Savannah Pearce

Savannah Pearce is a former student of Beacon Academy, and formerly a member of Team TSKN, pronounced Tuscany. Following the Fall of Beacon and a fallout with her team, she is traveling solo through Remnant.

Appearance
Savannah is a slender young woman with a square face and a perky, upturned nose. She has rounded, yellow ochre eyes and an olive skin tone. Her hair is honey blonde, worn loose and reaching her waist. Her fringe is pinned back over the top of her head, and she has a small plait behind her left ear, tipped in a turquoise bead.

Her Faunus trait is King Cheetah markings down the sides of her torso, across the tops of her shoulders and up the neck into her hairline. It also continues along the outsides of her arms and legs.

She wears a pale green, cropped ballet cardigan with long sleeves and a hood, over a dark brown singlet. Light blue skinny jeans tucked into high top, pale green canvas shoes with white soles and laces finish off the main part of her outfit.

Her accessories are a white skinny belt and matching utility pouch, held closed with a golden clasp. A horizontal holster for her weapon is attached to the back of her belt, mostly dark brown with pale green stitching and accents.

Personality
Savannah is prone to jealousy towards others, especially when she thinks they are having an easier time due to being Human instead of Faunus. She has yet to learn to live with her traits, flopping between hiding them away and displaying them with the lie of being a tattoo. In her opinion, life would be easier if she was a Human.

Despite this, she enjoys spending time with others, though she's more of an observer than a talker. She prefers to know the full story before entering a conversation, and hasn't really learnt how to crack jokes with others. Her sense of humour tends more towards humourous observations than anecdotes or puns.

Savannah is also highly independent, and prefers to accomplish a job by her own power. She has difficulty asking for help herself, but will accept assistance if the other person merely acts without consulting her first.

Due to the events of the Fall of Beacon, she's currently feeling very vulnerable and lonely. She also feels ashamed of her own attitude and life choices up to that moment, and left Vale to escape the judgement she thought everyone was casting on her. She's on a self imposed exile and pilgrimage with no real end goal, simply to escape her own bad life choices.

Backstory
Savannah is the second child of a Human and a Faunus in Mistral, and the only one to manifest a Faunus trait. Due to this, she envied the ‘ease’ she perceived her older brother to have when it came to interacting with the other children their age.

While her childhood wasn’t harsh, she found herself missing out on things her brother got to do naturally simply due to the inherent racism that still permeated the city. Whether it be from being denied entrance to a candy store to being charged extra to enjoy arcade games, it was unfair in the young girls eyes. She started covering herself up to hide her Faunus trait. Despite her mother’s urging to not be ashamed to show what she was, Savannah still hid away her traits under long sleeves and high collars, passing for a human alongside her brother.

When the time came, Savannah joined a Combat Academy like her brother before her, and found that the students were a bit more accepting of the Faunus than the general populace of Mistral. She started being more open about showing her markings, growing confident that though they were interesting they weren’t anything that needed to be hidden away.

This however had the effect of students noticing and remarking on them, since it was something ‘new’ and ‘different’ instead of simply being a part of who she was when she first started. Curious students sometimes made remarks about not understanding how she and her brother could be related if she was a Faunus, since Human/Faunus pairing were known to happen but not exactly common, and human children resulting from such a pairing were even rarer. Adoption and fostering were the common theories thrown around until either she or her brother explained the situation to each teen. A few unthinking remarks made Savannah’s newfound confidence in her Faunus traits waver, but it was too late to hide them so she had to persevere.

When it came time to go to a Huntsman Academy, Savannah declined attending Haven alongside her brother and having more of the same situation from Combat School happen. Instead she struck out to start fresh, applying at Beacon. Once there, she claimed that her markings were a set of extensive tattoos she had done while still in Mistral, and slipped into the life of being ‘human’ easily. Her new teammates accepted the lie easily, having no reason to suspect anything was amiss.

This continued for just over a year, until one of the older students named Cimet confronted her about her story. He revealed that he knew someone she used to attend Combat School with, and when she had featured in the background of a photo he had shared with them one day the entire story came out. Savannah panicked and begged him not to tell anyone, fearing her team’s reaction to her lying to them for over a year now.

He agreed, but on the condition that she now basically become his busybody/personal assistant, running errands and doing the research for his assignments for him. Savannah wasn’t happy about the situation but agreed to it anyway, keeping her head down and doing as he said in exchange for keeping the ruse of being human.

As the year wore on, he demanded more of her time that would normally be spent with her team, and the quartet drifted apart. Tensions in teamwork meant TSKN didn’t qualify for the Vytal Festival, to her teammates annoyance, and the wedge between them grew bigger. This continued until the Fall of Beacon later that year, where Savannah was separated from her teammates in the chaos.

When she finally caught up to them, it was along with a very upset Cimet who had just lost a teammate to the onslaught. Incensed and upset, he blurted out Savannah’s secret, accusing her of hiding it because she was an undercover White Fang supremacist feeding intel to the enemy. The whole story came out then, and the team fractured in the aftermath. Between Savannah lying to them for two years and then not trusting them to have her back when someone else found out, and then the Fall of Beacon and the White Fang’s involvement, the bridge was burned.

In the aftermath of the Fall, the news spread simply due to peoples need to talk about what they experienced, and her teammates made no effort to hide the betrayal they felt at her actions and lack of trust in them. Though most people were ambivalent towards Savannah, some started to see her in a negative light due to her teammates words. Instead of facing her problems and rebuilding her relationships with her teammates, and ashamed of herself and her life choices, Savannah fled Vale after a few months. She had no ultimate goal beyond being somewhere no one would be around to see her shame and embarrassment.

Weapon
Savannah's weapon of choice is a High Calibur Gun Blade (HCGB) named Grassfire.

The base form is a straight backed saber with a 32 inch blade. The blade is attached to two parallel arms, both 8 inches long, which in turns attaches the blade to the grip. A revolver cylinder is nested just below the blade guard, with a trigger below it.

When switching forms, the top arm pivots from the guard, pulling the blade back over the hand. The blade also shortens to half it's length, with the tip now resting in line with the end of the other arm. The other arm houses the barrel of her revolver, and the sword grip cocks at a 35 degree angle to allow for easier aiming. The revolver utilises .44 magnum rounds, with a magazine capacity of 6.

In it's holstered form, Grassfire is kept in its revolver mode, with the handle straight instead of cocked. The blade is tinted pale green with a silver edge, with the arms and barrel of the revolver being brass. The grip is wrapped in a tan coloured material, with a brass guard. The revolver cylinder is silver.

Semblance
Cognizance boosts Savannah's cognitive abilities and reaction time drastically, allowing her to plan and react faster than usual.

While remaining still, Savannah's ability to process thoughts and senses is increased four-fold, making a single second seem like 4 seconds in her mind. While minor movements such as eye and minute muscle twitches do not affect this, larger ones do, reducing her processing speed to only twice as fast. In addition, her own speed is increased twofold, matching her cognitive abilities when moving.

Extended use of her semblance generates a headache for Savannah, with anything longer than a few minutes developing into a full migraine. While it is best reserved for short bursts of time, spamming the semblance in quick succession reduces the length of time it takes for a migraine to develop. This is similar to standing on one foot for an extended period of time, and switching feet. While you are resting the first foot, once you switch back to it it takes less time for the foot to become fatigued again.

Fighting Style
Savannah's fighting style revolves around tactical assaults and retreats, moving in for a quick burst of attacks before retreating once more. She often stops once retreated, taking the time to study her opponent further and make a new plan for attacking. Her default stance is side on, with her left shoulder forward and her blade held in her right hand across her body.

Her bullets can be used with any Dust type, though she defaults to Fire. Additionally, she carries Ice and Lightning for when she needs to change things up a little.

She is somewhat skilled in Aura usage, enough to use ranged aura slashes with her saber, and she's training to be able to generate small shields for blocking bullets with her left hand.

Trivia

 * Savannah is named for the mixed woodland-grassland ecosystem, bringing to mind earthy browns and grassy greens. Pearce is a Medieval English variant of Peter, meaning Stone, which has been used as a surname instead.
 * Savannah alludes to Mafdet, the Egyptian cat goddess predating Bastet.
 * She was characterised as having the head of a cheetah or panther, which ties into Savannah's Faunus type.
 * Even after Bastet and other cat goddesses arose in Egypt, Mafdet was still invoked in protecting the tombs of pharoahs, possibly including Tutankhamen's tomb, which is why I chose a King Cheetah instead of a normal Cheetah.
 * Mafdet is also shown as wielding a knife ('claw of Mafdet'), which is why I went with a single straight backed saber for Savannah's weapon.
 * Grassfire is a reference to Savannah's own name.
 * Team TSKN's theme is mythological figures; Tafit alludes to Lucifer form Christian Mythology, Savanah alludes to Mafdet from Egyptian Mythology, Keshet alludes to Quetzalcoatl from Aztec Mythology, and Noir alludes to Charon from Greek Mythology.
 * Savannah's teammates are Tafit Morestar (named after Taafite, a purple gem), Keshet Kukulkan (meaning Rainbow), and Noir Beaute (meaning Black). Tuscany is a shade of purple, matching Tafit's own colour.