Calyra Val'Druna

Calyra Val'Druna is a Thauzunian native and low-born resident of the Mega city of Taz’Vaar. She is a skilled hacker, bladeswoman, and speedbike racer, despite only being 16. However, when it comes to more professional work, she is lagging behind...greatly. At her age, she could have easily completed 8 or 9 contracts and have already had a significant reputation. However, she has thus far only ever completed 1 single contract. This fault is not on her lack of skills but rather on her desire to follow the status quo of her people. She craves more than what any city on Thauzuno can offer.

Calyra stands at 5'7", her frame lean and athletic, shaped by years navigating the unforgiving backstreets of Taz’Vaar. She carries herself with a quiet, restless energy—a posture that’s alert but never tense, always suggesting she’s ready to move or react at a moment’s notice. There’s a controlled precision to her stance; she stands straight but never stiff, every line of her body hinting at both agility and resilience. Her dark brown hair is cropped short, cut for practicality rather than style. The strands are naturally wavy but kept just long enough to frame her face, never hanging into her eyes or distracting her. Her hair is slightly tousled but never unkempt, reflecting her preference for efficiency over vanity. In the harsh artificial light of the lower city, the rich brown sometimes appears almost black, which emphasizes the starkness of her pale complexion. Calyra’s face is sharply defined—angular cheekbones, a strong jaw, and a straight nose giving her an air of quiet intensity. Her features are striking, clean, and symmetrical, with a certain severity that often keeps others at a distance. She bears a thin, faded scar along her left cheek—a silent testament to her first botched contract, visible only on close inspection but impossible to forget once noticed. A dusting of faint freckles crosses the bridge of her nose, subtle reminders of her youth that soften the otherwise steely impression she gives.   Her eyes are perhaps her most arresting feature: a deep, dark green that appears almost black under certain lighting. They are sharp and unyielding, always in motion, as if constantly analyzing her surroundings and the people in them. There’s a vigilance in her gaze, coupled with a flicker of unspoken defiance—a hint that she’s seen and survived more than most people her age. When adrenaline kicks in, a flush rises to her high cheekbones, briefly bringing color to her otherwise pale skin. Her lips are naturally set in a line of focused concentration, rarely smiling, though occasionally quirking in the briefest expression of dry amusement or self-satisfaction. Despite her youth, there’s a weathered maturity in Calyra’s appearance—a subtle tension in the way she holds herself, as if every moment might demand she fight, run, or vanish. Her expression is mostly neutral, giving little away, yet those who pay attention sense an underlying resolve and watchfulness that makes it clear she is never truly off guard.

Calyra dresses with purpose, choosing clothing that prioritizes movement, durability, and function over style. Her standard attire consists of a fitted, charcoal-grey tactical bodysuit that hugs her frame and allows for agility. The suit is reinforced at the knees and thighs for extra protection, its panels subtly stitched and contoured to follow her body’s movement without restricting it. Over this, she wears a short, cropped utility jacket in a darker shade of grey, its high collar and minimal seams designed to deflect notice as well as wear.   Her forearms are wrapped in fingerless gloves made of flexible, grippy fabric—practical for both climbing and manipulating tech. The gloves allow for tactile precision, and the reinforced knuckles suggest readiness for hand-to-hand encounters or rough urban environments. Her waist is cinched with a rugged tactical belt, fitted with several pouches and compartments for carrying essential gear. While she travels light, everything on her belt has a specific purpose: digital lockpicks, encrypted data chips, a small utility tool, and a slim holster for a combat blade—worn at her hip for quick access. Her pants are tailored close to the skin, allowing maximum flexibility but offering subtle padding at impact points. The seams are tight and low-profile, avoiding anything that might snag or slow her down. Sturdy, matte-black combat boots rise to just above her ankles, well-worn and scuffed from constant use. They are practical and heavy-soled, ideal for sprinting across rooftops or traversing debris-strewn alleys.   Visible around her neck is a simple pendant on a thin cord, its unassuming design belying its true function as a secure storage device for encrypted information. On her left wrist, she wears a compact digital wristband—her primary interface for hacking, communication, and tracking mission data. This device remains inconspicuous, blending in with the rest of her urban gear but always within reach for a quick scan or data transfer. Calyra’s overall appearance is utilitarian and understated, blending seamlessly with the urban backdrop of Taz’Vaar. Every element of her attire is chosen for its reliability, functionality, and ability to help her disappear into a crowd or spring into action without hesitation. She carries no excess and wears nothing purely for ornament; every piece is a tool, every detail a calculated decision for survival.

Calyra Val'Druna was born on Ghraaldra 15, 2709 within the Mega city of Taz’Vaar, raised by a single mother in the slums of the city. Calyra is what Vey’Zari medics call Vorth’rahn-Kel, in which she was born with a “dead heart.” By all rights, Calyra shouldn't even be alive. However, thanks to a mysterious benefactor, top-tier medical specialists from Med-Corps were able to install a synthetic heart. The procedure came at a steep cost. All of Calyra’s natural blood had to be replaced with synthetic analogues—an invasive process that permanently rendered her infertile. She can never bear children of her own, and in a society where legacy is currency, this has quietly marked her as a “closed lineage,” a designation few speak aloud, but none forget.   Growing up, Calyra had a difficult childhood, in and out of mod clinics. Due to her mother’s low standing, they could barely afford food, let alone follow-up treatments or neural calibration support. She was too sickly for most apprenticeship programs, and too expensive to be worth the risk. That’s why, by age five, she was already running packages for underworld couriers—messages, schematics, stolen data cores—anything that needed to cross districts quietly and fast. Every job was a gamble: if her synthetic heart failed in the field, no one would come looking. She learned to make herself indispensable just enough to be missed, but never so valuable as to be owned. Unlike most Vey’Zari youths, Calyra never received formal mentorship. There were no training domes, no sanctioned mentors to groom her for syndicate work. Everything she knew came from scraped-together moments of clarity: watching slicers brute-force locks in exchange for a protein bar, memorizing the moves of streetfighters through a crack in a maintenance hatch, reverse-engineering discarded tech salvaged from garbage piles. She’d pull apart old data pads just to see how they failed. Trial and error was her only tutor. Every failure cost her something—skin, blood, trust—but each one taught her what no mentor could: how to learn without guidance and survive without being shaped.   Her mother became her de facto instructor. Her mother showed her how to weigh people by their eyes, not their words. How to listen without reacting. How to know when to run and when to vanish. Their dynamic was not warm—there was no space for sentiment—but it was durable. They survived together, day after day, and that endurance carved a language between them stronger than affection. Calyra’s formative years were marked by isolation and deep observational learning. She would watch mercs from the shadows, mentally mapping their routines. Sometimes she’d follow them home, not out of malice, but out of curiosity—to learn how they lived, how they carried their weapons, what kind of locks they trusted. More than once she was caught and chased off, earning bruises and warnings. Once, she returned the next day and offered to fix a malfunctioning hololens she’d noticed during the encounter. That merc gave her no thanks, but didn’t chase her again. It was the closest she came to approval.   By age nine, Calyra had already patched together a makeshift training routine, combining secondhand advice, stolen tactics, and muscle memory. She’d race through ventilation tunnels at night, time her hacking speeds against traffic cycles, and practice knife work using rebar and repurposed conduit. It wasn’t elegant, but it was hers. Without a mentor to mold her into a specific role, she became a composite—a fast learner, a sharper watcher, a quiet hybrid of talents most others never thought to combine. Her lack of formal apprenticeship isolated her from many youth circles and ensured she was never invited into the early contracts or syndicate feeder teams that shaped most operatives her age. But it also meant she had no allegiance, no overseer, and no one to disappoint. She was unclaimed, untested, and unfocused—something between a cautionary tale and a wildcard in the eyes of the local underworld. She hadn’t failed, exactly... she just hadn’t been noticed. Not yet.   Even now, older enforcers sometimes dismiss her as underdeveloped—too few contracts, too clean a record, not enough scars to prove herself. What they fail to see is that Calyra's training never came from structured drills or guided lessons. It came from scavenging knowledge like scraps of code from broken servers, piecing together a playbook entirely her own. Her skills weren’t shaped by mentors. They were forged in the static between forgotten systems and unspoken expectations. She is, in many ways, an anomaly—unfinished, unclaimed, and still building the version of herself that Thauzuno will eventually have to reckon with.

Calyra’s first contract came not through a syndicate channel or guild board, but from a broken conversation between two mercs arguing over drinks in a shuttered maintenance bar on the 35th Tier of Taz’Vaar’s eastern sprawl. She wasn’t supposed to be listening, but she was. A smuggler had botched a transport run—dropped a payload too close to a rival’s turf and vanished. The item, some kind of encrypted storage unit, had since gone dark somewhere in a derelict freight terminal crawling with rival scouts. No one wanted the job—it was low pay, high risk, and politically messy. But Calyra saw something else: opportunity.   She didn’t ask permission. She simply followed the trail: pieced together old transit logs, tapped into forgotten surveillance ports, and traced the blackout zone to an abandoned maglift tunnel beneath the Harkon Transfer Yard. It wasn’t courage that pushed her forward—it was hunger, both literal and reputational. She needed a win. She needed something that proved she wasn’t just another low-tier runner with good reflexes and nothing else. The job should’ve taken an hour. It took four. The maglift depot had become a warzone between scavenger crews and a local data-cult that claimed ownership over any “lost technology.” Calyra moved through their perimeter without alerting them—no small feat given the sound sensors embedded in the floor tiles and the cloaked drones riding the thermal currents. She mapped her route by temperature shifts and blinking relay lights, breathing shallow and staying low.   The container was half-buried beneath collapsed cargo plating and still broadcasting a silent distress ping in a forgotten frequency band—something Calyra only caught because she’d spent weeks teaching herself to read obsolete signal architectures. She retrieved it, rewired it on-site to falsify a location ghost, and vanished back into the undercity before anyone even knew it was gone. That was the easy part. The handoff nearly got her killed. She returned to the merc who’d bragged about the job and offered him the package directly—naïvely expecting some form of recognition or even gratitude. What she got instead was a pistol under her chin and a sneering accusation of theft. Only when the second merc, the one with the data-scarred voice, stepped in and verified the encryption code did the tension drop. Barely.   She was paid in a handful of low-grade vekra and a cautionary word: “Don’t ever show initiative again unless you’re told.” That was the lesson—she’d succeeded, but out of turn. No syndicate had sanctioned it. No patron had claimed her. Her victory was unlicensed, and therefore suspect. The contract was never formally logged. No title. No commendation. Not even a codename linked to it in the guild registry. But word spread—quietly. The girl with the synthetic blood who ghosted a dozen traps and pulled the payload without backup? People started watching her after that. Not openly. Not kindly. But watching, all the same. And Calyra learned something even more important than the value of skill: success without a syndicate doesn’t make you free. It makes you visible.

Calyra has only failed three contracts—but in the unspoken economy of Taz’Vaar’s syndicate world, three is enough to shadow a career, especially when you’ve only completed one. Her failures aren't the sort that end in open disaster. No shootouts, no public data leaks, no trail of bodies. They're quieter, more damning. They mark her as unreliable—not in skill, but in timing, temperament, and trajectory. She doesn’t fail because she’s sloppy. She fails because she refuses to act like everyone else.   The first was a low-tier infiltration run, barely worth noting on the job boards. She was hired to breach a low-clearance server node under Drenik Station—a halfway-dead subgrid used by midline smugglers for private negotiations. The intel was simple: access, copy, extract. Calyra got in, bypassed the physical security net, and cloned the data shard without being seen. But when she decrypted the contents—just out of curiosity—she discovered it wasn’t just smuggling manifests. The node held the names of unaligned street crews and unaffiliated children targeted for "early recruitment." She hesitated. Left the job half-finished. Sent an anonymous warning to a few of the names on the list and vanished from the network. The data was never delivered. The client never found out why. But the silence from the contractor boards after that was noticeable. Someone had quietly blacklisted her from minor commissions for over a year.   The second failure was a courier job turned bad. She was supposed to deliver a sealed drive to a mid-city broker during a blackout window—standard stuff. But the package was booby-trapped. Not with an explosive, but with a silent locator shard—meant to track who’d open it. Calyra didn’t open it. But she did scan it. When she noticed the shard, she dumped the drive in a sector scrap incinerator and scrubbed her entire courier chain to avoid drawing the attention of the broker, who had a reputation for vaporizing messengers who asked questions. The client later claimed she’d never delivered the package, and the burner account that paid her vanished overnight. Whether it was a setup or just carelessness didn’t matter. The job was marked as incomplete, and her name briefly circulated among underworld circles as a "hesitation risk."   The third was the worst—not because of the danger, but because she succeeded, and still walked away empty. She was tasked with tailing a former syndicate accountant who had defected and was planning to sell off trade secrets to a rival. Calyra shadowed him for two days through the outer rings of the city, tagging his every move, logging his contact points. She had enough data to triangulate the meeting, enough footage to destroy him in a tribunal. But when she watched him pass an encrypted chip to a tired-looking woman carrying a malnourished child, something shifted. She recognized the signs—synthetic blood indicators on the child's wrist, the same kind she wore under her sleeve. The same dark circles in the mother’s face her own mother used to have. Calyra handed over a dummy report instead—one with just enough noise to look convincing, but no actionable intel. The defector escaped. The contract was voided. She was never contacted by that client again.   To outsiders, these failed jobs mark Calyra as inconsistent. Unpredictable. A wildcard. But to those who really know her, those few watching from a distance, the pattern is clear: she only fails when the job demands she become someone she refuses to be. She has the skills. She just hasn’t yet decided how to use them. In Thauzuno, that’s not seen as depth. It’s seen as weakness.

Calyra’s reputation is a strange thing—half smoke, half silence. Among the lower-tier circuits of Taz’Vaar, her name isn’t feared, but it lingers. She's the operative people mention in afterthoughts. No one really knows what she is yet—rising, stalling, or already burning out. But they know she’s watching. And that’s enough to make some nervous. In the official syndicate registries, her record is nearly blank: one completed contract, three failed, and a trail of partial data pings that lead nowhere. That makes her dangerous—not because she’s done anything spectacular, but because she exists in a state of unsanctioned potential. She doesn’t owe loyalty to any one faction. She hasn’t chosen a specialty lane. She hasn’t been claimed. And that makes her unreadable. Unreadable means untrustworthy. Untrustworthy means interesting.   Among street crews and the courier net, she’s seen as an oddity: too skilled to be dismissed, too principled to be bought, too quiet to be popular. The younger runners—especially the ones scraping by with off-brand gear and no patron—whisper about her with something close to admiration. Not because she’s famous, but because she hasn’t folded. Because she says no. Because she’s still around. In an ecosystem where everyone is either bought, broken, or forgotten, the fact that Calyra hasn’t chosen a master is both infuriating and magnetic. But among older operatives, her name is often accompanied by an eye-roll, a shrug, or a warning. “That girl doesn’t finish.” “She hesitates.” “She thinks too much.” To them, Calyra represents inefficiency—the kind of operative who’ll drop a contract if the ethics don’t line up, or worse, vanish mid-mission if the objective suddenly feels wrong. That’s not just inconvenient. That’s bad business. Some syndicates have already quietly tagged her as a liability—not hostile, but incompatible with their system of loyalty-via-dependence.   Ironically, it’s that same moral ambiguity that’s earned her a kind of off-the-record credibility among fixers who deal in nuance—the shadow brokers, information couriers, and disillusioned middle-tier mercs who still believe discretion is worth more than brutality. These types don’t hire her often, but when they do, they don’t ask many questions. They know she doesn’t double-cross. She doesn’t leak. And if she accepts a job, it’s because she’s already decided it deserves to be done. The only thing everyone agrees on is this: Calyra Val'Druna isn’t finished. She’s still building something. Whether it’s a legacy or a mistake, no one can say yet. But she moves like someone who’s seen her future through a crack in the system—and isn’t sure whether she wants it or not.

Calyra’s personal life is best described as solitary, shaped by the constant uncertainty and underlying threat of life in Taz’Vaar’s lower districts. Her daily existence is a careful balance of survival and routine, never quite allowing herself to grow attached to people, places, or fleeting comforts. Home is a cramped, single-room unit wedged between two maintenance conduits deep in the city’s industrial quarter—barely large enough for a bed, a lockbox for her tech, and a single battered desk where she tinkers late into the night. Her living space is always in a state of half-readiness; nothing irreplaceable, nothing that couldn’t be left behind at a moment’s notice if the syndicates ever came looking for her. Privacy is a luxury, but one she guards fiercely. Despite her natural reserve, Calyra maintains a tiny, shifting network of acquaintances—mostly other street kids, tech scavengers, or junior runners trying to keep out of trouble. She isn’t known for deep friendships, but she trades favors and information with a few regulars, trusting them just enough to share a meal or run a small job. Most relationships are transactional, rooted in the unspoken rules of mutual benefit and discretion that rule Taz’Vaar’s social web.   When not running contracts or practicing her skills, Calyra finds a strange sense of peace in the city’s neglected edges: derelict rooftops, forgotten train tunnels, and the deep mechanical warrens beneath Taz’Vaar where few dare to go. She’ll spend hours riding her speedbike through the neon-lit maze of the lower city, both as escape and as reconnaissance, memorizing new routes and watching for changes in the shifting alliances that might someday affect her. Music, when she can get it, comes through cracked old speakers—a mix of ambient city noise and rare, stolen tracks from the upper districts. She has no formal hobbies, but a private ritual of disassembling and reassembling her tech serves as both meditation and insurance against boredom. Romantic entanglements are nearly nonexistent. Calyra’s wariness of deeper attachments is only sharpened by the knowledge that trust is a rare commodity and a liability in her world. She is occasionally approached by other young operatives or street racers, drawn to her skill or reputation, but she keeps these interactions short, rarely letting anyone close enough to become leverage against her. Loneliness is a constant undercurrent, but one she’s grown used to—a familiar ache that sharpens her focus rather than dulling it.

Calyra is the only child and daughter of Yalara Val’Druna, a poor junk vendor whose reputation in Taz’Vaar’s lower districts is built more on resilience than on profit. Yalara has always been a stubborn survivor, scraping by through endless barter and backbreaking work in the city’s sprawling salvage yards. Their relationship is close in the practical way of those forced to rely on each other for everything—less about affection and more about trust built through shared hardship. Yalara taught Calyra the essentials: how to spot useful tech among piles of scrap, how to negotiate with mercenary brokers, and how to read the subtle signals that mean danger is near. There was little room for sentimentality in their household, but Yalara’s fierce protectiveness shaped much of Calyra’s earliest worldview. Though burdened by chronic illness and financial strain, Yalara refused to let Calyra’s early health crises define her daughter’s path, instead pushing her to develop a stubborn self-reliance and a wariness of anyone offering help without strings attached. Yalara is not a woman given to long speeches or declarations. Her mentorship was the kind delivered in half-sentences and sharp looks, in warnings disguised as offhand remarks: “Don’t trust someone who smiles before you speak,” or “Anyone offering you more than you need wants more than you have.” She may not be formally educated, but her instincts are razor-sharp, honed by decades of disappointment and survival. She never discouraged Calyra from exploring the city’s darker corners—only made sure her daughter knew how to vanish when things went wrong. Theirs is not a soft bond, but it is absolute. Calyra may not speak of her mother often, but every choice she makes bears Yalara’s imprint: measured, practical, and quietly defiant.   The absence of a father was a constant but mostly unspoken fact of Calyra’s life. Though unknown to Calyra's mother, her father is a high-level and powerfully connected Syndicate tycoon. Calyra herself views him as dead or irrelevant by the way her mother speaks. Sometimes she would catch glimpses of expensive vehicles in the distance or hear stories of a shadowy patron covering her early medical bills, but those connections were always indirect, filtered through intermediaries and faceless transactions. For Calyra, her father became less a person and more a myth—a symbol of all the unanswerable questions she learned to stop asking. In her most private moments—during long rooftop rides or late-night data dives—she sometimes wonders if he knows she exists, or if she was simply a loose thread tied off with credits and silence. But these questions never make it to her lips. In Taz’Vaar, knowing less is sometimes the only protection you get. Whether her father abandoned her or protected her from afar, Calyra doesn’t speculate. She operates in facts, not fantasies. And the fact is—he’s not here. Never was.   Among her close non-familial relations, Calyra intentionally keeps her personal circle quite small and avoids building strong relationships with other. Not because she prefers solitude, but because she is slow to trust. On record, Calyra has really only two close friends, Avenra Sharak—who is one of the best snipers of their generation, and Spy Tyros—a heavy weapons specialist with gunpowder for brains. Avenra, with her distant precision and laser-cut discipline, is one of the few people Calyra respects without hesitation. Their friendship was never declared, just gradually formed over shared silences, sparring sessions, and the occasional contract shuffle. Avenra doesn’t ask questions, and Calyra doesn’t offer answers—that’s why it works. When things get loud, Avenra covers her from rooftops. When things get messy, Calyra clears the route. There’s no hierarchy, no loyalty oath. Just function and respect. Spy Tyros is the opposite: loud, impulsive, and impossible to ignore. He calls Calyra “ghost-pulse” and treats her like a quiet legend-in-waiting, even when she’s spiraling. Where Avenra tempers her, Spy drags her into chaos—bar fights, rooftop races, late-night surveillance runs that turn into minor heists. Somehow, Calyra never says no. Despite his volatility, Spy’s loyalty is absolute. He never asks her to change. Never asks her to explain. And that, more than anything, is why she still lets him close.   Mentors, in the formal sense, are still absent. Calyra has no handler, no sponsor, no fixer who claims her as a product of their training. She is self-made, stitched together from stolen knowledge and bruised trial-and-error. Still, she studies. She watches Avenra's stance. She mimics Spy’s chaos control. She listens to her mother’s ghost-warnings when choosing her routes. Her mentors aren’t titles—they’re shadows she’s learned to walk behind. Quietly. Strategically. On her own terms.

Calyra is defined by a careful blend of vigilance and reserve, her personality shaped by the harsh realities of Taz’Vaar’s undercity and the relentless struggle to survive with few resources or allies. She is naturally quiet and observant, rarely the first to speak in a crowd, preferring to assess the motives and weaknesses of those around her before revealing anything about herself. Every move she makes is measured, every word chosen for efficiency, and her trust is given sparingly. Those who know her best describe her as sharp-minded and fiercely independent, but also prone to self-isolation and suspicion, even when there’s no immediate threat.   Beneath her composed exterior is a core of stubborn determination. Calyra’s sense of self-preservation is matched only by her refusal to bend to the will of others—whether mercenary fixers, syndicate recruiters, or the shifting expectations of the city’s underworld. She is resourceful in the extreme, accustomed to making do with whatever tools, scraps, or bits of information are at hand. Her upbringing left her with a near-total aversion to unnecessary risk: she will not take a job she knows she cannot finish, and she will always choose the long route over a reckless shortcut, even if it means disappointing those who expect her to gamble for glory. Despite her skills, Calyra often struggles with self-doubt—a lingering sense that she is somehow out of step with her peers, that she lacks the ruthless drive required to carve out a legacy in Taz’Vaar’s cutthroat world. Her failures have left her with a quiet wariness, but also a surprising resilience. She is not broken by disappointment; rather, she adapts, adjusts her approach, and waits for the next opportunity. She prefers to work alone, yet possesses a strong—if hidden—sense of loyalty to the handful of mentors and allies who have earned her respect. Calyra never forgets a favor or a betrayal, cataloguing both with the same meticulous care she brings to her hacking or bladesmanship.   Her abilities are wide-ranging but tightly focused. As a hacker, she is a natural—quick-thinking, adaptive, and deeply intuitive when it comes to navigating code, encrypted systems, and surveillance networks. She can crack most low- and mid-tier firewalls without breaking a sweat, and her experience repairing scavenged tech has given her an instinct for improvisation that sets her apart from more privileged but less creative operatives. In combat, she is agile and precise, favoring speed and subtlety over brute force. Her training in bladesmanship is practical rather than ornate, learned from necessity and refined through countless close calls on the street. Calyra is also a gifted speedbike racer—a talent born from both necessity and escape. The thrill of speed, the rush of outmaneuvering rivals through the neon-lit city, is one of the few places where she allows herself real freedom. Her instincts for timing, spatial awareness, and risk assessment make her a formidable competitor, though she rarely seeks the spotlight or bets more than she can afford to lose. She moves through the world with an ease that belies the constant calculations behind her every step, always keeping multiple escape plans in mind and never staying anywhere long enough to become a target.   Her most defining trait, however, may be her adaptability. Calyra thrives in chaos, able to shift tactics in the blink of an eye when plans go awry. She is not fearless—far from it—but she understands her own limits and refuses to let fear dictate her actions. Driven by a sense of unfinished purpose, she keeps her ambitions close and her vulnerabilities even closer, unwilling to reveal more than necessary in a society that prizes secrets as currency.