by Physical Traits:
Lunella is twenty-eight years old and 5'7, but anyone that's been the subject of one of her intensive interviews will tell you that it often seems like she's much taller. She has curly auburn hair that cascades down to her shoulders, and dresses simply--her plain cloth shirts, quick-dry and denim pants, and well-worn hiking boots are evidence of her humble upbringing and of the many years that she's spent travelling the world. Her eyes are a deep brown, and she has a piercing gaze that often makes her come off as disconcerting when she's trying her best to be warm and inviting. Her face is round and soft, and you can tell just by looking at her that she's always eager to learn more.
Backstory:
Lunella Cassini Brightmaid is the preeminent scholar of rimward cultures and geography on our dear, dying planetary disc. However, it took a lot of work to get to this point.
Lunella was born in the small village of Io situated in the middle latitudes of Kema. She was raised through her mid-teens to live a quaint, rural life, helping to harvest crops for her family and take goods to the market. She relished this work, not because it was simple but because it was incredibly intricate and complex. At six years old, she started memorizing harvest tables and information about which crops worked best with which soil chemistry. By ten she was selectively breeding veggies on the family farm for higher yields, and thirteen years found Lunella pioneering a way to graft crops together. Hybrid broccoliflowers were a big hit at the farmer's market, and her red-orange apples also proved very popular.
But at the height of her adolescence, her life was abruptly uprooted. A corporation from the planet's hub had convinced the government of her country, Enceladus, that it was best for business if a superhighway was built through her town to facilitate transport of products towards the center of Kema. They were given one month to pack up shop before the foundations were laid down. While the road was not set to go through the family farm, her parents realized that a major road built through the center of town would all but kill the soul of Io. They made plans to move in with relatives one town over, but knew that Lunella, who was quickly coming of age, was made for so much more. Despite her protests, they gathered up most of their savings from the prosperous years that had come before and sent her to a technical college in her country's hubward capital of Ganymede.
Being so far away from home was difficult for Lunella, and it almost ruined her. In her first few months at Ganymede, try as she might to listen to her teachers' lectures and take notes on the scientific discoveries made in centuries prior, she was having trouble functioning. Assignments fell by the wayside, and there were many days where she accidentally skipped meals or forgot to go outside entirely. The once young and enthusiastic farmer's daughter was struggling, and she doubted that anybody around her noticed or cared.
Luckily, she was wrong. Her Disc Cultures teacher, noticing that she had failed to turn in two weeks of assignments, approached her one day as she was leaving class. They offered to help her, and from then on served as her private tutor. They helped her to manage her schedule, gave her one-on-one support with the class material, and even advocated on her behalf to other teachers so that she could be accommodated in these classes as well. With their help, she realized her academic potential and started to relish her education in the same way that she had hyperfixated on farm work for many long years. But the more she studied, the more she realized--everything that she was being taught, from engineering advancements to world cultures to modern-day medical research were based entirely on a hub-centric worldview! There was nothing in the curriculum about villages like hers, not about agriculture nor about community traditions. And when it came to the rim-most peoples of Kema, the situation was even more bleak. But she knew that these cultures mattered. She vowed that they would get the recognition they deserved, even if she needed to visit every single one of them herself.
After dotting all of her i's and crossing all of her t's, Lunella graduated in the 90th percentile of her class. After taking some time off to apply for a researcher's visa and visit her family, whose new farming business was taking off, she set off with a pack full of supplies and a research tablet designed to send all of her findings to a cloud server and post them on her travel journal, Moonlighting as a Traveller: Lunella's Guide to Kema. Starting in the area around her old village and moving outward, she pays her way with stories--telling locals about the fascinating folklore, culture, ideas and geography of other places. All the while, her motives stay the same; "People say that the world is dying. But if I learn about these places before they disappear--through writings, video, and spoken word--I can keep them alive forever."
Lunella is now in her late twenties, travelling the disc almost nonstop for the last ten years. She's amassed quite a cache of data, and her journal has received such recognition that she's been invited back to her alma mater to speak on several of the cultures that she's documented. At the start of our heroes' journey, she's spending time in a small village just miles away from the famous Rimfall--a place where the ocean cascades off the edge of Kema. As she tries to find somebody, anybody willing to give her a ride to the waterfall at the end of the world, the Behemoth lands to pick up provisions. She hitches a ride after Ookami recognizes that she belongs in the Pack, and while her initial plan is to jump off at the next town, something makes her stay--these people seem to be involved in something really important, and she may be the only person who's managed to get close enough to them to actually research what's really happening to the world. Over time, her desire to stay close to them for the sake of research mixes with newfound affection for the others in the Pack--no matter how much she annoys some of them. This is the first time that she's lived with other people since she worked on her family's farm, and it feels good to have that again.
Personality and Eld Ability:
Lunella is an enthusiastic researcher, and throws herself at her work with passion and drive even when the situation is fraught with danger. Her greatest strengths are her eidetic memory, and a passive eld ability that she's not aware of yet: when she's learning about an area, she picks up more information about people and places than she should be able to know from just research alone. But because she travels around a lot, nobody has been with her long enough before our adventure to actually call her out on it. For her part, Lunella knows that facts always have an origin. So if she happens to know a bit more than she remembers learning, clearly she just forgot where she first read it.
Lunella's biggest flaw is that she has no tact. She brings things up without any regard for her audience, so there are times when she's gotten in trouble for echoing unpopular social commentary from the region or by voicing things that a civilian shouldn't know. She's spent a handful of nights in various holding cells, and there are even a couple of places that felt it necessary to exile her because she happened to know that the crown prince had hemophilia or something.
Once she joins the Pack, Lunella is the mom friend and the scientist of the group. She doesn't understand why some members of the Pack aren't being more pragmatic as we travel further into our adventure, and while its clear that she cares she also sometimes raises some dander by calling people out on their idiosyncrasies or pointing out self-destructive behaviors that they don't think are a problem. While she's a scientist, Lunella very much accepts the evidence for Eld in the world and wants to figure out what makes it work, what it's made of, etc. so that it can be harnessed more precisely.
Until she realizes some of the more active aspects of her knowledge abilities, Lunella generally stays out of the action when the Behemoth goes to battle. Meanwhile, she tries to catch as much of it on camera as possible.
Lunella is twenty-eight years old and 5'7, but anyone that's been the subject of one of her intensive interviews will tell you that it often seems like she's much taller. She has curly auburn hair that cascades down to her shoulders, and dresses simply--her plain cloth shirts, quick-dry and denim pants, and well-worn hiking boots are evidence of her humble upbringing and of the many years that she's spent travelling the world. Her eyes are a deep brown, and she has a piercing gaze that often makes her come off as disconcerting when she's trying her best to be warm and inviting. Her face is round and soft, and you can tell just by looking at her that she's always eager to learn more.
Backstory:
Lunella Cassini Brightmaid is the preeminent scholar of rimward cultures and geography on our dear, dying planetary disc. However, it took a lot of work to get to this point.
Lunella was born in the small village of Io situated in the middle latitudes of Kema. She was raised through her mid-teens to live a quaint, rural life, helping to harvest crops for her family and take goods to the market. She relished this work, not because it was simple but because it was incredibly intricate and complex. At six years old, she started memorizing harvest tables and information about which crops worked best with which soil chemistry. By ten she was selectively breeding veggies on the family farm for higher yields, and thirteen years found Lunella pioneering a way to graft crops together. Hybrid broccoliflowers were a big hit at the farmer's market, and her red-orange apples also proved very popular.
But at the height of her adolescence, her life was abruptly uprooted. A corporation from the planet's hub had convinced the government of her country, Enceladus, that it was best for business if a superhighway was built through her town to facilitate transport of products towards the center of Kema. They were given one month to pack up shop before the foundations were laid down. While the road was not set to go through the family farm, her parents realized that a major road built through the center of town would all but kill the soul of Io. They made plans to move in with relatives one town over, but knew that Lunella, who was quickly coming of age, was made for so much more. Despite her protests, they gathered up most of their savings from the prosperous years that had come before and sent her to a technical college in her country's hubward capital of Ganymede.
Being so far away from home was difficult for Lunella, and it almost ruined her. In her first few months at Ganymede, try as she might to listen to her teachers' lectures and take notes on the scientific discoveries made in centuries prior, she was having trouble functioning. Assignments fell by the wayside, and there were many days where she accidentally skipped meals or forgot to go outside entirely. The once young and enthusiastic farmer's daughter was struggling, and she doubted that anybody around her noticed or cared.
Luckily, she was wrong. Her Disc Cultures teacher, noticing that she had failed to turn in two weeks of assignments, approached her one day as she was leaving class. They offered to help her, and from then on served as her private tutor. They helped her to manage her schedule, gave her one-on-one support with the class material, and even advocated on her behalf to other teachers so that she could be accommodated in these classes as well. With their help, she realized her academic potential and started to relish her education in the same way that she had hyperfixated on farm work for many long years. But the more she studied, the more she realized--everything that she was being taught, from engineering advancements to world cultures to modern-day medical research were based entirely on a hub-centric worldview! There was nothing in the curriculum about villages like hers, not about agriculture nor about community traditions. And when it came to the rim-most peoples of Kema, the situation was even more bleak. But she knew that these cultures mattered. She vowed that they would get the recognition they deserved, even if she needed to visit every single one of them herself.
After dotting all of her i's and crossing all of her t's, Lunella graduated in the 90th percentile of her class. After taking some time off to apply for a researcher's visa and visit her family, whose new farming business was taking off, she set off with a pack full of supplies and a research tablet designed to send all of her findings to a cloud server and post them on her travel journal, Moonlighting as a Traveller: Lunella's Guide to Kema. Starting in the area around her old village and moving outward, she pays her way with stories--telling locals about the fascinating folklore, culture, ideas and geography of other places. All the while, her motives stay the same; "People say that the world is dying. But if I learn about these places before they disappear--through writings, video, and spoken word--I can keep them alive forever."
Lunella is now in her late twenties, travelling the disc almost nonstop for the last ten years. She's amassed quite a cache of data, and her journal has received such recognition that she's been invited back to her alma mater to speak on several of the cultures that she's documented. At the start of our heroes' journey, she's spending time in a small village just miles away from the famous Rimfall--a place where the ocean cascades off the edge of Kema. As she tries to find somebody, anybody willing to give her a ride to the waterfall at the end of the world, the Behemoth lands to pick up provisions. She hitches a ride after Ookami recognizes that she belongs in the Pack, and while her initial plan is to jump off at the next town, something makes her stay--these people seem to be involved in something really important, and she may be the only person who's managed to get close enough to them to actually research what's really happening to the world. Over time, her desire to stay close to them for the sake of research mixes with newfound affection for the others in the Pack--no matter how much she annoys some of them. This is the first time that she's lived with other people since she worked on her family's farm, and it feels good to have that again.
Personality and Eld Ability:
Lunella is an enthusiastic researcher, and throws herself at her work with passion and drive even when the situation is fraught with danger. Her greatest strengths are her eidetic memory, and a passive eld ability that she's not aware of yet: when she's learning about an area, she picks up more information about people and places than she should be able to know from just research alone. But because she travels around a lot, nobody has been with her long enough before our adventure to actually call her out on it. For her part, Lunella knows that facts always have an origin. So if she happens to know a bit more than she remembers learning, clearly she just forgot where she first read it.
Lunella's biggest flaw is that she has no tact. She brings things up without any regard for her audience, so there are times when she's gotten in trouble for echoing unpopular social commentary from the region or by voicing things that a civilian shouldn't know. She's spent a handful of nights in various holding cells, and there are even a couple of places that felt it necessary to exile her because she happened to know that the crown prince had hemophilia or something.
Once she joins the Pack, Lunella is the mom friend and the scientist of the group. She doesn't understand why some members of the Pack aren't being more pragmatic as we travel further into our adventure, and while its clear that she cares she also sometimes raises some dander by calling people out on their idiosyncrasies or pointing out self-destructive behaviors that they don't think are a problem. While she's a scientist, Lunella very much accepts the evidence for Eld in the world and wants to figure out what makes it work, what it's made of, etc. so that it can be harnessed more precisely.
Until she realizes some of the more active aspects of her knowledge abilities, Lunella generally stays out of the action when the Behemoth goes to battle. Meanwhile, she tries to catch as much of it on camera as possible.
