Aether Princess
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION
The first thing you notice about Hero is that she is almost always seen wearing a gray-silver cloak. Its material has a fluid quality that shimmers and almost appears to move within itself. Underneath the oft-drawn hood of this cloak, you can see an escape of light and a cascade of curled hair that reaches her waist. Her visage is incredibly pale with alabaster skin that softly glows in an otherworldly enchantment, sometimes blurring the delineations of her countenance. Her most telling feature are her glassy eyes that pierce through the gleam with stark intensity.
A youth with pouty lips, soft cheeks, and a wistful mien. The maturity of her body, being at the time nearly coming of age in the culture of her people, is still somewhat on the leaner side although her burgeoning curves are beginning to take shape. Under the silvery gray mantle that often drapes her when she is out, there are hints at the hourglass figure crystalizing beneath.
Although she seldom lowers her hood in public, on the rare occasion it is, you see she has long slender pointed ears. On her brow rests a large gleaming pink gem unsupported by any circlet or device. Although rather reticent among strangers she has a resounding visual magnetism that belies the presence of divine origins about her.
INVENTORY
• Cloak
• Quaterstaff
• Holdall Bag
• Purse containing some credits
• Water Canteen
• Commlink
PERSONALITY AND BELIEFS
Hero wields a powerful wisdom that is inherited from her profound ability of introspection. Her overwhelming strengths and weaknesses are reflected in her energy of thought. Through the capacity of her insight coupled with her attunement to her intuition, she is adept at noticing the slightest variations of implication. As a result, it has granted her a cunning that allows her to contest any opponent in a clash of wills.
Surprisingly, despite this innate sophistication that was apparent at a fairly early age, she lets her emotions guide her. She is trademarked by her raw, powerful, unforgiving flares and tends to incite agitation in others through her passive aggression just because she can find mischief amusing. Yet these layers shed to pose someone of a gentler nature, fraught with frailty and uncertainty. She has an inherent moral compass providing a strong sense of conscience that sets her up as being a law unto herself. She is as capable of great selfishness as she is of selflessness. When push comes to shove, she always tries to do what she knows is right.
Her depth of feeling due to being a conduit to the cosmic force is the main impetus for her isolation. Constantly balancing individuality with acceptance, a crucible of both confidence and insecurity; Hero finds irony in the fact that it is in her loneliness that she achieves the culmination of both her content and longing.
STRENGTHS
• Cautious
• Wisdom
WEAKNESSES
• Self-sabtoging behaviors.
• A 'force cancer' that involves the uncontrolled growth of midi-chlorians within her.
• Inability to display any control over her force connection.
HISTORY
Hero's narrative begins with her mother Gehmella, a mysterious and rare being known as a Diathim from a realm within the thousand moons of Iego which her family ruled and protected. Seduced by an unknown darkness, Gehmella's Mother and Brothers fell from grace and together usurped her father, the leader of these so-called angels, casting him down and destroying him with their new forbidden power. Gehmella secretly attempted to rally members loyal to her father and restore the court to grace. Finding herself vulnerable and outnumbered, the spheres of existence within that moon field were already too tainted with darkness. After learning of her daughter's secret dealings and quiet revolt, Verauna, sought to imprison her. She uttered a malediction unto her daughter diminishing Gehmalla's power further. The curse leeched from her the radiant numen of her ancestry and would eventually be her undoing. Gehmella entered exile, expelled by the venom of the infernal court like a falling star.
Her wings and faith both lost; Hero's mother plummeted from the Ash Worlds into the silvery mists of the outer Galaxy in her fall from grace. The remaining power within her, guided like a magnet by fate, fixated on a planet upon which an ancient Sephi civilization's foundations rested.
Impacting upon one of their fleet's great Moth Ships, Gehmella was taken in and offered sanctuary from the leader of this family of nobles on the condition that she marry their eldest son. Gehmella had worked to conceal her true nature, and the King of this world could not guess exactly who or what she was, but there was an undeniable sense of power from her, one he wanted to be bound within his family. Gehmella agreed, if not for lack of choice, then for nothing else than the eldest prince Suleim's beauty and enigmatic nature. Gehmella would come to help make significant improvements and bring about a golden age for this city which was up until that point considered more of a backwater province of the much larger Galaxy.
Before Hero came an elder set of siblings, two sisters, with no incident. However, Hero's infancy and childhood were marked by slight oddities. For the duration of Gehmalla's pregnancy, Hero radiated with such light within her mother's womb that Gehmella had to take special precautions to conceal herself. At her birth which she insisted on having alone, Hero shone like a small star, strings of pure radiant energy shooting from every pore in her body and the strongest light of all beaming from her stark hazel-green eyes. Gehmella calmed the power of the Force within her baby. She was overjoyed with the hope that this was a sign of a reversal of fortune she had so long prayed for. Yet she continued to be mindful of keeping her true identity and any sign of her child's gift hidden from her grasping family and any other dangerous forces in the Galaxy.
In fact, Gehmella kept her heritage a secret even from her own children who believed they were simply Sephi royalty. In doing so she hoped to protect herself, those who took her in, and the new life she created. Gehmella pushed Hero's power deep down within her newborn where it could not be touched or sensed by either the babe itself, kin, or foe. But this proved to be a fatal error for the future.
There was an underlying strain at the heart of Hero's upbringing, one that kept Hero from fully appreciating her childhood. She realized there was something different about her. The desire for an heir of male influence imposed upon the child to appear more as a boy and be socialized as one from the cradle to the cusp of young adulthood. She was named Gal'Aether.
While her sisters were raised in a rather traditional upbringing at the royal court in the Sephi capital, Hero was much more sheltered. She was raised in a more rural setting, at her mother's insistence, creating an insular environment for her daughter which bespoke of something that haunted Gehmella that Hero could never guess yet one that thrived her daughter's very cerebral nature. Gehmella impressed upon her daughter that the galaxy was a strange and frightful place.
Also unlike her other siblings who showed no signs of aptitude in the Force, its presence within the girl was unusually smothering. It had bypassed the block her mother had attempted to sustain to a degree. Although she could not access the power, she felt a cosmic dread within her and was aware of it from her earliest moments of consciousness. She could see and feel universally the collective consciousness of the force on so profound a level that it brought her to the brink. She didn't know then that this was her connection to the force. The young child simply thought there was something inherently wrong with her and so engendered her lifelong disposition of isolation and feeling disconnected from others.
Throughout her early childhood, Hero became conflicted with what she considered her curse. She was too terrified to tell anyone else about it feeling ashamed of being so different. She became very adept in hiding and keeping her true nature contained, unknowingly having employed Force Stealth which only serves as a hint at what else could be disinterred from the dormant presence of the force within her. For a while, she was successful at digging this knowing so deeply that she almost forgot it existed. Over time, however, this cultivated a strain on her and taxed her both emotionally and physically.
Hero's mother had to ultimately relent her close guard of her youngest child and let her go to Vaerduran, a mountain retreat where Sephi adolescents were sent so they could be schooled and come of age under the guidance of the Elders. There she struggled to come to grips with the realities of a more public and structured life.
As she began to come of age the dormant power sealed away in childhood began to stir and foment. She became a crucible of a growing power so potent that she could no longer contain it. At first, it was merely unsettling vivid dreams, premonitions, and the subtle loss of control over the lock she kept on her powers. She would be sitting in class when she would start with a tremble, her palms and knees cold, her stomach sunk, and with a twitch, the chronometer would slam to the floor in a thunderous crash. Her classmates surveyed the room for a cause and retiring their glare upon her grew suspicious. Her pale glowing countenance already brought her unwanted attention and teasing.
As time passed it manifested in bouts of immense power bursting from within in sudden and unexpected destructive spurts. These fits caused just as much devastation within her as she seized in a state of terror and vertigo as it took over. She began seeing visions of things beyond her comprehension that left her drained and filled with existential dread. She felt infinity. The cosmos became a place of fear for her. It became impossible for her to fit in.
Hero consequently became even more solitary and rebellious, insisting on returning home. She would go to court with her mother and receive private tutoring.
All the while Gehmella's family in coordination with their mysterious benefactor that had originally tainted them, discovered her location and her alliance with the Sephi on Isobe, her husband, and the resulting children. A raid on the planet was planned in an attempt to seize the rogue Diathim and her offspring. Agents seized the capital with no regard for anything or anyone's well-being throughout their search. But Gehmella had already gone to fetch her children and flee.
In the inevitable confrontation at the capital, Gehmella transfigured into her true form and stood between her foes and her children. Enemies in the sky and on the ground all about them, there seemed to be no escape. As her mother engaged her enemies Hero and her sisters were terror-struck. A cold shiver passed through Hero's body, a beat deep within her began to drum, and her heart fell deep within her chest. As she swooned into the air, levitating, her eyes fluttered and a growing radiance fluttered within them. Pools of light opened within her tingling palms and mists of nebulae blanketed her as an infinity within her mind opened and her vision tunneled through a cosmic wormhole.
As their enemies narrowed in on them it was too late. Her power was unleashed as she became the embodiment of the Cosmic Force from a light that came from deep within. A blinding conflagration surged out destroying everything in its path. Gehmella was able to shield herself. Everything else in the vicinity, from the palatial residence to the smaller manses on the edge of the settlement folded like playthings. Even Moth Ships battling in the sky were torn apart and destroyed. In the small moment of opportunity when everyone was prone from the blast, Gehmella quickly used her power to eject Hero into the atmosphere in a protective bubble. . .
Hero awoke in a small room, with a Toydarian hovering over her, tending to her. She had been intercepted in her hurtling through the cosmos by a vessel on its way to Jakku. She was in a medbay of a dingy clinic, and the alien mending her was known as Doctor Tonalii Truhert. He was a healer whose care she was placed in. When asked her name Hero couldn't think of it. In fact, she found that she remembered very little of life before she awoke in this place.
It took many weeks and treatments in that bed for Hero to feel well enough to rise again. Finally given some more autonomy after a long recovery, Hero took her first steps toward independence. When she first got to rise and wash up, she peered into a mirror and the girl staring back at her felt familiar and different all at once, vibrant pink eyes playing with an inner dalliance of light. She was charmed by what she saw. Suddenly a name appeared in her mind. She was Hero. It was the one thing she knew for certain.
Doctor Truhert explained to Hero about the force and its existence within her. How being connected to the force in and of itself is a natural gift, but how her connection to it remained exceedingly raw and her inability to focus her connection posing a great threat. Hero was familiar with this power inside her, she knew it as innately as she knew how to breathe, and that it was somehow the cause of her being here lost without her memory. And that the only control she ever had over it was to suppress it as a child until it grew so strong it began to control her.
Further yet, Tonalii explained the presence of Midi-chlorians in her system which had begun to grow in a malignant pattern. Without the means to subside their uncontrolled division and growth, the pressure of their radical manifestation on her body and mind may prove life-threatening. An intervention had to be made, and more learned of her condition.
She was invited to remain at the clinic to undergo daily treatment and analysis. The more she spent time with Tonalii the better she felt. He began to teach her things about herself that she didn't know, like the power within her was not her fault, it could be a gift she could learn to control and use. This tutelage led to a close bond between the two and Hero trusted him more than anyone.
As she spent more time with the Doctor at the clinic, she began doing favors for him. This slowly turned into an unofficial position as an assistant at the clinic. Hero met many beings who all looked, felt, and acted differently. Things started to look like they were getting better and she was enjoying her life on Jakku.