Cassiopeia

Cassiopeia grew up in a living lair of twisted, softly-glowing trees in the Starwood Strand. Like so many of her flight, she delighted in turning her gaze heavenwards to take in the dazzling stars that studded the night. Her clan was small, and most of its members were involved in the trade of crystal plinths from the Crystalspine Reaches, so while stargazing was a favored pastime among them, they had no professional astronomers, only a few dedicated hobbyists. As a hatchling, Cassiopeia became enamored not only with the shining jewels of the night, but with the astrolabes, sextants, and telescopes with which dragons could view and measure the sky.

She eagerly soaked up every ounce of knowledge she could find regarding astronomy and the crafting of its related devices, and spent her adolescence tinkering away in her den, which she'd converted into an amateur workshop. Her early works were mostly modified telescopes made with pieces from parts of other mechanisms, but as she grew she branched out into simple, cobbled-together clockwork devices. Not long after she began experimenting with making her own lenses, for both telescopes and possibly for magnifying glasses and special eye pieces, her family intervened before her furnace of molten glass could cause a disastrous accident.

Cassiopeia was bundled off to a proper academy, and to her clan's great relief, all of the mishaps involving her creations took place at a nice, safe distance from their lair. At her new school she learned from revered astrophysicists and astronomical engineers. While she absorbed her lessons from them just as eagerly as she had learned from books in her home clan, her grades did not always reflect her knowledge, for she had a bad habit of skipping classes and assignments in favor of designing and crafting new gadgets in a creative fervor.

Eventually she graduated, and she rolled up her many, many blueprints, carefully packed away her favorite creations (gifting the remainder to friends and colleagues), gathered up her books, and set off on a journey north. In her was the true spirit of the Arcane, the desire to discover something new, or at least experience something unfamiliar, so Cassiopeia decided to forgo applying for a position in the Observatory in favor of seeking the ever-clear skies of Dragonhome, the land of her Snapper ancestors. In an Earth clan, she reasoned, she would not only have an excellent view of the night sky for her amateur astronomy hobby, but also a much less saturated job market for artificers like herself.

Her reasoning proved solid, as the dragons of the Diabase Demesne were intrigued by her breadth of knowledge of the stars, Arcane engineering, and gravity magic (which made her the only Snapper for miles around capable of getting airborne). The clan's smiths and engineers were no less skilled than Cassiopeia, and most had much more experience, but her background, area of expertise, and boundless enthusiasm for inventing and creating made her a welcome addition to their ranks. She found her personality clicked with Philoctetes, a talented mage and mineralogist in charge of the clan's mining operations, and they struck up a near-instant friendship that deepened as the years went on, and soon blossomed into romance. To some they may seem to be an odd match, an astronomer whose attention is on the stars above and a miner who works in the depths of the earth, but their happiness defies all doubters.

Cassiopeia is prone to getting carried away in her quest for knowledge and creation when the spark of inspiration ignites her imagination, and will blaze a trail of innovation and new devices without regard for food or sleep if not reminded that other things exist in life. Messy stacks upon stacks of portfolios filled to bursting with blueprints and hastily scrawled notes tower ponderously in her new workshop, atop a foundation of sturdy textbooks that never seem to be returned to their proper place on the shelf. Mounds of spare parts are heaped on her workbench and the surrounding floor, while tools and eyepieces can be found everywhere from the bookshelves to the seat cushions to even, occasionally, on the peg they're meant to hang on. Against one wall are piled a multitude of prototypes and devices in need of repair, and in a carefully-tended corner lie the blueprints and notebooks dedicated to gadgets that might help her husband and his colleagues in their work deep below her feet. When not throwing herself into her work, she's showing her clanmates the stars with her many telescopes, soaking up their sense of wonder at experiencing for the first time what she's known for years. And she couldn't be happier.