Master Alchemist, Seeker of the Stone
Physical Description
Physically, Rino looks much younger than his age due to his alchemical experiments. He appears to be in his late twenties/early thirties, when in fact he is approaching fifty. His skin tone is mid-ranged and can best be described as "ambiguous" due to his multitude of ethnic backgrounds, a result of his family's frequent and far-reaching travels.
Rino has high cheekbones, a pronounced, hawk-like nose, and a strong jawline which sports a short Van Dyke beard.
The right eye is yellow—evidence of the draconic the family says is in his bloodline—but the left eye is milky white and blind and covered by a large, vertical scar which he got while the demon was possessing him.
As an alchemist, Rino places a strong importance on the color red (symbolizing the final stage of the alchemical process, rubedo) and he incorporates that into his dress. He favors thick, extravagant robes covered in gold-stitched alchemical symbols and enough jangly gold jewelry to feed a large village.
Mental characteristics
The Moonfall line had a long, storied history of producing sorcerers and warlocks of unparalleled power. Always a very tight-knit family, nearly all its members lived in a single community, a small Okarthian village at the head of the Barzakh river named Khaliq. The Moonfalls were known for their secrecy, and it was common practice for members of the family to enchant their grimoires to curse all but a blood relative who tried to read them. They had a reputation for toeing the line between Light and Dark magic, and many a famous necromancer could be found with the last name Moonfall. By the time Rino was born, the family had amassed a vast knowledge of the arcane arts, which they jealously guarded from potential thieves.
Rino quickly proved to be a magical prodigy, which in any other family would make him remarkable, but in this family he felt dwarfed by the power that all his older, more experienced relatives wielded, and he always strove to prove he was just as good as them. When he was still young, barely an adult, he stole one of his cousins’ grimoires and snuck out to learn everything he could from it. Arrogantly, he attempted to summon a powerful demon from the book, thinking he had the skill to contain it. Instead, it possessed him. The demon, using Rino's body and power, leveled the town, killing everyone in it and nearly wiping out the entire Moonfall family. Channeling that much raw power through his body proved too much for Rino to handle at that age, and when the demon left him he was nothing more than an empty shell.
Dead.
The next thing he knew he was looking up at the face of a woman who he could only assume had brought him back, but before he could say anything to her, she disappeared. He became obsessed with discovering the identity of this mysterious woman, and many, many years later her face would become the basis for Auria's.
In the meantime, a second new obsession emerged: an obsession with death and overcoming it. For a few years after his resurrection, he wandered the lands in a daze before finally pulling himself back together. It was then that he became interested in alchemy, specifically in the elusive philosopher's stone. He threw himself into his research, and before long he began to make a name for himself in the alchemical world. It was during this time, at the Institute of Arcane Learning, that he first caught the attention of Zosima Sau Hemet, a prominent alchemist from the Barzakh delta who would in time consider him an upstart rival. Within ten years Rino became one of Arda'aman's leading experts on alchemy. As the years passed with no progress on the philosopher's stone, he turned his efforts to other pursuits, though he always kept the stone in the back of his mind, of course. He made advancements in the transmutation of lead, the purification of several different elements, the development of an alkahest, and, most recently, in the creation of a truly lifelike homunculus.
At this point in Rino's career, Zosima saw him as a serious threat to her own quest for the philosopher's stone, and she devised a plan to take him out of the picture. Having previously discovered where his secret lab in northern Sylanta was, she broke in one night when she knew Rino would be there. What she didn't count on was Rino still being awake and working on his homunculus. Zosima took him by surprise and began to place a powerful transmutation curse, one that would trap him in the body of a common house cat forever, unable to access his magic. In a last, desperate attempt to save himself, as the curse took hold, he poured all of his power into activating the unfinished homunculus and gave it its first and only order: "Help me."
Hours later Rino woke up as a cat, and the homunculus was sitting up, as alive as Rino. Auria—the homunculus—took a while to get her bearings, but eventually she and Rino began to search for a counter-curse. Before long, Rino began to suspect Auria was more than just a homunculus, that she was a fully conscious person, that he accidentally created sentient life in his lab. He never could have imagined the truth: that, when he tried to transfer his power into the homunculus, a part of his very soul transferred with it, and that was what made Auria more than just a homunculus.
Now, Rino and Auria are still scouring the globe looking for something—anything—to help restore Rino to his body and power.
He attended the Kssth Institute of Arcane Learning, widely considered the most prestigious magical university in the realm, where he earned a PhD in Alchemy. Though he studied sorcery there as well, he did not pursue a degree in it, preferring instead to get the bulk of his arcane knowledge from what was left of the Moonfall library. In addition to his extensive research in alchemy, he has tried to rediscover some of his family's arcane secrets that had been lost in the demon attack.
Rino is a gifted alchemist and sorcerer who has made many advancements in his chosen fields, most notably in the transmutation of lead, the purification of several different elements, the development of an alkahest, and in the creation of a truly lifelike homunculus. His most impressive accomplishment, however, is one nobody knows anything about: he managed to create sentient life in Auria. Admittedly, it was an accident, and not even he knows the truth of how it happened, but it is, nonetheless, a unique accomplishment.
Rino suffers from PTSD from the time he was possessed by a demon, which grows less pronounced with time. Usually it manifests as an extreme phobia of anything related to demons and demon-worship, though for a short time following the tragedy he refused to use any magic whatsoever.
Despite outward appearances, he is very much a scientist at heart. He is, paradoxically, a passionately logical person. He can spend days on end engrossed in his research, only emerging from his thoughts for food and sleep, and sometimes not even for that. His mind rarely slows down, and it isn't uncommon for him to drop everything at a moment's notice to jot down some new breakthrough or idea.
In the layman's eyes, he might appear to have a... shall we say flexible approach to morality. He has few outward qualms about dabbling in many forms of dark magic, and he can be shockingly harsh when he wants to be, and he will use any means necessary to achieve his goals. However, there are some line he absolutely, under no circumstances, would cross, and to many they may appear arbitrary. He will not work with demons or anyone who consorts with them. He will not suffer fools gladly. And, most importantly, he will not "cheat" at immortality. What he views as cheating is any method that either achieves it on a technicality (ie placing oneself in a magical stasis of some sort) or achieves it through becoming an undead (ie liches or vampires). Even the idea of liches and other extreme forms of necromancy disgusts him.
Personality Characteristics
Rino is primarily motivated by fear—fear of death, fear of losing Auria, fear of staying stuck as a cat for the rest of his life—and by his own ambition. Not only does he want to discover the philosopher's stone to achieve immortality but also to leave an indelible mark on the world, to accomplish something truly historic. He wants his name to be written in legend.
History
Rino is the only person in the world who knows the truth about Auria's past, but he lets Auria go on believing she's a normal human being with a childhood like anyone else. He does this partly because it's easier and partly because she seems perfectly content with her fiction. It's a flimsy excuse, he knows, but in truth by the time he began to suspect she was anything more than an unusual, though still mindless, construct it was too late to correct her. Too much time had passed, and she had too thoroughly convinced herself otherwise that Rino wasn't sure she would even believe the truth. She might even leave him, and she was his only hope to become human again.
In truth, in other words, Rino is too afraid of the consequences to tell her. To his credit, he does feel terrible about it.
Conversely, Auria hides nothing from Rino. It wouldn't even occur to her to do so. As far as she knows, it's been this way between them since they were children. (Never mind the glaring difference in age. Auria is physically in her thirties, while Rino is approaching fifty. It never crosses her mind that this might be a problem, because the human mind is remarkable at filtering out anything that contradicts its preconceptions.) She thinks their friendship is why she devotes everything to him, when in fact it's a byproduct of her creation. Rino realizes this, and it is one reason he's so wary of telling her the truth. He's afraid that, as a sentient person, she has the free will to act against her "programming" if she learns that's what it is.
Despite his dishonesty, Rino does truly care about Auria, more so than he's cared about anyone else. She's his proudest accomplishment and his closest friend, and he would do absolutely anything for her. He might even be a little bit in love with her: a fact which both terrifies and exasperates him, because it's so typical of him to fall in love with a part of himself.
Commonalities & Shared Interests
In a way, Auria is simply Rino as seen through a funhouse mirror. She is her own person with her own personality, but the part of Rino's soul that gave her life has a strong influence on her character. Her knowledge of herbs, potions, and magic comes from his knowledge of alchemy and sorcery. Her adherence to her witchy aesthetic comes from his flair for the dramatic and taste for lavish robes. Even her religious beliefs—the Goddess and God that are so different from any culture's religion—come from his reverence for the woman who resurrected him and from his own ego.
Rino has amassed a great deal of wealth by purifying and transmuting base elements, though he never discovers how to turn lead into gold. However, he wasn't always rich. Growing up his family was quite wealthy, but he lost all that in the demon attack and spent the next many years penniless. In fact, the allure of financial security was one of the reasons alchemy appealed to him in the first place. That period of poverty instilled in him a deep-rooted fear of losing what money he had, and even after he became rich he hoarded his gold like a dragon. The only exceptions to this were his infrequent yet extremely costly splurges when he indulged in his extravagant tastes.
He distrusted anyone else with his money, so he kept it split up between countless banks in as many different cities. Small "emergency funds" he kept hidden in his labs in Sylanta and Okarthia, and another in a pocket dimension that could only be accessed by performing a custom spell in his personal journal, which was written in a draconic code and protected by a blood lock. This proved to his detriment when Auria needed to access his fortune.
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