Frostvine

About
Frostvine is an old woman who has dedicated the majority of her life to the creation of Doll Homunculi. She is the creator of Athena 2.0 and the master of Tama the cat girl, though she can often get angry at her oft-distracted assistant. She made her first appearance in Rance 4 where she lives at the very top of one of the Ylapu towers. When Rance encounters her and despite his loud protests, she tells him of her life's work: Doll/android creation. Though Frostvine had already created a doll before, Athena 1.0, as the ultimate toy for a child, it's personality was "too human" and the creature eventually left with a Ham Bambara. To avoid this set-back in her newer creations, she asked Rance for two ingredients, the "honey" of both a devil and an angel, in exchange for Rance having the prototype of the new procedure, Athena 2.0.

Rance was able to provide the two ingredients by convincing Willis Fujisaki that her honey was necessary for a quest to save the world, and by simply summoning Ferris and extracting it from her after sex. However, in the latter case, the honey was also mixed with Rance's imperial juice. When Rance returns, Frostvine uses the ingredients to finish her Athena, but while Frostvine is ecstatic about her success, Athena turns out to have fairly low intelligence, probably due to an imbalance caused by the extra ingredient. Despite this, Rance gladly takes her and brings her back to his headquarter to H her, only to find out that nipples were apparently sold separately. An enraged Rance returns her to Frostvine, and while she promptly adds the missing touches, a second attempt reveals that the doll also lacked sexual organs. Thus, Rance brings her back to Frostvine, threatening her life if she does not quickly add the last component.

Frostvine also made appearance during Rance Quest, where she set a store to sell goods on the new city founded by Copandon Dott CITY in order to obtain financial support to back-up her research. While she was the owner, she had next to no role in the management of it, leaving all of its affairs to Tama including the role of shopkeeper. Rance asked her to research for a way to lift Sill's curse, and while she spent a few months researching about it, she saw no sucess in her attempts, much to Rance's irritation.

Personality and Abilities
Frostvine is an odd individual, utterly dedicated to her life's work, doll-making, to the exclusion of apparently everything else. However, she has grown extremely adept at her craft, with her dolls possessing intelligence despite being completely artificial and being virtually indistinguishable from humans, even possessing all elements from the Planner Scenario, such as Skill Levels. She's a revolutionary genius on the field, displaying a Lv2 skill in Life Science. She also possesses a fairly good Level Cap of 20 and her current Level is 15 despite the fact that she stays away from the battlefield. She takes great pride on her achievements but she's not arrogant or haughty, living a humble life on the Free Cities with only the basic necessities. Rance usually treats her very poorly, as he's dismissive and disrespectful with the elderly in general. Frostvine thinks of him as a rude youngster and is annoyed by his impolite behavior, but thinks of him as an interesting person due to his great talent as an adventurer.

As seen with Athena 2.0, her artificial life forms can also have great combat capabilities, with the latter being able to keep up with Rance in his many adventures, such as taking down Toushin Upsilon. However, despite their great strength, they seem to be stuck at level 1, making it impossible for them to improve their combat abilities.

Because of her focusing only on her doll experiments, Frostvine is extremely reliant on Tama for taking care of everything else, be it cooking, cleaning, or running her store, which is how she funds her experiments. Frostvine is extremely proud of her creations, and will even begrudge Rance for not using Athena 2.0 whenever she sees him without her at his side. She either does not think at all about sex, or is rather forgetful, as she manages to completely forget adding sexual organs not once but twice to Athena, despite Rance's obvious intentions. This is particularly surprising as one might suppose that Athena 1.0 had those components as well, what with her running off with a Ham Bambara for reasons probably other than him being a stunning conversationalist.

Trivia

 * While her appearance and the fact that she has Levels and a Level Cap seem to indicate that she's human, in the RWN she's listed on the category of "Mysterious Beings", suggesting that she's a different creature.