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 | Subject: Aldara Vladden  Sun Apr 05, 2015 4:54 pm | |
|   Aldara’raelgilaltui
143 ~ Female ~ Silver Dragon ~ Triad ~ Face Claim
~Full Name~ Aldara’raelgilaltui, of clan Vladden
~Nick Name~ ‘Dara
~Age~ 143
~Appearing Age~ 22
~Race~ Dragon - Silver
~Country of Origin~ Sweden
~Height~ 5’7” (43’ from nose to tail in dragon form)
~Hair~ Brown
~Eye Color~ Blue-green
~Body Type~ Aldara is slim and light, almost fragile in appearance. She looks more like a dancer than the dragon she is.
~Clothing~ In most situations, Aldara has taken somewhat after her older sister, and favors the finer things, though she prefers simple styling to the ostentatious, and hates to be too constrained in her movements simply for the sake of fashion. She has also been known to dress in leathers or more practical gear when on an adventure.
~Tattoos~ None
~Scars~ None
~Playby~Barbara Palvin
~Likes and Dislikes~ Aldara has relatively simple tastes for a dragon. She is fond of well-made items over the flashy, and she likes being comfortable when she is relaxing. When she isn’t she is an avid explorer, particularly hiking and climbing, and she revels in taking the unbeaten path. On the other side, she hates being penned in, especially by those trying to shelter her, or give her special treatment based on her Grandmother’s identity.
~Strengths and Weaknesses~ Like most of her kind, Aldara is very strong, and she has an iron will that most would say she inherited, but her stubbornness to prove she came by it on her own has only made it stronger. Because of this, she matches well the stereotype of the prideful dragon, and she can sometimes press on despite the warnings of others because of this. Like all her kind, she is vulnerable to physical injury, especially in human form. Aldara is also claustrophobic – she is merely uncomfortable in places too small for her true form, but actively terrified by spaces where she cannot extend even her human arms.
~Obsessions~ Aldara suffers from the classic draconic flaw of obsessing over collecting and hoarding treasure. Her treasure is rather varied – gold coins and jewelry are always welcome, but she tends to prefer exceptional quality over quantity, and so while her collection is worth an incredible sum, it is smaller than many.
~Fears~ Lobster, for one. In general, she is also afraid for the responsibility her bloodline places on her, that she might make the wrong choice and get others killed. She sees it as her duty to look out for the smaller, more fragile creatures, and she worries that she might hurt them. Some of them, anyway.
~General Personality~
Aldara could best be described as being compartmentalized. She doesn’t have multiple personalities, but she reacts to people very differently, based on the category to which she has assigned them – to the point that someone who she has labeled one way may not recognize who she is when interacting with someone in a different group. It is her way of keeping track of the roles she has in life, her responsibilities and her occasionally wild personal feelings, which she feels she has to keep under tight control. She is a passionate creature at heart, her emotions run wild and deep, but she has learned better than to let this be expressed in public. Her self-control is not natural, but hard-won, and it is a key aspect of who she has become. It allows her to be functional in society, if not necessarily the most popular of social butterflies.
The first group, and the most numerous, is made up of people she simply has minimal interest in. These are usually strangers, but occasionally just people she clashes with. Often these are the self-important, the pompous, or simply people she considers foolish. To them, Aldara is cold and aloof, responding politely but with the bare minimum necessary to meet that criterion. She will ignore them if possible, but will not generally respond with any true hostility – though her family’s dry, often mocking sense of humor can be caught from time to time if one is paying attention. She tends not to be tremendously overt about it.
The second group is those who have actively angered her. While not the easiest thing to do, these people see more of who she really is than the first – primarily at least a fragment of the legendary temper for which her grandmother is infamous. Aldara tends not to burn as hot as Aura though – instead she trends toward a very cold, quiet fury, to the point where it can sometimes be difficult for someone to tell they have slipped into this group until she lashes out at them. Aldara prefers to wait and plan her attacks rather than strike in the open, where it is expected; and she has a dragon’s long lifespan, which allows her the luxury of patience where these things are concerned. Her acid wit shows much more frequently to these people however, as well as a tendency to avoid even the minimal courtesy she shows to those she is indifferent to.
The final group is by far the smallest, but they see the largest amount of her personality. These people, one way or another, have gotten through the shell. Different things produce this result in each case, but once someone does get through, they find someone very different. Shields down, Aldara can be warm, loving, and even gentle – though she remains a dragon, and dragons tend to play rough. She retains her sarcastic sense of humor, but with a leavening mischief to it that warms it up when compared to the others. It is at this level that she becomes extremely protective – rational or not, given that many of the creatures she associates with are far older than she. Still, she is a dragon, and like all her kind considers herself greater and stronger than the smaller races, even if she is usually polite enough not to say so out loud unless she is teasing someone (which is not infrequent). When she forms a bond, she considers it a powerful thing, and it is difficult to break; however anyone who does manage to do so is certain to fall directly into the category of those she hates.
~Racial Abilities~
True form – This is not actually the ability – the actual ability is that she can take human form. When she releases that spell, her body reverts to her natural form. Aldara’s true shape is nearly fifty feet long, a slender variety of dragon that matches her general body type as a human. She is long but thin, though with powerful muscles in her core, especially those devoted to flight. She has tremendous wings relative to the size of her body, with a span of almost seventy feet, and is a true acrobat in the sky. Aldara’s scales are pale silver, almost white when the light shines upon them, and their outer surface has an oddly translucent quality that makes them seem crystalline, particularly in the light of the moon. Her wings are somewhat unusual as well – their membrane is similarly translucent, and the reason for her name, which means ‘crystal wings’ in the language of her people. Her eyes are the only part of her that remains the same: ice blue, though the whites become gleaming mercury. The silver color is just that – coloration. While there is an actual silver content to her scales, it is not sufficient to cause a reaction in werecreatures. It does, however, mean that they are nonreactive chemically – acids wash off her like water.
Her bloodline was forged in the high mountains where flight was nearly the only way to get around, and her shape reflects that. This is not to say that she lacks strength on the ground – all dragons must land at some point, and combat in the air often ends on the ground. Physically she is extremely powerful, more than capable of flipping heavy vehicles or tearing them apart with her claws, and her dagger-sized fangs can bite down with incredible force. As expected for a dragon, in raw power she outclasses any smaller creature, though her size imposes obvious restrictions on her speed and agility, particularly against multiple opponents.
She does have the ability to relax her concealment spell partially, and express aspects of her true form while maintaining a generally human shape. Most commonly, this would be claws, scales over places she needs to protect, or her wings. This is difficult though – she tends to do it only for short times, in spaces too small for her true form. It does not increase her strength substantially – just gives her some of the tools of her true shape when she has need of them.
Dragon’s Breath (Wind) - Of course, most dangerous of all is her breath. While she has her grandmother’s coloring, she does not possess the same icy breath. Aldara’s power tends more toward the wind. Her breath is a tremendous blast of wind, the equal of any tornado, focused into a tight cone that emits from her mouth. The friction of the air molecules has the side effect of producing tremendous electrical potential, and so this blast is accompanied by great flashes of electrical arcing. This produces plasma that is swept up in the air current, and produces an effect very similar to a flame breath, though brilliant blue-white unlike ordinary flame. The effect is also more focused, allowing her to use her breath almost like a cutting torch instead of the wash of fire most legends attribute to her kind.
Draconic magic – Like all her kind, Aldara has access to the potent elemental magic that flows through her blood. She is capable of magic similar to witches and other spellcasters as long as she is in human form, though she is not likely to be actually able to use such spells until she is much older. At her current age, aside from purely elemental magic, she is capable of only a few basic cantrips – lights, basic wards and one decent ability for illusion that allows her to camouflage herself as long as she stays perfectly still, and out of the way. The only serious magic she can do is with the wind – she can produce impressive gusts of wind, up to hurricane force for a second or two at a time, and lighter winds for more extended durations. This same power hangs around her invisibly, protecting her not unlike her scales, but from spells both benign and malevolent. Young as she is, the effect is not at all insurmountable, but a spellcaster will have a harder time affecting her with direct magic than most others.
~Weaknesses~ Despite the powers of her kind, and her increased toughness, Aldara is a living, breathing creature, and like any mortal creature, she can die from any number of injuries. Exsanguination, organ damage, curses, and non-paralytic or heavy-metal type poisoning can kill her.
~Special Talents~ Aldara has a natural talent for acrobatics that translates well into gymnastics and dance, as well as combat in her human form. She also has a good ear for music, and is an excellent singer, if somewhat shy about that fact. Of course she is also a fearsome predator and tracker, as one would expect from her kind.
~Learned Skills~ Like the rest of her family, Aldara has trained in combat both as a dragon and as a human, though unlike some she prefers to fight unarmed or with small weapons such as daggers or knives, making use of her exceptional agility as a human. She is competent enough with firearms though she finds them distasteful, and prefers small throwing knives if she needs to reach out. From one of her ‘previous lives’, she is also a trained ICU doctor, and very skilled at keeping people alive.
History
Aldara was born into the Vladden clan, almost a sort of nobility among dragonkind due to the fame of her grandmother, one of the oldest and most infamous dragons alive and a senior member of the Council. Like most children born into such a situation, her life was both easier and harder in various ways, but per the tradition of her kind her earliest years were spent in the wilds, far from humanity, living as a predator in the snowy peaks of her homeland. As she slowly matured, her parents introduced her to the supernatural society first, and later to that of humans, easing her in as she grew. Like any dragon, the process was slow, but she eventually became capable of passing for human in at least small towns, and carefully practiced keeping her nature hidden.
When she was sixty, just into the equivalent of a human’s teenage years, she was captured by human hunters. Kept in a solid steel crate far too small for her to assume her true form and break out, she could do nothing to defend herself while they tormented her, curious to see just what a dragon could take. They intended to sell her – but they took too long. Her mother found them, and killed the entire group before tearing Aldara’s cage apart. The experience scarred her however, caused her to withdraw from the world in many ways, and a fear of confined spaces persists in her to this day.
The capture set her back several years on her learning to be something other than a dragon, and so her family decided to take a different tack – sending her to another group to foster her among nondragons. She spent several years living among different factions, some human and some inhuman, though all of them supernatural in some sense. Thanks to this, Aldara has lived for at least a short time in a great many places across the planet, and is proficient in many languages and customs… though she can be equally awkward with all of them, if she is not inclined toward being friendly.
When she came into her own, no longer a child by the standards of her own kind, it didn’t take Aldara long to come across evidence of a group not unlike the one that had taken her. It was easy to find tales of poachers taking mundane wildlife, but she knew perfectly well that groups interested in totems from the supernatural existed… there was no way the group that took her had been the only one. She traced the group through its many ports of call back to a large organization in China… where she set about doing to them much what her family had done years ago. It was in the course of this retribution that she encountered Jade, and her family’s Triad. The alliance was natural from there, though Aldara is still inclined to be cautious with most of the criminals. They are, by nature, not always predictable.
After nearly a decade as something of a vigilante, Aldara took a different tack for her next life – after all, she cannot live in the same place or the same circle for too long before the humans begin to realize she fails to age. She is currently in her third ‘cycle’ – the first was as a hunter of hunters, her ‘vigilante’ years. She spent most of the last decade and a half as a med student and doctor. This new life has only recently started, and she resides in Starling City officially as a model – but the real reason she came there is to serve as an observer of sorts. She is also working with her old friend Jade from many years ago… a dragon has to keep busy. And she might just be able to keep things from getting worse.
Aura lifted a hand slightly, as Mar stepped up beside her, holding it out as another spawn came barreling from the fray and toward her. They knew their greatest reward would be in her slaying... the more foolish of their number tried in such a direct manner to accomplish this goal. Flickering silver light gathered around her fingertips, then lanced out in a brilliant bolt, which slammed into the heart of the creature. The impact drove it back a few steps, a glowing silver spear through its chest - and when the magical construct faded, it was blood that poured out, dropping the creature to the ground. Aura was no longer the most physically powerful of their number... but her talent for their race's innate magical prowess was unmatched, even by Abraxus. And she loved rubbing that in his face. Oh, he had attained great power through his dark rituals... but his magic would be forever profane. Never truly the power that had been passed down from the Nine, and she knew full well how that galled him.
She looked over her shoulder and back toward her protector with an arch of one silver brow. "How are you holding up, young one?" she replied, her tone bone dry. Of course she knew his meaning. Even holding more to minor applications of magic and a limited degree of her strength, Aura's endurance could not match the others. That was, however, not something she allowed to be common knowledge. Her troops, both Dragonian and human, needed to see her on the front lines, standing strong and tall and, if not invincible, at least unbowed. Mar knew better perhaps than any of them just how far her powers had faded - he had, after all, known her the longest - but she knew just as well that he would keep his mouth shut. And that, when he asked such questions, there was really only that answer that she could give him.
Of course the battle would not give them time to loiter and chat, so Aura flashed Mar a humorless smile and turned to meet the next rush, catching another attack with the side of her sword and spinning to the side, opening the monster's stomach up with an almost casual slash, then turning and grabbing it by the shoulder before she passed the razor edge of her weapon across it's throat. Black blood sprayed into the air, and she turned again, just barely getting her weapon up as another - this one far more feral, a quadruped that resembled nothing so much as a colossal, scaled lion - leapt at her. Her blade flashed as she brought it up, and it bit down, the impact driving her back to the ground. She twisted however, driving her feet into it and throwing it up and over even as she rolled to her feet. The blade of her sword was chipped and cracked, but it was ice after all... the edge melted and reformed in a moment, and Aura glanced up to see Alex as she thundered across the battlefield.
Inelegant, her oldest great granddaughter... but not without power. "I'm not the one you need to talk to about him. And I'm glad you're not bored, it's good to have you in the fight." Oh, she had more prepared sarcasm for the arrogant girl... but it WAS good to have her in the battle. She heard the peal of thunder that signaled Tempest was still in the fight as well, and glanced toward her for just a moment - she was still about, that was good. Behind them, the humans kept up their fire - they had set the dance of battle up well, with the dragonians and those humans with the strongest abilities holding the center, then shifting to keep the enemy off balance, while the heavy gun emplacements and snipers kept the enemy from washing around them. Melantha would keep that mess handled, and Alan would no doubt be adding his tweaks here and there... if there was ever a human whose strategic mind she could respect, it was that one.
Aura looked up again to see the feline spawn recovered and coming at her again, and she snarled just slightly as she turned to face it. "Persistence... not half as stubborn as we are."
 OOC Name: Kenny
Age: 26
Do you play another Charrie here at VF: Derek Maddox
How did you find us?: Violet
What is your preferred method of communication? AIM or Yahoo or PM
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