Username : giftwrapped
Time Zone : American Eastern
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Character Info
Name : Lena Gyllensvard / ???
Age : 17 / 1
Gender : Female / Male
Appearance : Lena is tall. That’s the first thing people notice about her. She’s as tall as many boys her age, with long legs and the build of an athlete—there’s nothing slender or delicate about Lena; everything is trained and strong in the manner of a swimmer and a runner. She’s very obviously not a sedentary sort, and even the way she moves is testimony to that. Her every action gives the impression that it is barely-contained, that it would be much larger if she were to let loose. It’s as if all that energy in her is just waiting to explode out.
Pale, with even paler hair and stunning blue eyes, she’s quite pretty, but she doesn’t seem to care much. Though she wears her hair long, it’s always up, usually in elaborate braids, and her stately beauty would be a lot statelier if she were to, you know, calm down. Her eyes, though pretty, are generally quite cold, and though she has a nice smile, it never seems to warm her face. She blushes easily, and quite visibly, whenever she’s feeling just about any strong emotion.
Living in the north has given Lena a taste for heavy clothes that will likely not be necessary here in Britannica. She tends to wear practical clothes and favours furs whenever she can. She doesn’t really like dressing up because of how active she is, but she will wear skirts and dresses when she needs to, and she has recently become capable of wearing them well. Her wardrobe, minus the fur, tends to be largely natural or pale colours with bright accents. As to footwear, she wears boots. Always. If she can’t, she goes barefoot.
Personality : They say the colder the region, the more placid the folk that come of it. There could not have been falser words spoken. Lena is, no two ways about it, a spitfire. Quick to anger, quick to lash out, and vicious with her temper, Lena is by no means a compliant young woman. Often defiant and with a huge mouth, she’ll backsass anyone she pleases, and damn the consequences. She loves conflict, in fact thrives on it, and very rarely learns from her mistakes. Part of that is because she’s too stubborn to see them as mistakes. She also almost never apologizes.
Her father often jokes that she should have been born centuries back, when the Sverig Rus were still marauding, and says she could have been a queen of her people. She likes that idea probably more than she should. She takes immense pride in her country—and her ethnicity—and has a tendency to look down on those who are of different nationality and race. She wears her blonde hair and blue eyes like a soldier would medals. Anyone in Scaandiva who insults her Sverig heritage is in for a beating. Anyone outside the country who insults any part of Scaandiva is in for one—it’s different outside your own borders, and while she might hate the Njorska with a passion, she hates outsiders more.
While she might give the general impression of hating everyone under the sun and lacking respect for anyone, there is some untruth to that. Lena needs to be made to respect people, yes, but once they’ve won that respect they have it forever. A lot of her belligerence is to test people, and if they ‘pass’ (and doing so is incredibly subjective), she becomes a pleasant friend, though she’d never be described as ‘easygoing’. When it comes to relationships, she prefers partners in crime to anyone telling her that what she’s going isn’t a good idea.
It’s hard to tell whether her daemon exists to keep her in check or egg her on, as most of the time she seems to completely ignore anything intelligent that little voice in her head might be telling her. She’s not willing to learn from her own mistakes at all at this point, and it’s going to take her little friend a long, long time to convince her otherwise.
Keywords [5 Max]: Passionate, vibrant, nationalistic, pigheaded, troublemaker
History : Lena was raised as a boy. Not in the sense that she was told she was male, or that her family pretended she was male. But she had five brothers and half-brothers of a similar age and no sisters, and there just didn’t seem to be a point in treating her differently than any of the boys. Lena herself took no issue with this, and was readily accepted into the pack of brothers. She grew up half-feral, running through the woods of Scaandiva with little supervision other than her oldest brother (six years elder to Lena, the youngest of the brood).
Her family situation was always a little bit…ambiguous. Her father was married, though not to Lena’s mother, but there were numerous women around the estate that he held who…had claims to the children living with him. Perhaps it was that Ansgar Gyllensvard was in a dispossessed nobleman—a descendent of the last Sverig king of Scaandiva, the family had lost their royal standing but not their lands (though the Njorska had certainly tried to take those), and those lands had been passed down.
Hertig Gyllensvard—though he was not, in fact, a Duke anymore, he continued to use the title, as did many of those surrounding him—was a progressive, opposing the Njorska control of the country, protesting the isolationist politics of the monarchy, and in general making a pest of himself. His wife and his mistresses were often similarly progressive, and Lena’s mother had even been a professor at the University in Stockholm before she was cut by Njorska monarchists and went to live with Gyllensvard. So it was no surprise that Lena, like her brothers, was educated in terms significantly more progressive than many Scaandivans and brought up in full knowledge of her Sverig heritage.
That heritage, in fact, got her in a great deal of trouble. The little girl who ran wild with her brothers occasionally ran wild without her brothers, and on more than one occasion ran into a handful of Njorska boys who were…often less than pleased to find a small, nasty girl hurling ethnic insults at them. There were fights from the beginning, but Lena could usually win in a one-on-one, and if she couldn’t, her brothers would always come if she yelled loud enough. And though Njorska government policies continued to oppress her family and make insulting the Njorska more and more dangerous, Lena continued to mouth off.
A few times, she was caught by Njorska soldiers on patrol, and occasionally the men would take their sweet time proving to her that no matter how much of a spitfire she was, she couldn’t win in a fight against them. Once, a man broke her jaw, and another time when she was fifteen she would have been raped if her eldest brother hadn’t come to beat the soldier senseless just in the nick of time. But Lena never learned.
When she was sixteen, she ran afoul of three young soldiers, and when she picked a fight with them, she found herself in over her head. None of her brothers were around—three had gone off to university and jobs and two were helping her father that day—and no matter how loudly she shouted, she got no response or backup, and found herself trapped. Two men caught and pinned her, and the third beat her senseless…and then made to take his punishment a step farther. He never finished the job, because before he could, Lena heard a voice in her head, screaming encouragement, and found a second wind that allowed her to free herself from the hands of the men holding her and deliver a sound several kicks to the soldier who had hurt her the most. Then she fled, and a shimmering light led her home in the gathering dark.
When she got back, she told her father, who immediately forbade her from wandering alone and decided then and there to send her to the University at Stockholm to keep her safe. She was bundled off as soon as the new term started, but found herself miserable in Stockholm, where she was often harassed by male scholars. And besides, that shimmering light turned out to be a daemon, and the University was ill-suited to the daemonology of other colleges. She complained to her father, who reluctantly agreed to send her abroad.
And that was that, she left for Jaradin College as soon as it was feasible to do so.
