Host
Name: Leilani Aren
Gender: Female
Appearance:
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Personality: A good-natured person with a side-dash of naivety, Leilani always thinks the best of people. While not exactly a social butterfly, she has little trouble making friends or maintaining relationships. She never seems to frown or get angry and she always has a good word or two to say about other people. On the flipside, she does tend to be too trusting, which got her into trouble several times. She also keeps her negative emotions bottled up instead of expressing them. This results in incredibly cathartic - but not necessarily healthy - stress explosions, which she prefers to have as far away from people as humanly possible.
Likes: Flowers, plants, botany, fresh air, people, meadows
.
Dislikes: Pollution, cities, "lifeless art", sour food, bullies
.
Interests and skills:
Botany and gardening: Leilani is a natural when it comes to taking care of plants, especially those she is familiar with. She is a quick learner, not to mention she has a natural intuition when it comes to them. Because of this, and her sociable nature, she is the most well-known member of the school's gardening club.
Photography: She picked it up recently as a hobby, owing to her interest in immortalising plants that bloom once-in-a-lifetime. She is not very good at it yet.
Human Connections: Not only does Leilani like people, but she is quite interested in their affairs along with how they connect with each other. Not in the scientific, social studies way, but rather in the personal experience way. She likes to learn more about her friends along with their experiences, and wishes to understand them as much as humanly possible.
Magical Girl
Name: Kalea Nivel
Appearance:
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Magical Girl Archetype: The Grieving Girl. Once optimistic champions, these Magical Girls still fight to protect all that is dear to them, but they have lost their spark because of a terrible tragedy. Whether it is the loss of a loved one, or something far more sinister, they are emotionally vulnerable; perhaps even fragile. They try to hold close whatever warmth or happiness they find in order to conquer their dreams. Some succeed, becoming as phoenixes rising from the ashes. Others fail, turning into shells of their former self.
Personality: Stricken with grief, Kalea finds little joy in anything at the moment. She feels as though her life is a bleak memorial and she spends a lot of time reminiscing about her sister or trying to express her sorrow in some way. All feels lacking at the moment, however; something she is keenly aware of. In her home reality, she sought therapy, but with only so many appointments, she did not make much headway yet. Before, she used to be focused, studious, and perhaps a touch lonely; something which her sister along with her tight-knit group of friends remedied. Now, however, she finds herself in an alien world, with nothing to support her save for someone who reminds her of Leilani all too much...
Likes: Her sister, science, meritocracy, fresh air, solitude
.
Dislikes: School, authority figures who "did not earn it", bullies, noise, rain.
Magic: Kalea is capable of controlling and creating gravity. With many years of experience under her belt, she is capable of incredibly fine manipulation: her mastery is so delicate that she is capable of puppeting people without ripping them apart or creating a black hole that only affects a specific material or a specific area. She also has a good understanding of her power's relativistic effects and is capable of using them to manipulate the perception of time. Though her spells have an intense visual component, with sigils and symbols lighting up around her in purple, this gives her opponent no advantage as by the time they notice what she is doing, it is usually too late.
She is also capable of using nightblaze spells, which rely on the availability of aberrant photon particles and waveforms created by the Photonic Plague. Her experience with these spells is more limited as she prefers to use them in a supporting role. This is mainly because of the Photonic Plague's immense dangers; were she to find another source for them, she would not hesitate to scale up her usage.
Equipment:
Vials of Photonic Plague: A weapon of mass destruction that very few possess, the Photonic Plague has the potential to annihilate entire solar systems, if it is used in sufficient quantities. A strange phenomenon that fundamentally alters light particles - decreasing their speed by roughly one third and vastly increasing their mass - it spreads from photon to photon as its name implies. Kalea possesses five vials, each one holding ten micrograms of the substance, with the rest of the thumb-sized device being downright paranoid security measures. Even in Kalea's reality, it would take months, if not years to crack a single vial.
This is entirely justified given the Photonic Plague's horrifying potential. The weapon has multiple stages of operation, each progressively more deadly than the last. During its first stage, it alters how light is perceived: any form of detecting photons starts to register the equivalent of disturbing hallucinations. Monsters, paradoxes and indescribable colours seem to manifest in any area that the Photonic Plague claims for itself, and while not directly dangerous, these illusions can lead most people astray. At this stage, the Photonic Plague spreads at a snail's pace.
During the weapon's second stage, the Photonic Plague spreads at roughly running speed. It is also the stage where nightblaze particles are created, appearing and behaving as black rays of light, with one key difference: they leech energy instead of transferring it, thus decreasing temperature in the area. At the same time, nightblaze particles decay rapidly into high-energy photons, which means that anything hit by them is going to experience an extreme and rapid thermal compression-expansion cycle, thus shattering into countless shards. This is also as far as Kalea will allow the Photonic Plague to progress.
In the Photonic Plague's third stage, nightblaze particles become the dominant form of light within affected areas and the laws of physics start to break down as well. Mundane beings or objects cease to function if they are not immediately destroyed by nightblaze particles, while magical phenomena start manifesting in unusual or illogical ways. A Magical Girl can still function within an affected area at this stage, but only for a couple of minutes at most. At this stage, the Photonic Plague progresses at the top speed of a sports car, which means it is extremely likely to reach its fourth and final stage.
During its last stage, the Photonic Plague starts to spread faster than the speed of light, enveloping an entire solar system in just a matter of seconds, before collapsing into a black hole due to the extreme amounts of mass it creates. Naturally, this halts its spread and confines it - but by then, it is already too late for the unfortunates who fell prey to the weapon.
At any point before its fourth stage, the Photonic Plague may be stopped by using mirrors, gravitational forces or any other method capable of concentrating light in a small area. This triggers the fourth stage prematurely, detonating the weapon into an insignificant black hole which expires in the matter of nanoseconds.
Gentle Embrace: This used to be Leilani's weapon of choice. A beautifully crafted, crystalline staff filled with motifs of vines and flowers, capped by a sapphire stone that looks as though it were a blossom, its appearance hides a sophisticated battle computer along with a potent magical focus. With its highly adaptable algorithms, it is capable of reading the status of any being with remarkable accuracy, not to mention suggesting courses of action to its wielder. What is more, it gathers natural magical energies along with any spell residue continuously, thus greatly enhancing a Magical Girl's staying power.
It also helps regulate the flow of magic when it comes to barrier, healing and boost spells. However, there are two factors preventing it from being useful at the current time. One, it has been tailor-built to Leilani from the ground up, meaning that any other Magical Girl would only be able to use it well below optimal performance. Two, Kalea will do everything in her power to hold onto this keepsake of her dead sister. It is, after all, the only thing she has to remember her by in this strange world.
Grief's Embrace: Kaela's weapon of choice. Once called Eternal Champions, these pair of armoured gauntlets are more than they seem at first. Fine, almost invisible threads emerge from them, running across Kaela's body to fortify her against the very forces she uses in combat. By continuously draining a little bit of magic from her, they are capable of automatically counteracting any gravitational forces that would affect her, thus saving her a great deal of concentration. However, this is not all that the weapon offers.
Grief's Embrace has an additional component. Namely, a black hole contained within a human-sized wrecking ball that is attached to a highly resilient chain. The wrecking ball itself has all the equipment necessary to nullify the black hole's gravitational influence, which means that it is nothing more than an incredibly heavy weapon that only Kalea can wield with her powers... theoretically. Practically, Kalea has figured out a couple of tricks when it comes to the containment field, meaning she can let out as much of the black hole's influence as she likes, for as long as she likes.
The weapon also has a unique terror aspect: because of its mass, if Kalea accelerates it beyond the speed of sound, it creates a reverberating, bone-shattering, deep bass of a sonic boom that is disturbing to hear on a fundamental level.
Backstory: Kalea Nivel and Leilani Nivel. The Miracle Twins. Shining stars of the Sterling Starsworn, their fame extended not just across their home planet of Narid, but the whole solar system. Though they were born as identical twins, a rare magical condition known as Divergent Chimerism slowly changed their appearance. By the time they were adults, Kalea had black eyes and black hair, while Leilani had white eyes and white hair. Still identical in nearly every other physical aspect, the twins have always had a close-knit relationship, which served them well when their magical talent was discovered.
Truly, the Sterling Starsworn could have not asked for a better pairing. While Leilani excelled in healing, enchanting and protective spells, Kalea excelled in the control of gravity - a potent offensive weapon - and the use of nightblaze particles. Even without their considerable magical aptitude, they would have made for excellent recruits. So naturally, when their training ended, they took off like shooting stars. There seemed to be no menace that the Miracle Twins could not defeat. Kalea's creative use of gravity and Leilani's ability to support her made for a very effective combination indeed. If the Miracle Twins continued their streak, then they could have achieved galaxy-wide fame.
Then Leilani Nivel died.
How or why, Kalea refuses to share - or perhaps, she can not share. For when she returned from the mission, still clutching her sister's decaying corpse, she looked as though she had went through hell itself. It took weeks of intensive therapy to bring her out of her catatonia and have her return as a working member of society. And then, just when she saw the light at the end of the tunnel, the Artist took her away.
That was another shock to Kalea's system. Still grief-stricken, she could not connect well to her peers and spent most of her time by her lonesome, staring at stars completely foreign. And when she finally got over the massive culture shock along with the fact that her new home did not have the conveniences she was used to, the soldiers attacked.
What is more, she ended up in the body of a girl she did not know... but reminded her all too much of her long-dead sister. From her appearance, through her behaviour, right up to the name. The resemblance seemed so uncanny to Kalea that, in her grief, she started to believe that Leilani Aren was the reincarnation of her twin sister.
Character Theme: Hope-filled Stars
Battle Theme: Gravity Will Erode You
