#𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐖𝐎𝐍𝐃𝐄𝐑 ‒ avita ║ HEADCANONS

[vullcanica]

Facts about Avita's excuse of a pet ✨️Molerat✨️

he was a failed necromantic experiment her dad Nikodemus fully intended to put out of its misery before Avita, a child at the time, imprinted on the misshapen critter and asked for it to be restored to some degree of health and wholeness. it became her first doggy :)

named after the naked molerat because that's very much what he looks like. just german shepherd sized. and... fleshier

initially an amalgam of haphazardly put-together preternatural viscera and whatever human bodyparts Nik could scrounge together to make it even-gaited, it's since taken a simultaneously more sustainable and less natural shape. he's now the proud owner of two faces (one beastly snout, one human, sharing a lumpy skull), approximatelly seven eyes and a spinal cord-fashioned tail

a mismatched amalgam of mixed-origin limbs in the front and back make molerat half-digitigrade and facultatively bipedal. and gives him running speed of about 51 kmh (32 mph). a delightfully efficient hunter

he communicates through series of eerily human-like sounds and, failing that, chirps and trills from its eclectic collection of tracheal cartillage. may mimic human tone and even certain words but he's as aware of their true meaning as a parrot is. which is to say, not at all.

ridiculously, obnoxiously loud when he needs attention

a happy, well-cared for creature, he's pretty sweet to familiar people, if a touch scatter-minded. playful, wholly curious, and entirely too needy about physical attention. pet. him. right now.

by no means gentle or cautious, by no fault of his own. bit of an elephant in a glass shop when excited. enthusiastic like a bear, curious like a shark and loving like a crocodile. as aggressive and violent as the aforementioned when it comes to large scary strangers and threats. rather protective of avita

skittish grump around strangers, though terrifyingly social and proactive about his curiosity. tends to posture without malicious intent behind it. will investigate everything and anyone. running is inadvisable as it activates his pursuit instinct.

very unaware of his size and visage (and don't you dare tell him 😤). if your lap can't handle a 180 pound murder dog, don't bother sitting down. playing with molerat includes equal dangers of injury by virtue of sheer proximity.

takes to green-eyed brunettes far quicker than anyone else, for unknown reasons

fun fact: molerat wasn't originally fully hairless, but has since lost the few tufts he had on scarse patches of intact epidermis and can no longer regrow them. he's classed as fully undead, with no organic growth processes going on.

feeds on preternatural viscera :) on an artificial diet of post-humously imbued human corpses

[vullcanica]

something particularly tragic about Avita's death being so.. predictable. about her having little to no agency in being born already propped up on a pedestal of miracle idol god-thing and, by extension, having her personhood and identity narrowed down to her fulfillment of that mold. the weight of leadership and divinity attributed to her every action without leeway for any mistakes or growth or any humanity to speak of because one stumble could mean falling the whole long, steep way down. her death being a simple consequence of her life, the culmination of a handful of choices made before her birth that put a fragile, young girl finding her precarious footing in the position of load-bearing golden calf. and finally, inevitably, the betrayal and heartbreak of discovering - with a noose around her neck - that humans will kill their gods as easily and remorselessly as they made them

[vullcanica]

Whenever Avita takes on too much energy - be it by choice, by underestimating a source or by necessity (as she can absorb attacks, explosions, soulsnatch whole groups of people, etc) - and is forced to bleed off some excess to prevent from destabilizing her form, it usually manifests into light energy. It's a safety reflex she's developed over the years for the good of those around her. At times even bleeding raw life force into her environment can unbalance it and cause abominable mutations and anomalies, so she makes sure that on exit it's converted into something as harmless as possible.

I.e. babygirl glows sometimes 💅

[vullcanica]

02.  the high priestess  :  how does your muse make decisions ? do they trust their instinct or would they rather trust their heart / their logic ? for our eldritch gal

muse headcanon questions // accepting

It depends on the time and information available to make that decision. Avita's primary drive is logic but she's hardly a slave to it. For example, you won't find her fearing the unknown or freezing in front of the sudden and unexpected. Whatever little of her human instincts are left aren't wasted on survival mechanisms she finds futile. Nor on taking her sweet time to overthink a decision she could've intuited already.

She's rather firmly rationally-minded. If she's decided on a course of action, she can even act in direct opposition to her feelings if necessary, especially when it comes to morality. In both altruistic and cruel ways. However, heart, when it does decide over mind, decides immovably. Her modus operandi is balance and reason.

But then reason as a whole can be terribly overkill when your very existence itself is illogical and you also deal with impossibilities in your line of interest. Avita, an irregularity in her own right, has gone on to be additionally responsible for propagating more irregularities. Risk is the bedrock of creation, progress and evolution - where she already has skin in the game and certain goals set. Suddenly everything looks like an opportunity, which, while she won't go into blindly, she would never cross off as an option until she's made considerable effort towards it and found herself at a loss. With enough drive and effort, and study of logistics, she rarely does.

In the same vein, she's notably good at circumventing the path well-trodden - either through inability/disability, superior practicality or curiosity. Why? Why not. If she operated based on the number of possibilities already proven (or proven to be easier), she'd have achieved very little by comparison. She's a mix between ambitious willfullness, rationale and white-knuckle hard work.

[vullcanica]

I've been thinking a little bit today, re: Avita, morality and love. Namely, how she makes a clean separation between the two and how she operates and makes her choices based on that.

To start with she's a woman with completely neutral moral innerworkings. It has nothing to do with alignment charts or what have you, I'm talking about the general basis of the morality of judgement and action, which ideally functions on neutrality and which posits all are born deserving of the same treatment. In any verse Avita is a firm believer in this. She approaches everyone with the same consideration, believing they are owed it. Yet she's capable of loving the morally reprehensible who act in opposition to that worldview. One would think this clashes with or even entirely negates her fundamental ethics but it doesn't. She maintains a complete mental separation between love and morality. They're two different, independently operational compasses that she follows on a case by case basis.

It's why she does not need love or even partiality to act morally and does not heed morality when she loves. Her type of easy kindness, acceptance and borderline heroism might get confused for deep empathy or compassion and suggest that she feels, relates to or even cares about everyone around her but at its core it's simply the unbreakable belief in equal merit by birth. That all creatures come into existence equally entitled to life, survival, freedom, respect, honesty and basic kindnesses. None above the other. Love itself, the concept of it, comes into direct conflict with those ethics - its very nature suggests partiality. So it is kept entirely separate. She does not need to love or even particularly like someone to treat them morally. Her kindness isn't only reserved to a select few. It's a much stronger sentiment and far more consistent an altruism than one borne of her emotional compulsions would have been.

((The other edge of the sword: She doesn't need to hate someone to harm them either. She could feel bad or remorseful for them and still choose to not let that move her. Yes, she's empathetic, there is an emotional compulsion there, but she allows it to play little part in her opinions and decision-making. Empathy is NOT morally charged and never will be.))

And then there's love.

And though love is separate from her moral views, it always reigns far above them.

The brightest example of this: In all verses Avita loves her fathers unconditionally regardless of their amorality, ruthlessness and infamous renown. They are her family, come hell or high water, and that is an immutable fact of her person that all who befriend or come to love her must accept in some capacity.

She experienced the best of them, yes, but was never spared their true nature either, nor lied to. Therefore her love for them is full, sincere, genuine and not exclusive of their darker sides. She spent her upbringing lovingly surrounded by the morbid and macabre and moralities and ideologies she did not end up growing into. In fact, her natural traits were nurtured fearlessly in such an independent household, even though her fathers did not possess them. That's the love she was surrounded by and the love she gives. She's capable of looking past differences, vast though they may be, and places no moral conditions on those she cares for.

[vullcanica]

Avita Desalvar. The Eighth. The Lady Vernalia.

Born again by miracle two millenia after her cruel, untimely death at the hands of a fearmongered town mob, Avita restarts her life in an artificial body, the result of her parents, Nikodemus and Antonin's tireless efforts to craft a vessel apt to hold her volatile, powerful spirit.

She's a preternatural already, first and foremost the holder of an Eater soul and thusly capable of weaponizing it to draw life from others, but the introduction of Antonin's eldritch blood makes a terribly mighty immortal out of her. It's how she's granted another chance at the life she never got to live, this time in a loving home with two present, adoring fathers who help her through her tumultuous settling within human flesh. And though her limitless potential opens to her many doors and paths, among them she chooses a green thumb, a social character and a love for philanthropy.

So come bother Avita and her horrific human frankenstein of a pet Molerat on their adventures into the bright new world. Her info can be found here! D&D verse available, mundane modern verse coming soon.

mandatory tag for @vilestblood (Antonín) bc dottir!!!