Enelen of the Stave

BASIC INFO​

APPEARANCE​

Enelen is unfortunately cursed with a bit of a baby face. At only 5'6" and with a thin build, he's frequently mistaken for being sixteen or so, and generally passes for younger than he is. He's the kind of guy who is going to end up thirty years old and still getting carded because people don't believe he's 18 yet. He's fairly frail and has pretty much no muscle definition. Unfortunately enough, he's the type to get winded going up too many stairs. His eyes are grey, and his hair is black and kept fairly short, wearing it straight so it falls just above his shoulders. Since there's no uniform for the university, he wears his old school uniform, which clashes with the Starlight Academy one, but is also what he's used to.

He is always with his staff. He doesn't go anywhere without it. It's so important to his magic that he won't so much as check the door without it. He also wears a small brown pin in the shape of a diamond on his collar. It's always visible, and is intended to be a way for people from his world to recognize each other if he ever meets them again.​

PERSONALITY​

Most people in Enelen's situation would be bitter and jaded. He's seen his world die, and he's unlikely to ever meet the people he considers family ever again. Despite this, Enelen is actually eager. He's always been known for his curiosity and desire to understand the world, and all of a sudden he has a whole new world with a thousand new things to learn about. He is (or perhaps was would be a better term) upset, but he's had three years to come to terms with it. Three years of goodbyes, of preparing himself for it. Now that it's come and gone, he's more than ready to move past it and start his life anew. He's eager and curious, desperate to find out everything he possibly can about the new world. He's doing his best to keep his mind open, despite how different things are, but almost everything seems to lead back to a comparison of how his world did things.

He's a very intellectual sort of person, and deals poorly with confrontation. He understands only the most basic of magical self defense, and his combat skills could be compared to that of a child. Faced with danger, he's going to do his best to flee before everything else. He doesn't like fighting, and deals poorly when faced with any sort of real danger. When it comes to fight or flight, he'll pick flight every time. He'd be offended if you called it cowardice though, if only because he feels it's the correct choice. Little can be gained by fighting, and he prefers to think of himself as making the best possible decision.

Enelen is quite friendly, especially to those he feels are interested in similar academic tastes. He's always optimistic and upbeat, so while he can be a bit awkward and single minded socially he can generally bulldoze through it without much effort. Most people are willing to look past a bit of awkwardness if the person being awkward is enthusiastic enough.​

POWERS​

Enelen's only true power is his magic, which is a completely normal and standard thing in his home. In the world he came from, absolutely everyone had magic, so to him it doesn't even count as a power at all, even if it is to the people of the Manta Carlos Islands.

Being raised as he was in a society with magic, most things that people would do via basic technology, he does with magic. While an ordinary person might whip out a camera, he instead uses magic to create what amount to photographs (although they work slightly differently, and certainly aren't as uniform as photos). Where other people might wash dishes with a dishwasher, he uses magic. Pretty much everything he does is magic to some extent, and it means he'd be entirely useless without it. If he ever lost his magic, he'd be... well, completely lost. He can't function without it, and it's one of the reasons he keeps his staff with him everywhere he goes.

His home world had four primarily schools of magic, and Enelen, as his name implies, belongs to the school that uses staves. His specific ones tend to be large staffs about as long as he is tall, and each one is ornately carved. The upside of having a staff is that it allows him to spread out his mana usage - storing up his mana within whatever core he's chosen for that particular staff, and letting his own mana recuperate slowly over time. It means it takes more for him to be exhausted, and removes a lot of the danger and risk associated with using lots of mana. The downside is the sheer amount of time and effort it takes. His staff takes near constant upkeep, and it always has to be with him. Using magic without holding his staff is significantly more exhausting than it would be otherwise, and his staff needs to be completely remade at least yearly. Physically, it also means his 'best shape' is still going to be slightly worse than someone else's, because any time he's awake he's providing mana to his staff.

He has a basic mastery of what most people would consider the basics of magic. Beyond the day to day, he has the combat skills that anyone over the age of twelve has in his world. He can send a percussive blast, he can create a magic shield, and he can armor himself physically. None of these are particularly useful or even good. The blast is only as effective as a solid punch, his magic shield is only going to protect him against low level spells, and he could get the same effect from his magic armor as by wearing kevlar clothing. While many mages in his world are capable of amazing feats of both defensive and offensive magic, such as erupting volcanoes, surviving almost anything, and stopping someone's heart with only a few words, Enelen is not. He's barely competent at the three combat magic spells he knows, and he's never actually had to use them outside of his school's self defense class.

Most people have anywhere from two to a dozen specialties in their magic, and Enelen has three. The first is the most practical of the lot, and that's magic primarily focused on learning. As a scholar first and foremost, he has a whole variety of spells he uses to enhance that. He has spells to help him work out how magic is being done. He has spells to help him record everything he interacts with automatically (in, no less, a magic book). He has spells that will make neat little notes of everything the book overhears, saving him from having to make notes. Perhaps most powerfully, he has what amounts to a magical wikipedia, containing all knowledge he's ever encountered. By using a quick spell on a book, all knowledge contained within it will be added to his own magic book. He can also use any blank book to access this knowledge, complete with neat and easy indexing.

His second talent is one that was extremely useful in his home world, but significantly less useful on the Manta Carlos Islands: He can undo magic. While enchantments were a necessary part of day to day life, so was undoing them, and it became a specialty of his to be able to unwind magic, breaking it down bit by bit. It's certainly not a fast process, but he can slowly work through most enchantments, although people rarely want him to.

His third talent is the most useful, but also the most basic - he can teleport. By casting a small spell, he can set up up to a dozen teleportation targets. It leaves no mark, and as long as nothing is in the circle he generates when he first sets it at the time he wants to teleport, he can come and go freely between them without having to burn through very much mana at all. He can't teleport to a place he hasn't already marked.​

BIOGRAPHY​

The world Enelen was born on was not the world of the Manta Carlos Islands. In his world, the islands exist, but they remain alone and empty, unwanted due to their comparatively small size. His world ran parallel to earth for most of the world's history. Evolution worked the same way, the dinosaurs still died out, and humans evolved slowly over time. The most fundamental difference occurred almost two million years ago, when homo sapiens evolved. While physically almost identical to humans in the world of the Manta Carlos Islands, these humans were instead fully capable of harnessing mana, or life force, in order to perform magic.

Over time, their ability to use magic evolved, shifting from more simple displays to more complex ones. They formed countries and warred with each other, creating greater and grander magics. Intense debate focused on exactly how magic should be harnessed, and eventually divided into four schools and their various sub schools, to which most people owe their allegiance. The greatest mages were inevitably those closest to each school, and those children who found themselves without family - whether abandoned, orphaned, or simply unwanted - were adopted by the schools, taking their name and serving as the teachers within them.

Over the past three hundred years, as the population continued to grow and they found more and more ways to improve their magic, the amount of mana required grew exponentially. Some magic required such an excess of mana that any mage performing the spell would be drained to nothing, leaving them little more than a soulless husk. First, humanity went to animals - using them as a mana source before slaughtering them for food. They found better and more efficient ways to store mana, and while the creation of mana was seen as the ultimate go, no progress was made. Mana created itself in living things, and aside from making more living things, there was no way to create mana to power things.

And soon, even animals became too little. Increasingly grand and complex magic required equally grand amounts of mana. So they turned to the earth itself, which pulsed with the lava in its core, and generated mana for reasons unknown. The greatest minds of the century declared that the earth itself was a living thing, and so humans began to use it for their greatest spells.

That was the world Enelen was born into, and the one he lived in for most of his life. He never knew his biological parents, and never had any desire to seek them out. It simply wasn't done, because the school was his family. Those who were also given to the school were his family, his brothers and sisters. He was raised in the largest campus of the School of Staves, practicing his magic from a young age. He was to be a scholar, to advance the study of magic and develop his own spells. He learned to unwind spells, and to improve his learning, and life was everything he could have expected it to be.

And then, as was inevitable, things fell apart. The grand mage of the School of Chants called a summit of all the grand mages, and when the four had gathered, he announced the truth to them, and then to the world: The world did not regenerate mana. Almost overnight, mana-intensive projects shuttered, suddenly with the realization that the world below them would run out. Every school united for the first time in history, suddenly driven by the fear that they were too late.

They were. By the time they'd done a comprehensive summary of the world, they realized that, at most, they had only five years left before the earth itself died beneath their feet. While some insisted they would be just fine without the earth's mana, concerning signs that had been brushed off were suddenly seen in a new light. Crops grew slower and weaker. The seasons were more extreme. Storms were more intense. Earthquakes more frequent.

For three years, plan after plan was considered and then discarded, until finally all four schools agreed. They would go elsewhere. Not to another planet, but instead to other worlds, worlds parallel to their own. But with no way to truly scry across dimensions, it was a dangerous and risky plan. They could not all go together. If they did, it was likely that they would land on a dead world, and perish all at once, ending their world entirely. Instead, they would go out bit by bit, scattering to a thousand dimensions to join the inhabitants of those worlds. To go towards magic in hopes of finding those like themselves. While no one said it, the secondary mission was clear: To ensure that any world they came from would not make their same mistake.

There would be no question that Enelen would go. While some chose to stay, to try and maintain life on their dying world, he had always been eager and curious, the perfect candidate to go. Among those in his school, a symbol was designed - a small brown diamond pin, to be worn wherever they went in case they might end up on the same world. The other schools followed suit with their own pins, always a diamond but each in a different color.

For three years, they mourned and said their goodbyes, and at last, the greatest magic the world had ever seen was done, emptying the world's mana until it was nothing but a husk, and sending a million young mages out to a hundred thousand worlds.​

EXTRA INFO​