@Invader Len All solids questions that I will answer NOW YO!
1.) A Prae doesn't even have to have anything resembling additional limbs when they use their Manifest. They can be wings, arms, floating crystals, weird lookin blades, an aura of flame, patterns/symbols floating around them or just a glow emanating from their body. Totally your choice.
2.) The various aspects brought into being by a prae's manifest ARE NOT made of flesh/bone etc etc, they are composed entirely of vis, but they are also functional. So they would be wings composed of vis (maaaagic wooo), but they would--regardless of size--potentially allow the prae in question to fly. If tendrils are your manifested bits of choice then they would be functional, meaning capable of grasping/moving things around, as well as probably throwing, pulling your prae towards things as well as blocking projectiles or whatnot (either by coiling up into something like a shield or by swatting them away haha).
@yoshua171 Totally tubular! (ow that hurt) This helps so much. I have more questions but I think I'll eat up less page space if I ask them on the discord. I'm almost done!
~"A human wrapped in its own affairs makes a very small bundle."~
Name: Calypso Cavasaari
Nicknames: Cal, Cali, The Cavaasari Brat
Sex: Female
Sexuality: Bisexual
Age: 19
Apparent Age: 19
Race: Prae
Specialty: Mirage (Wind Affinty)
Appearance: Body: Weighing in at only 105 pounds and standing at 5'3", Calypso is diminutive and slim. Her body is more androgynous than other of her sex, with a flatter chest, higher collar bone, and a wiry, pixie-like frame. Her skin glitters when struck by the light, like a cluster of reflective freckles over most of her body. Her crystal in the center of her forehead is small and dark blue in color. Her hair reaches her mid-back, and her facial markings are read and take up most of her upper and part of her lower eyelids. She has further red markings on her arms, legs, back and navel. Manifest: Contrary to others of her species, Calypso's manifest does not come out entirely wing-like. Her manifest sprouts from her upper back from her shoulder blades, but that is where the semblance ends. 8 ten-foot long tendrils, each as thick as an adult human male's forearm, prehensile and able to move on their own. They twitch and seem to pulse with light that trails down their lengths before tapering off into nothingness.
Personality: Calypso's personality is known of far and wide in the Prae circles of Medius, and her unofficial title reflects that. The Cavasaari Brat. Though her family's well known for being silent, respectful, and intimidating, Calypso is anything but. A spoiled baby, she has never wanted for anything, and usually gets her way through demands, whining, threats, and tantrums. Petty and shallow, self-absorbed and vain, she's more concerned with her material comforts and hedonism to care about her involvement with the larger forces surrounding her. Her social circles, outspending her friends, finding the perfect wallflowers and eye candy to complete her. Politics bore her, and all she really knows about the Licentia is that they're gross sewer dwellers who eat people and probably wear second-hand clothing (ew).
Most of her faults are not born out of intentional malice, however, but out of childish naivety and a sheltered lifestyle. After all, why would she question her family? Or the Prae government? They clearly know better than she does about all this pesky race stuff. While not hateful from experience, her perceptions of the poor and other races are formed from the media she consumes and the opinions of her friends and family. She's never met a Licenti before, so why shouldn't everything that's said about them be true? If they really weren't all monsters, why would everyone say they were? Perhaps a meeting with a Licenti could make her see the error of her ways... Or reaffirm their reputation with new hatred in her heart. Calypso's days of innocent youth are coming to a close, and soon she'll be pressed to make a decision. Go against all she's been raised for and believe in total strangers, or harden her heart to outsiders and prepare to enter the very dark world of the family business. Her overall ignorance is a great front for a certain author to get more caught up on what's happening
History: Calypso was born to the Casavaari family, an old family of Prae who emigrated to Medius in the 16th century. Setting up base in Milano, they were initially involved in the spice trade, setting up a plantation called Pepper Ridge farms. But the loss of the state's red sea route to the east compromised the financial integrity of the operation. Checcho Casavaari, the son of the matriarch, with no other legal alternative, began hiring mercenaries, first to sabotage Turkish sailing operations in the mediterranean, then to destroy them outright. When human mercenaries proved to be largely ineffective, Checcho began bringing in other Prae, and granting them prestige and protection for working under him. Thus, from humble roots, the Casavaari soon grew to be the dominant organized crime family in the entire sea, with their fingers in every trade deal. It was said you could not catch a fish in the ocean without the Casavaari knowing, and taking a portion for themselves.
That was then. This is now. The Casavaari have largely covered their tracks and assumed the cover of a legitimate business. Cassio Casavaari, Checcho's son and the new head of the family, is more concerned with looking clean and not attracting the attention of the authorities. But that doesn't mean they're a purely lawful business. Aggressive both in the streets and in the stocks, the Casavaari family own yachts, airlines, fashion moguls, TV stations, and have most of the government of Milano in their pocket. But now it seeks more. And what better place to expand their territory than Ominar, the city now owned by the Prae? Surely, it was reasoned, in return for the right manpower and funds, they could trade for a foothold in the city, and exploit their new business opportunities.
As for where Calypso Casavaari fits in all this, the answer is she doesn't. At least, not yet. Cassio's niece and closest living relative, she was raised communally by the family, forging close bonds to many of its members. She has no memory of her parents, whom she is told were killed in an accident when she was an infant. Though she received quality education and has had learned to control her Manifest, she has little ambition beyond personal fancy. Perhaps the reason she is still alive. Unbeknownst to her, her mother, Lucretia Casavaari, Checcho's oldest daughter, and her partner were killed by Cassio in a coup d'etat. A fact known to very few in the Casavaari family.
Now, just a few months shy of her 20th birthday, she finds herself sent away from Milano to Ominar, purportedly to take care of the property just purchased in the city. In reality, Cassio hopes this experience will serve as his niece's introduction to the true work of the family, so as to keep the power concentrated in the bloodline. If she fails, however, the rising tensions in Ominar are the perfect pretense for a Licentia assassination, and further oppression of the shapeshifters would be possible with that kind of backlash against them.
Belongings/Equipment: * Furcifer- A tame, 12ft long Nile Crocodile Calypso keeps as her personal pet. Known for causing the disappearances of local neighborhood animals and yipping chihuahuas. Is an innocent little angel, according to his owner. Usually found on a leash or swimming in the Villa's pond and canal system. Can climb fences at surprising speeds and is scared by loud noises. *Signio de Casavaaria- A gold ring with the seal of the Casavaari family, proof of her status and marking her as untouchable to any street thugs, on her side or otherwise.
Capabilities
Mental: Bribe - Money has its perks, and is one in and of itself. When you can promise enough of it to anyone, giving them visions of wealth and power in their mind, who cares if you deliver? By implanting ideas and vivid images of wealth in her target's head, Calypso is then able to ply their much more relaxed willpower to her commands or persuasions. Of course, if the person isn't greedy by nature or wise enough to see through the delusions, it doesn't work.
Gossip - Rumors have a way of taking a life of their own, and with the right seeds, you too can grow your own rumor farm! Calypso can subtly influence a person's perceptions of others for good or bad, sowing seeds of doubt or dislike in someone's mind, or making them more open to a person and their offers. As long as whatever is heard is convincing, the target will almost certainly act as planned. After all, rumors only grow.
Physical: Eavesdrop - Spending your whole life being told where to sit and where to not be isn't a whole lot of fun for any girl. So, naturally, Calypso's nosiness has been trained to new extremes. A trained ear, lip reading, holding her breath and hiding close enough to overhear critical conversations is essential to finding out what people are going to give you for your birthday. Or if there's an assassination plot against you.
Contortion - Being small sucks, but being small and unusually flexible isn't so bad. Capable of squeezing into tight places is great for impromptu games of hide and seek with the new bodyguard, or sneaking into the kitchen to lick the icing off the cake meant for a mean cousin's wedding, or spying on those who plot against you. And being able to tuck your knees behind your neck never fails to turn a few heads.
Magical/Technological: Gale - A manifestation of wind magic, Calypso can summon one powerful blast of wind, knocking assailants off balance and even shifting cars. The more powerful the blast, the more Vis it requires. While this ability cannot kill in itself, whatever a person lands on may prove deadly enough. More often it is used as a means of literally knocking the wind out of an assailant, giving an opening to attack or escape. Her aim is highly accurate, and the more concentrated the wind, the more powerful it is. Because she is touching the air around her via Vis waves to move it, it takes 2-4 seconds for the attack to prepare and then carry through. Because of her Vis connection to the wind, she can feel when objects or people resist even if she otherwise cannot detect them.
Sandstorm - A manifestation of wind magic, this ability relies less on the magic itself but the debris is can pick up. Sand, dirt, dust, silt, even pebbles and gravel become a dangerous, whirling cloud. Whipping those unfortunate enough to become caught with particles that sting, cut, choke, and cause severe injury to the eyes and other soft, exposed body parts. While usually not deadly on its own, that can change with the debris it picks up. A sandstorm with shards of glass, for instance, one would be lucky to survive. While itself not as accurate as Gale, Sandstorm can cloak the better part of a square block in debris, and the speed of the particles within can be accelerated at whim. Like Gale, it takes 2-4 seconds for the winds to start, then an additional 5-8 seconds for any debris particles to become airborne and reach critical velocity.
Manifest - A full Prae, Calypso can manifest her Vis, though not as commonly seen. Rather than wings, hers takes the form of 8 ten-foot long white tendrils, the thickness of a human arm and pulsing light. Prehensile, they are able to support her body and lift her above the ground, and allow her to move at previously unattainable speeds, scale buildings, and give improved physical strength. She is able to hold her manifest for 30 minutes at a time, or as little as 10 minutes if she expends too much energy.
@Tuujaimaa Ithuriel is accepted provided that you alter Vis dolens so that it can only amplify pain up to 5x . Maybe it scales with how much blood you get in/on someone? Beyond that seems fine.
@Invader Len Alright, so, abilities. I don't really have any explicit issues with Gale or Sandstorm. I do need to stress something for in regards to the exact mechanics of those abilities.
So prae have touch-based telekinesis. This does include Mirage prae, but their abilities are a bit more expansive than your average prae. Namely, they can infuse their vis, almost freely, into the element they were born to. So when Calypso is using Gale, Sandstorm or other elemental abilities, what is happening is she is basically releasing a wave of her vis outwards, arresting control of the air in her area, and then moving it with her will as an extension of her body.
In her Manifest, she is likely to have greater control of wind. It'll be more potent in general as well as allowing her greater accuracy and whatnot.
So using Gale and/or Sandstorm will take a few seconds with the first use. Beyond that you should be aware of the fact that when she uses Gale/Sandstorm/wind abilities that she will be capable of feeling the wind/stuff in the wind (glass, sand, dirt, etc) that her vis is infused into because it is an extension of her being more or less. So if you use Gale and someone resists it and charges through, she'll feel it even if she can't see or hear, or smell, or sense their vis etc etc.
Beyond that looks fine to me.
Add a note to Gale and Sandstorm that the first use in a new location takes about 2-4 seconds to properly activate. Doesn't sound like a lot, but it can make a difference.
Once that is done. Accepted.
Both of you move your characters to the character tab when edits are made. Thank you.
@yoshua171 Alright, I'll make the necessary edits and post her to the characters tab! Thanks for the clarification on telekinesis, I can't believe I missed the touch based stuff.
I'm trying to decide on what kind of Prae to be. You had several people (some already in the game and just making more chars) join as Prae. Would anyone like a character desire role filled? A character you want for your character but that none of the characters currently in game meet. Example: Brother, Sister, Best Friend, Lover, Nemesis, Rival, Guardian, etc.
@Holy Soldier It might be helpful if you join the discord, Holy. Most of our conversations go on there. If you don't want to do that, I've let everyone know about your question. ^^
Located in the outer skirts of the Entertainment District, this nightclub reopening has made it a worthwhile place to visit. Especially to indulge your worst sins. One Night in Hell is currently being run by Maryia Vladslavovna Vorobyova, or better known by her friends as Masha.
Outlay Map of the whole place.
Divided into two sections: Main bar and club areas. Each has their own favor and atmosphere to suit most types of patrons.
Nabriales: Sneaky, persuasive, physically enhanced, mental defense, Alchemist, Cyrstals, The Sight, Vi Sense, Teleportation, Fire/Light.
Fandaniel: Mental Fortitude, physical prowess super good, super-skill, Vis Crystal/Sense, Vis Armor, Shaping, Magic Breaker
Truth: Immune to Mental, Tells Truth, super mind stuff, Physically weak, Vis Sense, Geas Mastery, Illusion Mastery, Will, Magic Theory, Telepathy, Teleportation, Not much Combat Magic.
Ithuriel: Physical Suuuuuuper, mental weak other than doesn't mind pain, vis infused blood, Vis sense, blood sense, blood magic, toxin pain anticoagulant.
Aevyrion: Harmonic (Wave Motion Sword), parrying dagger, Fencer, quick, enduring, great vis Sense, loyal, resistant to mental attack, Heliomancy (stronger in Priscus, in daytime, solid light attacks), Make Things Explode Via Resonance, Wave Slash, Light Manip, Light Beam Prison.
Dranai: Magic Handgun with blanks, Crystal dust, Enchanted Bulletproof Undercoat, Intelligent, Professor, Teaching, Physical all right, Illusion, Barrier.
Bree: Invulnerable Duster, Pistol pair with FoF razorwire that can fire remotely, Pistol Pair with more power and racism, gloves that remember where they've been (sigils), rapier with flexibility, racism and replication, vampire sword, sheath that stores blood/vis stolen by vampire sword, Vis detection, multipersonality, Macguyver Tricky Explosive man, combat skill, slight physical boost, Art of Athriohm (?), Contracts.
Mairyell: Gun with explody Vis bullets, twin pistols, lots of bullets, faster mind, mental resistance, physical boost, blood eating, regeneration, fighty skill, Blood Manipulation, Brisn
Madison: Painful to read text color, don't explode from too much Vis Jewelry, enhanced processing, clumsy but decent shape, super minor regeneration, Kinesthetic Sense, Guardian bond, latent magic and super potential.
Reates: Space Time manip, sight manip, hive mind butterfly that eat vis and have cammoflague, cat of indestructible crystal with heat/electricity stuff, telepathy and mental resistance, PHD in Science/Teaching, Enhanced Intelligence, Knowledge of Abberants/magic, enhanced Physical, The Sight, Vis Sense, Systemic Method, Shroedinger's Magic of Unknown Parameters
Charles:Memory Bracelet, blurry fog, earthquake, darkness, teleport, healing. Immortal. Blue Mage. Vis manipulation/golems,
Name: Calix Falborough. Nicknames: Cali, California Gender: Male Sexuality: Spaghetti Age: 24 Apparent Age: 12 Race: Human Lineage/Nationality: American
Appearance: Standing at a towering 148 cm, weighing in at a mighty 42 kg, and with three sizes of B71|W59|H73, Cali can just barely pass as a teenage girl. In that most people would probably think he's a tween girl. There's not any ill magic at work, at least, none Cali knows of. Seems to just be wierd genetics being wonky. Cali blames inbreeding between high blooded families. Given how odd a beard would look on someone like himself, he's just committed to the aesthetic and removed it. No matter the fact that he could probably buy the entire ice cream company himself, convincing someone to buy some for you just never gets old.
As for more traditional measures of appearance, just take the text color and memes as a hint.
Personality: ~"Why would anyone stop at one super robot suit?"~ Reckless Ambition. Perhaps Cali's defining character trait. He amasses power and uses it to build dumb and destructive shit, without any real point to any of it or goal in mind. He's surpassed the (publicly known) limits of human military technology.. And for what? It's not like he needs more money, he already lives in absolute luxury. It's not like he has some cause he wants to fight for. He's considering joining the Resistance simply to get an opportunity to test out his weapons, not because he actually cares.
~"If it's this easy to surpass the limits of human power and technology... Where's all the other superhumans?"~ Wracking Paranoia. This is one of his few actual "reasons" to build all that stuff and amass power. With how easy he had it amassing enough power to level a skyscraper, maybe even a city, there must be others that have achieved that. Things like the mysterious upper echelons of IHO keep him up at night wondering just how strong someone who has similar talent but has been at it longer than him might be.
~"Nyeeeeeeeh!"~ Childish Immaturity. They say if you wear a mask for too long you can become the mask. And well, Calix has pretty much never grown out of childhood. Few people treat him as an adult. But even if it's a chicken or the egg argument for whether his immaturity caused that or vice versa, it's still one of the top contenders for driving forces of his personality. He rarely thinks about consequences, and just selfishly tries to get his way with almost no sense of shame or responsibility.
~"Pew pew pew, kaboom!"~ Enjoys Destruction. What little boy doesn't like smashing action figures together and stomping through sand castles? Only now this little boy's toy's can have outputs bordering on "maybe we should start measuring in tons of explosives?" It is a small kindness that Cali doesn't have complete disregard for civilian life, and has taken a few measures to reduce colateral damage, otherwise any display of the Kali suit's power in a civilized area would probably result in hundreds of casualties, if not thousands if the right building topples. Even with, or perhaps because of said small measures, the Kali suit is still a spectacular hazard to innocent life thanks to its philosophy of overkill and overwhelming volume of destruction rather than precision.
~"Anyone better than me is either lucky, a worthy opponent, or old."~ Privileged Cockiness. Despite being granted the majority of his wealth and power without significant effort from himself, he still considered himself the valid inheritor of his power, and if anyone else is better than him, they were the ones blessed overmuch with talent or time. Or that he'll surely surpass them soon. That doesn't mean he won't be absolutely terrified at his core of the idea of people stronger than him, but he'll try to act like he isn't. And he'll assume any given person is weaker than him until proven otherwise.
History: Knowledge is power, some say. In some cases, that's very literal, such as with certain magical traditions, where knowledge contributes to your ability to move the world. In an application of equality, Cali's power is knowledge.. which gives him more power? Ok, maybe it's not a perfect analogy. Regardless, Cali's power would have made him wealthy beyond his wildest dreams even if he had to start from nothing, and start from nothing he did not.
He was born to wealth and power, a massive manufacturing company made rich on modernizing militaries in the face of technological and magical progress induced by the introduction of Prae and Licentia. And he did not disappoint his parents. At least in the sphere of being useful to the company. Cali's power to interface himself with machines, and to interface machines with each other with never before seen efficiency (at least, not publicly before seen), resulted in impossible manufacturing efficiencies in his father's factories. And well, if he kept the results within tolerance, and skimmed off a few cycles, and parts for himself and his own pet projects? Well, as long as Cali kept the results better than without his enhancements, no one would be the wiser.
With his power, he's been gearing up, creating weapons of destruction, preparing every resource he can, safe houses, secret accounts, friends in low places. Thanks to his mental based power in an information driven society, he's been able to surpass the technological, financial, and magical limitations of even the military industrial complexes he'd been born to. The world is his oyster.
But he can't be alone, right? There must be others. Secret societies, covered up government agencies, other people who use hidden technology and enormous scale information to manipulate the world. They've got to be out there somewhere, and he has to be ready.
Belongings/Equipment:
A lot of people like to enchant normal clothes to function as bulletproof armor. Cali thought, "what if we took bulletproof armor, and added even more cool stuff to it with enchantment." Also, Cali, though reasonably content with his physical form, still wanted to be able to be big and stompy and tall on occasion when he wanted to be. And so he created an armored suit that adds about 25 cm, four arms, and several hundred kg if not for all the mass masking enchantments. And an armored assault vehicle's worth of weapons.
A common theme is that Kali suit features will be designed to function without magic, if for a limited duration of time, with Hammerspace features providing a good operational duration, and Teleportation providing theoretically infinite operational duration. Cali knows antimagic techniques exist, and he doesn't want the suit to crush in on him if something disrupts the magic, he wants to still be able to function for long enough to escape, and hopefully put a hundred or so hot fast pieces of metal in the direction of whoever or whatever's causing the problem. Thus, redundant designs mean the suit can function for about 5 minutes in combat even if all enchantments are disrupted. It can function for a fair bit longer out of combat, and MUCH longer if the mass masking enchantments are still functioning, being a bit harder to disrupt than Hammerspace and Teleportation. If the mass masking functions are offline, those 5 minutes will inflict a lot of wear and tear on the nearly overloaded musculature systems. If the teleportation is disrupted, the Hammerspace Drive still has enough energy for 2 hours of combat operation, and two hours of pure combat might break Cali first, as he is not especially battle hardened or mentally prepared for long fights.
The armor on the Kali suit is composed of some impressive alloys, and meshes, and plenty of them, with a mix of mass masking and straight up armor enhancements. In short, anything not designed to engage an armored vehicle with magical enhancement will not effectively damage the Kali suit or its wearer unless it bypasses the armor (like a mental attack). The suit is environmentally sealed, with an internal air supply with duration equivalent to its power systems. The suit has significant resistance to heat and cold based attacks, as the suit has some extreme superconductor cooling systems in place to handle the heat it generates (though shutting off its Hammerspace Capacity will cause these systems to quickly overtax themselves), and if it turned those off, it would be able to deal with extreme cold. These superconductors also function pretty well for electrical protection, though, while electrical attacks won't physically damage anything, they will still cause Cali an exceptional ammount of pain.
The Kali has spikes in its feet, enabling it to walk up walls. If your wall is really REALLY heavy duty. Mostly these are used for anchoring the Kali when it's firing its weapons, because Newton's Second Law is a bitch.
As for weapons, beyond having six arms with some heavy duty musculature, there are some physically carried around weapons, with backups/ammo retained in Hammerspace.
Reasonable Precations: This is a 40mm, tribarrel rotary electromagnetic autocannon. Most of the enchantments on this thing are for power, ammo, and cooling, particularly through shunting things to and from Hammerspace. The other enchantments are kinetic dampening to reduce recoil. Even with that enchantment, and the fact that it is wielded with super muscle robot hands, this is not a one handed weapon. It will break your wrist, and the grip will fly off too unless you are firing single shot mode. Even with all the enchantments and the Kali suit's augmented strength, Cali usually keeps four hands on this thing, if not all six, as well as deploying stabilizing spikes into the ground, when firing anywhere near its full automatic capacity. What Kali lacks in precision, it tries to make up for in sheer scale of destructive mayhem. This will be a noted theme among the Kali's weapons.
Of course, just because the railgun itself isn't enchanted with extra firepower, doesn't mean the bullets can't be.
Jehovah's Witness- This railgun round includes an layer of vis designed to resist opposing vis (such as someone attempting to use metal telekinesis to repel the bullet) and breach magical barriers. More or less an armor piercing round for magic.
Rainbow Connection- This railgun round is loaded with whatever random vis dust and scrapped enchantments was left over waste from all the vast industrial processes Cali has going on. When fired full auto, this results in a rather spectacular display of color as ice, lightning, fire, plants, random void energies and other nonsensery happen in the target area.
Safety Shortstop- This railgun round is programmed to teleport to a gun range about a meter after it passes where the target was recognized to be when the trigger was pulled. This is for shooting at someone when they have something behind them you don't want to kill.
Ouch- This railgun round increases its mass after it leaves the barrel. Ouch.
Upsie Daisy: This is a backmounted high-low pressure mortar, Cali not wanting to put all his eggs in one basket with railguns. The physical capacity of this mortar is 3 rounds. The Hammerspace Capacity of the Mortar Launcher can hold another 12 rounds. It also has a teleportation matrix for reloading both the physical and hammerspace compartments. But, as with all mortars, the real prize is what is launched and how it is launched. This can fire forward as an exceptionally heavy duty grenade launcher, or up into the air as a proper mortar. And the rounds are below.
John Henry- This mortar round pops up about 100 meters into the air over the target, and deploys a rather sketchy teleportation array, making extreme sacrifices in precision for mobility, speed, and maximum size. It's not capable of proper teleportation of delicate objects, using this personally would kill you, so it only works for relatively nonstructured material that doesn't matter if it gets swapped around a bit. It teleports in a very dense metal spike, massing 18,000 kg. In terms of its effects, it impacts 17,640,000 joules on the target with a tip that is kinda sorta sharp. Presuming the target stands in one spot for 5 seconds. Cali uses this for penetrating bunkers, destroying armored vehicles, and buildings. Or anything he really really doesn't like that happens to not be moving. Cali really likes this round, and it is inert at rest (incapable of teleporting the spike in until physically deployed), so he keeps it in one of his physical slots.
Mark Henry- Basically the same thing as John Henry, but deployed lower and faster, in a wall shape and purpose instead of a spike. A surprisingly vast variety of attacks are blocked by several tons of steel being in the way.
Technicolor Kaleidescope- This is a "flashbang" that also serves fairly well as an incendiary against unarmored targets, that is also designed to spread around and keep around blindingly energetic vis against all those pesky vis sense abilities' visual components.
Johnny Cash- An actually incendiary, this is a round that unleashes a whole lot of advanced, but ultimitately straightforward incindiary material. The fun is in the different deployment modes tweaking it's carrier material and changing the "unleashes" part of it. One mode sends a jolt through it that magentizes it so that it will cling to and burn through heavy armor. Another sends it wide it to act as area oxygen denial. Another acts as a happy medium. It can be set to create thick low hanging smoke, or almost none. It can be set to create toxic fumes. Fun times all around.
Old Faithful- Catch all for standard fragmentation type mortars. "Standard" includes such things as being loaded out with Jehovah's Witness Flechetes for piercing enchanted low profile armor (Which is another one of his standard rounds), or silver "holy" pellets for dealing with those vulnerable to such thing
Eye Spy- This round goes fairly more subtly as far as most of Kali's are. It deploys static micro cams, appearing more as grains of sand than as information recording devices, then the casing transforms into a drone after micro cam deployment. These micro cams individually get absolutely terrible reception, but, in their massive numbers, Cali is able to use them in parallel to get amazing reception of pretty much anything in the area's radius. Has variants that are just the micro cams or just the drone. A combined load is one of his standard mortars.
In case you were somehow still wondering, no, the Kali suit is not legal. No, he's not likely to be able to slip into a dinner party inside it. In the case he wants to deploy this destructive force, he needs to teleport in, achieve mission, and teleport out before the authorities arrive.
The Wisdom Kings are Cali's backup dancers. For when one robot exoskeleton worth of destruction and mayhem isn't enough, why don't we call in 5 full robots that are arguably stronger? If Cali needs them but didn't think he'd need them, the five skulls with swords he's wearing on Kali's neck aren't just decoration to live up to the name, but also teleport arrays. They can be thrown away (subtly altering their flight path with some magic), and each one will teleport in.. a better teleport array. And then a better teleport array. And then a better teleport array. And THEN they will each teleport in a Wisdom King.
Fighty Sword Model. Has the most advanced AI as swordplay is a bit more complicated than point and shoot. Much stronger and faster due to not having a squishy human in it. Plate thrusters everywhere that tap into magic to change acceleration very quickly via magic shenanigans with Telekinetic Physical Interface. Buster sword, shield to match, only two arms. Plenty of backup weapons for if internal plate thrusters and mass masking on the buster sword break, as well as a backup shield that is significantly thinner. But the buster sword is the only one that has vis infused platinum edges.
Created because Cali can't understand how swords and shields are still relevant, but powerful people keep using them so maybe there's something behind it?
What's better than one flamethrower? Six flamethrowers! What's better than six flamethrowers? Six flamethrowers and infinite fuel! What's better than six flamethrowers and infinite fuel? Six flamethrowers and infinite fuel and a suite of abilities to camouflage yourself and hide in the flames and heat mirages!
And let's throw some vis-infused platinum bayonets on those flamethrowers for maximum racism vs licentia.
The support Wisdom King. With medical gear for humans, and repair gear for Kali or the other Wisdom suits, as well as lots of spare parts in hammerspace and teleport array. Not entirely defenseless as it has the most limbs of any, with six primary arms, but also another six stub arms with fine manipulators on the back equipped with pocket shotguns, underbarrel grenades, and railguns, two of each.
It doesn't consider insane physical performance a requirement, so this is the physically weakest, including the Kali suit, and Cali can wear it, and be treated while inside of it, even if he was say, missing the lower half of his body. Upper half is still a bit beyond his medical tech to do without.
It's no surprise that Cali watched too many robot shows, and this mech uses macross missile massacre strategies, combined with hammerspace arsenal and teleportation arrays to make the missiles jump forward, suddenly change orientation, or otherwise perform real life robo-teching. Probably not as effective as just launching all the missiles beforehand and having slam down on the target at supersonic speeds, but where's the fun in that?
Has the second most advanced AI functionality behind Acala, more technical processing power but.. less intelligence. Cali just feels like this is a fast battlefield portable server, while Acala spooks him sometimes.
The caster specialist, this has reserves of vis and magic ready to refresh Cali's supply or use for big spells. And that's about it really. Hum. Potentially the most expensive with all the vis crystals, though the amount of missiles Trailokyavijaya is capable of using or the vis-infused platinum blades of the others are also staggeringly expensive.
Capabilities
Mental Not particularly originally. Would probably be pretty good with computers even without his powers, but what makes Cali a "genius" at them are his powers. They have made him a master at Robotics, AI, Physics, and many fields of magic. While he's not particularly brilliant or talented at any of these fields, he has the equivalent of millennia of study in each of them, thanks to his distributed capabilities and enhanced clock speed. But without his magic, he's unlikely to make any further discoveries.
Physical Pffft, no.
Magical Omni-Informational Interface: Cali's main power is to create informational interfaces where none existed before. Very fast and secure ones that don't care about language barriers or distance or even sentience. This includes interfacing computers into his mental capacity, as well as more relatively mundane mind networking with other sentient beings. It's not exactly telepathy, so much as making both beings one mind, with all the resources, insight, and sensory input of both. Trying this out with another human being was a harrowing experience of being part of a hive mind that scared Cali quite a bit. He sticks to computers now.
Thanks to not caring about distance, Cali has mounted this power through his nervous system making his own nervous system insanely fast and improving his brain's processing power massively. He could easily react and dodge bullets, if his body was in any way shape or form quick enough at acceleration to do so. It is not. Similarly, using this power on computers has made insanely fast servers that produce far less heat. While doing so gives Cali access to their computational power, it also introduces Cali's own errors to the computers. Mental attacks can work on machines that are part of Cali's network. And introducing extra electricity to anything that's part of Cali's network will generally reduce Cali to a gibbering crying wreck. He's not great with pain, and that causes a lot of it.
Teleportation: Cali doesn't have any innate talent with this, but due to his mastery of the Systemic method and brute force processing time to practice, Cali figured out teleportation, and it's one of his favorite tricks. Being able to instantly leave boring meetings is a truly irreplaceable treasure.
Telekinetic Physical Interface: A physical variant of Cali's main power, Cali can interweave things physical existence, making them the same thing on a large scale kinetic overview, translating all kinetic influence equally over their entirety. For example, casting this over a plate of armor makes any impact on the armor's surface impact it equally to every atom, changing the effective impact to the equivalent of a gravitational field applied equally to each unit of mass, with the same total energy behind it as the initial impact. This doesn't reduce the power of the blunt force any, but reduces any edge or point, no matter how fine or sharp, even mono-molecular, to an infinitely dull weapon. This spell, when active, renders most armor piercing (save the likes of say, electricity, mental attacks, or squash head rounds that use blunt force) attack methods very much so not armor piercing. But they still might work if there's enough raw force behind them. In order to cast this on two separate things, they have to have very close to no relative speed to each other. But, Cali keeps a row of really big, like, John Henry weapon sized spikes constantly moving back and forth in various angles and speeds back home, so that he can access one with close enough relative speed to his fist so that he can punch things REALLY hard without hurting his hand. Despite the name of "Telekinetic", this doesn't let him move things around with his vis so much as make it harder for things to move around with his vis.
Glazed Eyes: Cali has also learned a fairly effective "don't notice me" aura. This is his preferred defense when he can't bring his Kali suit. It's legal and easily explainable away if he gets caught using it in a dangerous situation. Namely, that he was hoping no one would notice him while escaping the dangerous situation. It's fairly subtle, so it's not going to let him sneak in anywhere he's obviously out of place (or sneak the Kali suit into anything but an armed robot sales pitch), but if he's dressed to fit in, it usually makes him easily missable.
The Systemic Method: Otherwise known as Formulaic magic, this magical methodology involves the creation of magical constructs which exploit and interact with physics. While most spells could be cast without it, most that do not use this form of magic tend to expend more energy to do less, whereas Systemic magic greatly expands both the possibilities and the subtle nuances of one's spellwork. It is a magic developed by Licentia and it is one of the few things they have shared with humanity, though that was oh so long ago by human standards. Cali is an impressive master of it, moreso than many mortal beings thrice his age, given his extreme mental speed and processing power while using Omni-Imformational Interface. Despite his lack of genius he has access to rather absurdly prefixed numbers of man-years of thinking time in the same time it takes most people to come to the conclusion that it's probably time to cast a spell. This means that rather than tailoring a spell for a general case of physics, he can tailor it for this specific one he's in. His ability to simulate physics interactions to the current limit of public human knowledge combined with his ability to process through hundreds of normal caster years of trial and error in a leisurely weekend to advance his general knowledge of how magic and physics interacts results in a mastery of the Systemic Method more appropriate to a being several thousand years old.
Counterspelling: Cali does not have access to that holy grail of powers, anti-magic. Cali DOES have so long from his perspective that in the time it takes a normal human to cast a spell at him, Cali can brush up on his classical magical interactions, pick a school of magic that counters it well, learn some basic countermeasures, and then cast them. This only works on fairly basic spells that are common knowledge and to which the counters are common knowledge.
Phantom Casting: Cali can psuedo-cast multiple spells at the same time due to his vast mental processing power at parallel tasks. However, just before committing the vis to make them happen, he can renege. This allows him to say, phantom cast a powerful boost on each bullet he is firing from Reasonable Precautions, or each pellet from a mortar. But then only commit to casting on the ones that are about to hit, as judged by his absurd reaction time.
Basic Elemental Magic: Cali has taken the time to get at least a cliff notes of pretty much every publicly available basic magic type, allowing him 'cantrip' level proficiency. If he wants to use his finger as a lighter, or charge his phone, he can. If he wasn't easily bored with a short attention span for anything not super fighting robots or his favorite types of magic, he'd probably be a lot scarier of a combatant.
However, ultimately, for all that skill, he doesn't have a very beefy vis reserve.
Technological Massive Industrial Base and Manufacturing Capability Magic Enhanced Server Farms. These feed his hyper sensory awareness as well as his Formulaic magic More money than he knows how to spend. When you've built more super robot suits than you know what to do with, you're too rich for your level of maturity.
M N A E C I L I A R E A ' E L H M O N C E R E mm-nay-sill-ea ray-ah el moan-sare Three-hundred-twenty-eight.♦ Female. ♦ Prae. ♦ Proxy.
[ ⊰⊱ ] Ⱥppearance
Standing at 5'7 and weighing in at 128 lbs, she is a rather lithe prae, typically wearing a ceremonial eye covering that shields her startling white eyes from others, and the world from her gaze. Her form could be considered healthy with an above average figure for a prae woman. She moves with a regal grace becoming of one with her station. Despite her gaze being obscured, many a prae have faltered at her presence and withered beneath her scrutiny.
[ ⊰⊱ ] ℬ io
Will update. Unsure of how to explain it currently.
Notable Traits:
Confident.
Believes in TRUTH.
Adores the God-Queen and holds her to be above all else (in importance. God-Queen is top priority always).
Intelligent.
Observant.
Serious.
Dislikes having her time wasted as she sees it as an affront to her cause.
Fair and Just, but unyielding once she makes a decision proper.
Communicator: Something of an implant, Mnaecilia has a high tech trans-planar communicator made with prae technology. The ‘item’ is not visible due to being subtly worked into her body and protected by a variety of methods--primarily through shielding and the enchanted durability of the materials it is composed from.
Heirloom: Something of a signet ring that she was given by her mother, this family heirloom is a reminder of her relatives even though she seldom sees them. The item is incredibly durable--clearly enchanted--and she continues the long standing tradition of repeatedly imbuing it with vis so that even when their family is gone...the ring will still remain.
She wears the ring on her left index finger.
Ritual Cloth: A single length of opaque black cloth that remains wrapped around her arms. This cloth is engraved with what appear to be faint runes, which do not glow and are only visible at a closer inspection. This cloth seals her vis, stabilizing it within her form so as to keep her Manifest under control. Further, the cloth serves to conceal the appearance of her markings and to somewhat suppress her awareness of vis. The material is much more durable than it appear as it is enchanted by a constant flow of vis from Mnaecilia herself. She is fully capable of using them to block most mundane weaponry and, with further augmentation and a fair deal of skill she may even use it to dampen or block some vis-based assaults. Wrapping the cloth around someone else will have the same effects as it does on her, but they will appear to affect others more than they do her.
Ceremonial Veil: Always draped over her eyes and forehead where it remains despite outside interference, Mnaecilia's veil has two purposes. The first is to dampen her ability to perceive and affect vis, while the second is to seal off her eyes excepting in extreme circumstances. As such, the veil is seemingly impossible to remove or destroy, both protecting and restricting access to her eyes at all times.
Prism: A refractive crystal typically used by Mirage prae to seal beings within; Mnaecilia's Prism is instead utilized to store vis in addition to containing Crescendo, on occasion.
[ ⊰⊱ ] ℭ apabilities
Prae Telepathy: As common an ability as it is among her kind, it is one that is seldom mastered. Like many magical and psychic talents, the art of Telepathy is a complex one, though it is defined by a small number of relatively simple concepts. One might boil Telepathy down to the art of communicating mind-to-mind without physical medium in order to transmit emotions, sensory impressions, and the abstract idea. While human telepathy and even licentia telepathy tend to have abject limitations based on the physiology and psychology of both the sender and receiver, prae telepathy takes things a step further. Most notable perhaps is their ability to treat thought, emotion, and sensation like a computer would files, allowing them to codify, encrypt, decrypt, zip, and unpack information and send it through not just their own vis, but ambient vis as well. While doing this with human or licentia telepathy typically results in information loss or corruption, doing so via the prae method does not due to the way the information is passed on; though communication between realms is still nigh impossible without a medium more stable than ambient vis.
Of course, despite its superiority above the telepathy of other races, Mnaecilia’s unique connection with the God-Queen has barred her from certain uses of her incredibly powerful talent. So it is that as long as she wears the Ceremonial Veil and Ritual Cloth she cannot use her telepathy to assault the mind of another being regardless of race or strength. Despite this weakness, mental barriers serve little to no purpose against her, allowing her to transmit thoughts, impressions, emotions, and sensations over a vast distance with minimal effort.
While Prae Telepathy can certainly be used to lull another being into believing that transmitted thoughts, emotions, impressions, or sensations are their own, Mnaecilia’s is not unless she enters her Manifest. As such, so long as she does not do the aforementioned all transmitted information is undeniably distinct from the mind of the receiver and its contents, allowing them to immediately recognize the presence of a foreign psyche.
Analytical and Emotional Intelligence: As one might expect from a spiritual leader among her people, Mnaecilia has an incredible capacity for understanding both the mindstate of others as well as the world around her to an exacting degree. She is able to--even without her telepathy and empathy--discern the general emotional state of people in her direct vicinity provided that she can hear, smell, and/or touch them. If she utilizes her vision as well, this perception gains an even more potent clarity as her gaze pierces the veil of deception and trickery to unearth the truth of the world around her. Similarly she is quick witted, observant, and beholden to the truth making her difficult to fool even on the worst of days. Yet, perhaps because of her nature she is less likely to have sympathy for those who lie to her and so a small untruth can lead to a rather significant consequence. In short: Woe shall fall upon those who dare deceive this proxy, for through her they deceive the God-Queen herself.
Martial Training: As a proxy, Mnaecilia must be prepared for the possibility of violence in the pursuit for the truth and the continued prosperity of their illustrious race. As such she was trained in the martial skills and while not what one would call a true warrior, she is no slouch in combat. Capable of handling a number of weapons as well as conducting herself without them, Mnaecilia has gone through extensive training regimes to make sure that she is in shape and ready for whatever the world throws at her in her services to the Will of the God-Queen. As a result she has considerable stamina, enough physical resilience to take a couple of armed hits with little to no damage, and of course sufficient physical strength and speed to allow her to match most combatants that don’t completely outclass her. One would consider her martial skills smack dab in the middle between “Novice,” and “Master.”
Domineering Presence: A result of her Divine Connection, her bearing and her mastery of the art of Telepathy, Mnaecilia’s presence acts much like a physical force as she strides through the world with confidence and purpose. For a prae, standing in her presence is both exhilarating and terrifying for to do so is to be as spiritually close to the God-Queen as most will ever get. This effect can cover a radius anywhere between 10 and 85 meters, though its usual range gravitates towards the lower end of the spectrum. This ‘aura’ fades in strength only once outside of the aforementioned radius, though it does so more drastically if it is stretched over a greater distance to begin with. As a result, her presence and imminent arrival can typically be detected several minutes before one ever sees her, lending a sense of imminent jubilation or doom depending on the relative innocence of those affected.
It should be noted that Mnaecilia is entirely in control of her Presence at all times; allowing her to extend its breadth over a 20 meter radius when under the effects of her limiting garments. It is only when these garments are removed and her Manifest unleashed that it may expand past this point. Furthermore, due to her control over this Presence, the proxy may focus it more intensely on someone if she chooses to, essentially mimicking the effects of a piercing--and all seeing--gaze at will. Perhaps most frightening is the fact that she can do this to up to 8 people at a time though the effects on them will vary depending on their mental resilience and race.
*Prae are more susceptible to this ability than the other races due to the influence of the God-Queen.
Divine Connection: A connection that all proxy are afforded once they have gone through their initiation; the Divine Connection is one established via ritual between the God-Queen and a Proxy. This link, once established, allows the God-Queen’s Will in its purest form, as an impression, be passed onto any--and all--proxies. This lets them act in accordance to her wishes even without any direct input from her. Additionally, this link allows proxies one other boon, that being one of temporary infusion for the in their times of need, a proxy may draw vis from the God-Queen, bolstering all of their abilities drastically. The extent to which their abilities can be bolstered depends on their capacity, which is improved via rigorous training and regular rituals to strengthen their bond to their eminent Queen. It should be noted that a proxy’s rank is decided by three factors, which are as follows:
The clarity, accuracy, and frequency of their interpretation of the God-Queen’s Will; the depth of their intelligence, devotion, and spiritual wisdom; and of course their capacity to receive and weather the power of the God-Queen in times of need both great and small.
Imbuement: An inherent ability among prae, Imbuement allows a prae to impart their vis not just to individuals upon their death, but into objects or people to influence them magically. While this ability has many uses, its two most common applications being telekinesis and enchantment. To initiate this ability a prae must either establish direct contact with their desired target or transfer their vis from an already imbued object/entity into their new ‘target(s).’ Once this first step is accomplished a prae may manipulate the imbued object in a wide variety of ways. In the case of telekinesis, a prae imbues an object or substance with their vis and then ‘binds’ the vis to the structure of the material, allowing them to move it according to their will. Enchantment on the other hand is typically more complex and, as it turns out, is Mnaecilia’s specialty.
While Imbuement-Telekinesis merely binds an object or entity’s structure with the user’s vis and then moves it, Imbued-Enchantment is the act of altering the inherent structure and properties of a given object, substance, or material in some way. While those unskilled in Imbued-Enchantment might only be capable of bolstering the base properties of their chosen article, someone with greater mastery of the art can do incredible things; often resulting in the properties of the final product being wildly more exotic than before.
A chief example of this departure into the exotic is Mnaecilia’s primary weapon: Crescendo, which takes Priscan air and vis to create an object that not only exerts its own force, but also acts more like a solid object than a gas. Due to the incredible amounts of vis packed into Crescendo it doesn’t exert physical force normally. Instead the Vae Maoris may output almost any amount of kinetic energy on impact--or in close proximity--to itself so long as it possesses vis to fuel the process. As such, even passing contact with Crescendo can result in a disproportionate amount of structural damage.
*Vae Maoris: A term utilized by prae to describe enchanted objects created via imbuement. The term is roughly equivalent for the human/licentia term “Artifact,” which is used to describe incredibly powerful enchanted items. However, unlike Artifacts, Vae Maoris include substances that have been sufficiently altered by Imbuement.
Crescendo: Depicted in her appearance, Crescendo is a unique one-of-a-kind construct composed of approximately one ton worth of Priscan air infused with enough vis to blow clear through a twenty foot thick wall of steel. By compacting this vis-infused Priscan gas into a crescent-shaped construct bound to her will, Mnaecilia has managed to create an object with incredible--if unconventional--durability, cutting power and utility. As almost any object infused with a prae’s vis, Crescendo can be moved telekinetically within a certain range of the proxy, allowing her to use it as both a defensive and offensive tool as she wishes. By exerting the incredible forces contained within the construct she may cleave through most materials and magics with varying amounts of effort depending on their durability.
Conversely, she may exert these forces inwards or outwards on a flat plane perpendicular to the edge of the bladed crescent, effectively allowing her to create a powerful force either that can be used for a variety of purposes. With focus, this force can be applied inwards in a more particular fashion, allowing Mnaecilia to ‘anchor’ Crescendo to herself, an individual, or an object with significantly less vis--provided it is not being actively infused by a wielder. Once ‘anchored,’ Mnaecilia may move herself, the individual, or object(s) in question as if she brought them telekinetically under her sway, but only so long as Crescendo remains anchored. This allows her to amplify her own speed, resilience, as well as allowing her flight even outside of her Manifest.
Manifest: Ascendant Nova
Discarding her restrictive garments, Mnaecilia may unveil her Manifest, the removal of her scarf and veil resulting in a tremendous eruption of force as her vis pushes against the limits of her ostium. So fierce is this shockwave that it sunders even Crescendo, scattering the construct over a wide area. Her eyes and skin begin to glow with mottled blue light, revealing her once unseen markings. Thin formations of metal overlay her skin, her markings connecting them as they reveal themselves. Those upon her back spread into the air as her vis suffuses them and gives them physical form, causing air to condense as her vis wrests control of it from nature itself, condensing it rapidly.
A shortness of breath briefly results before winds gradually escalate in intensity, ever flowing inwards towards the proxy. Light takes on a bluish hue as her vis saturates it, metal fragments forming as if from thin air to create the outline of wings at her back. The metallic substance continues to form around her throughout the duration of her Manifest.
While her Manifest is active, Mnaecilia becomes capable of infusing objects, materials, and substances with her vis merely via proximity. The state amplifies the range of her Presence, the potency and application of her Telepathy, but most of all it brings to bear the terrifying power of her Imbuement. So long as she is in this state she can freely enchant and manipulate ‘objects’ infused with her vis, endowing numerous qualities to them in the process. However, unlike a normal prae whose Manifest can only be active for a limited amount of time, Mnaecilia’s tremendous stores of vis coupled with her connection to the God-Queen mean that she is feasibly capable of maintaining her Manifest indefinitely. Of course, this has its downsides, as it has always, with the most serious one being that without the God-Queen’s vis her Manifest will remain active until her vis is completely depleted, which will kill her. This reveals the true purpose of the Ceremonial Veil and Ritual Cloth, which act as limiters for her mutated Ostium and tremendous stores of vis. Without those two items--particularly the Ritual cloth--Mnaecilia’s Manifest would inadvertently kill or drive her into a coma. Such is the price for so great a power.
*With the boon of the God-Queen’s Divine Connection, Mnaecilia will not die from her Manifest, but may be struck unconscious when her own vis runs out, leaving the God-Queen to trickle in enough vis to keep her alive, if unconscious.
Amon is a bit on the short side compared to an average human, standing at about five feet tall and only weighing about 110 pounds. He hasn't really done much in his life to build up any sort of muscle mass beyond walking around so he's a bit on the scrawny side, though he manages to make it look more elegant than skinny. An eye-catching feature are his amethyst gemstone like eyes which seem to sparkle if you only catch a glimpse. His forehead crystal matches the color, a round multi-faceted purple gem. A smile fits naturally across his face and is frequently seen there, complimenting his naturally friendly and personable aura. His snow white hair seems to go every which way, seemingly the only source of consistency laying in the two long strands of hair reaching down to about midneck. He nearly always wears his flower earpieces, those being the first thing he bought in Medius and a source of some pride. He tends to wear flow-ly, robe-like clothing that matches the color of his hair, it makes pulling off magic tricks easier as well as being really fun to wear. Amon’s marking are a bit unusual. They practically glow with yellow light and are connected to each other by a thin wavy line. They reside on the both sides of his hands, feet and neck: and are designed like so.
[ ⊰⊱ ] קersonality
Though Amon lived a rather restricted life for many of his early years, in more ways than one, he is naturally more of an extrovert than an introvert. His time in Medius has brought this facet to full force, as interacting with people as a showman of sorts is how he lives. He seems to be a perpetually cheerful sort of fellow, eager to talk to people and hear their stories. However he doesn’t seem to make much of an effort to know people much more than in passing. Amon tends not to try to know much more about a person than their name and doesn’t give out much more than that himself. He can a bit overwhelming at times, but attempts to be considerate to other people. Due to his free-form lifestyle he is nearly always willing to lend a hand to help people out, no matter how trivial the task in question is.
[ ⊰⊱ ]ђ istory
Amon's parents were both aristocrats living an extravagant life on Priscus , so it was no surprise that Amon was a bit spoiled for the early part of his life. Silver spoon and all that. Plus he was the ‘new baby’, although that was something that didn’t sit too well with his older brother. That was at least, until Amon discovered his element. Normally light as an element wasn’t a bad thing, but in Amon’s case he didn’t have much control over the associated element of heat that went with it, limiting him to being a glorified lightshow: much to his regal parent’s disappointment. This was a sharp contrast to his older brother’s element of fire; an element that could be both majestic and more importantly, destructive. A fact that his older, perfectionist, and somewhat envious brother, didn’t hesitate to inform him of. The two could be called rivals, but not friends.The coddling he had received in his first years had come back to bite him; not that he’d had much choice in the matter.
Despite the surrounding negativity, Amon found his element to be great fun to play with and enjoyed learning how to use it. His parents however, frowned upon this, instructing that he should focus on things that he could still be good at that would uphold the family’s dignity. Like chess or fencing, aristocrat arts. His parlor tricks wouldn’t impress anyone. The obedient son, Amon focused on these things, finding himself to be quite good at them; due to both a large amount of time being poured into them and a certain talent for it. It also contributed to him having a higher mastery of miscellaneous Vis skills than was perhaps average for a Mirage. Another source of aggravation for his older brother, who proved his superiority by means of his superior magic. This went too far on one such occasion, leaving him with a nasty burn mark on his right hand, leaving the back of right hand covered in heavy burns. Not able to rely on his parents, Amon treated the wound as best he could himself and carried on. His parents had to have seen it several times, but they never mentioned it, so Amon didn’t either. Clearly they didn’t care and Amon was sure bringing it up would only cause more trouble for himself.
Brotherly bothers aside, Amon was not strictly told that he couldn’t practice with his Vism which was nearly as good as telling him he could. His brother’s mockeries and cruelty only spurred him efforts onward. Thus he would take any time he could squirrel away to play with his parlor tricks. His second visit with Amana was nothing remarkable; as least as far any other 18 year old getting their manifest unlocked (the most awe inspiring experience one could ever have along with the understanding of what a God-queen truly was). His manifest was something of a disappointment to his parents, not appearing as the majestic wings that was typical of his family, instead mirrors that enhanced his ability to use what was still little more than parlour tricks. Amon officially became a Vihn that day, or Mirage in human terms.
It was also the day Amon left his family. With his manifest unlocked and his title acquired, he had no compulsion, nor desire, to stay under them any longer. Amon's curiosity and desire to be free of his parent's influence drove him to find a way to Medius. Thankfully his parents kept his existence and any details about him mostly under wraps due to the fact that he was something of an embarrassment; thus he had no trouble getting past the guards at the bridge he’d used to cross. Once there, Amon found that he had a whole new world to explore and a very different one at that. The first and most notable difference to Amon was the lack of ambient Vis. Amon was aware that he would have need of money other than his Vis card so he had… ‘procured’ some things from his house and take on his trip. It wasn’t like his family needed that much tableware anyway! They were pawned off for far more than Amon expected, giving him enough cash to live on comfortably while he figured out what to do next.
While travelling in Medius Amon took advantage of the time to play with his Manifest and how he could use it. It was by accident that he discovered the offensive properties of of his manifest, though not an unhappy one, save for the innocent grass he'd scorched. In one of the first towns Amon visited he experienced something that gave him an idea on how to fix the whole ‘income’ problem. A traveling circus was in town and Amon found the whole thing to be very fun and exciting. Now he couldn’t be a circus, but a one man show was certainly within the realm of possibility. A street performer of sorts. There was a time and a place for lightshows after all. So Amon spent a bit of time thinking of ways he could perform using his magic and then tested them. Mostly by wow-ing children and such on a small scale. Then a few performances at events that were being held. A crude booth at a carnival. A show for a kid’s birthday party. He got paid for a few of these and then started performing on his own, without having to attend an event for attention. He enjoyed few things more than using his Vis, so it was the perfect job.
So he roamed about, showing off his magic and being well-received for the most part. Amon further expanded his performances by learning traditional sleight-of-hand tricks with cards and such and putting his own spin on them. His self-confidence grew, his naturally introverted side came to light. He was good at talking to people and gauging them. One might call him a natural showman. Of course Amon was not just there for fun. Making dazzling visual displays was good and all but the mark left on his pride by his brother and his parents remained. His element could be powerful even with his limits and his Manifest would allow him to prove that. Thus Amon practiced with using his Vis, both while manifested and not, in made up combat scenarios: though he had never really had a chance to use them.
Mental -Two Track Mind: Amon is rather mentally agile and has no trouble focusing or thinking about multiple things at the same time. -Upper Class: Amon is rather knowledgeable about a matter of fine subjects, ranging from chess and music to dancing and etiquette. -People Person: Amon is good at figuring out what people are thinking are getting a general grasp of who they are rather quickly.
Physical -(Ambi)dexterous: Amon is quite nimble with his fingers on account of having roaming hands as a child, playing instruments, and taking an interest in magic tricks, though the latter occurred in a somewhat later part of his life. -Good Eyes: Amon has pretty keen eyesight, able to discern fine and quick movements rather easily as well as having an above average amount of depth perception.
Magical Amon is a Mirage specializing in Light, specifically the visual aspects of it. His control over aspects other than his element is slighter better than the average Mirage but not exceptionally so. This allows him to do a variety of tricks including but not limited to... -Changing the color of objects -Causing bright lights -Deflecting light from something or blocking it, causing darkness or nigh invisibility. -Slighter better than average mirage ability to use general magic such as Telekinesis, illusion magic, etc.
Amon’s manifest state brings five round, large-platter size(1-3 ft diameter) vis constructs into existence. These appear around his head, hands, and at his feet. When manifested Amon gains the ability to levitate and fly at a rather slow late compared to most Prae. However he can ‘ride’ his Vis discs to increase his speed and give him a larger amount of overall mobility. The discs can also be used to block weak physical and magical attacks, though they break if they sustain too much damage, reducing the duration which he can stay manifested by ⅕. Furthermore they can be used as mirrors of sorts to generate, amplify, reflect, or modify, his manipulated light at a greater potency than normal. In addition this allows Amon to focus his light to the point where it create lasers out of sufficiently concentrated light.
Nao is cut from a pointedly different cloth. At the very core of her being lies an innocence. Not innocence in the sense of naivety--it is more like a simplicity of desire. A straightforwardness. This "innocence" differs from gullibility not only in its nature, but in its source. Being naive is a sign of underdevelopment--of never having been tried. Trusting the fire because you've never been burned. For Naomi, however, this guilelessness is actually something entirely more like its own kind of tact--she trusts the fire not because she's never been burned, but rather because the fire keeps her warm and feeds her. She is careful. Every chance she takes--every risk she shoulders--is carefully considered. Nao is earnest in the blithest sense of the word. She will never tell a lie that didn't need telling, and comprehends the morally gray atmosphere of the world she lives in. In that morality, however, she chooses to paint in brighter shades. Simply because she could or would lie doesn't mean she will or wants to. It's all a cautious consideration. She is straightforward simply because it's better, to her, than being spurious and false-faced. Every nugget of information that passes through her ears is considered and placed through a gauntlet of queries and conflicts, and her next action is always the one that she feels has the greatest reward for the least risk. All of this, though, is merely the method by which she resolves internal conflict, and the reason behind her willingness to trust others. The web grows in breadth and depth as her desires and dreams and moral code enter the fray. Naomi is superficial. The absolute worst trait she carries is her desire for--and willingness to believe--a pretty face. At the core of everything, she believes beauty is what separates humanity from animals. Her conceit is immutable, but as far as she or anyone else can comprehend, it really is the only conceit she carries--and she carries it willingly. For her, romance is something pivotal to her beliefs; attractiveness, cleverness, seduction and glamor are all things that she idolizes. The greater truths of the world often beget a perfection of form; a clarity of existence. Nao carries herself with confidence. Most see that at first glance. However, much of that confidence is a facade; it's been generated by years of self-modification and her own personal evolution, rather than an inborn tendency to capture the eyes of others. As a result, she is noticeably feast-or-famine when it comes to social interaction; either she rises high and knows just the right thing to say, becoming the life of the party, or she fades into the background, like a wallflower. When she's at her best, she's socially sagacious and generally gregarious; at her worst, she's quick to find a corner of the room and start looking for small animals to talk to. Morally, Nao seems incredibly simplistic, but that belies a greater understanding--as many of her traits often do. Nao, most of the time, will quickly condemn actions that serve a petty purpose or put one person's gain above another's loss. However, when the scale is widened, her morals don't so much decay as they do metamorphose; when it becomes about the safety of others, or the choice between falling into riotous chaos and maintaining a mildly distasteful status quo, Nao will begin considering. She puts a great deal of merit into the lives of others, and is fiercely protective of the rights of the greater populace. Finally, Naomi is deeply, spiritedly individualistic. She believes two major things: One, that everyone has the capacity for greatness within them, and it simply takes time and effort to wring it out. Two, that greatness in and of itself is subjective, and she would really rather you leave your opinion of her dreams to yourself. It is these things that act as cadence to the tune of her life, and many of her reactions and interjections become self-evident once these--her closest-held tenets--are revealed. Her queer, sprightly demeanor is entirely intentional, and the result of her own personal crucible, rather than a symptom of underdevelopment.
History:
Nao's story starts as all good ones do: with an empty jug of milk at 10:35 on a hazy Australian morning.
It was the seventh day in a row that her father, Pyne Chāyì-Popjay, had decided to drink an entire gallon of milk a day. Her mother, Astrid Kosskie, had finally had enough. The argument over the ridiculous amount of money that they were spending on his newfound desire for calcium escalated very quickly. The squabbling continued for almost two hours, turning from good-natured jabs to harsh accusations and something that approached a true spat. That is, until the sexual tension broke like a twig and the two of them went at it like the world's worst Heimlich maneuver.
On that day, at 2:00 in the afternoon, their first child was conceived, and they were named Oliver Shastey Chāyì-Popjay.
Oliver, to the two of them, was a problem child. It all started at the ripe old age of four, when Oliver was just learning how to string together complex sentences. Their first statement went something a little like this:
"Daddy, I hate overalls and peas!"
This phrase caused the leg of the nearby endtable to bust into splinters. It was at that point that Pyne was certain of two things;
First, that Oliver was never going to own another pair of denim overalls in their life.
Second, that Oliver took after their father.
Astrid, until her favorite chairside table had been turned into an art installation, was woefully unaware of what she had married into. She'd known that the Popjays she'd met--and been told to keep quiet about--were accomplished mages and runicographs, but it was not until that very moment that she had suspected them of something more. That suspicion turned into conviction when Pyne insisted on homeschooling their child.
At the age of 6, Oliver became a receptacle for books. Oliver had learned to read quite early--before they were even able to speak--and under Pyne's tutelage, their knowledge flourished at the expense of their freedom. The books started simply enough; learning more complex phonics, reading longer-form narratives and novels, learning about poets, cursive, and maths. Suddenly, a book on discrete magics crept into Oliver's reading schedule, and they read it.
And then they read another.
And another.
At the age of eight, Oliver had, in some ways, forgotten themselves; for fear of manifesting their synesthetism, they had learned to walk with the very quietest of footsteps, and they were all but wordless--preferring to write as a means of communication. It was at about this time, however, that their innate magics were exacerbated yet again. Seventeen days after Oliver's ninth birthday, they tripped and fell against a wall... And found themselves laying there, against the wall, as if they'd fallen on the floor. Oliver sat up, and for the first time that week, spoke a single, solitary word.
"Dad?"
Pyne came rushing into the room, with Astrid close behind him. There Oliver sat, attached to the wall as if nothing had happened at all. Fearing the worst might happen, Pyne was forced to take his child into the fold, and Astrid with them. You see, Pyne was a Chāyì, and the Chāyì are a secretive folk; he had attempted to escape that life, to become his own person, and hoped--desperately--that his child wouldn't turn out like him. He'd tried to whet Oliver's appetite with books and teach them caution and care, but realized all too late that, without proper training, Oliver would be reduced to the life of an invalid. The magics inherent to the Chāyì were beginning to take their hold, and Pyne was no tutor.
But he knew people who were.
Deep in the Australian Outback, where no one would ever think to look, there is a crater. This crater is manmade, a massive thing that, if it weren't for some incredibly clever architects and artists, would be quite easily visible from above. In this depression lay a small university, of sorts--perhaps a square mile in size. Hidden from overhead view, it is one of the better-kept secrets of the Chāyì--a sort of halfway house for its Oceanic descendants. It was there that Oliver lived and died, and where Naomi was born.
Oliver's death wasn't a sudden thing. It was a slow, laborious process. It started innocently enough. When they were merely 11, the plague of their synesthetism had died down, weakened under their now-learned control. Its effects were ever-present, but not as bad as they'd used to be. On that day, Oliver asked a question.
"Why?"
Innocent, yet petulant query. Their first questioning of authority, of status quo. Why here? Why now? Why Oliver? It was the stone that would turn the river. The burbling of a new stream. It was not a question that Oliver would ask--Oliver had always been the type to merely read until they understood, not make a demand to know.
The answer would never come. Shea Chāyì-Popjay was of a no-nonsense sort. She would, however, teach Oliver many lessons, regardless of her own intent. Shea was, moreover, the first obstacle that Naomi vowed to overcome. Strict, stringent, and jaded, the only value that she saw was the value one could provide to her, and the only thing she valued was knowledge and factoids. An academic, through and through, but not a scholar. Under Shea's tutelage, Oliver learned two languages beyond the two they already knew.
She was also Naomi's first introduction into antisophy. Runes, written in flavors Shea saw fit, would be posed on a chalkboard or splayed across a page in her own pen. It was up to Naomi to pick them apart, and understand the intention in the text.
And she would decipher them. Naomi would always find the root, eventually, the cadence to which the runes were written and the logic by which they operated. Oliver wanted answers. Naomi realized that she could create them. Oliver would coop themselves up in their room, after that, poring over ciphers and encryptions and other linguistic excursions. Naomi had an immutable desire for knowledge.
As Oliver aged, they realized that they really could no longer be a "they" anymore. Emotions became complex. Reality became stark and obvious, and it became necessary to shuffle off one identity and adopt a truer one. Year by year, Oliver's feelings on the subjects they were to research and the path they wished to choose grew quieter and quieter; it was Naomi that grew more and more opinionated as time went on. Applications became more and more important. The finer points of magical alterations and alchemy became suddenly a great deal more vital than maths and sciences. Magic became, in and of itself, Naomi's total focus.
It was at 17 that Oliver became just a name that Naomi tolerated. It didn't represent her passions, her intentions, her ideals or her beliefs. She would hear that name at house functions and meetings, from her parents and professors. She was getting so tired of it. Naturally, she gravitated towards the friends she could find--and none of them lived on the compound where she'd been living for so long. She looked to express herself in quiet, subtle ways. She found poetry, linguistics, writing. She mused. She created. She designed verses and prose in ways that spoke to her, rather than to anyone else.
She'd learned much, but the knowledges put upon her were insufficient--they didn't suit her. She was destined for more than asceticism and a life governed by her elders. There was something so much more romantic out there, and she knew she would find it. Her father left his family for a reason; Naomi deserved to have a reason of her own.
The very first act that Naomi performed as an "adult" of her own definition was one of theft. She plucked the keys off of a night guard's hook and waltzed straight out the front gate, into the wilds beyond.
The seventeen year old Naomi managed to camp, alone, for 3 days. The first was easy; she hunted for food, made a little shelter, and relaxed under the stars--she was still close enough to the outpost that her cell phone had an internet connection, and the fresh air was wonderful.
Her phone died halfway through the second day. It was sweltering, and she needed a shower. She passed out under a rock, with barely enough water to make it through the night.
She awoke to her first brush with danger--true danger--in her blessedly short life. A small pack of dingoes had caught her scent, and descended upon the rock that she'd been sleeping under. She was tired. And weak. And so, so hungry. In the pitch of the night, she could practically see their musky smell.
Then, stepping out from under the rock, she realized that it wasn't night at all as the raging heat of the sun beat down on her back.
Naomi had gone blind. Yet--she could still see. Such strange colors, fulminating in the landscape, on a background of purest black. One of the wild dogs reared up and leapt for her, letting out a mighty bark--and cleanly dashed itself on the rock behind her. Then another, and then another. Two dingoes reared around, frantically looking for Naomi, who hadn't moved an inch.
It was at this moment that Naomi had, inadvertently, learned the fullest extent of the magical potential that she carried. When they found her the next day, Nao sat underneath the rock, pupils as white as the roaring sun, with burns, cuts, and blisters all over her hands--likely from clumsily skinning and cooking the dingo carcass that lay an arm's breadth away from her, a large chunk missing from its hind leg and a messy mass of peeled and gouged skin scattered around it.
'They,' as it were, were a couple of nice folk from a place called Alice Springs. The first, a dusky-hued, slight woman in her early 40s, and the second, a man that appeared to be masquerading as half of a bird. The two of them dusted Naomi off, fed her, and clothed her. People, of course, came looking.
Naomi decided to hide. The two helped, in more ways than one. The woman--Shaska Roucrouge--proved to be quite the actor. It helped, of course, that a large bird-person--Kapsey Atat--proved quite intimidating with a machete. Even accomplished mages like the Chāyì know better than to bother with large birds in their own home.
Kapsey proved to be an interesting person; a licentia hailing from Portugal who moved to escape the prejudices of the greater public. His morals were simple, but they were salient. He became someone that Naomi desired to mold herself after. He was like a superhero, to her--a great deal more like a father than her father ever was. Pyne was never around enough--he felt more like an uncle than a father.
Naomi, eventually, decided to start living in Alice Springs. She started out painfully, painfully small, living in the attic of that very same odd couple. She used her knack for linguistics to learn more applicable talents--namely, coding and IT. Her aggressive and depthy education saw to it that hiring was never an issue. It would be in that attic that she would spend six months of her life, before--finally--putting together enough money to find an apartment of her own.
At the age of 18, Nao realized that she needed to make a change. A severe, personal change.
She needed to mold herself into the person she knew she was.
Her magical studies never truly stopped, not even after she lost the vast library that the Chāyì painstakingly maintained. She began to research by doing. She began taking pills to alter her appearance--and two weeks in, she finished work on the first hand of Hecatoncheir, Diddles.
It was the first step on a long, long road of self-discovery and evolution.
Time passed. Work came and went. Surgeries came and went. Naomi, however, arrived. Slowly, bit by bit, she molded herself into a person--a being--that she could be happy with. A someone that took after people, not the expectations that were foisted upon her. She created things. Another 99 hands. Aldous and George. All sorts of wonderful and interesting items, all in the effort to properly explore who Naomi truly was.
Then, of course, she was found. No freedom truly lasts forever. The Chāyì brought her back into the fold, though the person they brought back was almost unrecognizable from the runaway that had stood there only 8 years prior. Even as they dragged her to meetings between the houses, her defiance of her birthright was palpable--it was apparent to everyone who talked to her.
Some were against who she had become, but a fair few were sympathetic to her cause. It was these few--Pyne counted among them. At 27, she--and a few others--smuggled themselves away from the Chāyì outpost, scattering themselves to the furthest reaches of the globe.
In the effort of learning more about the cultures that her adopted family were once a part of, Nao's pilgrimage found its destination in a city called Ominar.
It was there that, for the last time, she recreated herself from the ground up--in a way a great deal more extreme than anything before it.
Ominar is where Naomi rewrote herself as the protagonist of her own story, rather than the supporting character of everyone else's. It is the place where Oliver ceased to exist, and where Naomi, for the very first time, had come into her own.
Belongings:
Aldous and George: These twin constructs, when active, are linked directly to Nao's ostium, acting as a second pair of hands. However, what makes these massive hands unique is not their method of movement and motion, but rather their ability to move their digits along the rings that they have been fashioned on. It is noteworthy that, unless Naomi concentrates on their movements specifically, both Aldous and George will follow the movements of the hands they represent, maintaining a palm-like configuration. When Naomi ceases moving one of her hands entirely, she is capable of utilizing Aldous or George to their fullest extent, moving digits as she pleases to suit her needs. Aldous is the right, George is the left.
The Antisophist's Almanac: Ever the errant scion of the Chāyì, Naomi--nor any other traveling Chāyì descendant--would never be caught dead without the Antisophist's Almanac. This tome is, in and of itself, nonmagical. However, it details the ins and outs of the runic language, allowing--with time and a little bit of effort--most antisophists to counter-work almost any rune or ward. Comprehensive notes on every runic swish, sway, and structure that the Chāyì house has come across are detailed within. Moreover, this book often comes in a variety of different shapes and forms, usually tailored to the user's preferences. Nao's is white and leather- bound, with her name penned in her own script across the front. It is the fourth copy she has ever owned, and unlike the other three, it is in sterling condition and has remained so. Naomi's personal notes cover each and every page like a calligraphic mask. These notes come in at least four different colors; usually whatever color pen she had on hand at the time.
Hecatoncheir: Unlike most of the Chāyì, Naomi saw it fit to expand her knowledge of antisophy beyond just countermagic. Hecatoncheir is the result of this exploration, powered by her application of fascillomagy. To each and every one of these tiny, hexagonal drones, there is a connection point for Nao to reach out and link up with them. However, each of these connection points take up progressively larger and larger amounts of her cognitive function, to the point that if she were to use all of them at once, she would be completely unable to move save for her eyes. Named for the hundred-handed titans of myth, these mites all have one thing in common: each and every one of them have a portion of a rune inscribed upon their face. Given time and concentration, Nao is capable of quickly stringing together runes of many shapes and configurations, so long as there are no more than four endpoints for the rune; given the modular nature of Hecatoncheir, Nao was forced to forgo making more than a few endpoint drones in favor of offering more points of continuation on individual faces. Moreover, Hecatoncheir can act as a shield, as the drones are quite solidly built and any vis connections created force them into alignment. Upon the backsides of each of the "hands," there is a single, solid, bright dot of varying color: these are used so Naomi can create runes while pointing them away from herself.
Nao's favorite hand is named Diddles. It is an endpoint, and the only one with a white dot on the back; she uses it to start every rune.
A Wallet: Small, white, and clasps with two buttons. Fits nicely in her dress pockets. Also, it has a self-immolation mechanism. The Popjays, even among their peers, are really quite protective of their identities. Opening the wallet too quickly will cause the flint inlay in the clasp to spark, which will quickly cause the oil on inside of the wallet to catch aflame and burn the whole thing. The concave end of the clasp leads directly into the inner lining of the wallet, which is soaked in said oil. Her ID picture is awful. The face looks like her, except generally worse--and it lacks her trademark ears. It also incorrectly lists her height as 5'11'', and her hair color as "Black."
Gug: Her smartphone. The finger smudges are almost unbearable, but Nao's clothes are made out of fabric that just doesn't catch on the screen at all. However, she also hardly notices unless there's gunk on the screen, like soy sauce. (She has, on perhaps too many occasions, soaked Gug in rice and ended up cooking with it later.) Filled to the brim with texts from her family that she's ignored or half-heartedly responded to, numbers for restaurants, and, perhaps most importantly, three different completely terrible mobile games that she can't bring herself to delete or pay money for. Also, a disturbing amount of pirated music. The AI assistant refers to her as "The Chicken Nuggest." The ringtone is Saint Motel's "For Elise."
Capabilities:
Mental: Naomi is, in the strictest terms, very intelligent. She carries an innate ability to adapt, comprehend, and intuit, and much of that applies to any further mental capabilities that she carries. To that end, her willpower is really quite something to behold; while it isn't limitless, the amount of suffering she's able to put herself through is frightening, especially for someone of her stature. Her training in catalysmy is a major part of her mental resilience. Pattern recognition and problem solving are well above par, compared to most folk. Scholarly education; while she has no explicit degrees, her education level is on par with most post-graduates, specifically in the field of linguistics. Fluent in English, Mandarin Chinese, and Cantonese. Conversational in Russian, Korean, Spanish, and Portuguese. Comprehends the logic and syntax structures of most major Medius languages, and as such can intuit a lot of meaning languages she doesn't know. Familiar with most ciphers, and fairly capable of decrypting messages given time and effort. Prone to bouts of insomnia--as a result, she is somewhat chemically dependent on sleeping pills. Displays dysphoric tendencies, and frets about her appearance to the point of near-narcissism; lacks most other traits of narcissistic personality disorder, however. Capable of tolerating extremely high levels of discomfort. Highly functional, even without the use of some of her major senses. Responds well to stress and stressful situations, but often becomes indecisive in a pinch. Creatively inclined. Mathematically disinclined, but versed to the point of higher calculus concepts. Physical: Physically weak. Small stature, extremely light--easily to unbalance. Capable of contorting herself into spaces as small as 2 cubic feet. Highly dexterous, capable of doing two completely independent movements with both hands. Left hand dominant; hefts most objects with her right hand, however. Acute sense of hearing. Can hear sounds outside of the human auditory range. Highly effective sense of smell. Fairly sensitive, especially at her joints; strikes to nerve clusters such as the funny bone are especially painful, likely due to drastic body modification putting a stress on her bones and muscles. Lacks human feet; must wear shoes that support her vulpine ankles, as a result. Low pain threshold, high pain tolerance. Slightly nearsighted, but not to the point of needing any sort of corrective lenses. High degree of physical coordination.
Magical/Technological:
Catalysmy (Imprinted): Catalysmy is not to be confused with Cataclysmy, the much more exciting cousin that everyone wishes existed. Catalysmy--the art of antimagic using the body and the inner/outer ostium as a catalyst--is a discipline almost entirely unique to Precursors. Many races have attempted to replicate it, and all of them have succeeded in some regard, but Precursor catalysmy--practiced primarily by the Chāyì--is on a level all its own, thanks to the clever usage of their velo. The velo is something akin to a shield around a second set of ostium, and in being so, it is also uniquely capable of acting as a valve. The very essence of catalysmy is the capture of manifested vis in the outer ostium; this flytrap-like maneuver allows the mage--often through the use of a somatic component such as tai chi--to push the vis piece by piece through their inner ostium, pushing it around their anima and out through another hole that they have formed in their velo. This manipulation of velo has one unintended effect, however--it also renders them open to another strike, and at some point, enough magical energy will simply overload the user and levy the weight of all of the magics upon them at once. Masters of catalysmy are to be feared, however. The human facsimile of catalysmy is seen in the art of the Shaolin monk, who stands capable of withstanding immense pain and have some degree of simple antimagic. True catalysmists, however, are known to be able to counterattack with all of the vis that has been expended upon them, and, in a perhaps more fearsome manner, metamorphose to adopt the elemental aspects of the world around them and become--temporarily--a vessel for the elements.
Nao's understanding of catalysmy is twofold: first, she carries a great potential for antimagic. Unless she stands up against someone who greatly exceeds her own capacity for vis control, the functionality of vis-based attacks are practically useless, unless there happens to be quite a lot of them. Moreover, catching her blindsided is another simple method of bypassing her catalysmic barrier. Her second capacity is a vestige of true mastery, though she is not, herself, a master: she is capable, when properly focused, of counterattacking using only small amounts of her own vis. The problem lies in that she must be standing perfectly still in order to use this ability, and anything that breaks her concentration will render her unable to redirect the attack. As this skill develops, however, she is like to become a great deal more effective at redirection.
Complex Antisophy (Imprint Lexicon): Antisophy is more an art than a science. At its very core, this discipline is akin to learning how to pick a lock. Antisophy, or the countermagic of runes and the runic language, is a style of magic entirely unique to the Chāyì purely by the nature by which it must occur. Antisophy is characterized by the articulate imprint of a series of partial runes upon the anima, something like taking every possible line present in the alphabet and etching it into your eyelids. The runic language has two necessary components: purity of form, and purity of purpose. Form, of course, is present in the runes themselves. While runes lack a true lingua franca, there are only so many methods of completing a rune; this allows for the presence of somatic antisophy, or combat antisophy--a skill that cannot be taught to non-Precursors. There are two target goals of antisophists: to either ruin a rune by destroying purity of form, or overpowering the enemy's vis and essentially hijacking a rune by superseding the original creator's intent. Many of the Chāyì spend decades upon centuries perfecting this skill, and there is no such thing as a true mastery of antisophy, given the conceptual nature of runes. However, a collection of understood runes can be amassed, and meanings can be applied to new runes--that is the basis for the magic of antisophism. The capacity for instinctual magic, moreover, is pivotal. Thus, the Chāyì pioneered the concept of the Lexicon, the process of imprinting inscriptions rather than true magics. Popjay antisophism, for instance, is heavily based in the art of combat antisophy, and as a result has a bias towards popular runicographies, rather than focusing on shorthands. The rest of these antisophistic half-runes are inscribed in a massive codex known as the Antisophist's Almanac which Nao has in her possession--as do all Chāyì. On a personal level, Nao has a great deal of experience with antisophy, and uses somatic antisophy in a primarily anti-combat manner. Often, she chooses to stop fights before they even begin, ruining runes or overpowering runecrafters, in the process creating harmless or incapacitative runes. Moreover, Nao has a fairly complex understanding of the creation of runes, and--in tandem with fascillomagy--often creates tiny constructs with parts of runes written on each, mixing and matching them to complete full runes with a variety of different effects. These "recreated" runes are ones that she has personally memorized, using the Antisophist's Almanac as a lexicon of concepts.
Runicography (Learned): This is more of a runoff trait from having learned antisophy. A great deal of the runic language that Naomi is intimate with focuses on non-aggressive applications; very little of her understanding extends into the more creative explorations of runes, save for in the case of antisophic alterations. The presence of this capability in her magical knowledges is entirely for the sake of posterity, and is best described by referring to Complex Antisophy. When designing runes, Nao prefers to use a shorthand she refers to as "singlestroke." Using Hecatoncheir, she fashions runes that can be performed using only one press of a pen. Many of these runes take inspiration from traditional Chinese, the first language she learned to antisophize. This makes it particularly difficult to antisophize, because not only is it nearly impossible to break Hecatoncheir's purity of form--thanks to the hivelike nature of the construct--it is a shorthand, meaning that her opponent would have to be a precursor that could apply new meaning to her shorthand on the fly, or worse yet, someone who has made themselves intimately familiar with her runicographic notes.
Broken Synesthetism (Complex Imprint): Synesthetism is easily the most esoteric of the three major imprinted magics that the Chāyì family passes on--and the most pointedly dangerous. Synesthetism is the act of physically materializing the senses, which comes in a variety of manifestations. For instance, Nao is capable of manifesting her sense of hearing--which causes the sound waves that pass through her ears to flex and aberrate the world around her. This causes a ripple effect with every sound that's created in her vicinity, something like dropping a pebble in a silent pond. This, however, is where the similarities with normal Chāyì descendants end. Synesthetism, when imprinted, is so complex that it has never--not once--arrived in a child in its complete form. As a result, a part of the journey into adulthood for the Chāyì is properly grasping synesthetism and specializing in a sense. This sense, usually, is the one that first manifests during their early years--and many Chāyì learn how to utilize sensory manifestation in a variety of scenarios. For Nao, however, her synesthetism manifested in not one, but three ways. Sight, sound, and balance. Her early years were, in fact, a catastrophic disaster. As she developed and learned how to complete her personal imprint for synesthetism, an entirely new problem arrived: her imprint had actually become too complex to properly utilize. As a result, whenever Nao accesses synesthetism, she loses the sense that she manifests. It is important to note, though, that because of the complexity of this imprint and its effect on her, Nao is, in fact, unable to use the Sight unless she gives up her sense of sight. It is easy to see when Naomi uses her Sight, because her synesthetistic reactions are all completely visual: when she gives up her ability to see, her sclera dye a deep navy hue, whereas her irises and pupils become uniformly white. Before going further, it is important to explain how synesthetism is imposed upon an opponent or another living target. First, the target must be "tagged" with some of the synesthetist's vis--that is, the synesthetist must get their ostium in range of their enemy and suffuse vis in their direction, like fungal spores. As such, synesthetism is seen as a complement to close-range combat, and many synesthetists explore martial arts as a supplement to their magical skills. The first of the three is sight. When Naomi tags another person and imposes synesthetistic sight upon them, two things occur: she first blinds herself, and then, one by one, all of the target's senses slowly become visual stimuli. It begins innocently enough; they start seeing sounds as they ripple away from their sources. Then, scents guide them towards their origin. After about 5 minutes, however, their vision occludes and becomes more and more esoteric--in tandem with Naomi's. The only boon she has over her target is that she removes her vision in the first place--meaning that, for the first while, she has an immense advantage over a confused opponent. Once the sense of taste and touch begin to be visualized, however, the visual input becomes so cloudy and murky that even Naomi ceases to be able to discern relative location; it is usually at this point that she must halt the visual manifestations. Even when using the Sight without a target, Naomi's vision will still slowly obfuscate. However, this obfuscation is much slower, as she has to use less vis to maintain her concentration and keep the visual noise in check. Second, there is sound. The sound manifestation, for Naomi, is actually something more like a locus. When manifested, sound will begin physically altering the landscape and the surfaces of inanimate objects, rendering as they enter the vicinity of Naomi's manifestation--within 7 feet of her, in this case. As Naomi goes deaf when using this facet of synesthetism, her situational awareness usually comes from sensing these tremors as they pass over her or her clothes. When imposed on an opponent, these sound waves begin aberrating their physical form, to greater and greater degrees depending on the loudness of the sound and the amount of vis Naomi is expending. These tremors make bones particularly weak--as jagged structures are-- and often make it easier to severely cripple opponents. The visual cue for this version of synesthetism is, in fact, her ears; they clamp firmly down against her head, completely cupping themselves from all noise. Her original ears, too, would fold in on themselves, back when she had them. Finally, there is balance. When active, Naomi's sense of balance isn't so much gone as it is muted--making it difficult for her to stand upright, and anything faster than a slow stroll is vertigo-inducing. However, when active, she becomes capable of physically changing the pull of gravity on her person--allowing her to effectively attach herself to walls and ceilings. Without a sense of balance, moreover, it affects her exactly as much as being on the ground. Thus, she is capable of slowly but steadily ascending most any surface, given that she can keep her vertigo in check. When imposed on an opponent, their sense of balance is placed in lockstep with Naomi's movements. If she were to move onto a wall, their sense of balance would act as if they were laying horizontal. She often uses this skill in tandem with Aldous and George, pushing herself around in order to induce vertigo in her opponent. This, however, often causes her to vomit in the process. Because her sense of balance is muted, even light jostling will wreak havoc on her stomach. It is easy to tell when she loses her sense of balance, because all of the muscles in her arms go slack. This is due to her added reliance on fascillomagy during this sensory manifestation, but the actual physical manifestation--a whitening of the tongue and throat--are difficult to see unless she's talking. It is important to note that while Naomi can use these aspects of synesthetism in tandem, she will also compound the sensory loss associated with each, and draw on more vis in the process. As a result, she very rarely uses more than one, and has never used three at once.
Autotomic Fascillomagy (Learned): Many mages are versed in the usage of construct control and creation, but few are so passionate about the subject as Nao. Fascillomagy, or the magic of controlling constructs directly, is a generally indelicate art, but with Nao behind the wheel, it is something like a dance. Loosely related to technomancy, fascillomagy specifically deals with constructs that have been fashioned by the user and have an intended purpose that aligns with fascillomagy's uses. Nao's application of the magic, while unconventional, is still well within the means of the school's confines. It is also, moreover, the only magic that she could prospectively imprint at this current juncture. Through ruthless tenacity and a great deal of research, her practiced skills with fascillomagy are adjacent to mastery--she uses constructed limbs as if they were her own. This is best exemplified with her control of Hecatoncheir, which requires an immense number of specific and dexterous movements to control more than ten at once. The reason for Nao's mastery, however, is actually partially due to her warped synesthetism; she is uniquely capable of functioning while some of her body's major senses are shut off, and, as a result, her fascillomagy is amplified manyfold when she is perfectly unmoving. To control all 100 hands of Hecatoncheir, for instance, she must be sitting completely still--not standing, because she must also mute her sense of balance--otherwise, she'll have to focus too hard on standing up and every single hand of Hecatoncheir will drop like flies. This is where the "autotomy" comes in; she cuts off some of her ability to move and articulate in order to gain more control. In fact, were literal autotomy to occur, Nao would likely be able to have a greater degree of control over her constructs at all times. Her tail and ears, moreover, count as moving parts that she must "shut off" to gain more control, and--though Naomi might never admit it--part of the reason she has them may be to train herself to think with more limbs at once.
She prefers the romantic explanation.
The Search-Engine Learnings of the Modern Scholar: Much of Nao's technological knowledge is, in fact, a building block for her further understandings of most of her fields of interest. Naomi is well-versed in the much-lauded Google-fu, and is fairly capable at just about any task she sets her mind to, given time and access to a research tool. While, of course, Naomi is no script kiddie, she is faintly versed in a variety of coding languages to the point of being able to read and parse most of the code she sees--being able to pick out important syntax and the makings of recursive loops, for instance. From a purely technological perspective, Naomi is often as capable as the information she's been given. A perfect instance of this is her ley-constructs, Aldous and George. They were both fashioned by Naomi, but significant time and research--taking place over the course of seven months--were required to properly string together and piece together the knowledge required to fashion the twin hands, using the Chāyì's vast library of knowledge on vis crystals and fascillomagic anatomy, as well as advanced magical metalworking techniques and even things as mechanical as hydraulics.
In short: if there is a technical document on how to build a deck and Nao is in need of a deck, she will make that deck.
Preferred Name: Eve. Gender: Female Age: Wouldn't you like to know. She would too. Apparent Age: Around 25-ish Sexuality/Preference: Bisexual Pyrophilic Race: Eximus Licentia Sub-race: N/A
Personality: While she is largely modest when it comes to a lot of things, Eve can be incredibly cocky in terms of speed, and rightfully so given her abilities. Eve is a energetic yet relaxed girl, oftentimes struggling to find out her true potential but being content with never finding it so long as she's having fun. She. Eve is also unusually hyper for a large amount of time, and caffeine usually triggers her to calm down in a short amount of time, with pure caffeine calming her down in mere seconds. Eve thinks very quick on her feet, and while her ideas are usually bold and brash (and they often cause a lot of self-harm), in her opinion they're incredibly effective.
History:
"..."
"Hey. Wake up."
"... nngh... w-what...?"
"Wake up. You're in my campsite."
"Wha- OH OH OH I'M SORRY I DIDN'T KNOW TH-OW! Why does my head hurt...?"
"You see that cracked boulder over there? You flew into it."
"Come again?"
"You slammed your head into that boulder and you cracked it. I'm astonished that you didn't break your skull wide open."
"Did... did you put a bandage around my head?"
"Yeah."
"Thank you... mister...?"
"Aquilus, you?"
"I'm... I'm..."
"... can you even remember?"
"SHHH, I'M TRYING!"
"... ... ..."
"... I don't remember."
"Well you might not have broken your skull, but you definitely broke something in there."
"Did... did I have anything that had my name on it?"
"I checked the bag you had on you when you crashed. You had a book in there that said 'Property of Evelyn Pyrothol'."
"... that sounds long and annoying to say."
"Agreed. Eve sounds better, personally."
"... what... what happened to me?"
"Judging from what your journal had, you came to these parts to reconnect with yourself. I guess this is a way you can do that now."
"Not funny."
"Yeah, true. I can say from your journal that you have some powers related to a phoenix, so take with that what you will."
"I guess I'll have to find out alone then."
"If that's the path you're willing to take. I'd head down to the city over there first, in case you needed anything to help you."
"Okay... thank you Mr. Aquilus."
"Please. Call me Syphax. Now get going. If you see me on the road ever, don't hesitate to say hi."
"I won't!"
Belongings
- Journal : The only thing that sheds any light on her past that she can remember. A considerable amount of the pages have been burned. - A Nokia Phone : It's used for calling and nothing else. Eve likes to talk to you more or less in person. - A bag filled with general goods. Clothes, rations, pencils, stuff like that.
Capabilities
Physical
- Can achieve flight at breakneck speeds. - Clawed hands on the end of her wings. - Talons as feet. - Incredibly flexible and agile. - Fire-Resistant.
Mental
- Slightly resistant to telepathic abilities due to her hyperactive mind. - Prone to telepathic interference after a certain speed. - Predatory instincts. - Pyrophilic, and will be attracted towards open flames. - Can be difficult to understand due to how her thought process works.
Magical
Phoenix Abilities Eve's abilities are based off of a phoenix, the legendary bird of flames that inspired half of her normal form. Her abilities stretch pretty exclusively to pyrokinesis and very limited ash manipulation, but her abilities are definitely a force to be reckoned with. That being said, she oftentimes forgets about her pyrokinesis aside from her ability to light her body on fire by igniting her feathers, often remembering her abilities only when she's in a bind or if she is reminded of her abilities.
Unmatched Speed Eve is alarmingly fast in the air for reasons that are unknown, not even by her. The fastest she remembers flying at was that of a speed of a cargo jet, if not barely slower and at a downward angle. Her flight speed can be increased by drafting and various other ways of becoming more aerodynamic and achieving more speed. It oftentimes results in her main form of attack being a kamikaze dive into a target at bone breaking speeds, although she's often fine.
Damage Reduction and Terrain Instinct After achieving a speed of roughly fifty miles an hour in flight, Eve's body will become coated in some form of energy. This energy acts as a shield and becomes more reinforced the faster that Eve flies, up to a maximum of around 95% damage reduction upon impact of something. All hits acquired to Eve in this state will cause Eve to slow down, weakening the shield and lowering the amount of speed she can achieve. Similarly, Eve's mind achieves a semi-autonomous state, where her flight patterns and dodging ability contort and shift to accommodate to the terrain she is faced with, but not any attacks. It's difficult to understand and easily disrupted, but it's incredibly convenient.
I am fully willing to make any edits that I have to.
Please judge accordingly. I'm willing to elaborate on things if I have to.
@CorrosiveCherry Acceptemundo. Celaira and Tuuj have already accepted you as well so you're all set. Welcome to MA proper! We hope you stay long and enjoy your stay~~
@Gardevoiran your CS mostly appears fine. There might be a few aspects that need to be expanded upon I think. However, that will have to wait because it is late and I am tired (plus work tomorrow). Might be a bit slow going on that. Hopefully not though!
~"Oh? Aha.. Um, don’t mind me, I’m nobody in particular."~
Name: Katarina Gwendolyn Fielding Nicknames: Infrequently, Kat or Gwen Gender: Female Sexuality: Asexual Age: 24 Apparent Age: ^ Race: Human / Self-Tweaked Genetic Code Lineage/Nationality: American with British and Russian heritage… mostly in the cultural sense now.
Appearance:
Personality: ~"Ah? Yes, of course it’s dyed.. Aheh, heh.."~ Katarina is a little bit ashamed of the various frivolous cosmetic tweaks she’s made to herself. Here she is with the ability to probably cure every disease known to mankind, and potentially even death, and here she is giving herself ‘natural’ red hair. Yet nonetheless can’t bring herself to reverse the tweaks. There’s the excuse that it would be just as much a waste of time to do so as when she originally tweaked herself, but it’s still an excuse. The changes she made to herself as a teenager she still likes, even if she feels like it’s a bit of a guilty pleasure.
~"Uh, sorry, it’s not you, it’s me. I’m kinda burned out with relationships."~ Katarina did what every teenager with the ability to run simulations of their favorite porn material would do, and absolutely fucking wrecked herself. She learned the valuable lesson of “if you’re starting to get jaded after ten years of sim-time-fucking, do NOT try just amping up all the sensations”. If not for the inviolability of the mechanical parts of her brain network and her backups, she probably would have turned herself into braindead husk. In the aftermath, she tries to keep her uses of Sim-Time a little more restrained (and not the kinky type, already sim’d that). She finds most physical allure rather pointless. She’s already experienced sensation to the limit of literally destroying her mind, and most things shy of that don’t even phase her, whether pleasurable or painful.
~"I’m not racist, but…."~ Katarina is definitely a racist butt. No if and or but statements about it. Sure, there are some nice Prae and Licentia, Katarina will clarify, but some of them are literally the stuff of nightmares. Katarina finds it VERY hard to believe that some of the Licentia forms look EXACTLY like horribly creatures from human mythology out of sheer coincidence. She also finds the nature of their reproduction downright scary (there’s a reason she’s not in the zoology part of biology). Now that she’s mostly inured herself to disease, injury, and maybe even aging, getting spooked in the night by a Licentia feels to her like a more probable cause of death simply by removing other options. Prae have their own whole host of alien powers and abilities to be scared of. But perhaps more than that, the Prae in many ways appear like idealized humans, and Katarina sometimes fears that her path of optimizing humanity would simply lead to the recreation of a being something like them. There’s more than a small hint of jealousy coloring her view of them.
History: What does one do when one is simply trying to get your damn code to compile, when you suddenly discover you have the primary power of every isekai character ever, of learning shit retardedly fast (alright, for some it’s secondary to their power of being completely unlikable yet amassing massive harems). When you expected to become a hopefully become a doctor and maybe save a few hundred lives, and instead are bestowed with the power to potentially alter the evolution of the human race and make them immune or at least resistant to aging.
Katarina was just taking some dual credit biology classes, aiming to get good grades for entry into a nice college with an aim for pre-med, when she discovered the Omni-Informational Interface by accident, as well as her own magical talents. What was the point in going to college when she could hack into their systems and download the sum of their knowledge in mere days? Katarina very shortly dropped out of high school upon discovering this ability, to focus on exploring its full potential.
Some of these experiments were more self-indulgent than others, such as her own personal cosmetic tweaks, but all in all, Katarina had set herself on the goal of life extension and optimization for humanity. She sought to manipulate the genetic code to cure the root cause of diseases and undesirable traits such as hemophilia, and rocket forward human evolution.
And then Ominar came under the rule of the Prae, and that completely rewrote Katarina’s priority list. She figured she’d have an eternity to fix humanities’ ills and advance their cause, as long as the Prae didn’t take over humanity first. Determined to expose whatever scheme the Prae are up to, Katarina has been seeking whatever intelligence she can gather. She even considered teaming up with the nightmarish Licentia to defeat the Prae, for an individual monster is not as threatening to humanity as a whole as an organized threat. At least in Katarina’s mind. And Katarina’s mind is perhaps not the most wise of a judge, as she is one developing biological weapons to target the Prae “just in case”.
Belongings/Equipment: Cell Phone, purse, some lose cash, Katarina doesn’t travel very heavy.
Capabilities
Mental Katarina is more or less immune to the overwhelming effects of sensation, such as pain, except when it reaches such a point where it would effectively kill her anyway. And even then, her networked computers will still maintain a semblance of self. Katarina was always a fair shot with biology, focused on pre-med studies to become a doctor. She also was decent at writing up her own sims for schoolwork. She has far, far surpassed those studies since the discovery of her magical talent.
Physical Katarina is exceptionally healthy. With the ability to edit her gut bacteria and her immune system on the fly, she hasn’t been sick in years. Combined with tweaking to her genetic code both in its information and what parts are active, she’s not quite sure if she has developed clinical immortality. Katarina’s in great shape for a human. Not particularly superhuman though. She hasn’t made any breakthroughs to give herself obvious superpowers, finding that the human body is pretty great at what it does for the resources it has to work with. Sure, she has found ways to make little improvements here and there, or small optimizations to focus on what she prefers, but she’s not leaping over any tallest buildings in single bounds. While she is technically superhuman, she is not so to such a degree that the average person fed a diet of action hero movies would believe is superhuman. She’s just a little bit past the edge of normal human capability. Katarina is pretty sure she could completely sweep past that edge completely, if she was willing to make sacrifices in some areas instead of being well rounded, or if she was willing to make Vis or Technological components a more direct part of her physiology. Such measures as adopting parts of Liscentia biology into her own, or using advanced synthesized compounds. But she’s worried about the weaknesses that would introduce. And the possibility of horrible death if she slips up, however unlikely. For now, Katarina’s taking a relatively conservative approach.
Magical Omni-Informational Interface (Innate): Katarina’s breakthroughpower is to create informational interfaces where none existed before. Very fast and secure ones that don't care about language barriers or distance or even sentience. This includes interfacing computers into her mental capacity, as well as more relatively mundane mind networking with other sentient beings. Depending on the “bandwidth” of the connection made, this can range from telepathy, to making both beings one amalgamate mind, with all the resources, insight, and sensory input of both. This is how Katarina performs her Mind-Jacking and Sim-Time abilities.
Sim-Time (Learned, Application of OII): Thanks to it not caring about distance, Katarina can mount this power through her nervous system making her own nervous system insanely fast and improving her brain's processing power massively. She could easily react and dodge bullets, if her body was capable of doing so. It is not, though she can frequently dodge the arm raising the gun to fire the bullets. Similarly, using this power on computers has made insanely fast servers that produce far less heat, replacing electricity with vis. While doing so can give Katarina access to their computational power, frequently to run even further past the clock speed of ordinary humans with simulations, it also introduces Katarina's own errors to the computers. Mental attacks can work on machines that are part of Katarina's network. She can also cast on other people to enhance their own speed.
Mind-Jacking (Learned, Application of OII): Katarina has a number of tricks for messing with people’s heads. One of them is to record an image of their brain, tweak a few things, and then re-upload the new image of their brain. Allowing her to effectively “skip” that time from their perspective, say, making a security guard who’s being handed your identification believe he’s handing you back your identification after having verified it. She can also create “augmented” reality for people, while inducing a dreamlike state, to fool them into thinking that ‘it’s all a dream, that purple tiger moonwalking across the ceiling couldn’t possibly be real’. One of her few tricks that occasionally works without opening herself up too much is to create a bypass in the targets thoughts, skipping over their inhibitions and reason centers to get them to perform an act without thinking (though she has to cause the thought in the first place through real stimuli). In order to use this ability she has to create a psychic connection, that can be somewhat small. But generally, the more she is willing to make herself vulnerable by widening the connection, the more she can mess with someone else.
Optimal Physical Interface (Phone): Mostly a cocky name for a physical boost type ability, this is basically a Systemic Method enhanced “I am stronger and faster and tougher” with extreme efficiency. Stresses on the body are redirected to locations where that stress will be working with her motion rather than against. While this may not be the most efficient physical boost, Katarina’s extensive testing and effort is reasonably certain that it’s at least a local maximum in efficiency for this methodology. In order to activate this, Katarina uses Sim-Time on her phone to accelerate it's processing power and has it manage this spell, being too complicated for even Katarina's enhanced nervous system.
Medical Interface (Learned): A less cocky name for the exact same thing as physical interface only with medical treatment. The direct manipulation of the body at a cellular and even lower level for repair or modification. Given that this relates to Biology, which is something Katarina was already learning, she decided to store this information on her own nervous system. What may be overstepping her bounds is that Katarina is currently attempting to use this to develop a disease that specifically targets Prae. Her high concept is currently something that targets the higher concentrations of Vis that is present in the Prae homeworld.
Glazed Eyes (Phone): Katarina has also learned a fairly effective "don't notice me" aura. This is her preferred defensive measure. There’s no shield like not being a target. It's fairly subtle, so it's not going to let her sneak in anywhere she's obviously out of place, but if she's dressed to fit in, it usually makes her easily missable. While she has far more potent mental manipulations through Mind Jacking, those also open up her own defenses and is too invasive for her tastes, so she prefers this more standard spell. This spell is stored on her phone even though it's doesn't really need the phone's enhanced processing power, she just felt a bit stuffed.
The Systemic Method (Hybrid): Otherwise known as Formulaic magic, this magical methodology involves the creation of magical constructs which exploit and interact with physics. While most spells could be cast without it, most that do not use this form of magic tend to expend more energy to do less, whereas Systemic magic greatly expands both the possibilities and the subtle nuances of one's spellwork. It is a magic developed by Licentia and it is one of the few things they have shared with humanity, though that was oh so long ago by human standards. Katarina is alright at it, but compensates with her extreme mental speed and processing power while using Sim-Time. Despite her lack of genius she has a lot more "time" to think through things and cast her spell, and her phone part of her brain is very optimized for the calculations her brain brain isn't quite as good at. Her phone also stores some physics knowledge in the last vestiges of its available space to help out.
Phantom Casting (Still not actually learned): Katarina could pseudo-cast multiple spells at the same time due to her vast mental processing power at parallel tasks. However, just before committing the vis to make them happen, she could renege. This would allow her to say, phantom cast a powerful boost on each bullet she is firing from a gun, or each pellet from a mortar. But then only commit to casting on the ones that are about to hit, as judged by her absurd reaction time. We say “could” because she hasn’t actually conceived of or learned this yet, not as focused on martial applications with her powers yet as Cali would be.
Technological A nicely soupped up phone. Added memory.
Whereas many Prae are lithe and delicate looking, Vi has a noticeably muscular body that has been honed by decades of combat and training, though it’s not quite so bulky as to slow her down. And even though she is only 5’8” tall, her fierce magenta eyes and fiery hair ensures that she is able to command peoples’ attention when she needs to. This is complemented by the fact that no matter where she goes, Vi keeps her head held high and carries herself with an near unbreakable air of confidence. Her hair is kept long and falls down to the small of her back, yet an observant eye will see that it is remarkably well taken care of, contrary to what one would expect from such a no-nonsense woman.
Her crystal shines a brilliant yellow, but is often covered by her long locks of hair. And while many Prae have soft, flowing markings, Vi’s are hard and jagged, traveling up her arms and meeting at the sword emblazoned on her back, which denotes her heritage to the Rhys’alamot house.
{P}ersonality:
The product of a strict upbringing and a life of duty, Vi is the very embodiment of the unwavering resolve that the Rhys’alamot house prides itself on. From as far back as she can remember, both her status as a prodigy and her family’s words of “Greatness, at any cost,” have shaped both her views and wants, making her competitive and prideful at her best, but also shortsighted and arrogant at her worst. Not that she particularly minds how others view her, as she personally believes that her accomplishments speak loud enough to drown out whatever complaints may arise from her inadvertently stepping on shallow egos.
And as a woman used to being in command, the fiery red head has no qualms about seizing the initiative and bearing responsibilities that others may shirk away from. To Vi, the only direction in life she is aware of is forward, with absolutely no room for hesitation or steps backwards. Once she has committed to something, you can be assured that she will see it through to the end, consequences be damned. Consequently, she comes off as a bit of a slave driver to those serving under her and is a complete nightmare for anybody short of the God-Queen to manage.
Interpersonal relationships have always been a bit of a mystery to Vi. Or rather, even though she loves Priscus and has a strong sense of duty to her people, both her Spartan lifestyle and previous position as an Exeo have prevented her from being able to see people as little more than tools. In her mind, each person has his or her own merits and proficiencies, which makes getting to know each one to better understand which tasks they are most suited to a sensible pursuit. But beyond that, there is no room for her to let them in and become friends. After all, the one tool she trusts above all others is herself. And the moment that she has to rely on others would be the day that she has truly lost her edge.
Which made Vi’s fall from grace all the more world shattering for her. For the first time in her life, she was no longer adamantly sure of where she was going or what she had to do. And that’s without even beginning to address the wounds to her pride that resulted from her power being hamstrung. In the end though, she came out of the experience even more hardened and pragmatic than she was before. Where before she treated others with a tone of indifference, now her words carry a bite to them as she no longer reins in her blunt honesty with notions like etiquette and manners.
In the name of achieving her new found goal, Vi will use any tools she feels is necessary, even ones as despicable as the Licentia, and will not hesitate to discard them as soon as they prove to outlive their usefulness.
{H}istory:
You would be hard pressed to find anyone in Priscus that has not heard the name Rhys’alamot, as the family is almost synonymous with Prae military might. From the fools that have failed to sneak into Priscus to the Licentia that have met their swords, many have cursed the name. But by the same token, they also serve as an unwavering beacon of strength and honor for the Prae, serving to keep their lands safe from whatever threats may look to exploit them.
Such was the family Vistaeria was born into. But rather than shirk away from the monumental expectations placed on her, the girl welcomed the challenge and quickly proved herself to be a prodigy, picking up her lessons far faster than any of her siblings. While her talent was a source of pride for the girl, it would also prove to isolate her from Prae her own age, not that she noticed this little detail at the time. Back then, the thrill of learning new things and testing her limits was enough for her. Before she knew it, she was already leaving home to defend the Bridges to Piscus from invaders.
Few were surprised when she grew up and was named as the family’s next heir and fewer still when she was later brought before the God-Queen to be made an Exeo. Vi took to the position well, already well accustomed to a leadership role from her time guarding the Bridges. But despite that, she was hardly prepared for what she would face when she was assigned to be an envoy to Medius. Everything from the customs and people were different, but lying in wait was something far more insidious.
The order and discipline that she had become accustomed to back in Priscus were simply gone. The negligence sickened Vi, so she started petitioning the God-Queen for permission to investigate the root of Prae’s poor conduct. But try as she might, the only orders she received from the God-Queen were to stay put. Years passed, but try as she might to ignore it, Vi felt that something was desperately wrong with what was happening in Medius. And one day, she gave up asking for permission and decided to take matters into her own hands.
Her inquiry led her to meeting with her fellow Exeo, but the deeper she dug the more she realized that there were too many inconsistencies in the Exeo’s orders to be mere coincidence or accidental miscommunication. In fact, she started to realize that it was unlikely that any of the Exeos on Medius were getting their orders from the God-Queen at all. Someone, somewhere had to be pulling their strings. And when she followed where those strings led to, Vi found herself heading to Ominar with a to pursue name: Aismael. Stupidly, arrogantly, Vi confronted the Exeo directly inside of her Spire the same day she arrived in the city.
Two years passed, the once respected Prae now a shell of her former self. The memory of being stripped of her status and power as an Exeo by the God-Queen herself has haunted her over the years, as does being labeled a traitor by her own people. Exiled from Priscus, she was sentenced to live out the rest of her days quietly. And with no allies to call her own and her once exceptional ability to use Vis taken from her, many believed this was the only path open to her. Such a pitiful notion had never even crossed Vistaeria’s mind.
And now once more, Vi finds herself in Ominar.
{E}quipment:
Combat knife: While not Vi’s first choice when it comes to armaments, the 8” blade has proven to be a useful companion to her valae. There is nothing spectacular about the blade, except for the fact that Vi has enchanted it for increased durability and to finer hone its edge.
Valae: Currently due to the exorbitant amount of effort and money required to create them, Vi has only managed to procure 3 valae out of platinum tipped silver. For the time being, the only enchantments Vi has worked into them is to increase their structural integrity and to more thoroughly bind the platinum to the silver. (For more information, check the Armori Sonitae hider)
{C}apabilities
Mental
Dauntless in the face of danger
High mental fortitude
Average level intelligence
Pragmatic
Physical
Peak physical condition for a Prae
Battle hardened reflexes
Proficient with most bladed weapons
Savant of Armori Sonitae, or the Rhys’alamot fighting style
Magical/Technological
Imbuement: An ability that is nearly synonymous with the Prae, imbuement allows the user to infuse objects with their vis. The applications of this are numerous, but as the scion to the Rhys’alamot, Vi has specifically been trained in both touch-based telekinesis and enchantment. Of the two, Vi has a stronger affinity towards telekinesis, having been hailed as a prodigy for her ability to weave complex configurations and the sheer amount of objects she was capable of manipulating. And while Vi’s enchantments are nowhere near the same caliber, she has spent a long time developing her skill with them in order to better supplement her arsenal.
Enhancement: More of an offshoot of imbuement than anything else for a Prae, enhancement is the simple art of channeling vis into a specific body part to increase its performance. The magic is rather intuitive in concept, such as allowing one to strike harder by channeling vis into the arms or running faster by channeling it into the legs. There are of course physiological limits to this magic and there is always the risk that excessive use will put tremendous strain on the body which can result in long term consequences.
For Vi, this magic is used almost purely so she can keep up with the objects that she manipulates with her telekinesis in order to overwhelm her opponents. While she is by no means a prodigy at enhancement, her natural athletic physique is greatly supplemented by it, making her move far faster than many would initially anticipate a Prae to be capable of.
Manifested State: When activated, Vi’s manifest takes on the appearance of two wings, which are each made up of four “blades” of golden vis layered on top of one another. Not only does this state vastly improve her telekinetic abilities, but it also allows her to control each of her wing’s blades. While not particularly impressive at first glance, she can use these blades to imbue objects with her vis without direct contact, greatly increasing the arsenal of objects she has at her telekinetic disposal.
It should be noted that since she lost her powers as an Exeo, Vi’s manifest tires her out much more quickly than it used to and limits how much vis she is able to impart to each of her blades. In most cases, Vi can only maintain her manifest comfortably for 10 minutes at a time.
While telekinesis has always been ubiquitous with the Prae, the Rhys’alamot are the ones that pioneered a method of truly fighting with it. On the surface, it looks like its students do little more than learn to coordinate objects into specific patterns, called valans. But in reality, by practicing these formations over and over, the practitioner is able to develop a mental muscle memory of sorts, allowing them to reduce the concentration required to manipulate multiple objects at once and experienced users can even drastically cut down the amount of vis needed to do so.
Over the centuries, hundreds of unique valans have been devised, requiring a lifetime of dedication and training for one to even approach true mastery of the style. For Prae with a decent aptitude, it generally takes 2 to 4 months to truly master a single valan. This is complicated by the fact that each valan generally has a number of variations depending on the quantity of objects being manipulated. And in order to truly optimize one’s use of vis, they would have to manipulate items of the same weight and shape as what they learned the valan with.
Building upon this, the style was built around using innocuous shards of metal pressed into a diamond shape, known as valae. They generally have a dimension of 2’x1’ and are made out of metal that easily retains vis, such as silver. Through imbuement, the valae can be given any number of properties by their wielder to increase its offensive and defensive capabilities.
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