[OOC] Paradigm Shift: Agents of Fate [Currently Accepting!]

[Bazmund]

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- Timeline -

The history of our History

2016

• January 1st
  
  • With the first sunrise of the new year, a wave of violet light sweeps the globe, touching each country as the light of the sun meets the land. It is invisible to cameras and doesn't disturb wildlife - only mankind notices, and they see the purplish light even in their dreams when they're not awake. This event becomes known as the Violet Dawn.
  • Immediately, governments enforce a coerced silence on media corporations and try to stifle the news while their intelligence agencies figure out what exactly happened.
• January 3rd
  
  • A significant portion of the world’s population suddenly manifest magical abilities. The vast majority of these tragic individuals are either killed by the uncontrollable manifestation of their vast power, or driven irrevocably and unintelligibly insane - and are subsequently lethally subdued by riot police and government response.
  • Very few of what were eventually called The First Wave were taken alive; those that were, disappeared completely. It is likely that their citizenships were revoked, and that they remained in state custody until their deaths in captivity.
  • It is unknown if any 1st Generation Mages survive in the wild, but estimates are that less than a handful possibly could - and that less than a half could still possibly be serviceably sane. The events of this period will come to be known, one day, as the first World Wide Witchhunt.

2017

• January 1st
  
  • It happens again. Like a flashback to a nightmare, the public find themselves once again the subject of a wave of Violet light, washing over them like an occult tide with the rising of the sun. The world watches in horror… and waits in dread.
• January 3rd
  
  • The Second Wave awaken, and much like the first one they are either so wildly out of control of their powers that they are killed by them, publicly, or they are mentally destroyed by the weight of their new abilities. The government respond as they did before - with gunfire and Witchhunts. The position of the agencies created to deal with The First Wave is now secure; these are the forefather agencies of the modern institutions dedicated to hunting magicians - and accordingly, the second World Wide Witchhunt commences. A few more magicians from this era survive the bloodshed, but not many. Never many.
• April 20th
  
  • The Stafford Act - informally known as the Inquisition act - is passed by the UK parliament and subsequently taken up by the European Parliament as well. It formalises the cancellation of Brexit and the beginning of global intelligence cooperation to counter the Magical Threat. Mages are not quite universally seen as an enemy of civilisation as a whole, yet, but the public are terrified.

2018

• January 1st-3rd
  
  • The Third Wave are expected to follow this year’s Violet Dawn by the FOE, and by the wider antimagic intelligence community - but they expected it to be different, more chaotic, more violent. The magicians of the Third Generation are instead like something more subtly deranged, like a failed experiment. For this reason, many of them survive, at least initially. Their hallucinations and delusions will eventually lead most of them to be captured nonetheless, but in the meantime they remain the most survivable Generation yet.
• February 4th
  
  • The disparate branches and divisions of existing national intelligence agencies - the FBI Unusual Affairs branch, the CIA’s Extraordinary Intelligence Committee, the NSA’s Paranormal Task Force, MI5’s Crowley Office… - are formally dissolved and recondensed into their own institutions of investigation, by almost unanimous votes in nearly every sovereign nation in the world. This is the birthday of the European Magical Defence Agency, with the birthday of the Federal Occult Enforcement group coming the next day on the 5th of February.
• September 24th
  
  • The Magician known as Cam, a talented and reasonably stable individual of the third generation, develops their abilities and is eventually able to identify individuals with latent magical potential. They immediately begin using this ability to try and find themselves some friends.
• December 25th
  
  • Cam succeeds in finding seven others who are due to awaken after the next Violet Dawn. Knowing that they will not be able to reveal themselves until they too have self-identified as Magicians, Cam puts measures in place to protect them, and waits for the Sunrise on New Year’s Morning.

2019

• January 1st-3rd
  
  • As is now the broadly accepted pattern, on New Year’s morning the world is once again bathed by the Violet Dawn, and once again another fraction of the population is awoken. This year’s magicians are the most stable yet, 90% or so of them remaining both bodily and mentally intact. Intelligence agencies scramble to capture them, using new - if primitive - magic-sensing devices developed covertly using captured mages to test on; they are moderately successful, but for the first time most of the awakened Fourth Generation remain free past the first month mark.
  • Cam is successful in liberating four of the seven - the FOE were already too close to the other three - and bringing them together in Brightwell, Illinois. This is where they will, in the coming weeks, become the founders of the Violet Underground.

2020

• January 1st
  
  • The Violet Dawn arrives once more.
• January 3rd
  
  • You Awaken as a part of the Fifth Generation.
  • At 03:03AM, on the third minute of the third hour of the third day of the year, you get a text from an unknown number, telling you that FOE will be knocking on your door in fifteen minutes, and that you need to leave your apartment by the back entrance and meet them in a nearby alleyway if you want to live. The text is brief, but apologetic - and you probably don’t have any better options anyway.

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Important Information

Hello, dear friends, and welcome to the world of Paradigm Shift. This is a roleplay where your character is a newly awakened magician, with no particular training or extensive background in magic, who is rescued shortly after their awakening by an agent of the Violet Underground and whisked away to safety just barely in the nick of time.

This isn’t an RP about saving the world, and it’s not a game where every plot line will have a happy ending. There will be loss and pain in equal or greater amounts as there will be joy and hope. You will be dealing with forces that were, and are, almost entirely beyond human comprehension - and you will also be dealing with forces created by mankind, too. This will be a story about survival as much as about being the good guy, and I personally have very high hopes for it.

Before we truly begin, however, some ground rules…

Rules

• 0. The Guild rules apply in all circumstances, without exception, taking precedence over other rules should it become relevant.
• 1. The GM and any Co-GMs give their word to use communication as a means to resolve problems first and foremost, however this does not mean making unreasonable concessions, and it remains that the word of the RP Mods will be final.
• 2. All players should feel free to voice their opinions, concerns, and plot-based desires to the GM and/or to any other players that are relevant to a particular arc.
• 3. Without quotable, explicit permission from a character’s own player, you may not control any character other than your own’s actions and feelings in a given situation. Similarly, players may not successfully use Black Magic on other player characters without that player’s permission and informed consent.
• 4. There will be no metagaming.
• 5. All submitted character sheets will be subject to the rule outlined in the CS skeleton section. This is to encourage communication between the player base and the GM(s) and hopefully ensure at least a certain degree of party cohesion.
• 6. Again, just for emphasis; if you are concerned about something, if you have an idea that you think would be great for your character, or if you want any extra lore info or background, please just PM me. By creating the OOC I’m inviting open and free communication about all of this, and I’d really like to hear from you if you have something to say.

mentions

@Stitches
@Guardsman
@Haydrian Cindel
@silvermist1116
@Duskshine749
@Gentlemanvaultboy

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- Expanded Lore -

Stories and Detail

Detailed Backstory

- 2016 -

The Year of the Violet Dawn

In the year 2016,

the sunrise on New Year's Morning came accompanied by a flash of purplish light, travelling the world as the sun appeared for the first time of the year, meeting the eyes and minds of each human being as and when their New Year began. No person, whether they were awake or asleep, blind or sighted, above or under ground, missed it; the light - present one moment and absent the next - touched even the most remote of dreams. It was not visible on camera, not recorded by light sensors, and no wildlife reacted to it.

For forty seven hours the media tried to suppress this, under orders from the governments of the planet Earth to prevent public disturbance while intelligence agencies and research departments conducted an investigation - but rumours have a life all their own, and do not die easily.

In the 48th hour, these rumours bore fruit; the First Wave of magicians were born, created, or awoken. The silence broke like glass. These firstmade of the new age, all of them ordinary people with ordinary lives, some of them still children... were chaotic. Magic tore most of their minds or bodies asunder, dismembering one or the other in extremely violent and terrifying displays of frequently public power. Most of them died either at the hands of their own uncontrollable powers, burning up like motes of magnesium in the dark of the world, or at the hands of the police response. The few that survived are either in the captivity of the state with their citizenships revoked and their rights nonexistent, or frantically fleeing persecution and extermination. It is estimated that only a handful could possibly be left in the wild, less than half of them still sane.

The states of almost every sovereign nation in the world launched their counteroffensive almost immediately, rounding up suspected magicians and either interning them permanently or disappearing them entirely, as the first World Wide Witchhunt began. Geopolitics began to shift dramatically as the responses of different governments drove old alliances apart and bitter enemies together - the European Union saw motions for the creation of an EU-wide military wing almost immediately in their parliament, the United Kingdom's ambitions of brexit were utterly abandoned in favour the safety provided by European intelligence cooperation; the USA became more divided than ever, and the Middle Eastern countries began calling for unity. Russia didn't change a whole lot apart from the expansion of the role of the FSB and further reductions of privacy rights for civilians.

Then, just when people were confident that normality might still be restored, just when the police were standing down, it happened again.

On the very next New Year’s Morning, another wave of Violet, washing the land and kissing the sky with its unseemly affect… and another wave of mages, all exactly one year after the first.

The second wave were more stable, but not by a lot. The government was more ready for it this time, having created special investigative task forces in advance – the forefathers of the Federal Occult Enforcement agency and other such organisations. When people began randomly manifesting their powers, they were still chaotic and dangerous, and the sheer weight of magic upon a person’s mind did indeed crush some of them… but they were more stable. There are more survivors from this generation, as a result, even if they are still rare creatures.

The Third Generation of mages, once again accompanied by a Violet Dawn on New Year’s morning, were something like a failed experiment - but in a slightly different way. They generally did not fall victim to the mentally crushing influence of the colours of magic, nor did they find their powers totally uncontrollable – instead, many of these magicians began to hallucinate in the weeks after their awakening. Some of them started holding séance-like conversations with invisible beings outside of normal perception, some of them started obsessively documenting events in the past that had never happened, but whose effects could still be felt, and some of them retreated into the wilderness more or less permanently. Their prime unifying factor is the potentially delusional belief that their abilities make them a part of something larger, some greater purpose – a trait that 90% of all 3rd Wave mages captured by the government shared, at least before they expired in captivity.

It was at this point that the national governments of the world made the decision to formalise their anti-magic agencies and outlaw the practice of magic. These bills were passed by parliaments and congresses almost unanimously in almost every sovereign nation of the world, and led to the formation of the F.O.E. in America, the European Magical Defence Agency for the EU, and several less well known agencies world over. For the most part, these organisations are willing to share intelligence on suspected magic users, and have worked together to identify families or bloodlines where magic has been noted as particularly strong. Their cooperation allowed them to develop mundane means of detecting magic, and identify particular countermeasures, which all in all really should have meant that they were more prepared for the Fourth Wave than they actually were.

When the Fourth Wave happened in 2019 martial law was declared in major cities worldwide as a means of preparing, and squads of FOE troops went roving the country equipped with the primitive arcane detection equipment their quartermaster divisions had developed – but it seemed like nothing was going to happen. Instead of raving lunatics and violent psychopaths, the magicians of the fourth generation were normal people who remained largely psychologically unaffected, and were able to hide their condition long enough to make it past the initial days of the inquisition against them. Some of them were still caught and killed – or worse – but for the first time, the majority of mages went free, even if they had to leave their lives behind to do so.

It was in the months following the Fourth Wave that the Violet Underground was born.

With the government floundering to round up the suddenly invisible magician population, one of the rare, at least broadly sane Third Generation magicians decided that if Mages were going to keep appearing and the state was going to keep murdering them, something ought to exist to prevent it. After painstaking research and a good deal of stalking, the magician known as Cam was able to put themselves in contact with four other Fourth Generation mages, and form an organisation dedicated to ensuring the survival of their kind. To reflect the colour of their breed’s first dawn, it was named – informally – the Violet Underground.

The Violet Underground

The Violet Underground set about recruiting more magicians immediately after the magician known as Cam was able to put themselves in contact with several other fourth generation mages before their magic manifested, and the organisation quickly snowballed. In total, there are a couple thousand fully fledged members across the US, with a few hundred more in other continents – and many more associates beyond that, both mundane and magical. They knew they could not escape the notice of FOE for long, but were determined nonetheless to prepare for the next wave – and magic was going to help them.

Using their powers they were able to work on identifying those people who had the spark of magic living in their souls prior to the day they awakened, and they started trying to protect them as discreetly as they could while still dodging the influence of the FOE.

They were met with mixed success, their fortunes rising and falling like leaves on a purple wind. Matters were not helped by the deteriorating condition of their founder and most powerful member, Cam.

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The Violet Underground is a largely informal organisation, which depends more on experience and seniority than any particular system of rank - although at the metaphorical top of the chain of command there is a council of founders and elder members, upon whom the burden of leadership rests. By the time of the Fifth Wave there are five council members, and Cam is no longer among them. The purpose of the organisation is to protect and defend magicians from public persecution, and to this end most cells will support mages even if they do not want to become actively involved with the VU - though they do so at their own discretion.

Although command is very rarely given to an individual, the VU do have a structure of sorts to their operations - these are not hard specific groups, as much as they are peculiar subcultures that have formed around the roles adopted by different members of the Underground, but the organisation can be roughly divided as so:

Cells and General Members:
First and foremost, they rely on the general membership for action. The active members of the VU are divided by convenience and locality into cells, which operate semi-autonomously to surveil their home areas for both FOE activity and others with magical ability or potential. These members of the Violet Underground are flexible but without specialisation, and their specific roles will often vary depending on their location and the needs of the wider organisation at the time. Apart from surveillance they will often also be the ones performing disruptive activities, gathering basic resources, and - most importantly - sheltering new recruits, or those who do not wish to take an active part in the struggle. When they are called upon, they are also the most reliable group for providing force and power, by mere merit of their magical powers.

The Free Agents:
Occasionally considered to be the next step up from the general membership of the Violet Underground are the Free Agents; a group of smugglers, criminals, spies, and otherwise specialised individuals who have - either by proving themselves as general members, or by merit of an interesting background and skillset - been recruited by the VU as specialist agents. The roles of this loose group of delocalised freeroamers are myriad and highly varied - some of them work best as spies, infiltrating law enforcement and other social institutions, whereas some others work best as smugglers or thieves - but their unifying factor is that they are highly mobile and extremely difficult to catch. They will operate either alone, in pairs, or in small groups, and can generally be asked to do anything that an individual cell can’t do alone or can’t do at all. They are an applied force, targeting any specific objectives that they are given and completing them like a mission. Many in the VU look up to them - but the less naive do their best not to get attached to Free Agents; it is usually only a matter of time before they are killed, or worse.

The Academics:
A curious group of pseudo-academics and intellectuals who see magic not simply as a tool for survival or a weapon to use, but an entire field of study. Their work often sees poor results if any, and the risks of their vocations are fiercely debated as outweighing the benefits - but they are also usually the most powerful and trained mages in the Underground, by merit of having little else to do but practice magic. When it comes to practical applications, Academics are also usually the magicians best entrusted with performing ritual magic or enchanting items, making them a sort of bizarre R&D department on top of their ‘scientific’ role. On top of this, the Academics are where you will find the majority of those magicians who believed in Cam and… whatever it was they were up to. These are the magicians who best specialise in the study of History, and Histories. You will frequently find that Academics were either genuine researchers, the more reasonable kind of conspiracy theorists, or actual believers (and ‘practitioners’) of the Occult, before they awoke.

The Bootleggers:
Though they have a mixed domain and a grey area with the Free Agents, given their overlap of skills and roles, the Bootleggers truly do deserve their own mention; these are the people who deliver your food, who smuggle you medicine, and who hide your friends. They are as vital to the Violet Underground as blood is to a body, and are responsible for the maintenance and flexibility of the logistics and supply lines that allow the continued operation of the movement. If a particular cell cannot find their own food or make their own money, and needs to draw upon the resources of the wider Underground, then it will be these people they turn to. Another interesting facet of their existence is that - although the majority by far of the Violet Underground are mages - the Bootleggers are possibly tied with the Free Agents for the highest number of mundane members. Bootleggers are big travelers, crossing entire countries on a regular basis even without the aid of Blue Magic, and this belies their most important function yet; when the Violet Dawn returns and the FOE strike, these are also the people who work most closely with local Cells to rescue the new Generation. They often live lonely lives, but theirs is a sacrifice most necessary for their peers’ survival.

Tech Support:
Another subset - and arguably, the most vital subset - of VU members are the tech support. Their role is to set up and maintain any and all of the technology the organisation relies upon, and their word is considered the best word when it comes to what chatrooms and web forums are - or are not - secure and safe to discuss things on. Unlike Free Agents, Academics, or Bootleggers, this subculture of mages are not strictly speaking any sort of special group or force to be reckoned with - instead, they typically function as part of the regular Cells. They are not held in any particular renown and have no special reputation of their own, but are nonetheless absolutely vital to the function of the group. If the Bootleggers are a body’s blood, then these people are the body’s nerves.

The Fate of Cam

Cam had escaped the curse of the third generation during their awakening, but no debt goes unpaid forever; in the year they were with the Violet Underground, they began to hear voices and see figures beckoning them, claiming to know the truth of the world, claiming that they could show them what lay beneath the thin, dry, paper skin of it all. Cam initially tried to ignore them, but was inevitably pulled deeper and deeper by the increasingly invasive hallucinations. After a while, they became obsessed with the idea that the things they were seeing were in fact other mages – but more specifically, that they were mages from other worlds, or other timelines, where things were different in the past and the present. Whether Cam was right or not, the Violet Underground would not find out until much later, and either way Cam’s hallucinations changed them radically as a person.

They became violently defensive of the narrative they were constructing – that, with the right magic, they could change the course of history, and produce a more favourable Present. They called these other places, with whose denizens they’d spoken, the Histories, and explained that the History they were a part of was merely the surface layer of a world tenfold more complex than they’d ever known – or without magic, ever would know. They began trying to pressure their peers into conducting elaborate, bizarre rituals, with the goal of sending someone into another History, so that they could pull the separate threads of the world together in a more favourable way and re-knit the fabric of reality.

These experiments failed resoundingly, with whoever was sent never returning, or never going anywhere in the first place - and Cam vanished shortly after they started.

In their absence, the Violet Underground’s leading council convened to decide who should provide them direction instead - and they could not decide on an individual at all. To this day the organisation is loosely controlled by a group of five, whose first motion was to call for an end to experimentation with the Histories.

The Violet Underground did not tamper with the fabric of reality again.

At least not until now.

The Colours of Magic

Magic is a complicated and poorly understood thing, but can be observed to follow certain patterns and rules, the foremost of which is the division of Schools by Colour. Each discipline has certain spheres of control and influence, affecting different aspects of the world and – depending on the generation of the mage – affecting different parts of the human mind. Keep in mind, however, that magic cannot affect time travel, and it cannot either create or destroy either matter or energy. It should be noted that the spells you have access to are innate knowledge, something you only realised you already knew when you were Awakened. They are not refined, not necessarily very powerful, and most importantly are not the only magic you will have access to over the course of this game. Your spell choices should be specific abilities rather than general control of the environment, elements, or people, and their effects should similarly be quite specific unless there is a prior agreement with the GM.

Violet Magic

This is magic in its purest, rawest, most alien form. It is inefficient, costly, and draining to use for any real length of time, because it is like a force without direction. The few magicians who have existed long enough to have academic theories about magic have been tossing the idea around that – where magic is concerned – Violet is the colour from which all other colours are derived, but that’s probably nonsense.

In terms of what it can do, Violet magic is primarily used for powering other forms of magic, conducting arcane rituals, or using very basic spells that have no other particular alignment in terms of Colour. Examples of these things would be; powering an enchanted item, conducting a ritual to ward a building or create something new, or attacking another person with raw mana.

Green Magic

Next there is the Domain of Green, which governs the World and Environment, representing such things as naturally occur in the world. This is the discipline that governs natural forces and phenomena, and can be used to conjure electrical energies, set fires, and shape stone. All things that exist have some interaction with the domain of green, even if they do not strictly come under its sphere of control – like animals, which belong both to the Domain of Green and the Domain of Red.

Red Magic

The Domain of Red, in turn, governs all things that change and grow, and represents Vitality and Form. It is the discipline of magic that has the most hold on the physicality of flesh and the flow of blood, and also lays claim to the magic of transmutation. This is the art of the healer, the tool of the surgeon – but also of the alchemist and the shepherd. The Domain of Red is capable of doing harm to living things – but that is not its principal purpose, and it is quite limited in how it could be used for that task. It cannot be used upon the dead.

Blue Magic

The Domain of Blue concerns the sky, space, and the space-between-space. It is the magic of the interstice, and the art by which a Thing may briefly exist in two places at once - it’s original location and a new one - and then cease to exist in the former. It does not concern swirling portals, though ritual forms of Blue magic can provide similar effects, and it does not concern pocket dimensions. The practice of Blue Magic can be rewarding but holds the highest risk; one mis-step can cause irrevocable damage, and the spatial awareness required to concentrate on the destination can be taxing.

White Magic

White Magic involves the careful control of light and dark, in order to affect an immaterial change of appearance or to illuminate (or occlude) an area. It is the discipline that recognises best the value of true sight - or indeed, the value of a clever illusion. It does not, however, concern any mental manipulation or interference with the inner workings of anyone else’s mind. This is the domain of mirages and manipulation of light that, when interpreted by the human eye, makes things seem as though they are different. However when interpreted by the other senses, and under prolonged examination, the veil is usually lifted.

Black Magic

Black magic is not an inherently dark or evil thing, but carries a moral weight that some other colours do not. The Domain of Black is the magic that wraps the heart of your fellow man around your hand like silk strong; it is the discipline that can deprive your peers of their thoughts and replace them with ones of your choosing, the discipline that can convince a man he is holding his lover, when he is clutching a pillow. It is also the Domain that best relieves pain, but is not often used for this. Notably, Black Magic usually focuses either on the deep manipulation of a single person, or comparatively shallow manipulation of larger groups. It requires that you be able to communicate with the sense you are manipulating - within visual range for visual manipulations, earshot for auditory manipulations, and so on - and also that the mind you are manipulating is sapient; this means humans, principally, but arguments can also be made for intelligent animals such as apes, chimpanzees, ravens, and so on. In order to affect an effect, the mind must first reflect, and in so doing being reflected.

An Introduction to Histories

History is a curious subject. All our lives we are led to believe that it is simply a recording of the past; an account or set of accounts of events gone by, both recent and long dead. Occasionally you will find that our recording is wrong, and correspondingly we will correct it - but otherwise History seems to be quite fixed.

After all, you cannot change the past.

For what it’s worth, that statement is not incorrect, exactly - it is indeed true that time travel is not possible, even with magic as your ally - but what the collective societal consciousness of humanity has remained blissfully unaware of until now is that there are other Histories, too, where things happened rather differently, and where things may be either less or more real than our own. Opinion is still divided on what exactly these Histories really are - whether they are other world beyond ours, or our own world with a different timeline - and opinion is even further divided on the topic of precisely what manner they co-exist with ours in; are they parallel, contemporary with ours? Are they non-parallel, with time flowing at different rates and in different ways, relatively? Is it the same timeline with fundamental physical differences, or the same physical world with a different past? Are there crossing points where the distance between them narrows, and is that what Hallucination is? What impact are they on dreams, and for whose dreams are they an impact?

And let’s not even get into the theories about why these things exist - for one thing, it’s still not certain that they actually do exist at all; especially since almost everyone who was really into them wound up going horrifically insane, or apparently ceasing to exist entirely.

Like Cam.

All that is certain about the Histories is that they are quite dangerous indeed, and that the Violet Underground is at least broadly against further experimentation.

For now.

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- OOC and CS Skeleton -

This RP aims to actively work with its player-base to produce a tailored experience to the characters. As such, it works on a mutual trust between the players and GMs to act reasonably and within the limits of the world set before them. In order to encourage communication and mutual content building for the game, the character creation process becomes an application into the RP with the slight chance of rejection.

Please do not be alarmed by this! The way that character creation works is as follows:

• The player creates their character sheet as per usual. In this example, they have some areas they could improve upon.
• A GM will formally check their sheet and provide official feedback on the improvements that need to be made before they are accepted.
• The player submits their improved sheet, whereupon it will either be accepted or declined.

Throughout the entirety of the process, the player is allowed to ask any queries they may have about lore, their application’s shortcomings, or potential ideas and work-arounds. Even though you get two ‘chances’ to formally submit your sheet, you are actively encouraged to ask any questions you have and work with the GMs to produce the best version of your character.

The CS Skeleton is below:

Character Sheet Code

[center]
[img]Image here, if applicable[/img]
[h2]Name Here[/h2]
[h3]Basics[/h3]
[b]Name:[/b]
[b]Age:[/b]
[b]Gender:[/b]
[b]Height/Weight:[/b]
[b](Former) Occupation:[/b]
[b]Appearance:[/b]
[/center]

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[center][h3] Biography[/h3]
(History goes here)
[/center]

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[h3]Skills and Weaknesses[/h3]
[b]Skills:[/b] We generally advise our players to [i]avoid[/i] choosing to have exceptional skills that are heavily reliant on the abilities of the player. This would include things like exceptional charisma or intelligence, or claiming that your character has incredibly power over other people in a social setting. We are open to discussion on this, but the general rule with stand as a reflection of our past RP experiences.
[list]
[*] Strongest Skill
[*] Second Strongest Skill
[*] ‘Weakest’ Skill
[/list]

[b]Weaknesses:[/b]
[list]
[*] Biggest Weakness
[*] Second Biggest Weakness
[*] Third Weakness
[/list]

[b]Spells:[/b] Choose specific abilities with reasonably well defined capabilities and drawbacks. These spells reflect the knowledge your character already had, not arcane study or sorcery tutorship, and similarly are unlikely to be very well refined or powerful.
[list]
[*] Spell 1 (remember to include drawbacks of casting in spell description)
[*] 2
[*] 3
[*] 4
[*] 5
[*] 6
[/list]

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[Stitches]

Bagel's back

Abigail

Abigail Harlow

Basics

Name: Abigail Harlow
Age: 15
Gender: female
Height/Weight: 5'2, 44kgs
(Former) Occupation: Student
Appearance: Depending on the season, Abigail has two skin tones - pale and sunburnt. She's short and lanky, with knobbly joints, an upturned nose and snaggly teeth. Often has a spot or two on her face. Pale blonde greasy hair which she either wears loose, covers with an equally greasy baseball cap or ties up into an unappealingly tight ponytail. She wears thrift shop fashion or sports gear. Often smells of teenage BO.

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Biography

Abigail grew up with her grandparents in a caravan that cruised around Arizona. They were fulltimers; a beautiful nomadic subculture of trailer park inhabitants that scuttle from Solero Springs to Redville Acres, from camp to park and back again when they've outstayed their welcome. She didn't know her father and her mother was incarcerated around a decade ago for drug-related charges. They were kind yet misguided people who did the best for a little girl who found herself in an awkward situation. Abigail few up on exaggerated stories of her uncle, their eldest son - a stoic and severe war veteran-turned outdoorsy type, who her grandparents idolised but hadn't heard from in decades.

Where they could, Meemaw and Pops forced the impetuous rapscallion into whichever public school they could find. Her education was disjointed and patchy but it kept her occupied. They were the Catholic, god-fearing sort who, having failed their daughter and somehow lost all contact with their precious son, were twice as insistent to keep the demon-spawn on the straight and narrow. Abigail took to sports rather than drugs. Academia frustrated her but the rustic, eccentric and ultimately homely lifestyle of the various camper parks she frequented had imbibed her with knowledge that you'd generally expect to pick up from toothless old hermits and professional recidivists. She's bright, just not in the way you'd expect. Most of the time she doesn't elect to use her brightness, which probably explains the myriad of stories she's similarly accumulated over such a brief and tumultuous lifespan.

When the Violet Dawn first hit, Abigail was quick to pick up on the anti-mage rhetoric that her grandparents used quite liberally throughout the five year period. As strong southern Catholics, the incursion of magic was devilwork and the unwilling practitioners were souls destined to go to Hell. In her grandparents mind, and therefore in her mind, the Violet Dawn was the beginning of the rapture; the manifestation of these sinful and destructive powers were signs from God of the unworthy who deserved to be culled in Jesus' name. She lost friends and foe alike to the phenomenon but it never necessarily affected her, and she had far worse problems to deal with, so why would she care for the lives of the condemned? It wasn't as if it would happen to her, right?

---

Skills and Weaknesses

Skills:

• White Trash Encyclopedia: Well-versed in a vast array of little helpful tidbits ranging from repairs to pest control to lockpicking to varmint snares to shotgunning (sodas, of course!) to couponing. In other words, she's a bit of a jack of all trades, but only has a very minor knowledge in these things.
• Macguyver: Living in a low-income and transient lifestyle has pushed Abigail to become resourceful. Anything's a weapon or a tool if you think hard enough, and Abi's trusty roll of duct tape helps to facilitate the process.
• Jogger Junkie: Abigail's favourite sport is running. She enjoys her 8k morning jogs, her relay races, her marathons. She's fast on her feet and doesn't tire out easily.

Weaknesses:

• Child: She's fifteen. This should be self explanatory, but it means she's not very strong, not very mature, not taken seriously, not allowed to drink, smoke or drive, can't have a job and should be in school - to say the least. On top of all the human repercussions of being on this earth less than her adult counterparts, it also means her spellcraft is erratic and hard to control. She doesn't know all the spells she can cast and the ones she can cast aren't that strong yet. Magic is also more exhausting to use.
• Dumb Sombitch: Whilst gifted with a keen gut instinct and the gift of vibe-reading, Abigail's not all that smart; partially due to her age and partially due to her upbringing. She's especially vulnerable to Black magic because of this.
• Amber Alert: It's one thing if an adult goes off-grid, it's another if a child winds up missing. Even trailer park inhabitants look after their young. She's on missing posters and the news in and around the Arizona area.

Spells:

• Pick-me-up (Red): A very simple spell that regenerates flesh. At the moment it can only knit together scrapes and bumps, but may be able to work on detailed and extensive flesh wounds if given time and practice. Burns through calories to use, so it requires spare calories to cast.
• Overflow (Violet): Discharge of excess magical power, currently in small erratic blasts from the base of her palm, capable of causing burns. Difficult to control and essential to cast in order to 'burn off' excess power, which causes discomfort and pain if left uncasted for too long.
• Astral Projection (Violet): Currently completely uncontrollable and unpredictable. Sometimes, when Abigail sleeps, she can look into another History for a brief period of time. She cannot interact with the History and cannot be detected without magical means.
• Telekinesis (Green): Similarly uncontrollable and unpredictable, though easy enough to train, Abigail can (unintentionally) change the way in which gravity affects small inanimate objects. With refinement, the mass of the object and the direction of the gravitational pull on it can be manipulated. Causes headaches and even migraines after a significant period of use.
• Energy Theft (Green): Abigail can divert the flow of all electrical currents within a 6m diameter sphere into herself, effectively turning off all technology in the area. The electricity transmutes into mana, but the sudden surge of power can cause significant harm. Abigail can hold onto the spell to the limits of her physical and mental resilience against increasingly excruciating pain and, when she does lose her grip on the spell, it is vital that she releases the excess power quickly before it causes her to burn up.
• Currently Unknown

[Nate1008]

Hello! Can I hop in? I already have many ideas! Im going to start working on a prototype CS now. Sorry, im just really exited!

[Nate1008]

Prototype CS

appearance

(will find one later)

Jace Kahn

Basics

Name:
Jace Kahn

Age:
24

Gender:
Male

Height/Weight:
6'1
67 kg

(Former) Occupation:
Hacker/Smuggler

Appearance:
(WIP)

Biography

Once a smuggler and hacker, Jace was more of a background kind of guy. Preferring to lurk in the dark and not get noticed. He worked for a small criminal organization, smuggling illegal goods across borders and hacking for information and money. A professional hacker and programmer, and great at stealth, Jace did his job well. (still a WIP)

Skills and Weaknesses

Skills:

Strongest: Hacking/programing

Second strongest: Stealth

Weakest: Leadership

Weaknesses:

Biggest Weakness: Physical strength

Second Biggest Weakness: Aiming

Third Weakness: Quick to anger

Spells:

Mend: Allows fast healing of specific target (takes 1-3 minuets after cast to take effect)

Bolster: Gives extra physical strength to target (takes 0.10-1 minuet after cast to take effect)

Restore: Quickly heals another target at the cost of taking a part of the casters blood (instantly takes effect)

Flesh weave: Allows the caster to change their appearance by tearing skin, bone, flesh, muscle, and organ tissue to mutate and reform to improve their abilities (causes severe pain, trauma, physical and mental problems, blood-loss, e.g)

(more later... this is just a base reference right now)

Here is a prototype. Everything in it is subject to change and will probably will need edits.

[Briza]

You had me at —

Russia didn't change a whole lot apart from the expansion of the role of the FSB and further reductions of privacy rights for civilians.

[WanderingSpirit]

Oh people were quicker than I expected! If you are willing to have more people, I would like to join in on the fun and see where this will be going.

Work In Progress I guess?

Boo!

[Bazmund]

Hey folks, I just wanted to say thank you for the interest you've all shown so far. I'm looking forward a whole damn lot to seeing the finished products of the CSes we already have on the thread, and I'm going to tailor the specifics of the planned plot to our party once they're fully selected.

Speaking of which, I should mention at this point that I do actually have someone who's gonna help with CS feedback and acceptance - namely Stitches, who's already submitted a sheet that I'm going to be reviewing properly hopefully later tonight if I get the time. I'll add this to the OOC later on too, hopefully - just need to get some studying done first.

Again, thanks so much for your enthusiasm, it's so good to have you all here!

[Briza]

@Bazmund, are you looking for a particular FC style, i.e. real life versus animated?

[Bazmund]

@Briza I don't particularly mind and I won't ban anything, but the RP as a whole has the theme of realism and realistic consequences; your characters are magicians, and therefore they're innately powerful and can represent a significant threat to those they stand against - but you're not anime characters at all, and this definitely isn't going to play out like an anime. If you get shot, you get shot - and so on.

To that end, use whatever picture you like, but ideally reflect a real person with it and try to help us imagine your character as a real person.

[Briza]

Nvmd. Abort mission. Rolling out.

[Bazmund]

Alright folks, we have a discord server. When you join, use the @Baran (Bazmund) line to get my attention and I’ll add you to this RP’s subcategory.

discord.gg/B2Feza

[Gentlemanvaultboy]

Matt 2.0

Matthew Mearls

Basics

Name:Matthew Mearls
Age: 24
Gender: Male
Height/Weight: 5 feet 9 inches/197 Pounds
(Former) Occupation: College Student-->Pizza Delivery Guy
Appearance: Matthew wears a variety of different colored strings around his wrists, like knitting thread made into bracelets.

---

Biography

Matthew is sure that he has a sister. It's the only thing in the world that he is absolutely positive of. He knows his parents because their names are on his birth certificate. He knows he was going to college to study photography because he has the paperwork saying he was. He might have been involved in ameture racing, but those police reports never definitely connected him to anything.

He knows Maisy exists because when he first saw a picture of her after the incident, he smiled. It was the first real feeling other than bleary confusion he'd been able to muster after she'd taken a chainsaw to his mind.

See, his sister had been a second wave mage and on the day of her thirteenth birthday party not to long after the second Violet Dawn she had popped off maliciously and used black magic to tear through the memories of the whole neighborhood like a rabid tiger.

The pictures had been splayed out all over the news, their small town turning into a media circus as those vulture descended on it. Pretty much everyone in the back yard catatonic, a few hearty fighters stumbling around in a daze they never came out of.

Matthew had been lucky, supposedly. His affliction was consistent with people on the outer edges of the event. Some of those people had even had the state of mind to get into their cars and try to drive off. Most of them ended up in ditches a few feet from where they started.

They found Matthew six miles outside town rolled up on to the side of the road in his car, head resting on the horn and all the doors open. He didn't know how he'd gotten there and only had the shadow of a recollection of who he was. His entire life had been reduced to a few blurry imagines rolling around in his head.

He was lucky. The forefathers of the FOE didn't see the point in taking him to the facility they built to care for the victims at the epicenter. He was left alone to they and pick up the pieces of his mind.

When they started fitting together, though, he found something strange. Fleeting glimpses of a backyard birthday party and the unmistakable impression of a young girl screaming.

Now he doesn't want anything more than to know what happened that day. Preferably from the only person that could possible know.

---

Skills and Weaknesses

Skills:

• Never Forgets - Maybe it's because he has so much empty space, or because he's internalized memory strengthening techniques so thoroughly from his treatment, but he ironically has a mind like a steel box. If Matthew tries to remember something he damn well remembers it.
• Drives Like Hell - There might be something to those street racing charges. His sister didn't seem to have touched his muscle memory because driving a car or moped comes to him like breathing.
• Photography - Not a natural knack like driving is, just something that Matthiew had to re-learn. For obvious reasons he enjoys keeping a visual record of things.

Weaknesses:

• Easy to Manipulate - It's easy for human beings to come up with false memories even when they have the real ones to reference. Matthiew hardly even has that to work with. The things he remembers now are air tight, but things events before that are very malleable.
• Slow on the Uptake - Matthew might have a steel trap of a mind, but he has to take the time to put things in there. He is startlingly easy to get the drop on and slow to react to changing situations, outside of being behind the wheel where his instincts seem to do the heavy lifting.
• Migraines - Maybe as a side effect of having his entire past torn to ribbons Matthew gets splitting headaches at seemingly random times. He doesn't think it's killing him.

Spells:

• Scatter (Blue) - With physical contact Matthew can infuse something with blue magic. When it is fully infused it seems to explode into pieces. In actuality each piece is just being randomly moved, the effect being that the object is very cleanly minced into chunks.
  
  Matthew can control the direction of the chunks to some extent, such as making sure they all fly forward or away from the point of contact. He can also delay the explosion, effectively turning any item he can get his hands on into a makeshift shrapnel grenade.
  
  Matthew must wait until the entire object is infused with magic for it to be scattered, and must maintain contact the entire time. Objects previously infused with blue magic can not be infused with blue magic again.
• Put it back together (Blue) - This spell can be used in anything Matthew has previously Scattered. When he uses this spell all the pieces of the scattered object come back together rendering the object good as new.
• Weird Phase (Blue) - Matthiew can infuse Blue magic into something he touches, causing it to become "unstable." The next time something comes into contact with the unstable object it will phase inside whatever touched it and "fuse" with it. Objects infused with blue magic can not be infused with blue magic again.
• Living Memory (Black) - Matthew's magic scans someone's mind and brings forth an illusion of someone from that persons past, constructed based their own memories of that person. After it is summoned it will maintain a Black connection to the subject, allowing the illusion to act as that person based on the memories and biases the subject has of them. The illusion, because it acts as a real person, is completely outside of Matthew's control beyond his ability to end the spell. When used, triggers migraine immediately.
  
  Let's See (White) - Not really a spell on its own, more of a coating he can apply to other spells. Piggybacking on the back of black magic, Let's See creates an illusion overtop of any delusion or vision imposed on someone via black magic. This renders it visible to people other than the victim of the black magic.
  
  Fog (White) - Matthew can conjure up the illusion of a thick, pea soup fog. The more he conjures up the more his senses seem to muddle, and he sometimes sees things within the fog that aren't really there.

[duskshine749]

Zephyr

Zephyr Tremblett

Basics

Name:Zephyr Tremblett
Age:25
Gender:Male
Height/Weight:6 feet tall, 200 pounds
(Former) Occupation:Tae-Kwon-Do Instructor
Appearance:Zephyr tries to dress in a way which makes him unremarkable to other people. A simple hoodie with no markings and jeans will do just fine.

Biography

Zephyr has always been a pretty timid guy, he doesn't like getting very emotional or worked up over things. When he was about 8 years old he got in to a fight with a kid in his class, to this day he can't even remember what it was that set him off, but he was really angry at this kid. He ended up sending the guy to the hospital with a broken nose and a lot of serious bruises. It would have been worse if a teacher hadn't intervened so quickly.

He was suspended after that incident, obviously. When he came back to school all the other kids were scared of him, and Zephyr couldn't blame them, he was scared of himself. His parents thought he needed an outlet for the aggression he clearly had pent up. They signed him up and tae-kwon-do and Zephyr really took a liking to it, he felt like he could fight the others without trying to hurt them which kept him from going too far.

Towards the end of Zephyr's school career his dad came down with cancer, and died shortly after. Zephyr's dad always loved that he did tae-kwon-do and wanted him to keep up with it. So Zephyr did, he even got a job as an instructor since he was at this point a 3rd degree black belt. It didn't pay a ton but he liked it, he made up for the lack of pay with a second job as a school bus driver.

As all this was happening the first of the Violet Dawns had occurred, and this for some reason had grabbed on Zephyr's brain. It got him interested in the supernatural, wondering what caused it and why now of all times. Zephyr became very spiritual during all of this, believing the Violet Dawn was just a supernatural occurrence created by the gods when they felt the world needed magic for whatever reason. Zephyr thought about if he would like to be blessed with magic. He never could make up his mind, but he just kept living his life, it wasn't much, but it made him happy, and that's what mattered.

Skills and Weaknesses

Skills:

• Martial Arts-Zephyr has been taking tae-kwon-do most of his life, so he’s pretty good in a fight, though he tries his best to use it only for self defence
• Smooth Talker-Zephyr is decent at trying to talk his way out of situations, a useful skill since he really doesn’t like fighting if he doesn’t have to
• Professional Driver-Zephyr has driven a school bus part time for several years which has made him a pretty good driver

Weaknesses:

• Reluctant Fighter-Zephyr tries to never fight anyone if he can avoid it. He will deflect blows all day but he hates having to fight someone with intent to hurt them. He’s afraid if he lets himself go in a real fight to seriously hurt someone he may go too far
• Trusting-Zephyr is a bit too quick to trust that people are being honest and to give people second (and third and fourth) chances. He’s never been taken advantage of in a horrible way yet so that’s probably why he’s still like this
• Slow-Zephyr isn’t dumb, he can just be a bit slow on the uptake sometimes. Not realizing exactly what’s going on or needing to be told what to do in an unfamiliar situation is not uncommon

Spells:

• Create Weapon (Green)-Zephyr uses the earth around him to create a weapon, usually a staff as that is what he's familiar with. The staff can only take a few hits before breaking, and is mainly used to redirect blows.
• Rock Skin (Red)-Zephyrs skin takes on the appearance and toughness of the earth itself. This makes him very hard to injure in exchange for having near zero mobility while in this form.
• Ignore Pain (Black)-Zephyr numbs his senses and blocks out any physical pain he is feeling. This of course means Zephyr won't know how badly injured he is or if he is pushing himself too hard until the spell is deactivated.
• Increase Physical Prowess (Red)-This spell increases Zephyrs strength, durability, and endurance beyond that of a normal human. It can strain the muscles and leave Zephyr incapacitated if left used for too long.
• Sharpen Senses (Red)-Zephyrs mind goes in to overdrive, taking in all details of a person or place. This can be used to analyze a persons fighting style, body language, or even how they write. When looking at a room he can identify exits, weak walls and areas that were disturbed recently. This ability uses a lot of energy and can only be used in short bursts.
• Time Out (Black)-Zephyr makes a T with his hands and demands everyone in a small area cease hostilities. Those affected feel compelled to stop fighting for a short time. During this time they are also more susceptible to suggestions that lead to a nonviolent solution. This spell is less effective the more it is used, especially against the same person

[Bazmund]

@duskshine749 Creating sustained physical weapons with Violet magic is going to be incredibly taxing, especially if they can change their form on the fly. I don't think you'll be able to do that and other magic at the same time, at least not without a lot of training. Holograms work too, but in order for them to actually move you need to focus on their actions as much as your own for the illusion to still seem realistic - though it may not need to seem realistic to be effective. Ignoring pain is good, that's a good use of black magic. Blue magic cannot safely teleport you to a place you cannot see and do not have good familiarity with - I'll certainly let you try, but at some point that will end quite badly for Zephyr. As for sharpen senses, the concept is certainly fine but bullet time doesn't exist in this world, so while a moment might last a little longer for him it won't necessarily let him outfight someone who's just better than he is - for example, he might see the blow coming, but if he's been maneuvered into a position where he's at that kind of disadvantage it might just mean he has a subjectively longer period of time where he knows he's about to get hit. Sharpen Senses will let him see details on the fly where anyone else might miss them, it'll help him analyse his opponents if he's fighting, and so on - but it's not necessarily going to be the be-all end-all to melee combat.

Keep in mind as well that simply being able to have a sword and shield on hand doesn't necessarily mean you know how to use them - and that even if you do, most FOE agents just shoot people.

EDIT: I realise that all sounded really critical, sorry about that. I like the concept so far, and I liked Zeph in the previous RP, just to make that clear lol.

[DinoNuts]

CS

Brooks Lockwood

Basics

Name: Brooks Lockwood
Age: 54
Gender: Male
Height/Weight: 1 meter 80 cm, 102kg
(Former) Occupation: Bootlegger
Appearance: Brooks has built up muscle from constant labour, but it's padded with a significant amount of fat as well. Despite his imposing figure he tends to hunch a little to make himself seem smaller than he actually is. His hair is fully grey, long and unkempt; his body is littered with various scars, some of them more recent than others. He has age lines on his face and a full beard which is poorly groomed. He has the same hard, greenish eyes as his niece. His clothes aren't anything too specific; he tends to wear simple dark outfits, and errs towards outdoor wear. Sometimes he'll be carrying a backpack.

---

Biography

Brooks was the older sibling, but he wasn’t the favourite. That reward went to his little sister, and was well-deserved; Louise (or Loulou, in his childhood days) was bright, charming and pretty whilst he still had trouble talking to hia friends. Even though he grew up in her shadow, he was just as ready to dote on her as everyone else. He was doing okay in classes, kept going to soccer practice but wasn’t the best nor the worst player in the team; his childhood was punctuated with the adventures he took by the old quarry with his friends and Louise in tow. They used to make pillow forts during the evenings and watch VHS tapes of their favourite films. His parents were Catholic republicans and he had a nice house with a huge back yard. Things were simple and happy.

It all started to go a bit awry when Brooks reached middle school. Even as a kid he was content when left to his own devices and he missed out on making friends, which pushed him deeper into his own introversion. Meanwhile Louise was starting to get a different sort of attention and the friction started to build up in her own teenage rebellion against their parents. Brooks was often made to pick sides and, fearing the belt buckle, tended to openly support his parents whilst sneaking snacks to his sister’s room after the arguments. They drifted apart as each made their own friend groups and had studies to attend to, but still confided in one another. In particular, Brooks was at a loss on what he wanted to do once he graduated high school. With no clear passion shining through, he was instead gripped by his parents’ glorification of the Vietnam War during his youth and started to edge towards the draft, as it would at least give him some time to figure out what he wanted to do in college.

By this point Louise had only doubled down in her resistance against her parents’ old-fashioned ideologies. She had gotten into the anti-war movement pushed on by the atrocities of the Vietnam war (atrocities which her parents refused to acknowledge), and eventually her party lifestyle started to dip into drugs. Brooks was decidedly anti-confrontational - he had it beaten into him from an early age - and seeing the dysfunction in his home was beginning to alienate him from his family and push him even more into his bubble. When he did eventually admit he wanted to join the army, his parents gushed over him. The sudden swell of attention and pride was intoxicating at first, but his spirits were dampened when Louise turned her back on him with disgust. He wanted to explain that he was just doing it to buy himself some time, but he never knew how to put it into words. They grew apart. Unwillingly, Brooks became the favourite child.

Brooks turned 21 at the cusp of the invasion of Panama and he immediately enlisted. Then he briefly went home to find out that Louise had ran away with her meth head boyfriend. He was sent out to the Gulf War without complaint. The military hardened him and made him stronger, but he was exposed to such nightmarish scenes of civilian slaughter and ill practice that they continue to haunt him more than thirty years later. He never had a very high regard for his fellow man and the experiences that lingered past his military service (which was rudely interrupted by a bullet through the leg, permanently damaging his knee) cemented his general distaste for mankind. Brooks, now the wounded veteran, came back to a listless home. His parents had doubled down hard on Catholicism, adamant that God would protect him out in the deserts and would eventually bring their wayward daughter back to the fold. Their zealotry frightened Brooks enough to push him out of home and into employment on the oil fields and into lumberjacking operations. The long absences from home and the high pay were addictive; most of these jobs were gruelling for their employees because they had family, but Brooks never had much of a quarrel with hard work and a lack of creature comforts.

Eventually Brooks had more money than he was able to spend on his own. Finding a partner and making kids frightened him; he didn’t want a repeat of his childhood. He thought of recontacting his sister from time to time but couldn’t bring himself to face her. All his friends from high school were god knows where, and he wanted nothing to do with the army. At this point he was embittered and jaded, feeling the pangs of loneliness but too nervous to jump back into society properly, especially after 9/11. Instead, he started to look into living out in the country, somewhere in the midwest where nobody would bother him anymore. This interest paired with the gradual accumulation of guilt over his years which manifested in a constant sort of restlessness. He used to be able to satiate it with travel but could no longer live transiently with his knee. He ended up being enamoured with the thought of living off the grid and started to pool his funding into an old cabin in the middle of backwater Iowa.

Brooks was already well-established in his forest by the time the first wave hit. He subsisted off a mixture of hunting and trading with a nearby small town, giving them venison and scrap metal in return for supplies he couldn’t forage, fish or filter out from his surroundings. He didn’t know what it meant, but what little he got from his trips into town was enough to start work on his very simple underground bunker project - just in case. It was only after the third wave that the fugitives started to trickle into his neck of the woods. The first group of people he came across were a starving family; the father, Nicolas, was capable of abilities Brooks had never even seen before. It frightened him to no end and made him wary, but the sight of their pinched faces and grubby children was enough to allow him to reluctantly shelter them in his home. Soon he experienced a gradual trickle of refugees running for their lives, and hearing their stories brought back unpleasant parallels to his time in the military. Because he hadn’t seen the chaos that mages could inflict first-hand, he was more sympathetic to their cause than the usual citizen.

Unbeknownst to him, his good deeds had made ripples that reached the Violet Underground. Last year he negotiated an agreement; he’d take in mages throughout the year in return for supplies. Soon this elaborated into the collection of mages from difficult situations and he became a newly-hired Bootlegger. Being in contact with these fugitives helped to bring him out of his shell somewhat, though none of it could prepare him for his first ‘real’ assignment with the organisation.

Around fifteen years ago, somewhere in Texas, Louise had a baby. She was in and out of jail for possession of narcotics and, despite her estrangement from her family, she was able to convince his parents to take in the little girl. At this point they had gone off the deep-end and used their pensions to buy an RV, driving up and down Arizona and barely settling as they made a life for themselves in trailer parks. The girl - his niece - was due to manifest her abilities this year. As both a rite of passage and a small mercy for both the teen and Brooks alike, Brooks was assigned to collect her and bring her to safety.

---

Skills and Weaknesses

Skills:

• Survivalist: Since his deployment, Brooks has been living practically off-grid for over a decade. Through sheer experience alone he has become self-sufficient; he tends to hunt and grow his own food, repairs whatever he can and scraps whatever he can't for parts. He's good at cleaning and meticulously organised. His rough lifestyle has helped him develop a self assured demeanor and remain calm under pressure.
• Combat Training: Brooks not only went through full military training, he then spent several years in the frontline. For better or for worse, Brooks knows how to maintain and fire rifles and pistols as well as some hand-to-hand combat manoeuvres. He also picked up some more brutal and unsavoury tactics through experience alone. Like riding a bicycle, it's not something one can easily forget how to do, and even now his instincts can lead the way.
• Tough: Brooks has not lead an easy life for the past thirty years. He is no stranger to inclement weather, hard work and all manner of injuries, some of which he's sustained in the past two years looking after unstable mages. His knowledge of first aid is rudimentary at best (and falls under the category of a survivalist skill) but his stamina and ability to endure are above average.

Weaknesses:

• Isolationist: like his survivalist skill, this is a blanket term that encapsulates a myriad of shortcomings that come with a life of limited contact with the outside world. His social skills leave much to be desired; he's alright in one to one conversations but tends to shut off somewhat in groups. He's out of touch with modern technology, and only has a loose grasp on what's been going on for the past twenty or so years beyond the mage crises. He still drives a stick shift and his repair skills are consequently somewhat dated.
• War Wounds: Not all of them are visible, but the main issue seems to be with his knee. It was shattered in the Gulf war and reconstructive surgery could only do so much. He lives with a stiff leg and bad memories, both of which equally affect his quality of life.
• No Magic: Brooks is a Mundane; he wasn't affected by the Violet Dawn and consequently cannot cast any sort of spell. In some very specific circumstances he can employ the vehement belief that the FOE use to dispell magic, but only when he genuinely believes someone not to be a threat. As a disillusioned war veteran who secluded himself in the wilderness, these exceptions to the vast majority of potential threats are hard to come by.

[Bazmund]

@DinoNuts@Stitches Hey folks, I've spent a while reviewing the sheets and I reckon you're good to move them over to the Char tab. Really good characters, I'm looking forward to your intro posts a lot.

[Lady Selune]

Hider

Siobhan Caamaescro

Basics

Name: Siobhan Caamescro
Age: 27
Gender: Female
Height/Weight: 5'8 / 48kg
(Former) Occupation: Professional Drifter
Appearance: Siobhan is a woman of peculiar fashion. Every day she seems to wear something different, her perilously small suitcase managing to fit a vast array of clothes that span every culture on Earth. Beyond these clothes lie a woman not unattractive and decidedly exotic, with pleasantly tanned skin and blemishes that seem to add rather than detract. Not overly slim, nor particularly heavyset, Siobhan slips in and out of a crowd with ease... Which is exactly what she wants.

Biography

Siobhan has fifteen different names, thirteen different childhoods and eighty-four faces, one of which she keeps in a walnut box, locked up tight with a key she keeps in her hair. Her name speaks to at least three different cultures, her face to many more, and the places she's travelled another few atop. She claims to have family on every continent including Antartica, and also claims that almost every country in eurasia wants her arrested. A few probably do.

In short, she is a woman who has entirely forgotten any sense of stability. She has gathered not a mote of moss. No family ring her phone, no friends come around to her apartment for drinks and a chat. In a way, this makes her sad, but at the same time she often feels freed by this sort of independence, even as isolation and loneliness eat at her. So much has she wandered that Siobhan has genuinely forgotten where her first breaths were drawn, but nonetheless she had to have drawn them somewhere.

That somewhere was Istanbul, in a cramped and run down but still clean and professional hospital, with her mother collapsing of exhaustion before she could wrap her arms around her newborn child. Siobhan's first steps were across the gritty sand of a Dorset beach, and her first words were lost in the noise of a Thai market. As she grew, with neither a formal education nor a stable household, her life became a series of polariods snapped by her mother and kept in a thick binder that was always the first item packed into a suitcase whenever her parents intended to step onto a plane... Which was often.

By the time she was fifteen, she was so used to moving that staying still never once occured to her. One crisp, clean evening in Minnesota she slipped out the front door of the caravan her parents had rented and hopped into the back of a pickup truck owned by a Souix boy five years older than her. Three hours later, she'd hop out into a Canadian border town, having gained the boy's wallet but with her virginity still left in the cabin.

Ever since then she's kept on with her parent's methods of never staying still for a moment longer than needed. As the sky lit up with purple for the first time, she would be awakened... But not like others. Something in Siobhan's mind twisted that day, but her powers would take five more long, years to erupt out of her skull. She had been expecting them for quite some time.

Skills and Weaknesses

Skills:

• The Hydra's Gaze: Siobhan's powers had twisted inside of her for years. Although she lacks some mental acuity thanks to this, she more than makes up for it when it comes to her magic.
• No Strings Attached: Siobhan is the governmental equivalent of a ghost. Her birth certificate was tossed into a campfire when she was three, and somewhere between it being signed and it being filed, the other copy of her birth certificate got crumpled up; the next day the cleaner condemned it to landfill. She has no passport, no nationality, no family and nobody that can recognise her as a person, rather than a figure. Good luck hunting her down.
• Splitting Branches: Siobhan has an incredible ability when it comes to multitasking and lateral thinking. She can keep track of enough strands of memories to weave a nostalgic tapestery, a skill that comes in more than handy when keeping track of the many 'lies' she tells.

Weaknesses:

• Alone and Afraid: Deep down, Siobhan is a scared child. She uses herself as a commodity to get what she desires but lacks true intimacy. She shuts down around those who she should open up to and feels her heart squeeze itself as if to burst when a happy couple crosses her way. She cries at home to herself when she faces problems.
• The Crooked Corridoors: The gestation of Siobhan's powers did... Something to her mind. She feels the faliures of all the previous waves press down on her- her powers occasionally slip from her control, she hears things that don't make sounds and sees things on the edges of her vision. The sight of herself in a mirror for too long sends her howling. She never reveals why.
• Dragged Down: Siobhan's life of running means that stability feels wrong to her. She can feel a weight pressing down on her when she stays in the same building for too many days, one that only grows and grows the longer she stays still.

Spells:

• Glimmerkin (Blue): There are many histories. There are many futures. Sibohahn cannot see the future, but what has come and what will come often bear no small resemblance to one another, and by exchanging one for the other, Sibohan can attempt to predict what will come.
• Miststep (Blue): One moment she's in one place, the next she's in another. The next, she's behind you. Siobhan's heart and stomach lurch with each step she takes- too much and she stumbles, sober-drunk, ejecting the contents of her stomach and her blood boiling with an unnatural hormonal cocktail.
• Glamour (White): What you see is not always what you get. Especially with Siobhan around. Siobhan's best glamours come when she can reflect them, but Siobhan does not like mirrors. They splinter too easily, and the shards are oh-so-sharp to her cluttered cranium.
• Atomise (Violet): Siobhan can rend matter unto nothing. An object and blood trickles from her nose. A few more and her fingernails blacken and wither. A few more and her hair starts to drift down from her head. She has not gone further.
• Forget-Me-Not (Black): Who was that you saw the other day? Was it a man or a woman? You were sure they were attractive... Or maybe they were just plain? It's not like it matters. They didn't matter. Later, Siobhan has to try a little harder to press down her deepest insecurities.
• Aberration (Black): Siobhan lets another know what she wrestles with inside her mind every waking moment of her life. Most handle it worse than she does. Of course, by empowering them, she also feeds her own visions...

I can definitely see how Siobhan would be considered overly powerful or lore-breaking. If something's wrong, if she needs to be toned down or her abilities elaborated upon and tweaked, I'll do that in an instant.

[Bazmund]

For anyone who has yet to join the discord server:

discord.gg/rG93pW

[silvermist1116]

Deleted

[Stitches]

Thank you everyone for your sheets and your patience. We've been working on reviews either via discord or through PMs, and it's only taking a little while as we both like to review each sheet and figure out the best feedback for your character.

@duskshine749@WanderingSpirit@Nate1008, how are your sheets going? Remember we're on discord or on here if you need a hand.

@Lady Selune I believe Baz PMed you with the feedback but ofc if you have any more questions feel free to ask.

@silvermist1116 working on your feedback as we speak, would you prefer it in discord or RPerguild PMs?

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Concerning the start of the IC, we're pretty much ready to go on our side but we're waiting for enough accepted sheets. Personally I'm looking at 4-5 players, though we're still accepting applications until we reach that mark and then some depending on popularity.