Unakite Thane Mathai

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Creator: winterwolf0100
Roleplay: Lux Academy
Nickname: Una, Thane (by family)

Name: Unakite Thane Mathai
Age: 18
Pronouns & Sexual Orientation: She/her, and unsure/exploring

Appearance: Her skin is a tawny beige, with sepia brown eyes. Her black hair is completely straight, and is cut in a shaggy tomboy style that swoops back behind her ears and ends at the base of her neck. She stands at around 5'3" and is very skinny, with muscled arms. She generally wears a dark green cloak that fastens in front of her neck with tall brown boots and a loose-fitting shirt with a simple belt. Her skin (including her face) is covered in small scars from various cuts and injuries in fights. On her upper arms, she has some old burn scars, but for the most part, any major injuries were healed with the help of her older siblings.
Thematic: Deep brown paired with spare lines of deep, vibrant red. It's the shadows in corners where the light doesn't quite reach, and bleeding wounds infected with dirt and gravel. Bruised knuckles and growls in a dark forest.
Aura Color: A deep green, so dark that it looks like black until you squint. The stronger her aura, the more opaque it becomes.

Fighting Style: Una's fighting style is aggressive and forward, but she is also very calculating. She is used to thinking about the entertainment value of a fight, and so every move is chosen carefully. If she takes an opponent out too quick, there won't be as many bets placed, and if she goes to slowly, people get bored. Because of this, her top priority is not generally avoiding getting hit, but just avoiding getting hit fatally. She fights hand-to-hand or with her knuckle knives, which is still extremely close-range. While she has some practice with her magic and obsidian in particular, she also has a lot of practice in fights where magic is not allowed, so that's where her real skill lies.
Armor: Seeing as Una is not used to armor, its existence is going to throw her off more than aid her towards the beginning. As such, she would be more inclined towards light covering. However, a professor would likely point out that her fighting style is more in line with medium armor, which she would eventually--reluctantly-- take. She's generally not focused on protecting herself from small things [she doesn't mind a little pain, so long as it isn't a fatal/big injury], and is more focused on attacking the enemy, so mobility is a big must.
Magic Attunement: Obsidian
Weapon Preference: Knuckle knives


Personality: Una is extremely blunt, though she is generally not trying to hurt others' feelings. She constantly feels like she has to prove herself in any situation, because her instinct is to think people look down on her inherently. She can be quiet, but not out of shyness; she will speak if she has something she feels like she needs to say, and will likely become less quiet as the SB progresses. When Una feels threatened, she gets angry, though she usually can manage to stay collected in a battle. She has a difficult time trusting others, but once someone has earned her loyalty, she will go after anyone who attacks them ferociously. She has some biases against people who come from rich or privileged backgrounds, and tends to think of them all as one type of person. This is also something she'll grow on throughout the SB, as her view of the world in general becomes less black-and-white, good-vs-bad, and turns more nuanced. She can be extremely empathetic, she just has to learn to trust first. She'll become a more kind and considerate person, especially with her words, as she learns to trust other people and actually begins to enjoy life for once. She's not used to joking around in safe environments, so it's going to be foreign and uncomfortable at the beginning, but slowly, she's going to loosen up towards others in general.

Personal Strengths: She's confident, and extremely loyal. She can stay calm in a battle, and goes all in when fighting with a level of ferocity that will likely surprise her opponent at first.
Personal Weaknesses: She can be overly blunt, and have a difficult time developing trust for others. She also is not classically trained, so she will be at a bit of a loss on the social rules, etiquette, standard practice of fighting, and such.

Backstory: Una grew up in Flenting, a city outside Seralia, close enough to the Rupture to be a continuous concern, in a lower-class family. She grew up watching people starve and fight for their place in life from an early age, and grew to view it as the norm, watching all her older brothers and sisters (four, in total) compete in underground rings and circles of magical fighters. Flenting as a city has been overrun with violence for several decades, but it is especially prevelant in the poorer regions, closer to the Rupture border. Flenting became a port town of sorts for the black market, utilizing the demand for the less legal stuff within Whyndsor and the loose restrictions as Serlia's influence waned. The main trade was human trafficking. Wealthy people in the south bought humans to use their auras for free inscription or safety. As the market demand increased, young children being snatched off the streets began to be the daily occurrence. In retaliation, underground rings of fighters began to pop up as a way for the kids of Flenting to learn to fight on their own terms, with no protection or academy of their own. Of course, like anything in Flenting, this became something of a sport and a way to make money, as well as a method of survival. To those smart enough, they stayed in the arenas, because as long as they were a source of entertainment, they wouldn't be taken. This is where Una's older siblings all learned how to survive, and it is where Una learned how to fight physically, as well as where she learned what she knows of Obsidian attunement. In the underground, everything could be learned for a price, and you taught yourself whatever you needed to, so all skills are generally home-taught, dirty, and brutal.

When Una was ten, her eldest sister, twenty at the time, was killed in an underground cage-fight after being drained completely of her aura by a combatant. Less than a week later, her oldest brother, seventeen at the time, never came home from a match. Her family guessed that he'd been snatched by someone who was watching the match, but it was entirely possible he could've just as easily been killed and his body dumped by someone who hadn't liked how much betting money he'd lost them. Either way, that was when Una knew she couldn't count on her older siblings to keep the family together-- she had to do something on her own. At the age of ten, she began to study Obsidian attunement, branching away from the general aura use her single father had encouraged. Her older sister and brother, twins who were both fourteen at the time, helped her develop it as they threw themselves into the rings to make enough money for the family to survive. While their father tried to provide for them, all three children knew that a law-abiding job just wasn't going to make them the money they needed, and all three continued with their skill development. At the age of thirteen, Una began to enter the underground child rings. Because of the "wrongness" of them, they always drew in more money, whether from fascination or guilt, and all three of the siblings pulled the strings as much as they could. All three were good at toeing the line between a fight that was too quick and a fight that was too slow; they were entertainers as well as fighters, and knew how to get what they needed.

By the time she was fifteen, her older siblings were twenty and in the adult rings. At the age of seventeen, in one of her standard fights, Una was approached afterwards by a Darksbane who said she had the skills to get out of the rings and into a professional, safer setting: Lux Academy. Una had been hesitant and distrusting, but the more she thought on it, the more appealing it seemed as a way to get power and help her community. Her siblings challenged her to develop both her magical skills and physical fighting skills, as that was what she needed to showcase. And after a year of throwing herself into it nonstop, more than a few broken bones and concussions, and much stress on her father's part, Una was accepted for Lux Academy.
Connections to Lux Academy: She has no personal connections to Lux, only the recommendation of the Darksbane who watched her in one of her cage-fights.
Personal Goal: She wants to gain enough power to dismantle the cage-fighting rings in Flenting, her hometown. She feels like all the poor people have been abandoned by the government, and plans to make sure they aren't ignored anymore, through whatever means she can.
Personal Secret: Una fights people often, but there have been a handful of times where she has gone too hard, especially when she was younger and more afraid in a fight. She does not know if she killed the other people, but it keeps her up at night.
Personal Fear: She's scared that even with formal training, she won't be able to make a difference in her community or help those who need help the most.
Other: Una dropped out of traditional school at a young age; she's extremely behind on the basic subjects like math and reading, and has never had formal training in magic, so this entire school experience is going to be new and foreign to her.