The Prestige (Dark Champions - New Venice)
The Prestige
History[edit]
Victor Valentine was one of the most talented stage magicians who ever lived: one of the few great masters of legerdemain. In an earlier time he would have wowed sold out crowds from Havana to Atlantic City, and even in the modern era, with the profession in decline, he managed to eke out a comfortable living as a performer; and all through his long career, his daughters studied at his feet. Violet and Vanessa, identical twins, grew up in the backstages of a hundred theaters, cutting their teeth on thumb-tips and linking rings. By the age of four, they could work a dove pan. By the age of eight, they could pull a one dollar bill out of a hen’s egg. When they grew old enough, they joined their father’s show, pretending to be a single assistant. They worked as the girl inside a wide variety of torturous looking boxes, into which swords, guillotines, and chainsaws were usually thrust, or switched places with one another to appear as if they had teleported across an empty stage. It was the greatest life imaginable, for a kid.
The cancer changed everything. It turned her father into a shell of his former self. When the drugs didn’t work to cure it, he became desperate. First he turned to faith, and then faith healers, and then even less reputable treatments for his illness. He tried ground tiger’s testicle, he tried rare earth solenoids, he tried pyramids and pentacles and wormwood and radiometric oscillation machines. It drove Violet almost insane with rage to watch the man who could conjure a tiger from a mirror – who knew the secrets of a thousand cons – spend his last remaining funds on snake oil and crystals. While her sister Vanessa tried to nurture her father’s faltering hopes, praying that placebos would make him better, Violet worked to expose the frauds that preyed on her father. She became an expert in busting hoaxes and spotting the flaws in their methods: again and again she showed her father that the mystical herbs were 50% sawdust, or that the magical radiation machines were repurposed lava lamps, but to no avail. Victor died, still convinced that the very next cure would save him.
With her father’s death, Violet and Vanessa inherited none of his fortune but all of his debts. Vanesa quit showbiz to work at a pharmacy. Violet pursued a career as a magician, but with even less success than her father managed. She has all of his skill, and more, but not his name or reputation or connections. Performing shows when she’s able, she turned to other methods of making a living. One was above board: she teaches magic classes at a local adult education center. The other she keeps a secret from her sister.
Quietly, circumspectly, Violet made it known that she was available to help people who were the victims of fraud and crime: people who the police wouldn’t or couldn’t help. Being a magician is a lot like being a con artist, and so she came to know how they think. When thieves prey on the gullible and the weak, she tracks them down to their lairs, and puts in an appearance. The Prestige is a flashy, showy figure, emerging from nowhere to fall upon and beat frauds and parasites and take their unjustly stolen prizes. Violet always works for her clients for free, although she occasionally takes a little extra from the cons she dispatches in order to pay off her father’s remaining debts, or purchase new tools with which to maintain her crime-fighting illusions.
Appearance[edit]
Violet is a tall woman in her late twenties with angular cheekbones, short-cropped red hair, and a contortionist’s slender build. On stage she wears elaborately colored tailored (although slightly the worse for wear, now) suits or, for escape attempts, a black body-stocking: not fishnets. Never fishnets.
As the Prestige she wears a black bob wig and an old-timey magician’s costume, complete with top hat, folding cane, and tiny black bandit’s mask. With her height, build, and acting skills she can often pass for a man, a fact she puts to good use in concealing her identity.
Family[edit]
Violet’s sister Vanessa is her identical twin, although the two woman dress and wear their hair differently now that they aren’t performing together. Vanessa still possesses some skill with magic, but prefers to pursue a more normal life now, working as a pharmacist’s assistant. Where Violeta is sharp-tongued, distrustful, and skeptical, Vanessa is open, warm, and somewhat gullible. The two women share a house together in a neighborhood of New Venice that is rapidly going downhill, and though Vanessa does not know it, it is only due to Violet's nightime activities that the house hasn't been foreclosed or burglarised.
Characteristics (Normal charcteristics but a bit faster, and extremely high not quite superhuman dexterity and intellignece)
13STR 3
20DEX 20
15CON 5
12BODY 2
20INT 10
15EGO 5
20PRE 10
4OCV 5
4DCV 5
6MOCV 9
6MDCV: 9
14PD 12
14ED 12
3SPD 10
8REC 4
40END 4
30STUN 5
10BODY 0
RUN 16m 4
SWIM 4m/round 0
LEAP 3m/round 0
Powers
Stage Skills 45
Entangle 4d6 (Rope OAF) 2 (Able to bind and gag with scarfs or rope)
Garrote hth KA 4d6 (Rope) 2 (Able to bind and gag with scarfs or rope)
Cane 9 EB Stun only(Cane) 2 (Able to bind and gag with scarfs or rope)
Darkness All vision 10m r 2 (Smoke Grenade)
Missile Defection 2 (The famous catch a bullet trick)
Illusion (Requires planning 2 (Place an illusion if you have access to area beforehand)
Shapechange (People only) 2 (Mission Impossible Mask trick)
Cold reading (TP 9d6) 4
Senses Sight hearing small (The Super Dective skills you asked for treated as super senses)
Targeting 10 (Can hit someone in total darkeness by listening)
Analyize 15 (In short the character is a mobile crime lab)
Discriionatory 15
Tracking 15
Microscopic vision 100x 10
Talents
Eidectic memory 5 (Photographic memory)
Skills
Detective 5
Slight of hand/Pick Pocket 5
Persuasion 5
Escape Artist 3
Disguise 3
Perform 3
Lockpicking 5
Forgery 3
Total 299
Disadvantages
Secret Identity 15
DNPC:Sister 25
Pysch:Hatred of con men 10
Hunted: Telios Pharm. Inc. 10
