Khaaestra zahd Machkin, the Grand Architect (Khaa-es-tra)

Summary

Born from an illicit love affair, Khaaestra was thrown out as an infant, only saved from death by a conniving human servant of her mother's. Kept around as a bargaining chip, her youth wasted away in horrid conditions; a sickness struck during it, resulting in the amputation of her right arm and left leg below the knee. Worse, domestic abuse from her parents resulted in her right eye being lost entirely, and one of her curved horns being broken off. Yet, in spite of these great hardships, Khaaestra's cunning mind refused to yield.
Enamored by the sights of artifice, machines, and more, she saw in them the answers to her problems. Absconding from her 'family', she took to a trade caravan and stopped over in a distant city, signing on as a child-apprentice to a mechanic. There, she devised a way of restoring what she'd lost: mechanical prosthetics for her arm and leg. Though there was nothing she could do for her eye or horn, she pushed onward.
Desiring more than what life had given her, she conspired to enroll at a prestigious academy--one many high-born would attend. Her technical accomplishments captured the academy principle's attention; and so she enrolled under the name of his niece, whom otherwise died in battle years before.
Living a quiet life in the academy, Khaaestra's increasing innovations drew great attention from her high-born fellows. Through them, she found ever greater gifts and resources coming, all trying to capture her vast intellect. Each of them, unwittingly furthering her ambitions. In her final years of the academy, a scandal broke out: the principle's actual niece had returned suddenly, blowing up their entire scheme.
Stripped of identity, the principle cast Khaaestra out as an imposter of the worst kind, and so she vanished from the public eye in an instant. While she'd lost much of her contacts as a result, one notably continued to try building a bridge. Much to their delight, it was them that Khaaestra elected to use in full.
Venturing out of Lophern's southern reaches, she joined her patron's family in their city at the northern end's mountains, bordering on Immensio. There, her years of preparation and education came to fruition. Freed of political maneuvers, given a blank book to build anything she desired, Khaaestra pushed her skills to the limits.
More than being a simple esoteric mistress, she opened an engineering school of her own, training dozens upon dozens in her exotic form of magi-tech. In mere decades, her adoptive city transformed from a cold mining location into a thriving, thrumming city-fortress that no one has any hopes of assailing.
The grandiosity of it lured in all sorts of envious and intrigued persons, even as far away as Sa-kemet. Soon, queens, empresses, and otherwise were petitioning her for aid in redesigning their own locations, all of them offering wealth even a dragon would balk at.
Sending out her students, they spread her machkin school of engineering farther and farther, and soon all of Lophern could trace their latest innovations back to her. To some extent, the great push back against the Relentless on Lophern is attributed to her as well.
Still, Khaaestra's ambitions are endless.
The more success her creations have, the greater she pushes their limits. While it falls to her underlings to translate her works into something mass producible, her own 'personal work' is a world in and of itself. Self-moving automata, body-to-armor interfaces that can give metal sensation, magic enhancing apparatus, and even more bewildering items define her workshop. For, as anyone who knows her would attest, Khaaestra is driven to create and perfect; and perfection is unobtainable by her own admission.
She tries all the same.

Physical Description

General Physical Condition

With what remains of her original body, Khaaestra is for the most part lithe, with a slight hint of chubbiness. However, due to her stress, she often appears with baggy eyes, frayed hair/fur, and a sweaty/oily texture that persists even though she cleans regularly. Given she's missing one arm, half a leg, and an eye, she's in rather decent condition otherwise.

Body Features

Both her horns jut out from above the temples in a forward line, then curve backward, the tips then twisting inward almost like a pincer. The horn above her right temple is broken at the curving point, and the rest is simply gone outright.
She is missing her right eye; her entire right arm (with only the empty shoulder-socket remaining), and her left leg below the knee. Prosthetics as described below replace or cover these areas.
As she has lived so long with her prosthetics and different body kinetics, some of her fat, muscles, and other physical features have become asymmetrical. Thankfully, it is not as bad as it could've been, but it is remains distinctly noticeable.

Facial Features

Quite prominently missing her right eye, the frequency of a large eye-patch covering that scarred area shifts around the visual weight of her face. Without it, she has fairly gaunt features and a wide, rounded left eye that is always creased in a thin-browed frown. In fact, seeing her without the frown is rarer than anything else. Modest, upturned lips give an air of playfulness to her otherwise dead-serious oval-shaped face.

Identifying Characteristics

The most identifying features tend to be her prosthetics, as there are few people in all the world who have such extensive and functionally-complete examples. For those in baarham cultures, her broken right horn and asymmetrical nature is more attention-grabbing than anything else about her.

Physical quirks

She has a swinging sort of locomotion, a result of one natural leg and her prosthetic one. Khaaestra sometimes uses a cane to counteract this behavior, but to anyone with discerning eyes, it stands out.
Her left arm is fairly muscular, as it is always responsible for the finer control and usage she needs in life.

Special abilities

Mana Control -- To use her prosthetics, Khaaestra sends mana through them, animating her right arm and left leg with conscious effort. Years upon years of doing so has given her an insane degree of personal control over her own mana, to the point of being comparable to mistress mages in their own right.
Fire Magic -- She has a natural affinity for fire magic; in fact, she can create dangerously powerful examples of it using her right arm. Far hotter than most mages are willing to risk, she exploits her unique innovations to their utmost degree.
Command: Machines -- Khaaestra can command her non-sapient golems, filling them with her will, and turning them into fully functional workers, warriors, or whatever she needs them to be.

Apparel & Accessories

Khaaestra's prosthetics are fairly distinguished, reminiscent of dragon physiology in a sense. To understand their function, one must look at their structure. The core 'bone' frame is a hefty mana-steel set of rods, attached to ball-joint or hinge as needed.
A crystalline, crimson-colored fabric is then woven around the mana-steel frame, broadly coming to look almost like a set of muscles in their own right. Finally, a protective outer shell is bolted on, overlapping in layers like plate mail. The curled and pointed edges of this shell gives it the distinctly draconic impression most people feel when first meeting her.
Her eye-patch is a bulky thing with a thick, brown leather strap. An iron, cog-wheel like base covers the eye socket and part of the eyebrow, brushing up against her nose. A miniature, rotating red 'door' sits in the center of the cog, able to spin and open up by sliding into its housing. Her actual eye socket has apparently been carved out and smoothed, filled with a type of crysium gem work.
In the times she appears in public spaces, her clothing tends to entail a dark, crimson-hued vestments with white underclothing where appropriate. Three vest pockets go down her right side, ostensibly for her left hand to easily reach. A fusion of an aristocrat and scientist's attire, its become the (unwittingly awkward) inspiration for engineering uniform across Lophern.
Accommodations in her attire are made for her prosthetics, which otherwise cannot be covered up adequately. A belt and skirt combo hang off her waist, with the skirt chiefly covering her rear half, and the belt housing a number of pouches and locked-in-place technical tools.

Mental characteristics

Gender Identity

Female

Sexuality

Lesbian

Education

Self-taught from a young age, Khaaestra's genius came into its own during her years at the academy. Formalized education gave structure and opportunity, but her own desires and bizarre insights often challenged convention. While it's easy to peg Khaaestra as a 'genius', she has always put in an absurd degree of hardwork toward realizing her visions. In many ways, the successes she's made are the crown peaks off mountains of failures, a fact often represented in her rather high-strung and stressed out days.

Mental Trauma

She has an extreme aversion to poverty and starvation; the horrors of her youth are ever on her mind. Her manner of coping has to been to ever create more effective solutions toward addressing such problems--whether for herself, and also others. Though, she does tend to over-indulge when eating, a fact her prosthetics tend to disagree with.

Intellectual Characteristics

There are those who argue that Khaaestra may be the greatest intellect in the last half-millennium. Indeed, they often speak in reverence of her, accentuating the mysterious regality surrounding her.
Truthfully, she's rather stressed out all the time.
Khaaestra's vast intellectual prowess is as much a boon as a burden; for as many wonderful innovations she makes, she worries even greater about other problems. Working double-time as an administrator of a prestigious engineering school, on top of all her ongoing projects, on top of satisfying her eccentric clientele (and otherwise), on top of ... you get the idea. In many ways, her snappish and dry-biting witticisms are pressure valves to her ever-increasing workload, but she is, nonetheless, quite abrasive.

Morality & Philosophy

Khaaestra sees the world through logical pathways--cause and effect, construction and deconstruction, and so forth. If the people suffer, it is not from a nameless evil, but a traceable lineage of problems that has its own root causes. If a design does not work, then there is a fault or a lack of adequacy; either can be answered with a sophisticated degree of development time. She ultimately suffers from staring at the 'design' of the problem more than the reality, even if she does directly consider practical matters. That is, as many people will say and feel, Khaaestra stares 'straight through them' and takes them apart in her own mind. Then, she puts them together until she knows them better than they know themselves.

Personality Characteristics

Motivation

To push her craft to its limits, then create the fantastical world of tomorrow she dreams of. Deep in her heart, Khaaestra wants an easy, peaceful life, free of hunger, the fear of the Relentless and Forsaken, and without worry of some random warlady kicking down her door. All she builds and envisions are driven by this desire, and for as long as she has lived, it has ever proven reliable in giving her purpose.

Trivia

Zahd Machkin

The noble lineage of machkin is a relatively 'recent' addition to the baarham noble circles. Khaaestra was awarded it thanks to her work with the Iron Codex, and spreading machkin technological ideas across Veltrona. Since nobility entails responsibility for one's deeds, Vanzkah zahd Ghown essentially made Khaaestra responsible for her world-changing actions. A fact that has resulted in endless paperwork and administrative needs that constantly bog Khaaestra down. Although the two of them are not enemies in the traditional senses, Khaaestra and Vanzkah always end up butting heads. After all, Vanzkah is trying to keep Khaaestra's incredible eccentricities in line, and Khaaestra is a tortured creator bogged down by 'mundane problems'.

Current Location

Lophern

Species

Baarham

Honorary & Occupational Titles

The renown she commands in her architectural and engineering has often befuddled many. To this regard, her genius can only be called 'grand', and as more understand masonry and architecture than engineering, she is 'the Grand Architect'.

Year of Birth

2015 TD 420 Years old

Gender

Female

Eyes

Bubblegum Pink iris; black sclera

Hair

Shoulder-length, spiky/messy; black color

Skin Tone/Pigmentation

Olive

Height

Medium-short

Weight

Medium

Quotes & Catchphrases

"Life gives nothing to us; we must make with our own two hands the world we want to live in."

Owned Vehicles

• Lovaena-series Airship

Ruled Locations

• Laknor