Anthea

Basic Info

Age: 30

Height: 4'10

Ethnicity: Undetermined

Orientation: A-spec

Gender: Bigender

Pronouns: He/him, they/them, she/her (in approximate order of frequency, though I don't think they really make any effort to correct people or clarify which pronouns they use most of the time)

Appearance Notes: Anthea, as a rule, never wears shoes, not even in the rain or snow (he'll just use magic to dry or warm his feet in those conditions). Similarly, he always wears socks, never being seen barefoot. Usually longer socks, but shorter ones are okay as long as they aren't those socks designed to be invisible while wearing slip on shoes (socks that only barely reach the ankle could be acceptable, but they're on thin ice. Below the ankle is right out). Plain or patterned socks are equally valid. Beyond that, Anthea usually wears tattered, highly worn formal/semi-formal clothes that one assumes he either got second hand, or has simply owned for a very long time. They tend to be of a more old fashioned style, with more bows/ties/frills/buttons than modern formal or semi-formal wear. He has an inclination towards longer coats in general. I usually don't imagine him with hats but he CAN wear one, but I think he usually gravitates more towards circlet-type head pieces or a flower in the hair over normal hats. 

Anthea does have scars - technically, a lot of them, but most of the major ones are on his torso and so not likely to show up in art. He has tiny ones up his hands and arms that are less critical to include, but you can if you want to be Fully Accurate. The only strongly visible one is on his right arm, and it goes from the tip of his shoulder to down around to just a little above his elbow.

Power Appearance Notes: Human magic involves elaborate magic circles, but generally only beginners have to manually draw them. When Anthea casts spells, the circles/runes appear as softly glowing symbol on the palm of his hand. For smaller/easier spells, that circle is the only one needed. For medium to bigger spells, increasingly large and complex circles of light will appear on whatever the spell is being cast on (or just in the area of affect of the spell if it's not directly targeted) as well. I usually imagine the circles for Anthea to be a kind of redish-pink color but it's not totally set in stone. Might mess with colors based on the kind of spell at some point too. Spells take energy to cast, similar in practice to D&D spell slots - smaller spells can be cast easily and be sustained without focus, while big ones tire you out and are harder to sustain.

2 Cent Summary: Anthea is a somewhat stoic, very intently focused dark mage. What he wants from the Otherworld is unknown, but he pursues his goal zealously, manipulating the living and paranormal alike. He has some special interest in the five magic crystals that the heroes wield, and it doesn’t bode well for them.

Character Lore

History

[Redacted]

Anthea is a powerful dark sorcerer. He is very skilled in various kinds of magic, and knows a lot about the history of magic. Despite it being a very difficult - and generally forbidden - skill, he also excels at healing magic.

Anthea was largely raised by his grandmother, though not because his parents weren't alive. They simply chose to be minimally involved with Anthea because basically everything they liked to do (going on trips, attending big festivals, etc.) were things he absolutely hated and vice versa, and Anthea always got along really well with his grandma anyways. So, he was often left at her place while they were out of town. He was home schooled by her for a similar reason; three days into Kindergarten he hated it and was having problems with interacting with peers, and they didn't want to risk traumatizing the kid by forcing him to endure things he hated or found upsetting, so they just took him out and let him stay home. When they were home though, they did try to do basic activities with him and see how he was doing, and weren't ever really unkind to him.

His grandma helped teach him magic. When she found out he was seriously injuring himself trying to self-study healing magic, she decided that had to stop and so stole bodies from morgues for him to practice on instead (she returned them after the fact, and managed to avoid getting caught for quite a while). He briefly spent some time studying magic at the Consortium as a teenager, but eventually got kicked out for blatantly disregarding many of their rules and studying taboo subjects.

Currently, he lives in an apartment that he mostly pays for with magically made scam-money and does some part time work as a record keeper for a local book shop ran by a kindly old man.

Personality

Anthea has a very driven personality, one could almost say obsessive. Whatever goal he pursues, he does so single-mindedly and at any cost. He's a 'ends justify the means' kind of person once he has developed tunnel vision on something, though he does avoid cruel methods if he thinks he can achieve the same result without one. In general, he thinks deeply and intently on things, and often comes across as rather reserved and quiet because of it. 

Nevertheless, he does possess an ironic sense of humor, and can be something of a contrarian in action towards people who annoy him. He also is quietly obvious about it whenever he is judging someone. Overall, Anthea is a very literal person who has not spent a great deal of time socializing, so he often looks slightly put out or suspicious of people actually responding to him or talking to him more generally.  He is deeply accustomed to ignoring people and is very deep in his own thoughts most of the time, paying only minimal attention to the world around him. This results in him not always noticing if someone is talking to him, or partially speaking his thoughts aloud but so quietly and inconsistently that it comes across as random muttering. He often finds people confusing and will stare intently at people when they're especially puzzling him. He's a little bit terrible at reading emotional cues from others, so when he is actually conversing he'll ask questions a lot. The recent development of having several active enemies and a neighbor he's starting to speak to sometimes is by far the most socializing he's had to do in years, but he's slowly starting to adapt more to it.

Relationships

• Valentine/Silver Gale: These two are enemies. Valentine often mocks Anthea's sense of fashion and stubborn refusal to wear shoes despite being significantly less experienced with magic than him (because Valentine can be shallow), so Anthea finds him personally irritating as well as being functionally opposed. Valentine is initially terrified of Anthea because of how obvious the power difference between them is, and that is a large part of why he defaults to verbally antagonizing them, but he'd be extremely hesitant to physically threaten or provoke Anthea and usually focuses more on fleeing or doing the minimum to stop them, since he's all too aware that if Anthea really wanted to kill or torture him, they could just...do that, and he probably couldn't stop them. Anthea is somehow oblivious to the fact that Silver Gale is intimidated by him, and doesn't piece it together until much later, just thinking he really is that annoying and over-confident and sometimes a bit flaily or weird for some reason. Over time, as the specifics around their dynamic shift, Valentine does become a bit more genuinely confident in facing him as he gets better at his own magic. He continues to casually insult them and express disgust at any sign of them having basic morals or life experiences outside of 'being evil', and Anthea continues to find him frustrating. They eventually have to work together out of necessity, and their relationship slowly morphs into, if not friendship exactly, one where they know when they can rely on the other as an ally and when not, and more casual/less defensive trolling becomes more normal for them.
• Cedar/Willow Wisp: These two are enemies. Cedar fears Anthea and wishes Valentine would stop antagonizing him so much, but she also especially hates him for his usage of dark magic.
• Clematis/Casuistra: Anthea and Clematis are enemies. Anthea finds xyr powers especially curious, which Clematis Does Not appreciate since it has resulted in xem being held prisoner before.
• Hadyn/Chromosphere: Anthea and Hadyn are enemies. Anthea doesn't have a lot of personal feelings towards Hadyn, but Hadyn resents and is highly wary of him due to his interactions with their friends and teammates.
• Raelene/Carilon: Anthea and Raelene are enemies. Raelene and Anthea are similarly focused on defeating each other, but haven't had as many personal interactions.
• Mahir: Anthea and Mahir are neighbors within the same apartment complex. For a long time, they had a superficial relationship where they would simply greet each other in the hall or ask for the occasional supply, though they both considered their brief run ins a high light of their day. Things changed once Anthea used his magic to heal some injuries Mahir had acquired, and the two started to help each other out with more things. Both of them are intensely reclusive, so it took a while for them to realize and take advantage of the possibility of being proper friends. They are always very frank with each other, to the point that would be considered rude to most people, but they both appreciate the straightforwardness. Mahir definitely thinks Anthea is weird, but likes that since he usually finds people boring or frustrating. Anthea just finds every single one of their interactions bewildering but pleasant. They come to trust and rely on each other though, and eventually enter a very minimalist queerplatonic relationship with each other. Neither of them usually think to initiate physical contact, but they aren't shy about it if it's needed for some reason either. Between the two of them, Mahir is more likely to actively want physical affection of some kind. Anthea is fine with some partner-coded contact if it's while they're watching a movie or some other stationary activity, but prefers things like pats or hand-holding otherwise so that it doesn't restrict movement at all. Neither really like PDA but sometimes Mahir will sort of semi-lean on Anthea or hold their wrist loosely while they're walking somewhere since it doesn't require Anthea stop moving at all, which would be the only thing that really bothered him.

Bonus Information

Trivia

• Anthea has a lot of knowledge and opinions on the different makes and models of pens and inks.
• On the flip side, he is a little bit tech-stupid. Not because he hasn't been around it - he abstractly knows what the Internet is used for and that mobile phones are tiny Internet tools - but because he never paid any attention. He wouldn't know how to actually use a mobile phone if handed one at first, or even a regular old school computer. He could figure it out, but doesn't see a reason to when he already enjoys and has mastered book-centric library research, and doesn't need easier ways to communicate with people anyways.
• He likes black tea a lot, and usually drinks it plain or with only very mild sweeteners.
• When Anthea was an older teen, he would cast a spell of 'invisibility' - or really, of 'not being noticed' - on himself everywhere he went to avoid social interactions. Then he got hit by a car because the driver literally couldn't see him. The injuries weren't super serious - he spent a few days in the hospital and then was fine to recover from the bruising/soreness on his own - but it convinced him to only use the spell when inside of buildings and thus not around cars. The event was upsetting for the first day about, but then he processed it and mostly came to regard it as just an annoying and stupid event to happen. He'll tell people about this if it comes up without any hesitation, though he tells it in such an abbreviated an non-charismatic way that it tends to put people off.
• Anthea likes being out in rainy thunderstorms - he finds them calming and revitalizing.
• They chose their own name when they were around 10-11. They hadn't figured out they were bigender at that point, they just thought their original legal name was boring and stupid (it was some generic male name like John or Tom or Phil, doesn't matter which one really) and decided they would go by Anthea from then on instead. When they still preferred that name as a teen their parents accepted it was probably gonna be semi-permanent and payed to have the name changed legally.
• Anthea really hates theme parks, carnivals, circuses, and any place similar to those. He finds them terrifying and overwhelming and especially hates most of the rides, and will do anything to avoid those places if he doesn't have to go for some reason. He does, however, consider the food vendors at those places to be a Noble Profession because the 2 times he had to go to one of those places (once as a young child and once as an adult) one of the food vendors noticed his distress and was nice to him.
• Somewhat related to the above, Anthea has a very sensitive sense of equilibrium, and so he hates feeling like he's moving when he's not physically doing so. As in, he doesn't really like being a moving car (if it's not too fast he can tolerate it though) and wouldn't like being picked up/carried (if he had to be because he was injured or something he would cling to whoever was carrying him in a DEATH GRIP to try and cope), and sometimes even just seeing really fast moving/spinning stuff up close makes him feel really dizzy and disoriented in a distressing way. He also doesn't like being suddenly tugged at or hugged for a similar reason.
• They are somewhat touch-averse, but not totally. Mostly, he is touch-bewildered because he never expects it and has a hard time telling when other people want it, since it's not something he has much innate desire for himself. She only actually dislikes contact if it's too prolonged and/or restrictive, or if it's a lot at once or super sudden/throws her off balance. Generally, he prefers to be asked first or approached a little more slowly, but if it's not too overwhelming he'll be more confused than upset if someone forgets. He also never returns hugs even if he's okay with them unless he's told in advance how many seconds the hug is going to last, because otherwise having to think about that adds too many variables for him to overthink. They dislike any hug lasting longer than 5 seconds though, with the exception of when they're having a case of feeling dizzy/overwhelmed, in which case the contact can be grounding and they'll be fine with it until things stop feeling like they're spinning.
• Anthea is definitely autistic, and if it weren't for the many accommodations they make for themself with magic, they probably couldn't reliably function living on their own. (There probably were non-magic coping mechanisms he could have learned for certain things, but he started learning magic so young that he just...didn't, since it never seemed necessary)
• They have almost scarily fast reflexes when it comes to spell casting, since it's something so deeply ingrained for them. But their natural physical reflexes are actually a bit slower than average; if they were avoiding using visible magic because they were in public, and someone was like 'here catch' and tossed them their keys or something, they would bemusedly try to catch them about a half-second after they had already thwacked them and fallen on the floor.
• His MBTI type is ISTJ-A.
• His birthday is February 23.