Sinople Milan Noir

"I have been prepared for the worst, but I hope for the best."

- Sin

Appearance
Sin is a girl with a quite strong build for her short stature, aquired with long  years oftraining. Her green and brown long hair is never tied and despite she's striving to follow a kind of chivalry code of conduct, she's not from noble birth and it's noticable through her still warm and friendly attitude and face. Like some noble knight she always speak and walks confidently but her equipment could remember the one of a knight too : plated boots, grieves and vambraces. a tank top cover herchest under a thick cuirass and tassets protects her hips with a plated bottom half of a coat (from waist to knees). Chaps cover her legs between the top of her greaves and her short shorts. She sometimes brings along with her a winter camouflage fur cloak if she need it for a mission. An elegant white and gold sleeveless uniform vest completes her outfit, mainly green in color.

When she is equipped of her weapon, the back of her cuirass host an extra pair of magazines and an inbuit auto-loader with enough ammos to fully load a pair of them (ie 20 rounds), on witch her weapon is stored.



Personality
She basically got the same personality as her father : stubborn, lively and countrified but she can't say no to her friends and she refuses to judge by mere appearances, especially the faunus. She likes to party, to dance and when she is alone, like him she grabs a music instrument and plays folk music. Even if one key of her concertina is broken since she has found it in her grandfather's attic along with her weapon, she has never wanted to fix it. She's a countrywoman, usually very informal and outspoken.

Nevetheless, since she trains to be a huntress she tries to act like a more well-bred girl. Now she is not as informal as she used to be in public, has an overall gentle yet noble behavior, but she definitly can't get rid of the petulant and pouting side of herself Amsel doesn't forget to tease from time to time. She attemps to fit the more noble and righteous role she wants to embody in view of the vow she made in front of her grandfather's tomb. And nearly 4 years later, it starts to pay off : with all her efforts, her teammates noticed a growing charismatic, respectful and entrusting attitude.

During missions at the beggining of her formation, she was also subjet to outburts when she thought something was going wrong and it got worst if people didn't listen to her, because she suckded at stress managment and learned to follow her instinct instead of entrusting her abilities and her teammates. Hopefully, they were quickly used to her temper and now they manage to keep her confident in any situation.

Besides that, she has got far more self-control nowadays and she tamed her instinct of self-preservation. In any situation that would scare somebody, she still shiver in fear, but she feels it more like an inner strengh that keeps her alert, a thrill of the danger that makes her even more clear-headed. When people talk about this « problem », she always tell to them that « Fear keeps you alive when hazard comes, not bravery ». Quite ironical for a knight-like warrior isn't it ?

History
She grew up really close to the border of the secured area of Atlas. Her father was a trapper and her mother was a white-collar downtown. He sometimes had to fight grimms and pillagers near roads and railroads who managed to sneak in the area and sometime had to go out in the wild but he was okay with his job. Her mother wasn't careless but worked a lot and rarely came back home : their house was far from the city and she would rather hav taken a room in a hotel. Thus she was often absent and Sin was mainly bred by her father.

Her father teached her because the nearest school was quite far, but she preferred training and playing outside instead of studying, giving him quite a lot of job to focus her on her studies and secure the area around their house. Hopefully, fear and instinct saved her life few times, avoiding danger in advance as she came home minutes before strangers or lone wild beasts passed unusually close to their house. Her father was quite strong and so he always managed to neutralize them. When it happened, she used to look anxiously though the window and when he camed back, she told him proudly she wanted to become as strong as him. He always laughed and said that later she could if she trained hard.

Her father had sometimes to work for days without coming back home. Therefore she spents a lot of time to her grandfather's too. He lived in an old shack not really far away, in a well secured zone. He was quite invested in her upbringing and they spoke a lot about her future. He teached her a lot especially about history and legends. Because she decided to be stronger than her father, she wanted to become a huntress to improve her skills and to do something her parents would be proud of, and her grandfather was surprisingly quite sad about that.

Nevertheless, he trained her at shooting ranges with airguns. That is to say, watching and congratulating her or telling her when it is time to have some cookies, because he couldn't get out of his rollingchair for a long time. One day, after a long training, he told her that when she would become strong enough, he would give her a present.

At the age of 12, she started to spar with her father and shoot for real with her wise and full of sound advice grandfather. She also followed her father in the wild in secured missions : they leaved their house for some hours, the year after it was for a day or so and finally some days when she started to be able to defend herself. There he taught her a lot about nature, survival, hunt and grims but he deliberately avoided fights to protect her. It's at that time she learned that the reason why he and she were still alive was caution.

At the age of 16, her grandfather died and she inherited of all she wanted to take in his attic. There, she found old books, trinkets, photo albums but most of all, a shard of her grandfather's past she was never told about. And in fact, she never asked him about his past. Her father only said to her he was a soldier, and this answer always satisfied the curiosity of the child she was, until that day.

Many letters and diaries where locked in an iron box. He wrote all of them during his duties on the battlefront since he enlisted in the army. He particulary fought in the human army during the faunus revolution and he got retired a year after the end of the war. What she read about her grandfather shattered apart all she known about him, his kind and gentle attitude, his wrinkled but smily face and his wise and peaceful mind...

He used to be an aggressive fighter fearing no death, a patriot soldier eagerly serving his country and justice, or what he was told to be rightful.

After a life of fighting like a beast, the faunus revolution started and he slowly realised every lies he was untrusted in and how bloodstained her career was. In the latest letters, he wrote a kind of penitential prayer for what he did as a soldier in this unjust war. He sweared to never fight again, a vow he never denied as he never shot a single bullet when she was training with him.

In a huge box hung on the roof of his cellar, she found the old and gigantic weapon her grandfather used when he was young and strong. She found also a letter : her grandfather explained her this weapon killed many people. This bloody weapon that never should been used against other humans or faunus was his burden and the reminder of all his sins.

He also admitted he should have destroyed it a long time ago. But when her sweet granddaughter told him she resolved to become a hunter, he saw another future for it, far brighter. This would be her present when she would be strong enough to use it, but not to pass his burden to her. He wanted it to become her very own weapon to transform it in a memorial of this dark past and above all, a tombstone for anger, hatred and mistrust between humans and faunus. In this letter, he asked her to never forget all of this and to remind it to anybody as blind as their fathers, as he has been for a very long time.

<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm">From this very moment, she has taken with her this weapon and the wish of her grandfather. She decided to become a kind of knight bearing this noble and righteous task. She had to change her habits and behavior, to traing hard with this new and heavy weapon to really fit the character, but she took it very seriousely. She entered the Altas academy and became a member of the team ARES at the age of 17 and is now in her 4th year of training.

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Semblance : spin flip
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm">Sinople can manipulate the rotation of things she holds or of her own body. She can increase or decrease the speed of rotation or simply change its axis (she can even invert its rotation, like she/the object bounced on a trampoline). This task needs to define a center that can only be within her body or close to it (one meter max) or an axis approximately via one of her limb. Heavier and faster the object to manipulate is, more power she will need. It needs more power if she choose to accelerateate or decelerate an object's rotation and tremendously more if she does so without letting the exact opposite effect trigger quickly afterward (id es decceleration resp. acceleration). However, small direction changes aren't power-hungry at all and rotation inversion are often worth to be used despite their cost.

<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm">When she uses it, a 3D gimbal-like glyph appear around the object affected (or herself), figuring the locked or linked Euler angles and marking her own rotation or the object's rotation. Far more informations are coded in this glyph that are quite difficult to decode, even for her, but she generally don't need them. More the changes are important, bigger and brighter the glyph is. When she modifies the rotational speed, pointers start to move around the gimbal and when the loop is completed, the inverse effect trigger (that is to say : a decceleration for an acceleration, or an acceleration for a decceleration).

<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm">She isn't a dumb spinzaku or whirlwind attacker though :

<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm">She uses her semblance heavily to control and regulate her own movements, not to perform outstanting maneuvers obviously defying gravity and her own physical abilities. She also uses it to spin a round before firing them, making it more accurate and long-ranged (she needs to load it manually though).

<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm">However is an more interesting defensive semblance : as long as she can touch or grab her opponent weapon (parries and blocks), she can perturb slightly its rotational movements (center of rotation displacement or angle modification), making them less accurate and helping her to defend herself. An opponend could describe the sensation made by this use of her semblance as if his or her weapon slept on a hard and smooth metal sheet or was held by a wire attached somewhere on a wall, roof or ground. Others said they felt it like a blocked wrist, shoulder or hip, but it is always noticed as a strange feeling.

<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm">It is also possible to completely stop a hit (or more accurately the rotational components of its movement) for a split of a second and dodge before the backslash triggers, but it is far more tiring and not more effective than well-planned and energy friendly trajectories corrections, so she doesn't use it. Moreover, the usual slight trajectories adjustments she makes are generally small enough to make the glyph too small and translucent to be noticed, another advantage for her to not expose her asset in fights.

<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm">The only time she stopped an hit without any backlash because she had no choice, she passed out because of the too much aura consuming effect it was. This illustrate the power-hungry option it is, and the need for her to use her semblance in a more subtle and efficient way.

Weapon : gea assail
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Weapon : Gea Assail is a semi-automatic antimaterial greatsword rifle. Near 75" long (1,90m), it is relatively lightweight due to its latest upgrades. The two 10-rounds magazines form the cross guard and a ricasso uses a quater of the barrel's lenght. Parrying hooks are mobiles and serves as bipod when sniping. The blade is build along the rest of the barrel and a five-holes muzzle brake is build in the blade tip. The long handle ends with a recoil pad and serves as the sword pommel. The rifle's trigger can be concealed in the handle for practical purposes xhen she spars. Thin wires links together the muzzle and 2 rings she wears on her left hand : she can close independently or thogether the two row of holes to suppress the recoil compensation or to create a sideway impulsion she uses to start her most powerful maneuvers. A third ring can be used to fire directly from the blank rounds magazine without changing the active magazine and pulling the trigger. A fourth is used to unsheath her weapon from her cuirass easily.

<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Gea Assail fires 20mm, 20*138B rounds. They can be either explosives, armor peircing, incendiary and tracing, blank, but Amsel provides her in many other special warhead for her ammunitions. She always have one magazine of blank shells she uses for propelling purposes. She can interchanges the roles of the two magazines by pushing a small lever near the crossguard and thus firing for real with her 3rd ring.

<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">This weapon has a fonctional storage mode. Attached on the back of her cuirass, the magazines are unlocked and stored apart, near the two extra ones. The weapon shrinks in a compact form with the muzzle down, between the 4 magazines. She can still fire blank rounds in this mode for long jump impulses, direclty feeded by the in-build loader of her cuirass.

<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">She has to pull her 4th wired ring 2 times to draw her sword. The first partially unfold the handle, a part of the barrel and two refilled magazines quickly lock themselves on the weapon. The second pull unlocks the weapon from her armor and it completes its transformation during the short time of its travel between her back and her hands, ready to fight when she catches it.

<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Amsel brought a lot of new upgrades to this weapon : in 3 years, he managed to cut the weight nearly by half, replacing wood and steel by lighter and tougher materials, especially its blades and barrel made of lightwheight and durable advanced material like his weapons. He helped her to design its foldable and far more convenient form and he had the idea of the auto-loader system intalled on the back of her cuirass. He also supplies her in ammunitions given that the caliber is quite uncommon.

Combat style
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<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Sin is though and well armored fighter. She has some difficulties to uses her weapon as a proper two handed greatsword but she is surprisingly strong enough to hold it, and not as slowly as anyone could expect. In fact she uses mainly half-sword techniques : she grabs the handle and the ricasso or one hole in the blade to reduce the apparent lengh of the weapon and balance the weight distribution, greatly improving its maneuvrability. She is skilled in disarming, tripping and bull rushing techniques and uses a lot the pommel and the cross guard as maces.

<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">She is fond of using her sword along with her semblance in powerful cuts she can very precisely control, or in wide moulinets with witch she can uses her weapon's full lengh. She can start these attacks and movements by firing with her weapon and control the direction of exaustion of the gas with her rings (instead of using her semblance, to save her strengh). Then, her semblance helps her a lot to increase her mobility and to guide her strikes, with small corrections. She can be deadly and quite fast, turning around or over her target fluently to strike weak spots with powerful blows or dodging with a well controled side-turn. This mobility surprises her foes that face up to a such heavily eqquiped girl. She however lacks a lot of linear speed, as her whole mobility is based on rotations.

<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">She also shines at sniping on very long range when Ember guides her shots and provides her trajectory corrections. She can take down quite easily tough and well armored threads with powerful armor piercing rounds and usually shoot dead giant nevermores, death stalker and the other biggest grims or vehicles first, which are a pain in the neck otherwise, before joining her teammates in the melee.

<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">She is the dreadnough and the spearhead of the team, giving to her team the most of raw power output.

Trivia

 * Vert means "green" in French. But vert is the English equivalent for the French word sinople. It is a heraldry term that refers to the green color. Sinople used to reffer to a red pigment, the cinanbar also called sinopia, but in French the meaning of « sinople » suddently changed in the 16th century to designate the actual green in the heraldry vocab. This suddent change is especially transposed in her weapon, changing from a tool of death against faunus (red, associated to blood and dangerous things) in a weapon to defend them as well as humans against grims (green, associated with wild nature or safe things).
 * Milan noir is the French name of the blackkite
 * Milan is also the name of an French jetfighter prototype build by Dassault aviation in 1969. It is a variant of the mirage III serie with canards and new avionic equipments for that time. I have chosen it because this character fit the archetype of the plane : an older frame upgraded with new technologies to improve maneuvrability and power, to reflect the best of what Dassault was able to do in order to demonstrate and sell it to the Swiss air force. The mirage III was a popular plante at is time (it is 50 years old and there are still active planes around the world) and so I decided to make a character with the popular « huge weapon but small build » but with an old fashioned stuff / knight look. It is a kinda quaint plane too with simple and straight lines but still friendly and quite beautiful, and I tried to add details that makes her alike.
 * Gea assail is not a sword but the mythic spear of the Irish god Lugh made out of the finest yew wood. When he throws it, it is said to always hit its mark and return into its owner's hands shortly after. This name has been chosen to reflect the deadlyness of the rifle she owns and nearly masters, more than its melee specifications.
 * Its look is based on the Lahti L39, a Finnish WWII-era antitank and antiaircraf gun, and a really big one : 109lbs (49.5kg) for 88in (2,2m). Her own weapon is a bit smaller and far lighter but still quite hard to swing proprely even afer its upgrades, often destabilized by its momentum she can't totally control with her semblance. Even with all the wourkout that made her sturdy, she is still a bit awkward when she uses it at its full lengh. Beside that, she always half-sworded and so she's far more skilled and accustomed to use it this way.
 * Do-you-know-that rifle barrels comes in two ways : smoothbored and rifled ? Rifling allows longer and heavier bullets to be fired because of their gyroscopically stabilised trajectory, thus increasing the overall power of the gun. However a rifled barrel is more expansive (harder to make), lives shorter and slow down a little bit the projectile : some of its energy is tranformed into rotational kinetic energy, but there also more friction. Sin can have all positives aspect of rifling thanks to her semblance, without any of its disadvantages, except one. Indeed, she can spin them herself to simulate the effect of rifling with a smoothbored gun. But spinning bullets tend to deviate and to be destabilised because of the Magnus effect and the gyroscopic drift their own rotation creates, and  every sniper has to deal with it at long range.
 * Spin-flip is a term used to designate a suddent change in orientation of the spin axis of a black hole due to the absorption of a second one, reflecting the center of battle and destruction she can be, in every sense of the word.