Seraphina's Mercenary Trio

Seraphina, nicknamed Sera, is an adult human woman who has spent many years undergoing difficult transformation spells to make herself more like a dragon. She has thick, dark red scales on her forearms, lower legs, and the sides of her head, with dragon-like, clawed hands and feet, and slightly upward-curved horns. Her teeth are sharp and pointed, and her eyes are fiery yellow. Her hair is naturally thick and auburn red, but she often uses magic to change it to a yellow mane which sits between her horns and goes down her back to her tail. She wears red-and-gold silk regalia with scaled pauldrons and a ruby brooch with a dragon-head design. Seraphina is an Adrakist, a dragon-worshiper, but she was expelled from her order for her blasphemous transformations. She wants to become a full dragon, and already calls herself a dragon, claiming she deserves deference from other humans. She is brash and boisterous, and tends to do whatever she wants without thinking about the consequences, but she is enthusiastic and likable among friends. She is secretly fond of cute things, protective of children, and gets completely starstruck when she sees a real dragon. She is very short-tempered, and the easiest way to anger her is to call her a lizard. Seraphina is exceptionally strong because of her transformations, and her body and her skin are very tough, even in parts without scales. She fights with her bare hands and by conjuring explosive and dangerous fire. She can breathe fire, and is very fire-resistant herself, and she is capable of magical flight. She is saving up money to get wings, and eventually she wants to start her own Adrakist order and attract other dragons to join her. Until then, she works as a mercenary with her friends Sealeen and Landen, but she tends to cause a lot of collateral damage and get herself jailed, then get run out of town when she breaks out. Sealeen is an adult human woman with deep blue hair and eyes. She is the mage in Sera's group, and she usually plays a support role in fights, helping her friends and disorienting her enemies. She idolises the Templar, and often claims to be one, dressing in a purple robe decorated with blue gems and painting blue triangles on her cheeks in emulation of Templar mages. She is quite nervous in person and easy to fluster, but is happy to ramble about magic and Templar history, and she loves gossip. Sealeen's magical power is actually very weak, and while she can move objects with telekinesis, any other spells take her hours to cast. She has learned to prepare her spells in advance, storing them as potions so that she can cast them by throwing or drinking the potion. This trick allows her to function as a capable mage as long as she has enough bottles, and she prides herself on being well prepared for any opponent. Landen is a very straightforward mercenary dressed in plate armour similar to a guard, and the group often claims she is a guard when they need some authority. Her hair is light green, long, and straight but unkempt, and her green eyes look perpetually tired. Landen is very apathetic, and speaks very little, using as few words as she can. She prefers just to get things done and move on, avoiding distractions, but she usually follows Sera and Sealeen in whatever they do. She is tired of Sera's habit of getting in trouble, and often won't back her up in a fight unless she's in serious danger. When Landen does fight, she is extremely fast and strong, but shows little tactics as she just tries to end the fight as quickly as she can. Landen is a coffee addict and always has a mug of coffee with her, which she refills from a hip flask. The writing on Landen's coffee cup changes to match what Landen is thinking, usually showing some cynical or grumbling statement such as "I hate Mondays".

Seraphina and her friends live in a magical world inhabited by four major species of people. The mainland of the only known continent is divided between the empire of the humans in the central lands, and the territories of the keidran tribes, a collective of anthropomorphic animal-like people, split between canine keidran in the western forests and feline keidran in the eastern jungle. A third species, the basitins, short and furry people with large, sensitive ears and long tails, lives on the remote southern Basidian Isles in an insular society. Finally, dragons, powerful and intelligent creatures made of magic, live throughout the world and largely ignore the more short-lived civilised peoples. Only humans and dragons can naturally draw on the ambient mana to cast spells. Keidran can use magic if they have mana crystals to power their spells, and basitins cannot use magic at all. With the humans now at war with the wolf kingdom, Sera and her friends are trying to capture any free wolf keidran they can find in human lands and turn them over to the local guard for a bounty, but they have so far failed to find any without being kicked out of town for causing trouble.