Silico

Shred Ability Stone A medium damage melee attack. The target takes damage from bleeding for a short time. 250 Required Level: 1 Silverglow Meditate Energy Stone The caster will focus on the surrounding magical energies, generating a large amount of Breath. Reduces physical damage dealt by 75% for two turns. More silver than standard Meditate. 250 Required Level: 1

Silico & Margrethe Another clever word sets off an unsuspecting herd. =================================

"There's something about that one," Silico muses aloud. There really is, too, and he can't quite put his finger on it. It's really quite aggravating.

Mags shifts against his horn. Whether she agrees or not is a mystery, but she's not urging them to get out of here, so it's probably fine. Probably. He's killed bigger, meaner, and uglier people, anyway, if it comes down to that. Might be difficult with that bodyguard, though...

"Mmm," Kris says, below and behind, and Silico looks down at him, startled. That's an agreement. May wonders never cease - next they'll be rescuing puppies and calling each other pet names. There must really be something about that Imperial.

The Imperial in question is searching through her papers and completely ignoring them. She probably couldn't hear them from this distance, but Silico's learned by now to not assume that sort of thing. The saying really is quite accurate, and also it usually ends up with someone dead. So far it has been the other party that ends up dead, but there's never a guarantee of that.

Still, Mags seems to be willing enough, Kris isn't outright defensive like he was that time with the necromancer, and Silico doesn't think that whatever is going on with that Imperial is going to cause any of them to wind up dead. Inconvenienced, possibly, but then he's rather good at giving as good as he gets, so... should be fine. He nudges Kris, who looks up at him, shrugs, and goes back to squinting at the Imperial. Grilling him later is going to be fascinating.

The Imperial returns with the papers and a very fake smile. The bodyguard is never more than a pace away, and is looking at Mags. Silico can't decide if the bodyguard is obscenely intelligent or obscenely stupid.

"Well then," Nyne says, with the kind of cheer that makes Silico want to rip her tongue right out, "Let's see about filling out these employment contracts, shall we?"

---

Silico and Margrethe come as a pair, though you'd be forgiven if you don't realize it. One of them is rather smaller and less draconic than the other, after all.

The Imperial is Silico. He's much smaller than Imperials usually come, at least the adults, but he fills the space with the sheer force of his personality. There's no denying he's graceful, and some might even go so far as to call him beautiful - that is, until he opens his mouth and makes the full extent of his... difficult personality known. Silico is a jerk, and he revels in it. If you're unlucky enough to have to talk to him, the first words out of his mouth are probably going to be a backhanded compliment specially designed just so in order to cause maximum upset and/or irritation. Most people can't stand him, and he's quite pleased with that.

Perched on Silico's head is a ferret. Odds are you'll completely miss her, what with Silico's posturing and spirited attempts to antagonize you. And if you do notice her, well, lots of dragons have familiars - a ferret's not even anything interesting, as familiars come. And she's silent and still, too, wholly unremarkable overall. Unusual behavior for a ferret though... at least a normal ferret, and Margrethe is anything but. As sapient as any dragon, and frankly brilliant by draconic standards to boot, Margrethe could talk circles around just about anyone she cared to. (And does, on occasion, through her draconic mouthpiece. Silico is always oh-so-willing to play with whomever she designates a target.)

Together this unlikely pair is two strange halves of an even stranger whole. Silico is the brawn, the front, the one who gets them where they want to go. He might be the more dangerous of the two upon first glance - but it is Margrethe that represents far more danger than Silico's petty insults. An insult might ruin your day, but an emotionless, brilliant mind might come up with something to ruin your whole life.

Silico-and-Margrethe are oddly benign, all things considered, thankfully for... well, just about everyone. Mostly they're lone wolves - Silico doesn't get along with anyone, obviously, and Margrethe is not a social creature. Recently Kris has been included in their circle - and Margrethe is pushing them to work under Nyne. Why isn't clear, but Margrethe never does anything without a reason, and so for the time being they are doing the bodyguard thing. Time will tell what becomes of that.

Silico =============================== The youngest was a clever boy, cracking calculus by three.

Silico (and Margrethe) were once members of Goldwood, from long before Mizar's coup. Silico and Kris met there and pretty much immediately fell in love-hate and proceeded to snipe at (and occasionally beat the snot out of) each other on a daily basis. The relationship is... not very healthy, to say the least, but they're practically glued to each other now, so it seems to have sort of worked out.

The three of them now wander around doing odd jobs here and there, mostly mercenary work. Margrethe is often the directing force behind their wandering, though, and Silico at least assumes she has some ulterior motive. She rarely doesn't, after all.

♫ Light Em Up, Professional Griefers, Emperor's New Clothes ♥ Stereo Hearts, Killer • Silico is much smaller than an adult Imperial, being about 14m long with a similar wingspan. He looks like he just stopped growing at some point in adolescence. He's still larger than most of the members of the smaller dragon breeds, though, which he uses to his advantage. He also has a thick scar all the way down his belly, from pelvis to collarbone, in an unnaturally straight line. • A surprisingly good singer. He's often humming under his breath and tends to break out into full song every now and then, both his own compositions and things he picked up somewhere. His actual singing voice is a smooth-as-honey baritone, although his range is quite massive and he often moves up and down said range on a whim. In another world he'd have become a professional musician rather than a professional jerk. • For all his posturing and gleeful goading, Silico is not an idiot and will back off from fights he knows he can't win. He'll still do his best to irritate said targets, just not so much they actually lose it. On the other hand he also has a terrible temper - so if his targets manage to hit a nerve it doesn't take much to drive him to incoherent rage.

OOC Notes
• Dragon version of a Neopet.
• Silico's voice. (Accent and all!)

• Silico does not remember his childhood very well, though attempting to bring it up is futile, even by the likes of Margrethe and Kris. The first thing he remembers clearly is a freezing cell somewhere in the Southern Icefield, and Margrethe slipping through the bars to bring him water.
What he doesn't know is that he was part of Gaster's project, which has left him with a lifetime of oddities and lingering aftereffects - the least of which is his small stature and the surgical scar on his belly. His survival in and of itself is a small miracle mixed with a stroke of luck - to say nothing of Margrethe managing to locate him in the labyrinthine fortress in which they were both imprisoned. They escaped together, once he'd regained his strength and Margrethe had found the keys. It is for this reason that he trusts her without question and will defend her with his life.

• For all that Silico is a major irritant to everyone around him and openly pushes people away, he is permanently, unceasingly loyal. There's Margrethe, of course, who uses such loyalty to her own ends. Kris is only beginning to suspect just how over-attached Silico is to him, and is rather boggled by the concept of it. (And awed, a little; to know that someone would without hesitation fight through legions for you, or die trying, is quite the experience.)
Silico, for his part, is not quite aware of this trait of his. Big on introspection, this guy is not.

• Silico is intersex, though he's unaware of this. He's also asexual (but has no issues with using sex to get what he wants), and more or less aromantic. Kris appears to be something of a special case.

Margrethe =============================== You may say that I'm breaking your mind. (In my opinion, you're much too kind.)

♫ You're Gonna Go Far, Kid, Just Gold, The Wondersmith and his Sons

OOC Notes
• Margrethe's sapience appears to have also come with immortality; she's as old as Silico himself, and Silico is hundreds of years old. Her advanced age hasn't seemed to have affected her at all, somehow - aside from honing her ever-growing pool of knowledge. The peculiarities of Margrethe's mind appear to have given her memory retention closer to that of a computer's than that of a person's; she's able to recall knowledge and events from centuries ago with eerie precision.
• A textbook polymath, someone well-versed in a variety of fields. Margrethe can't speak aloud, of course, being a ferret, but her forepaws are dexterous enough to allow for some signing and she can read/write a good dozen languages with decent proficiency. Her understanding of spoken languages is even more expansive. And that's only languages; she's equally well-read in a variety of other fields.
• Margrethe is patient, calculating, calm, and frankly very nearly emotionless. Silico - and by extension Kris - are only people she's attached to at all. Her fondness for Silico primarily lies in the fact that he is predictable, easy to manipulate, and already obeys her. Things such as "friendship" and "love" have nothing to do with it.
"Amoral" is overall the best way to describe her, as ethics and morals are more or less interesting things that happen to other people. Yet, despite her amorality, Margrethe is generally benign, having no interest in causing chaos or imposing her own preferences upon others. In fact she tends to be subjectively "good" more often than not, because chaos often leads to destruction and such things are uninteresting. Mostly, she just wants to watch and learn, and occasionally manipulate events here and there to see what happens. If I maneuver this Lord into power, what happens with the relations between his neighbors?

• One could easily assume Margrethe to be asexual - she isn't. She possesses all the reproductive drive of a regular ferret of her species, and has had more than one litter of kits to boot. None of them inherited their mother's intellect, and as expected Margrethe never formed an emotional attachment to any of them. Nowadays she doesn't bother with the whole thing, considering it an interesting experiment that produced uninteresting results (aka a lack of fellow sapients).