Stitches

Atlantis Again: A Harry Potter RP

Alright, that sounds good.

Atlantis Again: A Harry Potter RP

This looks interesting, but I can't see any sort of plot being developed from it. Do you have a storyline in mind, or is this slice of life?

Paradigm Shift: Agents of Fate [Currently Accepting!]

"Looking for a way to not be bored without getting roped into doing chores," Abigail responded, rubbing her nose on the base of her palm. "Preferably without getting in trouble again, and giving them arcade kids a wiiiide berth. They're creepy as." She regarded Zephyr lazily as he approached and tried to join in, only showing a bare modicum of interest when she found out he was able to do martial arts. As Angeline and Zephyr got along, Abigail was starkly reminded with how her age made her even more of an outsider. She didn’t take part in the lesson yet but sat against a wall and watched them, awkward yet inquisitive. “Is this, like, something you do for fun?” she asked Angeline as she watched the woman contort into what was - in her opinion - painful and unnatural positions.

“What’s it like being a ballerina?” She tucked her greasy hair back into her baseball cap, sprawling against the wall in her own yoga pose of sitting around doing sweet F-A. “You gotta train a lot? Are the guys hot? How do they even get into leotards?” she bombarded Angeline with questions, unaware of her rudeness. She may be an uncultured little shit, but she was a curious uncultured little shit who was at least making an attempt to make friends in the face of life-changing uncertainty. At the very least, one could be thankful she hadn’t found a decent way to make fun of their poses yet.

Paradigm Shift: Agents of Fate

Yeah, Bazmund runs all the IC shenanigans plus some of the OOC shenanigans whilst I do a lot of the OOC stuff and help bounce ideas for the IC. We both do recruitment too.

Paradigm Shift: Agents of Fate

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Leadership

The Council

John

Peter

Janine

Nitya

Petra

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Membership

Simon Penrose

Simon Penrose

Basics

Name: Simon Penrose
Age: 24
Gender: Male
Height/Weight: 5"9 / 63kg
(Former) Occupation: Masters Student in Geography and Environmental Sustainability / US Army Reserve Officer Cadet
Appearance: Simon is a reserved, perceptive, and slightly nervous looking young man, with mellow brown eyes and a tendency to cross his arms when he's talking. Despite this, there's a certain sharpness to the man that comes across in how he holds himself, how his body moves when he's listening to people talk. It's easy to underestimate him.

Mike Stafford

Mike Stafford

Basics

Name: Michael Stafford
Age: 35
Gender: Male
Height/Weight: 5"10, 80kg
(Former) Occupation: Unknown
Appearance: Miles Honeywell stands at 5"10, lithely and powerfully built, with shoulders of average width. His skin is fair and largely unblemished apart from the occasional freckle and some minor acne scars on the left side of his jaw. His eyes are greyish and unintricate, without deformity nor unusual beauty. His hair is brown, neither dark enough to be remarkable nor light enough to be blonde. His smile is pleasant, but not stunning. His teeth are straight, but not perfect. There is little about him that is particularly memorable - he is no more than another face among billions.

Mark Zuckowitz

Basics

Name: Mark Zuckowitz
Age: 27
Gender: Male
Height/Weight: 5”8 / 80kg
(Former) Occupation: Gambling store worker / Drug Trafficker
Appearance: Mark is a stocky, muscular man, with oddly glossy dirty brown hair and slightly sunken eyes. His eyes are dark hazel, hard and unforgiving, perceptive and searching. He usually comes across as slightly shorter than he actually is on account of his tendency to slouch, and can usually be found wearing a dull hoodie, jeans, and a parka.

Lt. Mendez

Lt. Mira Mendez

Basics

Name: Mira Mendez
Age: 39
Gender: Female
Height/Weight: 5”9 / 85kg
(Former) Occupation: State Police Officer
Appearance: Mira Mendez is a practical, imposing woman, with broad shoulders and powerful musculature. Her face is framed by dark, thick hair, and marked by long lashes and thick eyebrows. Her lips are thin and her face is angular, forehead creased from frowns, and skin tan with the stroke of the sun. Her eyes are a deep and warm brown, and will occasionally belie a kindness that she rarely has opportunity to show any more. Normally she wears her uniform - which is generic and regulation even by police standards - and has little else on her clothing to mark her out, barring a gold crucifix worn on a silver chain about her neck, usually tucked into her shirt.

Zack Saint

Zack Saint

Basics

Name: Zachary St. Levin
Age: 19
Gender: Male
Height/Weight: 6”2 / 70kg
(Former) Occupation: Unprofessional Trouble Maker
Appearance: Zack is a tall, gangly, slightly acne-ridden anarchist punk. He likes leather jackets with spikes on them, highly styled unconventional hairdos, and ripped jeans. He’s got a sallow sort of face, with bags under his eyes and ears slightly too big for his face.

Samuel Thompson

Basics

Name:
Age:
Gender:
Height/Weight:
(Former) Occupation:
Appearance:

Anastasia Shevchenko

Basics

Name:
Age:
Gender:
Height/Weight:
(Former) Occupation:
Appearance:

Billy Ray McKinley

Basics

Name: Billy Ray McKinley
Age: 32
Gender: Male
Height/Weight: 5”9 / 72kg
(Former) Occupation: Mechanic - Civilian and HGVs
Appearance: Billy Ray is a fairly small seeming man, with muted expressions and eyes that seem to be trying to avoid drawing attention. His complexion is enhanced by a couple of well distinguished freckles on his cheeks, and his teeth are straight and well taken care of. He’s not overly broad, not impeccably toned, and not really all that strong looking - but it’s obvious enough that he works a job involving manual labour, and that he does exercise often even if it’s more a part of his natural lifestyle than for fitness in particular. He normally wears an olive green body warmer over a shirt and grey jeans.

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Affiliates, and Others

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Memorial Wall

Sexton Goodall

Sexton Goodall

January 3rd, 2020

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"He was a sour, moody, unpleasant bastard. Always had my back. I'm gonna miss you a lot, Sax. - Míra"

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Leadership

The Director of Operations

Harrison Redmond

Basics

Name: Harrison A. Redmond
Age: 67
Gender: Male
Height/Weight: 5”10 // 85kg
Occupation: FOE Director, previously a member of the FBI (details unknown)
Appearance:

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Membership

Special Agents

Ground Troops

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Paradigm Shift: Agents of Fate

Current Players:

Brooks

Brooks Lockwood

Basics

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.

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Biography

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.

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Skills and Weaknesses

Skills:

• Survivalist: Since his deployment, Brooks has been living practically off-grid for over a decade. Through sheer experience alone he has become self-sufficient; he tends to hunt and grow his own food, repairs whatever he can and scraps whatever he can't for parts. He's good at cleaning and meticulously organised. His rough lifestyle has helped him develop a self assured demeanor and remain calm under pressure.
• Combat Training: Brooks not only went through full military training, he then spent several years in the frontline. For better or for worse, Brooks knows how to maintain and fire rifles and pistols as well as some hand-to-hand combat manoeuvres. He also picked up some more brutal and unsavoury tactics through experience alone. Like riding a bicycle, it's not something one can easily forget how to do, and even now his instincts can lead the way.
• Tough: Brooks has not lead an easy life for the past thirty years. He is no stranger to inclement weather, hard work and all manner of injuries, some of which he's sustained in the past two years looking after unstable mages. His knowledge of first aid is rudimentary at best (and falls under the category of a survivalist skill) but his stamina and ability to endure are above average.

Weaknesses:

• Isolationist: like his survivalist skill, this is a blanket term that encapsulates a myriad of shortcomings that come with a life of limited contact with the outside world. His social skills leave much to be desired; he's alright in one to one conversations but tends to shut off somewhat in groups. He's out of touch with modern technology, and only has a loose grasp on what's been going on for the past twenty or so years beyond the mage crises. He still drives a stick shift and his repair skills are consequently somewhat dated.
• War Wounds: Not all of them are visible, but the main issue seems to be with his knee. It was shattered in the Gulf war and reconstructive surgery could only do so much. He lives with a stiff leg and bad memories, both of which equally affect his quality of life.
• No Magic: Brooks is a Mundane; he wasn't affected by the Violet Dawn and consequently cannot cast any sort of spell. In some very specific circumstances he can employ the vehement belief that the FOE use to dispell magic, but only when he genuinely believes someone not to be a threat. As a disillusioned war veteran who secluded himself in the wilderness, these exceptions to the vast majority of potential threats are hard to come by.

Abigail

Abigail Harlow

Basics

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.

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Biography

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?

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Skills and Weaknesses

Skills:

• White Trash Encyclopedia: Well-versed in a vast array of little helpful tidbits ranging from repairs to pest control to lockpicking to varmint snares to shotgunning (sodas, of course!) to couponing. In other words, she's a bit of a jack of all trades, but only has a very minor knowledge in these things.
• Macguyver: Living in a low-income and transient lifestyle has pushed Abigail to become resourceful. Anything's a weapon or a tool if you think hard enough, and Abi's trusty roll of duct tape helps to facilitate the process.
• Jogger Junkie: Abigail's favourite sport is running. She enjoys her 8k morning jogs, her relay races, her marathons. She's fast on her feet and doesn't tire out easily.

Weaknesses:

• Child: She's fifteen. This should be self explanatory, but it means she's not very strong, not very mature, not taken seriously, not allowed to drink, smoke or drive, can't have a job and should be in school - to say the least. On top of all the human repercussions of being on this earth less than her adult counterparts, it also means her spellcraft is erratic and hard to control. She doesn't know all the spells she can cast and the ones she can cast aren't that strong yet. Magic is also more exhausting to use.
• Dumb Sombitch: Whilst gifted with a keen gut instinct and the gift of vibe-reading, Abigail's not all that smart; partially due to her age and partially due to her upbringing. She's especially vulnerable to Black magic because of this.
• Amber Alert: It's one thing if an adult goes off-grid, it's another if a child winds up missing. Even trailer park inhabitants look after their young. She's on missing posters and the news in and around the Arizona area.

Spells:

• Pick-me-up (Red): A very simple spell that regenerates flesh. At the moment it can only knit together scrapes and bumps, but may be able to work on detailed and extensive flesh wounds if given time and practice. Burns through calories to use, so it requires spare calories to cast.
• Overflow (Violet): Discharge of excess magical power, currently in small erratic blasts from the base of her palm, capable of causing burns. Difficult to control and essential to cast in order to 'burn off' excess power, which causes discomfort and pain if left uncasted for too long.
• Astral Projection (Violet): Currently completely uncontrollable and unpredictable. Sometimes, when Abigail sleeps, she can look into another History for a brief period of time. She cannot interact with the History and cannot be detected without magical means.
• Telekinesis (Green): Similarly uncontrollable and unpredictable, though easy enough to train, Abigail can (unintentionally) change the way in which gravity affects small inanimate objects. With refinement, the mass of the object and the direction of the gravitational pull on it can be manipulated. Causes headaches and even migraines after a significant period of use.
• Energy Theft (Green): Abigail can divert the flow of all electrical currents within a 6m diameter sphere into herself, effectively turning off all technology in the area. The electricity transmutes into mana, but the sudden surge of power can cause significant harm. Abigail can hold onto the spell to the limits of her physical and mental resilience against increasingly excruciating pain and, when she does lose her grip on the spell, it is vital that she releases the excess power quickly before it causes her to burn up.
• Currently Unknown

Angeline

Angeline 'Angie' Harrison

Basics

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.

Biography

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 and Weaknesses

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.

Ellen Taylor

Ellen Taylor

Basics

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.

tattoo

Right design here:

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Biography

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.

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Skills and Weaknesses

Skills:

• Physically Fit- Ellen is used to working long hard hours without sleep. She has good endurance for manual labor, as well as tolerance of the cold, and can push her body hard before passing out.
• Captain- Ellen has experience driving cars, motorcycles, boats, jetskis, and even took a few helicopter flying lessons. She does NOT have her helicopter pilot license.
• Ready to run- Ellen doesn’t have strong ties to any particular place, though she would feel nostalgic about some places from her early life. She is used to traveling all around the world, and speaks bits and pieces of enough languages to get by in many places.

Weaknesses:

• Impatient- Ellen likes to stay active physically and mentally. She has a difficult time waiting around for things to happen. She will make a decision quickly if it means making one rather than waiting around and making lists of pros and cons.
• Impaired vision- Ellen can drive without her glasses/contacts, but she will get a headache if she goes too long without them. Without her contacts, she will need to bring writing up close to her face in order to read, as she is farsighted.
• Cynical- Ellen has always been a bit of a cynic, but there are certain things she just immediately feels negatively about. Like when she sees people looking happy, especially in family units, she tends to get suspicious and think they are hiding something or lying to themselves.

Spells:

• Condensation (Blue)- Ellen can pull water from the air in its gas form and turn it back into a liquid, coating her hands or the ground around her, roughly 0.75m in each direction. This will make the affected area (the ground or her body) slippery. She is susceptible to the effects as well for the duration of the spell and would have difficulty running or grabbing onto things. When she stops the spell, the water does not evaporate again—she must dry off.
• Seeing Double (White)- Ellen can create another version of herself as a hologram, and control it for a short amount of time. The illusion is silent, but can leave her field of vision. In such a case, she can shoose whether to see out of her own eyes or the eyes of the hologram. Any injuries that would be sustained by the hologram affect Ellen at a lesser intensity.
• Crab Claw (Red)- Ellen’s hands turn into elongated crab claws capable of tearing through flesh. Her left hand turns into one large claw, incredibly durable, meant for crashing and bashing. On her right hand, each finger turns into a long black enameled pincer complete with fixed finger and dactyl. Along the fixed finger are a series of small teeth for cutting. Prolonged use leads to hand numbness and aching of joints.
• Sea Glass? (Green)- Ellen can touch something made of glass and cause the particles in the glass to vibrate so quickly that it is ground into sand. She cannot turn the sand back into glass again. Trying to break down larger objects (like a large glass window on a shop) causes headaches, bloody nose, and potentially worse effects.
• Photosynthesis Antithesis (Green)- Ellen can create a 1.5m radius sphere in which the plants stop photosynthesizing and no longer release oxygen into the air. Any people/animals in the area would need to leave the bubble or suffocate from lack of oxygen. The excess oxygen is redirected to Ellen, over-exposing her to oxygen. This gives her headaches, sleepiness, and confusion depending on the length of the exposure.
• Second Skin (Red)– Ellen can make herself impervious to the effects of being cold or wet for an extended period of time. She does this by taking on the characteristics of the skin of a seal. She sprouts seal fur, which traps the warm air, and secretes an oil that works like blubber beneath the fur to keep her warm. Her skin turns greyish with the oil and fur, and will glisten in the light. Ellen cannot turn this spell off. After an hour or two, the second skin begins to molt and needs to be scraped off.

Zephyr

Zephyr Tremblett

Basics

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.

Biography

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.

Skills and Weaknesses

Skills:

• Martial Arts-Zephyr has been taking tae-kwon-do most of his life, so he’s pretty good in a fight, though he tries his best to use it only for self defence
• Smooth Talker-Zephyr is decent at trying to talk his way out of situations, a useful skill since he really doesn’t like fighting if he doesn’t have to
• Professional Driver-Zephyr has driven a school bus part time for several years which has made him a pretty good driver

Weaknesses:

• Reluctant Fighter-Zephyr tries to never fight anyone if he can avoid it. He will deflect blows all day but he hates having to fight someone with intent to hurt them. He’s afraid if he lets himself go in a real fight to seriously hurt someone he may go too far
• Trusting-Zephyr is a bit too quick to trust that people are being honest and to give people second (and third and fourth) chances. He’s never been taken advantage of in a horrible way yet so that’s probably why he’s still like this
• Slow-Zephyr isn’t dumb, he can just be a bit slow on the uptake sometimes. Not realizing exactly what’s going on or needing to be told what to do in an unfamiliar situation is not uncommon

Spells:

• Create Weapon (Green)-Zephyr uses the earth around him to create a weapon, usually a staff as that is what he's familiar with. The staff can only take a few hits before breaking, and is mainly used to redirect blows.
• Rock Skin (Red)-Zephyrs skin takes on the appearance and toughness of the earth itself. This makes him very hard to injure in exchange for having near zero mobility while in this form.
• Ignore Pain (Black)-Zephyr numbs his senses and blocks out any physical pain he is feeling. This of course means Zephyr won't know how badly injured he is or if he is pushing himself too hard until the spell is deactivated.
• Increase Physical Prowess (Red)-This spell increases Zephyrs strength, durability, and endurance beyond that of a normal human. It can strain the muscles and leave Zephyr incapacitated if left used for too long.
• Sharpen Senses (Red)-Zephyrs mind goes in to overdrive, taking in all details of a person or place. This can be used to analyze a persons fighting style, body language, or even how they write. When looking at a room he can identify exits, weak walls and areas that were disturbed recently. This ability uses a lot of energy and can only be used in short bursts.
• Time Out (Black)-Zephyr makes a T with his hands and demands everyone in a small area cease hostilities. Those affected feel compelled to stop fighting for a short time. During this time they are also more susceptible to suggestions that lead to a nonviolent solution. This spell is less effective the more it is used, especially against the same person

Paradigm Shift: Agents of Fate

The OOC is up.

roleplayerguild.com/posts/5139867

Paradigm Shift: Agents of Fate

Welcome to the Paradigm Shift Advanced section reboot! This RP has been going on in casual for around half a year. We are Currently Accepting New Applicants, but ask that you complete your sheet by June 14th for review.

Link to the Casual RP

Link to the Discord (HIGHLY recommended: makes the review process faster, you can meet the current cast and get to know us!)

Paradigm Shift: Agents of Fate

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- Timeline -

The history of our History

2016

• January 1st
  
  • With the first sunrise of the new year, a wave of violet light sweeps the globe, touching each country as the light of the sun meets the land. It is invisible to cameras and doesn't disturb wildlife - only mankind notices, and they see the purplish light even in their dreams when they're not awake. This event becomes known as the Violet Dawn.
  • Immediately, governments enforce a coerced silence on media corporations and try to stifle the news while their intelligence agencies figure out what exactly happened.
• January 3rd
  
  • A significant portion of the world’s population suddenly manifest magical abilities. The vast majority of these tragic individuals are either killed by the uncontrollable manifestation of their vast power, or driven irrevocably and unintelligibly insane - and are subsequently lethally subdued by riot police and government response.
  • Very few of what were eventually called The First Wave were taken alive; those that were, disappeared completely. It is likely that their citizenships were revoked, and that they remained in state custody until their deaths in captivity.
  • It is unknown if any 1st Generation Mages survive in the wild, but estimates are that less than a handful possibly could - and that less than a half could still possibly be serviceably sane. The events of this period will come to be known, one day, as the first World Wide Witchhunt.

2017

• January 1st
  
  • It happens again. Like a flashback to a nightmare, the public find themselves once again the subject of a wave of Violet light, washing over them like an occult tide with the rising of the sun. The world watches in horror… and waits in dread.
• January 3rd
  
  • The Second Wave awaken, and much like the first one they are either so wildly out of control of their powers that they are killed by them, publicly, or they are mentally destroyed by the weight of their new abilities. The government respond as they did before - with gunfire and Witchhunts. The position of the agencies created to deal with The First Wave is now secure; these are the forefather agencies of the modern institutions dedicated to hunting magicians - and accordingly, the second World Wide Witchhunt commences. A few more magicians from this era survive the bloodshed, but not many. Never many.
• April 20th
  
  • The Stafford Act - informally known as the Inquisition act - is passed by the UK parliament and subsequently taken up by the European Parliament as well. It formalises the cancellation of Brexit and the beginning of global intelligence cooperation to counter the Magical Threat. Mages are not quite universally seen as an enemy of civilisation as a whole, yet, but the public are terrified.

2018

• January 1st-3rd
  
  • The Third Wave are expected to follow this year’s Violet Dawn by the FOE, and by the wider antimagic intelligence community - but they expected it to be different, more chaotic, more violent. The magicians of the Third Generation are instead like something more subtly deranged, like a failed experiment. For this reason, many of them survive, at least initially. Their hallucinations and delusions will eventually lead most of them to be captured nonetheless, but in the meantime they remain the most survivable Generation yet.
• February 4th
  
  • The disparate branches and divisions of existing national intelligence agencies - the FBI Unusual Affairs branch, the CIA’s Extraordinary Intelligence Committee, the NSA’s Paranormal Task Force, MI5’s Crowley Office… - are formally dissolved and recondensed into their own institutions of investigation, by almost unanimous votes in nearly every sovereign nation in the world. This is the birthday of the European Magical Defence Agency, with the birthday of the Federal Occult Enforcement group coming the next day on the 5th of February.
• September 24th
  
  • The Magician known as Cam, a talented and reasonably stable individual of the third generation, develops their abilities and is eventually able to identify individuals with latent magical potential. They immediately begin using this ability to try and find themselves some friends.
• December 25th
  
  • Cam succeeds in finding seven others who are due to awaken after the next Violet Dawn. Knowing that they will not be able to reveal themselves until they too have self-identified as Magicians, Cam puts measures in place to protect them, and waits for the Sunrise on New Year’s Morning.

2019

• January 1st-3rd
  
  • As is now the broadly accepted pattern, on New Year’s morning the world is once again bathed by the Violet Dawn, and once again another fraction of the population is awoken. This year’s magicians are the most stable yet, 90% or so of them remaining both bodily and mentally intact. Intelligence agencies scramble to capture them, using new - if primitive - magic-sensing devices developed covertly using captured mages to test on; they are moderately successful, but for the first time most of the awakened Fourth Generation remain free past the first month mark.
  • Cam is successful in liberating four of the seven - the FOE were already too close to the other three - and bringing them together in Brightwell, Illinois. This is where they will, in the coming weeks, become the founders of the Violet Underground.

2020

• January 1st
  
  • The Violet Dawn arrives once more.
• January 3rd
  
  • You Awaken as a part of the Fifth Generation.
  • At 03:03AM, on the third minute of the third hour of the third day of the year, you get a text from an unknown number, telling you that FOE will be knocking on your door in fifteen minutes, and that you need to leave your apartment by the back entrance and meet them in a nearby alleyway if you want to live. The text is brief, but apologetic - and you probably don’t have any better options anyway.
  • After a traumatic but successful extraction, you arrive in Goodnight, an abandoned mall complex used as a temporary shelter for the VU and freshly awakened survivors.

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Important Information

Hello, dear friends, and welcome to the world of Paradigm Shift. This is a roleplay where your character is a newly awakened magician, with no particular training or extensive background in magic, who is rescued shortly after their awakening by an agent of the Violet Underground and whisked away to safety just barely in the nick of time.

This isn’t an RP about saving the world, and it’s not a game where every plot line will have a happy ending. There will be loss and pain in equal or greater amounts as there will be joy and hope. You will be dealing with forces that were, and are, almost entirely beyond human comprehension - and you will also be dealing with forces created by mankind, too. This will be a story about survival as much as about being the good guy, and I personally have very high hopes for it.

Before we truly begin, however, some ground rules…

Rules

• 0. The Guild rules apply in all circumstances, without exception, taking precedence over other rules should it become relevant.
• 1. The GM and any Co-GMs give their word to use communication as a means to resolve problems first and foremost, however this does not mean making unreasonable concessions, and it remains that the word of the RP Mods will be final.
• 2. All players should feel free to voice their opinions, concerns, and plot-based desires to the GM and/or to any other players that are relevant to a particular arc.
• 3. Without quotable, explicit permission from a character’s own player, you may not control any character other than your own’s actions and feelings in a given situation. Similarly, players may not successfully use Black Magic on other player characters without that player’s permission and informed consent.
• 4. There will be no metagaming.
• 5. All submitted character sheets will be subject to the rule outlined in the CS skeleton section. This is to encourage communication between the player base and the GM(s) and hopefully ensure at least a certain degree of party cohesion.
• 6. Again, just for emphasis; if you are concerned about something, if you have an idea that you think would be great for your character, or if you want any extra lore info or background, please just PM me. By creating the OOC I’m inviting open and free communication about all of this, and I’d really like to hear from you if you have something to say.

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- Expanded Lore -

Stories and Detail

Detailed Backstory

- 2016 -

The Year of the Violet Dawn

In the year 2016,

the sunrise on New Year's Morning came accompanied by a flash of purplish light, travelling the world as the sun appeared for the first time of the year, meeting the eyes and minds of each human being as and when their New Year began. No person, whether they were awake or asleep, blind or sighted, above or under ground, missed it; the light - present one moment and absent the next - touched even the most remote of dreams. It was not visible on camera, not recorded by light sensors, and no wildlife reacted to it.

For forty seven hours the media tried to suppress this, under orders from the governments of the planet Earth to prevent public disturbance while intelligence agencies and research departments conducted an investigation - but rumours have a life all their own, and do not die easily.

In the 48th hour, these rumours bore fruit; the First Wave of magicians were born, created, or awoken. The silence broke like glass. These firstmade of the new age, all of them ordinary people with ordinary lives, some of them still children... were chaotic. Magic tore most of their minds or bodies asunder, dismembering one or the other in extremely violent and terrifying displays of frequently public power. Most of them died either at the hands of their own uncontrollable powers, burning up like motes of magnesium in the dark of the world, or at the hands of the police response. The few that survived are either in the captivity of the state with their citizenships revoked and their rights nonexistent, or frantically fleeing persecution and extermination. It is estimated that only a handful could possibly be left in the wild, less than half of them still sane.

The states of almost every sovereign nation in the world launched their counteroffensive almost immediately, rounding up suspected magicians and either interning them permanently or disappearing them entirely, as the first World Wide Witchhunt began. Geopolitics began to shift dramatically as the responses of different governments drove old alliances apart and bitter enemies together - the European Union saw motions for the creation of an EU-wide military wing almost immediately in their parliament, the United Kingdom's ambitions of brexit were utterly abandoned in favour the safety provided by European intelligence cooperation; the USA became more divided than ever, and the Middle Eastern countries began calling for unity. Russia didn't change a whole lot apart from the expansion of the role of the FSB and further reductions of privacy rights for civilians.

Then, just when people were confident that normality might still be restored, just when the police were standing down, it happened again.

On the very next New Year’s Morning, another wave of Violet, washing the land and kissing the sky with its unseemly affect… and another wave of mages, all exactly one year after the first.

The second wave were more stable, but not by a lot. The government was more ready for it this time, having created special investigative task forces in advance – the forefathers of the Federal Occult Enforcement agency and other such organisations. When people began randomly manifesting their powers, they were still chaotic and dangerous, and the sheer weight of magic upon a person’s mind did indeed crush some of them… but they were more stable. There are more survivors from this generation, as a result, even if they are still rare creatures.

The Third Generation of mages, once again accompanied by a Violet Dawn on New Year’s morning, were something like a failed experiment - but in a slightly different way. They generally did not fall victim to the mentally crushing influence of the colours of magic, nor did they find their powers totally uncontrollable – instead, many of these magicians began to hallucinate in the weeks after their awakening. Some of them started holding séance-like conversations with invisible beings outside of normal perception, some of them started obsessively documenting events in the past that had never happened, but whose effects could still be felt, and some of them retreated into the wilderness more or less permanently. Their prime unifying factor is the potentially delusional belief that their abilities make them a part of something larger, some greater purpose – a trait that 90% of all 3rd Wave mages captured by the government shared, at least before they expired in captivity.

It was at this point that the national governments of the world made the decision to formalise their anti-magic agencies and outlaw the practice of magic. These bills were passed by parliaments and congresses almost unanimously in almost every sovereign nation of the world, and led to the formation of the F.O.E. in America, the European Magical Defence Agency for the EU, and several less well known agencies world over. For the most part, these organisations are willing to share intelligence on suspected magic users, and have worked together to identify families or bloodlines where magic has been noted as particularly strong. Their cooperation allowed them to develop mundane means of detecting magic, and identify particular countermeasures, which all in all really should have meant that they were more prepared for the Fourth Wave than they actually were.

When the Fourth Wave happened in 2019 martial law was declared in major cities worldwide as a means of preparing, and squads of FOE troops went roving the country equipped with the primitive arcane detection equipment their quartermaster divisions had developed – but it seemed like nothing was going to happen. Instead of raving lunatics and violent psychopaths, the magicians of the fourth generation were normal people who remained largely psychologically unaffected, and were able to hide their condition long enough to make it past the initial days of the inquisition against them. Some of them were still caught and killed – or worse – but for the first time, the majority of mages went free, even if they had to leave their lives behind to do so.

It was in the months following the Fourth Wave that the Violet Underground was born.

With the government floundering to round up the suddenly invisible magician population, one of the rare, at least broadly sane Third Generation magicians decided that if Mages were going to keep appearing and the state was going to keep murdering them, something ought to exist to prevent it. After painstaking research and a good deal of stalking, the magician known as Cam was able to put themselves in contact with four other Fourth Generation mages, and form an organisation dedicated to ensuring the survival of their kind. To reflect the colour of their breed’s first dawn, it was named – informally – the Violet Underground.

The Violet Underground

The Violet Underground set about recruiting more magicians immediately after the magician known as Cam was able to put themselves in contact with several other fourth generation mages before their magic manifested, and the organisation quickly snowballed. In total, there are a couple thousand fully fledged members across the US, with a few hundred more in other continents – and many more associates beyond that, both mundane and magical. They knew they could not escape the notice of FOE for long, but were determined nonetheless to prepare for the next wave – and magic was going to help them.

Using their powers they were able to work on identifying those people who had the spark of magic living in their souls prior to the day they awakened, and they started trying to protect them as discreetly as they could while still dodging the influence of the FOE.

They were met with mixed success, their fortunes rising and falling like leaves on a purple wind. Matters were not helped by the deteriorating condition of their founder and most powerful member, Cam.

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The Violet Underground is a largely informal organisation, which depends more on experience and seniority than any particular system of rank - although at the metaphorical top of the chain of command there is a council of founders and elder members, upon whom the burden of leadership rests. By the time of the Fifth Wave there are five council members, and Cam is no longer among them. The purpose of the organisation is to protect and defend magicians from public persecution, and to this end most cells will support mages even if they do not want to become actively involved with the VU - though they do so at their own discretion.

Although command is very rarely given to an individual, the VU do have a structure of sorts to their operations - these are not hard specific groups, as much as they are peculiar subcultures that have formed around the roles adopted by different members of the Underground, but the organisation can be roughly divided as so:

Cells and General Members:
First and foremost, they rely on the general membership for action. The active members of the VU are divided by convenience and locality into cells, which operate semi-autonomously to surveil their home areas for both FOE activity and others with magical ability or potential. These members of the Violet Underground are flexible but without specialisation, and their specific roles will often vary depending on their location and the needs of the wider organisation at the time. Apart from surveillance they will often also be the ones performing disruptive activities, gathering basic resources, and - most importantly - sheltering new recruits, or those who do not wish to take an active part in the struggle. When they are called upon, they are also the most reliable group for providing force and power, by mere merit of their magical powers.

The Free Agents:
Occasionally considered to be the next step up from the general membership of the Violet Underground are the Free Agents; a group of smugglers, criminals, spies, and otherwise specialised individuals who have - either by proving themselves as general members, or by merit of an interesting background and skillset - been recruited by the VU as specialist agents. The roles of this loose group of delocalised freeroamers are myriad and highly varied - some of them work best as spies, infiltrating law enforcement and other social institutions, whereas some others work best as smugglers or thieves - but their unifying factor is that they are highly mobile and extremely difficult to catch. They will operate either alone, in pairs, or in small groups, and can generally be asked to do anything that an individual cell can’t do alone or can’t do at all. They are an applied force, targeting any specific objectives that they are given and completing them like a mission. Many in the VU look up to them - but the less naive do their best not to get attached to Free Agents; it is usually only a matter of time before they are killed, or worse.

The Academics:
A curious group of pseudo-academics and intellectuals who see magic not simply as a tool for survival or a weapon to use, but an entire field of study. Their work often sees poor results if any, and the risks of their vocations are fiercely debated as outweighing the benefits - but they are also usually the most powerful and trained mages in the Underground, by merit of having little else to do but practice magic. When it comes to practical applications, Academics are also usually the magicians best entrusted with performing ritual magic or enchanting items, making them a sort of bizarre R&D department on top of their ‘scientific’ role. On top of this, the Academics are where you will find the majority of those magicians who believed in Cam and… whatever it was they were up to. These are the magicians who best specialise in the study of History, and Histories. You will frequently find that Academics were either genuine researchers, the more reasonable kind of conspiracy theorists, or actual believers (and ‘practitioners’) of the Occult, before they awoke.

The Bootleggers:
Though they have a mixed domain and a grey area with the Free Agents, given their overlap of skills and roles, the Bootleggers truly do deserve their own mention; these are the people who deliver your food, who smuggle you medicine, and who hide your friends. They are as vital to the Violet Underground as blood is to a body, and are responsible for the maintenance and flexibility of the logistics and supply lines that allow the continued operation of the movement. If a particular cell cannot find their own food or make their own money, and needs to draw upon the resources of the wider Underground, then it will be these people they turn to. Another interesting facet of their existence is that - although the majority by far of the Violet Underground are mages - the Bootleggers are possibly tied with the Free Agents for the highest number of mundane members. Bootleggers are big travelers, crossing entire countries on a regular basis even without the aid of Blue Magic, and this belies their most important function yet; when the Violet Dawn returns and the FOE strike, these are also the people who work most closely with local Cells to rescue the new Generation. They often live lonely lives, but theirs is a sacrifice most necessary for their peers’ survival.

Tech Support:
Another subset - and arguably, the most vital subset - of VU members are the tech support. Their role is to set up and maintain any and all of the technology the organisation relies upon, and their word is considered the best word when it comes to what chatrooms and web forums are - or are not - secure and safe to discuss things on. Unlike Free Agents, Academics, or Bootleggers, this subculture of mages are not strictly speaking any sort of special group or force to be reckoned with - instead, they typically function as part of the regular Cells. They are not held in any particular renown and have no special reputation of their own, but are nonetheless absolutely vital to the function of the group. If the Bootleggers are a body’s blood, then these people are the body’s nerves.

The Fate of Cam

Cam had escaped the curse of the third generation during their awakening, but no debt goes unpaid forever; in the year they were with the Violet Underground, they began to hear voices and see figures beckoning them, claiming to know the truth of the world, claiming that they could show them what lay beneath the thin, dry, paper skin of it all. Cam initially tried to ignore them, but was inevitably pulled deeper and deeper by the increasingly invasive hallucinations. After a while, they became obsessed with the idea that the things they were seeing were in fact other mages – but more specifically, that they were mages from other worlds, or other timelines, where things were different in the past and the present. Whether Cam was right or not, the Violet Underground would not find out until much later, and either way Cam’s hallucinations changed them radically as a person.

They became violently defensive of the narrative they were constructing – that, with the right magic, they could change the course of history, and produce a more favourable Present. They called these other places, with whose denizens they’d spoken, the Histories, and explained that the History they were a part of was merely the surface layer of a world tenfold more complex than they’d ever known – or without magic, ever would know. They began trying to pressure their peers into conducting elaborate, bizarre rituals, with the goal of sending someone into another History, so that they could pull the separate threads of the world together in a more favourable way and re-knit the fabric of reality.

These experiments failed resoundingly, with whoever was sent never returning, or never going anywhere in the first place - and Cam vanished shortly after they started.

In their absence, the Violet Underground’s leading council convened to decide who should provide them direction instead - and they could not decide on an individual at all. To this day the organisation is loosely controlled by a group of five, whose first motion was to call for an end to experimentation with the Histories.

The Violet Underground did not tamper with the fabric of reality again.

At least not until now.

The Colours of Magic

Magic is a complicated and poorly understood thing, but can be observed to follow certain patterns and rules, the foremost of which is the division of Schools by Colour. Each discipline has certain spheres of control and influence, affecting different aspects of the world and – depending on the generation of the mage – affecting different parts of the human mind. Keep in mind, however, that magic cannot affect time travel, and it cannot either create or destroy either matter or energy. It should be noted that the spells you have access to are innate knowledge, something you only realised you already knew when you were Awakened. They are not refined, not necessarily very powerful, and most importantly are not the only magic you will have access to over the course of this game. Your spell choices should be specific abilities rather than general control of the environment, elements, or people, and their effects should similarly be quite specific unless there is a prior agreement with the GM.

Violet Magic

This is magic in its purest, rawest, most alien form. It is inefficient, costly, and draining to use for any real length of time, because it is like a force without direction. The few magicians who have existed long enough to have academic theories about magic have been tossing the idea around that – where magic is concerned – Violet is the colour from which all other colours are derived, but that’s probably nonsense.

In terms of what it can do, Violet magic is primarily used for powering other forms of magic, conducting arcane rituals, or using very basic spells that have no other particular alignment in terms of Colour. Examples of these things would be; powering an enchanted item, conducting a ritual to ward a building or create something new, or attacking another person with raw mana.

Green Magic

Next there is the Domain of Green, which governs the World and Environment, representing such things as naturally occur in the world. This is the discipline that governs natural forces and phenomena, and can be used to conjure electrical energies, set fires, and shape stone. All things that exist have some interaction with the domain of green, even if they do not strictly come under its sphere of control – like animals, which belong both to the Domain of Green and the Domain of Red.

Red Magic

The Domain of Red, in turn, governs all things that change and grow, and represents Vitality and Form. It is the discipline of magic that has the most hold on the physicality of flesh and the flow of blood, and also lays claim to the magic of transmutation. This is the art of the healer, the tool of the surgeon – but also of the alchemist and the shepherd. The Domain of Red is capable of doing harm to living things – but that is not its principal purpose, and it is quite limited in how it could be used for that task. It cannot be used upon the dead.

Blue Magic

The Domain of Blue concerns the sky, space, and the space-between-space. It is the magic of the interstice, and the art by which a Thing may briefly exist in two places at once - it’s original location and a new one - and then cease to exist in the former. It does not concern swirling portals, though ritual forms of Blue magic can provide similar effects, and it does not concern pocket dimensions. The practice of Blue Magic can be rewarding but holds the highest risk; one mis-step can cause irrevocable damage, and the spatial awareness required to concentrate on the destination can be taxing.

White Magic

White Magic involves the careful control of light and dark, in order to affect an immaterial change of appearance or to illuminate (or occlude) an area. It is the discipline that recognises best the value of true sight - or indeed, the value of a clever illusion. It does not, however, concern any mental manipulation or interference with the inner workings of anyone else’s mind. This is the domain of mirages and manipulation of light that, when interpreted by the human eye, makes things seem as though they are different. However when interpreted by the other senses, and under prolonged examination, the veil is usually lifted.

Black Magic

Black magic is not an inherently dark or evil thing, but carries a moral weight that some other colours do not. The Domain of Black is the magic that wraps the heart of your fellow man around your hand like silk strong; it is the discipline that can deprive your peers of their thoughts and replace them with ones of your choosing, the discipline that can convince a man he is holding his lover, when he is clutching a pillow. It is also the Domain that best relieves pain, but is not often used for this. Notably, Black Magic usually focuses either on the deep manipulation of a single person, or comparatively shallow manipulation of larger groups. It requires that you be able to communicate with the sense you are manipulating - within visual range for visual manipulations, earshot for auditory manipulations, and so on - and also that the mind you are manipulating is sapient; this means humans, principally, but arguments can also be made for intelligent animals such as apes, chimpanzees, ravens, and so on. In order to affect an effect, the mind must first reflect, and in so doing being reflected.

An Introduction to Histories

History is a curious subject. All our lives we are led to believe that it is simply a recording of the past; an account or set of accounts of events gone by, both recent and long dead. Occasionally you will find that our recording is wrong, and correspondingly we will correct it - but otherwise History seems to be quite fixed.

After all, you cannot change the past.

For what it’s worth, that statement is not incorrect, exactly - it is indeed true that time travel is not possible, even with magic as your ally - but what the collective societal consciousness of humanity has remained blissfully unaware of until now is that there are other Histories, too, where things happened rather differently, and where things may be either less or more real than our own. Opinion is still divided on what exactly these Histories really are - whether they are other world beyond ours, or our own world with a different timeline - and opinion is even further divided on the topic of precisely what manner they co-exist with ours in; are they parallel, contemporary with ours? Are they non-parallel, with time flowing at different rates and in different ways, relatively? Is it the same timeline with fundamental physical differences, or the same physical world with a different past? Are there crossing points where the distance between them narrows, and is that what Hallucination is? What impact are they on dreams, and for whose dreams are they an impact?

And let’s not even get into the theories about why these things exist - for one thing, it’s still not certain that they actually do exist at all; especially since almost everyone who was really into them wound up going horrifically insane, or apparently ceasing to exist entirely.

Like Cam.

All that is certain about the Histories is that they are quite dangerous indeed, and that the Violet Underground is at least broadly against further experimentation.

For now.

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- OOC and CS Skeleton -

This RP aims to actively work with its player-base to produce a tailored experience to the characters. As such, it works on a mutual trust between the players and GMs to act reasonably and within the limits of the world set before them. In order to encourage communication and mutual content building for the game, the character creation process becomes an application into the RP with the slight chance of rejection.

Please do not be alarmed by this! The way that character creation works is as follows:

• The player creates their character sheet as per usual. In this example, they have some areas they could improve upon.
• A GM will formally check their sheet and provide official feedback on the improvements that need to be made before they are accepted.
• The player submits their improved sheet, whereupon it will either be accepted or declined.

Throughout the entirety of the process, the player is allowed to ask any queries they may have about lore, their application’s shortcomings, or potential ideas and work-arounds. Even though you get two ‘chances’ to formally submit your sheet, you are actively encouraged to ask any questions you have and work with the GMs to produce the best version of your character.

The CS Skeleton is below:

Character Sheet Code

[center]
[img]Image here, if applicable[/img]
[h2]Name Here[/h2]
[h3]Basics[/h3]
[b]Name:[/b]
[b]Age:[/b]
[b]Gender:[/b]
[b]Height/Weight:[/b]
[b](Former) Occupation:[/b]
[b]Appearance:[/b]
[/center]

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[center][h3] Biography[/h3]
(History goes here)
[/center]

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[h3]Skills and Weaknesses[/h3]
[b]Skills:[/b] We generally advise our players to [i]avoid[/i] choosing to have exceptional skills that are heavily reliant on the abilities of the player. This would include things like exceptional charisma or intelligence, or claiming that your character has incredibly power over other people in a social setting. We are open to discussion on this, but the general rule with stand as a reflection of our past RP experiences.
[list]
[*] Strongest Skill
[*] Second Strongest Skill
[*] ‘Weakest’ Skill
[/list]

[b]Weaknesses:[/b]
[list]
[*] Biggest Weakness
[*] Second Biggest Weakness
[*] Third Weakness
[/list]

[b]Spells:[/b] Choose specific abilities with reasonably well defined capabilities and drawbacks. These spells reflect the knowledge your character already had, not arcane study or sorcery tutorship, and similarly are unlikely to be very well refined or powerful.
[list]
[*] Spell 1 (remember to include drawbacks of casting in spell description)
[*] 2
[*] 3
[*] 4
[*] 5
[*] 6
[/list]

[Hr]
[H3]Roleplay Sample[/H3]
We want to see your character in action; write about a normal day, a significant part of their backstory - whatever you feel comfortable with. If you'd like something a bit more exciting, write about the violet dawn that manifested their powers - feel free to ask any of the members about how that went if you need a bit of help getting the specifics.

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Paradigm Shift: Agents of Fate [Currently Accepting!]

Ever since Abigail did away with her sleeping bag she's had to sleep on the floor. She tried to sync up the times she'd shuffle, half-awake, to the bathroom with the times she'd then shuffle out into the cold, blue expanse of night and light it up with purple. She was pretty sure her name was starting to stick out amongst the staff...as of yet, nobody else seemed to have as much trouble as she did with containment of her magic. She had burnt holes through the metal trash can but it was better than great jets of violet flame pouring out into the sky like a big, obvious, magical flare for nosy neighbours or overzealous FOE agents trying to scoop up the stragglers. Every time she used that spell, it hurt. Her palms blistered, went red and shiny. It woke her up every time, and then left her hungry as her skin peeled and shed off to reveal healthier, pinker flesh underneath - all in the span of fifteen or so minutes.

Did Abigail have a right to complain? Absolutely not. As far as she could tell, she was one of the lucky ones. Nobody had died - nobody important, at least - and she didn't kill anyone when she awakened. Did she desperately want to? Yes, but not here, and not to anyone she knew. Homesickness was a coming and going urge that she was surprised hadn't been so prominent in her mind, perhaps because of how definitively her old life ended. She wanted things to be the way they used to be - just like everybody else in this crumbling ruin. Goodnight felt like a liminal space, a place of stasis. It was the biggest bus stop she could possibly imagine, or perhaps a train station (though she'd never used a train before). It felt like people were waiting to move on. "Am I in purgatory?" she asked the singed trash can with its nasty old garbage fumes mixing with the mists of dawn, and got an odd look from one of the guards. That made her indignant. She turned to stare him down and raised her voice. "Well?" she barked. "Am I?"

"Nah, you ain't," grunted the man, pulling his scarf up a bit higher to keep out the chill.

"Just checking."

Abigail stank to high heaven thanks to teenage BO and a lack of deodorant. She wasn't wearing any of her old clothes except for the ruined baseball cap. They were secondhand and musty and suited her just fine, even if a lot of them were too big. She wandered around the sparse tiled halls of Goodnight trying to find something to do. The arcade kids didn't want much to do with her after she melted one of the joysticks. She couldn't tell which of the adults were helpers, survivors, sane or bonkers. A lot of the ones her age were all over the place, as if it were their first time away from home or something. Usually, an opportunity to kill time presented itself. This time, it presented itself in the form of one lady in an alcove stretching.

Abigail watched her for a bit. She was really pretty with the morning light coming in from the windows, a bit like an angel. And she didn't look all sad and worried like everyone else. She looked up and down the corridor and then loitered her way over to the stranger, rubbing her forearm awkwardly. "Whatcha doing?" she asked.