(I got a bundle of character art for myself with Christmas money, this is one of 15 pics acquired and one of 5 based on a set of Masks characters I played with to get a feel of the system.)
Okay, this is one of the five characters I made for running a solo Masks campaign and so far I have only done one session with this group…well two if you include the “how we met story”.
In any case, in Kyou’s world superpowers through history have been split between gifted and sorcerers. The gifted are somewhat standard superheroes with inborn powers. Recent studies in the setting have discovered that the powers come from a symbiotic virus, referred to as the Apotheosis Virus, which passes from parent to child and even then not with 100% certainty.
Magic is a process of opening cracks in the dimensional walls and siphoning power to use. A genetic mutation created the ability and it has since been passed on to the vast majority of the human population. Those with absolutely no magical ability are rare (or else not native to Earth) and have the benefit of not triggering things like magic traps or curses (though they can be harmed or inhibited by the results of a magician twisted space around them directly). At the extreme, the sorcerer can summon a life-form from an alternate dimension and keep reality bent around it so that it can survive on Earth and manipulate things so that the summon performs some task for them. Or perhaps leave and shape alternate realities around them so they can survive in another reality.
As for possession, rather than being a case of an external spirit taking control of a person as people used to believe, what really happens is that the person’s soul becomes altered to that of an entity from another dimension. It would be bad enough if only the soul and body were alien too each other, but it is also the world and the mind that compatibility issues resulting in growing mental stress, insanity and instinctual flares of wild magic. There are several families that have acquired a genetic trait which allows their body to tolerate having elements from multiple dimensions, this trait also has the effect of strengthening their ability to perform magic and tread between the planes.
Then there are the Brethren who have both the Apotheosis Virus and the ability to tolerate multi-dimensionality. While most Brethren have a human, terrestrial soul from this reality some have foreign souls and their Apotheosis Virus tends to cause their body to develop an approximation of what their soul expects. Eventually, the Brethren become incapable of remaining for extended periods within any particular reality and thus spend most of their existence inbetween realities along with other Brethren from Earth and other realities, occasionally visiting realms perhaps long enough to see that their bloodline continues or some other cause of their interest is forwarded.
In the case of the Higa, they’ve been born with the souls of dragons for eons. However, something happened to Kyou’s mother before she and her younger siblings were born and as a result, Kyou and the younger siblings from her branch of the family possess the souls of ningyo, mermaids or sirens. Neither of Kyou’s elder sisters, Hinako and Jun, were happy about this as they possessed certain attitudes regarding the superiority of their family line and the power of the dragons they boasted. For further trouble, when Kyou ended up being full Brethren, Hinako (who lacked the Apotheosis Virus and thus was not Brethren) seemingly grew insane with jealousy and envy. Hinako used magic to cause Jun’s Apotheosis Virus to rage out of control, accelerating the advancement of her body within a reality bubble foreign to Earth. As such, Jun is now essentially a full dragon and has to remain within a lair that Kyou helped craft for her. It is expected that by the time she could acclimate to her new body enough to change its shape or survive on Earth that she’d have become ready to pass on to the realms between reality.
Thus it falls to Kyou to act as the family’s agent in the modern age. The problem is that Kyou is not the massively powerful warrior of magic and might that her elder sister Jun wants her to be. She has the soul of a species of enchantresses and tricksters. So she acts as a caster of support magics for her team, creating places of stretched space to contain enemies or diverting light to create invisibility. She rarely directly attacks, much to her sister’s disappointment.
Meanwhile, the traitor Higa, Hinako is still out there somewhere, trying to find a way to get the Apotheosis Virus to take root within her so that she can be full Brethren.
Stats to current: http://thrythlind.blogspot.jp/2015/12/chimera-sirens-legacy-amber-chimera.html
I’m also playing Masks as a Legacy with the divine armor suite (I went more Dr. Strange Jr. with it)!
In the backstory revealed so far, my character’s mother was a powerful sorceress named the White Witch who was killed.
Aaaaaand, this is now how she looks 🙂
Awesome.