Race: Galdor
Birthday: 13th Intas, 2691
Age: 28
FC: Wallis Day
Current Location: Brunnhold, Anaxas
Occupation: Research Fellow, Physicist
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Player Name: Amphion
Though born in Gior, Marzena lacks - like her mother - the signature albino characteristics one might expect for a galdor from Gior. This, coupled with a family that hails from the Da Fintaine stronghold of Damna Erth but longs for influence and acceptance within the good graces of the ruling Da Huane family, have cultivated a feeling of outsider and otherness that lingers in Marzena's every atom. Yet, anyone who sees her would be surprised to know it: Marzena carries herself with a confidence and poise so deeply interwoven into the fibre of her being that it no longer matters if it is genuine or false.
As a teenager, Zena began to bleach her hair closer to the platinum blonde of her Gioran peers, and while she has grown out of the childish need to conceal her otherness that inspired the initial choice, it has long since become a habit that she maintains regardless. At 5'9" she is somewhat average for a Gioran woman, but stands several inches above many of even the men from Anaxas with whom she finds herself working most frequently, something she exploits to great effect with slim-cut fashion choices that accentuate her long and slender frame.
Marzena is like a magnet. She is fascinated by anything different and unfamiliar, grabbing hold of it tightly and drawing it close for scrutiny and study. She is keen to know that which she does not know, whether that is knowledge, people, or new experiences; as an academic, she is readily available to peers and pupils alike, making an effort to make herself available and accessible in a way that no one was for her during her student days. Yet, Marzena pushes away the similar and familiar, rejecting wholesale the expectations and demands of her family and of society, and holding peers and the people around her at a respectable and respectful distance, for the sake of her own comfort and protection. Her strange duality has its roots in a childhood spent feeling like an outsider, a status quo that she has since embraced and integrated into her sense of self; but it also comes from a rejection of whatever expectations and conventions she felt outside of, and from a lack of familiarity with and understanding of how to function in a situation that doesn't inherently feel as if it excludes her. Marzena is so accustomed to being something different and other, that the prospect of being welcomed and embraced as part of something is an utterly foreign concept, and on some levels even a little frightening.
What Marzena lacks in ability to interact with her fellow beings, however, she compensates for with a near giddy passion and enthusiasm for her field of study. A student of both physics and physical conversation, to Marzena the natural world is a beautiful, complicated, and utterly fascinating place, and one cannot help but be swept up in the gleeful joy with which Marzena explains the delightful simplicity of a rainbow, or the awe-inspiring complexity of the stars. Marzena hoards and gorges on knowledge with an insatiable hunger, and - once the initial complexities of social interaction have been navigated, something Marzena struggles with as much as any career academic - each new person she meets a new wellspring of new knowledge, new experiences, and new perspectives, which Marzena will drain completely dry if given the opportunity, often without a proper appreciation for how forward, inappropriate, and overbearing she might end up being. For some, Marzena is an irritation who asks far too many questions; but to others, she is a keen, considerate, and empathetic listener, just as eager to hear about someone's worries and woes as about the weird and wonderful experiences that make up their life.
Marzena was born in Damna Erth to Xhevanna Idas, the half-Gioran heiress of a mercantile family who decided that her lack of a husband didn't need to stand in the way of her designs on having a daughter. Marzena spent the first few years of her life in Gior, but when she was still young, Xhevanna relocated them both to Vienda, hoping to use Anaxas as a stepping stone to trade opportunities with Mugraba and Hox. Spending more time being raised by maids and tutors than by her mother, and seldom venturing beyond the grounds of their home, Marzena developed a passion for reading as a means of escape, and as soon as Xhevanna recognised this passion in her daughter, it became almost the sole means by which Xhevanna showed affection, reading and literature becoming the one unassailable thread that connected the two of them. As Marzena's passions began to spill over from the stories themselves and into the worlds and practices they described, Xhevanna catered to every whim, hobby, and fleeting interest, as if by providing Marzena with everything that Xhevanna had missed out on as a child, she could somehow succeed where she felt her own parents had failed.
Unfortunately, Xhevanna's efforts did little to leave Marzena feeling as if she belonged. She was a trinket, a trophy, to her mind doted upon with the same mentality as a prize stallion, or cherished artworks. Marzena was not something that Xhevanna loved; merely something that she loved to have, loved to experience in the proper way at the proper time, and then leave in the hands of lesser people to be dealt with, out of sight and out of mind. As Marzena reached the age of ten, however, the prospect of an education at Brunnhold became a beacon of hope, an opportunity to break out of her cage and finally be free to be herself beyond the scope of her mother's expectations. Unfortunately, Marzena's sheltered childhood left her somewhat unprepared for and unaware of the nature of other galdor children, and quite quickly, what had seemed like the green pastures and welcoming meadows of a distant paradise transformed into just another oppressive set of expectations that Marzena couldn't quite meet.
Zena was a troubled student at first. She was a Gioran, but not a real Gioran, not like the stereotypes that the Anaxi galdor had grown up on, and not like the Gioran students knew from back home. Worse, she had no concept of the structures and expectations that an environment like Brunnhold entailed. To her teachers, Marzena was an argumentative, arrogant, know-it-all brat; to Zena, her teachers were underwhelming bores vastly inferior to her tutors, and too secure in their own knowledge and understanding to withstand a healthy and reasonable level of challenge from a student. Marzena was frequently in trouble for her argumentative nature; and as a result, found herself associating far more with the more troublesome students at Brunnhold, rather than those her teachers might have hoped would have a good influence on her.
Luckily for everyone, Zena matured over time. As friendships slowly formed, she began to feel more settled and at home at Brunnhold, and as her courses advanced, she felt suitably challenged by the material, and began to engage more and more with her lessons. By the time she graduated, she was an exceptional student, and the prospect of leaving Brunnhold - leaving home - was one that she could not bear. Despite her mother's protests - or more accurately, her mother's blatant but largely silent disapproval - Marzena decided to pursue a career as an academic, and has continued to flourish as a member of the academy's staff and faculty, turning her passion for understanding the world around her into her life's work.
Excellent
Average
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Long-Term:
- Become a Professor?
- Be remembered in her field: an invention, theorem, law, unit of measurement, etc
- Memory threads to boost her physicality (fighting, sports, etc)
- So much Nicco angst
- Convince impressionable students that she is cool