application for mask or menace.

[anathemic]

〈 PLAYER INFO 〉
NAME: Julie
PLURK: quadrille
DISCORD: Feel free to ask for it!
RETURNING: Current player

〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: Anathema Device
CHARACTER AGE: 22
SERIES: Good Omens (TV mini-series)
CHRONOLOGY: Post-show
CLASS: Heroine, Chaotic Good
HOUSING: Jeopardy #004, c. September 1, 2019 (with Ben Hargreeves, Maureen Johnson, The Outsider, and Yusei Fudo) (with Adam Parrish, Alexander Dane, Lan Wangji, Meeth Crym, and Xellos Metallium)
JOB: Fortune Teller at Small Mediums At Large

BACKGROUND: wiki

PERSONALITY: Practical. Pragmatic. No-nonsense — except for the very specific breeds of nonsense that she chooses to believe in.

Anathema Device is an overachieving young woman who (somehow??) obtained a PhD by age 20, which really just shows how she’ll gun hard for something if she wants it, and academia was one of those things. She’s technically a witch, yes, who spent her whole life being prepped by her family to prevent the apocalypse, but she took it in crisp and businesslike stride. She seems wiser than her years; being raised with the end of the world looming over your head will do that to you, as does being raised on a prophetic book written by your ancestor in 1656 AD. She’s friendly and open in a brisk sort of way, finding it easy to talk to anyone or warm up to them; within days of arriving in Tadfield, after all, she’d wound up half-adopting a gang of unruly children.

If you hear about the things she holds as Important™ — like ley-lines, Atlantis, Loch Ness, whole-grain loaves and recycled paper, saving the whales and rainforests — it’s easy to picture a whimsical, airy hippie. This is not the case. She does care deeply about the planet, and treating it right, and treating each other right — but as a witch, she’s less Luna Lovegood, more prim bustling academic, who knows exactly who she is and her worth and what she can offer. Having the path of her life spelled out for her helped, in that regard. She has a big heart and an extremely meddling nature, since she sees most things as being her business anyway, and never quite grew out of the precocious headstrong youth phase. She doesn’t give a damn what people think of her, or if they think she’s a bit of an oddball.

(Honestly, she’ll probably be like that all the way until she’s a precocious headstrong old woman, like the independent women she admires in her own family.)

Despite how she behaves like an old busybody with the weight of accumulated centuries’ worth of ancestors’ wisdom in her veins, though, Anathema is still very young, and that inexperience will shine through sometimes. She’s quick on her feet to improvise during a crisis and she’ll pretend she still knows what she’s doing, but she might still turn to frustrated tears and throwing things when she’s overwrought.

The only thing is… Now that they’ve averted the apocalypse, the prophecies have sort of run out. She burned the books. Now she has a blank slate and is no longer walking in the footsteps of prophecy, and can make her own future. Rather than finding this terrifying, Anathema’s delighted at the opportunity to have her boundless curiosity unleashed on a new world and be able to do whatever-the-hell she wants.

POWERS: Anathema is a practical occultist raised by an entire family of witches, where their magic was treated as a matter-of-fact part of life — so much so, in fact, that she rarely used her abilities in-canon. Her low-key powers were mostly scrying and touch of psychic ability, but she's found that the Porter's given her a power-up (aka me also bullshitting about what an occultist might be able to do in the Good Omens universe).

• POWER #1: Witchcraft

  DESCRIPTION:

  
  A wide umbrella with a variety of applications. None of them particularly strong considering her youth, but she’s got a flexible toolbox; for the most part, it makes Anathema a jill of all trades but a master of none.
  

  • scrying: She can canonically sense and track the presence of ley-lines, and so in MoM, she can find a specific person or locate the source of a magical/powered disturbance, using a reflective surface or map and pendulum. If she's able to reach her target, she could also have her face crop up in a reflective surface near them to communicate. Limited to the continent she's on.
    
  • protection spells: She can imbue amulets, charms, or physical borders with a tiny bit of good luck; a small blessing to avoid car accidents, stubbing your toe, etc. The world just lines up a little better for you for 24 hours. Anathema just doesn't like doing it unless she really really likes you. If drawing a magical border, it can't be larger than an average-sized house.
    
  • mediumship: Not full summoning or any power over them, but she's sensitive to the presence of ghosts, and can talk to them if they're in the mood for a chat.
    
  • telekinesis: Some slight levitation of small objects, slamming of doors, etc, up to about 50lbs. Mostly just when she's upset. She will be very surprised when this power crops up.
    
  • elemental conjuration: She can't manipulate the elements whole-scale, but can conjure them up out of nowhere in a small way: a handful of fire, a volley of small rocks, a few liters of water, and gusts of wind. Mostly it's useful for lighting things, or extinguishing fires. Or dousing someone who gets on her nerves.
    
  • portals: Still in-progress, and so far only able to open portals within the confines of one city, and can only take people with her if she has her hand on them (so, max of two passengers). She started learning this spell from Lilith, and is still seeking someone to train her in it more. After a few months of practice, she'll be able to use it to travel between Porter cities of her own volition.

  
  

  WEAKNESS:

  
  Individual limits listed above, but in general, the fact that none of her abilities are particularly strong or destructive to begin with, plus her need for training & practice. Very little of Anathema's magic comes to her automatically, and is instead the result of training, and needs to come from other player characters teaching her specific spells and how to perform them.
  
  

• POWER #2: Aura-reading

  DESCRIPTION:

  
  Her main psychic power (with associated permissions post). Anathema can get a general glimpse of someone’s psyche and mood — not in-depth, it isn’t mind-reading, but just taking the vague psychic pulse of most people she meets.
  

  She was quite an expert on auras. She could see them, if she stared hard enough. They were a little glow of light around people’s heads, and according to a book she’d read the colour told you things about their health and general well-being. Everyone had one. In mean-minded, closed-in people they were a faint, trembling outline, whereas expansive and creative people might have one extending several inches from the body.

  
  

  WEAKNESS:

  
  It's just a vibe check. Characters with psychic defenses or particular magical/telepath powers can likely shield themselves from it if they want to, and particularly over-powering auras (like Sith auras) can debilitate her with a migraine if she looks too closely at them.
  
  

• POWER #3: Precognition

  DESCRIPTION:

  
  A new power she picked up upon returning from the Fractured World, like a particularly ironic callback to her precognitive ancestor, Agnes Nutter. Anathema can see occasional visions of the future, but unlike her ancestor's centuries-long predictions, Anathema's is very short-term: a matter of seconds and minutes. Just enough to dodge some immediate incoming peril, or catch a glass about to roll off the table, or get on someone's nerves by knowing what they're about to do just before they do it.
  
  

  WEAKNESS:

  
  These glimpses don't go far into the future, varying from 10 seconds to about 5 minutes. At first, she also won't have much control over when these visions occur and they'll be incredibly sporadic, although after some time and practice she could slowly learn how to trigger it more reliably.

〈 CHARACTER SAMPLES 〉
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE:

[ When the video clicks on, a darkhaired woman with large round glasses sits front-and-center. She adjusts the angle carefully, lining up the angles, her phone evidently sitting on some sort of stand. She clears her throat and folds her hands in her lap, before asking directly: ]

Who else happens to be an occultist, or witch? It sounds like it's more common here than back home. I'm quite interested in comparing our methods, seeing if there's some common schools of thought we can group them into, and so on. Or even if one person is able to teach their own kind of magic. There's so much we could learn from each other.

[ There's a beat, before Anathema breaks into a bright smile, too-bright and cheeky, because she knows she's prodding the lion with a stick now, if there are any metaphorical lions around: ]

And if you hunt or burn witches, I'd be rather interested in knowing that, too.

LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE: TDM!

FINAL NOTES: n/a

〈 TRIVIA 〉

• Always goes by her full first name. You could try 'Ana', if you're feeling lucky, but she'll probably just give you a level stare until you stop trying.


• Anathema believes everything. Not because she's gullible or naive, but because she has conviction. Conviction strong enough to move small mountains, or at least oversized hills.


• A lot of people assume she's a New Agey wet hen when they first meet her, what with the long skirts and crystals and the herbal brews and auras. Her beliefs line up to the stereotype, but her personality does not.


• Thanks to Agnes' book being her constant bedtime reading as a child, she grew up using her ancestor's centuries-out-of-date spelling, and was appropriately chided by her teachers for it. By the time she was in high school, and then fast-tracking academia and her PhD, she'd gotten it under wraps. Mostly. She sometimes still falls back on archaic spelling for some uncommon words.


• Uses journalistic shorthand when she writes notes to herself. Also v. fond of lists.


• Has a PhD in history, on forgotten inventors like Humphrey Gadget, Pietr Gizmo, Cyrus T. Doodad, Ella Reader Widget, and her ancestor Joshua Device: 'The people who invented things so simple and universally useful that everyone forgot that they'd ever actually needed to be invented.'


• The Devices were originally stolidly English, but after some emigration and migration, the current branch is American by way of Puerto Rico and then California. They live in Malibu and are very rich. Thanks to Agnes' prophecies, they were able to pull out from the 1929 stock market crash, and invest wisely in Apple during their early years.


• Her favourite books are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. They capture a blend of logic-ordered chaos and literary nonsense that she really rather enjoys.


• All the old canon prophecies, for my own reference.


• Miniseries script, for my own reference.


• It might be a witchy cliche, but it's true: she really likes cats. All animals, really.


• Tends to be irritatingly early to all events, if she can help it. It was a psychic side-effect at first, but now the habit's just stuck.


• Preferred perfumes: White sandalwood, blackcurrant, bourbon vanilla, and warm amber.


• Darth Jadus' notes on her. Whoops.


• Some witchcraft reference for me: 1, 2, 3, 4


• The dating profile she forgot she set up months ago:
  
  
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  Anathema
  22 / F / Jeopardy, NV

  the universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
  
  22. fortune-teller. bi 🌈
  CODE BY