Safiana Vialena
Return to Lux Academy
Creator: KateHardy
Roleplay: Lux Academy
Nickname: Safi
Name: Safiana Vialena
Age: 17
Pronouns: she/her
Appearance: Safiana is rather short, standing at a hair under five feet. She also looks quite thin at first glance, but don't let that underestimate her strength to much. With years of careful training, she's built up quite a bit of power. If that doesn't make a lot of sense, think of someone like Bruce Lee. She's also rather agile and fast as a result of her build not to mention she'd built up a lot of stamina over the years. Her skin is a lighter olive color, with the lightest of tans dusting across it. Her eyes are a startling electric blue that are still surprisingly soft mostly because she is almost always smiling. That and the fact that they are hidden behind a pair of glasses. Said smile combines with her unusually bright platinum blond hair that's basically white to create a startling amount of light. All around her arms and face run bits of skin that are ever so lighter than the skin surrounding them, weaving across her arms almost like her nervous system was on the outside instead of in. These patches of lighter skin are usually shimmering with a very light shade of blue when her aura is idle. When charged up they lose all hints of blue to shine pure white making it almost blinding to look at her.
She's usually keeps her hair loose, and it is fairly short, just around halfway down her neck. She prefers to wear a dress most of the time, although given the combat training she has to go through its often accompanied by a pair of trousers and her favorite pair of combat boots. Despite the combat boots being usually black, most of her other clothing is almost always rather light colored. She also usually wears a long coat over her dresses, given she seems to be perpetually cold. The heat never did bother her.
Thematic: Summer. Gentle sunlight. Yellows and light blues. A perfect light blue sky. A soothing summer breeze. A meandering river. Calmness and Stillness.
Aura Color: Her aura in a more dormant partially active state swirls around her like a gently flowing river, brilliant white with tinges of light blue scattering about like ink being tossed into water.
When fully active it solidifies into an intense beam of pure white like a ray of pure sunshine shining through the night.
Magical Abilities: While Safiana has always wanted to learn aura enhancement, its but a side project she wasn't too confident of fully revealing to the world. Her true strength for the moment lies in the years she's poured into spellcrafting, specifically through the spoken word. She's a master of many languages and is very good at intricate and rather delicate magical tasks with her eidetic memory and endless patience showing through in all her work.
Affinity: Safiana's aura materializes from her hands, the many veins swirling through her body coalescing at one point in her palms and spreading out like tendrils of electricity, almost arcing and hissing with power. She can use these almost like a whip of light, their natural heat enough to cause serious damage if used intently. She mostly uses them to strengthen her spells however, her aura arcing around to form the letters of whatever incantation she speaks, charging it up even more.
Magical Weapon: Safiana despite her short stature, uses her strength rather well to wield a custom built longbow, which while it may be physically smaller and therefore weaker than most longbows due to its smaller size packs quite the punch thanks to an intricate system of artficed pulleys woven into it, a gift from her grandmother. The bow also has two blades on either side of the arms built in as a last resort should Safiana ever run out of arrows.
Battle Style: Safiana prefers to rely of stealth and speed. Ideally her opponent wouldn't ever know where she was until they're lying on the ground defeated. Going against an unaware opponent she will maintain her distance, trying to stick to high ground and take them out with a distance. If she's made to fight an enemy that actively knows and is trying to defeat her she will dance around them, creating as much distance as she is allowed and trying to somehow slip her opponents field of view.
If she has no choice but to go head to head, she prefers to be quick and decisive. Often dancing around a little to identify and opponents weakness and striking once, expecting that to be the last blow. She doesn't like long drawn out fights and can sometimes end up on the wrong side of a close encounter because she struck too early out of not wanting to prolong a fight.
Personality: Safiana is a little ball of sunshine on most occasions. She always finds something to be happy about even on the worst of days, looking on the bright side in all situations. She's not the most confident person when talking to strangers (and she will fully enter lesbian disaster mode sometimes) but she's usually the kind of person that will wish everyone she sees including the flower she saw on the way to school a good morning. And while she's not the most talkative with friends, she tends to often talk her friends ears off. The other time she's prone to large amounts of rambling is when she's nervous. She can also be rather passionate about what she believes in and isn't afraid to speak up about it even if she might apologize profusely afterwards for her mini rants. She's not exactly guarded, but she's logical about most things, not taking most advice at face value unless someone properly justifies it to her. She doesn't trust every single person she sees, but she does tend to look for the good in people more than not. She pretty much never loses her temper, always able to keep her feelings in check and mentally sort out what's made her angry. This can be unhealthy at times however because she will internalize a lot of things to remain happy on the outside and try and make everyone else around her happy.
Personal Strengths: She has a very sharp mind, able to retain a lot of information very quickly and use it quite creatively. She's also someone that's nearly impossible to discourage. If she sees a good reason to do something, she'd do it as long as she is alive to do it.
Personal Weaknesses: She can be a little quick to dismiss warning signs in her haste to see the good in everything, and sometimes if she doesn't see the glaring wrong in something she can end up going through it without even realizing it. That leaves her prone to people who are a little skilled at the art of manipulation. On top of that, even though she hasn't even admitted it to herself has always felt pressure to keep herself and everyone around her happy as a result of her upbringing and this in turn means that deep, deep down she really needs to spend a solid week crying about a few things and maybe getting a hug from someone. She also has a lot of trouble depending on others, sometimes shouldering a bit more responsibility than is really healthy for her.
Backstory: Safiana was born into a fairly wealthy upper middle class family, except it wasn't quite that simple. She was the result of an affair on the part of the patriarch of the family. At first she was kept secret, living alone with her mother Imra Shalanda on the peaceful outskirts of Valatar, a quiet village consisting of families that tended more to the lower class but one that did well for itself, its people living with satisfaction despite their more meager means. It was a good start to her childhood, with a mother who loved her very much and enough to live with even if it wasn't always a lot.
That changed when her mother drowned while she was just four. Her life thankfully didn't go downhill, her father stepped in despite ignoring her mother for the past four years and in a move that shocked many, her new stepmother accepted even allowing her to take her fathers name and be Safiana Vialene. However, now living as the heiress to a wealthy middle class family with a pretty large reputation as a family of very successful mages was a far cry from her simple life from earlier.
Right from the age of four she was drafted into learning how to manage and run the family's many business that varied from potions to artificed weaponry. Her half brother, Lyn, while very accepting of his new sister and supportive wasn't the brightest crayon in the box and as a result their parents early on decided to groom Safiana to be the one that would eventually run the show despite being younger. Safiana, while not a fan of this particular arrangement, preferring to be free to explore her own interests like Lyn, did her best out of a sense of duty to the family. While her parents never pressured her to be anyone but herself, the society they were surrounded kept reminding her of what a sacrifice the Vialena's had made to adopt her despite the scandal and so she learned to think as little of herself as possible, doing something she only taught herself to like and doing her best to appear as happy as she possibly could. Over time when she was entering her teens, even she believed her own act.
Around then her parents started to train her with a bit more of a focus on entering the prestigious Lux Academy. Once again despite nothing explicit being said, it was quite obvious she was expected to get in and be the student that came away with a god shard. To her delight, she was allowed to pursue spell crafting under her grandmother instead of one of the family specialties as long as she knew enough to run the family business and hire others to do the actual magic she could pursue what she wanted. Her true curiosity towards aura enhancing lay dormant, only something she explored in secret and barely scratched the surface of.
She took to all her lessons like a duck to water and it came as no surprise to anyone when she was accepted to the Academy. Despite being confident that she's good enough to have what it takes to succeed and she knows it won't be the end of the world if she fails, she's driven by the feeling that doing this is the only way to earn the right to remain a part of her family.
Reason for Applying to Lux Academy: For all the outside world knows, she's the wealthy heiress to a family that wants her to have the best education in magic there is. Personally though, she desperately wants to get her hands on a god crystal and prove to herself that she's worthy of her family.
Connections to Lux Academy: Her parents, grandparents and a few more generations backwards have been student and a few even professors at the academy. She is somewhere around the twentieth or thirtieth from the family to attend Lux Academy and she's been told she's going there from a pretty young age having lived in Glinthaven pretty close to said academy since she was four.
Personal Goal: As stated already, she has a deep rooted fear of someday waking up to her family realizing she's not worth their time. She desperately wants to succeed here and get a god crystal to prove to herself that she's worth her family's attention.
Personal Secret: Safiana was present on the day her birth mother drowned, in fact it happened right in front of her. But, being just barely four at the time, she had no idea what was going on and didn't process her mother having died until someone came to pull her out of the water. She didn't even know enough to cry until much later. Deep down she believes she's responsible for birth mother's death.
Personal Fear: She's afraid of her family realizing she'd not worth their time. And of large bodies of water.
Other: Safiana is 200% a lesbian disaster™
Thoughts on Safiana
Railyn: Best friend vibes, but also Railyn might get frustrated with her if she's too nonchalant, like, easily beats him in training and then is super cheery afterwards? I could see that happening.
Cyra: I feel like Cyra would be really annoyed by Safiana at first, but if Safiana sticks around long enough to prove her skill, I think Cyra will change her tune. (This is a very similar arc to one of my characters. She's very positive and optimisti, and Cyra and her eventually become lovers, actually XD. To befriend Cyra, just be patient.) xD Safi might just be patient enough if she feels like befriending Cyra is something she wants to do, which I think will happen. I like the idea of them being friends so much. It feels canon.
Edalyn: Eda doesn't *hate* Safiana, but she struggles with her blinding positivity. How is she so dang ~nice~??? She also sees her as a goody-two-shoes. Her interactions will probably be brief, because she doesn't percieve much authentic-ness (is that a word?) from Safi.
Thane: Thane isn't going to dislike Safiana, though she is going to take note of her optimism and consider it unrealistic. She also considers Safiana to be extremely naïve, but she isn't necessarily annoyed with Safiana being raised in a more elite family like she is for several others, mainly because she feels like the main product of it has been Safiana's naïvety, which she can't exactly blame her for. She will point out that the world is not all sunshine and rainbows though, and she's not going to shy away from some of the harsher topics Safiana has likely been shielded from. In terms of Safiana's fighting style, it's going to be intriguing and likely a little funny to Thane in the way rich people can be funny in their own social expectations. She'll view Safiana's fighting as an attempt to be eloquent, even if that's not the thought process behind it. She's not going to trust Safiana's viewpoint on a lot of things not because she thinks Safiana is untrustworthy, but because she thinks Safiana probably doesn't really know enough about a lot of things to be a good judge on how dangerous or bad something might really be.
Euphemia: Oh, Euphemia would totally dislike her cheerfulness. Just like with Railyn, she would probably view Safiana as a pushover. She would view her as interesting, but I think Euphemia would def be a little scared to talk to her.
Kynina: Kynina's going to look at her and think "oh she's fun!". While she's the type to meet and know a lot of people, Safiana would strike her as being a little more extreme on that scale. Her cheerful attitude might be a little overwhelming at first, but mostly endearing, and she'd definitely come to appreciate a more optimistic person in this crowd. They'd likely be pretty good friends.
Ezra:
Aapeli: It depends on Pel's first impression of Safi. If she comes across as excessively enthusiastic to Pel, he'd feel overwhelmed and would likely steer clear of her at first. He'd see her as the kind of person who could be the center of a social group, and would feel like their personalities just didn't match. Pel would admire her sharp mind, though, and perhaps with time he would grow to appreciate Safi's near-constant cheerfulness.