Post by Nayru Al-Saiduq on May 26, 2016 5:31:31 GMT -8
Name: Nayru Al-Saiduq
Race: Dragon
Appearance: Nayru seems always at odds with her surroundings, subtly out of place even among the endless oddities of Arcadia. Perhaps it is her clothing, an odd mix of Nabatan fashions and jewelry that would be at home on a princess, but she wears as carelessly as a beggar. Perhaps it is her bearing; almost predatory, focused - and yet a huntress with nothing to hunt in the busy but generally safe, almost boring, confines of the floating city. Perhaps it is simply her demeanor, confidence bordering on arrogance, a sort of easy friendliness that stops short of charisma. Perhaps it is her eyes, as sharp as they are gentle, a curious cross between on-edge and relaxed.
Whatever the case, while she usually hides it relatively well, an acute observer can tell that she is at ill at ease within the bounds of Arcadia as it seems to be with her, just a little more stressed than she should be, but also how quickly the strain lifts from her shoulders in private or out in the field. She holds no dark secrets or hatred for humanity, simply a sort of aloof awkwardness that can at most temporarily hold back her natural forwardness. In the quieter regions of Arcadia, or much more commonly far away from her home, her friendliness and openness borders on naivete, and her closed body language rapidly opens up into a much more physical and simplistic sort of nature.
In action, there is little of the hesitation that can be glimpsed in her at other times; Nayru moves naturally, lithely, as thoroughly at home on the hunt as in a fight, a casual expertise born from experience. For she is a huntress, and all the world is her hunting ground.
Personality: The majority of Nayru's persona can be succinctly described in short order - she is forward and blunt; arrogant and self-assured in herself; friendly and trusting. While she generally manages to leave a good first impression, those around her for any longer are bound to notice her occasional bouts of poor judgement as confidence borders arrogance and eventually, inevitably, crosses over entirely. Her experience in combat and her birthright as a dragon alike conspire against her in this regard, though her consistently poor judgement does little to help. Her natural competitive streak also does a great deal to cloud her judgement, rarely for the better.
While it is clear that her persona as a whole is not... entirely ideal, to break Nayru down to those simple statements is to miss the forest for the trees, even if they are all more or less accurate. She truly means well, without a mean streak in her body, and while she is much of the way controlled by her emotions they do not dominate her. For all her failures, she generally manages to turn her considerable talents into positive directions; even if her desire to be a hero is in part simple glory hounding, as much or more of it is born from a genuine desire to help others, and the latter always wins out if there is a conflict - by this point it is almost expected for her to jump headfirst into dangerous situations and play the hero to help others, regardless of risk to herself or practical value.
Her loyalty is difficult to overstate as well - while Nayru is slow to make friends, casually charismatic but with a certain tendency to subtly distance herself from taking the step into true friendship, those that she does consider friends she would do anything for. The young dragon worships her mentor and adoptive mother Erim, the elderly dragon who found her years ago as a Lost Egg, and while she has no issue with talking shit and riling up those close to her, there is no real malice in her to add edge to those words - only her competitive nature flaring up.
While her distant past is shrouded in mystery, Nayru doesn't really worry about it that much - whether that is good or bad judgement remains to be seen. But to her, it is simple - she owes Erim everything, and she is happy as is; not perfect, perhaps, but she has a home, a loving mother, the family she craves, and a world that simply allows her to exist - to grow, to thrive, to fight and learn and hero it up on occasion. She views the world around her with more interest than her past, and is happier for it.
Nayru has a strong affinity for history in general, despite the seeming lack of interest in her own, and is fascinated by ruins and old stories as much as simpler pleasures like fighting and also fighting. Fluent in multiple languages, able to read many of the more relatively common writing systems found in ruins from both before and since the Lost Age, she cuts a surprisingly competent figure as an amateur researcher, completely uninterested in profit or even pragmatism so much as simply in love with learning - a tendency that was either instilled or at least cultivated in her by Erim and her endless stories.
While she knows little of Erim's actual history besides hints told by her mentor's countless stories, Nayru trusts her implicitly and gave up on prying long ago, eventually accepting that the older woman simply didn't want to go into much detail on it.
History: A mysterious backstory, parents either gone or dead, an orphan, strange powers for her kind - Nayru's origin story reads like the beginning of a stereotypical tragedy or a roaring revenge story. She apparently missed the memo. While it would be a bold-faced lie to say that Nayru has never once wondered what her actual origins were, who or what she was before Erim apparently found her wandering the desert as a child, all of that eventually simply ceased to matter when she realized that she had a family, a home, a mother - with Erim, who proved to her that spirit was a bond stronger even than blood ever could be, that life was what you made of it, rather than what it made of you.
Whether or not that realization was actually as profound as it sounded in her head, it was perhaps one of the greatest moments of maturation that Nayru ever experienced, and it has set the tone for her life ever since. Her early days, living with Erim in desert towns; her recent years, accompanying her mentor to a wondrous floating city in the sky. There are countless stories to be told - adventurers, shenanigans, friendships found and lost, but there was always that single beacon of stability in her life, the promise that no matter how bad her day went, no matter if she failed at her goals or simply wasn't strong enough, or even if she won at everything and returned triumphant - she always had a home to come back to, a mother's love to lose herself in.
Perhaps in another world, another time, Nayru's famously terrible judgement might have chafed under it - her deep-rooted insecurities forcing her to tear herself away from it, in some foolhardy penance or selfish attempted suicide - and in doing so, destroyed all that Erim had done for her. Perhaps she would have eventually realized just how much the ancient dragon had truly done for her, the true depths of her love, flouted by a stupid child who thought she knew better.
But she did not, and so - while she is flawed and sometimes weak and a little bad with people, well-meaning but as always plagued by her tendency to be carried away by emotion, this Nayru has found something resembling happiness in simply living, a blessing she would never trade away, and in that simplicity found an answer to her self-destructive nature.
Combat: Uncommon among dragons, Nayru does not have an alternate draconic form, or if she does, she does not know how to access it - there is no 'nuclear option' for her, and at a glance, if not for the arcane tattoos on her forearms, she could easily be mistaken for simply human. At least until a fight breaks out.
A lifetime of strenuous physical activity and survival in dangerous areas of the world has honed her body into a weapon all its own, and her learnings from wandering masters as well as her eternal search for the truth behind the historical Heavenly Lily's martial and spiritual teachings have left Nayru a master of martial arts, utilizing her heavily reinforced body to tear through foes with the need for any weapon but her body. In particular, she specializes in the fantastic equivalents to Bajíquán and Krav Maga, with bits of some other styles sewn in.
Bajíquán focuses heavily on extreme short-range power and makes more use of elbow and shoulder strikes than most flavors of martial arts, and is well known for striking points of vulnerability; neck and knee strikes are what she primarily prefers but thorax, shoulder, and hip strikes are also taught, and she is at least proficient in them. It is her preferred sparring style and she often uses it at the opening of a fight or when trying to fight nonlethally or at least stay low-key. Right up until she punches someone through a wall.
Krav Maga revolves more around brutal counters, mixing offense and defense to quickly and permanently disable opponent. It mixes in aspects of various grappling styles for better flexibility, and Nayru has mixed in more aspects of judo, akido, and brazilian jiujitsu in particular to dramatically amplify her ground game - when in this stance she often tries to take opponents to the ground to leverage her drastically superior strength while simultaneously crippling weapon-wielding foes who require a certain degree of range to fight optimally. Considering its focus on lethality and a complete lack of subtlety or restraint, Krav Maga is generally her fall back style when fights get serious.
In fights, though, she tends to get carried away, utilizing a combination of techniques from both styles in a more bestial approach, a savagely offensive budding style all her own that skimps on defense to maximize offensive power. Her exceptional strength and mobility allow her to abuse the forces of gravity and inertia much more heavily, making more use of leaping attacks and impromptu weapons to batter and break opponents.
Her draconic heritage manifests itself in a somewhat more limited fashion than for most dragons, with Nayru being exceptionally poor at breath attacks even by the standards of humanform dragons, unable to adequately harness that power internally without damaging her own body. Instead, Nayru focuses heavily on using it to enhance herself directly, using her own body as a conduit for the tremendous electrical power she naturally generates.
At a bare level it significantly enhances her reflexes and senses, but in a fight she harnesses bursts of power to drastically accelerate movements and add incredible weight to attacks, often surrounding herself in wreathes or coronas of electrical discharge as she pushes herself forwards, sometimes at the cost of damaging herself. The more she pushes it, the more power she gains, but the greater the ill effects on herself in the aftermath.
While she often fights unarmed, Nayru's greatest weapon may in fact be the ancient dragonbone spear she wields, as much an extension of herself as merely a tool; impossibly durable, razor sharp, and possessed of the common dragonbone tendency to conduct magic exceptionally well, it allows her to extend her reach significantly as well as almost intensifying her thunderous prowess. She can wield it with almost natural ease, the one partner she can always rely on - and yet - she does not, wielding it only rarely, for reasons all her own. If she does break it out, though, that's generally a good sign that she is deadly serious - which is not a good sign at all.
