Madison Freebird
Appearance
Madison could be best described as mostly average. Tallish for a human female, she is thin but decently toned, as is fitting for someone who lives without a lot of creature comforts and spends her days walking and working with her hands. Her facial features could be described as "bird-like", sharp and angular. A messy mop of thick black hair falls down to her shoulders, and her light blue eyes are constantly darting around, taking in every detail around her before summarily dismissing them. The mycomancer prefers to stick with functional and unassuming garb, usually tunic tops and loose slacks; the kind of things that adventurers that disappear in a crowd like to wear. A hooded cloak the color of pine needles is usually draped around her shoulders. Strapped to a belt she keeps a pair of daggers, one a tool for everyday use, another for stabbing things.
Skills and Abilities
Familiar -- Hyperion: The first of Madison's two constant companions is a delightful young woman by the name of Hyperion, which usually gets shortened down to Hype. The three words that could best describe her are "your best friend". Whereas Madison's all about death and destruction and darkness and all that fun villainous crap, Hype is the polar opposite. Before her corpse was wrapped in plant matter and reanimated by cordyceps spores after a trip into the woods went horribly wrong, Hype practiced healing magic. The teachings followed her into reanimation, and she's able to continue her work even in her current state. While she hates fighting and avoids it if she can, her razor sharp teeth hidden behind a mythril facemask can pierce most hides and rend flesh with ease, which helps her feed to regain strength lost whenever she casts healing magic as well as keep her own body together and functioning. A visual representation of a maskless Hyperion can be found here.
Familiar -- Boris: Boris is a grizzly bear of moderate size. He's a goof. He's also Madison's muscle, whenever someone needs to be taught a lesson. Also reanimated through cordyceps, and obey's mycomancer commands to the letter, if not the spirit of. Can repair his body by eating meat, just like Hyperion.
Mycomancy: Despite her parents trying to give Madison a balanced upbringing, teaching her how to tap into the many and varied elements of nature and command of wildlife, she spent most of her free time focusing her studies on mycology. The swamplands of the delta offered the perfect environment for countless types of fungi to grow in, and she spent her years in Garramarisma figuring out how to tap into their potential. An accomplished mycomancer now, Madison can command airborne clouds of spores and even grow fungi for any purpose--poisonous, edible, flesh-eating, even some big enough to serve as a temporary shelter against a terrible storm. All she needs is to be able to tap into the earth around her in order to work. Madison is able to grow fungi directly from organic matter, but this requires exponentially more concentration and energy if the source that the fungi is actually living, breathing, and moving.
Having been raised a druidess, the following less but still important things apply to Madison:
- Talented enough with the usage of knives and staves
- Good at navigating the world around her
- High knowledge of flora and a fauna and their potential uses
- Big civilization centers give her anxiety
- Tends to befriend and communicate with animals with relative ease and doesn't mind their company, but knows better than to try and boss them around
Personality
Manipulative. Conniving. Blunt. Always annoyed about something. A compulsive, obsessive mess of a woman. Thankfully, a lot of that is balanced out (or exacerbated, in some cases) by her honesty, laziness, and a sort of dark, nihilistic charm. In general, she tries as hard as she can to keep most of her relationships at a business level, trying her hardest to keep people at arm's length--despite a deep-rooted desire to mean something to someone, to know that her life is of actual worth to another living being. She finds herself constantly afraid that, if she were to let her guard down, they'd turn away once they saw what a sad, lonely, self-conscious lump she actually is... a fear that leads her to being a raging bitch to everyone once she feels she's gotten too close to them. It's a vicious, destructive cycle that's happened before, and the worst feeling in the world is the truth that it'll happen again and again.
Biography & Lore
Knowing that when she inevitably dies and rots in a hole in the ground someplace with a name that she never bothered to learn, Madison Freebird found that trying to remember her history was a worthless endeavor.
From the day she was born in the fetid swamps of Bayou Garramarisma, she was raised in the ways of druidism. Instilled at an early age was an understanding that everyone belonged to the earth; that no matter how grand your accomplishments were, how many songs the bards sang or poems were written in your honor, everyone from the mightiest king to the lowliest beggar would only existed to sustain the next generation of life.
If that's your purpose, to facilitate that cycle of rot and rebirth, why should you care about the little details along the way?
Madison was in her late teens she struck out on her own, going wherever her whims led her.