Mencha Cavallero Cascon

Name: Mercedes (Mencha) Cavallero Cascon
Age: 19
Race: Human
Sex: Female
Hair: Chestnut-coloured, and primarily worn in a chignon at the back of her neck. She keeps it neatly brushed.
Eyes: Gray
Weight: 124 pounds
Height: 5 feet 3 inches

Weapon: An espada ropera (sword of the robe), that was given to her by her grandfather in her twelfth year. The steel blade is 44 inches in length, narrow and tapering, with a lavish hilt. The sword is Mencha's pride. She keeps it in a leather scabbard, occasionally at her waist, but habitually buckled beneath the saddle blankets of her mare. She also carries a flintlock pistol, which she keeps in a belt at her waist.

Armour: A helm, gorget (“… a type of armor designed to protect the neck.” [Wikipedia]) metal gauntlets, and breast plate. Each piece is fashioned of steel plate, and is kept bundled in saddlebags. Mencha also wears tall, leather boots that reach past her knees, in place of greaves, or leg armour.

Strengths: Mencha has a developing taste for leadership, thinks with clarity, is intelligent in the way of books and scholarly pursuits, and is an accomplished swords-woman. Having hung over the shoulder of her tactician grandfather throughout the course of her childhood, Mencha has a fair understanding of battle tactics and martial activity, and uses this to her advantage when caught under crossfire. She works well with groups of people.

Weaknesses: Mencha is graceless, an awkward, stumbling lummox when deprived of her sword. Running is her bane and shall never be her avail; she is slow and not always in full control of her faculties. One unavailing peculiarity in her nature often disturbs her: though intelligent, she has a tendency to grow confused, a state that belies her wit and oftentimes shatters her sense of equilibrium. She is at times unimaginative, obstinate, and always a procrastinator. And of course, she is human, prone to severe injury and pain.

Skills/Magic: None

Personality: Blunt and humourless, Mencha is appalled by everything: differing opinions, merry persons, humour, sarcasm, buoyancy, emotions. She is comfortable with authoritative figures whose natures are as solemn and severe as the power they wield, but is alarmed by emotional people, as she honestly sees little sense in running the gamut of one's emotions. Mencha herself is a dour young damsel, whom, despite the difficulty she encounters in forming mutual regard, is staunch and loyal to those she calls friends, as well as to those causes she earnestly supports. Her humours are steady, changing gradually. She is pious, methodical, and conservative, and yet engages, and perhaps even indulges, in the art of war and battle, and all that pertain. She deviates from the accepted standard in her home life in this regard, but despite this, is the mirror image of the severe virtues her family upholds.

Mencha aspires to strong leadership. Being young, her method of rule is sometimes akin to that of a dictatorship; if opposed, she has a tendency to be rather puerile: cold shoulders, unfriendly glowers, blunt, witless quips, et cetera. She is a stolid girl, easily provoked but quickly appeased, and is cautious and conventional in all things. Suspicion leads her to delay—if in charge of an operation, she will hold back until all conditions have been deemed perfect for execution. Mencha is somber to excess, and lives religiously by maxims.

Appearance: Born to a house of minuscule heights, Mencha follows this family tradition unfailingly. She is short, proud of bearing, with the dusky, ebon features found in regions that bask in pools of sunshine among the dark foliage of wine-scented vineyards. Her hair wavers between pale and dark chestnut. Her face is broad and round, set with hazel eyes; a regular nose, and a downcast mouth. Her expression is perpetually grave, her neck stocky, her hair pulled scrupulously back and bound modestly most of the time. Her traditional outfit is a loose, navy blue shirt with long sleeves and high collar, yellow clips upon the chest and wrists, black trousers, and leather boots that reach her knees.

Dome Appearance: As a teacher at the Dome, Mencha garments are austere: a white, long-sleeved shirt with black cuffs and a strangulating collar, white trousers, a black belt for her pistol, and boots.



See also Traditional Appearance, Full Length
Dome Appearance, Full Length

History: Señorita Mercedes Cavallero Cascon was born into a wealthy Spanish family. The times of Cascon occupied a corner of the fifteenth century; the house flourished upon two pursuits: military and the art of beauty. By her mother's standards, Mencha was impoverished—God had forgotten to give her the charms that flowered in her sisters. Hers was a gloomy, stout, and bullheaded face where her sisters bloomed with ruthless beauty. Señora Cascon heaved tragic sighs over her tiny daughter's ill fortune, and the nurse said, with a cluck, "She might have done well had she been born into another family. But she was not—niña triste—she is ours, and so she shall suffer." The nurse, as one might suppose, was given to dire predictions; she rarely saw happiness in the futures of her ill-favoured charges, and would treat them accordingly.

When infancy revealed Mencha to be without the finely shaped head and dimpled cheeks of her three older siblings, it was calculated that she would suffer the fate of a luckless younger sister. Her sisters, scornful, in obedience to their nurse, began their hard treatment of their smallest sibling when Mencha was only a toddler. It is the nature of children to harry one of their own if the situation dictates; like hens, they will peck the object of their aversions to death. Had circumstances evolved, and events been allowed to proceed uninterrupted, Mencha would have nursed deeper wounds than she sustained and become as stone toward the torments and taunts of "ugly duckling" her sisters dished out. But her father put an end to this hard treatment before it could bear such vibrant fruit.

Mencha and her sisters had on the occasion taken trips to their grandfather's house. It was a fine, baronial seat upon the Spanish coast, stuccoed and towering with all the pride his status in society offered him. The old señor had taken a grand liking to Mencha; seeing as she was cut from a cloth different from that of her sisters, he bade his son, Señor Cavallero, to bring her for a fortnight or so to his manor. Sweeping Mencha from the nursery one fine summer's day, when God wound fingers of sunshine through the netted gossamer of the curtains, Señor Cavallero told his wife and his children's nurse that Mencha was going for a trip to grandfather's. "Sigh no longer, señora," he said, nodding at his wife. "The girls will not learn etiquette from a heaving breast. Donna Carminda—" looking sharply at the dour nurse—"you needn't set eyes on this ugly duckling for a while."

Donna Carminda shrugged. She could not care less.

The trip was the start of many such trips Mencha took to her grandfather's estate. There came a time when she became a vague addendum to the family circle, filially polite to her mother and sisters, and fond of her father. But her grandfather had embraced her ill-proportioned head and un-dimpled cheeks with enthusiasm; it was he and his house that she cherished and was eternally devoted. Her grandfather, in turn, gave her a superior education, not only in literature and religion, but the sciences, mathematics, and his own particular ability, the military art. He had been a tactician in the royal army, and had only some years ago retired. He taught her swordsmanship, and endowed her with an espada ropera; let her hang as a child over his shoulder, brushing her unkempt curls from the desk as he studied his old maps, and told stories of the old campaigns. When she grew too old to hang as a monkey, but still fed upon his narration, he took her about and introduced her to old comrades, who gratified her interest with tales of battles and tacticians. Mencha absorbed their words and lessons, and became proficient, if only in theory, regarding the military pursuit. It became her love, a strange and wild thing her sisters could not understand, but indulged as their poor hermana's lone ability.

Mencha's history is presently without great comment. She received a mare for her seventeenth birthday, and upon this fleet-footed mode of travel is given to wandering far beyond the precincts of her grandfather's manor. Her family does not question her rides, as she takes them for exercise, often in the company of good family friends. Yet, there is a danger too in her frequent excursions, for who can say that when universes shatter their boundaries upon one another, passages will not be opened to the adventurous, or the unwary, into other worlds?


... Approved.


Battles/Roleplays:
Azazel's Stone (In Progress)