She is strong but never silent , sure of where her truth comes from [OOC | APP]
PLAYER INFORMATION-
Name/Nickname: Peter
AIM/E-mail: pikabot/peter [at] spatula [dot] ca
LJ: pikabot
CHARACTER INFORMATION-
Canon Character and Series: Erza Scarlet, Fairy Tail
In-Game Name: Erza Scarlet
Age: 19
Gender: Female
Position & Ship: The Fiertia, Quartermaster
Appearance: Erza is about five foot seven, and well-built. She has long, straight, dark red hair that falls all the way down to her butt. She can almost always be found wearing breastplate armor, oddly enough with the logo of a popular brand of woman's clothing emblazoned on it. She wears under it a long-sleeved white blouse, and a black skirt, with black knee-high boots. The expression on her face is perpetually serious, as if she is annoyed by something.
Personality: Erza is a stickler for rules. She insists on everybody following all applicable rules and regulations, no matter how silly, and will treat those who break or disrespect them very harshly.
She is also very demanding to those around her. If she is in a hurry, and she asks you a question, you had better answer quickly; she has little patience for hesitation, and will actually head-butt you before moving on to ask the next person she sees. She punishes any perceived misbehavior forcefully and without hesitation.
In short, to her subordinates, she's a holy terror.
She does have a gentler side, though: she does tend to be a bit mothering, displaying concern and pride in her subordinates and ensuring that their needs are seen to. Unfortunately, she expresses this in odd, and sometimes destructive ways.
She also doesn't seem to get some of the vagaries of human interaction. For example, when proud of someone's accomplishments or relieved at their safety, she tends to clutch them to her chest. Which is fine in theory, until you remember that she regularly wears a big honking piece of metal on her chest. Ouch. She also doesn't have much of a nudity taboo: while she understands that public nudity is unacceptable (and treats it like any other form of misbehavior), she doesn't get even the slightest bit embarrassed if someone sees her naked in private.
Finally, she keeps her secrets very, very tightly. Publicly displaying any form of personal weakness is entirely unacceptable to her. If she has to cry, she will go and do it on her own. She locks her emotions away from everyone else and puts on a tough face for them to see. She never feels comfortable out of her armor, and has frequent nightmares, but nobody knows that because she never lets anybody see it.
Abilities/Weapons: Erza has potent natural magical powers, which she has learned to control to a very powerful extent. It manifests naturally as telekinetic ability, which she can use to, among other things, control various melee weapons in a certain range. However, she has developed that magical ability further, and created a process that she calls Ex-Quip.
In her quarters, hanging on the walls and situated on the floor, are various weapons and armors, all of them magically enhanced. Below each one sits a magical sigil with a spell of teleportation cast into it. At will, Erza can summon these weapons and armor to her person with those sigils, as well as return them to their proper place. She has mastered this to the point where the armor she summons appears on her body, ready to be used (although she suffers a very brief moment of nudity in between the banishing of one armor and the summoning of the next; for efficiency's sake, she lays these out as full outfits). She also has several mundane outfits she can Ex-quip into at any time.
Although her magical weapons are all more or less just mundane ones, enhanced to be more difficult to damage and hit harder, her magical armors are another matter altogether. Each one has its own specific function, excepting the generic breastplate armor she almost always wears, which is simply the most comfortable to move around in. There are:
Heaven's Wheel Armor: This armor is considerably more revealing than most, leaving her midriff and much of her chest bare. It also has four non-functional wings ont he back. This armor does not protect nearly as well as her others, but it has one other advantage: it comes with ten powerful swords which hover around it in a circle, controlled by her telekinetic ability. This armor helps her channel that telekinesis more easily, controlling the ten weapons with perfect synchronization and at a longer range than she normally could.
Fire Empress Armor: This armor is also rather revealing, covering her arms and legs and torso with metal forged in a flame motif, but leaving much of her upper body unprotected. However, it has an advantage to compensate: the Fire Empress armor regulates her temperature, protecting her from burns and other temperature-related damage.
Black Wing Armor: This armor is the most revealing of the and has bat-like wings coming out the back. It enhances her jumping ability significantly, and lets her glide short distances.
Herculean Armor: This armor is massive, cumbersome, and thick. It's a defensive device, plain and simple, and it takes a considerable amount of power to crack it open.
Purgatory Armor: This armor is jet-black, and covered in ominous spikes and adornments. It also has an odd effect on her appearance, darkening her eyes and modifying her hairstyle. It looks intimidating, and for good reason: It's easily the strongest of her armors. Almost as tough as the Herculean, and with an incredible boost to her physical strength, it is a force to be reckoned with. This all comes at a price, however. Unlike other armors, where only the Ex-Quip process and use of its special abilities required the expenditure of magic, the Purgatory armor is a constant drain on her magic for as long as she wears it, which tires her very quickly.
Erza is also very physically strong, and an expert fighter, well-trained in the art of war. One of her eyes is a magical prosthetic. It functions exactly like a normal eye, except that any spells or magical abilities that function through vision function at only half-power against her, and are completely ineffective if she closes her real eye. She is also incapable of crying out of this eye.
How well can your character hack?: She can't.
Weaknesses: Erza tends to be both distant and terrifying, which in combination alienates people. A lot. She also tends to try and do everything herself, which frequently exhausts her significantly. And her weird mannerism tend to chase people away like mad.
Anyone with knowledge of her time building the Tower of Paradise can easily use it to control her; she has a blind spot there.
History: Erza has few memories of her early life. She thinks she was somewhere hot, and arid...the badlands, perhaps. She isn't sure, and it isn't very relevant, because when she was very young she was kidnapped, and sold as a slave on the black market.
The men she was sold to were part of a sinister cult devoted to the worship of Zeref, an extraordinarily powerful and evil mage who died two hundred years ago. On a small, outlying island, they were in the process of building the 'Tower of Paradise', a huge, enchanted tower, which contained within it a magical system that when completed, according to their plans, would be able to bring Zeref back from the dead.
It was a huge undertaking, and needed tons of manpower. Or to be more precise, slave power. They purchased every slave they could get their hands on, be they young, old, or unfit, and set them all to work. That was Erza's childhood: day after day of backbreaking labor, all to build a bunch of madmen's tower higher and higher.
One of the older slaves, an elderly man named Rob, took interest in her and the other children. He gave them portions of his meals, did his best to shelter them from the guards' wrath, and took care of them as best he could. Although he had stopped practicing magic a long time ago, he explained the basics of it to Erza, who was fascinated by it, even though she could never get it to work.
When she was eleven, she and the other children tried to dig a tunnel, to escape from the main compound. If they could get down to docks, they could steal one of the small airships that the cultists used for transportation, and escape back to Reial proper. The tunnel was half-completed when they were caught, and dragged out.
The man in charge said that as they were behind schedule on the tower's construction, instead of dragging all six of them down to the punishment chamber, they would just take the one who had come up with the plan, to make an example of him or her. The others would just go back to work with their rations slashed badly. Then he demanded that they name the one they would take away.
Erza had not come up with the plan. In fact, she had been hesitant about it. But the one who had was Shou, one of the youngest of the group. She knew that he would never survive a stay in the punishment chambers like she could. And although they were all keeping silent, she could see him squirming nervously and knew that he would wind up giving himself away before long. She decided to take the blame for him...only to find that somebody else had had the same idea first. Just as she was about to volunteer herself, the eldest of their group, Gerard, raised his hand and claimed to be the culprit. Unfortunately, they didn't believe him. So they chose Erza at random from the would-be escapees and dragged her off, locking the rest of them back in their cells.
Erza isn't certain exactly how long she was in the punishment chamber, hanging from her wrists, whipped and beaten until she was bloody, given nothing to eat or drink save for some foul water. At one point they ruined her right eye, but she hardly noticed it against all the pain.
Relief came in the form of Gerard, who had broken out of his cell, killed a guard and stolen his weapon, and ran to where she was being kept, killing two more guards on the way. He cut her down, and as he was helping her to her feet, said that they couldn't jsut run or hide anymore. If they were going to get out of this place, they would have to fight for their freedom.
This escape attempt, too, was very quickly cut off: the guards rushed in and beat Gerard to the ground, furious with him for killing three of their comrades. Having recaptured him, they put him in the punishment chamber in place of Erza, and sent her back to the cells after crudely bandaging her wounds (it wouldn't do to lose a worker unnecessarily, after all). She sat in the cell she shared with two dozen other slaves, waiting for Gerard to return. The others gave her a wide berth, sensing that after what she had just been through, she wanted to be left alone for a while.
Then Shou began to cry. He was just a small child in a terrifying situation and he wanted to go home. Normally that would have earned no more than a few curses from the guards and some rattles bars, but today, the guards were on edge from Gerard's attack, and were looking for an excuse to hurt someone. They charged into the cell, ready to beat the poor kid, and at that moment something snapped inside of Erza. She remembered Gerard's face, what he said...and then she suddenly found herself jumping the nearest guard, attacking viciously. She managed to get her hand on his weapon and a moment later, both guards were on the ground, dead.
It sparked a slave revolt. Within minutes the other cells' doors were thrown open, and the slaves were surging out, fighting for their freedom with whatever weapons they could find, and with their bare hands if they couldn't find anything. Erza was right in the center of it, fighting viciously despite her small size, pushing the offensive up and up, to the upper levels where Gerard was being kept.
The guards may have been better-equipped and in better shape, but the slaves had numbers. They steadily pushed them back further, freeing more and more slaves and adding to their numbers as they advanced. The guards were unable to stop them, at least until the cult's leaders, all of them mages, joined the battle. The mages bombarded the slaves with magical power, breaking their resolve and throwing them into a retreat. Erza stayed at the front lines even as they fell apart and ran around her, determined to rescue her friend, but it was no good. As the other fighters fell away from her the mages targeted her, and she would have certainly died had old man Rob not leaped in front of her and taken the blast for her.
Her magic manifested for the first time, then, called up by the trauma of seeing the kindly old man fall to the ground, smoking lightly, dead. It was just crude telekinesis, but under the circumstances, it was more than enough. It picked up the discarded weapons lying at her feet and hurled them around in an impressive whirlwind, knocking the cult leaders out of the fight. The slaves rallied, and the revolt continued.
While the other slaves freed the rest of the compound and took control of the ships, Erza ran up to the punishment chamber alone to free Gerard. With her newfound magic she easily dispatched the few guards posted nearby, and set him free from the shackles. He was in even worse shape than she had been, eye notwithstanding. During his time in there, they had beaten and flogged and tortured him so badly that he could barely stand when she set him free.
And what was worse, he had changed, somehow. There was a crazed light in his eyes, and a manic edge to his voice, and he no longer spoke of escaping from the island; instead, he wanted to stay and finish building the tower. He said that he could see Zeref's ghost, and that building the tower for him would grant them true freedom.
Whether he had simply cracked under the torture or if he had legitimately made contact with the ghost of a man hundreds of years dead was unclear, but what was apparent was that he had developed magical powers himself. Powerful ones, too, as he demonstrated by viciously killing the guards she had disabled on the way in. Erza tried to fight him, but was clearly overmatched, as Gerard casually slapped her to the ground with his new power.
He would be staying here, he told her, and he'd keep the rest of the slaves, too. He wouldn't treat them like their masters had, he'd properly feed them and take care of them. But Together they would build the Tower of Paradise for their own ends. For Erza, he offered an opportunity to leave: she would need to take one of the smaller ships, alone. If she returned, or spoke to anybody of what he was doing, he would start killing slaves, one by one.
In the face of his new madness and power, Erza had no choice but to comply. She went down to the docks herself, took one of the smaller ships, and made for the shore. She had no idea how Gerard intended to keep the others from escaping, or to make them build the tower, but apparently he did, because she never saw any of them again.
Now free, the first thing she did was find Fairy Tail, Rob's old Mage Guild that he had always been talking about, to let them know of his death. It took her weeks to make her way to Kropmork, where the Guild was located, but she was determined to do this. She owed Rob that much. What she would do afterwards...well, she wasn't sure.
She was not overly surprised when they recognized Rob's name, but she was shocked at their reaction to her visit. As the bearer of bad news she had been expected to be treated poorly, but the exact opposite happened. Instead, they took her in, and asked her to join. Everything she needed was provided: food, clothing, a place to stay, training...the guild's Master even went so far as to call in a few favors to have a very famous magical healer replace her lost eye with a magical prosthetic. Oddly enough, the tear ducts didn't take properly in the healing process, which left her able to cry on only one side of her face. The healer offered to fix it, but she declined.
Over the course of the eight years since, she refined and focused her magic, becoming more and more skilled in its use. She learned to smile again, and Fairy Tail's warmth and acceptance warmed her substantially--but never fully. The secret she carried was far too heavy for that. She rose rapidly through the ranks through a natural combination of talent and hard work, until she was at the top, just below the Master himself. Her magic powers made her an ideal bodyguard or monster hunter, and she somehow acquired the nickname 'Titania', and was somewhat reknowned for her collection of magical weapons and armor, as well as her speed in switching between them magically.
Recently, however, the guild has fallen into dire financial straights. Despite Fairy Tail's considerable reputation, jobs were becoming more scarce and less profitable. After looking over the accounts, Erza decided to set off on her own and use her martial prowess to find an alternate source of income she could send back for the guild's use. Mercenary work would do nicely, especially considering how dangerously close to war Ivona and Vohemar were growing...
Name/Nickname: Peter
AIM/E-mail: pikabot/peter [at] spatula [dot] ca
LJ: pikabot
CHARACTER INFORMATION-
Canon Character and Series: Erza Scarlet, Fairy Tail
In-Game Name: Erza Scarlet
Age: 19
Gender: Female
Position & Ship: The Fiertia, Quartermaster
Appearance: Erza is about five foot seven, and well-built. She has long, straight, dark red hair that falls all the way down to her butt. She can almost always be found wearing breastplate armor, oddly enough with the logo of a popular brand of woman's clothing emblazoned on it. She wears under it a long-sleeved white blouse, and a black skirt, with black knee-high boots. The expression on her face is perpetually serious, as if she is annoyed by something.
Personality: Erza is a stickler for rules. She insists on everybody following all applicable rules and regulations, no matter how silly, and will treat those who break or disrespect them very harshly.
She is also very demanding to those around her. If she is in a hurry, and she asks you a question, you had better answer quickly; she has little patience for hesitation, and will actually head-butt you before moving on to ask the next person she sees. She punishes any perceived misbehavior forcefully and without hesitation.
In short, to her subordinates, she's a holy terror.
She does have a gentler side, though: she does tend to be a bit mothering, displaying concern and pride in her subordinates and ensuring that their needs are seen to. Unfortunately, she expresses this in odd, and sometimes destructive ways.
She also doesn't seem to get some of the vagaries of human interaction. For example, when proud of someone's accomplishments or relieved at their safety, she tends to clutch them to her chest. Which is fine in theory, until you remember that she regularly wears a big honking piece of metal on her chest. Ouch. She also doesn't have much of a nudity taboo: while she understands that public nudity is unacceptable (and treats it like any other form of misbehavior), she doesn't get even the slightest bit embarrassed if someone sees her naked in private.
Finally, she keeps her secrets very, very tightly. Publicly displaying any form of personal weakness is entirely unacceptable to her. If she has to cry, she will go and do it on her own. She locks her emotions away from everyone else and puts on a tough face for them to see. She never feels comfortable out of her armor, and has frequent nightmares, but nobody knows that because she never lets anybody see it.
Abilities/Weapons: Erza has potent natural magical powers, which she has learned to control to a very powerful extent. It manifests naturally as telekinetic ability, which she can use to, among other things, control various melee weapons in a certain range. However, she has developed that magical ability further, and created a process that she calls Ex-Quip.
In her quarters, hanging on the walls and situated on the floor, are various weapons and armors, all of them magically enhanced. Below each one sits a magical sigil with a spell of teleportation cast into it. At will, Erza can summon these weapons and armor to her person with those sigils, as well as return them to their proper place. She has mastered this to the point where the armor she summons appears on her body, ready to be used (although she suffers a very brief moment of nudity in between the banishing of one armor and the summoning of the next; for efficiency's sake, she lays these out as full outfits). She also has several mundane outfits she can Ex-quip into at any time.
Although her magical weapons are all more or less just mundane ones, enhanced to be more difficult to damage and hit harder, her magical armors are another matter altogether. Each one has its own specific function, excepting the generic breastplate armor she almost always wears, which is simply the most comfortable to move around in. There are:
Heaven's Wheel Armor: This armor is considerably more revealing than most, leaving her midriff and much of her chest bare. It also has four non-functional wings ont he back. This armor does not protect nearly as well as her others, but it has one other advantage: it comes with ten powerful swords which hover around it in a circle, controlled by her telekinetic ability. This armor helps her channel that telekinesis more easily, controlling the ten weapons with perfect synchronization and at a longer range than she normally could.
Fire Empress Armor: This armor is also rather revealing, covering her arms and legs and torso with metal forged in a flame motif, but leaving much of her upper body unprotected. However, it has an advantage to compensate: the Fire Empress armor regulates her temperature, protecting her from burns and other temperature-related damage.
Black Wing Armor: This armor is the most revealing of the and has bat-like wings coming out the back. It enhances her jumping ability significantly, and lets her glide short distances.
Herculean Armor: This armor is massive, cumbersome, and thick. It's a defensive device, plain and simple, and it takes a considerable amount of power to crack it open.
Purgatory Armor: This armor is jet-black, and covered in ominous spikes and adornments. It also has an odd effect on her appearance, darkening her eyes and modifying her hairstyle. It looks intimidating, and for good reason: It's easily the strongest of her armors. Almost as tough as the Herculean, and with an incredible boost to her physical strength, it is a force to be reckoned with. This all comes at a price, however. Unlike other armors, where only the Ex-Quip process and use of its special abilities required the expenditure of magic, the Purgatory armor is a constant drain on her magic for as long as she wears it, which tires her very quickly.
Erza is also very physically strong, and an expert fighter, well-trained in the art of war. One of her eyes is a magical prosthetic. It functions exactly like a normal eye, except that any spells or magical abilities that function through vision function at only half-power against her, and are completely ineffective if she closes her real eye. She is also incapable of crying out of this eye.
How well can your character hack?: She can't.
Weaknesses: Erza tends to be both distant and terrifying, which in combination alienates people. A lot. She also tends to try and do everything herself, which frequently exhausts her significantly. And her weird mannerism tend to chase people away like mad.
Anyone with knowledge of her time building the Tower of Paradise can easily use it to control her; she has a blind spot there.
History: Erza has few memories of her early life. She thinks she was somewhere hot, and arid...the badlands, perhaps. She isn't sure, and it isn't very relevant, because when she was very young she was kidnapped, and sold as a slave on the black market.
The men she was sold to were part of a sinister cult devoted to the worship of Zeref, an extraordinarily powerful and evil mage who died two hundred years ago. On a small, outlying island, they were in the process of building the 'Tower of Paradise', a huge, enchanted tower, which contained within it a magical system that when completed, according to their plans, would be able to bring Zeref back from the dead.
It was a huge undertaking, and needed tons of manpower. Or to be more precise, slave power. They purchased every slave they could get their hands on, be they young, old, or unfit, and set them all to work. That was Erza's childhood: day after day of backbreaking labor, all to build a bunch of madmen's tower higher and higher.
One of the older slaves, an elderly man named Rob, took interest in her and the other children. He gave them portions of his meals, did his best to shelter them from the guards' wrath, and took care of them as best he could. Although he had stopped practicing magic a long time ago, he explained the basics of it to Erza, who was fascinated by it, even though she could never get it to work.
When she was eleven, she and the other children tried to dig a tunnel, to escape from the main compound. If they could get down to docks, they could steal one of the small airships that the cultists used for transportation, and escape back to Reial proper. The tunnel was half-completed when they were caught, and dragged out.
The man in charge said that as they were behind schedule on the tower's construction, instead of dragging all six of them down to the punishment chamber, they would just take the one who had come up with the plan, to make an example of him or her. The others would just go back to work with their rations slashed badly. Then he demanded that they name the one they would take away.
Erza had not come up with the plan. In fact, she had been hesitant about it. But the one who had was Shou, one of the youngest of the group. She knew that he would never survive a stay in the punishment chambers like she could. And although they were all keeping silent, she could see him squirming nervously and knew that he would wind up giving himself away before long. She decided to take the blame for him...only to find that somebody else had had the same idea first. Just as she was about to volunteer herself, the eldest of their group, Gerard, raised his hand and claimed to be the culprit. Unfortunately, they didn't believe him. So they chose Erza at random from the would-be escapees and dragged her off, locking the rest of them back in their cells.
Erza isn't certain exactly how long she was in the punishment chamber, hanging from her wrists, whipped and beaten until she was bloody, given nothing to eat or drink save for some foul water. At one point they ruined her right eye, but she hardly noticed it against all the pain.
Relief came in the form of Gerard, who had broken out of his cell, killed a guard and stolen his weapon, and ran to where she was being kept, killing two more guards on the way. He cut her down, and as he was helping her to her feet, said that they couldn't jsut run or hide anymore. If they were going to get out of this place, they would have to fight for their freedom.
This escape attempt, too, was very quickly cut off: the guards rushed in and beat Gerard to the ground, furious with him for killing three of their comrades. Having recaptured him, they put him in the punishment chamber in place of Erza, and sent her back to the cells after crudely bandaging her wounds (it wouldn't do to lose a worker unnecessarily, after all). She sat in the cell she shared with two dozen other slaves, waiting for Gerard to return. The others gave her a wide berth, sensing that after what she had just been through, she wanted to be left alone for a while.
Then Shou began to cry. He was just a small child in a terrifying situation and he wanted to go home. Normally that would have earned no more than a few curses from the guards and some rattles bars, but today, the guards were on edge from Gerard's attack, and were looking for an excuse to hurt someone. They charged into the cell, ready to beat the poor kid, and at that moment something snapped inside of Erza. She remembered Gerard's face, what he said...and then she suddenly found herself jumping the nearest guard, attacking viciously. She managed to get her hand on his weapon and a moment later, both guards were on the ground, dead.
It sparked a slave revolt. Within minutes the other cells' doors were thrown open, and the slaves were surging out, fighting for their freedom with whatever weapons they could find, and with their bare hands if they couldn't find anything. Erza was right in the center of it, fighting viciously despite her small size, pushing the offensive up and up, to the upper levels where Gerard was being kept.
The guards may have been better-equipped and in better shape, but the slaves had numbers. They steadily pushed them back further, freeing more and more slaves and adding to their numbers as they advanced. The guards were unable to stop them, at least until the cult's leaders, all of them mages, joined the battle. The mages bombarded the slaves with magical power, breaking their resolve and throwing them into a retreat. Erza stayed at the front lines even as they fell apart and ran around her, determined to rescue her friend, but it was no good. As the other fighters fell away from her the mages targeted her, and she would have certainly died had old man Rob not leaped in front of her and taken the blast for her.
Her magic manifested for the first time, then, called up by the trauma of seeing the kindly old man fall to the ground, smoking lightly, dead. It was just crude telekinesis, but under the circumstances, it was more than enough. It picked up the discarded weapons lying at her feet and hurled them around in an impressive whirlwind, knocking the cult leaders out of the fight. The slaves rallied, and the revolt continued.
While the other slaves freed the rest of the compound and took control of the ships, Erza ran up to the punishment chamber alone to free Gerard. With her newfound magic she easily dispatched the few guards posted nearby, and set him free from the shackles. He was in even worse shape than she had been, eye notwithstanding. During his time in there, they had beaten and flogged and tortured him so badly that he could barely stand when she set him free.
And what was worse, he had changed, somehow. There was a crazed light in his eyes, and a manic edge to his voice, and he no longer spoke of escaping from the island; instead, he wanted to stay and finish building the tower. He said that he could see Zeref's ghost, and that building the tower for him would grant them true freedom.
Whether he had simply cracked under the torture or if he had legitimately made contact with the ghost of a man hundreds of years dead was unclear, but what was apparent was that he had developed magical powers himself. Powerful ones, too, as he demonstrated by viciously killing the guards she had disabled on the way in. Erza tried to fight him, but was clearly overmatched, as Gerard casually slapped her to the ground with his new power.
He would be staying here, he told her, and he'd keep the rest of the slaves, too. He wouldn't treat them like their masters had, he'd properly feed them and take care of them. But Together they would build the Tower of Paradise for their own ends. For Erza, he offered an opportunity to leave: she would need to take one of the smaller ships, alone. If she returned, or spoke to anybody of what he was doing, he would start killing slaves, one by one.
In the face of his new madness and power, Erza had no choice but to comply. She went down to the docks herself, took one of the smaller ships, and made for the shore. She had no idea how Gerard intended to keep the others from escaping, or to make them build the tower, but apparently he did, because she never saw any of them again.
Now free, the first thing she did was find Fairy Tail, Rob's old Mage Guild that he had always been talking about, to let them know of his death. It took her weeks to make her way to Kropmork, where the Guild was located, but she was determined to do this. She owed Rob that much. What she would do afterwards...well, she wasn't sure.
She was not overly surprised when they recognized Rob's name, but she was shocked at their reaction to her visit. As the bearer of bad news she had been expected to be treated poorly, but the exact opposite happened. Instead, they took her in, and asked her to join. Everything she needed was provided: food, clothing, a place to stay, training...the guild's Master even went so far as to call in a few favors to have a very famous magical healer replace her lost eye with a magical prosthetic. Oddly enough, the tear ducts didn't take properly in the healing process, which left her able to cry on only one side of her face. The healer offered to fix it, but she declined.
Over the course of the eight years since, she refined and focused her magic, becoming more and more skilled in its use. She learned to smile again, and Fairy Tail's warmth and acceptance warmed her substantially--but never fully. The secret she carried was far too heavy for that. She rose rapidly through the ranks through a natural combination of talent and hard work, until she was at the top, just below the Master himself. Her magic powers made her an ideal bodyguard or monster hunter, and she somehow acquired the nickname 'Titania', and was somewhat reknowned for her collection of magical weapons and armor, as well as her speed in switching between them magically.
Recently, however, the guild has fallen into dire financial straights. Despite Fairy Tail's considerable reputation, jobs were becoming more scarce and less profitable. After looking over the accounts, Erza decided to set off on her own and use her martial prowess to find an alternate source of income she could send back for the guild's use. Mercenary work would do nicely, especially considering how dangerously close to war Ivona and Vohemar were growing...