Akane Noctis - XERES LIVE!

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Basic Information

Full Name

Akane Noctis

Nickname

None She'll Acknowledge

Race (Grade)

Succubus (E)

Class

Wanderer

Height

5'10"

Birthday

Rainsong 5, 1283

Age

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Birthsign

The Twilight Phoenix

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Bloodline Ability

🔮Unknown

This Bloodline ability has not yet been unveiled to you.

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Physical Description

Akane Noctis, Silmarithil

Appearance

There is no mistaking Akane Noctis for anything other than what she is. The wings alone settle the question, two vast, leathery expanses of deep purple-black that spread behind her with the casual authority of something that has never needed to apologize for existing. Their inner surfaces catch candlelight in shades of burgundy and deep red, and when she folds them against her back, it is with the practiced ease of someone who learned very early in life exactly how wide doorframes are and exactly how much patience she has for low ceilings. Above the black gothic crown set at her brow, ornate, deliberate, its red gem catching every available light at the center, two curved horns rise in smooth arcs, their tips fading from dark to a warm gold-orange that looks almost like the end of a flame. Her hair is the color of seafoam in shallow water, a pale mint green that falls in two thick braids well past her waist, impossibly long and maintained with the care of someone who considers her appearance an operational asset rather than a vanity. Her skin is pale, her eyes a deep rose-tinted hue beneath lashes that give her default expression the quality of permanent mild assessment. She dresses for what she is: a deep crimson satin dress with its ruched bodice edged in black lace, long black gloves to the elbow, fishnet stockings, and boots that lace to the thigh. She carries an ornate jeweled scepter, more aesthetic punctuation than weapon, though she holds it with the ease of someone who could make that distinction irrelevant if pushed.

Unique Characteristics

The wings are real and functional. She has used them. She folds them out of doorways with the habitual resignation of someone who has been doing this for long enough that it stopped being annoying and became simply a feature of existing in a world not designed for her wingspan. Her horns catch light at angles that seem deliberate, though they are not. She does not perform her nature. She simply has it. The eyes are the thing that unsettles perceptive observers, not threatening, but evaluating. There is a quality to the way she looks at a person, particularly a prospective meal, that strips away the polite fiction of mutual social opacity. She is assessing. She has been assessing people for sustenance for long enough that the process is automatic, and anyone with enough self-awareness will feel the distinct and uncomfortable sensation of being appraised at a market by someone who knows exactly what things cost and has opinions about quality. She does not hide what she is. She does, however, have manners. Just not patience, which is a different thing entirely.

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Personality & Temperament

Positive Traits

Honest, not from principle, but because lying is inefficient
Holds standards she arrived at herself, not borrowed ones
Efficient and direct about what she wants or doesn't
Genuinely fair; treats people exactly as they deserve
Dry, precise humor delivered with the same mild expression
If she genuinely likes you, she says so once, and means it

Challenging Traits

Does not soften opinions, asked for or not
Very low patience for complaining or neediness
Gets bored quickly and makes no effort to hide it
Maintains no polite fictions about her nature
When annoyed, she's withering: quiet, precise, and it lands
Considers most beneath notice until proven otherwise

"I don't eat souls. I've said that eleven times this week. At some point the problem stops being my reputation and starts being your reading comprehension."

"You want to know if it hurts? It doesn't. You want to know if you'll remember me? You will. You want to negotiate terms before we begin? Don't. I'm not interested in people who need this to be more complicated than it is."

"I don't apologize for what I am. I've never seen the point of apologizing for gravity."

Likes

Furniture That Fits Her Wings
People Who Know What They Want
Strong Wine with an Opinion
A Good View from a High Window
Cities That Don't Bore Her Within a Week
People Who Don't Need to Be Managed

Dislikes

Being Asked if She Eats Souls (She Doesn't)
Moralizing From the Uninformed
Men Who Decide They're in Love After One Night
Low Ceilings
Excessive, Unearned Cheer
Being Expected to Apologize for What She Is

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Background & History

Born What She Is

Akane did not become this. She was born it, as cleanly and without ceremony as any other demonkin is born what they are. There was no curse, no transformation, no dramatic origin with meaning stitched into the suffering. She arrived in the world with wings too large for the room and a nature that would shape everything that came after, and the world was obliged to adjust to that reality because she was not going to adjust to it instead. She draws sustenance from intimacy, specifically from the vital energy exchanged during it, something warm and sustaining that her prey never miss in any meaningful way. They wake pleasantly tired, slightly hazy, and fine. She wakes fed. She has been doing this since she was old enough to understand what it meant, and she spent very little of that time in ethical crisis about it. A wolf does not mourn the deer. She eats. She moves on. She found, over time, that the framework was more interesting than the guilt, and the guilt was never particularly compelling to begin with.

The Drifting Years

She has no permanent home and has not wanted one, or has not wanted one enough to stay anywhere long enough to build it. She goes where the feeding is sustainable, which practically speaking means cities, large ones, preferably prosperous ones, ideally the kind with a surplus of people who have more money than purpose and are quietly looking for something they cannot name. That specific archetype is well-distributed across Xeres, and she has learned to identify it quickly. She has lived in several places over the years. She stays until boredom outweighs efficiency, or until circumstance makes the calculation for her, and then she moves. She does not leave dramatically. She packs, she departs, she finds somewhere new. She has noticed, over enough cycles of this, that most places are essentially the same once you know them. The specifics vary. The dynamic does not.

Why Silmarithil

Word travels, and someone mentioned, in passing, that Silmarithil was growing fast, new money, new soldiers, new administrators, all of them far from home and looking for something they couldn't name in a city they didn't know yet. That, she had learned, was efficient. People without established footing make different decisions than people who do, and those decisions tend to go in directions she finds professionally convenient. She arrived last week. She took a room. She assessed the situation from the window, from the street, from one early evening in what turned out to be an acceptable establishment. She is in the process of determining whether this was a good decision. She is inclined to wait another few weeks before committing to an opinion.

First Week

She has had exactly enough time to locate the better establishments, to identify which parts of the city have wine that meets her minimum standards, fewer than she would have preferred, and to get into one argument with a local who found her wings an inappropriate dinner conversation topic. She won the argument, which she considered the minimum acceptable outcome, and found the experience more tedious than satisfying. Her preliminary opinion of Silmarithil is cautiously neutral. The wine is better than the last city. The architecture is worse, which she is taking personally in the way she takes all ceiling heights personally. She has met three people she would classify as mildly interesting. She is withholding final judgment, but she is forming impressions whether she intends to or not, and the city has not yet given her strong reason to revise them in either direction.

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Goals & Aspirations

Feed Without Drama

Her primary operational requirement is a stable feeding arrangement that does not involve local authorities, organized theological objection, or any scene that requires her to stand in a public space and explain herself to people who have already decided what she is before she has opened her mouth. She has managed this in other cities. She is not particularly worried about managing it here. Her terms are not complicated: she takes what she needs, she leaves her prey intact and pleasantly rested, and everyone proceeds with their lives without incident. This is, in her view, a reasonable arrangement, arguably a generous one, given the alternatives a being of her nature could theoretically pursue. Not everyone reaches this conclusion immediately, which she finds tedious, but most arrive there eventually once they realize the practical alternative involves considerably more inconvenience than she is proposing.

Find Out If This Place Is Worth Staying

One week is not enough to decide anything. She has criteria, vague, but functional. Interesting people, in sufficient quantity that she does not exhaust the supply within a month. Tolerable food. Somewhere she can sit for an evening without the ceiling becoming a personal grievance. A sense that the city has enough happening in it to sustain her attention past the initial novelty. Silmarithil may clear all of these. It may not. She will have a clearer picture in another few weeks, and until then she is withholding the kind of opinion that requires actual investment, which is a different thing entirely from the opinions she is forming constantly about everything else.

Something She Doesn't Talk About

Beneath the efficiency and the sharp opinions and the thorough self-possession, there is something she does not have clean language for yet. It is not love, she is not particularly interested in love, or at least not in the version of it she has observed most frequently, which tends to involve a great deal of self-deception from everyone involved. What she does not have, and has not had in a long time, is the particular kind of not-being-alone that requires someone to actually know her, the full version, wings and feeding and sharp edges and all, and remain present anyway. Not out of fascination, not out of the particular blindness that comes with wanting something from her, but simply because they have looked at what she is and decided it was fine. She has not told anyone this. She wouldn't. But it is there, quiet and unhurried, in the background of every city she has moved through and eventually left.

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Current Status & Relationships

Residence

Silmarithil

Role

Wanderer

ATTENTION!

Akane Noctis is not dangerous in the way that requires civic response. She does not kill. She does not steal. She does not manipulate toward any endgame that would be bad for anyone around her. Her prey consent to the arrangement, frequently with enthusiasm, and leave no worse for the experience, tired, pleasantly so, and fine. The practical concern for anyone paying attention is different in nature. She has been reading people for sustenance for long enough that she does it automatically and well. She notices things that most observers miss, and she notices them quickly. She is new to Silmarithil, which means she is still forming opinions, still deciding what this city is and what it isn't. That window, where she can be impressed rather than merely tolerant, will not stay open long. She has been here one week. She does not yet know anyone who matters. She is beginning to look.