Yet another Character bio for Echoes of Shadows, and as per usual, picrew has been used to compensate for my lacking artistic skill.
The creator of this template asked in its description to be credited, and since I don't want to bother him with a tag, you can find him here. (His tag is also on the image itself)
Maire Aitkin
Full name: Maire Aitkin
Alias/es: Mother wolf
Age: 26
Ethnicity: Petrovan
Nationality: Angeheimish (The Kingdom of Angeheim)
Magic capability: Bioworker, order five.
Languages: Angeheimish, Vosch, learning Riets
Skillset: Knowledge of human anatomy, knowledge of medicine, knowledge of the criminal underworld, healing, weapon handling, scheming.
Background
Maire was born and raised in the Ollania Duchy of Northern Angeheim, and spent most of her early life in a furnace city called Wrenhaven. (Due to Angeheim's extremely cold temperatures and the fact that most of the country is in the Arctic circle, spending half the year under the night sky, many of their cities are built around massive furnaces that pump superheated steam throughout the pipes of these cities just to keep them livable.)
At a young age, she discovered her power over organic matter when she managed to heal a cut she'd received while out and about. However, she elected to keep her newfound power a secret from her family and neighbours due to Angeheim's attitude toward mages.
Similarly to Tuitis, Angeheim follows a puritanical sect of the Bozhist religion that holds the admittedly backwards belief that although magic is a fully natural thing to possess, using it is considered an irredeemable sin. If a mage is caught using their power, the state won't even bother with the fanfare of a public execution, they'll simply send witchhunters after them. This, coupled with other stifling, discriminatory and conservative laws regarding expression and one's role in society, forced Maire to hide much of who she is. She would eventually walk away from religion in it's entirety because of this.
Maire would soon meet a man named Malcolm Fahey: a criminal, thief, and charismatic conman. Similar to her, he actively worked to hide his own magic, however he had begun building a small commune of mages and other societal outcasts and directed most of his less-than-legal activities to their protection and survival.
Maire would end up working for Fahey as his people's healer, and when she began to show promise as an enforcer, that became her job as well.
One day, while she was in a pub celebrating a friend's engagement (with a few drinks behind her already) she overheard another patron boasting about having killed a 'witch' who was hiding out on a nearby farm, and providing a detailed and gory description of how it had been done.
At this point she was intoxicated, filled with burning rage and sans her usual self control. She got up, walked over, dragged him out into the alleyway, then proceeded to beat him to within an inch of his life, all the while railing at him about how she couldn't believe that creatures as weak as him were permitted to butcher their children when she didn't even need her magic to make him beg for mercy.
When morning came, she realised that the person she had hospitalized was none other than Janek Neuschäfer, the Captain-General of the Tuitish foreign division of witchhunters, and that she had revealed herself to be a mage in that brawl. Meaning, in short, that she would soon become the target of a nationwide manhunt.
Coincidentally, the Rietland Republics and Rostov went to war around this time, and the Republics were offering honorary citizenship to any foreign volunteers. So, she did just that, and schemed with Malcolm to stow their little commune onto those ships with refugee status once they reached Ost-Rietland.
She would go on to serve with the 107th volunteer regiment on the Zuurveldt Southern front, earning multiple medals for valor and bravery, and unofficially becoming her platoon's combat medic. This would be where she met Johan and his sister.
However, she could not escape the war unscathed. A stray rifle shot would take out her eye, narrowly missing her brain in the process. Although the surrounding bone and skin could be repaired, her eye was lost in its entirety. Later in the war, she would find herself running through a ruined city in an attempt to retrieve a wounded comrade, and only fifteen meters from safety with her fellow soldier still on her shoulders, an enemy mage severed her leg in an attempt to force more soldiers into the open for a sniper to take out. The Suiderkloof twins were the only people brave or stupid enough to run out to get her.
She would be outfitted with a mechanical leg, given a medal of honour for bravery and sacrifice, as well as the Zuurveldt Zelverkrijs (Silver cross) to denote her service, before being honorably discharged due to her service-related injuries. With her newly earned citizenship, she tracked down Malcolm and the rest of her commune, then moved to Zuidpunkt where she would work as a general healer in the city's hospital.
Physical Appearance
She has a rounded figure, and often jokingly refers to it as her 'body armour'.
Her skin is light and tends to burn much more easily than it tans, meaning that she usually has a slightly red glow to her thanks to the oppressive sun of the Sumeran continent. Her hair is the fiery red that is commonly found in the Northernmost duchies of Angeheim.
Maire's remaining eye is green, although a much more vibrant shade than Johan's. Her eye turns blood red when she uses her magic, which has the added effect of unnerving people more than knowing that she can hear their heartbeats and other bodily functions at work, and that she could silence those sounds forever if she wanted to.
A milky scar runs out to the side of her empty eye socket, showing where the bullet had passed through.
She walks around with a slight gait from the unwieldiness of an already heavy mechanical leg that is ever so slightly too long.
She has several tattoos running up her arm, each denoting something she's done or lived through, with the most prominent one being a sigil denoting the sun half-risen or half-set over the horizon: her mark affiliating her with Malcolm Fahey's gang.
Personality
Maire is often called 'Wulvemadhra' [Mother Wolf] by the other Angeheimish refugees in her commune and by Sasha Devin because of her almost maternally protective nature reminding them of a wolf with cubs who would rather die than let anyone come near them. Although she denies this, claiming that she's doing what anyone would do, if you were to ask anyone who got out of Angeheim because of her they'd tell you directly that none of them would've had the courage to willingly get involved in a foreign war as part of a scheme to get them out of their country.
Maire is a constant source of running commentary and rarely stops to filter her thoughts before they become words, with her commentary intensifying the more annoyed she becomes. Oftentimes, the things she says come across as humourous and the tiniest bit crass (which the people of the Rietland love), however she oftentimes says something without thinking only to realise a few seconds after the fact that she really shouldn't have said anything.
She worked hard for many years to unlearn her homeland's conditioning, to learn to not hide her personality and identity for the sake of others and as a result she lives unapologetically and loudly as herself. She is incredibly proud of how far she's come, and holds a healthy mental image of herself.
She has been described as someone who is more than willing to return a healthy dose in kind to anyone who gives her shit. This is actually her problem: She's hardheaded and doesn't know when to back down from a provocation. This makes her remarkably easy to pick a fight with.
Maire lives fast and freely, flirting with anyone that sparks her interest (Be they man, woman or other), although in reality she craves a deeper relationship that isn't built purely off of attraction and actually entails a close bond with another person.
She has an appreciation for culture, going out of her way to attend Chen, Ostian, and Somaj festivals just to appreciate their music and art. Her apartment is filled with paintings, sculptures and other such paraphernalia, and she has a collection of music records that she's assembled over the years.
Maire is also incredibly sarcastic.
Weapon of choice
Maire has a shotgun that's been purpose-made to be small enough to easily fold up and be hidden within the ankle of her mechanical leg.
However, if she ever runs out of ammo or doesn't have the time to retrieve her shotgun, she still has her magic and can simply force people's hearts to stop beating with some concentration on her part.
Relation to the rest of the team
Johan: Like Johan, she feels that there likely would've been a spark of something more than friendship between the two of them if he had any chance of living that long, and she does feel regret that she'll never get to see it happen. She also regularly scolds him for pushing his body too hard because she's the one who always has to put him back together after the fact.
Sasha: Despite there only being about a ten year difference between Maire and Sasha, many people who only barely know either of them tend to actually think that she's Maire's adopted daughter. This isn't helped by the fact that the bioworker has (at least in part) taken on the role of a maternal figure toward Sasha.
Anastasia: Maire and Anna both have the shared experience of being refugees, of having been forced to run from a regime that wanted them dead. They are both lovers of culture, although Anna lacks Maire's enthusiasm of exotic music, preferring stories. The pair are close friends.
Hans: Maire quickly clicked what Hans' secret past was after meeting him, although she didn't say anything because she felt that it wasn't her place. She did end up encouraging him to 'just go for it' regarding a matter of importance to him, which worked out incredibly well in the end. The pair can be described as best friends.
