Sarah Aruana

Overview=

"Despite what the tales says, I won't spit fire or swallow you alive. Come on."

- Sarah, joking about the popular beliefs about dragons.

Sarah is the gentle and demure dragon of an attractive appearance and estuary accent. She's adventurous and very intelligent, always wishing to learn and explore. She's a good listener and write everything she learns, her line of reasoning and ideas in her journal. Although being analytical, she has a big heart and always seek for what is benevolent for everyone, even if some people don't deserve it.

Appearance
Sarah is an example of how the Ancient Dragons of the Before Time looked like, at least for one variation of Water Dragons. She sports a purple-ish blue long hair, purple eyes, four horns, blue skin, fin-ish ears, an average build (not athletic but not chubby either) and a somewhat long tail.

As for clothing, she wears a wine-red qipao-like shirt with similar design to Kari's. She also wears black Shorts and grey boots. Sometimes wears a white lab coat as well, but it's occasional. The Crystal Pendant is also around her neck.

In a nutshell
Sarah is Intelligent, caring, eager, energetic, persuasive, kind, brave, resourceful, vigilant and agressive when pissed off

More detailed
She is a good willed and enlightened girl with a big sense of curiosity about everything. Insecure and a bit fearful when young, she becomes more confident and brave as she grows up and the responsibility as Voice of Light weighs more and more on her shoulders. She doesn't like it, but gives her best to do what she is expected to do. Oftenly, she demonstrates her wish to have only a normal life like the other dragons and perhaps become an explorer. Just like her sister, Sarah oftenly demonstrates to have a strong motherly instinct towards the others even if they are complete strangers for her. This makes her good at dealing with children, to interact with teenagers and blend in with them. But there are also times when she acts as the adult of the situation to try solve conflicts only with words.

It is not rare when Sarah joins a conversation and speaks too much, often about the dragons, science or any matter she knows at least a good portion about what the matter in question. If not, she may ask a lot of questions due to her curiousity nature. Because of this and the will to seek the truth only, she is a terribly bad liar, being relatively easy to tell when she is not saying the truth or hiding something. When the matter is about the dragons, she says she does not speak on their behalf, but she often defends her if a discussion about this matter begins. Other than that, she has plenty advices to give as a counselor. She also doesn't have the greatness syndrome and hates when someone assumes that from her either because of her origin or her responsibility as Voice of Light.

Although Sarah prefers solve conflicts with her words alone, the time will come when she needs to defend herself or the others. For this matter, Sarah possess the mental and physical strength to overcome hostility, but not emotionally. Sarah believes that the evil is not worthy of mercy and she is capable, even of killing, to ensure "the end of evil". But it is hard for her, as it is for any other normal person.

Behavior
As consequence of her origin being related to the Ancient Dragons of the Before Time, she shares their costums and habits. She almost never touches someone, not even for a handshake. She's polite, and know very well how to behave in front of authority, royality, or any other sort of important or famous people.

After some time living on Earth with Alyssa and her friends, Sarah learned to behave more like them and started to not think that much about touching. In a few years, she learned how to live like the humans as if she were one. This does not affect the way she behaved before, however, being only something she got used after some time.

Tastes/Likes
Sarah has a good ear for music, aspiring to be a great musician someday. She likes many Terran music genres and plays many musical instruments, acquiring this taste on Earth. Her favorite genres is Bossa Nova and Funky, but enjoys to play a bit of everything. She plays a custom made Ibanez SRAS7 bass. She also plays a regular acoustic guitar for songs that she cannot play with the bass as well drums sometimes. Sarah also knows the basics of piano but cannot play any classical songs or anything too hard.

She also likes to write her thoughts, what she learns and her logic involved on a paper notebook along with some drawings of objects, people and places. She has many of those notebooks, one for each adventure or matter of study. She says it is easy for her to learn and/or remember things when she writes or draw it by observation. Later she acquires a tablet and stylus but her preference is always with paper and pencil.

Hates/Dislikes
As the Voice of Light, Sarah has a big responsibility on her shoulders about the whole universe. Sometimes it feels overwhelming for her and self-doubting. Still untrained and unsure about what she must do, she may sometimes feel alone and depressed, preferring to cry when she is truly alone. Both the transition from a teenager to adult life and the expectations of the whole universe over her are too much for her to bear alone, so she regularly goes to Earth and met her friends again. During the time without her sister and while trying to deal with the Matriarch, she leans on Alyssa, her best friend, to stay mentally sane.

Althought she has acquired some powers and skills in the past, she refuses to use them except when absolutely necessary. Sarah sees herself as the only contact the humanity may have with the dragons for the time being. This means she never shows her true strength or make explicit her limits, be it for physical abilities, acquired skills through training or even her powers as the Voice of Light. She may not be the representative of the dragons on Earth, but the humanity may see her as such and she must comply to not complicate the relationship with the terrans. In a nutshell, Sarah tries to make the humanity to see her as one of them more than an alien.

Innate Abilities
''Be aware that the factor of comparison in this section is the human species. Her exact limits are relative and should not be considered as rule for character evaluation. See the Author Notes on the second tab above.'' Dragon Phisiology: As a pure-breed Water Dragon, Sarah has all the abilities of this species.
 * Supernatural Strength : Sarah is strong enough to crash through metal, wood, and stone with some effort like any dragon, but she never explored her limits in this regard, being not stronger than the average dragons of her kind.
 * Supernatural Durability: Sarah is relatively resistant to physical harm, what allows her to run further away if she needs to and also makes her a little hard to beat down or sustain injury.
 * Supernatural Speed: Just like any other bipedal water dragon, Sarah is also pretty fast. She didn't explore her speed running though, only being something that she does only to flee from trouble. The full extent of Speed Augmentation hasn't been explored by her.
 * Supernatural Endurance: Sarah can perform physical activity for longer periods of time than the other species, but not like a real dragon athlete.
 * Absolute Pitch: Sarah can identify or re-create a given musical note without the benefit of a reference tone. This helps her mainly while playing a musical instrument or singing.
 * Psionic-enabled: A rare condition for pretty much any species. She was born with a penchant for psionic abilities, though still considering that those must be developed with proper training.

Learned Abilities
Note: Sarah still has little proficiency with Material Spectrum Arts. She's very likely not going to use those techniques in combat.
 * Material Spectrum Arts: Having being trained since a child, Sarah can use of many techniques involving both the Shadow side and Light Side. Taught by the Matriarch of Dragon of the Seas, she can use of illusions, dematerialize and rematerialize objects, portals for teleport and generate twilight clouds. Some of those techniques requires a boost of energy provided by her Crystal Pendant. She can also use techniques from the light side of Light Arts, but she's still learning them.
 * Empathy: Sarah learned how to understand people and their emotions . It is the only psionic ability she has developed.
 * Partially Telepath: If touching a person through the mind meld, she can access mind and memories of a person, give access to her own mind and memories to that person, perform a telepathic suggestion or learn skills instantly from that person. This ability was used for Sarah to learn English faster than she would do by simply compare it with her own language.
 * Speed Augmentation: Sarah learned throughout her life, many techniques that augment her speed, giving her quick acceleration and endurance to keep running beyond the another dragon subspecies capabilities. This ability is exclusive to the bipedal water dragons. Techniques like the Dragon Boost and Blink Dash are easy for her to perform and at any time. Another ones may require a physical augmentation or a boost from her pendant.

Passive Abilities

 * Water Affinity: As a Water Dragon, Sarah can breathe underwater and is relatively fast swimming. She possess attributes that makes a quick stay underwater easy, having some difficulty for longer stays. She is not an amphibian. She is also slightly more vulnerable to fire and any other kind of heat harm. Extreme environments will also affect her health more due to her higher necessity of hydration.
 * Detector: Her empathy enables her to sense people even if they are emotionless by looking for thought patterns. Cloaking and conventional hiding doesn't work to hide away from her. If she's close, she will know the person's location with relative accuracy in 35 meters radius. Beyond this range, she can still sense people but with reduced accuracy if she is required to locate them. This ability was developed like a sixth sense. To dampen her detection sense is like close her eyes or cover the ears. She can do it but it doesn't work perfectly.
 * Heightened awareness to people's emotions: Because of her empathic nature, she can tell people's emotions with a great deal of accuracy, besting even those who say they are stoic.

Skills

 * Talented Musician: Sarah likes to play music and knows how to play many instruments, such as accoustic guitar, bass, drums and piano. Her favorite genres are Bossa Nova, Funky and Rock. She also says that she got interest in music only after listening to terran music.
 * Good Singer: Sarah is a talented contralto. See Krystal (Alesia Glidewell) for voice reference.
 * High degree of Intelligence: Sarah likes logic games and studies thoroughly her matter of curiosity, knowing a bit about everything.
 * Computers Whiz: Sarah has an ease to operate, manage and repair most computers from Earth. An explanation for that is how simple the systems and computers are if compared to the technology she's used to deal with.
 * Quick Learning: Sarah has an incredible ease to learn anything and very fast.
 * Counseling: Sarah has plenty advices and tips to give about several things, both from her own experience and from what she knows by reading or studying.
 * Highly Perceptive: Sarah often makes notes of what she learns, being very detailed about her subject. She has a trained sight and perception.
 * Drawing: Sarah is able to make a realistic portrait of anything with perfection, relatively fast. She uses this on her notes.
 * Master Linguist: Sarah's native language is not the English, but one which shares roots with all languages and dialects on Earth and outside it. She can decipher and speak, almost any dialect by simply referring to her native language. It is not perfect, though, still having a somewhat different accent for English . Now her ease with dialects is not the same when it's about writings, being way slower to learn if those languages use another form of writing other than the regular alphabet or the symbols of her native language.
 * Persuasive: Sarah can use of her attractive look and voice to gather all the attention from men and women for herself, as well change their minds if they are not overly determined or stone hearted to listen to her.
 * Cooking: Learning to be more independent and also influenced by her own curiosity, Sarah considers herself a good cook. She can prepare a variety of food, from meals to desserts. She likes to prepare traditional eastern food and also some non traditional cuisine. Her banana with chocolate crepes are a favorite of whoever tastes them. She also learned to cook some vegan dishes for her sister, usually with lots of tofu or another iron-rich meal.

Dreamsmith Stone (Pendant)
Because of her Material Spectrum Arts training, the Matriarch gave her a relic for assisntance, which Sarah is always wearing as a pendant. It has the ability to strengthen Sarah's energy output for techniques, allowing her to use stronger ones. Further in time, Sarah learns that it can power ancient technologies as well as vehicles and machines built by the dragons since ancient times. Can also be used to heal injuries.

The Crystal itself looks like a glowing gem, that can also be used as lantern and a self sufficient battery in a very similar way to the Kingdom Stone. Its normal color is light blue. Can get red if Sarah is in a critical situation, yellow if the Crystal's power is depleting and white when she's building up energy to use of a stronger technique. If depleted, its power will be restored slowly, as it is self sufficient.

Concept
Sarah Marine, as character, is some sort of character recycling, also made by Ryū, originally called as Marine Fairlight for the cancelled work known as Invocation of Twilight, the original universe for some concepts used on DragonStar.

The concept takes inspiration from existing characters as well, such as Schala from Chrono Trigger, Zelda from The Legend of Zelda series, mainly Breath of the Wild, Kida from Disney's Atlantis Movie, and backstory based on StarCraft, Freedom Planet and Atlantis the Lost Empire.

Sarah was also built to not be a brawler (initially), superhero or master in magic, going against the tendencies for female characters. Also away from the cliche of being the kidnapped maiden, only waiting for be rescued. Sarah was meant to be a deuteragonist when possible.

Appearance
The first design for Sarah Marine, was being developed since the character creation, but using Airlemi Linth's artwork by Tyson Tan, as base and first concept, but never being something official. Because of her heavy inspiration on Schala, have a Water Dragon with aquamarine skin and blue hair, was a direct reference to the princess of Zeal. Tyson Tan's art was showing that with perfection, even knowing that it wasn't an art of Sarah herself.

For the final design, features from airlemi were authorized to be kept by the character owner, as long as the final design be different enough. Things like the four horns, aquamarine skin (without the markings), a dragon snout and the average look were kept. And was decided since the beginning, that Sarah would wear different clothes than Airlemi, and she passed to wear the same clothes as Alice, from Bakugan. The new design was sent to Cloudi and the first artwork of this character was created.

Original ideas were used as well, like make Sarah's skin a single, solid dark aquamarine color, with lighter areas for her palms and feet, giving the feeling of brown people. Still in a cute and beautiful way for the aquamarine dragon. Her outfit was changed to something more original but still simple. The final design also used references from Merga for the skin color and Lilac for a pair of her horns.

Personality
Sarah's personality was a mix of Schala's and the character author himself. Because of this, Sarah sometimes may have a similar attitude to Lilac, because Ryū confesses that he identify himself a lot with the purple dragon. Aside from that, Sarah seems to have a different personality from her discontinued counterpart of Avalice Online, being more confident and aware of her abilities. However, she never uses them unless overly necessary, also explaining that a character built for use of power, is a character built for Power Playing.

Now about Sarah herself, she has a habit of write everything she learns and her ideas on her journal. This makes reference to what Professor Pierluigi Piazzi taught. "The best way to learn something, is write it. This way, what you want to learn, is written in your hard drive, called brain."

- Pierluigi Piazzi

This idea of using a journal to write Sarah's ideas, is also reflecting what the author oftenly does. Writing his ideas and works in progress somewhere.

Skills and Abilities
Looking to create a character who is considered at the same time, powerful and underpowered, this balance of powerful magic abilities with physical, mental and emotional limits, gives a new purpose for Sarah as character. Ditching completely Power Playing, sometimes giving the impression that she is, indeed, underpowered. This opens the possibilities for situations where a character who is more analytical is needed and not a hero protagonist, who defeats all the villains.

Crystal Pendant
Using both Disney's Atlantis Movie and Freedom Planet as reference, including the original Blazing Ruby from Invocation of Twilight as base, Sarah wears a Crystal Pendant which resembles the crystals used by the Atlantean people. It was created as a reduced version of the Kingdom Stone and a way to allow Sarah to use stronger techniques, as well indicate if Sarah is at imminent death risk, changing its natural blue glow to red.