User:Emry/Matthew Confused Mage
From NexusCrossing
I have a character concept that I am interested in playing. He was a character I played in an IRC channel a few years back. “Few” is a relative term of course.
I had a file that contained his character sheet and a background story for him, but I have misplaced it. I will try to find it in the near future so that I can get it too you. In the mean time, I will try to give you a brief description.
If I find the original, I will get it to you as well, as it is probably much better written than what I am putting here now.
Since I have misplaced the character sheet, I am making up a name for the moment. I realize that if I manage to find the character sheet after everything is set up that changing the name could be awkward. :P
Bio info in brief:
Matthew Michaels Type: Mage Trad: Orphan
Black shoulder length hair, green eyes, pale barely tanned, 5”9’ and 200lbs. He is a little on the heavy side, but it is mostly muscle. He has a tendency to become much heavier when the situation requires.
He has slightly broad shoulders, and healthy muscle tone, but doesn’t look like a body builder. It comes from years of working with Marcus. It has not truly occurred to him yet that he could change that.
He is about 27, and looks about 22. He ages slowly, and apparently always has. It is nothing intentional on his part.
Spheres: Life, Spirit, Prime, Correspondence
Among his Merits and Flaws was Fairy Affinity.
Concept in Brief:
Matthew was an unusual child from an unusual family. Someone in his ancestry had managed to make an impression upon certain members of the fairy realm. Due to this, there were always strange creatures around him as a child (well, fairies anyway).
The most immediate effects this had on him as he grew up was that first, he knew that magic existed, and second, it colored his image of what magic should look like, and should be.
All his life he had grown up around magic, and he knew that it had a certain feel to it, and happened in certain ways. He had never met a mage before, and wouldn’t know one if he saw the. Not right away at least.
He had no way of knowing that the part of him that was interpreting what he was seeing and feeling was something different from the average human being.
His best friends were a handful of fairies. Marcus, a troll, had been his mentor for many years. Marcus didn’t teach him squat about magic of course. He taught him about combat. He taught him how to swing an axe, a sword, and of course for practical reasons, a baseball bat. They are easier to come by.
One evening while he was on a fishing trip in the everglades, something didn’t feel right. The air was just kind of wrong. That was when he saw his first lycanthrope. He and a group of others, including Marcus, were on an old swamp boat, when a giant crocodile attacked the boat. The beast had sensed the changelings in the area, and wanted no such beasts near it.
They fought the creature as best they could, but more were appearing in the water around them.
As Matthew watched in horror he watched as the creature attacked his best friends and family. As he watched, something inside of him that had felt the creature coming was beginning to break free.
As he lay in the mucky water, watching his own arms bleed and seeing Marcus fall, that was the final straw. The thing inside asked no questions, it simply took over every aspect of his being.
Later he was told that he had let out an animalistic howl and transformed, or perhaps shape shifted is a better description, into a large black cat the size of a small horse.
The creature stalked towards the large reptile-men a soft malignant glow surrounding its body. As he came near one of them it lunged for the throat.
The battle continued on, he tore into them until finally as the last one fell, a clawed, half reptilian, arm was falling into the water, he collapsed unable to move any further.
His last thought as he passed out, as his human mind once more took control was that he had failed. The creatures would hurt no one else, but he had failed. Marcus was dead. That was all that was on his mind was that he had lost his mentor and long time friend. The man who had been their by his side from the day he was born, and had quite likely served his father in the same capacity. He was gone.
And now, he thought, he would die too. He would bleed to death laying in the swamp, and once the smoke cleared his blood, and the blood of the tainted beasts he had felled would attract the more natural scavengers and no one would ever know the difference.
When he awoke he was looking at the ceiling of a dimly lit room, and he could smell burning sage in the air around him. As his eyes started to focus, and he began to realize that he was still alive he looked around the room. The next thing he noticed was that he could smell Marcus in the room somewhere. His heart leapt. Marcus was still alive. He looked around until he found him.
As he began to speak, Marcus woke up where he had been resting and smiled. “Don’t worry boy, you are still alive. We brought you to someone who might be able to help.”
They had brought him to an old woman named Audra. She was an older woman, with a motherly smile, and skin the color of the autumn night. The people in the neighborhood thought of her as the old witch. She was not a practitioner of Voudon, but she could not convince the locals of that. When she came into the room, he could smell that she was different. She smiled at him.
“I see that you are awake,” she said gently.
Audra was a Bastet. From what Marcus and the others had seen the night before, they thought he might be as well. They had brought him to her.
After a few weeks, she was able to nurse him back to health. They still had no more answers than they had before. They had no clue what he was, just a number of things that he was not.
They were pretty certain he was not a fairy, and they were pretty certain that he was not a bastet. None of them even had a clue that things such as mages even existed. All they could do was to try to keep him alive and focused in some way until he could learn to control whatever it was that he was.
That was the one thing they knew for certain, was that he was not human: at least not a normal one. Every creature that they knew of that didn’t follow all of realities rules had one thing in common, they had to either adapt to what they were or they died in some horrible manner: quite often at the hands of the humans they had grown up along side of.
As time passed, and he was able to get his life into a more normal routine, Matthew was able to settle into a job, and find time to study and meditate. He knew about fairies and had general ideas about their magicks. More importantly he knew how their magicks felt. He used that as a starting point to experiment from, and went from there.
As his talents and control grew, it worked itself more and more into the mold of what he knew and thought he knew. Eventually his magicks started to take on the feel and flow of those associated with the fae and with changing breeds. After a few years of working along side of Audra he had come to think in many ways like a Bastet. When he shape shifted, it was usually into a cat. When he worked minor magicks, it usually looked much like something that a changeling might do.
So far he hasn’t done anything in the light of day that has drawn attention to him among mage society, and he is not even sure that they actually exist. Among the creatures of the night however, most that he has encountered think that he is a bastet. This is an assumption that neither he nor Audra have tried to dispel. He knows this is something that is more accepted among the Bastet than among werewolves and other changers. He doesn’t much care for werewolves anyway though. He never met one that gave him a chance to like them. The beasts had been hunting “his kind” for centuries. That was how he had come to think of things at least. He knew that he wasn’t truly a bastet, but emotionally he was not so sure.
