Ardent, The Broken Child

Personal Info
Name: Ardent

Alias: The Broken

Age: 183 (equivalent to a 6 year old human)

Gender: Female

Sexuality: Bisexual  

Personality: Ardent’s personality changes drastically depending on whether she is alone or with company. Incredibly weary when alone, she often watches over her shoulder, and can be startled by even the smallest sound or creatures, constantly wishing for company. She often tries to keep away from other dragons, her fear of being rejected or mocked by them vastly outweighing her wish for company. Although she does keep away from other dragons, she often looks forlorn while alone, imagining when it would be like to have a family, friends.

When in company with others, she is extremely shy and self-conscious, preferring to sit back and watch rather than be directly included in anything, only piping up if she has something to add or has a particularly strong view towards the topic being addressed.  Although she won’t show it, except for rare smiles or seemingly random laughs, she is incredibly happy to be in the company of her own kind, regardless of the tribe or heritage. Thanks to her history, she has no particular dislikes when it comes to dragons of different tribes, completely ignoring their size, history and tribe and judging them based on how they act.

Incredibly loyal once someone has won her trust or friendship, she opens up and becomes much more talkative and sociable.  Her emotions, usually hidden under her shy exterior, are extremely visible, not bothered with letting someone she trusts know exactly how she is feeling. At this point, it’s very likely that Ardent will attempt to cuddle up to larger / adult dragons if they allow her, incredibly affectionate and desperate for it to be returned, something that has been missing since her birth.

Interests:
~Ardent absolutely adores the rain, and will happily play and walk around in it if it’s light, or simply sit and watch heavier thunderstorms.
~The night sky. Ardent enjoys sitting outside anywhere there is a clear view of the night sky and watch the stars slowly move during the course of hours. She will often spend entire nights outside simply watching the sky, if she isn’t disturbed, in an almost trance like state.
~Snow. An odd interest for a Firewing, she has only seen snow first-hand once, and that was for only a short time. While it’s only for short periods of time, usually only seconds, she can sometimes be caught looking towards the Frozen Highlands with an almost forlorn gaze.
~Seafood. From squid to crab, she loves it all, marginally more than land animals.

Dislikes:
~Metal weapons, especially flails.
~Larger dragons. She is scared of dragons larger than herself, having never met any other dragons, and natural instinct telling her to keep away from something larger.
~Flight. Ardent’s flight muscles are quite weak, and flying for any longer than an hour is both painful and extremely taxing to her.

Fears:
~The ocean and large (deeper than 20 feet) lakes. While she does like the rain, she finds any large body of water terrifying, as she has almost no swimming skills, only just able to keep herself from drowning.
~Humans are terrifying to her, even though they are marginally smaller than her. She knows full well how cruel and bloodthirsty they can be, and the thought of being back in their clutches after escaping such a short time ago terrifies her.

General Appearance
Height: Roughly 29 feet, 137 as an adult

Scales: Ardent’s scales are largely deep black, similar in appearance to coal. The ‘largely’ comes from that fact that the scales that reside directly over any of her major arteries and veins are incredibly bright, almost orange, and shimmer incredibly slightly, giving the impression of magma slowly flowing. The brightness is directly linked to the amount of blood pumping and the importance of the blood vessel. Over her heart is the ‘centre’ point for this spider web of lines, the appearance of pool of magma. While the brightness is mostly constant, if she consciously thinks of dimming it, it dims, to a shade of black slightly lighter than the rest of her scales.

Eyes: The iris is a striking silver, while the pupil is black.

Appearance: Ardent holds the shape of a classic European dragon, with very little in the way of adornment. Her head has only a single frill, reaching from just behind her eyes to several inches down her neck, and roughly 30cm in height. This frill is kept in shape by several large spikes that the frill itself is strung between, each roughly 35cm in length. Along her back is a row of large and dangerous spikes, each roughly 50cm in length and curving slightly backwards, at equal distances apart, ending at the base of her tail. At the end of her tail, instead of snubbing off as is usual for reptiles, the scales converge into an extremely sharp point, several shades lighter than the rest of scales. Lacking any muscle for the last several feet of her tail, it being solid scales, it has no feeling or sensation. It can also be shattered or broken with no ill effects, the scales that make it up regrowing in a matter of days. Her claws are interesting, seemingly made of metal, although softer than most other dragons, and retractable. Her wings, one of her most striking aspects, are almost opaque and black, able to completely block out sunlight. This is countered by the bright lines covering the surface of them, each blood vessel in her wings shining like molten steel. While usually extremely bright, they can still be dulled by actively thinking of them dulling. If one looks hard enough, they can notice a few discrepancies to this. Just above each of her paws, almost covered by the iron bands around her legs, is a small ring of scales, which are slightly lighter than the rest, similar in appearance to flint. She also has patches like this under both of her wings.

While not of her own choice, she has a large, solid iron collar around her neck, almost an inch thick. While previously engraved and with an inscription, it has long since been melted and deformed, although still wrapped around her neck, the mark of the human that had once ‘owned’ her. Along with this are four matching iron bands around her legs, around the ankle. Another mark put on her by her owner, they are marginally thinner, albeit still non meltable for her.

Tribe Information and Status
Tribe: Rouge

Inheritance: Purebred Firewing

Rank: None

Family: Never knew her parents, assumed dead. Never knew if she had any siblings. Assumed dead.

Mate: N/A

Hatchlings: N/A

Skills and Abilities
Strengths: Ardent is incredibly skilled at navigating by the stars, having clocked hundreds if not thousands of hours simply watching the night sky over a period of years. In addition to this, thanks to her scales, she blends in extremely well with the night sky and shadows, nowhere as well as a Nightwing, but marginally more than most other species, although only when dimming her glowing scales. Oddly enough, she can go extremely long periods without sleep, almost a week, the trance like state she enters during her stargazing mimicking REM sleep.

Special Abilities:
    Fire Mist: Instead of Fire, Ardent breaths a dense mist of highly viscous and slightly corrosive flammable liquid, similar in appearance and consistency to tar. It can stick to targets for roughly 10 minutes before flaking off, but remains ignitable for closer to 4. Interestingly, this substance also ignites on contact with water, similarly to Greek Fire, albeit burning for only 20 seconds. The range of this breath is roughly 40 feet, with the majority of the liquid falling in the first 25 feet, anything beyond that receiving a slight misting. This same substance is also excreted by glands in her paws, constantly covering her talons in a thin layer, albeit marginally less viscous than the mist she breaths. Striking any of the lighter patches of scales with her talons immediately ignites her talons, allowing her to ignite her other talons, or the mist she had previously breathed. Additionally, but sheathing her talons, the flames on them are immediately quenched. This substance burns softly compared to most Firewing flames, at roughly 1,500F, but is incredibly bright. This substance usually burns for 90 or so seconds at room temperature, and cannot ignite at under 0F.

    Nova: Fondly called Nova, this is Ardent’s last ditch ability. When overcome by intense feelings of anger or rage, she loses control, her rage fuelling a nova of her own. The darker scales on her body quickly (within 10 seconds) change in colour from their usual black to the same colour as the scales that reside over her veins. At this point, she can usually stop the ability, from completing if she wishes, but doing so will almost completely drain her energy. If she chooses not to, a small sphere of fire will farm between her wings, and quickly begin to expand, reaching a 75 foot radius in roughly 5 seconds, usually enough to fully engulf her body, and rendering her unconscious. The sphere will stay like this for roughly 15 seconds, before expanding again, another 75 feet in 10 seconds. This sphere reaches temperatures of roughly 2,150F on the surface and for several feet ahead of it, before the temperature cuts off suddenly, while inside the sphere the temperature is much more agreeable, at about 500F. After reaching its max radius of 150 feet, the sphere will burn for another 30 seconds, during which the internal temperature will skyrocket to the that of the surface, to ensure that anything that can’t deal with the temperature is turned to ash, or at least nicely singed. After this 30 seconds, the sphere will collapse back to its origin point, returning the air to its previous temperature as the outer shell moves through it.  (She cannot begin and end this ability in the same post. The furthest phase of this ability she can reach in a single post is falling unconscious, to ensure that someone who can’t survive the temperature can run).

Weaknesses: While seemingly strong and glossy, Ardent’s scales and talons are incredibly brittle and relatively easy to shatter for other dragons claws and scales, offering very little in the way of protection or weaponry. Along with this, her physical prowess is extremely stunted, to the point where she would quite easily lose a fight to anything larger than a medium sized Lightwing. This extends to her flight as well, with an inability to perform any aerobatic or combat manoeuvres without (usually) catastrophic consequences. Finally, her glowing scales are an incredibly obvious weakness. While they are no weaker than the rest of her scales, they do sit almost directly over many vital blood vessels, literally pointing out where she is most vulnerable.

Combat Style: Ardent is usually extremely weary, preferring to avoid conflict where possible, fully aware of her weakness and lack of combat knowledge. When forced into a fight, usually by being unable to escape, she tends to rely heavily on her flammable mist. Usually more concerned with self-defence than offense, she tends to breathe her mist directly upwards and cover her scales in it, ready to self-ignite at a movements notice, her scales almost worthless as protection. If forced into combat, she tends to try and scare them off by setting her claws on fire or using her mist to generate large swathes of flame. If the attacker is unfazed or otherwise resistant to her flames, she often tries to escape, using her dark colouration and small size to hide and outwit her pursuers. If cornered, her options are limited to her Nova. In the very likely case that a dragon is immune to the high temperatures generated by her Nova, she is completely and utterly defenceless, her greatest weapon useless, and often unconscious.

Background
History: Ardent has a troubled, to say the least, past. Shortly before her hatching, the area in which her family was located was attacked by humans. Either forgotten, in a desperate race to escape, or her parents simply killed, she never knew. But she was left alone, her egg hidden, evidently not well enough. Taken back as some sort of treasure, a spoil of war, she was allowed to hatch in human hands. From the instant she was out of the egg she was abused, her muzzle clamped shut by metal contraptions and her wings tied to stop her attempting flight. Quickly growing in her first few years of capture, despite only being fed enough to keep her alive, she was eventually brought by a rich lord of some backwater estate, extremely close to unclaimed territory. Treated as nothing more than an extremely large working animal, and almost completely obedient thanks to her breaking at an early age from several extremely torturous ordeals, she never thought about rebelling once, taught that her own kind had abandoned her and let her to die (the story she was brought up to believe, that she was found abandoned). During this imprisonment is when she discovered her ability to ignite her talons, never showing this ability to any human, for fear of punishment or worse. Eventually, as she outlived several different masters, she began to hear whispers of rebellion. Not by other humans, but by the dragons that humans had hunted and killed for so long. Feeling a spark of something foreign, hope, flare up inside her, she began to entertain thoughts that maybe, just possibly, something better than servitude was possible. As the time went on, her ‘master’ was called to fight, obviously having some importance. Eventually, after several months, he did return, and made the biggest mistake of his short life. He had brought back a dead Lightwing hatchling, parading it around as some sort of trophy. His final mistake was showing it to Ardent, as a sort of reminder where she stood, an animal. Needless to say, something snapped insider her at that moment, as she looked down at the small, cold Lightwing. With no real idea of what she was doing, she summoned her nova and let it claim them all in a raging inferno.

RP Sample: As soon as she had awoken in that hell-scape she had ran. She told herself to get away, she had run so they wouldn’t find her again, but she was lying. That poor little dragon… She had been, scared? Terrified? Ashamed? That she could have done something while a hatchling died, instead of acting as nothing more than a beast? Yes… that was it. Shame. She was running from her shame. Glancing back every few minutes, eyes wide as adrenaline pumped through here system, she eventually began to slow as the minutes turned to hours, no signs of being hunted, as if anything could have survived the inferno she had conjured. Finally collapsing in a small clearing, breathing heavily, she reached towards her neck, and softly brushed over the iron collar that ringed her neck. While the inscription and engravings that had once covered it where illegible, it was still there, even the heat of her rage fuelled nova unable to melt it. Grimacing, she lay back and pressed a paw to her chest, a rib, if not several cracked, thankfully not too badly. Sighing, she felt unconsciousness creeping back, her body rebelling, and happily embraced it.

Bumpity boo

Hi, there. Your abilities are quite odd for a FireWing... They seem more like an ability a no-longer-existent species, the StarWings, would have...

Bump. Changed the Abilities to be more in-line with her pure Firewing heritage and changed a few others aspects at the same time.

1st Approval

Bump.

I got nothing against underwater fire but saying it follows normal rules and is put out by no oxygen means it can't burn surrounded by water. I mean unless it like magically separates the oxygen but you do realize there is far less oxygen in the same volume of water than there is air so even then it wouldn't be very strong.

bump

Approved 2/2