Cursory

Player: @First Player

NAME: Samuel Kersey
AGE: 22
OCCUPATION: Student
BIRTHPLACE: Paragon City
AFFILIATIONS: None
POWERS: Spellcasting

Sam Kersey, nineteen, was the kind of student who never read a syllabus past page one. Bright, curious, but hopelessly impatient, he’d rather skim than study, summarize than scrutinize. A linguistics major at PCU, Sam juggled classes, papers, and his part-time job at The Tattered Page, a cozy, overstuffed bookstore that smelled like dust, ink, and mild regret.

His days were filled with scanning fragile manuscripts, cataloging obscure tomes, and trying to wrangle the store’s chaotic inventory into some semblance of order. He loved the books—but mostly in theory. In practice, he was perpetually behind, living by his personal motto: “Good enough.”

One rainy evening, tasked with digitizing a newly acquired collection of texts, Sam stumbled upon a thick, weathered volume titled The Lexicon Arcanum. The introduction rambled about “True Names” and “Conceptual Syntax”—concepts Sam chalked up as metaphoric fluff. He scanned the pages but dismissed the incredibly detailed "Binding Oaths and Attunement Ritual" as mere flavor text for the fictional grimoire.

In doing so, he accidentally completed an ancient “Attunement” ritual hidden in the book’s opening passages. He transcribed a short, complex phrase into the store’s database, unknowingly binding himself to the language it described. His version was riddled with typos and missing accents—errors that, ironically, made the bond unstable but active.

That night, he started noticing strange things. Words he muttered seemed to echo. A sigh became a gust of wind. A curse at a flickering streetlight sent sparks flying. Then, a week later, came the moment that changed everything.

While walking home from class, Sam heard panicked screams from an apartment building nearby. Smoke poured from the windows; a small fire was spreading. People crowded the sidewalk, helplessly shouting as someone inside struggled with a jammed fire escape door. Sam ran closer, heart pounding. He didn’t think—he spoke.

“Door, open! Exit, move!”

The words left his mouth glowing neon-blue, shaping themselves into floating typographic glyphs. But his syntax was sloppy—half a clause missing, verbs and nouns flipped. The sigils twisted, flickered, and suddenly tore open a swirling typographic rift. The trapped tenant stumbled through it—and reappeared ten feet away on the sidewalk, dazed but unharmed. The crowd cheered, cameras out. Someone called him a miracle worker. But all Sam could think was:

Over the following days, he experimented, discovering through research that his brief, superficial reading had granted him the power to speak the Language of Creation, a form of magic where words directly shape reality. His rushed, imperfect attunement meant every spell was a gamble. Syntax errors warped meaning; mispronunciations spawned chaos. A protection ward might turn into a luminous typo storm. A levitation spell might lift him instead of the object. His power was vast, but fragile—just like his attention span.

So Sam Kersey became Cursory, the reluctant hero of half-finished thoughts and dangerously creative phrasing. His greatest weapon and weakness were the same: his words. Every sentence carried power—if only he could learn to slow down long enough to use them right.

📝Leximancy

The art of shaping reality through language—the manipulation of meaning, structure, and sound to command the physical world. When Sam speaks or writes using the Language of Creation, his words manifest as glowing, typographic sigils that materialize midair and obey his intent. Every spell follows the rules of grammar and linguistics: subjects, verbs, and objects determine targets, actions, and outcomes. The more precise his language, the cleaner and stronger the effect. In its purest form, Leximancy is both science and poetry—a literal syntax of existence.

The flaw lies in its linguistic perfectionism. Any mispronunciation, misplaced comma, or muddled syntax can distort the spell’s meaning, often catastrophically. A wrong tense may undo a spell prematurely; a misused homonym can create wildly different results. Because Sam’s initial attunement was rushed and typo-ridden, his Leximancy is inherently unstable—prone to flickering sigils, reality hiccups, and unpredictable linguistic “autocorrections.” His greatest challenge isn’t raw power—it’s slowing down long enough to say exactly what he means.

👁️Semantic Perception
When focusing, Sam can perceive the “meaning field” of objects and people—words or phrases faintly hovering around them like aura-tags. A broken clock might read “neglect,” a friend might flicker with “worry.” It’s not mind-reading, but a visual manifestation of intent and connotation.

🗣️Polyglot Assimilation
His exposure to The Lexicon Arcanum awakened a linguistic adaptability—he picks up new languages absurdly fast. Not fluency from nowhere, but his brain recognizes patterns instinctively, letting him communicate even with nonhuman or mystical entities.

Sam Kersey is a brilliant but impatient mind wrapped in a chronically distracted body. A natural linguist with a restless curiosity, Sam thrives on patterns, puns, and possibilities—but hates sitting still long enough to master them. His greatest strength is his intuition; his greatest flaw, his lack of follow-through. He’s clever, sarcastic, and deeply human—a hero who overthinks everything except the things that actually matter in the moment. Beneath his scattered demeanor lies genuine empathy and a desire to do right, but he often has to trip over his own mistakes to get there first.

Core Traits