[hider=Spire Schippers]


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Full Name: Spire Schippers

Professor of Terramancy and  Tracking.

Age: 35

Gender: Male

Primary: Terramancy, specialization in flora.

Secondaries: Tracking, ???

Description: Pearl gray eyes, angular features, longish dark hair, short facial hair, tall. Fond of peacoats, and tends to show up places a little overdressed rather than a little underdressed.

Personality: On first impression, Spire comes across charming. His sense of humor, though biting at times, usually comes with a smile as though to assure that it's all in good fun. However, many (namely, those who think he's a murderer) would argue that his charm is superficial, and that he's a sadistic, manipulative sociopath.

Skills: 
*Powerful terramancy. Though he has some skill with moving inorganic earth, his real strength lies with vastly accelerating and forcing plant growth, where he is able to burn up energy from the organism itself to conserve his own magical limits.
*Silver tongue. He can talk himself out of many a corner, and knows how to get what he wants.
*As a war veteran, skilled in most standard forms of combat.

Weaknesses:
*His relationship with his brother Toby is exploitable.
*In a fight, he's known to dash in for close quarter combat even when the smart thing would be to use a firearm or terramancy from afar.
*Socially/politically useless, crippled. He may have been exonerated, but the majority of the magical community still thinks he's guilty. See history.
  
Brief History: Enlisting in the war as soon as he was old enough, Spire became a member of an expert team of operatives during the war, the Alpha Omega squad. He fought alongside them for some time, but about 15 years ago, near the end of the war, Spire was arrested for murdering three innocents while attacking a den of cultists.

Spire claimed that the cultists had already cut the victims' throats when he dashed in and shot up the room with an automatic rifle, but some members of Spire's unit believed that Spire himself did the throat cutting, after the shooting occurred --apparently to cover up the fact that he had shot one of the innocents.

Since the gunshot wounds and the fatal exsanguinating cuts were all perimortem, the physical evidence was indeterminate. For some strange reason, efforts to contact the dead failed, so everything rested on one key witness, Ren Norrevinter, who said he'd seen Spire murdering the innocent victims.

However, Ren Norrevinter was conveniently killed by an explosive rune trap in the war shortly before the trial. Spire was in jail at the time, and wasn't a runecaster, so he maintained his innocence, but the Norrevinters never believed him. And neither did most anybody else.

Nevertheless, the charges didn't stick. Spire was exonerated, but the Schippers family name took another blow.

Much of the magical community knows the name Spire Schippers, most have seen his picture. Rumors float about that he has killed since the war, and he has been seen to mingle with some of the more unsavory sorts in the magical community. Most people who haven't met Spire believe him to be a psychopathic murderer. Most people who have met Spire...still believe him to be a psychopathic murderer. Toby's earliest memories of his older brother are through bars and in tribunals. In spite of all that, Spire has shown himself to be protective and surprisingly close with his little brother. 

Why in the hell he is a teacher now is anybody's best guess, but it might have something to do with the Sterlings wanting to snub the Norrevinters over trade route interference, or the fact that the original terramancy professor choice vanished a few days before the start of the term, and they needed to find someone in a hurry.

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I'm sure there's nothing shady going on at this school.

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