our story thus far: iosa edition

Iosa Iarann Dornn was born to Ira and Elok Dornn exactly 59 years ago. Ira was a fur trapper, and Elok was a metallurgist. Iosa spent most of her childhood helping one parent or the other, learning practial skills from each of them basically 24/7. In her free time, she didn't have many leisurely interests, choosing instead to stick to a strict regimen of self improvement. Even at a very young age, she'd spend a lot of her free time studying from whatever books and scrolls that would drift through town alongside trade caravans and travelers. It was a relatively no-frills life, and as a result Iosa tends to be highly direct and to the point, even for your stereotypical idea of a dwarf. She's not catty or by any means cruel, but she simply likes to communicate intent in as few words as possible.

Iosa left home at 41 with nothing but the clothes on her back following Ira's death in a hunting accident. The event left kind of a rift between Iosa and Elok, since neither of them really like talking about her feelings. Iosa sends letters home fairly frequently, but none of them are particularly in depth. They're mostly quick status updates: her overall health, her mental state (which is never anything but 'fine'), and her current plans for the future. Elok usually responds back with the same, in a weird distant way. She'll also send Elok questions about metallurgy, and it seems to be one of the few topics they can still talk about with one another.

Iosa's travels eventually carried them to a magic college, where she took the only majorly impulsive gamble of her life and decided to enroll to study artificing. Her interest was specifically in multiplication of force- devices able to create massive amounts of magical and mechanical work for minimal input. She's very much an engineer at heart, despite attending a magic college. As a result, her interest in intricate spellwork is shockingly low; Iosa is very much of the opinion that anything can be achieved through proper application of pure force. This gained her the nickname Annihilator Iosa, due to her proclivities towards reducing all of her test targets to varying levels of smoking slag. She's a simple person: she wants to be the strongest person in any given room, and if she isn't, she will be soon.

Eventually, Iosa's creative spark led her to create the first model of her Imperation Cannon, the Adamant Driver. It's a theoretical system of lenses, piston, steel, inscribed gems and magical plasma that could, in theory, allow even the most magically unskilled to obtain obscene levels of power through training and repeated use. The only problem, of course, is that such a spectacular weapon needed something to power it. This was a problem- simply put, Iosa couldn't find a battery big enough to let them test the Adamant Driver. Research had hit a standstill, and Iosa's thesis was incomplete.

This problem was 'solved' by Yolet, one of the school's more... esoteric professors. Yolet offered to 'put them in contact' with something that would be the perfect power source for the Adamant Driver. Over the course of a few months, Iosa and a few other students worked under Yolet in order to create a vessel to contain the thing that Yolet sought to summon. All they asked was that they be allowed to study the entity when Iosa was not busy with her testing- in return, Iosa would provide a suitable physical anchor to the being that Yolet sought to summon.

This, of course, ended badly. The ensuing explosion and magical burnoff practically leveled a wing of the college, and the rest of Iosa's classmates have not been seen yet. Iosa herself woke with an arm stripped of all flesh, fractured bones coated in a sickly layer of bismuth crystals and swirling, arcing magic. It was more than enough to power the Adamant Driver, and the levels of magical runoff she exudes only seemed to grow by the day. She also had fragments of bismuth driven into her cheek, gnarled burn scars giving the whole left side of her face the appearance of having crystalline teeth. It was a pretty bad situation, and Iosa was shortly expelled from her college for obvious reasons.

It didn't help that ever since the accident, she's been hearing some... interesting music in her head, due to the crystals embedded in her face. She's pretty sure they AREN'T touching her brain, so it's probably not just 'in her head' in the literal.

She finds herself an itinerant adventurer now, working diligently and tirelessly to improve the Adamant Driver- being a mage school dropout hardly matters if you've got something better than spellcasting on your side.