Embryes

There are few dragons out there who will ever venture somewhere as dangerous as where the crew of the Riftrunner plan to go: other dimensions outside of Sornieth's. In such a hostile environment, any lapse in teamwork could spell doom for everyone on board the interplanar exploration vessel. One missed message and suddenly you've jettisoned all your fuel crystals when trying to open a loading bay for sample collection. Luckily, the odds of that happening are zero. Not while Captain Embryes is the one giving orders and calculating the probabilities. Her mind is like clockwork, keeping perfect time as she monitors the activities of her crew. She's planned for every eventuality, so as long as everyone follows her lead the Riftrunner's exploratory mission will be a flawless success.

However, Embryes can count how many times her crew has actually followed her orders on the claws of her secondary hands. They don't disobey, as such. Most of the time, they'll get around to their assigned tasks... eventually. But that's not good enough! Embyres has a timetable for a reason, everyone scheduled to work in perfect harmony. She's not oppressive — there's space for some delays built into the plan. But they're not so lenient as to make room for Jerrence to fly his ornithopter for a week instead of marking any progress on the Riftrunner's engines. Her crew is less like a clock's gears turning in sync and more like a bunch of hatchlings trying to eat all the sand in an hourglass. The only one who can even come close to keeping to their schedule is Lotorc, and Embryes suspects that's just because she's given the obelisk extra free time to make sure she's able to grow lots of delicious paper for the crew. Paper grows on plants, right? It's definitely not a mineral or an animal, so it must. As far as Embryes is concerned, all plants grow into impenetrable tangles of thorns, so the fact that Lotorc can coax paper from them is a miracle.

If Lotorc is the most reliable member of Embryes's crew, then Quant is certainly the least. His wards might be critical for the functioning of the exploration vessel, but every part of his brain that isn't holding that magic is clearly full of the same fluff that covers his body. He can barely remember how to fly, much less what his job's supposed to be. He could probably get lit on fire and forget about the flames by the time he makes it to some water to put himself out with. Quant's habit of forgetting things puts the whole crew at danger — who knows when he'll forget to tell anyone about a hole in the side of the Riftrunner? Still, his magic is very useful. Embryes just has to pester him with a few hundred messages before he'll have the brilliant idea to actually cast a few spells on the recently constructed parts of the ship.

Embryes's method of passing along her orders and messages between crew members is something that only her calculating mind could pull off. She uses her shadow magic to create illusionary copies of herself to play to role of messenger. Each copy requires splitting her mind — seeing, hearing, and speaking individually from both her actual body and every copy she has active. A lesser dragon couldn't coordinate all that. But Embryes can use two copies to pass messages between Kirko and Ulrik while flying a third around to search for wherever Loblolly's gotten herself to. Spreading her concentration like that will give her a headache after a while, but to a captain a little pain is nothing. And anyways, her crew being more disorganized than they already are would give her a much worse headache.

When not trying to force the crew to actually do their jobs, Embryes has time to work on her grand plans for their expeditions. For them to survive their mission, every action they take will need to be precisely analyzed. She surrounds herself in mountains of paper, every sheet covered in probability calculations. She knows the odds of finding alien life (rather high), the odds of said life being intelligent (rather low), and the odds of Loblolly being severely injured by said alien life (nearly 100%). Even the actions of their patron, Brennus, have to be taken into account. He's more likely than anyone else to steer the Riftrunner into danger should they find any sign of his home plane. Not that Embryes is convinced they'll ever make it there. Her calculations show that for every rift that takes them closer to his home plane, the crew will gallivant through eight point four dimensions that have nothing to do with their mission and just seemed interesting to a member of the crew. They're going to need a lot more food supplies.

Fortunately, Embryes more than capable of memorizing the solutions to all her equations, so the paper she solved them on can be used as rations in an emergency.

Should the crew come under attack, Embryes's illusion magic is good for more than just making copies of herself while the real version flies away. With it, she can assault an opponents mind directly, making them suffer through all of their worst nightmares at the same time. Though Embryes isn't always very creative, so she's more likely to project her own nightmares onto the enemy than try to identify their own. Being trapped in a burning ship surrounded by allies who can't be bothered to do anything about the situation tends to frighten most people, though. And if it doesn't, Embryes has a backup plan: get Jerrence to crash the Riftrunner into the problem. She's already calculated that him crashing it is inevitable, so she may as well get some use out of the upcoming disaster.

Though she's loathe to admit it, sometimes the probabilities she's trying to calculate are a bit beyond Embryes's abilities. Her skills are in logic and organization, which isn't the same thing as math, sure, but even then she doesn't like admitting that she occasionally needs assistance when there's far too many variables in the equation. Especially when Aranwen is the dragon she has to go to for help. It wouldn't be so bad if Aranwen wasn't more full of herself than Cyrus is. She might be the brightest mathematician Embryes has ever heard of, but that doesn't mean she wants to hear her boast about how beautiful and intelligent she is while waiting for her to finish solving those equations.

(And the fact that Aranwen can speak and do advanced probability equations at the same time means she might even be better at parallel thinking then Embryes is, which is infuriating to her.)