Trisana Chandler (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
stormandwind) wrote2021-06-08 11:00 am
stormandwind) wrote2021-06-08 11:00 am
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lastvoyages
User Name/Nick: Tri
User DW:tricia868
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tricia868
E-mail: tricia868 [at] gmail [dot] com
Other Characters: Taura, Ulla
Character Name: Trisana Chandler
Series: Circle of Magic
Age: 18 (22 if we count Barge time)
From When?: post-Will of the Empress, once she's back home in Summersea (and post-her previous stay on the Barge)
Inmate/Warden: Warden. Tris is prickly, sometimes defensive, and not always a people person. She is, however, incredibly protective and caring, with a nurturing core buried down underneath all the barbs. She has a very strong moral compass and is quite stubborn. She might hit rocky points in any given relationship, with frustration on both parts, but if Tris can find some chance of helping them, she's the last person to give up or admit defeat.
Item: a book: Daring the Wheel: Those Who Defied Nature's Magic
Abilities/Powers: Tris has what is referred to as ‘ambient magic,’ meaning that her power comes from the elements surrounding her. She has an affinity for most meteorological phenomena and stores power from various natural forces in her braids. She keeps lightning, breezes and stronger winds, tidal force, hurricane force, earthquake force, and the energy of molten rock from the earth's core on hand for when she needs them. Tidal force is particularly dangerous to Tris. She can draw extra energy from it when she reaches her limit, but it will never equal a good night’s sleep and a break from magical workings. What she gains in endurance now she will pay for by collapsing later. There's even a limit that isn't necessarily based on how much of it she has stored in the braids that serve as her mage kit. Tris has had to admit to herself that, "there was only so much of the ocean’s strength a human body could stand before the blood turned to salt water and the muscles to braids of kelp."
Lightning and storms have the potential for lethal battle magic. Tris is capable of creating whirlpools and aiming lightning at ships, destroying them. She won’t use her power to kill unless absolutely necessary, and even then she will seriously hesitate. Tris will not act if there is a chance of making innocents victim to her power. She does have some defensive ability as well, and this she will not hesitate to use. Tris can catch cannonballs in a swirl of winds, keeping them from hitting their targets.
She can serve as a human furnace, so long as she has magma heat to use.
Tris loves weather. Breezes become something resembling friends once she carries them long enough, and she will happily stand on a rooftop in a thunderstorm and act as a human lightning rod. Earthquakes, though, tend to make her ill; she can usually sense one coming shortly before the shocks are felt.
Because of the incident in which Sandry spun together the power of the four young mages, Tris retains the ability to speak mind-to-mind with her foster siblings and to borrow bits of thread, magic, or metal magic for her own workings. She can, for instance, use a coin and her will to spin a strong storm down into a thin thread of storm power, roll that power into a magical construct of a ball of yarn, and then, when it is under control, store it for later. This allows her to handle forces that would under other circumstances be too much for her to manage. Removing a ship-killer of a storm from the ocean does not leave Tris responsible for deaths as it would were she to simply move it elsewhere.
Tris can create a disc of moving air to hold her and use winds to boost this disc upward within an enclosed space like a tower, an elevator to use in place of stairs. It is not practical in terms of magic expenditure and conservation of energy, but it does give an example of the way her power could be used to circumvent certain physical limitations if she were to be trapped or injured. Or just as a fun challenge to herself.
She can keep cool on especially hot days by gathering moving breezes around herself, and keep dry on rainy days by redirecting raindrops as if they have met an invisible shield. Such a shield can be extended to cover others in her party.
Tris can hear voices and see images on the wind; the images give her a headache and she often wears special glasses to avoid them. Neither of these abilities gives her any power of prediction, they just have the potential to give her insight into what’s happening out of range of her non-magical hearing and vision. She may be twitchy from visions if she does not have the tinted spectacles with her. Tris always keeps an ear out for what's going on around her. She can tug the puff of air created by someone's breath toward her, and either eavesdrop or twist it to broadcast whatever they've said to anyone in hearing range.
Tris also has incredibly good magical awareness. This could be in part related to the fact that lightning is said to strike living things because it senses the shadow of itself in them, and Tris is so closely bound to weather as an extra sense that she may feel the electrical impulses in people and animals. It could also be due to the fact that living things all have some inherent magic, great or small. Whatever the cause, if she concentrates hard enough, she can feel the locations, the energy reserves, and even sometimes the emotions of the people and animals around her. She rarely accesses this ability.
Like any power, of course, her weather magic obviously has limits. If she pushes past them, she could very well die. Tris once stopped the tides. It wasn’t for long, but she managed it. The once boulder filled cove in which she tried is now called Pebble Beach, and Tris was unconscious and then very weak for some time afterward. That was the best case scenario; she got lucky.
In terms of more mundane abilities, Tris can pick locks and knows very basic self defense. She speaks several languages. She reads quickly, and learns even quicker. She can blow glass. She's an excellent bargainer, to the extent that even the born-and-raised Trader in her adopted family lets Tris negotiate at market. She's a very good cook and housekeeper. She has served as a research assistant in infectious disease labs, and knows how to make a few basic medicines.
Personality: Tris always had a hard time getting close to people or trusting them, which is not surprising given her childhood experiences and later reactions to her power. Her magical abilities make people very uncomfortable in her world, and Tris herself does not do much to dispel that impression. With grown mages defensive, jealous, and sometimes hostile after realizing the extent of her power, it’s no wonder Tris decided to go to the mages’ university, Lightsbridge, “under an ordinary name, so [she] can get an ordinary license, so [she] can earn [her] living as an ordinary mage.” (This ambition changed during her previous stay on the Barge. She still intends to go to university, but she'll do it as herself. She's done trying to make herself smaller in order to fit other people's expectations.) Her most newly acquired skill, scrying images on the wind, is so rare that she refused to mention it even to her foster siblings for quite some time. They’d been separated so long that she didn’t have faith her chosen family would react differently than the other mages she met in her travels. She still loved them; they’re her real family, after all. She just didn’t know them inside and out anymore. Since her previous stay on the Barge, she has opened back up to her siblings and let them in completely.
Tris for most of her teen years was not interested in romance, or at least not confident enough to pursue or accept it. The only boys who had approached her prior to her previous stay on the Barge did so as a cruel joke, and Tris didn’t want to admit how much it hurt. Her relationships on the Barge did a great deal to heal old wounds and instill some confidence in Tris.
Sharply intelligent with a sincere love of reading and learning, Tris taught her foster brother to read and appreciate books as well. She's detail oriented and makes an excellent research assistant, regardless of whether the field is an area of expertise for her. Her motto, if anything, is "New learning never hurt anybody." She is productive. Prior to being given away to the Living Circle temples, Tris earned her keep with various family members by doing chores. She hates sitting idle, and even as an adult mage in places with cooks, housekeepers, and servants, she can often be found in the kitchen keeping her hands busy. She tends to go a little stir crazy on the Barge, needing things to keep busy. She doesn’t like wasting time or resources, and she doesn’t like skirting issues that could be addressed directly.
Tris takes almost childlike glee in storms and other interesting bits of weather, provided they are not endangering anyone.
Underneath the sometimes intimidating exterior, Tris is very nurturing and protective. She has been caretaker to a baby bird or two, a dog, a living glass dragon, an orphaned little girl, a grown man new to his magical power, and everyone in her temple family at some point. She may seem grouchy, but the grouchiness gentles whenever somebody really needs an understanding ear or some willing help.
Despite her temper, Tris has seen enough of the world that that she doesn't find much shocking. Her brother, Briar, thinks of Tris as someone he can tell "the most horrific things, and she would never laugh, be shocked, or withdraw from him." She'll listen, but Tris does have opinions on the well-being of the people around her, and she'll let them know in no uncertain terms. She believes in seeking help, including psychiatric help, when it's needed. She won't hesitate to say if she thinks it is, or if she disagrees with a treatment plan.
Tris believes in fairness and dislikes disparity in the treatment of social classes. (She had to get over her own judgmental attitude to reach this point. Squeamish about filth and poor hygiene, Tris was on the receiving end of one of her foster mother Lark's very rare cutting lectures after making a comment about how the poor breed disease.) She will do whatever she can to protect individuals who are unjustly placed in difficult positions; shield spells and bullying with the threat of lightning don’t always make friends, but if they’re the only option, at least Tris knows it will work. She does try to employ such tactics very sparingly. Her power elicits enough fear and uneasiness without any encouragement on her part. Tris certainly doesn’t want to make it any worse.
Because of the massive destructive potential of her power, Tris received a lot of mentoring in the ethical implications of its use. She knows that altering the weather patterns in her current location alters surrounding weather patterns, and Tris will not move around storms or rains for her own convenience or for any but the most dire reasons without first ascertaining that they will not cause droughts or floods elsewhere. Tris makes a very modest income providing ships’ captains with winds and carefully rearranging cloud systems to bring rain to crops, rather than exercising her far more lucrative potential for battle magic.
Tris was horrified when she first killed people with lightning. Grief-maddened after the betrayal and subsequent death of the only family member who had ever shown her kindness, she attacked a pirate fleet with her power and the assistance of her foster siblings. Seeing the deaths she could cause in an instant was a very sobering experience for her, and Tris never wants to be the source of such an event again.
Barge Reactions: Tris does remember her previous time on the Barge. It's helped with her self confidence, with softening some of her prickly sides, with finding a purpose for her life, and with finding people she wants to share her life with. She loves what the Barge has given her, but she hates both the magical sensory deprivation of it and the loss of control. Still, she'll take all of this in stride. She's taken steps to mitigate the harm she could cause in the event of a flood eroding her control.
It will be even easier to get her involved with Barge events this time around, because she already cares about some of the people on board, and she won't have the same adjustment period.
Deal: When Tris first came on board the Barge, her deal was to heal Zhegorz's mind. But now, Zhegorz has eked out a place and a purpose for himself. She's still mulling over the logistics of her new deal, but she wants to prevent anyone else from ending up like Zhegorz. Likes she so easily could have ended up herself. She wants a method of alerting people to undiscovered mages, so people don't keep slipping through the cracks untrained until their power drives them crazy, or their families disown them, or they kill themselves or someone else.
History: Tris was born into a merchant family in Ninver, in Capchen. She was the center of a series of bizarre meteorological occurrences from a very young age, but when tested for magic by the most expensive mage in the area, she was found to have none. She heard voices, as well. Thought to be crazy, possessed, haunted, or some other form of ill omen, Tris was shunted from one family member to another until none remained willing to take her in. Still a child, she was then given to the Stone Circle temple with the understanding that her family never wanted her back.
She fit in no better in the temple than she had in her own family. The girls in the dormitory made fun of the chubby redhead whose own family hadn’t wanted her. Tris felt no more loved or wanted than she ever had. And when Tris lost control of her emotions, the elements around her echoed her inner turbulence. Strong winds rushed through the dormitories when girls talked about her. Lightning struck trees when she stared at them too long while upset. Eventually, even the temple didn’t want her, and sent her to Winding Circle in Emelan, near the city of Summersea, which was “better equipped to handle cases like hers.”
This new temple was only a repetition of the previous, right up until Tris was removed from the dormitories and brought to live in Discipline Cottage under care of temple dedicates Lark and Rosethorn. With her in her new home were three other children who had not managed to adapt to temple life. There, eventually, she would have a family bonded not by blood but by love and loyalty and magic.
Of course, families like that aren’t formed in a day. Tris and the other three children, Daja, Sandry, and Briar, had plenty of misunderstandings and arguments. Lark and Rosethorn had their hands full for awhile. Once Tris and the others were ready to accept that they had magic, each was trained by a powerful mage. Tris was apprenticed to Niklaren Goldeye, the man who had first brought her to Winding Circle and tried to give her hope she’d be wanted.
The relationship between the four children gradually became friendship, and when they were buried underground in a massive earthquake, Sandry had to spin their magics together to make them stronger and give them the power to stay alive. This opened the door for mind-to-mind communication between them and an amplification of their individual and joint powers.
Tris had contact with her biological family again in the form of her cousin Aymery. She allowed herself to get her hopes up but was betrayed along with the rest of Winding Circle when Aymery let a pirate fleet into the temple only to be betrayed by his pirate allies and killed. Earlier battles with the pirates had been her first taste of battle magic; Tris was able to keep cannonballs from landing within temple grounds. When Aymery died, Tris destroyed the pirate flagship, killing those onboard. She was haunted by nightmares of what she’d done, and worked in the infirmary caring for the injuries that inevitably followed the battle. She worked with casualties both pirate and otherwise.
She lived at Discipline Cottage for several more years, and the people she shared it with are her family. Foster mothers and foster siblings. She loves them all.
At thirteen, an unheard of age for this accomplishment, Tris and her siblings were granted their mage’s medallions, making them fully accredited mages responsible under the laws that governed such. Following this, Tris traveled with her mentor, staying in the city of Tharios for awhile as Niko attended a conference. While there a fourteen year old Tris took on a student older than her, a glassworker named Keth who had developed lightning magic as a result of being struck by lightning. She also rescued and kept his accidental magical working, a glass dragon with lightning running through her veins; Tris named the creature Chime.
With Keth and a member of the local law enforcement, Tris played a part in catching and bringing to justice a murderer who targeted performers in the entertainment district. Along the way, she temporarily adopted the daughter of Keth’s housemate, one of the murderer’s victims. The little girl, Glaki, possessed the potential for academic magic, and when Tris returned to Winding Circle, she left Glaki with Lark to be cared for. She also left her dog, Little Bear, feeling it would be unfair to leave Glaki with nothing and no one familiar.
During their travels, Tris had encountered a lot of professional jealousy. She was a very powerful mage who dealt with forces that most people couldn't touch. She had earned her medallion younger than anyone they'd met. When she began learning to scry on the wind she felt she had to keep a secret of it, one more advanced magic that set her apart from everyone she met.
Her interpersonal conflicts were not limited to the professional arena either. The only times Tris showed any interest in a boy romantically went terribly wrong. In one case, his friends teased him until he started ignoring her. In the other, he and his friends lured her into an ambush and dumped honey on her, saying even a gallon of it "wasn't enough sweets for a tub like [her]." Tris doesn't trust easily in general, but she especially doesn't trust easily romantically.
When they returned home, Tris could no longer remain a resident in the temple unless she planned on taking vows there. No adult and already accredited mage could. She moved in with her foster-sister Daja, whose work as a smith mage had let her buy a home that would comfortably hold the whole family. Time apart and difficult experiences on everyone’s part left the once seamlessly unified group rather fractured; tension between Tris and her siblings was high. Finishing their growing up separately had left them near-strangers, and they would have to get to know each other again before they could be comfortable opening up their minds to their siblings.
At the request of Sandry's uncle, Duke Vedris, all of her siblings accompanied Sandry to Namorn to appease her cousin, Empress Berenene. Tris had no patience for the maneuvering within the court and avoided it as much as possible, though she impressed everyone with her weather-work, and frightened some of them.
While in Namorn they encountered a man named Zhegorz. Daja had rescued him from a hospital fire during her previous time in Namorn. Zhegorz was there as a mental patient. They kept him with him to look after him, and they realized that he was seeing and hearing on the wind, the same as Tris did. A fifty year old man, thought crazy from the time he was in his teens, and subjected to decades of treatments aimed and managing a madness that was never there in the first place. The years of doubt and fear and the misdiagnosis and inappropriate treatments unbalanced him. Zhegorz is making progress under their care and Tris' teaching, but they don't think that his mind will ever be quite whole again.
Sandry was kidnapped as part of a plot to get her money and power by forcing her to marry someone. Briar and Tris got her out, and Tris blocked up the secret passage in the palace that they'd used to smuggle her. They told off the empress, and declared that they were leaving Namorn. Empress Berenene didn't appreciate this defiance, and, considering Tris the greatest threat in their group, had her mage curse Tris to fall down the stairs in a way that caused the most injury possible short of killing her. Dozens of broken bones and multiple dislocations.
Tris convinced her family to leave her behind. They headed for the border, and once she'd healed a little, she dragged herself onto a horse and followed along with Sandry's cousin Ambros. She bolstered her siblings' power from a distance, allowing them through the border protections. The mage who cursed Tris, Ishabal Ladyhammer, was waiting at the border when Tris arrived but let her through without protest.
Tris and her siblings reconciled, letting each other into their minds again. Zhegorz chose to return with Ambros, to keep an ear out for any trouble that might try to find him.
(Post-Barge) Tris fetched Harry and Silna from their world with help from Iris, and brought them to the inn where she and her siblings were staying, so that they could all travel together back to Summersea.
Sample Journal Entry: My name is Tris Kal-El, and I was a warden on the Barge for four and a half years. I don't know how long it's been here since I left, but I certainly hope some of you are still familiar faces. I've missed the people here a great deal. I'll be in my cabin, number 6 on level 2 again, if anyone wants to stop by. I can offer tea and cookies in exchange for catching up on Barge gossip.
If you don't catch me there, try the Enclosure or the library. I also missed all the books.
Sample RP: There are two equally hard parts in coming back to the Barge. The first is leaving Harry behind. She's going to miss her future husband with every fiber of her being. She'll miss her family too. But she still wants a deal. She can't walk away from the chance at that. Not even if her inmate is gone now and she'll need to start over with someone new. She owes it to all the children who are born like her, frightened of what they are.
The second thing, of course, is that she'll miss weather. Tris feels the familiar sensory deprivation of the Barge settle around her again and winces. It's harder, the second time around. Her first time on the Barge, she didn't even know what to brace for, but willingly cutting herself off from her element again was nearly impossible.
She immediately reaches for her braids, unraveling several of them to release the breezes they contain. She has the weather she can carry with her. She did this for four years. She'll be fine.
The breezes twine affectionately around her shoulders, tug at her sleeves, ruffle her skirts. They're old friends. At least she has some friends here. Time to find out if any others are still on board.
Special Notes: Tris has a living glass dragon made of a variety of different magics, with lightning for blood. Chime is very loyal to Tris, affectionate and protective, and likely to eat anything she can get her nose into. She breathes glass flames in whatever colors are made by things she's eaten, and even her indigestion expresses itself in glass. Chime can also fly, and spit glass needles at anyone who incurs her wrath or threatens Tris.
Tris also has a winged monkey Green Lantern construct that can form a barrier around Tris if she loses control of her magic.
And a fluffy black dog.
User DW:
tricia868Discord/Plurk: triangulate#3253 (Discord) /
E-mail: tricia868 [at] gmail [dot] com
Other Characters: Taura, Ulla
Character Name: Trisana Chandler
Series: Circle of Magic
Age: 18 (22 if we count Barge time)
From When?: post-Will of the Empress, once she's back home in Summersea (and post-her previous stay on the Barge)
Inmate/Warden: Warden. Tris is prickly, sometimes defensive, and not always a people person. She is, however, incredibly protective and caring, with a nurturing core buried down underneath all the barbs. She has a very strong moral compass and is quite stubborn. She might hit rocky points in any given relationship, with frustration on both parts, but if Tris can find some chance of helping them, she's the last person to give up or admit defeat.
Item: a book: Daring the Wheel: Those Who Defied Nature's Magic
Abilities/Powers: Tris has what is referred to as ‘ambient magic,’ meaning that her power comes from the elements surrounding her. She has an affinity for most meteorological phenomena and stores power from various natural forces in her braids. She keeps lightning, breezes and stronger winds, tidal force, hurricane force, earthquake force, and the energy of molten rock from the earth's core on hand for when she needs them. Tidal force is particularly dangerous to Tris. She can draw extra energy from it when she reaches her limit, but it will never equal a good night’s sleep and a break from magical workings. What she gains in endurance now she will pay for by collapsing later. There's even a limit that isn't necessarily based on how much of it she has stored in the braids that serve as her mage kit. Tris has had to admit to herself that, "there was only so much of the ocean’s strength a human body could stand before the blood turned to salt water and the muscles to braids of kelp."
Lightning and storms have the potential for lethal battle magic. Tris is capable of creating whirlpools and aiming lightning at ships, destroying them. She won’t use her power to kill unless absolutely necessary, and even then she will seriously hesitate. Tris will not act if there is a chance of making innocents victim to her power. She does have some defensive ability as well, and this she will not hesitate to use. Tris can catch cannonballs in a swirl of winds, keeping them from hitting their targets.
She can serve as a human furnace, so long as she has magma heat to use.
Tris loves weather. Breezes become something resembling friends once she carries them long enough, and she will happily stand on a rooftop in a thunderstorm and act as a human lightning rod. Earthquakes, though, tend to make her ill; she can usually sense one coming shortly before the shocks are felt.
Because of the incident in which Sandry spun together the power of the four young mages, Tris retains the ability to speak mind-to-mind with her foster siblings and to borrow bits of thread, magic, or metal magic for her own workings. She can, for instance, use a coin and her will to spin a strong storm down into a thin thread of storm power, roll that power into a magical construct of a ball of yarn, and then, when it is under control, store it for later. This allows her to handle forces that would under other circumstances be too much for her to manage. Removing a ship-killer of a storm from the ocean does not leave Tris responsible for deaths as it would were she to simply move it elsewhere.
Tris can create a disc of moving air to hold her and use winds to boost this disc upward within an enclosed space like a tower, an elevator to use in place of stairs. It is not practical in terms of magic expenditure and conservation of energy, but it does give an example of the way her power could be used to circumvent certain physical limitations if she were to be trapped or injured. Or just as a fun challenge to herself.
She can keep cool on especially hot days by gathering moving breezes around herself, and keep dry on rainy days by redirecting raindrops as if they have met an invisible shield. Such a shield can be extended to cover others in her party.
Tris can hear voices and see images on the wind; the images give her a headache and she often wears special glasses to avoid them. Neither of these abilities gives her any power of prediction, they just have the potential to give her insight into what’s happening out of range of her non-magical hearing and vision. She may be twitchy from visions if she does not have the tinted spectacles with her. Tris always keeps an ear out for what's going on around her. She can tug the puff of air created by someone's breath toward her, and either eavesdrop or twist it to broadcast whatever they've said to anyone in hearing range.
Tris also has incredibly good magical awareness. This could be in part related to the fact that lightning is said to strike living things because it senses the shadow of itself in them, and Tris is so closely bound to weather as an extra sense that she may feel the electrical impulses in people and animals. It could also be due to the fact that living things all have some inherent magic, great or small. Whatever the cause, if she concentrates hard enough, she can feel the locations, the energy reserves, and even sometimes the emotions of the people and animals around her. She rarely accesses this ability.
Like any power, of course, her weather magic obviously has limits. If she pushes past them, she could very well die. Tris once stopped the tides. It wasn’t for long, but she managed it. The once boulder filled cove in which she tried is now called Pebble Beach, and Tris was unconscious and then very weak for some time afterward. That was the best case scenario; she got lucky.
In terms of more mundane abilities, Tris can pick locks and knows very basic self defense. She speaks several languages. She reads quickly, and learns even quicker. She can blow glass. She's an excellent bargainer, to the extent that even the born-and-raised Trader in her adopted family lets Tris negotiate at market. She's a very good cook and housekeeper. She has served as a research assistant in infectious disease labs, and knows how to make a few basic medicines.
Personality: Tris always had a hard time getting close to people or trusting them, which is not surprising given her childhood experiences and later reactions to her power. Her magical abilities make people very uncomfortable in her world, and Tris herself does not do much to dispel that impression. With grown mages defensive, jealous, and sometimes hostile after realizing the extent of her power, it’s no wonder Tris decided to go to the mages’ university, Lightsbridge, “under an ordinary name, so [she] can get an ordinary license, so [she] can earn [her] living as an ordinary mage.” (This ambition changed during her previous stay on the Barge. She still intends to go to university, but she'll do it as herself. She's done trying to make herself smaller in order to fit other people's expectations.) Her most newly acquired skill, scrying images on the wind, is so rare that she refused to mention it even to her foster siblings for quite some time. They’d been separated so long that she didn’t have faith her chosen family would react differently than the other mages she met in her travels. She still loved them; they’re her real family, after all. She just didn’t know them inside and out anymore. Since her previous stay on the Barge, she has opened back up to her siblings and let them in completely.
Tris for most of her teen years was not interested in romance, or at least not confident enough to pursue or accept it. The only boys who had approached her prior to her previous stay on the Barge did so as a cruel joke, and Tris didn’t want to admit how much it hurt. Her relationships on the Barge did a great deal to heal old wounds and instill some confidence in Tris.
Sharply intelligent with a sincere love of reading and learning, Tris taught her foster brother to read and appreciate books as well. She's detail oriented and makes an excellent research assistant, regardless of whether the field is an area of expertise for her. Her motto, if anything, is "New learning never hurt anybody." She is productive. Prior to being given away to the Living Circle temples, Tris earned her keep with various family members by doing chores. She hates sitting idle, and even as an adult mage in places with cooks, housekeepers, and servants, she can often be found in the kitchen keeping her hands busy. She tends to go a little stir crazy on the Barge, needing things to keep busy. She doesn’t like wasting time or resources, and she doesn’t like skirting issues that could be addressed directly.
Tris takes almost childlike glee in storms and other interesting bits of weather, provided they are not endangering anyone.
Underneath the sometimes intimidating exterior, Tris is very nurturing and protective. She has been caretaker to a baby bird or two, a dog, a living glass dragon, an orphaned little girl, a grown man new to his magical power, and everyone in her temple family at some point. She may seem grouchy, but the grouchiness gentles whenever somebody really needs an understanding ear or some willing help.
Despite her temper, Tris has seen enough of the world that that she doesn't find much shocking. Her brother, Briar, thinks of Tris as someone he can tell "the most horrific things, and she would never laugh, be shocked, or withdraw from him." She'll listen, but Tris does have opinions on the well-being of the people around her, and she'll let them know in no uncertain terms. She believes in seeking help, including psychiatric help, when it's needed. She won't hesitate to say if she thinks it is, or if she disagrees with a treatment plan.
Tris believes in fairness and dislikes disparity in the treatment of social classes. (She had to get over her own judgmental attitude to reach this point. Squeamish about filth and poor hygiene, Tris was on the receiving end of one of her foster mother Lark's very rare cutting lectures after making a comment about how the poor breed disease.) She will do whatever she can to protect individuals who are unjustly placed in difficult positions; shield spells and bullying with the threat of lightning don’t always make friends, but if they’re the only option, at least Tris knows it will work. She does try to employ such tactics very sparingly. Her power elicits enough fear and uneasiness without any encouragement on her part. Tris certainly doesn’t want to make it any worse.
Because of the massive destructive potential of her power, Tris received a lot of mentoring in the ethical implications of its use. She knows that altering the weather patterns in her current location alters surrounding weather patterns, and Tris will not move around storms or rains for her own convenience or for any but the most dire reasons without first ascertaining that they will not cause droughts or floods elsewhere. Tris makes a very modest income providing ships’ captains with winds and carefully rearranging cloud systems to bring rain to crops, rather than exercising her far more lucrative potential for battle magic.
Tris was horrified when she first killed people with lightning. Grief-maddened after the betrayal and subsequent death of the only family member who had ever shown her kindness, she attacked a pirate fleet with her power and the assistance of her foster siblings. Seeing the deaths she could cause in an instant was a very sobering experience for her, and Tris never wants to be the source of such an event again.
Barge Reactions: Tris does remember her previous time on the Barge. It's helped with her self confidence, with softening some of her prickly sides, with finding a purpose for her life, and with finding people she wants to share her life with. She loves what the Barge has given her, but she hates both the magical sensory deprivation of it and the loss of control. Still, she'll take all of this in stride. She's taken steps to mitigate the harm she could cause in the event of a flood eroding her control.
It will be even easier to get her involved with Barge events this time around, because she already cares about some of the people on board, and she won't have the same adjustment period.
Deal: When Tris first came on board the Barge, her deal was to heal Zhegorz's mind. But now, Zhegorz has eked out a place and a purpose for himself. She's still mulling over the logistics of her new deal, but she wants to prevent anyone else from ending up like Zhegorz. Likes she so easily could have ended up herself. She wants a method of alerting people to undiscovered mages, so people don't keep slipping through the cracks untrained until their power drives them crazy, or their families disown them, or they kill themselves or someone else.
History: Tris was born into a merchant family in Ninver, in Capchen. She was the center of a series of bizarre meteorological occurrences from a very young age, but when tested for magic by the most expensive mage in the area, she was found to have none. She heard voices, as well. Thought to be crazy, possessed, haunted, or some other form of ill omen, Tris was shunted from one family member to another until none remained willing to take her in. Still a child, she was then given to the Stone Circle temple with the understanding that her family never wanted her back.
She fit in no better in the temple than she had in her own family. The girls in the dormitory made fun of the chubby redhead whose own family hadn’t wanted her. Tris felt no more loved or wanted than she ever had. And when Tris lost control of her emotions, the elements around her echoed her inner turbulence. Strong winds rushed through the dormitories when girls talked about her. Lightning struck trees when she stared at them too long while upset. Eventually, even the temple didn’t want her, and sent her to Winding Circle in Emelan, near the city of Summersea, which was “better equipped to handle cases like hers.”
This new temple was only a repetition of the previous, right up until Tris was removed from the dormitories and brought to live in Discipline Cottage under care of temple dedicates Lark and Rosethorn. With her in her new home were three other children who had not managed to adapt to temple life. There, eventually, she would have a family bonded not by blood but by love and loyalty and magic.
Of course, families like that aren’t formed in a day. Tris and the other three children, Daja, Sandry, and Briar, had plenty of misunderstandings and arguments. Lark and Rosethorn had their hands full for awhile. Once Tris and the others were ready to accept that they had magic, each was trained by a powerful mage. Tris was apprenticed to Niklaren Goldeye, the man who had first brought her to Winding Circle and tried to give her hope she’d be wanted.
The relationship between the four children gradually became friendship, and when they were buried underground in a massive earthquake, Sandry had to spin their magics together to make them stronger and give them the power to stay alive. This opened the door for mind-to-mind communication between them and an amplification of their individual and joint powers.
Tris had contact with her biological family again in the form of her cousin Aymery. She allowed herself to get her hopes up but was betrayed along with the rest of Winding Circle when Aymery let a pirate fleet into the temple only to be betrayed by his pirate allies and killed. Earlier battles with the pirates had been her first taste of battle magic; Tris was able to keep cannonballs from landing within temple grounds. When Aymery died, Tris destroyed the pirate flagship, killing those onboard. She was haunted by nightmares of what she’d done, and worked in the infirmary caring for the injuries that inevitably followed the battle. She worked with casualties both pirate and otherwise.
She lived at Discipline Cottage for several more years, and the people she shared it with are her family. Foster mothers and foster siblings. She loves them all.
At thirteen, an unheard of age for this accomplishment, Tris and her siblings were granted their mage’s medallions, making them fully accredited mages responsible under the laws that governed such. Following this, Tris traveled with her mentor, staying in the city of Tharios for awhile as Niko attended a conference. While there a fourteen year old Tris took on a student older than her, a glassworker named Keth who had developed lightning magic as a result of being struck by lightning. She also rescued and kept his accidental magical working, a glass dragon with lightning running through her veins; Tris named the creature Chime.
With Keth and a member of the local law enforcement, Tris played a part in catching and bringing to justice a murderer who targeted performers in the entertainment district. Along the way, she temporarily adopted the daughter of Keth’s housemate, one of the murderer’s victims. The little girl, Glaki, possessed the potential for academic magic, and when Tris returned to Winding Circle, she left Glaki with Lark to be cared for. She also left her dog, Little Bear, feeling it would be unfair to leave Glaki with nothing and no one familiar.
During their travels, Tris had encountered a lot of professional jealousy. She was a very powerful mage who dealt with forces that most people couldn't touch. She had earned her medallion younger than anyone they'd met. When she began learning to scry on the wind she felt she had to keep a secret of it, one more advanced magic that set her apart from everyone she met.
Her interpersonal conflicts were not limited to the professional arena either. The only times Tris showed any interest in a boy romantically went terribly wrong. In one case, his friends teased him until he started ignoring her. In the other, he and his friends lured her into an ambush and dumped honey on her, saying even a gallon of it "wasn't enough sweets for a tub like [her]." Tris doesn't trust easily in general, but she especially doesn't trust easily romantically.
When they returned home, Tris could no longer remain a resident in the temple unless she planned on taking vows there. No adult and already accredited mage could. She moved in with her foster-sister Daja, whose work as a smith mage had let her buy a home that would comfortably hold the whole family. Time apart and difficult experiences on everyone’s part left the once seamlessly unified group rather fractured; tension between Tris and her siblings was high. Finishing their growing up separately had left them near-strangers, and they would have to get to know each other again before they could be comfortable opening up their minds to their siblings.
At the request of Sandry's uncle, Duke Vedris, all of her siblings accompanied Sandry to Namorn to appease her cousin, Empress Berenene. Tris had no patience for the maneuvering within the court and avoided it as much as possible, though she impressed everyone with her weather-work, and frightened some of them.
While in Namorn they encountered a man named Zhegorz. Daja had rescued him from a hospital fire during her previous time in Namorn. Zhegorz was there as a mental patient. They kept him with him to look after him, and they realized that he was seeing and hearing on the wind, the same as Tris did. A fifty year old man, thought crazy from the time he was in his teens, and subjected to decades of treatments aimed and managing a madness that was never there in the first place. The years of doubt and fear and the misdiagnosis and inappropriate treatments unbalanced him. Zhegorz is making progress under their care and Tris' teaching, but they don't think that his mind will ever be quite whole again.
Sandry was kidnapped as part of a plot to get her money and power by forcing her to marry someone. Briar and Tris got her out, and Tris blocked up the secret passage in the palace that they'd used to smuggle her. They told off the empress, and declared that they were leaving Namorn. Empress Berenene didn't appreciate this defiance, and, considering Tris the greatest threat in their group, had her mage curse Tris to fall down the stairs in a way that caused the most injury possible short of killing her. Dozens of broken bones and multiple dislocations.
Tris convinced her family to leave her behind. They headed for the border, and once she'd healed a little, she dragged herself onto a horse and followed along with Sandry's cousin Ambros. She bolstered her siblings' power from a distance, allowing them through the border protections. The mage who cursed Tris, Ishabal Ladyhammer, was waiting at the border when Tris arrived but let her through without protest.
Tris and her siblings reconciled, letting each other into their minds again. Zhegorz chose to return with Ambros, to keep an ear out for any trouble that might try to find him.
(Post-Barge) Tris fetched Harry and Silna from their world with help from Iris, and brought them to the inn where she and her siblings were staying, so that they could all travel together back to Summersea.
Sample Journal Entry: My name is Tris Kal-El, and I was a warden on the Barge for four and a half years. I don't know how long it's been here since I left, but I certainly hope some of you are still familiar faces. I've missed the people here a great deal. I'll be in my cabin, number 6 on level 2 again, if anyone wants to stop by. I can offer tea and cookies in exchange for catching up on Barge gossip.
If you don't catch me there, try the Enclosure or the library. I also missed all the books.
Sample RP: There are two equally hard parts in coming back to the Barge. The first is leaving Harry behind. She's going to miss her future husband with every fiber of her being. She'll miss her family too. But she still wants a deal. She can't walk away from the chance at that. Not even if her inmate is gone now and she'll need to start over with someone new. She owes it to all the children who are born like her, frightened of what they are.
The second thing, of course, is that she'll miss weather. Tris feels the familiar sensory deprivation of the Barge settle around her again and winces. It's harder, the second time around. Her first time on the Barge, she didn't even know what to brace for, but willingly cutting herself off from her element again was nearly impossible.
She immediately reaches for her braids, unraveling several of them to release the breezes they contain. She has the weather she can carry with her. She did this for four years. She'll be fine.
The breezes twine affectionately around her shoulders, tug at her sleeves, ruffle her skirts. They're old friends. At least she has some friends here. Time to find out if any others are still on board.
Special Notes: Tris has a living glass dragon made of a variety of different magics, with lightning for blood. Chime is very loyal to Tris, affectionate and protective, and likely to eat anything she can get her nose into. She breathes glass flames in whatever colors are made by things she's eaten, and even her indigestion expresses itself in glass. Chime can also fly, and spit glass needles at anyone who incurs her wrath or threatens Tris.
Tris also has a winged monkey Green Lantern construct that can form a barrier around Tris if she loses control of her magic.
And a fluffy black dog.