Abraxas App

[divinityfrompain]

OOC INFORMATION

Player Name: Dee
Are you over 18?: Yes
Contact: theskyisnew on plurk
Other Characters in Game: (J)Istredd, Jesper Fahey

IC INFORMATION

Character Name: Julia Wicker
Canon: The Magicians
Canon Point: 3x13 "Will You Play With Me?" shortly after leaving the group
Age: 26-27ish
Background: Wiki

Trigger Warning: Before the app starts, I want to warn that rape, pregnancy through rape, abortion, and a variety of lack of consent choices are all mentioned below. This is a huge part of Julia's character and it can't be jumped around. I will be certain to have an opt-out and inform people of this before it is ever discussed in game. She really has no interest in sharing this widely and her trauma wouldn't be thrown around willy nilly, but I'll be careful with these aspects.

Arrival Scenario: Solvunn

Suitability: Julia's story surrounds wanting to find a community of her own and losing it over and over. She wanted to go to the magic school Brakebills, and in other timelines she always did, but this timeline she was rejected. She couldn't convince them to let her in and find that magic community. So she found two covens on the outside, and lost both, one violently. She tried to make friends with Quentin's group and also lost them. She tried to find her place in the fantasy world Fillory and burned that bridge too. She was starting to find it in the gods before coming here.

So Julia is searching for a place to feel supported and part of something, and the Summoned and Solvunn seem like good examples of that. She is also learning how to be a goddess and doing good and will dive into parts of this world for that reason. She will be interested in meeting other gods if possible in the future, curious about how it works in this world, because she was about to bond with another one (Iris) and lost that chance. She was a part of a religious coven hoping to pray to the goddess Persephone, and she believed in that, so maybe finding her place in a similar situation will be good for her. I am very interested in her eventually reaching out with the gods here and getting involved in that aspect of Solvunn.

Julia is a healer and a nature magic user, both qualities that could be helpful to Solvunn and to the game at large. She's always been a savant at magic but was untrained officially due to being rejected from Brakebills so she'll look for teaching from others and excited to do that. A part of her may think this is part of her goddess training, that finding out how magic works here will help her world get magic back, as it's currently not usable there.

She will look to bond with the Singularity on a spiritual level as her divine power connects with the wellspring/source of magic in her world, but she'll mostly just gel that way. As I mentioned in my request for a third, I think it would make sense for her to get that connection with plot engagement time, but I intend to lean more into the divine (gods) side of things for her eventually.

Powers: Julia has two major sets of powers at this juncture:

Julia is a magician although she is considered a Hedge Witch rather than a 'true' magician due to lack of formal education in magic. Hedge Witches have to put together magical spells by finding them in the wild or by testing out magic on their own which can be dangerous. Their spells are more creative and unique since they don't have strict book requirements when learning.

She eventually became so skilled in magic as to be considered as good as any trained one. This is due to her specialization of Meta-Composition which is the understanding of the theories of magic and being able to reshape them to her mind, which is how she can use it better than most other Hedges.

Magic that Julia has done openly includes: elemental magic, teleportation of objects, mental magic/manipulation, and creating magical objects and fixing them.

More importantly, Julia currently has divine magic and she is now considered a goddess in her world. Julia was gifted divine power (a "seed") by Persephone as a thank you for not killing her son Reynard. She took his god power and gave it to Julia. She has the following abilities:

She can use magic without needing her hands or reciting spells. This is because she does not pull her magic from the Wellspring as all other magicians do, but it is from her internal power now. She can share her magical energy with other people, allowing them to temporarily tap into her power.

She can 'sense' and 'hear' prayers of other people and also feel their pain or emotions, knowing when they need her. All divine beings can hear the prayers of people and part of their job is to answer those. Their power is flexible enough that they usually can do what is needed, that is why they answer it. Due to her close connection to her friends, she often showed up or teleported to where they were when they needed her. Gods can teleport anywhere they want.

For Abraxas: Teleportation will be nerfed outside of the allowances already given. Julia will only be able to hear the prayers/connect to their feelings of other Summoned when given permission directly by the players. I would like some day for her to hear prayers of locals, but I will approach the mods through plot engagement after she's been involved with the game for a while.

Julia has near invulnerability and health. She is not immortal, gods can and do die in her world, and it's just more difficult to harm them. She can regenerate her health, although she is not skilled at this yet and it will be much slower in Abraxas. She will be long-lived and only die from intentional violence. Other beings can tell right away that she is not human, her divine power is practically radiating out of her most of the time. Non-humans notice all the time in the show that she's something else.

Like other deities, she can "freeze" people and hold them still, unable to move outside of their eyes. She may have other abilities that are specific to Reynard but has intentionally not leaned into his trickster magic.

Julia's major abilities revealed as a goddess include advanced healing and nature manipulation. She was able to heal Kady from an overdose, curing severe scars, migraines, and blindness due to past injury. She cannot bring anyone back from the dead. Her nature manipulation led to her bringing back a burned-down forest to life and more alive and lush than before. This earned her the goddess title of "Our Lady of the Tree."

She is particularly strong with earth-centric magic but it is implied she can do most life-based magic, like energy transference (mentioned above as sharing her power), and 'healing' rotten things to life.

These skills will be removed entirely for Abraxas:

Time Manipulation: Julia has been able to freeze time itself, which she used to stop an elf from dying in front of her, holding them frozen until she could heal them. She will not be capable of this in Abraxas.

World Creation: Iris informed her that at full power Julia would be able to create entire new worlds exactly as she wants to. They can also create 'pocket dimensions,' smaller worlds only for them, but she won't be able to.

PERSONALITY QUESTIONS

Describe an important event in your character's life and how it impacted them. This is where the trigger warning above begin.

The more important event in Julia's life is when she and her coven summon who they think is the goddess Persephone but it is actually her violent son Reynard. He kills all of Julia's friends and when she tried to save her friend Kady instead of run, he violently raped her. This led Julia on a revenge path, determined to destroy him for what he did, and she betrayed the others (including her best friend Quentin) by partnering with their mortal enemy the Beast to use his power. She lost her Shade by aborting Reynard's divine child, the Shade being the 'soul' or the emotional center of a person, so she stopped feeling empathy.

For a time, Julia went down a dark path because of that, reckless and ruthless and destructive. But she showed her true colors when she chose to bring Alice's Shade back instead of her own, and by showing mercy for Reynard when his mother begged for it. Despite looking down the pistol at the creature who destroyed her entire life, she chose to spare him, and in doing so got back her Shade.

Eventually, that act of compassion for Persephone led to her being given Reynard's god powers and on the path she is now to become a goddess better than all of the others that let her (and humanity) down. While she was angry at first for being forced to have anything of him again, and she tried to give it away, she decided to keep it for herself and to do good with it. She wanted to heal and to rebuild worlds.

Does your character have a moral code, or other set of standards they try to live by?

Julia's been all over the place morally and because of that she tends to firmly sit in the moral gray. After her rejection from Brakebills and obsession with using magic no matter what the cost, she worked for a time with some pretty nasty Hedge Witches who didn't mind doing bad things to get more magic. This included her helping them break into the mind of her childhood best friend Quentin and torturing him mentally by making him think he was in an insane asylum, despite knowing about his depression. She wanted to hurt him for hurting her, which becomes a pattern with Julia, being a hurt person who starts to hurt others in a vicious cycle.

Julia has killed, she's betrayed, she's partnered with evil people, and she has made many mistakes while also living with some pretty heavy consequences. Without her Shade, she was able to do evil without any qualms, but even then some part of Julia understood she was doing the wrong thing. She has worked exceptionally hard to try and recover from the damage done to her, from the "black spot" Reynard put on her, and try to get back to who she was once.

Julia used to believe in loyalty, love, friendship, hard work, and magic above all things. While she's quite skeptical and has a world-class bullshit meter, for a time she found a community of positive witches who made her feel a part of something bigger. And that turned out poorly, but in a way she's always been seeking it again. Julia's sense of morality vaguely settles into the community, such as what is good for everyone, what is the way in which you can give back.

But she doesn't believe in any pure 'good' or 'evil.' (With one exception: Reynard.) She thinks everyone's complicated and while she's trying to live the better version of herself, it doesn't mean it's easy, or that she won't slip again.

What quality or qualities do they admire most?

Kindness is a key quality that Julia respects in others. She can be a negative person and suspicious of others, especially post Brakebills-rejection, but she's drawn to people who are gentle and kind and usually have come from a bad place themselves. She fell for Richard, an older witch, who was sweet to her while she was in rehab (pretend) and helped show her that a coven could be a supportive and loving environment. He'd been through some dark times and came through it, and she was drawn to that bright light. Her best friend Quentin is one of the kindest people she knows, so forgiving and willing to admit to his faults, even if she hurt him.

She is also drawn to people who know what they want, who have a sort of confidence and settled in their being. Julia thought she knew what she wanted but finding out about magic changed all of that, and she still isn't certain of her path. She's struggling with her ascent as a goddess because she wants to do good, but it's hard to know how to accomplish that or what to do with the next fork in the road. People who are good at guiding others and fulfill a sort of 'teacher' role appeal to her. She ended on her path a little bit because she never had positive role models in her life or through Brakebills, so she does admire people who can be that for others.

Do they have a part of themselves they dislike?

Julia isn't proud of what she did on her revenge path against Reynard. Losing her Shade and her moral center, destroying things around her, betraying her friends, and letting the Beast live all are things she feels remorse for. But that trauma isn't the only time that Julia showed her anger and resentment could overtake her.

As mentioned above, Julia mentally tortured Quentin to get access to Brakebills but she also did it out of anger for him abandoning her and refusing to help her with Brakebills. She did feel guilty and try to save him, but she has that quick temper and sense of righteous injustice and can make impulsive decisions because of it. She hates when something is unfair or she feels like she's being treated disrespectfully.

There are times when her anger is helpful rather than hurtful, like when she tries to protect Kady against Reynard, and her sharp control over the Beast, but most of the time she's working against her own streak of bitterness. She knows that about herself and she's trying to take steps to be better, but she definitely dislikes that part of herself. And hopes that it's true she can change.

What is their sign, and why? The Tower. Julia by her very existence in the current timeline of the Magicians is chaos. In 39/40 timelines, her being at Brakebills led to the same dark end, but the change to reject her from Brakebills and force her to become a powerful Hedge on her own is what eventually led to the end of the Beast. Julia absolutely refuses to accept people telling her who she is or what she can't do, so she challenges the status quo at every opportunity. She was both a rebel and a person on the path of vengeance so the Tower is very apt. She should not have been able to become a goddess so she creates change simply by existing.

SAMPLES

Samples: My TL on TDM with enough comments