Shine Cycle Character Profile: Regina
This is the next in the series of profiles of characters who will appear in the Shine Cycle, my fantasy-series-in-preparation.
Regina Princess at large, journeyman mage under the tutelage of Windstorm of the Rivers Kingdom, and a senior ombudsman in the Imperial Service. She has declined to attempt the great-mage examination even though she is obviously eminently qualified.
As a mage, Regina has studied and turned her hand to many kinds of workings and problems to be solved, and carried out workings with an unusual air of authority that belies her nominal rank. However, when called on to repeat a previous feat that no longer interests her, she performs competently but unexceptionally. She lives in the Rivers Kingdom with Windstorm, under whom she seems content to study for as long as she is willing to teach her.
A slender, athletic woman of medium height with straight shoulder-length very light brown hair. She favors mage’s robes in deep reds, blues, and greens. The only jewelry she wears is a light silver circlet and a few rings. Her expression is usually a look of intense determination, but often relaxes into a serene smile.
When she unexpectedly found herself in the new environment of the Sunshine Kingdom, after getting her bearings, and taking a “cultural orientation” course the government offered, Regina went through the capital looking for ways to make herself useful. She found one short-term job, then another, in a series of these that lasted for more than five years. Eventually, she took a position with the Imperial Service as an “itinerant ombudsman” (a “perpetually-understaffed” role) and set out to wander the Empire and improve its citizens’ lives.
During her first “tour of duty” as an ombudsman, several local mages whom she encountered recognized a latent and potential talent for their Art, which she had previously been unaware of, and gave her unsolicited advice to train herself in it. When she finished that tour and returned to Capitol, she took their advice and enrolled in the College of Mages as a novice. Over the course of that decade the praise of the citizens she met led her superiors to promote her several ranks.
In the College of Mages, she developed a respectable but undistinguished career as first a novice and then an apprentice, and passed her exams to become a journeyman easily but not spectacularly a little more than a decade after she entered the College.
As a journeyman, she was strongly encouraged to “journey,” which she combined with a return to her duties as an itinerant ombudsman for the Imperial Service. On that lengthy and repeatedly-extended trip, in a variety of places throughout the Empire, she found herself confronted with citizens’ problems that an application of the Power could help, but for which there was no obviously-correct “standard” solution. In each case, she turned her mind and interest to the problem and developed a novel solution, then executed it with a flair, skill, and confidence that her instructors never saw during her years as an apprentice. With the help of her companions on the journey, she wrote reports on most of these incidents, which she submitted to the College for use by others in tackling similar problems.
After about two decades of this wandering, she stopped in the Rivers Kingdom for what was intended to be only a visit, if an extended visit, with her kinswoman Windstorm. When she heard about the constant and varied challenges posed by that kingdom’s floods, she decided to settle there permanently rather than either indulging her desire for novelty by continuing to wander or returning to Capitol to seek further advancement.
