Odessa Virelan
Basic Information
Bloodline Ability
This Bloodline ability has not yet been unveiled to you.
Physical Description
Odessa is one hundred and eighty-seven years old and looks about thirty, as E-grade folk do. She is a tall, statuesque Ifrit with warm, sun-bronzed skin scattered thickly with freckles, hazel eyes flecked with gold, and a great mass of long, waving hair the color of a well-fed forge, which seems to hold the light a little longer than it should. She dresses the way she builds: beautifully, and with nothing left to chance. Her usual gown is copper-red silk worked with fine gold filigree at the collar, shoulders, and waist, worn beneath a floor-length mantle of sheer amber gauze, with long gold earrings and a few plain rings. None of it has ever been scorched.
Odessa can sense temperature with extraordinary precision. She can tell when a piece of metal is ready from several paces away, identify a blocked furnace from a subtle change in the air moving through a room, and adjust a flame almost without thinking about it. She tends to pause in a doorway for a moment when she enters a building. It looks like poise. It is an inspection.
She carries herself with the composure of nobility despite holding no hereditary title, and like most of her kind she is entirely comfortable standing beside heat that would send anyone else out of the room. Her hands are immaculate, which surprises people who assume a woman who has spent more than a century around furnaces must have the burns to show for it.
Personality & Temperament
- Composed and courteous, even beside a roaring furnace
- Intensely organized, down to the last sack of charcoal
- Teaches her methods freely to any smith who will listen
- Makes practical things beautiful as a matter of principle
- Endlessly patient with honest ignorance
- Visibly irritated by waste, above all affordable waste
- Carries herself like nobility with no title to match
- Will tell you your chimney is wrong within the hour
- Dismissive of fire magic that exists only to destroy
- Cannot leave a badly built oven alone, even as a guest
Anybody can burn something. Civilization begins when someone learns how to keep the fire exactly where it belongs.
You are heating the sky. That chimney is the most expensive thing you own, and you built it yourself.
"Practical" is not an excuse. If it must stand in the middle of your workshop for a century, it can be beautiful.
- Polished brass and flame kept in clean, glowing channels
- Beautiful architecture: arches, spires, tall windows
- A furnace still warm at dawn without being fed overnight
- Ledgers showing the same work done on less fuel
- Workers standing at ease beside a furnace at full heat
- Waste by people who can simply afford to be wasteful
- Heat vanishing up a chimney when it could warm a street
- Ugly engineering excused as "merely practical"
- Being asked to throw a fireball as a party trick
- Blocked flues, cracked firebrick, and lazy bellows work
Background & History
She has since learned that Goodberry is already home to another child of Emberpeak, a professor of evocation who is said to care about control nearly as much as she does. She has not yet decided whether that will be a pleasure or an argument.