Name: Brooks Lockwood
Age: 54
Gender: Male
Height/Weight: 1 meter 80 cm, 102kg
(Former) Occupation: Bootlegger
Appearance: Brooks has built up muscle from constant labour, but it's padded with a significant amount of fat as well. Despite his imposing figure he tends to hunch a little to make himself seem smaller than he actually is. His hair is fully grey, long and unkempt; his body is littered with various scars, some of them more recent than others. He has age lines on his face and a full beard which is poorly groomed. He has the same hard, greenish eyes as his niece. His clothes aren't anything too specific; he tends to wear simple dark outfits, and errs towards outdoor wear. Sometimes he'll be carrying a backpack.

Brooks was the older sibling, but he wasn’t the favourite. That reward went to his little sister, and was well-deserved; Louise (or Loulou, in his childhood days) was bright, charming and pretty whilst he still had trouble talking to hia friends. Even though he grew up in her shadow, he was just as ready to dote on her as everyone else. He was doing okay in classes, kept going to soccer practice but wasn’t the best nor the worst player in the team; his childhood was punctuated with the adventures he took by the old quarry with his friends and Louise in tow. They used to make pillow forts during the evenings and watch VHS tapes of their favourite films. His parents were Catholic republicans and he had a nice house with a huge back yard. Things were simple and happy.

It all started to go a bit awry when Brooks reached middle school. Even as a kid he was content when left to his own devices and he missed out on making friends, which pushed him deeper into his own introversion. Meanwhile Louise was starting to get a different sort of attention and the friction started to build up in her own teenage rebellion against their parents. Brooks was often made to pick sides and, fearing the belt buckle, tended to openly support his parents whilst sneaking snacks to his sister’s room after the arguments. They drifted apart as each made their own friend groups and had studies to attend to, but still confided in one another. In particular, Brooks was at a loss on what he wanted to do once he graduated high school. With no clear passion shining through, he was instead gripped by his parents’ glorification of the Vietnam War during his youth and started to edge towards the draft, as it would at least give him some time to figure out what he wanted to do in college.

By this point Louise had only doubled down in her resistance against her parents’ old-fashioned ideologies. She had gotten into the anti-war movement pushed on by the atrocities of the Vietnam war (atrocities which her parents refused to acknowledge), and eventually her party lifestyle started to dip into drugs. Brooks was decidedly anti-confrontational - he had it beaten into him from an early age - and seeing the dysfunction in his home was beginning to alienate him from his family and push him even more into his bubble. When he did eventually admit he wanted to join the army, his parents gushed over him. The sudden swell of attention and pride was intoxicating at first, but his spirits were dampened when Louise turned her back on him with disgust. He wanted to explain that he was just doing it to buy himself some time, but he never knew how to put it into words. They grew apart. Unwillingly, Brooks became the favourite child.

Brooks turned 21 at the cusp of the invasion of Panama and he immediately enlisted. Then he briefly went home to find out that Louise had ran away with her meth head boyfriend. He was sent out to the Gulf War without complaint. The military hardened him and made him stronger, but he was exposed to such nightmarish scenes of civilian slaughter and ill practice that they continue to haunt him more than thirty years later. He never had a very high regard for his fellow man and the experiences that lingered past his military service (which was rudely interrupted by a bullet through the leg, permanently damaging his knee) cemented his general distaste for mankind. Brooks, now the wounded veteran, came back to a listless home. His parents had doubled down hard on Catholicism, adamant that God would protect him out in the deserts and would eventually bring their wayward daughter back to the fold. Their zealotry frightened Brooks enough to push him out of home and into employment on the oil fields and into lumberjacking operations. The long absences from home and the high pay were addictive; most of these jobs were gruelling for their employees because they had family, but Brooks never had much of a quarrel with hard work and a lack of creature comforts.

Eventually Brooks had more money than he was able to spend on his own. Finding a partner and making kids frightened him; he didn’t want a repeat of his childhood. He thought of recontacting his sister from time to time but couldn’t bring himself to face her. All his friends from high school were god knows where, and he wanted nothing to do with the army. At this point he was embittered and jaded, feeling the pangs of loneliness but too nervous to jump back into society properly, especially after 9/11. Instead, he started to look into living out in the country, somewhere in the midwest where nobody would bother him anymore. This interest paired with the gradual accumulation of guilt over his years which manifested in a constant sort of restlessness. He used to be able to satiate it with travel but could no longer live transiently with his knee. He ended up being enamoured with the thought of living off the grid and started to pool his funding into an old cabin in the middle of backwater Iowa.

Brooks was already well-established in his forest by the time the first wave hit. He subsisted off a mixture of hunting and trading with a nearby small town, giving them venison and scrap metal in return for supplies he couldn’t forage, fish or filter out from his surroundings. He didn’t know what it meant, but what little he got from his trips into town was enough to start work on his very simple underground bunker project - just in case. It was only after the third wave that the fugitives started to trickle into his neck of the woods. The first group of people he came across were a starving family; the father, Nicolas, was capable of abilities Brooks had never even seen before. It frightened him to no end and made him wary, but the sight of their pinched faces and grubby children was enough to allow him to reluctantly shelter them in his home. Soon he experienced a gradual trickle of refugees running for their lives, and hearing their stories brought back unpleasant parallels to his time in the military. Because he hadn’t seen the chaos that mages could inflict first-hand, he was more sympathetic to their cause than the usual citizen.

Unbeknownst to him, his good deeds had made ripples that reached the Violet Underground. Last year he negotiated an agreement; he’d take in mages throughout the year in return for supplies. Soon this elaborated into the collection of mages from difficult situations and he became a newly-hired Bootlegger. Being in contact with these fugitives helped to bring him out of his shell somewhat, though none of it could prepare him for his first ‘real’ assignment with the organisation.

Around fifteen years ago, somewhere in Texas, Louise had a baby. She was in and out of jail for possession of narcotics and, despite her estrangement from her family, she was able to convince his parents to take in the little girl. At this point they had gone off the deep-end and used their pensions to buy an RV, driving up and down Arizona and barely settling as they made a life for themselves in trailer parks. The girl - his niece - was due to manifest her abilities this year. As both a rite of passage and a small mercy for both the teen and Brooks alike, Brooks was assigned to collect her and bring her to safety.

Abigail Harlow

Name: Abigail Harlow
Age: 15
Gender: female
Height/Weight: 5'2, 44kgs
(Former) Occupation: Student
Appearance: Depending on the season, Abigail has two skin tones - pale and sunburnt. She's short and lanky, with knobbly joints, an upturned nose and snaggly teeth. Often has a spot or two on her face. Pale blonde greasy hair which she either wears loose, covers with an equally greasy baseball cap or ties up into an unappealingly tight ponytail. She wears thrift shop fashion or sports gear. Often smells of teenage BO.

Abigail grew up with her grandparents in a caravan that cruised around Arizona. They were fulltimers; a beautiful nomadic subculture of trailer park inhabitants that scuttle from Solero Springs to Redville Acres, from camp to park and back again when they've outstayed their welcome. She didn't know her father and her mother was incarcerated around a decade ago for drug-related charges. They were kind yet misguided people who did the best for a little girl who found herself in an awkward situation. Abigail few up on exaggerated stories of her uncle, their eldest son - a stoic and severe war veteran-turned outdoorsy type, who her grandparents idolised but hadn't heard from in decades.

Where they could, Meemaw and Pops forced the impetuous rapscallion into whichever public school they could find. Her education was disjointed and patchy but it kept her occupied. They were the Catholic, god-fearing sort who, having failed their daughter and somehow lost all contact with their precious son, were twice as insistent to keep the demon-spawn on the straight and narrow. Abigail took to sports rather than drugs. Academia frustrated her but the rustic, eccentric and ultimately homely lifestyle of the various camper parks she frequented had imbibed her with knowledge that you'd generally expect to pick up from toothless old hermits and professional recidivists. She's bright, just not in the way you'd expect. Most of the time she doesn't elect to use her brightness, which probably explains the myriad of stories she's similarly accumulated over such a brief and tumultuous lifespan.

When the Violet Dawn first hit, Abigail was quick to pick up on the anti-mage rhetoric that her grandparents used quite liberally throughout the five year period. As strong southern Catholics, the incursion of magic was devilwork and the unwilling practitioners were souls destined to go to Hell. In her grandparents mind, and therefore in her mind, the Violet Dawn was the beginning of the rapture; the manifestation of these sinful and destructive powers were signs from God of the unworthy who deserved to be culled in Jesus' name. She lost friends and foe alike to the phenomenon but it never necessarily affected her, and she had far worse problems to deal with, so why would she care for the lives of the condemned? It wasn't as if it would happen to her, right?

Name: Angeline Harrison
Age: 31
Gender: Female
Height/Weight: 5'6 / 67kgs
(Former) Occupation: Professional dancer
Appearance: A tall, lithe and athletic figure when she isn't dolled up in her performance gear. Angeline is only just started to show signs of ageing but she has a youthful and smiling face. Her eyes are a pale off-green colour, and she's usually tied her blonde hair up. Out of habit she keeps her appearance somewhat neat, if not meticulous. You'll often see her in plimsolls or other flat, flexible footwear alongside some sensible skirt and sweater combination, opting for a look that's a mix between chic and scholarly. She is no stranger to accessories and a nice handbag. If she isn't dressed in performance gear or extremely casual business casual, she'll be in some leggings and a hoodie.

Angeline Harrison was born in Bedfordshire, England, to a fairly wealthy upper-middle-class family. She went to private schooling as a child and was allowed to follow her interests instead of the most financially sensible career path. She often took part in extracurricular activities, starting with gymnastics and then quickly moving onto the school's ballet classes. Her teacher for the after school club saw that the girl had a knack for performing arts and encouraged her to attend Irrendale Ballet Academy, a prestigious dance school, when she was around twelve years old.

Despite the rigorous training, carefully planned out diets and constant rehearsals and performances, Angeline did her best to prioritise her education. She sacrificed a social life and a fair amount of sleep to keep up with her grades and her practice, but the friends she made at the academy would last her for decades. She came out of her secondary education with decent A levels and a professional career as a ballerina through a partnered agency with the academy.

From there she spent almost a decade of her life performing both at home and around Europe in various gigs, rehearsing and practicing with her own professional mentor, organising her home life in tandem with a nutritionist and having some small but fulfilling relationships with men who ultimately couldn't keep up with her constant travelling. She was put on the front cover of a few ballet related magazines once or twice, but never as often as when she fractured her ankle from landing awkwardly after an unbalanced jeté.

In the time off work, Angeline realised that she didn't have any sort of back up plan aside from perhaps becoming an instructor once she has outlived her athletic career. Since it would take upwards to a year to fully recover, she decided to go to university in America to study Biological Sciences. She started her degree aged 29 despite the increasingly difficult paperwork it took to get into the country, and during her second year of studying she started to slowly get back into the swing of dancing using the network of friends from the academy as a foothold in the US. Her powers manifested halfway through her degree.

Skills:

• Strongest Skill - Good Physique - Flexible, strong, agile. Capable of performing feats that the average Joe cannot, but she's untrained in anything but dancing.
• Second Strongest Skill - Biologist - Above average knowledge of ecology, neurobiology, molecular cell biology, pharmacology and genetics and evolution.
• ‘Weakest’ Skill - Calm under pressure - High-pressure lifestyle full of rigorous training, diets and practice along with education results in her being able to handle the pressure of an intensive lifestyle without panicking too much.

Weaknesses:

• Biggest Weakness - Sheltered. She's never truly experienced hardships or financial difficulty and usually has everything she needed on hand, and the ability to replace what is broken. She doesn't know how to repair, recycle or conserve resources.
• Second Biggest Weakness - Weak immunity. Stemming from a sheltered life and some predisposition in her genes, she's more prone to illness after suffering from exposure, eating dirty or rotten food and unsanitary conditions.
• Third Weakness - Reliant on Authoritative figures. She isn't rendered useless without orders, it's more that when she is given instructions from someone who seems to know what they're doing, she won't listen to her better judgement and assumes said figure knows more about the scenario than she does. It can lead to her walking blindly into bad situations.

Spells:

• 1 - GREEN - Can produce streams of water from her fingers like a little watering can. Results in dehydration (1:1 ratio), though it should become more efficient and hopefully she'll be able to manipulate the streams with time.
• 2 - RED - Plant growth. The spell encourages tissue growth in other life forms but slows regenerative properties in herself (slows cell replication, immune response etc).
• 3 - RED - Botanical vision. Her eyesight makes plants with properties she is looking for light up within the vicinity to her, but she is utterly blind to anything else.
• 4 - RED - Carbon-graft - Any carbon-based lifeform can be used as supplementary tissue to seal surface level wound but it kills the lifeform upon use, only 'heals' what the lifeform is in contact with and takes days to be incorporated into real flesh. Excess parts fall off until the body is good as new. During the healing process, the lifeform used still retains its properties (ie a tree bark graft can still burn or splinter if struck hard enough or ignited).
• 5 - GREEN - Boosts the naturally occurring properties of chemicals in plants and animals (I.E. the effects of opiates derived from Papaver Somniferum or the opium poppy), but imparting potency within the plant draws from her energy and leaves her fatigued. Like the dehydration spell, it will become more efficient over time.

Name: Ellen Taylor
Age: 23
Gender: Female
Height/Weight: 168 cm/ 56 kg
(Former) Occupation: Alaskan King Crab Fisher
Languages: Fluent in Italian, French, English. Conversational with German, Spanish and Portuguese

Appearance: Ellen has a scar on her left arm from a cord snapping and a piece of equipment striking her two years ago. She also has a tattoo on her right wrist, half of a yin yang, designed by her sister, who had the other half on her wrist. Her hair is currently brown at the roots with it lightening as it goes past her shoulders, but she has gone completely red and blonde as well. Her hair is naturally brown. She wears contacts, though her vision is decent without for short durations. She wears black stretch leggings, flats, and a layered top—usually a tank top with a cotton t-shirt or zippered sweatshirt on top.

Ellen Taylor was born Elena Romano, in Italy. She and her identical twin, Chiara, were inseparable when they were young. She grew up in Milan, with the ability to hop on a train to nearly anywhere at the drop of a hat. They often spent weekends skiing in Switzerland, or shopping in France, during the weekends and holidays from school.

Chaira and Elena didn’t share all of the same hobbies. Chaira loved art, and Elena was more interested in physical activities like sports and gardening (the latter of which was not easy in the city itself). As they grew older, they both became aware that they traveled more frequently than most of their peers, and their classmates often vacationed with both parents. The Romano family rarely vacationed together. At first they believed it was their parents’ work schedules that kept them apart, but Elena realized, and eventually enlightened her sister to the fact, that their parents purposefully busied themselves to avoid the other.

Both spent adequate time with their daughters, but Elena was sure they were just waiting for the girls to turn eighteen so they could divorce. Chiara vehemently disagreed, and made it her mission to keep them together. She was always planning events for the whole family to attend, and it worked…sort of. Chiara and Elena were able to attend the same university, and Chiara made plans for family dinners nearly every month. She hoped to reignite the spark she was convinced was there when they were young. Elena was more skeptical, but went along with her sister rather than being labeled a cynic.

In 2016, Elena and Chiara were in their second year of college. They shared a room despite having vastly different majors. Chiara had been majoring in art with a specialization in graphic design. She really wanted to be a tattoo artist, and hoped that her education would help her land a great job. She designed the tattoos she and Elena got for their nineteenth birthday. Elena was majoring in Agricultural Science, though she spent most of her time with athletics. She enjoyed competitive and recreational skiing, fencing, and rugby. Unfortunately, neither girl finished their degree. On January 3rd, 2016 Chiara awakened, and most of the people in her dorm died shortly after.

Elena hadn’t been in her room at the time. She had been at a discoteque, dancing and relaxing on the Saturday night. By the time she got back to her campus after the awakenings caused mass panic, she couldn’t get back to her old room, let alone find the remains of her sister.

In the following weeks, Elena went home to mourn. Every morning she woke up, looked across the room, and expected to see her cheerful sister there, drawing or painting. Every meal at the table, she stared at the empty seat across from her. Every time she brushed her teeth in the bathroom, she looked at the holder that held both of her brushes. It was hell.

Her parents barely spoke to each other. They barely spoke to her. Elena went entire days without talking, and there were brief times she wondered if she had forgotten how to speak at all. She lay awake at night wishing she had been there. Perhaps if she had been with her sister, she could have stopped…whatever madness took her mind and her life. She didn’t know exactly what had transpired that night for her sister, and couldn’t bear to read the local reports. She read eye witness testimony about what happened to others around the world, and it made her ill. She couldn’t imagine her sister having gone through any of that…especially not alone.

Sometimes she wondered if her parents were filled with hate. Did they wish Elena had been taken instead? Did they think Elena could have stopped it? Did they blame each other? Did they think perhaps they had missed some underlying sign of madness, susceptibility, or…some other sign of what was to come? Elena tried to ask, but all she got back were bland reassurances that it wasn’t anyone’s fault. She didn’t think they believed their words, either.

Elena tried to pull her parents together. She made them dinner one night. She got them tickets to shows she thought they would like. She tried bonding with each separately, too. Elena went with her mother to some of the events of Milan’s fashion week. She took helicopter lessons with her father. Elena even brought them both to art museums. But she couldn’t be the glue for the family. Not alone. Chiara had barely been managing it before, and now it was like the cracked vase that was their family had shattered, and all Elena had to put it back together was a kids’ glue stick.

The pressure was too much. She couldn’t do it all. Elena dropped out of school. It was too hard to attend her old classes and pretend she had the energy to care about it all. It was too hard to see all of the people who did a double take when they saw her, thinking she was Chiara. It was too hard to have Chiara’s friends checking on her, all the while expecting some sort of comfort from her.

Soon all of Milan became too much. Her home, the neighborhood, the restaurants… Everything. When people she had never met looked at her for too long, Elena wondered if they thought she was Chiara, or if they knew…somehow…that she was only half-there. Only half capable. Elena packed up her things and left home.

On the anniversary of her sister’s death, Elena was at a bar, drinking and playing darts. The bar was a dive, but it was more crowded than most weekdays. Many people wanted to drink away the sorrow and pain of what had happened the previous year on that very date. Someone called for the bartender to turn on the news after checking their phone, and shortly after, the television in the corner blared that there were yet more awakenings. The dread and suspicion in the room mounted. Elena and the others in the bar wondered who would be next.

As nations around the globe finally agreed to cooperate, Elena grew anxious. She worried she would be afflicted, though there were no ties yet to people within the same family being affected by this…event. She had been saving money since she left home, as she had been working in Northern Italy as a ski instructor. She got a fake ID in France, then traveled to Switzerland. She spent the latter half of 2017 traveling around. She hated feeling like she was on-the-run, like she had done something wrong, but she needed to get far enough that she could…settle down a bit.

Funds were difficult to come by when she was constantly moving and only picking up odd jobs. She worked under the table, which was great for some employers, but not exactly the easiest type of work to apply for, and she was always looked at with suspicion when she made her payment preferences known. Somewhere in the Yukon, Elena, now going by Ellen, met a man and followed him onto a fishing boat. His crew was short someone and they promised good money for quick work. She didn’t know much about it, but she spent the Third Wave onboard a thankfully unaffected crab fishing boat.

The work was quick, but it was dangerous. Still, she earned enough money to make ends meet for most of the rest of the year, which made the risk quite worth it. Plus, the boss didn’t mind paying her under the table, as she took a smaller cut in exchange for the discretion. Eventually Ellen split from the man, but kept coming back for the job. She worked there for the next two seasons as well. She didn’t have to ensure she picked a job ending before January 3rd. No one ran their crab fishing boats over the anniversaries of the awakenings anymore. No one wanted to lose their whole ship and shipment because someone went nuts and developed some sort of magic.

Name:Zephyr Tremblett
Age:25
Gender:Male
Height/Weight:6 feet tall, 200 pounds
(Former) Occupation:Tae-Kwon-Do Instructor
Appearance:Zephyr tries to dress in a way which makes him unremarkable to other people. A simple hoodie with no markings and jeans will do just fine.

Zephyr has always been a pretty timid guy, he doesn't like getting very emotional or worked up over things. When he was about 8 years old he got in to a fight with a kid in his class, to this day he can't even remember what it was that set him off, but he was really angry at this kid. He ended up sending the guy to the hospital with a broken nose and a lot of serious bruises. It would have been worse if a teacher hadn't intervened so quickly.

He was suspended after that incident, obviously. When he came back to school all the other kids were scared of him, and Zephyr couldn't blame them, he was scared of himself. His parents thought he needed an outlet for the aggression he clearly had pent up. They signed him up and tae-kwon-do and Zephyr really took a liking to it, he felt like he could fight the others without trying to hurt them which kept him from going too far.

Towards the end of Zephyr's school career his dad came down with cancer, and died shortly after. Zephyr's dad always loved that he did tae-kwon-do and wanted him to keep up with it. So Zephyr did, he even got a job as an instructor since he was at this point a 3rd degree black belt. It didn't pay a ton but he liked it, he made up for the lack of pay with a second job as a school bus driver.

As all this was happening the first of the Violet Dawns had occurred, and this for some reason had grabbed on Zephyr's brain. It got him interested in the supernatural, wondering what caused it and why now of all times. Zephyr became very spiritual during all of this, believing the Violet Dawn was just a supernatural occurrence created by the gods when they felt the world needed magic for whatever reason. Zephyr thought about if he would like to be blessed with magic. He never could make up his mind, but he just kept living his life, it wasn't much, but it made him happy, and that's what mattered.

Name: Jennifer Briggs
Age: 20
Gender: Female
Height/Weight: 176cm/66kg
(Former) Occupation: Student (Media and Communications)
Appearance:

Born in Queens, New York City, one would be hard pressed to think of Jenny's childhood as anything unique or special. Her family were lower middle class, with her father a sanitation worker and her mother a teacher. Although studious and with an excellent work ethic, most of her life went by unremarkably. Even the first Violet Dawn swept by, with Jenny, much like the rest of the world, thinking it a tragic disaster and little else. Then, however, came the second wave. Most people's view on the second wave was much the same as the first, but Jenny was placed in a unique position- one of her best friends Awoke in the Second Wave.

She only spoke to her briefly over the phone, and the next day she found that her friend had died. Or, well, they assumed she had died, since a body was never found. Devastated, Jenny found herself astonished by the official narrative that these early generation mages were all unstable forces of destruction- after all, she had known one, and she had even spoken to one before her death. How dare they make these assumptions of innocent people?

Still, it took until the third wave for her feelings to truly harden. Early reports of the FOE and the third round of martial law struck at her sensibilities too much to ignore. The secrecy, the treating of mages like they were no longer people... All of it seemed so wrong, like a stifling of a unique and wonderful thing that had come into the world. Perhaps it was ludicrous of her to become so invested in magic whilst still a mundane, but she started to dig into the news about the Violet Wave and the people affected by it, sifting through the conspiracy theories and government sponsored coverup news in order to find the truth.

Slowly but surely, she began to uncover the few individuals brave, sane and clever enough to provide accurate and hard-hitting reporting. Journalists, both hard hitting reporters and mainstream sources that moved out of lockstep with what the government were saying, became a lifeline into a world she was prevented from learning about. She wanted to add her voice to this chorus, and her academic achievements were good enough to earn her a scholarship to Columbia as a media and communications major.