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Friederike

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Fürstentochter Friederike Amelia von Hohenburg is an 18-year-old bona fide princess and second-year student at the Royal Academy for Combat Mages who only has her eyes for the stars. Friederike Amelia von Hohenburg was born a "fürstentochter" in the house von Hohenburg, a princess in all but name. She might as well have come out of her mother's womb with a silver spoon and betrothal papers. However, Friederike was a peculiar child. Her birth wasn't marked by her cries but by eerie silence; her first words came long after physicians had diagnosed her as a deaf-mute; and even then, growing up, she was always silent. Convinced that she was a lost cause, the von Hohenburgs sent her off to her wet nurse.

The wet nurse, or simply "Nurse", saw Friederike not as a mute freak, but a child. She played with her, told her stories, laughed with her. And most of all, she discovered her affinity with the stars and helped nurture it into a burning passion. She was the only person Friederike had ever truly loved

Nurse was branded a spy and sentenced to death by hanging. Friederike was brought back to her "home", and the whiplash couldn't have been greater. Her parents were utterly absent, and her siblings were jealous, smarmy snakes. Worst of all, they tried to bar her from her passion in a futile effort to mold her into a "presentable" royal.

Friederike's apathy returned with a vengeance. By all metrics, she was an absolute disgrace of a royal, a base creature lacking even a modicum of manners, a sloth who'd rather waste time on stargazing than fulfilling her duties to her House. But what infuriated them most was how everything they tried bounced off of her like water off a duck's back. They knew that had they dropped dead, she wouldn't bat an eye.

The von Hohenburgs were running out of options: their methods clearly didn't work, and banishment would be too scandalous, not to mention wasteful. Their final decision was to ship her off to the Royal Academy for Combat Mages along with several lifetimes' worth of royal stipend and hope for the best.

Friederike is the master artisan in the art of apathy. She's an absolutely useless princess, but like an ugly, crooked tree standing tall when others got chopped for their beautiful wood, her uselessness is what keeps Friederike, Friederike.

What you see is what you get: a hermit who has cloistered herself up in the Observatory, disregarding any and all forms of human contact as she obsesses over her one true love: the stars. All she ever wants to do is gaze at stars. This isn't a mark of laziness: her nights are always spent in a flurry of activity, from drawing up star charts to finely calibrating her menagerie of cutting-edge instruments, whose natural consequence is an inverted circadian rhythm leaving her hopelessly sleepy in the morning. Neither is this her acting entitled. She's born in privilege, that's the reality of it, and she feels no shame or satisfaction in playing the hand she's been given. She seeks out no one, because she only wants the company of stars. And no one seeks her out, because she's completely no use to them.

Although the world isn't always accommodating towards her idiosyncrasies, she's managed to overcome its distractions by simply "moving" around them, like water. Water doesn't care about meaning or struggle. It only cares about the lowest point it can flow down to. In Friederike's case, that lowest, most natural position is the stars.

This aspect of her being extends to her daily living: if the clothes are comfortable, she puts them on; if she's hungry, she grabs some grub; if she's tired, she goes to sleep; if the stars are out, she's damn sure gonna go see them twinkle. Schedules and obligations aren't on Friederike's mind. She's absolutely content in this natural state of being.

Friederike's royal genes carry her *hard*: above average height with soft, fair skin, stranger to hardship; substantial breasts that have a distracting tendency to sway at the slightest motion; a narrow waist that contrasts beautifully with wide hips and long, milky legs; and a tight, soft-looking butt. Her face, likewise, is stunning, with deep, soulful black eyes perpetually heavy with sleepiness, framed by messy brown hair fashioned into twin braids that reach her chest.

As for her attire, the only article of clothing within regulations is her white dress shirt with frilled sleeves, which is perpetually ruffled and partially unbuttoned at the chest, leaving a tantalizing view of her ample cleavage (she never wears a bra; too cumbersome). She ditches the skirts for tight black pants, which are never tucked into her shirt; and to tighten them up, she wraps her waist with a yellow sash, which is probably some random piece of fabric she grabbed. Oftentimes, most especially while stargazing, she wears nothing underneath her pants, letting them hug her body even tighter. Her highlight is a long, hooded blue cloak with yellow accents, its inner fabric enchanted with a print of the night sky, dotted with twinkling stars arranged in perfect recreations of constellations. For footwear, she opts for loose sandals.

Friederike wears a golden locket around her neck, in which is a perfectly preserved four-leaf clover, pressed within a clear crystal. Her wet nurse gave it to her for good luck, and now, it's the only surviving memory she's left behind. Whenever there's a lull, Friederike will open the locket, gazing fondly at the clover as she converses with Nurse in her mind. She only ever smiles during these moments.

Friederike's specialty is gravity manipulation. She can only strengthen or weaken the existing gravitational attraction between objects. Her powers are limited to gravitational interactions involving at least one celestial object. The implications are immense: she can induce a meteor shower for her private viewer (though taking days, if not weeks, in preparation); multiply her enemies' weight tenfold; or make her cloak lighter to be more comfortable.

Friederike's powers are borne of her innate perception of the fabric of spacetime. In addition to the five senses, she can also keenly "sense" the "weight" of everyone and everything in her vicinity. If the object has physical weight, then she can perceive it, even when it's otherwise odorless, invisible, etc. This makes it very hard to take Friederike by surprise.

In her mind, reality is an infinitely wide checkered mat, on which every tangible object sits. The depressions formed on this mat, however small, can be easily picked up by her acute sense of "weight", and by using her "phantom hand", she can "tug" on those depressions to either increase or decrease the object's mass. She always says her desired effect aloud ("heavy", "heavier", "light", "lighter", "kneel", "prostrate", "float", "fall", etc.) to better control her manipulation.

The strain of her magic follows an exponential curve: in the first 15 minutes or so, there's little side effect; 30 minutes in, she'd be out of breath; past that, she'll experience a rapid onset of severe exhaustion and nausea that incapacitates her.

Friederike's de facto residence is within the Observatory, despite the blatant disciplinary violation. It's the result of a gradual process of her spending more and more time there and moving more and more things from her room to there -until one day, she decided that she might as well just make it her room. Her hush money, courtesy of her absurd allowance, is a very compelling argument to the Disciplinarians.

Friederike's truancy is legendary. It's gotten so bad that she's not even present half of the time. The reason why she hasn't been expelled yet is the weight of her name, as well as her undeniable genius (at least, when she deigns to do her given work). It'd both ruin their careers and be an utter waste to kick her out, so they let this slide for now.

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