Traveling Wave

Name: Traveling Wave

Pronunciation: Traa-vul-ing way-v

Gender: Female

Type: Western Dragon

Species: Aquatic Dragon

Age: 28

Date of Birth: April 13th

Personality: She is bright, chipper, and enthusiastic, with a glimmering intelligence in her eyes and a smile on her face.  She is officially a Salmon of the Lakara tribe, an explorer of the deepest, darkest corners of the ocean, and quite a skilled one at that... But frankly, she doesn’t find it all that interesting.  At least, not as interesting as the things she could be doing instead.  Those things include, but are not entirely limited to, rocketing down the rivers and meeting new dragons, and trying to learn everything said dragons know about any facet of engineering, architecture, metalworking, or anything similar.  She collects this knowledge in her notebooks, along with months’ worth of falsified exploration reports and various other writings she scribbles down.  She uses all this accumulated mechanical knowledge to perform experiments on what works and what doesn’t, seeking to expand what she knows with every test and every dragon she meets in the hopes of becoming the greatest engineer in Nuiran.
...However, this plan is rather thwarted by her innate magical abilities.  This volatile form of magic contaminates anything she creates, causing strange effects and imbuing various items with different properties they didn’t have before.  These imbuements are, oddly, somewhat consistent- if, for example, she makes a spoon and it flies out of her claw, then every spoon she makes in the same way would do the same.  More powerful imbuements are much, much harder to consistently create.  This, coupled with her mostly loner lifestyle, has led her to believe that magic is entirely not real, and all of it originates from very advanced engineering techniques she simply hasn’t discovered yet.  This belief, as well as how every dragon she’s met so far has stared at her like she had fifteen eyes when she told them this, has led her to believe that there is a secret organization of dragons that has been working tirelessly to disguise grand feats of engineering as this “magic” by implanting devices in the claws and bodies of dragons all across the continent.  Because of her optimistic tendencies, she doesn’t actually believe that this organization has any sort of ulterior motives, and as a result doesn’t hide these beliefs- she just wants to grow her knowledge and engineering ability.

Hobbies: Experimenting with new engineering concepts/techniques, meeting new dragons, reading instructional manuals like novels, swimming upstream at very high speeds

Likes: Engineering, architecture, talking with dragons who know about those things, meeting new friends

Dislikes: Arrogance, an unwillingness to share information, Ki’shans in general

Fears: Deathly fear of falling, acquired fear of failure

Quote: “Aren’t the wonders of engineering so... uh, wonderful?”





Place of Origin: In a hydrothermal vent field deep undersea

Tribe: Lakara

Position: Salmon (Explorer)

Language: Universal, Aquatic

Home: An underwater cave under a cliffside she created herself using explosives

Parents: Unknown, she hatched alone

Siblings: Unknown but unlikely

Relatives: Unknown

Mate: No

Offspring: No

History: Hatched alone in a hydrothermal vent field, she quickly had to learn to survive on her own- a trivial task, with her instincts guiding her.  She chased down and caught even the swiftest fish, her passage leaving trails of smoky bubbles and shockwaves of sound through the water.  At a few years old, she was discovered by a Lakara Salmon investigating reports of strange and rather loud noises, and after a few months of regular visits and gifts of food they managed to gain her trust enough to meet her without her speeding away.  She was raised collectively by a loose group of other Salmons, being taught how to converse both in Aquatic with her bioluminescent scales and Universal with her mouth.  Once she reached adulthood, she was given a position as a Salmon.  However, she prefers to do other things than explore, and will create a month’s worth of false reports at a time, backed up by rapid fly-bys of the areas she’s been assigned.  She does stay in touch with the other explorers, but for the most part she lives by herself in her cave, and spends a large majority of her time in said cave, or swimming up and down rivers, or occasionally diving deep to rapidly make observations for her next round of falsified reports.




Height: 8 ft

Length: 16ft head-to-rear, 28ft head-to-tail

Wingspan: 10ft with jet-wings parallel to body, 20ft with jet-wings perpendicular to body

Scale/Fur/Feathers: Her main scales are silvery-blue iridescent, with a fade to sooty black on her claws and the tips of her jet-wings.  Her underbelly is dark gray.  The intake vents and outlet vents of her jet-wings are nearly perfect vantablack, and glow a faint red with heat.  Her scales have patches of bioluminescence that glow a deep blue.

Eyes: A piercing sea-green.

Accessories: Multiple waterproofed bags and satchels strapped to her chest, her back, the sides of her neck, and the base of her tail.

Horns/Spikes: Multiple streamlined, backwards-facing spikes on her head and down her back that are really just large, elongated, raised scale-plates.  They can all be moved up and down independently, and are used for high-speed underwater maneuverability.

Overall Appearance: She looks very much like a Valstrax, though with a rather pointy snout instead of a beak, and her wings are a pair of single jet-claws attached to highly articulate, three-jointed limbs- one ball joint at the shoulder, one ball joint connected to the jet-claw just under and behind the front intake vent, and a backwards-facing hinge joint in the middle of the limb.  These jet-wings can fold tightly to her back.  During supercavitating underwater flight, the jet-wings will extend so the intake vents graze the edge of the supercavitation bubble, taking in water for use as fuel.  During non-supercavitating swimming, they remain close to her back.  Her forelegs are more slender than her hind legs, and her foreclaws are small and nimble while her hind claws are much larger and sharper.  Her tail is long and tapered, the base of her tail rather thick and gradually tapering off to a point.  At the end of her tail are four large, backwards-swept fins each 90 degrees apart.  These fins can each be independently rotated up to 45 degrees and folded sideways up to 90 degrees, and are used for stabilization and maneuvering during supercavitating underwater flight and non-supercavitating swimming.  When out of the water, she folds the top and bottom fins down.  




Abilities:
-Underwater Breathing

- Hydro-detonation Jet (Her jet-wings can split water into hydrogen and oxygen for use as fuel.  It is burned as propellant in a Rotating Detonation Engine configuration within her jet-wings.)

- Supercavitation (Using her jet-wings, she can achieve supercavitating underwater flight.  Her jet-wings propel her at high speeds, and she expels the excess oxygen and other gases out of her maw at high pressure to create the supercavitation bubble.  This enables her to swim at 120 mph, though her initial acceleration is rather slow and can be surpassed by most aquatic dragons until she reaches approximately 75 mph.  When in a river or near the surface, supercavitating underwater flight creates a visible wave crest that travels with her, hence her name.
During supercavitating underwater flight, her maneuverability is greatly reduced, and she must either decelerate slowly or breach out of the water entirely so that the supercavitation bubble does not collapse and injure her.  Supercavitating underwater flight is also very, very loud, making her hearing effectively useless during flight and alerting any underwater creature of her approach minutes or more before she arrives.  The bubble itself also heavily obscures her vision, and the position she must take to expel the excess gas forwards prevents her from being able to see anything below her- effectively, her vision is limited to mere detection of shadows passing above her and movement directly in front of her.  If she is attacked while in supercavitating flight, the bubble may be disrupted and collapse inwards, bringing her to an immediate stop and injuring her.  Upon collapse, she receives the same effect as if she had used her Hyrox Blast ability twice, as well as disabling her ability to use her jet-wings as jets for 1 hour and momentarily stunning her due to the sudden pressure change.  If the disrupting attack was melee, the attacking dragon may be caught in the blast and be momentarily stunned as well; Otherwise, the supercavitating bubble collapse has no effect on the attacker.

- Hydrox Blast (In combat situations, her jet-wings can be used as effective weapons.  As well as being essentially another pair of claws with extended reach, she can also ignite a burst of propellant in a damaging blast.  Outside of the water, this attack is only effective at melee range, but while underwater it can momentarily stun and/or disorient another dragon with a violent pressure wave from up to 30 feet away, which in the case of non-waterbreathing dragons may force them to release their held breath.  However, this attack burns her when used, and can only be used two times during a battle before requiring an hour to heal and recover.  If necessary, it can be used another two times, but the third use reduces her supercavitation speed by half for two hours and the fourth use completely disables their use of their jet-wings as jets for 24 hours.

Strengths: very fast swimmer, rapid learner

Weaknesses: Flightless, extremely naive and trusting, very difficult to convince of concepts that conflict with her worldview, will rather quickly assume that anyone trying to convince her of said concept conflicting with her worldview simply has their views warped by their worldview, refuses to believe that magic is real

Fighting Style: She fights to escape, using their jet-wings as claws to keep their distance and slashing with her hind legs if her opponent closes the distance.  If cornered or otherwise unable to escape, she is likely to surrender.

Magic:
- Engi-magical Imbuement (When she creates a tool, item, or other object, her innate magical abilities will imbue it with a magical property.  These properties are consistent and replicable, but more complex creations will have more complex effects that are harder to replicate.  Many effects have a limited amount of “charge”, and cannot be recharged.  When charge is depleted, the magical imbuement fades, and the object becomes mundane.  Combining imbued items may result in new effects.)
Known Imbuements:
- Ocean floor sand + chunk of sulfite deposit from thermal vent field + iron rust + gold (20:10:3:1 ratio) packed tightly in a rigid container and coated with fish blood, then allowed to dry = Explosive that efficiently pulverizes stone in its blast radius and creates a very minimal shockwave- good for making caves
- Clawful of ash + a chunk of ocean salt + whale oil packed tightly in a rigid, non-flammable container and ignited with flame = [u]Fireball launcher (20ft effective range, 5 uses, explodes if doused with water)
- A large chisel with a head made of copper and a handle made of fish bones wrapped in leather = A chisel that always breaks off a chunk of rock just large enough for the user to hold in their claw after 3-20 hard strikes (depending on the hardness of the rock).

Bump!

""

Name: Traveling Wave

Pronunciation: Traa-vul-ing way-v

Gender: Female

Type: Western Dragon

Species: Aquatic Dragon

Age: 28

Date of Birth: April 13th

Personality: She is bright, chipper, and enthusiastic, with a glimmering intelligence in her eyes and a smile on her face.  She is officially a Salmon of the Lakara tribe, an explorer of the deepest, darkest corners of the ocean, and quite a skilled one at that... But frankly, she doesn’t find it all that interesting.  At least, not as interesting as the things she could be doing instead.  Those things include, but are not entirely limited to, rocketing down the rivers and meeting new dragons, and trying to learn everything said dragons know about any facet of engineering, architecture, metalworking, or anything similar.  She collects this knowledge in her notebooks, along with months’ worth of falsified exploration reports and various other writings she scribbles down.  She uses all this accumulated mechanical knowledge to perform experiments on what works and what doesn’t, seeking to expand what she knows with every test and every dragon she meets in the hopes of becoming the greatest engineer in Nuiran.
...However, this plan is rather thwarted by her innate magical abilities.  This volatile form of magic contaminates anything she creates, causing strange effects and imbuing various items with different properties they didn’t have before.  These imbuements are, oddly, somewhat consistent- if, for example, she makes a spoon and it flies out of her claw, then every spoon she makes in the same way would do the same.  More powerful imbuements are much, much harder to consistently create.  This, coupled with her mostly loner lifestyle, has led her to believe that magic is entirely not real, and all of it originates from very advanced engineering techniques she simply hasn’t discovered yet.  This belief, as well as how every dragon she’s met so far has stared at her like she had fifteen eyes when she told them this, has led her to believe that there is a secret organization of dragons that has been working tirelessly to disguise grand feats of engineering as this “magic” by implanting devices in the claws and bodies of dragons all across the continent.  Because of her optimistic tendencies, she doesn’t actually believe that this organization has any sort of ulterior motives, and as a result doesn’t hide these beliefs- she just wants to grow her knowledge and engineering ability.

Hobbies: Experimenting with new engineering concepts/techniques, meeting new dragons, reading instructional manuals like novels, swimming upstream at ~350 mph Max diving speed is 140mph and flying speed is 120mph, and since water is more viscous than air, a max swim speed of 350mph cannot be approved.  We've never run into a swim speed limit before, but until that is decided with staff, I think temporarily a swim speed of 120mph is the max.

Likes: Engineering, architecture, talking with dragons who know about those things, meeting new friends

Dislikes: Arrogance, an unwillingness to share information, Ki’shans in general

Fears: Deathly fear of falling, acquired fear of failure

Quote: “Aren’t the wonders of engineering so... uh, wonderful?”





Place of Origin: In a hydrothermal vent field deep undersea

Tribe: Lakara

Position: Salmon (Explorer)

Language: Universal, Aquatic

Home: An underwater cave under a cliffside she created herself using explosives

Parents: Unknown, she hatched alone

Siblings: Unknown but unlikely

Relatives: Unknown

Mate: No

Offspring: No

History: Hatched alone in a hydrothermal vent field, she quickly had to learn to survive on her own- a trivial task, with her instincts guiding her.  She chased down and caught even the swiftest fish, her passage leaving trails of smoky bubbles and shockwaves of sound through the water.  At a few years old, she was discovered by a Lakara Salmon investigating reports of strange and rather loud noises, and after a few months of regular visits and gifts of food they managed to gain her trust enough to meet her without her speeding away.  She was raised collectively by a loose group of other Salmons, being taught how to converse both in Aquatic with her bioluminescent scales and Universal with her mouth.  Once she reached adulthood, she was given a position as a Salmon.  However, she prefers to do other things than explore, and will create a month’s worth of false reports at a time, backed up by rapid fly-bys of the areas she’s been assigned.  She does stay in touch with the other explorers, but for the most part she lives by herself in her cave, and spends a large majority of her time in said cave, or swimming up and down rivers, or occasionally diving deep to rapidly make observations for her next round of falsified reports.




Height: 8 ft

Length: 16ft head-to-rear, 28ft head-to-tail

Wingspan: 10ft with jet-wings parallel to body, 20ft with jet-wings perpendicular to body

Scale/Fur/Feathers: Her main scales are silvery-blue iridescent, with a fade to sooty black on her claws and the tips of her jet-wings.  Her underbelly is dark gray.  The intake vents and outlet vents of her jet-wings are nearly perfect vantablack, and glow a faint red with heat.  Her scales have patches of bioluminescence that glow a deep blue.

Eyes: A piercing sea-green.

Accessories: Multiple waterproofed bags and satchels strapped to her chest, her back, the sides of her neck, and the base of her tail.

Horns/Spikes: Multiple streamlined, backwards-facing spikes on her head and down her back that are really just large, elongated, raised scale-plates.  They can all be moved up and down independently, and are used for high-speed underwater maneuverability.

Overall Appearance: She looks very much like a Valstrax, though with a rather pointy snout instead of a beak, and her wings are a pair of single jet-claws attached to highly articulate, three-jointed limbs- one ball joint at the shoulder, one ball joint connected to the jet-claw just under and behind the front intake vent, and a backwards-facing hinge joint in the middle of the limb.  These jet-wings can fold tightly to her back.  During supercavitating underwater flight, the jet-wings will extend so the intake vents graze the edge of the supercavitation bubble, taking in water for use as fuel.  During non-supercavitating swimming, they remain close to her back.  Her forelegs are more slender than her hind legs, and her foreclaws are small and nimble while her hind claws are much larger and sharper.  Her tail is long and tapered, the base of her tail rather thick and gradually tapering off to a point.  At the end of her tail are four large, backwards-swept fins each 90 degrees apart.  These fins can each be independently rotated up to 45 degrees  and folded sideways up to 90 degrees, and are used for stabilization and maneuvering during supercavitating underwater flight and non-supercavitating swimming.  When out of the water, she folds the top and bottom fins down.  




Abilities:
- Hydro-detonation Jet (Her jet-wings can split water into hydrogen and oxygen for use as fuel.  It is burned as propellant in a Rotating Detonation Engine configuration within her jet-wings.)

- Supercavitation (Using her jet-wings, she can achieve supercavitating underwater flight.  Her jet-wings propel her at high speeds, and she expels the excess oxygen and other gases out of her maw at high pressure to create the supercavitation bubble.  This enables her to swim at 350 mph Until decided in staff, I don't believe anything above 120mph will be approved, though her initial acceleration can be easily matched by many of Lakara’s faster swimmers.  During supercavitating underwater flight, her maneuverability is greatly reduced, and she must either decelerate slowly or breach out of the water so that the supercavitation bubble does not collapse and injure her.  Supercavitating underwater flight is also very, very loud, making her hearing effectively useless during flight and alerting any underwater creature of her approach perhaps minutes before she arrives.  When in a river or near the surface, supercavitating underwater flight creates a visible wave crest that travels with her, hence her name.  She cannot fly in the air.

- Hydrox Blast (In combat situations, her jet-wings can be used as effective weapons.  As well as being essentially another pair of claws with extended reach, she can also ignite a burst of propellant in a damaging blast.  Outside of the water, this attack is only effective at melee range, but while underwater it can momentarily stun and/or disorient another dragon with a violent pressure wave from up to 30 feet away, which in the case of non-waterbreathing dragons may force them to release their held breath.  However, this attack burns her when used, and can only be used two times during a battle before requiring an hour to heal and recover.  If necessary, it can be used another two times, but the third use reduces her supercavitation speed by half for two hours and the fourth use completely disables their use of their jet-wings as jets for 24 hours.

- Engi-magical Imbuement (When she creates a tool, item, or other object, her innate magical abilities will imbue it with a magical property.  These properties are consistent and replicable, but more complex creations will have more complex effects that are harder to replicate.  Many effects have a limited amount of “charge”, and cannot be recharged.  When charge is depleted, the magical imbuement fades, and the object becomes mundane.  Combining imbued items may result in new effects.)
Known Imbuements:
- Ocean floor sand + chunk of sulfite deposit from thermal vent field + iron rust + gold (20:10:3:1 ratio) packed tightly in a rigid container and coated with fish blood, then allowed to dry = Explosive that efficiently pulverizes stone in its blast radius and creates a very minimal shockwave- good for making caves
- Clawful of ash + a chunk of ocean salt + whale oil packed tightly in a rigid, non-flammable container and ignited with flame = [u]Fireball launcher (20ft effective range, 5 uses, explodes if doused with water)
- A large chisel with a head made of copper and a handle made of fish bones wrapped in leather = A chisel that always breaks off a chunk of rock just large enough for the user to hold in their claw after 3-20 hard strikes (depending on the hardness of the rock).

Strengths: very fast swimmer, rapid learner

Weaknesses: Flightless, extremely naive and trusting, refuses to believe that magic is real How is this a weakness?

Fighting Style: She fights to escape, using their jet-wings as claws to keep their distance and slashing with her hind legs if her opponent closes the distance.  If cornered or otherwise unable to escape, she is likely to surrender.

Magic: Yes- see “Engi-magical Imbuement” above.  She has no control of the effects that arise, and is also entirely unaware that she has this ability at all.""

Overall looks pretty good!  Just need to discuss with staff max swim speeds, and with minor edits, should be good to go!  When feasible updates are done, bump and I'll give a tentative 1/2 approval, pending staff discussion of swim speeds.

Bump!  Made edits to weaknesses and expanded the description for the Supercavitation ability, as well as more precisely specified some effects of it.

Bump- waiting on confirmation/denial of the tentative 1/2 approval

Hey there! Apologies for the wait, finals week is a killer TuT

Alrighty- Overall it's really good!! Just a couple notes from me, then I'll give you your second approval:

Abilities:

Supercavitation: Now, unfortunately 350mph is still going to be waaaay too fast. Thanks to the increased drag created by the water, staff members have decided that the maximum swim speed is 60mph. However, considering A. She's basically rocket powered, and B. That supercavitation reduces that drag significantly, I'd honestly just rule this as flight and grant you the 120mph speed limit during supercavitation. If she's just paddling around, then the 60mph speed limit will still apply, but while she's rocketing around we can just rule it as underwater flight.

Magic:

This should be the very last thing from me; since you list her Engi-magical Imbuements here, would you mind moving those details out of Abilities and into Magic just to clarify that they are magical?

Edits made!

Alrighty, last last question from me: Can she breathe underwater? Or does she have to hold her breathe? If so, how long can she hold her breath?

Right, edited! Yes, she can breathe underwater.