Darcy Harris

Dr. Devine’s niece, and the "TA" of Mysteries of Ames. As far as she knows, he’s trying to write a book about the cryptozoology of Ames Forest, which is a good enough reason for him to send them out into the woods to hunt for cryptids every other night, right? Darcy is a smug, self-possessed genius with hidden vulnerability, incredible magical talents and even more incredible magical potential, but for someone with innate empathic gifts, she is awfully emotionally stunted.

"Kiddo" if you're Jules. Weird, right? She thinks so too.
"Baby" if you're Page. Cute, right? She thinks so too.

19

Standoffish. Eloquent but wry manner of speaking. Becomes visibly uncomfortable in emotional situations, often averting her gaze.

The memory of her parents, the promise of a sense of stability.

Prideful, distant, guarded

Fiercely intelligent, with deeply held morals and convictions. She dislikes a lot of people, but when she loves someone, she loves them.

Every man, to her, is annoying until proven otherwise. She's also biased against anyone who she considers shallow, "stupid," or emotionally unintelligent (which is a lot of people, because she tends to make snap character judgments).

Strongly magically gifted. Paints and draws well.

Creating art, collecting old photographs, gardening

INTJ 6w5

Depression

Sagittarius Sun, Scorpio Rising, Virgo Moon

Being vulnerable, being wrong, and more than anything else, being betrayed.

Strange creatures, dead flowers, dark eye makeup, reading

Getting corrected, hot weather, wearing bright colors

Bi, with a strong preference for women.

Wiccan (it’s worth noting that not all mages practice Wicca or any kind of “magical” religion; many are secular). Her patron goddess is Morrigan, and her practice is influenced by the Celtic paganism that’s been passed down to her by generations of women.

She doesn't think a lot about politics, but when she does, she finds herself falling left-anarchistic.

Student, “teaching assistant,” mage

Black

Dried papaya

A photograph she has on her wall of her mother and father on their honeymoon in London in the 80s.

Her own magic (she's a long-range attack kinda gal).

Cats, snakes, mosshounds

12/01/1999

Darcy was born into the powerful Devine family, one of the oldest magical families in Ames having arrived there right after Salem. The child of the gentle, clever Theodore Harris and the ambitious, brilliant Phaedra Devine, and the baby of the whole family for about six years until her Uncle Basil had his daughter, Darcy's talents were evident from a young age. She rarely cried as a baby, almost seeming to know when it was and wasn't appropriate, and as a toddler, she was able to make flower bulbs sprout just by touching their soil. By the age of four, her dreams were regularly clairvoyant, and there was no denying that she had strong innate telekinetic abilities as well (as evidenced by her habit of making toys hover above the heads of children she didn't like so that they couldn't play with them).

Though Darcy attended the local public schools (she requested to with the encouragement of her parents, and it isn't uncommon for modern Ames mages to do so, though her older brother Lachlan chose not to), her parents and Uncle Jules held her to a strict routine of magical practice (her Uncle Jules being the strictest of them all). By seven, Darcy could telekinetically snap an adult's wrist (though it took much effort), perform several emotional inducement hexes (including complex ones which involved inducing the desire to perform specific acts, not just feelings), and feel someone's feelings merely by touching them. Incidentally, Lachlan (who rarely saw Darcy as anything but competition) couldn't do any of this until he was eight; even by this time, at age twelve, he struggled with empathic magic.

While much of Darcy's early childhood centered around honing her abilities, and while she was always a bit prickly, she was not unhappy. Her parents doted upon her (perhaps even favored her), and she and her mother had an especially strong connection. Phaedra could play many ancient songs on the fiddle, and when she would play them at the edge of the forest after dark, many creatures would flock to her. Darcy and Phaedra's cat Delilah liked to come along, and they would play gently with whatever animals they met, rubbing noses with foxes, bunnies, and mosshounds. Lachlan would even come along too sometimes, though this stopped as he got older. She was also close with her maternal grandmother, Menodora Devine, who despite being somewhat batty in her later years, was a gifted mage with plenty of stories to tell. Menodora passed away when Darcy was nine.

As Darcy entered her tween years, Lachlan grew more and more envious of her. But while she seemed to be her parents' "favorite," Lachlan was Jules' pet. When Darcy was eleven, Phaedra and Teddy died under mysterious circumstances and Uncle Jules became the sole guardian of the Harris siblings. While he grew softer and more yielding towards Darcy after this, she became deeply and profoundly depressed. She continued practicing her magic during this time, and was still something of a prodigy. However, she preferred not to do empathic magic now, as tapping into her own reservoir of emotion (a key mechanism of empathic magic) was something she wanted to avoid. She instead became more well-versed in embodied magic, strengthening her already impressive telekinetic abilities.

On her thirteenth birthday, still in the throes of mourning a year and a half after her parents' death, Darcy devised an enchantment which she believed might reanimate her parents (despite a lifetime of warnings against necromancy). She went to their grave (they were buried in the garden of Devine Manor), dug her way to the casket, and opened it (fortunately mage corpses decay at a much slower rate than ordinary humans'). Upon trying to perform the enchantment, Darcy felt a painful jolt like lightning through her veins and her vision clouded. When she regained composure, her parents were still lying dead, though she thinks she may have seen her mother's eyes open for a moment (to this day she isn't sure, but the image torments her regardless). Jules had heard thunder and rushed outside, quickly returning the casket to its place, and brought Darcy inside to give her a stern talking-to about the dangers of necromancy: she could have easily been killed herself.

This incident left Darcy with an irregular scar on her right palm, and enough emotional scars that she managed to put the bartering stage of her grief behind her. She was a solitary creature in her early to mid-teens, but more stable than she had been the first couple of years after losing her parents (at least partially because among her plethora of talents, she had discovered a new one: repression). She began to spend more time developing her non-magical talents, such as painting and drawing, and had an active DeviantArt profile on which she primarily posted original ship art of Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas and Emily from The Corpse Bride. She also developed a habit of collecting old photographs to hang on her wall. She would scour the manor attic and the College archives for fascinating, "energetic" pictures from as far back as the 1890s. Throughout high school, Darcy had one friend: Evangeline Walmond, another mage, a year younger than her, from another old family.

When her senior year of high school arrived, Darcy had already known her whole life that she would attend Ames. As Lachlan had gone to Cumbria, England for his higher education, Darcy's decision to stay at home curried her favor with Uncle Jules, who she had grown to think of as half a father figure (only half). When he asks her before her second semester to be his teaching and "research" assistant for Mysteries of Ames, she happily complies, but no clairvoyant dreams can prepare her for what will unfold in this class.

122 lbs

5'6

Copper red

Wavy/curly (2c/3a), mid-back length

Brown

Light with freckles

Feminine, trim. Slightly elven features.

Irregular scar on the palm of her right hand

Lilac and patchouli

Soft Classic

Warm Autumn

Below Average

Very High

High

Below Average

Above Average

Average

Roses and morning glories, but she thinks almost all flowers look better dead/pressed than alive.

She's loved Tim Burton movies since middle school, but lately she's developed an affinity for Mulholland Drive.

Winona Ryder

Page, actually.

She hasn't had it yet.

She doesn't drink often (she just doesn't like the taste of alcohol), but when she does, she prefers something sweet like hard cider.

Cabernet sauvignon. Deep, bitter, and most of her peers can't handle her, but at the end of the day, there's just something to her. Also, red hair, red wine.

Yes. You can hear her haunting alto singing voice when she does incantational magic.

English and history, though she was mentally checked out for just about all of high school.

Usually a t-shirt or sweatshirt and pajama pants, even in the summer. She gets cold easily.

"You, dumbass. I'm staring at my laptop screen, with my headphones in, using my hair as a curtain, and I didn't even notice that you were here until you went and tapped on my shoulder. What part of that suggests to you that I'm looking for company?"

"I'm not. It's allergies." (note: she does not have allergies.)

A lot more sensitive than she lets on. She feels things very deeply, but hides that behind her rough exterior.

She never really watched Vine in its heyday, but Page showed her "hey I'm lesbian" "I thought you were American?" after referencing it and she thought it was funny.

There's a 99.9% chance she doesn't like them either. They might become even more a target of her vitriol than they already were, but otherwise, she doesn't particularly care.

Functional.

Edgy, but also categorically depressed.

Girl Anachronism - The Dresden Dolls
Gold Dust Woman - Fleetwood Mac
Going Under - Evanescence
Transylvanian Concubine - Rasputina
Runs In The Family - Amanda Palmer

Much like Darcy, I had an unfortunately well-documented DeviantArt phase.