This is a pick of my characters from the story/roleplaying setting of Avelyon High. It is not by a far stretch all of them, just a few of my favorites. The setting is urban fantasy, with a technology level about on par with the modern world, and some magic added in. The school in question is a boarding school, and the largest mixed-race school in the country of Erigineea.
Roxeen's life was turned upside down when, at 17, his father was arrested for possession and his mother got custody of him. He resented his mother for quite possibly tipping the police off, he resented himself for not realizing that something was up on that day much sooner and hiding evidence, and to top it all off he didn't get along with his stepfather and half-sisters. It also didn't help matters any that he's gay and neither his mother nor her new husband approved of homosexuality -- the only luck he had there was figuring that out before tipping them off.
In the process of coping with the stress of a life he didn't choose for himself, where he was far from appreciated by his caretakers, he turned against himself. For a short period of time he cut himself, before realizing that it would set his mother off if she found out. That was when he stopped eating. It must be stressed that the twisted body image that comes with anorexia in his case is not a matter of thinking he's fat; he knows he's skinny, he's always been. Rather, he convinces himself that while he can see he's thin, it's absolutely normal and nothing to worry about, and he really doesn't need all that extra nutrition he didn't deserve.
Outwardly, Roxeen is quite even-tempered, though it's far from unheard of for him to snap. However, he's also snarky to a fault and is unlikely to put up with any nonsense from his friends. Prior to the dip in self-esteem that came from living with his mother he wouldn't put up with shit from anyone, but he's developed a tendency to tell himself he deserved it.
He's got long, platinum-colored hair (I usually draw it somewhere between mid-thigh and mid-calf length), grey eyes, pale skin, and too many piercings for any sane person. If his temper does get the best of him, his eyes will temporarily turn yellow, due to him having what is essentially a familiar: a huge black cougar named Strek, with white where the usual dark cougar markings would go. His favorite piece of clothing is an unbelievably ugly and lopsided knit sweater that his childhood friend Naiomi made for him. Oh, and since it's not a given in the setting, he's human.
Roxeen also has an uncanny knack for dating the wrong kind of guys. It's not that he's drawn to the bad guys -- all of them were positively charming when he first met them -- but he has the worst luck and they turn out to be rotten. The tally includes a psychotic fox mage, a physically abusive werewolf, an overprotective elf (who wasn't really rotten, but Roxeen does not take well to people insisting that he's sick and needs to eat more) and, post-high-school, a guy almost twice his age who dated him for six month and then dumped him along with two daughters from the guy's previous marriage. Aside from this he can be a total boyslut, and the guys he just messes around with are generally a lot nicer than the ones he ends up dating.
Myen is a very devoted follower of Shol-yunali, the Goddess of Wisdom. So devoted, in fact, that She decided to make her a Paladin several hundred years after the Gods at large stopped doing that. She's got her heart in the right place, hates seeing people (or creatures) suffering, and is an all-around nice girl. Sometimes, she has a bit too much trouble with "the ends justify the means"-type logic; being sent by her patron Goddess to free a slave, she feels guilty about stealing the slave even though slavery is wrong.
She is also a very focused young woman. When she was unexpectedly promoted to Paladin and given a Steed to ride, she didn't waste any time in contacting the career advisor and informing him that she would be taking Equitation from now on, because it needed to happen, and that was the end of it. It's very frustrating to her when other people see what's right and still need to debate that very thing. If it's right, it's what needs to be done, end of story.
Physically, she's human, from a region where humans have dark skin. Her hair is a very pale blonde, buzz-cut except for chin-length bangs, and her eyes are blue-gray. Not terribly gifted in the chest department, and somewhere around average height. She wears formal Paladin clothing (see refs) and a yellow jasper horseshoe pendant on a silver chain. The horseshoe has a small musical 1/8th note set into it; I'll see about getting a reference of it up fairly soon.
I have modelled her steed after a Tenessee Walking Horse, it's a palomino blanket appaloosa with mane/tail matching her hair almost perfectly.
In Socks's country of origin, if you can't pass as human, you have virtually no rights. Centaurs, after several millenia of being enslaved, fairly recently won something resembling freedom; they'll still end up working on human ranchers' estates to pay off debts, but there is an end in sight for this work, unlike the work of true slaves. However, sometimes these ranchers don't play fair. It's widely known that centaurs detest half-horse offspring, so if the ranchers can make sure such is born, that much better -- they're even likely to be returned to their owners by their own relatives, should they manage to run away. Socks is one such half-centaur horse hybrid.
He is, like many slaves, broken enough to be subservient to any human and, really, inclined to do what he's told by anyone who tries to order him around and can manage to sound authoritative. The only reason he is not still a slave is that Myen ran across him when she was in the progress of freeing a presumed-dead prisoner of war that was kept as a slave at the same ranch, and she felt sorry enough for him to bring him along on their escape. Likely in no small part because of this, he's fallen for her.
Appearance-wise, Socks's is built like a centaur, with the humanoid torso of an anthropomorphic horse rather than a human male. His mane runs all the way down the spine of this upper torso, to where his more horse-like back starts, and his horse father was a draft horse, so he's got that general appearance with a Roman nose and lots of feathers. His coat is a blue dun in color, with a very marked black stripe running down his spine. Three of his legs have white socks on them, while his right foreleg is instead black up to the knee. A metal slave collar is forged around his neck.
A slave from the same country as Socks, Aljaan somehow managed to stage his own escape. He arrived to Erigineea in a sorry state at about age 14, and it took him almost two years of hard work to finally get citizenship and get accepted into a school despite having no prior education to speak of. He speaks, reads and writes Erigineean, but his spelling is abysmal and his handwriting worse.
He is very friendly, easy-going and in general easy to get along with, though not particularly outgoing. Few people manage to get on his bad side, and when they do, chances are he'll still put up with them rather than make a fuss about it. He doesn't like physical contact much in general, is very unwilling to say no if he's asked to do something, doesn't like to ask people for favors, and gets uneasy around raised voices. He is, however, fairly good at hiding his discomfort -- he's had to be.
An akenaavayia, Aljaan has a pair of thick hollow horns connected to the nasal cavity, which can produce a loud sound if he is startled or laughing. His hair is two-toned, with his bangs and a small section of head hair near the front being scarlet and the rest of his hair being black; his eyes match his hair. He has a long, prehensile tail, which has a frill of short scarlet hair along the top, extended into a stripe in the otherwise black long tuft at the end of it. His feet are plantigrade like a human's, but the frontmost part is a pair of cloven hooves, and his legs are covered in thick black fur like a horse's feathers from about the knee down. The rest of his body is covered in thin, almost unnoticeable fur, about the color of an average suntan on a human.
Roxeen's stepdaughter, from a slightly later timeline -- she comes into his life when she's fourteen and he's 22, as her father (mid-late fourties) starts dating him. Six months later her father moves on without a word, signing over the upscale condo onto Roxeen, but this time, he doesn't bother bringing his daughters with him. As a result, Ravaethinne (Ray-vay-THIN-ay) and her eight years younger sister Nythengaille were left in Roxeen's care.
Raven, which is the name she usually goes by, was harassed by her peers in school for quite some time, mainly because of the way she chooses to dress. She prefers black over any other color, though she's taken to applying violet dye to her naturally black hair to give it a purple sheen, and will regularly wear skirts (with several underskirts) and corsets; it's a rather romanticized version of goth fashion. Along with this, she wears thick black eyeliner around her amber eyes.
She's rather sceptical to most new people; initially she hated Roxeen and wouldn't accept him as a father figure until he caught her in the middle of a practical joke staged by her tormentors and, to her surprise, didn't get upset with her about being somewhere she definitely shouldn't be, at an hour she should have been at home and in bed. Even having accepted him she's a bit too fond of pushing his buttons and figuring out how far she can go before he completely snaps at her. To her doing so is a comfort thing, as her biological parents divorced two years after her sister was born and neither of them has been very interested in what she's been doing, so getting Roxeen to put his foot down is affirmation that he cares.
About a year after the girls are abandoned with Roxeen, Aljaan moves in with them, and Raven takes comparably easily to him after hearing about his past. After that she's generally inclined to accept people Aljaan vouches for. Other than that, she's prone to giving people rather nasty nicknames; she initially called Roxeen her father's boytoy or fucktoy depending on whether her father was around, and the man Roxeen meets some time when she's sixteen ends up being addressed as "Poodle-Twat".
Ale!van (the '!' symbolizes a click sound that is quite common in wyvern tongue), usually called Alej by his non-wyvern friends, comes into Roxeen's life when he's 24 and is still to some extent recovering from getting burned by his last boyfriend. At that time Ale!van is fairly recently divorced, though he and his ex-wife parted on good terms, and due to his dangerous line of work they decided that his wife would have custody of their daughter Be!ii (usually just called Becky). After the divorce he decides to move a couple of states away, and chance has it that there's an opening in his line of work in Avelyon.
Alej is a law enforcement officer by profession, specifically a member of the North Avelyon Police Department Special Curses Unit. The unit specializes in handling cursed, demonic and magically gifted criminals who may be prone to violence; their most imporant duties tend to be to rat out feral werewolves and escort social workers or parole officers who work with such individuals. What he brings to the group is wyvern regenerative properties, minor healing gifts and his raev mage gifts.
Like all raev Ale!van has a bond to a gemstone, in his case it's a ruby. Thus his skin is rust red in color, his fur is a brighter red, and he has a star marking on his forehead, running all the way down the bridge of his nose and along the top of each eye, which is truly ruby in color; in the old days before humans realized that his mother's race was sentient they were hunted in order to use this bit of fur to create synthetic gems. His muzzle is bald aside from the ruby fur along the top of it, and he has a pair of backwards-curving horns which meld into a bone comb on the top of his head.
His tail is mostly furred, has three spikes poking through the fur near the base of it, and about two thirds of the way down the tail it splits into three, which a short distance from the branch become bald, with an additional two spikes along their top and each tipped with a poison barb. His body is otherwise mostly that of an anthropomorphic fox, though his ears have a split in the outer edge. The only other major difference from his vulpine mother's body structure is his sickle claws: two of his toes have large sickle claws, and he has another one on the back of his heel. The latter is held aloft by virtue of him being digitigrade, but the former cause some inconvenience as he cannot wear much of any footwear save for sandals.
Alej is kind, caring, and in general a pretty damn nice guy. This doesn't mean he's unable to make mistakes, as he can and does do so, but he really does try to do the right thing most of the time. If he has a fault it's a tendency to bottle things up if he thinks bringing them up will upset the other party; doing so is the main reason he sometimes does rather ill-advised things. He also has a lot of respect for authority, driving the leader of his squad batty by constantly "m'am"-ing her, even when they're not performing their duties. If any proof is needed that he has a healthy sense of humor, the fact that he takes Raven's nickname for him in stride and retaliates by calling her "Carrion-Breath" should be enough. Even if Roxeen doesn't like him encouraging her.
The thing that most frustrates Alej about his relationship is Roxeen's flat refusal to call him his boyfriend.
Characters from my stories or my comic set in a roughly medieval era in the same world as Avelyon High. Magic is more common, Paladins are much more common (would be hard for them not to be), and certain areas of the world are nowhere near as pleasant as they are a few thousand years later. The setting got its name from a magical refuge for Paladins that lets holy knights that for some reason are unable to do their God's bidding can stay and be certain they will not be called upon for Quests. The reasons vary, from old age to caring for an incapacitated fellow Paladin, severe chronic illness or disability and near-crippling phobias.
Colone used to be the mount of well-known mercenary captain Anya Ironhand, daughter of the Lord Tragash. Then she married and was going to move to her husband's estate on the Islands of the Sun, when their small party was ambushed. Colone threw her and ran off, luring the bandits away, and that was the last he and Anya saw of each other, as she thought him dead and he had no contact with anyone who could possibly bring him until after her death. At that point her oldest son returned to the mainland, banished due to something stupid he did in a fit of temper. Colone ran into the son of his rider by accident, and elected to travel with him mostly because he didn't have anything better to do. That had managed to, quite accidentally, aquire the equine-seeming Goddess of Water as his mount probably didn't hurt.
In Erigineea and her neighboring countries, with one exception, the majority of equine magical creatures, the Children of Alioda, are "created" as a mage wakens the slumbering soul in an ordinary horse, giving it sentience. The King's Army in Erigineea had been doing this to black steeds for quite a while, creating dracasi for use as mounts, before one of their agents seized a black-dyed Colone from a foreign horse trader. A trainer with a grudge gave the swan-winged horse to young Anya of Tragash, considering the ill-tempered colt a failure. The explanation for his unexpected development was found when he next shed, showing black patches on a white base coat rather than the expected pure black coat. Colone was very loyal to his rider, saving her life on several occassions, though when not in mortal danger his rather coarse personality did (and continues to) shine through.
He's built sturdily without being heavy as such, with fairly heavy feathering on his legs, similarly to a Gypsy Vanner horse. His right eye is sky blue while his left eye is a fairly dark brown that's more common for horses, and he wears a pendant consisting of a polished chunk of dark sodalite set in bluish silvery metal on a chain around his neck. The chain is fairly similar to fine chainmail in construction, and at a command word the links will indeed multiply and create armor for him which will turn just about any blade.
Colone's personality didn't exactly soften with the death of his rider -- he's bitter, narcissistic, snarky and has a penchant for tough love. Gaining his respect is difficult, one of the few humans who have done so is 's half-brother Shadowrose, an assassin who was forced to join up with them when sealed his magical gifts after a failed assassination attempt. His "rider" until he settled down in Haven was Gina, a Paladin Candidate who'd managed to inspire the ire of her Goddess and needed 's protection. Outwardly, Colone doesn't seem terribly fond of Gina, bickering with her at the shadow of a chance, but Gods have mercy on anyone else who dares call the Candidate names.
Since his arrival to Haven, Colone has been subject to more than his fair share of curses and magical accidents. A curse fell on him alongside the rest of Haven, turning him into a small, cutesy pony with tiny wings (think roughly My Little Pony or Webkinz or similar anatomically impossible but cute thing), something he detests. Then, when one of his few friends fell ill and the two people who would have been first choice for caring for her were unavailable, someone had the bright idea of trying temporarily give him a human form, which would also have the benefit of letting him get around outside Haven without drawing attention. This backfired, as the Curse doesn't like being tampered with, so instead he got an anthropomorphic form. This form is decidedly buff, being that Colone is a war horse, and the only real oddity about it is that his mane grows all the way down his spine to his tail. Usually he wears it in a sort of French braid along his spine, tied to his tail with a bow and loose from there on.
The World of Darkness is a roleplaying campaign setting by White Wolf, which is, as the name implies, very dark. This is based on the newer edition of World of Darkness, including but not limited to Vampire: the Requiem, Werewolf: the Forsaken and Changeling: the Lost. The game is generally set in a grittier, more dreary version of our world.
Mathilde was turned into a vampire at age 8, and outwardly she has remained at that age. She is manipulative and an expert at making use of her youthful appearance to her own benefit; she has specialized in feeding off sleazy old men with a taste for prepubescent girls, and if she thinks she can get away with it she will mommy-daddy any situation that doesn't please her. She is also more than slightly crazy, as she carries around a stuffed roadkill rabbit (not in the sense of a run-over rabbit toy, in the sense of finding a roadkill rabbit and replacing the meaty bits with stuffing) which she calls Bunnykins and is convinced tells her what to do. On top of that she has the long-time goal of Diablerizing her Sire (biting the vampire who turned her into one), despite knowing that Diablerie is seen as a beastial and disgusting act at best in the vampire world. Definitely off her rocker a bit there.
She has freckles on her cheeks, blue-gray eyes, blonde hair and, unless she's putting on an act, a certain stubborn-dignified no-nonsense set to her jaw. Generally she'll wear something sufficiently childish to not look out of place but still dignified-looking; a fairly low-key interpretation of gothic lolita garb wouldn't be out of place for her but overalls definitely would. She has a pink backpack where she'll put Bunnykins if she needs to go out among the mortals; they'd probably not be very tolerant of seeing a girl walking around holding a dead rabbit. Hair done up tightly in buns on either side of her head.
This is a medieval-ish fantasy setting, with magic, where all the people are anthropomorphic animals; what publically posted writing I've done in the setting is part of this collection on FurRag. Characteristic for this setting are hunter/tanner pairs, going for a quite elusive creature whose skin has anti-magical and blade-deflecting properties. The hides need to be treated with spiritual magic in order to keep their impressive look, which in turn is more or less neccesary in order to sell them to a fair price. (Note that these creatures can be killed with magic, but the amount of boom it takes would destroy the hides in the process.)
These two characters are partners in every sense of the word; while they may not be in love with one another, they care deeply for one another, and regularly seek each other's company in bed. Aside from just plain feeling good, this also helps Eyra recharge after he has drained much of his own energy working on hides.
Eyra, a chestnut-colored jaguarundi, is a tanner-mage. He originally worked alone, an uncommon enough occurrance, by poisoning his prey and following them to skin them when they finally succumbed to the poison. As this implies, he is a better than average tracker, has a decent bit of woodland skills, and is for the most part capable of taking care of himself. He's skilled enough in spiritual magic to reliably turn out good-quality hides, has a quite firm grasp on illusion magic, and is capable of, if he or his partner are in mortal danger and he absolutely needs to, down one of the creatures he hunts by magical means. He can also be quite bossy towards his partner.
His eyes are amber-colored, and he's quite small, about five feet in height, with a long torso, fairly short, digitigrade legs, and a long tail. He wears short-sleeved light leather armor for hunting and may pull a cloak on over it if he knows he's just going to be travelling; his armor has some faded blood stains on it as his work does mean slicing up fresh corpses. He carries a knife crafted from the claw of one of the beasts he hunts, a shepherd's sling with ammunition made from heavy seeds, and a small magical pot of fire which he will use to heat the tip of the knife to aid in cutting hides off dead beasts' carcasses.
Where Eyra is relatively fragile,his partner is a tank. He stands a bit over seven feet tall, is densely built, and has every bit of strength that his build suggests. His job in the partnership is to use his large two-handed war hammer to smash in the skull of their prey, and he does it well. His fur is on the dark side for a wolverine, but not dark enough to be mistaken for black, with a more yellow tone to it than Eyra's coat. He cares deeply about the tanner-mage he works with, probably one reason he lets Eyra order him around.
His gear is definitely on the sturdy side: a thick leather tunic with bones secured to it to protect him from claws and fangs should they get through his defenses. Aside from his war hammer he does carry a dagger similar to his partner's knife, but avoids using it unless he has to as damaging the skins they're hunting for would be bad business.
