"Thirty minutes, you say? I bet you ten bucks I can do it in twenty."

~APPEARANCES~

Acacia doesn't particularly stick out visually. Her golden eyes and dark hair make for a fairly standard appearance among Faunus, the being of which she proudly displays to the outside world. She very rarely obscures the ears and tail, Faunus traits inherited from her parents, and if she does, it's usually for comfort. Her silhouette is well proportioned, but almost always obscured by her clothing. Her attire is unremarkable, the only reliable constant of which is the warm and weatherproof jacket and the red and black gloves. She'll wear some combination of pants and plain T-shirts or sweaters, the details of which tend to disappear underneath the jacket she flat out refuses to part with. She'll rather stay at home, waiting for it to dry after taking it out of the washing machine than leave without it. The gloves she is less attached to, but she carries several pairs of them anyway. She owns a few necklaces, which she switches through every so often, but it doesn't make much of a difference usually, since they are hidden beneath the jacket anyway.

To her own chagrin, Acacia has a bad case of constant bad-mood face, making her seem very difficult to approach. She doesn't usually mean to come off as angry, but she's adjusted well to it. Her movements are fluent and natural, even when doing things she is not particularly practiced in. She is usually seen smoking (which is in no way okay for her to do), or - if someone who isn't supposed to know is looking - eating something from a wide ensemble of treats she keeps with her. In daily life, one probably wouldn't take note of her in ing, since she usually follows the flow of events and environment around her.

Much of her appearance conveys details about her lifestyle. Her worn, but practical shoes and the courier-bag make her out as a traveller, which - in essence - she is. It wouldn't tell the average observer though where she is going, and what purpose her travels have. Acacia is aware of the impression she makes, and has internalized a lot of the perks of leaning into that first impression as inaccurate as it might be at the first glance.

"No thanks, I'd rather keep the jacket."

~PERSONALITY~

"I know it's bad, but I can't help it."

OUT OF COMBAT PERSONALITY

Acacia seems a little hard to talk to, what with her facial expression that makes it seem like it's always a bad time to talk and her habit of listening to music wherever she is. In fact, the first two or three responses one will get from her upon approaching her will very much fall into that pattern. Those first responses will be short and somewhat gruff, often just being communicated by body language and short gestures, all the while she will keep her music running. This stems from her being too lazy to take off her headphones for a few seconds, before putting them on again. Once it's been made clear to her that the encounter will evolve into a genuine conversation, she'll make that effort gladly. In proper conversation, she speaks very clearly and articulates her ideas well, although sometimes her tongue might let some slang slip that reveals her origins and maybe ideology. By the way she speaks, one can make out a clear in-group/out-group thinking, sometimes to a distressing degree. Her outlook on life is strongly defined by this sort of thinking, as she has been exposed to stigma against Faunus frequently. It's never been something she could get used to, so all offenses of that kind hit her harder than they probably should. It makes her highly aggressive in political and ideological discussions, bordering on the inability to take in information and she often holds long living grudges against those who she thinks harbour the kind of racist prejudices she has put up with most of her life. She is, however, careful about throwing around these kinds of accusations.

Her modus operandi in daily life is "quickly and unassuming". She can follow the flows of her surroundings fairly well, making her somewhat difficult to keep track of in a crowd. If she needs to get somewhere urgently though, she will search for paths away from the crowd though, frequently leading her to the lower roof-tops running around the streets.

Acacia is maybe not very academically engaged nowadays, due to her past, in which it was never practical to sweat the details. Last time she had been in a classroom, she had been a solid B-student, but she has not managed to pick up her studies that well ever since. Since the Fall of Beacon, Acacia has considered herself a practical person, relying on others to work out the theoretical details.

Her smoking habit is maybe the thing she is the least proud of about herself, as she knows that it's bound to weigh heavily on her health in the future, but she can't seem to shake it. Otherwise she is more or less fine with her flaws, resulting often reckless, but self-righteous behavior.

IN COMBAT PERSONALITY

Although Acacia might not like to it it, she revels in combat, favouring face to face confrontations to the larger, disorganized skirmishes that characterize the usual Grimm encounters. The movements of combat seem to come naturally to her, as fighting takes very little edge off her other cognitive abilities, especially her speech. To her, fighting is a highly personal affair, meant to be carry out with frequent and exchange of words. On the flip-side fighting for fighting's sake is - while certainly enjoyable - pointless to her.

While she is certainly invested in combat, she won't initiate combat with a person, unless they have angered her to the point where she wants to actively hurt them. Otherwise she'll wait until a first attack has been made, upon which she will chase them down, until there is a clear winner and a clear loser. Acacia takes interruptions to matches like these a personal attack and will make the interloper her next target to hunt down.

Due to her enjoyment of battles, Acacia will often let the battle take its natural course, accomodating her opponent's style to balance it out, should she be at a clear advantage and provided she has no particular interest in harming her opponent. It makes her a good sparring partner to her friends, of which she has few.

Her way of perceiving combat makes her a sub-par partner, if one were to expect great advances in of teamwork. She is not one to save another from imminent threats either - although Grimm and personal enemies are an exception - mainly due to her own outlook of interruptions during duels. She might be useful to buy team-mates time to prepare or to leg it, but otherwise one can count on her more or less doing her own thing. Being engaged in combat won't usually stop her smoking or eating, depending on which she is currently enraptured in.

~DOMINANT TRAITS~

Overall, Acacia is a somewhat serious person. She seems very busy with herself, shutting out a lot of her surroundings, through social queues. She doesn't particularly mind with other people, but she definitely takes a lot of time for herself to be alone with herself. Acacia has a lot of respect for combat and its etiquette, which she'll adhere to as long as she feels, she can afford to. Otherwise she considers herself a practical person. Her life has lead her through a lot of situations that allowed her to see the world from many different angles, many of which she has consciously rejected, others she has integrated into her understanding of things. Regardless, she relies a lot on those eye-opening experiences, causing her to question whether she is doing the right things during the more somber moments.

"I suggest you back down before it gets personal."

~LIKES AND DISLIKES~

GENERAL:

LIKES:

Walks, Recounting of old events

DISLIKES:

Aforementioned deviant ideology, interruptions to most things.

FOOD:

LIKES:

The in-between kinds of food and snacks, fruit.

DISLIKES:

Nothing in particular

SPACE:

LIKES:

Open, but crowded spaces, high spaces.

DISLIKES:

Nothing in particular

HOBBIES:

LIKES:

Sparring, Tangential involvement in social activities, weapon maintainence, Eavesdropping

ACTIVITIES:

LIKES:

Travelling, whatever her current side job is.

DISLIKES:

Planning, being stuck in conversations

TALENTS / ABILITIES:

USEFUL TALENTS:

Long attention span, good imitator, food rationing

USELESS TALENTS:

Catching leaves out of the air,

HABITS:

GOOD HABITS:

Efficient shopper, keeps an eye out on prices and is used to calculating costs accurately. Keeps a respectful distance from things.

BAD HABITS:

Tendency to take things personal, listens to music almost all of the time, her hearing isn't required otherwise. Smoking.

~CHILDHOOD~

"I can take care of myself now."

Acacia spent her early childhood in Menagerie, where she went to school. She liked living there despite her parents' financial situation being somewhat tight. Her mother, especially raised Acacia to be grateful for the few things they had, and since she had little reason not to internalize this value, she did her best to follow it. She moved to Atlas for combat school, but had to live mostly on her own there, since both her parent needed to work back in Menagerie. Before moving away from Menagerie, Acacia and her parents had made an agreement that she could visit combat school, but her pocket money would be limited, mainly because her parents didn't have a huge income to begin with. It wasn't much of a problem for the bright-eyed youth, although upon arriving in Atlas, her experience of wandering the streets alone was jarring. Acacia had by that point been aware of the racism against Faunus, she was even tangentially aware of the Fang's effort to act against it, but having spent her entire life thus far in an environment consisting almost entirely of Faunus, she has had little concept of how living in an environment that could at times be actively hostile against her. Seeing other faunus being treated like a walking time-bomb because of faunus traits they couldn't hide tinged the rest of her experience in Atlas with a slight cloud of fear. Acacia went through combat school, hiding her faunus traits, not that she had particularly needed to. She saw many faunus be treated normally by students and teachers alike, but to her, wearing her ears and tail outwardly just wasn't worth the risk. Despite constant alertness during those years, she looks back fondly on her time spent in combat school. She discovered her ion for music, and her love for playing tag there, she could hone her skills in battle far better than she would have had the opportunity to back in Menagerie. Although she could live in the dorms without having to think about food or water, living without parental figures she could turn to took some getting used to, but it gave her a good outlook on life as it would continue into her teenage years.

~TEENAGE~

"It says a lot about how things are, that we are ready to fight for the things you take for granted."

As she grew into her teenage years, Acacia grew more aware of the struggles that Faunus went through in their daily lives. Being exposed to the protests and the rethoric of the Fang, before and after the split granted her a deeper understanding on the way oppression worked on the Faunus and what disadvantages this meant in unrelated situations. She would openly argue for equal treatment of the Faunus, yet kept her own faunus traits hidden by way of pulling a hood over her head when moving around. She enrolled at Atlas Academy after finishing combat school. By the time her classes had started there, she had started a job working mail delivery. As such, she moved around the crowded streets fairly often. Since she was paid by the amount of mail she delivered, she quickly worked out a way to navigate the streets in as little time as possible, either exploiting the way people created gaps in the crowd as they moved, or travelling over rooftops she could reach via ladders, or climbing the walls in alleys. It allowed her to indulge in luxuries that been denied to her previously due to her and her family's financial situation. This started with sweets, she would buy whenever there was a discount on them and ration them over the month, and later went on with cigarettes. However, the first things she bought were a set of headphones and a weather-proof jacket to shield her from the rain during delivery runs. She would keep that job during her entirely stay at Beacon.

She didn't have her weapon design figured out by the time she enrolled at Atlas. She had always gone with a standard Huntress Weapon, a mechanically simple sword with an integrated sub-machinegun mode without any dust integrations. She had always done well with it during combat school, and her talent in combat didn't really force her to innovate. Acacia's experience studying at Sanctum didn't necessarily deviate much from combat school. Of course she had a little less time to spend with friends, due to longer classes and her job, but that didn't bother her as much. It would turn out that she wouldn't get to finish her first year at Atlas though.

On her first mission, Acacia was sent over to Vale to combat some minor Grimm infestation that had cropped up near the city center. It was a routine job, more or less perfect for students, since the accuracy on threat assessment was high, and they were at least close to a city one could retreat to, albeit a makeshift one. Threat assessment only covered the Grimm present though. Originally it had been supposed to be a group if ten or fifteen Ursai, not really anything to worry about, if one had a team to watch one's back, and the early blows traded with the pack of Grimm went about as well as one could expect of mid-semester first-years. Acacia did her thing, of course, focusing one Ursa at the time and pummeling it into submission, which had her working a bit away from the rest of her team. She only noticed something wasn't going the way they had been planning when loud screeching and commotion caught her attention in-between searching for a new enemy to chase down. She turned her attention back towards the rest of her team-mates, who had disappeared into a mob of Grimm and Red Fang. Evidently, they had lured the Grimm towards the center of the rebuilding kingdom, starting with some Ursai, and now they had managed to bring in some bigger ones. Acacia looked around frantically for a sign from her comerades, convinced they would at least be fighting somewhere, when the motor of an airship clearly distinguished itself against the carnage on the ground. It had been the same one Acacia and her team had arrived here. A glance on her scroll told her, she had been disconnected for several minutes now, not that she had noticed. She's never been sure why they left without telling her, or trying to her, but she knew she wasn't going to return to Atlas Academy. A sharp whistling of air behind her ripped her out of the trance and she just managed to catch a heavy strike of claws with her weapon, which sent her flying into a nearby store-front. She glanced back outside through the shattered glass, to see the small horde of Grimm breeze by, leaving chaos in theor wake. One Red Fang operative noticed her ears, helped her stand and sent her on her way to leave the chaos. It would turn out that that was against the norm for the Fang, but Acacia was just glad she made it out alive.

The following days she spent scavenging for food and for dust, hoping to get enough ressources together to get out of Vale. Preferrably, she could either get to Shade Academy to complete her training, or she could return home to Menagerie. Originally she sought shelter from some of the locals, but she was denied often for the panic that was engrained in the remaining population about Faunus and their possible Red Fang time ties. She decided then and there that her time of hiding was over and she would wear her Faunus traits proudly from then on out. Over the following weeks, Acacia got by doing odd express delivery jobs for those that couldn't afford a real fee, or delivering material that wasn't strictly speaking legal. During one such run, she happened upon the Red Fang member that had saved her from the Grimm on that mission. It turned out that he had overheard her a few times arguing in public and had viewed her as a potential recruit to the Red Fang. Since she had no hope to scrounge together enough money to get to Vacuo on her own, and she agreed with their cause at least, Acacia agreed. Even though she did not agree with their methods.

Life in the Red Fang suited her nicely, she found with a certain degree of horror. She got a lot of delivery missions from one member to the next due to her unique skillset in that department, and the Fang had enough resources to let her build a decent weapon. This is where her third constant companion "Mercury Pride" entered the picture. Although her skills seem almost uniquely suited to working with the Red Fang - even to the point to get her far within the newbie ranks - she hopes to leave them behind and move on to Shade Academy, but for that to come true, she would need to shake the watchful gazes of her superiors.

~WEAPONS~

"I've learned my lesson. This is never leaving my side."

Mercury Pride

Mercury Pride's primary form is a blade designed to accomodate Acacia's preferred fighting style. In concept it is a simple sword without any built-in transformations, albeit having its weight and length tailored to her specifics. It does accommodate dust - mainly fire and gravity - to enable smoother cutting and harder hitting strikes respectively. The sheath of the blade however, is the more innovative element of the weapon. It can be worn on her left forearm, in such a way that the hilt of the sword points towards the hand. It begins far up enough so that wearing it with the sword sheathed won't constrict her wrist movement. Wearing the sheath this is only really practical in battle, which is why there is a strap to sling it over Acacia's shoulder in a more regular manner during everyday life. Attaching and detaching the sheath to her forearm can be achieved with a smooth motion, automatically fastening clamps around the arm, which can be loosened via a button to the side. The sheath has an active lock to hold the blade into place, somewhat like a safety switch, as well as a compartment for dust discharges. These discharges work similar to shotgun blasts, each u one of six potential blasts and can be fired off regardless of where the sheath is located in the moment. It's mostly loaded using vials of wind dust, that can serve to improve Acacia's mobility, or to push enemies away slightly. The entire contraption is encased in a durable steel alloy so to act as armor or a blunt weapon when needed.

Acacia had a lot of time thinking about her weapon while she was stuck in Vale, during which she had trouble coming up with anything that let her sacrifice her melee combat capabilities, but she was aware that not having any ranged options in combat would be a great disadvantage. That dilemma was the source of the sheath design, that was: separating the parts of the weapon she wasn't too attached to from the parts she was. She got her weapon made rapidly with help from the Fang, but had to work hard to pay up for it afterwards. She has not quite compensated for the monetary value of the weapon quite yet, but working with the Red Fang keeps her from being bothered about it.

~SEMBLANCE~

"No matter how far you run, I'll catch up to you sooner or later."

Current Continuum

Acacia's semblance compliments her everyday life as well as her combat style. Her aura latches onto one of the existing currents that surround Acacia by a maximum of a five meter radius, such as a gust of wind, flowing water, or a crowd of people moving in one direction and enables her to align her own momentum with the direction that current is flowing in. This has obvious limits to it. For starters, she can only ever change her own momentum by a tenth of the oriented value relative to that current momentum every two seconds. By the nature of how her aura interacts with her surroundings, the impuls can only reach outside her current inertial system, if she is less than ten meters away from the edge of said inertial system. This may or may not lead to unforeseen injuries though. When latching on a current, Acacia's aura does only distinguish between different classes of objects, such as different kinds of matter (gases, liquids, a swarm of apples thrown by a maniac at rapid speeds), meaning she has no real say in what direction her semblance will push her. Rather, all her utility of that semblance hinges on her approximating the vector sum or all the objects within that class within a certain radius around herself. Her semblance will also make no distinction between different kinds of living organisms, with the exception of Grimm. As a consequence she can't separate between species and subspecies when latching on to a current of organisms. Anything attached to herself can obviously not be used to increase her own momentum, nor can the semblance declare Acacia as an inertial system herself. Otherwise, any moving object in itself qualifies as a current, although too small a quantity in either mass, or velocity is more or less useless in a practical sense.

The aura cost of using her semblance is mainly dependent on the radius she extends her aura to, scaling directly with the volume of a sphere. To keep it simple: Acacia can uphold a radius of 1 meter around her for 30 minutes. Any change of Radius will increase/decrease the rate of depletion by the square of that change.

When Acacia approaches 90% depletion, her control over her semblance will start slipping, causing the radius to fluctuate wildly, which will usually lead to her losing the last ten percent fairly quickly.

~SEMBLANCE BACKSTORY~

"You won't ever really believe how much power a train engine has, without experiencing what a fraction of that does to you."

Working with the Red Fang brought a whole cornocopia of dangers with it, some of which even a new weapon can't prepare a young aspiring huntress for. Acacia spent a lot of time on assignments to deliver materials and semi-sensitive information. On one such an assignment, she found herself travelling along the tracks of a short distance train. The ruins of Vale around that time was crawling with Grimm of course, and although Mercury Pride made short work of the smaller to middlingly large ones, when a swarm of Manticores started bearing down on her, Acacia did the sensible thing and ran. At the time she was carrying some envelopes adressed to some higher ranking Red Fang and her priority was getting those delivered safely. She was fairly used to running long distances, but still, the Manticores where gaining on her. Acacia kept running along the track, hoping a train would she could jump on. Even at the time, she was certain that even if one came by, she would come out the situation battered and sore, but at least it would be better than being eaten by the Manicore, assuming that was what they did with their prey. Sure enough, she could hear a train approaching from a distance. It wasn't a particularly large one, but that didn't matter to her. Soon, Acacia had to start dodging the snapping jaws and vicious swipes of her pursuers, further slowing her down. The amount of Grimm that could reach her increased every few seconds, slimming down her chance of survival. Her lungs were starting to burn, and her legs had already started complaining by the time she had to make the first jump out of the way of the razor-sharp claws. The the train caught up to them. Acacia worked her way towards the tracks, all the while being weary of the attacks. It took her several seconds to get into the range, from which she could reach the train with a optimistic leap. Too bad that her leap in that moment was not quite so optimistic. She stumbled upon landing short just a few centimeters. The train rushed past her and Manticores took her fall as an invitation to pounce. Acacia reached out to the train that was rapidly moving away from her, and even as she could see the sharp claws closing in on her face from the corner of her eye, she suddenly felt a violent tug, ripping her off the ground and towards the train. She almost flew into the railing and almost fell back off the vehicle. The impact of slamming into the railing knocked the air out of her and she only barely managed to pull herself on the tiny platform before checking out for the remainder of the ride, upon which she was woken up and fined for riding without a ticket. Acacia begrudgingly paid up and continued on her way to deliver the envelopes, still slightly dizzy and bewildered.

~BATTLE STYLE~

"I don't just fight for the sake of it. If I'm fighting you, then you have done something wrong. And it could be too late to remedy what you have done."

~WITHOUT WEAPONS~

Acacia is used to hand to hand combat. Being separate from her weapon makes her a lot less deadly of course, but it doesn't really discourage her to chase down an enemy. Her way of fighting is based a lot around forcing the enemy to move, and subsequently leveraging that movement against them. She also throws a lot of short jabs and kicks, which tend to hurt after a while. Just as well, as Acacia is known for taking her time in battle, but it can be a bit bothersome for those just aiming to practice hand to hand fighting with her. Although she has no favourite targets, she will aim to even the playing field, so a lot of effort will go into disarming an enemy, should she have lost her weapon.

~WITHOUT SEMBLANCE~

Her semblance is only tangetially useful to battles, requiring a lot of concentration to effectively use. In that way, her combat without a semblance will only really lose the occasionaly yank in a seemingly random direction. Her movements are still very fluid, but less unpredictable and her punches hits have more of a natural trajectory to them once they connect.

~WITH WEAPONS~

Acacia's fighting style centers largely on her weapon. Her movements in battle are as fluent as they are in everyday life, utilizing the blade and sheath in combinations of attacks and deflections, the momentum of which she will utilize to speed up her own movements, albeit for short bursts of time. Her semblance aides her in performing more complicated maneuvers, but of course she won't really have the final say about how those turn out.

~WEAKNESSES~

Acacia is more or less forced to rely on her own abilities, if she wants to have pin-point control over her movements. Her usage of the semblance also rely heavily on how well she can predict movements and mass of groups of objects. Otherwise, her way of conducting battle is really not suited to fighting more than one enemy at a time. She might manage surviving, but her semblance and her weapon can only effectively chip away at their stamina and or help her escape the situation far enough to pick them off one by one. In large skirmishes, she is dependent on a team with which she won't necessecarily be compatible with, and to which she will most likely be unable to give back to in of teamwork. Her tendency to draw out fights is detremental to efficiency in battle, lessening the amount of work she can get done.

Acacia is not especially sure what she should be doing from her position. She feels indebted to the Red Fang, but she would rather split from them before she is asked to do things she can't come to with. She counts herself lucky to have been sent on delivery missions so far, but it makes her nervous to showcase her combat abilities, least someone might think that sending her into combat might be a good idea. Should she need to fight anything other than Grimm, she is careful not to injure them too badly, hoping that she might keep her options of defecting as open as possible.

"Just let me do my thing, and I'm sure I can make myself useful."

~RELATIONSHIP / HISTORY~

"I don't know people, and people don't know me. I just deliver the packages."

Faceclaim:

Texas - Arknights

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