Chaya Suvahl

Name: pickle
Age: over 21
Contact: oglops @ plurk
Other Characters: none
Interests: I’m interested in exploring the mage/templar conflict from the point of view of a mage who would maybe be less well-equipped than the other mages in the game to deal with the dangers of possession (this isn’t to say POSSESS ME PLS, though that might be a neat thing to come up, but that the fear of it is a big part of her daily life). No real plans beyond that at present. The nature of my character (unsuited for combat/The Game/other exciting things that happen in DA) means that for the most part I’m unlikely to be directly involved in plot stuff. I’m going in aware of this and I’m cool with it.


Name: Chaya (Suvahl, if people are expecting her to give a family name).
Canon/OC: Native OC
Journal: ashesandboneyards
Race: Elf
Nationality: Dalish, Suvahl clan. They primarily roam the northern Marches/southern Antiva.
Occupation: Mage, technically, but not combat-oriented. She’s there to try to convince crops to grow around skyhold (because lbr in that kind of climate they need a lot of convincing).
Age: 33

History

• Born into the Suvahl clan. Historically, the Suvahl clan has had something of a mage problem - for some reason or another, they just keep ending up with them. Chaya was lucky, at least, and there happened to be space for her at the time that her magic began to show itself.
• Her magic manifested in the aftermath of a plague had struck the clan soon before her magic began to show itself. The Clan’s first and keeper, due to them tending the sick, both became very ill themselves. The first died of the plague, and the keeper survived but their ability to control their magic suffered a permanent impact. Chaya became the new first, and was forced to quickly develop her skills to support the Keeper.
• A few years later, the keeper's inability to control their magic would lead to their possession and the deaths of not only themselves (at Chaya’s hands) but also many members of the clan. Due to Chaya's young age, an older mage was brought in from another clan to take over as Keeper in her place. However, the clan were not all willing to accept a member of another clan as their new leader. Though Chaya remained in the position of first and did her best to support the new keeper as best she could, those who couldn't accept an outsider keeper forced her into taking over many of the responsibilities of keeper at a young age anyway. They wouldn't trust the outsider with the tales of their ancestors, demanding that Chaya should be the one to gather and keep the clan's knowledge.
• Thankfully, the outsider keeper was a kind soul. They took the distrust of their new clan in stride and did their best to support Chaya to make sure she wasn't overwhelmed by her new responsibilities.
• A new mage was discovered in the clan to take the role of second a few years later. The clan as a whole was still shaken by the possession incident, and even as they respected them as leaders, the clan's mages were treated with some suspicion. The new second, barely a toddler at the time of the possession, did not understand the fear and was overconfident with their magic, earning the clan's distrust.
• Two decades later, yet another mage was discovered in the clan. None of the clans they were in contact with had the capacity to take on another mage. Someone would have to leave. Some argued that the keeper, raised in another clan, did not belong among them. Others said that the child, who had not yet learned their ways, should be the one to be forced from the clan. Others disliked the second, who cared so little for their fears and used their magic with no caution at all.
• Rather than let the argument split her clan Chaya abandoned them herself, intending to surrender herself to the nearest templar and get circle’d. The circles aren't a bad life, after all, as far as she's concerned.
• However she KIND OF DID NOT GET THE MEMO about the whole mage/templar war business. You gd shems making everything inconvenient for her. Without a convenient circle to surrender herself to, she’s decided that the inquisition is probably the closest thing and also has the most well-armed people to stand behind in case of danger.

Personality

Chaya presents herself as a coward, as someone who’d rather not do any more work than is strictly necessary, as someone completely unreliable-

-this isn’t too far off the truth, really.

Abandoning her clan has left Chaya utterly directionless. Since childhood, she has never been anything but a keeper of knowledge - the one entrusted with remembering their clan's history. She can’t let herself die - the knowledge that would be lost with her, useless as it may be, isn’t hers to destroy (and she still cares very much about not destroying things that aren't hers) - but she has no reason to live other than to keep remembering it. She is a coward, not because she particularly cares for the idea of staying alive in itself but because dying means forgetting. It means failing. And despite abandoning her clan, despite everything she says, she still has too much pride to accept that kind of failure.

Despite all this, she’s genial enough. She’s friendly and even if her solutions to problems tend to be ones that involve her doing very little actual work, she’s still more than happy to consider people’s problems and offer solutions. She genuinely does enjoy the company of others and she wants to make people happy and help them as best she can. She’s not the best friend in the world, she’s far too flighty to manage anything resembling a real relationship with anyone, but she’s good company when she’s there. She's used to trying to take care of and support people and it's still a role she fits into comfortably.

Her pro-circles stance (and while she does present her belief in this stance as solely motivated by her own cowardice, it does go a little deeper than that - not only are the circles able to weather possessions, they also don’t need to throw anyone to the literal wolves) has left her a little at war with herself - her pride as a dalish isn’t necessarily compatible with the fact that she thinks that the chantry’s ways are better, and her belief that the chantry’s ways are better isn’t compatible with the fact that she’s unwelcome in the chantry, nor with her belief in her own gods. This has all led to her being somewhat insecure about both her stance and her dalish pride.

Being forced into the role of keeper (in workload, if not in name) as a child was a very negative experience for her, as was being the only mage in the clan too 'valuable' to abandon. Determined to avoid a similar thing happening again, she makes a point of being as unreliable as possible. She doesn't want to be counted on, and she certainly doesn't want to be useful enough to discard someone else in her place.

Strengths & Weaknesses

+ Magic
Chaya uses a mixture of creation magic and parts of the keeper specialisation (she couldn’t really tell you where one ends on the other begins, since she doesn’t have the kind of formal training that would divide magic into schools like that). She’s skilled in using her magic for the kinds of things that would be useful to a wandering tribe, especially one wandering a land as low on natural resources as Antiva - usually allowing/encouraging crops to grow outside of the area/seasons that would allow this, ‘healing’ wooden equipment and sensing and purging poisons and illnesses. She can heal people if she must, though it feels significantly less natural to her than healing wood and she tends to avoid it because she is lazy.

+ Good at running away and staying alive.
+ Naturally a very friendly person, happy enough to talk to strangers, content to play nice and get along well enough with pretty much anyone who isn’t out for her blood and maybe even a few people who are.


- Magic
Due to the whole ‘a possession happened in recent memory’ incident, Chaya hasn't dared study more offensive magic than is strictly necessary. It’s a big gap in her knowledge that she’s deliberately left and is very unwilling to fill - she wants to be as easy to kill as possible if the worst should happen. She also very deliberately avoids pushing herself too far with magic - something that she presents as an extension of her usual laziness - out of a fear of possession. She would refuse to heal someone, even if it meant letting them die, if she thought there was even the slightest danger of pushing herself too far. This applies double to her 'allowing crops to grow' magic - she'll do what she knows she can do safely, but the's fully aware that it's a type of magic that the templars aren't used to, that they're less well-equipped to protect her from if the worst happens. If she thinks the alternative is putting herself at risk of possession, she'll let people starve.

- Coward.
- Probably not who you'd want as a diplomat, less because she's going to go around picking fights and more because on most issues she's likely as not to just agree with whoever she's talking with out of laziness.


Inventory

Her staff. A knife (for general knife use, not really suitable as a weapon). Clothes. Needles and thread to repair clothes. Tent and bedroll. A lantern. A few days’ worth of food.

With mod permission, I’d like her to be able to bring a Halla (and a few days' worth of feed) with her.

Motivation

She likes having people with swords between her and things that might kill her. The Inquisition has people with swords. It works out nicely.


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