Magic

Magia is a talented magician. What she lacks in brute strength, she more than makes up for in finesse. Along with an exacting dedication to precision and versatility in all magical exercises, she is insatiably curious about the mechanical apsects and limits of magic. Her focus on minute perfection over power makes her a deadly, if not flashy, combatant.

When it comes to elemental magic, Magia is naturally talented with water and has learned to manipulate air as well. She doesn't find elemental magic as fascinating or useful as green magic, though, and considers it to be the least deserving of focuses for any mage. In terms of problem-solving, it's a hammer when she'd prefer a scalpel. Though she is as talented with her elements as any other powerful mage, rarely does she actually use them. Most commonly, she practices precision when training this type of magic.

Where she really shines is natural or green magic, manipulating the energy of living things. She prefers plants, as they lack a will of their own and are easier to bend into the desired form, but she is capable of using animal magic as well. Her skill with plants nearly landed her in the wardens but (thankfully for the wardens) the erasers took her in for her deadly application of this usually benign magic.

Magia was once very talented with spoken magic, capable of stringing spells together like storybooks to tell a story in illusions and effect. Her neuroses have made practicing Spoken magic taboo for her. Rarely, if ever, does she speak her spells aloud. If she removes her mask long enough to use a spoken spell, odds are good she's in a very bad situation indeed.

Athlete & Actor

Magia was trained from a very young age to be a star. Naturally talented, driven, and focused, she excelled in the skills she was expected to learn and more besides. She learned gymnastics, dancing, acting, and a myriad of other skills that have turned her into the superb athlete that she is today. Her academic background focused on languages, arts, and magic, but she also personally sought out science and history to inorm her magical performances and give her needed context for her shows. As a magician, she learned sleight of hand, pickpocketing, and the art of deception, which she diversified and matured as an actor.

Though she refuses to speak most of the time, Magia still practices languages. She finds the grammatical structures to be informative in practicing and creating new spells.

Stage magician, actor, and all around childhood star by the name of MISS MARVELOUS. Her whole life was in service to her parents' dreams of stardom for their little girl. All of her hobbies were mandated, she was constantly in “showtime” mode, and thus never fully developed her own identity. Growing up in the eye of the public she was never allowed any privacy. Her puberty and adolescence were watched over by millions of guardians, and as she grew more and more she became more and more uncomfortable with the commodification of her entire life and, in particular, the feeling of entitlement and public ownership of her burgeoning sexuality.

Magia staggered into adulthood a taped-together mishmash of child star and public servant, whose default “service persona” was the only personality she actually had. She began to realize, bit by bit, that she was not “real” in the way other people were. She began interrogating herself as a “character”, trying figure out her motivations and personality. The more she puzzled about herself, the less the pieces of who she was seemed to fit. She began to realize she had no inner life, no thoughts beyond the performance. The more she dug, the more anger and resentment she found. It sprung up from every interaction and every failed attempt to build a person out of the Miss Marvelous show reels. It bubbled up between the cracks in her mask and Marvelous struggled to keep her composure. Where once the perfect starlet persona had been all she’d ever known, now it was a thin soap bubble stretched over a gathering storm of rage.

She began wearing masks to her performances, to remind herself what she was supposed to be, and she gave interviews less and less as she lost her grip on who “Marvelous” was. Indeed, she was losing her grip on reality altogether. Every time she looked in the mirror she less and less recognized the person looking back. Worse, when she looked at the world it was brittle and cracking at the edges. None of the shards fit quite right, and she saw things in the spaces between, things she couldn’t quite describe. She got more and more scared, more and more angry.

It came to a head when a new manager made unwelcome advances. Despite her signaling she was uncomfortable, he persisted. Magia lost her grip on Miss Marvelous and on reality. In the haze of broken, unbearable anger, Magia not only killed him via strangulation with vines; she managed to mangle him so badly as to be a pile of mush and bones, completely unrecognizable. She finally got enough control to slam a mask on her face, using it as a tool to focus and control herself.

After that, Miss Marvelous ceased to exist. Her disappearance was all over the news, and the grisly evidence of what was possibly her death or perhaps her kidnapping elevated her from popular star to legendary figure in celebrity history. Conspiracy theories abounded. Documentaries were made. The schroedingers cat scenario of neither dead nor alive made her a legend that transcended her true existence.

And that was fine with Magia, who ran away to relearn how to control herself and how to be a person. She was still a mishmash of things, now a bit more unseemly and wild, but she managed to become someone capable of interacting with people again. She couldn’t go back to stardom, and she didn’t have skills that actually translated to a “real” job. She eventually settled on trying to be a dragon rider at Evercrest, which would satisfy her need for a job and the rage and bloodlust that still consumed her.

Log

Roleplay developments logged here.

Mask [ important ]

Magia's most defining and ubiquitous possession is her magic mask. It is made of smooth lacquered bone and shaped to fit her face like a faceplate with no indentation or obvious eyeholes. It is magic in the sense that she can control the ink on its surface with her own magic, using it to shape expressions or marks that convey what she wants to project to the world.