Name: Tobias (Toby) Schippers
Primary: Runes
Secondaries of Interest: Healing, Familiar Summoning
Description: Tall, but stick-skinny, with the lanky look of someone who used to be tiny but obviously went through a rapid growth spurt. A few weeks shy of 18 years old. Cute, but the way an injured puppy is cute. Wavy mouse-brown hair, big eyes, perpetually concerned eyebrows, and dimples. Wears rectangle-rim glasses when he has to read something far away, and a lot of argyle sweatervests.
Personality: Mild-mannered and polite. Loves literature. His notable block-stutter often makes him seem nervous and unsure--and at any given moment, let's be honest, he probably is nervous and unsure. Between his personality and his appearance, Toby isn't exactly an imposing human being.
Skills: Already somewhat proficient in his self-taught memorization and application of runes. If he lacks depth in certain combative uses, he makes up for with a formidable breadth of knowledge.
He has managed to use one of his secondaries in a limited way, able to summon an utterly harmless Familiar that looks a little like a sugarglider in the face, a little like a duckling, and a lot like it could star in a children's cartoon. Toby has, however, managed a few other summonings. And not all of them are cute or harmless. He enjoys shooting, and is not a bad shot...in a calm, controlled shooting range with stationary targets.
Weaknesses: Toby has no real combat experience, or much social experience in the magical world, for that matter. As mentioned, he's scrawny and his speech impediment is a hinder to his communication. He has no knowledge of healing, merely interest.
Brief History: Toby's mother was grafted in from the powerful terramancy family, the Fox family, which used to be something to be proud of, before Matthew and Morgana Fox had to go become well-known cultists. His father's line, the Schippers family, is known to be a bit of a mixed bag. A few outstandingly gifted rune-casting sorcerers dot an otherwise underwhelming and dilluted family tree. And for as many bright lights, there are black marks--it seems no generation of Schippers can avoid at a criminal lowlife or two.
Toby's father didn't do much to nullify that point of view, as he skipped out on them when Toby was five. His mother later developed an aggressive cancer that even magic could not fix. Four years ago, when Toby was fourteen, she passed away, and Spire, Toby's much older brother, became Toby's legal guardian.
Note on Spire Schippers: Toby will have to navigate school with a considerable shadow hanging over him. The most recent Schippers scandal involved Spire, who was a member of an expert team of operatives during the war. About 15 years ago, near the end of the war, Spire was arrested for murdering three innocents while attacking a den of cultists. (He claimed that the cultists had already cut the victims' throats when he shot up the room, but some members of Spire's unit claimed that Spire himself did the throat cutting, after the shooting occurred, to cover up the fact that he had shot one of the innocents.) Since the gunshot wounds and the fatal exsanguinating cuts were all perimortem, the physical evidence was indeterminate, and the key witness, Ren Norrevinter, was conveniently killed in the war shortly before the trial.
The charges didn't stick. Spire was exonerated, but the Schippers family name took another blow. Much of the magical community knows the name Spire Schippers, most have seen his picture. Rumors float about that he has killed since the war, and he has been seen to mingle with some of the more unsavory sorts in the magical community. Most people who haven't met Spire believe him to be a sociopathic murderer. Most people who have met Spire...still believe him to be a sociopathic murderer. Toby's earliest memories of his older brother are through bars and in tribunals. In spite of all that, Spire has shown himself to be protective and surprisingly close with his little brother.
Other:
For a few years, Toby had foster siblings, his cousins: Cyrus and Dinah Fox, but they were passed along when his mother became ill.
Toby is familiar with Maeve Byrne, one of a few members of Spire's old team who didn't renounce his association, and whom Toby views in a capacity not unlike a crazy aunt.
Toby and Spire have more or less kept away from the magical community as a whole for the last few years, with Toby attending an ordinary high school and studying his gifts in private.
Name: Canvas Fajaar Ahktar-Sterling
Primary: Necromancy
Secondaries of Interest: Levitation, Blood Magic
Description: 16 years old. Average height, average build, and casual style, but with the tanned complexion, dark hair and thick lashes of the Persian Ahktar line and a dash of the infamous good looks of the Sterlings, Canvas cuts a fairly striking picture.
Personality: Though Canvas got his magical ability from the Ahktars, he seems to have gotten the personality of a Sterling through and through. Charming, flirtatious even when he doesn't mean it, even when it's entirely not the time and place. He is capable of more deceit and manipulation than he usually has the guile to execute. Canvas is more concerned with being liked than being powerful, and doesn't spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the future, though as the bastard son of his Sterling rather and Ahktar mother, he knows it probably won't involve being a family heir.
Skills: The Sterlings paid for an expensive private education, and additionally his springs and autumns with his mother gave him hands-on experience with summoning spirits sprung from the zoroastrian tradition of the Ahktars.
Weaknesses: Despite his access to good training, Canvas is not exactly ambitious, and isn't much more skilled in his crafts for all the extra expense. His flippant attitude can also get him into trouble.
Brief History: It's never any massive shock when a Sterling goes impregnating someone other than his wife. They worked out a decent system. Summers and Christmastime with his father and the silver spoons, the rest of the year with his mother and the vultures; though both respectable magical families (the Ahktars being a very old Iranian necromancy line), they are two different cultures, and two entirely different worlds, which Canvas has learned to straddle.
Name: Tatia Anne Fale
Primary: Aeromancy
Secondaries of Interest: Illumination and Levitation, because those sound the most straightforward.
Description: Light brown hair, dark eyes. 16 years old. A slim 5'10" figure that people would call "willowy" if they were being kind and "lerpy" if they weren't. Her features are naturally rather unremarkable, but she makes up for it by using makeup to accent what she has to work with.
Personality: Sarcastic, witty, dry, and not easily fazed. More likely to say, "welp, okay," and just go along with things in a mild state of functional shock than she is to express fear or dismay. She can come across rather unempathetic and will rarely go out of her way to serve anyone in an altruistic manner, but all of that said, if she's pinned to a corner in a moral dilemma, she'll usually choose the noble route, albeit while rolling her eyes.
Skills:
-Making people feel stupider than her.
-Legitimately being smarter than most of those people.
-Playing the violin like a boss.
-Being a quick learner, which is a good thing because...
Weaknesses:
-...she's totally clueless about this entire culture and its emphasis on family pride.
-She has never been in a physical altercation beyond hitting kids smaller than her when she was like 8.
-Her apparent fearlessness ends with a deep, irrational phobia of seeing other peoples' blood.
-Literally no practice with any secondaries, and only instinctive use of her primary.
Brief History:
Tatia grew up with no knowledge of magic or the occult other than what she read in Harry Potter and saw in the episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that her dork older brother was obsessed with, and the weird shit her grandmother sometimes babbled on about once she started getting a bit senile.
Tatia's maternal grandmother was a weak Aeromancer in a family of sorcerers that had mixed with nonmagical humans for so long that the magical culture had already all but forgotten their names. When good ol' Gran's children (including Tatia's mother) never manifested abilities, she let that part of her heritage disappear, living in a normal suburban Oregon neighborhood.
Tatia's magical blood may have trickled through a generation without manifesting, but lo and behold, Tatia began to grow up and SURPRISE could create windstorms with her brain. By a statistically improbable twist of fate, somewhere deep in the roots of her father's family tree were more Aeromancers: the combination yielded Tatia (who boasts a level of natural power one would expect from a moderately respectable Aeromancy line -- only so-so by general standards, but pretty remarkable considering her lack of breeding).
Gran has tried to catch Tatia up on things a bit over the last few years (but...well...the senile thing is an obstacle), and Tatia has been sparsely contacted by Council representatives, but she's still jumping in a little blind.
Hooray.
