Nexula Finemind

"Oh! You’re the ones from my dream. Hm. I thought you'd be taller. Not that height has anything to do with dimensional flux resilience — or, does it? Anyway. I'm Nexula Finemind, Arcanist. You don’t know it yet, but you’re going to be very important to the fate of this city during this melding and I’m willing to offer you my services as a mage and researcher. What say you, Riftguard? Oh! That’s right, you haven’t earned that title yet. You will soon enough though, we just have to conduct a few tests."

• Eccentric: Mid-sentence tangents. Notes-to-self aloud. Occasionally forgets what time, day or year it is.
• Scatterbrained: Often loses her train of thought and is constantly misplacing things.
• Anxious: Constantly worried about dimensional spillover, mana inversion, or "that sound."

Nexula is obsessed with understanding the portal's rhythms, energies, and implications. She sees the Melding as an arcane puzzle to be pieced together.

However, she lacks the combat prowess to do the field research herself. The Riftguard are, in her eyes, walking data collectors. They might also be fated champions foretold in one of her older footnotes, but she can’t find the book where it was written.

• Scientist 
• Immortality

Nexula is a researcher through and through. She enjoys the tedious tests that confirm or disprove her theories. She loves everything about arcane research and has been absorbed in it ever since her graduation. She believes that the arcane holds the secrets to immortality and she would very much like to live forever.

• Fear of Death - Nexula fears the end of her existence more than anything. She wants to continue unlocking the secrets of the arcane forever and death would seriously impede her progress.
• Scatterbrained - Nexula often misplaces items or ends up looking for things for minutes at a time that she had been holding or wearing on her head. 

• Can teach Mage or Witch player characters 1 Tier I Spell before each Encounter
• • Her teachings are wild but insightful, as she dabbles in experimental spell theory.
  • She may also offer weird enchanted items, temporary spell alterations, or chaotic magical boons at the narrator’s discretion. 

• Serves as the city’s only surviving high mage since the last Melding.
• Enchants items, places magical charm and seals and generally serves as the city’s solution to most major problems of arcane origin.

• Speaks in tangents, asks rhetorical questions, and ends sentences with “wait, what was I saying?”
• She’s the ultimate lore-dump character, but give her weird prophetic visions about the future and foreknowledge of enemies but expressed through abstract metaphors (Example: “Beware of the boulder that walks.”)
• Can act as: A magical mentor, a foreshadowing oracle or an unstable but invaluable ally.

Nexula Finemind appears at first glance to be an unremarkable, middle-aged woman with a slight frame. Her hair is always a little wind-tossed and her spectacles are always a bit askew. Dark circles under her eyes indicate long sleepless nights spent deep in research.

She moves with a distracted air, her gray-blue eyes flick about with a restless energy.

To the casual observer, she seems like an unmarried recluse, content in her tower, with her broom, her teacup, and her stack of scribbled scrolls. To those paying closer attention, her teacup stirs itself when she turns away, the broom is busily sweeping on its own in the next room and the scribbled scrolls all contain arcane runes and spells.

Nexula dresses like someone who once cared about presentation, but that was several deep research projects ago:

• Robes: Faded indigo or soft gray woolen robes — threadbare at the sleeves, patched in places by hand or by spell. Her outer cloak is too long and always dust-stained at the hem.
• Color Scheme: Muted earth tones with occasional bursts of faded magical embroidery, typically symbols for shielding, memory, and protective charms, such as “Please Don’t Explode.”
• Accessories: Her round rimmed glasses, a single long chain that holds dozens of keys and a satchel that is overstuffed with papers, dried herbs, and writing implements.
• Jewelry: Earrings and bracelets.
• Hair: Long and silver-streaked, but unkempt, often tied up in a half-knot with a wand or quill pin.

Nexula is a kind soul that is a bit cracked at the edges. But the more time you spend with her, the more the impossible becomes normalized:

She’s not the sort of mage who casts fireballs in battle, but she could explain exactly how fireballs are generated, magically and scientifically, and how much of an inefficient use of one’s mana reserves they are.

• She’s Been Dead Before: There was a botched portal opening experiment when she failed to account for the fourth dimension in her calculations. The resulting temporal explosion caused the destruction of her tower and Nexula died for exactly 42 seconds. She was pulled back by an unstable temporal loop but a changed woman. Since then, the tower has been in a perpetual state of destruction, so slowed down by the temporal loop that it appears to be ever so slowly… exploding. So slowly that one could not perceive it in a single sitting. Every few years it explodes 1 cm out, ever so slightly altering its appearance.

She worries that if the portals were to ever be sealed, the spell that keeps her tower intact and her alive would cease to be.

• She’s Watching the Riftguard: While she downplays her involvement, Nexula has quietly enchanted tokens, maps, or mirrors connected to the Riftguard to gather data, detect anomalies, and maybe intervene if the fabric of reality starts to fray.

She keeps logs of their behaviors, interactions, and speech patterns. One Riftguard member already triggered a phrase from a prophecy in her notes.She's debating whether to tell them.

• She’s Written the Ending Before: In a burst of insight (or madness), Nexula once entered a fugue state and wrote a complete account of the Melding, from beginning to end. She sealed it in an envelope with a wax rune that burns the hand of anyone who tries to open it... including herself.

She doesn’t remember writing it. She doesn’t know if it’s accurate, a prophecy, or just a hallucination. She has sworn to only open it if Portaland begins to fall.