Born to and raised by a pair of Archeologists, Chinami's sociability was stunted from day one. Her parents loved their job, perhaps too much so. They traveled often and always brought her with them, preventing the young girl from properly developing long-term friendships or even getting a proper schooling where it didn't relate to archeology. Over time, Chinami began to stop even attempting to make emotional connections with locals, mentally exhausted from constantly having to leave them behind. She had swung right past loneliness and entered a state approaching apathy.

Though she loved her parents as most children do, by age 10, she was coming to resent them for the fact that she couldn't be a "normal" kid. Instead of improving her mind, she was forced to improve her body in order to walk -or even survive- long treks through jungles and climb steep ruins and mountains. She had no friends except the adults among the larger archeology team that traveled with her parents. As a result of these influences, she came to mature mentally far more quickly than any child should, becoming pithy and foul-mouthed.

By the time she was 12 years old, she was perhaps as much of an expert in the art of tomb-raiding as her parents, and she was the senior authority to the majority of the team as a whole in terms of time spent among them. She knew how to survive, how to treat wounds, to safely trip and disable traps and otherwise Indiana Jones her ways through absolutely lethal mystical ruins. Careless as her parents were, she'd been injured on many an occasion in her explorations. Cuts, bruises, broken bones, concussions and more that she often had to heal from naturally; the girl had an almost unnatural pain tolerance. Frankly, she was a somewhat scary child, almost comparable to a child soldier in grit, but despite the unease of the other adults, her parents didn't seem even slightly aware that something was off, instead praising their daughter for her accomplishments.

Chinami did not feel very accomplished. She had long since recognized her own lacking in intellectual pursuits and had begun to seek teaching from the other adults on the team, choosing to spend all of what allowance she had on books in the rare moments that she was in civilization proper. She saw archeology as a dead-end (even literally) profession, filled with too little profit and far too much danger. Weighing her pros and cons, the young girl had already started on the path to abandoning her family and team to set out on her own. All she needed first was the knowledge to make it out in the world. Thus, the self-education.

Little did she know, her plans would come to fruition, just not in the way she'd intended.

In the twilight months of age 12, her parents entered a particularly dangerous mystical ruin in search of rumors of a "cursed dagger" that could apparently inflict death with the slightest prick. Unfortunately, between the pair and their daughter, they were quite competent and capable of navigating the ruin's traps finding it. The young girl was not happy with this, as a gut feeling of impending doom had begun to well up within her. Whether it was a divine premonition or not, it mattered little in the face of her parents' reckless joy.

As they approached the dagger, which floated suspended ominously above an alter, Chinami warned her parents to be careful, but they dismissed her worries, sure in their security after successfully disabling any traps that would shut the doors on them and prevent escape. Her father grabbed the dagger, and everything quickly began going wrong.

A large golem was ejected from the ceiling and slammed down atop her father. If that didn't kill him, then the firm stomp on his head a moment later did. The dagger was sent flying, and the tomb guardian's attention was clearly zeroed in on it. Despite this, Chinami's mother chose to grab the dagger, only to get casually swatted by the unnervingly quick construct. Even injured, however, somehow her mother had the reckless and/or selfish presence of mind to toss the dagger Chinami's way.

Panicked, the girl unthinkingly picked it up from where it has slid across the floor to her and then was forced to flee the guardian. She put every last bit of her training and experience to the test, as she fled through the halls of the ruins, but the guardian was an enchanted being meant to catch far more dangerous intruders than a mere child. It was only her small size and agility that kept her ahead by a hair till the inevitable happened.

One of the guardian's attacks just barely clipped her side, but the sheer strength behind it made even a featherlight touch damn-near lethal. Ribs broken, Chinami was thrown like a skipping stone, and her uncontrollable tumble saw the dagger plunged into her gut. Despite being a dead girl walking, Chinami's harshly-earned pain tolerance and will to survive held strong and pushed her to struggle up and continue to stumble away as fast as she could, leaving the dagger in her gut to stem the bleeding. She took advantage of the distance gained from being tossed to exit the ruins and begin scaling the side using thick overgrown vines, the guardian on her heels like a bloodhound, as it stabbed its appendages into old stone to scale after her.

Flopping onto the top with the guardian practically breathing down her neck, Chinami ripped the dagger out of her stomach and swung at the guardians hands in despair, only to be genuinely surprised, when the dagger parted the mystically enchanted substance like butter, causing the guardian to lose its grip and tumble down to the ground. Filled with renewed hope that she could at least take this monster with her, Chinami's face turned ashen when the guardian revealed the ability fly, and she only barely managed to roll away from a slamming blow that would have ended her as surely as her father.

It occurred to her then that she was about to die, and she had something of a mental blue screen... and a realization. Something about that very concept offended her on a personal level, more than anything had ever irked her before. It was a visceral hatred, a bone-deep revulsion. The very idea that she would die, that it was inevitable?

No.

She was a survivor.

She would not die.

She refused to die.

As the guardian's arms rose for a final blow that Chinami was far too weakened by blood loss to avoid, the girl raised the dagger with every intent of chopping those arms off the moment the came down, using their own momentum against them, and gave a blood-curdling scream of animalistic defiance. Suddenly, both Chinami and the guardian were surprised by a pearly-white ghostly fist impacting the side of the guardian's head with a sound like thunder and such force that the construct was nearly beheaded by the single blow.

As the guardian reeled back, Chinami goggled at the sight of the ghostly white figure standing over her with an appearance reminiscent of a feminine golem with ethereal blue "hair". It glanced over its shoulder at her, gave her a simple nod and then, without fanfare, ripped forward with a flurry of blows so fast that Chinami's eyes watered, a series of thunderclaps shaking the ruins, as gusts of wind buffered her hair and eyes.

The ruin guardian tried to fight back, but it was suddenly outclassed so entirely it somehow ceased to be humorous, even despite it mercilessly hunting her down moments before. The pearly-white ghost utterly dismantled the golem in moments, its fists caving great craters into enchanted stone and metal, and the aftershocks seemed to be doing almost as much damage internally. It felt like a small eternity; when in reality, the barrage lasted no longer than 7 seconds, before the spirit halted its attacks and casually turned its back on the guardian. A moment later, as if suddenly remembering it had been struck, the golem seemed to implode from the sheer force of the blows, before the force finished its inward journey and exploded out and away, scattering the golem's parts across the jungle below.

Her pulse pounding in her ears, Chinami initially feared for her life, but the longer she stared at the being that had saved her, the more she came to recognize a strange connection there that hadn't existed before. As much as she wanted to explore that oddity, she needed to go see if her mother could be saved. It was around this moment that she noticed -to her great unease and simultaneous relief- that both the dagger and her wounds had disappeared, nowhere to be found.

The situation being as urgent as it was, the young girl was forced to abandon thought in that direction and hurry. She returned the inner ruins and found, indeed, that her mother had survived, but she was seriously injured. The girl performed emergency first aid to the best of her ability and confirmed that, luckily, her mother was in a state to be moved, if barely. At Chinami's request, her new ghostly companion carefully picked up and carried the woman, and the two left the ruins to seek aid from the rest of the archeology group.

Chinami's tale of daring and lethality and the seriousness of her mother's injuries prompted an immediate evacuation back to civilization to seek treatment for Chinami's mother and prevent the rest of the team from potentially falling prey to threats similar to what Chinami had miraculously vanquished. While they were able to save her mother's life, she was permanently injured enough to make performing her prior job all too dangerous. Between that and the reality-check of her husband's funeral, Chinami's mother chose to abandon archeology and take up being a botanist in Rhea.

While distraught that it had taken her father's life and nearly her own to make her dreams come true, Chinami couldn't help but be pleased with the outcome. She was almost unnerved by the sheer feeling of triumph that seemed to sweep through her body the minute she stepped into her new permanent home. She had survived everything the world had thrown at her. She had survived an almost certainly cursed stab from a artifact and could only theorize that the dagger must have been part of some sort of divine or demonic "test of worthiness". She couldn't begin to imagine why she had passed where others had assumedly failed, and she couldn't help but worry about what had happened to the dagger itself, knowing that it hadn't returned itself to its original resting place.

But in the end, such concerns were irrelevant. She had survived. She had conquered life's trials and tribulations, and she been rewarded with power and the opportunity to grasp the life she had begun to dream of, a successful quiet life, devoid of enemies or danger. All that was left was to not waste that opportunity.

And the best way to do that was to get an education.

She had been studying the four great schools of Rhea, weighing her options. Unfortunately, her options were slim. Laurels' and Clauzwitz' were too high class for her lackluster education to keep her enrolled. 13 year old Chinami hadn't the greatest opinion of her scholastic ability, and both schools looked too strict for her to have time to catch up before being expelled... assuming she could even get accepted to begin with. Mephisto's just seemed like a bad idea for her overall reputation, and the school itself was impossible to even find, much less enroll in. Chinami could only assume that the school reached out students rather than the other way around, and one might possibly get in through a recommendation the Chinami didn't have.

Kibari's was the only option left. With its lackluster standards of attendance and gaudy decadence, somehow, this was the only option left to her amongst the most "respectable" schools. Despite that, it had fair education facilities, so it would have to do. Chinami had only about 2 years to correct her scholastic deficiencies and train her new power, so she set to both with a fervor like nothing before.

And with time and dedication, 2 years later, she swept through the acceptance process and took her first steps towards peace and success. From that day forward, she swore that she would work hard, harder than anyone else, in order to compensate for where she was lacking and, more importantly, where her new school might also be lacking.

Chinami's primary ability is to manifest a pseudo-physical "punch-ghost", which can move up to 5 meters away from her. It acts at Chinami's will and mental command, being directly connected to her soul; for this reason, it is often prone to react early to threats Chinami's main body couldn't see coming but subconsciously recognized through gut instinct and the like. The "Spirit" can selectively tangibly interact with the world and is completely unaffected or hindered by any effect that does not specifically target souls or -to a lesser degree- life force. If it is harmed, however, any damage it takes is reflected back on Chinami, but not any special effects beyond that. It can use its selective tangibility to peak through or reach inside and meddle with the insides of targets, and this same selective tangibility allows it to overlay itself upon Chinami's main body, letting her use it as armor.

On the flipside, the silver lining of being able to be harmed by soul/lifeforce attacks cuts both ways. The Spirit is able to physically interact with -and use it's third secondary power on- objects and effects that normally can only be targeted/opposed on a spiritual level.

This power passively enhances all the standard physical abilities of her "Spirit" so that it is more than a mere ghost, but these enhancements tend to weaken in unison with Chinami's own accruement of injuries and/or exhaustion. At full strength, it is able to move at super-sonic speeds with reaction time to match. Strength-wise, it's somewhat less intimidating, able to lift weights equivalent to a truck and toss them a short distance -though certainly not casually; luckily, Chinami has enough control of this strength to ensure that she doesn't accidentally kill others. Its 5 Basic Senses are dialed up to 11, along with its 6th/spiritual ones, but they seem to have protection against being overwhelmed and are thus unhindered by blinding light, deafening sounds and the like.

Durability is included in these enhancements but doesn't weaken like the others. Even if her Spirit can be harmed by effects that target souls or life force, those effects must be of notable strength to actually break through the Spirit's durability. The result is that, even if she knows she will take damage regardless, it is still safer overall to use her Spirit as a shield against effects that can hurt it and mitigate some harm.

Both Chinami and her Spirit are able to perceive spiritual/soul/lifeforce-based phenomenon in the world, to the point, for example, that she is able to witness someone's soul leaving their body on death and can use her Spirit to interact with such things before they pass on should she be fast enough.

Chinami, at all times that it is summoned, shares senses with her Spirit. This doesn't appear to cause any disorientation, and due to the semi-autonomous nature of the Spirit, she is able to multitask well enough to simultaneously control both her bodies at full effectiveness. As a side effect, sharing her Spirit's senses allows her to perceive the world in extreme slow motion if she wishes, allowing her a great amount of time to think and strategize.

A power that Chinami strongly suspects may be her true main power, with her Spirit merely a means to channel it.
She has noticed that she can cause selective alterations to objects/creatures her Spirit touches, at the cost of getting strangely too spiritually and physically exhausted to safely use it in rapid succession without risking self-harm. Chinami's high willpower and ability to mentally push through debilitating injury tend to be detrimental here, as if she isn't careful, she is fully capable of literally exhausting herself to death from overuse, which is why she typically limits herself to 10 uses per short period/fight out of caution.

The size of her target doesn't seem to be a factor. The ability seems to allow her to affect any aspect of a target (material, integrity, enchantments, etc.), but inflicts greater exhaustion the more extreme or exotic the change she wishes to make, unless she takes time to slowly inflict it over the course of a minute or so while maintaining contact. Targets must, at their core, remain the same thing they were when they started, performing the same base function in the world. However, this ability apparently considers "change of location" a valid part of its purview, allowing teleportation. While she can affect and boost herself and others with this ability, she cannot affect her Spirit itself, no matter how hard she tries.

When she first discovered this ability, the changes she caused tended to be temporary, lasting only mere minutes. After years of training, the changes have come to consistently last between 3-4 hours, with the strange exception of healing and teleportation, which are always permanent unless she specifically attempts to have them not be. Chinami has good reason to suspect that in time and with training, she will be able to consistently make all her changes permanent.

Chinami has yet to identify the core principle of this ability's function, but she has her suspicions, rooted in a fair amount of high-level theory. She has also taken great care to conceal the full extent of this ability beyond healing, paranoid -or perhaps rightfully worried- about what knowledge of its existence might bring upon her.

The truth of this ability's functionality is as simple as it is terrifying, and it is this high concept truth that currently evades Chinami's realization and stymes her mastery of this power. Her power, quite simply, swaps targets with an alternate dimension version of themselves. Rather, to be specific, it doesn't actually transfer things across dimensional barriers but instead merely "copies" an alternate existence and then "pastes" it over the one in Chinami's world, overwriting the prior existence.

-Harumi Nadakai:
Chinami's mother and a botanist in Rhea. Chinami both loves and resents her. Chinami has chosen to hide her healing abilities from her mother, allowing the woman to stay permanently injured, as Chinami believes this is the best way to keep her from having any ideas of returning to her former dangerous tomb-raiding profession. In order to preserve her mother's life -and her own quiet life- this is what Chinami believes is the greatest kindness she can give, her trust in her mother's own judgement forever tarnished. Harumi, on the other hand, does actually love her daughter and seems to have learned her lesson from the incident that widowed her, and she apparently fully supports Chinami's ambitions, to which the latter feels rather guilty about not knowing how she should feel about that.

Celestine Telamon Lightbringer,"Cel", "Bane of Clausewitz", "Jester of Kiburi."
15
Mephisto 3rd year.

Celestine was abandoned not long after they were born in this world. Discarded like trash because of their freak physical features, both boy and girl, they were taken in by an orphanage in Rhea. This allowed the strange child to survive... but their life was plagued by sentiments of rejection. The other children shunned them, and they were treated as unwanted weight upon the staff. Due to their seemingly impossible biology, they suffered from bouts of illness that nearly killed them before being five. Only one boy activedly befriended them, Parker. But he too, was a target of the bullies for he had been born without a blessing at all. Things seemed grim, until one day, a gentleman named Locke Telamon Lightbringer took the strange infant under their care.

Their adoptive father spared no effort in their education, sending them to the prestigious Saint Laurel's school and doted on the child. However, it was clear that the light of Saint Laurels held a lot of shadows. Bullies found their way to torment Cel inside the school, and yet the ambiguous infant shouldered on, holding on the bliss he found at home that many other orphans could never have. Little did they know that their father had other plans in store rather than raising a heir. When they arrived at home during their 14th birthday, a betrayal awaited. Celestine was to be sacrificed to untold gods and powers in exchange of forbidden knowledge. Celestine snapped, their blessing awakening fully at once, and managing to overpower the evil sorcerer stepfather, seizing all of his assets in the process when he died as a result of their struggle.

Frazzled and driven mad by the ordeal, Celestine tried then their chance at Clausewitz' school, intent on gaining martial prowess. However, when said school standards were deemed too tight for what they wished (to skip courses), the not-even-highschooler went on a rampage that sent 12 other students to the hospital, awakening a new power in the tribulation and gaining a new moniker. Disappointed, he instead tried their hand at Lord Kiburi's. Such school allowed him what he wished to do, as long as it was cool, but Celestine was unsatisfied. They had no desire to follow someone's trail, they were a trailblazer themselves. After admitting they had used Kiburi's project as stepping stone (much to the founder's hilarity) they quickly switched to a place that suited their needs the best, Mephisto.

• Core Power:Soul of Chaos: Celestine's soul is... different than most. It holds all the potential outcomes, yet none of it is determined. As a first effect, they are neither female or male, and both and the same time. It is unbound in the grand scheme of fate, and thus allows for things others cannot accomplish. Celestine is flat out immune to luck-altering, or fate effects (clairvoyance upon their actions gives back random static noise), and given that the mind is built upon the soul, mind altering effects are not unlike hitting water with a sword: It doesn't stick for long. Moreover, the Soul of Chaos allows for practicising arcane arts, being skills that warp the natural order. It can cause a feeling of revulsion on certain people and sensitive animals.
• 1st Power-Sorcery (Od): Sorcery is the use of one's own internal magical energy (od, another word for this kind of energy is Ki), to perform some pretty basic spells. Cel is adept at using the od to heal minor wounds, launch small blasts of energy, that hurt as much as a punch, and reinforce their body to resist some enemy attacks and not die at the first time someone kicks them hard. Od is also employed in a mage's favorite trick: Flight. Useful for getting away and launching overhead attacks. This is a secondary ability that is taught.
• 2rd Power- Ritual Magic: Ritual magic refers to the complex rituals and scriptures a mage has to use in order to manifest powers that otherwise their Od would not be able to. These usually involve painstakingly intricate circles, chants, and exotic components. Sure, Mages can rain blizzards and fireballs on top of people's enemies with the right catalysts, but such a bizarre display would flush out months of work and years of savings in pretty fireworks. For example, a fireball would require a desiccated salamander ritually sacrificed under a new moon and smoked in a 100 year old tree's wood, and making a Wall of Ice would require to carve a single block of pure ice made from a pristine spring, and then melt it with purifying salt. It is possible for her to make lasting enchantments and curses, although the time and effort involved in those is proportional.This is a secondary ability that is taught.
• 3rd-Power-Eye of Kairos: After so many struggles in their life, Celestine has awakened a sort of sixth sense that follows the ebb of battle. As battle is chaos, they can seamlessly navigate it down to an instinctual level. Martial arts and battle moves become trivial to learn and counter, and tactics are but an afterthought. As this is an introspective ability, it cannot be negated in the way all their other senses can. However, the strain of use will eat away their concentration after enough time, and give them crippling migraines and disrupt his magic.

• Alyona::"My bestie. She sheems to revel in inflicting misery as much as I do."
• Parker:"We used to be childhood friends back at the orphanage. He was a decent guy. Then again he thought I was a girl. I would loathe to fight him."

Richard Parker aka "Handyman"
18
Thomas Haast Institute for the Consecratedly Challenged (THICC) 3rd year & Vigilantes

Richard never knew his parents. He was abandoned at birth like so many others of his place. Despite being found out to not have a blessing, Parker did his best to fit and made no small effort to keep in the game with his superpowered peers. He always had a soft spot for people whose blessings (or lack thereof) made them miserable. He befriended a little sick girl (or so he thought at that time) named Celestine. Both of them endured together the dog-eat-dog ambient of the orphanage, and Parker even joked that they could eventually marry. However, to all things come an end. Celestine departed for a new life. Parker didn't. He struggled all alone in the orphanage. Eventually, his situation was taken over by an specific institution for those with defective or nonexistant blessings.

The new environment gave Parker the respite he needed to fully develop as a person and his skills. As such, under the institution protection and tutelage, his skill grew in leaps and bounds, and he eventually ventured to take side jobs, as well as affiliating himself with the Vigilantes. The institution did turn a blind eye to these activities, knowing that any extra bit of money and skill would count. Parker, for his part, has aspirations to get a decent cushy job and a wife whose blessing doesn't kill him.

• Core Power:Godless: Richard Parker has no blessing. Nothing at all. He, however is both at the peak of fitness and mental skills.
• 1st "Power"-Jack of All Trades: Parker, from a very early age, has had to double down on learning new skills to compensate the blessings others have. As a result, he's skilled in a nearly staggering amount of diferent fields, like mixed martial arts, parkour,handcrafts, driving, cooking, basic mechanics... and the list goes on. Chances are, if it's useful for modern life, and it's a mundane utility that's not extremely specific (such as breaking science or military equipment), chances are Parker has a know how. Even if he doesn't, he knows a guy who knows a guy.

• Celestine:"I thought they were a girl. They're still hauntingly beatiful regardless, and they are twisted beyond redemption... Our friendship seems to have cooled off thus."