Dr. Emma Lloyd

World's best healer and nothing else whatsoever

One of the world's greatest healers, able to cure ailments nobody else can manage! Provided you don't mind that it feels like something is growing into your body and tearing it apart, or that she has a vague yet constant aura of Wrongness despite the dozens of wards stacked up to hide it and smells like rot, or that she could definitely use this same magic to fuck you up physiologically beyond literally all repair.

But hey, you can't argue with results, and by all accounts she has a genuine, legitimate commitment to helping others.

A reclusive, antisocial, intensely superstitious old woman whose skills and drive to help others keep her in the spotlight. She doesn't sleep as much as she should, and what spare time she gets between miraculous healings is generally spent alone, on reading or personal projects. She's at ease and remarkably commanding when doing her job, but awkward in most social situations.

Biomancy

Doctor Lloyd has always hidden what exactly allows her to go beyond other healers, in spite of all the good it could do. Sure, tactics and techniques are shared, but whatever insight powers them stays under wraps. In truth, her magic is a dangerous one, born of desperation to help and of being locked out from light magic no matter how hard she tried. Unable to purify her mind enough to use her emotions for good, she turned to skill - to thought, analysis, and action. They're more reliable anyway.

Her magic relies on direct, conscious manipulation of living material. While this delicate dance can run circles around the restrictions of other healing magic, it bears harsh consequences for any misstep, and in all the intricate steps no defenses can tell healing and harmful uses apart. The two are on a razor's edge anyway. Lloyd has to cheat wards and seep through defenses just to do her job when every safeguard sees an attack. And she's gotten very good at it.

A student of biomancy could rip out someone's throat or shut off nerves as easily as fixing a cut. Dr. Lloyd is not a student.

Abomination

Some hundreds of years ago, Dr. Lloyd was a normal man. She isn't anymore.

Put in more detail, she became a monster in an incident she no longer remembers - not quite alive, not quite undead, not much of her made of anything from her original body. She's piled wards on top of wards to hide this monstrous nature, but hasn't quite escaped a mild aura of dread induced in others. She constantly smells of incense and plant oils to cover the scent of rot, and refuses to show an inch of skin below her neck.

An old friend of hers was a necromancer, and surely involved, but the design of her undead body makes little sense. Mismatched eyes, uneven hair, scarification that should have been preventable and doesn't align with logical places to put pieces together. Structural defects that would let her rot without necromantic aid that she then had to fix imperfectly. Markings that seem more for control than for preservation. She doesn't like thinking about it.

While she could remove her scars by now, or make her hair look uniform, she never has. It's been long enough that they're simply another part of how she looks. This philosophy hasn't stopped her from making other modifications, though, most notably her self-performed biomantic HRT.

[Bio in progress]