Tennei

## **Tennei, The Artificer**

Tennei is a ruthless engineer coming from a rich Seran family. She is incredibly inept at magic, which resulted in her enrolling to Satran Academy engineering department with the purpose of creating magical machinery as a replacement for her lack of magical skill. She succeeded greatly in this field, setting herself for a comfortable life in New Satra. At some point, she was commissioned for custom arm implants for Dr. Livell Corit, her former teacher from the academy, which she quickly constructed and secured her position as his personal assistant. With the access to Libvell’s research into forgotten spectre magic she was able to create her greatest invention yet – a pair of gravity bending gloves.

Unlike her sister, Tennei is cold and calculated. She was greatly spoiled by her parents while growing up, which resulted in her becoming selfish and materialistic. While not actively malicious, almost everything she does has her goals as priority. While she can be pretty egoistic, she is not against working with or for someone else, as long as she will benefit from this.

## **Story**

Some people are just born lucky. As a daughter of rich Seran merchant, Tennei had everything she demanded – toys, clothes, cosmetics, even Satran technology. While her sister Eleya found joy in archery and playing outside, Tennei embraced the wealth and spent her free time spending her father's fortune, breaking hearts and partying all nights. As a child, she would surprise her classmates with a new magical toys her father bought for her every week, but she could never use magic herself. At some point her peers started noticing it, and began to make fun of her because of that – in response, she tried her best in various magic classes, and even hired private teachers. At the age of 15 for the first time Tennei found a thing that money could not buy – true magic.

With the financial backing of her father which she used lavishly, and which she never questioned, she could easily solve all problems with her body, but one’s magic comes from their soul. Even the most powerful eternal ones would struggle to alter the soul of a sentient being, barring the fact that no sane god or demon from Seru would even attempt to perform a task like this out of ethical and legal concern. The only thing Tennei could do about it was to grind her teeth out of envy when she saw her classmates performed a magical tricks.

The mockery of her schoolmates made her furious, and she vowed that she will find a way to wield her own magic, even if she had to rip it out of the frozen heart of Nekaru. In desperation, she travelled to New Satra with a plan to replace her own hands with special implants capable of performing programmed spells – a custom device costing so much, that even her miraculously rich father refused to pay the full price at once. Tennei planned to live in Satra for a while, before her dream implants were paid in fully… except in the end, she never got them.

She learned bitter truth from a letter. Fadon Noriw, her father, has been arrested for his multiple tax frauds, leaving Tennei with only what she had with herself, and with her spending habits, it would not last for a week. Feeling betrayed and vulnerable, separated from her wealth but still determined to achieve her goals by any means necessary, Tennei had to swallow her pride or else she would risk becoming homeless. Given she was already in Satra, she decided to try one last chance she had to fulfil her goals, and enrolled to the Satran Academy.

The artificial will given to machines can perform the same magic as living things do, and over the next few years Tennei worked hard and studied even harder to create machines which would do exactly this for her. She had to sell all of her expensive clothing and jewellery and move to a small apartment in the Lower City – all she could afford with her side job as a shop clerk.

She met many interesting people during her 4 years in the Academy, but maintained contact with only a few after getting her Satran Engineer License. During the final exam, there was only one guy who scored higher than her. Unlike the natural magic, creating the artificial one went smoothly for her, and she specialised in making artificial limbs and golem parts. With the fresh license and good recommendations from (most of) her teachers she had no problem finding jobs afterwards. She had never heard from her father again, and learned that her sister had a part in killing some demon under the swamp on west coast only because every possible news outlet wrote about this even for a few weeks at the very least. Rejecting her family completely, she began to build her own fortune in New Satra.

When Dr. Libvell Corit, her former teacher from the Academy contacted her with a commission for a custom arm prosthetic, she fulfilled the request without hesitation, and by doing that achieved exactly what she wanted. Tennei joined him in his lab as his assistant, and while still being able to do various freelance works, she had the exclusive access to his research on the old spectre magic, brought straight from the desert. The old magic terrified her, but she started experimenting with it on her own, breaking the laws of physics and bending gravity. She could not monetize these experiments, but the weapons she created with the spectre designs she used as personal toys, to satisfy the unfulfilled lust for power she felt all these years. Although cautious, Libvell was fine with – as long as Tennei would test them in the mountains around the city where she could not destroy half of his laboratory again.

The power trip she had with her gravity-controlling gloves would not last forever. She tried hard to forget the origins of the spectre magic she was using, and refused to join Libvell on his trip to the desert, putting a lot of effort to use her pride to mask her fear. The only thing she wanted was the power magic granted, power for her own sake. She played with what she did not understood.

All would change when another old student of Libvell came to his lab, searching for the old mage and finding only Tennei.

In the Stargazer’s absence, she was forced to swallow her pride once again. The cry of the abhorrent had to be silenced.

## **In-game**

Tennei is a complex, combo heavy mage. Her abilities are a powerful disengage tools, while being a viable damage source too.

Abilities
If an enemy pushed by her abilities, or her abilities hit terrain, a Piece of Debris drops.
All Pieces of Debris disappear after 10 seconds.
 Gravity Well
 Scatter
If she is holding a Piece of Debris, she throws it dealing 8 damage to the first enemy hit and slowing them by 90% for 1 second.

## **Trivia**

* Tennei was mentioned for the first time in Eleya's backstory.
* Initially, she was not supposed to become a playable character. Her kit (alongside the title) were made in a vaccum, and only connected to the character by pure accident. The placeholder name given to the kit was very similar to "Tennei" and the decision was made to turn her into a full character.
* Originally her name was written as "Tannai".
* Her title and color scheme were inspired by Artificer from Risk of Rain 2.
* Tennei is the first playable character who wears glasses.