Yvaine

Yvaine was a PC in the Scales of Justice campaign.

Description
Yvaine's right arm is entirely mechanical, with a winding mechanism located on her shoulder. She is well-groomed, with her blond hair kept sensibly short so as to not get tangled in the machinery going across her shoulder and into the base of her skull. She has contemplative brown eyes that seldom seem to blink and a deep olive skin tone. She wears a stark adamantine key around her neck and a light toga bound at the waist with a thickbelt containing a variety of tools and spell components.

Background
Yvaine, a young, bright-eyed student in the crafting school of the Institute of Ascension, had signed on as a research assistant to a kindly gnomish professor by the name of Winston Wetherby. He had obtained funding to pool the resources and talent of the stop students from various school to work on what he had dubbed the Legacy Crystal. It was meant to be a device which could take an imprint of the mind of the user, where their thoughts and knowledge could be stored so future generations could enjoy the benefit of their experience. However, Professor Benton Nade had coveted that funding for his research, and had arranged for the device to be sabotaged. The tampering caused the crystal to explode in a burst of shrapnel and magical energies; those too close to the device were impaled by the crystalline shards.

Yvaine was only partially caught in the blast, and her right arm took the brunt of the damage. However, her injuries left her catatonic and the arm could not be saved. Academy policy dictates that any students who expire while still paying off their tuition donates his or her body to magical research; it was judged that her state was close enough to dead to invoke this policy. Professor Nade used the opportunity to appeal to the school for funding to experiment with augmenting humanoid creatures. The availability of a comatose body gave him a unique opportunity to attempt to repair damage to the consciousness as well as the body. He determined that the easiest way to fix this was to create a partially sentient clockwork creature in the shape of an arm, and fuse it to her cortex, allowing the magical device to compensate for the non-functioning portions of her brain.

When she awoke, functional and if anything more intelligent and durable than she was before the accident, they declared the experiment a rousing success. However, though the surgeons had assumed her condition to be the result of brain damage, what had truly occurred is that the energy coming from device meant to copy consciousness had, in fact, severed a small portion of her consciousness from her being. The shard was still bound to her, but no longer was a part of the whole. When channeling her magic, she would sometimes subconsciously tap into that shard which tended to manifest as a hand. The very literal phantom limb gave her a strange affinity for spells involving telekinetic manipulation.

Following the surgery, she was allowed to finish her studies at the academy at no cost, provided that she would agree to observation and to occasionally be paraded around in front of others to gain the school prestige and funding. Once her studies were done, she found she lacked any real ambition. However, she lacked a connection to the school now, and found it disconcerting that her peers tended to treat her more as a curiosity than a colleague, so she decided to set out to find a purpose.