Re: [OOC] Character Crearion and Advancement
I'll note that. Also, I'm going to drop Grimoire's unmodified background here to kickstart discussion I guess. Still waiting to hear from the GM on how much will be kept, but I hate sitting around twiddling my thumbs. While this background is written for a different setting, I doubt whatever the GM and I settle on will stray too far from what's below.
TENTATIVE HISTORY
Born in the French metropolis of Strasbourg, Grimoire is the son of Nicolette Lacoste and Jean-René Rousseau, a pair of moderately successful architects. Where his father was an ordinary human, his mother hailed from an age-old family of sorcerous gypsies who protected the Earth Realm from supernatural threats secretly. Rebellious even as a young girl and extraordinarily powerful by even her family's standards to boot, his mother estranged herself from her family at the age of 17 by walking a taboo path: that of the superhero. Adopting the code name Tarot, she defended the United States' west coast from the schemes of countless supervillains over the span of seven years. Of all of her adversaries, none hated her more than the depraved necromancer, Baron Samedi, and it was during her final battle with him 20 years ago that her career as a superhero ended in disgrace and tragedy. Their fateful battle began after Samedi discovered his mother's secret identity and murdered every innocent she'd shown even the slightest concern for, a group which included her fiancé. Overwhelmed by hatred and rage once she cornered Samedi after destroying the grotesque abomination stitched together from the bodies and souls of his latest victims, his mother lost control of her sorcery during the ensuing battle and unleashed a catastrophic explosion of arcane energy that obliterated not only Samedi but everything else in a one-mile radius around her. Racked with grief over the countless innocents who had died because of her, but too afraid to face penance for her actions, his mother abandoned superheroics and sorcery and fled to France, far from the site of her shame. Hidden by powerful non-detection spells, it was there that she began her life anew under the alias of Nicole Harding and met her eventual husband: Jean-René Rousseau.
Raised in Strasbourg's Centre Gare district, Grimoire's early childhood was best described as charmed. He had two loving parents, a carefree upper middle class lifestyle, and a whole host of friends. Things didn't become interesting until his school years when his latent sorcery manifested and started producing a variety of harmless and harmful effects whenever he experienced strong emotions. Out of a combination of necessity and selfishness, as well as angst that his father would react poorly to the revelation of his sorcery because his father firmly supported anti-metahuman legislation, his mother taught him to both fear and suppress his magic. As it is often wont to do, suppression soon morphed into repression such that Grimoire would have likely gone through his life fully ignorant of his sorcery if not for a devastating automobile accident when he was eight which claimed the lives of his mother and father and left him comatose. He learned later that he too would have died in the collision if not for the maternal instinct of his mother, who conjured a protective cocoon of arcane energy around him clumsily mere moments after their vehicle was struck. When he awoke from his coma a few months later, he found himself in the Fens district of Freedom City under the legal care and custody of the very relatives his mother had abandoned decades earlier: the Lacoste family of sorcerers.
Grimoire's life was anything but ordinary under the care of the Lacostes. For starters, his family saw parenting as a community affair. This resulted in roughly two-thirds of his nearly three thousand relatives shouldering the responsibility of filling the shoes left by his mother and father. The most influential of his throng of parents were his uncle Alain and aunt Bethany, for it was with them and their twin sons Adrian and Bastien whom he resided. Consequently, the brotherly bond he formed with his cheerful and mischievous cousins was instrumental in helping him overcome his grief. After parenting, there was sorcery. The Lacostes viewed sorcery as an intrinsic part of themselves and used it in virtually every aspect of their daily lives. So, instead of fearing and repressing his sorcery, Grimoire learned to harness and control it properly under the tutelage of his venerable grandfather Théo. The privilege was obvious to Grimoire considering his grandfather sat on the council of elders who presided over the Lacostes, known as the Triumvirate, and was regarded as a brilliant sorcerer throughout the magical community whose magical might dwarfed even his mother's. Neither sorcery nor an army of parents could compare to the stunning revelation of his family's utterly deplorable reputation among the people of Freedom City however, which the children at the public school he attended were eager to share with him. Put simply, most of the city's residents viewed the Lacostes as nothing more than a band of thugs because of excessive media bias regarding their countless arrests and clashes with local law enforcement which usually stemmed from their oft disorderly behavior, blatant disregard for rules and frequent association with the criminal underworld. Strangely enough, his family's dreadful reputation didn't affect the highly successful carnival that they operated in the city's Midtown district, which was a major attraction thanks to its rustic, old world appeal. Despite the many idiosyncrasies, Grimoire adjusted to life with the Lacostes quickly and eventually grew to a point where he couldn't imagine life otherwise. It wasn't until the final month of his eighth-grade year at Hawkins Community School that he started questioning the very same tenets that his mother had rejected nearly three decades prior.
Grimoire had always been bothered somewhat by his family's decision to restrict itself to acting against supernatural threats only. After all, he'd spent over half of his life idolizing superheroes. Understandably then, there was a part of him which desired to become a superhero, a part that became increasingly restless as he mastered more of his sorcery. Things came to a head eventually when he was faced with the choice between keeping the secret of his sorcery and saving the life of his middle school homeroom teacher, whom he witnessed being beaten by a masked man while returning home one night. Instinctively, he smashed his teacher's assailant through a brick wall nearby using his sorcery then rushed to aid his teacher. In the end, his actions didn't jeopardize his sorcerous secret because his teacher had passed out from injuries shortly before his intervention. Despite that moment of unsanctioned heroism, nothing changed for Grimoire until his summer vacation when the Freedom League saved both him and his family from certain annihilation at the hands of a lowly half-demon named Balthazar who sought prestige and power in the Nine Hells. Balthazar was the depraved architect of a deadly disease which affected Lacostes exclusively and wiped out over ninety percent of the family in the span of a week. In the wake of the great tragedy born from the unholy union of magic and super-science, the Triumvirate spent weeks reevaluating several of the Lacoste's tenets. At the conclusion of their long deliberation, the Triumvirate granted the Freedom League access to the Lacoste's considerable stores of magical artifacts and knowledge, albeit the League's access would be controlled and supervised closely until the League proved it could be trusted. They also lessened the prohibition on superheroics by allowing Lacostes to don the cape and cowl after receiving proper training. In tandem with that decision, they granted a handful of the family's high school-aged children permission to attend Claremont Academy. Meanwhile, Grimoire showed the first trappings of his heroic destiny when he fashioned a simple mask from an old t-shirt then began sneaking out at night to combat many of the minor metahuman criminals who plagued the Fens and its neighboring districts. Now, as a member of the first group of Lacoste children permitted to attend Claremont, he embarks on the next leg of his heroic journey while still moonlighting as a superhero secretly. All the while enemies both known and unknown conspire against him from the shadows.
NPCs
Balthazar:
Throughout Balthazar's century or so of life, the denizens of the Nine Hells never regarded him as anything more than an unremarkable bottom-feeder because of his mixed human/demon blood. To prove them all wrong and confirm his own existence, he struck a devastating blow against the demons' greatest enemy, the almighty Lacoste clan, using a virulent disease engineered from chaos magic and super-science. For Balthazar's heinous act, eternal torment awaited him. For, by failing to eradicate the Lacostes, he jeopardized the entirety of the Nine Hells by allowing them the chance to regroup and exact a terrible vengeance. Jailed and tortured within the deepest pits of the Hells, Balthazar found salvation in the most unlikely of people: Baron Samedi. Apparently, the Baron had his own plans for the lowly half-demon.
Adrian and Bastien Lacoste:
Adrian and Bastien are identical twins and Grimoire's cousins, although they are brothers to him in every way that truly matters. They are the same age as him and notorious tricksters possessed of robust equanimity. Like Grimoire, they too are promising sorcerers who were permitted to attend Claremont, with Adrian a talented illusionist and Bastien a gifted summoner. Testament to their closeness and the strength of their bond, Grimoire and the twins work together extremely well, so well in fact that the Triumvirate almost always assigns them together on missions. All of these traits combined make harming the twins one of the best ways to hurt Grimoire indirectly. Moreover, because Grimoire and the twins rely on each other a great deal, Grimoire's obligation to his cousins will inevitably come into conflict with his academic and superhero responsibilities.
ANOTHER BIT OF DESCRIPTION
The Lacostes are publicly perceived as little more than an impoverished band of criminals and thugs who virtually reside in prison cells. As a result, Grimoire often experiences harassment and prejudice from anyone who realizes that he's a Lacoste but doesn't know that he and his family are champions of good magic. In general, knowledge of their heroic deeds is limited to members of the magical community. Even then, it isn't uncommon for particularly virtuous members of the magical community to doubt and mistrust him and his family, or worse....
