[hider=Candace McMorran]
[center]Name: Candace McMorran

Gender: Female

Age: 22

Sexuality: Bisexual, but leans more towards women

Godly ancestor: Hephaestus

Son/daughter or further removed: daughter

Relationship with godly ancestor: Hephaestus has not fathered quite as many children as some of the more attractive Greek gods, so he is decidedly invested in the children that he does have. He intervened to help Candace and her mother when she was very young, and she has known about her parentage since her mid-teens. He admires her work from a distance.

Relationship with mortal family: after a period of pointed rebellion against her mother and stepfather, Candace has come to appreciate the loving and open minded upbringing that they provided her with. She hasn't lived at her parents' house since leaving for college in the US, but has always returned for major holidays and twice for summer vacation. She is six years older than her next-oldest half-sibling, and has never been especially close with any of them, though that's not to say that there are any issues between them. They're simply too far apart in age to share very much in terms of friends or common interests. She keeps in touch with her mother and her sister Virginia through various online means and, whenever she visits, likes to initiate lively discussions around the dinner table. She tries to influence her younger siblings (particularly her sister) where she can, and steer them in what she believes is the right direction.

Powers: Candace's powers reflect those of her father in almost every way.

- Candace can create and manipulate fire and is more or less immune to its effects.
- She has a talent for creating machines and gadgets to solve problems and serve specific purposes. These are often highly unconventional, idiosyncratic in design, and difficult to reproduce, but extremely effective.
- Candace can imbue things with force and motion that would otherwise remain static.
- She is able to make inanimate objects that have either a face or the form of a living thing come to life, in a sense. They will possess memories of what they have witnessed and will remain staunchly loyal to her.

Personality: Candace is strong willed, aggressively independent, and bullish when it comes to her sense of morality. Perhaps she just has stronger convictions than most people, and perhaps she's trying to bury some deeply held insecurities. In any event, as a visibly disabled person living in a world that is fundamentally at odds with her sense of agency, she feels as if she has no choice but to try harder, reach farther, and react with more force and fury than others do in order to be treated as an equal. 

Beyond that, she is best described as conventionally unconventional, subscribing with zeal to the trends and belief systems that define modern left-wing campus culture. She smokes weed and has experimented with a handful of psychadelic drugs, but isn't what one would ever consider a 'stoner'. Candace enjoys gaming (though not the thinly-veiled misogyny that runs through much of gamer culture) and is reasonably good at it, but makes a point of being active and challenging herself physically. She regularly plays wheelchair rugby and basketball and tries to remember to spend some time outdoors away from her workshop. She has dabbled in slam poetry, was active in a number of student bodies while in university studying engineering (with a minor in women's studies) and regularly attends protests and rallies. When not out and about doing something, she can often be found tinkering in her shop or at least using a CAD app to render her future projects on her iPad.

Bio: Candace was born in Glasgow, Scotland and raised by a single mother who was working as a waitress at the time. She doesn't remember much about her early years, but now understands the severity of the poverty that she and her mother lived in. For the first couple of years, there was a seemingly endless carousel of surgeries to lessen the effects of a particularly serious arteriovenous malformation of the spinal cord that left her paralyzed from the waist down. Though children of Hephaestus have often exhibited ambulatory difficulties, hers were particularly severe. The medical costs above and beyond what the NHS covered must have been significant, but they were handled by a mysterious benefactor. For many years after, she had a vague memory of him as a huge man with a bushy auburn beard, receding hair, and a severe limp who leaned heavily on a cane. When she was three years old, the girl's mother was able to return to university and complete her degree in early childhood education thanks to a generous grant from the bearded man. While there, she met, fell in love with, and married the man who Candace would grow up with as her father: Shane Coburn. It was a rather whirlwind love affair, and within less than a year of their marriage, had produced a child: Candace's younger sister Virginia. Two more would follow: twin brothers Neil and Brandon. 

Candace's way with mechanical things was plainly evident even during her childhood, as she would often complete Lego sets intended for much older children with perfunctory ease and enjoy them for a couple of weeks, before taking them apart and building entirely new creations of her own imagination. Indeed, the floor of her bedroom would often be a minefield of sharp Lego pieces that only she (not having to worry about stepping on any of them) could navigate with ease. She dabbled in minecraft and roblox, but was drawn more towards creating things in the real world with her own hands. Robot Wars was a near-obsession, and she still has some of her crayon drawings of her favourite competitors and orginal concepts. Trips to science fairs followed, as did subscriptions to magazines like Popular Mechanics (which soon turned into online subscriptions). She confounded many of her teachers because she didn't seem to have a particular aptitude for mathematics, being no more than slightly above average. It seemed as if her engineering abilities were intuitive in a way that other people couldn't understand.

While she featured in a number of human interest articles (often with a well-intentioned but somewhat condescending tone) as a young prodigy and an inspiration, Candace's teenaged years were particularly difficult. She struggled not only with her self-perception and confidence as somebody with a disability, but also with her budding sexuality. She found herself mostly, though not solely attracted to other girls. She tried to ignore these feelings for a few years, and her parents, thinking that her withdrawal stemmed from a lack of confidence, attempted to push her towards healthy heterosexual relationships. They also sent her to a summer camp for other disabled children and enrolled her in a wheelchair basketball program. Candace enjoyed the activity, and it provided an outlet for some of her energy, but she still wasn't all that comfortable with her feelings and was beginning to understand that she just wasn't going to fit the norm. Compounding these issues were the emergence of her latent powers. Candace found that sometimes, when she was working on an engineering project, the pieces would move as she visualized them. At first, she was afraid. She wondered if she was going crazy. Then, she studied the phenomenon and began using it to her benefit, though she became somewhat reclusive in her tinkering for fear of anybody finding out. Combined with her insecurities about her sexuality, Candace went through a year or two of being deeply reclusive.

Enter her father. It was a particularly cool April morning when Hephaestus appeared in front of her. She almost instantly recognized him as the bearded man from her infancy. The first thing that he said to her, with all of the tact and good grace in the world was "You're a lesbian, kiddo, or at least something close. Also, I'm your father." It wasn't the easiest of conversations. One party was confused and terrified and the other had never had much of a way with words nor much use for etiquette. However, her immortal father not only explained the extend of Candace's abilities, he also taught her how to control them, by demonstrating them himself. Further conversations followed, eventually involving her family. Disbelief turned into acceptance, and even into embrace. Candace, more sure of herself, reemerged from her shell and graduated with a scholarship that allowed her to attend MIT overseas. 

In campus life, she found her calling, The stories of other people who had struggled growing up resonated with her, and she became strongly committed to setting the world right, aware that she had been gifted more power than most by the unique circumstances of her conception and birth. She was active in student groups, campus politics and social life, and int he social movements of the day. Her long red hair was cut to shoulder-length, the left side of it buzzed, and its tips died all colours of the rainbow. Following graduation, driven by curiosity, she decided to take a couple of years off before starting her Master's and visit the city of New Celestia that her father had told her about.[/center][/hider]

[hider=Abigail Miller]
[center]Name: Abigail Miller

Gender: Female

Age: 19

Appearance: Abby's a country girl and she looks like one. She's tall, a bit gangling, but pretty, with long straight blonde hair and a smattering of freckles. She has a wide open, apple pie American look about her and usually wears a large grin with a slight but distinct gap tooth. She can usually be found wearing jeans or jean shorts and a sleeveless t-shirt, sometimes with a plaid flannel shirt over top. She'll always accessorize with a small silver necklace with a crucifix and sometimes a cowgirl hat or wide-brimmed straw hat.

Sexuality: straight

Godly ancestor: Demeter (Greek goddess of plants, crops, and harvest)

Son/daughter or further removed: Great-granddaughter

Relationship with godly ancestor: Abby has met and spoken with her Godly ancestor, but little else. Though there is an old family story on her father's side that they're descended from the Greek Goddess Demeter, it's never taken seriously. However, they've always had unusually good luck with their crops and all of them have been sunny, good-looking people. Abby was rather surprised to find out about New Celestia, that she could interact with it, and that the Greek gods (and all of the others, for that matter) were real. It was only recently that she actually met her divine ancestor. They spoke at length and Demeter saw her as a dear thing.

Relationship with mortal family: Abby is one of a large brood of corn farmers from Nebraska. They've always been close as a family and they've been farmers of some sort for almost three hundred years. Thanks to a combination of consistently strong harvests, sound investment, and the lord's blessing (or so they believe), they've expanded their property, moving ever further westward and becoming rather successful. They've also dabbled in equine sports, and Abby enjoys horseback riding with her two brothers, two sisters, and numerous cousins and family friends. As the middle child, she's always been a bit rambunctious and active, but her father in particular adores her energy, curiosity, and sense of humour. Abby is close in age with her older sister and younger brother, and all three were in high school at the same time and shared a large circle of friends. She loves her family too much to want to stay in New Celestia for long.

Powers: Abby isn't exceptionally powerful, though she has the ability to control plants to a limited degree, and to make them either grow quickly or wither. She can cheer people up just by entering a room, and everything will seem just a bit opeful, and more beautiful. However, she needs to be in at least a neutral mood in order for this to work. Her moods have a strong effect on the plant life around her. Happiness will make things grow and prosper. Sadness will make them wither and die. Anger will make them become hard, thorny, and potentially poisonous. Excitement will bring out their colours, make them taste better, and make flowers bloom.

Personality: Abby's a happy, well-adjusted young woman from rural Nebraska. She has a sunny, innocent-seeming disposition and can come across as a total hayseed, though she knowingly plays this up for laughs. She can be a bit of a clown, and she may not be quite as naive as she seems. Abby's definitely a bit on the adventurous side, and can git into mischief, though none of it is particularly serious. She's curious by nature and is going to do what she is going to do, though she can get sucky when she doesn't get what she wants. She also has some reckless tendencies, though these haven't come back to bite her in the ass just yet. Abby's rather socially conservative, though she'll always try to be friendly to anyone. She's also a devout Lutheran and regular churchgoer, though it's more out of a sense of community and normalization where she comes from. She's also not sure what to make of the fact that she's actually descended from a Greek deity. In terms of philosophy, she'd rather be water than rock and tends to just go with the flow.

Bio: Not much has ever happened in Abby's past. She's grown up in a normal, happy family, and has never wanted for anything. They may not be rich, but they definitely have money. She had a loving upbringing, complete with all of the usual summer vacations, friends, sleepovers, and pool parties. Her oldest brother, Danny, is currently serving in the armed forces and has been posted to Fort Worth before being deployed overseas. She decided to take a gap year after graduating high school, and since she had nothing better to do, she accompanied him there. There had always been the old stories in the family, and they came up again one night while she and Danny were sharing a few beers (shh! Don't tell anyone that she was underage drinking). On a whim or a dare, she decided to investigate and found out that not only was the place real, but she could enter it, while none of her acquaintances could see it. She's determined to spend some time here soaking this place in and learning all about it under the cover story of roadtripping across the country with some new friends.[/center][/hider] 


[hider=Matthew Roderick-Wright][center]Name: Matthew Roderick-Wright

Gender: Male

Age: 68

Appearance: Matthew is an older man of mixed African American and Caucasian ancestry, still fit and in good shape into his late sixties. He has a full head of thick grey hair, kept close-cropped and professionally short. He often dresses in jeans, a golf shirt - always tucked in - and a comfortable pair of running shoes. He can often be found wearing a US Army pin and sometimes a Chicago Cubs baseball cap.

Sexuality: This is even a question?!

Godly ancestor: Mars

Son/daughter or further removed: Grandson

Relationship with godly ancestor: Matthew grew up knowing of his unique ancestry and sought to live up to it. In the jungles of Vietnam, he was fueled by thoughts of doing this legacy proud. As a soldier, he excelled in waging war and indeed, Mars looked with pride upon this mortal grandson of his. Shying away from the less... martial aspects of his ancestor, he remained in the army following the end of the war, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel and commanding an armoured division during Operation Desert Storm. Having retired with full honours a handful of years ago, he decided to pursue his interest in his family history by moving to New Celestia and meeting with Mars for the first time. There was no emotional outpouring - just a heartfelt handshake and a long conversation between two professional military men who shared a deep respect for each other - exactly the way that Matthew had always pictured the encounter.  

Relationship with mortal family: Matthew's parents are long gone, though he is in  occasional contact with his brother Lawrence, who is a corn farmer in southern Illinois. The two of them go to see Cubs games together at least a couple of times per year, and Matthew occasionally dotes on his great nephews and nieces, though he thinks that they're being raised to be soft and indulged and that a bit of discipline would've done them good. He has no wife or children of his own, though he was briefly married to a woman named Costanza in the early eighties. His stepson, Roger, was a disappointment to him, and the two of them do not speak to each other at all. 

Powers: At age 68, Matthew is still absurdly fast and strong, and has 20/20 vision and excellent hearing. He knows his way around multiple types of weapons and can figure out how to best use them instinctively. He is incredibly tough and difficult to injure in spite of his advanced age, and possesses mildly superhuman endurance. He has a natural tactical acumen that extends past the battlefield into virtually any situation involving conflict. Matthew also has a green thumb, but has never really developed this talent. He keeps a nice cactus garden, he supposes. 

Personality: Matthew is a tough, no-nonsense retired veteran and a career military man. While he is deeply socially conservative in most ways, he is a firm backer of civil rights and a quiet but unflinching warrior in the fight against racism. He believes strongly that attitudes help to shape reality and as a result, you will never hear him drop an 'N-bomb' under any circumstances. Matthew has an oldschool sense of honour and duty, but he can also be aggressive and a bit of a bully. He is used to a chain of command and does best when part of one. Matthew will not complain about what he sees as 'petty concerns', nor will he 'stand for any special snowflake bullshit'. As a result, he holds a lot inside, and he's a bit of a lonely man with his share of regrets, standing on his pride and military service as the sun begins to set on his life.

Bio: Matthew and his younger brother Lawrence were born during the baby boom in Chicago to an African-American mother and a mixed-race father who had served with distinction during the second world war but been prevented from rising above the rank of captain due to his race. His parents both worked: his father in a factory, and his mother doing room cleaning at a hotel. Matthew wasn't old enough to remember much of the first phase of the civil rights movement, but he still remembers where he was and what he was doing when he heard about the death of Martin Luther King.

Matthew was an average student during his high school days, but he was an incredible natural athlete, especially as a football running back. Only a fiery and violent disposition and a lack of discipline prevented him from being offered multiple tier one scholarships. In any event, he still ended up playing in the NCAA for a year before the Vietnam War draft was held and he was called to service. Though he considered refusing, like his hero Muhammad Ali, he decided to answer the call in order to honour his father, who had fallen ill and been forced to take a leave of absence from his job. 

In the jungles of Vietnam, Matthew truly came to life for the first time. He was cited for numerous acts of personal bravery well above and beyond the call of duty. He proved to be excellent at sniffing out ambushes ahead of time, thwarting enemy plans, and extricating himself and his fellow soldiers from impossible situations. It wasn't long before the medals, commendations, and promotions came flooding in. Whatever he may have felt about the flimsy justifications for the war, Matthew pushed it all aside. His job was elimination of the enemy in the name of his country, and he carried it out with loyalty and gusto. The conclusion of the war was something that he had seen coming, but at this point, he was already firmly entrenched in the military life. During the relatively conflict-free eighties, (despite the incendiary rhetoric being tossed about between cold war rivals) he made an attempt to settle down with the widow of one of his Vietnam buddies who he'd kept in touch with. However, her teenaged son was a delinquent, and Matthew's attempts to set the boy straight drove a wedge between them and resulted in the marriage failing after only a couple of years.

After that, he dedicated his life to serving his country, and did so as a captain and then a lieutenant colonel in the conflicts of the eighties, nineties, and early twenty-first century. That there was something more than human blood running through his veins, Matthew was certain, and he'd been told the family secret by his father upon his passing from cancer at age 56. Upon his retirement, Matthew decided to pursue this interest all of the way to New Celestia, half expecting it to have been little more than some elaborate last joke of his father's.[/center][/hider]

[hider=Zack Martin]
[center]Name: Zack Martin

Gender: Male

Age: 28

Appearance: Zack is a tall, lanky man with spiky jet black hair and a sharp goatee. He has a white skunk stripe running through his hair and bright blue eyes. His features are best described as sharp and fall somewhere between severe and handsome. He can commonly be seen wearing a pair of torn, faded blue jeans, a white t-shirt, and a black leather motorcycle riding jacket with blue highlights on the shoulders and cuffs. He has a handful of piercings in his ears and several tattoos on his biceps, forearms, and calves.

Sexuality: Straight

Godly ancestor: Fulgora (Roman Goddess of Lightning)

Son/daughter or further removed: Son

Relationship with godly ancestor: Zack has known his mother for a lot longer than most of the divine offspring in New Celestia have known theirs. They are in regular contact and she has helped Zack to make the most of his powers.

Relationship with mortal family: Zack never knew or met his father. He had a number of foster families, but most of them just annoyed him and the feeling was mutual between them. He doesn't really have a family aside from his mother. 

Powers: Zack can create, control, and resist lightning and electrical charges, He also has some powers over positive and negative magnetism. He can become a human embodiment of lightning, and, as such can appear wherever and whenever lightning does, effectively using it as a form of teleportation.

Personality: Zach is irreverent, abrasive, and snarky, with a deeply cynical streak. He exhibits a consistent failure to take much of anything seriously except for his work on cars and motorcycles. Zack has strong opinions on a lot of inconsequential things, such as music taste, clothing style, choice of alcoholic drinks, and television series, though it isn't alwasy easy to tell if he's trolling you or not. He also think that Donald Trump is hilarious and awesome but should "die like the fucking cunt he is". Zack isn't actually a misanthrope. He loves women, especially when they shut up about their feelings and just hop into bed with him. The truth is that he's just tired of people. They're all broadly the same and most bore him. Most are self-obsessed. They're usually friendly enough, but there's always social politics with people and he'd rather work on squeezing an extra half-second out of his totally bitchin' new ride while listening to some face melting metal on his headphones than deal with that shit. Zack doesn't care if you feel ignored by your parents. He doesn't give a rat's ass about your struggles with your gender identity. His level of caring about your recent breakup with your boyfriend/girlfriend equates to precisely zilch. The secret pain and loneliness that you hold inside is a cool story, bro.

Zack's mostly here to laugh at the world and its various forms of pretentiousness while smoking two packs a day, souping up his Camaro, and not giving a fuck. Of course, he's crying inside all the way. The dude has issues - loads of them - but that's what alcohol's for, right?

Bio: Zack's mother is a lightning goddess and his father refused to take take responsibility for him upon his birth and for a couple of years thereafter. Coincidentally (or not) he was struck and killed by a bolt of lightning while walking home from a club one night. Zack spent a few years in an orphanage before being taken in by foster parents. However, their financial situation deteriorated after both of them lost their jobs within months of each other and they were forced to give him up. Zack bounced around between foster families for the next decade or so, leaving him pretty jaded. Without any real attachment to or investment in the people who he was living with, he began to act out in attention-seeking ways or simply for his own amusement. Before long, he developed a reputation as a problem child and any interest in him dried up.

On his fourteenth birthday, he found himself formally adopted by a wealthy, divorced businesswoman named Maria Fulgora. She was, of course, an alias of the Roman goddess who was his biological mother. She moved him to New Celestia and gave him the lowdown on just about everything. It took her a while to make any cracks in his well-practiced wall of hostility, but eventually he came to think that she was kind of cool, mainly just because she didn't try to change him or condescend to him. She just supported what he wanted to do. After that, Zack never wanted for much of anything. He was a complete shit in high school. Some of the older teachers still shudder at his name, and it lives on even in the stories told by current students. However, he managed to graduate with decent marks and f to get through college so that he could run a garage and teach shop. Vehicles and machines are so much easier to deal with than people. They don't talk back, they diagnose their problems honestly, they shut the fuck up when commanded to, and you can hit them when they really piss you off without being sued for assault.[/center][/hider] 

[hider=Selena Casillas Ochoa]
[center]Name: Selena Casillas Ochoa

Gender: Female

Age: 38

Appearance: Selena is a petite woman with tanned skin, and straight black hair with bangs cut to shoulder length with lazerlike precision. She often wears a full skirt suit in either white or black, with a thin pencil skirt and high heels that add a forbidding click to every step that she takes. He makeup is always perfect and her nails are always painted blood red. On sunny days, she will wear a pair of aviator sunglasses that make it impossible to see her eyes.

Sexuality: straight

Godly ancestor: Thanatos

Son/daughter or further removed: Daughter

Relationship with godly ancestor: It used to be very strained, though it has improved in recent years. 

Relationship with mortal family: Selena's mother died during childbirth, and she was raised by her aunt and uncle as if she were one of their many children. In fact, while growing up, virtually nobody knew that she [i]wasn't[/i] one of theirs. Time and distance have separated them somewhat, though they're still on good terms and she regularly visits on holidays. Of more consequence are her husband, Michael: the son of a minor Chinese water deity, and her daughter Victoria: a synthesis of the two sets of powers. They are her everything.

Powers: Selena has always been deeply uncomfortable with her powers, since she was raised as a devout Catholic and they come from a Greek death god. The most peculiar of these is her apparent age. Though she's approaching forty, she doesn't look a day past her early twenties. Of course, as the offspring of a death god, she possesses the ability to call people into the afterlife with nothing but a touch and intent. In some circumstances, she can also return them to the mortal plane. However, the ability that has made Selena the most uncomfortable is her power over pain and grief. With but a look and a thought, she can inflict immense amounts of it upon people, but conversely can relieve it. She herself can move at will from one plane to the other. Though while she is in the land of the dead, her body remains behind in the living world and is completely vulnerable. Finally, just like her father, she can sprout a pair of ethereal wings from her back and use them to fly. They look almost exactly like angel's wings except for the fact that they're pitch black.

Personality: Selena is a warm and caring individual by upbringing, but it contrasts with the detached and distant yet coolly benevolent nature bequeathed to her by her father. Every day of her life she remains locked in a struggle against that side of herself. Selena can laugh at a good joke, but she's not very good at making any herself. Her marriage has been blessed with genuine passion as well as understanding and a great many common interests. In most ways, Selena is utterly typical of an upper middle class woman in her late thirties, from her taste in media to her set of interests, to her social and political opinions, which lean conservatively left but little more.

Bio: Selena grew up cursing her father, whoever he was, for leaving. She always assumed that he was some no good gangbanger. She was raised by her aunt and uncle and it was a largely happy upbringing, though they were rather poor and often struggled. Just having her in the room often made them feel better. 

Taking this a step further, she got into medicine and after years of schooling, eventually became a doctor. It was right after her graduation that she was told the truth about her birth by her aunt. The old woman was rather skeptical herself, but she had never known her sister to lie. Upon investigating New Celestia herself, Selena was contacted by her father and was horrified to find out that not only was he real, but he was  the very epitome of a cool, handsome, emotionless death god. She wanted nothing whatsoever to do with him, not understanding (or perhaps not wanting to understand) that he saw it as his job to ease pain as well. 

Moving her practice to New Celestia, she did well for herself and eventually fell in love with one of her clients, a man named Michael Xu, the son of a Chinese water deity. Before long, they had gotten married and Selena had gotten pregnant. She worked for as long as was medically responsible, before temporarily referring her clients to another physician while she went on maternity leave. Her daughter, Victoria, is the light of her life, and was born seven years ago. That was also the time that her father picked to come back into her life. They talked rather openly about her resentment. He admitted that he had probably inadvertently killed her mother. There was nothing that could be done to change the past. However, they could attempt to have a future.[/center][/hider]  


[hider=Mario Manzetti]
[center]Name: Mario Manzetti 

Gender: Male

Age: 34

Sexuality: Straight, but those gay people are cool too

Godly ancestor: Cloacina (Roman Goddess of sewers)

Son/daughter or further removed: Son

Relationship with godly ancestor: As a generally very hands-on type of deity, she's been involved in his and his brother's lives since day one and the bonds between them are deep and strong.

Relationship with mortal family: Mario was raised by his father and his nonno and nonna, and the old couple spoke a good deal of Italian around the house, so he's actually fluent in it. They would dote on him and his twin brother Luigi endlessly, though their divine mother was also a fairly regular guest. The two boys grew up aware of their unique heritage and naturally went into the plumbing business despite their father being an advertising executive and a loving but often absentee parent. Mario and Luigi are about as close as siblings can be. They share similar tastes in food (both love mushrooms) and clothing (they're both suspender-wearing hipsters, though Mario prefers red and Luigi prefers green), and even in women. There are these two: Daisy and Peach, that the brothers have been going on with for a while, but they still can't quite figure out who's gonna date who, you know?

Powers: Mario is just incredible with all types of metal and piping. He has an amazing ability to dig underground at high speed and can visualize where he is underground at all times, in addition to being a repairman extraordinaire. He's very resistant to heat and can even generate low level fires from his hands to help unclog particularly nasty blockages. Mario can sense poison from a considerable distance away and has the ability to purify anything, making it safe to eat or drink. He can quench thirst and prevent the symptoms of liquid-borne diseases and infections. He's also just damned tough and doesn't care about getting dirty. All of his abilities are shared by Luigi.

Personality: Mario's an easygoing guy most of the time, with an ironic sense of humour and a cool, laid back demeanor. He's a good cook and likes a good beer while watching the game, and he's started to get a bit paunchy as a result. When under extreme stress, he can demonstrate a fiery temper, and is often prone to panic and hyperactivity. 

Bio: Mario's pretty much been happy as a clam for most of his life. He's been coming and going from New Celestia for a while. So has Luigi. They've had some adventures, rescues some princesses, had some badass go-kart races, and chilled with some sentient apes along the way.[/center][/hider]  

So, tell me which of these six characters you find most interesting, unique, and/or appealing, and I guess that's the one I'll use. If anyone wants to use one of the others, feel free to do so. If the OP wants to use any as NPCs, then go for it!