Name: Llywelyn (Leo) Seisyll
Door:
Door pass for Dom designation
Canon: Original Character
Canon Point: Year 5025 PM on AU version of Earth (Equivalent to 2025 CE)
Age: 25 as of 5025 PM
Appearance:
HereHistory:
Note: The character's personal history contains incidents of childhood and adolescent emotional and physical abuse. These portions and others will be marked in bold with relevant content warnings.
Leo (named Llywelyn at birth) was born into the Seisyll family May 13, 5025 PM, in an alternate reality version of Earth’s England. Leo's mother and father, Menna and Quintus Seisyll, headed the Seisyll family, with Leo's three older siblings Cynog, Eirwyn, and Brynmor forming the rest of the immediate blood family unit. The Seisylls were an ancient magical family in a version of Earth where magical rule, while in direct competition in 5025 PM with tech-based perspectives on how to interact with reality, still dominated globalized society and rule of law on Earth. The Seisylls played an important governing role in conjunction with the main magical ruling and enforcement body of the world: The Esteemed Cardinal Point (ECP). Their family’s main magical patron was Zeus/Jupiter, and the Seisylls were considered the primary educators and adjudicators for all channeling magics related to him.
[CW: Mentions of childhood and adolescent emotional and physical abuse]
The importance of the Seisyll family is significant, because it impacted many parts of Leo’s childhood and adolescence. From birth to age 4, like all children from prominent magical families who may show future aptitude for channeling magics, Leo was introduced to various toys, other items, and tests designed to prod children (oftentimes forcefully) for inborn ability. Although not always painful, these “tests” were performed on a child with no ability to understand what was happening, or his family’s reactions to any of it. This early pressure put specific emphasis on Leo’s understanding of his family as being highly competitive against other magical families, and their willingness to subject him and his siblings to difficult, painful, and unyielding pressure to achieve the family’s desired end: discovering and cultivating heirs that would be able to carry on the Seisylls’ ancient purpose of serving and representing their primary patron. Leo’s inborn abilities responded well to these tests, and through them, his parents discovered what appeared to be unusually prodigious aptitude for many kinds of channeling magics.
As a consequence, Leo was positioned as the likely heir to succeed the family’s current head: Menna. Family focus shifted from Cynog, Eirwyn, and Brynmor, and a spotlight was put on Leo from ages 4-14. As a child beginning to understand what was happening to him and what all of it would mean for him in the future, the stubborn, flippant, and self-posessed Leo did not respond well. Capable with a number of channeling magics, curious, and prone to innovation and trying unorthodox things, Leo was able to pick up Jupiter’s channeling magics quickly, but also began to experiment with them in ways that stood against the Seisyll family’s primary focus. He did not accept his family's single-minded focus on their collective ambitions for the world, and rebelled early, often, and sometimes explosively. Leo was punished for this in ways that escalated continually over the course of his childhood and adolescence. He was watched closely by his family, sometimes instructed under the eye of the Seisylls’ personal guard unit, and strictly controlled (not always successfully) in what he was allowed to do both personally and with his magic. This pressure, and the rejection of Leo’s curiosity, creativity, and desire to make his own choices, gave him the early idea that he not only did not want to be the head of the Seisyll family, but also that his family was only going to use him for as long as he stayed with them.
Even worse for the Seisylls, starting at a young age, Leo began to show an interest in the significantly advanced technology of his world. This kind of interest, while common throughout his version of Earth as a whole, stood directly against his family’s focuses and ambitions. It also put the Seisylls in direct conflict with the magical social conventions and laws of the ECP, which had for thousands of years placed societal and cultural focus upon magics as the lens that reality ought to be understood and dealt with through. At first, limited allowance was given for Leo “tinkering” with computers and robotics. This patience ended as soon as the youngest Seisyll child’s interest began graduating to his true passion: combining magics with technology. Leo was forced to experiment in private, and when his experiments were discovered, he was punished: including, on several occasions, by being dragged on pilgrimages to the ECP (the AU version of Greece on this Earth, and referred to as Halous) for further attempts at re-education on magical values and the restriction of his rebellious and wilful personality.
None of it worked to the Seisyll family’s satisfaction. As he aged into adolescence, Leo’s focus only continued to sharpen on his own interests and rebelling against his family’s aims for him, and that rebellion became increasingly creative and painful for all parties involved. With this, and Leo’s growing power and deepening magical knowledge, the family’s perceived window for intervention and course correction was closing. Pushed to her emotional limits by Leo’s insubordination, Menna began to use magic against her youngest son to try and extract compliance. On many occasions, she exploded at him out of anger, and used various kinds of offensive lightning magic against him, hurting, terrifying, and angering him each time. These episodes, which happened to Leo between the ages of 13 and 14, sealed the fate of Leo’s relationship with his blood family and broke what was already a contentious and fractured relationship permanently. Shortly after his 14th birthday, Leo forcibly and violently emancipated himself from the Seisyll family’s hold, and tore off into the heart of London with no intention of speaking to his mother, father, siblings, or extended family again. At this time, Leo informally discarded his given birth name of ‘Llywelyn’, and took on the name ‘Leo’ instead. As he planned to never introduce himself by his surname again, and didn’t want to attract immediate attention by trying to change either of his names formally, this was enough of a symbolic severance from the Seisylls for him.
[/CW]
From 14-16, Leo spent time living in whatever ways he could manage. This amounted to scraping his way through techo-magical London by stealing, squatting, leaning on his magics to try to defend himself when necessary, and otherwise using his growing powers to his advantage where and when he could. He eventually came to live in a scrap yard for various kinds of metals, as it was both a good source for components for his technomagical interests and experiments, but also a place he considered unlikely for his opulently wealthy and tech-rejecting family to want to look for him. He was wrong about this, eventually, but the choice did allow him to live out from under his family’s watch and control for several years as they tried to find him. During this time, Leo held onto his family’s basic veneration for the gods for his own magical purposes, but continued to build his magic and tech skills and knowledge. He also continued nurturing his preference for trying unorthodox magical combinations for channeling. The result was that he discovered that his aptitude was as expansive as it had always been, but his own disinterest in many different kinds of channeling (e.g. healing magics) starkly limited how readily able he was to produce any kind of magic he might think to. By age 17, with the help of some tech-friendly people he met in the city, Leo was able to start building a small commission-based technomagical robotics business for himself. The funds he gained through this work allowed him to sustain his minimalistic and (basically) unhoused way of life.
Between the ages of 18-25, three significant events happened to Leo that would go on to shape his young adulthood drastically. The first was a deadly confrontation with members of the Seisyll family guard when Leo was 18, and the resulting murder of his eldest brother, Cynog. After discovering the likely places to find him, the Seisyll family guard tried to claw Leo back to the Seisyll villa several times by force. The results of each attempt were mixed, with Leo getting progressively more powerful over time, better at resisting through his magics and resourcefulness, but also walking away from these fights with injuries— and further determination to hold onto his freedom. These confrontations confirmed to the Seisyll family that Leo’s power would soon make it too difficult for them to bring him back through their own resources, and so they made what would be their final attempt: by sending Cynog, a powerful mage in his own right, along with the guard. This fight ended with Leo murdering his eldest brother, and the Seisyll family having responsibility for dealing with him taken out of their hands by the enforcement arm of the ECP. Conflicts with the ECP would worsen as time went on, often with Leo deliberately fanning those flames through his chaotic, disproportionately aggressive, sometimes not entirely serious, and (almost always) ineffective forms of terroristic resistance.
[CW: Sci-fi body horror]
The second significant event in Leo’s young adulthood, was his choice at age 19 to replace his left arm with a technomagical robotic one. “Corrupting” his own body in this way was, as he considered it, the only way to permanently remove him from consideration for a representative role in his family. If he did that, he reasoned, the Seisylls may still decide to try to capture him for disgracing his own magically-capable body with tech, but they would at least not try to make him take Menna’s place. Accomplishing the enormous magical and technological task at hand took took months, extensive testing, and preparation for channeling complex and layered magics, but he did accomplish it in the end. It painted him further as a target in the eyes of the ECP, but the sacrifice felt worth it, because it seemed like it ensured his freedom. In light of that achievement, becoming a more deserving target was nothing.
[/CW]
The third event, was Leo meeting the android woman who would eventually become his wife later down the line: Arilena (preferred nickname Rilena) Ismajli. Rilena had grown up a functionally non-magical person in a broadly magical world, and lived a lower-key life— until non-magical recovery from an accident forced her to become a partial android to survive. After her accident, Rilena followed her earned resentment towards the magical family system (and tech-unfriendly magical world more broadly) and information from her tech-friendly contacts, to a person who seemed like the perfect vehicle for resistance: an ex-magical family member. Leo and Rilena had different ideas about why the ECP needed to be resisted, but their preferred methods aligned enough that both were willing to work together on some projects. Through Rilena, Leo gained an eccentric and loosely cobbled together crew of other societal misfits: 2 human, and one a technomagical robot that Leo built and infused with a stolen technologically-preserved human sentience. Sometimes together, sometimes not, this group went on to oppose the ECP and any representatives of magical families that crossed their paths. With Leo as the de-facto symbol and leader of the group, all of the resulting resistance was chaotic, showy, and ineffectual, and only served to see everyone involved marked by the ECP as threats (both symbolic and physical) that needed to be squelched.
Leo’s eventual marriage to Rilena was a totally spontaneous choice, and considered by both people involved to be something of a joke. Neither person thought highly of the society they live in, and neither was it important to them that their relationship have any kind of shared agreement between them. The relationship had been both good and bad for them in turns, but still represented a connection between two people who were not often tolerated by others— Rilena because of her persistent anger issues and resentment towards the society she lived in for its treatment of her over her android body, and Leo because of his selfish, arrogant, and frequently irreverent personality.
World Magical System:
The magical system in Leo's world is based around a concept of "borrowed" power from concept-gods that represent a wide variety of concrete physical realities (like the ocean) and abstract ideas. The gods on his Earth are represented by the named deities of the Greco-Roman pantheons, but the gods themselves are not personified beings, and nor do they have histories of their own. In the ancient past in Leo's world, the use of this magic was purely experimental and accidental, and the discoveries of what each "concept-god" represented were found only through trial and error over thousands of years. Currently, mages with the functional capability for magics draw upon this power through a skill referred to as "channeling". Channeling amounts to various combinations of prayer, specific physical hand motions, practice, and sometimes significant preparation with drawn symbols, constructed altars, or sacrifices of varying sizes and levels of personal importance.
Mages that can channel magics typically have a preferred set of 3-5 "patron" concept gods that they focus their practice and attention on specifically. Extensive practice with preferred gods results in easier channeling with less preparation required over time, and less of a physical toll on the caster. Channeling less frequently called upon gods requires time spent studying, practicing, and preparing for magics use. Use of less familiar magics also, depending on the strength of the spell, can result in a physical toll that ranges from exhaustion, to more serious conditions like comas, extended periods of insanity, or death.
Within this magic system, Leo has the capability to layer magic types over one another and combine them. A good example of this, is channeling both Jupiter (lightning magic) and Vulcan (fire magics) to create low-level electrified flames. Regardless of pratice with individual patrons, especially complex layered magic use (calling upon more than 2 concept-deities at once) is not sustainable for long-term casting (longer than 20 minutes), and exacts an immediate physical exhaustion toll or worse.
Overall, this system amounts to "reality manipulation" magics, in that the creation of physical things like fire, water, etc. are not dependent on having sources of fire or water around a person. Power is drawn from omniscent abstract concepts, and remains in the physical world for only as long as a mage's channel is being sustained (with firm limitations for certain types of channeling, which I have detailed below) through their own limited physical energy and sustained mental focus.
Personality:
Positive Trait: Tough
A difficult young life (albeit one he often chose for himself deliberately, or forced upon himself through poor decision-making) has made Leo a tough and resilient person. He believes deeply that failure is a win condition all on its own, and has many times now picked himself up and dusted himself off after experiencing it. Some of this toughness is maintained as a posturing and self-protective shell around his heart, but it's also genuine. He has survived his family's relentless pressure campaign to extract his compliance for their ambitions, being effectively tortured and controlled by them for years, and also survived living alone in a chaotic city as a 14-20 year old person. He's used to encountering dangerous people with bad intentions, and experienced being badly hurt by many of them. All of these experiences have amounted to a hard callus forming over his emotions and sensitivies to people trying to hurt him emotionally or physically. He's good at powering through difficulty, and responds to obstacles with resourcefulness and continuing to try to overcome them.
Although sometimes a trait that has positive results for him, a negative way his toughness is represented in his past is through the murder of his brother Cynog. When the time came and his freedom was on the line, Leo immediately chose to kill his eldest brother rather than make any attempt to reason with him. His toughness can make him decisive in this way, and unwavering in the decisions he makes. Once he commits to something, such as murdering Cynog, no amount of moral ambiguity, physical difficulty, or personal sacrifice will keep him from trying to find his way to his desired end.
Negative Trait: Arrogant
When it comes to how well he's able to connect with other people, Leo's arrogance is his most significant negative personality trait. He believes that he has significant magical and technology-based talents that make him an "exceptional" person. Other people rarely measure up to his own self-imposed standards, and he's quick to take shows of anything he considers to be signs of ignorance, further as marks of stupidity in other people. His arrogance also leads him to treat other people poorly in many circumstances - usually by stealing from them, or by treating them as lesser than himself. From his perspective, he reached the heights he has through significant pain, personal sacrifice, and dedication. Anyone who seems to show him that they've been unable to (or are unwilling to) do anything similar to his satisfaction, are "weaker than him", "have chosen to surrender to others on their own", and "not worth his time".
Leo's arrogance is best represented by a significant evil action from his past: the creation of one of his "friends", a sentient robot named Sebastian. Sebastian was originally a technologically-preserved sentience of a dead government official from Leo's Earth-- until Leo and Rilena stole that sentience from a secret database. Leo wanted to prove he could create a sentient robot by infusing it with a technologically-preserved consciousness, and his own arrogant ideas about his capabilities with channeling made him believe he could. Rather than consider the morality of trapping a human consciousness in a robot body against that person's will, Leo went ahead with the experiment. It proved successful after several months of practice and preparation, but resulted in the horror of a human man being forced to exist in a body he didn't choose, or want, after death.
Negative Trait: Selfish
After scraping for an existence throughout all his teen years, and feeling certain in his beliefs that only so many people can be trusted, Leo has grown into a selfish young adult. He prioritizes his safety and freedom over the safety and desires of others, and will do what he feels is necessary to protect himself - even if that may result in harm to other people. He's learned that he has to put his own needs and wants first, because otherwise people may try to use him, hurt him, or take things from him. Rilena has pushed on this trait in him over the years, but it's one that's deeply seated in Leo after years of being forced to take care of, and to rely on, himself, alone.
A good example of Leo's selfishness is present in the way he leads his anarchistic "crew" of occasional partners in resistance against the ECP. He is not a good leader, and uses his de-facto position as the symbol and head of the group, to exact his preferred style of vegeance and resistance, regardless of what the others around him may want. In the past, this has led to his own selfish choices resulting in harm to the people around him (his resistance methods are generally messy, destructive, and poorly planned) and his own self.
Negative Trait: Cynical
Although curious about people and open-minded at heart, Leo's experiences with his family, the Esteemed Cardinal Point (aka the ECP, a magical body that creates and enforces magical law on his Earth), and his time alone in technomagical London as a teenager, have made him deeply cynical about other people. He expects others to want to use him callously for his magical or technology-based skills, or both, and is quick to presume betrayal over good will from others. His cynicism has made him automatically reluctant to show vulnerability to others, or to ask for help of any kind-- even when he might desperately need it. When given a choice between asking people permission for something, or finding a way to manouver around them or take something from them, he will almost always choose the latter options. His trust is hard-won, and usually requires time, and a person putting up with his significant anger issues and childish behavior on Leo's part, until he may start to accept the idea that they genuinely do have good intentions towards him.
His cynicism has been well-represented through a pattern of consequences throughout his entire life, but is especially present in his occasional (almost always unsuccessful) resistance efforts against the ECP. Much to his more humanitarian wife Rilena's frustration, he takes action against the ECP by trying to destroy their facilities or by stealing significant magical objects from them, purely as a form of vengeance. His cynicism makes him discount completely the idea that any member of the ECP would be willing to listen to him about their (perceived, by him) wrongs against him. He believes the entire body is automatically despotic and self-serving, and therefore only deserving of punishment from his hands directly.
Other Traits:+ Innovative
+ Confident
+ Creative
+ Intelligent
+ Charismatic
+ Quick-witted
+ Bold
+/- Curious
+/- Open-minded
+/- Playful
+/- Eccentric
+/- Attention-seeking
+/- Rebellious
- Aggressive
- Childish
- Irrepressible
- Exhibitionistic
- Shameless
- Manipulative
- Dismissive
- Easily bored
- Reckless
- Offensive
- Rude
- Stubborn
Powers and Abilities:
High-level understanding of robotics and other computerized technologies. Maximum extent of what he can do is build sentient robots and hack lower-level personal technologies. (Person-to-person hacking ability depends on OOC player acceptance in an opt-in page for the character.) He has no ability to build, nor interest in creating, robots that have tech-based weapon-like capabilities (e.g. no rocket launchers, explosive devices, plasma beam-like weapons, etc.) or transportation capabilities (e.g. no cars, flying machines, etc.). When he does arm robots for fighting, he does so by front-loading them with magics like fire or lightning spells, which can only affect one person at a time.
Specialized technomagical ability, which involves blending his magics with robotic technologies. He mostly uses this for powering what he builds with chanelled electrical magics. It is also used in the "front-loading" way mentioned above.
Magical power through a means called "channeling" on his Earth. (Explained in greater detail in the above "World Magical System" section.) He has an in-born capability for a wide variety of magics through the use of this skill. These include:
1. Basic elemental magics (lightning, fire, wind, water) - Leo is well-practised with these and able to use them readily. These are low to med-level (e.g. a single bolt of electrical energy) magics that, when they hit in the middle of a fighting context, only affect one person at a time.
2. Emotion-based magics (ability to stoke fear, desire, anger, confusion, sleep, nightmares in a sleeping character) - Much less practiced in these. Use is time-limited (max 1 hour), can only affect one person at a time, and results in a physical exhaustion toll. Successful use at all depends on OOC acceptance through a player opt-in page.
3. Specific animal transformation abilities that are short-term (max one hour) use. (Forms: Bear, eagle, dolphin, horse)
4. Ability to conjure literal light and darkness/shadows (non-damaging magics)
5. Limited necromantic magics (causing low-level necromantic/decay TTPRG-style damage through magic that is derived from channeling death-associated deities)
6. Limited time magics (Maximum capability is reverting his own position in time by 3 seconds, which amounts to what looks like instantaneous teleportation across a maximum 20 foot space. This does not affect the flow of time in a given world nor the area around Leo, nor the people around him in any way. He has no ability to time travel or affect the flow of time in a world broadly.)
Inventory:
(1) Jupiter statuette, (2) Thick, beaten up, and well-noted compendium of major and minor concept-deities from his Earth, (3) Tiny spherical bird-shaped robot named Fi (wiffle ball-sized, animal level of sentient intelligence, only capable of birdlike behavior/movement and recording/playing audio and video messages)
Samples:
Both show thinking and communication styles in different contexts -
1 &
2 
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
technomagical) wrote2024-12-14 03:48 pm
