Maria

"I am Maria of House Antioch, bearer of the Raven's seal, Novice of caste-- okay never mind, this is silly."

Maria is a newly awoken witch studying at Mooncrest academy. She is the protagonist of A Tale of Witches and the story is primarily told from her perspective.

Appearance
Maria has dark green eyes (though she would consider them brown) and chestnut hair which she keeps cut short for practical reasons. Her skin is fairly tan from training to become a guard and has a collection of scars from various escapades. Some of the more notable scars include a large one on her back from falling onto a sharp rock, a small scar on her hand from a gunshot wound and another on her shoulder from a crossbow bolt. Luckily her face has no major scarring. Maria also has a very toned and muscular physique from her years of training and daily exercise regime though she is quite embarrassed by this.

Clothing
Maria has very plain clothing especially compared to her highborn friends. Almost all of her clothing is undecorated and dyed in shades of brown.

Normal Outfit: A simple brown linen dress with leather shoes and brown stockings. She wears this as her everyday clothes.

Training Outfit: Loose linen garments that tie off around the ankles, arms and throat. Probably a shade of brown. Normally worn barefoot.

Personality
Maria is a very airheaded person and her thoughts are prone to trailing off on tangents related to her past in the middle of conversations. This has caused her to appear gloomy and distant, but she is actually quite prone to bursts of excitement most notably when on the topic of her friend Eriadne. Most of this is tied to her lack of social skills especially along the lines of reading others body language and her lack of emotiveness. Though she does have issues with her self-image often describing herself as ugly and useless especially in relation to her friends. She often describes herself as being unworthy of her friendships because of this. During stressful and dangerous situations Maria becomes much more confident and sure of her actions and decisions. Because of this people look to her for leadership during these times sometimes to a completely unreasonable degree.

Maria has a very strong sense of honour and duty driving her to protect and help people as much as she can while maintaining law and order. Though this has caused her personal conflict many times as she witnessed the extremes of these ideals during her life. She attempts to maintain a balance between the two. Although when pushed she will tend towards helping those who need it over upholding the law, especially in relation to people she cares very deeply about like her friends.

Maria morning rites in particular her meditation are very important for her mental well being. If these are not completed during their appropriate times she starts to become increasingly lost and confused during the day particularly during social encounters. This is likely caused by her naturally airheaded and awkward thought process combining with her deep training shifting out of her subconscious as she become more stressed and agitated. Maria's religion plays a very important role in maintaining her clarity of thought through the use of meditation and memorization of quotes and wisdom to help her focus and guide her decisions.

Early life
Maria was raised by her mother (Aristea Lagidis) and father (Andros Lagadis) with UNDEFINED SIBLINGS, at a farm owned by her grandparents during her early life. This part of Maria's life was largely uneventful though she did manage to teach herself how to swim in a nearby lake. Maria and her parents moved into a small townhouse in the city proper when her father was promoted in rank.

Guard Training
At some point, Maria decided to follow in her fathers footsteps and become a guard herself. With the help or many instructors Maria learned the skills of her profession such as weapon use and improved her physical fitness. At the same time, her father taught Maria the basics of reading and writing and her mother passed on her cooking skills as she was employed as a cook in a nearby noble house. During this time Maria managed to blunder into two separate robberies gaining some of her more notable scars, the first was a mugging where she was shot in her right hand by a gun and the second was the attempted robbery of a money lender where she was hit in the left shoulder by a crossbow bolt (Which had very nearly ended her life.). She also managed to give herself a large scar on her back from falling out of a tree onto a small rock.

Deep Training
During her guard training, Maria made the decision that she wished to receive standard guard deep training to augment her skills. Though her father was not happy with the decision initially he agreed to allow Maria to go through with it. The training was performed at a local temple dedicated to the god Sharsee. The training itself is detailed in a log by her father here.

Adrien the Freetrader
Maria formed a close friendship with the freetrader Adrien Lamere during her time in the city, even coming to see him as a brother. They had many adventures together during Maria's training as a guard many of them quite dangerous.

The worst experience of Maria's life was when Adrien was ambushed by a group of brigands outside of the city walls where he was savagely beaten and lost both of his eyes. During his recovery, Maria became well known by the hospital staff as she brought him food and drink every day to improve on the small hospital diet. Though he did recover and he even got a pair of prosthetic eyes powered by magic, though they can be quite unsettling to look at.

City-wide Gangwar
Maria accidentally sparked a city-wide gang war by inspiring a group of seriously scared and frightened traders and small scale business owners that felt like they had to lash out. Leading the paranoid gangsters to assume that is was some form of false flag attack from a rival gang. Though the war was ended and the city returned to order a large number of lives were lost and a huge amount of property damage cause.

Becoming a Witch
Details to follow.

After becoming a witch, Maria was ritually disowned by her family and sent to Mooncrest Academy by train.

Skills and Abilities
Maria's Character Sheet

Traits

 * Streetwise: Maria knows the codes and customs of the street, being adept at communicating and bartering with all manner of fringe elements as if it had been born there. A highly useful trait quintessential when one needs to perform undercover investigation or enlist the help of the population when combating a threat bigger than the transgressions of the petty criminals used in doing so.
 * Weaponlore: Maria knows the use of one or more weapons well and is adept in naming and judging the traits of several others.
 * Chantseeker: It allows Maria to see magic use and learn and cast spells faster. She can even sense passive enchantments somewhat, as seen when she first opened the dorm room door and felt things "shift" inside the mechanism.
 * Athletics: Maria has a high degree of control over her body as well as a high degree of functional strength and dexterity.
 * Atavist : Maria's physical abilities transcend the limitations of her body, assuming she's at a sufficiently high level of mental concentration. See Will Abilities.

Skills

 * Weapon Basics: Maria is trained in the use of a few different weapons though she specializes in pole-arms and crossbows.
 * Law Basics: A collection of knowledge she gained during her guard training.
 * Cooking Mastery: Maria learned how to cook from her mother who works in a noble's household. She is capable of cooking by smell.
 * Swimming Basics: Maria taught herself how to swim while she was still living in her grandparents farm.
 * Literacy Basics: Maria was taught basic reading and writing at temple school.

Disciplines/Will Abilities

 * Preternatural Strength: A skill that raises Maria's physical strength beyond what should be possible for a girl her age. (Roughly as strong as a trained woman in her mid-twenties)
 * Cloudwalk: A stealth skill that allows Maria to move silently and avoid detection. It can also be used to cross dangerous surfaces like ground glass.
 * Fear Gaze "Killing Intent": A ability that allows her to project her rage through her body language. Though she lacks the training and aggression to use it to it's full extent.
 * Heart of the Storm: An ability that lends Maria a nearly impenetrable aura of calm in stressful situations. Allies are automatically more likely to listen to her, even the most stubborn ones feeling it hard to escape her influence in this state. Auto-triggered by excess stress.

Deep Training
Maria has standard high-intensity guard deep training focused around handling different combat situations among other skills related to guard work.

Deep Training can be accessed via the silver Trigger Pendant she always wears.
 * Threat Rank: Allows Maria to assess a situation with extreme speed separating enemies, neutrals, and friends within seconds of contact while ranking them according to dangerousness. Fallible, but extremely accurate. One of the reasons you shouldn't ever try to continue self-defense efforts once you realize a Guard is around. People have a tendency to turn into the direction they are looking which can end up unfortunate if you've got a ranged weapon. (No commentary on current political events intended).


 * Attack Adviser: Allows Maria to use the information gained through Threat Ranking to load up a suitable pattern of response from long-term memory taking into account the number of insurgents, the number of guards and the number of neutrals in an encounter as well as present weapons on both sides.


 * Silent Observer: Memory-based filter/cataloging Program that takes in relevant details and saves them for later easy retrieval by other parts of the system. This includes information on response patterns by non-guard friendlies, potentially useful escape routes in a new home or the layout of a city block.
 * A Hunter's Mind: Maria enters a state of hyper-concentrated awareness in which her morality stops setting the pace of her actions. Can only be accessed involuntarily.

Mysteries

 * Ended Separation: The witch has learned that the differences between past, present and future, as well as the difference between herself and others, is an arbitrary assumption and knows how to exploit this knowledge. Uses include seeing into the immediate future, entering the minds of others or even exerting influence this way. Maria gained this mystery during her first sensing class.
 * Mystery of Paradox: A Mystery gained through Maria's affinity to AKAZU's realm. Meaning is currently unknown.

Rotes

 * Futuresense: A spell that allows Maria to see a projection of future events about a second before they happen. This ability counters itself as the projections account for each other. Learnt during Maria's first sensing class.
 * Aberration Barrier: Forms a small shield approximately one foot in diameter which can be moved around the casters body. It is completely impenetrable by anything less than a god, but it has to be held in place by the casters will. Maria was taught this rote by Eriadne during dinner on the first night at Mooncrest.

Notable Possessions

 * Silver Pendant: A pendant connected to her deep training which allows her to access and edit certain parameters on the subconscious level. It follows the stand guard design of a hand and is connected to a medium length silver chain with a ball clasp. She keeps it on her or within arms reach at all times.

Trivia

 * Maria's alignment is Order on the Paths of Protection and Strength..
 * Maria's Birthday is on the Lesser Junction of the Gorgon's Star with the Sign of the High Priest. As such, her birthday actually has a variance of +-10 days. For simplicity's sake, it's on the 4th day of the 6th month.
 * Seems to be quite vulnerable to the effects of raised deviancy scores.
 * Her Pa is the best dad in the known world. Her Ma is also pretty awesome.
 * Likes beef bowls
 * Starts most threads with "My friends -cause that's what they are-"