M.A.G.I.: Urban Fantasy - Office Adventures

• What is your name?: $ini$ter, real name unknown save for company records. Sidney Argus

• Sex/Gender?: Male

• Age?: 101

• What Species are you?: European Mountain Dragon—A once-proud race of majestic reptilian loan sharks that made a good business model out of snatching up nobleman’s daughters for collateral, generations of inbreeding with said captives have reduced the breed to a shell of their former physical power. EM Ds able to shed their human forms to transform into the lizard form of myth have become the exception rather than the rule, though the traditional money-hoarding attitudes and behaviors have persisted over time.

• What department do you work for?: Finance, obvs

• What do you look like?: Despite living for (just!) over a century, $ini$ter still looks and acts like a thirty-year old dipshit. Lanky, and wiry, his bleach-blond hair is always spiked up, he’s incredibly pale for no particularly good reason, and he’s usually wearing something just on the cusp of too fancy for the situation. He has a gem-filled grill that he wears occasionally, both for looks and the ancestral taste.

• Tell us about yourself!: Bombastic, sarcastic, and abrasive to a fault, $ini$ter firmly believes that bling is the thing. Growing up during the Great Depression means that he’s no stranger to disreputable things to get his gem fix—however, his incredible mathematical aptitude and his wizardry with number balancing make him an invaluable asset. He also firmly believes in the cause of human-monster harmony, if only because he believes the worst kind of discrimination is the kind that affects him. Despite not being person of the year, $ini$ter's concern with immediate pleasures and aversion to blood makes him mostly harmless. And despite being fascinated with the trappings of the wealthy, he is still a low-level punk at heart, and is secretly insecure about the fact. After a… falling out with his last employers, and a subsequent brief stint on a counterfeit binge, $ini$ter hooked up with M.A.G.I. to keep his nose clean and his head down. How well he is doing either is up for debate.

• European Mountain Dragon facts!
  • While it isn’t a hard-and-fast rule, generally speaking spending money makes an EMD feel ill. Naturally, they only do it when absolutely necessary, making them great for managing your finances. Making money has the opposite effect. This is a psychosomatic reaction, so it isn’t confined to any one currency. The exception to this is spending money on things that make one seem more wealthy, such as expensive jewelry and clothing.

  • Spending counterfeit money, on the other hand, provides a contact high, and is a bigger drug problem in the EMD community than any traditional narcotic.

  • Traditional EM Ds used to eat raw gemstone, and it was considered quite the delicacy. Inbreeding has given most EM Ds a traditional human digestive system, but that doesn’t stop the practice as much as you’d think.

  • Despite his magpie-like obsession with gems, $ini$ter has a hard-and-fast rule about stealing. Monetary transactions are sacrosanct in his mind, and he’ll always find some way to pay for something that he really wants. This is partially out of the faintly alien mindset of the EMD race, and partly because the last time he broke that rule, he ended up… paying for it anyway.

  • On a related note, due to a brief experience at the bottom of the Hudson River, $ini$ter is capable of taking a more ferocious dragon form, topping out at the size of a small bus with a uniform gold sheen across his scales. As this is highly impractical for basically any situation save for near-death experiences, $ini$ter takes medication to suppress it.^note ie he swallows diamond earrings. It’s a homeopathic thing.

  • While $ini$ter isn’t physically superior to most humans, he is more or less completely fireproof. So whenever he smokes, he does it to look cool.

  • $ini$ter’s parents, currently living in an undisclosed mining town, took part in the California Gold Rush. They have never, ever let him forget it.

• What skills do you possess?: Along with all that dragon stuff, $ini$ter is really good with numbers. For him, every dollar is like his best friend, so if you steal any of it, you can bet that he’s going to hunt your ass down. He can do this due to the dragon ability to sniff out precious metals, and while this helps to track down loose change, dollars are outside his purview.
  • Having grown up during the great depression, $ini$ter did most of his work money laundering and accounting for mobsters. In addition to making him a decent scrapper, the work made him exceptionally knowledgeable about criminal practices and some sections of the underworld, and can be counted on to know about things like guns, the telltale signs of a mob hit, and what it’s like to get the snot kicked out of you and tossed in the river with stolen gold bars strapped to your ankles.

edited 11th Apr '16 11:38:38 AM by Uncandescent

Okay, I think I finally finished my sheet!

Hey, I'm interested. I think I'll go for a rich, Brilliant, but Lazy Deadpan Snarker scientist who always thinks that he is Surrounded by Idiots. I'm thinking of making him a Drow or Vampire, or perhaps a weakened and bound Eldritch Abomination.

edited 11th Apr '16 4:40:07 AM by ThisGuy481

• What is your name?: Johnny Roberts.
• Sex/Gender?: Male.
• Age?: 9 (or at least he looks 9. Real age is unknown even to him.)
• What Species are you?: Black-eyed child.
• What department do you work for?: Legal.
• What do you look like?: He appears as a young child with somewhat pale skin and dark brown hair. As the name of his species would suggest, his eyes are jet black. Not just his pupils, his entire eyes are black. He wears sunglasses to hide his eyes. A bit of a habit from the old days, but he likes to keep them on regardless.
• Tell us about yourself!: Johnny, like other black-eyed children, has a bit of a foggy backstory. But what he's willing to share is the following. Back in the 60's, Johnny and others of his kind would try to trick home owning humans to let them in. If they succeeded, there tended to be one less homeowner in the world. However, when they were able to walk freely again back in 1986, he realized his old games weren't going to fly and decided to put his shockingly mature ass through law school. After a while, he ended up here as a lawyer. As for personality, he and his "friends" were never really expressive. He tends to act very calm and hardly ever acts out. Most of the time, he sounds like he's planning something but he realy isn't, he's just thinking about cases he's working on and the sort.

• Johnny is, as you can guess with his profession, very good in the courtroom.
• He is also really smart for his (supposed) age, and knows about a lot of things you wouldn't expect a kid to know. Of course, he isn't a kid.
• Because his eyes are quite a bit... eh... different from humans, he isn't affected by the dark and can easily see.
• A paper football champion.

edited 11th Apr '16 5:05:17 AM by gregnes2000

Wow, this looks like a lot of fun! Would a Beholder character be all right, or would they not be integrated well enough into modern society at this point?

If it is allowed, I think I have an idea for a character... ^^

Gnoop, Emilia, Elendriel, and Johnny are all accepted.

I really like Sidney, but there are so many things that I want to do with dragons, that I don't want your character's version of them to be the end-all. So, I would ask that you would please change it so that he is a very specific dragon breed. I like all the ideas you came up with though. Just have to change that. If you do that, you're accepted.

And sorry, Beholder is a bit too much.

No problem, $ini$ter is now the proud scion of the European Mountain Dragon race.

Do we have enough people for a Discussion Thread, you think?

(Since the this world is vague, I'm going to be somewhat liberal and deviate from normal Mind Flayer stuff from Dn D - for example, instead of being added to an Elder Brain when they die, an Illithid instead is merely permanently banished from the universe it is in at the time of death, and returns to the Far Realm, and they are not all hermaphrodites. Basically, they are more typical Humanoid Abominations than, well, Mind Flayers.)

What is your name?: Nyara Lythelm

Sex/Gender?: Male

Age?: Young Adult (I have no clue how Mind Flayers age :P)

What Species are you?: Illithid

What department do you work for?: Research and Development

What do you look like?: A blue squid sitting on top of a lab coat, basically. Illithids look same-y most of the time.

Tell us about yourself!: A sarcastic, laid-back and brilliant, even if very lazy, Illithid, he has had a rather cushion-y, relaxed life, which has left him honorable for a Mind Flayer, if a bit bratty. When magic had become unveiled and people actually knew that an Illithid was anything other than an op-as-hell tabletop game enemy, an Illithid of all things applying for a job at MAGI in research was quite the treat.

It is known that he was raised as part of a high Illithid caste, and always aspired to be a scientist - a career even more reputable for in Illithid society than it is in most human societies. Ilithids are a curious bunch - one of the original reasons brains would become part of their natural diet. Ever since he was a larva he would hack and program computers as well. His life... was surprisingly uneventful. There weren't many establishing moments in his life up until now, and he barely even did anything until he got a job at MAGI.

He assimilated easily into human culture, often enjoying their cuisines, and their internet. Beignets, Jelly-Filled Donuts, and Burritos were among various foods he enjoyed - mostly due to the fact that they were, like his usual diet - juicy substances (buttery dough, jelly, or meat soaked in hot sauce) within a very soft, malleable shell that is in turn covered in another substance.

Of course, he was considering joining a smaller. more scientifically specialized group, but his diet was the source of controversy in many companies, causing him to eventually decide that MAGI was the only corporation willing (read: bonkers) enough to hire him. The people who hired him would likely never see such a combination of disappointment and amazement. A common cause of disappearance of donuts, soda, hamburgers and specimen brains

What skills do you possess?: He is a skilled programmer and biologist, with a taste for theoretical physics. Typical Illithid stuff - Brain Extraction, Telepathy, Mind Rape, and, semi-uniquely, super usually not using all of this awesome stuff ever skills.

edited 12th Apr '16 12:01:45 AM by ThisGuy481

Understood then! I'll just do my backup character idea instead. It should be up later today. ^^

@This Guy

Well, Saturn is busy at the moment, so I'm gonna give my 2 cents here:

I like the squid idea, it'll set up so many tentacle jokes as well as filling the minority quota But you should probably change the 'extreme intelligence' thing to something else, a character is only as intelligent as its writer, if you instead change it to a subject you're most familiar with or most obsessed with right now instead, it'll show a lot more intelligence in your character than tell. Same goes for the "but he was still quite a skilled scientist, so they kept him about" thing, correct me if Im wrong but Im pretty sure the backstory's only for what he do BEFORE he join MAGI. If Im reading it wrong and it meant that he works for other companies before, what did he DO that is so called so good that they kept him about.

Also, while I understand that one does not simply understand where an eldritch Abomination comes from and that part alone makes them interesting and scary, in the context of this RP, you should expand out what he did in the recent past, as well as why did he join MAGI instead of other science oriented companies.

K. Did a bit of editing.

edited 11th Apr '16 8:44:35 PM by ThisGuy481

If you're having trouble figuring out what age he should be, maybe check out a Dn D creature manual?

This looks like fun.

What is your name?: Laithe Dhuibh

Sex/Gender?: Female

Age?: Older than she looks, she appears to be a young adult. As selkies are immortal, she doesn't appear to age.

What Species are you?: Selkie

What department do you work for?: Legal

What do you look like?: She appears to be human when not wearing her seal skin, and is a quite pretty 18yr old-ish. She tends to wear floral frocks and dresses. She has brown hair and sea-green eyes. In her seal form, she looks like a seal.

Tell us about yourself!: Born to a selkie mother and a abusive human father, she was raised human, before her mother found her seal skin. Her mother then fled to the sea, taking her with her. This happened when she was seven. Originally out of place among the selkies, she grew to love her new home and family. When the Masquerade broke, she and some other selkies joined human society, proud in what they were. She hides her skin in a chest in her home, and must return to the sea occasionally.

She is quite quiet, but wears bright colours as a form of expression. Though she won't talk about her past much, but will divulge it if it will help someone else. She works well under pressure, but if pushed too far will reveal another side of herself. She is generally friendly, and though she will not interact with other people much, she will actively seek them out if there are none around.

What skills do you possess? She, within the legal department is a legal researcher, staying out of the court room, but finding evidence and legal precedents for ongoing cases. She capable of finding incredibly exact pieces of information, and can store plenty of information.

She is an excellent swimmer, with or without her seal skin, and capable of breathing underwater in either form. In her seal form she can talk to other sea creatures.

It is seemingly impossible to get her drunk, not due to her supernatural heritage, but for unknown reasons. She is also a good cook, but refuses to eat other sea mammals. She specialises in preparing fish, as it is her favourite food. She is good at cards, and at board games.

edited 13th Apr '16 12:37:12 AM by secretlyasuperhero

@ ltBGob

I think he did that intentionally, you know, for spookiness. But whatevs, that's not a problem.

@This Guy

While you did a good job explaining why he didn't join other companies, I think you missed the point with the intelligence thing, specifically, "a character is only as intelligent as its writer.". It is a very general perspective thing, one could be a master at programming, yet be very shitty at chemistry, therefore only a genius in programming and not the other. A better thing to do is to say which of the science fields your character's specialized in; chemistry, physics, human biology, take your pick, it'll help flesh your character out because it shows interest and passion.

Also, don't neglect the recent past. Like I said, I understand that it's to set him up as a spooky eldritch abomination, what one does in the past adds to the experience of the person and experiences determines the personality. It is much more dynamic than just telling us your character's personality. It also allow yourself some leg room in creativity. Start out by explaining why an eldritch abomination like him started to have a craving for donuts and why is he interested in science and such.

edited 11th Apr '16 11:34:32 PM by sgtpendulum

So, any idea when we might be starting this RP?

• What is your name: Yukimura Mirai (Online handle Vi Xen)
• Sex/Gender?: Female
• Age: Are you sure she went to university?
• What Species are you: Kitsune.
• What department do you work for: R&D, also does IT due to her specilization.
• What do you look like: Something along the lines of this◊
• Tell us about yourself: Mirai is a rather young Kitsune, but something of a prodigy when it comes to electronics... That is when you can actually get her to focus on her job, most of the time she gets easily distracted, either by building some form of killbot, program, or just playing video games on the company computers.
• What skills do you possess:
  • Robotics and Computers, any thing that runs on electronics really.
  • Programing.
  • Likes to pretty things up.
  • Quite a bit of a gamer.
  • Able to project glamour/illusion

• Name: Kou Asagami
• Gender: Female
• Age: 451
• Species: Demi-Human (Oni-blooded type)
• Department: Intervention and Intelligence
• Appearance: Don't clip your nails, or talons, or claws, at the desk.◊
• Description:
  • Kou is a reserved woman suffering from cultural inertia. An ex-member of an organization dedicated to guarding Humanity from creatures thought to be beyond our understanding and upholding the masquerade, the failure of her life's mission weighed heavily on her.
  • What do you do when confronted with forty-eight years' worth of evidence that your life mission is pointless? What do you do when your colleague, people you entrusted your life to, turned to terrorism? When your entire world turned upside down, where do you turns to?
  • During her last face-to-face session, her therapist encouraged her to keep active. Get a job. Stop lounging in her ancestral manor, watching garbage variety show and feeling sorry for herself. So, here she is. In a distant land, filled with different people.
  • Despite her serious appearance, she possesses a rather dark sense of humor and surprising lack of tidiness. She's also kinda sorta specieist and distrustful of supernatural creatures, though she tries to keep this under wraps. While incredibly brave – as one tends to be when making a lifestyle choice of combatting things that stood over 9 feet tall while armed with a knife – she exhibits a rather immature pettiness and vindictive streak.

• Skills:
  • Demon Hunter: An expert hunter of Youkai, an umbrella terms describing demons native to Japan. She possesses excellent knowledge about such creatures, though mostly tuned toward hostile confrontations. Beyond that, her combat capability is good, both in traditional close ranged weapon and firearms.
  • Stealth: She possesses excellent situational awareness, complementing her stealth training. Despite installing new security camera, allegations that she was the thief who stole the breakroom sandwich remains unproven.
    • Ninja: Actually, you know what? She's a goddamn ninja. So yeah, that's what she can do. Ninja stuff. Don't bother calling her that, though, or she'd spend 15 minutes lecturing you on the nuances and incredible difference between being a Demon-Hunter-Magic-Assassin and a Ninja.
  • Oni-Blooded: A property gained by those that killed many demon over their lifetime. The Hunter becoming the Hunted. In a modern context, she has long lifespan, enhanced physical attributes and reflexes and smells like death to Youkai. Death is a very unattractive smell, though she never felt the need to impresses them in a dine-n-date before, so this has never been an issue. She does not know if supernatural creatures not native to Japan have any particular olfactory opinion toward her.
  • Amateur Cook: She is learning the culinary arts at a rapid rate. Her secret guilty pleasures are fatty junk food and ice creams.

edited 13th Apr '16 1:59:17 PM by pblades

Your link isn't working.

Thanks. Better now, I think.

That legitimately made me crack up, thank you.

edited 12th Apr '16 10:06:54 PM by Uncandescent

• What is your name?: Valros "Valentine" Brightborn (nee Valros Brightborn Longtooth Shortnose Bugeye)
• Sex/Gender?: Agender.
• Age?: Just right. (Gnomish equivalent to 25.)
• What Species are you?: Gnome.
• What department do you work for?: Public relations or, as Valentine often calls it, 'Mission Impossible'.
• What do you look like?: Valentine does their best to always be a presentable image. Their long jet black hair, which cover the pointy ear tips, is pulled into a slim ponytail, running halfway down their back. Their beady eyes are often hidden by designer shades. Their wardrobe is comprised of suits and formal dress wear, working in mostly black and white to compliment their dark olive complexion. They are tall for a gnome, which roughly equates to about 3'7", despite insisting that it is closer to 3'7.5".
• Tell us about yourself!: Valros Brightborn Longtooth Shortnose Bugeye was born into a house with two loving parents and a bunch of asshole siblings who took far too much joy in the outdated naming ceremonies. Valros found the jeering over their appearance a heavy weight early on in life and quickly set about doing everything in their power to rectify this, whether it was through potions, magic, or whatever snake venom someone peddled. It took many a year to learn the good from the false, but Valros, as a gnome, had plenty of those. They learned and 'perfected' their appearance. In honour of this accomplishment, Valros discarded the names not passed on by their own parents. It was about this time that the masquerade fell. Eager to interact with a people as marvelous as humans, Valros plunged head first into some of the first interactions between magical beings and humans, namely as a travel agent with a company that, unfortunately, tied itself to an outdated concept of gnome as a mascot. They quickly grew disillusioned with this, as humans appeared to admire height as some sort of attractive trait, the backwater hicks, as well as constantly showing a disdain and outright fear of magic. However, Valros still wanted to be on the cutting edge of the interesting part of the world, and thus found themselves joining MAGI as a 'Public Relations Officer'. To say that Valros, or Valentine as they now went by, was several leagues over their head in this nonsense would be quite the understatement.
• What skills do you possess? (Include not only magical abilities, knowledge and training or expertise, but also other unimportant skills.):
  • "I Woke Up Like This": Like any competent gnome, Valentine is a practiced illusionist. These illusions are mostly focused on themselves, due to their vain nature, but can be extended to the world around them.
  • "I'm a Consummate Professional, I'll Have You Know": While most gnomes are predisposed to relish in trickery and shenanigans, Valentine has trained themselves to acknowledge that the rest of the races they have to interact with on a day-to-day basis have no sense of humour and expect stoic seriousness with only the odd vaguely amusing anecdote as the sole source of levity. They hate it but that's just the way of the world and they have adapted thusly. Given a time and place, however, and Valentine will happily engage in some stereotypical gnome prankery.
  • "Right, I Haven't Seen That Con Before": Being of a race that does not suffer the same aging issue that humans and some magical races have, Valentine has seen their fair share of cons, especially those that relate to physical appearance. As such, they have a good eye for spotting cons and noticing any imperfections in appearance alterations, magical or mundane in origin.
  • "Let Me Tell You...": In an attempt to be liked while still figuring out how to 'perfect' their appearance, Valentine developed a gift of the gab, becoming skilled in the art of storytelling. Having traveled quite a bit of the world and met many strange and interesting creatures (and some non-humans too!), Valentine has an arsenal of anecdotes to share to try and warm people up to them.
  • "Size Doesn't Matter": Au contraire. Being of a smaller size, while having its challenges, opens up many benefits, such as an increased ability to hide and sneak, slip through gaps, and (with a bit of illusionary assistance) get "Kid's Eat Free!" meals.

edited 12th Apr '16 10:28:58 PM by EviIPaladin

Valentine, Kou, and Nyara are all accepted.

secretlyasuperhero, you forgot your character's name, and you had quite a few formatting issues, but accepted.

Imca, could you expand your character's past? Other than that, accepted.

And here is the discussion board

edited 12th Apr '16 10:39:46 PM by Saturn

I'm interested in this, but i don't really have that much time rn so I'll post a sheet later

Also, do you have an estimate on when the game would start?

• Name: Gerald Doughtry
• Sex: Male
• Age: 46
• Species: Human
• Department: Legal, specifically as an Internal Affiars Manager who often does work on the side as a Human Resources Consultant. Any other would die of exhaustion when trying to do the paperwork of two men at once, but not this man.
• Appearance: Harold is a overweight, aging man who apparently never seemed to care much about personal appearance. His hair is mostly located on his mutton chop-esque moustache, the small remainder is a very well slicked comb-over of similarly faded-redheadness. "Rotund" would be a good description of his body type, and "plodding" would be a good descriptor of how he walks. He dresses interestingly: standard white shirt and khaki pants, along with bright red suspenders and green-rimmed eyeglasses. He only seems to have two ties to wear, one puke green and one red. He wears the former most often. Very sweaty.
• Personality: Not the most quick-witted in conversation, but he's got the right stuff to succeed in this company. Most of his sentences will be peppered with a few "uhh"s or "hmm"s, and his speech is just about as slow as his walking speed. He's very work-minded, and reluctant to fraternize beyond what he sees as the minimal amount required. Partially because he believes that it's everyone's job to raise morale, partially because he has trouble relating to anyone. There are times that he becomes as sharp as a knife and hyper-competent in speech, but those usually require a massive transgression of company policy to trigger. Remarkably unflappable, he often stares down the most angry of fired employees in the face, even when they're 4 feet taller than him and breath fire.
• Backstory: Born in Georgia, his life story is generally a mundane one. Did well in school, went to college as a business major, eventually starting straight into the human resources department of another company from which he eventually migrated to M.A.G.I. Partially because of higher pay, an excuse to move to the slightly less humid land of California, and because he saw this new world of magical beings as a challenge unlike any other. Quickly rising through the ranks due to his incredible clerical skill, he is quite possibly the Leonardo da Vinci of office workers.
• Abilities:
  • Incredible Recall: His memory is perfect. There is not a single meeting, presentation, form, seminar or team huddle from the last 28 years of experience that he can't remember crystal-clearly. Because of this and his rigid dedication to correctly filing paperwork, he is probably the single most efficient non-mechanical entity in the entire company.
  • Regular Sharpshooter: He knows how to fire a shotgun, and how to use it well.
  • Perfect Bureaucrat: If there is one thing that has managed to keep him in his position despite years of advancement and magically-influenced personnel able to naturally outperform the average human, it's that he's cognizant of every single policy in the entire company, even for unrelated departments and those that he shouldn't be aware of. His recall allows him to make use of this fountain of knowledge and regularly inform people of slight policy transgressions that nobody in general follows.
  • Fast Food Fantasy: His major hobby is in attempting to recreate the ingredients and meals of major restaurant chains, and he's gotten good at it over the years. He's kept mum on whether or not he knows the 11 Secret Herbs and Spices.
  • Hobby Menagerie: There are a couple of other minor hobbies that he's kept up with, like stamp collecting. There is one hobby that he's made a few subtle references too, only hinting that it is so dark and unacceptable that it would forever ruin his position if word got out about it. Watercooler talk often makes speculation on what kind of depraved shit he's into when there's nothing else to discuss, but so far no leads have been made.

Gerald is accepted!

And with that. Sign-ups are CLOSED