Velma moves with the economy of a soldier who has carried kit through winter and dust, each motion precise and unhurried. Her hair is an extreme, copper-brown waterfall falling in hammered waves to well past her waist, often braided into a single thick cord during travel and left loose when she reads by lamplight. Her face is square and deliberately plain, eyes a cool steel-gray that consider more than they reveal. Skin is weathered and brown, the texture of old hide with small scattered scars along forearms and knuckles. She smokes a wooden-stemmed pipe intermittently, the bowl polished black by years of use. Unexpectedly, she keeps a small stack of neat, folded scrap papers tucked into the inside of her breastplate—doodles, tiny formulas and single-line poems to Oghma, written in a cramped, almost careful hand.