Breaking down. Reserve please
Name: Magenta LaRue, aka Seraph
Gender: Female
Age: 19
Power: Semi-Willful Power Shifting. Magenta has a power that is theoretically one of the most powerful that could exist: at will, she can change powers. However, this power comes with a major caveat in that she cannot, at all, choose the powers that result. Furthermore, her powers have an agenda of their own: they’ll generally shift into something that makes it possible for her to survive a situation, but not straightforwardly and not with much consideration for her other objectives. Trying to game this by resetting her powers multiple times in a row will result in her powers punishing her with weaker and more obnoxious abilities. Generally speaking, the risker her situation, the more potent a power she might be granted, but this is no hard and fast rule. To make this even more annoying, she actually does not know the specific powers she gets: she gets general feelings about them in the vein of “this power is perceptive/kinetic/physical/etc,” and she had to learn what feelings meant in the same way a child learns to read. She cannot even stop resetting her powers at a time where she might get a good one, because when she goes to sleep, she loses any powers entirely.
Appearance:
Magenta’s appearance varies day to day, for she often uses makeup and hair dye to change her appearance. She’s a hair under six feet with an olive skin tone, with a sturdy, heavy backpack on her back, and those are the only things that stay consistent in any civilian identity she happens to use. Her most consistent appearance is the one she uses when she wants to appear as Seraph. She wears a cheap white mask, but she decorated it with a sharpie and her incredible art skills, making it flow with incredibly elegant and ornate designs. She usually wears very cheap clothes or else clothes that she could have shoplifted easily. She has highly functional muscle from all the physical exercise she does when trying to not die.
History:
Magenta knows what happens to the Foram.
Her father ran several facilities that managed captured Foram, and when Magenta was 11, she went with him to work one day. He did not intend her to see anything, but Magenta was always a curious child, and when she slipped from his sight to go explore, she opened a door she shouldn’t have and saw something happening to a Foram in there.
She closed the door before anyone noticed and told her dad that she went to the bathroom, nothing more. But whatever it was, she refuses to talk about it even now, and it clearly has stuck in her mind very hard.
She struggled quietly about this information for two years, but when she discovered her abilities, she realized that the vaccine her father made her take failed, utterly and completely, even if the way it failed changed when she wanted it to, and every time she went to sleep besides. She struggled to come up with a plan to deal with the situation: after all, she had a very comfortable life. She was used to the comforts that her family’s wealth got her, to excelling not only in school but also in anything vaguely artistic.
Magenta had, thankfully, been very very careful with any odd seeming impulses, refusing to indulge them in front of anyone for years, on the off chance that her vaccine didn’t take and her father threw her into one of his facilities. Less pleasant, however, was her decision seven days after she realized her powers, during a meeting her father had with some of his subordinates. Her powers had granted her a increased knowledge of chemistry, and she used it to make and contain fluorine gas until she intruded on his board meeting that day and dumped it on his head, very publicly burning him alive.
At first, the thirteen year old Magenta had no idea what to do with her newfound fugitive from the law status. She was able to evade the law with some success with her art skills: she figured out shoplifting pretty quickly, and could make her face look entirely different with the makeup she snuck into a backpack she stole. In her position, many people would have fallen into a bad crowd, but Magenta did not. No, she did not merely fall into a bad crowd. Oh no. Mere 'bad crowds' cowered in fear of who she actually fell in with, for this was no mere 'bad crowd', or even an 'advanced bad crowd’, this was pure evil: namely, Theresa "Tess" Lively, aka Powder Girl.
When pro Foram groups argue about Foraminis having rights, Tess single-handedly demonstrates a very good counter argument. Her ability to manipulate particulate matter was not one most people would have thought very threatening until she very abruptly appeared on the scene by using her power to scatter sawdust in the middle of Times Square to create a dust explosion, singing “Humpty Dumpty” just prior. Attempts to stop her went abysmally: the list of people who were killed in the attempt is depressingly long, ranging from powerful Foraminis to elite trained government agents, up to and including Navy SEALs. More terrifyingly, she did not seem to have an overall agenda in perpetrating her massacres: she simply thought that murder was absurdly funny and entertaining, and thought of people only in terms of how amusing their deaths could be. Many people hesitated fighting her early on because her short stature and cutesy, high-pitched voice made them believe themselves mistaken about who was the cause of all the death around her, but very quickly people learned to take her deadly seriously, and entire crowds would blanche in fear when they heard her cyanide-cute voice singing nursery rhymes just before she found a new, creative way to kill everyone in the crowd.
And she decided to take Magenta under her wing, because the teenager had, “Lots and lots of potential!” and could even “become super duper fun!”
Magenta was, understandably, not at all enthused by this prospect, but when she tried to object, Tess made it clear that, “Oh, you’re such a silly willy! You can’t leave until you graduate, and to do that you’ve gots to kill me! And if you faaaaiiiil...”
Tess’s overly saccharine grin combined with the dust cloud she flung with lethal velocity to just miss Magenta made it clear that Tess would have great fun making Magenta her next amusement.
And so for four months, Magenta was forced to join Tess and the latter’s sick, terrifying amusements. At first, Magenta tried her level best to avoid participating, but Tess was starting to make it clear that Magenta needed to start “practice!” or else face Tess’s nonexistent mercy. But Magenta was clever, and realized that Tess didn’t care who she killed, so long as she was killing, and therefore started to manipulate Tess into pursuing targets of Magenta’s choosing. Under Magenta’s subtle redirection, the duo went after anti Foram officials, gangsters, and other terrorists, and life was, in a very dark way, looking up for Magenta, who went around, wearing an ornately decorated mask and calling herself ‘Seraph.’
But when, on a rare solo excursion, Magenta saw someone give her the same kind of terrified face people gave Tess, Magenta realized that no matter how noble her intentions, she was still not only enabling Tess’s massacres, but participating in them.
At first, Magenta despaired. But very quickly, she grew furious at what she had become. She grew angry at the system that abused the Foram to the point where she killed her own father for being a monster, the laws in place that made her very existence illegal, and the ‘mentor’ who shaped her into the very sort of monster she hated. And so, Magenta decided to ‘graduate.’
She very quickly discarded the idea of fighting Tess directly: while Tess preferred ambushes, Tess had also acquired terrifying experience in fights to the death, and the amount of people she killed for trying to fight her was enough that Magenta could not even begin to count them. Furthermore, when Magenta “rolled” her powers on the day that she decided to kill Tess, the power of the day was an ability that enhanced coordination between allies, minimizing friendly fire and increasing synergy, a power not precisely suited to the overwhelming lethal force Magenta intended to “gift” to Tess. “Save scumming” having the potential to make the situation worse forced Magenta to consider how to use this enhanced coordination power to kill Tess, as she had no intention of staying with Tess for even a day longer.
Magenta ended up contacting many Foram, leaking Tess’s current location. When three of them arrived to actually try to kill Tess, Magenta stealthily used the enhanced coordination power to make the fight against Tess easier. Unfortunately, while Tess had to try quite a bit during the fight, it was quite clear that, even against the well coordinated and powerful Foram, Tess held the advantage.
Until Magenta stabbed Tess from behind with a knife to the back of the neck.
While Tess had powerful abilities, she also required concentration to use them, Without those powers, Tess was unarmed, 4’7”, and slender against someone with a foot and close to a hundred pounds on her who was using a knife.
Magenta didn’t let up with the knife after the first attack. She stabbed Tess again and again. At first, she was methodical, but she quickly dissolved into an incoherent rage as she stabbed Tess over and over and over, crying and yelling and screaming as she used the knife to stab Tess into the consistency of salsa, venting her frustrations not only at Tess’s tutelage, but also at the terrible direction of her life since she first saw what her father enabled against the Foraminis, only stopping several minutes after the main evidence Tess’s body was a red stain on the ground and finely chopped meat.
She then got up, brushed herself off, and calmly asked if any of the other (now dumbfounded) Foraminis had lighter fluid, gasoline, or thermite.
Very shortly after, people began to react to Magenta with even more fear than they already did whenever she was recognizable: apparently, someone recorded the whole thing and put it on the internet (one person actually reuploaded it, replacing the audio with “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead”). Furthermore, the fear only grew for the next years, and it took her a bit to realize why: while she knows that her power is an enormous douche that likes trolling her all the time, all everyone who fought her (and died or were severely injured for their efforts) only saw someone who survived to kill Tess at the age of 14 and who consistently shows up to combat with a different power every time for no apparent reason. Furthermore, attempts at diplomacy failed very badly, as Magenta has a tendency to react to overtures with extreme violence, thanks to assuming that any “allies” actually seek to control her, which only exacerbates her intense feelings of loneliness (that she attempts to suppress as much as possible).
This is where Magenta is now, with an ability that makes her powerful, an intellect that makes her dangerous, and a sanity that is barely hanging on and slipping all the time.
Personality:
On the surface, Magenta is very superficial. Practically every other sentence she uses has some variation of “like”, “so”, or “whatever.” Her actions make this impression even worse, as she has a tendency to act almost entirely on impulse, easily trading a long term benefit for a short term advantage, even to her detriment. She easily comes across as vapid and stupid, and is difficult to take entirely seriously between her speech patterns and her actions. She is not precisely fickle, but she is definitely not the type to stick to a long term master plan. On top of all of this, she has a tendency to be abrasive and condescending, particularly when someone is trying to intimidate or otherwise control her. This especially tends to show up in various graffiti that she leaves around the city, suggesting that both the Vigilantes and Demon’s Run go do things anatomically difficult to impossible.
However, while her impulsiveness has a tendency to make her come across as less than intelligent, Magenta is both a good critical thinker and extremely creative. It does not matter if she is approaching a canvas, an instrument, or a particularly tough opponent, she is very good at creating entirely new approaches from very little material to work with. Furthermore, her tendency to be impulsive in conjunction with a power that practically exists to jerk her around has left her in many situations with her back against the metaphorical wall, developing her native creativity to the point where she can improvise off of practically nothing. This was especially true after murdering her father, and then even more so after her little apprenticeship under Powder Girl: surviving when everyone is trying to kill you rarely happens by accident.
Alignment: To Demon’s Run, she’s a particularly hardcore vigilante who likes to kill them sometimes, but she’s a bit too murdery to fit into the vigilantes proper. So technically neutral, but plenty of people have reason to want to recruit or kill her.
Other:
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