Balina Savannah

WORK IN PROGRESS

Balina Savannah is an original character based on the world of RWBY made by Kyran Kandosa2 for his Silver Moon Chronicles fanon. She is an member of Team MARS.

Appearance
Balina has an full, well-muscled figure with an heart-shaped face. Her mist blue eyes are upturned, similarly to a cat's. Balina wears her hair parted down the middle and braided into a ponytail that reaches just below the shoulders, with two jaw-length front braids framing her face. She has pale skin, and a white lion's tail with black stripes. She has three black parrallel stripes tattooed diagonally from jaw to cheekbone on each cheek. Her eyes and Aura glow garnet when her Semblance is active.

Balina's combat gear follows the usual pattern worn by the members of the Silver Moon Clan, an helmet, limb armor, and a combat harness over an knee-length sleeveless trenchcoat. The limb armor is a set of armored boots with knee and ankle guards, chuisses to protect the thighs, rerebracers to protect the upper arms, and elbow-length gauntlets with integrated weapons, a signature of the Clan, particularly the branch that adopted her, the Moonfang family. Her helmet covers most of the head, leaving the mouth of the fixed visor, which doubles as an liger mask, open. The limb armor and helmet are silver with white details. Balina's trenchcoat is white, has a slit in the back from hem to hip height, to accomodate her tail, and is lined with ballistics armor. The grey combat harness she wears over her trenchcoat has several pouches, an utility belt, and an pair of pauldrons with liger motifs to protect the shoulders. She wears an white longsleeve shirt, grey pants, and black leather belt beneath her armor and trenchcoat. For civilian attire, she retains her armored boots, and strips down to her underclothes, which consist of an sky-blue turtleneck with her symbol on the left breast, white pants, and an black belt.

TempestFate:
Weapon: Dual Bladed Submachine Gauntlets

Type: Ranged, Melee

Weapon Derivation: Submachine gun, hidden blade

TempestFate has three modes. Inert mode has the weapon housings slid back behind the hand, allowing it to be used as an ordinary set of gauntlets. Ranged mode slides the housings forward and over the hand, activating the firearm portion of the weapon. Mounted on the outer forearm, TempestFate's firearm is an submachinegun chambered for PDW rounds, which are between SMGs and rifles in caliber with an rifle-grade propellant charge. Each gauntlet loads with an P90-like 24-round horizontal magazine. Melee mode also slides the weapon housings forward, and deploys an retractable blade from the housing mounted on the side of the arm. The firearm portion of the gauntlet can be used while the blade is deployed. The controls are an sleevegun-style grip that extends when the weapon is active, with an pair of triggers built into the grip. The upper trigger fires the bullets, while the lower trigger deploys the blade as long as the grip is squeezed.

Semblance:
Balina's Semblance is called "Rebound". When used, an glyph appears at her feet, and at least one additional glyph is summoned no more than fifty feet from her. The glyphs' effect is to deflect attacks by emitting an pulse of energy upon impact. Balina perfers to use these glyphs to chain ricochets from TempestFate, allowing her to bypass obstacles when shooting. She can also further support her allies by using the glyphs as platforms. However, these glyphs can only be summoned when she is standing in place, and the energy cost to sustain them increases with distance and numbers, increasing the risk of their use. It also costs energy with each deflection. Despite over a decade of training, Balina finds her Semblance very difficult to use in melee combat.

Abilities:

 * Faunus Night Vision
 * Agility: Having a tail and being raised by the Silver Moon Clan, Balina has strong balance, and skill in freerunning.
 * Liberal arts: The Silver Moon Clan introduced Balina to art and music not merely as entertainment, but as an warrior's educational tool. Both contributed to refining her attention to detail, dexterity, and discipline. Her favorite instrument is the keyed violin, or "nyckelharpa".
 * Survival: Another product of her upbringing, Balina is well versed in forestry, first aid, handicrafts, and other skills useful in survival situations, such as plant identification and orienteering.
 * Gardening: Balina has been taught to garden for many practical reasons, such as exercise, self-sufficiency, and thrift.
 * Massage: An long-standing tradition of the Silver Moon Clan is learning and using massage as a way to help relax and bond with one another, relieving pain and promoting blood flow to speed healing.
 * Martial arts: Trained from age four in hand-to-hand combat, Balina uses the baseline fighting style of the Silver Moon Clan, relying on blending into and redirecting the movements of her opponents and countering with explosive attacks.
 * Stealth: An natural trait for an Faunus whose totem derives from ambush predators, Balina is the best of her clan at stealth, though her preferred outfit leaves something to be desired in terms of concealment for most environments.
 * Swimming: Balina is very comfortable in the water, and is a strong swimmer, an attribute of her liger totem's tiger aspect.
 * Aura Control: Only age six when her Aura was first unlocked, Balina has since grown much more skilled in it's use than an ordinary combat school student.

Personality
As an extremely rare White Liger Faunus and the only member of her family with a feline totem, Balina is very understanding of those who find themselves outsiders or otherwise isolated. The best example of this is her close bond with her younger cousin Bailey, who is the only other female among the Silver Moon Clan's seven children. She is equally comfortable working alone or as a team. This is likely due to her being something of an ambivert, with her preference for company or solitude varying with her mood. Given that ligers are half-tiger, which share nests and overlapping territory but otherwise live alone, her family sees this as normal. Balina also shares a good connection with Bailey's largely solitary older brother, Albus. Though a tomboy from growing up surrounded by males and warriors, she still tends to connect just as easily with the females that manage to find their way into her social circle, a trait her family attributes to the other, lion half of her totem. As an result of her past, Balina is very protective of family, friends, and others who earn her loyalty, something she values highly, and won't hesitate to fight, frequently in an uncharacteristically viscious, even outright sadistic, manner if they are threatened. Even being outmatched in strength or numbers is no deterrent in such situations, another possible contribution of the tiger aspect of her liger totem.

Backstory:
Balina Savannah was taken in by a pair of Black Bear Faunus, ex-Huntsman Artorius Stark and his wife Ursula, when they found her as an infant on their doorstep with a note that had her name written on it. Despite her uniqueness in having both a lion's tail and a white tiger's coloration, no hospital in the area could identify any possible parents for the baby Liger Faunus. Artorius and Ursula formally adopted Balina, and raised her with their own son, Bjorn Stark, who was born just three months after she first arrived. All was well, until an drunk driver killed Artorius on the way home shortly after the children had their third birthdays, and they quickly became in danger of losing thier home. As his own apartment was usually empty due to his trade as a Huntsman, Artorius's best friend and fellow mechanical engineering enthusiast, an Red Wolf Faunus by the name of Gregory Moonfang, took them in. Soon falling in love with the shattered family, Gregory married Ursula and adopted Balina and Bjorn as his own. Hoping to spare them from further loss and provide a more consistent income, as well as giving them a properly present father figure, he retired from being an Huntsman full time in favor of becoming the Forgemaster of Torch Academy, though he still takes the occasional hunting mission during school breaks. Like any other member of the Silver Moon Clan, Balina began learning how to fight at age four alongside the identical twins Arcturus and Albus Silvermane, her eldest stepcousins by Gregory Moonfang's only sibling, Columbiana, and her husband, Bernard Silvermane. Arcturus and Albus' younger sister, Bailey, was an year old at the time. When Balina was six years old, the youngest of the Silver Moon Clan, the fraternal twin brothers Orion and Arctos Moonfang, were born. A year later, when Balina and Bjorn were seven, they and their cousins witnessed the murder of Bernard and Columbiana, also losing Arcturus, Albus, and Bailey's unborn sister Mackenzie in the process. After this, the Silver Moon Clan returned to living in an single household for the first time in decades, on the small orchard owned by Bernard's parents, retired Huntsman and Huntress Crassus and Flora Silvermane. Balina wasted little time in bonding with her four-year old stepcousin Bailey, who was the only other young girl in their family. When she, Bjorn, Arcturus, and Albus were all old enough, they began attending Torch Academy, with Bailey following three years after. Now having graduated from Torch Academy at age 17, Balina applied for and was accepted into Lantern Academy so she can follow the warrior traditions of her adopted family by training as a Huntress.