Moira Harvelle-Devaux
• RACE: Superhuman / Witch / Mage / that kinda thing
• FACTION: the Hellfire Club
• AGE: 28
• MARITAL STATUS: Widowed
• SEXUAL ORIENTATION: straight
• OCCUPATION: Herald (New England branch) high(ish)-up position in some shady organization she wants Out of.
ARCHETYPE: Moira embodies a quiet, observant archetype. She sticks to the background when she can, revealing little about her true feelings, and her actions focus more on what is required to survive than what she actually desires.
Strength: Shielding -- even as a child, Moira was obsessive about maintaining secrecy and protecting her thoughts, and as an (initially unconscious) result she built up mental walls that were more than figurative. Further knowledge and practice with magic has allowed her to gain exceptional control and mastery of that ability -- expanding into setting up moderate or temporary shields around some else, intentionally broadcasting red herrings to telepaths, and blocking off memories in herself or others. Advance telepaths may be able to glean some information tidbits from her thoughts, but she would at least feel their intrusion into her mind.
Strength: Wards -- her penchant toward secrecy and protection naturally inclined her toward ward-casting, and she’s proven extremely adept at it. She is capable of casting wards to protect items, places, and people; her own property is safeguarded with a multitude of them: in the unlikely chance an unwanted someone gets in, it’s not without her knowing.
It's Complicated: Electrokinesis -- an innate ability that surfaced a couple years after her parents’ deaths, it’s linked more to the control of her emotional state than her magical knowledge. Unfortunately it’s more often a hindrance than a help. She’s not a fun person to hug on a dry day, and can accidentally fry electronics when she’s antsy. With her unyielding poker faces, her power is more likely to give her away than her expression. The air around her gets charged and static-y when she’s too agitated (or if the environment’s conducive to electrical build-up), and she’s unable to control her power lashing out when she’s in physical danger. The electrokinesis responds to her fear and distress, paying no heed to where she is or if witnesses are present.
Using it can leave her extremely vulnerable: where her shielding abilities are about controlling and reinforcing energy, her electrokinesis is about releasing and depleting it. The effects are both physical and mental, and their severity depends on amount of power used. Constant or significant use of those powers can leave her anywhere from groggy to unconscious, and can weaken or completely break down her mental shields. Her healing rate also suffers; injuries that normally take a couple days to heal may take a week or weeks depending on the amount of energy dispelled. In a fight it’s either/or between her offensive electrokinesis and defensive shielding, and Moira opts for the shielding everytime; but, as her electrokinesis is subject to little conscious control, that doesn’t always work out.
Limitation: White Magic -- unfortunately having shields and wards around her 24/7 prevents the good as well as the bad. The effects of white magic are drastically reduced when used on her, or negated completely. If Moira gets hurt, her only option is to heal the old-fashioned way.
Limitation: Combat -- unless there’s some great luck on her behalf, Moira will almost always lose in a physical confrontation. She may know enough self-defense to escape a pure-vanilla-human mugger with an average build, but anyone with serious training, agility, or body can easily overpower her. She’s not a particularly good shot either. Her electrical burst can be powerful and is her best offensive chance in a fight, but it’s likely to put her in just as bad shape as any opponent it hits.
PERSONALITY/TRAITS: Moira takes the stoic and quiet type to new heights. She’s a master of blank expressions and tailored reactions, often showing neither distaste nor preference in her manners unless doing so is advantageous. She keeps to the background as much as she can, honing the art of observing more than she lets on. She’s careful and precise in her words, and even more so with her emotions. She is a person who is often underestimated in her intelligence and ability -- assumptions she’d rather have continue -- but she remains impeccable in completing the tasks she’s given. She makes no moves to go beyond the duties given to her or to seek more responsibility; she discretely tries to avoid such things as much as possible.
She’s polite and formal, keeping an arm’s distance from bonding to anyone on a significant level. She comes off as conservative, even adhering to traditions such as wearing exclusively black and dark colors in the year following her husband’s passing regardless of her lukewarm emotional attachment to the man. The person she’s come closest to trusting since her parents’ deaths was her late husband, and even then she had her significant share of secrets.
BACKGROUND: One day, when she was 7, Moira didn’t have parents anymore. She didn’t witness it, and wasn’t sure exactly what happened, but she remembers waking up to police inside their house and they broke the information to her in that awkward cautious manner reserved for breaking such awful things. Her parents’ deaths, after they had stood by their ideals and been unwilling to play ball with the organization, had been orchestrated by the Hellfire Club -- not that the police or young Moira knew any of that.
After their deaths it was the cliched orphan route of bouncing around foster homes -- she doesn’t remember all their names -- before finally landing in an orphanage by 11. She hadn’t been a rebellious handful of a foster kid, and nothing had been wrong with her foster homes -- they had been filled with perfectly nice people, actually. But Moira just never really got on with any of them. She had been polite, but unusually reserved. She knew about magic, her parents had kind of been heavily entrenched in the stuff, and the importance of keeping such a thing secret had been instilled in her since before she was walking and talking properly. Her parents were dead, but that didn’t mean their values went out the window -- possibly aware of some danger to their lives, they had taught her that.
So, as a child, she was very careful about not exposing that secret, though she was equally determined to pursue magic. Unfortunately pursuing magical knowledge was easier said than done because 1.) a child is limited in the freedom to seriously pursue any path without adults knowing, and 2.) most resources on magic found in libraries and the like are hogwash. She only had a child’s memory of tasks her parents performed and one little book about basic wards and protections in her possession to go on. However she did have some innate abilities; one -- the mental shielding -- she was unaware of, but the other proved more evident. She noticed things: small electronics in her presence going haywire, her frequent shocking of the people that touched her, an outdoor trip where the compass needle wouldn’t stop spinning in her hand. They were small signs that could have been easily brushed off, but Moira had been on the alert for anything strange and recognized the details for what they were: magic.
Unfortunately knowing it was there proved little use in being able to control it. She couldn’t seem to do any more than accidentally upset other kids’ remote-controlled cars and unleash a static-shock vengeance on the unsuspecting fingers of the masses. ...So nothing particularly impressive. Then, one day, some of the orphanage’s more mischievous occupants decided to play a prank. It wasn’t a cruel one, just a prank boys in the prime of their impishness play on girls in the height of their prankability, but it did startle Moira something awful. And startling a young 12-year-old Moira meant one uncontrolled burst of electricity, one unconscious prankster, and another prankster too shocked to explain things coherently -- a burst of lightning exploding from a girl? The adults clearly thought it was a case of overactive imagination and an unfortunate freak bolt of lightning. Moira knew different but, a bit shaken by the thing herself, wasn’t going to correct them.
It was a couple days after the ‘Incident’ that she first met Cato. He was 25 years her senior, and arrived at the orphanage in a large back limo, and revealed that he knew about her, he knew about her parents, and -- most importantly -- he knew about magic. In their first encounter he performed little feats that she was nowhere near capable of, telling her that was only the beginning. After years of keeping quiet about who her parents were, what she knew, and what she could do? Having Cato appear out of the blue was a godsend that she wasn’t going to doubt too harshly.
A week later he had taken her on as his ward, and it was truly an outcome that rivaled any rags-to-riches stories she had seen in movies. Cato had extensive resources on magical knowledge and gave her the freedom to learn and practice it. He also had wealth -- incredible wealth. There she had security, and people she could trust even if they weren’t family. Cato, helpful though he was, was always careful that she not think of him nor his son as blood and Moira was fine with that, because she wasn’t looking to replace her own and had more than enough already.
When she was 19, Cato proposed. Considering the age gap -- the man was 44-going-on-45 -- there was hesitation on Moira’s part, but it was minor. She certainly wasn’t madly in love with the man, but he had always shown to respect her and she respected him. He hadn’t been abusive, his behavior had never been untoward towards her, and he carried interesting conversation. A trophy wife’s life had a stability hers lacked, and she was perfectly willing to keep Cato’s company and secrets if it meant security and comfort. And even if there was a divorce? It wouldn’t be on account of her actions -- she wasn’t foolish enough to risk such a thing with an affair -- and even divorcee of Cato Devaux would be a more stable situation than she was now. So Moira accepted, not minding the mantle of trophy wife.
...Unfortunately Cato proved to be far more progressive than all that. He surprised everyone, Moira included, by proving to want a genuine partner instead of an indulgence. Shortly after the marriage he set about getting her involved in his businesses and -- most importantly -- the Hellfire Club. Cato’s family followed a direct line from one of the Club’s founding families, and he used his standing to get her in and move his wife up the ranks. Of course, Moira did her part to earn the titles and responsibilties. Even if she wasn’t gung-ho about everything, she hid it well and performed admirably in what was asked of her. Her particular excellence in shielding and wards, coupled with her husband’s influence, secured her undesired position as Herald. Within her mind, the Prince’s schedule and plans would be safe from even skilled telepathic prying.
She’s held the position of Herald for a couple years now, enduring the weight of it but knowing better than to let on any complaint. Unfortunately for her, not everyone has been happy about her acquiring it. With her husband’s protection there had been little that could be done to remedy that acquisition, but his unexpected death three months ago has thrown that security out of balance; Moira is very aware of her now precarious (well, more precarious) situation.
CHARACTER GOALS:Moira wants Out. Or, at least, she wants to not be as involved and tangled up in things as she is. It isn’t a sentiment she advertises or trusts anyone enough to share, and having a distaste for aspects of the club has not stopped her from performing as best she can at the tasks required of her; but she always keeps an eye out for an opportunity toward some amount of (stable) freedom.
She does not, however, take up the mantle for any righteous cause: she has no aims of bringing down or exposing the system, even if she now knows they killed her parents. She doesn’t want freedom if all it means is waiting for the inevitable day that the rest of the Club hunts her down, where the best outcome she could hope for would be a quick death. The only way out of her Herald position is her own death or the end of her Prince’s reign. But the cost of getting caught in a betrayal,when others are salivating for the chance to take her down, is more than she’s willing to risk. The best she can hope for is some opportunity that would allow her to turn the other way at the right moment and feign ignorance afterward; then a new Prince would take over, and a new Herald put in place, and maybe nobody would decide that process required her head on a plate.
Granted, the slim chance of that working doesn’t make her magically free from Club affiliation. She knows that; and she knows that any degree of freedom working out on any level is pretty much impossible considering how involved is the position she’s in. ...But it’s a desire that’s there nonetheless, quietly tucked away just enough to keep her alert for some rare opportunity without losing her mind in such an unlikely fantasy.
HINDRANCES:
Emotional Isolation -- those that interact with Moira pin her with emotional range of a toothpick, and she’s just fine with that. It’s not so much her being completely adverse to bonding with another human being; it’s more that she’s in a situation where paranoia about people ready and waiting to screw her over is perfectly sound. Surviving her situation comes first, then she can try an awkward crack at the touchy-feely stuff. Until then Moira keeps her thoughts and emotions extremely close to the chest, only letting them slip for her benefit.
Enemies -- being a Herald may be a position that can be overlooked and underestimated -- Moira works to reinforce that -- but it's a high position nonetheless, and there are others gunning for it... or maybe some simply want her out, period. Not everyone was happy when her husband brought such an outsider into the fold and used his influence to maneuver her into high standing. Alive, his power within the organization kept her virtually untouchable; dead, that protection is gone and there are those in the ranks waiting to exploit it. But Moira hasn’t been willing to roll over and say ‘die’ for their sakes. Her survival instinct is sharp and her position as Herald, particularly one skilled at the job, has given her as much help as it has trouble.
Bound -- the Hellfire Club isn’t some cozy weekend book club that can be joined and dropped at ease. It’s an organization that commands her life, and breaking unfavourably might just forfeit it. In fact, there may not even be such thing as a ‘favourable’ break from the Hellfire Club, especially for one current entrenched in the position as Herald. With that title she’s bound to serve in her duties until the current Prince’s reign ends or until her death -- Moira’s avoiding the hell out of risking the second option. (There’s not even any guarantee that being freed from her Herald duties would get her free from the Club.) She can try to use tact and finesse to get out of things, but in the end when her superiors say ‘jump!’ she asks ‘how high?’.
Cautious -- Moira doesn’t let her position and desires overwhelm her or steal the show. Right now? She doesn’t even invite those guys to the party. Instead they’re locked away in their little box whilt eht rest of her mind either observes and analyzes everything or calculates the risks of every possible action. This usually comes down to a “Nope, don’t do it.” when she’s decisions that might -- might -- get her free. Moira doesn’t initiate opportunities toward fulfilling her desire, instead she waits for one to reveal itself. ...And she knows she might be waiting a long, long time.
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mericlecure) wrote2011-05-19 05:13 pm
