Vienna

> *You want me? To heal them? Well, what can you give me?*
>
>

## Appearance

Vienna is a human who stands at about 5'7". She has lighter brown hair that reaches just beneath her chin, with twin white streaks framing her face. Their skin is a slightly darker tone, with freckles scattered across their face. Her eyes are a pale green, with a pair of round, black-framed glasses sitting in front of them. She has a faded scar on her right cheek that spans an inch or two.

They typically wear a white collared shirt with silver triangular collar pins, along with a loose navy blue jacket that has a white band around the right sleeve. They alternate between black pants and a knee-length skirt, both with simple patterns embroidered at the bottom, paired with white work boots. She always wears a small golden sun charm on a black cord necklace, usually kept tucked beneath her shirt.

After they return from the two year timeskip, Vienna is more often than not found with their hair tied up in a loose ponytail. They have a few more freckles, and an x-shaped scar across their left palm. Their fashion choices remain the same.

## Personality

Vienna is a relatively convoluted character. She considers herself to be a cold, distant, and logical person, but in actuality can be very scattered, awkward, and forgetful. Her logic isn't something that quite follows a normal path, and if she attempted to explain it, there's a good chance it wouldn't make too much sense.

They struggle with properly conveying their thoughts and such, and are usually considered awkward and strange in regular social situations. They tend to keep to themselves, preferring the echo chamber of their own thoughts than making room for the voices and approaches others might take. They tend to tunnel into certain ideas of their own until either someone else solves an issue before they can, or they manage to convince others of a certain way to solve something. Many find them an estranged character, and outside of essential transactions, Vienna avoids approaching people.

She has a relatively unconventional view of the world, a result from growing up in a unique environment. Vienna is only concerned with saving her own skin; if given the choice independently, she would sacrifice whatever and whoever it takes to make things easier for herself. Her moral code is skewed away from the normal ethics that are considered "normal" by a societal standard, but she refuses to step away from the lines she draws for herself. Other than her own code of rules, she puts most of her trust in making "correct" decisions to those around her.

They focus heavily on trying to prove themselves to whatever company they may keep, but aren't very sure of most of their skills. Instead, they rely heavily on reinforcing their role as a "healer," hoping it will allow them to gain some kind of respect.

### Rules

Vienna holds herself to an exact code of conduct. She refuses to let herself remove, modify, or exploit any of these rules, regardless of how stupid she may consider some of them to be at certain times. She is allowed to add to this code of rules, along with modifying and removing a new rule up to two weeks after it is instated.

Currently, these rules are as follows:

1. Never intentionally take action to kill someone.
2. If you do not know something, then it does not matter to you.
3. Give up whatever it takes to get where you need to be.
4. Do not take things given to you out of pity.
5. Only revive people you have spoken to.

## Skills and Weaknesses

### Features and Traits

[ **Walking Encyclopedia** ]: You use your knowledge of medicine to quickly come up with a diagnosis of someone’s symptoms in a broad sense.

[ **Health is Wealth** ]: You have a pool of Your Level × 5 hit points that you can use to heal your allies and yourself. This resets every long rest.

[ **Cellular Regeneration** ]: You drink an experimental potion full of unexplored medicinal plants and herbs. This potion regenerates d6 over 2 rounds. You have 2 charges per long rest.

[ **Grace of God** ]: You pour your sweat and blood into healing your allies so much that the metaphor isn’t such a metaphor anymore. You may use your own health points in the pool for Health is Wealth. You take twice the damage that you heal (from your health pool).

[ **Specialty** ]: Taught under a discredited academic.

[ **Observant** ]: Quick to notice details of your environment, you gain the following benefits:

* Increase your Intelligence or Wisdom score by 1, to a maximum of 20.
* If you can see a creature's mouth while it is speaking a language you understand, you can interpret what it's saying by reading its lips.
* You have a +5 bonus to your passive Wisdom (Perception) and passive Intelligence (Investigation) scores.

[ **Languages** ]: Vienna can speak *Common* and write in *Ares*, an encoded language invented by Sera.

### Weaknesses

Vienna has an acute fear of the dark\*, and struggles most with this when alone in very open spaces. They are also afraid of being forgotten and failure.
\*This fear stems from the underlying fear she has of losing her sight, hearing, and/or voice.

## History

**CONTENT WARNING**: Vienna's backstory contains themes surrounding **abuse** (**verbal, psychological,** and **emotional**) and **non-player character death**. Additionally, there are allusions to **dehumanization** and **unethical experimentation**.

**ADDITIONAL NOTES**: While Vienna’s backstory is largely straightforward, there are some loose ends left untied. Most of these are left purposely to leave both room for interpretation and creative freedom. This tells the story of their life as Vienna would have experienced it, excluding most details of others’ lives that do not further their story.

### Early Childhood

Vienna was a firstborn child, growing up in relative isolation in a small facility. If you asked her today, she wouldn’t be able to tell you where it was, only being able to rattle off a few insignificant landmarks that had been nearby. Rather than raising her themselves, her parents left Vienna to her older cousin. She was told to call him Sera, despite him being more widely known as Raphael. She never knew him by his other name.

Sera became everything she needed growing up, mostly making sure she didn’t die before she could learn to take care of herself. He often worked while Vienna played or studied nearby, being an experimenter and ex-doctor who had had his license revoked several years prior. The two formed something of a unique relationship, becoming some blur between parental and siblings while maintaining a kind of professional distance on Sera’s part.

While she still occasionally saw her parents, there was a clear distance between them. The four of them were neutral at best, and outright hostile at worst. The two tried to argue for Vienna to attend a normal schooling, but Sera insisted he would be able to teach her, going so far as to not only introduce her to basic reading and writing, but also a secondary language he often used to record his own work and studies. Vienna remembers none of these arguments.

Sera was an ever-shifting person, often neutrally kind towards Vienna on good days, and extremely aggressive on bad ones. She learned to stay quiet and keep to herself, as otherwise she wouldn’t be able to predict if Sera would carefully guide her or berate her for being unable to do a task. Vienna became relatively passive as a result, firm in the few beliefs that Sera instilled in her, but otherwise heeding to his beck and call. He remains one of few figures that Vienna will listen to with little to no hesitation or doubt, a learned behavior.

Around the time Vienna was six, she was introduced to her younger brother, Finn, four at the time. He stayed longer than her parents usually did, around a month or so at a time, but was still away more often than not. Still, he was around enough for the two to become somewhat close over the course of a few years.

Where Vienna was quiet and careful, Finn was energetic and loud. He is the one who first brought her beyond the informal front porch of the facility, introducing her to the natural world that surrounded them. She had been outside before, of course, but never without permission or reason. She’d never left a ten foot radius from the door. He changed that after days of convincing, also becoming the reason she scraped her face after chasing her through the surrounding forest. Vienna was later harshly scolded for this and her wound was left improperly treated for a day or two, whereupon Sera taught her how to properly dress and clean wounds. She rarely left the facility grounds after that.

### Learning Medicine

Sera officially introduced Vienna to what he called medicine when she turned eight. She’d previously been learning indirectly from whatever he had done, with the scrape incident becoming her first proper introduction to the subject.

Sera taught her everything she knows about medicine and then some, introducing her to the tests and experiments he runs on occasion. It was then he began calling her “Five.” Derived, he claimed, from her first initial. Even Finn only ever called her “Vi,” and Vienna nearly forgot she had another name to begin with.

(If you asked Vienna, years later, what the experiments were for, they would have no answer. They speculate that Sera worked for some greater organization, which would explain why he occasionally disappeared for hours or days on end with no notice. Even then, sometimes it seemed as if the tests were a result of whatever random thought crossed his mind that day.)

Vienna became his assistant and occasional subject, most often recording simple notes and providing an alternative perspective. By age eleven, she became well-versed in the procedures, even being allowed to go so far as to make direct modifications to experiments and proposing some of her own. She rarely spoke in anything beyond short phrases, and her footsteps were so quiet you would hear a pin drop before you heard her enter a room. Years of constant harsh corrections and reprimands had forced her to become an obedient and composed assistant, near professional in nature.

When he was around, Finn also assisted in experiments. Sera more often assigned Finn dangerous or difficult tasks, mocking him when he completed them incorrectly, and leaving Vienna to tend to any wounds that would result. Sera often forced him to take part in the stranger experiments, studying his behavior before and after being put in dangerous situations. These routines became a regular for the three of them whenever Finn stayed over, until his visits became more sporadic and shorter over the course of a few years.

As Finn came less and less, Sera grew more and more bitter. He snapped more, his patience wore thinner. Vienna remembers he once smashed a vial against the wall before storming out of the room, only to come back seconds later to pick up the glass bare-handed. She wouldn’t be able to count the amount of times she had stood in his office as he tore through dozens of folders, leaving ripped and scattered papers across the floor to sort and fix before he returned.

The last time Finn visited was the worst of all, with Sera barely masking hostility with a thin façade of kindness. Finn had been twelve, Vienna fifteen. The second day, he claimed that he wanted to observe the effects of freezing temperatures on health and wellness in adolescent bodies, talking about examining the effects of movement on preventing cold-related sickness or infections. He locked Finn outside of the facility overnight, occasionally standing in a window overlooking the outside. Finn was left with clothing that was far too thin for the subfreezing temperatures of winter, and when Vienna went out hours later to check on him and monitor his condition, she found him dead.

### Aftermath

Sera blamed Vienna for Finn’s death, claiming that she had full control of the situation. *She* had been the one to lock the door, *she* had been the one who modified the so-called experiment to become what it had been. It was her fault he was dead. Sera had just been unfortunate enough to be present. Later, he claimed that he hadn’t even known she had done it.

Vienna trusted his word on it completely, taking the blame for his death. She came to believe that she *had* killed him, though whether it was with her own hands or through her actions she never could say. Her parents called her a murderer, berating Sera for how she was raised in such a way to resort to killing her own brother. Sera threw them out when they came to take her with them, and swore to do worse if they ever returned. Vienna does not remember their visit. He promised Vienna that he would protect her, and that it wasn’t her fault. He said he was her *only* protector, the only chance she had to stay safe.

Even still, Sera often held this over Vienna’s head, justifying his biting comments with the fact that she had killed someone. Her own blood, no less, one of the few people she was ever taught to care for. If she reacted negatively to these reminders, she was often refused meals or rest as indirect punishment. When she hesitantly refused to assist in his experiments, Sera mocked her for her guilt, forcing her to become involved at a more personal level that she hadn’t before. It felt foreign, like she was taking the place of Finn in Sera’s eyes.

Over the course of the next few months, this treatment slowly worsens, with Vienna becoming completely dependent on Sera’s kindness. She blames herself completely, mostly disregarding the empty comforts he provides to her. Even when he offers her a more normal lifestyle, going back to observing the experiments and a regular cycle of meals, she refuses, believing that she deserves to be treated this way.

### Post-Aftermath

After a particularly long day, Sera completely snapped at Vienna after she failed to complete something he had asked of her. Rather than mocking her for her incompetence or guilting her for her shortcomings, he folds into his anger, grabbing her by the collar and throwing her out the facility doors. Vienna can distinctly remember him yelling at her to “die how you deserve to, just like he did” before slamming the door shut and stalking away. She stayed there for a moment, frozen, before crawling towards the doors, careful tapping dissolving into pounding on the door as she begged for Sera to let her back inside. She only stopped when she heard something crash on the other side, and stumbled away from the door as Sera swung it open, a dangerous look in his eyes.

They remember trying to fight back, if only for a bit. It went wrong nearly instantly for them, and they were dragged back inside the facility with a handprint plastered on their face in faded red and a new bruise blooming on their arm, Sera muttering about their incompetence.

Getting thrown out became a frequent solution Sera resorted to after that, and Vienna often sat outside for hours at a time waiting to be let back in again. Even now, no matter the number of layers they wear, they can’t escape the chill that’s settled on their skin.

Eventually, Sera never came to let her back in.

She doesn’t really know if he was just waiting longer than usual, if he was testing her, or if he’d just plain forgotten. All they know is that eventually, the night came and went, and they took a tentative step away. And then another.

She kept walking for a while. Something about the simplicity of the solution made it all the more terrifying, like she'd failed some unspoken test Sera had tried, and that he would be coming to drag her back home any second now, but nothing ever happened.

Around late-afternoon, they stumbled out of the woods, with nothing but open sky before them. They followed a path a short distance away to a town. Refusing to take the hospitality offered by those there, she snuck into a small storage room behind someone’s home and spent the night there.

They set up shop as a medical practitioner in order to take care of themselves. While they were still around seventeen, they lied about their age, and those who went to them often left with good results. Despite the minimal conversation they held and their obvious nervous habits, Vienna slowly built up a relatively trustworthy reputation, though throughout the first few months several people tried to offer more than just simple monetary compensation. She refused, resolute in having to earn her own position and comfort. She rarely spoke to anyone outside of her clients, and even then struggled to remember the names of her regulars, but she liked it that way.

They lit a candle for Finn when the snow began to fall again.

During her time here, a client offered her a book on the principles of medicinal treatment. She initially refused, thinking they were attempting to undermine her abilities, but they left it in her care regardless. It was this book that introduced her further to the possibility of raising the dead, something that she had considered completely impossible before, though it gave minimal information on how exactly to do so. She started becoming obsessed with the idea, doing any possible research into the subject she could. She believed that by reviving Finn, her wrongs would be righted, and that Sera could trust her abilities again, allowing things to go back to how they had been when she was growing up.

Her nerves caught up to her eventually, paranoia that the townspeople somehow knew they had killed Finn, or that they were secretly reporting back to Sera. This spiked when a couple passing through stopped by her area, and she incorrectly identified them as her own parents. If they had recognized her, then they knew she was alive, and she was still close enough to the facility that they could have gone to visit Sera. Or maybe they were off to take legal action, to come back and arrest her, or to kill her, or—well, you get the idea.

Vienna set off for elsewhere, closing her doors at this small town. They set their sights on the city, where it’s likely that they’ll be able to blend in with more ease and find a better way to support themselves. They reasoned it would be easier to get lost in a crowd, along with being able to set up better security for themselves without seeming too out of place.

They took interest in the Hunter’s exam when they got closer to the city, and after a few weeks of research to figure out what it is, basically decided “screw it,” made the first impulse decision of their entire life, and joined the first group they could find that was bound for the testing location.

Their main goal with passing the exam is to build enough of a network that they can find their family—and, more importantly, where Finn was buried.

## Relationships

### Ren and Truth

Vienna holds very little care for her parents. She distantly remembers them, but more in the same way that someone else might remember a very average teacher they've had in middle school years later. Her relationship with them is nothing like that of a normal parent and child. She holds very little against them.

### Sera

Vienna holds some bitterness towards Sera, but ultimately the fear and respect they have for him wins over that. If the two were to meet again, she would likely fall into old habits and heed his beck and call. They remember him as a mentor and a guide, and the person who taught them most of everything that they know. They trust him with their life.

### Alvox

Vienna holds a form of respect for Alvox. They are slightly cautious around them, but he piques their interest.

### Aspect

Vienna believes that Aspect sees too much good in the world. They think that her optimism could mean her downfall, but hold nothing against her.

### Basil

Vienna holds nothing against Basil. They think of them as a bit of a quirky figure, and perhaps a little naïve.

### Everan

After spending a few months exchanging letters with Everan, Vienna has come to think of him as something similar to a friend. They despise the nature of his Constitution, but hold a form of respect for him regardless. They think his name is too many syllables, but haven't voiced that thought.

### Kyouma

Vienna thinks that Kyouma is far too confident, along with a bit loud for their tastes.

### Victor

Vienna is intrigued by Victor and the importance of his title. The only doctor they'd ever known was Sera, and she holds a slight fear that the two are more alike that they appear, despite his insistence that he isn't a medical practitioner.

### Yua

Vienna believes Yua is a force to be reckoned with, and occasionally tries to assist her in order to gain a form of protection from her strength.

## Trivia

* The scar on her cheek is from slamming into a tree when she was 7 years old.
* Vienna cannot swim. Despite this, they do not fear of drowning.
* The sun charm they have on their necklace matches the one Finn had of a moon.