[Zarkaylia]

Nerissa Tharmon

 

Ty SentaiPink~ <3



Age: 32 (birthday 17th uneven months)
Race: Lucin
Huntress, apple farmer and farm hand. Ex-mercenary.


Appearance
Nerissa stands at 5’7 with fair lightly tanned skin, straight waist long raven black hair and large almond shaped light blue eyes. She’s slender and light built, her strength her agility and speed, with some less visible muscles. Her most prominent facial features apart from her eyes would be her cheekbones.

On her back there’s three dark scars from lashes and across her right thigh there’s a large long scar from a cut. On her left arm remain pale bite-marks. She also got 2 tattoos, one white-silver star on the inside of her left wrist and a black crescent moon on her right, the two parts of the sigil she’s chosen as hers.

Sum up of scars and marks
- Back: 3 scars from lashes.
- Middle/Waist, right side: 1 scar from an arrow wound.
- Left thigh: 1 long scar from a cut.
- Left arm: bite-mark from a zombie, not very visible.
- Right shoulder: large scar on top of shoulder from a stab with an ice shard.
- Lower back on left side: a thin scar from a stab wound.

- Tattoos: white-silver star on the inside of her left wrist and a black crescent moon on her right.


Bodylanguage and behavior
Nerissa’s overall body language is confident, arrogant and relaxed outwards. If you'd compare her with Zarkaylia she’d in no way carry the same warrior-like poise that demands much earned respect. She walks just as relaxed, in public.

When she speaks she has a habit of gesturing with her hands either up and down or in circles. Whenever she smirks or grins she does so bit crookedly or lopsided and the more satisfied she is by the situation the darker expression comes with it. A simple smile you'll rarely get from her unless you're special to her, not without self-satisfaction shining through, unless she decides to put up an act.

Nerissa licks her lips whenever there's satisfaction or control and in the lack of it, when she's nervous or feel threatened by the situation, she rubs at or holds her wrists or hands.


Personality
Nerissa is a cocky woman, self-confident and self-centered though able to put up an act if she wants to, which is quite rare that she does since she’s of course the best. Power hungry she's grown out of, but she remains ambitious. She can be very polite and outgoing to get what she wants, to in the next turn rude and dark, but behind it all her mind constantly works, observes and plans. She enjoys a work fulfilled with perfection and creativity. She’s more a practical person than one to make too much use of manipulating, but she enjoys watching it and how things lead up to the next thing. She’s very insightful and very difficult to fool as she’s spent a life working on NOT letting herself be fooled. She has a taste for delicate simple beauty, fine alcohol (though any alcohol is more often than not appreciated) and definitely for fine tobacco.

Nerissa love her powers and while not instantly showing them she doesn't mind showing off to feel the thrill of power run through her. Practicing is as much a joyful art and a display as it is needed and useful.

Music, playing her recorder and listening alike, work as meditation and relaxation. Melodic melodies she find soothing. In times of boredom and trouble where she cannot use her recorder, she simply hums or sings instead. Nerissa doesn't have a strong beaming singing voice, more so towards shrill or delicate instead.

Nerissa's very fond of apples.

In moments of mental torment related to memories and PTSD she can tug at her hair, even rather violently, and wraps arms around herself for protection. Depending on severity of her PTSD attacks, she can try to defend herself against imaginary threats but over time have come to just scream, plead and try to flee.

Over the years, when suffering real mental torment over a longer time or feeling out of control of her own life or feeling not herself, Nerissa's shown to turn to childish or downright destructive measures to deal with her pain. She's shown several destructive behaviors towards different things, but it's thinned down to mainly herself as she's 9 times out of 10 feeling overwhelming shame. These show themselves as alcoholism, abuse of her own powers, overworking or other measures that'll leave her knocked out or physically too tired or busy to be able to think of or feel her torment. As for childish behaviors these have turned from large acts such as vandalism into just small things, like concentrating for hours on picking apart flowers. These are problems yet to deal with, of course.

Capabilities
Water Manipulation [skill]: Master
Air Manipulation [skill]: Normal
Aether Manipulation [skill]: Easy

Lucin Language [knowledge]: (fluent, native language)
Dagger [skill]: Advanced
Double blade (short swords or short sword + dagger combination): Advanced
Stealth [skill]: Apprentice
Tactics [skill]: Apprentice
Recorder [skill]: Competent
Mesalian Language (speaking) [knowledge]: Competent
Mesalian Language (literacy) [knowledge]: Apprentice
Archery [skill]: Apprentice
Farming [skill]: Novice

Background

Spoiler

Birth (0-4)
Nerissa was born in a clan’s temporary settlement, Clan Tharmon. The clan consisted of criminals and questionable figures, people of the Celestial Realm’s underworld that sought sanctuary and shelter among brothers and sisters. Her mother were at the time a rising strong force within the clan, a power hungry brute, murderer and mercenary, and her father was a lost veteran from the War of Veld who after years of drinking turned a mercenary. Her parents were lovers and hadn’t ever had the thought of taking it as far as marrying.

Upon her birth she was given the name Nerissa, given her mother’s middle name, and no last name as her parents’ names carried their reputations.

Nerissa grew a fair skinned child with her mother’s large almond shaped light blue eyes, prominent cheekbones and her father’s raven black hair.


Powers and Growth (4-13)
Nerissa debuted early in her powers, already at age 4 did she push around Water, but also started off weak and struggling. Her parents took it as a bad sign, especially her mother who valued strength, and began a hard training. At age 7 a now cocky and boasting Nerissa had caught up with her peers in terms of strength in powers and spent her time battling, fighting and playing pranks whenever she wasn’t being taught how to defend herself with blades, tactics, literacy and numeracy.

Her mother didn’t pay any attention to teaching her anything but how to pull peoples’ strings, stealth and to rule as she’d grown one of the front figures of the clan and wished her daughter to do the same. Nerissa found the games interesting to watch and enjoyed pushing people around as much as the acting, the power felt sweet when her mother amused herself with letting the child present her orders.

Nerissa’s father had years ago fought in the War of Veld and found himself a young lover in Nerissa’s mother while on the path down from an honored and praised hero to a drinking and gambling mercenary. For what it was worth he decided to teach his daughter honor, tactics, basic knowledge and how to defend oneself between his drinking and work. Once he’d have cared more for his daughter’s growth and the bad influence she got from the environment she grew up in, but as the broken man he was and still is he didn’t have the spine anymore to face that reality and kept drinking.

However her father, once a much better and an educated man, insisted she learned something less destructive too. Nerissa’s much annoyed mother sent her to the less law abiding bards the clan held themselves with and protected, letting them handle the “bullshit” and teach Nerissa how to play the recorder. While it annoyed her mother and soothed father’s weary heart Nerissa herself found it a good way to meditate and earn extra gold.

Maturity and beginning career (13-17)
Nerissa’s training thus lead up to the inevitable day she turned a teenager, in her proud parents’ eyes now a young woman able to start working and practicing the art she wished to take on; mercenary work. As a sign of her maturity she received her father’s old dagger. It was a beautiful and deadly piece of metal with pointed long double edged blade and a black hilt with simple but delicate ornament across the full cross guard, a small opal at its center. Her father explained it was a gift from the Celestial Kingdom, an award he’d earned for his services. It came with an ornate matching black leather hilt and a black belt he made smaller to fit her. From her mother she received her first own short words, the hilts black to match her father’s gift but otherwise much simpler in quality and design. That night celebrations were in order and Nerissa was drinking, singing, fighting and smoking with the adults, showing off her gifts and drunkenly tried to play a humorous melody while her mother kicked her father’s arse in a friendly duel.

At start Nerissa accompanied her father in his work to get some field practice with supervision before she took on any own contracts. Her father was reluctant to let his daughter see the darker and bloody sides of his work but to his terror Nerissa showed nothing but indifference at her first sight of a corpse and developed a sick fascination in watching her father slay his opponents. When trying to explain to her the serious matter of death and how final it is her lack of understanding of what the big deal was had him finally come to realize how bad the environment in the clan had been for a child to grow up in. Upset and scared of what he’d created he stopped letting her join him and began giving her some of his easier contracts to handle on her own while doing as he always did to solve his problems; drink.

Nerissa came off at a poor start. Inexperienced as she was she fell for a few easy tricks in writing contracts and got left unpaid or walking into traps and overall had to learn some lessons the hard way.

Her first real bump in her career came as early as her 15th season. While she read her contract properly before signing anything and demanded some pay in advance among other precautions she made the error to put too much trust to her contractor. Her client was of course a questionable figure; a thief planning an ambitious hit on a wealthy merchant’s caravan and wished to hire her as extra brute force.

However, he let Nerissa act as distraction and left her behind to get caught by the mercenary entourage. Young as she was the men showed some mercy despite her resistance and colorful language but they still handed her in to the town guard. Nerissa spent a night in arrest before facing the judge, charged with robbery, murder and assault. Luckily, she wasn’t guilty to more than assault and no evidence could be brought forward to support the other charges. She was sentenced three lashes and a few months in jail. The three lashes left remaining scars on her back and she had to admit they caused immense pain. She spent the months in jail practicing recorder by playing in the air and singing the melodies to herself.

For years to come that was one of her greatest mistakes and she made many more that didn’t have as dire consequences but still taught their lessons as she made herself a name. In one infuriating event she mistook one of the client’s men for someone else and stabbed the man in the back, broke his arm against a door and decapitated the bastard. It cost her one of her short swords to repay the client and get out alive.

She chose to take upon herself a sigil; a black crescent moon and a silver star intertwined. It was a common thing to do for mercenaries and it was either that or taking a false name. With the gold she earned she had a pendant made of the sigil, tattooed her wrists and bought a pipe as she took on the habit to smoke. She also upgraded her old dull recorder to a much finer one.


Sold Out (25-26)
She became her mother’s pride, starting to equal her in terms of ruling the clan while building a career her father had dreamed of but never had the heart to commit to, traveling far and wide in her endeavors and ambitions. By her 25th season the “moon” of the elusive clan Tharmon had became a thorn in the local politicians’ side along with what seemed a good era for mercenaries now that civil wars ravaged the Middle Realm. Meanwhile the government had a recent setback in one of their missions and a need of hiring brute force rather quickly. Preferably someone who’d not be too reluctant to get their hands a little dirty and wouldn’t ask too many questions. An ambitious plan and search was launched.

The government funded a reward for every brought in mercenary. A handsome amount of gold that would be applied on top of whatever price was on the unlucky ones’ heads. Thus begun a hunt and the mercenaries turned in were offered a job for a fair fee. However the ones representing the government never expected to be met with such reluctance. Leaving their home Realm apparently either was out of the question or demanded a lot more in payment. The funding getting strained by the reward for the mercenaries themselves to be brought in made raising the payment impossible and one by one the mercenaries’ lives were ended on spot, their bodies tossed in unmarked graves to never be seen again.

Nerissa herself knew nothing about this, no words had spread yet of the increasing numbers of disappearing mercenaries when the day came and she was to sign another ambitious contract with a smug grin at the good deal she’d make. Nerissa had worked with the client more than once before and would not have guessed the slimy old woman would have been pressured and blackmailed into letting the guard storm in to arrest her on given signal.

Nerissa was a little girl no longer, at the much indiscrete sign given by her client she dropped the wax stick she’d been heating over a candle in her right hand and drew the dagger with her left in one fluid motion and cut the woman’s throat open, blood splashing over the table, unsigned contract and Nerissa. When she turned and drew the short sword in her right the guards stormed the room. Six of them with two more outside put Nerissa in a situation where she couldn’t possibly win. Instead of charging she bolted towards the balcony at the back of the room, chased by the men and women.

She found the large thick vines decorating the house facade and tossed her weapons down on the ground to get her hands free as she begun to climb down. While this was a successful move to escape the guards in the room she just left, upon jumping the last bit down and landing she noted three more heading her way from the gate. She picked up her weapons and tried to get past without success. A guard’s slash against her thigh allowed another to grab her arm as she lost balance and while she still tried to fight word spread that she’d murdered the old woman. She was beaten mercilessly till she passed out.

Looking like she’d been dragged after a wagon she was brought forward to the ones representing the government in chains and on her knees listened to their offer with one eye wandering between them, the other swollen and blue. The situation and the irony had her laugh. A cold and sinister laugh that had them peak their pretty maintained brows at her. She gave it a moment’s thought but the sound of this ambitious contract made her curious and hunger to explore new lands and possibilities overruled the fact the pay was bit low. She accepted.

She was allowed to heal up and was even aided by a small frail middle aged healer’s incredible skill and couldn’t help but note they sure were in a hurry to send her off. She was only given a short time to bid her parents and clan farewell, receiving a wooden box with fine tobacco as a goodbye gift. Once she had healed she gathered her things and prepared for the journey with the contract long worked out under many arguments and signed. But as she walked through the impressive Celestial Gate with awe there was one thing they’d forgotten.

They’d forgotten the Mesalian language. Nerissa arrived not knowing a single word and while most of the pay she had demanded in advance was supposed to pay for the long journey plus last after arrival she was now forced to spend much more than she thought. This frustrated her greatly as she couldn’t make her way far without either and needed both the language and the gold. She found her way to a decently sized town and had to spend the next 8 months studying the language and culture. She tried learning to blend in as much as she could while gaining some extra gold by performing at taverns but it was nowhere near enough to fill the gaping hole in her pouch after such long sidetrack.


Towards Ravenna (26-27)
Finally, now 26 seasons old, she could begin her journey towards what she heard was called the Forbidden Lands with enough knowledge to survive and make her way across the Mainland. Re-filling the box with tobacco was a must. She much enjoyed the journey across the seas. She’d never seen so much water in her entire life and spent the days practicing her skill with the element to the crew’s annoyance. In the evenings she entertained them all with her recorder music and drank and smoked with her newly gained fellow travelers and she very much enjoyed the company of the sailors.

Finally one day the call that land had been sighted was heard and gazing upon her destination, the cliff with the looming raven towering over the lower town of Ravenna, she grinned with a sinister chuckle.