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» EXSILIUM application for Magr'ateth
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Player NAME: su
Personal JOURNAL:![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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IM & SERVICE:
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Player PLURK: sumanity
Current CHARACTERS: None
» CHARACTER INFORMATION
Character NAME: Magr'ateth, Fifth Lord of Mt. Tiermant (aka "Loiec k'Tiermant")
Character PULL-POINT: From a moment just before he would have been dragged into a strange underground dungeon and from there into a world-spanning adventure.
Character AGE: 2½
Character ABILITIES:
Inherited Knowledge:
Even straight out of the egg, Mag had access to ancient reserves of genetically-inherited knowledge, halfway between pure instinct and taught knowledge. Most of this concerns the natural world; he has a grasp on the traits of weather, animals, geography, how to hunt, and so on as automatic as if he'd been consciously taught all of it.
Contained within this are certain addenda on other things to concern even young dragons - how to recognize unnatural creatures, the basic principles of diplomatic conduct with humanoid royalty and fae creatures, recognizing the signs of dangerous magic, the architecture of underground excavations, and so on. Distilled as the knowledge is from endless generations of dragons, very little of it directly concerns anything to do with humanoid society from the "inside" rather than the "outside".
Shape-Changing:
One of the half-secret traits of Mag's kind is that they are adept shapechangers - such that even the least clever of them can manage some level of basic changes. Even the traditional "dragon" shape is an aspect of this, such that it's a well-trained secondary form instead of their natural shape. It only takes a few moments to assume a familiar form, with an unfamiliar one taking potentially several minutes to 'craft'; one change is easy, but repeat changes in a short time can start to tire him out pretty quickly.
Mag's own most natural form is that of a crested white-scaled serpent, large enough even with his young age to easily match a full-grown reticulated python - and with the strength to match, as his most native hunting instincts are to ambush prey and crush it to death in his coils. He can move as well in water as on land in this shape, like some strange hybrid sea snake.
As second nature, though, he can change, gaining legs and wings and claws and ripping, tearing teeth. This shape is comparable in size to an adult wolf, being a little shorter in body size but a little taller and with a long tail... and with a pair of wings that grant him a thirty-foot wingspan. In this form he's a strong flier, managing 30 miles an hour for sustained flight, double that for shorter 'runs', or triple that for very short 'sprints'. (Just don't ask him to do much precision flying - he's got a turning radius of some fifteen feet at best and has a stall speed around 10 miles an hour.) On land and in water both he can manage a solid 40 miles per hour in sprints and make a good 50 to 60 miles a day in long-distance travel.
This form is a fantastic (un)natural predator: it can outrun, outwrestle, and outfight almost every natural creature in its weight class on land, sea, and air, and having armor plating that can compare to an armored knight's plate and a cavalcade of natural weapons (claws, teeth, and even the strong pseudo-claws of the wings' wrists) make only examplars of the animal world like brown bears, giant crocodiles, or hippopotamuses any real threat. (Usually these aren't creatures that he'd bother try to fight in the first place, since he can easily loiter in flight long enough to pick easier prey.)
The gold-yellow scales of this form are a conscious choice. The color is his public mark of allegiance to the Lantern Path. Were he to change his choice of philosophy, he could change the color of his scales, too.
Like many of the more social dragons, Mag has a well-practiced humanoid form he can assume. In this shape he resembles a young human - though he's still got a measure of his natural crushing strength, leaving him with power more like a burly strongman than the slender thing he appears to be. He's got particularly sharp teeth and fingernails, too, though he usually tries to stick to the 'human' forms of combat if only for appearances' sake.
Mag can't take forms much larger than himself, in a sort of vague conservation-of-mass principle, but he can manage smaller ones. These have a certain special difficulty to them, as suppressing the extra mass down to the point needed for substantially smaller shapes takes an extra degree of concentration and focus. Getting too distracted could result in suddenly 'popping' back to normal size and shape. (He can skip this and assume a smaller-in-volume form that still has what approaches his usual mass, but turning into a 300-pound mouse usually obviates the whole point to start with.) In this way Mag has practiced two simple small shapes: a scaled island lizard-hawk, and a particularly ordinary brown field mouse.
Mag can take new forms without needing practice - but doing so makes it much harder to hold those forms fully and reliably. Without having weeks or even months to practice and meditate at a particular form, differences and tells of his serpent or dragon forms almost always show through. For example, to fake being a human he's never imitated before, he might have to hide shining eyes and scales. He could potentially even pretend to be an inanimate object - though the process of 'learning' a form involves enough psychological understanding that actually doing that for more than the short term would be practically impossible.
Mag's shapeshifting doesn't do anything to help with clothes or personal effects, necessitating either stripping or ruining his clothes if he needs to do a quick change while in human form. He's likely to develop a spell for this at some point in the future, but for now he hasn't yet had enough experience with - or as - a human to be able to internalize that kind of effect. Exposure to any others with clothes-transforming effects would help, though.
Keen Senses:
In any form he takes, Mag has exceptionally keen senses, with eyes as sharp as an eagle's and night-vision suited for the darkest nights or murkiest waters. His senses of smell and taste are very sharp, as well - he can track creatures by scent and can pick out the presence of unusual ingredients in food or even poisons by taste alone. Even in complete pitch-darkness, extremely keen hearing and scent, and a sort of crude, nonvisual heat-sense let him tell the locations of things near to him. It would almost certainly take magic or advanced technology to have a hope of sneaking up on him - even while asleep, as he can literally sleep with one eye open and a subconsciously tasked-off part of him watching his surroundings.
Heart-Engine:
Another half-secret of the dragons - though one better kept by them, or less understood by others - is the use of heart-engines, artificial secondary organs metaphysically absorbed by the dragon's shapeshifting ability. Each heart-engine is the core of the dragon's near-perfect metabolism and ability to metabolize even inorganic materials, and they act as high-capacity energy storage, as well as augmenting the dragon's own magical traits. With it, even dangerous toxins or rotting trash can be safely consumed; it would take magically-potent poisons or advanced technology to present any threat beyond an upset stomach.
Each heart-engine is particularly attuned to a certain pure-enough expression of an elemental process, like fire, ice, or lightning, and must be created in proximity to that element and refined by interaction with a dragon's own shapechanging. With increased personal power, dragons can integrate multiple heart-engines into themselves; most focus on a single type, but some synergize the traits of multiple elemental processes into something new. In any case, any heart-engine's traits apply in every form the bearer of it takes.
As young as he is, Mag hasn't had the experience needed to craft a heart-engine of his own. For lack of that, he uses one gifted to him by his mother, holding the searing heat of a volcano's heart. With the heart-engine's power thrumming inside him, Mag can comfortably linger in even very intense heat. Even molten lava is no more harmful to him than water is, though letting any of it solidfy on him would be more of a bother. It would take particularly focused heat or flame - high-intensity blowtorches or appropriate magic, or example - to even hope to hurt him that way.
He can channel that power outwards, too, breathing gouts of clinging half-liquid flame. It takes a few moments to re-focus his energy after each time, and doing it too often can make him intensely hungry. As young as he is, his flame is not hugely potent, but it's still enough to sear an unwary human with potentially lethal wounds.
There is a pair of downsides to having it, though. While his internal heat makes cold ambient conditions easy for him to deal with, targeted high-intensity cold effects - things like ice magic or technological freeze rays - can flash-suppress it for a moment, making them especially effective. On the other end of the spectrum, very potent fire-manipulation effects can potentially affect him directly. (This is liable to temporarily supercharge his internal flame, too, so woe betide the person who tries to control him this way but fails.)
As devices that aid in converting almost anything into raw magical and metabolic power, heart-engines are nearly invaluable in magical projects or weapons (or those built with sufficiently advanced technology), though convincing him to willingly part with it would be exceptionally hard.
Dragon's Adeptness:
In any form he takes, Mag is a naturally adept flier and swimmer. This is enough of a magical quality that he'd even be halfway competent with piloting planes or boat with no more instruction than being told what each control does. He can bear the pressure differentials of moderate altitudes and depths with no serious problems. He can even breathe water, though doing so loses enough efficiency that, as with high altitudes, his body prefers to autonomically shift into a low-exertion mode that preserves energy and delays the early exhaustion he'd otherwise experience.
Aging:
Mag is young... particularly young in human terms, seeing as he's only two-and-a-half years old. Like all dragons, he will grow and become more powerful over time - physically, mentally, and supernaturally. This generally won't matter in gameplay terms, as this growth is slow enough to take on the order of decades simply to progress from the dragon equivalent of childhood... though anyone using time-manipulation or aging powers on Mag might be in for quite a surprise.
Magic:
As with all dragons, Mag has a certain degree of innate magical power. Each takes months of meditation and focus on the concepts associated with it to become properly usable, shaped into his soul in the same kind of psychologically-influenced way as a new physical form. Mag's own power is not very great even with the engine-heart within him, though there are a few magical effects he can use.
The first of the proper spells Mag knows is one that lets him tear into solid stone and earth as if it were soft clay. Of course, this is most useful in his dragon shape, where his claws and shape make the task much easier - after all, it's still tough to dig through even a lot of clay. The way that power has to be continually poured into this spell while it's being used makes it much more exhausting to keep using than his others, making it something he prefers only to use in relaxed conditions.
The second is that by swallowing something whole, he may send an object (or even creature) into a sort of stasis, unharmed and not even physically inside him until he coughs it up again. (This is of course limited by form - in his most native form he might be able to swallow something whole around the size of a medium-size dog without causing any serious harm, were it cooperative enough to let him do so.) He can manage about his own natural weight in stored things, give or take - around 300 pounds.
The last is that he can channel extra power into his fiery breath, infusing it with power that scours at what it strikes, burning away the touch of magic. This has no special effect against permanent works of magic such as permanently forged items, but it can burn away temporary spells already in effect or act as a short-lived barrier against new ones. With his youth and limited magical power this effect has limited potency - it might cancel out the spells of an apprentice sorcerer entirely, somewhat weaken the magic of a well-trained professional, and have no effect at all against a master wizard.
Along with the well-shaped spells that Mag has crafted, he can produce simple effects at will, so long as he hasn't tired himself out - things like little lights or noises or animated flames, or simple tricks like whispers carried across a field. None are genuinely powerful or dangerous, but they can be useful if used cleverly.
Dragon's Tongue:
Like many dragons, Mag has a certain gift of honeyed tongue and a sense for lies that's just as potent. This isn't foolproof; with his limited experience in human society, even simple tricks might catch him if they take advantage of his lack of knowledge, and his own bright-eyed persuasion is likely to fail entirely if he has to try and handle something he doesn't have the knowledge of or proper vocabulary for. As he grows he might manage to be a skilled manipulator, but for now he's more likely than not to fail at it when dealing with humans.
As might be expected he's got a natural gift for languages, too. The dragon language itself is extremely complex, being filled with dialects and sub-dialects passed down through racial memory in lieu of normal teaching - and it's near-unpronounceable by most humans without heavy training, having a heavy element of whistles, clicks, and almost musical noises layered together. Of human tongues he knows only that of his homeland - a language with an unmistakable similarity to archaic French and Latin - but he could pick up other languages very quickly with active study or immersion in them.
Hospitaler:
Mag's training as a hospitaler's apprentice - and the half-initiations he's gone through, in the presence of blessed relics of the human order, and in conjuction with his half-formed devotion to the Lantern Path - has gifted him with the synaesthetic sense for moral standing that the most fervent hospitalers are known for. This is never foolproof, for there's never any guarantee that a repugnant man might not still be the best choice for society, but it does let him 'size up' someone on a glance. In particular, things of pure philosophical wickedness or goodness show up very brightly to this sixth sense - but beings with no real sense of right or wrong never do.
By turning this power outward, he may strike a blow that disrupts the power of wickedness, adding a holy sting to the attack. Half-trained as he is in this human art, this isn't very effective and is still particularly exhausting to him; it's the kind of thing he'd only use if he had to, and would usually channel it into his burning breath.
These abilities are as dependent on his psychological devotion to the hospitaler's standard as they are on his own supernatural power. Though they depend on no one act, he could no more change his philosophical stance and retain them in their current form than he could fly while in the shape of a toad.
His work as a hospitaler's apprentice has also given him a grasp on the basic use of human weapons and armor. In terms of pure skill he is clumsy, having only a barest grasp of proper fighting technique... but with raw strength and a serpent's swiftness, he can fight viciously even in human shape.
Mag's also skilled in his order's practices of first aid and long-term medical care... though, given the sort of world he comes from, that's not saying all that much, as they're reasonably educated about the actual mechanics of injury but far behind modern medical techniques. He could do fairly well for makeshift treatment of wounds, and has tricks to use with resources like poultices of natural materials, but he'd need thorough re-training to live up to modern battlefield medic or nurse roles.
Predator's Antipathy:
If Mag were a normal hospitaler's apprentice, he'd be learning the way of horses, too... but the animals have a certain antipathy to him, as might be expected. It isn't so much a flaw in his changing as it is a slow burn of internal power that he isn't yet skilled enough to control; animals tend to become antsy and unhappy around him whether they know he's there or not. With well-trained, powerful, or especially slow-witted or intelligent beasts this isn't much of a problem, but asking him to play nice with a normal animal for long will almost inevitably end badly (probably with him eating the animal in question, because that's what dragons do).
Character HISTORY:
The dragon who would in time be come to known as Magr'ateth was hatched in a clutch of several siblings, in a fortress carved into the upper face of a sleeping volcano. The very first part of his life was simple; with his siblings he was instructed in the simple practicalities of being a dragon - hunting, navigation and flying, the tricks of changing from shape to shape. Though his parents watched for safety in their care, they barely bothered to know him. This, the wyrmling knew, was the way things had to be, for such a young dragon as he was barely a dragon at all.
It was with that basic level of competence that he and his siblings were sent out from their home with a simple command: that for a year they would survive on their own, and then return. At that time they would be named and become true dragons, rather than clever animals with a dragon's shape. The thought of this independence rather excited the dragon... and it excited the people in the towns at the foot of the mountain, both for the excuse to hold a party about it and to finally get the inquisitive and perhaps sometimes less-than-likeable wyrmlings out of the area.
The wyrmling and his siblings spread towards the seven corners of the world. First he traveled over the sea, going from island to island. There he watched the birds and fish and fishermen - the ones not instantly terrified by the dragon's shadow overhead, anyway. The thought of so many people fleeing bothered him, and he studied the ways of one of the island birds, learning how it lived and fed, and learning how to imitate its form. Soon he was watching the men and their boats in that form, learning bits and pieces of their language.
In time, though, the smooth routines of the fishers and traders changed from intricately interesting to boring, and his attention turned back towards land. At the edges of forests between kingdoms he hunted, and made fools of several dragon-hunters. The stories of his presence that spread did not concern him; he spent his time marking his crude territory and studying the creatures within it. There he learned the trick of shaping earth and stone to carve out deadfalls and temporary burrows. Where one of his siblings might have been drawn to the great elk or hunting-wolves, in his shape of a bird the wyrmling studied the little creatures under the trees. One caught his attention more than the others, and he spent his fancy on half-practicing the shape of a simple mouse.
The trap that finally caught him was a fairly simple one, for all the magic in it. A white stag led him on a merry chase into the deep woods, where he couldn't fly for fear of tearing his wings on trees, and ran him ragged. The way it was always a step ahead filled him with a sort of prideful anger, and when at last he'd chased it into a cave he proceeded without caution or care. There, when he'd cornered it, the earth of the cave erupted around him and wrapped him in iron chains.
The stag was a witch's familiar, he pieced together from the scraps of conversation he could understand as he was dragged away in chains by men with horses. The woman herself looked young but had a certain touch of age about her. The wyrmling was locked away into a steel cage, and made halfway an exhibition by the woman at her market-home at the crossroads in the forest. There he endured in silence while being poked and prodded and stripped of scales for use in alchemical solutions, and he honed his understanding of the human language.
One visitor in particular drew his attention, among the travellers who walked the forest roads and bought the witch's potions and poultices. She had dark, strange eyes, and she spent time at the bars of his pen when others treated him as only a mute animal. Then in the dark of night she came to him, holding conversations in an unsure human tongue, always leaving before the witch's familiar could return from its haunts in the forest. They set a day, when the stars would align properly - and then she left again, not to return until then, lest the witch be warned of what was coming.
What the witch had expected was for the young dragon's arrogance to chain him more effectively than any magic could. Her own confidence about it had blinded her - for while he spent futile weeks trying to break the bars of his enclosure, that was just to keep up appearances, as he'd learned his lesson that night of the chains, and in the cage he spent his nights practicing the details of whiskers and fur and little paws. Finally on the appointed night, the wyrmling slipped between the bars in the shape of a mouse and dripped the witch's own poisons into her mouth while she slept - while his new friend caught up the witch's familiar in whisker-fine strings, out in the forest, and throttled it to death.
When they met again the wounds of the wyrmling's friend revealed her as not a human at all, but one of the spider-kin, with the body she wore as her puppet. This was no bother to the wyrmling, and together they ransacked the dead witch's home and left her body hanging from the door, with a warning scrawled across the shop-face against capturing magical creatures. In the forest and the both of them washed of the witch's blood, they spent a long time talking.
They could not stay together, for his first year was coming, and it would be time to return home for his naming... but they dawdled long in the woods while she taught him the wiles and secrets she'd learned of humans, and he shaped himself half-human under a thick cloak as they walked the roads back towards the mountains. At times he would need to become himself again, and a strange half-remembered specialty of dragon's hoard-carrying surfaced again within his passed-down memory. That became his second proper spell, so that he could carry things within a space within-but-without himself by as simply as swallowing them.
At a crossroads they parted and the wyrmling continued on, with his covering garb hiding him as an exotic foreigner or a wounded convalescent. In the towns at the base of the mountains, where time long enough with strange visitors passing up and down the slopes had taught the people to act properly to strangers, he learned more of humans, with his half of the witch's silver teaching him of luxuries he'd never experienced before. Finally the time came close enough that he would have to return, and he took the path up the mountain, needing nothing more to hide himself than a shaded hat to keep his dragon's eyes from view. He was the second to return home, as a sister of his had come a few days before. None others of the clutch made their appearance within the time given to them.
A moderate (by dragon standards) feast was held on the mountainside, with the flames and friendly brawling of the visiting dragons above providing a particularly exciting backdrop for the human harvest festivals happening in the towns at the base of the mountain. The formal naming of the two wyrmlings was almost just an afterthought - they'd already proven themselves, and for all involved, focusing on the unusual foods and tribute taken up the mountain by human priests was rather more interesting. The wyrmling that had called himself Loiec in the human towns below became Magr'ateth ("Clever Little Knife"), fifth in succession for the "throne" of the mountain.
With his new name came recognition of Magr'ateth as a true dragon, and a much warmer relationship with his parents and older siblings. With his time spent again at home - after he and [companion] parted ways again, though with promises to keep in touch - Mag was introduced to greater elements of the Lantern Path. Time to linger ever-closer to the mountain's liquid heart opened his mind and senses enough to the heat to receive the gift of his mother's least heart-engine, and that let him spend time in the lava to craft the core of his third, magic-burning spell.
That time came to a close, though, as his parents laid out an offer. From there he would go to a city, well down the coast, known for an order of hospitalers militant - protecting knights - and for the sciences of healing and cosmopolitan attitude such protection offered. He would join that order as an apprentice and be trained by them. He could hardly refuse, for the chance of something exciting and new it offered.
With new coin in his purse and tailored clothes instead of the tattered motley he'd come in, Loiec set out again upon the road - by foot, for no horse would have him. Time in the cold and rain was no great bother to him, and he found himself drawn to pilgrims on the road - poor groups come to visit the city's well-known healing springs - for want of conversation.
In the city he encountered his friend again, the spider-kin with the dark eyes, and together they traded stories and explored the place. The time came again too soon to part, though, as Loiec had to report to the hospitalers before they went looking for him. The cover story had him as a reclusive noble's boy, eccentric but good-hearted, and sent to learn the ways of war proper to a noble by masters who would preserve that spark of good in him.
Loiec's ways and behavior were rather strange to his hosts - though the quiet arrangements that had happened by private mail were enough to keep the concerns raised by the other apprentices from becoming public. With the hospitalers he learned, and if his trangressions were punished perhaps a mite less firmly than those of the other initiates, the occasional correspondence with home kept him in line.
With them he learned more properly how to be human, and he learned the ways of the sword and shield, and of caring for the sick and wounded. With his strange meditations and his lack of human fears, he spent much time in the holy crypts, until at last he was given the official blessing and guided through the oaths and the rituals of acknowledgement. Then the whole world twisted askew, for at once he could see and taste the evils lurking in the hearts of men.
Though still an apprentice, his stamina and casual attitude towards hardship got Loiec quickly picked for assistant duty during trips into surrounding lands... and to testify in courts, explaining the hospitalers' sixth sense in a way that soon became a rote pattern.
It was investigating one supposedly "haunted" graveyard in particular, as the record-keeper and map-maker to group of experienced hospitalers, that the walls started to go strange and twist in ways he didn't know possible, and then everything went dark...
Character PERSONALITY:
Mag's a complex beast to deal with, being a dragon who happens to coincidentally be human-relatable mostly by virtue of his youth... and young he is, being only two and a half years old. With his minimal life experience, he's got an intense curiosity about new things, and an idealistic teenager's bright-eyed optimism about the world and his future. He is a dragon, after all, and though he's loaded up with knowledge about the world by birth, he hasn't experienced even a fraction of that in person. His instincts still tell him that the easiest way to handle problems is to eat them or run away from them, for all that he's learning more nuanced positions by his exposure to humans.
Mag follows the Lantern Path, a sort of philosophy-religion held among the more enlightened dragons. Its precepts hold that as dragons are clearly the physically, mentally, and supernaturally most superior creatures that exist, they must also be morally superior in order to fully live up to their own potential. The exact interpretation of what 'morally superior' means varies, but every take on it tends to center on the idea of dragons protecting and shepherding the development of lesser beings. Mag's grasp on the philosophy is more in the particulars of meditative techniques and rough rules of thumb to use with interactions with lesser creatures than it is on the greater theological picture.
Around humans, Mag's behavior is held on the straight and narrow more firmly by the hospitaler's oaths that he holds to. The nature of being a dragon is such that he can be fiercely dedicated to them in the immediate term and still see it as almost a sort of business deal, with no more long-term moral significance attached to breaking them someday in the future than the breaking of a business contract. For now, while he follows them, the oaths command him to be good and true, to guard the weak, to be rightful and courteous, and to champion what is right and good. He has not sworn the full array of oaths, and so he holds no specific fealty to human authority, and nor does he have any strict obedience to honorable behavior - useful loopholes, given what he is. Generally he does succeed in upholding his oaths - though he steps the line sometimes, taking time in penance and meditation to regain his balance of human-inspired morality and dragon inhumanity.
For all that he could be held as a good person in human terms, Mag is still an apex predator with only about a year's grasp on the subtleties of human culture and civilization. It's his focus on the Lantern Path that keeps him from broadly categorizing others in terms of what sort of effort it would take to eat them and take their valuables... or from admitting to it, anyway, because every dragon knows that every other dragon is always thinking like that even if they never mention.
After all, like all dragons, Mag is viciously greedy and envious. It's only his extended view of his life compared to humans that keeps these from being overpowering traits. He can expect to live a minimum of a good two or three millenia - and, with the imagined invulnerability of youth common to all sentients, the thought of dying before that time doesn't even enter the picture. To take a leisurely century or two among humans before really getting the business of gathering proper treasure and setting up a lair is something he can think of with the same casual ease as a human scion of a wealthy family taking a year's sabattical before going to university.
On the immediate level, Mag is still the sort of person to work out cruelly advantagous personal deals, stretch the generosity of others to the breaking point, and generally walk the fine line of being a greedy git without actually quite violating the strictures of the Path or of his hospitaler's oaths. Though it's not just for material wealth - he can eat massive amounts, and he generally will whenever he gets the chance to, both for more energy to store up and for the chance to try new food, whether it's a raw beast or unfamiliar human cooking.
Pride and wrath are well-represented, too. Mag's quick to boast when a good opportunity comes up, whether he's sticking to his human persona or not - and, though he never quite lies about it, he does tend to stretch the truth or omit things to make himself look better. Calling him on the details or suggesting that he might not be telling the truth at all is quick to go to his head. The meditative techniques of the Lantern Path help him keep control, but this still makes him almost comically easy to provoke and manipulate the anger of by somone who's figured out this quirk of his psychology.
The only deadly sins that he's really missing out on are lust and sloth... not because the nature of a dragon lacks them, but simply that he's not old enough yet to really experience the call of either. He's experimented a bit with both (after all, a rich boy traveling on his own can find all sorts of unusual luxuries if he looks for them), but doing so takes a conscious physical emulation of his elders - normally, he's both generally asexual and incapable of the extended hibernation of elder dragons. Give it half a century and he'll be rather more drawn to both.
Aside from the things that he might (reluctantly, hesitantly, maybe, if somebody with enough social finesse were to call him on them) admit as flaws, there are traits that certainly stand out in comparison to human assumptions. Death means very little to dragons, for example; the idea of having an extended period of grief like humans often do is something Mag would find somewhere between creepy and humorous. (The closest dragons get to something like human funerals tends to be a ceremony where the deceased is made into a number of tasty dishes for the attendees to try while they trade stories about him.) Similarly, true hardship is as strange to him as a foreign country, being a creature with all the best traits of animals and people and very few of the disadvantages of either.
» EXSILIUM INFORMATION
Chosen WEAPON:
In the Initiative's armory, Mag will find a silver-hued sword that can transform into a bow - and, as he practices more with it, other weapons, too, along with performing metamorphic changing tricks like he can do with his own body.
Chosen SKILLSET:
For all his power, it would actually be best to keep Mag out of any front-line fighting. He may have armor-plated scales, but he's not actually immune to mortal weapons, and he's not skilled or fast enough to make up for how obvious a target his flashy golden appearance makes him.
Instead, he'd probably work best in sabotage or shock attack roles, where he can get in quickly, wreck things (while laying down plenty of literal fire), and then get out again. He'd also be useful in a support role; with his sharp senses and long flight time, he can play overwatch to a group on the ground without needing any outside equipment.
Of course, that's assuming that his actual identity gets revealed. So long as he sticks to just being "Loiec", he's likely to end up in a support role, and be pulled in for his experience with supernatural or demonic enemies if such a situation is to arise.
» SAMPLES
First PERSON:
[Someone seems to have typed this by hand... and not very well, either. Whoever it is could probably use some lessons.]
Bonjorn lesgens ke mirum boite !!
I do not know if I trust this device to [untranslatable] .But trying is better than not trying and so I still should?? Please forgive the poor writing I am still working on it . I am Apprentice [untranslatable] Loiec. Therefore from the egg, I am pleased to meet all of you. I am wondering to know where in this place I can find an apothecary .i am feeling quite lacking without proper medicines prepared .
Third PERSON:
The rain's wet and very cold, and Loiec doesn't bother to wrap his cloak about himself like he would at home. The streets are much too clean, so much that it feels almost more unreal than those first moments of pain and shock in the white room, when the half-dismembered animate skeleton was still at his throat, and he took the men in strange clothes for more beasts, and only a year's restraint at the flat of the blade of the old man who'd taught him kept him from incerating them all.
None of it makes sense, none of it, but the rain is real, and so is the way the linen shirt clings to him and itches. Loiec tilts his head back, so the rain can run across his face, and rubs his eyes. The effect of the strange medicines still lingers, dragging at the movements of his fingers, weighing him down. A stranger in even stranger garb pushes him out of the way, saying something in that harsh-edged teutsch language, and Loiec squawks a protest as he stumbles clear of the flow of traffic.
Player NAME: su
Personal JOURNAL:
anagramaryeIM & SERVICE:
anagramaryePlayer PLURK: sumanity
Current CHARACTERS: None
» CHARACTER INFORMATION
Character NAME: Magr'ateth, Fifth Lord of Mt. Tiermant (aka "Loiec k'Tiermant")
Character PULL-POINT: From a moment just before he would have been dragged into a strange underground dungeon and from there into a world-spanning adventure.
Character AGE: 2½
Character ABILITIES:
Inherited Knowledge:
Even straight out of the egg, Mag had access to ancient reserves of genetically-inherited knowledge, halfway between pure instinct and taught knowledge. Most of this concerns the natural world; he has a grasp on the traits of weather, animals, geography, how to hunt, and so on as automatic as if he'd been consciously taught all of it.
Contained within this are certain addenda on other things to concern even young dragons - how to recognize unnatural creatures, the basic principles of diplomatic conduct with humanoid royalty and fae creatures, recognizing the signs of dangerous magic, the architecture of underground excavations, and so on. Distilled as the knowledge is from endless generations of dragons, very little of it directly concerns anything to do with humanoid society from the "inside" rather than the "outside".
Shape-Changing:
One of the half-secret traits of Mag's kind is that they are adept shapechangers - such that even the least clever of them can manage some level of basic changes. Even the traditional "dragon" shape is an aspect of this, such that it's a well-trained secondary form instead of their natural shape. It only takes a few moments to assume a familiar form, with an unfamiliar one taking potentially several minutes to 'craft'; one change is easy, but repeat changes in a short time can start to tire him out pretty quickly.
Mag's own most natural form is that of a crested white-scaled serpent, large enough even with his young age to easily match a full-grown reticulated python - and with the strength to match, as his most native hunting instincts are to ambush prey and crush it to death in his coils. He can move as well in water as on land in this shape, like some strange hybrid sea snake.
As second nature, though, he can change, gaining legs and wings and claws and ripping, tearing teeth. This shape is comparable in size to an adult wolf, being a little shorter in body size but a little taller and with a long tail... and with a pair of wings that grant him a thirty-foot wingspan. In this form he's a strong flier, managing 30 miles an hour for sustained flight, double that for shorter 'runs', or triple that for very short 'sprints'. (Just don't ask him to do much precision flying - he's got a turning radius of some fifteen feet at best and has a stall speed around 10 miles an hour.) On land and in water both he can manage a solid 40 miles per hour in sprints and make a good 50 to 60 miles a day in long-distance travel.
This form is a fantastic (un)natural predator: it can outrun, outwrestle, and outfight almost every natural creature in its weight class on land, sea, and air, and having armor plating that can compare to an armored knight's plate and a cavalcade of natural weapons (claws, teeth, and even the strong pseudo-claws of the wings' wrists) make only examplars of the animal world like brown bears, giant crocodiles, or hippopotamuses any real threat. (Usually these aren't creatures that he'd bother try to fight in the first place, since he can easily loiter in flight long enough to pick easier prey.)
The gold-yellow scales of this form are a conscious choice. The color is his public mark of allegiance to the Lantern Path. Were he to change his choice of philosophy, he could change the color of his scales, too.
Like many of the more social dragons, Mag has a well-practiced humanoid form he can assume. In this shape he resembles a young human - though he's still got a measure of his natural crushing strength, leaving him with power more like a burly strongman than the slender thing he appears to be. He's got particularly sharp teeth and fingernails, too, though he usually tries to stick to the 'human' forms of combat if only for appearances' sake.
Mag can't take forms much larger than himself, in a sort of vague conservation-of-mass principle, but he can manage smaller ones. These have a certain special difficulty to them, as suppressing the extra mass down to the point needed for substantially smaller shapes takes an extra degree of concentration and focus. Getting too distracted could result in suddenly 'popping' back to normal size and shape. (He can skip this and assume a smaller-in-volume form that still has what approaches his usual mass, but turning into a 300-pound mouse usually obviates the whole point to start with.) In this way Mag has practiced two simple small shapes: a scaled island lizard-hawk, and a particularly ordinary brown field mouse.
Mag can take new forms without needing practice - but doing so makes it much harder to hold those forms fully and reliably. Without having weeks or even months to practice and meditate at a particular form, differences and tells of his serpent or dragon forms almost always show through. For example, to fake being a human he's never imitated before, he might have to hide shining eyes and scales. He could potentially even pretend to be an inanimate object - though the process of 'learning' a form involves enough psychological understanding that actually doing that for more than the short term would be practically impossible.
Mag's shapeshifting doesn't do anything to help with clothes or personal effects, necessitating either stripping or ruining his clothes if he needs to do a quick change while in human form. He's likely to develop a spell for this at some point in the future, but for now he hasn't yet had enough experience with - or as - a human to be able to internalize that kind of effect. Exposure to any others with clothes-transforming effects would help, though.
Keen Senses:
In any form he takes, Mag has exceptionally keen senses, with eyes as sharp as an eagle's and night-vision suited for the darkest nights or murkiest waters. His senses of smell and taste are very sharp, as well - he can track creatures by scent and can pick out the presence of unusual ingredients in food or even poisons by taste alone. Even in complete pitch-darkness, extremely keen hearing and scent, and a sort of crude, nonvisual heat-sense let him tell the locations of things near to him. It would almost certainly take magic or advanced technology to have a hope of sneaking up on him - even while asleep, as he can literally sleep with one eye open and a subconsciously tasked-off part of him watching his surroundings.
Heart-Engine:
Another half-secret of the dragons - though one better kept by them, or less understood by others - is the use of heart-engines, artificial secondary organs metaphysically absorbed by the dragon's shapeshifting ability. Each heart-engine is the core of the dragon's near-perfect metabolism and ability to metabolize even inorganic materials, and they act as high-capacity energy storage, as well as augmenting the dragon's own magical traits. With it, even dangerous toxins or rotting trash can be safely consumed; it would take magically-potent poisons or advanced technology to present any threat beyond an upset stomach.
Each heart-engine is particularly attuned to a certain pure-enough expression of an elemental process, like fire, ice, or lightning, and must be created in proximity to that element and refined by interaction with a dragon's own shapechanging. With increased personal power, dragons can integrate multiple heart-engines into themselves; most focus on a single type, but some synergize the traits of multiple elemental processes into something new. In any case, any heart-engine's traits apply in every form the bearer of it takes.
As young as he is, Mag hasn't had the experience needed to craft a heart-engine of his own. For lack of that, he uses one gifted to him by his mother, holding the searing heat of a volcano's heart. With the heart-engine's power thrumming inside him, Mag can comfortably linger in even very intense heat. Even molten lava is no more harmful to him than water is, though letting any of it solidfy on him would be more of a bother. It would take particularly focused heat or flame - high-intensity blowtorches or appropriate magic, or example - to even hope to hurt him that way.
He can channel that power outwards, too, breathing gouts of clinging half-liquid flame. It takes a few moments to re-focus his energy after each time, and doing it too often can make him intensely hungry. As young as he is, his flame is not hugely potent, but it's still enough to sear an unwary human with potentially lethal wounds.
There is a pair of downsides to having it, though. While his internal heat makes cold ambient conditions easy for him to deal with, targeted high-intensity cold effects - things like ice magic or technological freeze rays - can flash-suppress it for a moment, making them especially effective. On the other end of the spectrum, very potent fire-manipulation effects can potentially affect him directly. (This is liable to temporarily supercharge his internal flame, too, so woe betide the person who tries to control him this way but fails.)
As devices that aid in converting almost anything into raw magical and metabolic power, heart-engines are nearly invaluable in magical projects or weapons (or those built with sufficiently advanced technology), though convincing him to willingly part with it would be exceptionally hard.
Dragon's Adeptness:
In any form he takes, Mag is a naturally adept flier and swimmer. This is enough of a magical quality that he'd even be halfway competent with piloting planes or boat with no more instruction than being told what each control does. He can bear the pressure differentials of moderate altitudes and depths with no serious problems. He can even breathe water, though doing so loses enough efficiency that, as with high altitudes, his body prefers to autonomically shift into a low-exertion mode that preserves energy and delays the early exhaustion he'd otherwise experience.
Aging:
Mag is young... particularly young in human terms, seeing as he's only two-and-a-half years old. Like all dragons, he will grow and become more powerful over time - physically, mentally, and supernaturally. This generally won't matter in gameplay terms, as this growth is slow enough to take on the order of decades simply to progress from the dragon equivalent of childhood... though anyone using time-manipulation or aging powers on Mag might be in for quite a surprise.
Magic:
As with all dragons, Mag has a certain degree of innate magical power. Each takes months of meditation and focus on the concepts associated with it to become properly usable, shaped into his soul in the same kind of psychologically-influenced way as a new physical form. Mag's own power is not very great even with the engine-heart within him, though there are a few magical effects he can use.
The first of the proper spells Mag knows is one that lets him tear into solid stone and earth as if it were soft clay. Of course, this is most useful in his dragon shape, where his claws and shape make the task much easier - after all, it's still tough to dig through even a lot of clay. The way that power has to be continually poured into this spell while it's being used makes it much more exhausting to keep using than his others, making it something he prefers only to use in relaxed conditions.
The second is that by swallowing something whole, he may send an object (or even creature) into a sort of stasis, unharmed and not even physically inside him until he coughs it up again. (This is of course limited by form - in his most native form he might be able to swallow something whole around the size of a medium-size dog without causing any serious harm, were it cooperative enough to let him do so.) He can manage about his own natural weight in stored things, give or take - around 300 pounds.
The last is that he can channel extra power into his fiery breath, infusing it with power that scours at what it strikes, burning away the touch of magic. This has no special effect against permanent works of magic such as permanently forged items, but it can burn away temporary spells already in effect or act as a short-lived barrier against new ones. With his youth and limited magical power this effect has limited potency - it might cancel out the spells of an apprentice sorcerer entirely, somewhat weaken the magic of a well-trained professional, and have no effect at all against a master wizard.
Along with the well-shaped spells that Mag has crafted, he can produce simple effects at will, so long as he hasn't tired himself out - things like little lights or noises or animated flames, or simple tricks like whispers carried across a field. None are genuinely powerful or dangerous, but they can be useful if used cleverly.
Dragon's Tongue:
Like many dragons, Mag has a certain gift of honeyed tongue and a sense for lies that's just as potent. This isn't foolproof; with his limited experience in human society, even simple tricks might catch him if they take advantage of his lack of knowledge, and his own bright-eyed persuasion is likely to fail entirely if he has to try and handle something he doesn't have the knowledge of or proper vocabulary for. As he grows he might manage to be a skilled manipulator, but for now he's more likely than not to fail at it when dealing with humans.
As might be expected he's got a natural gift for languages, too. The dragon language itself is extremely complex, being filled with dialects and sub-dialects passed down through racial memory in lieu of normal teaching - and it's near-unpronounceable by most humans without heavy training, having a heavy element of whistles, clicks, and almost musical noises layered together. Of human tongues he knows only that of his homeland - a language with an unmistakable similarity to archaic French and Latin - but he could pick up other languages very quickly with active study or immersion in them.
Hospitaler:
Mag's training as a hospitaler's apprentice - and the half-initiations he's gone through, in the presence of blessed relics of the human order, and in conjuction with his half-formed devotion to the Lantern Path - has gifted him with the synaesthetic sense for moral standing that the most fervent hospitalers are known for. This is never foolproof, for there's never any guarantee that a repugnant man might not still be the best choice for society, but it does let him 'size up' someone on a glance. In particular, things of pure philosophical wickedness or goodness show up very brightly to this sixth sense - but beings with no real sense of right or wrong never do.
By turning this power outward, he may strike a blow that disrupts the power of wickedness, adding a holy sting to the attack. Half-trained as he is in this human art, this isn't very effective and is still particularly exhausting to him; it's the kind of thing he'd only use if he had to, and would usually channel it into his burning breath.
These abilities are as dependent on his psychological devotion to the hospitaler's standard as they are on his own supernatural power. Though they depend on no one act, he could no more change his philosophical stance and retain them in their current form than he could fly while in the shape of a toad.
His work as a hospitaler's apprentice has also given him a grasp on the basic use of human weapons and armor. In terms of pure skill he is clumsy, having only a barest grasp of proper fighting technique... but with raw strength and a serpent's swiftness, he can fight viciously even in human shape.
Mag's also skilled in his order's practices of first aid and long-term medical care... though, given the sort of world he comes from, that's not saying all that much, as they're reasonably educated about the actual mechanics of injury but far behind modern medical techniques. He could do fairly well for makeshift treatment of wounds, and has tricks to use with resources like poultices of natural materials, but he'd need thorough re-training to live up to modern battlefield medic or nurse roles.
Predator's Antipathy:
If Mag were a normal hospitaler's apprentice, he'd be learning the way of horses, too... but the animals have a certain antipathy to him, as might be expected. It isn't so much a flaw in his changing as it is a slow burn of internal power that he isn't yet skilled enough to control; animals tend to become antsy and unhappy around him whether they know he's there or not. With well-trained, powerful, or especially slow-witted or intelligent beasts this isn't much of a problem, but asking him to play nice with a normal animal for long will almost inevitably end badly (probably with him eating the animal in question, because that's what dragons do).
Character HISTORY:
The dragon who would in time be come to known as Magr'ateth was hatched in a clutch of several siblings, in a fortress carved into the upper face of a sleeping volcano. The very first part of his life was simple; with his siblings he was instructed in the simple practicalities of being a dragon - hunting, navigation and flying, the tricks of changing from shape to shape. Though his parents watched for safety in their care, they barely bothered to know him. This, the wyrmling knew, was the way things had to be, for such a young dragon as he was barely a dragon at all.
It was with that basic level of competence that he and his siblings were sent out from their home with a simple command: that for a year they would survive on their own, and then return. At that time they would be named and become true dragons, rather than clever animals with a dragon's shape. The thought of this independence rather excited the dragon... and it excited the people in the towns at the foot of the mountain, both for the excuse to hold a party about it and to finally get the inquisitive and perhaps sometimes less-than-likeable wyrmlings out of the area.
The wyrmling and his siblings spread towards the seven corners of the world. First he traveled over the sea, going from island to island. There he watched the birds and fish and fishermen - the ones not instantly terrified by the dragon's shadow overhead, anyway. The thought of so many people fleeing bothered him, and he studied the ways of one of the island birds, learning how it lived and fed, and learning how to imitate its form. Soon he was watching the men and their boats in that form, learning bits and pieces of their language.
In time, though, the smooth routines of the fishers and traders changed from intricately interesting to boring, and his attention turned back towards land. At the edges of forests between kingdoms he hunted, and made fools of several dragon-hunters. The stories of his presence that spread did not concern him; he spent his time marking his crude territory and studying the creatures within it. There he learned the trick of shaping earth and stone to carve out deadfalls and temporary burrows. Where one of his siblings might have been drawn to the great elk or hunting-wolves, in his shape of a bird the wyrmling studied the little creatures under the trees. One caught his attention more than the others, and he spent his fancy on half-practicing the shape of a simple mouse.
The trap that finally caught him was a fairly simple one, for all the magic in it. A white stag led him on a merry chase into the deep woods, where he couldn't fly for fear of tearing his wings on trees, and ran him ragged. The way it was always a step ahead filled him with a sort of prideful anger, and when at last he'd chased it into a cave he proceeded without caution or care. There, when he'd cornered it, the earth of the cave erupted around him and wrapped him in iron chains.
The stag was a witch's familiar, he pieced together from the scraps of conversation he could understand as he was dragged away in chains by men with horses. The woman herself looked young but had a certain touch of age about her. The wyrmling was locked away into a steel cage, and made halfway an exhibition by the woman at her market-home at the crossroads in the forest. There he endured in silence while being poked and prodded and stripped of scales for use in alchemical solutions, and he honed his understanding of the human language.
One visitor in particular drew his attention, among the travellers who walked the forest roads and bought the witch's potions and poultices. She had dark, strange eyes, and she spent time at the bars of his pen when others treated him as only a mute animal. Then in the dark of night she came to him, holding conversations in an unsure human tongue, always leaving before the witch's familiar could return from its haunts in the forest. They set a day, when the stars would align properly - and then she left again, not to return until then, lest the witch be warned of what was coming.
What the witch had expected was for the young dragon's arrogance to chain him more effectively than any magic could. Her own confidence about it had blinded her - for while he spent futile weeks trying to break the bars of his enclosure, that was just to keep up appearances, as he'd learned his lesson that night of the chains, and in the cage he spent his nights practicing the details of whiskers and fur and little paws. Finally on the appointed night, the wyrmling slipped between the bars in the shape of a mouse and dripped the witch's own poisons into her mouth while she slept - while his new friend caught up the witch's familiar in whisker-fine strings, out in the forest, and throttled it to death.
When they met again the wounds of the wyrmling's friend revealed her as not a human at all, but one of the spider-kin, with the body she wore as her puppet. This was no bother to the wyrmling, and together they ransacked the dead witch's home and left her body hanging from the door, with a warning scrawled across the shop-face against capturing magical creatures. In the forest and the both of them washed of the witch's blood, they spent a long time talking.
They could not stay together, for his first year was coming, and it would be time to return home for his naming... but they dawdled long in the woods while she taught him the wiles and secrets she'd learned of humans, and he shaped himself half-human under a thick cloak as they walked the roads back towards the mountains. At times he would need to become himself again, and a strange half-remembered specialty of dragon's hoard-carrying surfaced again within his passed-down memory. That became his second proper spell, so that he could carry things within a space within-but-without himself by as simply as swallowing them.
At a crossroads they parted and the wyrmling continued on, with his covering garb hiding him as an exotic foreigner or a wounded convalescent. In the towns at the base of the mountains, where time long enough with strange visitors passing up and down the slopes had taught the people to act properly to strangers, he learned more of humans, with his half of the witch's silver teaching him of luxuries he'd never experienced before. Finally the time came close enough that he would have to return, and he took the path up the mountain, needing nothing more to hide himself than a shaded hat to keep his dragon's eyes from view. He was the second to return home, as a sister of his had come a few days before. None others of the clutch made their appearance within the time given to them.
A moderate (by dragon standards) feast was held on the mountainside, with the flames and friendly brawling of the visiting dragons above providing a particularly exciting backdrop for the human harvest festivals happening in the towns at the base of the mountain. The formal naming of the two wyrmlings was almost just an afterthought - they'd already proven themselves, and for all involved, focusing on the unusual foods and tribute taken up the mountain by human priests was rather more interesting. The wyrmling that had called himself Loiec in the human towns below became Magr'ateth ("Clever Little Knife"), fifth in succession for the "throne" of the mountain.
With his new name came recognition of Magr'ateth as a true dragon, and a much warmer relationship with his parents and older siblings. With his time spent again at home - after he and [companion] parted ways again, though with promises to keep in touch - Mag was introduced to greater elements of the Lantern Path. Time to linger ever-closer to the mountain's liquid heart opened his mind and senses enough to the heat to receive the gift of his mother's least heart-engine, and that let him spend time in the lava to craft the core of his third, magic-burning spell.
That time came to a close, though, as his parents laid out an offer. From there he would go to a city, well down the coast, known for an order of hospitalers militant - protecting knights - and for the sciences of healing and cosmopolitan attitude such protection offered. He would join that order as an apprentice and be trained by them. He could hardly refuse, for the chance of something exciting and new it offered.
With new coin in his purse and tailored clothes instead of the tattered motley he'd come in, Loiec set out again upon the road - by foot, for no horse would have him. Time in the cold and rain was no great bother to him, and he found himself drawn to pilgrims on the road - poor groups come to visit the city's well-known healing springs - for want of conversation.
In the city he encountered his friend again, the spider-kin with the dark eyes, and together they traded stories and explored the place. The time came again too soon to part, though, as Loiec had to report to the hospitalers before they went looking for him. The cover story had him as a reclusive noble's boy, eccentric but good-hearted, and sent to learn the ways of war proper to a noble by masters who would preserve that spark of good in him.
Loiec's ways and behavior were rather strange to his hosts - though the quiet arrangements that had happened by private mail were enough to keep the concerns raised by the other apprentices from becoming public. With the hospitalers he learned, and if his trangressions were punished perhaps a mite less firmly than those of the other initiates, the occasional correspondence with home kept him in line.
With them he learned more properly how to be human, and he learned the ways of the sword and shield, and of caring for the sick and wounded. With his strange meditations and his lack of human fears, he spent much time in the holy crypts, until at last he was given the official blessing and guided through the oaths and the rituals of acknowledgement. Then the whole world twisted askew, for at once he could see and taste the evils lurking in the hearts of men.
Though still an apprentice, his stamina and casual attitude towards hardship got Loiec quickly picked for assistant duty during trips into surrounding lands... and to testify in courts, explaining the hospitalers' sixth sense in a way that soon became a rote pattern.
It was investigating one supposedly "haunted" graveyard in particular, as the record-keeper and map-maker to group of experienced hospitalers, that the walls started to go strange and twist in ways he didn't know possible, and then everything went dark...
Character PERSONALITY:
Mag's a complex beast to deal with, being a dragon who happens to coincidentally be human-relatable mostly by virtue of his youth... and young he is, being only two and a half years old. With his minimal life experience, he's got an intense curiosity about new things, and an idealistic teenager's bright-eyed optimism about the world and his future. He is a dragon, after all, and though he's loaded up with knowledge about the world by birth, he hasn't experienced even a fraction of that in person. His instincts still tell him that the easiest way to handle problems is to eat them or run away from them, for all that he's learning more nuanced positions by his exposure to humans.
Mag follows the Lantern Path, a sort of philosophy-religion held among the more enlightened dragons. Its precepts hold that as dragons are clearly the physically, mentally, and supernaturally most superior creatures that exist, they must also be morally superior in order to fully live up to their own potential. The exact interpretation of what 'morally superior' means varies, but every take on it tends to center on the idea of dragons protecting and shepherding the development of lesser beings. Mag's grasp on the philosophy is more in the particulars of meditative techniques and rough rules of thumb to use with interactions with lesser creatures than it is on the greater theological picture.
Around humans, Mag's behavior is held on the straight and narrow more firmly by the hospitaler's oaths that he holds to. The nature of being a dragon is such that he can be fiercely dedicated to them in the immediate term and still see it as almost a sort of business deal, with no more long-term moral significance attached to breaking them someday in the future than the breaking of a business contract. For now, while he follows them, the oaths command him to be good and true, to guard the weak, to be rightful and courteous, and to champion what is right and good. He has not sworn the full array of oaths, and so he holds no specific fealty to human authority, and nor does he have any strict obedience to honorable behavior - useful loopholes, given what he is. Generally he does succeed in upholding his oaths - though he steps the line sometimes, taking time in penance and meditation to regain his balance of human-inspired morality and dragon inhumanity.
For all that he could be held as a good person in human terms, Mag is still an apex predator with only about a year's grasp on the subtleties of human culture and civilization. It's his focus on the Lantern Path that keeps him from broadly categorizing others in terms of what sort of effort it would take to eat them and take their valuables... or from admitting to it, anyway, because every dragon knows that every other dragon is always thinking like that even if they never mention.
After all, like all dragons, Mag is viciously greedy and envious. It's only his extended view of his life compared to humans that keeps these from being overpowering traits. He can expect to live a minimum of a good two or three millenia - and, with the imagined invulnerability of youth common to all sentients, the thought of dying before that time doesn't even enter the picture. To take a leisurely century or two among humans before really getting the business of gathering proper treasure and setting up a lair is something he can think of with the same casual ease as a human scion of a wealthy family taking a year's sabattical before going to university.
On the immediate level, Mag is still the sort of person to work out cruelly advantagous personal deals, stretch the generosity of others to the breaking point, and generally walk the fine line of being a greedy git without actually quite violating the strictures of the Path or of his hospitaler's oaths. Though it's not just for material wealth - he can eat massive amounts, and he generally will whenever he gets the chance to, both for more energy to store up and for the chance to try new food, whether it's a raw beast or unfamiliar human cooking.
Pride and wrath are well-represented, too. Mag's quick to boast when a good opportunity comes up, whether he's sticking to his human persona or not - and, though he never quite lies about it, he does tend to stretch the truth or omit things to make himself look better. Calling him on the details or suggesting that he might not be telling the truth at all is quick to go to his head. The meditative techniques of the Lantern Path help him keep control, but this still makes him almost comically easy to provoke and manipulate the anger of by somone who's figured out this quirk of his psychology.
The only deadly sins that he's really missing out on are lust and sloth... not because the nature of a dragon lacks them, but simply that he's not old enough yet to really experience the call of either. He's experimented a bit with both (after all, a rich boy traveling on his own can find all sorts of unusual luxuries if he looks for them), but doing so takes a conscious physical emulation of his elders - normally, he's both generally asexual and incapable of the extended hibernation of elder dragons. Give it half a century and he'll be rather more drawn to both.
Aside from the things that he might (reluctantly, hesitantly, maybe, if somebody with enough social finesse were to call him on them) admit as flaws, there are traits that certainly stand out in comparison to human assumptions. Death means very little to dragons, for example; the idea of having an extended period of grief like humans often do is something Mag would find somewhere between creepy and humorous. (The closest dragons get to something like human funerals tends to be a ceremony where the deceased is made into a number of tasty dishes for the attendees to try while they trade stories about him.) Similarly, true hardship is as strange to him as a foreign country, being a creature with all the best traits of animals and people and very few of the disadvantages of either.
» EXSILIUM INFORMATION
Chosen WEAPON:
In the Initiative's armory, Mag will find a silver-hued sword that can transform into a bow - and, as he practices more with it, other weapons, too, along with performing metamorphic changing tricks like he can do with his own body.
Chosen SKILLSET:
For all his power, it would actually be best to keep Mag out of any front-line fighting. He may have armor-plated scales, but he's not actually immune to mortal weapons, and he's not skilled or fast enough to make up for how obvious a target his flashy golden appearance makes him.
Instead, he'd probably work best in sabotage or shock attack roles, where he can get in quickly, wreck things (while laying down plenty of literal fire), and then get out again. He'd also be useful in a support role; with his sharp senses and long flight time, he can play overwatch to a group on the ground without needing any outside equipment.
Of course, that's assuming that his actual identity gets revealed. So long as he sticks to just being "Loiec", he's likely to end up in a support role, and be pulled in for his experience with supernatural or demonic enemies if such a situation is to arise.
» SAMPLES
First PERSON:
[Someone seems to have typed this by hand... and not very well, either. Whoever it is could probably use some lessons.]
Bonjorn lesgens ke mirum boite !!
I do not know if I trust this device to [untranslatable] .But trying is better than not trying and so I still should?? Please forgive the poor writing I am still working on it . I am Apprentice [untranslatable] Loiec. Therefore from the egg, I am pleased to meet all of you. I am wondering to know where in this place I can find an apothecary .i am feeling quite lacking without proper medicines prepared .
Third PERSON:
The rain's wet and very cold, and Loiec doesn't bother to wrap his cloak about himself like he would at home. The streets are much too clean, so much that it feels almost more unreal than those first moments of pain and shock in the white room, when the half-dismembered animate skeleton was still at his throat, and he took the men in strange clothes for more beasts, and only a year's restraint at the flat of the blade of the old man who'd taught him kept him from incerating them all.
None of it makes sense, none of it, but the rain is real, and so is the way the linen shirt clings to him and itches. Loiec tilts his head back, so the rain can run across his face, and rubs his eyes. The effect of the strange medicines still lingers, dragging at the movements of his fingers, weighing him down. A stranger in even stranger garb pushes him out of the way, saying something in that harsh-edged teutsch language, and Loiec squawks a protest as he stumbles clear of the flow of traffic.