Röta

• Build & height: 2.05 m, tall and slow, with a long neck and long arms. She stands like a tree in fog, slightly bowed.
• Face: soft and kind, half-veiled by a ledge of shelf-fungus across her brow. Her lips are dark like wet bark.
• Hair: a mass of black leaves and moss to her waist, in which insects nest: beetles, woodlice, a moth or two drifting out when she moves.
• Eyes: pale and ridged like mushroom gills, with a soft glow-rot light, yellow-green, like fungus shining in a dark wood.
• Skin & burl-mark: grey-brown under a coat of fungus and mould in patches of white, ochre and black. Mushrooms grow from her collarbones. No sin (Scarwood). Her burl is a rotten stump-shape at her sternum with fresh green shoots growing out of it, which bloom when she uses her power.
• Clothing, layer by layer: a robe of matted black leaves over a slip of soft moss, its hem always crawling with things being born.
• Signature item: the shoots on her chest, the proof that something always grows. And the smell: a forest floor after a month of rain. Nobody gets used to it. Characters wrinkle their noses in every panel she's in.
• Movement: slow, as if she is never in a hurry, because everything comes to her in the end. She glides more than walks; things squelch.
• Voice: soft, damp and patient. She speaks in low, unhurried sentences. Her balloons are soft-edged and speckled with spores.
• Variant looks: Composting (everything around her slumping into rich black soil and then bursting into growth: orchards, flowers, moss). Spent (thin and pale, the fungus sparse, her bones showing as roots). Holding (Saga II: someone in her arms for exactly one minute, and she has never looked so frightened).

Röta can rot anything at all (steel, stone, a castle, an oath, a grudge, a name, a K-rank), and from whatever she rots something new grows, and she chooses what.

• Rot a tyrant's crown, and an orchard comes up. Rot a broken promise, and it becomes a warning that grows into everyone who would make the same promise.
• Speed: a sword rots in one of her heartbeats; a fortress takes a night.
• Reach: touch, or any ground that is her soil. In the Compost Fields, everything standing on the earth is in reach.
• The Compost Fields rule (home field): whatever rots here, something new grows from. It is also where the dead of Trinity lie between death and respawn.
• What it can't do: rot salt (salt preserves; it's the one thing she can't touch). She can't rot the five things the Null can't uncount either. She can't rot something living faster than one of her heartbeats.

• Tempo: one heartbeat a minute, about a seventieth of a Mingus. The slow count of things decaying.
• Home tempo: the Compost Fields.
• Heartbeat technique: THE LONG ROT-BEAT. One of her heartbeats lasts a minute. Inside it, everything within her reach decays a whole season, and when the beat ends, what she chose grows. That's why nothing living can stand near her for more than a minute: a minute is one of her heartbeats, and no living thing survives two. No one else has a heartbeat that long.
• Burn cost: each full burn composts part of her own body to feed the growth. She thins, her fungus falls away, and it takes a season to regrow.

Nothing living can stand near her for more than a minute. She has birthed a thousand things out of rot (orchards, forests, a whole people of mushroom folk) and has never been allowed to hold a single one. Every burn composts her own body.

• Salt. Salt doesn't rot. Saltbrand's salt-fire (Bastion Five) is her worst counter: what dies in salt-fire stays dead and never reaches her soil.
• Bakasura's hunger eats what she grows, faster than she can grow it.
• Speed: a fast enemy is gone before her minute ends.
• Isa's hold stops her minute mid-beat.
• She is lonely, and offers of company work on her.

• Her soil: wherever she lies down for a night becomes Compost.
• The mushroom folk: knee-high, slow, gentle people with mushroom caps for heads who farm the Compost Fields and talk in soft puffs of spore. Their elder, Mother Murkla, is the only one who has ever sung to Röta from closer than a minute away (she sang, ran, came back, and sang again).
• The moths in her hair, which carry spores where she sends them.

Patient. She opens by kneeling and putting her palms on the ground, and lets the soil do the work. She finishes with a Grave-Orchard: the enemy's camp is fruit trees by morning. Team combos: Röta + Smurjan: Seedbed holds his respawn while Kali and Bakasura fight on. Röta + Trollmage: he waits, she rots, and a MACRO of compost grows a forest in an hour. Röta + Vigolas: he COMPACTs a rotten fortress into a cube of rich black earth and plants it somewhere useful.

• Wants: to hold something. Once.
• Fears: that everything she makes is just a way of saying goodbye.
• Contradiction: the mother of a thousand things who has never been a mother to one.
• Humour: gentle and morbid. "You'll be lovely compost. Not today. Some day."
• Habits: counts the minutes others spend near her, and steps back at fifty-nine seconds; names every tree she grows.
• Alone: lies in her own field and lets things grow on her.

• Smurjan: "My perennial." She has grown him back before. In Arc 5 she offers him a respawn that comes back unaltered; he refuses, because the drift is his to carry.
• Kali: the debt, and the minute.
• Bakasura: "…Hungry." "I know, dear. I know." Her enemy, and the one creature whose hunger she understands.
• Vigolas: Greed-sight sees no value in rot, until he looks at her compost heap and it glows gold: the most valuable thing in Trinity.
• Kompis + Mingus: Mingus rolls in her compost, delighted, the only living thing that has ever wanted to come close. At fifty-nine seconds she has to back away from him, and he follows. "Go. GO. …Good dog."
• Rougeina: "You end things so nothing grows. That's wasteful." An argument they never finish.
• Eken: the brother she could fell. They don't speak.
• Old Torbjörn (the ferryman inside Smurjan): she grows his birch.

• "Everything ends up with me. I don't mind. I make it into something."
• "You'll be lovely compost. Not today. Some day."
• "It isn't him. It's a birch. But it's something."
• "One minute. That's all anyone can stand. …Will you?"
• "They're mine until they grow."