Maeve’s world ended before she was born, and she grew and lived in one of the bio-domes that dotted the wasteland of what used to be planet Earth. The population of hers was small and growing smaller as people dispersed to other bio-domes or were killed by the waste beasties or agents of the warring gods.

Her home bio-dome was named ‘Northwest,’ and it was populated by a mixture of survivors from all over the world, though predominantly midcontinent North America with a smattering of those from Central American, the United States Deep South, and Subcontinental Asia, along with a handful of others. Not that countries really existed anymore, or...continents as it was known before the wasteland came to be.

Regardless, she learned to eke out a half-subsistence/half-technologically advanced livelihood from an Earth that bled when the topsoil was disturbed.

The wasteland’s dangers could not be overstated; not all of her cohort made it to puberty, let alone adulthood. Beasties roamed the wastes, hunting humans with deliberate malice and a preference for intelligent prey, and agents of Earth’s presiding conqueror-god stole those who could not defend themselves.

By dint of luck and her parents’ overprotectiveness, Maeve avoided being dragged off or devoured. Each of her mothers and her father were Salvage, and they supported the Northwest Dome community by alternatively digging deep into the dying earth and hunting through ruins for materials and technology left over from the cataclysm some two hundred years prior. Their knowledge of how to navigate the waste helped them raise both her and her two younger siblings to be safe and self-sufficient.

Maeve’s dome childhood consisted of alternating periods of the growth and disaster. It seemed that whenever things were finally going well, a major setback or long step toward human extinction would hit their community hard. She was put to small tasks early, same as her brother and sister, and learned a diversity of practical skills that would help cover the gaps left by those who died.

The uncertainty of her childhood gave rise to a challenging adolescence for young Maeve. She had grown up to believe that contributing to Northwest was her purpose for being, but she also hated everything about salvage and how helpless it made her feel to creep around the waste like small prey. She got into more trouble trying to force confrontations that would make her feel like she had any control over her environment at all, and all of her earnest helpfulness as a child transmuted into an aggressive chip on her shoulder and a fight-me attitude. Her early teens were a nightmare for her family.

Then, at roughly fourteen, she was chosen by the dragons to learn echokenning. She was swept from Salvage and her family and renamed as an Echokenner. Her fierce drive made her an excellent student, both of echokenning and the more mundane skills she would need to become someone who could fight humanity’s slow slide into oblivion and actively protect the dome.

She became a Master Echokenner at the tail end of her teens (19), able to perform the dragon’s magic of stealing properties and objects from nearby echoes of their own reality as well as rip doors in spacetime.

For thirteen years, she was one of the preeminent Masters of Northwest, hunting beasties, protecting the next generation of echokenners and dragon anchors, and providing security for her dome. She retrieved those stolen by beasties and the warring gods, destroyed any beasties sent against them, and fought alongside the dragons and their anchors.

She had a handful of relationships, none of which lasted, and she put those relationships below her drive to keep the dome safe. The people she tried to form longer-term relationships with learned relatively quickly that she was more-or-less intent to wring every last drop of pleasure out of them for her own sake, rather than become any sort of partner. So that went over really well. Her friendships often went better, but she preferred to befriend others with similar focus and drive, so they often understood her well.

Maeve also became one of the four Echokenning Masters that provided dome leadership and liaisoned with the dragons. She became established, even as the wasteland outside of the dome became ever more dangerous.

Her time with Northwest came to an end, however, when she was cornered by a beastie out on the waste, and it outwitted her. She was forced to rip through to a distant, distant reality to escape and never returned. It is unknown within her dome whether she died or simply went too far and was unable to find her way back. Her disappearance signalled the beginning of a period of major decline in her dome as the other Masters were similarly picked off to the point of her people’s near-extinction.

Maeve’s family consists of her two mothers, Faith and Juliana (+24 and +27 years old), her father, Seamus (+25 years old), her younger brother, Cameron (-2 years), and her youngest sister, Josette (-3 years). Faith was from Louisiana, Juliana from Brazil, and her father was Irish-American. Maeve and Cam are of Juliana’s lineage and Josette is of Faith’s.

Above all, Maeve is a survivor. Her world went through their apocalypse a good century and a half before she was born and the world is still deeply inimical to humanity. The population is only still alive because they refuse to die, and Maeve absorbed the lessons of their resistance into her bones. She will fight the apocalypse with her bare fucking hands and will not go gentle into that good fucking night.

Maeve always puts her oxygen mask on first. She considers this not selfishness but a deeply practical acknowledgement that she is trained and she can help, but only if she is alive to do so. When in conflict and barring evidence to the contrary, she will decide she takes precedence, because she considers herself clever, capable, and more able to problem-solve than just any random person she meets. That said, there is the distant possibility she would yield to someone who had the skills to preserve her life, but she’s not going to trust just anyone.

She, as is suggested by...everything thus far, has what can be euphemistically termed a healthy self-confidence. Generally speaking, she is practical, self-aware, and skilled, and has spent half of her life as one of the talented few. With these traits, the combination of her track record of simply staying alive, and her leadership position in her community after learning echokenning, she hasn’t doubted herself since she was a teen. The hard shift from being ‘helpless’ as a youth to being able to impact the world around her has led her to believe that she should involve herself. At the drop of a hat. Whether or not she’s needed. To her this isn’t a matter of pride, it’s a matter of a deeply subconscious drive linked to the idea that if she can, then she must. With such a drive toward playing an active role in whatever situation presents itself, she hates playing support (‘sitting back’ no matter how useful unsettles her intensely).

Part of her aggressive/confrontational/controlling nature is her personality’s reaction to the pervasive sense of futility and helpless doom that comes from living in a dying world. It’s an attempt at hypercontrol, and she wields her magic and knowledge like a hammer. And if her aggression/control is a hammer, most things look like nails.

More than just her attempts at control, though, her uncertain/traumatic life has impacted her in intersecting ways. She has a rapid stress response to similar trauma stimuli (often that conflict is solved by her domineering it right the fuck out of her life), she seeks a ‘normal’ of a pervasive sense of doom (if the world isn’t ending, all’s not right, and she catastrophizes), her sense of fun requires the adrenaline of risk and taboo (one casual misstep means literal death, but that’s part of the appeal now), she is ill adapted to comfort except in excess (and will aim right for decadence and overindulgence because she’s used to external pressures enforcing moderation), and she has a rough go of relationships for several reasons.

Maeve’s approach to relationships goes like this: she is extremely, extremely selfish, especially in romantic relationships. She doesn’t honestly consider the other person beyond what they can offer her. Whatever they get out of things from her is incidental and also besides the point. (This is, of course, a major area for growth.) This mixes in with the fact that her socialization was performed under extreme duress and with a very limited pool of people. Newcomers and ‘getting to know people’ isn’t really in her skillset. She often treats people as if she already knows them and is just trying to dig secrets out of their skulls. She’s both blunt and curious to the point where she’s...sometimes an acquired taste. It’s not that she doesn’t understand people’s reactions to her, it’s that they’re the ones that need to adapt to her rather than visa versa.

Maeve has been a Master Echokenner since she was 19 (so roughly 13 years). Echokenning, in brief, is the ability to comb through present reality and/or the echoes of the present reality and perform a ‘kenning,’ bringing two disparate elements together to create a new effect. This echokenning is hard on the mind of observers, and often an observer will ‘taste’ mint when interacting with or witnessing an echokenning. Echokenning burns mental energy faster than it burns physical energy, and overextending can cause confusion and memory issues. Burnout can leave the echokenner suffering from maladies of the mind.

In D&D terms: Maeve is functionally an enchanter, with the ability to perform limited conjuration and minor planar manipulation on parallel dimensions.

Echokenning

• Charms are the most basic of an echokenner’s skills. Charms are usually bronze, as it’s the alloy that accepts the kennings most readily. The charms can come in any form, and the form is usually dictated by the preferences of the echokenner themselves. To perform kenning with a charm, the echokenner must apply some manner of logic that makes sense to them and then connect the charm with the attribute that they wish it to have by tapping this and other realities for the attribute. They’re mobile, transferable once kenned, and can be thrown or discarded and still function.
  
  Example: A giraffe charm that makes light when around dangerous beasties, because giraffes are built so they can ‘see danger,’ kenning together the charm and the light from the last ember of a campfire from a nearby reality. The giraffe’s light will glow warm and red.
  
  The more powerful an echokenner, the more of a logical leap the kenning can span. A beginner or limited echokenner might opt for a more literal ‘light’ kenning on a charm shaped like a torch or firefly, and a more literal ‘alarm’ kenning on a bell or dog--in both cases kenning in attributes from actual torches or dogs.
  
  Charms and runes are the only permanent forms of echokenning that do not strain an echokenner’s mind, and charms are Maeve’s favorite form of kenning. They’re versatile and she can chuck them at people she doesn’t like.
  
  
• Charmtatts are similar to charms, but permanently etched into the Echokenner’s skin. Often, the kennings performed on charmtatts are designed to enhance or augment the physical, mental, or spiritual properties of the echokenner themselves, and they predominantly tap into the kenner’s own echoes.
  
  Example: A tattoo of a deer or a cheetah (or a single cheetah spot or hoofprint) allows the echokenner to increase their speed as they align themselves with an echo in another reality that is faster than themselves. The effects of a charmtatt kenning can also be significantly more abstract than one on a charm, such as giving the Echokenner a sense of magnetic fields or a boost in morale. Additionally, the more literal the kenning or the closer the kenning is to something that the kenner might actually do/be, the easier to perform. Running like a faster version of themselves is vastly easier than granting themselves an actual cheetah’s swiftness.
  
  Maeve’s charmtatts are almost more of personal relevance than they are used for echokenning, but she’s selected a range of them focused on enhancing her abilities and her presence, though she does not keep them activated often and uses them sparingly. Keeping charmtatts activated strains the echokenner mentally, and Maeve has learned not to depend on them.
  
  
• Runes are are painted, sketched, or otherwise marked sigils on surfaces that function similar to tatts or charms. They can be given similar triggers for their effects and are tied to the integrity of the rune; in effect, a stone rune is more permanent than a chalk rune, and they do not require mental focus to sustain. They’re most often used as traps (kenning in the heat of volcanos or the shrill of bending metal) or utility-type effects (such as creating light when there is motion in the room). Because they can be drawn and then kenned, they’re also good for emergency kenning in the absence of charms or tatts, and can use words as well as imagery to provide a very precise base for kenning.
  
  Maeve doesn’t use runes often, and she’s sloppy when she does, using more words than images.
  
  
• Borrowing is the next step up from basic kenning that shifts into the actual manipulation of the echoes. Borrowing is essentially temporary invocation, shifting physical objects and independant effects from nearby echoes into the primary reality.
  
  Example: An echokenner needs a chair, so they borrow one from an echo. This is a very literal and direct manipulation of the echos and the Borrowed objects fade over time as they lose their alignment with the reality they’d been dragged into. Most echokenners do not wish to expend the effort to do this, so it’s often considered an emergency-type skill as they might borrowing a weapon or, as an example of an effect, a spark from the echo of a fire. Food or other consumable things cannot be Borrowed as they would provide no sustenance, though things like medical supplies can be used as-is before they fade back into their original reality.
  
  Borrowing can also be combined with charmtatts or charms to give the echokenner the ability to breath fire or to fly with Borrowed wings. The more experienced and powerful the echokenner, the longer the effects of Borrowing lasts. Some, like the dragons to whom echokenning is natural, can perform permanent Borrowing, thus healing themselves of wounds by replacing the wounded area with parts of a different version of themselves and discarding (and often consuming) the wounded flesh. Maeve, as a Master Echokenner, can sustain Borrowing as long as she’s concentrating. Beyond that, it takes between a week or a month for something she’s Borrowed and abandoned to revert to the echo it was Borrowed from.
  
  
• Doors is the final and most complicated skill that an echokenner can perform. The basic idea is that they can sink their fingers into the layers of reality that separate echoes and rip out a chunk, opening a portal to a different reality. These doors close over time, and when they seal naturally they leave no scars in reality. When closed swiftly, they leave a seam or scar that fades slowly over time. The echokenner is limited in how far they can rip into reality and travel at one time, and it’s immensely difficult to rip into the same molecule-thin layer of reality between different attempts at opening a door. Maeve is very skilled at door-making, and she can travel the furthest of any of her Master Echokenner peers.
  
  Creating Doors, however, causes ripples in reality that can be tracked by creatures that can sense them. Additionally, most nearby realities represent families of cause-and-effect; if the current primary reality is a wasteland, most likely any that an echokenner can reach will also be a wasteland. Doors are also unique to human echokenners, as dragons exist within all of their echos simultaneously and have no need of them.
  
  Maeve’s grand eventual plan was to rip into a reality as far away from her own as she possibly could and evacuate the last of humanity to somewhere more hospitable. She was driven from her reality before she could convince Northwest dome that it was possible or she could reach a height of power where she was able to find a reality that suggested anything but death if they tried to leave their entrenched position.
  

Maeve usually rocks a mixture of sixteen charms and charmtatts, eight of each:

1. Ranseur (Charm)
   
2. Scarab (Charm)
   
3. Acorn (Charm)
   
4. Hollyhock Blossom — Baker’s globe mallow (Charm)
   
5. Key (Charm)
   
6. Harp (Charm)
   
7. Goldfish (Charm)
   
8. Book (Charm)
   
9. Pawprint (Tatt)
   
10. Swallow (Tatt)
    
11. Eyeball (Tatt)
    
12. Nautilus (Tatt)
    
13. Infinity Loop (Tatt)
    
14. Laurel Wreath (Tatt)
    
15. Full Moon (Tatt)
    
16. Compass (Tatt)
    

In the realm of more mundane abilities, Maeve’s weapon of choice is the Ranseur, a polearm/spear-type weapon designed to keep nasties at more than arm’s length. She also has a fair-to-middling grasp of hand-to-hand simply as part of her training regimine for her weapon.

She also has administrative and teaching skills, as she has helped run the apprenticeships for young Echokenners since she was roughly twenty-five.

Maeve inhabits a dying Earth. One hundred and eight-two years prior to her birth, a spat between cosmic lovecraftian-type deities claimed the Earth as collateral damage. One of the multidimensional gods lost their fight and as it died, slammed into the Moon, sprawled across the Earth, and bled out.

This had several effects.

1. The moon broke. Just cracked right apart and left a trail of debris across the sky. The resulting asteroid strikes are an extreme hazard for remaining humanity.
   
2. The geographical makeup of oceans and continents was forcibly rearranged by the impact. Most of the population died in the indifferent cataclysm. Places that would never have been close by were now within walking distance, creating a great deal of cultural turmoil in the century after the death of the god.
   
3. The soil was saturated with a god’s blood, turning the planet into a half-living ghost of the dead god. Plants either thrived or died without a great deal of in-between. The soil became crimson and when its disturbed or turned, it ‘dies’ once more and dries to a rust color.
   
4. Humanity slammed face-first into the conflict between the cosmic entities. Rightfully pissed off, they tried to retaliate, only to realize that they didn’t exist in nearly enough dimensions to even enter the battlefield. The god had not just died across the Earth, but across multiple Earths in many parallel dimensions at the same time. They were like ants stabbing a whale with dandelion fluff.
   

Enter the dragons. Another multidimensional race, the entities that humans began to call dragons existed on a limited, comprehensible scale. Many of these entities found that they did not want humanity to go extinct by accident, and took part in preserving humanity as well as they might. To that effect, they began to teach the practice that became echokenning. This allowed humanity to see the entire battlefield, even though they were diminishing rapidly enough that they might never be able to participate.

A culture developed around the dragons. Echokenners were the ones who took to the dragon’s teachings and were able to apply them. The Dragonworks sprang up to provide support to both echokenners and dragons, and it was discovered that dragons, in order to exist and interact with a single reality rather than many in aggregate, needed human anchors that gave them a focal point that kept them present. These combinations of anchor and dragon were called Guardian pairs, because it soon became clear that the echokenners were now targets. The subset of dragons choosing humanity’s side had brought the attention of the still-warring deities to Earth.

Humanity was now the target of the Gods’ Hunt, and beasties began to crop up in the wastelands as humanity scrambled to protect themselves by building biodomes. Beasties--nightmare creatures cobbled together out of teeth and claws, spite and intelligence--considered humans a challenging and preferred prey. Echokenners were the first targeted, then Guardian pairs, and then the average human. With echokenners growing in strength every short generation, they were nascent threat to be taken care of.

Dome culture strengthened as disparate peoples were forced together for survival. People began to be identified by the service they provided the community (Echokenner, Guardian, Dragonworks, Salvage, Infrastructure, Engineering, Archive, Artisan, etc…). Small council democracies formed where cults did not. The past became sacred with the future uncertain, and the ability for any one person to absorb as many skills and as much information as possible became a mark of status.

Humanity, at the time of Maeve’s birth, was at a balancing-point. The death of a single echokenner or even one average human might spell the difference between survival (and the eventual thriving) of humanity or hasten their ultimate extinction. A knife-edge present for decades, there’s no way to determine to which side humanity has finally tipped.