Orica

[Cevian]

Name: Orica
Age: 19
Gender: Female
Nation/Allegiance: Formerly Lycia, Tania -> None
Appearance/Description: Orica stands tall and imposing with her golden blond hair tied into two tails on either side of her head. She wears rather heavier armor than most women tend to, even more so since it it had to be custom made to fit her well endowed body, not that it has those pointless groves shaped around them. Despite the color's historical association with Bern, she decided that the armor should be a bright red to match her eyes, with gold trim to go with her eyes. She also wears a cape that matches that same color. She wears a skirt, one of the few things she has to accent her femininity, but a full pair of pants leggings underneath them.

Orica is serious 110% of the time, so if something does manage to pierce that seriousness she has trouble reacting to it. She holds strength, and upfront strength, in very high regard, not caring for underhanded tactics. If you are truly strong enough to win, then you shouldn't steep to such lows. Still, she understand not everyone is strong and protects the weak when someone strong tries to harm them. If they think they are strong enough to abuse their own strength like that she wants them to prove it.

Bio/Backstory: Tania, being rather close to Bern during the invasion, took the it rather hard, even more so being one of the smaller houses in Lycia. Even after the invasion was pushed back, it still took a while for it to recover, even more so as bandits from the mountains in between Lycia and Bern took advantage of it's weakened state to pillage it.

As part of the recovery, the Marquess started to work towards strengthening the mindset as well as physical strength. Even if someone does not have the skill to learn magic, they can be taught to weild a weapon. With this refocus they were able to push back the bandits and this concept of Strength as been kept ever since. The philosophy's origins in stopping bandits and protecting themselves due to the invasion from Bern has not been lost

This was the ideal that Orica was raised under being the daughter of the Marquess Vanar. Strength is what matters and it's what you need to do anything. Strength to rule, strength to protect or even strength to invade. One should strive to have the strength to do what they want but be prepared to use that strength to defend themselves.

From a young age she was trained to fight and be able to take over running the House of Tania, her stern and serious nature helping her to focus on those tasks with a strong fervor. In combat she prefers to use spear and axe. Most people don't expect a young woman like her to be throwing around such a heavy weapon like an axe or hammer.

After it was announced that Lycia would become an Empire centered in Ostia, it seemed like a suspicious way to do things. This move seemed like it came out of nowhere and, given how the Emperor started to act afterwards it just made her more skeptical. The invasion of Etruria was the tipping point for her. As Tania had been the focal point of an invasion so long ago and the reasoning being a spy being captured, which really seemed like an excuse to do something they were already planning to do. If they really wanted to invade they should have manned up about it and done it, and let their strength clash against Etruria's to see the victor. This underhanded invasion, as well as the ongoing persecution of anima and dark magic, was the opposite of what she saw strength as.

Present day, Orica is watching how things are going. With an upset like Lycia conquering Etruria something else was bound to happen in the world at large. Unlike the invasion, she might be able to have a say in this given how Bern was acting. While the lesson was learned from their long-past invasion, she had no ill will to that long past action. What you do now is important, and what she was doing now was waiting. The Strength of Patience to find the right time to act and to find the right action.

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Update: The Events that happened after the cancellation of [IRP] When Strength is All You Have Left, Is That Strength All You Need?

Orica's stubbornness and straightforwardness pushed away all her potential allies. Even Satsume abandoned her, apparently finally fed up with her to the point that just leaving without saying anything.

And maybe he was right. They were all right. Just walking up to the Castle probably was suicide. If her family wasn't there anymore then what could she do, allies or not, against that? But that was just the kind of person she was.

Things went better than she had expected. The guards obviously knew who she was but did nothing to stop her as she moved forward. It was then that she met the woman that took her home and family from her, a Swordmaster dressed white named Taiga.

Whatever the two of them said to each other didn't matter. A fight was why going to happen and it started quickly. Just looking at it the fight was one-sided, Orica's spear unable to hit her much more agile foe while she took her opponent's sword strikes. Her armor protected her from most of it, but all her opponent needed was to it her once.

It was the same way Orica's whole family was taken out: Poison. Such a straightforward family stood no chance against someone taking advantage of how they acted like that. Eventually she succumbed to the poison and passed out.

Expecting the poison to finish her, they took her weapons and armor, leaving her in her cloth gambeson under armor and tossing her body in a river coming down from the nearby mountains.

That was not the end for Orica, though. Somehow she managed to fight off the poison and wake up later on a bank of the river, somewhere deep in a forest. She was alive, but far from perfect, as she started slowly walking forward.

Everything had been taken from her. Her home. Her family. Her weapons and armor.

And her Strength.

She had nothing and no one to rely on anymore. To her it was a fate worse than death, for if she were dead then she wouldn't have to deal with what happened...

The Lament of Defeat.