Vessa Blackglass

Gnome / Psychic

Submitted character story

Vessa Blackglass is a deep gnome, and once upon a time, before the Overdraw, she looked it, with skin as black as polished obsidian, hair darker still, eyes bright as mica in a face like the deep stone she came from. She climbed a very long way up out of the lowerworld to study at a surface college, bringing with her a svirfneblin's caution and a prodigy's appetite in. And she'd done it all right: every ward doubled, every arcane equation checked twice, she placed first or second in her year in all things, usually first, to Jio Yerrick's endless irritation. She was in the vault for Coriel's 'grand experiment' because she had been *invited*; of all who participated she was the one with a Lyceum-wide reputation for keeping workings safe and under control. She had drawn up half the safeguards herself. She's had a long time to think about how little that mattered.

The Overdraw took her color. That's what everyone who knows her, or her origin, sees first. The obsidian gnome came out of the vault bleached nearly white; hair like frost, skin pale as bone, only the eyes still dark, two chips of the old stone left in an almost ghostly face. Deep gnomes read such things as omens, but Vessa, who doesn't believe in omens, caught herself flinching from mirrors for a long time after. She was born to be safe and unseen in the dark. Now she cannot enter a room without feeling the strangest-looking person in it, marked by a thing she couldn't make safe.

In exchange for her color and too many of her friends, the cascade of the Overdraw's change gave her *weight*. Vessa sets gravity where and as she pleases, pinning a charging knight under his own suddenly unbearable mass, lifting herself weightless off a cliff, hanging boulders in the air like a held breath and letting them fall as meteors. She is, by a wide margin, the most dangerous person in most rooms she enters, and she's learned to let people go on thinking she is the company's kid; tiny, ageless-faced, easy to talk over. The underestimation useful, and on her worst of days, well deserved.

She and Jio never stopped competing. The rivalry survived the vault the way a scar survives the wound; changed, permanent, not the thing, but a reminder of it. They keep tally on everything, still: kills, distance, cleverness, who got there first. What neither will say is that the scorekeeping is what got them both through the aftermath. On the nights the grief came for Vessa, the one reliable handhold was the certainty that somewhere not far away, Jio Yerrick was insufferably fine and would need beating tomorrow. Yet she would sooner drop a mountain on herself than tell him so. She feels that he almost certainly knows, and feels roughly the same, in his tiefling way, and like her, will never say. The feelings running between them are fiercer and plainer than romance: Jio would tear a hole in any reality he had to in order to drag her out of danger, and Vessa would, without hesitation, utterly flatten anything that truly meant him harm. They are each other's favorite irritation, and line in the sand.

Vessa has not yet explored the true limit of her own power. What she does now, she knows, is wading in the shallow water. Somewhere past it, she has felt the edge something she's not yet reached for: to bear down and *down* on a target until it falls into itself, a man folded to a marble, a maelstrom crushed to a tiny burning star. She suspects it is there. She has been careful, so far, never to need it.