Welcome to Gaia! ::

And in the silence, I hear wings beating

Name: Rand
Gender: Male
Stage: Messenger Reborn
Personality: Curious and outgoing. Rand can't see something new without wanting to run over to it, look at it, touch it, and find out everything he can about it. This same curiosity applies to people.

And in the silence, just my heart beating

Name: Owle Isohos

Description: Owle is only 5'3" tall; barely taller than the staff she carries. She has long, blue hair cascades down past her shoulder blades and just reaches the middle of her back. She has large, brown, curious eyes. Her build is neither slim nor stocky, but somewhere in between. Anyone would think she was human except for her armorlike scales and the two tiny brown feathered wings that protrude from her back. When folded, her wings cannot be seen from the front and are mostly hidden by her hair in the back. Even when spread, they barely reach past her shoulders. When she flies, she flaps them frantically to get aloft. Her scales have the shape of rounded out triangles, and are about one inch wide at the top. For the most part they?re a ruddy brown, but a streak the color of flame runs along their bottom edge. They are positioned in various locations along her back (see picture) her shoulders, and her upper arms. Her calves are entirely covered in these scales, as are her feet. Emerging from the scales where her toes should be are long, blunt, claws, made for digging and tree-climbing rather than fighting.

Her staff is five feet long, and is made of a deep brown wood that has been polished till it shines. Her knife is simple and roughly made; it has her name engraved on the crosspiece, and its metal is the telltale teal of mithril. When Owle becomes a cat, she is of average size. Her fur is a pure black, as is her nose. Her eyes are green and wide. Her paw pads are mottled, a mixture of black and peach. When she becomes a bird, she is small enough to sit in the palm of one's hand, but just a little too large to close one's fingers around completely. Her feathers are mostly light brown, though she has black markings and a white underbelly. I think she resembles a sparrow, but it's been a long time since I studied ornithology so I'm not sure. Her beak is small and pointed, and her eyes are jet black. When she is a bar of soap, she's rectangular with slightly rounded edges, and is off white in color. She bears no brand name or logo. When she is a ball of armored scales, she looks like a curled up pangolin, or spiny anteater; all you can see are the scales, everywhere.

Equipment: A five foot long wooden staff and a small mithril knife

Abilities: Because I like to make things simple, I?m going to break things down into schools and give a description of the major abilities of each one.

Telepathy

Tracking: Owle has the ability to sense the ?mind sig? of anyone within five city blocks of her, if she is paying attention. A ?mind sig? is the unique pattern of mental energy given off by an individual. When Owle is not paying attention, she senses the mind sig of those within a fifty yards of her. Owle can also search for a specific mind sig, no matter how far away it is, and get a sense for the general direction that mind is in.
Any abilities that hide auras, or are meant to keep telepaths or magic from detecting people, will prevent Owle from feeling a mind sig.

Communication: Owle can speak telepathically to others, and can even link others? minds together so that they can talk amongst themselves.

Mental defenses: Owle is capable of making shields that protect from telepathic assault, to guard herself and others. She also has a variety of other defenses set up within her own mind, which include a small army of characters that exist only in her mind (and therefore, cannot be used to guard the minds of others.) This is one of her strongest points.

The Black Shield: The black shield is the last mental shield set up within Owle?s mind. It is difficult to find and far more difficult to break. Owle sees the black shield as containing the very core of her being, and thus uses it as a focus to enter into a very peculiar mental state. When she retreats into the black shield, Owle loses all emotion and sense of self. She can still feel pain, but it no longer matters to her; her body is only a shell, the ethereal, invincible soul within the black shield is what truly contains her. Objectively she knows who her friends are, but she cannot feel love or loyalty while in the black shield. All she cares about is eliminating the threat that caused her to withdraw into the black shield in the first place. If she can do this without causing her body pain or harming her friends, she will, but that is secondary while in the black shield, and often seems hardly worth the effort.

Mind Hacking: Owle can invade the minds of others, and can either screw with their minds or restore them to normal. Her morals don?t normally allow her to assault others telepathically, so she is ridiculously bad at doing so, to the extent that any strong-willed individual has a decent chance of being able to fight, if not entirely resist, her influence. She is, however, very good at healing minds that have been assaulted, as it tends to be what she does. Once she is in a mind, it is also very easy for her to read its surface thoughts (unless said mind has defenses against that.) However, note that it is only easy to read surface thoughts, so she can be thwarted by a person concentrating on something else.

Mental Combat: Owle can use her power to fight against other telepaths.

Shifting

Various forms: Owle has several standard forms that she can shift into quickly. These are a bar of soap, a song sparrow, a domestic black cat, and a ball of armored scales, about 2 and a half feet in diameter. The scales are quite tough in that they can stop a bullet at 100m, but Owle can neither move nor see in this last form. I base this toughness off what I?ve found on Google about pangolin scales?apparently spiny anteaters really can resist a bullet fired at 100m.

Modifications: Owle can grow or shrink any of her forms down to the size of a sparrow and up to the mass of two humans. She can also make minor modifications to her forms, like, for instance, making herself a calico cat instead of a black one, or giving herself wings or longer fangs in cat form. These things require a good amount of energy, though, leaving Owle exhausted afterward. To use any modified form in combat effectively, she?d have to change into it the day before and get some sleep before fighting.

Blood shifting: Owle can turn her own blood into materials she has grown very familiar with (currently this only includes a kind of sleeping powder and the metal mithril.) However, this requires so much energy she can hardly avoid passing out from exhaustion during the process, and immediately passes out once she?s done.

Storage Space: Owle can store various objects in the same place she stores her excess mass when she shifts into something smaller. However, they must be either objects she has been around for six months, or objects made especially for her. They cannot be animate, and must not be larger than she is. She can retrieve stored objects very quickly, and with little energy cost. Her two weapons are among these stored objects.

Healing: Owle can use her shapeshifting abilities to force her wounds to heal. However, this requires a good deal of concentration, not usually found on the battlefield.

Random Techniques

Analyze: Owle has the ability to analyze any spell (or magical item) she comes into physical contact with, or sees cast (requires full attention.) She knows what the spell does, and, if applicable, how to counteract it.

The Other Half: Owle and Flare Sithfallin are a part of one another; they are two separate people, but are somehow a part of each other's souls They blame it on the fact that they 'created' each other...each had daydreams and wrote about the other before they actually knew the other existed; however, it may be for a different reason entirely. They don't truly understand why they are this way, and at first could not believe the other was real. Since they are linked in this way, they can always tell what the other is thinking and feeling and are able to see through the other?s eyes, no matter what the situation. They could probably also manipulate the other's thoughts and actions if they tried, but since they know the other could do the same to them they refrain from taking advantage of the link. Their link cannot be broken or interrupted except by a force that could sever someone's soul.

History: Once upon a time, certain aspects of certain gods who shall remain nameless created a servant. In terms of power, she was the most minor of deities. Although she had the capacity to think for herself, she could not act against the will of her creators. Her position among the gods was equivalent to that of a part time high school student's in an office; every task that was somehow unsavory, demeaning, or tedious to her creators, she was forced to carry out. Before long she yearned to be free of this existence, and, having no other recourse, prayed. There is rumored to be a god above all the other gods, who encompasses them and is greater than them. It was to this god that she prayed for freedom. Please, no price is too great. Just let me be free.

This god above gods took pity upon her, and answered the goddess's prayer. Her powers and memories were stripped from her, leaving her only vague glimmers of what once had been. Her body changed, and she was flung down to Gaia as Owle Isohos, "One Who Left Eden In Search Of Her Own Sunrise." She knew only her name and what little of her story it told her. She will never regain her memories or her former powers, for doing so would mean becoming a slave to the gods once more.

Owle Isohos first became aware of herself when she woke up in a clearing in Barton Forest, remembering only that she had left a place that was supposed to be paradise because she wanted to be free. The first night she spent there she heard a bloodcurdling scream and went to investigate, only to find several strange people named Dartmoor, Yuki, and Myers. She ended up traveling with them, and in the course of their journey learned that she was both a telepath and a shapeshifter. After various parties chasing Yuki and Myers made attempts on their lives, Owle got seperated from the group and returned to Barton Forest once again. (RPed)

There, she lived for a time in cat form with a lynx she named Yellow. In her spare time, when Yellow was not pestering her to hunt and fish, she wrote down stories about a demoness named Flare, who'd lived for 2,000 years. Slowly, Owle began to realize that the events in the story were leading Flare right to Gaia, and to a town called Barton, which Owle described as "a mere three miles from the eastern edge of the forest.". Owle was amused by this strange twist of fate, for she never planned so far ahead in her stories; they seemed to her to be things that merely happened, whether she will or no. On a whim she left the forest, traveling east. To her surprise she actually found the town in her story, and Flare. After nearly getting charbroiled by the trigger happy fire-wielding demoness, Owle discovered a strange bond between them. For a brief moment, she had seen through Flare's eyes and understood as the demoness did; they were a part of one another. As it turned out, Flare had been making up stories about Owle, too! There was nothing to do but travel together. While Flare often threatened to kill Owle, the two of them got along well, and eventually came to trust one another with their lives.

(Everything from this point on has been RPed, unless it is stated otherwise.)

Before long, flyers advertising a tournament on a grand scale began popping up all over Barton. The prize for the winner? A single wish, for anything his or her heart might desire. Flare jumped at the chance, and Owle joined to fight at Flare's side, though she had no wish of her own. Although their team, the Crystal Guard, was haphazardly formed under the leadership of the demoness CrystaJenn, they survived the first round, and Owle was among the few who made it to the finals. There, the finalists found the possessed goddess Hysteria, who tried to make them fight one another to the death for her own amusement. But the finalists defied the goddess, turning their anger toward her. The final blow freed the goddess from the curse upon her, and all the finalists rejoiced. Though Owle spent most of the fight as a sparrow, and her one attack against the goddess failed, she came away from the tournament feeling as though they had won. They had beaten the goddess, and two of their number were granted a wish...they had won. Owle always felt a close bond to those other finalists...though she can't for the life of her remember what half of them looked like, let alone their names.

Soon after the tournament ended, more mysterious flyers began appearing, and of course Flare had to join in the Grand Hunt for the six elemental pendants. The event changed Owle's life forever; it was because of the Hunt that she met the feral Rand, and first visited Washu's Subspace Saloon and the Bob Roberts' Memorial Bar & Grill in searching of clues to the pendants' whereabouts. On her very first visit to the Memorial, a man named Morgan Flare attacked her for being a "mutie" - his filthy word for all who were not strictly human with no powers. To Owle's surprise, the regulars at the Memorial defended her, a total stranger, and eventually drove the madman away. When they learned that Owle was sleeping in a clearing in Barton Forest, they insisted upon giving her better accomodations: first at Tarrasque's bar, the Night Flow, then at the Memorial, which Rage took over when Bob Roberts died. She grew quite attached to this little family of hers: Rage the fiery warrior, K the super hero, Angel the kitsune cleric, Tarr the werefox, Rand the feral, opaj of the Hawaiian shirt and flame pants, and Elvi the necromancer. She even began to like K as more than family...

Then, one night while Owle was visiting Flare's favorite training grounds, the shade of a man approached her, trying desperately to communicate with her. It urged her to let down her mental shields, in order to "make things easier." Owle complied, dropping her outermost shield, and was rewarded with an immediate mental assault. Though Owle fought well, just when she thought she had eradicated the intruder, the shade managed to attach himself to a portion of her mind. She could not oust him without also destroying a part of herself. In turn, however, he could not go further into her mind to control her. There was nothing left for either of them but to talk to one another.

As it turned out, the shade was the ghost of Bob Roberts. After Angel broke up with him, the man went insane, adding deadly security measures to what was now the Memorial. A week or so later, the kitsune went into the bar again, and Bob shot her. Bob's old friends quickly came to her aid, eventually killing the man. K may have actually struck the killing blow, but Bob blamed every one of Owle's new family, save Elvi and Rand, for his death. He told Owle that he needed a body; in exchange for doing some small favors for him, he would protect her. Grudgingly, Owle agreed. It wasn't as though she had any choice.

After three days of assaulting her friends from the safety of her mind, Bob ditched her. He was dragged, kicking and screaming, back to life as an angel, and began working as a bartender at Washu's Subspace Saloon and Restaurant. Soon enough, Owle found him and forced him to admit to who he was. The two of them formed a shaky, sibling like friendship. Since Bob no longer seemed to have any designs on her friends, Owle was content to keep his location and reincarnation a secret from them. She was somewhat distressed to find that some hostile part of him had taken root and was growing in her mind, but neither of them would be able to do anything about it for months, so she set those worries aside.

When Rand found the elemental pendant of Shadow, at first Owle was overjoyed that they were succeeding in the Hunt. That didn't last long, though, as she soon discovered that the Shadow Pendant augmented her telepathic abilities. Back then, her mental power manifested itself as 256 black snakes that seemed to have minds of their own. In reality, the snakes responded to Owle's baser desires, the ones she suppressed with all her might: her lust, her anger, her thirst for blood and power, her pleasure in manipulating the minds of others. When she was near the Shadow Pendant, the snakes swelled up inside of her with power, and Owle had to fight tooth and nail just to keep them from invading the minds of those around her. Because of this, Owle tried to avoid Rand, staying away from him and the pendant he carried at all costs. Until Bob let her know that the pendants slowly drove their bearers insane...

Foolishly Owle confronted Rand, trying to persuade him to give up the pendant, to take it off and bury it somewhere. The feral would not listen; he believed, with good reason, that Owle wanted the pendant for herself. The more Owle stood in his presence and pleaded with him, the more power the Shadow Pendant fed to her snakes, and the harder Owle had to fight to keep them in check. Finally they burst free of Owle's control, invading Rand's mind and forcing him to try to yank the pendant off through his own neck. Owle could only watch, helpless, trapped within her mind as her own power assaulted her, the snakes trying to rip apart the persona that had kept them repressed for so long. If Flare hadn't come upon the scene and knocked both Rand and Owle unconscious, neither would have survived the night.

The next morning, Owle prostrated herself before Rand and begged for forgiveness, but the man refused to so much as look her in the eye. Though her other friends forgave her, that meant nothing to Owle; Rand was the one she had wronged, so only his forgiveness could absolve her. Owle was so overwhelmed by guilt that when Morgan Flare showed up to arrest her for her crimes, she went with him willingly. She deserved whatever he did to her, and more than that besides.

He forced her to wear a collar that suppressed all her powers, so that when she wore it she was neither shifter nor telepath, but as powerless as a human. Then Morgan brought her to the NGC, his base in the mountains, where he used her as slave labor to improve his defenses. Her friends came to rescue her, but Owle refused to even try to escape. She deserved her fate, whether her friends accepted that or not. However, after some time they did manage to drag Owle's carcass out of there. (I mean this almost literally; that rescue had the most meaningless near deaths I have seen in all my time as an RPer.)

Despite the peril Owle's friends risked to save her, she marched right back to the NGC, staying there willingly with Morgan. The two had a grand old time together: He abused her and tried to convince her she was evil and worthless, and she meekly obeyed him and tried to convince him that she wasn't evil and worthless. Needless to say, Morgan made far more progress in his endeavors than Owle.

Owle eventually came to love her captor, and when a mysterious telepath caused him to kill himself, she sentenced herself to three days of torment to bring him back. Even then, he hated her, and her love for him only made him hate her more. The mysterious telepath struck time and time again, hacking Morgan's mind to make him love Owle. Each time Owle fixed him, and still his hatred for her grew; he believed that Owle was the one hacking him in the first place. Eventually Morgan declared his love for the white mage Sey, a friend of Owle's, and Owle forced herself to give up her feelings for him when Sey said she loved him back. Still, Owle could not give up trying to win his friendship, at least. She discovered that she could use her shapeshifting talents to make herself look different, and human. And so Laurel, the human who was Owle, came to the NGC. Laurel spent two glorious days with Morgan, until Bob convinced her that what she was doing was wrong, and she needed to confess who she was. She did so, and, much to her surprise, Morgan allowed her to walk away. "Just go," he told her.

"Are you ever going to let me come back?" she asked.

"Are you ever going to be a real person?"

"I can be, if you let me."

In the end, all Morgan would say was "You'll know, when you're ready [to come back]"

In the time she spent away from Morgan, it became more and more apparent that Laurel was different from Owle. Owle tried to deny it, screaming at Bob that Laurel was the same as her, not some other person she was using as a slave. But in the end, Laurel pulled Owle into their shared mind to speak with her, and the shifter could no longer deny that the two were not a whole. Much as the snakes represented a repressed part of her personality, Laurel was a part of her that had been hidden deep inside, brought to life and given power by Owle's messing about with Morgan. Laurel saw what Owle could not: the two of them had to accept each other and become one, then in turn accept the snakes. Otherwise they would stay fragmented as they were, never fully in control of who they were and what they did.

And so Owle became whole, the dominant curiousity and innocence of Owle united with the common sense and quiet strength of Laurel, in turn united with the ardor of the snakes. She returned to Morgan on the morrow, and for a time thought he had accepted her as human.

Then an army of darkness marched on Barton, and Owle defied him to join her friends in the Grand Battle that was to come. She left the NGC, and served Barton by setting up a telepathic network to ease communications among its defenders. She also fought well in dragon form, providing rides and protection for her friends James Black and Sey, as well as decimating an enemy soldier or too. Owle's most major contribution to the battle was rebuking the telepaths that attacked the East Wall, with the help of only a few companions. She also healed Sey when the priestess's mind was in danger of vanishing, and discovered the camp of demons that snuck up on Barton, planning to enslave it in its hour of weakness. At most, though, as always, Owle felt she was only a bit player in the great battle for Barton.

When it was all over, Owle returned to the NGC, where Morgan Flare promptly tried to kill her. Through deception, she was able to hack his mind, forcing him to sleep while she escaped. For a long time after, she lived in the woods as a cat, trying to forget her sins. Finally, Flare snapped her out of her depression, and Owle went to live at Washu's Subspace Saloon and Restaurant. (Morgan's attempt on her life was RPed. The aftermath, due to the vanishing of Morgan's player, was not)

Months before the battle, fate had brought Rage to Washu's, and somehow he had discovered that the nameless bartender was Bob. Bob, believing Owle had betrayed him to Rage, arranged for her to be locked out of the Saloon. However, when Owle appealed to Washu and Wenn, the owners, they dropped the shield against her and allowed her back inside. Soon, Owle began meeting mysterious men who reminded her of Bob...and were Bob, in actuality, though unbenownst to her. Once, when Bob believed she was getting close to discovering who he was, let his body die while transferring memories to another body. Owle held him while he babbled of nonsensical snippets from his past, and tried to investigate his mind to find out what was wrong with him. His defenses launched an assault against her, which she was forced to destroy. When she next looked for his mind, she found it gone, and believed she had destroyed it. Drowning in guilt, she nearly let herself die...

Then Bob showed up again, making no attempts to hide who he was this time, and Owle directed all her energies into trying to get him to forgive her. She had not betrayed him to Rage; whatever it took, she wanted him to believe that. Finally, she bared her mind before him, dropping even her innermost shield. Still, Bob refused to believe her. To make things worse, that little hostile part of him left over from his possession of her took advantage of the opening in her shields. Running into the innermost portion of her soul, this little bit of Bob attempted to destroy her. Owle killed him, but not before he released hellish forces of chaos upon her, weakening her forever. Three days later, the real Bob sent an assassin after the unsuspecting woman. She died without glory, stabbed through the lung by one of the Saloon and Restaurant's own utensils.

Owle was reborn as a small pangolin (spiny anteater) hybrid named Tiamika, who somehow found her way to Washu's and was adopted by a man named Kal Torak. Tiamika lived a strange, but brief life. The only thing of note happened to her when Bob went out to rescue his girlfriend, and Tiamika accompanied him to aid him. She was of little help, and was traumatized by the horrors and killing she saw there.

A being named Abel Cain soon brought Owle back to life...in the same body as Tiamika. This resulted in one changing to the other at random; neither was aware that the other existed. During this time they found the angel child, who they named Rand after the feral Owle once wronged (or after Tiamika's plushie), and adopted him. Owle was also reunited with Rage, who seemed to have lost all his memories from the past two years she had known him. The two became friends again, anyway, and were reunited with Angel and a few other old friends as well.

Finally, Owle became Tiamika in front of Flare. The instant she changed back, Flare informed Owle that someone had just stolen her body, and made Owle search her mind. Deep inside her mind, huddled within her soul, she found Tiamika. But the moment Tiamika looked into Owle's eyes, a deeper piece of Owle awoke, one that used to be a god. It noticed that its mind was split into two people, and fixed it. The two personalities merged, and their memories were wiped clean to avoid the conflict of remembering life as two different people. While the new Owle remembers the names of people she knew when she sees them, and has some idea of what they once meant to her, she cannot remember anything that happened between them. In other words, Owle remembers things, but not events. Though her body and abilities changed drastically, she believes that she has always been as she is now. Satisfied with its handiwork, the fragment of the god Owle once was went back to sleep, and left the new Owle to find her way in the world once more.

Naturally, Owle can never avoid trouble, and was quickly swept up into the events surrounding the destruction of Carter City. Apparently a bunch of killer robots were rampaging, and someone was offering a prize for the robot CPUs...

For Owle, things resolved unsatisfactorily. She was able to keep Flare from getting herself killed, but she learned several things about Sey she would rather have not known. The priestess was not the same pious woman Owle vaguely remembered; no, this Sey was attacking innocent people to get her hands on the robot CPUs! Owle's distrust of Sey peaked when she saw Sey knock out her friend Daniel after Daniel had defended Sey against a man who was attacking her. She wholeheartedly supports Daniel in his quest for revenge.

After that fiasco was over, she ran into shade lord Omikron, one of the forces that had tried to destroy Barton in Grand Battle. He informed her that the energy of his master, the Forgotten, was stirring once again, and would likely destroy Barton and consume the world. Now free of the Forgotten’s influence, he sought to keep this from happening…with Flare and Owle’s help.
In the middle of this quest to save Barton, Owle got dragged off to the Dreaming by some muses, and they told her a story that worried her very much. Not long afterwards...(To be continued. But in summary:

Owle meets Vahn.
Omikron falls into a coma.
Owle meets Rafe.
Owle finds out she was a goddess, Rafe is a god, and she and Rafe loved each other way back when.
Owle gets swept into the hunt for the Petals of Chaos.
Owle becomes pregnant with Rafe's child, immaculately.
Rafe kills his and Owle's daughter from way back when.
Rafe is taken by the Furies.
Owle helps defeat the Viceroy.
Vahn says he'll help Owle get Rafe back.
Owle goes on crazy psycho quest to get Rafe back.
Owle sleeps with Vahn.
Omikron wakes up from his coma, and leaves the Firebrand. He has found a calling.
Owle gets Rafe back, but he has no memories. Owle is sad.
Owle meets Sunstrike, who drops Tijae on her doorstep.
Tijae puts the moves on Rafe.
Shades of Grey, the battle over the Vale, occurs and Owle doesn't get to take part in it cause she's five months pregnant.
Rafe reabsorbs the essence that was gestating within Owle, making her no longer pregnant and getting his memories back. Owle is happy.)

Places I have never been

Flare Sithfallin

Played by: Flare Sithfallin

Bio: An immortal half-demon, Flare has been trying to lose herself for the past 1500 years. Her reasoning is, everyone she loves is eventually going to die and break her heart, while she keeps living. She can't stop them from dying, but she can stop herself...from caring about anyone. That way, when people die around her, she doesn't have to go through the pain of losing a loved one. If she could succeed, she'd have no loved ones to lose.

She's tried backstabbing, senseless murder, crossing and doublecrossing, hiring herself out as a mercenary, locking herself away in a cavern in the mountains....none of it has ever worked. Always she's found herself caring about someone. Still, the various things she's tried has made her rather good at battle and deceit, and escaping with her own hide intact.

Relationship:Flare is about the closest thing to family Owle's got. The two of them share the same soul...each can always hear the other's thoughts, and know what the other is doing.

***

Rage

Played by:: ragingtofu

Bio: The owner of the Firebrand Bar & Grill, Rage thinks of himself as an old-fashioned hero. He never backs down from a fight, and always runs in head first when his friends are in danger. He would die before letting anyone he loved get hurt, and watches over the regulars in his bar like they were family.

Relationship: When they first met, Owle was impressed that Rage would risk himself to protect her, a total stranger. Eventually, she came to live at the Firebrand. Now, she thinks of Rage as family - a cousin, perhaps - and takes comfort in the knowledge that he'll protect her and care for her, no matter what happens.

***

Angel

Played by: Angelbell

Bio: A kitsune cleric who stays at the Firebrand.

Relationship: Owle never got along too well with Angel, though she likes her well enough. It probably has to do with the awkwardness of having been halfway possessed by Angel's dead lover the first time they met. Still, as one of the people Owle's lived around for most of her life, Angel counts as family.

***

opaj

Played by: opaj

Bio: A warrior who always wears a Hawaiiian shirt and flame pants. He's a good guy with a sense of humor, and weird things tend to happen around him...such as armies of squirrels attacking and edible punctuation appearing out of thin air. He tends to wander quite a bit, and though he has a room at the Firebrand, he is often absent.

Relationship: Though Owle's never been around him too long at once, the two of them have gotten along splendidly whenever he's passing through. Owle counts him as a friend.

***

Kyle

Played by: K-Man

Bio: A teen from an alternate version of earth where people with blue eyes were persecuted. After finding himself on Gaia, many odd things have happened to him...the latest development being that an evil entity named Zell turned him into some sort of shapeshifting monster, and a corporation named Enigma made a clone of him. Currently, he believes he is the clone.

Relationship: Kyle lives at the Firebrand, and, for various plot related reasons, he and Owle believe they are brother and sister.

***

James Black

Played by: themightyjello

Bio: A human man with no powers to speak of, James Black has the uncanny ability to talk his way into and out of any situation. Though it's true he has no powers, he is never at a disadvantage; James is a master of using whatever he has at hand to achieve his goals. He once used a fig newton to keep a dangerous projectile from landing on the girl he loved.

Relationship: Owle met James during the hunt for the pendants, and at first didn't like him at all. However, after he gave her a pet bunny and comforted her when she was drowning in guilt over attacking Rand, she grew to count him as one of her closest friends. He is the sole reason she was able to forgive herself for hurting Rand. When war came to Barton Town, she and James fought side by side to protect the priestess Sey, further cementing their friendship.

***

Daniel

Played by: Arcturus Highwind

Bio: A man who loves danger, and high risk situations. He seems to throw himself into adventures with barely a thought for his own safety.

Relationship: Owle recently met Daniel in the Barton Mountains, and instantly liked him for his plain honesty and simplicity. She's grown attached to him, and trusts him, though she hasn't known him long. He once helped her save Flare's life.

***

Omikron

Played by: Joseph Brown

Bio: A shade lord created by the Forgotten One, Omikron was given a voice and a consciousness. He broke away from the evil being who created him, and is now dealing with his guilt over the evils the Forgotten One once made him commit. He fears that his presence will cause those around him to come to harm, and so strives to protect those he involves himself with.

Relationship: Omikron came to the Firebrand to warn Flare he felt the Forgotten One's power rising once again. Flare didn't trust him, so Owle offered to go through his mind to be sure he was telling the truth. In doing so, she found his past and feelings were similar to what hers had once been, and has felt a kinship with him ever since. She wants to protect him, and ease the guilt that plagues him.

***

Vahn

Played by: Vahn Kyonuske

Bio: A devil, a badass, a mercenary. He tends to stay aloof and mysterious, so not too much is known about him. He was a fighter in the Leviathan Stadium, and has saved the world a number of times, if he can be believed.

Relationship: Owle met Vahn in Ariel, after it had been ravaged by the shades. She was instantly attracted to him, because, let's face it, he's extraordinarily hot. He also is attracted to her, as evidenced by him flirting with her, trying to peek at her in the shower, and ostensibly fighting for her over the Petals of Chaos. Owle's opinion of him cquickly plummeted, though; he said he would protect her during the seven days of chaos, but he abandoned her, leaving without a word. He showed up at the Temple of Destiny in the Void, after all of it was over, acting like he was some sort of hero. Still, though, Owle treated him as a tentative friend...even after learning she was pregnant with another man's child, Vahn offered to rescue the child's father from the wrath of the Furies. Dense as Vahn might have been to abandon her, Owle can't help but acknowledge he does care for her. Nor can she help but still feel attracted to him.

Things soon got hot between them, though it may have been more a mutual seeking of comfort, of escape, than anything else. Owle has Rafe to go back to, and Vahn himself is in love with a former god named Sunstrike, currently missing. It's made things a bit weird between them, but Owle's forced to acknowledge, to herself at least, that she does love Vahn.

***

Rafe

Played by: The Male Avatar

Bio: The god of dreams, also known as Morpheus and Oneiros. The son of Hypnos and Nyx, the nephew of Thanatos, and brother to the god of nightmares. Rafe has loved Owle since almost the moment of her creation, and gotten no end of trouble and suffering because of it. It fell to him to kill her immortal body, casting her down to the mortal world. And it was he that watched her for thousands of years while she went about her various lives, falling in and out of love with others. Even after he quite literally spent thousands of years wandering the netherworld in order to find a way to restore her memories, for a long time he could not bring himself to offer her the choice. She seemed so happy...

Relationship: When Rafe finally entered Owle's life again, she didn't like him at all. To her, he seemed like just a sketchy middle-aged man who was hitting on her. However, after a short while, her feelings softened...he was being so kind to her...and then he began telling her, in veiled terms, who he was and who she had been, and what she had meant to him. She could not deny the truth of his love for her, and could not help but want him around. Even without her memories, she came to begin to love him in return, and was prepared to go into the deepest reaches of hell to save him. Once she remembered the myriad times she had met him in the past, each time feeling as though he swept her off her feet into madness she was glad to partake in, she felt about as strongly. But after being left alone with her own thoughts and a child growing in her belly, she came to fear that it wasn't her Rafe loved...it was Isoho, the goddess she had been in the past. Her feelings for him were her feelings for someone she had met but a short time ago, while his feelings for her seemed stronger, deeper...but now that Rafe has returned fully to himself, and told her that he wants to get to know the person she is now, she feels far less uneasy. Who knows where things could go?

***

Abel

Played By: Joseph Brown

Bio: A demon betrayed by other demons, mostly destroyed and left for dead. He lives only by the grace of the horrid machines that now make up most of his body. He currently seeks to kill those demon lords responsible for his current state, and enjoys spiting higher powers.

Relationship: Abel once brought Owle back from the dead to further his own ends. Owle is intrigued by him; she has much the same tendency of wanting to spite the gods. Now that she has her memories back she likes him all the more, seeing him as a friend and a comrade with similar goals.

***

Sarielle

Played By: Sarielle

Bio: A quiet woman, a former angel, Taka's caretaker. Sarielle is kind and caring, though there are fiercer sides to her Owle hopes not to see.

Relationship: Owle's not so sure about this former angel thing, especially since Sarielle really wants to be an angel again. Owle doesn't like the gods; the gods, for the most part, don't like her. So beings that serve the higher powers are not on her list of things to necessarily like. Fortunately, Owle knew Sarielle before she knew what Sarielle once was. She considers Sarielle a friend, a woman whom she is greatly indebted to, who helped Owle out when she had every reason not to. In her own head, she's currently pretending that the Sarielle she knew beforehand is a completely different person than the Sarielle who wants to be an angel again.

***

Sunstrike

Played by: Sunstrike

Bio: Sunstrike's had a complicated past; he was a god before he went insane, consumed his sister's soul, and tried to destroy everything. Now he's a cute, quirky, affectionate mortal on Gaia, working a job as the janitor at Leviathan Stadium.

Relationship: When Owle first learned about Vahn and Sun's relationship, she thought she would resent him for it. It would have been easier for her that way, certainly. But when Vahn brought him out from the Tundra of Guldor, having saved him from his past, and Owle saw him lying there...she just couldn't. Her heart went out to him in sympathy, and she wound up inviting him to stop by the Firebrand, offering free drinks whenever he came. To her surprise he came, and the two of them became fast friends, always trying to help each other out in one way or another. Sun has an uncanny knack for cheering Owle up whenever she's down, and Owle genuinely enjoys his company. She hopes he'll come by more often, and she suspects that her sister Flare has feelings for him.

***

Kalis

Played by: Psychofish

Bio: A confused lad who seems to have conflicting sets of memories, and some powers of chaos within him. He is cautious, down to earth, and reasonable, rare traits among adventurers.

Relationship: Kalis wandered into the Firebrand late one night, when Owle was up angsting over the mess she'd made by sleeping with Vahn, and the possibility that Rafe loved only who she used to be and not who she was. He gave Owle some good advice and got her to stop crying. She, in turn, got him something to drink and let him hide out from something he thought might have been following him. She's encountered Kalis a few more times since, and has learned to count on him for good advice and a helping hand in practical matters. He genuinely wants to help those he meets, and for that trait Owle likes him.

Go farther than I've ever seen

Kal Torak

Played by: Kal Torak

Bio: An insane half orc blood mage who thinks he is (or is) a god. He wrote a book of prophecies, and believes in the truth of the words.

Relationship: Believing that Tiamika is the Child of Light he prophesized, who he must corrupt in order to prevent from destroying him, Kal Torak took Tiamika in as his daughter. She believes he is her father, though they look nothing alike, and puts all her faith in him. While she does not accept everything he says as absolute truth, she doesn't think he would ever lie to her.

***

Axel

Played by: ragingtofu

Bio: The younger brother of Owle's friend, Rage. Axel isn't as close to Owle as Rage is, but he likes her and she likes him.

Relationship: After Owle died, Axel couldn't shake the feeling that Tiamika somehow was Owle. He continued to play with her, befriend her, teach her tricks and tell her stories despite Kal Torak's disapproval. Though Kal Torak told Tiamika Axel was evil, the little girl never believed him...Axel was too funny and nice to be a shadow.

Angel child of the sky

9/30/06
Owle is: Taking a walk on the beach outside the Firebrand with Rafe. Things are finally looking up for our intrepid heroine. She's no longer pregnant, and Rafe is beside her with his memories intact. Plus, as far as she knows, all her friends and loved ones are safe.

As far as she knows.

Rand is: Waiting on a customer in the Firebrand. Cause he can, and his mom's not there to stop him.

Verde is: Assuring Rand that the customer is not dead.

Owle is: Talking to Abel Cain in the Firebrand. Her friends and allies have gathered here to discuss the problem of the gods that are planning to kill Owlie, and the game of chaos that may give them the opportunity. Omikron is still lying unconscious on the couch, but between being molesterized by the dead sexy Vahn, molesterizing the god of dreams, and trying to decide whether or not she really wants her memories back...well, she has far too much on her mind to be worried about the shades. Still, Owle seems happy about it all; hell, she may die in seven days, but she's got two hot guys vying for her affections and she may have a chance to regain everything she's ever lost; not to mention spite those who took it from her. If she's going to die, she's going to die fulfilled.

Rand is: In Sarielle's house, mercifully unaware of the game and the threat to Owle's life. He is, however, busy making Taka's life a living hell. He just can't seem to keep out of trouble...

Verde is: Being watched over by a dwarf, and worrying his poor little head off about Owle and Rand.