Mira

Mira is a 15 year old alchemist from Drelvyndor who is an ADHDer. She comes from a upper middle class family. Her father runs a textiles business and her mother does tailoring work out of the home. She has an older brother, 17, and a younger brother, 12. Mira's parents realized she was bright at an early age and nurtured this through homeschooling. While her older brother was studying at academy, he brought home a text on alchemy, enthralling the then 8 year old Mira. Mira asked for and devoured every book on alchemy she could understand, asked to see the labs at the academy, and wanted to be taken to visit working alchemists. Realizing that the academy wouldn't be an option for her, her parents found an alchemical school for girls in northern Seris.

Once she turned 12, Mira was sent to board at Rose Creek School for Young Ladies. The school's curriculum focused on medical alchemy with elements of hearthcraft alchemy. Other classes included etiquette, literature, art, and music. This environment was difficult for Mira. She struggled with painting and was asked not to return to music classes after her first year. She found it difficult to read the books assigned in her literature class and the books she had thrived on as a child were nowhere to be found in the library. Etiquette classes were especially hard as she constantly was marked down for failing to sit still, losing track of conversations, and interrupting. She struggled to turn work in on time in all of her classes. However, her alchemy classes were most crushing by far. Instead of focusing on the theoretical and encouraging experimentation, she found herself doing rote memorization and copying recipes from the same book as everyone else. Her attempts to improve recipes were met with failing grades for disobeying instructions. Still, her parents believed in her and she didn't want to disappoint them.

She also encountered social difficulties at the school. Instructors often called out her academic struggles in front of the other students. Other girls soon stopped associating with her during class lest the instructors target them as well. Outside of classes, others commented on how loud she was and how she never stopped talking. She started to self isolate in response to this and spent most of her free time outside writing in her notebook. She found herself alone, reading books on math and alchemy and reading them over again, the only place she felt like herself.

Things came to a head in her third year of the program. In alchemy class, Mira became distracted and started working on a second reaction related to her own interests. The primary reaction involved ethanol and plant matter in a glass beaker over a small flame. The beaker overheated and began to boil, eventually boiling over and igniting. The resulting fire caused severe damage to the alchemy lab. Mira's parents were sent the bill and she was dismissed as persona non grata with the expectation she'd return home. Instead, she'd been saving the spending money her parents had sent to buy her own alchemical kit. She took this money and bought passage to Scara.

She doesn't really know where she's going or what she wants to do. All she knows is she can't go home and look her parents in the eye. She can't tell them she failed to their face. So instead she wanders Scara, her money slowly depleting.

Mira struggles with her own appearance, not in the way that Thallia does, but she feels plain and boring, her adhd making it hard to keep on managing her appearance. She calls it being utilitarian but she sees the dresses and makeup and white gloves and hair in curls and it stirs something in her that she doesn't want to name. She also struggles with her feelings towards other girls. She doesn't have a name for or understand these feelings and is afraid it's part of the same thing that makes her forgetful and flighty. She is scared she's less useful than the rest of the party and is concerned they may leave her.