"Sign here, please."
Name: Casara Talbot
Gender: female
Age: 20 (born in April, 1996)
Place of Birth: New York City suburbs
Current Residence: New York City
Alignment: Dark Shadow, but works for the Guild and is welcome there
Rank: Captain-ish (outside of organizational structure)
Birthmark Shape: small stylized wing
Location of Birthmark: left shoulderblade
Magical Abilities: Casara is an aeromancer, and a skilled one. She can fly on the back of the wind, though it's much harder indoors and she requires a larger room to get off the ground. As another application of this ability, she is able to handle falling dangerous distances without injury, even indoors. An interesting side effect of her methods is that flight creates a sort of heat-haze shimmer. Cas has practiced to enhance this, so the haze will keep mundanes from spotting her when she flies about, working as a natural form of concealment. It's not so effective at close range, simply because it requires air to be moving in order to work and that tends to be pretty noticeable. If she's not worried about being seen, or wants to get a better look at where she means to land, forming a sort of magnifier using the same principles of refraction is easy enough. Wind carries words, and Cas has mastered using it to eavesdrop from a distance. It's difficult to do indoors without a draft, but outside she can catch a speaking voice quite a distance away. She can also pick a single voice out of a crowd or through the sound of a noisy room.
In terms of offensive magical ability, Cas is fairly limited -- with one deadly exception. She has mastered air manipulation, and this means it is well within her capabilities to deprive a person of air long enough to kill them silently.
Casara is a tall young lady, easily the equal in height of the average male. Her active lifestyle has made her a lean, wiry woman, and genetics have been sparing with their usual gifts: her hips are narrow and her bust small. Her features are androgynous, though on the rough side, and she is a far cry from what most would call beautiful. She falls somewhere between mildly cute and unremarkably plain. She keeps her dirty blond hair cropped to a short bob, and without her makeup she can easily pass for a man. When she's at home, Cas likes wearing mid-length skirts that don't hinder her movement, and looser blouses. She also has a few hair clips that she is fond of. For her job as a courier, she dresses in close-fitting attire, generally slacks and long sleeved shirts. Fingerless gloves, a hat, sturdy shoes, and of course her bag round out the outfit.
Casara is not a people person. She keeps a cool demeanor while working, but in truth strangers and crowds make her nervous. Many things make her nervous, and she works hard to keep her anxiety in check. She has something of a paranoid streak, and worries a lot about everything. She'll go to great lengths for her friends, such as she has, but she doesn't really make friends easily. She uses brusqueness and irritability to hide nervousness with her peers, and this earns her no favors. For those she does consider friends, Casara will go through fire and flood. Cas handles serious danger better than she does everyday anxiety, though her demeanor will often go cold if she is under a great deal of stress.
Casara Talbot was born in New York, the only child of a reasonably well-off pair of unaligned mages. Her father owned a charm shop, and her mother's magic lay in binding winds. She had a happy childhood, with little in the way of care. Casara was a sunny girl, curious and full of laughter. She had the gift of wind, but it looked to be stronger than that of her mother's, and she loved using it.
All that changed shortly after her eleventh birthday, when members of a small cult grabbed both her and her parents. They ritually tortured and killed the two adults in front of their daughter, forcing her to watch. As they approached her, she passed out, and when she came to she was the only one left alive, for those in robes had been slaughtered.
Cas wasn't sure what had happened, but she knew her parents were now dead. She fled the building, eventually finding her way back to familiar streets, and she made her way to where her aunt and uncle lived. A couple days later, she woke to find them lying dead in the kitchen, ripped apart. A neighbor she knew found her huddled at the other end of the house the next day, unable to bring herself to come close enough to the bodies to reach the door. That neighbor took her in, though he was unable to get the girl to tell him or his wife what happened.
That night was disturbed only by nightmares, but the next, when the neighbor's wife tucked the child into bed and blew out the light, a shadow rose beside her and sliced open the woman's throat. The dead woman's husband came running at Cas's screams, to find the girl knocked off the bed and the small knife her uncle had given her lying across the room after she'd tried to stab the shadow with it. Calling the girl cursed, he demanded she leave -- fortunately for him, from outside the shade's effective range. Having no choice, she left.
She was picked up shortly thereafter by a freelance mage pair, sanctioned by the guild but technically not under their governance. One was a master of shadows, the other a chronomancer. These two bound the creature in Cas's shadow, and took the traumatized girl to a facility equipped to deal with rogue mages. It was determined the creature was not under her control, and that she was not at fault for the deaths it had caused. However, she couldn't exactly go around with a murderous monster hiding in her shadow. It took a number of months but a method was devised by which Cas would have control of her new pet.
During this time she developed a relationship with an older healer that sometimes worked at the facility. A man by the name of Hedgewin Randalls, he was actually the father of the chronomancer that brought her in. Once Cas's shadow was under control, he adopted her, since she had nowhere to go.
It was a long time before Cas was comfortable with people, and even longer before she was comfortable with the dark. She did well enough in her studies, but memories -- and her shadow demon -- both haunted her. She's learned to live with both, but some days it's an huge effort just to walk out her door. At least her growing magic provided her an escape, and there are no shadows while flying.
She was thirteen or fourteen when DS approached Hedgewin. The doctor's daughter, Leah, was already a member, full of talk about how they'd change how things were done, how chronomancers and others with "restricted" magics would be treated better. Hedgewin himself wasn't particularly keen, but Cas saw potential, though she wasn't brave enough to join at that time.
Then came Guildfall. Leah died getting key members of the DS out safely, including a young man at the center of things: one Aloysius Leighton. It was time for Hedgewin to think about retirement, and with all the political unrest it was easy enough for him to explain moving away from the city and out to Long Island for a quiet retirement. Cas went with, as did the newest member of his household, Alan.
Cas went into courier and delivery work at sixteen, and is now known for her reliability and discretion. She doesn't gossip and makes sure things get where they need to go in a timely fashion. It helps that she's able to shorten the distance between places by flying, though she does a number of deliveries on foot as well. She is approved for Guild work though she also takes a number of independent deliveries.
When Aloysius was ready to start up his organization again, Cas was right there, and she's quietly been a member ever since.
