Lamwen (Wen) Ivorcyll

 biography 
Lamwen did not use to have this name nor appearance. In truth, she is not even native to Etheyris. Coming from a place in which Aether was unknown to people, she used to be a scholar for pay and a witch in secret, in a place where witchcraft used to be seen as delusional at best and a practice for charlatans and servants of the devil at worst.
She ended up in the star after a spell she cast to help her get away from someone going wrong - or maybe too right. She is not sure to what happened to her body, but the few memories she has made it clear that she spent an unknown amount of time adrift at the Lifestream, holding on to scraps of her individuality by sheer stubbornness. Much of it was lost, must of it was absorbed by other souls drifting in there during their post-mortem cleansing process, and, whoever emerged in Gridania, lured by the Aetherite, didn't look nor think like her previous self, most of her memories from the world of before gone, and the remaining fragments, either hers or someone else's, too scrambled to make sense of.
A stranger, with whom she only managed to communicate due those fragments of memories of people who knew the language, helped her shortly afterwards, and up to this day, she knows she owes Lia the dignity of at least being clothed soon.
After some talk, the visiting highlander could make upsomething from the stranger's plight, as much as Wen herself couldn't. Since some inter-shard travel could be a possibility in that case, she decided to share with the disoriented Elezen a source of her she had been getting for herself: the Thaumaturge's Guild in Ul'Dah, who she knew had some information on void gates, as much as the content of said information was unknown to her. After an incidient involving the ladybugs on the Shroud — of which Wen is scared to this day —, both arrived in Ul'Dah, and Wen soon enrolled the guild. The, she started her quest for knowledge about the world around her. At first, to find out about the rules that reigned this reality and try to come to come back to the place where she came from, as vague as her memory of there was.
During her quest to understand the social relationships of that strange place, she met the au ra who was going to be her husband, and what was instant fascination became love. He started teaching her to bartend, and parallel to mixing, she kept delving deep into the Thaumaturge's guild's knowledge. She learned much from there, showing a higher proficiency on the theoretical than on the practical usage of Thaumaturgy. However, her unclenchable thirst for knowledge led her started dabbling in Black Magic, which caused her to have a falling out with them — the first of a few falling-outs that she would have in this star, but the only that she caused herself.
Ashamed by being expelled from the guild and fearing any judgement from her friend for disappointing her, she never got to say goodbye to Lia.
After that event, she decided to continue her research by herself, counting on one of her former clients at a bar she started working at in order to achieve funds to bring her more books and equipment. Using the funds acquired at that bar she started, little by little, setting up a lab.
Eventually, mostly because she ended up falling in love with that au ra she met and who gave her so much to live for. Among those things are Bunbun, the bunny he that was formed along with Wen from the excess aetherial energy that leaked on her wake after leaving the stream and molded after her need for comfort. The bunny who spent months watching Wen in secret. The bunny who allowed herself to be captured when it looked like Wen needed a companion. Besides the man and the rabbit, Wen also fell in love with that place. That was when she realised that she should stay.
Her research and extensive testing on herself, comparing with calibration data, made her notice that her aetherial density was too low — and getting lower by the week. In despair, she reached out to a friend, in search of comfort, but she had no idea that said friend was deeply connected to the void. In an act of sacrifice that Wen had no idea was going to happen, her friend poured so much of their own energy to "sew" her to reality that they had to return to the void, filling Wen with permanent survivor's guilt, as much as she could still feel her friend through their new connection.
Until, someday, she couldn't. And, slowly, her stiches started coming undone again. Lamwen barely had time to mourn her friend, since she had her own life to save at the moment — and the sands of her hourglass were falling even faster. Inspired by a previous joint project in order to create a prosthetic eye for her now husband, the same person who was the main reason for her choice to stay, she assembled a team for her most ambitious research project by then: the creation of an artificial body for herself.
The research took too long, and it got nearly too late. But, at the end, they all managed to put everything together, a plant-based body with a mechanical structure, put together by aetherical code imbued in it.
With the help of a third party besides the support of a friend, her consciousness was successfully transferred, despite one or another close call.
The adaptation to her new body nearly complete by now, and it has not been an easy eandeavour. She got a new layer on her senses, her aetherial sensibilities are too high, and her brain struggles a bit in keeping up with the new influx of information, as much as she has gotten better at it with time. Sometimes, she gets hugely overwhelmed by sensory overload, and, as a distraction, she throws herself deeper at work. In order to finance her researches and continue acting independently, she works at venues during the night and keeps on with her research during the day.
Never willing to stop learning and desiring to do something that could benefit people other than herself and give back to the world she learned to love, she has started researching the most subtle effects of slight aetheric imbalance and treatment methods.
Due to the importance of her research, she dug even deeper at work. Adding the exaustion of overworking herself on a project with extremely high stakes to her difficulty in dealing with sensory overload and her unwillingness to put up with her then-husband's mercenary friends who started making her the butt of their jokes and treating her like a freak after they found out about her conditions, ended up leading to a very painful divorce. He kept the house while she kept her lab and Bunbun's custody.
Crestfallen, she moved her lab to a place far away from her previous address, and started living above it while she doesn't get a bigger place to give poor Bunbun more room to hop around.
After a period of grief, she has started, little by little, builduing a new life - she made new friends, found lab partners to help to lighten the load of her research, started building a resemblance of social life and, due to pure peer pressure, she is even forcing herself to do some research outdoors.
She still throws herself over way too many projects, but, at least, that is what made her project a prototype of visual dampeners for herself - glasses that reduce the aetherial visual input she receives - since her visual aetherial perception tends to be the most overwhelming.
Recently, Bunbun, the same rabbit who helped her to retain her sanity in being alone in a whole new body, has lead her to an Elezen in the brink of death, who she, in an impulse of the person who always tends to help without thinking on the best route that she is, brought home to try and do something to save his life. Since she is not really prepared to do any type of healing, the poor bunny had to do the healing herself before her lab partner arrived for support. The man has left a huge impact on her and, after a while with no news of him, as much as he's always been in her thougts, they finally reunited and had a conversation that was not influenced by the weight of his state of health and they immediately clicked. Now, they consider each other friends, although Wen's thoughts about him are not the same she has about all her other friends.