Name: Lilith Fairbanks
Age: 21
Gender: Female
Height: 5’8”
Weight: 125 ibs
Ability: Magical Catalyst

Personality: Lilith is a sweet and gentle creature, always striving to help those around her when they are in need. That being said, being trapped in Murkwell with her overbearing father for the last eleven years has instilled the girl with a strong sense of wanderlust. More than anything else, Lilith longs to travel the world and learn all about what goes on outside the city's borders.

Lilith wants to see the best in people, so she can be naive at times. She is smart as a whip though, with an enchanting sense of humor.

Bio: Lilith Fairbanks was born to a poor seamstress woman named Elora in the small village of Semarta, and though they always struggled to make ends meet, they both loved each other very much. On the morning of her fifth birthday, Lilith woke to find that her match mark had appeared overnight. Ecstatic, the little girl ran into the kitchen to show it to her mother. “Oh, a fox! Now that’s a good one, they mean good luck,” her mother told her with a smile, running a thumb over the small design that now adorned her daughter’s left wrist. “You must be careful though, my Lily, because it’s the mark of a predator. It means that it will be a love with teeth, the kind that can bite you if you aren’t careful,” the seamstress warned, ruffling her daughter’s hair. “Your man will be a dangerous one.”

“Won’t he have the same mark as me?” the small ginger asked, watching Elora nod as she returned to chopping an apple for breakfast. “…well then, maybe I’m the dangerous one!” Lilith giggled, grinning wide to put all her teeth on display. “See? I’ve got teeth!”

When she turned ten Lilith met her father for the first time. He was a big man named Atlas Fairbanks who had come from a city far to the west called Murkwell and wanted to take Lilith home with him. Atlas promised Elora that the girl would be well looked after and would receive the finest education. Elora was hesitant at first, but after Atlas conceded to let Lilith visit during the summer months, she agreed because she honestly believed that would be best for Lilith.

So the young girl went to Murkwell with her father and was groomed to be the prefect wife for which ever nobleman had the biggest coin purse. Sometimes, after a long day of endless singing, dancing, cooking, and sewing lessons, the ginger girl would curl up in bed and stare at her match mark, wondering if she'd ever find her mate and if he'd take her away so they could go on grad adventures.

Extra: Lilith discovered her ability when catching an old woman who was falling, resulting in stranger freezing over a huge chunk of the Blackfoot river. The elderly woman apologized profusely, telling her she had the ability to make snow flakes, but had never done something that big before. Lilith never told her father about this.

Still on excellent terms with her mother, who she spends every summer with.

Name: Atlas Fairbanks
Age: 52
Gender: Male
Height: 6' 2"
Weight: 225 ibs
Ability: None
Proffession: Owns multiple businesses and houses that he rents outs for very high prices.

Personality: Atlas is a smooth talker who can con people into almost anything. He sees others as objects and is constantly scheming on how to use them to make more money.

Bio: While passing through the small fishing village of Semarta on the eastern shore, Atlas sweet talked a naive seamstress named Elora Ashgrave into bed with him. Ten months later he received a letter informing him of the birth of his bastard daughter. Atlas was completely disinterested in the child, seeing it as a huge money pit.

He continued on this way until one night when he was playing cards with a group of local lords, who were lamenting about the poor selection of eligible young women available for marriage, one young man even saying he would be willing to pay his own weight in gold for a young lady of quality. Suddenly seeing his daughter as a potential goldmine, he set out to find her.

It was remarkably easy to convince Elora to hand her over custody of Lilith, simply pretending that he felt guilt at abandoning them and wanted to make it up to them. Lilith herself was a little harder to manipulate, but once he began to feign love for her, she became more docile.

As the girl grew older she became graceful and beautiful, with a few lords taking interest in her as young as her fourteenth birthday. The business man bided his time though, until the Duke of Edessa made a bid so outrageously high that Atlas would have been a fool not to take it.

Extras: His match mark is a chipped wine goblet on the back of his right knee, but it is faded and scared over, meaning his soulmate is dead.

Name: Samael
Nicknames: Sam, Fox, The Black Mask
Age: Around 23
Gender: Male
Profession: Assassin, Bailiff, Conman
Appearance: Full Body, Face Close Up
Height: 6'1"
Weight: 149lbs
Ability: Telekinesis

History:
Sam remembers very little of his life before the streets. His earliest memories are scrambling through alleys to escape from shop keepers, and begging for food outside of taverns around the age of six. Samael was taken in by Mikhail when he was around seven years old, the day on which Mikhail found him is the day that Samael considers to be his birthday, and counts his age as turning seven on that day. Mikhail was a crook, a conman and a thief, but he looked after Sam, along with a collection of other young boys from the streets of varying ages.

The oldest of these boys was Israfil, or Issy as he was known for most of his life. He was about ten years senior of Sam, and had been with Mikhail for many years. It was Issy who taught Sam to pick pockets properly, as Mikhail had trained Issy several years before. Together with the other boys, Sam had many successful ventures picking the pockets of the rich folk who walked the streets of Edessa.

When he was around eight and a half, by his reckoning, his mark appeared, a fox on the inside of his wrist. Mikhail believed little in the grand delusions of young minds, and used the marks merely as a way of identifying the boys. From there on, he was known almost exclusively as Fox to the rest of the gang of pickpockets and thieves.

As Samael grew older, he developed a more toned physique, and grew taller, making him quite unsuitable for picking pockets any longer, as he was too large and would attract too much attention. Whilst some of the other boys that Mikhail had raised moved on when they reached this point in their lives, Samael remained and began to take a part in some of Mikhail's more dark schemes. Burglary was a small step up from picking pockets, so he started there, eventually he moved on to more sophisticated plots as a con artist, working alongside the other older urchins to swindle the rich and stupid out of their money for fake relics and items. It was around this time that Samael discovered his power. His telekinesis was weak at first, and he was barely able to do more than knock over an empty cup, over time he was able to move on to slightly heavier objects, and then much to Mikhail's pleasure, using his powers to open the locks of doors by moving the mechanism inside. This marked a successful part of his life, in which he'd sell fake relics, steal them back in the dead of night, then sell them again the next day to another idiot.

The simple times did not last forever though. When Samael was around seventeen, the old man who had cared for them all and fed them for many years grew suddenly very ill, and was dead within a few days. Several of the urchins left the gang, whilst the rest, Samael included, rallied around Issy to lead them now, as Mikhail's most trusted and skilled protégée.

Issy dropped his childhood nickname as he inherited the gang, and returned to calling himself Israfil. Israfil turned the gang down a darker path, lending money and using the former burglars and pickpockets as bailiffs, threatening violence to those who did not pay pack their extortionate interest rates. Samael was conflicted, but stood by the man he'd looked up to as an older brother all his life, and followed orders loyally. Over time, it came to be that so many local shop owners and innkeepers owed the gang money, that Israfil had all but carved out a section of the city for himself. Here, the gang watched the corners, they dealt with snitches, and took 'protection' money off of local business owners to ensure the safety of their enterprises. Eventually, the gang moved further into the shadow world, kidnapping and demanding ransomes, and eventually offering assassination services.

Israfil selected Sam as one of those who would wear the black masks and kill for money, believing that his "little talent" for opening doors and windows would come in handy. Again, Sam followed orders loyally, ignoring his conscience. As no one was quite sure how many assassins Israfil had under his control, they were collectively referred to as 'The Black Mask', a label that identified both the band of assassins, and the assassins themselves.

When Sam was twenty-one, he married the second daughter of an innkeep, and together they moved to a small house in a part of the city outside of the gang's control. She did not share his mark, but she was very attractive, so at the time she had seemed better than nothing. His wife believed him to be a farmhand, working on one of the many farms that surrounded the city, and he did not give her any reason to doubt him. He would leave for work early in the morning, before the sun rose, and return long after it had set. Some nights, he never returned at all, telling her that if they worked late, he and the other farmhands would sleep in the barns to save the walk back to the city in the dark. As time went on, he grew fond of his loyal wife, trying to ignore the nagging voice in the back of his head that told him she wasn't right...

Name: Israfil
Nicknames: Blank, Issy, Scars
Age: Recently turned 34
Gender: Male
Profession: Gang Leader, Conman, Loan Shark
Appearance: Full Body, Face Close Up
Height: 5'11"
Weight: 153lbs
Ability: Mind Manipulation

History: [See Samael's History for a more detailed version of some events]
Issy was fourteen when Mikhail found him. Already an accomplished pickpocket, and knowing what he was doing, Issy was the foundation upon which Mikhail built his gang of urchin pickpockets. Issy trained the new blood, Mikhail sold what they stole, and provided for the children in his care. Issy waited for a long time for his mark, earning him the nickname of Blank amongst the other urchins. His mark finally appeared when he was nineteen, a snake coiled around his wrist several times. Bitter and twisted by years of believing he was the only person who had no soulmate, Issy took a knife to the markings, cutting at his forearm, tearing apart the skin so that the mark was barely discernible through the scars in the end, leading to his more sinister nickname of Scars.

When Issy was twenty-seven, he poisoned the man who had fed and clothed him for so many years, and took control of the gang, using his natural skills of persuasion to make many of the urchins stay loyal to him, or so he believed. Israfil's power was responsible for much of the boy's childhood and good fortune as he grew older, though he never knew it. Believing himself to be a persuasive businessman, Israfil never stopped to consider that he might have a power that allowed him to persuade people to do as he wished. It was this unknown power that led him into being such a successful loan shark, by convincing people that they should take money from them to 'improve' their business, then sending his gang around to collect the payment before the proprietors were able to pay it back.