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PLAYER
Player name: Jenny
Contact: cephalopods
Characters currently in-game: n/a!

CHARACTER
Character Name: Kyna Midha
Character Age: 24
Canon: Original
Canon Point: April 2017
World Description:
Kyna’s world is a pretty standard Earth-but-with-magic urban fantasy setting. There’s a mix of sentient races like humans, elves, gnomes, etc, all living together and aware of one another. Most cities have a mixture of races and magic is commonplace. There are still some cloistered groups—some gnomes live in cities and some live in magically shielded villages, while faeries mostly keep themselves separated on another plane altogether, and there are definite negative stereotypes about most races. Elves, for example, are viewed as haughty and condescending by some, while some think of halflings as thieves.

Technology and magic are pretty integrated, too. Most banks are shielded by both electronic security systems as well as magical wards and shields, for example, and there are both cellphones and magical communication devices. In day to day life, it’s common for people to come in contact with and use both. Magic users vary mostly depending on where their magic comes from. Almost anyone can learn magic, it’s just a matter of how naturally talented you are at it. Warlocks and clerics gain their magic from some sort of patron, either a god or something else, while wizards teach themselves and sorcerers are born with a sort of natural magic that’s harder to control. All magic users need some sort of item, called a focus, to use their magic. As the name suggests, the focus acts a little bit like a magnifying glass amplifying sunlight, and makes spells easier to cast and control. A mage can still use magic without one, but it’s often super dangerous and hard to control. A focus has to be attuned to the user’s magic, which is an exhausting and difficult process generally done under the supervision of another mage, and if someone loses their focus they need to create a new one.

The world is more dangerous than ours, though, which is kind of natural given that there are all sorts of magical creatures running around. There are special branches of the police and military that tend to deal with these threats, but if you want unofficial help, a number of guilds and crews fill the gap. Those range from sketchy as hell to the ones that are super reliable and tend to even work alongside government backed teams.

History:
Okay, as concise as possible!

Kyna is a half-elf. She and her older brother, Nico, were born to a human woman in New York City. Their father, Reluvethel, was an elf who was absolutely obsessed with magic and acquiring magical items and artifacts. In fact, he was was more interested in those pursuits than his children or their mother, so he was in and out for most of their childhoods. He was always far more interested in Kyna, because she had a knack for magic and her brother was pretty terrible at it, but even then their time together was limited and often strained. Kyna learned a bit of magic from him, but that’s about all he gave her, and he disappeared for good when she was around 10. That meant that Kyna and Nico both spent almost their entire lives with their human family, and had little to no contact with their elf side. Kyna’s mother tried to fill the gap by hiring a tutor to teach them the elvish language and culture, but Kyna relates to humans far more than she does to elves.

Kyna spent much of her childhood and teenage years teaching herself magic, for better or for worse, and couldn’t stand school much. Her brother, Nico, was pretty much the opposite, and ended up breezing through college and landing a successful career working for a special police unit that dealt with magical anomalies, such as demons, possessions, curses, etc. Kyna skipped college altogether and stayed pretty broke and directionless until her mid twenties, when she found out that one of the guilds in the city, Kairos, worked basically like an adventuring temp agency. Out of a combination of boredom and morbid curiosity, Kyna picked up a job and was assigned to a team. The lineup changed a bit over time, but the two that stuck around were Tucker and Harlan, a thief and a wizard, respectively. The upside of Kairos was that it didn’t look into its adventurers too closely, which was great, because Kyna had avoided registering herself as a mage or registering her focus. The downside, of course, was that anyone could ask Kairos to do a job for them, meaning that many of their missions were far more dangerous and morally dodgy than originally anticipated.

Since the crew has been on about a million jobs at this point, I'm going to gloss over most of it and just focus on the events that were super important to Kyna personally. The group has dealt with everything from ghosts to dragons to demons at this point, and along the way, Kyna has almost died about fifty times and has become very, very attached to her adventuring party.

After a few jobs, the group was trying to save a bunch of kidnapping victims from a pair of faerie queens in Central Park. Kyna's focus was stolen from her, and at the time it was a tattoo, which meant that that chunk of skin was sliced off. It screwed with her head pretty badly, but once they got back, Harlan helped her make a new one and let her stay at his place for a while. This was pretty much the start of her trusting him.

Along the way, Kyna also discovered, by accident, that Tucker was a shapeshifter. More specifically, he turns into a wolf, and as werewolves are the more typical ravenous beasts in this world, Tucker was terrified of anyone finding out and mistaking him for one, so Kyna kept his secret for him for quite a long time, which helped them get much closer, too. They've both become her best friends, but over the course of their jobs they've also encouraged her to do a lot more dodgy and illegal things than she might on her own. She's become more willing to throw other people under the bus.

The job with the biggest impact on Kyna was a pretty simple retrieval mission, in which the group was supposed to recover a couple of sentient, magical weapons from a cave system. Lo and behold, Kyna's father, Reluvethel, was after the same items, but there was something obviously wrong with him. Kyna really struggled with allowing him to help or even to come with them, but over the course of the job, she and Tucker realized he was possessed by a demon who was using a book to control him. Reluvethel disappeared into the caves in an attempt to get to the items first, and when they caught up with him, Harlan managed to destroy the book and the party killed the demon. This left Reluvethel deaf and entirely devoid of his magic. Kyna brought him home but, while waiting for Nico to get to her apartment to help, Reluvethel killed himself in Kyna's kitchen rather than deal with a life without magic. Kyna was, perhaps unsurprisingly, pretty traumatized by this.

This also set off a series of fights with Harlan, partially because Kyna wasn't dealing with her trauma well at all and partially because she was pissed at him over the fact that, during the same mission, he had cast a charm spell on her in order to steal a ring that he thought would restore his magic back to normal. That shook Kyna's trust in him pretty significantly, but after a thousand arguments the two managed to hash things out. That conflict gave Kyna a much better idea of how to open up to people and talk about hard topics without having a meltdown.

The next, and the most current job, found Kyna's group saving four children who were being used for pretty horrific necromancy rituals, and Kyna got surprisingly attached to the kids. It's given her a taste of how jobs that focus purely on helping people might feel, and so far she's pretty into the idea.

Personality:
Kyna is a very emotional person. She feels things deeply and tends to act on those emotions without considering the consequences or giving herself time to step back and calm down. She’s high energy, far preferring action over planning, and is the type to blast a door down rather than bother looking for the key. She absolutely hates being bored, and goes a little crazy without constant background noise in her apartment. When she’s restless or nervous, she fidgets or paces, and she prefers the noise and excitement of busy spaces over a night in.

She also has a hell of a temper, and is absolutely terrible at hiding her emotions or reactions. When she’s angry, she’s usually just a touch irrational, and when someone screws her over, she holds a grudge and can be super vindictive about it. She wouldn’t bother to save the life of someone who’s betrayed her, for example. Despite this tendency to feel emotions deeply, Kyna has an incredibly hard time expressing or talking about them. She’s terrified of making herself vulnerable and being rejected or abandoned, so she often refuses to talk about it when she’s upset, and she’s terrible at resolving conflict easily. When people do ask her about sensitive issues, she often deflects by changing the subject or making a joke. When they push, she gets defensive, angry, or shuts down altogether. Her normal way of dealing with problems is to just... not deal with them, so she'll run from conflict unless she's trapped and absolutely has to deal, at which point she tends to freak out and get overemotional and illogical. She'll say things she doesn't mean or make decisions she almost immediately regrets.

Kyna has a pretty significant fear of failure, and more specifically of failing the people around her. She's afraid of making herself vulnerable in the "wrong" way, or, to put it another way, opening up and being rejected or freaking someone out. It leads to a self-perpetuating cycle in which Kyna is afraid to open up, suspects that people will get sick of her because of it, and then keeps them at arm’s length so that they eventually get fed up. For a long time, her only confidant was Nico, who is relatively good at sussing out her feelings without Kyna having to explain them, and who benefits from the natural trust and comfort that comes with having grown up with Kyna. The two are incredibly close, because Kyna’s mother often worked long shifts at a hospital and so Nico took it upon himself to watch out for her.

Kyna simultaneously looks up to her brother and feels that she can’t match up. He knows exactly what he wants to do with his life and she has no idea, so she’s often stuck in a rut making no progress. Nico thinks she can do better than her guild job, and near constantly encourages her to do something else, which is a source of conflict between the two.

Tucker and Harlan are the other two exceptions, largely because their jobs have forced them to go through a lot of life threatening and traumatizing events, and Kyna has slowly opened up to them out of necessity. Harlan in particular pushes Kyna to open up and calls her out on her avoidant behavior, and Tucker tends to struggle with his emotions, too, so there’s a natural push and pull between the three of them. Harlan and Tucker have had her back through a lot of hard stuff, so Kyna has slowly but steady begun to consider them her best friends.

This has obvious advantages, of course, but Kyna is terrible at giving the people she cares about a free pass. She overlooks Tucker’s blatant lying and Harlan’s hypocrisy and temper. The two are also a pretty terrible influence. Harlan is far more willing to kill than Kyna is, and Tucker trusts pretty much no one and doesn’t hesitate when it comes to breaking the law. This has rubbed off on Kyna, meaning that she’s become much more used to killing the people who are trying to kill her rather than attempting negotiation or non-lethal force, and she’s much more likely to steal or rip someone off these days. Despite this, she’s still by far the most moral one in the party. She always argues against killing hostages or anyone not trying to kill them or anyone actively surrendering, and she’s more likely to go out of her way to help someone in need or inconvenience herself to stop a murderer. Still, she can be convinced to bend on these standards if someone gives her a solid enough argument or if she likes them enough, and she’s pretty good at convincing herself it’s okay if what she’s doing isn’t actively hurting someone else or hurting someone who she thinks deserves it.

Despite those flaws, she does like feeling like she’s helping people. While she’ll never hesitate to ask for more money from her boss or take a gift, if someone were kidnapped she’d help if asked, no pay required. Harlan’s constant pushing has also made her better at talking through her issues, even though it’s with a small circle of people.

In most social situations, Kyna is sarcastic, teasing and very social. She’s not great at lying or charming people, though. She's also incredibly stubborn, more out of a fear of being proven wrong or shown up rather than out of a certainty she's right. This ties into her fear of being vulnerable in general. Her magic is really the only thing that makes her feel powerful and the only thing that she has full confidence in, so she can be outright cocky when it comes to spells. Losing her focus is one of her biggest fears, and because she sort of defines herself around her magical ability, losing her magic would leave her floundering much like it did with her father. Kyna isn't so much obsessed with gaining more magical knowledge as she is utterly convinced that she's really, really good at magic and will just continue to be badass at it naturally. To give you a metaphor, she's not the student who spends weeks preparing for an exam, she's the one completely convinced that she can walk in and ace it, and any concepts she isn't familiar with she can figure out on the fly.

Kyna's racial background also puts her in an interesting position. Reluvethel was always a loner, so Kyna doesn't know his side of the family at all. She was raised with a human mother, and while her school and upbringing was pretty diverse and her mom tried to keep the kids in touch with their background, Kyna's entire support system has always been human. Because of this, she doesn't relate deeply to her elvish background, even if she has knowledge of the culture and speaks the language. The fact that she ages more slowly than her mother and the rest of her family and the idea of losing everyone she cares about besides Nico due to old age terrifies her, and she tries not to think about it if at all possible, which is pretty much how she deals with anything that makes her super uncomfortable, because facing things is hard.

Inventory:
- Wallet with the usual wallet stuff
- An iPhone
- A backpack
- Focus (a cheap plastic BFF necklace)
- Healys (a pair of heelys that give her a boost to healing spells. Mechanically it means she gets advantage on dice rolls for healing.)
- A sun necklace that allows her to cast Prayer of Healing once a day
- A switchblade

Abilities:
Kyna is a D&D wizard, level ten specifically, but our campaign sometimes plays a bit fast and loose with those rules. Wizards learn magic through education, whether that's self-taught or otherwise. Our campaign ignores the prepared daily spell list mechanic, but Kyna can only cast a certain number of spells per day, with the exception of her cantrips. She also needs a focus to cast spells, because without it, her magic is unpredictable and dangerous.

Kyna specifically focuses on evocation magic, which basically means she really likes being destructive. Lightning and fire spells are her go to, and she does a ton of damage with them. Here’s a list of the spells she knows so I don’t clutter up this app. Despite her spells being pretty powerful, Kyna is weak physically. She's not very strong or fast, and can't take much damage, so she's pretty much the epitome of a glass cannon.

She’s also a half-elf, which gives her a couple of benefits. It’s impossible for anyone to put her to sleep through magic, and she’s harder to charm (or magically control) than most people. She can also see very well in the dark, much better than a human. Tucker has also taught her to pick locks! She’s not super skilled, but she can open simple ones. She speaks both English and Elvish.

Flaws:
Kyna is very, very emotional, and consistently thinks with her heart rather than her head. She’s impulsive and has a serious temper, and both of those qualities can get her to make terrible decisions. She’s also easy to sway, especially if someone she’s friends with is the one trying to convince her, or if doing something morally wrong will greatly benefit her in some way. Kyna can also come off as a bit emotionally immature, and she’s prone to forcing her way through problems or just running from them.

SAMPLES
Action Log Sample: Here on the TDM!