Summer Astraea Aurora

Summer Astraea Aurora is a second year 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 best described by as a "military enthusiast" who loves anything military, her family, but 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 also holds a strange attraction to heavy objects.

She has a very roundabout way of speaking, which confuses many who talk with her. She shows little interest in mostly anything not related to the military, so she is mostly seen with a tired or bored expression on her face. She usually speaks in a monotonous voice and depending on the situation she may wear a poker face or a wide grin that usually creeps others out. Her eyes also seem to never change, stuck semi-open which looks like she's sleepy.

She acts mischievous whenever she sees something that does interest her or whenever she likes to tease her friends out of boredom. She has a habit of getting herself in trouble once this happens, and doesn't really care as long as it doesn't affect the relationships of her friends. She also does pranks but usually on Akiba, as she finds his reactions hilarious from anybody else's. However, when the situation calls for it she can express a great amount of seriousness, especially towards her actions and beliefs and telling others off when they question her actions. Even her speaking pattern changes to a more direct one, as well as show more emotion.

Despite her lacking any sort of social skills she tries to keep her presence known to others, or rather due to fears of being forgotten. She dislikes being left out and gets an uncomfortable feeling in her chest whenever she does, forcing her to try anything to get her presence known to others. It is somewhat because of this that she can be quite compassionate and loyal to her teammates. She also dislikes anyone other than her close friends to touch her feathers, and will instinctively jump in a battle-ready pose whenever it happens even if it was by accident.

Backstory
Summer was 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, with her first name being the only thing she knows.

After a few years she was suddenly adopted by a military officer from a camp nearby and was taken to his home in Vacuo. Despite her race she was easily accepted into the soldier's family and was given a new name, Astraea.

Due to her step-father saving her while working, she has gained an interest in anything military-related like weapons, vehicles and people, and has since dreamed of becoming someone like her adoptive father.

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 13.

During her previous school years, she was known for wearing military-esque outfits and armor. She was also well known for her weapon, the Daring Damsel. When she graduated she asked her step-father if he knew any good schools, and he answered with a few famous schools including Beacon. She decided on attending Beacon Academy, due to the school's reputation.

Daring Damsel (Heavy Ballistic Dust-Paneled Machine-Buster)
A weapon described as large enough to hide an average person behind it, the Daring Damsel is Summer's one and only weapon. It is a large buster sword 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, 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 her opponent's, as well as her own, positions as well as her 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.

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 glyph's activation. A glyph 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 glyph 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 glyph's activation by Summer. When the target performs the certain action, the energy charged within the glyph 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 glyph, 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 the glyph 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.

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 somewhat shorter than the average person's, but they are built to handle a great amount of weight, like her weapon. Due to her weapon she moves rather slowly if not for its dust panels that, if using wind dust, will alleviate the weight greatly, thus giving her the ability to move 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 or others. This only improved when she activates the dust on the weapon and giving it effects like blowing away anything in close proximity if using wind dust or burning anything it makes contact with it if using fire dust.

She focuses on an unique tactic that focuses on an all-or-nothing strike by setting her opponent up in advance, or just using her strength to crush or slash anything in her way. Whenever doing the former, she tries to find her own creative way to get her opponents in a position that'll get them hit like planning out her movements and attacks beforehand to get them in position, 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.

Against Grimm she tries to be very efficient, usually just using her Damsel's gun form to quickly kill off a group of Grimm. When faced with more armoured Grimm like the Deathstalker she instead resorts to using Damsel's melee form alongside her semblance, enabling her to break through the toughest of armours.

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 this has its risks.

Weaknesses
Even though she is, as stated before, well-rounded in terms of physical and mental capabilities, she is still held back by a lot of things. Firstly its her weapon, due to its large size it is easy for opponents to predict her next attack, added that she is also very weapon-dependent.

This is also the same problem with her semblance, along with the added risk of getting hurt by its backlash if she fails to finish up a ring or is unable to release the energy. Another added risk is that fact that her body may not cope with the amount of added energy from her semblance, and may cause injuries just because of it. Also, it takes 5 rings worth of energy to kill a person, so she has to watch out at how much rings she's making and make sure that she doesn't go to that point.

Her whole outfit also slows her down due to its overall weight, even with just the tailcoat and pants, which is technically her own fault. She has to use aura frequently to be able to fight effectively, since she needs it to increase her strength which, in turn, enables her to move herself and her weapon around, as well as function Damsel's mechanics.

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.