Summer Astraea Aurora

Summer Astraea Aurora is a former Beacon student and member of Team SSAN.

Appearance
Astry is tall and has a well-rounded body with white hair that fades to a golden hue at the tips. Her hair is spiky, with a group of strands standing up at the top of her head. Her bangs are long and tied in a braid at the left side of her face to keep them from blocking her vision. Covering her neck is a plumage of feathers with the same coloration as her hair.

She wears a complex suit of armor colored light blue, red, and white with golden details woven into a thick, buttoned-up, long-sleeve, tailcoat reinforced by a metal skeleton (which is needed to fit in her armor to her clothes) woven in between two thickly woven, strong fabric and is akin to a bulletproof vest. To cover her legs, she wears pants made of the same material as her shirt, as well as reinforced by a metal skeleton.

Covering her chest is a fitting breastplate that has her emblem painted on the middle, while covering her shoulders are small shoulderguards that also have her emblem painted on in the middle. Her forearms are covered in thick metal gauntlets lined with a thick, heat-insulating fabric.

Her waist is protected by petal-shaped armor connected to a guard that covers her crotch. Her thighs are covered by a thick metal-plating held together via belts, while her lower legs are covered with modified greaves while her feet are covered in sabatons.

Personality
Summer is seen by many as the weird "military enthusiast" who seemingly shows little care for anything else. She displays a casual laid-back attitude and seems to be easily accepting of almost anything that happens around her.

She has a very roundabout way of speaking, which confuses many who converse with her. She is mostly seen with a tired or bored expression on her face and usually speaks in a monotonous voice. She rarely shows other emotions to people outside her circle of friends and families, but she surprisingly makes a lot of expressions when around them. Her eyes also seem to never change, almost always semi-open which looks like she's sleepy.

But inside, Summer is actually very lonely and either awkward or outright avoids others she hasn't met yet. She lacks a lot of social skills due to having most of her childhood spent on scavenging for food to keep herself and her old family, an orphanage, alive and she rarely, if at all, talks to the other orphans and the caretakers. However, thanks to such experiences she has gained a strong sense of responsibility, strength, persistence, and sense of purpose.

Her love of military-related stuff is solely due to her father, a military officer who saved her and her old family. She loves her adoptive father greatly and looks up to him as a hero, so she constantly tries her best to make him proud of her.

Unfortunately, due to his doting and her need to impress him so much, she has grown overly reliable to others and their responses. She can't even go alone most of the time as well due to this and hates being left out or ignored. If she is unnoticed by her friends, she'll try to find ways to get noticed, like teasings and such, anything to at least remind them that she's there. She even emulates her previous friend's weird speech pattern so that she's more interesting to talk to, or thats what she believes. She is also very vengeful, and can snap at others who hurts her friends. She also easily holds grudges to people who do hurt them, even if it was by accident.

Much of her present personality is gained from the people she befriended and interacted with during her time in her previous school. Her mischievous and pranking habits were from her previous classmate and first close friend, while her methodical attitude and great attention to detail is thanks to another of her first friends.

She doesn't like people touching her neck-feathers, and may attack someone by reflex if they touch them.

Backstory
Summer is bird faunus born in poverty, in a town ravaged by civil unrest and racial discrimination. Her parents, for unknown reasons, left her in an orphanage when she was very young, around 4, with her first name being the only thing she knows.

Much of her early childhood was living in the harsh war-torn town, trying her best to stay alive. When she reached 8 she, along with a few others alongside one of the two caretakers in the orphanage, were chosen and tasked to rummage around the area for food or the occasional ration drops. Not only that, since the discrimination for her kind was very serious, riots would always break out between them and these usually end in bloodshed and bullet fire. She was lucky to get out almost unscathed whenever she found herself in these kinds of riots. During one expedition for food she met a man holding up a sign of a dangerous looking animal with claw marks on the side. Seeing her, the man knelt down and shared a few words with her.

"It is hard to live in this place. You must be strong, so that you can protect those you care for. However to do so you must-.", these are the words passed onto her by a White Fang member who attempted to recruit Summer but ended up getting captured before he could finish his message. The unfinished message stayed with Summer however, and though she may never know the end of his little speech, she was determined to follow these words.

From her 8th to her 9th, her life was a continuous daily cycle of scavenging for food and materials, all the while running through conflicts, stray bullets, and the heat of the sun beating down from above. This routine was very dangerous, but it kept her and the orphanage alive, if only for a little bit more, and that kept her going every day. Fortunately, the people who go look for these supplies are given more food than the rest, so Summer's usually fed enough to continue this routine. That was until a week before her birthday, when food started to become harder to find. Not only that, the supply of water going to the Orphanage stopped running, meaning that she'll and the other scavengers have to also find water while the others try to find the reason of the water outage and hopefully fix it.

Unfortunately, the new addition to her already hefty routine made her work harder, meaning the energy she uses now is more than the energy she gains back from the food. Three days was all it took to wear down the little girl, and this happened when she was trying to get the supplies she's scavenged back home.

With no energy to continue forward and the thirst and hunger being too great for her to manage, she was about to eat up all of the food and water she's got on herself but held herself back because she didn't want to return empty-handed and disappoint her brothers and sisters. She resorted to crawling, but she didn't got far and it only exhausted all the energy what was left in her. So she layed there, starving with food right next to her but not taking a single bite, and she slowly lost consciousness until she was out cold. She should've died of starvation at that moment, but it was then a military group passed by her unconscious body.

The officer of the group noticed the food and water on her and how she was sprawled on the ground, and initially thought she was shot. But upon closer inspection he found no bullet wounds, but did notice she was having a fever. So he took her to a medical center in the military camp just outside the town, where they diagnosed her of nearly starving and in desperate need of hydration.

Two day afterwards, Summer awoke to the sounds of a beeping machine and a tube stuck to her right arm in a place she's never seen. The tube on her arm greatly startled her, and almost pulled it out but was stopped just in time by the military officer. He warned her that if she pulled it out, she'll bleed and it'll hurt, which prompted the girl to let go of the tube and flop back down onto the bed.

The officer explained that she almost died of starvation and dehydration before asking why she didn't just eat the food and water she was holding. Summer then explained the constant struggles she and others had to go through to keep her home, the orphanage, safe and her family fed. She also explained that she wanted to give the supplies to her brothers and sisters first, which is why she didn't consume them.

The officer was greatly impressed at the girls resolve to help her home despite being a child, and after interacting with the girl informed his superior about the orphanage and urged him to rescue them and take them in as refuges. The superior, at first, refused rescuing them as they already have it bad enough with the amount of refuges they already have and told the officer to leave before later sending him and his group to the orphanage.

When they came back, they brought back with them everyone from the orphanage. There in the camp, the officer asked the caretaker of the orphanage if he could adopt a child who was under her care, who he showed was Summer when she directed the caretaker to the medical area where the girl was resting in. It was then she told Summer about what happened and that she has a new family, with her new father being the officer who saved her.

The officer's name was Douglas Aurora, and Summer was his new daughter starting that day, which was coincidentally her birthday. Her first present was a new name, Astraea, and a new family in her new home in Vacuo.

Due to her step-father and the military saving her and the orphanage, she has gained an great admiration for him and an interest in anything military-related like weapons, vehicles and people, and has since dreamed of becoming someone like her adoptive father who'll one day save a lot of people.

After a week in her new home, her new parents began homeschooling her. Whenever studying, Summer would try her hardest to impress her father whenever he was helping or just around. This is where she starts getting overly attached to him, and his doting attitude only made her more reliant on him.

During her teen years she began to question her true parents' whereabouts. This brought her to her step-father, who also didn't know but tried to help her nonetheless. Sadly, he soon found out via a dream that he accidentally killed them during a hectic escort mission via grenade, which he confirmed thanks to an eye-witness account of a survivor during said escort. The news greatly saddened him and filled him with both guilt for killing them and fear for losing his step-daughter's love. Yet, despite this, he still told her, saying that she "deserved to learn the truth."

As he expected, the news outraged her and she quickly distanced herself from her father. However, her father was persistent, and constantly asked for her to talk to him. This request was ignored until a month afterward, where she finally gave up and listened to his message.

"I was the reason you lost your family, and because of that you may never forgive me. But even if you despise me for the rest of your life, even if you hunted me down and killed me later on in your life, I will still love you. So please let me, even for just this one moment, give you my love, not for me nor my family, but for your's."

Her father's words reached Summer, and she soon enough forgave him with a hug. Afterward, her relationship between her step-father improved. She was now even more determined to become like her step-father, who retired when she reached 15.

During her previous school years, she was known for wearing military-esque outfits and armor (a military geek). She was also well known for her weapon, the Daring Damsel, which is a monster of a weapon as said by many of her classmates. There she made very few friends, her interests weird others out and whenever she tried she failed spectacularly. Not only that, the friends that she does have (weirdos whom she befriended out of desperation) is a crazed madman (girl) who believes she's an evil genius (and the person who helped in designing her signature weapon), and another who is a nimble thief who loves playing pranks and teasing others. The latter girl, at first, always butts heads with Summer, since she always tries to get the drop on her and finds teasing her a lot more enjoyable, and this has forced Summer to prank her back in nearly every occasion in revenge. However in the end, Summer ends up liking their interactions with eachother and vice versa, and the two end up becoming really close friends. Also, this friend's pranking habits end up rubbing off on Summer and is the sole reason why she teases and pranks her friends later on.

When she graduated, she asked her father if there's any good Academies for huntress-in-training and found Beacon. The school had a high reputation and many who graduate from it become great hunters and huntresses. With that in mind, she applied for Beacon and passed.

Unfortunately, her two friends didn't apply there but rather in the local Academy. After getting enrolled into Beacon, she never heard from her two friends ever again. She felt extremely lonely after this, and even emulated the genius's weird speech pattern to remind her of them, as well as hoping that it'll make her more interesting.

During the invasion of the Grimm on Vale, she and her teammate Akiba had to fend off the beasts as the civilians flee. Though they tried as best as they could, the Grimm were too many and they were forced to retreat. Unfortunately Akiba, who had run out of aura when he fought against a Grimm while the two were escaping, was heavily injured when another Grimm sideswiped him. He sustained a large laceration on his right arm and was knocked down. Summer, having been unable to protect him, lashed out her rage on the Grimm who stood no chance against her.

She was able to return with him to Beacon, only to find it was also under-attack. She regroup with her remaining teammates and fought the Grimm, the WF, and their own androids and robots.

A day after the Battle of Beacon, the academy has been lost to the Grimm. Add to that her failure to protect her teammate from danger the previous day, it made her feel dreadful, guilty and very disappointed with herself. The feeling didn't leave her, but upon seeing Nymbus arguing over the phone with someone regarding if she stayed or goes home, she couldn't help but try to do something. With the prospect of her new close friends splitting apart, and the chance that she'll end up alone, she couldn't help but act to prevent it, quickly intervening with Nymbus' call to try to convince her mother otherwise. This and with Scarlett's help, the two succeeded in convincing Nymbus' mother, and this lightened up her spirits a bit.

When Akiba woke up the next day she felt greatly relieved that he was okay, and when he discussed that he'll be investigating on the attack, and suggested that someone had caused, even planned, this to happen. This lit up a flame of vengeance inside her, and this flame only greatened when she looked back at the destruction these people caused, reminding her of her original hometown's terrible condition. She quickly told Akiba that she'll come with him so that she can take revenge and also make up for her inability to protect him before.

Daring Damsel (Heavy Ballistic Dust-Paneled Machinegun-Buster Sword)
A weapon simply described as a sword large enough to hide an average person behind it, the Daring Damsel is Summer's one and only weapon. It is a large doubled-edged greatsword with a complex set of handles that enables her to hold the weapon in many different ways.

The weapon is around 5 feet long and 1 feet wide. It is double-bladed, with a set of two blades: an outer blade and inner blade. To give the weapon strength while also keeping it relatively light, both blades are hollow and have a thickness of 3 inches. To increase the strength of the outer blades even more, they were configured to sit on top of the inner blades. The outer blades are connected via a T-shaped mechanism (Or simply T-mechanism) in the middle of the blades. Its main purpose is to act as a railing for Damsel's outer blades, enabling them to extend to twice its length. This also hides the mechanisms needed for the weapon to transform into its gun form.

Daring Damsel's gun form is a light machine gun that keeps its ammo in a small drum-magazine placed at the right side at the base of the weapon's right inner blade. The gun can fire two bullet per second, with each magazine holding around 50 machine-gun rounds.

Lining the weapon's inner blades, as well as the guard and a few revealing parts of the T-mechanism are thin dust plates that glows the color of the dust being used, and enables the weapon to act as a hoverboard and giving it maneuverability to compensate for its size and weight. These parts also alleviates the weapon's overall weight when active.

The weapon is very difficult to use due to its size and weight, even with the help of the dust panels, and needs a user to be both strong and experienced in using large weapons similar to it, like being able to shift the weapon's weight around efficiently, as well as keeping in mind their opponent's, as well as their own, position as well as footing. It is also a pain to repair, as most of the parts are needed to be disassembled to be able to effectively repair its many parts and mechanisms, which forces her to really take her time.

When unneeded. the Daring Damsel sheathes into a relatively smaller, box-shaped blade with the handle being kept unchanged.

Full Potential
Her semblance enables her to create a symbol enclosed in a circle that stores energy which is generated through work done during the semblance's activation. A encircled symbol will appear behind whatever Summer want's to empower (called a target), whether its her arm, her feet, or her weapon, and will stay behind and follow the target, hovering just a few inches away from it.

Whenever the target is doing work or, if its an object, moving, a band grows out at one side that grows at a rate of how much work the target is doing until it merges with itself at the other side, creating a ring. Whenever a ring is complete a "Ding" comes out of the symbol signifying this. She can continue to create more rings as long as the target keeps moving, but each ring needs more work done than the previous ring.

If their is at least one full ring, it can then be release to the target. To activate this, a certain action must be done, which is determined upon the semblance's activation by Summer and shown in the middle of the symbol as an icon. When the target performs the certain action or icon action, the energy charged within the symbol is added to the target.

However, if the target fails to release the energy within a minute or is immobilized during activation for 3 seconds the charged symbol, due to having nowhere to go, will instead explode out in a shockwave, with the shockwave's direction facing towards the target. If the target releases it with an incomplete ring, the energy charged in the incomplete ring will be sent back to the target, but the complete ring(s) will still be added to the energy of the target's action.

As of late, she has gained the ability to summon another symbol, enabling her to charge two at the same time. The two symbols charge at the same time if its on the same target or, if on another target, depending on its amount of work instead.

She can also merge the two symbols to create a Combination Symbol, where the two action icons are merged and the actions must be done in sequence. The way the sequence works is that there is a symbol with an action that will act as a base and the symbol added to it will be the next action to be done, and when performed the two actions share the same power charged by the combination symbol. For instance: one symbol has a jump action icon, and then a downward slash action icon is merged onto it. The first action will be the jump before following with the downward slash. If the target doesn't perform the next move of the combination symbol, then they will experience the same backlash like if normal, but the energy will be instead half of the whole combination symbol.

Also, if one symbol with an existing amount of charge merges with another, the charge of the one merging will be added to the base symbol. She can even add more than one symbol to one base symbol since, when merged, the combination symbol functions as one symbol. This enables her to add more moves into a combination symbol, but the energy of the backlash now depends on what move she's failed to do and how many moves remaining after the failed move. An example would be that if she has a combination symbol with 3 moves and she failed to do the second, since she stopped and now can't perform the 3rd move as well, the damage will be 2/3rd's of the symbol's charged energy.

Note: The semblance does NOT protect the target from the effects from doing an empowered action. For example, if Summer empowers her arm to punch a wall, the bones in her arms may break due to the collision between it and the wall.

Prowess
Summer is a strong and sturdy warrior with a well-toned body. Her arms are slightly shorter than the average person's, but they are built to handle a great amount of weight, like her weapon. With her weapon being quite heavy, she should move rather slowly if not for its dust panels that, if using wind dust and/or gravity dust, will alleviate the weight greatly, thus allowing her to move more quickly with little effort as long as their's dust in the panels to keep it light.

After creating her weapon, she discovered it was large enough to be used defensively. Due to its width, it can hide a person like herself behind it, thus making it a portable makeshift shield that she can carry around to protect herself and/or others. This only improved when she activates the dust on the weapon and giving it effects like blowing away anything within close proximity if using wind dust or burning anything it makes contact with it if using fire dust.

As stated earlier, thanks to wind and/or gravity dust the weapon can be surprisingly fast due to the alleviated weight but it is still heavy and requiring Summer's strength, endurance, and skill to use effectively. But with the lessened weight, it allows her to perform risky tactics like an all-or-nothing strike without having to worry too much on getting slowed down by it and can go toe-to-toe with most other fighters with smaller and faster weapons, however she prefers the aforementioned tactic than any other due to how satisfying it is for her to achieve. By setting her opponent up in advance and finding creative ways to get her opponents to move into said positions, like planning out her movements and attacks beforehand, using feints to find an opening, using the hoverboard function to send her weapon flying towards her opponent to force them to dodge or block, and the like, she can, if she's understood her enemy long enough, pretty much control the flow of the fight and bring them down without working too much of a sweat, not unless of course they pull out something she's not expecting thus throwing her off.

Having said that, Summer is able to somewhat predict the actions of her opponents. She takes note of her opponent's movements then find weaknesses, blind spots, or even habitual body motions that she can use to better set up her next attack. Although she can get too focused on this which can loosen her guard for a split second, allowing people to get the drop on her if she's not too careful.

Thanks to the kit she has, she's capable of handling almost all kinds of Grimm. Against most flying Grimm like minor Nevermores or Grimm in groups, i.e. Beowulves, she uses Damsel's gun form to mow them down. When fighting with more armoured Grimm like the Deathstalker or Boarbatusk she instead resorts to using Damsel's melee form alongside her semblance, enabling her to break through the toughest of armours with relative ease. She can also outmaneuver most ground Grimm by using her weapon's hoverboard function, and can even catch up to a Nevermore in flight at full power.

She can also use her semblance to increase her strength and do superhuman feats like jumping up to as high as a two-story building, or destroy a wall with a single punch. She can even empower her own weapon or even other people, although the latter has its risks.

Etymology
Summer is the time of the year when it is the hottest, and is represented with bright and vibrant colors.

Astraea is taken from αστηρ (aster) meaning star.

Aurora is the name of the roman goddess of the morning, and also means "dawn".

Trivia

 * Summer's outfit is a mixture of real WWII uniforms and the uniforms worn by Gallian forces in Valkyria Chronicles.
 * Her weapon was conceived during the Back to the Future Day, along with an idea of "Combining Cloud's Buster Sword with a hoverboard."
 * Her fighting style is a reference to how a hunter fights using a greatsword in Monster Hunter, which is usually a hit-and-run tactic. The semblance was also taken from the greatswords ability to charge its attacks.
 * She has difficulty recalling the names of others, and often fails in pronouncing them correctly.