Knife

Knife Image Reference, art by Niladhevan

Knife looks pretty average on the streets of Manta Carlos. There's no wings, no tail. She's one hundred percent human, standing at around 5'5". She has muscle built up, but it's hidden under a thin layer of body fat from eating poorly. She's littered with small scars, including two small scratches on her left cheek, and a particularly prominent scar just above her right hip. Her hair is any ashy brown, and her eyes could be described as golden... brown. Her skin is naturally dark, and her face is round with large ears that stick out.

Knife's clothes tends to fall on the skimpy side of things. Since so much of her time was spend running around the south (mostly southwestern) united states, heat was the name of the game. Long pants were important for leg protection, as were shoes, but up top things tended to be less necessary. Normally it's a tube top or a crop top, occasionally with a vest or jacket thrown on to save her shoulders from sunburn.

Knife could easily be described as hot headed and it would still probably be too charitable. She's an act first, ask questions never kind of girl. She jumps to aggression and gets riled up far too easily, and the likelihood that she gets into a fight only seems to increase the more people there are around her. She really, really should probably be in therapy to get it under control, but the idea would never, ever occur to her.

Beyond her tendency to be a bit too aggressive, Knife is extremely, mind bogglingly curious. She'll climb a cliff to figure out what's on top just because she can. That's not to say she's academic--anything but, she did awful in school--but she's a bundle of curiosity that is desperate to learn everything about everyone and everything.

Or almost everything. Knife has a strong aversion to the past. She wants to know who you are and what your powers are and how they work, but she couldn't care less where you came from or what your life was like there. She doesn't care about history, and it's largely a pathological thing. She hates her own history and doesn't want to talk about it, and thinking about any other history means thinking about her own, so she avoids it.

Knife has no real regard for personal space, and is pretty bad at picking up on 'back off' cues. Mostly it's simply a lack of experience. It's been years since she's really seen anyone, and the longer she spends on the island, the better she'll get.

For all her faults, Knife makes a surprisingly good teacher. She's the kind of teacher who picks up very quickly on the social dynamics of a group, and is very good at gauging who is falling behind. You'd never want her to administer a math test, but when it comes to physical fitness and survival skills, she's top notch.

Knife has only a single power, although it's rather powerful: Knife can teleport. Specifically, she can teleport herself and anything she's touching. Unlike so many others, Knife's power isn't significantly limited by weight--she could teleport a bus if she wanted to, although that seems to be near the upper limit as far as size goes--or by distance. Knife can teleport, in theory, anywhere. She could teleport to Saturn if she wanted, she'd just die horribly almost immediately. She needs to be able to visualize where she's jumping to, and then she simply is there. No puff of smoke, no sudden pop or crackle. She's simply there one minute and gone the next.

It's possible for Knife to teleport to a place she's never been if she has pictures or a clear enough description. Thankfully, her powers prevent her from teleporting into any objects (she simply won't be able to teleport if she tries) although they won't prevent her from teleporting into dangerous situations. After years of practice, Knife's managed to shave her time down to ten seconds between jumps, which usually means she teleport herself to way up in the sky, using the fall to scout out a new place to jump to before making the jump before she hits the ground. It's her preferred way to travel.

Knife's Knife: Knife isn't sure if her knife was the inspiration for the original Gae Buidhe, or if it was inspired by the original Gae Buidhe. She doesn't care to investigate, either.

Once the head of a spear, Gae Buidhe has become a knife, carefully crafted into one not unlike a KA-BAR in design. The blade is around seven inches long, with a five inch handle. The blade itself is a clip point. While the handle shows signs of intricate styling, Knife has buried them under a layer of electrical tape to help her grip.

When dealing with an ordinary human, Gae Buidhe works identically to any other knife, aside from being slightly more durable than the average knife would be. It can still snap, which would require Knife to retrieve the pieces and repair it.

Gae Buidhe's true strength is similar to that of Gae Buidhe of legend. While wounds inflicted by Gae Buidhe can heal, they heal only at a normal human rate. Supernatural or magical healing of any kind would have no effect, and those with healing factors would find them unable to heal any injuries made by the knife, save by waiting a long time.

This also means, if Knife were ever to manage to overpower and kill someone capable of resurrection, that the knife could grant them true death, their souls unable to revive in any manner.

Knife, as a survival teacher, has a special permit to take her knife with her. She uses it in almost all her classes for a whole variety of purposes, and since that's almost all she teaches, she needs it on her almost all the time. She keeps it secured with clips so it can't be quickly pulled as a compromise.

Knife doesn't like to talk about her past, and it's unlikely anyone is going to get much of it out of her. She was born in Nevada, and had a normal enough life right up until she was eleven. That was when the plague hit--the end of the world.

The end of her world. Knife's parents got sick, and so did everyone else--everyone but Knife. She knows she wasn't the only survivor, but she might as well have been. The first few months there were other people, and a lot of them were willing to help her out when they saw how young she was, but eventually they all dried up.

Knife was alone. She learned to survive the hard way, teaching herself from books pillaged from libraries. She watched civilization crumble, and she traveled, collecting food where she could. She survived, and surviving took up most of her time.

When she was fifteen, she stumbled upon something strange--a skeleton that clearly wasn't human. There were wings on it and something that might have been a tail, and even though the body was all but rotted away, she found a neatly written journal still safe from the elements in a partially rotten pack.

The man was a scout for a place called Starlight Academy, and his pictures and notes helped Knife make the jump to the Manta Carlos Islands for the first time. She had hoped to find survivors--a bustling town--and instead she found the same rotting wasteland she'd left behind. There were signs that indicated that at least part of the island had been evacuated, but it was also clear that most hadn't made it.

Knife explored the island as she went, searching for some sort of sign for where they'd all gone, and eventually she... sort of found it. Knife wasn't clear if the machine was actually how the rest of the survivors had left, but she wasn't willing to argue. The machine, by her guess, would let her escape her universe by supercharging her own powers, allowing her to teleport not just through space, but through dimensions. Unfortunately, it was broken, and it would take years for Knife to be able to repair it, allowing her to jump through dimensions in hopes of finding one like her own.

Despite having only recently arrived on the island, Knife has effectively already memorized the general layout, and is privy to a great number of it's location-based secrets, having explored them in her own world.

Culturally, Knife is as Indian as chicken tikka masala, which is to say not at all. She was supposed to be going back to Assam to meet her grandparents sometime before she turned eighteen, but never got the chance. She doesn't speak Assamese or any language other then English.