#but i realize that so few people even see this it doesn't matter lel

[elstreem]

So here is Zoe, my OC in this story where she is a witch healer!

To begin explaining all this...she's originally a Zelda OC, a Minish character I originally wrote in what still is an OCxVaati ship, haha. As time went on and I got to know her better, I added to her story and even wrote up more lore and worlbuilding stuff for the Picori, stuff regarding elements and apprenticeships (it's somewhere on my blog, something like Minish headcanons, though some of it might be outdated now.)

But I got to know her so well and when I made this design for her, I finally found a story for her where she could be her own character - so here she is, a witch-healer in a world where humans live alongside stranger folk, fairies, demons and deities. This is pretty long so I'll put it under the cut.

Zoe is a fairy-born, meaning she is of human and fairy blood (her mother is a full wind fairy, her father is human but with fae heritage, making her mostly fae herself). Being fairy born, Zoe has natural aptitude for magic - to be specific, she can absorb and generate an impressive amount of magical energy within herself, exemplary even by fairy standards. She does have a limiter of sorts, however - she can never channel that energy towards any feat of destructive intent (great power usually has limits of that sort - for that matter, divinity-level beings cannot interfere with the mortal realm because of how great their power is. It sort of balances out.).

So Zoe became a healer to best use her abilities, and she travels around looking for patients to heal and cases to solve. Specifically, she is best at breaking curses, what with her natural ability to absorb magic. Her job does involve normal medicinal procedures like administering medicine or occasionally even surgery, but half of her job is being a mediator between her human patients and oftentimes nonhuman entities who issued the curses because of some slight. It is an exhausting job, though, and very much dangerous, since she does often earn the ire or scorn of other nonhuman entities. To break a curse, she usually resolves a misunderstanding between her patient and the curse giver, but if a curse will not be revoked, she expends her own magic energy to neutralize the curse. If I ever do write a a story for her I picture it as similar to Black Jack or Mushi-shi in terms of narrative...I am huge fans of both, but the thing is I'm fairly bad at writing self-contained short stories. I'm pretty used to writing (and not actually finishing) longer stories.

…I did include Vaati in this story too, a fae-demon who specializes in magical craftsmanship and also making curses of his own lol. They're complete opposites in their nature, but they get along surprisingly well. But since Vaati isn't mine, if I ever write out Zoe's story as my own project I will have to leave him out or maybe change the personality I gave him into my own character. This explains why he's in some other artworks like these ones:

And yeah, the backstory behind the scissors is that it's a gift from Vaati. And yes, Zoe does call it Shearious Business.

Some other stuff about Zoe:

-She was a cheerful kid growing up, but became rather serious as a healer, and can't blame her seeing how risky it is. Outwardly, she is no-nonsense and impersonal when dealing with patients, but she is still something of a romantic at heart. It's just very hard to see this side of her unless you're a close friend of hers.

-Since she constantly absorbs and generates magic, she has a LOT of hair where some of it is stored, and an easy way for her to dispense magical energy into her medicines is to cut off locks and put them in. So in reality, her hair often has bits where it's been weirdly chopped off (she usually takes a bit off her sidelocks.) Her hair grows pretty fast though, in a matter of days, and she's constantly cutting it off to either sell or keep for her own uses.

-Those scars on her arms? Every bit of her body is steeped in magical energy, not just her hair, and one of the most potent sources is her blood. So she's often cut her arms to let out some blood. She cuts rather cleanly and heals fast, so honestly if you're not looking for them, you'd hardly see her scars. Only fresh ones would be most visible.

-As a witch, she does have a familiar, a raven spirit called Argon. He's a wise, guardian sort of familiar, and comes to her whenever she needs help, usually for advice or just some talk since she's pretty capable on her own.

-As for her faery side, her mother was a wind spirit, and with it comes a link to avian and butterfly features. Zoe is...mostly human-shaped, but she's also partly butterfly-like in nature, which can be seen in her features (the shape of her eyes, hair, etc.). She's pretty sensitive to smells and vibrations in the air, something which helps in her job. Also, she's an absolute sweet tooth - could probably eat cups of sugar if she let herself, but she tries to limit it to fruits. Her preference for coffee is to smother it in huge amounts of sugar and cream until she can barely taste the coffee. Monstrous, I know.

-I did say her magical energy cannot be used for feats of destruction, and as a healer she has an oath to do no harm. But for self-defense, if she absolutely has to, she can invert her knowledge of healing to seriously wreck a body. She knows how to close a wound and she very much well knows how to open one, is what I'm saying. This is skirting on the very edge of her nature though, and if she does something that goes much too against her nature as a healer she will suffer terrible backlash, which will cause her pain and temporarily cripple her magic system.

So even though she's kind of scary with how many sharp things she's carrying, they're actually mostly only for preparing medicines from plants and such.

Don't ever tempt her to use Shearious Business on you though.