Irukandji

. powers

Irukandji is a chaos witch. Basically, she is able to unweave the essence of reality and put it back together the way she likes. She's powerful, but not omnipotent; rearranging reality takes up a lot of energy, so the best way to apply her powers is to be extremely judicious and change only what is utterly necessary to achieve her means. She sheds chaotic energy naturally, and it hangs around her in invisible but very dangerous and volatile threads. She literally knits the excess magic into sheets to keep it safe and contained and to store it up for big tricks; her cloak is woven from her magic, and changes in length and density depending on how much power she's been using.

. temperament

misanthropic, standoffish, fearful, self-loathing, in the habit of refusing herself joy, very badly-adjusted, prone to quiet fury + sulking + being grumpy in general, yearns for human companionship but also hates humans, needs 90,000 hugs

. story

Irene Carter was… accident-prone, as a child. Things just tended to fall or break or rearrange themselves confusingly when she was in the vicinity; neatly-stacked paper piles shuffled themselves, water spilled from capped bottles, and she picked plums from the apple tree in the backyard three summers running. Her mother died when she was young and her father and stepmother did their best, but despite being a sweet child--if quiet--she found herself mostly left alone by her peers, none of them quite able to explain the static that she carried around her, wrapped like a cloak.

When she was eight, her family went to the beach, and Irene took to the ocean like a wave to the shore. She seemed more settled, happier, and less likely to somehow unravel the wool of sweaters she was wearing whenever they got back, so they went to the beach as often as they could.

When she was eleven, she was stung by an irukandji jellyfish while drifting a little off the coast.

It hurt. It hurt a lot, and that broke the last knot on Irene's powers that her mother had tied up before she died. Chaos magic is matrilineal, but power fluctuates between generations, and while the late Carla Newman-Carter was skilled, Irene's power was too vast to keep knotted up for so long; it's especially difficult to keep things orderly when the very nature of their magic rebells against order. A chaos witch who doesn't know what she is or how to control her magic is very, very dangerous. Nobody in her family knew what to do with a preteen who crackled with static, who literally started storms when she was upset, who could not be approached without risk of death. As her father would advise if he still could, people who touch Irene die.

Irene fled, terrified and guilty and completely unable to explain what had happened to her or what she had done. As far as her stepmother and half-sister could tell, Irene and her father both died that day, perhaps swallowed by the sea. She took the name Irukanji, and for the next three years, she did whatever she could to avoid other people. The song of the ocean was loud her in her bones and she stuck by the coast, but any tree she passed would still yield fruit to her, and like this she survived, if nothing else.

As a lonely and maladjusted 14-year-old, still filled with fear and loathing for herself and everything else, she starts talking to the ocean--and sometimes, the ocean talks back. She fills herself with the song of whales, the messy emotion of dolphins, the cool drive of scaled fish and crustaceans. Through them, she learns to fear and loathe the humans who attempt to conquer the sea, snuffing out lives by the hundred thousands, corrupting it with spilled oil and waste.

One day, from her spot on the rocky shoreline, she hears the scream of sharks caught by a finning boat. Her powers, still unidentified but no less desperate for an outlet, swell up alongside her distress and crackle out so violently she passes out. When she comes to, there's a man--perhaps just a boy--sitting next to her, with fresh, viscious scars on his shoulders and hips, and faint markings on his neck and back that suggest gills. Stumbling over words that don't seem to fit in his mouth, he tells her that he's one of the sharks caught by the finning boat, that he'd been cut and thrown back and waiting for death to come already when--

Well, it got hazy for the both of them at that point, but Irukandji dubs him Carcharias for what he used to be and refers to him as the single greatest stroke of luck her powers ever brought her.

However, it is mostly confusion at first, and a lot of hurt, and she finally goes searching for an explanation. She finds one in the form of her great-aunt, her mother's mother's younger sister, who finally tells her she is a chaos witch and teaches her to control and channel her powers. The only way to contain chaos magic, advises great-aunt Camille, is to store it with order, and she unwinds and unwinds the shimmering scarf she has on. Its edges blur a little if you look at it for more than a glance, and seems to go on forever. Great-aunt Camille says it's knitted out of her magic, and teaches her how to weave her own.

Irukandji spends two days and two nights with a pair of wooden knitting needles, carved from ash to keep her powers tame, and emerges with an inky-blue cloak that just falls to her hips. It looks staring into the deepest part of the ocean and is icy cold to the touch. The space around her feels clear for the first time in her life.

Anyway, so, then she becomes an eco-terrorist supervillain

. motifs

irukandji jellyfish, deep sea (bubbles), element: ice/water, space/nebulae and chaos, fruit trees (simultaneously in fruit and flower), spellbooks, knitting, big-ass cloaks with hoods and tattered hems

flower: forget-me-nots

colours: blue dabudee dabudi (especially dark navy and ice-white)