Name: Dr. Beatrix Darnell
Age: 34
Species: Human (mostly)
Occupation: Embittered academic
Personality: Beatrix is a woman who has learned from crappy mistakes. Cool, sharp and intelligent, what was once ambition has since become bitterness and what was once bitterness has become acceptance due to the things she has experienced in her life: she is not such an arrogant snob as she was when she was younger, not so naive due to the obsession that basically burnt her hands off.
Traces of the younger woman still remain: though she manages to go about life with an ostensibly dispassionate, rational, detached scholar's eye and no longer flings herself into things with such abandon, she still pushes herself far too deep and dangerous and tends to still make snap judgements and assumptions. She is a total perfectionist, an a**l OCD stickler, taking the fight rather than the flight. The brittleness of her youth has softened somewhat - she no longer takes herself quite so seriously - but she's still something of an ice queen. She has a graciousness and a generosity of spirit that prevents her from being the Ice b***h From The Black Lagoon, but she still veers unfortunately towards uptightness and lack of patience with those who are obviously not on her mental level. She is pitiless to the reckless and the foolish, but this is borne out of the anxiousness of a woman who was once extremely reckless and foolish (and still holds the seeds in her) and doesn't want others to follow through.
History: Ex-historian, ex-author, and ex- something quite close to a horrible mixture of Indiana Jones and Encyclopedia Brown - Beatrix was born into a privileged family in London, the eldest daughter, absolutely academically brilliant with high hopes for her future. She got her Ph.D at an early age and studied at Cambridge University: she was passionate about magical theory, history and personages. Overly passionate. Somebody should have looked into this: they didn't. Suckers.
Beatrix is one of those humans who has no magic in them. None. None whatsoever. Zero. Nil. Nada. This she considered her absolute tragedy: she'd fallen desperately in want, love and need with magic after a personal encounter with it age fifteen. She started to slaver after the stuff like an addict. She chose magic as her field of study, though the only thing she could learn was the theory. There was, however, one avenue open to the reckless, the greedy and the avaricious: through stringent ritual sacrifice - using life energy to generate magic that she couldn't - she started to dabble in demon-summoning. She was wounded viciously early on, but, ruffled up slightly, continued: she was appallingly determined and creepily obsessed. And too proud to let on to anyone what she was doing, being a rather solitary scholar.
It was at this point she fell in with one of the rogue magical dynasties of England, the Dexters, who symbolized all she loathed - magic done with cheating, on the fly, with no respect at all for symbol, ritual and discipline. (Or as they saw it, "doing magic without all the long-winded crap.") In fact, she'd written a number of books about them, none of them nice or complimentary. Ironically she ended up a firm family friend after falling in with a son of the family and travelled all over the world for a short period of time getting involved in madcap magical hijinks and amusing detective work (and Indiana Jones jackets).
Unfortunately, the urge grew too strong and her little occult habit wasn't stopped: finally Bea made a frantic treatise with the wrong demon for magic of her own. He obediently granted this to her, not mentioning that what he was granting was the ability to see every astral plane and every demon and every spirit and every plane of existence and everything everywhere magical at once. Bea spent three years in an insane asylum until the head of the family she'd loved - Rebecca - took pity on her and sewed her eyes shut: she no longer sees anything now, but since she'd seen everything with even her eyes closed before, this is a lot better than seeing and being gaga. It was too late, though, for Beatrix personally: what she'd done was utter anathema, and how she'd done it was worse. Bye-bye, reputation. This just made the already rogue Dexters' names worse in association, and deeply butthurt and ashamed she fled for a number of years.
She has ostensibly taken in a cabbage due to the fact that cabbages do not make a whole lot of mess.
Familiar: Thwomp was the first result of Bea's little foray into dabbling with summoning magic, and she's just lucky she managed to raise it rather than a pit fiend. Thwomp is a small floating grey stone lump of vaguely rectangular proportions, outlined on its vertical perimeter with tiny little jagged 'teeth' of dull white mica. It has crude eyes and a little mouth that are basically just three indentations in the stone; Thwomp is armed with a fondness for coming down very hard on people's fingers (hence the name) and subsists entirely on sugar water and candy. Not exactly the most alarming of familiars, but Beatrix is desperately attached to him, having been with him for years.
Thwomp now acts as Beatrix's seeing-eye rock.
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Name: Wisp Jacqueline Darnell
