Aurora Herlynn is a player character played by Crystal within the Arcadia Complex.

Aurora Herlynn
Gender:	Female
Race:	Elven
Age:	21
Faction:	Independent
Occupation:	Freelance Archer
Rank:	N/A

The elvish girl only stands at about 5'6“, a bit on the shorter side for a female of her species. She has strawberry blonde hair that dangles down to about her mid back and is usually seen sported in a milkmaids braid with two red ribbons tying off the ends. Green irises, like that of emerald gems, are set into the whites of her eyes and highlighted by almost always rosy red cheeks. Her ears are elongated and come to a sort of point, typical of an elf, and are almost always a soft red at the tips.

Years of crafting using bows of different sizes and draw weights have given her good upper body strength and toning. Her mass comes in to about 134 lb, a healthy weight for her size.

Aurora was born into a family of two loving parents. Her father, Alekail Herlynn, was an amazing bow craftsman who ran his business out of a small shop he had built at the edge of the property. And her mother, Laira Herlynn, was a hunter, gardener, and housewife extraordinaire who provided for much of the small family’s food and sold excess game on the side when she could. There was nothing that woman couldn't do in Aurora's eyes. She schooled Aurora at home, taught her to hunt and set traps, taught her how to cook and how to grow and nurture a garden with many kinds of crop yielding plants.

Life for the young elf was calm and peaceful and she enjoyed spending time helping her mom around the house or crafting bows with her father. She loved both her parent's dearly, but her mom especially was a great source of comfort for her. She was sweet and caring and always there to lend an ear to what may trouble Aurora. Even when the girl struggled with her fear of animals and gross things after the incident when she was little, her mother was patient with her. In fact, if not for her mom’s persistent encouragement, Aurora may not have ever left the house again.

The day her mom died shattered the girl's fragile reality. It was as if the light had been sucked out of every everything. Her father was not in much better shape, and the two mourned her mother's death for days thereafter. She had died of the same illness that had almost taken Aurora, herself, when she was a baby. It was an illness thought to spread by contaminated food and must have come into the house by the few produce she had gone to buy in the crowded market, a rare occurrence for her to even do so as most of the food was produced in their garden.

Once she had fallen ill, due to her age, there was not much that a doctor or a healer could do besides encourage us and tell us to wait. She was sick for a month, bedridden, the sickness almost appearing to age her as she could barely move and speak in the end and her body had become frail. It was not something for the faint of heart to see someone you love like that, but she could not just abandon her mother when she had always been there for her, even if it hurt.

Even now in her adult life, Aurora hates to look back on that moment, her mother’s fail body, dying right before her eyes. She chooses instead to think of her mom she was is life. She can see her in the leaves of the garden plants, the spots of sun that burn through the canopy, feel her brush past as the wind stirs, she was still existing and at Aurora's side, like an energy; a presence.

As a young thing, the elf girl was just like any other kid. She loved to be outside and with the animals. Even at that age she wasn't much of a fan of getting down in the dirt, but it never really tended to hold her back. Personal preference you could say.

But one day while staying over with one of her friends at their small family farm, she found herself suddenly alone and unsupervised near one small, muddy hog pens on the property. While trying to pet one of the hogs, perilously sitting on top of the fence, one of the hogs would bump into the wooden post, causing her to fall into the muck bellow.

Before she could pull herself out of the grime, she would be stepped on by the large, hairy hog, and forced under the mud. Her friend, who’d noticed her fall, would run screaming for help while Aurora struggled to get her head above the thick muck, the putrid stuff filling her nose, ears, and mouth.

Humiliated and petrified from the experience that day, Aurora would grow to become a sort of clean freak, going out of her way to avoid getting messy or into any sort of muck. “Messy things” range from blood and the normal sort of stomach churning fluids to stinking mud or grease.

Going off to the prestigious Academy of Lu’airn for magic studies had been a dream nurtured by her father and mother since she was little. On the fateful day when she had been taken to a local healer for a grave illness as a baby, the elf mage had felt the energy within Aurora and notified her parents of the good news.

From that day after, the two hard working parents had started saving all the money possible, wishing to give their baby girl the chance to delve into study and mastery of the rare ability that was passed down through their bloodline. When Aurora turned 18, she was accepted into the prestigious academy. It was most certainly an unorthodox institution. It had no real standards in its curriculum, but was strict no less, pushing it’s students to independently acquire knowledge and mastery over their magical ability. The academy even opted to bring in masters and teachers for each and every different ability that attending students had.

The ancient arcane ability that Aurora possessed was increasingly something that was not seen in her race, so there were only two other people who shared the ability she did out of the several thousand enrolled there. This meant that she had the rare luxury of having much more personally tailored work with her Master and she grew quickly during her time there.

Would seem pretty amazing to have practically your own teacher at a prestigious academy, huh? It definitely was. But that was the thing. What was so amazing could only happen because of one thing. Money.

After only two years at the academy, all the money her father and mother had saved for her schooling were gone. Aurora's father, now the sole source of income since her mother had been lost some time ago, chose to keep this troubling financial situation hidden from her. But nothing like this could stay hidden forever.

When Aurora had come back home on one of the few holiday visits, she discovered that her old family home and much of what was inside it had been sold. And her father had moved into his shop to live in a small room in the back of it. When confronted, he shrugged it off. When she pushed, he claimed it was to bury painful memories and rid him of her mother’s lingering presence in the house. This was hard for Aurora to believe, considering her father had always comforted her by talking of mother’s presence in a warm, loving way. The blow of losing her childhood home was almost enough to make her leave and return back to her dorm at the academy early. But something about it all wasn't adding up.

On the last day she was there, a strange man, a human, had come to the shop. She had been out when he came, and when she saw him leaving, she followed him away from the shop before approaching. He was a loan shark, and was coming to pick up money from the selling of the house. Even with that chunk of money, it was only enough to dent the total amount owed. It didn’t take a genius to put two and two together here. Her father wasn’t a gambler or drinker or doing anything illegal…yet. The only thing that was a big burden on his finances at the moment was her schooling.

She now had many questions for her father, most of them starting with “Why…”, but if he had went through the trouble to keep it a secret from her like this, then he wasn’t about to drop the charade. So she devised a plan, a lie for his lie.

When she got back to the academy, she packed her necessary things, and sign the papers dropping her from enrollment into the academy. She would then travel back to her home city of Tai’el, where she intercepts the letter to home from the academy, which stated her removal from the institution, and would replace it with her own. Her replacement letter was to inform her father that she had proven herself and been granted into an exchange program to travel over seas. Expenses were to be paid at the end and kept track of by the exchanging academy she will be staying with.

With a silent with for luck and love to her father, she stepped away from the mailbox. Her destination? Anywhere. The goal now was to make money, whatever she could bring herself to do to get it. With trusted family bow on her back and quiver of fine arrows strapped to her waist, she walking down the road leading away from her house and the shop, leaving all she loved behind.

Since that incident from her childhood, Aurora never really liked to get dirty or messy. She absolutely hated the feeling of it and thus goes through great lengths to not get herself into any messy sort of situations. But sometimes this can clash with the other sides of her that have a powerful sense of duty and loyalty. Upon an animal becoming injured, she will immediately swoop in to try and help the creature, throwing caution to the wind about her distaste of dirt and grime.

Similarly, if a comrade is being assailed by an enemy and they require her assistance not from far away as an archer, but instead up close and personal with the enemy, she will run in to thick of things to save her teammate's skin. Do note that if you put her into this kind of situation, you will now have to face the threat from her for getting her clothes messied and her feathers ruffled.

The word arcane is defined as: understood by few; mysterious or secret. It is as fitting as ever for the ability that the elf holds within her. No two dusty books she has read on the subject are alike. Some categorize it as an immense energy that the user is born with and holds within them, able to summon it at any time to do as they wish with. Others describe it as the user being a vessel channeling the magic stored within the world around them, that the power is indeed not their own and is instead borrowed. Another theory, yet, is that it is simply a mistake in nature; power within someone that never quite figured out what form of magic to take.

That being said, all of these theories have some truths to them that they base speculation off of. The power is raw and volatile and can be dangerous to both the user and those around the user if not properly contained. This is the reason it is common for the power to be used along with the aid of tools. To put it simply, it is a kind of enchantment process, imbuing an object with the raw magic energy and learning how to give it desired results.

The weapon of choice for Aurora is the bow and arrow. She utilizes her power to craft different sets of arrows to give an edge in combat in a world where guns and cannons are readily available. The arrows vary in intensity and effect and include the following:

Upon the single arrow being shot, it will flare into a flash of blue. When the light fades, three shorter arrows, like that of a crossbow bolt, will now be in its place. It grants more surface area hits at the cost of decreased dept of punctures. Good for taking down small to medium creatures with little to no natural armor.

Tracker arrows are to be fired first, as they are the ones that then guide the seekers. A tracker arrow, if successfully embedded into the target, will then establish a marker at the place the arrow hits. Seeker arrows will then be shot and guided around obstacles with the intent to hit the marker. But this marker, however, can only guide an arrow’s direction. Seeker arrows are still subject to the laws of physics and will lose energy, speed, and altitude as they travel over distances.

Pure arcane energy formed loosely into an arrow. When shot, the arrow’s shape will break apart as the energy will start to disperse out in what would most closely resemble bending lightning bolts. This move is rather dangerous, for when the bolt strikes the intended target, a large amount of energy will still be present and will exit the body by traveling into the ground or into nearby objects via outreaching bolts of energy. It is extremely volatile and cannot be controlled after the arrow is released.

Heirloom Bow

This page was originally created by Crystal on Tue 30-01-18.