Cassandra Phillias
Name: Cassandra Phillias, aka "The Illusionist"
Race: Human (rounded ears)
Gender: Female
Age: 20
Height: 5'6"
Weight: 119 lbs
Sexuality: Ambiguous
Hair: Dark brown, shoulder length hair. She occasionally allows it to grow past her shoulders, but only lets it grow a few inches before cutting it.
Eyes: Hazel
Skin: Light, pale.
Build: Her body appears unnaturally thin, a side effect of her constant spell usage, which saps a considerable amount nutrients from her body when her mana begins to grow low
Family: She has never known her real parents. The only family she has ever known were the other students at the magic academy and her master.
Birthplace: (Unfortunately, I haven’t yet come up with this yet. Cassandra is the main character of one of my original stories, but I haven’t yet decided the name of the country or the town where she was born.)
Appearance: Many who see Cassandra for the first time often think she has some sort of serious health problem because of her weight and skin color. Physically, she is remarkably unimpressive, seeming malnourished to the point of anorexia and seeming sickly pale. Both of these are side effects of her excessive mana usage.
Clothing:When not performing or using her alter ego as a means of garnering attention, Cassandra usually sports a fairly plain brown robe instead of the more common pants and shirt because she enjoys the looseness of it. However, when she is performing, the outfit she has always appeared in is in her black robe accompanied by a black and white mask, revealing on her eyes through two thin slits.
Personality: Her isolation at the Magic Academy left her without much verbal interaction with anyone other than her instructors. However, as she spent more time traveling through towns and meeting new people, she gradually adapted a more outgoing personality. By most who talk to her now, she has been described as witty, cocky, courageous and compassionate. Seen in a more negative light, she can be arrogant, overconfident and reckless, sometimes needlessly putting others in danger through her actions.
History: Cassandra (or Cass, as she prefers to be called) was born to a family of peasants in the mountainous area near the edge of the country. Her birth was seen more as a damning than a blessing, however, as the couple already had four other children and scarcely had enough money to support the mouths they already had. Despite this, she was kept and raised normally, though not with the enthusiasm her parents expressed with the other children. Cass never knew why her parents didn’t pay as much attention to each other, so she always just thought she had done something wrong.
Two tough years later, the local mage school was looking for members. It didn’t matter how old you were, you just had to be skilled enough to get in. Initially, her father attempted to get in as a way to pull the family out of the gutter (since if you got in, the academy moved your family to better housing closer to the academy). He was quickly rejected, however, as he demonstrated no magical ability whatsoever. He seemed heartbroken at the prospect of spending the rest of his existence in the rotting **hole he called a life.
Just as the recruiter was about to leave, his papers flew from his hands into the eager hands of Cass…who happened to be sitting across the room. She had used telekinesis. It was a basic form of magic yes, but no infant had ever been able to do magic. He was immediately interested and requested mission to take Cassandra to the academy where she could be trained, but her parents gave a very tentative no. They had spent all their life caring and nurturing the other children, and now the one they had neglected was being chosen for something none of them had ever dreamed of. They were defending their damaged pride.
Not intent on leaving without the child, however, the recruiter offered to buy her. When they asked the price (which did shock him that they would accept), he offered more than a hefty sum: ten thousand gold coins. That was more money than they had made in their life and probably ever would make. Greedily, they took it and immediately forgot about their child. They were gone the next day, never to be heard from again. Some claim they’ve seen the family on some island out in the middle of the ocean, living on their own, away from the society that had treated them like dirt.
Cassandra was immediately taken to the academy and raised for several years before she began her training. The recruiter, who she later learned was James Waylay, one of the instructors at the academy. Ironically, his best field was the one that she had demonstrated a basic understanding of as an infant: telekinesis. When she finally came of age and was permitted access into the school proper, she was assigned to him, most likely at his behest.
She spent most of her life at the academy before she completed her training at age seventeen. After that, she was told to leave and refine her own abilities. No mage ever became great by listening to old men with beards give lectures. She had to work on her own spells, find her own strengths, and find out what she could accomplish with her power. This was also a way of the academy to keep students from complaining about being trapped or missing their families. From this point on, they were free to do whatever they wanted and return to the school only if they wished to.
She spent three years after that traveling across the country, perfecting her magic abilities and searching for her parents (unaware they were in fact in the middle of the sea). During this time, she used her magic to raise money to fund the journey, taking up the persona of The Illusionist, an expert spell caster whose signature trick is an illusion spell, creating copies of herself, much to the amazement of those less educated in the magical arts.
Since then, she was offered a position as a teacher back at the academy because of her refinement of the teleportation spell. Originally, the spell required you to deconstruct matter and move it to another place, a process that took the vast majority of the user's power. She came up with a simpler process, something she refers to as hyper-telekinesis. By simply moving an object (or oneself) at a fast enough rater, it provides a fairly powerful substitute to actual teleportation.
Recently, in the aftermath of one of her more profitable performances, Cassandra befriended the runaway, Karen Akana, a strange winged girl who has been accused of breaking into and making off with the valuables of a rich noble. Her own doubts towards the rules of society compelled the mage to help the woman instead of turning her in. Unfortunately, this has also put her on the same wanted list as Karen for aiding and abetting a fugitive. Her entire future now rests on the true identity of this woman. With luck, that future won’t be in a prison cell.
Strengths: While Cass is skilled with all forms of magic, her favorite has quickly become earth manipulation, also known as Geomancy. This is the area she has put her of her effort into. Unfortunately, it is also one of the most exhausting specialties. All Geomancy spells cost a significantly larger portion of mana than other spells because of the power required to manipulate earth.
Weaknesses: While Cassandra is a fairly skilled mage, she still needs to be able to think to cast her spells. If the area she is in is extremely noisy, uncomfortable, or otherwise distracting, her spells will often be weakened or she won’t be able to cast them at all. While she has mostly overcome the weakness to noise--a necessary task since she often performs in crowds that spend most of their time cheering--she has become more susceptible to temperature changes.
Equipment: As a magic user, her clothes are often light and thin and her supplies minimal in order to reduce weight and allow for easier spell casting. However, there is one item she keeps on her person at all times: her magic stave. While it is a relatively plain weapon, it is nonetheless capable of powerfully channeling many of her spells and reducing the mana required for each one. Carved from oak when she was nine, it hardly ever leaves her person. When separated from it for long periods of time, she even appears to grow paranoid and neurotic.