Breisleach/Abilities

Like many Yuribans, breisleach has a great many skills and abilities, as well as some distinctive weaknesses. Some of these are innate to her species, some are from her training or development.

OOC: Using this knowledge

Anything in innate, trained magic, and trained general skills categories are probably things that can be inferred or learned from asking around. The weaknesses and acquired skills may be known or inferred, but far less reliably, and it may be best to check OOC before you take advantage of them.

Innate Kitsune Skills

• Shapeshifting: As with any kitsune, breisleach can transform to and from a full vulpine form. At her age, she's also capable of shifting to maintain a chosen appearance, and is practiced to the degree of being able to manage fine control of parts of her body, such as turning her nails into claws.

• Organic Shaping: breisleach's primary innate ability as a kitsune is the shaping of organic material, specifically, stone, metal, and wood. She most often uses this in building and the design and creation of jewelry.

• Magical Healing: breisleach's secondary ability is a specific kitsune form of magical healing. While quite effective, using it requires a fair amount of energy from the bodies of both the individual being healed and the healer. As such, while extremely adept at diagnosing and dealing with illnesses, this form of magical healing is dangerous to use on a severely injured person or one otherwise near death, as the possibility always exists that the power used in healing them will be more than their body can support, or, if the healer tries to provide it on their own, may lead to the death or magical burn out of the healer. The magical healing does tend to not heal bones as strongly as natural healing, so it is usually only used for breaks in delicate areas. breisleach also has a strong philosophical bias against healing minor to modest illnesses as it prevents the body from forming natural antibodies.

• Enhanced Hearing and Scent: Whiles breisleach's overall speed, strength, and sight are within human norms, her hearing and sense of smell are notably stronger, reflecting the vulpine elements of her species.

Trained Magical Skills

These are abilities that breisleach is capable of teaching to others, although those of a religious nature she will only teach to those training as a priestess or druidess of the native religion.

Religious Magics

• Druidicism: As a trained druidess, breisleach is capable of tracking the health of animals, plants, soil, water, and other natural elements, adjusting the distribution of natural elements, and encouraging plant growth.

• Spiral Walking: Like many Yuriban priestesses, breisleach is capable of using ritual magic to reveal glimpses of the past.

• Ritual Magic: As a priestess, breisleach is trained in a variety of forms of ritual religious magic, including cleansing curses or remnants of dark magic, forming magical wards and shields, and more.

Utility Magics

• Teleportation: Like many residents, breisleach is capable of utilizing Yuriba's innate magics to travel quickly to major areas of the island; she is able to teach how to do this to others, even those without magical potential, although the skill can manifest in different ways for different learners.

• Stored Spells: Having developed a process for this on her own, breisleach is able to imbue simple spells like healing energy into gemstones that can be invoked by either percussive force or a slight push of magic. She believes she could teach this to others, certainly those with a knack for working stone.

• Aura Awareness: Like many workers of magic, breisleach has some ability to detect the auras and nature of others; however, for her, rather than 'seeing' them, she tends to perceive in a mixed smell/taste sense, meaning that the difference between this sense and her enhanced kitsune senses can be rather narrow.

• Object Bind: breisleach can call certain regularly used objects to her, no matter where she is; this is a branch of the common Yuriban teleportation magic and also reasonably easy to teach.

Trained Skills

These are various particular skills that breisleach has picked up over her lifetime; she is capable of teaching any of them to others.

• Herbal Healing and Midwifery: In addition to her magical healing, breisleach relies heavily on traditional first aid, the use of herbs, and traditional childbirthing skills in her medical practice.

• Spear Hunting and Fighting: Her preferred weapon, breisleach uses a spear for hunting, combat, and self defense. She primarily uses a heavy spear but can use light ones with significant skill as well; years of practice putting her in the upper echelon of skill for those who focus on this weapon.

• Dagger Combat: While her skills with the dagger and other short blades are not remarkable, breisleach can use them for utility and combat as well as a typical trained fighter.

• Tailoring: breisleach runs a clothing store, and is skilled in designing clothing, sewing, knitting, and has some level of skill in other fiber and fabric crafts.

• Multilingual: breisleach speaks current native Yuriban dialects, as well as (somewhat archaic) Japanese and Gaelic. Her English has been fairly effectively modernized by immigrants.

Acquired Skills

These skills are ones that have been developed by certain events in breisleach's life; by and large, she cannot train anyone to use them and many of them are not common knowledge.

• Incorporeal Being, Earth-Linked, Immortal, Earth-Sense: These are all tied together; after an earlier event, breisleach's soul was separated from her body and connected tightly to the island itself. Because of this, she is a being of thought and innately connected to the earth, for good or ill, giving her both increased physical stability - she can be the very definition of an unmovable object when in contact with the ground, if desired - and granting her a constant sense of the health of the island.

• Divine Channel: breisleach can briefly channel one of the goddesses in a form of willing possession in order to invest a Sentry or Guardian; doing so leaves her quite exhausted afterwards and the effect cannot be held for more than a few minutes.

• Layered Self: Deeply affecting breisleach's psyche can be challenging, as her mind has a distinct series of layers, reflecting her daily self, her formal self, and her true self.

• Storm-Energized: Since being hit by lightning, breisleach feels energized and sometimes slips into a trance during a storm.

• Past-Life Recall: After events helping Brysaihe handle the history of her soul, breisleach is now able to fully recall her three most recent prior lives.

• Blended Aura: Between her druidic nature and her magical ties to the island, breisleach's own aura blends seamlessly into the environment around her, making it nearly impossible to pick out.

Weaknesses

Certainly, breisleach has a lot of positives in her column and can be a powerful figure... but she has some notable weaknesses as well.

• Astral avoidant, psionically weak: While many of the more gifted magical or spiritual sorts are able to access the realm known as the astral, breisleach appears to have a mental block against doing so. Between this and her unusual mental shielding, she also struggles a great deal with psionic communication, being unable to return any sort of mental link with normal levels of coherence unless boosted by an artifact or a soul-level magical tie.

• Atypical Mental Shielding: Most of those who have mental defenses rely on ways that prevent others from entering their minds, deflecting or warning them of intrusion. Not so much so the case for breisleach; instead, her mindscape is a vast psionic hedge maze, full of traps, pitfalls, and other risks for the unwary that blunder into it. It's less 'protected' and more a case of 'hoping it's messy enough to make what you find probably not what you were looking for'. Unfortunately, even this doesn't help her in a related area...

• Dreamless, Unshielded Sleep: Due to her non-physical nature, breisleach almost never is able to dream her own dreams. However, because of this, her mind is extremely attractive grounds to any who project dreams or those who prey on sleeping individuals, not just being easily accessed by them, but sometimes even attracting it. While she is quite capable of knowing that it's not her own dreaming, she generally has to rely on clues that she sees in the dream to guess where they come from. Unless, of course, for once it's the accommodating sort that wants to talk to her instead of just rain forebodings onto her head.

• Complicated Fertility: Lacking a true physical body, breisleach cannot bear children while still able to make use of many of the aspects of her technically non-physical nature. Although long term ritual and dedicated magics now allow her to become pregnant, her power is significantly diminished when she's in this state, as it prevents access to her incorporeal skills and many of her more powerful magics.

• Reflective Injury, Perceived Injury: Also tied to her current nature, while breisleach is technically highly resistant to injury, she faces the problem of mind over matter - that is; if she thinks she's been hurt, for all intents and purposes, she has been. Wounds that effect her emotions tend to linger and take much longer to heal. Furthermore, serious magical or physical damage done to the island is reflected on her body, as seen in scarring left in the wake of Inishie-san's eruption, as well as the seizures that earthquakes trigger in the kitsune.

• Partial Amnesia, Inhuman: These two are quite connected; breisleach's memories for the year or so on either side of her accident are heavily damaged and the holes were replaced with memories from the land. Consequentially, not only are there things she remembers poorly or not at all, but some parts of her are beyond not being typically human; they're not even mortal in nature. This may be part of what leads to the fact that she is a...

• Fanatic: Flatly, breisleach is wildly devoted to the island and her role as its protector, to a degree that involves being willing to make sacrifices that might shock others.

• Geased: The kitsune is effectively under one geas at this point, as a Guardian to the island.

• Place-Bound: breisleach isn't just uninterested in leaving the island - she literally can't. She even grows quite nervous past waist depth in the ocean water and anytime she's in the air.

• Early Neglect: Abandoned by her parents and never formally adopted, breisleach has some personal insecurities related to her origins. It's quite possible that her short stature is less genetic than a reflection of a lack of proper nutrition in her early infancy.