[hider=Martin the Magnificent][color=48d1cc][b]Name[/b][/color]: [color=BC8F8F]Martin Margrave, formerly Martin Warrick, sometimes the Magnificient Marovio[/color]

[color=48d1cc][b]Age[/b][/color]: [color=BC8F8F]33[/color]

[color=48d1cc][b]Human Appearance[/b][/color]: [color=BC8F8F][i]Tall, dark, and handsome, Martin plays hard to the stereotypical image that screams either magician or evil vizier, depending on what sort of movies you watch.[/i][/color] 

[img]https://i.imgur.com/tlFN3C6.jpg[/img]

[color=48d1cc][b]Personality (Optional)[/b][/color]: [color=BC8F8F]The showman. The charmer. The daredevil. The maniac?[/color]

[color=48d1cc][b]Occupation[/b][/color]: [color=BC8F8F]Stage magician (former?)[/color]

[color=48d1cc][b]History (Optional)[/b][/color]: [color=BC8F8F]Martin majored in theatre, to the despair of his math and engineering professors - whip-smart and clever with his hands, he would have made an outstanding architect. He wanted to be a magician instead, but it turns out all the fantastical props in the world don't make up for a certain lack of stage presence and an insurmountable aversion to the slow ramp of complexity necessary to hook an audience instead of just overwhelming them from the start. He knows the backstage arts, but his work has to be front and center. He's skilled, but his career is failing.

So is his marriage; Martin may have locked in the dream of marrying his high school sweetheart, but somewhere after the early years the dream began to fade. Adrianna Lisbon-Margrave hasn't been home the last couple years, and their awkward bitterness-edged friendship has been deteriorating of late - some kind of trouble she won't disclose, something to do with her work up at Blackthorne. He'd be more concerned if he wasn't also trying to be a positive influence in the lives of Jacob and Alison Warrick, younger siblings by seven years and ten respectively, who their parents say are in trouble with a drug craze quietly sweeping NSC. Some newfangled thing called Thana or Thane, short for Thanatopsic Arcana, said to produce the same full-throttle trip as a dying brain dumping its remaining chemical load all atonce.

Maybe he'd at least have a handle on THAT, along with his stumbling career and the [color=7ea7d8]oncoming subway train[/color] of middle-aged loneliness and mediocrity he can feel starting to circle around him, if it wasn't for the latest complication - two unexpected visitors to his last, greatest, and most fateful performance. One was a friend of his wife, an off-duty S.C.A.R.E. operative (Martin knew her as "internal security") determined to make the most of a bad date by taking in a good show.

The other was Smile, not off-duty at all, who changed what actually wasn't a very good show into something...extraordinary. He pointed out, over the course of a movie-monster fast advance, that all these suffering people weren't really looking for Martin's help. No one suffering is. They just want to be understood. For Martin to...have a heart.

The clip's gone viral, but nobody outside the kooky conspiracy boards has bitten on the idea that a magic show might have involved an actual supernatural event - yet. Sure, it was a weird finale, but timely pyrotechnics and a little primal instinct from Martin covered up the worst of what happened for the majority of his audience.

Not so much for the operative, though. Martin was black-bagged backstage and woke up buried in the laboratory-dungeons of the Evadne Complex, full of strange urges and rippling with a power he doesn't understand. As if his life wasn't complicated enough.[/color]

[color=48d1cc][b]Infection Status[/b][/color]: [color=BC8F8F]Infected[/color]

[color=48d1cc][b]Miasma Abilities (Infected Only)[/b][/color]: 

[color=BC8F8F][color=7ea7d8]LUNAR OMENS:[/color] His Infected appearance is contrarian - a bulky body and wide, wedge-shaped predator's head, but its slender limbs move delicately, balancing on bone spurs like a dancer. He has help, though, in the form of a loose relationship with mass and gravity. He moves too fast - especially through the air, breaking physical laws regarding velocity and air resistance as if he'd received a state exemption - and across surfaces that not only lack obvious grip but shouldn't be able to support his weight, which is actually several times what his appearance would suggest. The selectivity of these omens make him exceedingly dangerous on the hunt for prey unaware of them, especially if that prey is not itself imbued with supernatural physicality.

[color=7ea7d8][b]CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT:[/b][/color] Martin can consume biomass to create batlike "familiars" that are mostly bundles of teeth, wings, and tail-tacles from his body: a corpse offers enough material to refine into a single familiar. They're loosely independent and not particularly dangerous (to humans) when not directed by his will; they hunt nonhuman fauna and for bodies, whose biomass they repurpose into infected disturbing "hives" that can produce more of their number (with the advantage that hives accept piecemeal offerings; the character needs at least a hundred pounds worth of corpse all at once). While familiars are intelligent enough to avoid harm when possible, they don't threaten living humans even in self-defense - they're unwilling to endanger potential Infected hosts. They hide from Infected not of their strain, but sometimes follow them in hopes of new biomass sources, and sometimes mob non-sentient Infected who cross into a hive's "territory". Their hives begin to leak Miasma as they grow, and non-sentient Infected created by exposure or forced into extended contact (at least a day) with its Miasma adopt familiar instincts - driving Infected of different strains to destroy both familiars and hives if they can get at them.

Within about a hundred yards of the character, Martin can hear and echolocate through his familiars. Within about thirty yards, they become effectively extensions of his will. Within biting range, Martin can actually eat familiars that have been directed to consume and catalyze blood or neural tissue for him - a mouthful of blood allowing him to recover about a day's worth of memory over a few minutes' time, while a familiar that's snacked down on a whole brain offers up to a week, digested over hours. Infected with the familiar strain aren't quite so attuned: he can listen through one at a time, direct its actions, or consume it to recover memory, but all of these activities require his full concentration to perform.

[color=7ea7d8]RUNNING WITH THE DEVIL:[/color]  Once a hive reaches about a busload's worth of biomass, it stops producing batlike familiars and "calls" its existing brood home. If most of them make the journey, the hive devours them to spawn a single new being - a packmate - a lupine Infected whose form and relationship to the physical laws of our universe are similar to Martin's own. More alarmingly, a packmate displays sentient levels of autonomy...and the first time it consumes an entire human corpse, becomes imprinted, thereafter capable of taking that form and a week's worth of its memories. Like familiars, they can catalyze blood and neural tissue. Unlike familiars, they don't need to die to update each other or Martin - a single heavy bite will do. These creatures aren't capable of creating familiars or evolving, but the phenomenon is one whose threat is immediately obvious.

Familiars and packmates both seem compelled to sing or hum softly in the presence of a hive or their ultimate master, and this sole instinct resists all attempts at override.[/color]

[color=48d1cc][b]Miasma Appearance (Infected Only)[/b][/color]: [color=BC8F8F]His transmogrified form is a monstrous sort of chiropterolupine mash-up, big, toothy, with no eyes in the usual place and too many elsewhere, winglike limbs clawed by bone spurs, and big fluffy ears. He is a fever-dream variation of a vampire werewolf.[/color][/hider]