(no subject)

[tenderhoof]

Out-of-Character Information

Name: Shocky
Are you over 15?: Yep
Time Zone: Mountain
Personal Journal: tindercylinder
Reliable Method of Contact: Shockrageous @ Plurk or a PM on any of my accounts
Other characters in the game: Blacky, Casey, and Mary
Link to slot request if 6th, 7th slot: NO.

In-Character Information

Name: Aquenda Tenderhoof
Game/Series: Warcraft
Teacher/Student/Other: Student, will likely "teach" spirituality on the side
Canon Point: BURNING CRUSADE-era
Age: 24... roooughly the equivalent of a human 18? I could rant all day about the rpg books and their info on ages vs. everything else.
Grade Level/Class Taught/Job: College freshie.
Dorm or Living Arrangement: Dorm.

Personality: Aquenda was pretty sheltered for most of her life and damn, does it show.

When meeting people, she's a little bit shy and maybe even what could be called socially awkward - stuttering when she's tense or excited, and asking all kinds of personal questions. She's just really eager to learn about other people! Most of the time she catches herself before she gets a little TOO invasive, and will remember her Taurahe roots. Respect your elders, bow to people, wish them good tidings, etc. Like any tribe, hers was heavy on tradition, but being so young and fascinated by other cultures means she's likely to pick up on all sorts of customs for greeting and interacting with people... and is likely to mix them up a bit, but not on purpose.

She is an optimist! To the point of naivete, even. She thinks everything will be okay if everyone just works together and tries to understand one another. A long-standing war between factions with a history written in blood? Oh, if she takes a stand to show that she thinks the war is wrong, surely everyone else will throw down their arms and join her and sing kumbayah! ...Alright, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much. Even though she's tried that and failed, she sure as heck isn't giving up on her hopes of world peace anytime soon. Especially when there are things like Scourge and demons to worry about - surely working together against a common enemy can unite everyone. Eventually. Yeah, that sure worked in later expansions.

She's also pretty trusting of everyone. Tauren as a people are pretty honest, honourable guys, so of course being raised in that kind of community makes it easy for her to assume most other people are like that too. She has encountered a few liars before, but is willing to give everyone the benefit of the doubt at first unless they reek of demons or something. And even if they do prove to be horrible and manipulative liars who were just using her the whole time? Well, it's... it's complicated, okay?! If she's really attached to the person she'll still want to keep on good terms with them, no matter how hard it is. They can change, right? Right?!

She is also pretty impulsive. If a plan comes into her head, she doesn't think about all the things that could go wrong and try to make it fail proof. She'll just think of the quickest and fastest way to succeed and how great it will be and how it will likely improve the world. With a mind like that she might as well be an engineer. Good thing she's not, or she probably would have exploded fifty times by now.

Now she may be really naive, but she's not stupid or anything. What she lacks in street sense she makes up for in book smarts. She can pick up on things like other languages quickly, and has memorized a lot of the world history of Azeroth. After a lifetime of knowing nothing but the expanse of the Barrens and her tiny tribe, finding out there was so much more to the world was a huge shock and she wants nothing more than to make up for lost time and learn EVERYTHING about anything. History especially is fascinating to her, because imagining what the world used to be like is pretty exciting! Her second favourite area of study involves DRAGONS. Because Azeroth has some pretty neat dragons, if you ignore the jerk who would later split the world in half. ...Again.

Now, even a peace-loving optimist, there are things that get on Aquenda's nerves and upset her. She hates being startled and she hates being threatened, but who doesn't, really? Beef jokes are pretty tiresome after hearing them twenty-odd times, and racism in general is pretty detrimental to her hopes of world peace. Young upstarts who don't respect tradition also kind of get to her, but then she realizes she's being a bit of a hypocrite because leaving her tribe to travel the world and do things like read make her SUCH A REBEL... Oh, and also ruin exploring is kind of spitting in the face of her peoples' beliefs about respecting the land. More on that later.

But really, she tries to be tolerant and accepting whenever she can. It's just really hard sometimes.

Some of the soldiers in the Argent Dawn have seen some serious shit, and some of them deal with it through sarcasm. Aquenda has picked up on this style of humour, and while she doesn't do it very often, sometimes she will make a cynical joke or two. She doesn't do it to be malicious like some people, at least. She just thinks it's entertaining... but she's still learning to do it just right so she too can be amusing. For now it's just socially awkward, ha ha. She's also gotten a bit of an impromptu sex ed through crude soldier humour, but she doesn't think that's as funny. In fact, she gets a little embarrassed about it and would really much rather talk about something else. Like, anything. WHO TALKS ABOUT THAT IN PUBLIC MY GOODNESS.

Even if she doesn't like sex jokes, she is a big romantic at heart. Her favourite story as a child was about the moon, Mu'Sha, falling in love with the White Stag, Apa'ro. She has childish ideals of finding her ~true love~ one day, sure, but the idea of settling down and having kids just sounds way too limiting for her. Especially after just gaining her own freedom! Still, it might be a thing to consider when she's much older... for now, she is dating Knowledge and seeing Adventure on the side.

...I feel like I should clarify and say she is not in fact banging Uxie or Rick.

It kind of goes without saying, but being an impulsive goody two-shoes means that if there's a problem, Aque wants to play hero and save the day. Not for the glory, but for doing the right thing and making the world a better place. The glory part would just feel weird for her, honestly. Even taking part in the Argent Dawn's promotion ceremony kind of made her a little nervous with all those eyes on her, man. What if she screwed up? That would have sucked. Tauren are a proud race in general, but Aquenda's self-consciousness about her stuttering and general social awkwardness give her bad stage fright. Someone else can be celebrated, thanks. As long as it's not for her hard work, of course. She's not THAT altruistic.

TL;DR: Naive hippie bookworm who fights zombies and does afraid of public humiliation.

Backstory: OKAY let's go over a (VERY) brief history of Azeroth first. So there's this world that got split in half a couple thousand years ago thanks to a big war on demons and crap, Night Elves and Tauren ended up on one side, the Night-Elves-Who-Would-Evolve-Into-High-Elves and Dwarves and Gnomes and Humans on the other, Trolls all over the damn place. Some jackass mage on the Eastern side thought it would be a good idea to bring demon-possessed orcs into the world, they razed a couple of human cities until they were eventually beaten back and mostly put into internment camps, Moses Thrall eventually freed his people and made plans to lead them across the ocean, and the northern human areas started getting hit by a zombie virus. Basically, a good time for everyone to get the hell out of there and into better lands.

MEANWHILE, ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD...

For hundreds of years, the Tauren had been stuck wandering the barren wastes of the creatively named Barrens. Because food was scarce and violent centaur were everywhere, they lived a nomadic life, each tribe going their own way and trying to survive, maybe stopping to trade and exchange stories whenever they ran into each other. One such "tribe" was actually made up of misfits and stragglers from other tribes, so they were pretty tiny and ill-defended, but at least they had fewer mouths to feed and could move around a lot faster. So things were generally safe for them.

This tribe was led by a bull named Garraga Tenderhoof! And he had a daughter, Aquenda! Of course, being the daughter of a chieftain of little rag-tag band doesn't mean diddly squat in actual political situations, except that one day she'll have to make decisions and be responsible, so Aque has never been all that thrilled for the day she takes over. Being an only child sucks sometimes, man.

Anyway, being the only kid in the tribe (besides her teenaged cousin) AND the chieftain's daughter meant she got babied a lot. Sheltered from danger as best as she could be, coddled, etc. It was all fine and dandy for the first little while, but she got more and more restless the more she realized she wasn't being allowed to do things all the other tribe members were doing, like hunting and scouting ahead and... whatever else she was missing out on! Eventually her complaining got some of the elders to agree to teach her the basics of shamanism, which kept her occupied for a little while, but then she realized she had been duped to still staying right in the camp at all times.

So one day she decided to go sneak out while everyone was distracted with disassembling tents. Where was she going? She had no idea. But she'd be back by nightfall, probably. Too bad the Barrens were kind of super boring and full of nothing for MIIILES. Eventually she did come across a hill covered in giant thorns, full of pig-like people. Quilboar! She'd heard they were dangerous, but she'd never seen one in real life, either. She'd totally be fine if she was careful, right?

HAHA, NOPE. Hooves are not very good for sneaking around, and she got spotted pretty quick. Good thing one of the tribe's hunters was tracking her down and came in time to save her sorry butt, but not without her getting a few treatable wounds first. Needless to say, she was grounded for a pretty long time.

Not much of interest happened for a while after that. Staying in the camp, traveling the land, learning more about communing with the elements... Yep, that was her life. Nothing exciting until one day in her late teens her tribe came across some weird creature. At first they thought it was a centaur, except this one only had two legs and there were no hooves at the end. It spoke a strange language and tried to scare them off, but it was obviously hurt, so after deciding that the one guy alone clearly wasn't much of a threat, they took him in and tended to his wounds. He must have gotten lost from his tribe or something, so maybe once he healed enough he'd put in a good word for the tauren and they would have allies in this dangerous world. That was the plan, anyway.

In the meantime, Aquenda took a liking to the strange human thing and followed him around like a puppy. She didn't understand a word he said, but he seemed to pick up on a few basic Taurahe words when she tried to teach him, and he was nice enough. But it was pretty obvious he'd rather be with his own people. Especially since she caught him sneaking off in the middle of the night. She gave him one of her father's axes to protect himself and let him go, but from that day on she was even more enchanted with the idea of the outside world than ever.

MEANWHILE, IN THE EVENTS OF WARCRAFT 3...

Remember when I said everyone was looking for better lands that weren't full of internment camps and undead plague? That promised land just to happened to be Kalimdor. Of course, humans and orcs were still pretty at odds with each other and tried to make settling into this new continent difficult for the opposition. Along the way, the human-led Alliance races joined up with the Night Elves, and the Orcish Horde helped drive the centaur out of the grassier lands of Mulgore and the well-respected Bloodhoof tribe decided that they would make a permanent home there. Oh, also something about both factions forming a temporary truce to stop a giant demon from blowing up the world tree... by... blowing up the world tree. GOOD JOB, EVERYONE. At least they blew the demon up with it.

MEANWHILE, WITH OUR HERO...

So eventually Horde outposts started popping up all over the Barrens and the heroic adventure business was booming too, so it was only a matter of time before the Tenderhoof tribe found out about the Horde thing and the Mulgore thing and that there was so much more to the world than they thought. Would they move to Mulgore with the other tribes? No, they were kind of stubborn sticklers for tradition, but it was great to have a place to stock up on food or just hang out with people from time to time. Aquenda, on the other hand, was so eager to leave this life of traveling and start a new life of... traveling OTHER places instead! So she begged and pleaded to go start her new life journey, and eventually her father conceded.

So Aquenda started with Mulgore to do the starting zone quests learn about other tauren tribes and do her rites of passage, mostly involving collecting jugs of water and collecting wolf paws. Okay, that was all well and good, but what about the other races of the Horde? Orcs were honourable warriors and that was awesome! Trolls knew a lot about the spirits and had funny accents! Forsaken... were undead aboninations and an affront to everything the Earth Mother stood for! Whose idea was it to even let them into the Horde? Well, after her initial disgust, Aque sympathized with their plight because obviously the poor things just wanted a cure from undeath. (This was looong before their little fuckup in Northrend, of course.)

Speaking of curing undeath, after months of traveling the world and trying to stay out of the conflict between the Horde and Alliance like some gnome-hugging hippie, Aquenda found an organization that catered to her interest in working together with the other side and her interest in fighting the mindless Scourge and healing the dead lands of Lordaeron!

After becoming a soldier for this organization, the Argent Dawn, Aquenda spent most of her time devoted to helping their cause, but leaving plenty of time to travel the rest of the Azeroth (and later Outland) and learn about the history of the world and cultures she'd never even heard of. Not to mention having inner conflicts about archaeological digs; ruins are SO TOTALLY COOL but at the same time the land is violated so much for the sake of digging up these things (that are cursed half the time), and it goes against everything she was raised learning... but... precious knowledge... Yeah, uh, maybe she would try to mostly gain her historical knowledge from books instead. Mostly. And by learning a fair bit of human Common with the Argent Dawn, she was able to read their books as well!

Now, surely she climbed the ranks of the Argent Dawn quickly and became some famous scholar with all her knowledge, right? Nnnope. She did get a promotion after a successful incursion into Stratholme even though the dungeon bosses just rose again as soon as they left, but she was so eager to learn things for herself that the thought of teaching others never actually occurred to her. Besides, teaching others was the role of elders, and she was still so young!

Young enough to be a student at... say... A SCHOOL. Now, until the Blood Elves joined the Horde, things like academies and schools were pretty much unheard of for the more tribal races and the Forsaken didn't give a crap about anything they did in their human lives. The only school Aquenda had ever heard of was the Scholomance, a hive of necromantic filth and villainy, and not exactly the sort of place she'd want to enroll. So how the heck did she even hear of Smash Academy all the way on Azeroth?

Well, a little birdie (more like a dragon than a bird) who was stationed in Lordaeron and did work with the Argent Dawn, just so happened to also be one of the dragons in charge of keeping timelines stable. Aquenda was in some kind of time paradox - she was meeting none of the people that Alpha Timeline Aque should have met through in-game RP and so none of the major events that should have led her to her untimely demise and awakening as a Death Knight were happening.

What a bit of a pickle! Chromie was not as merciless as some dragons when it came to guarding the time stream, however. So instead of wiping beta Aquenda's existence entirely, she came to her with a proposition: send her to a pocket dimension where all time streams and universes intersect, where she would not be harmed (by the Bronze Dragonflight, at least) and the flow of time would not be tampered with by her continued existence.

Aquenda had no idea what she was agreeing to, but anything sounded better than being erased. TO SMASH ACADEMY SHE WENT.

Anything Else?: -Aquenda is an Elementalist. While she can perform basic healing spells and swing a mace hard enough to crack a skull or two, her true power comes from invoking the elements. SHE IS THE AVATAR wait no... Unlike mages, who bend the elements to their will, shamans and elemental spirits have a relationship more based trust and respect. They commune with the elements when they need something and hope for the best. Usually it works. But not always.
-She comes with one riding kodo named Pawne and one parrot named Moema. She believes the parrot to be a physical avatar of her animal spirit guide... maybe there's some truth to that.
-She can speak Taurahe, Orcish, and conversational Common.
-Tauren only recently developed written text, and even that is much larger than what she usually reads. It's kind of affected her vision, but she usually doesn't notice. Insert jokes about far-sightedness here
-She can turn into a wolf! Sort of. At least she's not a druid.
-She is an herbalist and alchemist! Basically, she picks flowers and mashes the parts into potions and salves. How the heck do those big clumsy-looking hands handle flowers so delicately? Who knows, but tauren have a +15 racial bonus to herbalism, so...
-Being a shaman means she is more in tune with ancestral spirits in general, but nowhere near the extent of a Spirit Walker or anything. But if an angry spirit is trying to make itself known, a shaman will probably be one of the first to notice.
-The TIMELINE BULLSHIT is mostly a dumb and silly way to strongly distinguish SBG*Aque from WoW*Aque and also a way to get her to the school in the first place. Fight me.

In-Character 1st person sample: [The feed turns on to reveal a big wet nose hogging up most of the camera space. It moves back, revealing a wide-eyed tauren face.]

Ah! It works! [Wow, what kind of crazy-ass accent is THAT?]

Lok'tar! Hello! This device - it is Gnomish? It hasn't exploded so far, so definitely not Goblin... I have never seen anything like this. Even the writing of... of...

[She wrinkles her nose and pantomimes writing something on her palm.]

...Mail! Even the writing of mail is not common in my tribe. We prefer face-to-face. But, as this is speaking and not writing, it is still good, I think. I-I know it will help me to practice the human tongue. You can probably hear I am still learning.

[She laughs nervously, rubbing the side of her face. Then she glances away, trying to remember something.]

...Oh! I was so excited, I forgot the most important thing. My name is Aquenda Tenderhoof. I come not as a member of the Horde, but of the Argent Dawn, so I hope we may be good friends.

In-Character 3rd person sample:

She was the only shaman in the school.

At first it was nothing more than a disappointment, knowing there was nobody should could train under to improve her own spiritual prowess. But as days wore on, in this place where the Elements themselves walked among mortals and bickered without end, she realized that it fell to her to be school's spiritual leader.

"Noooo," she groaned, pacing back and forth atop the soft grass outside (she much preferred it to tiles or carpeting). Moema sat perched on the back of a nearby bench, preening his feathers.

"I'm not supposed to be a leader of anything. Not yet. I'm too young to be an elder, even by default. I... I only even completed my rites a few years ago...!" She paused, lifting her gaze to the sky in hopefulness. "Maybe they don't really care about that kind of thing here, after all. ...No, that's no good. Such a lack of balance could be... uuugh..."

Aquenda pressed her palms against her eyes, sighing in defeat. "No, I do have to do this, then. Maybe those spirits will calm down a bit if people know how to appease them. And not destroy everything. Right?"

She looked to the senegal, who was far too preoccupied with rubbing his beak against the wood of the bench to give much of a response.

"Hey! You could at least pretend to care."

Moema just gave a non-committal squawk and turned away from her. Some totem animal...

"How can I teach others about the spirits when the spirits won't even guide me?"

They had truly abandoned everyone in this place, hadn't they? That only doubled the urgency for a shaman in Aquenda's mind. Right. That settled it. She would take on this duty for the good of both the physical and spiritual worlds. And if she failed...

...well. That was going to suck for everyone, wasn't it?