Name: Alias: 17 (She's the 17th host of the Arcana) || Real Name: Iris Arkwright
Gender: Female
Age: 16
Year: Third
Class: Katastrophea
Arcana: The High Priestess
Abilities:
‘Normal’ Magic - 17 can fire beams/bursts of golden energy. That same golden energy can also be used to form versatile, dextrous tentacle-like weapons. She can also create barriers/shields/whatever you want to call them.
Telekinesis - 17 has access to a sort of telekinetic power, allowing her to pick up, move, and/or throw objects that are about the size of a person, allowing her to use objects in the surrounding area as projectiles/shields to hide behind. She can use this on actual people as well, although for some reason prefers not to. It doesn't allow for very fine, detailed movements, and is mainly useful for throwing stuff around.
Flight - She can fly, but only for about fifteen minutes at a time.
Teleportation - 17 can teleport. However, it takes a large amount of power, and requires a good 10 seconds or so to charge, making it not very useful in combat. iIt also produces a loud burst of sound both at the place she left and the place she arrives. Only really uses this for transport over long distances.
Healing - She’s capable of healing wounds and sicknesses on both herself and others by touching the wounded place, or, in case of illnesses, blasting their body with 'holy' energy.
Spirituality - She has a very keen connection the more supernatural parts of the earth, being able to sense flows of energy in the air, the presence of otherworldly spirits, etc.
She isn't very physically strong - perhaps even relatively frail - so she prefers to do her combat from a distance and get the heck out if things start looking like they'll get really rough.
17’s Arcana itself often takes form as a voice in her mind, calling itself ‘God’ while taking on the image of her adopted brother and the previous (16th) holder of the High Priestess, Sullivan. In the form of her friend, the Arcana gives her advice and sometimes orders, as well as cryptic prophecies and the promise that if she becomes strong enough, she will be able to take matters into her own hands and bring back the friend that she killed. When the Arcana isn’t trying to play mindgames with its host and actually feels like being useful, it can act as a sort of sixth sense for her, giving her visions of events to come, warning her of incoming danger, and providing advice in combat. She prefers to have as little to do with the cryptic being as possible, and tends to ignore its advice in favour for her own judgement, despite the fact that her Arcana is usually correct.
Masquerading as: Goddess of Magic
Appearance:
17 stands at about average height, with a well-proportioned physique that isn’t exactly muscular but certainly isn’t anything but healthy. She isn’t a person who enjoys physical exercise, doing the minimum required to maintain her good health, and as such doesn’t have a lot of muscle. Her skin is on the paler side. Her most distinguishing characteristic is her eye-catchingly green hair. It was originally black with some decidedly unnatural green streaks in it (something that has caused her much grief in the past), but ever since she dyed it fully green to spite her Arcana when it suggested that she fix up her hair colour to blend in more easily, she has kept it that way. It’s long, very straight, and she takes care to make sure that it’s never
too messy. Her eyes are an unnervingly bright golden colour and have a sharp, piercing quality, making her very good at staring people down, or staring at things in general.
For some reason, 17 has never liked to wear coloured clothes, leaving her wardrobe a mix of different shades of nondescript greys that make the striking colour of her hair and eyes stand out just that much more. In a place such as Amrita, where she doesn’t need to hide her powers, she opts for a large, grey hooded cloak that floats like a sort of mist in the air around her, seemingly unbound by gravity. It covers most of her upper body, and a good amount of her lower one as well. Underneath the cloak, she tends to opt for a shirt and pants, both on the looser side and a pure, featureless shade of grey, or in rarer cases, black. In the ‘outer world’, where she must appear as a normal person, she drops the coat for a grey, hooded rain jacket.
Personality: 17 is an aloof and often cold person, preferring to keep to herself and have as little to do with other people as possible and generally keeping the at arm’s length. In public, she speaks little, and shows hardly any emotion, adopting the demeanour of a uncaring monarch - a sort of ‘I know you’re there, but I couldn’t care less about what you’re doing or feeling’ sort of attitude. She’s polite when spoken to, but in a stiff and formal way that makes it sort of obvious that she’s doing so out of necessity and courtesy instead of any actual respect she holds for your person. She generally seems like a sort of ‘aloof princess’ sort of character, and carries herself with a detached, almost regal air. Similarly, her movements have a sort of elegance and grace normally associated with people of high social class. She has an almost uncannily sharp intuition, and can get the grip of situations, concepts, and people very quickly and with relative ease. And, as a matter of course, she can be cold-bloodedly ruthless when dealing with her enemies, and sometimes even her friends (not that she has any).
Her aloof and above-it-all nature, when combined with her natural good looks and her exceptional intelligence, is pretty much the recipe for someone people hate and envy. She’s aware of this, and while there had once been a time when tried her best to ‘redeem herself’ in the eyes of her peers, by now she has grown accustomed to it and sometimes intentionally plays up these characteristics out of a sort of spite and an act of defiance. She’s very cynical and disillusioned with the world, and she has an instinctive distrust of almost everybody around her, both as the result of the traumatic events of her ‘inheritance’ of her Arcana, and as a result of the hatred and bullying she experienced in her childhood. She bows to nobody and somehow manages to appear dignified and self-confident regardless of the situation. She tends to be somewhat openly spiteful and defiant to everything in general, and has a sort of ‘is that all you can do?’ attitude to things that fate throws at her.
17 can be very competitive at times - both a blessing and a curse. It’s part of what causes her defiant nature when it comes to her circumstances and her bad luck over the years - she refuses to give in to fate, since that would, well, be tantamount to admitting defeat, permanently. She doesn’t like losing and can dwell on losses/defeats for a long time, but generally manages to take it gracefully and show no outward signs of frustrations. She likes to win, and seeks desperately to become more powerful, so that she can one day enact revenge on the Arcana and the Gods that ruined her life, revive Sullivan and her surrogate parent(s), and return her life to the paradise it used to be. She tends to accept challenges very readily, and people can often goad her into taking part in activities she might otherwise pass on by presenting it in a way that suggests that they’re giving her a sort of challenge. Despite this, she knows her limits, rarely bites off more than she can chew, and isn’t above withdrawing from a conflict in which she is outmatched - though not before swearing to surpass whoever it was she lost to some day.
She does in fact have a ‘warmer’ side, but it rarely shows, especially since the loss of everyone and everything she ever loved. To those that she
is close to, she can be very protective and caring, although never explicitly showing any affection. Perhaps as a result of being alone for so long, she can be very awkward around those that she does in fact care about, not wanting to hurt their feelings but being uncomfortable with and even afraid of showing outwards ‘love’, platonic or otherwise. When around people that she’s comfortable with, her normally haughty and slightly arrogant attitude gets turned up to eleven, although its exaggerated state lends itself more to being almost comical and a whole lot less aggravating (which is partly intentional on her part). While she certainly isn’t ‘kind’ when throwing out insults at ‘normal people’, being the owner of a sharp tongue and not afraid to use it, she tends to do the same with greater frequency to those she considers her friends and capable of ‘taking it’ (although if you’re sensitive enough, you might realise that insults directed people she’s close to tend to lack the ‘edge’ they normally possess). It may be a cliched motivation and she even accepts it as such, but she wishes for nothing more than to be able to live a simple, happy life with people that she loves, something that has been repeatedly given to and then brutally taken from her. In her heart, she regards it as an impossible wish, but continues to pursue it anyway because she has nothing else to do.
History: Abandoned by her incredibly superstitious parents (who had never meant to have a kid anyways and were unmarried) on account of odd, almost ‘demonic’ green streaks in her hair, it would be an understatement to say that 17’s childhood was off to a rocky start. Left in an overpopulated and underfunded orphanage that cared for ‘odd’ children, she grew up surrounded by tired, unhappy adults who tried their best to show the kids love but failed miserably on all accounts, as well as an army’s worth of other similarly abandoned children, all with their own quirks, mostly for the bad. Being the 17th person to enter, she wound up being called only by her number, and has thus gotten used to using it as a name. She would often wake up to the view of her roommate, a vampire-like girl with blood red eyes, leaning over her bed with her wide eyes fixated on her neck - and she was among the more harmless people there due to her hyperactive and usually well-meaning nature. Many of the residents would get into fights, and even as a child, her natural beauty made her a ripe target for envy, and her physical frailty as well as her friendlessness made it easy for others to let that dislike for her show - through the use of force. So suffice to say, it wasn’t exactly the most nurturing place to have grown up in.
When she became seven, she was lifted out of this nasty place by a man named Phenex Arkwright, who was young then but wouldn’t remain young for long. She had no complaints about leaving her personal hell, and left without even bothering to pack her bags - anything of worth she had had either been destroyed or stolen, and she didn’t want to keep any memories of this place with her anyways. She moved into Phenex’s house, where he was living, unmarried, with another kid he had adopted a while ago - a golden-haired boy with a huge case of a nasty attitude. Phenex himself was a loving father, and doted on both his children in the rare moments when he was free, since the demanding nature of his job left him little time to truly get to know his children. Frequently, 17 would notice that a sort of unbridgeable distance existed between them (herself and Sullivan) and the man they called father, and that only continued to feed into her disillusioned worldview. Nevertheless, for a small amount of time, she was tenuously and questionably happy. That was something more than she had ever had before.
Then, of course, everything changed. She hadn’t known it then, but it would soon become a pattern.
Eventually, as both Sullivan and 17 - now named Iris by her newfound father - grew into adolescence, their father’s kind and loving personality began to unravel. He started talking to them less, going to work more. His back became hunched and dark bags appeared under his eyes, His hair, once always immaculately combed, now became frazzled and unkempt. And, what’s more, the scent of smoke and alcohol permeated the air in his room. For seemingly no reason, his attitude changed entirely, and his previously level-headed demeanour was replaced by a sort of insanity. He became abusive when he was drunk or in a bad mood, and distant when he wasn’t. For better or for worse, 17 grew closer to her brother during this time, united (sort of) against their father’s pointless wrath. They learned to fight back, and the family that had once been so peaceful and happy was soon torn apart, even as the two became far closer than they had ever been before, growing to love each other like true siblings instead of just people living under the same roof.
The night before the two of them were finally preparing to just run away from home together, Phenex decided at long last to come clean. Sitting his two now-even-further-estranged children down in the living room, he told them both about the Katastrophea and the Arcana, stating that it was time for him to pass on his powers. In a demonstration of his remaining strength and as a way to prove to his children that he was speaking the truth, he bore a hole through the earth, causing the entire house to collapse on top of them and trapping them at the bottom of a man-made sinkhole. In there, 17 watched on as Sullivan devoured their unconscious and dying father. He had always thirsted for power, and in a way, taking that from the father that they had both grown to hate was his way of enacting revenge.
They were dug out of the sinkhole a few hours later, and sent into the custody of a man named Nick, who had been Phenex’s friend. Nick was fat and decidedly unattractive, even repulsive at first glance, but he was a kind man, and he treated them both as well as he could with his limited income. He took an immediate liking to Sullivan, and for a brief moment, it seemed like their life would remain as it was. But not long after they moved in, Sullivan’s mental state began to deteriorate just like Phenex’s had, and he became prone to sudden bouts of inexplicable hunger. But he was strong, and he endured it well - far better than most would have. Over that time, the Arcana had been talking to him, and they had developed a strong, mutual hatred of each other. In an attempt to kill the High Priestess, Sullivan fasted. But even then, his mental stability was beginning to break down as the Arcana, desperate for nourishment, started to destroy his mind. There are times where he would wake up and refuse to be called anything other than 16, and other times when he would be unable to recognise 17 or Nick. But even then, he held on, and they were all able to desperately cling on to the notion that things were going fine.
However, the Arcana was becoming more and more desperate for nourishment, and it eventually threw caution to the wind, forcibly taking over Sullivan’s body and using it to attack a dying God for nourishment. They fought a pitched battle, in which the Arcana managed successfully to kill the old god, but in doing so, damaged Sullivan’s body beyond repair and almost destroyed his sanity entirely. When 17 found him lying on the ground in the park nearby their house the following day, he was in a sort of delirium, and couldn’t recognise her. The Arcana forcibly transferred itself to her in that moment, leaving the broken husk of its previous host and taking a new one. And then, in the cover of the trees, she devoured her ‘brother’. She doesn't remember what happened, but she had seen him eat their father, so she had a decent idea, and the imagined image would haunt her for the rest of her life.
Now alone and oddly calm for the situation, she returned to Nick’s home after cleaning the blood off of her body, explaining that Sullivan had run away. It wasn’t that far of a stretch, since he was decidedly unhappy, so the man just accepted it (not without a good deal of sadness), saying tearfully that at least he would be able to save some more money. 17 continued to live with Nick for a while, but it was clear to her that he didn’t really care for her all that much, with her brother having been his favourite child, so to speak. The atmosphere at home was always sombre and dark, and Nick, who had always been a drinker and a smoker, began to do so with increased frequency, blaming himself for losing his friend’s son. He started becoming less bombastic and ‘warm’. Seeing a repeating pattern with the behaviour of her father, 17 spent more and more time away from home, and the two only grew further apart, each withdrawing from the world and living with their own unhappiness and guilt.
In this time, the Arcana in her head began to talk to her, calling her its 17th holder and addressing her by the number she's used to hearing for a name instead of the one Phenex had given her. Sensing her guilt and her fear, it took on the form of the brother she had lost and began to torment her, never giving her a moment's peace. They would get into heated arguments in the back of her head, but over time they settled on one and only one thing - that she needed to become stronger, more powerful. With her newfound healing powers and her connection to the more supernatural elements of the world, she convinced herself that one day she would be able to revive the family that she lost, kill the Arcana within her, and return herself to the happy life that she lost. In a way, she knows that it's a pipe dream, but she still clings to it in order to preserve her sanity as the High Priestess Arcana attempts to rob it from her.
Regardless, her home was no longer a home to her, so when a man showed up and claimed to be from Amrita academy, she parted with Nick without much of a fuss, and decided never to return to that empty house again.
Other:
- She still has nightmares of devouring her brother.
- She hates the smell of alcohol or smoke.
- She's left handed.
- She doesn't like to feed, but isn't above doing so without remorse (relatively) if she has to.