Professor Willow

**Professor Willow** is a researcher, monster trainer, and artificer from Chikyu.

## Background

### Early life

As a child, Willow was fascinated by the few relics from Chikyu's past that had been scavenged from the Wilderness, many implying that the Chikyu of generations ago was much more well connected than the one she lived in, and also many of them contradicting each other. Many of Chikyu's researchers wrote the problems in these relics off as fantasy: They did not line up simply because they were made up in the first place.

Willow held onto her belief that they were real and could be explained as she grew up and began to delve into the Wilderness herself. Looking more specifically for these fragments of the past, Willow would find more of them on her own than the entire region had in many years, culminating in the discovery of an underground ruin that no one alive had known of.

### The Ruin

The walls of this ruin were covered in carvings which were close to the writing of Chikyu, which Willow found she could decipher easily enough, although there seemed to be very little value to what she could read. This changed when she found tracing out the words as she spoke them activated something, tracing a carving that said "Sing" caused a light song to fill the air. To her dismay, she would find no one else seemed to be able to read the words, or even hear the music as she had.

Despite the advice of Isamu and others, Willow continued delving deeper into the ruin's secrets, spending more and more of each day within it until she stopped returning home at all. The longer she spent in the ruin, the easier the strange carvings were to read. She could begin to cast the spells even without the glyphs nearby to trace, so long as she could remember the motions.

Eventually, she came across a carving that was not just words, but a tablet containing full paragraphs, perhaps a speech or dedication. One "word" in the carvings stood out to her: She was unable to read this one. Suspecting it to be a name, she traced out the glyph as she had done many times before. After doing so, the world turned black and white. What first appearing as a infinite void, Willow would come to realize this was still the ruin, just different. The chaotic patches of black were made up of countless numbers of the symbols she had been investigating, and as she focused on this strange world, she could tell they were making up the walls and rubble that had been here before.

Struggling through the strange world, Willow rushed from the ruin to try to reach Isamu. But unlike the features around her, people and creatures did not seem to exist within this place. Except, perhaps, the infinite little glyphs. As minutes stretched into days, Willow grew paranoid in the void, believing the glyphs to be looking at her. She began casting spell after spell to no avail within the void. None of them did anything but produce more of the glyphs.

After an unknowable amount of time, Willow remembered a word she had seen, at the very entrance of the ruin, that had never seen to do anything. She cast it once more, "Refresh," causing color to all at once return to the world. But as Willow adjusted to the sudden change, she realized with fear, and then excitement, that she was not on Chikyu anymore.

## Spells and Equipment

Willow has access to many cantrips and glitch magic from her time in the Chikyu ruin. On Feraguo, Willow would learn devisery and use it to imbue objects with glitch magic, creating chaotic items that only Willow seems to understand how to use, many requiring very strange and precise steps to execute whatever it is it does.

The most common device she has with her is the Verify Tests Machine, or Refresher, a palm-sized device with an orange number display. A short time after being activated, if not deactivated, it will cast Willow's Refresh spell, with the goal of unsticking herself from failed glitch magic. If it casts, it will flip the number display by one to alert Willow something has gone wrong.

## Planes visited

* Chikyu
* Feraguo