Arrow Witch
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
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| Arrow Witch floats outside the Department of Special Projects in Nova Praetoria | |
| Arrow Witch | |
| Player: synthozoic | |
| Origin: | Magic |
|---|---|
| Archetype: | Defender |
| Threat Level: | 25 |
| Personal Data | |
| Real Name: | This she has buried using her powers in the secret police. |
| Known Aliases: | Alison Winston, Alys |
| Species: | human |
| Age: | 26 |
| Height: | 1.76m |
| Weight: | 75kg |
| Eye Color: | brown |
| Hair Color: | dark brown |
| Biographical Data | |
| Nationality: | Praetorian |
| Occupation: | Field Magician of the Powers Division |
| Place of Birth: | Neutropolis |
| Base of Operations: | Currently the Rogue Islands |
| Marital Status: | Single |
| Known Relatives: | Orphaned |
| Known Powers | |
| Trick Arrow and Dual Pistols, Flight, assorted magical devices | |
| Known Abilities | |
| With transformative magic is able alter physical projectiles like rocks, bullets, arrows and others. Has a powerful magical talent and is sensitive to magic of nearly all types. Well versed in occult scholarship, alchemical lore and related disciplines. Extensive training in forensics and criminology. | |
| Equipment | |
| The Arrow Wand: an enchanted stick that when used by a trained magician, becomes a bow-shaped arc of energy. The Little Michaels: a matched pair of enchanted flintlocks that, when used by a magician, can fire a variety of enchanted bullets. With sufficient magical talent, the guns never need to be loaded with real bullets at all. | |
| This is my attempt to badly mix Lamont Cranston, 1984, the Serenity's Alliance Operative, the State Alchemists of Fullmetal Alchemist, the Mercykillers of Planescape and maybe a little Batman. A spy and a ruthless instrument of Themis or Justitia. Or something like that. We'll see where it goes. | |
Contents |
The Summary
Arrow Witch is a state magician working for the Preatorian Powers Division. She is now on Paragon Earth spying and paving the way for Emperor Cole's planned invasion.
She's a true believer defending the Global Praetorian State and, for this utopia, she'll make nearly any personal sacrifice. She's currently in the Rogue Isles but, she is no simple villain. She's spying to see what obstacle Lord Recluse may pose to Praetorian forces. This means there are some jobs she won't take as other criminals would. If Rogue Island employers ask why, she'll just dummy up. She later plans to secretly move to Paragon City to study what the opposition is like there. As such she makes frequent return visits to Praetorian Earth to deliver reports.
Talents, Powers and Abilities
She was born as a wild talent and her native magical energy manifested in early childhood soon after she was orphaned. Since then she has taken extensive training and eduction on the use of her talents and knows a wide variety of spells and rituals. She specializes in transformative magic where magical forces are used to alter and amplify natural objects. She can alter her own inertia and gravitational effects, to run at great speed, leap large distances or even fly.
But she is justly famous for something she calls velosmancy, the magical skill of enhancing projectiles. With this, ordinary rocks, bullets, arrows and other projectiles are transformed by her magic to do things not possible by ordinary physics. In her hands, a bullet fired from a gun could freeze a target solid or burn it with magical fire. She can do the same with arrows. In her hands an ordinary gun or bow would never need to be reloaded, strung, cleaned and would never jam. Her bow and arrows or flintlocks and balls are just foci for her magical power and do things ordinary bullets or arrows would not do.
One of the reasons why she chose to use velosmancy is because it's reliable even if her magic deserts her for some reason. A gun is still a gun, magic or not.
But these aren't the only spells she knows. She has protective spells against mind reading but these aren't very powerful as Praetor Tilman has forbidden such knowledge. But as an expert magician she knows extensive scrying, divination and alteration rituals. She has teleportation spells and healing magic. She can sense and identify a wide range of enchantments.
In addition to her magical talents and skills she is a highly trained government agent with extensive knowledge of criminology, military doctrine and self-defense.
Biography
As an only child of six, she saw her parents brutally murdered in the civil unrest that would, decades later, lead to the creation of Calvin Scott's Resistance Movement. Having no relatives who would claim her, she spent her early life in a state orphanage. She was an odd, grim and quiet child with an autistic level of focus. This might have lead to teasing and bullying but, soon after her arrival, there was one mysterious incident after which the other children avoided her as something unspeakably dangerous.
But aside from that, she posed no discipline problems and nearly a year later, when she allowed the adults to notice it, her magical talent was spotted. This, along her mostly spotless academic and behavioral records, brought her to the attention of teachers at the Praetorian State Magical Academy. They were very impressed by such a young wild talent and several of the academy teachers there took on the role of her foster parents and mentors.
As an exemplary student, she studied all manner magical techniques at the academy over the next 14 years. Towards the end of that education, her professors began to steer her training towards police and military uses of magic. This she accepted with great enthusiasm and at the end of course of study, she passed with the some of the highest marks in the Academy's history.
It wasn't that the adults had to steer her much at all. Her ability to focus on something she deemed as important had been described in her records as "pathological." Throughout her life at school and outside, she was a very intense child and young adult. There seemed to be some unspoken mission that she was on that she never shared with anyone. She had no social life for her relations with other students were distant at best. Always she was working on extracurricular study or training the gymnasium or practice ranges. She had little interest or patience with the distractions of young life. She seemed most at ease with men and women much older than herself, especially if they had something to teach her.
After her course of training, when the Powers Division came by to recruit her, she said, "Yes," even before the recruiter introduce herself.
The rest is public knowledge. Her rise through the ranks of the PPD was meteoric and soon she was trusted by people within the Emperor's inner circle. She had become one of Cole's most trusted agents. Soon after that she was sent to Paragon Earth.
Personality, Quirks and Mannerisms
Ethically, the Arrow Witch tries to avoid unnecessary violence or killing, believing they are all too often excuses for the incompetent. Mercy and extenuating circumstances are a rarity for her but not entirely unheard of. She is a creature of the law, any law, above all else. She always respect laws, even those not of her planet. It is not her place to pass judgement on the morality of the laws she follows or enforces for she believes that the laws of humanity are always a work in progress towards a final perfection. If she can bring that final perfection a day closer to reality she is satisfied. If you are corrupt official, you'd better hope she is not set on your trail!
She has examined the societies of Paragon's Earth, both Stateman's Paragon and Lord Recluse's Isles, and found them all wanting but, one of her deepest secrets is that she finds Emperor Cole's Global Praetorian State wanting as well. But, given her view on legal systems, she easily accepts Praetoria as a work in progress and views it as a means to end. She views it as the best example she has seen so far and worth defending for the moment.
She is truly seeking a utopia worthy of defending, and so far, this dichotomy in her thinking serves her well. She is an idealist as pure as she can make herself but at the same time she accepts the realities of her givens.
Notoriously taciturn, she's not one for making speeches or debating things with others. She has no time for idle chat, if she's in a social or public setting in her distinctive purple and black uniform, she's there to do her job or study and interrogate suspects. She really has no secret identity in the normal sense. Her life as the Arrow Witch is her real personality and her real life. The child she was twenty years ago she has long since buried. Let's put this way, suppose she was police officer (Which basically she is, a superhuman one.) she could patrol in a squad car with the same partner for a decade, doing the all the highly stressful work of the police, and at the end of that decade that partner would never even learn her first name. Yes, psychiatrists could probably build careers out of her dysfunctional response to the world.
For her work, she has constructed at least one false identity, Alison Winston, which is diametrically opposed from her real personality. Alison Winston claims to be a freelance journalist or technical writer. Alison has an easy smile and is approachable and friendly. Arrow Witch uses the Alison persona to get information and set others at ease. She may develop others as her spying work on Paragon's Earth continues. At the moment, Alison alternately claiming to be working for a the professional magician's trade journal, Letters in Thaumaturgy and Legerdemain or the superhuman celebrity gossip rag Superpeople. Alison claims to be from Chicago, and Arrow Witch, since her arrival in the Paragon universe has made a careful study of recent history so as to blend in.
Like many Praetorians, (And, probably, many other people from alternate versions of Earth.), she dislikes calling Paragon's Earth the "Primal Earth." As far as she is concerned, her's is the "prime Earth." To her Primal Earth is better called "Paragon Earth."
People have noticed in working with the Arrow Witch that she tends to smile a lot, even if she doesn't talk much, even in the grimmest of circumstances. Some of her enemies have remarked that this indicates an unnerving level of self-confidence, even though she's been seen to fail many times. It's as if she thinks she's working to some destiny that no one else can see yet. It's as if she thinks history is on her side and, as such, she's completely unafraid of death or defeat.
Some of the Tools of Her Trade
First there is her bow--or bow grip rather. It looks like the grip of a recurved composite bow of Turkish design. To save space the arms of the bow don't exist until the wielder invokes them into being. This also saves the effort of stringing and adjusting the bow before use. The arrows themselves a quite ordinary as they are not expected to last. But she can invoke spells each arrow fired to alter their affects. The arrows she pulls from her magic cape. The cape seems to have an endless supply of arrows to fire.
In issuing magical commands to the bow and its arrows she addresses it as "Lucille," pulling a larger smile than usual. This is probably some private joke of hers.
Then there are the "Little Michaels." These are silver and nickel plated, engraved flintlocks with water proofed pans made a few centuries ago by some gunsmith in the Balkans. They seem much lighter than they should be considering the materials, nor do they give any recoil as ordinary guns would do. With the right commands, they can spring at once to the hands, fully loaded and ready for firing, even though they contain no balls. Other commands can transform the balls fired into missiles that can immolate, freeze or poison targets. With these the Arrow Witch can shoot and shoot and never worry about reloading or running out of ball shot. They also have a greater range than would be possible for a flintlock pistol.
The weapons are tuned to her aura. This is so she can trace them if they are lost or stolen. Because of this tuning, the weapons revert to being ordinary but beautifully made recurve composite bow or flintlocks in the hands of other people. Even still, the craftsmanship, age and materials make these weapons worth a lot of money to collectors.
Weaknesses
Take away her magic and all she has left is her ordinary equipment and training. She's as mortal as the next person and, as such, she always takes precautions to survive without magic, should it be drained away somehow. On assignments she always wears bullet resistant body armor and her arrows and flintlocks work just fine as ordinary weapons. She is skilled in unarmed combat as well. Tactically, she's predictable and conservative. Opponents that have fought her in the past can take advantage of this.
Aside from magic her main Achilles Heel is her mind. Psychologically her mind is a complete mess with many deeply repressed, unexamined and old pains. On the other hand, it could be argued that these are also the source of her mental fortitude, that she is the hard grain of indignation made by the horrors of a chaotic world. She is extremely strong willed, perhaps inhumanly so. It may be this unrelenting will is the source of her magical talent. She counts on her magic to defend against mental attacks but often it doesn't always work. For example, Praetor Tilman and many others could easily best her any form of mental combat.
Allies, Associates and Group Affiliations
A new arrival on Paragon Earth, she doesn't have any and, given her deeply secretive nature, is unlikely to have any. However, back home on Praetorian Earth, this is a slightly different story. Praetors White and Tilman have commanded her often and so has Provost Marchand. Occasionally she has received orders from Emperor Cole himself. As a loyal agent of the Emperor's Law, she is well equipped and well supported. She has never sought any public recognition for her work and the state media has often suppressed stories about her exploits for reasons of undercover security. As such it is unlikely that other members of the Powers Division have heard of her.
The Resistance on the other hand, have slowly built up records about her and it's possible that specific members within the Resistance may count her as an enemy.
Given her work for the Empire, she avoids becoming to closely allied with person or group on Paragon. This may change over time.
