Charlatan
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Contents
Backstory
Upcoming
Powers
- Eldritch Energy: With the help of the Amulet of Aratron (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 blindingly constant explosion of light shards, 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 mystical knowledge Charlatan can use the magical energies to blast her foes, bind them, banish them, make them fly off in explosions of light, or summon unstable sigils that will detonate near enemies, and cast magic circles to increase the flow of Eldritch energies or to ritually manifest into being massive golems made out of magical iron. She can also heal herself and allies, almost as proficiently as Vanity herself.
- Aura: A side effect of the channeling of vast amounts of Eldritch energies is that it engulfs and permates her entire being, and emanates from her like a majestic aura to equally permeate all her teammates who don't stray too far from her. This greatly enhances all aspects of every individual thusly touched by the magic. Every faculty, physical and mental, thus becomes magnified, amplified.
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. Now, her channeling massive amounts of Eldritch energies greatly enhances her constitution, endurance and both her physical and mental strength, which does make her qualify as superhuman, but she is still far from invulnerable and can be hurt by physical, energetic, elemental and even magical means.
- 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.
- Interruptions: A lot of Charlatan's powers require a certain level of concentration as well as some time to properly cast her various magic spells, and during that time she can be interrupted, which is not only rude but has the frustrating effect of cancelling the casting of said spells and magic powers.
- 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
- 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.
- 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 Amulet of Aratron. 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.
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.
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 Amulet of Aratron (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.
