40

The Ultimate

Charlatan

Mistress of the Arcane

All Smoke and Mirrors

Freeform Hexslinger

Player:

Affiliations

[[File:|center|250 px]]

Super Group

Rank

· Other Affiliations ·

UNITY

Identity

Real Name

Charlene Louise Casey

Aliases

Charlatan

Birthdate

January 18

Birthplace

West Chester, PA

Citizenship

American

Residence

Millennium City, MI

Headquarters

Occupation

Personal Assistant/Stage Magician

Legal Status

Registered Superheroine

Marital Status

Single

· Known Relatives ·

Charles Douglas "Charlie" Casey (father), Marlene Beth Casey (née Fuller, mother), Charles "Chuck" Casey Jr. (older brother), Douglas "Dougie" Casey (younger brother), Louise Garmon a.k.a. Lucinda Louisa Morgan (grandmother), Amanda Alicia Morgan (aunt) and Miranda Maria Morgan (younger cousin).

Physical Traits

Species

Human

Sub-Type

Sorceress

Manufacturer

Parents

Model

Daughter

Ethnicity

Caucasian

Gender

Female

Apparent Age

26

Height

5'7"

Weight

118 lbs

Body Type

Lean

Hair

Brown

Eyes

Brown

Skin

Fair

· Distinguishing Features ·

Wears Glasses

Powers & Abilities

· Known Powers ·

Arcane Sorcery

· Equipment ·

Eldritch Amulet

· Other Abilities ·

Mysticism

Backstory

Destiny can be a powerful force sometimes, and this is how Charlene Casey became the superheroine known as Charlatan in not just one multiversal version of Earth, but in at least two distinct ones, thus having two separate origin stories!

In both of these continuities, Charlene Louise Casey is the daughter of Charles Douglas "Charlie" Casey who is himself the son of Carl Daniel Casey and the enigmatic Louise Garmon (no known middle name), whom Carl had met on a trip to Vibora Bay and with whom he had desperately fallen in love. Together hey had moved back to Carl's native Pennsylvania, had never gotten married--despite several proposals by Carl--but nonetheless produced a child, Charlie. Louise left both her new family and the state of Pennsylvania a few short years later, when her son was still but a small child.

This mysterious Louise Garmon, a very young woman of whom nothing was known as if she had never existed prior to her meeting with Carl, was in reality none other than Lucinda Louisa Morgan, of the Morgan clan of Wessex Witches, an influent and affluent family of Arcane Sorceresses from "the Old Country" (England) who had been established in Vibora Bay almost since the city's founding, centuries ago. Lucinda's mother, Miranda Martina Morgan, was the fabled superheroine known as the Moonstone Protectress whose very existence was itself shrouded in mystery. Though a loving mother, she was also very stern and demanding, and young Lucinda had rebelled against her, adopted an alias and ran away with the first handsome young man who could whisk her away. She eventually got wiser, saw the error of her ways and came back to Vibora Bay, having to leave behind her beloved son Charlie. Lucinda would later have a second child with another man, this time a daughter who was named Amanda.

Carl Casey soon met another woman with whom he also fell in love and who gladly accepted his marriage proposal, and they raised young Charlie together, in the knowledge that he was Louise's son. In this caring family Charlie grew up to become a fine young man. He got a job at an insurance company and he married Marlene Beth Fuller, a young woman who was working at the same company as a secretary. The young couple had three children together, two boys and a girl, the latter being of course Charlene Casey.

Charlie's younger half-sister Amanda would, like him, also have a daughter, Miranda Maria Morgan, who inherited not only her great-grandmother's first name but also her powers and future role as clan protectress (and who would become--at least in one universe--the superheroine simply called Moonstone). At a very young age she exhibited Rifter powers, the ability to open portals to other places, other worlds, dimensions, realms and planes of existence. While Amanda pursued a career in modeling, using glamours and prosperity spells, young Miranda, under Lucinda's tutelage, developed her own far more impressive magical powers. On one occasion, Miranda inadvertently opened a portal to a particularly dangerous place and innocently stepped through it. Lucinda had to go after her to try and get her back. In one universe, they made it back safe and sound a few days later and Amanda, terrified at the prospect of this happening again and losing her only daughter for good made her mother bind Miranda's powers and use a forgetting spell so little Miranda wouldn't do this again until she was older. In another universe, neither Miranda nor Lucinda ever made it back, which crushed Amanda, who quit modeling and became a recluse.

As a result, in one universe, Charles never saw nor heard from his birth mother ever again, and in another he found her again and the two reconnected later in life.

In the version where Charles couldn't find anything about the woman he only knew as Louise Garmon--because she was no longer on that Earth, and presumed dead--Charlene never learned of her connection to the Morgan family of Witches nor of her magical heritage and she went to university to major in Communication Studies. She wanted to end up working as a TV Producer or something similar, and when a friend got her an interview for a job as a personal assistant at a modeling agency, she figured she could do that for a while in order to make connections at various media outlets. She was first assigned to rising star Nadine Valentine, who was an entitled, total diva who treated her--and everyone else--miserably. Still, Charlene did an admirable job and when Nadine's agent Sylvia Seibel shifted her attention to the agency's newest rising star Vanessa Phair, eventually she reassigned Charlene to her. Vanessa was becoming more and more famous and under the influence of her best friend--the model and aspiring actress Jessica Pearl--she got into partying and doing drugs more and more. On her 23rd birthday, Vanessa overdosed on a new designer drug. Ever-watchful, Charlene promptly called 911 and the paramedics arrived soon after she had just died from the OD, and were successful in resuscitating her. She nevertheless slipped into a coma that lasted weeks and during which she ascended to the Celestial Realms and met the Angel Malakite who rescued her by imbuing her with his own angelic essence. When she came back to consciousness Vanessa retained that essence which gave her magical powers and eventually she became the superheroine known as Vanity.

Charlene stayed as her personal assistant and before long found herself the target of a kidnapping at the hands of Nadine who had since also gained superpowers--of the toxic kind--and who had become the villainess Envy. Vanity tracked them down and confronted Envy, who as a means of escape killed Charlene, thus forcing Vanity to remain with her in order to revive her. Vanessa felt enormous guilt at this and decided to teach Charlene basic magical self-defense techniques in case a situation would arise where she couldn't get to her in time. Vanity would also acquire a powerful Eldritch Amulet at the end of one of her more rocambolesque adventures and she gave it to Charlene who was struggling with the practical aspects of her magical training. That amulet allowed her to channel all the power she could ever need and her mastery of the theoretical aspects of the Arcane Arts elevated her to superhuman-like status. Vanessa asked Trudy Wong, an internationally renowned Asian American fashion designer and personal friend to design a costume for Charlene, and she came up with the idea to combine a stage magician's sparkly formal attire with the more revealing outfit of the lovely assistant. Thus the Charlene of this universe would become the mystical superheroine known as Charlatan!

But meanwhile, in the multiversal version of Earth where a now almost middle-aged Charlie finally reconnected with his birth mother--since Lucinda had managed to come back through the portal with young Miranda--the two reestablished contact and she went back to Pennsylvania to see him again and meet his family. Since within the Morgan clan of Witches, magical powers are passed on from mother to daughter, and rarely ever manifest in sons--who are also few and far between--Lucinda was curious about whether Charlene would have inherited any powers. At the time, Charlene had just finished High School, and Lucinda invited her to come spend the summer at her Vibora Bay mansion. There Charlene met her younger cousin Miranda, whom she babysat on several occasions when Lucinda would attend secret Trismegistus Council meetings.

One time Charlene stumbled in the Morgan mansion's Timeless Arcane Library, a strange place not quite entirely in our physical universe, where time moves very differently indeed. One day equals one year in there, but while spending time in there a person would still age as if they were on the outside, and would also experience hunger and fatigue at the same rate as if outside in the real world. In other words, one real-world hour would be like about two weeks in the Library, and if someone can go five hours without feeling hungry again after a meal, then in the Library that person could stay in there for roughly ten weeks without having to eat nor sleep! When Charlene found her way into the Arcane Library she spent nearly half an hour in there before Lucinda found her, and so she spent about a week rummaging around mystical volumes of forbidden lore and old spellbooks. During her stay, Lucinda realized that though Charlene had some potential for theoretical magic she had not manifested any particularly strong aptitude for practical magic, which came as a slight disappointment at the same time as somewhat of a relief, given the dangers her younger granddaughter had already faced.

But spending a week in the Library was an experience which had a profound impact on Charlene, and she became a little bit obsessed with the subject. When she moved to Millennium City to go to university she tried to find people with an interest in magic, any kind of magic. She saw a perfomer in a small nightclub who went by the stage name The Great Alonzo; there was something peculiar about him, and Charlene could feel it. She approached Alonzo--whose real name turned out to be Alexander Ian Kelley--and the two quickly became friends, and almost as quickly, lovers. He easily convinced her to become his "lovely assistant" and taught her his tricks, which as she suspected involved some real magic mixed in with the prestidigitation. Not being exceptionally gifted at practical magic either, Alonzo made use of sundry enchanted items, the search for and acquisition of which took a lot of his time. One day, in his search for more powerful mystical artifacts, he came across a formidable Eldritch Amulet. This object imbued with great potency allowed him to create astonishing illusions which unfortunately ended up attracting the wrong kind of attention.

Members of the cult-like villainous group DEMON targeted him after word of his new spectacular feats reached their ear. They tried to get him to reveal the location of the amulet but he wouldn't give it up and they killed him. Charlene later found his body and evidence of DEMON's presence and she decided to seek vengeance. She retrieved the Eldritch Amulet, took her lover's sparkly blue tuxedo jacket, bowtie and top hat which she wore with her skimpy black assistant's outfit to create her new heroic persona. And just like that, the Charlene of this other universe would also become the mystical superheroine known as Charlatan!

(It is to be noted that in this universe, Charlene never applied for the personal assistant job at the modeling agency and never met either Nadine or Vanessa, and as it turns out, in the other version of reality her presence had been a mitigating or sobering influence on Vanessa's wilder ways. So in this version Vanessa ODed long before her 23rd birthday, and no one was there to call the paramedics in time. Vanessa died before even achieving any lasting fame, was never elevated to the Celestial Realms, never met Malakite and thus never came back to life to become the Radiant Sorceress known as Vanity.)

Powers

• Eldritch Energy: With the help of the Eldritch Amulet (usually hidden inside her theatrically high, sparkly top hat) Charlatan is capable of channeling immense quantities of Eldritch energies, which form the power behind her Sorcery. These ancient energies manifest as a violet-blue palpable light in which mystical runes can be magically inscribed to rewrite the very fabric of reality itself. Charlatan can use this energy to defy gravity and fly in a swirl of floating orbs of light, or immerse herself in the darkness between dimensions to move about unseen and unheard.
• Arcane Sorcery: The ancient and incredibly sophisticated art of manipulating Eldritch energies to rewrite and reshape reality in a myriad of ways. With her access to vast amounts of powerful magical energies which Charlatan can channel through the mystical power of the pentagram she can decimate her foes with a single-focused, unforgiving beam of soul-crushing destruction or explode in a myriad of magic missiles to take out multiple enemies at once. She can also cast magic circles to increase the potency of the Eldritch energies to even more devastating effect and to ritually manifest into being massive golems made out of magical iron.

Skills

• Mysticism: Charlene spent countless hours reading obscure tomes of forgotten arcane lore, and her scholarliness here has definitely paid off. Charlatan is very knowledgeable about almost everything magical and mystical.
• Herbalism & Organic Alchemy: Charlene learned the old ways of potion making, and has taken up the practice of making decoctions and tinctures, herbal and mineral potions of all kinds to affect the human body and mind in various ways.
• Organizational Skills: Charlene is a very driven person, she's very methodical, and almost always has a plan for every contingency. If something needs to get done, Charlene will get it done.

Weaknesses

• Physical Weakness: Physically, Charlene is a very ordinary human woman with all the same limitations and frailties as most ordinary human women, perhaps even moreso given her lithe frame. She does have a higher resistance to magical energies than most people though.
• Mental Attacks: Charlatan is not immune to psionic attacks and manipulation either, but the Eldritch energies she draws into herself do make it more difficult for such attacks to succeed. Often perpetrators will experience a reverberation and a feeling of awe (awfulness and awesomeness simultaneously) at their probing thoughts encountering a barrage of ancient runic mysteries.
• Timidity: Charlene is not the most assertive person. Sure, if her job requires her to confront people in order to achieve her objectives, she'll find a way to do so, but that is more because she then feels imbued with the authority of her employer, and she won't hesitate to drop Vanessa's name to get things moving. But as a rule, in her personal life, she is not that confrontational, nor that self-confident. It's not that she has trouble believing in her own abilities, but rather that she fears others won't and that conveys an uncertainty which in the field of superheroics can often be problematic.

Annotated Tropes

Upcoming

Trivia

(Most of these facts are only specific to the Charlatan who exists in the same fictional universe as Vanity, since the alternate universe where she exists alongside Moonstone is a more recent creation.)

• Charlene's parents are Charles Douglas Casey and Marlene Beth Casey (née Fuller), respectively a Regional Agency Manager at Bestern National Insurance and a former secretary at the same company turned homemaker.
• Her first name was chosen because it combines elements of both her parents' names: Charles and Marlene.
• Her middle name is Louise. It was her paternal grandmother's first name, or so her father thought. It turns out Louise Garmon was an alias used by Lucinda Louisa Morgan.
• She is the proverbial middle child, and she still has issues stemming from the perceived parental neglect. She thinks she felt compelled to excel in school and do as much as she could in an effort to earn some form of positive reinforcement.
• Charlene's older brother Chuck was a star athlete in high school. He now lives in Scranton, married to a pre-school teacher and he works as a salesman for a company that sells and installs whirlpool bathtubs and hot tub spas.
• Charlene's younger brother Dougie is openly gay. He is currently working as a waiter in Los Angeles trying to make it as an actor. A few years ago he achieved a short-lived and somewhat shameful fame when a clip of his atrociously bad singing audition for American Icon went viral.
• Charlene was a bit of an overachiever in high school; she was of course a straight A student but also managed to work on the school paper, be in the Audio-Visual Club, the Debate Team as well as the Mathletes Team and the Girls' Badminton and Volleyball Teams.
• Charlene did a lot of babysitting throughout her teen years. She started at age 13 and stopped at 18 after she finished high school and moved away for college. She often thinks of her current employment as a kind of babysitting job, although she would never admit that to Vanessa.
• Charlene graduated from Columbia University with a B.A. magna cum laude in Communication Studies.
• Charlene has a cat she calls Buttons, though his full name is Sir Reginald Benedict Buttons IV.
• Charlene's favorite film is Mulholland Dr.
• Despite having always self-identified as straight, Charlene does have a bit of a crush on Vanessa, which she tries to hide as much as possible. And she doesn't really wish that something would happen either, but she is definitely a little bit bi-curious for Vanessa, who kind of suspects it but finds it more amusing than noteworthy.
• When Vanessa resided primarily in Beverly Hills, in her pre-Vanity party girl days, Charlene dated a production assistant named Noah whom she had met on the set of the "Foxbat" movie, where Vanessa had been cast in a cameo role as Herself. For a while she thought he was "the one" and secretly hoped for a marriage proposal down the line, but it wasn't meant to be. The relationship ended on a sour note.
• It was Charlene who promptly made the 911 call that got the paramedics to Vanessa's mansion just in time to resuscitate her when she overdosed on Cloud 9 at her 23rd birthday party.
• When Vanessa chose to move to Millenium City to pursue her superheroic career, Charlene had no choice but to follow again. She found herself a nice little basement apartment in City Center, on the edge of Downtown, only a couple blocks away from Vanessa's apartment building.
• Charlene of course has full access to Vanessa's apartment building and her own key to Vanessa's luxurious penthouse loft. She too has become good friends with the building's doorman, Ben Carlson, a former costumed crime-fighter.
• It was Charlene who leaked to the media the inappropriate pictures and messages that were sexted to Vanessa by Carlos Danger, the mayoral candidate backed by her then boyfriend Sherman Adair.
• Whenever Vanity spent a good deal of time in Vibora Bay on assignment to eradicate the various supernatural threats plaguing the Queen City, Charlene spent her time there mostly rummaging through the innumerable ancient tomes of arcane lore she found in Vanessa's library. All this study borne out of curiosity and boredom helped her a great deal when Vanessa decided to teach her how to wield mystical energies for the purposes of self-defense.
• Charlene was very hesitant about making the leap to becoming a superheroine herself, and required a lot of coaxing on the part of Vanessa.
• Charlene chose her heroic name out of a feeling of being somewhat of a fraud, seeing as the true source of her powers is the Eldritch Amulet. There was definitely a hint of self-deprecation in that choice of name, which to her mind echoed Vanessa's own choice of Vanity, a sobriquet most people would think of as being a fault rather than a quality.
• Charlatan's original costume was designed by internationally renowned Asian American designer Trudy Wong, at Vanessa's behest. The intention was to embody the idea of a stage magician as a kind of mystical charlatan, combined with the sexiness of a magician's assistant's outfit, which is a sort of reference to Charlene being Vanessa's personal assistant.
• As Charlatan, Charlene initially would have prefered to wear a mask, but since she needs to wear glasses (she's myopic but also has astigmatism, so contact lenses don't work too well for her) and wearing her glasses on top of a mask just looked rather silly and impractical. She figured that probably no one would recognize her in that getup anyway, and Vanessa has generously offered to extend to Charlene's family the same protection service that her own family benefits from, which is like a sort of private Secret Service akin to the one who protects former Presidents and their families.
• After Charlene started crime-fighting as Charlatan, Vanessa hired the same contractor who had "tricked out" her penthouse loft to do the same to Charlene's basement apartment, equipping it with high-tech computers and surveillance equipment and all manner of superheroic gadgets which Charlene has no clue what to do with. Vanessa refers to this process as "Pimp My Crib".
• Charlene was inducted into the Trismegistus Council when her knowledge and practical mastery of the Arcane Arts proved sufficient to the Council Elders.
• Through Project Hermes, Charlatan was enlisted in UNTIL to serve on occasion as a mystical consultant and field medic.

Allies

• Vanity: Of course, Vanessa Phair, Charlene's current employer and best friend, the very reason she became Charlatan. Vanity has taught Charlene the theoretical and practical basics of Sorcery, has granted her full access to her extensive library of mystical volumes, she greatly encouraged Charlene to put her new abilities toward crime-fighting, had her costume designed and made for her, had her apartment turned into a proper superhero hideout, and even accompanied her on her first outings as a fledgling superheroine and definitely kept a close eye from afar on her first few times doing it solo.

• Moonstone: In another universe, Charlene's cousin seven years younger, Miranda Morgan, the current Morgan clan protectress and superheroine in her own right. Charlene spent a whole summer in the Morgan family mansion in Vibora Bay after she finished High School, and she babysat young Miranda numerous times. Charlene, although older, still has a bit of an inferiority complex towards her cousin, since she feels she is the more powerful Sorceress and the true heiress of the Morgan clan. In reality Charlene is a far more powerful damage dealer--though much more fragile--and whilst both heroines use enchanted items, Charlatan's powers derive much more from her Amulet than Moonstone's derive from her many enchanted items.

More to Come

Foes

Upcoming

Character Genesis

Charlatan was born originally out of the fleshing out process of the backstory of another one of my characters, Vanity. I figured Vanessa being who she was would definitely need to have a personal assistant, and such a character would be very different from her, and could play an important--even if small--part of any story involving Vanity. Thus Charlene Casey was born.

At the time I had no plans whatsoever to ever create and level up a heroine based on what was essentially a background character, and in terms of RP, basically a NPC. But then in the process of conceptually developing my webcomic series I was planning to use her more in the upcoming stories, even have her be kidnapped and then killed (though only temporarily seeing as Vanity has the ability to resurrect the recently dead).

Then I started thinking what if Vanessa were to try and teach Charlene some magical self-defense techniques in the aftermath of that story, and what if she somehow became powerful enough to also become a superheroine in her own right? The seed was planted, I just had to do it! I decided to focus exclusively on the Arcane Sorcery powerset, having never done so before, and thus not using any Sorcery powers specific to the other three Sorcery powersets. But later it became painfully obvious that Aura of Arcane Clarity is not a passive used very often for a reason, because it basically sucks. So I resolved to do a full RetCon as soon as Charlatan would hit 40, to change it for Aura of Primal Majesty, thus making the build even closer to the Grimoire Archetype. I hadn't played a Grimoire-like character in a long time, and I was experiencing some serious nostalgia for my second ever CO character back when I first started playing as a silver member, which was needless to say a Grimoire. Charlatan's final build is somewhat close to that archetype, despite not trying to reproduce it faithfully in any way, which I guess is inevitable if you're going to design a Sorcery character, but it does feature certain departures from it.

(P.S.: The preceding was written long before the changes to the Sorcery Framework within the Champions Online game and as such is no longer accurate. I was since forced to RetCon Charlatan's entire build, and decided to go a different route, now basing it on the Hexslinger archetype which is more DPS oriented than Support.)

The name Charlatan came early in the development of the new character, but not immediately. After all I couldn't create the character ingame without having come up with the right name first, not unless I wanted to waste Zen later on a Rename Token! And I was very eager to start leveling my new character as soon as possible. So I was looking for names that would be somewhat magical and would fit Charlene's personality. I was having no luck coming up with anything good and then alliteration came to my aid, Charlene / Charlatan! Notions of a "Stage Magician" theme immediately came to mind, based on the idea that the first stage magicians were fraudulently presenting mystical feats produced with mere trickery. The concept for her main superheroic costume had to embody that and so I decided to go for a sexy mix of traditional stage magician's formal-looking yet flashy outfit and the skimpy outfit of the stage magician's female assistant.

Then came the difficult part of making sense of that name and theme in the context of a genuine sorceress. In other words, why would Charlene choose to call herself a charlatan when she was using real magic? That also resolved itself quite fast; Charlene had always been conceived as being a tad mousy and bashful, and when encouraged to use her new found talents she would most likely see herself as a fraud, someone only pretending to be a hero. I pushed that notion a bit further; Charlene was definitely smart enough to understand all the principles of magic, but couldn't for the life of her make it work in any way on her own. So Vanessa gave her a magical object, the Eldritch Amulet (which may be an important object in an upcoming webcomic story taking place before Charlene became Charlatan), a jewel worn on the forehead which allows the user to draw on immense amounts of Eldritch energies (the idea tying very neatly with the graphic look of the Legacy Aura of Arcane Clarity that Charlatan has, which matched at the time the actual passive I was using throughout the entire leveling process). So using a mystical device to access the magical energies she needs to actually practice her Sorcery would make her feel like she's somehow cheating, that her magical powers are somewhat fraudulent. And with that I had everything tied up in a neat little bow, and Charlatan was ready to spring into action!

RolePlay Hooks

• Vanity: You personally know Vanity? Or other members of Eternals, Inc? Charlene's professional and personal relationship with the supermodel/heroine could be a starting point.
• Trismegistus Council: In need of mystical expertise? Got a problem related to the supernatural, occult or plain old magic? Reach out to the Trismegistus Council, they might very well send Charlatan to help you through it!
• Project Hermes (UNTIL): Need a good field medic? Charlene's connection with UNTIL's Project Hermes makes her a suitable candidate to help any military unit or super team on the field of battle, no matter where it may be.

Theme Songs

• Charlatan's Theme: Eels - Flyswatter This strange yet catchy song somehow captures the essence of who Charlatan is as an out-of-place personal assistant turned superheroine.
• Close Call Theme: Screaming Trees - Nearly Lost You This song is all about how Charlene almost lost Vanessa on her 23rd birthday when she ODed, and also later how Vanity nearly lost Charlene when Envy kidnapped and killed her.