Rykjudo - Loner

[emil]

Name:
Rykjudo Hypnos Pasithea
'Moon Kight'

in Druin: "raae-kuk-jaeoo-deoh" [possibly RAY-kk-ZHYOO-dyoh in execution]
in common: RYKK-zhoo-doh

Gender:
Female

Race:
Wolf

Sub-Race:
Demon

Breed:
Druin Ancient

Appearance:
At 8 feet tall, Rykjudo is monstrous, compared to the normal wolves that are the majority in this strange new world. Coupled with the slight wildness she acquired from roaming the earth, she can be a little bit intimidating. She has a frost-white coat, topped by a lustrous sea of blue mane that gradually fades into lighter, dustier shades as it runs towards her tail-tip. Her tail is also massive, for her species tends to grow new tail segments as they age [and her age is great]. She has horns and claws as blue as chilled flesh, and fangs white as bone. The membranes of her nose and eyes are stained red; the color also 'extends' into subtle over-eye markings. These accent unsettling golden eyes, reminiscent of a [drowsy] owl's. From her brow juts two long, well-worn horns, with color deep as stone and tips sharp as sword-edges. Her ears are a step away from being comically large [and they would be, if not for the easy dignity of the head they sit upon]. The Druin's underbelly is fully plated, with scales that grow in darkness and newness as they run towards her tail tip. The plates of her neck and chest are old as she is, and the palest and most worn of them all.
She has great, shimmering wings that she obtained through magic. The feathers have the dusty texture of a butterfly's wings, and shed sparkling clouds of scales when disturbed. Their overall form and pattern is that of a snowy owl's; they have a frost-white base, like her coat, and inky blue markings.


Magic/Spells:
Rykjudo's magic springs from a spirit of 'the font of Psyche', Morpho, whose power is to manipulate the seat of consciousness. It took the form of an uncanny butterfly before merging with its new partner. This spirit's 'ruling element' is night. It is weak to sunlight, and while it takes shelter in Rykjudo's body, her power is still affected by this and is more potent when the sun is obscured.

She typically uses her magic to strengthen parts of her body and imbue them with a mind-paralysing agent, which can make the minds of even intelligent creatures sluggish should she score enough blows on them. If she focuses magical energy into her eyes, she can induce hallucinations in a target [intensity varies based on their mental state and strength of mind] and even outright hypnotize them. Her voice is also passively imbued with a small part of this magic, creating a benign [and mild] magical empathy between herself and those she speaks with.

When she wraps willing targets in her wings and channels her magic, she can reprogram their base thoughts, lock away memories, share qualia, and even induce amnesia. This process usually causes the target to hallucinate about blue butterflies, mimicking the form of Rykjudo's spirit.

Her spirit, due to its butterfly mimicry, has a minor magic that allows for wing-summoning. This is a fairly passive action.

Rykjudo's base affinity is adjacent to death and illusion, causing her to see strange things with her owl's-eyes at the deepest part of night. Her total inability to interact with them, however, often causes her to assume that she's dreaming or hallucinating [unless another is present that can see spirits and the dead; so far, the stars have not quite aligned in this way].

These abilities are 'organic' in use and do not have names, but they can be split into six distinct 'spells'; paralysis, hypnosis, empathy, mind-walking, wing summoning, and being able to 'peek' beyond the veil. Their limitations are based on their complexity. All of them, save for passive abilities, present an exponential energy drain, and pose a danger to Rykjudo's own mentality if overused. Passive abilities have a 'fixed' nature and cannot be amplified in exchange for their lack of energy drain. Her final spell has the risk of fragmenting her own mind and the mind of the target should something run awry. She also cannot exert any real form of true or total mind control; the magic-induced hypnosis that she can ease weak [or weakened] minds into is merely a state of unnaturally heavy suggestiveness that can be broken with the right stimuli.


Skills:
Rykjudo has the wisdom of a traveler, having seen the old world as it changed and changed and changed right before her eyes.
She is also very old compared to many of the Druins that survived the war to re-settle in the areas that were once Shinkou, Akeru, and Giaku; she has over 500 years of experience to back up her skills.

She has balanced skill in speed and strength, with special emphasis on moving naturally with the flow of battle and ending things as quickly as possible. She doesn't restrict herself to specific or named moves, preferring to let her instincts and reflexes move for her. Showing off is a weakness and she will exploit any opponent who has that fatal tendency.
She also follows the ancient Druin tenet of training her body to surpass her magic, something retained from their formerly militaristic culture.
Her skill in horn-sparring has become near-transcendental. Her deathly-sharp horns are chipped and scored for a reason.

Due to her love of the occasional tart fruit, she's good enough at tracking them down, along with other edible vegetation. When there's no meat to be found, having safe plants to temporarily line one's stomach with can be a godsend; can't hunt without energy.
The Druin race has opposable thumbs, allowing them to build and operate structures scaled to their size with relative finesse.


Personality:
Rykjudo remains largely the same, despite having been a few inches away from ending up a mindless fringe-dwelling monster via magical accident. She retains her quiet pride, careful grace, and feeling of protectiveness over others. She is still very much a strange knight in a stranger world, with good manners and fair sense. She demands respect in a grave sort of way, her countless years of wandering lending her an undeniable gravitas.

She is one of the few Ancient Druins left, but finds no particular sadness in this; though there are only things an ancient Druin can understand, she feels a sort of species-bound kinship with any kind of wolf, even the tiny ones. Druins are still wolves. However, she rather misses being one of the youngest out of her former peers; now that they've all gone and died, she's an old lady compared to everyone else despite being nowhere near the end of her lifespan as an Ancient. Even that crazy old Druin King is gone...

Her general personality orientation is less outward and more inward; pacifistic, defensive, calm. She prefers to solve problems without violence, and will resort to using her magic to apply the right pressure needed for [beneficial] change; she would rather make use of mild manipulation to defuse possibly dangerous situations than escalate prematurely. However, she knows when to resort to violence. Her reservation should not be mistaken for shyness, meekness, or submission. She will defend what she feels is worth defending, and those that cannot be turned away will be torn apart.


Biography:
Rykjudo, despite her power over the minds of others, has lost some important things from her own. During her wandering of countless years, it seems, the world has changed around her, due to war and magical strife. During the final intervention, she was struck by a magical blast, which fragmented many of her oldest memories and ripped part of her old name from her; having no others that knew her name, she had to quest for the 'true name' of her now-wounded identity. Druins are typically named after their parents, making this a loss that seems to be tied directly to the memories she can no longer recall. While her personality is largely intact, as is the sum of her most important knowledge [such as that regarding survival, battle, or magic], she finds herself at a loss, especially without her name. For now, she wanders aimlessly as a loner, but also feels drawn to the newborn Empire [if only out of curiosity]. What does she seek in this beautifully restored world after watching it fall apart around her?


Art/Refs/Etc:
*ordered from newest to oldest
*really old [crappy] stuff is just marked as OLD
-stranger (c) me
-art (c) pooqa
-pixel (c) me
-[OLD] (c) me