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| − | == History ==
| + | Home run! Great slugging with that aenswr! |
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| − | 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.
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| − | 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.
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| − | 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.
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| − | 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.
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| | == Appearance == | | == Appearance == |
