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In a world where religion and magic are the same things, it is known that all of Creation is made up of the five elements of Earth, Air, Water, Fire, and Spirit. All things are made up of a complexity of these elements, the more elements that they are made with, the more powerful they tend to be. Even humankind is made up of only three of these elements; Earth, Water, and Spirit. Because we are only made up of three, we are imperfect and require heat from the sun, air in our lungs, and food and water to survive. Throughout the eons since the creation of this plane of existence, many a Mage has attempted to combine all five elements to create a superior form of life that transcends all of the restrictions on the human body. Most of these attempts failed terribly, but the worst of them succeeded in creating life, though not the life that was intended. Demons have been born into this world created by those who would wish to push human life into purity, however, these broken, twisted forms come out tainted with the pain of their existence and rampage and destroy anything in their path. So a technique was developed to seal away the demons and the Practice of the Five, as it was called, came to become taboo.

The technique for binding a demon, which works on many other life forms as well, involves binding the spirit of the demon into a living thing and further binding that living thing with elemental bands of each of the five elements. Humans have been used, but the impurity within their own spirit drives them mad, making it improper to use as anything but a very temporary last resort. The ideal vessel is a tree. They naturally live long lives, they grow slow enough to make maintaining the bindings easy, and they are generally not capable of going mad.

This story takes place in this world, where you are students of the order tasked with maintaining the bindings on these Hallowed Trees in order to keep the demons contained. There will be a brief flashback period at the very beginning of the roleplay to when you are all children, between the ages of five and seven learning of this awesome responsibility that you will all one day have. Then we will jump ahead to your graduation date, where you will all be between 17-19, and hijinks will ensue. Members of this order are conscripted amongst the very rare Mages that are adept at Spirit. Four of you will also have a focus on another element (one each, first come first serve). It is possible to have sub-elemental focuses, such as metal for earth, but this will be later down the road, for now, focus on the five main categories. 

[hider=Elements and How They Are Used]
You can think of using the elements similar to the way that elements are used in Avatar: Last Air Bender. There are physical move components to most elemental uses. You are using your body to draw the program runes into the air, and by doing so you shape the spell. The more complex the spell, the more powerful, the longer it takes to cast. There is no set spell list, just understand that it takes time to do more complex things. While the other four elements are fairly straightforward, Spirit may need a little bit of clarification. Spirit in its most basic sense is the essence of life, it flows through everything in existence. A mage that can manipulate spirit can effectively manipulate anything alive. When combined with any one of the other elements, it can create temporary elementals to assist in a labor or to attack and defend, keeping in mind the limitations of the element (don't ask a fire elemental to move the wood stack from one area to the next). But on its own a Spirit Mage can control the flow of spiritual energy, they can use it to heal injuries and revitalize the tired, they can also use it to remove the life from something else, they can encourage living things to do their bidding, with a strong enough spell - even a person. While these are extremely powerful mages, they are limited by one thing- they must make physical contact with what they intend to manipulate. So while a fire mage can throw a fireball or an earth mage can shoot spikes of rocks up out of the earth ahead of them, a spirit mage must physically touch the target of their spells.[/hider]