Harper

Harper

Full Name: Harper Reneaux

Age: 26

Gender: Female

Race: Hylian

Occupation: Mercenary (Healer-class Mage with minor alchemical training)

Appearance: Harper and Piper are identical twins, but this only affects basic points of appearance. They both have blonde hair, but while Piper cuts hers short, Harper has no such physical constraints. Her hair is wild and long, framing her face to accentuate the high cheekbones and thin jawline she inherited from her parents. She usually keeps it bound in a messy ponytail that hangs to her shoulder-blades, with bangs hanging to her eyebrows. When not bundled, the hair hangs loose to the small of her back. Their eyes are the same steel grey colour, but while Piper’s are tired and frustrated, Harper’s are glittering and mischievous.

The twins are the same height, but Harper is much smaller in physique than her sister. While Piper spent her life physically exerting herself to squeeze the maximum amount of self-control and power out of her body, Harper was cooped up in mage studies, reading books and practicing spells. While she’s gotten significantly more fit living life on the road, she’s still somewhat fragile. She often finds she needs more blankets during the winter to stay warm, which appeals to her desire for soft and comfortable things.

She loves wearing silly clothing. Her wizard’s robes are all flashy violets and pinks, flaring out at the waist to reveal tightly-fitted cloth leggings tucked into knee-high boots, both black. She wears a belt at this point of separation to keep the top half of her robes tight against her, from which hang several vials of potion and alchemical reagents that might assist in a fight. She also wears a comically-oversized wizard’s hat, with the classical wide brim and pointed top. Only the brim is so wide that a wire is needed to keep the front from blocking Harper’s line of sight at all times.

Personality: Harper is still learning to switch gears after her living situation has changed. When she was a teenager, her father pushed her to study magic, to make sure that she’d be as useful an adult as her sister. This cooped an extraverted, buoyant child into dusty studies, talking one-on-one with old men who cared about nothing but their magic.

It wasn’t to say that Harper didn’t like magic. She’s always loved the feeling of energy flowing through her body like wind through grass, pulling on strings and weaving together specific chains of thought, then breathing life into them. The pure artistry of spellcasting is her favourite thing in all the world, and she could be lost in it forever. But her beliefs didn’t align with those crusty old masters; she would rather be out in the world learning and growing through experience, not reading.

During her time in the Royal Academy, Harper began overcoming her depression. But it’s been a long road, and she’s still working on it. There are occasional setbacks due to her magical prowess or a conversation that goes badly with Piper, and she’ll retreat into herself, full of blame and tears. But she’s doing better.

Like her sister, Harper has a deep and profound need to protect others. She’s more social, and the diplomatic face of the organization between the Reneaux twins, but their hearts are entirely aligned on this. It wasn’t as if Harper was completely unaware of Piper’s protective nature toward her in their youths. She’d always been sharp and perceptive, highly interested in the world around her, and had picked up on the discordant notes between her sister and their father.

While Piper will go against her conscience sometimes for the good of the group, Harper will always follow her heart. She has been known to give her half of contract payments back to the payer so that they’d be able to feed their children or their puppies. She’s a veritable wellspring of compassion and creative enthusiasm and is always ready to cheer others on.

Weapons: Harper carries a staff that is suspiciously plain when compared to the rest of her flashy, flamboyant persona. It is a simple oak staff, approximately as tall as she is, with tendrils of wood wrapping around a large, sapphire-coloured orb focus at the top. Despite looking as if it was a branch plucked from a tree, the staff is impeccably smooth, and warm to the touch.

Equipment: Harper carries a bag over her shoulder that contains field rations, bandaging, and fire starting supplies. On her belt, she has some alchemical reagents in vials to assist should she need to create something in the field.

Her alchemical “elective” training at the academy taught her many recipes for elixirs, potions, and toxins that she can make while traveling. As such, she and Piper are able to travel light and do some minor foraging.

Pets: While he’s not a pet so much as a spirit familiar taking on the form of an animal, Harper’s second-longest running companion is in the shape of a dragonfly. He is all the colours of fire, brilliant reds, oranges, and yellows, and she named him Dinraal.

Dinraal flutters around within a five-metre radius of Piper. He can increase her healing range by landing on a target within this distance, while she would normally have to be able to touch the target.

Magic/Talents: Harper has done very little magical training outside of healing. While she was rotated through various tutors as a child, before entering the Royal Academy at 18, her interest in other schools of magic was limited to pure academics. Knowledge of how other mages thought would help her further her specific interests.

Due to a decade of tutoring and private study, as well as some minor experiments on herself, while she was growing up, Harper could be considered to be a fully competent (and confident) mage.

Her healing works fairly simply, a sustained flow of magic through one-to-three patients at once. While some advanced healing mages, or younger paragons of focus, could maintain the thought processes to heal more patients or heal more wounds with more efficiency, Harper’s particular forte is in directing her focus elsewhere.

She can stitch together one large wound per cast or a handful of moderate wounds. These tire her, causing what she refers to as “fuzzy brain” for a few minutes, though the time can be shortened if she is able to sit down and rest. If she tries too hard to push through these issues for further healing, the effect becomes more and more serious, until she will eventually black out. Smaller injuries like a shallow knife cut or non-vital arrow piercing don’t tax her heavily enough to cause these particular side effects.

Harper specializes in one particular advanced technique offered to healers at the academy once they’d surpassed normal graduation requirements. It is a sustained spell weave that allows the caster to heal their own wounds quickly and without direct focus. Because it is constantly channeled without fully conscious thought, it will keep the healer from being injured on the battlefield and die because they passed out.

That being said, the sustained form requires a certain amount of magical energy to be directed toward it. Because of this, Harper’s effectiveness in the field is stunted. But it also means that she can direct enemy fire her way through flamboyant, distracting techniques. By distracting the enemies, she can provide safe approaches and openings for Piper to put a quick end to a battle.