A child of four years first found her calling for fire in a way rather different than many other prospective adventurers. She first stoked the flames, away from the safe supervision of her parents. Waited until the red fire rolled blue in the middle. She pulled on the heavy metal tongs, like she'd seen them do, managed to secure them with her chubby fingers around a chuck of unpurified glass, and brought it to the flames.
She stood too close, as the glass began to glow and the colors of fire reflected in her pale green eyes. When her parents returned from selling their wares to merchants visiting the guild hall, they were both horrified and proud to find that their young daughter had created what a small glass figurine that could be recognized as a bird in flight.
In the next years, they taught her their trade, and when they went to the guild to sell, she sold hers as well. When she was twelve, she was granted membership to the Slateport Artisans under her own name. Her mother took her to the guild master, Josiah Whisperfoot, an older halfling who she'd grown up thinking of as something between a boss and a grandfather and undid the knot on a cloth holding a dozen trinkets, smooth, well-shaped, distinctive. A large weasel, posed as if hunting, with colored glass and intelligent amber eyes; large glass feathers, in black, blue, and orange that shone gently with different hues when he brought them to better light; a delicate glass pine tree; a series of fat mountain goats; a cawing raven that stood balanced on its arching talons and tail; a drunken gnome holding a massive mug to his mouth; and a collection of carved wooden dolls, charming in their authentic simplicity-the simplicity of a child with a craft of someone much more experienced. He took the time to admire each work, before smiling and the girl and presenting her own guild card—made in engraved metal, the Guildmaster's own speciality. Michaela Greyfen—an official Craftsman of the Slateport Artisans Guild.
Sometimes, while, in her carving or charging sand in the furnace's crucible, her mother would stop, sit on her heels, skirts brushing the sediment from the workshop's floor, and watch her daughter quietly, tuck the girl's green hair from her face as her focus never shifted. Her mother watched as worked the glass into the shape she willed it with precise, easy movements, perfectly mirroring her parents. Her father called her the "Hot Shop imp" when she would be slow to leave the workshop for dinner.
Michaela loved the life. She didn't have to go to school, the work was hard, the living easy, and it was quiet—just her and her parents and the sound of the blowpipe, the scrape of her mother's knife against obsidian, and the ever-present crackle of the furnaces. She loved the heat of the flame, there was something about wielding something so wild and natural and using it to create art and tools and whatever she needed. It was a constant presence, one that kept them warm, and helped them put food on the table. A constant presence It was the fourth member of their home.
She had a dream too—to be a master glassmith, the best in the guild, then master other materials too. When Michaela asked to try out metallurgy next, her mother considered it carefully before offering a compromise. After all, "patience and care with glasssmithing will prevent burns, just like it will in life. Not long my dearest, when you're a little older we'll find you a master."
Michaela never learned to metalsmith. The chance was stolen from her, among much else. When the red dragon attacked, her dreams shattered like her glass. Idrul, they shouted in the streets. After all these years, Idrul has come for us! The shouting did not last for long. Michaela and her parents watched from the window as the guild crackled and caved but the dragon didn't kill them that long, long night. It wasn't until the hours after the dragon razed most the city and the sky was thick with smog, that pillagers came. And the house burned.
Michaela had once heard Guildmaster Josiah say that humans lived too fast. As a young girl she called him out on his muttered words— here she was, living just as slowly as he was right in front of him. As an orphan at thirteen, she started to have an idea. What could a human or halfling or gnome think of themselves, if they were just a snap of the fingers in a Dragon's point of view? What could a commoner hope for in the face of such insurmountable adversity?
Wandering through the rubble of the district she'd known all her life, in a city once built high with coloful towers, she found strangers singing song on quiet nights. Many gathered around visiting bards as they sang tale of adventuring heroes, saving man and maiden from cruel fate. "And these heroes, who harness limb and vine, the panthenon's divine might, fists of iron, they are said to come to the most selfless people, who have nothing, but still give to those with little," the bard parts from the string of his lute to give a modest bow, set his hat on the ground in front of him. A few copper pieces are frettfully offered by some of the audience and the rest dispell quietly.
Michaela stands from where she was sitting on a plank of wood from a pulled-apart carriage. She marched over to the bard, who dropped the copper into his pocket and set his hat on his head. "You stole from those people, you tricked them." She had watched him carefully, she knew.
The bard chuckled. "I didn't lie, I told them a story. I told them to listen and I gave them hope. And hope's worth more than three copper, don't you think?"
Michaela's mouth opened and closed at that. Her voice came out more a desperate squeak, her dirty hand grabbing his sleeve tight. "What can they do with that? It can't feed them."
The bard sighed, pushing her fingers off his coat firmly, though vibrant, it was a little frayed. "Maybe you're too young to understand. Do you know what you would you do if you had hope?" He didn't wait for her answer, he turned around, hopped over a broken wheel in the street, and continued on. She watched him until he disappeared from view.
If an adventurer came, she'd have hope. She decided that if a hero came to help them she would hope again. But weeks passed and people stagnated without that hope. And the dread inside her made her think, maybe there was something to the bard's words. What would the others do with a little hope? What would she do with hope? And slowly the question stopped being that, and became 'What can I do to create hope?' And the cycle began again.
She wasn't yet fourteen when she left her city for the next town, then the next, and joined their academy for magic. For the first time, she was opening a spellbook and refining her script in Common, Elven, and even Sylvan. She wasn't allowed any of the tools she might have used glassmithing, but she was fine with that, fire was a siren, beautiful, tempting, vicious, and hungry.
Just under two years of study, she became a first level wizard, she could hold fire again, a controlled fasimilie of forge and draconian fire. She had built something like a normal life back up, she had a proper aspiration—adventurer—and one moment she was walking down the corridors to the conjuration library and the next, she's in…nothingness.
Fluid space, and her body doesn't feel quite corporeal and she's seeing visions flash past her eyes. Stilted images of a broad blond haired man with a goliath frame but a friendly smile, of another built man with fire flickering across his skin without burning. Of a creature, or man, masked and dressed in black with tubes coming out of him facing off with the blond man. A clash. The blond man curled on the ground, skeletal in frame, like a druegar. He looks up at his enemy, blood pouring from his mouth. Other strangely dressed people watch in stunned horror. The man's fists curl and he's pulled his emaciated frame up to stand, and something like a blur appears behind him and everything goes red. The visions fade. There is only the sound of hard breathing, and even then, it fades.
Michaela jerks awake on cement, as a car the speed of a level 20 monk and the size of a bugbear barbarian swerves with a screech and hurtles past her with a honk. She grabs at her heart and gasps and pulls herself out of the street, flashes of the vision playing behind her eyes. She works her way into the grass, too disoriented to look for somewhere to hide from the mechanical beast. Who were those men? Where am I? Why— The terrifying look in the emaciated man's eyes—not rage, it was something else. She could read it off his face—desperation, determination—something else? He'd gone from a massive form to nearly nothing, like he'd been attacked by Vampiric Touch over and over again. Then who was the necromancer fighting him? She didn't have answers. Even as hard as she concentrated nothing more came to her.
She stands, pulls herself together, moves aimlessly. She's in a city, one much more compact, loud, and busy than Slateport had been. No one dresses like she does, in Snapdrake Academy robes, and there are so many people. The words she heard before being shifted, she jolts for her spellbook, a thin silver and blue tome, and jots down fragments of phrases she heard, but it's hard to remember past the panic she felt during and after. Then, like the adventurer she was aiming to be, she gathered her wits and went to explore. The voices around her were speaking Common, a slightly different accent, but Common all the same. She'd never heard of such a place, though, she feared she was very far from where she started.
She first caught the plot thread by stepping on the #1 Hero's face. When she removed her foot from the crumpled flyer, the bright colors catch her attention and Michaela stoops to pick it up and investigate. It was colored so it couldn't have been created by a press that the head researchers of the academy allegedly has access to. If it was handmade, a great deal of skill and craftsmanship must have gone into it, and why would it have been left on the ground in an alley? If it was magic, it could be done, but she couldn't think of a spell that did this in any of her research. Running a finger over dry yellow ink, she froze, comprehending what she hadn't seen on the page previously. The bottom banner, under the text, "YUUEI HERO ACADEMY — UA ENTRANCE EXAM — DO YOU HAVE WHAT IT TAKES? — APPLICATIONS START NOW — EXAM DATES TO BE ANNOUNCED" Just below the block letters, was an ensemble of more strangely dressed humans, or humanoids, rendered lined up but in different action poses, as if the images were taken out of different situations. And in the middle was the grinning face of the blond-haired man from her vision. She almost dropped the flyer in surprise, but managed to slap her hands on either side before it fell on the ground again. He looked healthy and strong, not like he was a few rounds from death. It hadn't happened yet. Whatever that event was that she'd seen hadn't happened yet. She had a clue. She needed to know more about this 'UA.'
Michaela is pronounced Mish-shay-la
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