nidorina

• Witch's original world is a podunk little village in a Vaguely Medieval European (kind of Scandinavian/Irish) Fantasy sort of setting running on fairytale logic and also fully entrenched in patriarchal structures. Magic exists, but is strictly condemned, especially by the Council ruling her village. She grows up here as Hazel Lockwood, moving in with her best friend Nessa following the death of the latter's parents, when they're 14 or so, and they tend to chickens and sheep and make a little living this way.
• Hazel learns to do magic after ending up deep in the woods chasing a chicken and acquiring a fae artifact. Always one with a mind for mechanics, she takes it apart and learns how it ticks in secret and discovers that magic is a learned thing, instead of being borne of either contracts with fae or devils, or a natural skill, like the world assumes.
• After a while of performing her studies in secret, she is caught and turned into the Council by Nessa. The Council uses their own fae artifact (a stolen item they keep under the pretense that only they can be trusted with the evils of magic) to steal Hazel's true name, assuming she is under a magic contract and this will break it, and sends her on her way.
• The now nameless girl, having learned precisely nothing apparently, continues her studies in further secrecy. She slips up and is caught again, but flees into the woods before she can be taken for trial and presumably condemned as a witch and killed. She spends a couple of weeks basically just camping out while trying to figure out what the fuck to do next.
• Before she gets that chance, a knight from the main kingdom arrives with the intention of killing her per the village's plea. A fight ensues; the nameless girl has no experience in battle but has the home field advantage, as it were, being deeply familiar with these woods and their magic. The knight manages to slash her face, ruining her eye, but she manages to kill him.
• Injured and desperate, knowing she will never be safe here, the girl who will be Witch concocts a teleportation spell with no real destination in mind. She overshoots dramatically and ends up tearing a hole in space-time, entering the Universeity.
• The Universeity is a demiplane created by a loose coalition of immortal beings—gods, demons, etc. It was intended to be a neutral ground dedicated to research, study, and the cataloguing of knowledge, but mortals kept worming their way in there whether they liked it or not. Accepting that mortals just kind of be like that, the immortals just kind of went "ugh, fine," but set some limitations: mortals were only permitted to study things already in existence in their home worlds. No sci-fi folks learning magic, no mages learning about spaceships. To enforce these rules, the immortals offered a select few mortals slivers of their power, creating the Student Council. In the sub-sub-sub basements of the Universeity, a loose coalition of anarchic students teaching classes about forbidden subjects and sharing knowledge amongst themselves rose in opposition to the Student Council, calling themselves the Black Catalog. The two groups get into regular fights, where the Black Catalog cannot possibly match the Student Council's raw power and keeps up with tactics made from combining skills that were never meant to have anything to do with each other. Still, they try to keep the fights relatively on the down-low, because if they make too much of a mess the immortals will kick everyone out.
• So the girl who will choose the alias Witch arrives at the Universeity. Her injury is healed and she's enrolled in classes. She befriends an alien gunsmith who eventually introduces her to the Black Catalog; Witch, who has never been partial to restrictions on studies, is incredibly eager to join. Eventually she learns mechanics and robotics well enough to craft herself a bionic eye and a robotic familiar. Her eye is kept covered and her Crow's robotic nature is kept secret.
• Along the way, she finds herself increasingly disapproving of the Black Catalog's methods, which include a lot of studying for its sake and not paying any mind to the ethics of what they're doing. This culminates when a student named Eveline creates a Homunculus, just a whole-ass person who is meant to be nothing more than a database and information repository and is never actually treated like a person. Witch is Big Mad about this, but doesn't have any standing to do anything about it except slowly befriend the Homunculus.
• Witch also befriends a fellow mage named Sebastian, who is a scrawny nerd who's just here to study and oblivious to all of the Black Catalog's shenanigans. Witch doesn't tell him. They bond over both being nerds.
• Eventually, through shenanigans, a sentient book binds itself to Sebastian. The book contains a spell that can kill immortals—and once people find out about that, chaos ensues. The Black Catalog wants to study it, the Student Council wants to destroy it, and none of them are especially concerned about what happens to Sebastian, whom they have to go through to get it because the two are bound. Witch immediately betrays the Black Catalog to protect him.
• Along the way in this adventure, team Sebastian Defense Squad grows and they meet Nemo, a girl with crippling social anxiety and stunning ninja skills; Tangram, an extradimensional alien being who eats magic items and is mostly here because all of Sebastian's opponents come with snacks for them; Saros, a former member of the Student Council who switches sides after falling in love with Nemo; and eventually the Homunculus, who Witch steals from the Black Catalog basement so that they can, you know, be a person.
• There are many cool high-powered shounen fights in this planet-sized university in an attempt to protect Sebastian, all the while trying to uncover the secrets of the book. And then, of course, Witch ends up here in Aterat instead.

• Force/energy magic. If Witch has to fight, she can fire purple magical energy, and also harness it into a force field for defensive purposes.
• Levitation. She uses this most often to fetch and move items. It has a lot of practical purpose!
• Item enchantment. This is Witch's specialty! It includes things like magical good luck charms, enchanting her broomstick so it and she can fly, and providing her eye with many of its functions.
• Potion making. Another of Witch's specialties! She can create luck potions, cure ailments, fix magical mishaps, apply magical effects, and create other potions to all sorts of purposes, given the right materials and enough time.
• Plant magic. This includes harnessing magical properties from them for her item enchantments and potions. She can also actively manipulate plants to make them grow or move, but rapid growth isn't actually great for the nutritional content of a plant, so this is mostly only useful if she needs a bush to be bigger to hide around or for tree branches to get out of her way.

• functioning as a regular eye, of course, capable of simple vision.
• taking and providing exact measurements of size or distance (in part to compensate for issues with depth perception).
• infrared and night vision options.
• projection of images or words. Basically she has a minor holograph projector in her skull.
• recording. Witch can record images, audio, and video with her eye and have the results beamed directly into her brain or project them as a hologram. The big thing she uses this for is mapping—if she's traveling an unfamiliar space she sets her eye to record her surroundings, utilizing its ability to measure distances and sizes, to create a basic map of the area (usually something like this).
• analyzation. This is the big one! Witch's eye is able to instantaneously provide a litany of information about things in line of sight she chooses to scan. While the database of information the eye pulls from is vast due to the breadth of her research and that of those who've aided in it, it's still manually curated, so the eye is limited by her own knowledge. It'll grow throughout her time in game. Attempts to scan completely unfamiliar objects or phenomena will not return any useful data beyond the unknown status of it. Please note that scanning of other player characters or their belongings will never be done without player permission, and, thanks to the multiversal nature of the game, it's very easy to have a built-in excuse of "no useful results were returned because the information was too new" for literally anything if necessary.
• Magical analyzation: By scanning magical items or phenomena with her eye, Witch can retrieve information about its ingredients, components, function, and source. This applies to things like psychic or divine powers as well, though these aren't her specialty.
• Technological analyzation: While Witch cannot use her eye to break into a piece of high-level technological equipment's programming, she can break down its basic components and function based on her previous experiences.
• Mundane analyzation: Scanning more regular items will inform Witch that they are not, in fact, magical in nature, and still break them down to more basic components. This allows her to, at a glance, determine the edibility or toxicity of foodstuffs or fauna, figure out what material a structure is made of, and other such uses.
• People (and other living beings): Witch doesn't have much need to break anyone down to basic biological functions, but can, at least, scan a person and receive some information about them: species, vital signs (useful if someone is injured or ill), presence of magic or other abilities on them, and anything generally fucky about their physiology. This is rarely necessary and she doesn't care to snoop, so she doesn't usually scan people.
• Other: While the eye may not be able to provide much useful information on things yet unfamiliar to Witch, it will at least be able to confirm the lack of presence of things or phenomena that she would recognize.

Witch has a cool bionic eye enchanted with her magic that does a whole lot of cool things! its powers are given in full detail over here, but the primary bit that this post is for is that when she scans items or people, the eye returns a whole bunch of information for her—with people or other living beings, she gets things like their vital signs and whether they're capable of magic (including things like psychic abilities) and, vaguely, what kind of magic. she can also scan spells as they occur to get more in-depth details about their origin and purpose.

Witch isn't in the habit of scanning people willy-nilly, and i'll never have her scan a character without player permission. she also isn't the type to go spreading people's secrets—the people at the Universeity are so varied that very little is an inherent surprise to her anyway. if you'd rather Witch never ever scan your character at all, please let me know here! conversely, if you're okay with Witch potentially doing so at some point, should it ever come up, and want to give me advanced permission, please let me know what sorts of things she'd learn about them. this includes things like:

• what species they are—if they outwardly appear human but are actually robotic (in part or in whole), a construct, divine, powered by magic, etc., that's the kind of thing Witch would be able to pick up
• their powerset in general terms—namely what sort of powers they might have (magic, psychic, biological, etc.) and a general idea of how powerful they are
• anything fucky about their vital signs

as a note, Witch can't just pull information completely out of her ass; she has an existing database that her eye obtains the information it returns from. this database is pretty vast, though, considering the multidimensional-jamjar nature of the Universeity, and it's constantly updating with her time in-game.

comments are screened in case you're worried about spoilers or secrets or anything!

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