Antryg Windrose

P L A Y E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Your Name: Kira
OOC Journal: tinwateringcan
Under 18? If yes, what is your age?: No
Email + IM: swordwithasmile AT gmail ; I don't use IM but can be reached through gchat or private plurk at tinwateringcan
Characters Played at Ataraxion: None

C H A R A C T E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Name: Antryg Windrose
Canon: Barbara Hambly's Windrose Chronicles novels
Original or Alternate Universe: Original Universe
Canon Point: After returning to LA at the end of Dog Wizard.

Setting: Antryg is from a world where magic is and has always been real. Once it was ruled by wizard-kings, but six hundred years ago, an army composed of secular and Church forces defeated the Archmage and the council. The wizards brokered a deal: from that point on, they would no longer interfere in human affairs. In the current day, although magic still has power, most of the growing population of non-magical humanity doubts it is real at all.

In Antryg's home country, the Empire of Ferryth, the Church of the Sole God is a powerful force, and still implacably opposed to the use of magic, which they believe to be an inherently evil and corrupting power. The church's Inquisition is a feared entity that acts to track down wizards who don't hold to their oaths of non-interference. The Wizard's Council keeps to itself, and those who are born to power but unwilling to take the Council oaths of noninterference either scrape by on half-guessed scraps of knowledge or join the Church as part of its cadre of wizards whose souls are considered redeemed by their submission to Church authority. Despite the dominance of the church, an older polytheistic religion friendly to wizards still has a minority presence in the Empire.

The Empire of Ferryth is on the verge of the Industrial Revolution, with factories beginning to spring up everywhere, and popular rebellion is an ongoing threat in the further reaches. The Emperor holds supreme political and military power, untempered by any elective or hereditary legislative bodies.

Antryg's world is part of a multiverse, lying close by Earth in an interdimensional matrix known as the Void. Some wizards have the power to open gates into the Void, allowing them to travel from one world to another, and Antryg has used this power to travel back and forth between his own world and 1980s Southern California.

History: Antryg was born into a large, poor peasant family living near lands held by the rogue wizard Suraklin, who took him as soon as he was old enough for his magic to manifest. Suraklin trained him and alternated between kindness and abuse until Antryg was willing to do nearly anything from a combination of love and fear of the old wizard. He helped Suraklin perform dark magic -- the creation of monstrous creatures, the sacrifice of children, and more -- until he could no longer bear to help and fled.

Suraklin was defeated by the Emperor and Archmage working together, imprisoned, and executed. Antryg was found by the Archmage years later, hiding in a monastery, still terrified, and convinced that Suraklin was alive and seeking him through his dreams. The Archmage took him in, welcoming the boy into his own family and teaching him Council magic, and Antryg found a home in the Council's stronghold. Antryg blossomed there, and was, at thirty, the youngest ever to be elected to the Council himself. He lasted three years before his Council rank was revoked for meddling in a series of riots in the southern reaches of the Empire.

Then, three years later, he compounded the error by helping to defend the people of Mellidane against the Emperor's forces when they marched to brutally quell a rebellion. He was arrested and sentenced to death by torture, but the Archmage argued for his life, and Antryg's sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in the Silent Tower, a prison wrapped in spells that rendered him unable to use his magic.

Antryg spent seven years in the Silent Tower, until strange spells of magical and emotional deadness began to spread over the land and gates through the Void opened unexpectedly. He realized that his lifelong fear that Suraklin was alive and hunting him was not a delusion, but the truth: Suraklin had found a way to take over other bodies, possessing first the Emperor, and then the Archmage. With the help of a computer programmer from California named Joanna and a young soldier who worked for the Wizards' Council, he uncovered Suraklin's plan to transfer his consciousness from his latest human body into a computer stolen from Earth, using a combination of technology and magic to ensure his immortality and draining power from both Earth and Antryg's universe to fuel the computer forever.

Unfortunately, Suraklin in the Archmage's body managed to convince Joanna that Antryg was the true host of Suraklin's consciousness, planning to use her to program the computer. Suraklin left the Archmage's body for his co-conspirator's in California and Joanna betrayed Antryg to the Inquisition. Antryg killed the Archmage, who had been left mindless and catatonic with the departure of Suraklin's personality, out of mercy. He was caught red-handed at the site of the murder, returned to the Silent Tower and tortured into a full confession.

After signing the confession, Antryg faked having been psychologically broken by the torture in order to cover his preparations for a desperate escape attempt. He succeeded in getting out of the Silent Tower, where he met Joanna, who had realized Suraklin's true identity when he took over the body of her colleague Gary and made preparations to return and help Antryg defeat him.

They managed to discover Suraklin's hideaway and destroy his computer after he had transferred his mind into it, but the forces of the Prince Regent and the Inquisition caught up with them at the site of the computer's destruction. With no way to prove they were telling the truth, Antryg claimed to have been using magic to manipulate Joanna in order to save her life, and was re-sentenced to the death that he had once escaped.

He was saved, against his own expectations, by a being from across the Void, an alien scientist whose life he had saved when it stumbled into his world through one of the spontaneous Gates in the Void, and who had been using the advanced technology and magic of its own world to research the Void since that moment. It plucked him out of his own world, and once safe, he opened a Gate to California and reunited with Joanna.

The two of them, who had fallen in love during their desperate attempt to avert the destruction of both of their worlds, moved in together. Antryg began working as a part-time psychic and part-time bartender, and slowly taught himself to be literate in English; Joanna quit her Defense Department job and began working as a consultant for quite a bit better pay.

They had barely half a year of peace before a wizard from Antryg's world crossed the Void to kidnap Joanna. He followed her, and found that the Council's stronghold was riddled with rifts into the Void, with monsters emerging all over the surrounding countryside. The Council blamed him; he blamed them for Joanna's kidnapping; but in the end, he managed to discover that one of the weakest of the wizards, the Council librarian, had caused the problem by forcing open a permanent Gate into a world where she had the magical power she'd always dreamed of. He closed the Gate, sending her to that world permanently, but in the process the new Archmage was killed fighting off a terrible monster. Antryg returned to California with Joanna, knowing that now he would truly never have peace, because the magic that determined the new Archmage had chosen him.

Personality: Antryg is kind, incurably curious, idealistic and deeply paranoid. Everyone he has ever loved has betrayed him: his parents sold him to Suraklin, Suraklin abused him, the Archmage became Suraklin and even Joanna sold him out to the Inquisition. Despite this, he still loves deeply, because the thing he fears most of all is loneliness. He does not, however, trust easily. He often doesn't even trust his own senses; he spent the majority of his life thinking that Suraklin's voice whispering in his dreams was his own fearful hallucination, and this has left him with a reflexive distrust of his own mind.

It's this paranoia, and the conflict between his natural optimism and the defensive cynicism built on a lifetime of disappointment, that leads Antryg to cheerfully and repeatedly tell everyone he meets that he's insane.

He has the eccentricity to back it up: Antryg has an investigative streak that's led him to hold a huge number of heterodox opinions about magic, starting with his faith in tea-leaf reading and other cheap fortunetelling methods and ending with his tendency to believe every single good-luck superstition and old wives' tale until it's definitively proven wrong. The other Council wizards think he is incurably wrong about most things, and most of them are willing to believe he is actually delusional. He's certainly wrong about some of it, but since he doesn't know which pieces, he's not willing to give any of it up.

The eccentricity, although genuine, is also something that Antryg uses as a shield for his emotional vulnerabilities. Since childhood, he has frequently been the prisoner, effective or real, of dangerous and capricious forces. He has learned never to show fear and rarely to reveal his genuine emotions. Lightly chattering on about inconsequential and ridiculous subjects allows Antryg to hide the things that he truly fears and cares about. He doesn't trust anyone, even the people he trusts most in the world, not to use those things against him.

Antryg's curiosity about the world expresses itself in nearly everything he does. He'll stroll into near-certain death just to figure out how it's going to try to kill him, and he loves learning about other worlds and new fields of science or kinds of technology. He's the sort of person who, even when he knows nothing about electricity, can't restrain the urge to take a toaster apart to see what's inside. He's particularly interested in collecting rubbings of tortoise shells, because a wizard hundreds of years ago sincerely believed that the collected knowledge of the universe was encoded in the patterns on tortoise shells, and Antryg is hoping to get enough rubbings together that he can work out the code.

He's fond of animals and children, and has a heroic streak that's caused nearly all of the problems in his life. It's very hard for Antryg to see injustice or cruelty being done without leaping in and putting his own life on the line to stop it. He has a crippling sense of responsibility for everyone and everything. When faced with a monster from another world, he tries to send it home. When faced with a woman who's tried to kill him, kidnapped his lover and threatened to destroy the world, he gives her her heart's desire. He is, frankly, merciful to a fault: sometimes it ends well for him (as when the monster from another world went on to save his life) but, usually, it ends with him being smeared as an accomplice or even as the one who was masterminding events all along.

Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations: Antryg is a trained wizard, which in his world means he's gained the following non-magical abilities:

• Martial arts training, including the use of swords and long staffs.


• Drafting skills: he can accurately copy complex designs, and is also a reasonable sketch artist.


• Very good memory and trained observational abilities.


• A general knowledge of ways to tend, harvest and prepare useful herbs, and how to use them for medical purposes.


• General astronomical knowledge.


• A preindustrial understanding of medicine (essentially he is the equivalent of a 19th century surgeon): he knows general anatomy, and can treat wounds and nurse people through illnesses or injury.

His magical powers rely on the world that he finds himself in -- his variety of magic is based on both an element of inner magical potential (in his world, there are strong wizards, weak wizards and non-wizards) and the way that potential interacts with the magic that's available in the world around him (when he travels to Earth, he isn't able to use magic because there's no magic in the world for him to use.) If necessary, the easiest way to limit his powers would be to limit the magic he can draw on in Ataraxion's world, which would leave him unable to perform more complex and energy-intensive spells.

Magic in his world is rather Harry Potter-like, in that wizards manipulate energy through specific spell rituals and sigils, and are able to create new spells as well as using learned spells or cantrips. It's limited both by what a wizard knows how to do -- Antryg, trained in Council wizardry as well as in Suraklin's dark summonings and blood magic, has an unusually broad base of knowledge -- and by the amount of power a wizard has to fuel the spells they can create.
Simple wizardries, possible even for someone with minimal training, might include:

• Summoning or quenching light and fire


• Causing objects to move at a distance


• Making oneself or something else hard to notice


• Seeing things happening at a distance using a crystal, pool of water or fire, and communicating with other wizards through them.

More complex wizardry, which requires advanced knowledge but can be done with limited power, includes:

• Casting an illusion which appears real to just one sense, or using magic to cause sudden emotions (summoning spells, fear spells, calming spells, and so on.)


• Creating sigils that can hold certain types of magic and continue generating an effect, such as a Sigil of Air that would hold a field of clean air around it, protecting its wearer from drowning or toxic gases as long as the magic held out. These require the use of metals, crystals or other materials that are magically associated with the type of sigil being made: for instance, the Sigil of Air requires the use of silver wire and a quartz crystal.


• Using and combining multiple Sigils in order to create more complex spell effects.


• Creating a wizard's mark, which is invisible to anyone without magical abilities until activated. When active, it glows. Using a wizard's mark as a "target," a wizard can cast spells at a distance or see events happening near the mark more clearly than they can see events happening elsewhere.


• Creating a protective circle that can shield people within it against certain forces or against physical attacks (a circle made with less power won't hold up as long against a concerted attack as a circle made with more power; any circle will fail eventually.)


• Low-level healing, such as closing ruptured blood vessels or strengthening a body weakened by illness.

High-level magic, requiring both advanced training and lots of power, includes:

• Changing one thing into another thing entirely, such as turning a piece of bread into quiche or a person into an animal. This requires a lot of energy and can be exceptionally dangerous if the target of the transformation is, for instance, a human being. (When used to make food, it would take more energy to change something into food than eating the food would provide.)


• Affecting the weather: summoning and dismissing storms, calling fog, and so on. This can have unintended consequences, as magically altering the weather badly disrupts natural weather patterns.


• High-level healing, such as removing poison from a body or reviving someone whose heart has stopped from blood loss.


• Summoning poltergeist-like entities into physical form, allowing them to wreak great destruction.


• Creating objects that can be used to hold, store and release magic, as well as function in holding spells in existence for long periods of time.


• Summoning large, rawly powerful manifestations of energy: a lightning bolt, the essence of nothingness, a pillar of flame, and so on. (Summoning something that's too powerful or too hard to control can easily destroy the summoner.)

He also has certain natural abilities and senses linked to his magical powers, which don't seem to depend on the use of any kind of magic outside himself:

• Ability to sense interdimensional energies, allowing him to know when interdimensional rifts are occurring and where.


• Ability to sense natural magic in the world around him: he can feel energy flows and knows when they strengthen and weaken. This lets him sense moments of power (the stroke of midnight, moonrise, moonset, sunrise, sunset, which days of the year the world's power is the greatest, and so on).


• Ability to see clearly in the dark, even in total lack of light, although he can't see color in the dark (and of course can only see as clearly as his eyesight permits regardless of light or dark.)


• Ability to see and render visible wizard's marks and detect the use of magic in his vicinity (the range depends on how hard he's trying to sense it.)

Inventory: Glasses; one tarot deck; a box of white chalkboard chalk; a sword with a slightly curved blade, sharpened on one side and blunt on the other, like a cross between a scimitar and a Japanese katana; a backpack; a handful of assorted ceramic good-luck charms and beads threaded on string; a shawl knitted with apparently random hunks of yarn, unspun wool, ribbon and lace; a large, unpolished quartz crystal; a roll with 100 m of fine copper wire; and a pen-knife.
Species/Race: Human
Appearance: About 6'4" and thin, with a wiry build. He's significantly scarred; he has a large, circular mark that looks like an acid burn scar at the hollow of his throat, swollen knuckles from badly healed breaks and dislocations, old, tiny bite and puncture scars that track the veins in both of his arms, manacle scars on his wrists and neck, and a few marks from sword cuts or bullet grazes. He has a long face with a delicate bone structure, large nose, wide mouth, graying brown hair, and wide gray eyes surrounded by a network of wrinkles (being so nearsighted he's nearly blind without glasses, he has done a lot of squinting.) His hair is wavy and he usually wears it long, with a beard. His voice is deep and expressive.

PB is Scott Bellis in his role as Max Fenig from the X-Files:



Age: 42

AU Clarification: N/A

S A M P L E S
Log Sample: Antryg reached out to press his hand against the bark of the tree, easily big enough that five men spreading their arms around its trunk would have trouble touching fingertips together, and tilted his head back to look far up into the alien canopy.

He walked his fingers over the bark. Its texture was wrong. The very surface was deeply grooved and unfamiliar under his fingertips. This would be another world to learn from scratch: the scents, smells, plant and animal life, the pebbles underfoot… and, of course, the reason why you didn't put a fingertip in the river if you wanted to get it back in the same shape. He opened his mouth, ready to comment, and then closed it again on a rueful smile. There was no one else here; no one cared to listen to his observations. Was the water at the top of the trees, where it caught in the leaves and the crooks of branches, as acid as the river? Or was it safe, like the rain? Something must be leaching into the river, but whether it was soil, or the plant life, or something ruptured deep inside the metallic hulk of the crashed air-ship, he couldn't begin to guess.

The trees might be unfamiliar, but the size of the fragile-fleshed plants in the undergrowth said warm: warm all the time, but with more rain than California and its sage-speckled hills...

Antryg closed his eyes, a breath slipping out as his shoulders slumped. California. It had been a place of exile, cut off from magic, but it was Joanna's home… Joanna, who might be safe without him, or might be in even greater danger if they believed he would come for her. He couldn't. He wasn't going anywhere but this world just yet. The strain on reality cut like cheesewire against his senses, and when he'd dared an attempt on the Void it had threatened to mince him like an onion for soup.

She would be fine. He'd done three readings for her last night without a single prediction of disaster. She'd be--

He wiped his fingers meticulously on the skirts of his coat, pushed up his glasses, and pinched the bridge of his nose against the tension that gathered behind his eyes. No one was watching, but still, by long habit, he straightened his shoulders and re-settled his glasses with a determined air.

No matter how hopeless a situation seemed, there would prove to be a way out. The cold, cruel truths of reality were for the sane. Antryg didn't see any need to have a bout of sanity any time soon. There was simply too much to do to scream and huddle in a ball.

And besides, this world was interesting. He rapped his knuckles against the bark.

"What would I get if I tapped you?" he murmured to the tree. "Sugar or poison? Shall we see?"

Comms Sample: [mirrors]
Hello! -- you can see me, yes? -- this is really wonderful and I must talk to whoever cast it. How are you sourcing the power? And am I right in guessing that it's not just the mageborn who can use it? Remarkable, just remarkable.

Oh, sorry, I don't mean to bore the rest of you -- whoever built this spell do please give me a ring! I'm always at home, wherever home might happen to be on a given day. Today you ought to look by the particularly tall tree with the purplish tint to the bark. Which does bring me to my second question: does anyone happen to know where I could get a few logs? Enough for a lean-to will do! It's going to rain tomorrow, you see. You will have my eternal gratitude, and a very lovely set of pinwheels made to your specifications. I would offer flowers but I'm afraid I touched a flower the other day and I've come out in the most remarkable rash. Flowers will be yours, eventually! -- Once I'm sure what sort of brightly colored flora around here don't have anything toxic in them!

Speaking of which, does anyone know if there's any sort of plant here that can be eaten? I've been thinking that if we can work out how to grow them, we might do a bit better than we will scavenging. The soil hasn't been bringing me out in any rashes, but I haven't a clue whether it has any virtue for growing familiar plants -- that's if anyone has seeds, of course, does anyone have seeds? I checked my scarf and there isn't a single useful bramble stuck in it, which has always been my luck, I'm sorry to say.