Earth Magus Mu'Koros
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
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| Mu'Koros, showing off | |
| Earth Magus Mu'Koros | |
| Player: @SPTrashcan | |
| Origin: | Magic |
|---|---|
| Archetype: | Controller |
| Security Level: | 41 |
| Personal Data | |
| Real Name: | Christina Muccoros |
| Known Aliases: | None |
| Species: | Homo sapien |
| Age: | 16 |
| Height: | 181cm |
| Weight: | 60kg |
| Eye Color: | blue |
| Hair Color: | blonde |
| Biographical Data | |
| Nationality: | Mu-Oranbegan-American |
| Occupation: | Hero Corps recruit |
| Place of Birth: | Alabama |
| Base of Operations: | Paragon City |
| Marital Status: | Single and not looking so go away |
| Known Relatives: | none, dammit |
| Known Powers | |
| Oranbegan earth control, Mu storm control, second sight | |
| Known Abilities | |
| Misspent youth, Sadshir martial art | |
| Equipment | |
| Spellbreaker axe | |
| No additional information available. | |
Contents |
Affiliations
Sentai swordsman Rondellus is probably Mu'Koros' most trusted friend at this point, although his casual flirtation tends to get on her nerves and his continued acceptance of obvious villain Nami Amilaris strikes her as unbelievably stupid. She considers Crey apologist Chief O'Toole an idiot, but at least he can be relied on in a fight. Her envy of Crey chewing gum shill Minty Fresh Lass's good looks is poorly disguised at best, but she likes her anyway even if she can't see the obvious truth in front of her face. Possibly the only person she has a full degree of respect for is King Wence of the pumpkins, although she chides him now and then for his recklessness - seeing no contradiction in doing so even as she takes the brunt of enemy attacks instead. She also respects Silver Gale's superior grasp of magic, but as for Liz Fauntleroy, well, she's just a mean bitch.
Personality
If it isn't already clear, the first thing to point out is that Mu'Koros is prickly. She is blunt, distrustful, unwilling to give anyone the benefit of the doubt, brash, opinionated, humorless, and carries grudges in a big heavy bag. When things don't go her way, when people act stupidly or carelessly, or when she's just feeling pissy, she will lash out with bitter sarcasm and snide remarks. If peeves were pets, she'd be running an animal shelter.
Despite - or perhaps because - all of this, her self esteem is in the toilet. She is fully aware of the great legacy of her forefathers and knows exactly how poorly she is living up to it. She pushes herself to, and sometimes past, the breaking point in a desperate bid to redeem her two cultures.
Powers
Magic
Mu'Koros is slowly becoming more adept in her spellcasting through careful reading of the spellbooks she has stored on her laptop, as well as lessons from MAGI instructors. One difficulty she has had to work around is that her books focus on a rigorous theoretical/ritual model of spellcasting, while she herself leans toward an intuitive/somatic style. Where the Oranbegan style is to issue precise instructions to the universe indicating the effect desired, Mu'Koros prefers to take hold of the elements and dance them into place.
Oranbegan Earth Control
Like the Oranbegan Earth Magi, Mu'Koros has mastery over the earth. She can turn solid ground into a treacherous morass of shifting sand, entomb her foes in columns of stone, or cripple them with spines of rock forced up from the ground. Her favorite spell opens a bubbling fissure in the earth, sending out powerful vibrations that knock anyone nearby flat. She can also craft a servant from rock and mud, a misshapen but powerful golem she calls Tater (due to his vaguely potato-shaped body).
Mu Storm Control
Rather than channeling the supernatural lightning of the goddess Hequat as the Mu order does, Mu'Koros has adapted their rites to natural weather. This ranges from a simple gust of wind to a debilitating hailstorm to a miniature tornado.
Additional Powers
Second Sight
Mu mystics train their supernatural senses by wearing a cowl over their ears and eyes. Mu'Koros has inherited those senses, and they color her perceptions whether she is consciously focusing on them or not. Mystic people or artifacts acquire an indescribable tint, and the currents of force in the earth and sky are visible to her. Sometimes she wishes she could blind these senses - when visiting Astoria, for instance. At other times, she puts on her own Mu cowl and uses her second sight instead of her normal senses.
Abilities
Misspent Youth
When Mu'Koros was still Tina Muccoros, she was, to be frank, a juvenile delinquent. Theft, fighting, and vandalism were the substance of her life - she still carries a nasty scar under one eye from a particularly vicious scrap. Although she is by no means proud of her former life, she hasn't forgotten how to palm small objects, misdirect attention, lie glibly, and pick simple locks, and she'll use these skills if she has to.
Sadshir Martial Art
One of the books comprising the legacy of her ancestors was a slim manual on armed and unarmed combat. Although clearly formulated for a much stronger person, the double-fisted strikes and axe techniques are still effective when Mu'Koros employs them, especially against foes she's already rendered helpless. As to the question of whether it's honorable to kick a helpless enemy, Mu'Koros' answer is a snort of derision.
Weaknesses and Limitations
Mu'Koros is, in the end, only human - and a rather skinny, undernourished, asthmatic human at that. Although she can employ spells to keep herself awake and moving - and does so, with greater frequency than is probably healthy - she cannot repair the damage done to her body and eventually crashes out, requiring immediate medical attention. Furthermore, she is young, inexperienced, headstrong, and willing to take foolish risks - but never with the lives of others. She seems not only willing but eager to give her life to save another's.
Equipment
Laptop
This battered laptop is anything but state-of-the-art. However, Mu'Koros wouldn't trade it for any other, because on its hard drive are the scanned and partially translated pages of a small library of Mu and Oranbegan texts. These are what she uses to study her own forgotten cultures and their magic.
Spellbreaker Axe
Other than the books, the most important relic of her forefathers that Mu'Koros has found is this ancient, battered ceremonial axe. Carefully crafted with a complex anti-magical pattern, the axe can be used to sunder spells by breaking their patterns. It is therefore very effective against the animated dead. Of course, being a large, heavy bladed weapon makes it effective against many other things. It bears a suspicious resemblance to the axe wielded by another hero of Paragon City.
Character History
Tina Muccoros grew up with little to be proud of. Her parents lived a poor and squalid life and reveled in it, or so it seemed to her, and she resented them for it - but her pride wouldn't let her allow anyone else to say so. Tall, skinny, plain and awkward, she got into constant fights as her classmates mocked her worn clothes and artless manners. Almost inevitably, she fell in with like-minded outsiders, and with them engaged in the pointless rebellion of petty larceny and drinking - though not smoking, due to her asthma.
That changed the day she found the reliquary. Sent by her parents to retrieve some furniture from long-term storage, she stumbled on an old wooden chest containing a number of brittle leather-bound books and other strange artifacts. At first she thought of nothing more than selling the antiques for quick cash, but something about the alien alphabet and strange diagrams in the books awakened her long-suppressed curiosity. Afraid that her parents would punish her for poking through these obviously old and valuable tomes, Mu'Koros began sneaking into the storage units late at night and photographing the books' pages with a cheap disposable camera, then scanning the resulting prints into the third-hand laptop she had extracted from her parents. By day, instead of skipping classes to hang out on the streets and steal things, she skipped class to hang out in the library and laboriously decipher and translate the old writing. What she learned changed her life.
The Oranbegans (she read) had once been a peaceful civilization of scholar-mages. Their peace was shattered by an invading army of Mu cultists, who from their dreadful iron temple-citadel sought to bend all civilizations toward worship of their goddess Hequat. As the Oranbegans sought desperately to save their underground libraries, they turned to ever more vile and perverse sorceries until in the end they were no better than the Mu, and the two mystic armies smashed each other apart until only the barest, bitterest remains of each once-mighty nation were left.
However, not every Oranbegan or Mu was drawn into this apocalyptic conflict. The Oranbegan project to create a gate through space and time was only partially completed when the Mu destroyed it, but well before its completion it was sufficiently powerful to suck one of its Gatekeepers, an Oranbegan time mage named Koros, into the unknown future. There he learned of the horrible fate that befell his beloved nation - both the destruction wrought by the Mu, and the corruption of the Oranbegans themselves. Determined to do all he could to save both peoples, he returned to the past and gathered not only sympathetic followers from Oranbega but a few defectors from the Mu temples as well. Using their combined powers, the followers of Koros transported themselves to a distant land, where they escaped the fate of their peoples. For his wisdom and tolerance, the Mu survivors made Koros an honorary Mu monk, and the community that resulted from his intervention took on his new name: Mu'Koros. Tina pieced together the rest of the story with her own research: how the Mu'Koros people had slowly assimilated with their neighbors, retaining only some books they could no longer read and a last name whose meaning they could no longer remember.
Knowing that her ancestors had once been great mystics and scholars made Christina reflect on her own comparatively mundane life and poor character, and for the first time in her life she was not merely resentful but ashamed. She became determined to live up to the examples of her forefathers, and live according to their precepts of peace, righteousness, and wisdom. She stopped stealing and fighting, and spent her time in study, both of mundane schoolwork and of the history, philosophy, and arcane arts of her people. In secret she struggled to understand the mastery of elemental force, learning to communicate her will to the universe by gesture instead of stumbling over the alien syllables of Oranbegan incantations. Her parents barely noticed her improving conduct, and she in turn kept her esoteric knowledge secret, wishing to surprise her parents with her mastery of what they had apparently chosen to ignore.
However, when at last she told her parents of the books and what she had learned from them, their reaction was not astonished joy but spiteful disdain. They angrily explained that they knew about the books, but were not only uninterested in their heritage but had chosen to reject it in favor of assimilation. Unreasonably, they accused her of disobedience and excessive curiosity. They demanded that she bring the books to them, and then to her horror they burned the entire collection.
That very night, Mu'Koros left her home, never to return.
