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       "The strong man knows how to attack. The weak man knows how to defend. But only the clever man knows how to live."
       

Name(s): Sascha Vinterboorne
Nickname(s): Sash (pronounced like sosh), Vin, Red
Age: 19
Sex: Male
Birthday: 14/3/X761
Sexuality: Bisexual
Class: Mystic
Alignment: Neutral
Rank: D - Class
Guild: Sabertooth
Guild Tattoo: Red Tattoo - Right upper arm
Face Claim: Red Hood - City of Dead Sorcerer

II. APPEARANCE

Height: 6'
Weight: 176lbs
Hair: Brown
Eyes: Red

General Appearance:
Sascha is, in a word, toned. He doesn't work out enough to seem truly fit or gain a high degree of muscle definition, but just being in a guild means he's no slouch either. While somewhat tall, his body still has the right proportions, so he just looks like a normal guy scaled up some, rather than some sort of cross between praying mantis and a human. His face is often adorned with a soft smile because life genuinely amuses him with all its little twists and turns.

For clothing he will normally wear a pair of jeans, a t-shirt, and a red hoodie that zips up in the front. He prefers to go barefoot, even on hot, cold, or sharp ground, and thusly deals with the consequences. He has several hoodies of different colors that he'll wear during social outings or days, off, but he always wears a red one for missions and battles because he sees red as the color of success.

Extra:
One incredibly odd thing about Sascha is how his body, or rather, his head, reacts to the activation of his magic. While his red eyes might already seem like something odd, adding two red wedge marks under them and two in his hair can make his face when calm or angry seem a little more imposing than he realizes. They don't do anything save give a really obvious tell for when he's about to use magic.

III. PERSONALITY

Personality:
Sascha is in this game called life for himself. While he sees the merits of working with others, and realizes that everyone else has goals, he can't be bothered to care all too much beyond how something benefits him. Some might call him self centered for it, but you only get one chance at life. He wants to make sure he goes out on his own terms, if at all. Friends, family, allies and even enemies, he will manipulate them all if he thinks it will lead to him getting ahead in life. And if someone else happens to benefit from his actions, then that's a nice little karmic bonus.

When around others, he doesn't let his self serving nature become immediately apparent because that makes it so much harder to use someone for his own gain. If they know they might be used, then they're less likely to display those characteristics he will be able to use for his own benefit. He's not malicious in his manipulations of course. He just wants to get ahead in life. Not life. Not make a mountain of corpses to stand on. He won't deliberately lead someone to harm unless its absolutely necessary, and in those cases, it's probably someone who deserves it already.

When it comes to rules and laws, he could live without them. sometimes his manipulation can get just a tad out of hand, and he might end up doing something that would be considered outside the established lines. If those lines didn't exist in the first place, he wouldn't have to worry about them. But since they do, he does his best to keep his actions and manners within the established conventions. Try would be the operative word here. He doesn't always succeed. It just makes life all the more amusing though.

Likes:

• His feet remaining bare.
  
• Experiencing the world.
  
• French fries for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
  
• Living. Sure it sounds cliche, but Sascha loves life, and getting to experience it. Even when there are things he hates about living, like getting hungry, tired, and injured, in a way, he still loves them because feeling those things means he's still kicking.
  
• Girls with glasses. An aesthetic thing really. He can't explain it, and will more or less freeze up when asked to, so it's best to just let him have his weird little tick.
  

Dislikes:

• Being forced to wear shoes.
  
• The chance of being locked up in jail.
  
• The color chartreuse. It's the most visible color to the human eye, and something about it just rubs him the wrong way.
  
• Life or death situations. No one want to be in them, well, no one sane, but beyond wanting to live as long as he can, Sascha doesn't want go anywhere near a situation where he needs to put his life on the line to get something done.
  
• Healthy foods. Possibly connected to his magic, Sascha burns calories pretty quick, hence why he isn't fat but can't seem to put on muscle. Healthy foods usually take more calories to digest than they actually give out, so Sascha avoids them with a passion to avoid becoming emaciated.
  
• Girls who wear far too much makeup. Another aesthetic thing.
  

Motivations:
The pursuit of happiness would be a good way to sum it up. Sascha wants the good life. Money, power, skill, the smell of success wafting around a massive mansion house. All the sorts of things that people better off than him seem to have. Of course with his own twists. None of that silly fancy food rich people eat. French fries twenty four - seven. And no one would be allowed to wear shoes in his home. The best way he sees to get there is as a mage. Mages take on jobs that pay out decent money, and if their magic is strong enough, then nothing can even hope to touch them. He's not stupid or overly idealistic either. He knows being a mage and using magic to reach that level of success will be a long and dangerous journey, but he's also confident that he will be able to play his cards right and gather the proper allies to get him to his goal with minimum actual risk to himself. And of course, experiencing everything life has to throw at him along the way.

Fears:

• Being enslaved. Even stronger than the fear of death is the fear of going back to such a dark state of being. To be completely under someone else's power, to live and die at their whim is something Sascha has made a vow never to go back to. Even with this conviction, he can't help it if he still has memories from that time. Nor can he help the occasional nightmares that result from those memories.
  
• Another thing he fears are true dragons. Not wyverns, who have wings in place of front legs, but fully grown, six limbed dragons. Probably inherited from the instincts of wyverns, he knows on a subconscious level just what sort of destruction these mighty creatures can bring. While he would love to leard dragon slayer magic to help give himself some sort of defense against dragons, that would unfortunately mean training with a dragon in order to learn.
  

Positive Traits:

• Animal Tongue (+4): You are capable of speaking with animals.
  
• Daunting Presence (+2): You are skilled at inducing fear in your opponents.
  

Negative Traits:

• Cautious (-1): You are uneasy engaging in behavior that carries a chance of failure. You must spend twice as long performing any skill that requires an action. For example, deciphering a page of text would take 2 minutes for you instead of 1.
  
• Clumsiness (-1):You have the unfortunate habit of dropping things, knocking things over, or tripping. Once per battle the opponent can call upon your clumsiness and easily dodge one of your attacks.
  
• Star-crossed (-1): You keep falling in love with the wrong people. You're the common soldier who falls in love with the king's daughter at first sight, or the hero who falls for the villain's daughter without knowing who she is.
  
• Dark Secret (-1): You have some sort of secret that, if revealed, would make you an outcast amongst your society and companions. While this secret is on your mind at all times, it will come up in topics only once in a while, but when it does, watch out! [He was once a slave]
  
• Indecisive (-1): You have been known to hesitate when faced with difficult choices or split-second decisions. If forced to choose between letting a villain escape and rescuing a loved one from being lowered into a snake pit, you're likely to agonize over the situation until something--perhaps a cry for help from your sweetheart--forces your hand.
  
• Hedonistic (-1): You love a good time. You party too much, drink too much, and eat too much. You have trouble resisting an invitation to join someone in a drink and sometimes shirk your duty if offered a more enjoyable time elsewhere. Whenever a good time is presented you let your guard. You're also not capable to resist seduction of any sort. It's just not in your nature to resist such opportunities.
  

IV. MAGIC

Magic: Take Over - Wyvern Soul
Caster or Holder: Caster
Description: Wyverns. The smaller cousins of dragons. While wyverns may not be as prominent or impressive as their relatives, they still manage to thrive in an ever changing world and landscape. Some might call them vermin, while others can call them the spirit of survival. Wyvern Soul is a form of take over magic that involves the user taking on certain aspects of the wyvern to better deal with the situations that they may come across. Whether it be enduring weather based spells, spitting fire, or just being able to see better at night. Wyverns have evolved a multitude of individual strengths which a takeover user can use in battle, if only he can master their strong survival instinct.

Strengths: Adaptability. The wide spread of wyverns in both type and location allows the user to hold their own in most situations so long as they're prepared for it. Because the wyvern's main instinct is to survive, the spells used by wyvern soul draw heavily on the fight or flight instinct, using each in turn where necessary to help maintain the user's life.

Weaknesses: Instinct. The more wyvern power the user draws on, the harder they have to fight to keep their mind from descending into that of the beast they copy. The fight or flight instinct will backlash if they lose control, which can cause the user to turn tail and run if sufficiently intimidated, or keep on fighting where they have no chance of winning if angered. In addition, some wyvern adaptations are highly situational due to the environments wyverns live in. While a spell drawn from a canyon wyvern might provide good impact resistance due to that wyvern having to deal with falling rocks all the time, it could be extremely inefficient for dealing with piercing damage from bullets and arrows, where the force is too concentrated to dissipate harmlessly. Finally, water is a major weakness for Wyvern Soul. Wyverns have adapted to catch fish, but none have been found that possess the ability to swim. Enduring a little rain is one thing, but being caught on the ground with a tidal wave heading your way is quite another.

V. HISTORY

History:
Sascha was born into captivity. In a village renowned for producing tame wyverns that could be kept as pets, his family came from a tribe of people who could communicate with the beasts. One hundred years before Sascha's birth, the tribe was attacked by men who wished to use the wyverns as battle mounts. At first the idea was to slaughter the whole tribe so that the wyverns could be easily corralled and would not turn against them. The men soon discovered that while they tribe could communicate with the wyverns, they had not truly tamed them, so none but those of the tribe could even go near one before it spat fire, acid, or poison. Only a single, meager family of the tribe was left, and they were soon put to work breeding proper, broken mounts for the invaders.

As time passed and the need for war mounts diminished, so changed the duties of those that remained of the wyvern tribe. Rather than producing beasts of battle, they created creatures of sport, breeding faster wyverns for racing, more vicious ones for cage fights, and even smaller ones with the ability for deadly breath bred out of them. The latter served as pets. The secret of the village was kept a secret, with fully tamed wyverns retrained to act wild so that a display of the 'taming process' could be put on display for investors who visited. The village was inhabited with the descendants of the invaders. And the descendents of the captain who led them were the ones to take care of the 'village pets' as they were referred. The last of the Wyvern Tribe line.

By the time of Sascha's birth, the role of head of the family made its way into the hands of a softhearted man. Many before had seen the way the Wyvern Tribe descendants were treated as cruel, but none before had possessed the power to do something about it. While he knew power would be taken immediately by his younger, crueler brother should he try to release Sascha's family, the old man still had his ways. He spent his life trying to improve the living and work conditions of Sascha's family, while his brother made them steadily worse in his own way, as if to balance out things. If Sascha got a proper mattress, then he would be beaten within the week for looking at his masters 'funny'. Better, healthier food meant he would just have to work longer at trying to break one of the most dangerous of the wyverns in the village.

It was not enjoyable work by any means Sascha found when he started at it at age five. To make wyverns antagonistic, they had to be constantly backed into corners and poked with sharp objects so they would fight. To make them faster and faster, they were chased around and shocked with a lightning lachryma on the end of a stick. During races, a small shock was applied to get the beasts going. Their wings were disabled as well. They could still use them to run and climb, but the full function of flight was removed. Only the miniature wyverns were treated in any way close to decent, but those that had the ability to use some sort of breath defense were drowned as soon as they showed the capacity to do so, whether they were considered fully trained or not. Sascha was forced to experience, and take part in all this from a very young age, and lived under the implied status of being only a few missteps from being treated like that himself. As motivations to commit acts of cruelty go, it was one of the most effective for a young child.

The kind master was still working on a way to improve the lives of his slaves all through this. He spent a fair bit of his time constructing a package to be delivered to a nearby Rune Knights outpost. He knew men of the government would be righteous and expose the cruelty for what it was before ending it. He was something of a coward though, hence why he never stopped his brother from being cruel to Sascha's family. The package was full of proof of the cruelty towards the tribe, and he didn't want to go to jail, so he sent the package to the bank with instructions for it to be delivered upon his death. Unknowingly, he was very lucky to get the package out. Sascha was nine when the kind man passed, apparently through severe allergic reaction. The odd thing was that the specific plant that caused it didn't even grow in the village, or anywhere near it. Not too many questioned it though, for they feared the one who just came into power, the cruel younger brother of the previous master, would send them out of this life the same way.

Everything good thing that Sascha had grown up with was stripped away. At times, he envied the wyverns, who at least got regular meals. He feared he would die trapped under the heel of another's boot, not able to see the beautiful world that captured wild wyverns spoke of.

That's when the knights came.

Sascha was in the middle of yet another beating for suspected plotting with the beasts when the knights descended on the town. Sascha made a break for it. The cruel master had said one too many times that he would rather kill Sascha's whole family than see the cash cow of wyvern breeding taken from him. Sascha didn't want to find out if that was true. Of course the man chased him, something shining in his hand. He was gaining too, as Sascha was only a child. He wished that he could run even half as fast as some of the racing wyverns. They were descended from desert wyverns, and had shovel-like claws for increased traction. Before the boy knew it, he was pulling away from his evil master. Looking down, Sascha almost lost his footing. His toes had been replaced with those of the wyverns he'd just been imaginging.

He ran for a full day before his legs finally came to a stop. He stumbled into a town, half delirious, the instincts of a wyvern trying their best to retain a hold on his mind. Under the innkeeper's wing, he stayed there for a week before the knights found him. He was deposited in an orphanage, as his assumptions about the cruel master had been correct. After losing sight of Sascha, he'd run back into his home, locked the doors with magic, and killed off what remained of Sascha's family. At first, he was resentful of the rich, and all the trouble they'd brought him in pursuit of money.

But then he started to explore the new world he'd been so unceremoniously dropped into. At age eleven, with a head full of stories of mages and their explorations and money, he made a pact with himself to do just that. Sure all the kids laughed at him, but they didn't know he actually had the capabilities of a mage. His escape from slavery hadn't been a fluke, or a trick of his eyes. Though he didn't know what it was called at the time, he had used takeover magic. And since takeover magic works best for those creatures the mage truly knew, his manifested in take over of certain aspects of wyverns. He'd grown up studying them, so there was no better magic for him.

Quietly, he honed his skills until he was old enough to leave the orphanage. He'd never allowed himself to be adopted, because all his prospective parents talked so fondly of being able to get him shoes. Sascha couldn't allow that since one of his most basic spells would destroy any pair of shoes he happened to be wearing at the time. As soon as he turned eighteen, he was out of the orphanage doors, and out into the world. Another year was devoted to just exploring before he finally decided it was time to settle down with a guild to help achieve his goals.