Full Name: Marek Stanislaw
Nicknames/Aliases: Mark. Mister Stan.
Age: 38/98* (See Backstory)
Gender: Male
Primary: Trickery
Position: Mechanical Technician (Security)
Secondaries: Familiar Conjuration, Tracking
Description: Miklos stands a little over six feet tall, and his top hat obscures most of his aqua-colored hair- a change from his chocolate-brown hair color caused by his time in the realm of the Dievai. His clothing adheres to the staff requirements on principle- formal slacks, jacket, and a long red scarf. Though the more hoity-toity of the magical families complain that his attire is so stained and patched as to look positively garish.
Personality: Miklos holds himself as borderline misanthrope and magothrope- to a stranger, it seems he hates you before he has met you. He believes you to be an incompetent unless he knows you to be an expert. The source of his seething anger is a mystery to the students. Many assume it's because he is the one dispatched to rescue them from mortal prison when their nights of partying go seriously awry.
But if there were ever a situation where his life and a student's were in the balance, then the student would most definitely live.
Skills: -
A man of light feet and unassuming presence; his use of trickery and experience as a partisan fighter allows him to shift by mundane and even magical scrutiny with little difficulty. He cannot change his whole body, but minor things like hair, eye color, scarring and prominent features can be molded like clay when he needs to do so. More powerful than this, his magic thrives on the contrived coincidence. Murphy's Law is the way the professors have explained his spellcasting to one another. If it is possible for your tire to suddenly spring a leak after hitting a pothole, it is a relatively simple thing for Marek to make it so.
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A man of mundane knowledge, he learned the art of machine and automobile repair from his mother, and the value of mortal connections with his father. Why use magic to solve a problem when a word in the police sergeant's ear will do? Why throw a fireball when you can rig a man's car to explode? And when these things fail, there's always his old Sten SMG, locked up off campus, still secure after surviving the Uprising and its trip through the realm of the Dievai.
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A Dievai bound to him. The creature Parael shifts in form from a common barn owl to a bouncing, spectral light, to a ghastly skull wreathed in smoke. The Dievai is his servant, and so long as his requests to it do not require the use of magic, the creature must obey him.
Weaknesses: - No one would think to lift a finger to help
"the miserable man". Miklos' demeanor means he has few real friends outside those who know his real position as chief of security.
- Reliance on trickery and manipulation gets him through many difficulties, but as a famous mortal actor once said,
"it only works on the weak minded." When the bluff is called, he has to resort to the more mundane art of
ass-kicking to get out of a scrape.
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A Man Out of Time. While summoning his Familiar took him into the realm of Arcadia from 1944 to 2004 and he has had some time to re-adjust to this new world, he still cannot grasp most of the changes that have happened during his absence.
Brief History: Marek Stanislaw was born in 1921 in the city of Warsaw to a small, tight-knit magical family. He was educated in the art of summoning the Dievai, trickster familiars capable of granting great power at terrible cost- bargaining with these creatures who wish to roam free on the Earth. The trick to mastering these beings was careful word games, sly social maneuvering, and an awareness of their behaviors- something he never felt confident he could master. Rather than being rebuked for weakness, his mother and father claimed this was a sign of wisdom- only the foolhardy boast of being able to bargain with the Dievai. Marek also learned the art of concealment and observation, of the Waxen Mask and the Upturned Die. Tricks of chance that could make magical and mundane onlookers seem completely inept, willing to attribute natural causes to supernatural occurrences. Judicious use of such magic could go a long way to getting a man out of a difficult situation, even among the mundane world.
The Stanislaw family was caught off guard by the Nazi invasion of Poland but managed to stay together in the city of Warsaw for most of the war. They even fought alongside the Polish underground- until the uprising of '44. When Germany began the complete demolition of neighborhoods to crush the Poles, Marek was caught between a rock and a hard place. With his family's apartment collapsing under the artillery barrage, he opened a portal to the Dievai realm and summoned his familiar- a being calling itself Parael. He had no time for finesse or word games with the creature and quickly accepted its offer of safety in exchange for the time he claimed not to have.
Which was how Marek found himself in the land of the Dievai for 60 years. He emerged in the modern world not a day older than when he left, completely confused by everything he saw and learned. Gradual re-integration with the magical community brought him up to speed on some things, but the Cult War made him set that on the sidelines. Marek went "off the grid" as they say today, during the fighting. Curiously, during this time, occasional cult members found themselves running afoul of bizarre "accidents"- for what else can it be when an archmage's washing machine falls through the floor and crushes him in his own basement?
Marek returned to public life after the conflict ended, taking on odd jobs in
Other:The Stanislaw family of Magi were a long and storied bloodline in Old Poland, spoken of as boogey men in the night that could consume their enemies through a command of shadows and terramancy. This was a lie fed by the superstitious mortals and the few other magi that passed through Eastern Europe. The truth, like the Stanislaws, was always in plain sight. Polish folklore enshrines the idea of the clever hero, the man or woman who meets the devil on the road, wagers their soul for power, and outwits the demon to keep both the reward and the soul.
The Stanislaws were not masters of arcane, but master bargainers with eldritch spirits, demons, unseelie- whatever they might be called around the world. Their family's power began to wane during the rebirth of Poland in the 1920s, and it took the mundane world to do what the magical could not. Those family members not killed during the German occupation were seized by the Soviets, dying in gulags before they could escape to the other side of the Iron Curtain.
So far as he knows, Marek is the last of his family line.
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On the Dievai - The Dievai (singular, Dievas) are capricious spirits from another wild plane. They enjoy making bargains in exchange for permission to unleash their power. Popular folklore says they grant three "wishes" in exchange for their freedom; if the bargainer cannot guess their True Name after the Third Wish, the Dievai fulfills the wish and is free to wreak havoc on the material plane. Marek has used two wishes- the first to escape Warsaw during the Uprising, the second to escape the realm of the Dievai. He intends to die before making the third and freeing this inscrutable creature to enact its will upon the world.
