Tabby
Derpsichord
----- Alma Hekmatyar -----
----- The Breath of Creation -----
[media]
[/media]
Motivation: Take Creation under her wing.
Intimacies:
- Emilia (daughter) - Emilia means the world to her, but while she bitterly regrets not having bid her daughter farewell, Alma knows that she could never have taken a ten-year-old girl with her on this journey. Not that simple reason stops her from blaming herself anyways, but that is hardly a surprise anymore.
- Karal Xerath (husband) - From commanding officer and supply requisition liaison to loving husband, he has been at her side for a decade. Even as their relationship twisted and grew, as emotion tainted reason with passion, they were of one mind. Each respected the other as an individual, and each understood the importance of the other's work, the personal sacrifices they made to keep those in their care safe and well. Alma misses him terribly, has thought more than once of simply returning to Lookshy to see him once more, but has managed to cage the tide of emotion - for now. Their relationship was once defined by love, respect, and trust in equal parts; Alma is terrified of finding the truth of the matter now.
- Radiant Orchid (old friend) - The taimyo who oversaw the First Force for decades and recommended Alma to the General Staff for citizenship eventually became the medic's closest friend. Despite the mystical aura and practiced reserve of the seemingly ageless general, she was an endless font of warmth and encouragement to steady Alma whenever the latter faltered - whenever the burden Alma bore seemed too much to carry alone, Orchid was there to help her carry it. She also somehow contrived to show up unannounced and unexpected every god damn time, one of many running jokes between the two being that the silver-haired woman had missed her calling as the world's greatest infiltrator. Even in the wake of the disastrous Exaltation, Radiant Orchid just so happened to be there when Alma needed her most, offering comfort and advice - and absolute silence regarding Alma's continued existence.
- Helping others - Angel of Mercy, mother hen, overbearing do-gooder; Alma has earned more than a few impromptu titles over the years as a result of her incessant drive to better others, some more flattering than others. She accepts them all with good humor, stifling the urge to turn those who complain into scalpel-flavored pincushions with herculean effort.
- Medicine - Alma has spent her entire adult life learning to maintain and repair the human body; it is perhaps her greatest calling, the most direct way she can save those who might otherwise be lost. It is oddly relaxing - she is completely desensitized to blood and gore in its entirety, finding (successful) operations to be blissfully simple; while the path to victory may be strewn with difficulties, her tendency to hurl herself entirely into the task leaves little room for worry or doubt.
- Explosions - bitches love explosions.
- Explosives - Alma became known at least as much for her volatile concoctions during her stint in the First as for her skill with sharp instruments. What began as an exercise in attempting to further her medical knowledge and toolset burgeoned into something between hobby and driving passion; she finds tinkering every bit as relaxing as surgery, as well as an avenue more suited for releasing the endless torrent of creativity that bubbles incessantly within her than the necessarily limited nature of sewing people up can often allow.
- NOT CLOCKS - seriously, fuck clocks.
Personality: Caring, charismatic - and caustic. Alma is a study in contrasts that define her as much as she defines them; decades of loss and hardship have ground away the naivete and naked joy she once found in life, but in so doing have merely polished the iron will that sustains her. Countless moments of loss have left her struggling to open herself to others - and yet the warmth she emanates is palpable, her inability to not meddle in an attempt to make things right a quality - a habit- she has never come close to overcoming. Disarming humor keeps others out of her heart even as she indulges in her desire to help them, and her innate magnetism pulls others ever inwards as she tries to find a way to fill the gaps left behind by the things she has lost.
And yet she is not merely an ethereal creature of love and tolerance - Alma is scarred, physically and emotionally, by the nightmares she has endured. Endured, and grown strong in; she feeds on stress, repurposes it as the unyielding steel that defines her, determined to never yield to the weakness that has so many times come to swallow her whole. There is love, but so too is there bitterness, austerity, ice - and amidst the warring values of her nature, a sort of forged maturity that gives her words and actions curious weight. Time and time again she has been forced to make brutal decisions, to prioritize only those who could be more easily saved, to watch those she cared for die, and she no longer shies away from them. They still cut deep, but her heart is already scarred, and what is one more wound to bear if doing so saves another from that cruel fate? Alma is more than capable of bringing absolute resolution to bear, to doing what must be done no matter the cost to herself, encasing her emotions inside a fractured prison as necessary. As a mortal, she earned the moniker of the Angel of Mercy for her work - but so too did the sobriquet of Angel of Death haunt her, an uncomfortable truth she was happy to leave behind in the First Field Force.
An unyielding drive towards excellence has carried her far in life, from clockmaker's daughter to decorated field medic and alchemical expert to heights not often reached by mortals in the Age of Strife - forged in the fires of war and unrelenting stress, Alma learned years ago that only the strongest will would not crack under stress, and despite the lingering resentment at how much as gone wrong in her life, she grudgingly accepts much of that hardship as necessary to give her the strength to persevere through each problem that crops up, each greater than the last; she is uncomfortably aware that without those lesser evils she would have been crushed by the greater. Whether it be an awkward form of maturity or a desperate attempt at rationalizing, Alma values her continuing sanity too much to delve too deeply into that particular conundrum, preferring to leave it at a necessary evil.
Despite all that she has been through, the armor of will she wears as the only hauberk she needs, her natural charisma and raw magnetism shine ever brighter; the girl Alma once was may have been forged by hatred, but she never died - the unending caring and bottomless affection that once defined her still exist within her, refusing to be silenced by an uncaring world. She may curse them for the pain they bring, but Alma cannot help but indulge in those qualities any more than she can honestly dislike them; it was a vague urge to help that took her down the path of medicine in the first place, and to know that her goals have not yet dissolved in the harsh realities of life brings Alma a vindictive pleasure that she secretly delights in; an act of vicious stubbornness, a quiet denouncement of a world so terrible it cannot abide happiness and joy for more than an effervescent moment in time.
---------------------------------
Behavior: Alma communicates as much through body language as with words; she often gesticulates throughout conversations and explanations alike - pacing while thinking, carelessly waving away concerns, playing with her hair or rolling a gore-encrusted scalpel across her fingers with alarmingly practiced ease. She speaks with passion and sincerity; words filled with hope, backed by unearthly charisma and the all-encompassing warmth that suffuses them. While prone to lapsing into technical jargon, Alma picks and enunciates her sentences with care; she is atrocious at lying and manipulation, but simply channeling her feelings into speech has carried her so far.
Possessed of an incisive sense of humor, combined with the acquired tendency to keep people at arm's length despite her natural urge to pull them closer, she often fits her words with multiple meanings - euphemisms, double entendres, and subtle jokes alike vie for dominance against the bitterness that has crept upon her outlook, tinging her words with a hint of the sardonic. She makes a sincere effort to deal with stress via humor, but depending on her mood it can range from innocent to grim without any real outward signs - at least, as far as she is aware. Radiant Orchid has always been able to read her like a book, somewhat of an in-joke between the two close friends, and even her daughter, Emelia, has an obnoxious tendency to see through her mother's paltry tricks with unnerving ease.
She is, on the other hand, very good at walking in a businesslike manner. That has to count for something, right?
---------------------------------
Backstory: Clocks. Always with the fucking clocks. Alma was not quite the daughter one might have asked for; as a child, she never saw the point in tinkering around with a bunch of dusty machinery, much less doing it for a lifestyle. Still, she was pleasant, trustworthy, and possessed of a burning curiosity; not terrible qualities, as they go. She would later count herself fortunate that her father tolerated her youthful disagreeability and strove to instill some measure of responsibility in her; even as a helot she came to understand that it was her duty to serve her city as best she could. For the father, making clocks. For the daughter - becoming a field medic. Alma still finds it amusing irony that in the end, she ended up remarkably similar to her father; the only real difference is that her work centered on the biological where his stayed strictly in the realm of the mechanical.
The military, however, was less forgiving than her father had been. Alma was nearly crushed by the weight of it - the drills, the arduous physical exertion, the roughness of men who were accustomed to the brutal lifestyle. Curiosity and questioning were no longer rewarded, or even tolerated - only excellence and drive, strength and loyalty; to the unit, to the Legion, to Lookshy itself. It was not until weeks into her training that she realized they asked nothing of her that she could not provide - that despite the seeming cruelty of those there, they expected nothing that they could not themselves give. A week later, she realized that she had stopped crying at night; by the time their basic training was over, Alma had found the reserve of quiet courage necessary to persevere, to dare to excel, and she has never once looked back.
She was fifteen at the time.
Life in the First Field Force was more demanding than her training had ever hinted at. Experimental technology and unrelentingly mounting expectations combined to draw every ounce of willpower and dedication she could find within herself to not buckle under the stress, even as the ghastly scenes of the critically wounded haunted her nightmares, but the realization of how petty and worthless her fear was in the face of how important her work was served to steel her nerves, and Alma found herself settling into her new lifestyle before she realized it. The twisted faces frozen in eternal horror and agony she saw by day returned to her by night, but she had found a job worth doing - people, just like her, who had also found it in themselves to persevere through unrelenting challenges, men and women who were literally giving their lives for the very principles she struggled to uphold; to give in to her fear and loathing would be to discard everything they had fought for as worthless, unimportant, to make a mockery of the very concepts she had held to in order to stay sane.
An angel of mercy on the fields of total apocalypse - Alma found that her own hard-earned composure and innate charisma helped earn her purchase amongst her peers, as well as those she worked to save. Mortal or no, time and time again she strove against time and -seemingly - Fate itself to save those she could, to ease the passing of those she could not... and in making acquaintances, she opened herself to the greater pain of watching them fall - and fall they did, whether to malfunctioning equipment or disastrous skirmishes, lucky arrows from doomed foes and friendly fire alike. More and more she came to realize the inadequacy of mortal medicine; serious illness and catastrophic physiological damage alike were far beyond the scope of what could be easily sawed off or sewn up, and often there was nothing whatsoever to be done for the more horrifically mutilated than futile attempts to ease their agonized passing or grant them a quick and merciful escape from torment unending.
She turned to thaumaturgy and alchemy alike, determined to find a solution. All she found were myths and folk talks; legends of healing magics, miracle salves, old wive's tales that even their rudimentary medical science could debunk. Within those fields, though, Alma found something more proactive, turning her search from miracle cures to weapons. Alchemical grenades that unleashed unnatural fire or shearing shards of jade, hextech devices that could coat areas in ice or shroud them in smoke - tools to control and dominate small engagements, even protect herself and those she cared for during field runs to collect wounded on active battlefields. She would not be entirely helpless, Alma vowed - if she could not heal, she would remove the necessity of it.
Her vicious brilliance as an alchemist and tireless dedication to the well-being of those under her wing could not be ignored, and Alma found herself the recipient of more than a few promotions, rapidly assuming control of the First's medic corps... and earning a field laboratory after one too many effective uses of her experimental gear.
Constant requests for ever more esoteric reagents and equipment kept Alma in contact with a wide variety of officers, mortal and Terrestrial Exalted alike; a running stream of minor alchemical incidents gradually led to a running joke that entering her field laboratory was more dangerous than singlehandedly assaulting the Realm itself armed with only a smile, but results were difficult to argue with. As Alma continued to broaden her horizons and link up with more of the sorcerer-engineers that held lore she could use, her chaotic experiments took a turn for the devastating, now ranging from alchemical explosives that rivaled low-grade essence weaponry to attempts to mimic Terrestrial circle spells. Without essence of her own, there was little she could do to power truly powerful weaponry herself, but bound elementals and aid from her compatriots filled in the gap, and as success blossomed, she found it easier to negotiate ever more.
Among it all, the businesslike relationship she held with her taizei, a Terrestrial named Xerath, gradually grew into something more; he was young and handsome and intelligent, and she was young and thoroughly smitten. Long nightly discussions on their respective work turned torrid in the blink of an eye, but the First was not exactly a place to settle down and raise a family - and neither of them even wanted to give up their work for that, united as much in their love for their city as their burgeoning feelings for each other. She was happy, for a time, relishing her success - but never satisfied with what she felt were mediocre contributions, unable to understand or harness the First Age weaponry and equipment that the Exalted held as their birthright.
Stubborn determination brought success, though, her absolute refusal to accept her own limits as much a boon to her work as it was detrimental to her sleep. While she never quite managed to grasp her goal of absolute healing, constant experimentation yielded everything from healing salves of - limited effectiveness for minor wounds - and strengthening elixirs to toxins deadly enough to dissolve beakers, countertops, and floors alike - which led to yet another awkward set of explanations as to why she needed yet more renovations on things that had just been replaced a month ago in the exploding helmet fiasco.
Curiously, the whole issue came to a head not with a court martial, but a recommendation from her taimyo leading to a decision by the General Staff to grant her citizenship - and a polite invitation to return to Lookshy proper, with its far more fitting facilities, rather than continuing to terrorize the good men and women of the First with incessant experimental detonations. Field test subjects had been becoming difficult to acquire anyways, so with great pragmatism and dignity, she accepted her honors - and decoration for her service - and returned to the city of her youth to continue at least one aspect of her work, determined to volunteer at hospitals as often as she had the time in an attempt to carry on the other half.
She was married the next day.
Marrying into one of the Great Houses came with repercussions, but her accomplishments barely convinced the relevant eugenics program to accept the unexpected union, and their first daughter, the energetic and effervescent Emilia, was born less than a year later.
Peace came for her at last, but as time passed, a lurking undercurrent of dissatisfaction fouled the nirvana of what she had assumed would be a perfect life - not dislike of her family, but with the limitations that continued to hold her back. Even free of the horrors of frontline work, the simple knowledge of how many of the First's soldiers continued to die haunted her, and she was already at the peak of what she could imagine accomplishing as a mortal; without access to essence of her own or magic like her husband's, there was only so much she could do. Resentment and helplessness built up within her, knowing how little she had really changed, how little she could change; she was happy, and yet not at the same time.
The Sun came for her in the dead of night, blinding light of a vision so great she could not begin to comprehend it. A glimpse at what she could become, must become - her mind was overwhelmed by the vastness of it, and yet as it was stretched, it grew to begin to encompass the terrible purpose that was ignited within her, the Sun itself speaking of using her gifts for something more than mere alchemy, for more than Lookshy itself; his purpose encompassed Creation itself, an endless panorama of scenery she had never dreamt of, centuries beyond imagining of endless toil - and at the end, a world that she had helped forge. It filled her, spilled out of her, scathing her laboratory with the heat of the sun itself even as it burned away her mortal existence, but it could not remove her all too human fear.
Faced with a responsibility too vast to even comprehend, filled with the might of the Sun himself in a body that had never been intended to hold it, Alma scorched what remained of her laboratory with Solar fire, mad with fear, with pain, with confusion. Her escape is still a dull memory filled with flashes of fear and regret, of knowing she had done something terrible and yet not having the courage to face it, but by the time she made it to the gates she had calmed down, begun to plan; she knew that she could not return after what just happened, and that news of what had just happened would spread quickly, ensuring that she would not be able to leave - but the guards knew nothing yet, and as a well-known citizen it was effortless to make an expeditious exit. She was running, and Alma knew it - allowing cowardice to guide her actions where she had survived so much death, and yet the horrific enormity of what she had seen was impossible.
A responsibility, not to hundreds, but to millions - not to a single city, but to Creation itself. To a patriot, to one who had spent their entire lives believing in the supremacy of Lookshy on every level, realizing how little it meant compared to all creation was a shock beyond compare. More, the concept of taking responsibility for so many; she had taken every death in the First hard, and even beginning to comprehend how many millions more were at stake was not something she had the strength to bear alone.
She fled.