Divina Sepia

"There’s only one way to make it through your first mission, and that’s through luck. After that, you’d better learn as many skills as you can, because that’s going to be all out by the next time."

Divina Sepia is member of the Vale Survivor Corps and a current Survivor Coordinator. Her weapon of choice is a pair of dual blades capable of channeling Dust.

Appearance
Divina has fairly average looks for someone her age. She wears her black hair long, going halfway down her back, usually untied save for when she is on missions. Then she will use a simple hairstick to tie it in a bun. Her eyes are also a fairly average brown, though they do have flecks of blue in them. She chooses not to wear makeup, preferring to spend her money on more practical things and her skin is fair, save for the very rare acne. The only true marr on her face is a scar that she sustained in the line of service a few years ago, a single vertical scar that bisected her left eye. Rather than hide it, she got tattoos to accentuate it. Two black lines curve under her eye until they reach the opposite side, then they zig-zag back to the center scar where they terminate.

Her outfit is also simple and practical for when she is out on the job. She wears a breastplate made of hardened leather and light chain, under which is a loose brown shirt and, typically, with a leather tasset around her thighs. She also wears loose leather pants, which are tucked into knee high boots. Her forearms are covered in custom bracers, which have been outfitted with hidden compartments to store dust. Around her waist is a thick leather belt, upon which pouches containing necessities and sheaths for her weapons hang.

When in Survivor headquarters, Divina will usually wear loose-fitting clothing, usually brown cargo pants and a t-shirt. She will usually keep a sword tied to her hip and her bracers on, despite the relative safety of the HQ.

Personality
Divina is a quiet individual that does not care to trust or make social connections with anyone, mainly due to her years in the survivors; very few live long enough or stay long enough to make a connection worthwhile. When she does approach others, it is purely for business, either to approach them for jobs or to collect late payments from clients. In the context of survivors, she rarely does anything but teach and hand out tasks, and when she does speak, it’s to the point and brief.

That does not mean that she simply ignores people. She tends to people watch, learning about others through their body language. She is also not shy or afraid of people, but rather she is reserved. Typically, she will eat her meals in the headquarters mess hall, where she can observe the latest group of recruits and try to determine which ones will survive their first assignments.

While Divinia is not a warm and friendly person, she is also not cold and snobbish.She does not discriminate against most groups, be they poor, faunus or criminal. But she does hold a bit of a grudge against against hunters and those who would fawn on them, though it is usually because they tend to harbour ill will to Survivors if they even know about them. She also resents the way hunters are recieved by people a little, and believes that their training in cushy academies is incomplete, hence why she chose to stay with Survivors as opposed to go to Beacon.

Because of her career and the fact that she has been a survivor longer than most, she is also well aware of what anyone will do to survive. She does not judge people, notably the criminals that come to the Survivors, for their crimes unless it is truly severe (ie: child molesters or serial killers.)  However, because of this mindset, she is guarded against people that she meets, thinking the worst in people before she gets to know them, which she usually doesn't even do.

When teaching, she is quick to the point and feels no need to candy-coat anything she says. She is blunt, to the point, and in physical training, will often push her students to their limits. She is not a popular teacher at the Corps, but her classes still teach young survivors what they need to know. She is sympathetic to the new recruits, and will usually only give them the jobs that are better suited to their abilities. Survivors under her coordination tend to live longer than most.

However, she is self-conscious about the fact that she had never recieved proper, formal education after escaping her village. Her academic skills are poor at best, and she knows only enough mathamatical skills to make it through day-to-day life. Her classes only cover survival, and because of her self-consciousness, she doesn't take any proper academic courses supplied by the Corps, even if she desires them. This self-consciousness furthers her grudge against Hunters who do get proper education, though she acknowledges that her lack of knowledge is her own fault.

Biography
Born to Delilah and Meran Sepia in Topori Village, Divina lived a quiet, if not somewhat troubled childhood. The village was on the edge of the border between safe land and Grimm Territory. When she was thirteen, the creatures of Grimm moved to attack the village, very nearly destroying it and every living person inside. Only a handful of survivors, Divina included and Delilah excluded, made it safely to the City of Vale.

There, she and her father managed to find a small apartment to live in, which her father finding work as a clerk for Schnee Dust Company. Divina, however, wanted to fight the creatures of Grimm that had resulted in the death of her mother. However, due to their lack of funds and her lack of true experience, she did not make it to any Huntsman prep schools. Desperate to join the fight, Divina searched for an alternative and found the Survivor Corps. Her father had reservations about it, given that the survivors do not have a good reputation, but Divina nevertheless joined up.

Ultimately, her father’s worries were proven, as Divina was thrown into her first mission with very little practice or training, a group of recruits similar to her and only one senior Survivor. It was a small town that had been attacked by a handful of small Ursa. The senior had managed to kill them, but not before most of the recruits, Divina excluded, were killed. She had only managed to survive through sheer luck and someone else protecting her, just like when her village was destroyed. Nevertheless, that mission allowed her to enter the training courses that the Survivor Corps offered and she went to them with gusto, learning survival tactics, combat, and eventually on Aura and dust usage. For the next three years, she juggled her quota and the courses carefully, working as hard as she could and living from job to job so that she could fulfill her desire to become a Huntress.

That desire changed, however, when she reached her third year in training, at sixteen years old and a year before she could enter a prestigious Huntsman academy. A village had sent out a request for creature extermination, and she had taken the job with two other learned survivors. While she and her fellows were huddled in the woods to avoid villager contempt for their organization, two huntsmen had arrived planning on taking the same job. Whereas the survivors were treated with disgust, the huntsmen were openly welcomed and provided for. In the middle of the night, Divina’s team was out in the cold when they noticed the approach of a small pack of beowolves. By the time that the Huntsmen were awake alerted to the threat, Divina’s team had already exterminated most of the pack, despite only one of them having a real dust weapon. Had they been treated well with the villagers, the creatures would only have been detected when their attack began. While she and her comrades were commended by one of the huntsmen for their efforts (the rest had mysteriously disappeared to the privy) Divina noted that the bias against Survivors had worked to their advantage, a fact further proven when she spoke to the client for payment and got more than the agreed upon amount, if only the Survivors would leave quickly.

From then on, Divina chose to stay with the Survivors, turning down the opportunity to study at Beacon Academy. She learned instead from the Corps library, on the battlefield, and from the classes provided, choosing her own pace in between taking jobs. She worked as an active survivor for years while others around her fell. When she was 18, she had saved up enough money to specify and purchase her own dust weapon, a pair of twin blades that were worthy weapons of their own merit.

After years of service as an active Survivor, she was given the opportunity to work as a Survivor coordinator, so that she may hand down official jobs to other survivors and, on occasion, keep the better paying or more dangerous ones to herself. On occasion she gets invitations to Hunter academies to inform students about Survivors.

Weapons and Abilities
Twin Swords: Though they have no formal name given to them, Divina’s swords are of high quality. Made of a titanium alloy capable of channeling Dust, they are thin blades meant for stabbing an opponent at vital locations as opposed to the brute force of a claymore. However, one is weighted heavier than the other, meant for her favoured hand and used as her main striking weapon, while her other is thinner and meant for parrying or guarding, only striking with it in rare cases. Both weapons have a compartment in the handle for dust to be placed in, either through crystalline or powdered form. The dust augments the blades, as opposed to giving them abilities. If fire-based dust is placed in for example, the blades would be enveloped in flame; if it is kinetic-based dust, the blades may strike harder. This allows for a variety of ways that the swords can be used, but because of that, and that it can work with both powder and crystal they have no alternate form, and thus must be carried by hip sheaths.

Other weapons: Because Divina had spent a long time working on survival, she is adept at melee combat, be it hand-to-hand or one-handed weapons. She does not have an inclination to use two-handed weapons, mainly due to the disadvantages of her smaller frame and the lack of speed in their use. However, she has  trained in, if not extensively, most one-handed weapons, be they blades, bludgeons, or improvised weaponry to the point where she can use them in a pinch. However, she does have a preference for her twin swords, and will only use improvised weapons if absolutely nessicary, and even then, she must get used to each individual weapon before she can use them effectively.

Aura: Having unlocked her aura a few years ago, Divina can use her aura both defensively and offensively in conjunction with her weapons and armour if the situation calls for it. However, Divina finds, in her own opinion, that the situation rarely calls for it, and tends to allow her swords to fight for her instead of her soul. She will, if a hunt has gone too long, use her aura to search her surroundings carefully, but she tries not rely on it as she has not received formal training to use her aura properly outside of a few Corps classes. As such, she relies more on her own physical ability as opposed to aura, keeping her at a disadvantage against creatures of Grimm. Her Aura colour is brown, and she does not have a known semblance due to her lack of development.

Survival skills: Because of most location's unwilliness to take in Survivors, Divina has wilderness survival skills including hunting, foraging, tracking and camping. She also keeps a journal of which plants are safe to eat and not, and refers to it often. She does know how to listen to her surroundings like a conventional hunter, even applying it to urban areas and eavesdropping on others, though her natural skills are obviously not to the same scale as a Faunus.

Stealth: Divina utilizes stealth, though not in the conventional way of sneaking around in the shadows. Instead, she uses her status as someone to be ignored to her advantage, eavesdropping on those who would not pay attention to her for her own benefit. Similar to how beggars and barkeeps hear the most information, Divina listens well to her advantage.

Trivia

 * Sepia is a shade of brown
 * Divina is a reference to Salvia Devinorum, a plant often used for its psychadelic properties. Ironically, despite it's use as Diviner's sage, Divina is very down to earth and doesn't rely on "mystic" abilities as often as she should.