Rose Bateleur - Basic Info

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 Rose Bateleur

Rose Bateleur is a reasonably normal 21-year old woman living in the Big City. However, she’s been 21 for three years, and which Big City, planet, timeline, & reality are subject to change at whim.

Before she created Rose Bateleur, she was The Magician, a transcendent immortal embodiment of every smart, quick, new idea anyone ever had.  For uncountable but not countless aeons she played a game called Mystic Journey with her fellow Arcana, a game in which they faced off to see whose ideals were most worthy to shape reality.

During the last round, The Magician came to understand that the gameplaces with which they played - mortals - were in fact really people, despite having a flesh body with a linear and corporeal existence.  After losing a tiebreaker round in a game of Rock-Paper-Scissors, Rose hung up her hat and decided that, before the Arcana played the next round, she wanted to spend more time understanding mortality - from the inside.

A whole Arcana cannot fit in a person.  Not only is the Arcana too big, but a person contains portions of the idiom of every Arcana - they’re not shaped right.  So somewhere out there, the Magician still exists independently of Rose Bateleur… but everywhere and everywhen else, the Magician is sleeping, quiescent. The part of her that pays attention and appears to be an individual person is entirely focused on Rose.

Rose is aware that she’s an ageless disembodied consciousness, or at least, she knows that’s true. She doesn’t remember most of it, and she also knows she was born, grew up in and out of foster care and a series of orphanages, attended a magnet school, early enrolled in college at fourteen, got a bachelor’s degree in anthropology at seventeen, dropped out of grad school at nineteen because she could never finish her thesis, taught herself the rudiments of stage magic by twenty-one, and began touring low-rent clubs, busking, and backpacking her way across the world at twenty-one, the first time she got bored and frustrated and stepped into a new universe where heckling the stage was a misdemeanor.  (She didn’t, and can’t, do that on purpose - she only knows that since that moment, when she gets bored of one place, she winds up somewhere else soon).  She also knows that all her official documentation has claimed she’s 21 ever since then, in whatever time and place she turns up. Her hair and nails still grow, but she’s not aging in the same ways most people do.

She also remembers being Prometheus. And the day the apple fell on Isaac Newton’s head.  And winning a quick-draw duel in a town where nobody knew her name. Amd working on analog computers alongside Charles Babbage. It gets confusing, especially because, as a general rule, she can’t remember anything important about those lifetimes and experiences - because she wasn’t a gunslinger or Isaac Newton or Ada Lovelace or Prometheus. Instead, as the Magician, she was written into the fabric of the world behind the world, and every stitch of her DNA was a moment of brilliant ingenuousness in someone’s life - the Magician was and is the tapestry, not of those people, but of those moments & ideas.

Her magic is stage magic. Most of the time. But she knows in the back of her mind what she is, and that gives her a few privileges.

Rose is fluent in your language.  In fact, sometimes she forgets that people speak more than one.  With that said, she’s often impossible to follow regardless of language, and sometimes utters sentences which seem to smear vaseline on the camera-lens and blur themselves into incomprehension, when she tries to express a relatively simple five-dimensional concept that seems obvious to her. She’s not sure if it’s just that what she said can’t be expressed in words, or if Big Rose (her term for the Magician) is actually censoring her.

Rose can look how you’d like her to. She can’t disguise herself as a person who is not-Rose, but she can alter her height, her hair and eye color, the shape and details of her body, and her attire - not as she likes, but only in order to meet the wants and expectations of people around her. She doesn’t need to do so if she doesn’t want to, but if you imagine her in heels, she has heels available if she wants them.

Rose is never in the dark. She can make a light at all times, though she can’t simply conjure magical light - but wherever she is, she can flip a lightswitch, find a flashlight or a cigarette lighter, or in some way find mundane means of producing sufficient light to read text on a page (no more) no matter whether such means were available a moment ago.

Rose has tools of the trade. If Rose needs a wand, a blade, a cup, or a coin or disk, she will find one close to hand. Note that this only works if she doesn’t have one and if she needs it - she cannot produce two nickels, but she’s never one penny short; if she has a Swiss Army knife she has no means of producing a sword; and she cannot absolutely guarantee the form of the object she finds (except that it will not be useless for a purpose of she needs it. But if she needs a self-defense weapon, that doesn’t mean she can produce a rapier & not a small knife just by wanting it; just because one works better - it’s a crapshoot every time).

Rose can open locks. All other security measures work fine and Rose has no supernatural knowledge of what’s behind doors or inside containers, but she can, with a bobby pin and a moment of legerdemain, open any lock, even electronic locks.  

That’s the extent of her powers. And except for the language thing, which happens whether she wants it to or not, Rose tries to avoid using these abilities.  She’s trying to be just some kid seeing the world; she hates it when people look at her differently.