Merel Serac

Appearance
Merel is quite pleased with her appearance, standing five feet ten tall with a slender figure and long blonde hair reaching halfway down her back. Casually she dresses in a variety of clothes, preferring cooler tones like green, aqua or blue and picking clothing that accentuates her slim tall figure. At Beacon she either goes around in her school uniform or in her combat outfit.

Her combat outfit consists of a white sleeveless shirt with a yellow collar, a highwaisted light blue skirt with sky blue suspenders and a second darker layer,  blue-grey shorts and blue-grey fingerless gloves with a sky blue ribbons wrapped around her wrist, crossing once to form a similar X shape like her suspenders on her back. Her boots match her skirt in colour and have the same sky-blue ribbons she has on her gloves extending above the rim to form a similar cross shape.

Her left glove is like her right but reaches up to her elbow and has the sky blue ribbons spiral up her arm from her wrist, crossing each other three times before stopping just below her elbow, the ribbon of this glove has been infused with Ice dust and will glow a bright cyan when she uses the dust.



Personality
Cheerfully optimistic in her own calm analytical way, she seems to approach everything with the same take charge attitude, be it a pack of Grimm or a stack of homework. Having grown up spending long periods by herself and never really needing other people besides her childhood friend Vegas Oriel and her adoptive father Egil she was content with her situation.

Merel has been described as arrogant or cold and that might very well be true. Especially after Merel began her training at Signal and excelled she went about her life with little interest in others opinions on how she did things. This has caused her to seem rather harsh and cold to other students but if she takes the time to get to know you Merel is a surprisingly caring and fun-loving individual, she just prefers to do things in her own pace. Teamwork has not been Merel's strong suit, preferring to either do it on her own or take charge and have everything go according to her plan rather than discuss it with the others.

Weapons & Equipment
Merel uses a broad bastard sword she calls The Precipice. the blade is made from a dark grey steel and has a faint blueish tint. The weapon can transform into a dust-powered rifle. Merel can load it with various types of dust charges but typically she uses ice dust to fires projectiles that encase the target in thick ice (similar to the Ice flower combo shown in Painting the town)

Along with the sword/rifle she also uses her dust glove. The long glove on her left arm has been imbued with ice dust to allow Merel to create pieces of armour from Ice. Normally she makes her shield, gauntlets and maybe even pauldrons or a breastplate to take hits but she can create a full set of armour if she needs to. Although this can take a while as she has to create each piece one by one working out from the chest piece to her feet and then her arms before finally making an ornate winged helmet. Beside the armour she can also make simple defences like a wall of ice or even use it for offence by creating blades of ice or shards to use as projectiles.

Abilities and Powers
Merel is a skilled swordsman, capable of engaging multiple foes with her sword and shield and her various combination attacks. She's also a surprisingly good student in more academic fields. Her observation skills in combat allow her to plan her strikes and defence to match the foe she faces. She had received training in using her aura and semblance to complement her choice of weapons.

Semblance: Avalanche.

When Merel activates her semblance and takes a hit she stores half of the energy, lessening the damage done to her aura and keeping her footing even against stronger enemies. The more hits she takes the more energy she stores and the more she can release as a shockwave from her body.

She can chose how to project the shockwave, as a spherical blast to hit anything around her, to give more punch to her attacks or to shatter a piece of her Ice armour and send the shards flying to an enemy accurately within a range of fifteen meters.

The maximum damage Merel can absorb is equivalent to her losing roughly 30% of her aura. Merel's preferred use of her Semblance is to make either an Ice gauntlet or an Ice shield and let it take enough damage to almost break it before shattering it herself with a directed shockwave to use it as a close range ice shard shotgun when she goes back on the offensive. However she has to plan these surprise strikes around the fact that she cannot keep her semblance up for longer than a minute at best and cannot use it more than once every few minutes before it starts to fatigue her, which can be crippling for her when she still has her heavy ice armour on.

Background
It is strange how any situation can pass as normal when it is all you know.

Merel grew up never knowing her parents. They were both hunters and had died on a mission when she was only two and a half years old. Having no other family to take care of her Merel was given into the care of Egil Crucible, a teammember of her parents and a close friend of them. The first months were tough for Egil, adjusting to life as a single parent and having to give up his career as huntsman to take care of the child of his friends. One of Merel's more distinct memories of those first years of her life was of her learning in first grade that it was strange that she was not the daughter of her father but adopted. It did not matter to her that she did not have a mother or that Egil was not her biological father. Egil had always been Egil and he had always taken care of her.

As Merel grew older she grew curious of who her parents were. Egil explained to her they were Hunters like him before he began teaching at Signal. He told her of their adventures when they were younger and how they would fight the monsters of Grimm. The idea of her parents fighting the forces of evil excited Merel and lead to many adventures in her neighbourhood fighting the monsters hiding in the playground with sticks as swords and guns and the like.

It was around this time that Merel befriended a girl of her age in the neighbourhood, Vegas Oriel, a girl with a particular love for fireworks and other things that go boom. How the two would get along so well would always be a mystery for Egil who at first was reluctant about letting Merel play with Vegas. However after a while it was clear the two were becoming inseparable and so the two families would begin a long friendship between the two children and their fathers.

It was a bit weird going to the school where your father teaches, Merel though when she first began at Signal. Not that her father would play favourites with her during class or anything like that. It was just weird growing up with stories from her father about the place so she had her preconceptions about Signal Academy when she started her first year. While at school he would be her teacher at home Egil tried his best at being a supportive father but from time to time they would clash as Merel went through puberty and Egil had little experience to handle a teenager growing up. Thankfully their fights would not last long and overall Merel could consider she had a pretty normal life as a teenager.

As Merel grew and learned more at Signal academy her talents began to show. Much like her mother Merel proved to be a capable swordsman and would relish in her sparring matches against the other students. She learned to use her semblance and aura and how to use them to create hew own style in combat. When she made her personal equipment she surprised Egil with her choice of weapons, resembling a mix of her parent's combat styles. While her mother Alice had always favoured a direct assault with her rapier, Jack had been the reliable commander of their team. Merel's shield and bastard sword were an echo of her father's spear and tower shield and his walls of ice with which he had controlled the battlefield near fifteen years ago. it invoked mixed feelings in Egil seeing the ghosts of his friends in Merel. Likewise it was for some odd to that there was only to Egil witness her graduation from Signal and acceptance at Beacon. But because it was Egil who had taken care of her for as long as she could remember it was always clear to Merel that he was her father.

Trivia & Origin

 * Merel is based on Kopaka, the Toa Nuva of Ice from the bionicle Lego toy line, along with Tynisa Maker, a main character from the Shadows of the Apt book series.
 * Merel is the dutch word for the common blackbird and a common dutch girls name.
 * Serac is the name for an ice formation caused by intersecting crevasses on a glacier.
 * Credit for the new Semblance and Ice dust glove idea goes to SelenaZephyr who proposed the idea the evening before 'Dance Dance Infiltration' aired.