Bruin Umber

"I am a lot of things: arrogant, selfish, smart-aleck, but I could be worse. Know that."

- Bruin Umber

==Appearance:==

Bruin is a average-looking boy of 17, with dark blue eyes and brown hair. His body is wiry, thin but strong, and is of an average height. Before he returned to Vale for the Vytal Festival, Bruin wore a rough brown denim jacket over a plain white shirt, his emblem situated as a patch on his right sleeve and around his neck is a long dulling red scarf to keep out the cold. He also wears a pair of well-fitting jeans and good running shoes. However, when he returned to Vale, he put on a stylish brown zip-up hoodie with his favorite necklace.

After the Battle of Beacon, he became more focused on travelling gear, now wearing a brown leather jacket over a white shirt. Also, he returned to using his scarf and began letting his chin hairs grow out a bit, giving him a more grizzled look.

==Personality:==

"Are you always this hard to work with?!"

- Luna Airgid

Bruin can best be described by the Myers-Briggs personality type INTP. He is quiet to anyone who he doesn't know and majorly sarcastic to those he knows, for good and for ill. Easily bored, he throws himself into one flight of fancy after another, picking up new things along the way. He enjoys fighting not for the sake of fighting, but the art and skill of the duel. He cares not for titles or supposed authority, instead wishing to understand the person as they are. His unnecessarily high standard for people leaves him alone for most of his life, save for his mother and "brother," and giving him a streak of arrogance, due to him believing himself to be one of the few to pass his own high expectations.

Despite this, Bruin still strives to be a hero like in his stories, one who protects the helpless and avenge the fallen. Even if he views the situation as foolish, he will still provide any aid he can, with a snarky comment or two on his lips, not because he thinks he has to help, but the fact that he wants to.

==Background:==

"I don’t need your pity. I can provide for myself just fine."

- Bruin Umber

Early Life

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Bruin was born in a small village outside of the Vale cityscape. Not much is known about this time, as the village was attacked by bandits and Grimm when Bruin was 3. Escaping the carnage with Bruin in arms, his mother streaked into the forest in hopes of finding her way to the city for safety, while the village burned. Eventually she reached a road, too tired to continue, when an event that changed Bruin's life happened.

A Huntress by the name of Nox Umber came riding on a horse in the direction of the village, when she spotted Brun's mother leaning against a tree on the side of the road. With the remnants of her energy, she convinced the Huntress to take Bruin, as there was nothing left for him in the ruins of his home village. Nox reluctantly accepted the child, and the woman staggered back to the village. It is assumed that she later died from her injuries.

After being more or less adopted by Nox, he was raised mostly by her twin sister Candace, her husband Gary Yron, and their son Albus. Despite losing his family once, Bruin quickly adapted to his new family with a certain silent bliss that he never truly outgrown. From this family and his mother's willingness to love what was simply a lucky break, he grown into someone that nobody would have expected from a mere boy living on the outskirts of Vale: a child of the city.

The Accident and What Came After

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When Bruin was 5, there was a major accident that happened on one of Nox's missions. Though little is known exactly, certain details had been noted. Nox’s mission, as well as her fellow 5 Hunters, were charged with clearing out an abandoned village of Grimm to see if it was possible to rebuild. According to reports from the one of the only other survivors, a strangely intelligent pack of Beowulves trapped the whole band in the middle of town, along with another Huntress that happened to be in the area. Of those involved, 3 dead, 2 wounded, and the mysterious Huntress MIA.

When Nox returned, heavily scarred and emotionally exhausted, she decided that a temporary retirement from active duty of being a Huntress was just what she needed, and later became a literature teacher at a small elementary school in Vale. Bruin began his quest for some sort of interest at about 9, seeing that he will someday need to find a future career and opted to beat life to the punch.

The Quest for a Reason

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For the next 4 years, he tried a large variety of careers, some notable ones being violinist, cop, journalist, athlete, and even bartender. None held his attention, though sometimes he came back to a career that held his attention longer than usual. Finally, when he turned 13, his mother decided to begin training Bruin in the art of Hunting. With this, he found his match. Learning simple combat tactics and survival techniques, he shown to be a clever fighter, a strange mix of brutality and elegance in his fighting style, though he never lost his talent of dodging tasks and total focus on a single task.

Preparing for a Huntsman academy was hard for the new warrior, as his fellow wannabe Hunters prepare for longer than a month or two for a combat school training. When he failed to enter Signal, he instead opted to focus more on home-training with a tried-and-true Huntress. Working to his advantage, he trained outside the City of Vale with his mother, who came out her retirement to gain access to official, but low level, Hunting missions to bring Bruin along with. When he hit the age to sign up for an academy, he chose to go to the Minstrel Hunter academy, Haven Academy, to better understand other cultures.

==Weapon and Ability:==

Bruin, unlike most students who uses complicated weapons with alternating forms and high maintenance, instead opted for a standard bow, arrows, and a pair of short swords. He called his swords Dismal Eclipse and Luminous Twilight and dubbed the bow Thousand-Yard Stare. His arrows, however, are the most interesting portion of his combat kit.

Of the 25 arrows that he keeps with his weapons at all times, he has 10 specially-made arrows whose heads are pure Dust crystals, prepared in a way to automatically explode on contact with a solid surface (not that much preparation is needed.) Of those 10, his average loadout is 5 fire arrows (generates a small but damaging explosion), 2 gravity arrows (pushes away everyone in the area; useful for non-lethal crowd control), and 3 ice or earth arrows (generates a rough field that traps the target in ice or earth), though other dust types may be used in his arrows, dependent on the situation, prep time, or resources.

As for abilities, he is not a frontline fighter. His Aura pool is rather on the smaller end, meaning he would absorb less damage without risking his hide, but he makes up for it with his natural speed and agility. He is also clever and calm, easily making strategies and battle plans on the fly, throwing most people off guard long enough for a finishing strike.

==Semblance

Bruin's semblance is called Phantom. It allows him to seemingly meld into shadows, disappearing from most people's view. This achieves a sort of invisibility that allows him to move somewhat freely. However, his ability to move is somewhat affected, slowing down his agility and lessening the force that he can put behind his weapons. Thus, it serves as an emergency escape when he needs to leave quickly.

This invisibility does not mean that Bruin is incapable of being tracked in this state. Any noises he makes when invisible still sound, any arrows he manages to fire suddenly appear the moment he shoots them, and he is still beholden to the laws of the physical world. His invisibility can last at most 6 minutes before he begins risking his health and consciousness, less if his Aura has taken a beating

Strangely, while invisible, Bruin has the ability to see things and sometimes shadows of people that are not there, though he cannot interact with them. Nobody can explain this phenomenon, though some superstitious people that he has told believe that these are in fact ghosts. Bruin does not believe that, but he still stays away from these images whenever possible.

==Trivia:==

* [|"Bruin" ] is the Dutch word for brown and is used in English as a folk term for brown bears. [ |"Umber" ] is derived from the word "umbra," meaning shadow, and is connected to the term “terra di ombre,” or earth of shadow in Italian.

* The members of team BLAK have a double allusion: one of the four basic classes of D&D and a corresponding legendary hero:

** Bruin is based off of the Rogue class, a class dedicated to underhanded feats of skill and questionable motives.

** Bruin is also based of of the legendary figure Robin Hood, who had defended the poor from the tyranny of the rich by literally breaking every law that he can, along with his band of Merry Men.

* Bruin learned to play the violin when he was 10.