Cordelia Speight

Name: Cordelia Speight
Aliases: Topsy
Age: 19
Gender: Female
Class: Magician (Witch)
Faction: Independent
Division:
Rank:



Image:
Appearance:

Petite at 5’2” Cordelia is slightly shorter than most girls her age but with a head of red hair is isn’t exactly easy to miss. Her facial features are smooth, a nose that flattens out with a tilt that almost makes it grecian. Her lips are full but frame a small mouth over a slightly jutting chin that follows up into the high cheekbones of a heart shaped face. Her eyes a deep green are her most expressive feature along with thin reddish brown eyebrows that twitch slightly when she smiles and crinkle when she frowns. They are normally matched with a pair of glasses either black square frames or rounded to cover for a moderate case of Hyperopia.

Her body is a banana on the fruit scale or what some would call a rake. Her bust is flat, her hips are almost non-existent and her legs seem much longer than they really are. It can actually be somewhat hard to see where one part of her ends and another begins in her normal clothes. Generally avoiding anything overly physical she has no visible muscles but being quite slender means she still looks somewhat physically fit.

When it comes to clothes she tends to be rather dull. The best way to not be noticed is to just look like everyone else, so t-shirts, open shirts, zip-up hoodies and jeans are most of her wardrobe. There are a few skirts and blouses but she hadn’t had that much need for them, at least for her dressing the part of a witch doesn’t seem needed. So for the most part she looks like a regular teenager from New England, thanks to her height and figure it can be somewhat hard to place how old she actually is.

Whenever going outside she puts on lipstick, foundation, mascara and sometimes eyeshadow. Meanwhile at home she tends to not bother at all if she is staying in all day working on something. Doing her nails is something she tends to do with her friends, normally in plain colours like green or purple but she refrains from extensions. Perfume if she wore it would be overridden by the smell of incense that tends to follow her but she still does try sometimes. Marked with wisps of cherry, cedar and ginger as her normal choice which gets more apparent the more she is away from home.

Having grown up with her family at home and in Massachusetts she has a cross between the mixed New England Eastern Accent and something somewhat more Galic. Dropping her Rs when they end a word or do not come between vowels while having a strolling cadence that makes her ancestry somewhat apparent.

Personality:

Cordelia has always been impulsive though luckily she tends to have the common sense to stop that being too much of a problem. Going with her gut feeling more often than not she doesn’t naturally think about her actions too much. Which is somewhat odd given how much time she devotes to working the best ways for getting things done and what is the most important. She can swing wildly between focusing on her social life and making time with it only for when that time comes to drop everything to focus on what she feels is the more important issue. Her friends help keep her on track but she can seem far less organised that she is.

Focusing her gut feelings she tends to get people, what they are feeling and talking about very easily. She isn’t always right but since she so often it is first impressions that other people make are big for her. If she because of bias or a person just acting differently its very hard for her to change how she feels about them. Once they fall into a category for her it's quite hard for them to change it in her eyes. As a whole she likes most people but of course given she is a witch means she needs to be skeptical of anyone's motives and its extremely hard to gain her trust. Being told that she can trust almost no one all her life while hiding a part of herself ever since she was old enough to understand is something that stuck deep in her mind.

Those she trusts and is close to she holds closest. Her mother Erin, father Andrew and aunt Deana are her family and she tries her best to be a good and responsible daughter, and witch. It feels to her that Erin and Deana put a lot of pressure on her to be a good witch and at some point carry on their line. Its not something she has actually been told but, it is what she would want her daughter to do in their situation. Her father is much more relaxed and tends to spoil her a lot more, yet she still feels closer to her mother. She does hold her humans friends close and does want to protect them, chief among them is Liza. Even more so now they are adults they are like sisters, barely a day goes by without them talking and they still frequently sleep over at each others houses.

As a general rule Cordelia feels her ideas and thoughts are right over anyone else's, even those that may have studied the topic in detail. She is used to her best guess being right and it is more than a little hard to convince her otherwise, if you can even get her to wait to explain. She also is extremely active, even when a big hurdle has been overcome she keeps on trying to improve herself and learn something new. Unless someone is trying to better themselves in some way they are being lazy, which applies to herself more than anyone else. Often putting too much pressure on rather than taking a break once in a while.

Due to the actions of the US government in the past and the natural assumption of witches that they need to hide from those that would harm them Cordelia doesn’t trust any of the global organisations in the slightest. She wants to live her life as a witch with human friends, able to make enough money to get by and help out a few people if she could. She considered it for a little while but she doesn’t want to join any of the groups that focus on helping people with magic or a better future together, or power. They all have their massive down points though, either by being downright corrupt or not matching up with her beliefs at all. Coming from a rather traditional line she has been taught that various monsters should be avoided and if must be destroyed. There are good spirits but it's still advisable to avoid them and not trust everything they say.

Notionally she is a pacifist but will still take action to defend other people or herself. She’d rather avoid conflict and she’d rather not risk her life for anything, yet she also isn’t a coward. When something bad is happening and she can actually do something about it she’ll stand up but there have also been a number of times she has just walked by. People throwing insults at someone who might or not be a magic user, she just crossed the road. To put herself on the line there put her family on the line, there wasn’t anything she could do without risking them.

Her favorite food is chicken and leek pie and when given the option between bread and crackers she will almost always choose crackers. With Pepsi vs Coke, Pepsi wins but Dr Pepper is better. Being around people smoking seems to offend her lungs whatever she feels and she isn’t that keen on drugs and drinking mostly on the grounds that if she lets down her guard setting someone on fire might seem like a good idea.

History:

The only child of Andrew Speight and Erin Speight-Byrne and born a year after they married in April 1988. Her father worked at the funeral director’s his own father ran up until his death in 1995 which he in turn took ownership of. His family had been running the Funeral Home since 1912 for four generations and were upstanding members of the community, her grandfather had once stood for Mayor. Her mother’s side is much more secretive to the outside world, though she appears as a rather bubbly housewife to most. Erin Speight-Byrne is from a long line of witches that fill many of the expected criteria by modern fiction.

Originating from Ireland the family arrived in America during the 1850s, joining the Irish communities and carrying out their role as healers, seers and wise women as they had done back in the old country. As the world became more modern they became more removed from it in at least their magical interactions. Erin like all her female relatives had natural talent and was taught their ways, the words, the spells, the song and the potions, which she in turn passed onto her daughter.

The three live along with Erin’s sister Deana Byrne in a large three story house at 72 Belmont St, Fall River Massachusetts. It is a red fronted shingled Victorian style home with a tower on the left hand side and two chimelies jutting from the centre. It stands out but no more so than the other similar homes on the same street. To the outside world there was nothing overly odd about the family as far as the day to day things went. Cordelia was home schooled until she was ten years old and ready for 6th grade, when her mother trusted her enough not to let their secret slip. Inside their home Cordelia grew up with magic as part of her life, as soon as she could talk she already started to show some of the most basic traits. If her mother wasn’t a witch then the spontaneous fires might have been more than a little troublesome. However the reasons for hiding these abilities went beyond what her grandmother had gone through.

In 1945 the world learned of magic. It had always known of course but it had ignored, let it slip and fade from the collective common consciousness. Those that believed, those that practiced were lost to the shadows until that fateful day. The world shook and awoke, eyes opened to the truth it rose back as the years passed. People reacted entirely with fear at first, magic appeared to have doomed the world. Normal people always feared witches, even those that relied on them and used their arts. With the Demons summoned in Germany though, it was everywhere. Already people were focused on the war effort, magic became another part of that. Anyone known to practice it, even perfectly mundane magic show magicians were rounded up under the National Magical Conscription Act. The guise of it was to help fight against the demons, in practice it was to keep them somewhere where they could be watched. Cordelia's Great Grandmother and her family hid, most of them managed to hid themselves with the government's limited ways of detecting them, however within the magical community everyone knew of someone that had been taken. Some released years later, others not at all.

Slowly, as the magical factions in the world make their mark and dealt with the German Incident along with the new Incidents that sprung up all over the world, people started to adapt. By the time that Cordelia was born magic was somewhat accepted. There were famous public magic users in the United States, though it was still dangerous. More than a few were assassinated, attacked and in some places it was certainly not safe to be known as one. Many schools would not allow for supernatural students to attend, forcing them to government and I.A.C.S.B. programs. On top of that while not made public all those with supernatural powers however minor were required to be registered. Given the lengths that their ancestors had gone through however and the efforts her family made to lead a normal life they managed to evade detection. Luck had a lot to do with it. Not going to the doctor, keeping away from and of those armoured I.A.C.S.B. agents, not using magic before going out in public without cleansing. It wasn’t odd to her that she had to do all this, it had always been her life, it was a part of her. During the day, she was a normal ten year old. Playing with her friends, learning about the world but always mindful of what might be around the next corner, where to run to if something happened. This was not so different from all the other students though, the world had changed after all. As common as fire drills were Monster Drills, what to do, where to go. Every year there were stories about attacks that made the news, rumors that there were far more that didn’t. It was just common knowledge what route you took to evacuate the city, to have an emergency kit ready.

There was one when she was little, a huge one. A giant creature with an elongated body, thousands of tentacles attacked a small city in northern Massachusetts. Thousands of people died from that and it couldn’t help but make the news, the monster disappearing back into the Ocean. That wasn’t the first, but it was one of the largest up to that point. The rumors were monsters like that were drawn towards magic, causing another spate of anti-magic attacks.

There were other strange events that littered the years though, odd lights in the sky, strange weather, people just vanishing, then in 2005 the Northwestern States suffered from The Six Days of Night. For no yet explainable reason the sun, the stars and the moon all vanished entirely from the sky leaving entire states in darkness. People certainly panicked, rioting and looting but nothing actually happened at all. Sixteen year old Cordelia stayed home with her family and waited it out. Of everything that happened in those six days, the worst of it was done by normal, powerless humans. Thoughts that it was the end of the world, it drove a lot of people of madness and even now two years later people are still put on edge by it, even if most of the damage has been physically repaired.

Then last year in 2007 the big one happened, at least since 1945 it was the big one. A dragon, giant and fierce fell upon New York and made it her nest. Between the steel towers and subways she made her home and killed tens of thousands. Against a dragon conventional military could do nothing and even magic could not get close. The only option was to evacuate the centre of the city, most people left entirely. In those first days you could see the flames on the horizon from the coast, the dragon though was confined to the TV screen though. It never seemed to stray that far from its new home, that didn’t mean that the death toll did not continue to climb. Its appearance at least did seem to make magic users slightly less threatening, there were indeed worse things out there.

While all of this was front and centre of the minds of just about everyone she met, Cordelia tried her best to just be normal. From when she joined school she made friends and was an odd but quite normal girl. Her best friend right from day one was Lisa Turvy and it didn’t take that long for Cordelia as straight man to Lisa’s mischief to become Topsy to Lisa’s Turvy. Despite having met in 2000 and spending a lot of time with each other out of school it was only in the events of the Six Days of Darkness that Lisa was given any inclining that Cordelia was anything other than a girl with an odd mother. There were witchy type things around the house but that wasn’t entirely abnormal any more. Magic worked, at least against magic. It was common sense to keep salt sprinkled across your threshold, to have a chain of garlic near the door, the threats they were meant to keep away were real now. Even if you hated the idea of magic and magic users, it made sense to try and protect against them.

Others went further, one did not have to go far in back streets to find people selling purportedly magical potions and charms for just about anything, even if they were mostly fake. Nor would it be long before one group or another would run the peddlers out of town, yet they kept coming, people kept buying, even in secret. So to have things like that about the home was not really that odd, Lisa’s own parents had a few and so did a lot of her friends and they all including Cordelia and her parents went to church together. She found out after Cordelia told her. It was the second day of the Six days of Night and after begging her mother, she finally relented. She reminded her daughter of all the risks, both to all of them and her friend. At the same time though Cordelia was sixteen, almost an adult and there was not much that could be done to stop her doing what she wanted. So the second day, with the entire state under martial law and restrictions she crossed the three blocks between their houses.

School was canceled, so was work for most people and almost all the shops were closed. Most people were staying home with barred doors. The Turvy house was the same, Cordelia having to come in through a window when they recognised her. The excuse of studying was paper thin but enough, once the coast was clear and they were alone in Lisa’s bedroom. She told her everything. What she was, what that meant, what she could do, what she couldn’t and why it had to be secret. How what was happening was just as scary to them and that she was sorry she had lied for so long. It was a lot to take it, the normal human barely faltered in her response though. It didn’t change anything and it explained a little. That she was trusted enough to keep a secret and her friend could do these cool things. It was enough to forget about what was happening in the sky for a while. She remained the only person in the world outside of her family that knew about what the Speight women really were.

Studying magic was something that Cordelia did along with everything else she needed to know before she was ten years old. There was no real line between basic Math and English and basic magical theory or lessons about the types of monsters that exist in the world. Over the centuries her family had written down their folk law, lifted information that they might need from other sources. They were massive and mostly in Irish and all of them enchanted to appear blank to any reader that did not have the family blood. It was from these and her mother that the young witch learn her spells, potions, alchemy and the truth of the world. When she joined school she still often spent hours a day in the evening studying the words of those that went before her and trying to perfect her art.

Having graduated from high school Cordelia opted not to go to college and elect on using Witchcraft as her would be career. It was a somewhat hard choice as she would have liked to go on to study photography but in the end, she was the only person in her generation that could carry on her family. Sooner or later she would have to give up living in the normal world, or at least focusing on it. It made more sense to make that change before going to all that expense.

Not having a job meant she was also somewhat flexible when things happened. One of her older friends was getting married to someone she met at college, there was of course a wedding in Boston which was easy to get to and a second in his home town, which happened to be right in the middle of nowhere. He was very likely to be the only Geophysicist within a thousand miles when he graduated. Hot Sulphur Springs, Colorado was a tiny place over two days away by almost non-stop Grayhound and she was just about the only one of the bride’s friends that could make the trip, making her the chief bridesmaid.




Mana: E: 22 units. A passable witch and with more than enough to use her spells with room for improvement.
Strength: N/a
Consitution: N/a
Agility: F Dancing is a required part of both her culture and her magic and as such Cordelia is somewhat faster on her feet than most people.




Arma Maga:

Name: Cherry Heart Wand (Focus)
Rank: E
Description: Used as a focus this wand can be used to cast magic in a stealthy way with neither words or legwork though it takes more time, in conjunction with both these things it can slightly speed up general casting.  Twleve inches long and tapering to a blunted point it is a thin shard of smoothed light pinkish wood that looks like nothing more than a prop to onlookers.
Cost: 2

Equipments:

Name: M&P22 Compact
Rank: E
Description: Firing .22 long rifle rimfire rounds it is normally used for sport or hunting small game but the damage to a human can still be significant. Given Massachusetts gun laws the magazine has only ten rounds and generally if she even carries it she will not carry extra ammunition though there are two that came with the pistol. If she is away from home though she isn't legally allowed to have it on her person in the State.

Name: Blank Notes
Rank: N/a
Description: A series of notes from over a decade of study from her family Grimoires which still reside with her mother, they carry a range of topics but most are on modern magic and rituals.




Skills:

Name: Marksmanship Pistol
Description: Being a woman in America alone can be dangerous, being a witch, even a secret one is far more so. At her father’s pressing she joined a gunclub with him when she was fourteen and goes to the range twice a month.
Rank: F

Name: Magical Knowledge (Modern Witchcraft)
Description: Covering a range of elemental magic as a base the vast majority is practical magic that can help in a non-combat every day use for the user. There his a minor amount of history of magic along with monsters and beasts that may be encountered but much less than some paths of study would have. Both Magic and alchemy is used in combination along with learning of rituals and different types of meditation that can help boost magical awareness. It also include scrying to locate items or people using a man and crystal.
Rank: E

Name: Natural Familiar
Description: It is natural for a witch to have a familiar and they naturally attract them, for most this are what you would expect, cats, owls, bats, ravens, crows, but it need not be limited to that. These are merely the ones that are easiest to control for most witches, however each is indeed different. For Cordelia the natural affinity is anything from the taxonomical family of Phasianidae, chief among them peafowl with other members including chickens. Why not limiting her to this type of familiar they are by far easier for her to make use of. In the wild these birds seem unafraid of her and show no fear to her touch. When using one as a familiar she can command it mentally to do things it would naturally do, such as guard an area, act as an alarm, attack an object or person. She can also with some effort see though their eyes even when at a distance and give them impulses to go to a certain location.
Rank: D

Abilities:


Name: Group Awareness
Description: Spending half her life looking over her shoulder and watching how people react around the mere mention of magic means that Cordelia is able to read a group of people and see it change. When there is danger building she knows when to get out and when to take cover and blend into a crowd, its saved her more than once.
Rank: E

Name: Magical Manipulation
Description: The ability to cast Magic. One must be born to use it. With this ability, the world can be manipulated to the degree of one's knowledge and affinity in Magic. This ability ranks up with one's own Mana Statistic. All Magicians must have this ability or they cannot cast anything. That said, they must have this ranked up to at least same rank of the desired spell they wish to cast.
Rank: D


Techniques/Spells:  (This may need some major editing)

Name: Ioinnir (Glimmer)
Incantation: Blowing into your cupped hands before commanding, "Ioinnir " and pushing your hands towards the target.
Description: The target either a person or object glows with a light akin to a full moon brightening a dark location but having no effect in sunlight. It depends on the location but in an open field it can be seen for up to 300 meters in pitch darkness.
Rank: F
Type: Ether
Cost: 2

Name: Glámsýni (Glamor)
Incantation: Placing wand or finger to your nose and focusing on the appearance of the person you will be taking on, before speaking aloud, "talamh slán a dhéanamh de," Pulling hands over face to complete.
Description: Being able to change ones hair or eyes colour are simple things, it can take on another persons face with some effort and at higher levels their clothes and body as well. It needs focus to keep up but a single casting should work against most cursory glances. If the person knows who the caster is pretending to be though they may notice imperfections in the spell, on average it can last about ten minutes.
Rank: E
Type: Mind
Cost: 5

Name: Buailte Dhorn (Bigby's Striking Fist)
Incantation: Thrusting Wand or right hand towards the target with legs lunging with a deep voice commanding, "Máithreacha stailc chosaint do leanbh."
Description: An invisible fist strikes with the strength and properties of an E rank human up to ten meters away for a single blow and vanishes after impact.
Rank: E
Type: Ether
Cost: 5

Name: Ward of Protection
Incantation: "Tá sé seo le tearmann."
Description:
A chalk or sand circle three feet across, a five pointed star inside forming a pentagram, runes are drawn around and inside to focus the mana in the room and turn that into a force that reinforces it with an invisible barrier against those that mean harm to any of those inside. It takes about thirty seconds to draw and needs an open solid space to be done, it is normally drawn on the floor but walls and ceiling can also work, breaking one of the lines will break the spell. The barrier has a strength of D rank and the properties of a solid wall on open areas such as windows or open doors, on walls, ceilings and floors it adds to the existing structure as an extra layer.

At E rank the following additional requirements are needed:
The caster must remain in the circle,
The chant of, Tá sé seo le tearmann must be repeated at least, every fifteen seconds,

It gains a + modifier if it is cast in a Spiritual or Mental place of Sanctuary:
Churches, Mosques, Hospitals, Children's Bedrooms

Does not work more than once per room,
Rank: E
Type: Ether
Cost: 1 Mana per minute (or post, maybe?)

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