Sep. 12th, 2034
name aurora "rory" leto mayer
age, dob 24/2000
pronouns she/her
occupation ???
species witch affiliation dragonfly farm
In the wildest hills of West Virginia, a sprawling family of witches reign over thousands of mountainous acres known as Dragonfly Farm; their public face is more 'FBI watch list for backwoods militias', but if you know, you know. The coven's leader is Suzan Leto, Rory's grandmother, who often deploys her, their left hand, to do as Grandmother asks, no matter how violent or dangerous. But things at the Farm are changing, as Rory's sister Nova enters into a power struggle with Suzan, and Rory begins to consider how controlled she has been for the past thirteen years — and what pieces of her identity have been permanently lost in the process.
+ biography
perceptive
disciplined
loyal
protective
stoic
enigmatic
cynical
dry-humored
violent
brainwashed
repressed
martyring
Rory is maternally from a large ethnic Sabi family — a sub-ethnicity borne out of an especially ancient witching pedigree, spread across Europe and West Asia — which settled in the US in the 1970s. Her father is not Sabi, and her parents had an elopement very much against both sets of grandparents' wishes; Suzan thought that Roby Mayer was inclined to crack under the pressure of six children in ten years, and Roby's mother Wendy thought Liv Leto was beautiful but chronically self-absorbed and immature. In the most uncharitable perspective, both were right. Aurora is her parents' second child, the first being her sister Nova, followed by Lila and Aren, Adam, Aleda, and eventually seventh-born Taya. Prior to permanently setting up in West Virginia approximately thirteen years ago, the family was semi-nomadic and known for its work in the performing arts.
In the intervening years, they have been transformed into something else. An act of mass violence — revenge against them for killing of a rich man, a killing which Rory herself performed at only eleven years old, at the behest of someone else (it's always at the behest of someone else) — brought them back into old magic, old ways. Old brutalities, too. Her father has been wrongfully imprisoned for the slaughter, which is another grievance against their enemies. It is generally agreed she should not have been used to kill the rich man, but since she did it, Grandmother continues to employ her as the family's ritualistic first-chair murderess. Sometimes these deaths are quick and nasty. Sometimes she insinuates herself into another person's life for weeks, months. There are no police or profilers to catch and explain her — every murder takes a victim's own soul in the form of an object, but there's often very little explicable physical evidence. By most public consensus many of her victims ostensibly "deserve it", so these are vigilante killings, but this does not lessen the long-term impact on Rory, or really make it clear why she and Grandmother are entitled to choose that designation.
The Farm itself is now influential, politically and socially. Rory has no part in its business operations, but is referred to as a marketing employee in public documentation. Other ways in which her devotion to the family and Grandmother at her own expense are evinced are in her personal life (she was once in an arranged engagement, and had a son at twenty, which she was definitely not ready for) and her recent internal questions about who she might have been if she had not been trained to do these things for the purposes of their magic and their power.
Sometimes when she goes places for work she does things she could never explain to anyone at home. Nightclubs, bars, big parties full of bad people. More and more, in fact, she engages in these strange, impulsive, shocking, adrenaline-seeking behaviors, each act like cracks of light through shuttered windows.
One day, when she was about fourteen, her favorite aunt, the youngest one, the moral one, left the family, and wanted to take Aurora with her. Sometimes Rory thinks about taking her little boy and leaving to wherever Aunt Vera has gone. But more often instead, she thinks about what it would be like if they made the Farm a place that her favorite aunt would come back to, and they could be a real family again, and not a military operation slash cult slash prolonged work of megalomaniacal grief with roots stretching back much longer than thirteen years.
Those are a child's thoughts, she knows. She stopped being a child at eleven. But she didn't have these thoughts before, and now she does, and she presumes they mean something is happening to her that she absolutely cannot tell anyone from the Farm, not even her siblings. That means she's doing something even more dangerous: she is making connections external to her family, its arranged marriages, its secret barns full of blood and blackmail and patchwork bodiless entities that alter the physical all the same. She's reaching for outsiders, and like any good thrill-seeker, has no idea what might reach back.
In the intervening years, they have been transformed into something else. An act of mass violence — revenge against them for killing of a rich man, a killing which Rory herself performed at only eleven years old, at the behest of someone else (it's always at the behest of someone else) — brought them back into old magic, old ways. Old brutalities, too. Her father has been wrongfully imprisoned for the slaughter, which is another grievance against their enemies. It is generally agreed she should not have been used to kill the rich man, but since she did it, Grandmother continues to employ her as the family's ritualistic first-chair murderess. Sometimes these deaths are quick and nasty. Sometimes she insinuates herself into another person's life for weeks, months. There are no police or profilers to catch and explain her — every murder takes a victim's own soul in the form of an object, but there's often very little explicable physical evidence. By most public consensus many of her victims ostensibly "deserve it", so these are vigilante killings, but this does not lessen the long-term impact on Rory, or really make it clear why she and Grandmother are entitled to choose that designation.
The Farm itself is now influential, politically and socially. Rory has no part in its business operations, but is referred to as a marketing employee in public documentation. Other ways in which her devotion to the family and Grandmother at her own expense are evinced are in her personal life (she was once in an arranged engagement, and had a son at twenty, which she was definitely not ready for) and her recent internal questions about who she might have been if she had not been trained to do these things for the purposes of their magic and their power.
Sometimes when she goes places for work she does things she could never explain to anyone at home. Nightclubs, bars, big parties full of bad people. More and more, in fact, she engages in these strange, impulsive, shocking, adrenaline-seeking behaviors, each act like cracks of light through shuttered windows.
One day, when she was about fourteen, her favorite aunt, the youngest one, the moral one, left the family, and wanted to take Aurora with her. Sometimes Rory thinks about taking her little boy and leaving to wherever Aunt Vera has gone. But more often instead, she thinks about what it would be like if they made the Farm a place that her favorite aunt would come back to, and they could be a real family again, and not a military operation slash cult slash prolonged work of megalomaniacal grief with roots stretching back much longer than thirteen years.
Those are a child's thoughts, she knows. She stopped being a child at eleven. But she didn't have these thoughts before, and now she does, and she presumes they mean something is happening to her that she absolutely cannot tell anyone from the Farm, not even her siblings. That means she's doing something even more dangerous: she is making connections external to her family, its arranged marriages, its secret barns full of blood and blackmail and patchwork bodiless entities that alter the physical all the same. She's reaching for outsiders, and like any good thrill-seeker, has no idea what might reach back.
+ world/abilities
World summary, for now.
TELEKINESIS: *****
PSYCHIC IMMUNITY: ****
PHYSIOLOGICAL ENHANCEMENTS: ****
SPELL-CASTING: ***
ENTITIES: **
NAMING: **
ATHRA: *
Non-supernaturally, except for how witch grace informs everything, Aurora is a lifetime athlete, gymnast, and dancer who specializes in aerial hoops and silks.
TELEKINESIS: *****
PSYCHIC IMMUNITY: ****
PHYSIOLOGICAL ENHANCEMENTS: ****
SPELL-CASTING: ***
ENTITIES: **
NAMING: **
ATHRA: *
Non-supernaturally, except for how witch grace informs everything, Aurora is a lifetime athlete, gymnast, and dancer who specializes in aerial hoops and silks.
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