Leslie Xue, the Drama Queen

[Snicker]

Name

Leslie Xue

 

Favourite colour

Black (it goes with everything!)

 

Mundane form description

 

Leslie is physically unimposing even for her 14 years, at a scant 4'11" and 98 pounds soaking wet. Her eyes are an atypically light shade of brown for someone of Chinese descent: almost amber, making her look unusual or downright uncanny in the right light. Otherwise, she looks fairly typical for a girl of her age and ethnicity.

Leslie dislikes wearing bright colours, and most of her clothes are black with maybe coloured highlights. She typically wears her Fortune Private Learning Academy uniform even after she gets out of school, as she's one of the school's few students who genuinely likes it.

 

Personality

By all rights, Leslie should be a villain of the week. It can only be a mistake of fate that she's a full-fledged magical girl.

The only child of two wealthy Chinese immigrants, Leslie has spent most of her childhood at private schools, in extracurricular programs, or receiving individual tutoring, culminating in her current enrollment at the Fortune Private Learning Academy, a private high school. She's highly privileged and higher educated, the embodiment of her parent's ambitions, and she knows it. Her mother and father don't hide that they're proud of her; she goes a step further and is outspokenly arrogant, even narcissistic.

Inwardly, she fears - if not knows - that she is an imposter. That all of her education is gilding over her fundamental inadequacy and banality. That she is truly ordinary and that everything her parents have done for her was squandered. That they will one day realize this, the light will go out of their eyes when they look at her, and they'll have nothing left for her but the disappointment and disregard that she deserved all along.

Sometimes, when she carelessly allows her mind to introspect, she fears that she's even less than ordinary. After a lifetime of her parents dictating her activities, she has no interests, hobbies, or passions of her own. On the surface, she's identical to the other girls around her, and below the surface, she sees nothing. She's empty, a supporting character. Maybe something is broken inside of her. Maybe she's not even a full person.

Leslie distracts herself from these thoughts by leeching off the emotional energy of the people around her. She doesn't even really like her friends at the Academy, but she hangs out with them because they love to talk about themselves and their feelings and they never expect her to share her own. Leslie feeds on drama, and when there isn't enough, she'll make her own, spreading rumours and manipulating emotions. She loves to bask in people's feelings, even if she's the one that caused them in the first place - and really, she loves the power of bending people to her will, especially if they have no idea she did so.

 

Magical form description

 

Leslie's magical form reflects her own power fantasies: older, sexier, and dripping with regal confidence. She wears a silken black evening dress with long gloves and black heeled boots. Her hair is long and black, her lips are cherry red, and her irises are shining gold. She's model-tall, at 5'10", with a waspish hourglass figure that tops out at 140 lbs despite her generous curves. Despite all this, there's still a youthful air to her, looking more like a 16-year-old knockout than a true femme fatale.

Not technically part of her magical form, but almost inseparable from it is her typical facial expression of confidence and superiority. In her magical form, she looks at you like she owns you - and deserves better.

 

Why did the Moochee pick you?

 

Leslie is more like a villain of the week than a magical girl; that said, villains of the week are ambitious, motivated, and above all, proactive. Leslie's Moochee saw her restlessness and desire for power and thought it could be wielded against Rampants. It was right; being a scion is the first thing Leslie truly has that's hers, not a decision her parents made, and she's thrown herself into it wholeheartedly. She loves the thrill of finding and defeating Rampants and spends every spare moment trying to find more.

Of course, this decision had as much to do with the Moochee as with Leslie herself. Tuuliq is blunt, warlike, and not afraid to fight dirty. He knows there's a chance Leslie will get in over her head or go mad with power, but she'll probably chew through plenty of Rampants along the way, so it's a net win in his mind. He also doesn't care for her on a personal level, finding her self-centered and two-faced, so that makes it easier. Leslie can tell he doesn't have her best interests at heart, but doesn't much mind; she figures she can take care of herself, and she finds his honesty in disliking her refreshing...and maybe, just maybe, affirming.

 

Power concept

In her magical form, Leslie's enhanced abilities, advantages, stealth, speed, and leaping ability are "standard" physical improvements of the sort common to scions. All her other abilities have the Emotional descriptor and thus are only effective against targets with emotions. These include fairly primitive "emotions" - if the target can feel anger, fear, or confusion, it's probably susceptible to her powers - but truly mindless or purely reflexive creatures are nonetheless immune.

Leslie's ability to sense emotion makes her difficult to sneak up on or lie to, as she can sense emotion at range 360 degrees around her with enough sensitivity to discern specific emotions and the location of the emoter. She can also manipulate others' emotions, and generally does so via three go-to applications:

• Courage: Leslie inspires the target with feelings of confidence and zeal, rendering them immune to debilitating fear and pain and regenerating physical damage at the rate of one recovery per round. This power can be used on any target she can accurately perceive without the need for an attack roll, and it takes a DC 20 perception check to notice her using this power, though the target knows they are being inspired by an outside party. Leslie cannot use this power on herself.
• Distress: Leslie plucks at the edges of the target's emotions, distressing and distracting them with frustration, paranoia, or whatever is most effective on the target's emotional state, causing no damage but impairing their ability to attack or defend themselves. This power can be used on any target she can accurately perceive without the need for an attack roll, and it takes a DC 20 perception check to notice her using it or its effects - the target simply feels overwhelmed without realizing it's due to an outside force. Naturally, this power rewards a stealthy strategy and is most effective when used in partnership with another, more overtly aggressive Scion.
• Hubris: Leslie inspires the target with feelings of confidence and zeal - too much confidence and zeal. The target loses awareness of their surroundings and, while their actual intelligence is not reduced, they become inclined to make reckless decisions and underestimate danger. This also has the benefit of making them more vulnerable to more emotional manipulation. This power can be used on any target she can accurately perceive without an attack roll, and it takes a DC 20 perception check to notice her using this power or its effects.
• Infatuation: Leslie invokes obsession in her target, rendering them distracted at least and slavishly obedient at most. This power can be used on any target she can accurately perceive without the need for an attack roll. It also takes a DC 20 perception check to notice her using it or its effects; while obviously she'll need to reveal herself to the target to entrance or command it, this will still hide her actions from the target's allies.
• Rancor: Leslie draws upon the target's antipathy towards her, twists it, and reverberates it until it decays into such raw magical energy that it devours the target from within. This power can be used on any target she can accurately perceive and does not require an attack roll, but cannot be used stealthily; indeed, the targets aggression towards her and awareness of her attack are required for the power to function. In addition, this power is Leslie's crude attempt to manipulate rules of magic that she doesn't understand or even have awareness of, and is only effective on innately magical creatures such as Rampants. It cannot be used on mundane humans or animals, no matter how much they hate her. It's unclear how effective it would be on Moochees or other people with Aurora Syndrome.

 

Goals

• Learn more about Rampants, where to find them, and how to fight them
• Continue to develop her powers
• Have some fun with it
• Never let them know how broken you are inside

 

Bonus credit!

Fortune Private Learning Academy: A private high school located in Juniper. Though it doesn't turn away locals, it focuses on attracting international students or children of well-off immigrants. It advertises itself as an exclusive institution that only accepts the most elite and accomplished students, but in reality they accept almost any child whose parents can pony up the hefty enrollment fee. The Academy promises small class sizes, high-quality facilities, and the greatest possible education in all of its programs. The classes are small, but the facilities are designed and maintained to look good rather than perform well, and its educators mainly teach students how to take tests well rather than improve their functional knowledge. Its faculty engage in dubious or outright unethical practices to ensure their test scores remain high, but no one has caught on yet.

 

Character sheets

For the purposes of clarity, I've created separate character sheets for Leslie's mundane form and her scion form.

• Leslie Xue, the girl
• Leslie Xue, the scion

[Snicker]

Upgrade to PL 14:

Leslie had too much PP for her PL, so I'd cast too wide a net to bring everything up to the PL maximum. Exciting!

• Increased her array by 12 points, thus increasing her Affliction, Damage, Regeneration, and Weaken powers. These were rank increases; no extras were purchased.
• Increased her base Defensive Roll advantage by 1 (which means it was also applied to her mundane form) and her Enhanced Advantage by 1, which was applied to her Defensive Roll. In effect, this meant her mundane form gained 1 Toughness and her scion form gained 2 Toughness (one of which is magical and one of which is mundane).
• Increased her Parry and Dodge defenses by 2 each.

This leaves her Fortitude and Will defenses below the PL maximum, so if you want to hurt her, that's what to target!