Zachary Lightwing

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Zachary (Scenesys ID: 165)
{{{Img}}}
Quote
"If you had my job, your soul would want to leave your body, too."
Profile
Full Name: Zachary S. Lightwing
Gender: Male
Species: Magician
Theme: Original (OC)
Occupation: Data Entry Manager
Citizenship: United States of America
Residence: Gotham City
Education: Online College
Status: Shelved
Groups: {{{Groups}}}
Other Information
Apparent Age: 25 Actual Age: 25
Date of Birth 21 July 2000 Actor:
Height: 165 cm Weight: 63 kg
Hair Color: Brown Eye Color: Green
Theme Song: {{{Song}}}

Profile

Zach is a creature of dual purpose and mentality. When he takes on his human guise, he is the picture of mild-mannered mundanity with just a sprinkling of odd in the mix. When he is cavorting as his disembodied feline-like spirit, he is gregarious, curious and ambiguously predatory. Because of this split, he doesn't feel right in either life, and so he is constantly searching for new purpose.

Sheet

Description

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A caucasian man standing at around 165 centimeters, with somewhat ratty brown hair. He appears to be in his early twenties and carries no scars on his ordinary face. He has some freckles around his nose and on his cheeks. His face is bare of any and all stubble. A pair of mundane rectangular black-rimmed glasses sit on his nose in front of his almost... radioactive green eyes, the lids around them darkened from far too many nights without proper sleep. Going down, he appears to be wearing a white button-up shirt with some manner of flower-patterned tie. He has a number of pens in his shirt pocket. He also has a pair of black slacks and shiny black shoes. He does not appear to have anything else on him except for a phone clipped to his belt.

Those eyes almost seem to glow, but never when directly looked at, only shimmering like a cat's eyes from odd angles.

History

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Zachary was born as the middle child in a family of seven. His family had lived in Gotham for a century but hadn't really been anything big or special. The real history there was that his parents were hedge mages of a lineage of low-powered magical people. They were the ones that people went to for the grueling tasks that took up lots of time, the fodder to put toward rituals that just needed sheer manpower. They had very ordinary jobs and made the appearance of being completely normal people even to their own children. They had resolved long ago that the world of magic was too dangerous and they were too weak, and so Zachary had a very mundane childhood. He went through elementary school without incident but found himself hungry for all kinds of information in a way that other people weren't. He sought out answers even about his own family, and why they were stuck in a hellhole like Gotham and soon he found his answers in an unexpected place.

He stumbled across the magical diaries kept by his parents. As they were heavily coded, it took him several years of translating as he grew to really get any adequate information out of them, but what he found lit up his imagination like a wildfire. In it he found that he could be magical, he could be special, he could be like everyone that he idolized. He learned how to cast magic in secret, where his parents wouldn't know, and he found a thrill in the way power surged around his fingertips and lit his nerves up like a christmas tree. He became drunk with the power and learned the harshest lesson magic can teach you: Magical monsters are waiting for the smallest opening in order to attack.

His unchecked spellwork brought the attention of an extraplanar demon that possessed his little brother. This demon seeped deeper into him until even Zach's parents couldn't overlook it and they attempted an exorcism. When they finished, the boy was dead and Zachary's parents were told by the demon about who brought it there.

Seeing Zachary as a risk to their mundane lifestyle, they sealed away his ability to use magic by force and they forbid him from leaving the house. They gave him a strict and even borderline abusive upbringing where he was taught the risks of saving people without truly understanding what you're doing, and slowly his innocent need to learn power to become a great hero shriveled like a poisoned rose.

He only escaped from this when he graduated from an online college. His spirit was crushed, and so he fit into the cogs of corporate life quite easily. He grew to accept that he would be performing tasks no one would remember him for until he ended up in a grave. This thought drove him to visit his brother's grave, where he might be able to atone for his mistakes. Where he could find some peace with what he had done.

The demon was waiting for him. It struck him from the dark in the graveyard while he was alone and he began to bleed out. It cackled as he slowly expired, and then it simply left when it grew bored of the pitiful and defeated creature crumpled at his feet. Its obfuscated body evaporated into the night and that night Zachary Lightwing died.

Zach then woke up in an wide expanse. A dead plane. His soul couldn't go anywhere, a side-effect of the sealing of his magic, and so he was left in the wasteland of a world overtaken by some great and powerful entity. A forsaken soul, a fragmented mortal being with nowhere to go. And there he met another spirit, a dying creature that spoke to him. It told him of all the things it could never do while it was alive. It told him that it regretted not being able to see all that it could, and that it let the chains of its own fear hold it down. This strange green wisp was dying, soon to fade into nothing, smothered by this deathly place into an eternal void.

He reached out and grabbed it. He couldn't abide that fate for either of them. He had allowed his fear to hold him down. He allowed the twisted despairs of mortal beings turn him into a slave. He sought the being's wish and he took it into his soul.

Personality

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On the mundane, human side of things, Zachary is what you might call a cookie cutter human being. He likes baseball but not football, he has few strong opinions about anything in particular, and seems to carry a mild yet unflappable friendliness to him that cracks the guise of his normalcy when he begins to behave like this to people that would confuse or terrify others. He only really shows true excitement in the presence of big-name heroes, like a polite fan boy might. Day to day life for Zachary is kept very ordinary.

This mask of normalcy, however, is just a mask. It becomes increasingly clear the harder someone looks that this rigidly lukewarm individual is putting on an act. He can get thrown off when confronted in ways he didn't quite expect, and tends to take long pauses to seriously consider the 'right' way to reply to things when he's going around as a human being. He will never outwardly admit that there's anything weird about himself even if someone were to torture him. Those that risk the disguise of a normal person are seen as a hundred times more threatening because of that, especially those that can sense magic or confront him on his aura or some other factor. He will lie up and down even to these people in the vain hope that they might just accept his responses and leave him alone.

In his spirit form, he is much more free to express himself and so he does. He is quick to approach the new and unknown and the first to toy with something that he probably shouldn't. He has no real malevolence but he is not really living for the sake of anyone but himself, and so he tends to come across as very mercurial or untrustworthy. He seems to share his love for superheroes, though, and might actively seek them out even while they're on the job in order to meet them. He is aware this can be annoying and just doesn't care, feeling catharsis just in meeting the unique figures of the world one way or another.

In either form, he is inclined to try new things and so he is open to all manner of experience, though the form one meets him in determines how he might respond to a given encounter, as he carefully avoids mixing the two worlds so that it's harder to see the overlap if someone meets both forms in separate circumstances.

Abilities

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ELECTROKINESIS
The ability to manipulate electrical energy. Electricity, such as that from a power line or an appliance, falls within his domain when it is within about fifteen feet, allowing him a great deal of influence on directing it or nullifying it. He is also able to expel charged electrical energy in forms as harmless as a taser shock to as catastrophic as a lightning bolt, but he must collect the appropriate amount of energy before performing the higher ranges of this ability. Lightning cast in this fashion is magical in nature.

HALF-DEAD
Zachary is not technically alive. He does not require sleep, food, water or air. This also makes him immune to abilities that drain 'life force' or attack this energy, as he possesses none in the traditional sense.

MAGI
Zachary is a full-blooded magician, which means he is capable of sensing magic, seeing magical creatures, and interacting with the mystical where mortals cannot. He is not, however, capable of casting or studying spellwork.

PROJECTION
The ability to project his soul away from his physical, human body. This projection comes in the form of foggy white cat with expressive glowing green eyes. He possesses electrical properties in this form, capable of riding an electrical current, of absorbing electrical attacks and draining the charge from electrical devices to heal. This form may interact with the world as a physical creature does, and yet physical damage will often pass right through it due to its spiritual nature. He is unable to pass through physical matter himself, however, and must utilize electrical sources to travel to otherwise inaccessible places.

Skills

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ARCANE KNOWLEDGE
He has the knowledge that most mid-level hedgemages might be expected to know. He can recognize rudimentary magical phenomena and name most earthly mythological creatures off the top of his head. In many cases he can provide tactical information on how to defeat magical foes or at least provide the first steps toward it.

ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING
While not a super genius, his exposure to the innards of computerized devices through the years and after his powers blossomed that he can repair all but the more advanced tech, and can be relied on to jury-rig truly advanced tech to get it to work in a pinch.

Resources

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{{{Resources}}}

Weaknesses

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DISCHARGE
Above a certain limit, Zachary absolutely must expel pent up electricity within a time limit appropriate to the amount of energy he has collected, with the truly titanic amounts only capable of being held for a minute or two at most. After that time limit, the electricity will release on its own, and uncontrollably, electrifying everything near him in a catastrophic pulse. This happens automatically if he is struck with copper, however, or if he is hit with a spell aligned with water in some way.

DOUBLE LIFE
Zachary is very obsessed with maintaining the separation between his mundane persona and his spiritual self. He may even be willing to kill to maintain this secret if he is pushed into a corner. This is not something meant to protect others or himself, but a reflex built into his personality and his dual nature, and so he struggles with it in entirely different ways.

PREDATORY
Not in the evil sense, but in the feline sense. He is a creature of curiosity and so he can be enticed by the new and different, at least for a while. This can get him to do things that others would balk at doing, and can be a very easy way to manipulate him into performing acts of evil if one is careful about omitting the parts that might spook him away. He is prone to bursts of berserker aggression when he is truly threatened or when those few he actually trusts are endangered.

UNNATURAL
As a chimeric spirit riding his old body, Zachary is vulnerable to many of the magical abilities that would work on demons or the undead. As he is not an evil spirit, however, he is not repelled by holy places or objects.

Logs

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Title Date Scene Summary
Strange Check-In December 4th, 2017 Summary needed
Lost Souls May 1st, 2017 Summary needed
Fear of a Bat Planet April 30th, 2017 Summary needed
LexCorp Launchpad 2025 April 29th, 2017 Summary needed
The Hall of Just Us. April 28th, 2017 Summary needed
All Cats Are Grey April 27th, 2017 rooftops and cats and Gotham oh my
Park Days April 27th, 2017 Summary needed.
Collect Call to Hell April 26th, 2017 A Cat, an Oni and a Crusader crash a demonic party, and everyone gets covered in garbage. Hooray!
Be the Light You Want to See April 26th, 2017 Summary needed.
What's In A Name April 25th, 2017 Summary needed.
There's A Row In Spanish Harlem April 24th, 2017 An old man, two cats, and a mouthy mouthless Brit walk into a ba--er, an alleyway. All hell breaks loose. It's just Sunday in Harlem.
Loitering April 24th, 2017 Summary needed.
The Cat Came Back 1 April 23rd, 2017 Summary needed.
That's What Heroes Do April 21st, 2017 Summary needed.
AHHHHHHHH! April 21st, 2017 Summary needed.

Cutscenes

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Title Date Scene Summary
Feast April 24th, 2017 Summary needed
Shock April 22nd, 2017 Zachary learns of Bruce Wayne's death

Gallery

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