#Character #FeraCharacter

A former journalist now turned a conscripted soldier for the Ilmarian Imperium (Nation). Josephine now works as an intelligence officer for the Special Branch

Josephine Auerswald carries the look of someone who has lived through too much, too young, weathered by war, sharpened by necessity, yet still marked by the softness of the life she once had.

She has short, wavy blonde hair, cut to a practical length but still falling in loose curls around her face. Her features are open and expressive, with a pale, fair complexion that shows every bruise, every sleepless night, and every hard decision. Her eyes are wide, intelligent, and quietly haunted, the gaze of a former journalist who has seen truth turned into ash.

She looks every inch the reluctant soldier turned intelligence officer: resourceful, battered, resilient, and still holding on to the spark that once made her a seeker of stories, long before the war made her part of one.

Josephine Auerswald embodies a complex blend of idealism, grit, and quiet defiance, traits born from her past life as a journalist and sharpened by the brutal reality of conscription into the The Friebruckian Invasion of The Three Kingdom's war.

At her core, Josephine is driven by truth. Even after being forced into service, she retains a reporter’s instinct: observe everything, question everything, and never take the official line at face value. She listens more than she speaks, storing details, patterns, and inconsistencies with the same precision others reserve for weapon drills. Her mind is always turning, connecting threads, reconstructing motives, seeking the story behind the orders.

Despite her sharp intellect, she is not cold. Josephine feels deeply, perhaps too deeply for a soldier. She is empathetic, quietly protective of those around her, especially conscripts like herself who never asked to play a part in a conflict spun by distant men. She holds a natural discomfort with hierarchy and blind obedience, often following rules only long enough to understand how to bend them.

War has changed her, though. She has learned to compartmentalise, to swallow her hesitation, to lie when she must. There is a hard edge developing beneath her gentleness, the pragmatic ruthlessness required of an intelligence officer. She hates it, hates how easily she can now justify deception or gather information that might condemn someone, but she does it because survival demands it.

Josephine is resourceful to a fault, stubborn when cornered, and capable of bursts of astonishing bravery when the situation calls for it. Fear rarely paralyses her; instead it sharpens her focus, the way it did when she chased dangerous stories back in Ilmaria’s city streets.

Still, the war weighs on her. There’s a quiet melancholy in her—an unspoken grief for the life she lost and the ideals she fears she’s betraying. Yet beneath that sorrow, something fiercer endures: a conviction that the truth matters, even now, especially now. It guides her, shapes her decisions, and keeps her humanity intact amid the machinery of conflict.