Flavia

she / her
  • bisexual pride flag!

info

  • full name: Flavia de Montecristo
  • height: 160cm / 5'3"
  • age: 23
  • specialization: pyromancy
  • sanctioned?: yes
  • High Gothic fluency: rough, basic understanding
  • birthplace: Cadia
  • convictions: a list almost as long as she is tall that contains everything you'd imagine a Loner psyker would be accused of lmao
blitz: brain rupture.
aura: kinetic presence.
ability: venting shriek.
keystone: warp siphon.
  • weapons

  • Inferno StaffRifthaven • Mk II
  • Blaze Force Sword Obscurus • Mk II

Scathing, sarcastic, sharp-tongued, and quick-witted; will antagonize you first. Flavia is actively mean and hostile to pretty much everyone, and just as openly disdainful of the Imperium and everything about it which leaves little room for speculation on why she's even on the Mourningstar at all. A more interesting question is how she's managed to live this long without simply being executed for her abrasive and irreverent nature...

She is now always found in the company of the zealot Montecristo, and seems to be in.. some kind of relationship with him despite the two of them constantly arguing and antagonizing each other whenever they're seen. Catching the attention of this man is enough to chill the bones of most, as his reputation as a torturer for the Inquisition tends to precede him, particularly his tendency to vanish his victims altogether... though those who know Flavia enough to be familiar with her personality tend to be content to leave her to her fate. She is, notably, still alive despite the zealot's fixation on her... the two of them seeming to have some kind of obsession with each other beneath their disdain and contempt for one another.

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warp aura

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warp connection

major psychic discipline: pyromancy

For all Flavia's physical shortcomings, her connection to the warp is both stronger than that of the average psyker and manifests in her as the rare pyromancy discipline.

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minor psychic discipline: telepathy

While Flavia is not an especially potent telepath, she can involuntarily hear whispered fragments of most others' thoughts if physically close enough to them. Her ability to parse another mind becomes clearer if she focuses, though she is not learned enough to do this subtly and the subject of her telepathy will feel the strong pressure of intrusion in their mindscape.
Her telepathy is also completely overridden by particularly strong faith, causing her ability to read the minds of most zealots difficult at best. The zealot Montecristo who has claimed her in some sense has a mind wholly unreadable to her, his thoughts ever guarded fully by his unwavering faith in the Emperor.

Some other telepath psykers may have the moral scruples to not go poking around in others' minds, but Flavia has no such qualms. While she is aware of the ever-present risk of her mind being contaminated by another's, she can't help but pry at least a little with most people if for no other reason to get more ammunition to use in antagonizing them.

backstory

content warnings: ableism, abuse, forced drug use, dark / toxic relationship.

  1. chapter 1
  2. chapter 2
  3. chapter 3
  4. chapter 4

I

Born as Flavia Scaevus on the fortress world of Cadia, her small stature and frail body were considered weakness since the day of her birth, causing her existence to be detested and resented even before her connection to the warp was discovered. The since-destroyed records of even her earliest evaluations detailed her inability to even lift some heavier melee weapons other children her age were able to handle, constant and lingering physical exhaustion, poor circulation, and subpar at best hand-eye coordination with every model of gun available for trial — effectively a social death sentence on a planet where all civilians have the expectation to be exemplary soldiers foisted upon them.
From her very first memories she was treated as a pest, a burden, a Thing and waste of resources, assigned to struggle with tasks considered beneath anyone else. Her every need was held in contempt against her, her "weak" body blamed on a lack of willpower and committment to training, and her outrage at the injustice levied against her punished quite harshly. She no longer remembers a time she didn't have to protect herself with a dry, cutting wit and scathing, open disdain, or didn't feel the need to throw the first verbal punch — after all, they were going to do the same to her anyway; she may as well have control over when the abuse was going to happen.

Mistakenly she thought at times things couldn't get worse, even as she learned quickly to keep quiet about the swirling colors everyone seemed to have slowly become surrounded by as she matured, and the whispering she started to hear. She always felt cold, which she initally accepted as a symptom of her faint pulse and poor blood circulation, but eventually began to suspect this was also something more. At around age 9 she experienced an involuntary surge of pale blue fire from her body, which frightened her quite deeply and made her struggle to retain her composure as a snarky mean kid, though the event alarmed those around her much more. Mercifully no one had been seriously harmed in her exposure as a psyker, yet she was still instantly handed over to the Sisters, as this event happened to coincide with one of what would be the last arrivals of a Blackship to Cadia to collect known psykers, the timing sparing her what would've been her immediate execution. Flavia's family was quite glad to be finally rid of her and made no attempt to prevent this from being overheard by her, but by this point they had earned her resentment in return and she found herself only feeling pleased by the thought of never seeing any of them again.

II

Her harsh life gave her a naïve confidence she could handle whatever lay in wait for her on the Blackship, and she immediately realized how wrong she had truly been. The extreme torment of the journey to Terra on the ship was unlike anything she had ever experienced. And yet, by the ship's arrival at its destination she was noted that despite her physical weakness her will remained steeled and her mental fortitude both intact and among the very best of the thousands of captive psykers. She appeared shaken from her trials but still insulted and antagonized her captors the entire time she was dragged off the ship, and even as she was evaluated for sanctioning.
The senior amongst Flavia's evaluators found her willful, stubborn and hostile nature to be "amusing" and was curious to see how far she would get in the sanctioning process before reaching a point of failure, even as a young Flavia venomously derided them as too cowardly to simply execute her. Deep beneath the tide of her hostility she was highly traumatized from her imprisonment aboard the Blackship and completely terrified by the potential for what new horrors she would be subjected to, and part of her wished she could make someone angry enough to simply kill her and end her suffering.

This was not to be so; she emerged years later from a successful sanctioning at age 17 to the surprise of everyone involved. Some had hoped enough of her brain had been reshaped to rid her of her hostility and defiance, though to their dismay and disappointment the tortures of sanctioning seemed to only serve to make her meaner in addition to honing her dangerously powerful pyromancy. While Flavia had her entire life thus far to submerge her fears deep enough within her psyche they would not cause her will to waver, a skill that was the crux of her not only being selected for sanctioning but also fully surviving the process, deep within her at the edges of her mind she felt the clawing of the decades of her constant trauma and grief. She never had any friends or anyone who cared for her, and probably never would. Her psychic awakening had stolen from her any semblance of a vaguely normal life she could have ever had. No one loved her before, and they certainly would never love her as she was now. Autonomy over her own body was constantly stolen from her, and finally with being sanctioned even her own mind had been carved and reshaped at the behest of others and bound to the Emperor. How much of her mind was even still her own was a question she had to entirely avoid asking herself.
Deep in her hidden self, beneath layers upon layers and guarded walls, she struggled not to wither under the isolation and the pervasive, crushing grief of being violated to her core.

III

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IV

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