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Player name: Jessi
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forgefire
AIM/Plurk: jessihoney18 on AIM;![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
ajessiaday
Email: jess.piggin at gmail
Other characters: Peter Grant
Character name: Daja Kisubo
Age: 18
Canon: The Emelan series by Tamora Pierce
Canon point: The Will of the Empress – some time after Tris comforts Daja about Rizu, before the circle leave Namorn
Totem: Daja has a brass coating on the palm of her left hand that runs between her fingers and joins up with the palm covering, a little bit like a short half-glove. It was created when her trangshi Trader staff was melted during her attempt to contain a magical forest fire when she was 10; it is basically grafted to her skin and will never come off. The metal is “living”, meaning it grows (she has to pick bits off it pretty regularly to stop it from spreading and covering her whole body), is malleable and always warm/body temperature to the touch. During fissures, the metal’s living properties will be diminished – it will grow cold, stiff and restrict her hand’s movements somewhat. It will be resistant to her magic during them too, meaning she will be unable to warm it or shape it by magic during them.
ALTERNATIVELY, her Winding Circle mage medallion, a small gold disc showing on the obverse a picture of a hammer over flames, engraved with the names “Daja Kisubo” and “Dedicate Frostpine” along the edges, and on the reverse a spiral that represents Winding Circle. When a fissure happens, both sides will just be a smooth, brightly polished blank.
Weapons: Her Trader staff, an ebony staff with caps of brass at either end that she carries pretty much everywhere she goes. It’s both a weapon and a cultural item: etchings and designs on it tell Daja’s life story to those who know how to read the markings, and she uses the staff as a melee weapon and is an extremely practised staff-fighter.
Abilities/powers: Daja is an ambient smith mage. This means she has the ability to shape, draw on and use the magic inherently contained within metal and fire, and her magic is most usually performed while undertaking metalwork/blacksmithing. She is an expert blacksmith and whitesmith, and she can work with or without the use of magic.
Daja’s power covers a lot of things but is mostly creative. She can construct amazing magical things out of metal, particularly when she works with the living metal of her former staff. This living metal is entirely her own, and with it she has managed to create a number of unique magical items, such as prosthetic limbs that are warm and move and react almost as living flesh would; gloves that allow the wearer to pick up and handle high-heat things for use in fighting house fires; magical scrying mirrors; spectacles and earplugs to dampen magical visions; apparently she even created a prosthetic eye (presumably magical and working, though it’s only a passing mention) from the stuff once.
She has a magical connection to all metals, and can identify metal by touch and smell, magically and more mundanely. She can sense metals from a distance, and depending on how far away it is and how much magical power she currently has, can shape and call metals to her, allowing her to do things like pull nails out of wood and so on. She can perform workings to spell protection or keep out disease by using the right combinations of essential oils and carving special designs into whatever metal thing she is working on.
She can work with fire and heat without metal as well, drawing them to her magically, holding fire in her hands or weaving it into patterns. All but extreme heat (such as molten lava) will not harm her physically. She can breathe smoke without risk of death, though too much will make her lungs and throat sore.
Through her connection with her foster-siblings (and the half year or so their magic was allowed to blur and run together) she also has some small affiliation with plant magic, weather magic and thread magic. These usually manifest in her drawing elements of those magics to use in her own smithing projects, such as weaving “threads” of fire into a grid to create a steady forge fire or drawing on organic plant designs for her metal creations. This blending of their power also granted her the ability to see magic with her naked eyes – it appears as sparkles and flashes of silver light, softer or brighter depending on the strength of the magic.
Location: Discipline cottage is a cosy thatch-roofed cottage, with a neat little fence around its grounds. There is a large garden outside the back of the cottage that is the healthiest, most beautiful, flourishing garden you could ever hope to imagine. There’s a separate privy outhouse in the corner of the back garden. The cottage contains six bedrooms, two work-rooms, a living room and kitchen/dining room.
Coming in from the front door, there is a small shrine in the entrance hallway. The entrance is flanked by two bedrooms on either side (Sandry and Briar’s), then a workroom and the open living room, two more bedrooms (Lark and Rosethorn’s) and the kitchen/dining room at the back. There’s a wooden ladder/stairway that leads up to the attic, where there are two more bedrooms (Tris and Daja’s). There’s also a ladder in the attic that leads up onto the thatched roof.
Discipline is furnished comfortably and everything feels homely. There are fine tapestries and carpets, good strong furniture and it’s all clean and tidy.
It will always be sunny, warm and bright in the area of Limbo where Discipline is, like a perfect summer’s afternoon. It feels extremely peaceful and calm. However, it isn’t entirely open: within the dream, the rooms belonging to Sandry, Briar and Tris will be closed. The living room and dining room are open, as are Lark and Rosethorn’s bedrooms and workrooms and Daja’s bedroom, but Daja’s siblings’ rooms will have shuttered windows and locked doors.
Personality: Within the circle of her three foster-siblings, Daja is the rock, the cooler head who tends to think of practicalities and pragmatism when the others may be more impulsive. She provides roots and strength to the group. Her personality is very balanced, possibly influenced by her connection to metals and the earth they come from. She is sensible and practical, making choices through reason and logic more often than not and almost always thinking carefully before coming to a decision. She tends to be quite serious, but she isn’t stuffy. She loves and takes pride in her work, likes to have fun and has a sense of humour.
Daja’s magic is a huge part of her, and she gains strength from metals and fire and smithcraft. She’s happiest with a hammer in her hand and a forge fire heating her skin. As a Trader child, she wasn’t allowed to observe smiths performing their craft, although she wanted to; the pain of losing her family was tempered by her new opportunity to follow her magic and her heart. She experiments with her power, working it like no other mage really ever has, thanks to her power being combined with her siblings’ and her young age when she first started learning. When there’s a working she wants to perform but there isn’t an established way to do it, she will experiment and can usually create a way to get her magic doing what she wants it to do. She is determined and driven, working at problems steadily until she can solve them; she’s not afraid to try new things. For example, when she discovers the twins of Frostpine’s friends have magic, she has to adapt and try different methods of teaching them meditation and power control due to their different personalities.
Daja is slow to anger, and perhaps due to her Trader upbringing will tend to ignore someone who has gotten on her bad side or simply give them the cold shoulder. That said, she isn’t afraid of a fight, and will defend herself if someone is fool enough to attack her physically. She doesn’t take pleasure in fighting but she doesn’t waste her energy feeling guilty about hurting someone who deserves it if she acts in self-defence or defence of someone else. Although she doesn’t often get truly angry, she can get frustrated and is sometimes rather petty in her reasoning, though she does tend to recognise when she’s letting herself get irritated over something small and usually feels bad about it.
She has seen a number of horrible things in her time, all at quite a young age, but unlike some of her siblings, she is quite good at not letting this affect her too deeply. She doesn’t suffer from any kind of PTSD and although they sadden her, she is able put the events out of her mind. When she is in immediate danger, she is usually calm and acts quickly and instinctually; partly, this comes also from her Trader upbringing, as Trader children are trained to remain calm in times of trouble. She usually acts to help people, but weighs dangers and such before doing so. Her personal beliefs say that people will be judged and their actions will be accounted for by the Trader gods, so she doesn’t spend a lot of time wishing punishment on others.
Daja can be stubborn. She knows her own mind and sometimes falls into the trap of thinking that means she knows better than others. She is strong-willed and although she doesn’t anger quickly, she can be unkind at times; this usually only happens when she’s deeply hurt or upset by things and lashes out against people. When she comes home from Namorn with Frostpine and finds out she can no longer live at Discipline cottage, she’s very hurt and even quite frightened by the prospect of losing her newfound home. She reacts by buying her own house for her and the others to live in, a gesture that’s both practical and almost spiteful, in that she doesn’t let Sandry (who she blames for not letting her know about the loss of Discipline) know about her plans and doesn’t tell her even after she’s been living there for over two weeks.
Although she doesn’t always show it, Daja has strong emotions, particularly when it comes to her foster-family. The loss of her Trader family in the wreck of Third Ship Kisubo gave her an appreciation of how precious family and home are, and she takes threats to that very seriously. She will support her friends in almost anything and loves them fiercely. That said, she won’t shy away from telling them when she thinks they’re wrong. Daja is a proud person, and she can take things personally if the insult stings her pride, though her practical side tends to win out after a time and she recognises if she has gone wrong.
Thanks to her upbringing, plus her experiences with being trangshi and with the arsonist in Namorn, Daja has a strong sense of honour and personal responsibility. Trader culture dictates that both the money one brings in to one’s family and personal honour are valued extremely highly, and must be taken seriously – owing things to others is seen as shameful and it is a matter of personal honour that debts (whether favours or money or trade goods) are repaid as quickly and exactingly as possible. Her time with her foster-family and as a mage has softened this a little, but Daja will usually not do work for free nor ask favours without offering something in return (the exception is gifts/work she does for people she admires for whatever reason, where usually knowing them/knowing she can help them is payment enough).
When it comes to love, Daja has recently realised she is a nisamohi, a lesbian, and had one serious relationship (though it was short-lived) with another woman. Although she loved her deeply and was heartbroken that she could not stay together with her, Daja’s practical side won out over any of her romantic leanings when she had to leave. Although she cried for hours afterwards, rationally she knows that it had to happen the way it did. This will probably always be true of her: practicality will override any wild romances or passions.
As for how she will react to Limbo? Daja is likely to be disbelieving of the situation at first, and try to come to some conclusion that makes sense in her own mind rather than taking someone else’s word for it. At the point where she will be entering the dream, she will probably be secretly a little glad for the reprieve from the real world, due to her distress about Rizu and (even though the distance between her and her circle of friends has basically been mended at this point) the exhaustion/frustration of her situation with her siblings. She will likely look on her time in Limbo as a chance to collect her thoughts and ready herself for the challenges of her adult life when she returns to her world. She’s also going to make herself a forge, even if she has to cannibalise metal from the crumbling buildings of the dreamworld.
History: Daja was born into a Blue Trader family, meaning a Trader (or Tsaw'ha) clan who had numerous ships and sailed the Pebbled Sea buying and selling their goods. She was brought up in Trader culture, which recognises craftsmen and artisans as necessary for the creation of their trade goods but simultaneously looks down upon those same craftsmen; she was a quite interested in the work of the non-Trader lugsha (craftsmen) but was never allowed to handle tools or learn much about their work. She was tested for magic by Trader mimanders (mages) when she turned four, but they saw no power in her.
On the first trade voyage of the spring in her tenth year, Daja’s family ship was struck by a violent storm that destroyed the Third Ship Kisubo and killed her entire immediate family. Daja was the only survivor and floated alone in the ocean for some time. She only lived due to her hidden ambient magic, which allowed her to call a suraku (a survival box, filled with waterproofed provisions of food and water) to her thanks to the wide metal bands around it. She lived on its contents until she was rescued by a great mage named Niklaren Goldeye (or Niko), who had forseen the destruction of Third Ship Kisubo and had visions of Daja’s fate.
In Trader culture, bad luck is essentially thought of as a disease, a terrible contagious thing to be avoided if possible. Being the lone survivor in a disaster is thought of as the worst kind of bad luck. Due to surviving the annihilation of her family, Daja was made trangshi (outcast or unclean) by the Trader Council and forbidden to speak to or interact with Traders, lest her bad luck rub off and infect them. She was given an unmarked Trader staff with bright, polished brass caps so that Traders could recognise her as trangshi, and she was sent away.
Niko, having spotted her undiscovered ambient magic, took her to Winding Circle, a temple complex housing mages and dedicates to various gods and disciplines, situated near a town called Summersea in Emelan. He placed her with two great mages, Dedicates Lark and Rosethorn, in a small house called Discipline cottage. In Discipline she found herself living with three other children around her age. They were all from very different backgrounds but with similarly hidden magic: a noble, Lady Sandrilene fa Toren, a thread mage; a merchant’s daughter, Trisana Chandler, a weather mage; and a former thief and street-rat, Briar Moss, a plant mage.
During the course of their first year at Discipline, she and the other three children quickly became closer, as they all found out they had magic and began to learn how to control it, both separately and together. Daja was allowed to join a great smith mage, Dedicate Frostpine, in his forge; he began to teach her the smithing art and more control over the magic they shared. It was a pretty horrible year for disasters – the kids had to hold together and work through a huge earthquake, a concentrated pirate attack, raging forest fires and an epidemic of a new and deadly disease – but they did their best and became stronger for the experience. In the course of the earthquake, the four children were trapped underground and Sandry spun their magics together so they were strong enough to survive. This gave them all some elements of each other’s magic and allowed them to speak in each other’s minds without physical contact (mages who share a type of magic can usually do this but they have to be touching physically).
During a trip to the north of the country, Daja made contact with a White Trader clan (those who trade through caravan travel), a member of whom had seen her accidentally create a living iron plant out of thin metal rods when her magic got away from her. Although she was trangshi, this creation was deemed to be so valuable by the leaders of Tenth Caravan Idaram that one of their clan was forced to take qunsuanen (literally meaning to wash off bad luck), an elaborate series of rituals and magical protections that allow a Trader to speak to a trangshi without the trangshi’s bad luck infecting that Trader. The one who took the qunsuanen was called Polyam, a woman who had once been important in the caravan but had been severely injured in a rockslide, losing a leg and her ability to ride and making her one of the least important members of the caravan.
Daja was hungry for her own lost culture and valued the opportunity to speak to even one lone Trader for the relatively short time it would take to bargain for the metal vine. However, instead of simply bargaining, selling and that being the end of it, through a series of events, Daja ended up saved the caravan from a raging firestorm. She walked into the fire, heading it off, weaving it and sending it away with some help from her foster-family so it wouldn’t eat the Traders alive. In the process, her clothes burnt off and her trangshi staff was disintegrated, the brass cap from the top melting onto her hand (the origin of her metal half-mitt).
Once the fire had been tamed, the Tenth Caravan Idaram owed Daja so much zokin (the life balance in the bookkeeper god’s books, essentially karma) that they were honour-bound to take her into their clan. She politely declined, choosing instead to stay with her adopted family and learn her craft, something that wouldn’t be allowed if she chose to study with Idaram’s mimanders. She asked instead that the caravan simply tell the Trader Council to strike her name from the books of the trangshi, as she would then be able to bargain and interact freely with Traders. They agreed, gave Daja a new Trader staff, etched with her life story, the caps no longer blank brass. As a personal thanks for being the one who made her return to Trader status possible, Daja, her teachers and her siblings created a realistic prosthetic leg for Polyam, made from the living metal that now grew on Daja’s palm. (In the following years, Daja sold her living metal creations to Traders and merchants and became quite wealthy doing so.)
After that eventful year, the four children’s lives settled into a quieter routine of study and magic, and at the age of 13 they all earned their full mage medallions (some of the youngest mages ever) proclaiming they were licensed and temple-approved to work magic without supervision and binding them to the laws and rules of the Winding Circle. Four years after they’d first come to Winding Circle, Daja, Briar and Tris all accompanied their individual teachers on journeys out into the world.
Daja travelled with Frostpine to Namorn, a country to the far north of Emelan and Winding Circle. She studied with smiths and mages along the way, learning new skills and honing her art, learning with village blacksmiths and the finest court whitesmiths along the way. She and Frostpine wintered with old friends of Frostpine’s in a city called Kugisko, built over a series of islands. Daja spotted ambient magic in Frostpine’s friends’ twin daughters and although she managed to find each of them a teacher in their specific magic (cooking magic and carpentry magic respectively), she took the responsibility to teach the girls the basics of magical control, meditation and the rules that mages live by while their other teachers trained them in their specific craft. While Daja lived in the city, it was plagued by a rash of house-fires which were eventually revealed to be arson. She used her magic over the course of the winter to try to mitigate the damage caused by fires and help those who fought against them. THEN SPOILERS and she managed to help identify and bring the arsonist to justice, to be tried and then executed by being burnt at the stake.
Daja and Frostpine left Kugisko as the thaw came but didn’t return to Winding Circle immediately, taking a leisurely route back, stopping where they pleased. As they made their return, Daja having turned 16 not too long before, Frostpine informed her that, as she had come of age and had attained her medallion and was therefore an adult mage, she would not be allowed to live at Discipline cottage in Winding Circle temple unless she chose to become a dedicate herself. Hurt and shocked, Daja bought a house and forge in Summersea and quietly set about making herself a home that could not be taken away from her. Inside she blamed Sandry (who had been living with her Uncle Vedris, the Duke of Emelan in Summersea and must have known about the temple rules but had not told her) and shut her mental connection off from her foster-sister. Things weren’t helped by Tris and Briar’s respective returns from their travels over the next two years. They both moved in with Daja, but they had each had experiences that caused them to draw away from their foster-siblings. They were all adults and their experiences had made them nearly strangers. None of them let down their mental walls and their magical links remained closed.
Two years after Daja’s return to Summersea, Sandry’s cousin, Empress Berenene of Namorn, wanting to draw Sandry back to her empire (where the lands that had belonged to Sandry’s mother were) so that she could use Sandry’s wealth. She arranged for Sandry to visit, to marry her off to a Namornese nobleman and therefore keep her money in the Namornese Empire. Duke Vedris approached Daja, Briar and Tris and asked they accompany Sandry, for protection. They agreed and off they all went to Namorn.
Berenene had information on them all, tempting them each to stay by appealing to their wants, hoping to win three powerful young mages for her Empire on top of Sandry and her considerable wealth. She would probably have offered Daja a rank and position as a smith in the court or suchlike, but didn’t consider it a priority once Daja fell in love. The Empress’s seamstress, a young noblewoman called Rizuka fa Dalach unexpectedly wormed her way into Daja’s heart. Realising she had been pursuing the wrong gender, Daja realised the reason she had had no romantic interested before was that she was a nisamohi (a lesbian); the two dove into a passionate affair.
Unfortunately, after a few weeks at court and disastrous attempt by a young nobleman to kidnap Sandry and force her to sign a marriage agreement, through which the circle slowly reformed and opened their minds to one another again, the young mages decided they had to leave. Daja asked Rizu if she would come with her, but Rizu refused. Broken-hearted, Daja returned to the house and readied herself to leave with her siblings.
1st person sample: Good morning, all. [Daja’s handwriting is neat and well-formed.] This is Daja Kisubo. I realize it’s early but I wanted to let everyone know I’ve finished putting together my forge. I’m open for business, even if there’s no proper business to be had here.
If I wasn’t in the dream I’d have nails or horseshoes to make, if nothing else. [Quite a long pause before she continues writing. She was thinking over prices.] At home I would ask a price but simply having something to work at here will be payment enough, I think. The practise will keep my arm strong. There are many things to do there and not so many here, so please ask if there is something you would like me to try my hand at forging.
Note: Is it alright if in her items from home she gets a portable forge and a selection of her various smithing tools? If it’s not, she’ll almost certainly set about making them herself in Limbo anway, so I’m happy if you guys want to veto them for any reason.
Journal:
forgefireAIM/Plurk: jessihoney18 on AIM;
Email: jess.piggin at gmail
Other characters: Peter Grant
Character name: Daja Kisubo
Age: 18
Canon: The Emelan series by Tamora Pierce
Canon point: The Will of the Empress – some time after Tris comforts Daja about Rizu, before the circle leave Namorn
Totem: Daja has a brass coating on the palm of her left hand that runs between her fingers and joins up with the palm covering, a little bit like a short half-glove. It was created when her trangshi Trader staff was melted during her attempt to contain a magical forest fire when she was 10; it is basically grafted to her skin and will never come off. The metal is “living”, meaning it grows (she has to pick bits off it pretty regularly to stop it from spreading and covering her whole body), is malleable and always warm/body temperature to the touch. During fissures, the metal’s living properties will be diminished – it will grow cold, stiff and restrict her hand’s movements somewhat. It will be resistant to her magic during them too, meaning she will be unable to warm it or shape it by magic during them.
Weapons: Her Trader staff, an ebony staff with caps of brass at either end that she carries pretty much everywhere she goes. It’s both a weapon and a cultural item: etchings and designs on it tell Daja’s life story to those who know how to read the markings, and she uses the staff as a melee weapon and is an extremely practised staff-fighter.
Abilities/powers: Daja is an ambient smith mage. This means she has the ability to shape, draw on and use the magic inherently contained within metal and fire, and her magic is most usually performed while undertaking metalwork/blacksmithing. She is an expert blacksmith and whitesmith, and she can work with or without the use of magic.
Daja’s power covers a lot of things but is mostly creative. She can construct amazing magical things out of metal, particularly when she works with the living metal of her former staff. This living metal is entirely her own, and with it she has managed to create a number of unique magical items, such as prosthetic limbs that are warm and move and react almost as living flesh would; gloves that allow the wearer to pick up and handle high-heat things for use in fighting house fires; magical scrying mirrors; spectacles and earplugs to dampen magical visions; apparently she even created a prosthetic eye (presumably magical and working, though it’s only a passing mention) from the stuff once.
She has a magical connection to all metals, and can identify metal by touch and smell, magically and more mundanely. She can sense metals from a distance, and depending on how far away it is and how much magical power she currently has, can shape and call metals to her, allowing her to do things like pull nails out of wood and so on. She can perform workings to spell protection or keep out disease by using the right combinations of essential oils and carving special designs into whatever metal thing she is working on.
She can work with fire and heat without metal as well, drawing them to her magically, holding fire in her hands or weaving it into patterns. All but extreme heat (such as molten lava) will not harm her physically. She can breathe smoke without risk of death, though too much will make her lungs and throat sore.
Through her connection with her foster-siblings (and the half year or so their magic was allowed to blur and run together) she also has some small affiliation with plant magic, weather magic and thread magic. These usually manifest in her drawing elements of those magics to use in her own smithing projects, such as weaving “threads” of fire into a grid to create a steady forge fire or drawing on organic plant designs for her metal creations. This blending of their power also granted her the ability to see magic with her naked eyes – it appears as sparkles and flashes of silver light, softer or brighter depending on the strength of the magic.
Location: Discipline cottage is a cosy thatch-roofed cottage, with a neat little fence around its grounds. There is a large garden outside the back of the cottage that is the healthiest, most beautiful, flourishing garden you could ever hope to imagine. There’s a separate privy outhouse in the corner of the back garden. The cottage contains six bedrooms, two work-rooms, a living room and kitchen/dining room.
Coming in from the front door, there is a small shrine in the entrance hallway. The entrance is flanked by two bedrooms on either side (Sandry and Briar’s), then a workroom and the open living room, two more bedrooms (Lark and Rosethorn’s) and the kitchen/dining room at the back. There’s a wooden ladder/stairway that leads up to the attic, where there are two more bedrooms (Tris and Daja’s). There’s also a ladder in the attic that leads up onto the thatched roof.
Discipline is furnished comfortably and everything feels homely. There are fine tapestries and carpets, good strong furniture and it’s all clean and tidy.
It will always be sunny, warm and bright in the area of Limbo where Discipline is, like a perfect summer’s afternoon. It feels extremely peaceful and calm. However, it isn’t entirely open: within the dream, the rooms belonging to Sandry, Briar and Tris will be closed. The living room and dining room are open, as are Lark and Rosethorn’s bedrooms and workrooms and Daja’s bedroom, but Daja’s siblings’ rooms will have shuttered windows and locked doors.
Personality: Within the circle of her three foster-siblings, Daja is the rock, the cooler head who tends to think of practicalities and pragmatism when the others may be more impulsive. She provides roots and strength to the group. Her personality is very balanced, possibly influenced by her connection to metals and the earth they come from. She is sensible and practical, making choices through reason and logic more often than not and almost always thinking carefully before coming to a decision. She tends to be quite serious, but she isn’t stuffy. She loves and takes pride in her work, likes to have fun and has a sense of humour.
Daja’s magic is a huge part of her, and she gains strength from metals and fire and smithcraft. She’s happiest with a hammer in her hand and a forge fire heating her skin. As a Trader child, she wasn’t allowed to observe smiths performing their craft, although she wanted to; the pain of losing her family was tempered by her new opportunity to follow her magic and her heart. She experiments with her power, working it like no other mage really ever has, thanks to her power being combined with her siblings’ and her young age when she first started learning. When there’s a working she wants to perform but there isn’t an established way to do it, she will experiment and can usually create a way to get her magic doing what she wants it to do. She is determined and driven, working at problems steadily until she can solve them; she’s not afraid to try new things. For example, when she discovers the twins of Frostpine’s friends have magic, she has to adapt and try different methods of teaching them meditation and power control due to their different personalities.
Daja is slow to anger, and perhaps due to her Trader upbringing will tend to ignore someone who has gotten on her bad side or simply give them the cold shoulder. That said, she isn’t afraid of a fight, and will defend herself if someone is fool enough to attack her physically. She doesn’t take pleasure in fighting but she doesn’t waste her energy feeling guilty about hurting someone who deserves it if she acts in self-defence or defence of someone else. Although she doesn’t often get truly angry, she can get frustrated and is sometimes rather petty in her reasoning, though she does tend to recognise when she’s letting herself get irritated over something small and usually feels bad about it.
She has seen a number of horrible things in her time, all at quite a young age, but unlike some of her siblings, she is quite good at not letting this affect her too deeply. She doesn’t suffer from any kind of PTSD and although they sadden her, she is able put the events out of her mind. When she is in immediate danger, she is usually calm and acts quickly and instinctually; partly, this comes also from her Trader upbringing, as Trader children are trained to remain calm in times of trouble. She usually acts to help people, but weighs dangers and such before doing so. Her personal beliefs say that people will be judged and their actions will be accounted for by the Trader gods, so she doesn’t spend a lot of time wishing punishment on others.
Daja can be stubborn. She knows her own mind and sometimes falls into the trap of thinking that means she knows better than others. She is strong-willed and although she doesn’t anger quickly, she can be unkind at times; this usually only happens when she’s deeply hurt or upset by things and lashes out against people. When she comes home from Namorn with Frostpine and finds out she can no longer live at Discipline cottage, she’s very hurt and even quite frightened by the prospect of losing her newfound home. She reacts by buying her own house for her and the others to live in, a gesture that’s both practical and almost spiteful, in that she doesn’t let Sandry (who she blames for not letting her know about the loss of Discipline) know about her plans and doesn’t tell her even after she’s been living there for over two weeks.
Although she doesn’t always show it, Daja has strong emotions, particularly when it comes to her foster-family. The loss of her Trader family in the wreck of Third Ship Kisubo gave her an appreciation of how precious family and home are, and she takes threats to that very seriously. She will support her friends in almost anything and loves them fiercely. That said, she won’t shy away from telling them when she thinks they’re wrong. Daja is a proud person, and she can take things personally if the insult stings her pride, though her practical side tends to win out after a time and she recognises if she has gone wrong.
Thanks to her upbringing, plus her experiences with being trangshi and with the arsonist in Namorn, Daja has a strong sense of honour and personal responsibility. Trader culture dictates that both the money one brings in to one’s family and personal honour are valued extremely highly, and must be taken seriously – owing things to others is seen as shameful and it is a matter of personal honour that debts (whether favours or money or trade goods) are repaid as quickly and exactingly as possible. Her time with her foster-family and as a mage has softened this a little, but Daja will usually not do work for free nor ask favours without offering something in return (the exception is gifts/work she does for people she admires for whatever reason, where usually knowing them/knowing she can help them is payment enough).
When it comes to love, Daja has recently realised she is a nisamohi, a lesbian, and had one serious relationship (though it was short-lived) with another woman. Although she loved her deeply and was heartbroken that she could not stay together with her, Daja’s practical side won out over any of her romantic leanings when she had to leave. Although she cried for hours afterwards, rationally she knows that it had to happen the way it did. This will probably always be true of her: practicality will override any wild romances or passions.
As for how she will react to Limbo? Daja is likely to be disbelieving of the situation at first, and try to come to some conclusion that makes sense in her own mind rather than taking someone else’s word for it. At the point where she will be entering the dream, she will probably be secretly a little glad for the reprieve from the real world, due to her distress about Rizu and (even though the distance between her and her circle of friends has basically been mended at this point) the exhaustion/frustration of her situation with her siblings. She will likely look on her time in Limbo as a chance to collect her thoughts and ready herself for the challenges of her adult life when she returns to her world. She’s also going to make herself a forge, even if she has to cannibalise metal from the crumbling buildings of the dreamworld.
History: Daja was born into a Blue Trader family, meaning a Trader (or Tsaw'ha) clan who had numerous ships and sailed the Pebbled Sea buying and selling their goods. She was brought up in Trader culture, which recognises craftsmen and artisans as necessary for the creation of their trade goods but simultaneously looks down upon those same craftsmen; she was a quite interested in the work of the non-Trader lugsha (craftsmen) but was never allowed to handle tools or learn much about their work. She was tested for magic by Trader mimanders (mages) when she turned four, but they saw no power in her.
On the first trade voyage of the spring in her tenth year, Daja’s family ship was struck by a violent storm that destroyed the Third Ship Kisubo and killed her entire immediate family. Daja was the only survivor and floated alone in the ocean for some time. She only lived due to her hidden ambient magic, which allowed her to call a suraku (a survival box, filled with waterproofed provisions of food and water) to her thanks to the wide metal bands around it. She lived on its contents until she was rescued by a great mage named Niklaren Goldeye (or Niko), who had forseen the destruction of Third Ship Kisubo and had visions of Daja’s fate.
In Trader culture, bad luck is essentially thought of as a disease, a terrible contagious thing to be avoided if possible. Being the lone survivor in a disaster is thought of as the worst kind of bad luck. Due to surviving the annihilation of her family, Daja was made trangshi (outcast or unclean) by the Trader Council and forbidden to speak to or interact with Traders, lest her bad luck rub off and infect them. She was given an unmarked Trader staff with bright, polished brass caps so that Traders could recognise her as trangshi, and she was sent away.
Niko, having spotted her undiscovered ambient magic, took her to Winding Circle, a temple complex housing mages and dedicates to various gods and disciplines, situated near a town called Summersea in Emelan. He placed her with two great mages, Dedicates Lark and Rosethorn, in a small house called Discipline cottage. In Discipline she found herself living with three other children around her age. They were all from very different backgrounds but with similarly hidden magic: a noble, Lady Sandrilene fa Toren, a thread mage; a merchant’s daughter, Trisana Chandler, a weather mage; and a former thief and street-rat, Briar Moss, a plant mage.
During the course of their first year at Discipline, she and the other three children quickly became closer, as they all found out they had magic and began to learn how to control it, both separately and together. Daja was allowed to join a great smith mage, Dedicate Frostpine, in his forge; he began to teach her the smithing art and more control over the magic they shared. It was a pretty horrible year for disasters – the kids had to hold together and work through a huge earthquake, a concentrated pirate attack, raging forest fires and an epidemic of a new and deadly disease – but they did their best and became stronger for the experience. In the course of the earthquake, the four children were trapped underground and Sandry spun their magics together so they were strong enough to survive. This gave them all some elements of each other’s magic and allowed them to speak in each other’s minds without physical contact (mages who share a type of magic can usually do this but they have to be touching physically).
During a trip to the north of the country, Daja made contact with a White Trader clan (those who trade through caravan travel), a member of whom had seen her accidentally create a living iron plant out of thin metal rods when her magic got away from her. Although she was trangshi, this creation was deemed to be so valuable by the leaders of Tenth Caravan Idaram that one of their clan was forced to take qunsuanen (literally meaning to wash off bad luck), an elaborate series of rituals and magical protections that allow a Trader to speak to a trangshi without the trangshi’s bad luck infecting that Trader. The one who took the qunsuanen was called Polyam, a woman who had once been important in the caravan but had been severely injured in a rockslide, losing a leg and her ability to ride and making her one of the least important members of the caravan.
Daja was hungry for her own lost culture and valued the opportunity to speak to even one lone Trader for the relatively short time it would take to bargain for the metal vine. However, instead of simply bargaining, selling and that being the end of it, through a series of events, Daja ended up saved the caravan from a raging firestorm. She walked into the fire, heading it off, weaving it and sending it away with some help from her foster-family so it wouldn’t eat the Traders alive. In the process, her clothes burnt off and her trangshi staff was disintegrated, the brass cap from the top melting onto her hand (the origin of her metal half-mitt).
Once the fire had been tamed, the Tenth Caravan Idaram owed Daja so much zokin (the life balance in the bookkeeper god’s books, essentially karma) that they were honour-bound to take her into their clan. She politely declined, choosing instead to stay with her adopted family and learn her craft, something that wouldn’t be allowed if she chose to study with Idaram’s mimanders. She asked instead that the caravan simply tell the Trader Council to strike her name from the books of the trangshi, as she would then be able to bargain and interact freely with Traders. They agreed, gave Daja a new Trader staff, etched with her life story, the caps no longer blank brass. As a personal thanks for being the one who made her return to Trader status possible, Daja, her teachers and her siblings created a realistic prosthetic leg for Polyam, made from the living metal that now grew on Daja’s palm. (In the following years, Daja sold her living metal creations to Traders and merchants and became quite wealthy doing so.)
After that eventful year, the four children’s lives settled into a quieter routine of study and magic, and at the age of 13 they all earned their full mage medallions (some of the youngest mages ever) proclaiming they were licensed and temple-approved to work magic without supervision and binding them to the laws and rules of the Winding Circle. Four years after they’d first come to Winding Circle, Daja, Briar and Tris all accompanied their individual teachers on journeys out into the world.
Daja travelled with Frostpine to Namorn, a country to the far north of Emelan and Winding Circle. She studied with smiths and mages along the way, learning new skills and honing her art, learning with village blacksmiths and the finest court whitesmiths along the way. She and Frostpine wintered with old friends of Frostpine’s in a city called Kugisko, built over a series of islands. Daja spotted ambient magic in Frostpine’s friends’ twin daughters and although she managed to find each of them a teacher in their specific magic (cooking magic and carpentry magic respectively), she took the responsibility to teach the girls the basics of magical control, meditation and the rules that mages live by while their other teachers trained them in their specific craft. While Daja lived in the city, it was plagued by a rash of house-fires which were eventually revealed to be arson. She used her magic over the course of the winter to try to mitigate the damage caused by fires and help those who fought against them. THEN SPOILERS and she managed to help identify and bring the arsonist to justice, to be tried and then executed by being burnt at the stake.
Daja and Frostpine left Kugisko as the thaw came but didn’t return to Winding Circle immediately, taking a leisurely route back, stopping where they pleased. As they made their return, Daja having turned 16 not too long before, Frostpine informed her that, as she had come of age and had attained her medallion and was therefore an adult mage, she would not be allowed to live at Discipline cottage in Winding Circle temple unless she chose to become a dedicate herself. Hurt and shocked, Daja bought a house and forge in Summersea and quietly set about making herself a home that could not be taken away from her. Inside she blamed Sandry (who had been living with her Uncle Vedris, the Duke of Emelan in Summersea and must have known about the temple rules but had not told her) and shut her mental connection off from her foster-sister. Things weren’t helped by Tris and Briar’s respective returns from their travels over the next two years. They both moved in with Daja, but they had each had experiences that caused them to draw away from their foster-siblings. They were all adults and their experiences had made them nearly strangers. None of them let down their mental walls and their magical links remained closed.
Two years after Daja’s return to Summersea, Sandry’s cousin, Empress Berenene of Namorn, wanting to draw Sandry back to her empire (where the lands that had belonged to Sandry’s mother were) so that she could use Sandry’s wealth. She arranged for Sandry to visit, to marry her off to a Namornese nobleman and therefore keep her money in the Namornese Empire. Duke Vedris approached Daja, Briar and Tris and asked they accompany Sandry, for protection. They agreed and off they all went to Namorn.
Berenene had information on them all, tempting them each to stay by appealing to their wants, hoping to win three powerful young mages for her Empire on top of Sandry and her considerable wealth. She would probably have offered Daja a rank and position as a smith in the court or suchlike, but didn’t consider it a priority once Daja fell in love. The Empress’s seamstress, a young noblewoman called Rizuka fa Dalach unexpectedly wormed her way into Daja’s heart. Realising she had been pursuing the wrong gender, Daja realised the reason she had had no romantic interested before was that she was a nisamohi (a lesbian); the two dove into a passionate affair.
Unfortunately, after a few weeks at court and disastrous attempt by a young nobleman to kidnap Sandry and force her to sign a marriage agreement, through which the circle slowly reformed and opened their minds to one another again, the young mages decided they had to leave. Daja asked Rizu if she would come with her, but Rizu refused. Broken-hearted, Daja returned to the house and readied herself to leave with her siblings.
1st person sample: Good morning, all. [Daja’s handwriting is neat and well-formed.] This is Daja Kisubo. I realize it’s early but I wanted to let everyone know I’ve finished putting together my forge. I’m open for business, even if there’s no proper business to be had here.
If I wasn’t in the dream I’d have nails or horseshoes to make, if nothing else. [Quite a long pause before she continues writing. She was thinking over prices.] At home I would ask a price but simply having something to work at here will be payment enough, I think. The practise will keep my arm strong. There are many things to do there and not so many here, so please ask if there is something you would like me to try my hand at forging.
Note: Is it alright if in her items from home she gets a portable forge and a selection of her various smithing tools? If it’s not, she’ll almost certainly set about making them herself in Limbo anway, so I’m happy if you guys want to veto them for any reason.