Varnan sped down the highway on his motorcycle in the late Monday weather. These old mountains were bitter cold at this time of year, definitely not the type of weather to be riding through on two wheels. But the icy wind kept him alert, in the same way a commanding officer's presence made people stand up straight. According to the trail he was putting together, the last two lycanthropes had come through this way. He had found trails going through the south end of Cloverfield and both were coming from the west, more or less. They hadn't killed anybody before he managed to lure them away and into a cave and tossed a crude molotov in. They just happened to be the apparition type of werewolves, so they'd shrug it off in a few weeks, maybe longer. He would've sealed them, but he was on a tight schedule right now.
Using some chronomancy to check the past, Varnan had deduced their trail into Cloverfield, and eventually pulled off to the side of a long, cold, dark road as he got to an intersection. Four lanes in each direction, some leading up into another clutch of mountains and some heading into another town. There was an overpass stretching across them, with more cars on it than on the ground. Varnan came to a stop. Traffic was down to a skeleton crew’s worth of cars, mostly people heading home or doing early Christmas shopping.
It had been about a week now, since the apparitions started to get his attention in town. Errant undead and werewolves in a frankly strange concentration. The mountains were full of strange things that humans were smart not to disturb, things older than the modern city that was nestled in them, but beast men and blood drinkers were a niche. They lived in those mountains away from civilization and didn't care for humanity. No one went up those mountains, no one bothered them. It was their own little world.
And yet they were flocking towards people that they didn’t ever bat an eye towards. They were migrating, and it couldn’t have been the weather. Usually, those clans would never do this. It would’ve been easier to just ask them what was happening, but werewolves and vampires weren’t known for diplomacy.
The light turned green, and he turned down the road that led to Raven's Rest.
On his investigations, he'd noticed a pattern. The two werewolves he had to dispatch later came from the west, and so did all of them. Not a single vampire strayed from that course, either. It followed, therefore, that since Raven's Rest was closer to those mountains that this was the first place they'd make landfall.
The low hum of his motorcycle filled the near-silent air. Varnan kept an eye out for any trouble while he slowly cruised down the empty roads. It was quiet, about as quiet as anyone could expect at this hour. A few lights on in houses went out as he passed, the snow was a bit thicker here, and it was starting to build up on the roads. Luckily, he changed the tires out last week for this.
Varnan pulled up to the side of a shop with a neon sign still shining in the sleepy hours. Bill’s Tattoo Shop. Varnan had called the owner in advance to say he was coming over to talk about paranormal things, since he had also been there in the Cataclysm and would know these sorts of things. Dusting himself off, he stepped inside.
"Bill? It's me," Varnan spoke, looking around around and seeing absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. "Have the werewolves been giving people trouble here too?"
Good lord, these kids knew how to set things on fire.
The sun struck the mansion, and Rohan couldn't help but turn his eyes away to avoid going blind. It was just a sea of white through the eye slits of his mask, like a big flashbang going off. And now the mansion was a crumbling wreck that they were going to have to fight through. That was a good way to start off, and a good way to get attention. But that seemed to be the plan. But, it didn't take long for the security in this place to start returning fire.
Unfortunately, Jess wasn't looking very okay, and she got swarmed by her people. Rohan skidded across the ground like he was skating on ice, slipping behind one of the glowing green shields Sycamore's defense put up, and grabbed the Briar Spear from his back. He pulled a rubber bit off the sharp end and flung it at Jess's burnt body. It wouldn't have hurt, in fact Jess would just feel cold where it impaled her. Upon making contact with her, her wounds were quite literally going up in smoke, as bone-white fumes rolled up her arm as her injuries were replaced with healthy skin. She'd feel like she had just woken up from an oddly restful nap, and the "wound" where the artifact struck her was replaced with the smoke as well.
Trying to pull it out would just look like it wasn't even stuck in her at all. It was a matter of seconds before the pain started to recede, as well.
"Save your one time use healing emergencies!" Rohan shouted over the gunfire. "Just remove that when you're fine, and hold onto it! I'm going up, I'll pick them off!"
Rohan's Mask of the Antelope started to give off red smoke from the eye slits. He ran forward, and jumped higher than anyone could physically jump without magic. His feet his the bark of a tree, twenty feet off of the ground, and then he rebounded higher into the canopy above. With the hail of bullets focused down there, the old man didn't have to worry much. Leaping from tree to tree with supernatural agility, he let loose a volley of arrows from Steelfeather. His bow was enchanted by his curse, in such a way that the arrows flew straight now matter how far it took to hit something. And then, when they did hit something, they hit with the force of a bullet. The arrows themselves were cut and processed by his hands to be able to withstand that strain, so they'd hit nice and hard.
A rain of these arrows fell upon the Elite's distracted gunmen with no rhyme or reason. One minute, they were raining down from their left, then behind them, then directly overhead. By the time anyone had a bead on where the arrows came from, Rohan already vaulted into another tree, circling around like a vulture.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Getting onto the island was the easy part. Now came the calm before the storm, now came the hard part.
Stormy had gone off and changed into all black, covering his head with a hood and black bandana. Historically, this type of thing was how people covered their tracks, (because of course a history professor would think that way, the fucking nerd.) and go home alive. He stepped up with Drake and the Aggro squad. "Keep near me, and I'll keep all of you covered," he said, cracking his knuckles with the kind of stoic fury that mountains stood tall against time itself with. Green sparks of Lux sizzled down his hands and caught the wind, filling the air with a sound similar to sheet metal bending on a roof. These rich bastards would break against his shields, or he'd break them, whatever it took to bring everyone home alive. Stormy had been silently dreading this fight, but he dreaded every fight. There was always a threat of death, or someone going missing, and he was an Adept of the Spider. That sort of thing defined him.
"It's most of us against a bunch of aristocrats, and the plan is good. We've got this, so trust yourselves, okay?!" He said this to everyone. Stormy wanted them all in good spirits, as good as they could get, because a good start was everything in life. "Everyone here has seen worse than this! Good luck!"
"Now would be a damn good opportunity for Shock and Awe, Aryin- Speak now or hold your piece. I can get you in deeper for an ambush."
Amara was armored up in a way that felt all too familiar. Black riot gear, a black riot helmet, combat boots, gloves, the whole nine yards. She went back in time today, gripping a well-adorned Beneli M4 chambered with the Temple's renown Wall Shot; More pellets than mundane engineering could possible pack into a twelve gauge round. Across her armor, she had whole rows of the shells lined up in speedloaders, along with maybe a dozen magazines full of forty-five caliber ammunition of equal quality and source. Her phantoms fell in around her, and unlike the usual ghostly appearance, they were also armed to the fucking teeth. Amara had gotten in good with the Temple, promising goodwill and favors in return for them going the extra mile to arm her gravebound warriors. It wouldn't do good to disguise themselves if her ghosts gave away who she was, after all. So each one was damn near identical to Amara herself, armed with a shotgun and ammo.
"You heard the woman!" Amara shouted, as her phantoms stood by their appropriate groups. Two went to the Artifact team, and every other team got one. "We'll be in touch as much as possible- Even if you don't radio, my phantoms will give me a constant play-by of what's going on for you! If you need backup, everyone will know!"
The old carpenter of the 317 pulled his antelope mask down over his face, and the world became grey through his eyes. "I'm faster than most of you with this mask on," he announced in his gravelly tone. "I'm your sniper, and in-a-pinch medic." He pointed to a spear of gnarled, white birch slung over his back. "This heals someone I stick with it, if we can't heal any other way. I'll probably be the first to get somewhere else quick if another healer can't, so don't forget!"
He held a long and stout bow of wood in hand, and between that, the Briar Spear and his scepter of ash both on his back, Rohan looked like he was ready to kill.
And lastly, Jack became the picture of Death. He had abandoned the usual dark academic look, forgoing his woolen coat for a black cloak that hid his face. Shadows curled at his feet like smoke from a fire, ever the ominous and pointlessly dramatic man he was. He stood with the group intend on dealing with the Veil. "As I mentioned earlier, when we find the Eustis Veil, I'll banish it to Void at the earliest chance!" The Shadowzone could, hopefully, fit that stone in the living room now that most of it was empty. It definitely couldn't fit anywhere in the Eleventh Path without some dimensional string-pulling that would take too long for their current schedule. "If we need to retreat, remember that I can teleport us out! I have faith in all of you, and I will see you all back at the Eleventh Path when we are through!"
He hoped those words of encouragement would help whatever doubts they had. He was a confident, egotistical man to his core, and Jack felt that now was the perfect time for everyone to have an ego.
If all went well, everyone would meet back up in the pocket dimension, and they'd all get drunk over a victory.
”What’s the point if it’s all going to be destroyed?" "Ladies and gentlemen, the main event is upon us."
_______________________________________________ Nathan Jackson | Magnus the Magnificent
He/Him | 21 / ??? | Caucasian / ??? | 5'9" / 6'1" | 178lbs / 112lbs _______________________________________________ Failure / Whimsical _______________________________________________ Skills & Talents ”Writing doesn’t pay the bills." ”Pick a card, any card will do!” ___________________________________
Keyboard King ⫻ Nathan always had a knack for writing things out on paper. Things that had to be formal, things like resumes and tax forms… He’s great at sounding professional in an email!
Internet Historian ⫻ Staying up late and watching so many video essays online results in an unsettling amount of useless trivia. Odds are very good Nathan knows more about mundane things than some do about the paranormal… Most of it is likely pretty worthless.
Customer Service ⫻ Everybody has to eat. Nathan works are a fancy coffee shop in the nice part of town. And it’s amazing just how many people think the guy who gives them their watered down slop knows how to fix all their problems.
First Aid ⫻ During the Cataclysm, there were situations where neither Nathan nor Magnus could just fight the problems away. Sometimes, a person was bleeding out and needed to be stitched up. He learned quick.
Showmanship ⫻ Magnus was born for the stage. There isn’t a place in the All-averse where he’s more comfortable than before a crowd of onlookers waiting to be wowed, and he is just full of surprises.
Paranormal Combat ⫻ The miraculous hero of Cloverfield is no stranger to battle. Beware the fury of a man wears a feathered hat to war, for he fears not the pain of death. Magnus brings a certain thrill to blood fights that most people are often out off by.
Acrobatics ⫻ Gravity be damned, Magnus soars through the air like an angel on the wind! He leaps from rooftop to rooftop in search of evil, descending upon his villainous foes with catlike-agility. Even the most perilous of paths are nothing to the mighty Magnus!
Appearance ▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔ ”Man, and this was my favorite shirt." ”Beneath my hat, you’ll see nothing. But when I reach in…
Nathan isn’t anything special when you first see him. A long and lanky build with a mess of hair that he just hazardous combs to one side is what sticks out the most. He does get around a lot, though, so he’s in good enough shape. Nathan gives off an air of inferiority that’s lot of people pick up on quick, he tends that walk with his head tilted low and generally lacks the presence to get anyone’s respect.
As Magnus, it’s a whole other story. He radiates confidence, always waking with his head head high and brimming with the energy of someone bold. The enigmatic magician wears the outfit of a Victorian magician, with a long red cloak hanging off his shoulders and an absurd, feathered hat. Silvery from drapes down his clothes and compliments the stark white mask he wears, concealing his face and identity behind a veneer of mystery.
Psychology ▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔ ”Do you ever just wish you could stop everything for five minutes?." ”Fret not, for I always have a trick up my sleeves.”
MAIN GOAL ⫻ Nathan isn't asking for much. A lot of people who know magic is a thing have some great aspiration in life, from uncovering the greatest secrets to conquering some grand beast. But in the wake of Nyrah's destruction, the most he can do is hope he doesn't lose his apartment. While the city keeps going and while people try to get back on their feet, Nathan is working his ass off to keep a roof over his head.
Magnus, on the other hand, is hellbent on making Cloverfield a safer place. Imagine, if you will, a world without the Joker or Bane, Poison Ivy or the Scarecrow. This is that world, and Magnus is this world's Batman. Chaos runs rampant in the south end of Cloverfield, with magic of all folds going unchecked. People suffer underneath it while they make ends meet, and in his approximation of human awareness, he wants to save them all.
PHILOSOPHY ⫻ Nathan thinks people should be good to each other, plain and simple. At the end of the day, people are all you have when you're not filthy rich. Family is important to him, both found and born. Without it, people don't have anything that lasts. Magnus, on the other hand, believes the world is a stage. There are the villains, and then there are the heroes responsible for shielding the innocent. He believes he is one such hero, down to his core.
SECRETS ⫻ Among the people who know of Magnus' presence in Cloverfield, not one of them knows he is secretly just a guy named Nathan Jackson, who found a magical mask one day. Conversely, no one in Nathan's life knows that he's a paranormal being, and he tries to keep these two lives separate as best he can.
Though, it's getting more difficult the longer he uses the mask...
SEXUALITY ⫻ Nathan is (probably) just straight. But Magnus cares little for such things.
FEARS ⫻ Nathan hopes and prays his family never loses their home. They're lucky that they managed to stay in one of the nicer parts of the south end, but if the bills couldn't be paid... It'd be over for them. But something else he fears just as much is the thought that he might one day lose his struggle with Magnus, and that he'll run out of willpower to take the mask off.
Magnus fears the opposite of this, in his own weird way. They're two halves a whole, and yet each feels incomplete as the other. For Magnus, it feels like dying every time he has to remove the mask and maintain his everyday life. Whenever he isn't Nathan, he fears the day he'll no longer need the Mask of the Hero to live a life with purpose.
WHAT DID THEY DO DURING THE CATACLYSM? ⫻ The masked magician of Cloverfield was a shield to the weak and defenseless. When Nyrah came to ransack the city, she was set upon by a hail of explosive playing cards and baffling illusions that fooled her at every turn to deter her from those in need. With little more than a clap of his hands, he drummed up medical supplies that no knew he had, offering his support to other fighters in the streets. The silly paranormal being was known by others to be some odd mix of self-righteous yet equally humble at the same time, hurling himself into the air with a flaming whip to get Nyrah's attention on minute and talking like a superhero the next.
Nathan Jackson was nowhere to be found.
FLAWS ⫻ Magnus is a product of everything Nathan wants to be. Someone people can look up to, someone who can make things right in the world, the type of man who people point to in their hour of need. But it's only through the Mask of the Hero that he finds that strength. Without the mask, Magnus doesn't exist. And without Magnus, Nathan is just a spineless nobody who holds himself back. He doesn't have the confidence to stand up and make changes without the courage that comes with being a masked hero. Being Magnus psychologically changes Nathan. It fills him with a kind of confidence that one can only get from supernatural means. His own personality is written over, like a werewolf under the full moon. And the feeling of so much belief in himself is nothing short of an addiction. Every day, Nathan finds it a little harder to take the mask off, and a little harder to remember that there are people who need him and not Magnus.
The other half of this coin is the fact that Magnus always has his head in the clouds. There's no balance between the two. As the family man grapples with the temptation to leave the mundane behind, so too does the bleeding heart magician struggle with the weight of normalcy. It isn't enough for him to live a day-to-day life, even if he could relate to humans... Something has to give eventually.
Backstory ▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔ ”We don't always have much to lose. Sometimes... Sometimes we just have to do something." ”Let me tell you a story, of mundane dullards and miraculous legends. Of a great dragon and a small town of heroes...
Nathan Jackson is the son of Carl and Jasmin Jackson, born into the middle class on the south side of Cloverfield. The life he had growing up as a kid wasn’t great by any means. Jasmin had health problems exacerbated by his birth, and Carl worked in the mountains. Sometimes, he would be home for days, and when he was finally home, the man of the house wasn’t in the mood to gripe with a scrawny kid and an ailing woman who just had to sit around the house all day. Nathan was always kept fed and a hand was never raised against him, but it wasn’t always soft and warm. Often, he’d overhear his parents bickering about who had it worse, the woman who could barely stand without her leg feeling numb or the man who breathed coal dust every day.
This sort of dynamic at home often had an impact on Nathan’s life in school as well, he’d do his best in class and be grilled for not always having the best grades by a man who thought math or science was childish compared to what he had to put up with. And so, Nathan put up with tough love over the years, never getting much sympathy at home and never being able to quite get away from the shitty attitudes back home. Still, like any ordinary person, he worked his ass off.
Things started to get a little different when Carl was killed in a mining accident, though. Nathan was only 16, and life fell to shit by then. They could barely pay for a funeral, and Jasmin wasn’t getting paid very well for a remote job she had as a telemarketer. The only reason they managed to stay afloat back then was due to an uncle on Carl’s side, who had a kid of his own but was a lot more stable. He came by every now and then and helped them through tough times, but Nathan had been sneaking out at night by them to deal with things in his own way.
His grades slipped in a way no one could blame him for, given the changes in his life. He never got to see his dad smile even once during the time he was alive, and it all just sucked. Everything was a disappointment in one way or another.
Life got shittier when the reality hit him that he’d never go to college. At the rate he was going, there was no way he or his family could afford it without drowning in debt. There were programs offered online that he could apply for to get scholarships, and there was a good chance he’d be able to do something with his life, but Jasmin’s health started deteriorating by the time Nathan was 18. If by some miracle he managed to move out, then there was a good chance she’d be helpless if something happened to his uncle.
And that was when he found something strange.
On another one of the nights where he’d sneak out to be alone, Nathan found a white mask laying half-buried under dirt and rocks. Touching it, the mask radiated power of some kind. He could feel it in his fingertips, as a voice- his voice beckoned him to put it on. And when he did, his eyes were opened to the paranormal. His mind spilled open like a floodgate, something in his brain fundamentally changed and became more like itself. He was gifted magic.
On that day, Magnus the Magnificent was born.
Magic has a funny way of finding people in the right times. After roughly a week of looking into the paranormal and coming to terms with how the Mask of the Hero worked, something awful happened, the Cataclysm. Nyrah descended upon Cloverfield threatening to level it. And so, a magician clad in red and black stood up to fight back. He dove into the streets like a hero, alongside so many others who he never knew were in this city, and they beat back the dragon. For two long days, his newfound gifts were tested as so many fell around him. But in the end, the heroes defeated the villain, and Magnus’ trial by fire came to an end.
But it wasn’t all good, because in the chaos, Nathan’s uncle was killed. He had been so good to Jasmin, and Nathan could have done something to same him while out as Magnus. But he never noticed, and blames himself to this day. After another funeral and a round of legal discussions, Uncle Rick’s daughter, Emily, moved in with them. It’s been hard, but Nathan had managed to balance out his life with the life Magnus lives. Nathan Jackson keeps his family afloat in a world that refuses to let them prosper, and Magnus the Magnificent saves the world so people like him can carry on.
It’s all Nathan can do to feel like he’s enough, these days.
Abstraction ▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔ ”Before your very eyes, I will whisk these troubles away! One magnificent wonder at a time!"
TYPE ⫻ Agent
ABSTRACTION ⫻Mask of the Hero
ABSTRACTION DESCRIPTION ⫻ The Mask of the Hero allows its wearer to assume the role of their idealized self. An exaggeration of everything they wish they could be, but fear they may never will be. This idealized form is a heroic one, meaning some don’t benefit from its power in the first place. When the mask is put on, those who benefit from it become something closer to an Apparition. They become the person they always wanted to be, their new form embodying these traits in curious ways.
In Nathan’s case, he becomes Magnus the Magnificent, a fantastical magician who embodies the thrill and liveliness of the world. He becomes wonder and whimsy in the shape of a mortal man. Psychologically speaking, Magnus is a completely different person from Nathan Jackson, enjoying the absolute best qualities of his mundane counterpart without his flaws. Magnus’ abilities reflect this, making him a veritable superhero cast in the archetype of a performer. With an arsenal of tricks up his sleeves, no one truly knows what Magnus has in store for them.
Smoke and Mirrors ⫻ Magnus can project multicolored fog from the folds of his clothes, which quickly become complex hallucinations for those in the affected area. These hallucinations are visual and auditory, and can be any from from duplicates of Magnus himself to tricking someone into thinking they’ve gone deaf. To those susceptible to these illusions, it's like a dream. It's damn near impossible to tell real from fake without some sort of magic ability to circumvent this.
Sleight of Hand ⫻ Magnus’ hands behave like a pair of pocket dimensions, each able to independently store up to 20lbs of mass. All he has to do is touch something that would fit in his hand, curl his fingers, and abracadabra. It’s vanished. With a flick of his wrists, Magnus can bring these palmed objects back into reality for a quick surprise attack.
King’s Deck ⫻ Shimmering playing cards appear in Magnus’s hands, which he throws forth like boomerangs. The King’s Deck has four different kinds of cards for the four suits. Diamond cards are razor sharp and cut through metal like paper. Clubs are blunt as a rock and hit with the force of a mule’s kick, heart cards debilitate their target, as if poisoned by a snake. And the most extravagant of them is the spades, which explode like a grenade when they hit a surface.
Sword Swallower’s Curse ⫻ Magnus conjure up a glowing sword out of thin air, as long as he is tall. The sword is lighter than air, but has the unique property of being able to puncture through damn near anything. From human flesh to solid steel, the sharp point of the blade stabs through it all.
Ringmaster ⫻ With a wave of his hand, Magnus can conjure up a flaming whip of ethereal energy. This whip hurts like a bitch to get struck by, but ultimately hurts more than it injures. It's a deterrent, a way to shut down the evildoers of Cloverfield with mercy. Magnus can hit a target with this whip from up to 15 feet away, and he's been seen using it like a grappling hook once or twice during the Cataclysm.
LIMITS ⫻
Smoke and Mirrors ⫻ Beyond a radius of 20 feet, Magnus' illusory smoke just looks like a jumbled up haze. Anyone past this distance is wholly unaffected.
Sword Swallower’s Curse ⫻ Like a true magician, the sword doesn't inflict much harm on the audience. Oddly enough, it seems to only be able to harm living beings if they have an Emotional Field. Those who are Blind, or are affected with exceedingly weak magical resistances are unharmed.
WEAKNESSES ⫻
Smoke and Mirrors ⫻ The hallucinations make no distinction between friend and foe. Anyone caught in it will be subject to visual and auditory hallucinations.
Sleight of Hand ⫻ When Magnus stores an object it is stored randomly in the pocket dimensions. When an object is pulled back it it will be pulled in that random order. Depending on what he has stored he might end up looking like a magician pulling ribbons from their sleeves in important moments.
King’s Deck ⫻ The cards are all pulled from the a singular deck and they are pulled from it at random. This means that when Magnus draws a card, he will not know what it will do until he sees it for the first time. This also limits what he can do with each suit. He will either need to count the cards to remember how many of each suit he has left or find creative uses for the card if it comes out without it. Magnus is also not immune to the shrapnel created by the spades. If he throws it too close he risks hurting himself.
Other ▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔ ”Things aren’t great in town. But if I can’t do this for them, I might as well just pack up." ”We all fight for something, don’t we?”
Nathan works in a snobby coffee shop in the north part of Cloverfield. It sucks.
He/Him | 32 | African American | 5’10” | 198lbs _______________________________________________ Dignified _______________________________________________ Skills & Talents "Let me give you a hand with that." ___________________________________
Baker ⫻ Through immeasurable trial and error, Varnan eventually got the hang of making cakes and pastries, and anything else that fits in an oven. Don’t even try asking him how many times he had to use his chronomancy to save a pie he burnt, he won’t tell you.
Grizzled Veteran ⫻ As a former field agent, Varnan had the rules of conflict drilled into him day after day. If there was ever someone to keep their cool in a tense situation, it’s him. It’s damn near impossible to shake his level head, and anyone who succeeds only pisses him off.
Discretion ⫻ The Guild taught its agents that borders only apply to the citizens within. As such, Varnan often infiltrated many places to take care of business. He has an easy time keeping his head down and minimizing the chances that someone gets suspicious about things.
Teamwork ⫻ One man can’t do it all, even if that man has all the time in the world. Varnan has a good sense of working in a group with others, he’s a team player when he needs to be and a team captain when no one else wants the responsibility. If there’s work to be done, then he’ll get it taken care of by getting the right people on it.
Appearance ▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔ "It gets cold at night, this close to the mountains."
Varnanis the picture of a man who takes care of himself, but manages to stay humble. A mane of coiled hair drops down from his head, hanging off his shoulders. A lifetime of field work across the All-Verse has resulted in a great deal of muscle that sometimes goes unnoticed due to the clothes he wears. Varnan tends to dress for comfort and practicality, only concerning himself with aesthetics when it’s an occasion. As such, he’s often seen in anything from jeans and a leather jacket to sweatpants and unbuttoned Hawaiian shirts.
Psychology ▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔ "Stand down and you will not be harmed."
MAIN GOAL ⫻ Varnan’s biggest concern is Cloverfield's well-being. After all, he lives here. He’s invested in preserving the city as a whole and combatting whatever threats come knocking. Ever since he left the Hourglass Guild, it’s been his home. And Varnan doesn’t tolerate nonsense in his home.
PHILOSOPHY ⫻ Varnan is the type of man who beats down a group of invading paranormals, breaks their spirit and towers over them, and then politely asks them if they’d like to negotiate. He’s a man of principles and dignity; There is a right way to do things, a right way to win and a right way to fail. Varnan believes in holding one’s self to a better standard, and making sure things are done in as best a way as they possibly can be.
SECRETS ⫻ The existence of the Hourglass Guild, and Varnan's past connections to it, are something he doesn't talk about much. It's complicated, to say the least. As far as anyone can tell, he simply came from somewhere that meant a great deal to someone else. It's easy to piece together the fact that Varnan has a tricky history, given the sheer sophistication of his magic, but no one in Dazzle knows the Guild is out there.
Varnan also tries to keep his very existence as a paranormal being quiet in general. While it wouldn't be the end of the world if his neighbors found out he could rewind time itself, he'd rather not advertise that fact. He's trying to live an ordinary life if he can, even as he tries to balance it out with his involvement in Cloverfield's prosperity.
SEXUALITY ⫻ Bisexual
FEARS ⫻ Varnan fears the possibility of the Hourglass Guild discovering that he’s still alive. Desertion is punishable by erasure from history. Of course, he also fears things like a second Cataclysm, and other things that would uproot his life.
WHAT DID THEY DO DURING THE CATACLYSM? ⫻ Varnan was sent to Dazzle by his superiors in the Hourglass Guild. His task was to track Nyrah down and stop her for good, and when he came to Cloverfield, he put his talents to work. Paranormals who would’ve been killed miraculously survived death when they shouldn’t have, entire buildings were saved as he turned back the clock. Varnan brought a sense of stability and competency to the Cataclysm, seeing it through to the end.
FLAWS ⫻ Varnan's stuck up nature isn't for everybody. His inclination for doing things "by the book" often puts him at odds with those who would cut corners or take the moral low ground to make ends meet. To him, a victory that was secured through cheating is no real victory at all, and sacrificing one's own values just to say they made it is like its own form of death.
Backstory ▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔ "You wouldn’t last ten minutes where I came from."
Varnan’s kindling event never happened. He did not exist in the eyes of the All-Verse before his induction into the enigmatic group known as the Hourglass Guild. Thanks to the use of esoteric chronomancy, no one remembers him from before these days. At the young age of 13, Varnan was brought to a place between worlds, by an old and wizened agent after someone found a newly kindled Adept in a place where he wouldn’t be missed. He had the potential, and so the Guild raised him as one of their own.
The Hourglass Guild, a militant bastion of time bending paranormals, taught Varnan to combat paranormal threats with his magic. He learned from masters older than centuries, and spent most of his childhood studying the lessons of those who came before him. Time is a difficult thing to control, even in the hands of such experts, but the Guild held its apprentices to high standards. By the age of 16, he had successfully mastered his first chronomancy spell, marking the beginning of Varnan’s ascension to an official status.
At 18, Varnan received his Timepiece, a standard issued artifact given to all agents of the Guild. He was formally inducted, and his first assignment began hours later in a world called Flare. A band of undead apparitions had been amassing power, and eventually melded together into something much stronger. This rancorous beast threatened to spill into other worlds, gathering up dead things as it went along. For three long weeks, Varnan and his fellow Timekeepers slowly worked backwards to find the origin of the creature, where they stopped the event that brought it together and sealed the original apparitions.
By 21, Varnan had mastered an additional four spells archived in the Guild’s extensive library, and put them to use in shutting down an invasion of Adepts raiding the world known as Shine. They appeared through canyon-wide rifts to conquer the planet and create an empire. Varnan was one of right agents sent to aid the magical authorities of Shine. After a month of extensive combat treating of injured, and field agent casualties, Shine was saved. Varnan and three others returned to the Conservatory with the feeling of a hollow victory.
Varnan saw many other battlefields in his time; In Glow, he led a stealth mission against an apparition that assimilated Blinds into a hive mind networke. In Haze, he was sent in alone to assassinate an Adjoined planning to open the Pit. After roughly 20 years of close calls and work in disastrous areas, Varnan’s attitude about work in the Guild began to shift. He had been deployed to so many worlds and only stayed long enough to take care of business, and he had recently been promoted to a field officer, a rank that gave him the authority to assign missions and train new agents. But he wanted something different, and that was next to impossible.
To betray the Hourglass Guild was to forfeit omens existence. It was a lifelong commitment, one that members could only escape by never existing in the first place. His time had made him weary, but Varnan had planned something risky. If it failed, he wouldn’t be able to regret it in the first place.
In a world called Dazzle, the Guild’s seers detected a monster ransacking one city after another. Nyrah the Ravager. She was dangerous. Not dangerous enough to warrant a squad of field agents, but dangerous nonetheless. Varnan volunteered to ship out and get rid of her. Given his status in the Guild, and his history of successful deployments, there wasn’t any debate in sending him out. And so, Varnan was dropped into Dazzle with a plan in mind
.Dispatch Nyrah the Ravager, and take an early retirement.
Varnan tracked her for days, and days became weeks. He combed through the wreckage of entire cities for clues that could help stop her, linking together a profile of her abilities. He always had to keep looking over his shoulder, just in case the Guild decided to check in. Eventually, he tracked Nyrah to Cloverfield, where the citizens fought back with a fury unlike anything Nyrah had been faced with before. It was all out war in the streets, with combat on the scale of something he saw on the rare occasions the Guild would send in a squad. Over the course of a few days, the last few pieces of Varnan’s puzzle came into effect.
Mere hours before Nyrah was taken out, Varnan transmitted a message to the Guild through his Timepiece: I am gravely injured, and may not survive. If I am not found in the Conservatory soon, know that it was an honor. It was sheer luck, and luck alone, that no one thought to dig deeper into whether or not Varnan was actually injured. The honest truth is that he was fine, and simply faked his death. The Guild didn’t even think twice about his absence.
And now, over a year later. Varnan Ingram is an ordinary resident of Cloverfield. He’s someone’s neighbor, he works at a bakery, and very rarely does anyone have the change to see the hardened warrior that waged war across the All-averse. He still keeps his Guild-issued channeler on him, just in case something dangerous inevitably comes knocking, but his days as Field Officer Ingram are long behind him.
Abstraction ▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔ "You had one road out of this, and it just closed."
TYPE ⫻ Adept
ABSTRACTION ⫻Purple Lux. Varnan’s channeler is a Guild-issued Timepiece.
ABSTRACTION DESCRIPTION ⫻ Varnan is a professionally trained chronomancer, with an masterful list of time manipulation spells at his disposal. With a wave of his hand, he can take control of a battlefield and save allies from certain doom. As one of the Guild’s former field agents, his magical training emphasized combat, making him dangerous in a head-on battle.
Temporal Arts ⫻ Varnan's tricks of his former trade. All field agents of the Hourglass Guild, colloquially called "Timekeepers," are trained to use various methods of time manipulation with an emphasis on combat. Though they almost always learn a few investigative and defense-based tricks as well, and Varnan is no different.
Parallel Code ⫻ By laying a hand on physical matter, Varnan can record its current physical condition to his Timpiece, to "reset" back to at a later date. Broken windows, for example, can be fixed with a snap of his fingers. Injuries can be healed in no time at all with a bit of preparation, even a car's Parallel Code can be recorded when the gas tank is full; Varnan hasn't paid a dime in gas since he officially moved in. This can be applied to people as well, but those with an Emotional Field must allow him in.
Transversal ⫻ A variant of Parallel Code. Transveral records a location in physical space, and when triggered, reverts things back to their original position. This is akin to teleporting, but only serves as a way to return somewhere and thus can't be used proactively. In a fight, Varnan can mark somebody with Transversal to get them out of his face or send them back to a secure location.
Expedite ⫻ With physical contact, Varnan can speed up the flow of time in a localized way. This doesn't have a direct use, but depends on how it's applied. In a situation where a bomb needs to go off faster, Varnan could speed the timer up. Or, if someone's Abstraction slowly heals them, he can touch them to make the healing faster. Cracks in a wall will grow entire feet in seconds. And if he uses this long enough, a defenseless Blind could grow fatally old in moments.
Stasis Pulse ⫻ A wave of purple Lux is sent forth, suspending connections to the flow of time. Anything caught in this shotgun blast of magic is temporarily frozen for up to five seconds. Things become fixed in place, unable to be damaged or moved by anything in the universe. When the blast finally wears off, it's like nothing ever happened.
Hands of Saturn ⫻ The Hands of Saturn is a set of detainment methods. By getting in close and striking someone at close range, these spells can displace them from time's influence. Much like the Stasis Pulse spell, an individual is completely cut off from reality in all ways. They can't be moved, they can't be injured. From their perspective, the world is a blurry, disjointed mess of stimuli along the lines of a chaotic dream. Barring exceptions where someone has an information-based Abstraction, or Abstractions capable of nullifying Lux, those imprisoned by the Hands of Saturn can't make sense of anything.
Hour ⫻ The Hour hand suspends an individual for exactly one hour.
Minute ⫻ The minute hand suspends an individual for exactly five minutes.
Second ⫻ The second hand suspends an individual for exactly ten seconds.
Butterfly’s Manse ⫻ Varnan projects his Lux outwards, anchoring it to reality. In a ten foot radius around him, he can manually alter the speed at which time moves, to as slow as a tenth or as fast as five times its normal movement. He is the only one able to comfortably occupy the Manse, since the border acts like a wall that tries to push others out. While inside, Varnan can investigate or take care of things that are time sensitive without worry, since speeding up time means he can accomplish tasks in a fifth of the time they usually take.
Theta Screen ⫻ A investigative trick that involves opening up a distortion in time. Using this, Varnan can peer into the past by walking through an area. The Theta Screen layers the past over the present, bleeding them together and organizing them so that each is crystal clear. Events of the past play out in the area where they occurred, making it easy to uncover things that would otherwise be indecipherable.
LIMITS ⫻ Every member of the Hourglass Guild knows the difficulties of working with time itself. Guild chronomancy is structured in just such a way that it actively works against situations that would cause a paradox. The failsafe worked into every individual spell taught at the Conservatory ensures a field agent won't become their own ancestor or do something so fundamentally stupid that it would require a whole squad of Wardens to contain. In practice, this means three things.
Law of Severance ⫻ Firstly, all chronomancy spells taught to Guild members automatically "short out" when coming into contact with foreign chronomancy. Varnan's magic is effectively allergic to other time-based paranormals, which means that one could very easily fight fire with fire if they dealt with him. Those who rewind time to heal themselves could walk right through a time-distortion effect he creates while their spells are active. Someone under the effect of a time-bending spell that rewinds their body could completely negate the Hands of Saturn.
Law of Primacy ⫻ Guild chronomancy is designed to avoid manipulating the future in all ways. The only possible way for Varnan to interact with events yet to pass is to use a spell that peers into the future, in the same way the Theta Screen peers into the past, or use a spell to send someone back. Under no circumstances could he open a portal to the far future and bring back an artifact, or get rid of people ten years ahead of time. Under Guild rules, doing such a thing means his Timepiece would alert the Warden division, at which point he'd be swarmed and taken away from Dazzle entirely.
Law of Imperatives ⫻ When a field agent is more than fifty feet away from any active spells they have cast, they fizzle out. Reality stabilizes until their work is rendered inert. This prevents Varnan from setting up a zone of altered time and then leaving to set one up a block away. As a field agent, he was trained to stay in the thick of things until the conflict is resolved. Leaving things unattended, therefore, runs against that.
Parallel Code ⫻ As a safety precaution, field agent models of the Timepiece have a limit to how many codes for living things it can store at once. For civilians- The official term for Blinds- the limit is ten at a time. For Paranormal beings with an Abstraction, this is three. Varnan is not exempt from this limit.
Hands of Saturn ⫻ Each detainment technique, in ascending order, is more difficult than the last to pull off. Moreover, they're visually obvious. Paranormal beings with an Emotional Field have the capacity to resist if they know what to expect; The Second Hand is the easiest, able to subvert the Emotional Field of most paranormals who simply don't see it coming. But the Hour Hand puts the most strain on Varnan, meaning he'd be lucky to detain more than one individual at a time. To get past the Emotional Field with the Hour Hand, Varnan would have to put most of his power into it, leaving him vulnerable if he isn't careful.
WEAKNESSES ⫻ Parallel Code ⫻ Transversal / Hands of Saturn ⫻ In order to reset an object or location, Varnan must also distort his own place in time and doing so will cause Varnan to experience his own timeline out of order. A small fix will cause Varnan to experience seconds of his past, or future, as if it was the present. A major use of the power can send him weeks, months even, down either way of his timeline. The effects of this last for as long as it takes for the spell to finish. As well, Varnan will not know when these time slips take place or where it will send him.
For Hands of Saturn it will start slow but ramp up quickly over time thus giving Varnan a limit on how long he can actually keep someone imprisoned.
As well, death can not be reverted. While he can heal the wounds it will not return life to the body.
Expedite ⫻. Speeding up the passage of time also speeds up the passage of time for him. Prolonged use of this spell could cause him to age noticeably depending on how much time is sped up.
Stasis Pulse ⫻ Those with strong emotional fields, like apparitions, are able to resist this effect.
He/Him | 32 | African American | 5’10” | 198lbs _______________________________________________ Dignified _______________________________________________ Skills & Talents "Let me give you a hand with that." ___________________________________
Baker ⫻ Through immeasurable trial and error, Varnan eventually got the hang of making cakes and pastries, and anything else that fits in an oven. Don’t even try asking him how many times he had to use his chronomancy to save a pie he burnt, he won’t tell you.
Grizzled Veteran ⫻ As a former field agent, Varnan had the rules of conflict drilled into him day after day. If there was ever someone to keep their cool in a tense situation, it’s him. It’s damn near impossible to shake his level head, and anyone who succeeds only pisses him off.
Discretion ⫻ The Guild taught its agents that borders only apply to the citizens within. As such, Varnan often infiltrated many places to take care of business. He has an easy time keeping his head down and minimizing the chances that someone gets suspicious about things.
Teamwork ⫻ One man can’t do it all, even if that man has all the time in the world. Varnan has a good sense of working in a group with others, he’s a team player when he needs to be and a team captain when no one else wants the responsibility. If there’s work to be done, then he’ll get it taken care of by getting the right people on it.
Appearance ▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔ "It gets cold at night, this close to the mountains."
Varnanis the picture of a man who takes care of himself, but manages to stay humble. A mane of coiled hair drops down from his head, hanging off his shoulders. A lifetime of field work across the All-Verse has resulted in a great deal of muscle that sometimes goes unnoticed due to the clothes he wears. Varnan tends to dress for comfort and practicality, only concerning himself with aesthetics when it’s an occasion. As such, he’s often seen in anything from jeans and a leather jacket to sweatpants and unbuttoned Hawaiian shirts.
Psychology ▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔ "Stand down and you will not be harmed."
MAIN GOAL ⫻ Varnan’s biggest concern is Cloverfield's well-being. After all, he lives here. He’s invested in preserving the city as a whole and combatting whatever threats come knocking. Ever since he left the Hourglass Guild, it’s been his home. And Varnan doesn’t tolerate nonsense in his home.
PHILOSOPHY ⫻ Varnan is the type of man who beats down a group of invading paranormals, breaks their spirit and towers over them, and then politely asks them if they’d like to negotiate. He’s a man of principles and dignity; There is a right way to do things, a right way to win and a right way to fail. Varnan believes in holding one’s self to a better standard, and making sure things are done in as best a way as they possibly can be.
SECRETS ⫻ The existence of the Hourglass Guild, and Varnan's past connections to it, are something he doesn't talk about much. It's complicated, to say the least. As far as anyone can tell, he simply came from somewhere that meant a great deal to someone else. It's easy to piece together the fact that Varnan has a tricky history, given the sheer sophistication of his magic, but no one in Dazzle knows the Guild is out there.
Varnan also tries to keep his very existence as a paranormal being quiet in general. While it wouldn't be the end of the world if his neighbors found out he could rewind time itself, he'd rather not advertise that fact. He's trying to live an ordinary life if he can, even as he tries to balance it out with his involvement in Cloverfield's prosperity.
SEXUALITY ⫻ Bisexual
FEARS ⫻ Varnan fears the possibility of the Hourglass Guild discovering that he’s still alive. Desertion is punishable by erasure from history. Of course, he also fears things like a second Cataclysm, and other things that would uproot his life.
WHAT DID THEY DO DURING THE CATACLYSM? ⫻ Varnan was sent to Dazzle by his superiors in the Hourglass Guild. His task was to track Nyrah down and stop her for good, and when he came to Cloverfield, he put his talents to work. Paranormals who would’ve been killed miraculously survived death when they shouldn’t have, entire buildings were saved as he turned back the clock. Varnan brought a sense of stability and competency to the Cataclysm, seeing it through to the end.
FLAWS ⫻ Varnan's stuck up nature isn't for everybody. His inclination for doing things "by the book" often puts him at odds with those who would cut corners or take the moral low ground to make ends meet. To him, a victory that was secured through cheating is no real victory at all, and sacrificing one's own values just to say they made it is like its own form of death.
Backstory ▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔ "You wouldn’t last ten minutes where I came from."
Varnan’s kindling event never happened. He did not exist in the eyes of the All-Verse before his induction into the enigmatic group known as the Hourglass Guild. Thanks to the use of esoteric chronomancy, no one remembers him from before these days. At the young age of 13, Varnan was brought to a place between worlds, by an old and wizened agent after someone found a newly kindled Adept in a place where he wouldn’t be missed. He had the potential, and so the Guild raised him as one of their own.
The Hourglass Guild, a militant bastion of time bending paranormals, taught Varnan to combat paranormal threats with his magic. He learned from masters older than centuries, and spent most of his childhood studying the lessons of those who came before him. Time is a difficult thing to control, even in the hands of such experts, but the Guild held its apprentices to high standards. By the age of 16, he had successfully mastered his first chronomancy spell, marking the beginning of Varnan’s ascension to an official status.
At 18, Varnan received his Timepiece, a standard issued artifact given to all agents of the Guild. He was formally inducted, and his first assignment began hours later in a world called Flare. A band of undead apparitions had been amassing power, and eventually melded together into something much stronger. This rancorous beast threatened to spill into other worlds, gathering up dead things as it went along. For three long weeks, Varnan and his fellow Timekeepers slowly worked backwards to find the origin of the creature, where they stopped the event that brought it together and sealed the original apparitions.
By 21, Varnan had mastered an additional four spells archived in the Guild’s extensive library, and put them to use in shutting down an invasion of Adepts raiding the world known as Shine. They appeared through canyon-wide rifts to conquer the planet and create an empire. Varnan was one of right agents sent to aid the magical authorities of Shine. After a month of extensive combat treating of injured, and field agent casualties, Shine was saved. Varnan and three others returned to the Conservatory with the feeling of a hollow victory.
Varnan saw many other battlefields in his time; In Glow, he led a stealth mission against an apparition that assimilated Blinds into a hive mind networke. In Haze, he was sent in alone to assassinate an Adjoined planning to open the Pit. After roughly 20 years of close calls and work in disastrous areas, Varnan’s attitude about work in the Guild began to shift. He had been deployed to so many worlds and only stayed long enough to take care of business, and he had recently been promoted to a field officer, a rank that gave him the authority to assign missions and train new agents. But he wanted something different, and that was next to impossible.
To betray the Hourglass Guild was to forfeit omens existence. It was a lifelong commitment, one that members could only escape by never existing in the first place. His time had made him weary, but Varnan had planned something risky. If it failed, he wouldn’t be able to regret it in the first place.
In a world called Dazzle, the Guild’s seers detected a monster ransacking one city after another. Nyrah the Ravager. She was dangerous. Not dangerous enough to warrant a squad of field agents, but dangerous nonetheless. Varnan volunteered to ship out and get rid of her. Given his status in the Guild, and his history of successful deployments, there wasn’t any debate in sending him out. And so, Varnan was dropped into Dazzle with a plan in mind
.Dispatch Nyrah the Ravager, and take an early retirement.
Varnan tracked her for days, and days became weeks. He combed through the wreckage of entire cities for clues that could help stop her, linking together a profile of her abilities. He always had to keep looking over his shoulder, just in case the Guild decided to check in. Eventually, he tracked Nyrah to Cloverfield, where the citizens fought back with a fury unlike anything Nyrah had been faced with before. It was all out war in the streets, with combat on the scale of something he saw on the rare occasions the Guild would send in a squad. Over the course of a few days, the last few pieces of Varnan’s puzzle came into effect.
Mere hours before Nyrah was taken out, Varnan transmitted a message to the Guild through his Timepiece: I am gravely injured, and may not survive. If I am not found in the Conservatory soon, know that it was an honor. It was sheer luck, and luck alone, that no one thought to dig deeper into whether or not Varnan was actually injured. The honest truth is that he was fine, and simply faked his death. The Guild didn’t even think twice about his absence.
And now, over a year later. Varnan Ingram is an ordinary resident of Cloverfield. He’s someone’s neighbor, he works at a bakery, and very rarely does anyone have the change to see the hardened warrior that waged war across the All-averse. He still keeps his Guild-issued channeler on him, just in case something dangerous inevitably comes knocking, but his days as Field Officer Ingram are long behind him.
Abstraction ▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔ "You had one road out of this, and it just closed."
TYPE ⫻ Adept
ABSTRACTION ⫻Purple Lux. Varnan’s channeler is a Guild-issued Timepiece.
ABSTRACTION DESCRIPTION ⫻ Varnan is a professionally trained chronomancer, with an masterful list of time manipulation spells at his disposal. With a wave of his hand, he can take control of a battlefield and save allies from certain doom. As one of the Guild’s former field agents, his magical training emphasized combat, making him dangerous in a head-on battle.
Temporal Arts ⫻ Varnan's tricks of his former trade. All field agents of the Hourglass Guild, colloquially called "Timekeepers," are trained to use various methods of time manipulation with an emphasis on combat. Though they almost always learn a few investigative and defense-based tricks as well, and Varnan is no different.
Parallel Code ⫻ By laying a hand on physical matter, Varnan can record its current physical condition to his Timpiece, to "reset" back to at a later date. Broken windows, for example, can be fixed with a snap of his fingers. Injuries can be healed in no time at all with a bit of preparation, even a car's Parallel Code can be recorded when the gas tank is full; Varnan hasn't paid a dime in gas since he officially moved in. This can be applied to people as well, but those with an Emotional Field must allow him in.
Transversal ⫻ A variant of Parallel Code. Transveral records a location in physical space, and when triggered, reverts things back to their original position. This is akin to teleporting, but only serves as a way to return somewhere and thus can't be used proactively. In a fight, Varnan can mark somebody with Transversal to get them out of his face or send them back to a secure location.
Expedite ⫻ With physical contact, Varnan can speed up the flow of time in a localized way. This doesn't have a direct use, but depends on how it's applied. In a situation where a bomb needs to go off faster, Varnan could speed the timer up. Or, if someone's Abstraction slowly heals them, he can touch them to make the healing faster. Cracks in a wall will grow entire feet in seconds. And if he uses this long enough, a defenseless Blind could grow fatally old in moments.
Stasis Pulse ⫻ A wave of purple Lux is sent forth, suspending connections to the flow of time. Anything caught in this shotgun blast of magic is temporarily frozen for up to five seconds. Things become fixed in place, unable to be damaged or moved by anything in the universe. When the blast finally wears off, it's like nothing ever happened.
Hands of Saturn ⫻ The Hands of Saturn is a set of detainment methods. By getting in close and striking someone at close range, these spells can displace them from time's influence. Much like the Stasis Pulse spell, an individual is completely cut off from reality in all ways. They can't be moved, they can't be injured. From their perspective, the world is a blurry, disjointed mess of stimuli along the lines of a chaotic dream. Barring exceptions where someone has an information-based Abstraction, or Abstractions capable of nullifying Lux, those imprisoned by the Hands of Saturn can't make sense of anything.
Hour ⫻ The Hour hand suspends an individual for exactly one hour.
Minute ⫻ The minute hand suspends an individual for exactly five minutes.
Second ⫻ The second hand suspends an individual for exactly ten seconds.
Butterfly’s Manse ⫻ Varnan projects his Lux outwards, anchoring it to reality. In a ten foot radius around him, he can manually alter the speed at which time moves, to as slow as a tenth or as fast as five times its normal movement. He is the only one able to comfortably occupy the Manse, since the border acts like a wall that tries to push others out. While inside, Varnan can investigate or take care of things that are time sensitive without worry, since speeding up time means he can accomplish tasks in a fifth of the time they usually take.
Theta Screen ⫻ A investigative trick that involves opening up a distortion in time. Using this, Varnan can peer into the past by walking through an area. The Theta Screen layers the past over the present, bleeding them together and organizing them so that each is crystal clear. Events of the past play out in the area where they occurred, making it easy to uncover things that would otherwise be indecipherable.
LIMITS ⫻ Every member of the Hourglass Guild knows the difficulties of working with time itself. Guild chronomancy is structured in just such a way that it actively works against situations that would cause a paradox. The failsafe worked into every individual spell taught at the Conservatory ensures a field agent won't become their own ancestor or do something so fundamentally stupid that it would require a whole squad of Wardens to contain. In practice, this means three things.
Law of Severance ⫻ Firstly, all chronomancy spells taught to Guild members automatically "short out" when coming into contact with foreign chronomancy. Varnan's magic is effectively allergic to other time-based paranormals, which means that one could very easily fight fire with fire if they dealt with him. Those who rewind time to heal themselves could walk right through a time-distortion effect he creates while their spells are active. Someone under the effect of a time-bending spell that rewinds their body could completely negate the Hands of Saturn.
Law of Primacy ⫻ Guild chronomancy is designed to avoid manipulating the future in all ways. The only possible way for Varnan to interact with events yet to pass is to use a spell that peers into the future, in the same way the Theta Screen peers into the past, or use a spell to send someone back. Under no circumstances could he open a portal to the far future and bring back an artifact, or get rid of people ten years ahead of time. Under Guild rules, doing such a thing means his Timepiece would alert the Warden division, at which point he'd be swarmed and taken away from Dazzle entirely.
Law of Imperatives ⫻ When a field agent is more than fifty feet away from any active spells they have cast, they fizzle out. Reality stabilizes until their work is rendered inert. This prevents Varnan from setting up a zone of altered time and then leaving to set one up a block away. As a field agent, he was trained to stay in the thick of things until the conflict is resolved. Leaving things unattended, therefore, runs against that.
Parallel Code ⫻ As a safety precaution, field agent models of the Timepiece have a limit to how many codes for living things it can store at once. For civilians- The official term for Blinds- the limit is ten at a time. For Paranormal beings with an Abstraction, this is three. Varnan is not exempt from this limit.
Hands of Saturn ⫻ Each detainment technique, in ascending order, is more difficult than the last to pull off. Moreover, they're visually obvious. Paranormal beings with an Emotional Field have the capacity to resist if they know what to expect; The Second Hand is the easiest, able to subvert the Emotional Field of most paranormals who simply don't see it coming. But the Hour Hand puts the most strain on Varnan, meaning he'd be lucky to detain more than one individual at a time. To get past the Emotional Field with the Hour Hand, Varnan would have to put most of his power into it, leaving him vulnerable if he isn't careful.
WEAKNESSES ⫻ (DO NOT FILL THIS OUT, I WILL PROVIDE IT FOR YOU)
”What’s the point if it’s all going to be destroyed?" "Ladies and gentlemen, the main event is upon us."
_______________________________________________ Nathan Jackson | Magnus the Magnificent
He/Him | 21 / ??? | Caucasian / ??? | 5'9" / 6'1" | 178lbs / 112lbs _______________________________________________ Failure / Whimsical _______________________________________________ Skills & Talents ”Writing doesn’t pay the bills." ”Pick a card, any card will do!” ___________________________________
Keyboard King ⫻ Nathan always had a knack for writing things out on paper. Things that had to be formal, things like resumes and tax forms… He’s great at sounding professional in an email!
Internet Historian ⫻ Staying up late and watching so many video essays online results in an unsettling amount of useless trivia. Odds are very good Nathan knows more about mundane things than some do about the paranormal… Most of it is likely pretty worthless.
Customer Service ⫻ Everybody has to eat. Nathan works are a fancy coffee shop in the nice part of town. And it’s amazing just how many people think the guy who gives them their watered down slop knows how to fix all their problems.
First Aid ⫻ During the Cataclysm, there were situations where neither Nathan nor Magnus could just fight the problems away. Sometimes, a person was bleeding out and needed to be stitched up. He learned quick.
Showmanship ⫻ Magnus was born for the stage. There isn’t a place in the All-averse where he’s more comfortable than before a crowd of onlookers waiting to be wowed, and he is just full of surprises.
Paranormal Combat ⫻ The miraculous hero of Cloverfield is no stranger to battle. Beware the fury of a man wears a feathered hat to war, for he fears not the pain of death. Magnus brings a certain thrill to blood fights that most people are often out off by.
Acrobatics ⫻ Gravity be damned, Magnus soars through the air like an angel on the wind! He leaps from rooftop to rooftop in search of evil, descending upon his villainous foes with catlike-agility. Even the most perilous of paths are nothing to the mighty Magnus!
Appearance ▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔ ”Man, and this was my favorite shirt." ”Beneath my hat, you’ll see nothing. But when I reach in…
Nathan isn’t anything special when you first see him. A long and lanky build with a mess of hair that he just hazardous combs to one side is what sticks out the most. He does get around a lot, though, so he’s in good enough shape. Nathan gives off an air of inferiority that’s lot of people pick up on quick, he tends that walk with his head tilted low and generally lacks the presence to get anyone’s respect.
As Magnus, it’s a whole other story. He radiates confidence, always waking with his head head high and brimming with the energy of someone bold. The enigmatic magician wears the outfit of a Victorian magician, with a long red cloak hanging off his shoulders and an absurd, feathered hat. Silvery from drapes down his clothes and compliments the stark white mask he wears, concealing his face and identity behind a veneer of mystery.
Psychology ▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔ ”Do you ever just wish you could stop everything for five minutes?." ”Fret not, for I always have a trick up my sleeves.”
MAIN GOAL ⫻ Nathan isn't asking for much. A lot of people who know magic is a thing have some great aspiration in life, from uncovering the greatest secrets to conquering some grand beast. But in the wake of Nyrah's destruction, the most he can do is hope he doesn't lose his apartment. While the city keeps going and while people try to get back on their feet, Nathan is working his ass off to keep a roof over his head.
Magnus, on the other hand, is hellbent on making Cloverfield a safer place. Imagine, if you will, a world without the Joker or Bane, Poison Ivy or the Scarecrow. This is that world, and Magnus is this world's Batman. Chaos runs rampant in the south end of Cloverfield, with magic of all folds going unchecked. People suffer underneath it while they make ends meet, and in his approximation of human awareness, he wants to save them all.
PHILOSOPHY ⫻ Nathan thinks people should be good to each other, plain and simple. At the end of the day, people are all you have when you're not filthy rich. Family is important to him, both found and born. Without it, people don't have anything that lasts. Magnus, on the other hand, believes the world is a stage. There are the villains, and then there are the heroes responsible for shielding the innocent. He believes he is one such hero, down to his core.
SECRETS ⫻ Among the people who know of Magnus' presence in Cloverfield, not one of them knows he is secretly just a guy named Nathan Jackson, who found a magical mask one day. Conversely, no one in Nathan's life knows that he's a paranormal being, and he tries to keep these two lives separate as best he can.
Though, it's getting more difficult the longer he uses the mask...
SEXUALITY ⫻ Nathan is (probably) just straight. But Magnus cares little for such things.
FEARS ⫻ Nathan hopes and prays his family never loses their home. They're lucky that they managed to stay in one of the nicer parts of the south end, but if the bills couldn't be paid... It'd be over for them. But something else he fears just as much is the thought that he might one day lose his struggle with Magnus, and that he'll run out of willpower to take the mask off.
Magnus fears the opposite of this, in his own weird way. They're two halves a whole, and yet each feels incomplete as the other. For Magnus, it feels like dying every time he has to remove the mask and maintain his everyday life. Whenever he isn't Nathan, he fears the day he'll no longer need the Mask of the Hero to live a life with purpose.
WHAT DID THEY DO DURING THE CATACLYSM? ⫻ The masked magician of Cloverfield was a shield to the weak and defenseless. When Nyrah came to ransack the city, she was set upon by a hail of explosive playing cards and baffling illusions that fooled her at every turn to deter her from those in need. With little more than a clap of his hands, he drummed up medical supplies that no knew he had, offering his support to other fighters in the streets. The silly paranormal being was known by others to be some odd mix of self-righteous yet equally humble at the same time, hurling himself into the air with a flaming whip to get Nyrah's attention on minute and talking like a superhero the next.
Nathan Jackson was nowhere to be found.
FLAWS ⫻ Magnus is a product of everything Nathan wants to be. Someone people can look up to, someone who can make things right in the world, the type of man who people point to in their hour of need. But it's only through the Mask of the Hero that he finds that strength. Without the mask, Magnus doesn't exist. And without Magnus, Nathan is just a spineless nobody who holds himself back. He doesn't have the confidence to stand up and make changes without the courage that comes with being a masked hero. Being Magnus psychologically changes Nathan. It fills him with a kind of confidence that one can only get from supernatural means. His own personality is written over, like a werewolf under the full moon. And the feeling of so much belief in himself is nothing short of an addiction. Every day, Nathan finds it a little harder to take the mask off, and a little harder to remember that there are people who need him and not Magnus.
The other half of this coin is the fact that Magnus always has his head in the clouds. There's no balance between the two. As the family man grapples with the temptation to leave the mundane behind, so too does the bleeding heart magician struggle with the weight of normalcy. It isn't enough for him to live a day-to-day life, even if he could relate to humans... Something has to give eventually.
Backstory ▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔ ”We don't always have much to lose. Sometimes... Sometimes we just have to do something." ”Let me tell you a story, of mundane dullards and miraculous legends. Of a great dragon and a small town of heroes...
Nathan Jackson is the son of Carl and Jasmin Jackson, born into the middle class on the south side of Cloverfield. The life he had growing up as a kid wasn’t great by any means. Jasmin had health problems exacerbated by his birth, and Carl worked in the mountains. Sometimes, he would be home for days, and when he was finally home, the man of the house wasn’t in the mood to gripe with a scrawny kid and an ailing woman who just had to sit around the house all day. Nathan was always kept fed and a hand was never raised against him, but it wasn’t always soft and warm. Often, he’d overhear his parents bickering about who had it worse, the woman who could barely stand without her leg feeling numb or the man who breathed coal dust every day.
This sort of dynamic at home often had an impact on Nathan’s life in school as well, he’d do his best in class and be grilled for not always having the best grades by a man who thought math or science was childish compared to what he had to put up with. And so, Nathan put up with tough love over the years, never getting much sympathy at home and never being able to quite get away from the shitty attitudes back home. Still, like any ordinary person, he worked his ass off.
Things started to get a little different when Carl was killed in a mining accident, though. Nathan was only 16, and life fell to shit by then. They could barely pay for a funeral, and Jasmin wasn’t getting paid very well for a remote job she had as a telemarketer. The only reason they managed to stay afloat back then was due to an uncle on Carl’s side, who had a kid of his own but was a lot more stable. He came by every now and then and helped them through tough times, but Nathan had been sneaking out at night by them to deal with things in his own way.
His grades slipped in a way no one could blame him for, given the changes in his life. He never got to see his dad smile even once during the time he was alive, and it all just sucked. Everything was a disappointment in one way or another.
Life got shittier when the reality hit him that he’d never go to college. At the rate he was going, there was no way he or his family could afford it without drowning in debt. There were programs offered online that he could apply for to get scholarships, and there was a good chance he’d be able to do something with his life, but Jasmin’s health started deteriorating by the time Nathan was 18. If by some miracle he managed to move out, then there was a good chance she’d be helpless if something happened to his uncle.
And that was when he found something strange.
On another one of the nights where he’d sneak out to be alone, Nathan found a white mask laying half-buried under dirt and rocks. Touching it, the mask radiated power of some kind. He could feel it in his fingertips, as a voice- his voice beckoned him to put it on. And when he did, his eyes were opened to the paranormal. His mind spilled open like a floodgate, something in his brain fundamentally changed and became more like itself. He was gifted magic.
On that day, Magnus the Magnificent was born.
Magic has a funny way of finding people in the right times. After roughly a week of looking into the paranormal and coming to terms with how the Mask of the Hero worked, something awful happened, the Cataclysm. Nyrah descended upon Cloverfield threatening to level it. And so, a magician clad in red and black stood up to fight back. He dove into the streets like a hero, alongside so many others who he never knew were in this city, and they beat back the dragon. For two long days, his newfound gifts were tested as so many fell around him. But in the end, the heroes defeated the villain, and Magnus’ trial by fire came to an end.
But it wasn’t all good, because in the chaos, Nathan’s uncle was killed. He had been so good to Jasmin, and Nathan could have done something to same him while out as Magnus. But he never noticed, and blames himself to this day. After another funeral and a round of legal discussions, Uncle Rick’s daughter, Emily, moved in with them. It’s been hard, but Nathan had managed to balance out his life with the life Magnus lives. Nathan Jackson keeps his family afloat in a world that refuses to let them prosper, and Magnus the Magnificent saves the world so people like him can carry on.
It’s all Nathan can do to feel like he’s enough, these days.
Abstraction ▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔ ”Before your very eyes, I will whisk these troubles away! One magnificent wonder at a time!"
TYPE ⫻ Agent
ABSTRACTION ⫻Mask of the Hero
ABSTRACTION DESCRIPTION ⫻ The Mask of the Hero allows its wearer to assume the role of their idealized self. An exaggeration of everything they wish they could be, but fear they may never will be. This idealized form is a heroic one, meaning some don’t benefit from its power in the first place. When the mask is put on, those who benefit from it become something closer to an Apparition. They become the person they always wanted to be, their new form embodying these traits in curious ways.
In Nathan’s case, he becomes Magnus the Magnificent, a fantastical magician who embodies the thrill and liveliness of the world. He becomes wonder and whimsy in the shape of a mortal man. Psychologically speaking, Magnus is a completely different person from Nathan Jackson, enjoying the absolute best qualities of his mundane counterpart without his flaws. Magnus’ abilities reflect this, making him a veritable superhero cast in the archetype of a performer. With an arsenal of tricks up his sleeves, no one truly knows what Magnus has in store for them.
Smoke and Mirrors ⫻ Magnus can project multicolored fog from the folds of his clothes, which quickly become complex hallucinations for those in the affected area. These hallucinations are visual and auditory, and can be any from from duplicates of Magnus himself to tricking someone into thinking they’ve gone deaf. To those susceptible to these illusions, it's like a dream. It's damn near impossible to tell real from fake without some sort of magic ability to circumvent this.
Sleight of Hand ⫻ Magnus’ hands behave like a pair of pocket dimensions, each able to independently store up to 20lbs of mass. All he has to do is touch something that would fit in his hand, curl his fingers, and abracadabra. It’s vanished. With a flick of his wrists, Magnus can bring these palmed objects back into reality for a quick surprise attack.
King’s Deck ⫻ Shimmering playing cards appear in Magnus’s hands, which he throws forth like boomerangs. The King’s Deck has four different kinds of cards for the four suits. Diamond cards are razor sharp and cut through metal like paper. Clubs are blunt as a rock and hit with the force of a mule’s kick, heart cards debilitate their target, as if poisoned by a snake. And the most extravagant of them is the spades, which explode like a grenade when they hit a surface.
Sword Swallower’s Curse ⫻ Magnus conjure up a glowing sword out of thin air, as long as he is tall. The sword is lighter than air, but has the unique property of being able to puncture through damn near anything. From human flesh to solid steel, the sharp point of the blade stabs through it all.
Ringmaster ⫻ With a wave of his hand, Magnus can conjure up a flaming whip of ethereal energy. This whip hurts like a bitch to get struck by, but ultimately hurts more than it injures. It's a deterrent, a way to shut down the evildoers of Cloverfield with mercy. Magnus can hit a target with this whip from up to 15 feet away, and he's been seen using it like a grappling hook once or twice during the Cataclysm.
LIMITS ⫻
Smoke and Mirrors ⫻ Beyond a radius of 20 feet, Magnus' illusory smoke just looks like a jumbled up haze. Anyone past this distance is wholly unaffected.
Sword Swallower’s Curse ⫻ Like a true magician, the sword doesn't inflict much harm on the audience. Oddly enough, it seems to only be able to harm living beings if they have an Emotional Field. Those who are Blind, or are affected with exceedingly weak magical resistances are unharmed.
WEAKNESSES ⫻
Smoke and Mirrors ⫻ The hallucinations make no distinction between friend and foe. Anyone caught in it will be subject to visual and auditory hallucinations.
Sleight of Hand ⫻ When Magnus stores an object it is stored randomly in the pocket dimensions. When an object is pulled back it it will be pulled in that random order. Depending on what he has stored he might end up looking like a magician pulling ribbons from their sleeves in important moments.
King’s Deck ⫻ The cards are all pulled from the a singular deck and they are pulled from it at random. This means that when Magnus draws a card, he will not know what it will do until he sees it for the first time. This also limits what he can do with each suit. He will either need to count the cards to remember how many of each suit he has left or find creative uses for the card if it comes out without it. Magnus is also not immune to the shrapnel created by the spades. If he throws it too close he risks hurting himself.
Other ▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔ ”Things aren’t great in town. But if I can’t do this for them, I might as well just pack up." ”We all fight for something, don’t we?”
Nathan works in a snobby coffee shop in the north part of Cloverfield. It sucks.
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