Name
Asa Shumirova
Gender
Feminine
Sexuality
Straight
Appearance
Standing at 168cm, Asa has a tall and slender build. Although she has near-perfect hourglass proportions, she lacks muscle somewhat, due to her rather inactive childhood. Her initially fair skin is tanned to a light golden color. Having spent most of her childhood running around barefoot (due to her general dislike of shoes), the soles of her feet have hardened to the point that she can comfortably run on gravel. She has highly arched feet, and tends to walk toe-first when barefoot, resulting in an almost dance-like movement.
Asa has a delicate, oval-shaped face, with high cheekbones, and a narrow chin. Her ears, well-proportioned, are somewhat pointed in shape. Her nose is straight, with a rounded, very slightly upturned tip. Downturned lips contribute to her faraway and sad resting expression.
Slightly downturned blue-grey eyes, usually distant and watchful, take on a lively, joyful glimmer when Asa is in a good mood. Asa's hair is straight and long, falling all the way to her hips. The fine brown hairs take on golden glow when struck by light.
Attire & Accessories
Asa's wardrobe was always quite limited, and as much as she wanted to, she never really got around to customising it much, as the majority of her clothes were handed down from her mother or even grandmother. Her clothes are generally casual, but never baggy, and always neat.
Asa always wears a small flower pendant on a silver chain around her ankle, a 'good luck' charm of sorts, given to her by her parents when she moved away. Silver, with six pointed, overlapping petals, and no more than three centimeters in diameter.
Personality
Fun fact: Asa absolutely hates having to describe herself as a person, having dug through her own personality so much, she struggles to see the entire picture at once. She would much rather leave the task to others.
Speaking of which, there are other tasks she would prefer to leave alone, most of which fall under the category of communication. Regardless of how good (or not) she is at hiding it, Asa is very awkward at any form of communication, but is positively terrified of any staged conversation. It doesn't help that she struggles to find the right words to make her thoughts understandable to others, outside the context in her mind. Neither is it helpful that she seems to frequently forget words - being bilingual, and not having the opportunity to speak either language very often.
Her fear of communication is reflected in her behavioural patterns. While she may stride around with a calm confidence, a shadow of worry will pass over her expression the moment she knows she has to talk to someone she doesn't know. She will wait silently for people to notice her instead of interrupting a conversation.
But she's quite talkative once you get past that initial barrier, happily chatting about whatever common topic she might have found. In fact, she sometimes worries that she's being too talkative and annoying the other person. Asa does tend to judge herself a lot in that way.
Calm, patient, always with a small but friendly smile on her face, always understanding and compassionate, Asa is the ideal listener, albeit a silent one, since she's never sure what the right thing to say is. No one has ever seen her lose patience, get angry or upset. She will walk around smiling from ear to ear, though, if she's in an especially good mood. She doesn't even notice it until people shart giving her weird looks.
But that's all the surface, the tiny fraction of who she is, the small part of herself she feels safe to expose. Not a mask, of course. That was something Asa learned early on - she couldn't lie. She couldn't become someone entirely different. She could only pull together existing parts of herself, convince herself she was happy, and act it, the way she would be if she was. Always happy. Always calm. Always the best at everything. That was what she expected herself to be, and what it frustrated her to fail at. Perhaps it's partially the way she was raised, always expected to have the top grades, always told that nothing but the best is enough. In any case, it pains her to be worse than anyone. And it has made her competitive. Very competitive. And she enjoys it, it's her definition of fun, even when the only person she can compete with is herself.
On the inside, Asa is an artist. She loves anything beautiful, and sees beauty in many things. She will lose herself in sculpting, painting, music, or poetry. She loves animals, too. To Asa, the natural world is divine. Humanity is divine. Everything, from the highest mountain to the smallest stone, from a bear to an ant, from an oak to the grasses in the fields, is beautiful and divine.
Asa has a very clear image of the world she wants to create for herself. When it comes to her beliefs, they are very clear and do not change easily. While she will not dictate them to other people, she will have no one dictates theirs to her, either. She is incredibly loyal to those she considers 'family', as few as they may be, and will defend them from anything and anyone.
Strengths
- Highly intelligent and very capable of abstract thought, Asa easily grasps new concepts, and often excells at anything she tries her hand at.
- Asa has the drive and determination to sit down and spend the hours 'forcing' herself into perfection. She won't stop until she has achieved the ideal, or at least made significant progress towards it.
- A loyal friend, Asa is always there for the people she cares about. She would be there for strangers, too, but has been disappointed too many times to invest in people who don't want her around.
Weaknesses
- An awkward communicator, hindered in equal parts by her lack of experience and her belief that she is awkward.
- Can be competitive to a fault, sometimes going a bit too far.
- Asa can quickly grow tired of loud groups, cheerful or otherwise, and needs time away to ground herself and recharge her batteries.
Trivia
Asa has played the clarinet since she was four (that makes it 14 years! A scary number, if you ask her). She is also mildly allergic to cats, dogs, horses... anything that has fur on it - sad, considering how much she loves them. Also, Asa is VERY into things like pagan culture, witchcraft, ect., and likes to draw elements of that into her own way of life. She will never mention it to anyone, but Asa doesn't like calling herself 'Russian', and much prefers to think of herself as 'Slavic', instead.
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Worlds
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In the Shadown of Our Ancestors
By ThisIsAPackName
Role
The Lover's Descendant
Relationship with Ability
Has been able to use it intuitively from birth. Sometimes, she would just 'know' what someone was thinking or feeling. Having never been told of her power, Asa would often second-guess herself, always looking for proof that these moments were more than just wishful thinking or her imaginitive mind. With age, her ability showed itself more often. As she spoke to people, Asa would get thoughts, images, smells, and feelings out of nowhere, and it confused her. Having grown up in a highly intellectual family, she kept looking for a logical explanation, and didn't know how to talk to her family about it until she could.
Affiliations
Although she does have more distant relatives, the ones she grew up with are her parents and younger brother, and she loves them dearly. Even now, living away from them, Asa often misses them, even falling into depression on occasion, and calls frequently.
Backstory
Born in Russia, Asa and her parents immigrated when she was only two, wary of the country's political situation. So Asa grew up in the quieter corner of the King's Land, having never really known much of her homeland. Asa's life growing up was a rather normal one. She went to school, made friends. Then her family would move to a different town, and she'd go to a different school there, and made friends again. And then they'd move again. It always seemed to bother her a lot when she never heard from her friends again. She always blamed it on her 'awkward' communication skills, and her being 'different'.
Asa had always felt like she was different from everyone else. She never knew what people were talking about. If there was a famous person everyone knew about, she never had any idea who it was. The concepts and values she had grown up with seemed to be entirely different from those of the people around her. So the only people she ever really connected with were her family.
Coming from a line of engineers, with software developers for parents, it could be said that Asa was always expected to take on a highly intellectual profession. Which she almost did, and most definitely still could. But she also had a passion for animals, or more specifically, horses. At the age of 16, Asa had moved away from her parents, and gone to study about horses near the Capital. By her 18th birthday, Asa had taken up two part-time jobs, one as a programmer, and the other in a small stable at the edge of the city. She was living her dream. If only it wasn't such a lonely one.
Winter 
Day 
Blizzard
