Name: Chemori
Race: Konatsian, Blade Dancer: Swordsman Heritage, Enchanter's Blood, Blade's Edge
Alignment: Good
Age: 27
Appearance:
Chemori is a slender Konatsian, and slightly taller than average for her people, with the long pointed ears and vivid coloring typical of her race. Her hair is a deep violet that turns nearly black indoors and shows its purple in direct sunlight. It's unusually long, kept loose, and allowed to fall well past her waist without any effort at practicality. Her eyes are a clear, cold blue, framed by teal-rimmed reading glasses she refuses to take off even in a fight. She smiles quickly and easily. Her nails are usually painted the same dark plum as her hair. A pair of small enchanted focus-gems hang on short chains from a clip at her belt, and she touches them without noticing when she's thinking.
Her default outfit fuses two traditions. The outer layer is a Konatsian robe: white wool with gold trim along the hem and sleeves, wrapped and knotted at the waist with a wide teal sash. Beneath it she wears a practical black undersuit of a more modern cut, form-fitting and easy to move in, the kind of thing a Konatsian laboratory technician would actually work in rather than the layered ceremonial dress the robe suggests. She usually has a small glowing datapad within arm's reach and can often be seen reading from it while she walks, eats, or argues.
Her bearing is forward-leaning, literally and otherwise. She tends to angle herself toward whoever or whatever has her attention, and she steps into a room before she looks at it rather than the other way around. Her hands are always doing something — turning an object over, adjusting the focus-gems, sketching a diagram on any available surface with a fingertip while she talks. Her voice is warm, fast, and unexpectedly technical, and she has the habit of asking a specific question before most people have finished saying hello.
Background:
Chemori was born on Konats to a family with no particular martial distinction and no particular mystical credentials, in a culture where both were expected. Her parents were agricultural enchanters, quiet, respected, unremarkable, and they raised a daughter who asked too many questions about how the binding-songs actually worked and who took apart the harvest charms when they were finished with them to see what made them tick. She was apprenticed young to one of the planet's greatest living masters of binding-enchantment, Elder Durian, who recognized a brilliant student and patiently tried to teach her the tradition the way it had been taught for centuries. She was, by every account including his, the best student he had taken in a generation.
She was also, by her mid-teens, taking the old enchantments apart mathematically and rebuilding them as equations.
The old binding-songs are held to be living things, passed hand to hand and voice to voice, diminished by any attempt to render them into a form that could be mechanized or mass-produced. Chemori's interest in doing exactly that was not well received. By the time she reached adulthood she had been politely, then less politely, told to stop by a number of people whose opinions were supposed to matter. She did not stop. She enrolled in the closest thing Konats had to a technical university, she took on a small research staff, and she spent most of a decade rebuilding interstellar warp theory from the ground up, grafting Konatsian binding-enchantments onto astrogation mathematics that no one in her tradition had previously thought compatible with them.
It worked. The prototype's first successful flight cut the crossing time from Konats to its nearest neighbor from six quarters to one. Within a quarter of the public demonstration, the Council that had denied her research funding three separate times reversed itself, offered her a university chair, and announced the planet-wide adoption of her drive for every new ship commissioned after that year. The ceremony was attended by almost every figure of consequence on the planet. Elder Durian was a conspicuous absence. He had given a public address the week before in which he had said, without naming her, that a tradition is not a recipe and that the most dangerous way to destroy an old enchantment is to build a machine that can do it for you.
Chemori accepted the chair, set up her lab, and held the position for only six weeks. Then she packed a Konatsian saber, a scientific datapad, a case of her own focus-gems, and set off in her ship, The Harmonia. She is said to have told one of her students, on her way out, that she had built the keys to the universe for her people and had not yet walked through the door herself. Her departure was celebrated on Konats.
She wrote a short note to Elder Durian before she left. He did not write back.
Her stated goal, to anyone who asks, is to see the universe her drive opened up — all of it, if she can, and learn every technique her hands can hold. Her unstated goal, the one her old mentor would recognize immediately, is to find the parts of that universe that can match her, and to grow until they cannot.
Race: Konatsian, Blade Dancer: Swordsman Heritage, Enchanter's Blood, Blade's Edge
Alignment: Good
Age: 27
Appearance:
Chemori is a slender Konatsian, and slightly taller than average for her people, with the long pointed ears and vivid coloring typical of her race. Her hair is a deep violet that turns nearly black indoors and shows its purple in direct sunlight. It's unusually long, kept loose, and allowed to fall well past her waist without any effort at practicality. Her eyes are a clear, cold blue, framed by teal-rimmed reading glasses she refuses to take off even in a fight. She smiles quickly and easily. Her nails are usually painted the same dark plum as her hair. A pair of small enchanted focus-gems hang on short chains from a clip at her belt, and she touches them without noticing when she's thinking.
Her default outfit fuses two traditions. The outer layer is a Konatsian robe: white wool with gold trim along the hem and sleeves, wrapped and knotted at the waist with a wide teal sash. Beneath it she wears a practical black undersuit of a more modern cut, form-fitting and easy to move in, the kind of thing a Konatsian laboratory technician would actually work in rather than the layered ceremonial dress the robe suggests. She usually has a small glowing datapad within arm's reach and can often be seen reading from it while she walks, eats, or argues.
Her bearing is forward-leaning, literally and otherwise. She tends to angle herself toward whoever or whatever has her attention, and she steps into a room before she looks at it rather than the other way around. Her hands are always doing something — turning an object over, adjusting the focus-gems, sketching a diagram on any available surface with a fingertip while she talks. Her voice is warm, fast, and unexpectedly technical, and she has the habit of asking a specific question before most people have finished saying hello.
Background:
Chemori was born on Konats to a family with no particular martial distinction and no particular mystical credentials, in a culture where both were expected. Her parents were agricultural enchanters, quiet, respected, unremarkable, and they raised a daughter who asked too many questions about how the binding-songs actually worked and who took apart the harvest charms when they were finished with them to see what made them tick. She was apprenticed young to one of the planet's greatest living masters of binding-enchantment, Elder Durian, who recognized a brilliant student and patiently tried to teach her the tradition the way it had been taught for centuries. She was, by every account including his, the best student he had taken in a generation.
She was also, by her mid-teens, taking the old enchantments apart mathematically and rebuilding them as equations.
The old binding-songs are held to be living things, passed hand to hand and voice to voice, diminished by any attempt to render them into a form that could be mechanized or mass-produced. Chemori's interest in doing exactly that was not well received. By the time she reached adulthood she had been politely, then less politely, told to stop by a number of people whose opinions were supposed to matter. She did not stop. She enrolled in the closest thing Konats had to a technical university, she took on a small research staff, and she spent most of a decade rebuilding interstellar warp theory from the ground up, grafting Konatsian binding-enchantments onto astrogation mathematics that no one in her tradition had previously thought compatible with them.
It worked. The prototype's first successful flight cut the crossing time from Konats to its nearest neighbor from six quarters to one. Within a quarter of the public demonstration, the Council that had denied her research funding three separate times reversed itself, offered her a university chair, and announced the planet-wide adoption of her drive for every new ship commissioned after that year. The ceremony was attended by almost every figure of consequence on the planet. Elder Durian was a conspicuous absence. He had given a public address the week before in which he had said, without naming her, that a tradition is not a recipe and that the most dangerous way to destroy an old enchantment is to build a machine that can do it for you.
Chemori accepted the chair, set up her lab, and held the position for only six weeks. Then she packed a Konatsian saber, a scientific datapad, a case of her own focus-gems, and set off in her ship, The Harmonia. She is said to have told one of her students, on her way out, that she had built the keys to the universe for her people and had not yet walked through the door herself. Her departure was celebrated on Konats.
She wrote a short note to Elder Durian before she left. He did not write back.
Her stated goal, to anyone who asks, is to see the universe her drive opened up — all of it, if she can, and learn every technique her hands can hold. Her unstated goal, the one her old mentor would recognize immediately, is to find the parts of that universe that can match her, and to grow until they cannot.
