Name: Brigitta Hackney
Title(s): N/A
Gender: Female
Age: 19
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral
Objective for the Grail: Brigitta can find spirits and raise the dead, but she can’t find the one thing she truly wants; love. Her wish for the grail is to find the perfect match. Monsters are always cast out by society and Brigitta has been deemed as such. Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster — How could anyone like that ever find love?
Command Seal:
Title(s): N/A
Gender: Female
Age: 19
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral
Objective for the Grail: Brigitta can find spirits and raise the dead, but she can’t find the one thing she truly wants; love. Her wish for the grail is to find the perfect match. Monsters are always cast out by society and Brigitta has been deemed as such. Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster — How could anyone like that ever find love?
Command Seal:
Appearance: As standards go, Brigitta is your typical goth with a wardrobe consisting of multiple shades of black, grey, and purple. Her hair, makeup, and her clothes are all perfectly colored and sometimes all look the same color in certain lighting. But don’t be fooled! Brigitta’s hair is a solid raven black with reflections of purple, while her clothes are normally inky black. All a contrast to her alabaster white skin.
Frills are not Brigitta’s taste and she prefers spikes, studs, lace, and laces. Each outfit is riddled with lace trims and studded completely out. Spikes so big they might as well be used to puncture her enemies are what her jewelry is mostly made of. Aside from a black choker made from the noose of martyrs.
Personality: Driven by pure morbid curiosity, the allure of death, and what comes after is what motivates this macabre mage. Every culture believes in a different afterlife, and in a way, she believes in them all. Interacting with the dead is like discovering a new story lost to time, a piece of history long forgotten. Knowing the unknown and cherishing what has been lost. Brigitta has turned her experiences with the dead into an unpublished book, one that tells the tragedies and acclaims of each spirit she’s interacted with. You could say Brigitta looked too deeply into Romeo and Juliet and tries to make everything reflect that.
Even though Brigitta's everyday life is full of death and sorrow, she makes it fun and uppity, but to most… it’s still dreadful and sorrow-filled. Among her writing, she has taken up theatrics to fill her time. Musical and just regular acting, Lights, camera, action! Brigitta likes to put on her own musicals by reanimating the dead and giving them a role to fill, sometimes she even gets them to perform soap operas. Who doesn’t love to watch a rotting corpse cheat on their wife with the maid? Brigitta sure does!
All in all, this mysterious girl is very whimsical and there are a lot of complexities that make up Brigitta Hackney. She may be fun and death-obsessed, but she is by no means a pushover and is quite a fearsome opponent. She’s one of the first to charge into battle, testing her limits, and seeing how far one is willing to go. For her? She’ll go pretty far. Brigitta is careless in that sense and given her family magecraft believes her extra layer of protection is enough to save her if things go horribly wrong.
Bio: All things begin with life and in the same cycle, all things will inevitably meet their end. A fate in which no one or nothing can escape. Cheating is only a temporary solution to a constant motion like death. Many try, and few succeed. However, there are a select few who can alter death’s plan and enforce their own upon the deceased; Necromancers. Death defiers, occultists, and most of all cheaters. The bane of death’s very purpose. With a natural affinity for the dark arts, these individuals wield great control over the dead, and with dedication and sacrifice, these death weavers can manipulate the soul and even their own body or another. Truly something to be feared, for it takes a demented mind to defile the dead in such a way.
In the 1100s, Decebal Lividus Hackney became more than a novice necromancer hiding from the hands of judgment —he became a Pontifex to a group of occultists, fatalists who sought to expand their reach in the afterlife. The young occultist was given the opportunity to learn secrets about his craft, secrets master necromancers spent their lives trying to decipher. In return for accepting to lead his fellow dark enchanters in a time of need, Decebal was granted power and knowledge beyond comprehension. The knowledge that bumped him from novice all the way up to grandmaster. Equipped with all the tools he needed to succeed in his task, Decebal never saw the man who dubbed him Pontifex again.
Throughout the years the grandmaster necromancer and his group of fatalists rose and fell like the push and pull of the tide. Whenever major world events occurred, you could be sure the occultists were there to clean up whatever mess man left behind. War, plague, and disasters that shook the earth, they collected each body and vanished. Of course, the Holy Church knew of their existence, but they left little to no mark and no reason to raise the Church’s suspicions. It was assumed the group had no real power due to no signs of reanimated bodies.
Little did the church know that the group took up residence in a small isolated town where they conducted experiments, with varying levels of extremity on the bodies of the deceased. But not even the living were safe for long… After rumors about a cult of necromancers spread, Decebal knew he had to act fast before the church sent out their elite to put nails in all their coffins. Left with no other option but the extreme, Decebal swiftly murdered the township's Lord and used him as a puppet to protect their work. Decebal's mastery over the dead allowed his puppet to move freely, talk, and most importantly take orders. This allowed the necromancers free reign over the town, performing their immoral experiments in a time when the land was plague-stricken, which meant missing people were not just expected, but planned for.
Having no one to inherit your power and knowledge is a mage's biggest fear and Decebal wasn’t going to let his knowledge vanish after his eventual death. No, he decided to carry on his legacy after courting and marrying one of the disciples — Delora, a gypsy with the gift to speak to ghosts of the past. A medium and a necromancer, she found solace and a purpose in Decebal’s cult and became one of his disciples. Soon, she became his wife and mother to his child. And the two had a plan to dub their newborn the township’s heir, the spawn of their dead lord. A plan that ascended the family to status and power among mages while gaining wealth and partial immunity to the church.
Over the years since, the Hackney family disbanded their secret organization in favor of keeping their knowledge within the family. They have risen, fallen, and gone into obscurity. Before returning, only to repeat the cycle again. According to reports from the Clocktower in the 1800s, the Hackney family had gone into hiding deep in the Netherlands, before reappearing briefly in the 1900s and then retreating to obscurity. As such, the family is known primarily for being businessmen first, and socialites last. But as of the 1950s, the Hackney family has been considered dead. As no mage had heard from the family for a long time, and no heir proper had arrived at the Clocktower. While some believe it was a result of internal family politics, some believe the family's dealings caught up to them and they were exterminated by a member of the Holy Church for breaking some kind of sacred law.
Introducing Brigitta Hackney, the surviving child of the Hackney Family's most infamous ritual. The ritual in question rewrote how the organs and parts of the body connected and acted with a survival rate that is unsurprisingly low, with Brigitta being the third child born of her parents… and the only one to survive. Which left her childhood undergoing training and experiments on her body, killing and reviving cells to see their reactions, to hopefully mutate her genetics and achieve a body fit for the Holy Grail War. Even then, she was still a student, and in order to help her achieve that, her parents had her enrolled in the Clocktower. Perhaps to make rivals, or to lord over it. However, Brigitta had no idea the Clocktower had shunned her family, not because of their practice, but because of how they went about it. No secret was a secret among mages, and word spread about their…endeavors in the middle ages.
It is likely the family’s general isolation meant they didn’t even know of a grail war against the forces of good and evil going on until a few months ago. A few months ago Brigitta became the first and only Master of the Hackney family, and the one to lead the family into a new era. Though let's be honest... She's got her work cut out for her.
Magic Circuit Switch: Dirt Filling a Grave (Real or Imagined)
Number of Magic Circuits: B
Quality of Magic Circuits: B
Elemental Affinity: Earth, Aether
Magecraft:
- ♱ General Magecraft
The commonly understood metrics of what constitutes the bare basics of magecraft. One could hardly be considered a mage without at least an understanding of these basic principles.
♱ Necromancy
Something that is supposed to be the end is only the beginning for those who practice this dark art. Once dirt covers a body, it is left to rest in peace for eternity while its friends and family grieve their loss. Necromancers work against the laws of nature and preside over life and death, they defy the very fabric of what it means to be dead by decimating remains and giving purpose to those who may not have had it in life. Albeit a very selfish purpose determined by a necromancer's will and desire. Twisted and immoral whims are fulfilled through a reanimated corpse, and if their family members could see them now, they would pray for the expulsion of the very demon inhabiting the body of their loved one. Zombies of the living have no memory and lesser necromancers create monsters instead of fully realized ghouls. Only select families or individuals have the ability to keep a corpse's memory and abilities from their life intact. Most mages who delve into this taboo craft never live long enough to gain control over the monsters they raise. The ones who do have centuries of familial knowledge to guide them.
Undeath is much more complex than one might think. There are restrictions each practitioner must follow, guidelines they don’t tell you before your own creation mutilate you. To raise the dead, understanding the afterlife is the key to success. Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong if you prematurely try to progress past your limits. But using the dead as weapons is only a small part of the cemetery of secrets and abilities that have been buried over the ages. Necromancy is not just the reanimation of corpses and calls of wraiths or spirits, it is invoking all that is dead and using it to your advantage. Being crafty is in a necromancer's nature, which is why many frowns upon the craft. Crafty means using your surroundings and sometimes your surroundings are unfavorable. How can one raise the dead in a concrete jungle? Well, even within the most unbeneficial of territories it is almost always a guarantee that sometime, somewhere, someone has died and bones make amazing constructs or weapons, perfect for a necromancer in unknown territory. Even their very own cells can be harnessed and used in unusual ways. With more than 200 thousand of a person's cells dying every hour, they have more than enough to work with.
Some bodies provide a better skill set and power boost than others, with mages and phantasmal beasts at the top of the spectrum. Human bodies are weak, fragile, and easily disposed of. While the body of a magus has natural resistances that can help slow down the wear and tear of a zombie magus. In very rare instances, a reanimated mage can carry a magical plague, affecting only those exposed to prana. The effect transferred is based on the magecraft the mage specialized in life and could range anywhere from the skin slowly rotting, to the crystallization of body parts and becoming so fragile, that they break. However, this is just a myth among necromancers and has been deemed untrue. Stories and lies necromancers tell each other to up-scale their abilities. Though mages are undesirable to fully raise due to their ability to go rogue and turn on their master. This doesn’t mean their body parts can’t be used, they prove to be very useful weapons and mystical objects harboring properties of the mages craft.
Once the masters of their craft, the Hackney family was proficient in their craft and could raise armies of magi with phantasmal beasts as their defense. Even starting the first magi-transferred plague through one of their experiments. They were at the pinnacle of power before the Holy Church started observing the family with its ever-so-watchful eyes. Even going as far as to make the church believe they went through a ‘reform’, while never really changing, just recalling and dismissing many of their creations. There are still Hackney’s to this day that can still do all their craft entails, just not to the degree of Hackney’s in past decades. Brigitta herself is a competent necromancer, but she isn’t a master and it shows. While she can reanimate corpses and raise spirits and even access every aspect of the dark art, she has very little control over her creations, backfiring more than usual and going rogue. Her control over the dead is not as fierce as others and she chooses not to utilize this aspect that often.
♱ Fleshcraft
With seven billion humans on the planet, the most abundant resource is human bodies, and flesh is the second most abundant. A form and branch of its predecessor — Fleshcraft is viewed poorly, often because of how... grotesque it is. It's hardly one of those flashy magecrafts, and you'll be carrying around a book made of human flesh. It's hardly a good look, and most mages would avoid being associated with something so deeply rooted in necromancy. Much less mold and work flesh-like dough.
Fleshcraft was more commonly used among necromancers in the 15th century before the controlling grip of Christian Doctrine crushed this particular magecraft into the dirt. It was favored among necromancers due to Flesh making a great offense. It's malleable. Used to shape, form, and mutilate their opponent's flesh, and even their own, practitioners were revered and many strayed away. Using flesh, meat, and bone as material for crafting objects. One is capable of shaping flesh, either into claws, or making flesh hard as rock and stone. With a greater understanding users of this magecraft are able to repair organs and perform risky surgery without the risk and allow for the creation of Mystic Codes.
Still existing in the Hacknet family magic crest, like a particularly nasty-looking wart. After inheriting her family’s crest, Brigitta discovered flesh craft and added it to her personal arsenal. Excelling at its usage, Brigitta can shape her own flesh and the others, though this process is extremely painful even for small things like claws or simple surgery. With this magecraft Brigitta is able to repair her mystic codes made from flesh. Brigitta is, however, not able to perform surgery on herself. Like a doctor holding a scalpel to themselves, she is blind-sighted and cannot see what needs to be done. Making it mildly inconvenient when she’s internally bleeding.
♱ Spiritual Evocation
A Thaumaturgical System that allows one to summon beings or perform spiritual possession. It includes "invocation", the technique of attracting higher spirituality into one's own self, and "evocation", the technique of invoking spirituality on the outside of the self. Necromancy makes use of this by contacting a former version of the dead, an alive version, and using this as grounds to invoke the corpse and reanimate it. This process is supposed to be clean and effectively bring back the person in question with full memory and functionality, however, many necromancers get lost in this process due to having to search for the spirit, and the dead love to lie. The result of bringing back the wrong spirit or the connection breaking during the journey back is a zombie. Most necromancers create zombies, not for lack of knowledge or experience, but because there are many interferences causing the ritual to be incomplete.
♱ The Body Burns
The Hackney family has a ritual. That ritual is performed with the birth of the new heir and is to protect them from death. Long ago, the Hackney family's deeds had a tendency to catch up with them. Witch Hunters, Assassins, and all manner of ill-tempered peasants had a tendency to take their rage out upon the heirs of the Hackney family. The family developed a method to strengthen the body, by making it harder and harder to kill. Organs are designed to carry the load of each other. If the lungs fail, the skin may breathe. The amount of redundancies is quite staggering and allows Brigitta to survive for a longer period of time than most other mages would if a specific organ were to fail or be removed. Unfortunately, it also makes any form of surgery not performed by a member of the Hackney family... Very very difficult.
A unique trait that allows Brigitta to survive organ destruction by placing the strain/use of one organ onto another. For example, if her lungs fail, or are punctured, her skin is capable of taking on the strain of breathing. Other organs are capable of fulfilling the usage of another organ for a period of time.
The more organs that fail, the more strain that is placed upon the remaining organs to fulfill their role. This is not immortality, but a way to increase one's own survivability by placing strain on other parts of the body to fill in for the functions of damaged organs.
There is no alternative to having a brain or heart though. Should the brain/heart be destroyed, it cannot be replaced.
♱ Complex Organ Systems (Weakness)
A weakness inherent only to the Hackney family. By reworking their organs to be capable of built-in redundancies to carry their own load, the body of the typical Hackney family member is... Very complicated. Careless surgery of the body, without understanding how it functions is likely to result in pain, organ failure, or worse... As such, members of the Hackney family perform their own surgeries, or with a team of assistants who know their bodies as well as they do.
Increases the difficulty of performing any sort of physical surgery on Brigitta. Anybody attempting to perform on-the-fly medical procedures (without magecraft) must have surgery or medical skill of B-rank or higher in order to perform it successfully. Otherwise, it is sure to fail.
Crest:
- ♱ Magic Crest
A Magic Crest is a collection of magic circuits of the Magus family. It is a potent tool in any Magus arsenal as within it are a number of stored spells from each of the Magi that contributed to the Crest, therefore, the older the Crest, the more useful it is. To access any spell recorded in the Crest, the Magus has to pour prana into it; causing it to show on their body, then they get access to all information needed for casting the chosen spell.
The Hackney family crest dates back to the 1100s during the Holy Roman Empire. According to what little public records exist of that time, the Hackney family was responsible for overseeing a small town in the Netherlands. The town itself bowed to the Holy Roman Empire, but in truth, it was utterly isolated and that loyalty was no deeper than ink on a page. The Hackney family turned that small village into a prison. They began breeding programs and would kill small children for their experiments. The isolated nature of the village kept outside interference from being involved.
Inevitably, when the 1200s rolled around, the family destroyed all public records of the small village they had turned into an experiment ground and moved on. Finding new domains to lord over, they became advisers to royalty and kept their experiments ongoing in secret. The Hackney family as it is now is built on the bedrocks left by the previous generations. The experiments are still ongoing, but the methods of gathering their resources have changed. In truth, the Hackney family has little to no interest in ever-changing.
The current heiress of the family is Brigitta Hackney, daughter of the family head Albert Constantine Hackney, and granddaughter of Bernard Cassius Hackney.
Like a nasty wart, this magic crest is littered with necromancy and a dark past. If it could talk, you’d hear the tragic stories of each victim: the Hackney family brutally mutilated or sent people running in fear. Even though the dark relic reeks of death, it has been taken care of since its creation in the late 1100s. Each head has added its own versions of spells and dark incantations, vastly different than the last. You can be sure there is a lot of knowledge to pick through and learn from to hopefully add their own spells. The Hackney family does not tolerate slackers.
Weapon:
- ♱ Noose of the Martyrs
In the 1600s, a group of nineteen Dutch scholars, clerics, and men of the cloth were hanged in the city of Brielle. The priests and scholars were executed in a turf shed, despite the pleas of several local government officials and the Prince of Orange. Their deaths led to the growth of nineteen white flowers to honor their faith and courage, despite the cruelty inflicted upon them. The noose used to end their lives was cut down and made into a stylish choker necklace… How ironic.
Brigitta wears the noose of the nineteen around her neck, which has been fashioned over the years into a black ribbon that is worn at all times. It is a cursed item, carrying the pain of those who suffered the deaths of martyrs. It is their wish that those who ended their lives be made to suffer as they had. Anybody who wears this necklace is the tool of that divine rage. As such, whenever injured, any injuries dealt to Brigitta are inflicted upon the aggressor. This does not include a servant's noble phantasm or anything that indirectly attacks her such as curses.
♱ Hand of Glory
The pickled left hand of a hanged man from the 1700s. Murdered in cold blood, the man was hanged for his crime and as a man does, they defiled his body by cutting his left hand off. The one that ‘did the deed.’. Sold as an oddity with no real power as claimed, a Hackney bought the pickled object and used their flesh craft to turn it into a mystic code. Any locks the hand touches are instantly unlocked, not including doors locked by magical means. Weak bounded fields touched by the hand are dispelled within a matter of seconds.
♱ Rotting Candles
A set of candles made from human flesh is passed down throughout the family. They burn far slower than normal candles but are also much hotter. Their scent has been compared to that of the legendary titan arum, more commonly referred to as the corpse flower. When one of these candles is placed within the palm of the Hand of glory and a personal (preferably flammable) object of someone is placed into the flame of the candle, it will instantly combust as the candle begins to burn. Until it burns out the person will have their movement severely hindered, or they will be rendered completely immobile if left defenseless.