Apprentice

Pippin, Pere

Male

26

140lb

5'8"

Dark brown

A little too long and gone to waves, often pulled back with whatever cord or string was lying around

Olive

He wears glasses he doesn't need.

He knows asking questions is the best way to have a conversation, but his default is to share facts instead.

Careful with his hands. Never touches his face or any other exposed skin unconsciously.

Has fidgeted with his fountain pen until the ink gets everywhere, and will again.

Slouches, pulls in on himself, tries to be smaller as though afraid of taking up space.

To never return to the surface world

To learn the history and customs of magic; to exist in this realm without feeling like an outsider.

To find a purpose

His impatience with other people's lack of knowledge or aptitude probably has a lot to do with why he fears his own shortcomings.

You can't fail something you don't try at - a strong incentive, sometimes, not to try.

His goals are usually noble, but he has no compunctions about using underhanded tactics to achieve them. He's not much of a fighter, so when he can, he rigs the fights.

Archery, languages, cartography, guitar - there are a lot of skills he's picked up one rank in, so to speak, but few that he has pursued beyond that. He has picked up basic first-aid, nonmagical herbalism, and a keen eye for rock and mineral identification as side effects of his particular casting style.

Being trapped - physically, mentally, by walls or by habits

Failure. Incompetence. Letting people down.

There's probably some creature on the Isle of Lore he's tangled with that left a lasting phobia, but tbd.

December 2, 1992

He was a gifted child. Not a genius, a prodigy, the kind of flash-in-the-pan intellect that’s very good at navigating the american public school system but ill-prepared for the real world. Being good at memorization and test-taking and reasonably curious, although never interested enough in any one thing to become an expert, carried him right up through school and into ivy-league Brown University, where he majored in math because it seemed like a challenge and graduated a semester early, just to prove he could.

He loved college. In the petri dish of campus life, connections grew more quickly and spontaneously than any of the cities he had lived in growing up, and Peregrine found himself in a group of friends he considered himself truly close to for perhaps the first time in his life. He graduated with decent grades and a solid job offer and went right into his programming job, too excited by the prospect of something he could do and get paid for to wonder if he actually had any interest in doing it.

Three facts that suggest something of the Huerta family dynamic:

Martin is bilingual, but he never taught Peregrine Spanish, or even spoke it around him. The elder Huerta had an accent all his life and perceived it as a hindrance to his career, and he was afraid that, should his son learned a second language as a child, Peregrine would have the same problem.

Veronica enrolled Peregrine in Japanese classes through middle and high school. In her opinion, East Asian countries were the future of the tech industry and this would give her son a leg up.

Despite this, the only language besides English Peregrine achieved any fluency in is classical Latin, which he took through college.

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The elder Huertas would have been shocked if anyone ever told them they steered the course of their son's life too rigidly. Pippin never complained; if he had asked for something different, they would have given it. They bounded his path not with explicit demands but with implacable and unquestioned assumptions, especially once he entered school and demonstrated abilities in reading and math above his grade level. He was going to do well in school, get into a fancy college, major in science or engineering, and then go off into the world. He didn't have to do that, of course not. But no adult in his life so much as suggested he might do something else. It was not a matter of the presence of boundaries, but of the lack of cognitive alternatives.

The family moved around a lot as Peregrine grew up, but they were well-off and they usually lived in urban centers, where the likelihood of prejudice against a half-mexican kid was low; there was no innate reason for distance from his classmates and neighbors. By nature, though, Peregrine tends to be slow at making friends, and often the family moved on just as he was thawing to someone. He dated a few times, had one semi-serious relationship in high school and one in college, but these were things he fell into, not things he pursued. He never had a crush he didn't convince himself to have.

Most of the way through Peregrine's college years, Martin and Veronica Huerta quietly divorced. They didn't share the news with Peregrine until the papers had been signed. Martin began dating a family acquaintance, a single mother with two younger children, so soon after that Veronica suspected their affair had begun before the marriage ended; that soured what should have been an amiable separation. Veronica sought to arrest her descent into bitterness by plunging herself wholeheartedly into a new career, and Martin became deeply involved with his new family. Peregrine, while gladly not caught in the middle of things, did find himself without much incentive to go home on holidays.

Peregrine jumped from college into a decently paying programming job, and on paper the next four years were all good. He was living the Millenial dream: installed in his own apartment, getting good health insurance from his job, earning enough money to pay rent and dine out and travel when he could finagle the vacation time. His friends all drifted away and lost touch, his family were caught up in their own lives, but that was fixable, and hey, most people hate their jobs, at least his paid him well.

He likes to think he could have climbed out of the rut he'd fallen into, eventually, but instead he found an antique spyglass in a consignment store and was dragged forcibly out by the plans of the Goddess of Ruin. He was among the first of the humans to arrive on the Isle of Lore, and has been here honing his magical abilities for a two years, with a singlemindedness born of desperation: he never wants to return to that existence, that lifeless life in a dying world. However much he can't quite seem to make himself belong here, however dangerous his studies and surroundings, it's all worth it for sunsets and silence and wonder and a gloriously uncertain future.

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10

17

With an affinity to Sol and a particular specialization in spells of sight, knowledge, and revelation, Peregrine is what might classically be called a seer.

His casting style is alchemical, relying on pre-prepared potions, powders, salves, or specially treated items; many of the substances he ingests, inhales, or applies to his skin are toxic or poisonous, especially those he uses for spells outside his affinity. But as he’ll be quick to tell you, everything is poison - it only depends on the dose.

Brainstorming spells he might know:

Light: the only magical effect he can achieve without need for an alchemical catalyst, although conjured light is easier to control and maintain when he anchors it to something, and he usually carries several crystals for this purpose. With a properly prepared crystal as a focus, light can be summoned in a burst to blind or disorient (he always has at least one or two of these on hand in case of emergency), or can be modulated to pierce through fog, illusion, or magical darkness (he carries the crystals necessary for these more rarely - only if he expects to need the spell).

Enhanced senses: see across a broader range of the electromagnetic spectrum, including infrared, ultraviolet, or even radio waves or x-rays. A good way to see in the dark without summoning light, especially when humans or other creatures with heat signatures are present. The material components for this spell are eyedrops kept in a small crystal bottle.

Scrying: the viewing of far-off places using a precisely-brewed elixir in a bowl of glass and gold. In theory, scrying can be used to view anything the light touches, but in practice it is limited by the fact that the world is very large and a mage needs to know where to look; furthermore, any number of natural phenomenon or magical effects can hide a person or place from a scrying spell.

Spellsight: a borrowed Lune enchantment, this allows the user to view both constructed spells and the flow of magic itself for a short time. The material component is a potion too toxic to take more than once in a twenty-four-hour period, and has the side effect of making the consumer’s eyes glow silver for the duration of the effect (half an hour, give or take).

Seeking: find a specific object or person using a connection to another object or person. Requires a tea brewed of sundry herbs and rare reagents, as well as a small bit of the item being used as a connection.

Appraise: learn the material makeup of a thing. Draw a circle around the item to be appraised with a specially prepared chalk.

Truesight: become temporarily immune to illusions and invisibility. Runes painted around the eyes with alchemical pigments.

Prophecy: another borrowed lune spell that involves inhaling the smoke of toxic herbs to induce a dreamlike and often metaphorical vision of the future.

Soulgaze: this shows the truth of the nature of a person; however, it is couched in symbolism and metaphor (the target player, if they decide the spell succeeds, may choose to give only images without any explanation of what they mean). Using a particular pigment, trace a rune on skin - the forehead is best, but a hand or arm will usually work if trying to cast the spell discretely.