emily falke

Story Hooks
& Dynamics

Seaspit

You drowned. Or at the last thing you remember was drowning, thrown from a vessel in a storm or pulled into a riptide or put there by someone who wanted you dead. One thing is sure, though: you drowned. And so how is it that you wake to find yourself in an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar home, far grander than the sea's gullet that claimed you? And why does something feel different - wrong - inside you?

Scrimshawed Destiny

Emily gives you a piece of scrimshawed whalebone or walrus tusk as a boon. It hums with a strange kind of magic and bestows on you a subtle, elusive power. However, it also has a way of bringing you back to her in a hundred different ways. It must just be your imagination, though, and besides: it's too beautiful to trade away.

Loyal Hounds, Reliable Tools

She finds you desperate, broke, or broken. She takes you as you are and tidies you up, cleans the blood from your mouth. You are lost, rudderless, that's okay - many of the things she finds are. She is infinitely kind and infinitely patient, it seems. She knows where to fit you in and how to give you purpose.

Albatross

The ship you work for or even captain needs a Tidewright to make that run. Maybe not technically, but legally-speaking: there are certain waterways forbidden to use without such an individual aboard the vessel. When the day comes, she arrives early and begins setting up her station at the centre of the main deck. Things always go strangely when she's aboard, though, and this time will be no different.

An Artisan's Patron

Emily commissions you for for a piece of art - a portrait, a sculpture, whatever your trade. You arrive at her home at mid-day for tea. You blink and several hours have passed that you hardly remember, and a painting you never started is half-finished. Your hands are covered in watercolours or plaster and sore from use. The painting is in your style, but far more beautiful than you've ever made. It feels powerful.

Class In Session

The teacher longs for the student, it's only natural. Maybe you're a novice that's only just started on their path of magic, or maybe it's never even been a plan of yours in the first place, but one day, you cross paths with her and she decides, either by deduction, divination, or plain, uncanny intuition, that you will learn magic, and she will guide you every step of the way.

In For A Penny

You require a favour or boon from her, a magical one that you cannot easily acquire yourself. In exchange, she will ask for a favour of you, one of unspecified date, time, or details, but 'equal in magnitude.'

Siren Snares

Vylbrandians might sneer at the rituals of their Tidewrights, but no one can argue that to watch them dance is anything but enchanting. Maybe it's why they fear it: for the way it can make you lose yourself; for the way it can make you weep. One night, in moonlit pond or on a starry ocean shore, you stumble on her working her magic, and something happens that changes everything.

Worldbuilding
& Headcanon
(Abridged)

Kokkish Tribals of the Strait

Kokkish is a general term used by scholars to describe a large collection of miqo'te tribes - spread across islands in the Strait of Merlthor, up through the Yafaem Saltmoor, and far further along the White Maiden river - many of which share a language group, various cultural traditions, and faiths centred around sea-based gods.Emily's tribe in particular, the Tahn, belong to a particular archipelago off the southeastern coast of Vylbrand. There is little fondness between the Kokkish and Vylbrandians, though, who tend to view the islanders as pirates at best and sirens and witches at worst, thanks in no small part to their above-average aetherical affinity and their tendency to use magic in directing their small, maneuverable watercrafts to attack moored and anchored vessels at night.

The Admiralty Academy of Arcanima

The La Noscean Admiralty Academy of Arcanima and Natural Philosophy, often times shortened to the Admiralty Academy of Arcanima or simply 'Triple A' by its students, is a Lominsan institution of higher learning with close ties to the Admiralty's Navy, Mealvaan's Gate, and the Nymian Restoration Society. Although the Gate is still the most common and official path to gain licensing as an arcanist and assessor, the wealthiest or most talented of Vylbrand's hopefuls attend Triple A as a far more rigorous, prestigious, and thorough understanding of arcanima.Alongside its several flagship theoretical tracks, it also offers a practics focus for those interested in something more akin to a battlemage mercenary academy... or for those who do not quite have the money and don't mind commissioned 'field experience' sellsword work (all proceeds to the school) as part of their curriculum.

The Worshipful Company of Tidewrights

An occupational guild native to Limsa Lominsa, the Worshipful Company of Tidewrights serves the Vylbrandian populace by licencing and regulating specialised arcanists (known as Tidewrights) who provide a myriad of solutions to seafaring ills: wave-cutters, wind-shapers, seer-like navigators, and otherwise. Their contributions can be so valuable, in fact, that many of La Noscea's largest shipping guilds will rarely send a vessel out to sea without a Tidewright aboard to soothe that greatest foe of any sailor: the sea.With a reputation for being clannish and insular, outsiders have drawn many parallels with it to a kind of 'maritime knighthood,' with most of the guild's members being lifted from the many families that hold ancestral ties to the guild, such as the Falke's, and suffused with an endlessly strange brand of pageantry: oaths, rites, traditions, chanting, and dancing, most of which are regarded as eccentric, superstitious, and ritualistic by many of the other more modern and secular guilds. They even host their own personal pantheon that (largely to assuage the mob in older times) is still subordinate to Llymlaen, if not the rest of the Twelve.Beyond their smaller chapter houses in many of Vylbrand's ports, the Tidewrights' ancestral home is the the Drowned Stacks: a sprawling, members-only library carved out of a coral grotto a few miles up the coastline north of Limsa Lominsa. All that humidity terrible for the books, you say That’s probably partially why it was chosen. Just like artists, sorcerers – real sorcerers – love to show off. It’s a statement: we own the ocean, it doesn’t touch what we don’t want it to.

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