to make the wand into a more traditional blunt or stabbing weapon, but she doesn't like to do that; she's worried about compromising its structure.

Fashion and Style

Nura likes practical, comfortable clothes that don't show a lot of skin. She tends to adhere to Simirror cultural norms on clothing, which prefer to keep the head and neck covered, but she's less picky about having a hat on than most. If she's wearing more formal clothing, she likes flowing gowns and long draping shawls; she enjoys the way the wind blows through them. (It can suck when she trips on them, though.) She doesn't really use makeup, but she will use hair-care products to style her cowlick and keep its curls manageable.

Backstory

Childhood

Nura was born in Raisin Ruins, to the Bakkal coven - something of a local pottery and glasswork celebrity amongst Simirrors. Since her birth, Nura was constantly pushed by her parents to take up the family trade, especially since she was an only child and her mother, Akilah, had difficulty conceiving her in the first place. Nura's father, Diya, was much more laid-back but ultimately helpless to stop his overbearing, emotionally manipulative wife; while he coddled Nura, he couldn't do much to protect her from Akilah's expectations, and he didn't have the imagination to think of a life that differed from the competitive pottery industry.

Nura was always a bright child, and showed promise in her studies from an early age, which Akilah nurtured to the point of hyperfocus. Though clay manipulation didn't come as easily to Nura as some of her relatives, her creativity and her willingness to hone her skills made her one of the better choices to take up the family legacy, especially with her comparative skills at glasswork. But Nura never really wanted to do it; she mostly kept her head down in her childhood, but she was constantly escaping to fantasy universes in the form of the science fiction books and shows she had access to in her community library. Any expression of her desire to become an astronaut was largely brushed aside.

Beginnings

Eventually, Nura's pent-up frustrations came to a head. As she grew older, into her late teens, she began to more openly rebel against her parents, even planning to take astronomy courses in the universities in Butter Buildings. Akilah, angry at the sudden-seeming pushback from her daughter, demanded compliance. When Nura couldn't tolerate it anymore, she emptied her bank accounts and enrolled in university at the young age of seventeen.

Though Nura did well in the early courses she was able to take, her funds ran out quickly and she couldn't finish her degree. Disheartened, the young Simirror looked towards the largely-unregulated industries on Halcandra; it'd give her some experience and let her get out to space like she wanted. After several fruitless attempts to apply, the Simirror finally landed a glassworking job on Halcandra - ironically, the kind of thing she initially fled her home to escape. Still, the new environment was invigorating even if she wasn't doing exactly what she wanted... and, seeing her interest in spaceship upkeep, her metalsmithy boss offered to teach her welding as well, a skill that landed her a spot on the same asteroid mining deployment as Taavi Aare.

Though Nura didn't make many friends at first, being her withdrawn sort of self, she witnessed Taavi sacrifice himself to protect another member of their mining deployment and became fascinated by him. During his long recovery, she visited him frequently, and got to know him well enough that she felt comfortable with him. It helped that his gregarious, social nature and his kindness made it easier for her to become friendly with the other members of the crew; with such a sunny nature, Taavi helped Nura to bond with others in a place where she'd previously felt alone. The only downside was the hard physical work and the lack of proper protection; Nura's lungs had never been the strongest, and constant exposure to heavy dust was taking its toll...

The Vagabonds

While relative calmness continued for awhile, it wasn't to be forever. In December of Nura's 21st year, Taavi and Nura were dispatched to the asteroid fields for a routine mining expedition. Nura had come to trust Taavi, and so when he said he'd received a map of the mines that they were to explore alone, she didn't question it overly much. Little did she know that one of their fellow crew members had set Taavi up with a map of an abandoned section of the mines.

That section ended up being dangerous, and when Taavi and Nura entered them, the caves collapsed. In the resulting rockslide, Nura's wounded lungs finally gave out enough for her to struggle to breathe. The two were trapped together in the cave system for almost a week without anything but a few tools, and were severely wounded and sick by the time they were found. The extended period in the caves together forged an intense, isolating bond between the two, to the point of some slight codependency. Nura was able to recover with the aid of a prosthetic that left a painfully-obvious mark on her throat, something that she considers a mark of her own obsessive perfectionism and tries to conceal.

Present Day

By now, much of what happened in the cave systems is a quiet, painful memory for Nura, but it doesn't do much more than haunt her dreams. Having been picked up by the Cornucopia sometime after their recovery, Nura has readjusted to a much safer, much more steady life, where she gets to explore and her contributions matter. She doesn't regret her choices, though she often wonders what could have been different... and what she has given up by making her choices. Could she ever go back home? Does she even want to? Those are questions she's not sure she wants to answer. While she's out here with Taavi and the crew in space, she doesn't need to answer them... so maybe she'll stay away a little longer. There's so much to learn out here in space.

• She learned to sew just so that she could patch her hat. It's the first clothing she bought on her own, without any oversight.
• Her eyes glow all the time, but they dim when she's tired and brighten when she's really staring at something. The glow's bright enough to actually cast very faint light in dark places, though it's caused by magic energy and not light, so it doesn't interfere with her sight.
• Her favourite musical genres are classical, ambient and trance music. She often meditates to songs with vibrating elements, like bells.
• She's afraid of getting things stuck in her throat, even though they technically wouldn't obstruct her breathing with the tank she has.
• Theme Music: Space Junk Galaxy by Mahito Yokota