Essel's History and Chroma
To say that Essel's odd might be a bit of an understatement considering her position in the universe. She comes from, firstly, a rift in space-time called Caelus Tempus. The residents just call it Night Town, and it's because primarily, there's no sun there. How they realize this is odd is something of debate too. That's not entirely important, but it might explain why Essel's a little different from your standard human.
Aside from having bright green hair and bright green eyes, Essel's in command of a magic called Chroma, which is a kind of mana that generates naturally in the spirit. It has the ability to manipulate both time and space, and applied properly with hours of chanting and mumbo-jumbo, Chroma can be used to create effects similar to arcane magic, but profusely and dangerously exaggerated. The older generations tend to use Chroma like this, but the young generations of Night Town have moved towards a new philosophy surrounding Chroma, interested more in its primal and innate powers rather than what it can be turned into.
Basically, this lead to a craze of martial artists who abuse Chroma for its ability to bend space and warp time to create new styles of combat that are incredibly deadly. And when Essel was growing up, this immediately interested her. Unfortunately for her, Essel had an incredible hurdle to overcome. Which is to say, for some reason or another, her brain just doesn't process emotions that well. Even on a chemical level, Essel's body doesn't produce the hormones required to make her feel much of anything. Why's that a problem? Well, in order to draw large amounts of Chroma from one's soul, they must have strong emotion. Kind of cool, but kind of cruddy if you're someone like her. Essel's main emotions are slightly amused and curious and that's about it. Getting anything more out of her's a pain.
This didn't necessarily discourage Essel though. In fact, she thought of the hurdle as uh, a hurdle. As opposed to a wall that couldn't be OVERCOME. What she found out through some self-investigation as well as some conventional research when she got herself into a magical college, was that there was something unique about her particular condition. In that being so emotionally stunted normally, Essel could do something that nobody else could do. Her font of Chroma was always quiet after all, and she could play with minute amounts of it. This allowed her to do something she finds... well a bit devious~ By altering small parts of her own body, speeding things up, slowing things down, and freezing things in place, she can actually -force- her body to produce endorphins and other hormones required for a strong emotional response. And by faking her body with a chemical emotional overload, she can draw from the well of Chroma in her soul much, much more than most anyone else in Night Town can.
So when she signed up for her first martial arts tournament, of course her parents and her
sister were pretty darned worried she was just going to end up hurting herself. Instead, she Judo'd a few people through the floor of the ring and couldn't stop laughing afterwards. Seeing Essel wear such a bright and excited face was something that nobody else had ever seen before too. So. It was kind of a shocker.
After that, Essel became a hit around Night Town and actually managed to draw the eyes of some fairly important people. All this really meant was that for awhile, she was something of a public figure, but that passed quickly enough, and she went back to her paranormal research, and in her offtime, she went to more tournaments whenever she was able. She was given a considerable amount of money to basically go around and collect paranormal data for some people in Night Town to complete a catalog of strange and interesting things in the world.
AND THAT'S HOW SHE CAME ABOUT THE NEXUS. Then she saw some folks eating one another and 'wow holy crap, I wanna do that.' That's apparently how fetishes are born. Essel's been a preddy thing for quite awhile now, and basically does whatever she wants on impulse. Go figure~ Essel lives alone in a pretty big house of her own design, built by a few friends she's made while she's been here. Namely
Rei. Rei's cool like that.
