Leslie (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
foundfamilies) wrote2017-01-24 12:37 am
foundfamilies) wrote2017-01-24 12:37 am
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aefenglom
WARNING: THIS APP WILL INEVITABLY DISCUSS CHILD ABUSE/CHILD DEATH DUE TO THE NATURE OF HER CANON.
Player Information
Name: Yosie
Age: 25+
Contact: PM to foundfamilies or yobousiesho @ plurk
Other Characters: N/A
Character Information
Name: Leslie (currently, in a court case to change her last name legally from Sperado to Salvatore, so she usually doesn't give one)
Canon: The Monster Duchess and Contract Princess (the comic, as more has been translated publicly in English compared to the light novel, though there are no differences in scenes where both have been translated)
Canon Point: Early in chapter 26 of the comic, where Leslie goes to bed thinking about the words the duchess has told her.
Age: 12 (most people guess 9-10 due to malnutrition stunting her growth)
History: As far as I know, there is no history write-up available in English (aside from the unofficial translation of the whole comic). I have attempted to be succinct but complete, but can expand/contract if desired. CONTENT WARNING: CHILD ABUSE/CHILD DEATH
Personality: Leslie’s most remarked upon trait is her complete sincerity. When she is not trying to hide anything specific, her words and actions are almost painfully earnest and honest. She hates the idea of hurting anyone she doesn’t hate, though, so she hides anything she believes would worry others or she believes is childishly selfish. To such people, she is usually quite polite and reserved, but her true feelings often slip through, especially when she gets excited. However, particularly “childish” or “selfish” outbursts by her own reckoning leave her extremely embarrassed once she calms down, and her sense of appropriate manners has been shaped by her training as a maid and by egotistical tutors who made her bow and scrape to them despite her technical noble status. Most obviously, many note that she tends to curtsy and bow as deeply as a commoner meeting royalty, even though she has technically been a noble all of her life.
This sincerity does not only represent itself in pleasant ways, though, when she interacts with those of whom she has a negative view. After she no longer seeks the Sperado family’s love or approval, she refuses to play along with their attempts to do anything to her, even when it gets her in more trouble than pretending to obey. She talks back even to the marquess, of whom she is afraid and whose temper flares when defied in any way, even when she is supposed to lay low as Duchess Salvatore makes preparations to save her from the danger, and she is not above using force, either social or magical, to stand up for herself. Twice, she even considers using her magic to kill the Sperados outright, though it only happens when she feels completely backed into a corner. She decides against it out of a belief that they deserve a worse punishment.
However, I believe her strongest character trait is her resilience. Her childhood was cruel to the extreme and no one aware of it ever made any attempt to help her or encourage her. Many of the Sperado family’s servants even regularly blamed Leslie for her own abuse by saying she should have been more obedient, and they often expressed sympathy to the abusers instead. And yet, despite knowing that she should be cautious around everyone to avoid being used for her strong powers, she warms up almost immediately to the kindness of everyone she meets in the Salvatore mansion, seeming to have forgotten this concern by her second visit to the mansion. In this loving and safe environment, she soon proves to be a bright and cheerful child. Even after being unexpectedly confronted by her abusive sister, almost as soon as she returns to her caretakers, she is expressing her delight over how comfortable her new boots are. Many characters have expressed surprise at how much joy simple pleasures will bring her.
The trauma of her abusive upbringing do show through despite her resilience, though, especially in the form of a complete lack of self-confidence and of significant anxiety. After being made to feel useless her whole life, she has no confidence in her own abilities. Each of her three new tutors pause to consider a response to Leslie during their first lesson, and Leslie is instantly certain that she is inadequate in some way and has disappointed them. Even when, in the case of her first tutor, she is called a genius for her academic achievements, she only takes it as a sign that she is not inadequate, to her great relief, and is soon worrying again when she does not immediately succeed at a task she is given a matter of minutes later.
Despite her lacking self-confidence, when Leslie is pushed, she displays a very strong will. During her childhood, she was taught to be quiet and obedient, but once she decides to leave, she stands up to the entire Sperado mansion, talking back to people who abused her all her life. She slaps a servant trying to remove her from a carriage (she’s immediately disturbed to have struck another, but she tells herself it was necessary and keeps those feelings from her expression) and lets some of her own hair be pulled out rather than let her mother pull her away by it to punish her. When she is unable to find an opportunity to meet Duchess Salvatore outside her mansion, she waits at the mansion's gate for a full day in the snow without warm clothing. She is even able to power through her anxiety at times when she feels like the action is her only choice to survive.
In a similar vein to her lack of self confidence, she is very inclined to blame herself for things that happen to those she loves. When the Salvatores are brought to a child custody trial, Leslie believes that it is her fault for having asked for their help to free her from an abusive household. This leads to repeated nightmares where she fears the duchess will be executed for helping Leslie, but her first priority when the nightmares wake her up is to try to go back to sleep, thinking people will worry if they notice her sleep deprivation. These nightmares are not unique: she experiences stress-induced nightmares a couple of times during the canon. Due to the extreme fear of fire she develops after the attempted sacrifice, these nightmares are always filled with fire and even a contained fire in a fireplace terrifies her. (The first magic device shown in the story heats Leslie’s room at the Salvatore mansion to avoid this problem.)
The isolation from that childhood restricted to the Sperado mansion also expresses itself in terms of an odd mixture of knowledge and ignorance, often aware of adult or academically advanced concepts, such as contracts and philosophical theory, while not knowing of the existence of more day-to-day matters, like pinky promises and hot chocolate. This extends to her strange mixture of class experiences: she is very used to being starved and is amazed by how tasty the food served at the Salvatore mansion is, but she also is completely used to having servants around, even though she was treated more like one herself most of her life. Her understanding of human behaviours is also skewed, often surprised by kindness but understanding the distinction between regular anger and anger that would lead a person to harm her by just the look in the other’s eye. She seems to split people in her mind between the binary of “good people” and “bad people.”
In the end, what Leslie is looking for is the ability to live what she considers to be a ”normal life,” where she can live for herself rather than others. She wants to eat proper food, read books freely, and start a family with someone she loves. She doesn’t care about wealth or power beyond what is needed for her to accomplish this. As she lives with the Salvatores, though, she comes to also wish to be real family with the Salvatores — which, despite their obvious love and care, she remains unsure if she can hope for or if they are merely being kind to the one with whom they have a contract. She is still learning to accept or expect love from others, though every day she gets closer to realizing it.
Abilities & Skills:
Inventory/Companions: Wearing: a light pink nightgown with ruffles and ribbons (pictured in icon). Likely some period-appropriate underthings, like a shift (not pictured in comic for obvious reasons).
Holding: a black stuffed bunny with violet eyes and ribbon.
Companion: a sentient collective of shadows (though all actions suggesting sentience have been taken as one group and have only split up in response to Leslie’s magic, the translation has Leslie call them “the shadows” in plural, leading me to propose they exist as a kind of collective, so I will be referring to the shadows as “they” but as one actual being when it comes to sentience). In canon, they react to Leslie’s wishes and are able to physically interact with the world, even becoming somewhat three-dimensional by raising mist-like tendrils. Their intelligence is never discussed, as they stay hidden to everyone who does not have the power over darkness, but they are at least aware enough to demonstrate opinions like caring for Leslie’s well-being, and Leslie speaks to them as though they are intelligent. In her world, the shadows are virtually undetectable: even when Marquess Sperado is magically blinded by them before he knows Leslie possesses magic, he seems unaware that anything unnatural occurred.
In Æfenglōm, the mods have discussed some limitations with me in the FAQ. Based on my understanding of their words (feel free to request or suggest any changes):
Choice: Witch
Reason: Leslie had great powers by her world's standards and, upon being tutored in the subject, put a lot of work into improving her control. She is also an academic prodigy for her age, with her understanding of the subjects she has been taught at a comparable level to the end of formal education in the empire, which will allow her to make good use of this academically intense magic once she gets used to it.
Sample: Network sample
Action sample
Player Information
Name: Yosie
Age: 25+
Contact: PM to foundfamilies or yobousiesho @ plurk
Other Characters: N/A
Character Information
Name: Leslie (currently, in a court case to change her last name legally from Sperado to Salvatore, so she usually doesn't give one)
Canon: The Monster Duchess and Contract Princess (the comic, as more has been translated publicly in English compared to the light novel, though there are no differences in scenes where both have been translated)
Canon Point: Early in chapter 26 of the comic, where Leslie goes to bed thinking about the words the duchess has told her.
Age: 12 (most people guess 9-10 due to malnutrition stunting her growth)
History: As far as I know, there is no history write-up available in English (aside from the unofficial translation of the whole comic). I have attempted to be succinct but complete, but can expand/contract if desired. CONTENT WARNING: CHILD ABUSE/CHILD DEATH
- Story Setting
- The comic is set in the Rucardius Empire, a powerful country where each noble house possesses an inheritable special, often magical, power. Two of these are especially important in Leslie’s story: the Salvatore family and the Sperado family. The Salvatores are the empire’s most important guardians: while most noble houses’ powers have gotten weaker, the Salvatore family’s abnormal physical strength only grows stronger. Many outside the family think of them as dangerous monsters, attributing their strength to demon blood in their ancestry, but their physical and political power makes them almost untouchable. The current head, Duchess Salvatore, is infamously reclusive.
- The Sperado family’s prestige, in contrast, is in decline. They possess ”the most powerful magic” in their power over darkness, but, gradually, fewer children were born with this power, until a century has passed without a single one. Secretly, their heirs are born with weak magic, but this is strengthened by ritually sacrificing another Sperado child. The child born after one with this shadow magic always has white hair and are considered “the most useful sacrifices.” The current head, Marquess Sperado, is obsessed both with restoring the family by their shadow magic and with his envy for the Salvatores.
- In addition to the noble families’ powers, many priests of a sky god possess divine magic, which can be used to heal or to soothe out-of-control powers, but cannot mix with magic. The temples keep records of noble genealogy and grant noble children “blessed” middle names in exchange for a donation from their parents.
- The current Marquess Sperado convinces his wife to give birth to a second child and, as hoped, she has the white hair described by former heads of the family. He names the child "Leslie," referencing a flower meaning "a happy and peaceful family," but her life contains anything but. Her family treats her as useless and worthless, abusing her until she thinks that her only value is in serving her older sister, Eli. In case Eli’s powers never awaken, Leslie is trained as Eli’s maid, though after she accidentally spills tea on the prince during her first outing as her maid, she is confined to the mansion for the rest of her childhood. While confined, she spends much of her time being tutored in subjects Eli might be expected to know as the fiancée of the crown prince so she can prompt her.
- After Eli’s weak power awakens, the Sperados prepare the sacrificial ritual at the fire pit of a pavilion suspended over a canyon. When Leslie causes the servant instructed to throw her into the fire to hesitate by clinging to a nearby pillar and begging for her life, the marquess knocks her in himself by striking her in the stomach with the blunt end of a spear, berating her for not quietly accepting her role to die for Eli. As she is locked in, unknown voices tell her to survive and escape as many ghostly arms, apparently unseen by anyone other than Leslie, extend from the fire to push her into the canyon. She is saved from the fall by her newly awakened shadow magic.
- When Leslie wakes up and moves to leave the room, the shadows under her bed reach towards her, but they retreat when she reassures them she will be all right. (This and later interactions suggest both that these shadows are sentient in some way and that Leslie has some instinctual awareness of these living shadows, as her mild surprise at the interaction is more on the level of not expecting the shadows to care so much rather than surprise at their existence.) Leslie abandons the idea of ever being loved by the Sperados, especially after she overhears them talk about how the next opportunity for the ritual is in six months and about how Leslie was conceived solely to be a sacrifice. Having previously overheard the marquess receive the information that Duchess Salvatore intends to adopt a daughter from a spy, she plans to ask the so-called Monster Duchess for protection as the head of one of the few houses politically powerful enough to resist the Sperados and the law keeping minors with their parents.
- On the day of a yearly meeting at a local temple usually attended by the duchess, Leslie uses her uncertain status as technically being a daughter of the Sperado family to confuse and bully the servants into driving Eli's carriage to the temple with Leslie in it instead. When the duchess doesn't arrive, she accesses the Sperado family's records instead, finding many young deaths in the family, claimed to be accidental or from disease, where the children were given shorter funerals than the minimum tradition demands. She deduces that the ritual is a family tradition and concludes that the hands pushing her from the fire belong to the ghosts of the previous victims, still trapped in the magical fire. Believing her strong magical powers were empowered by their accumulated resentment, she swears to avenge them, and herself.
- When Leslie returns to the mansion, Eli pretends to be a worried, loving sister in front of her visiting fiancé. As she looks into Leslie’s eyes, though, she discovers that Leslie shares the same powers as her, and also that Leslie's magic is far, far stronger. Leslie quietly threatens Eli, saying that if their father found out that she has the stronger powers, she would take Eli's place as being the beloved daughter. As Leslie continues to defy orders, the Sperados and their servants believe she has "gone crazy." During this time, Leslie trips her nanny with her magic when her nanny attempts to drag her off to apologize to her sister for upsetting her.
- At her demand, the coach driver drops Leslie off at the gate of the reclusive Duchess Salvatore’s mansion and she convinces him to claim he brought her to the temple to spend the night in prayer. After Leslie waits in the freshly fallen snow without a coat until sundown, the duchess recalls her grandfather’s stories of how younger Sperado children used to die young unusually often and is curious enough to invite Leslie in. Leslie proposes a contract: Leslie promises to use her magic for the Salvatores (briefly demonstrating her power and clearly impressing the duchess) and to renounce any inheritance in the Salvatore family when she is old enough to live on her own; in exchange, she asks to be kept safe until she reaches adulthood and, when pressed, she also asks for the duchess’s help in eradicating the Sperado family if possible. The duchess is interested, both for practical and empathetic reasons, but she first tests Leslie’s courage by removing her quarter-face mask that hides her burn scars. Instead of showing fear as the duchess expects, Leslie looks sad and asks if the burn hurts like her own does, which goes past the duchess’s expectations for not being afraid. The duchess accepts Leslie’s proposal, though Leslie is unaware that the duchess’s sympathy towards a desperate child played a large role in this choice.
- After Leslie’s own burns are treated by a priest and she stays overnight in a guest room, Leslie reluctantly returns to the Sperado mansion as the duchess prepares to be able to adopt Leslie regardless of her birth parents’ opinions. As Leslie continues to fight back against her abusers, the marquess realizes from the story of Leslie’s nanny being tripped that Leslie may have shadow magic. He plans to use both daughters, Eli as the crown prince’s fiancée and Leslie as a weapon of war. After his attempt to trick Leslie into thinking he’d had a change of heart fails, he instructs servants to trap Leslie in a burning carriage and to block the door such that Leslie will be unable to open it without magic, using her new fear of fire to force her to prove that she possesses magic.
- Eli alerts a group of knights to the plan, still fearing that Leslie will replace her as the favoured daughter if her stronger magic is known. By chance, one of the knights is the oldest Salvatore son, Bethrion, and he brings Leslie to the Salvatore mansion, realizing that she will not be safe with the Sperados. After Leslie briefly wakes up to see the duchess at her side, Duchess Salvatore leaves the sleeping child and confronts Marquess Sperado of what she knows and guesses of Leslie’s treatment, rattling him. He declares his intent to take her to court for a custody battle over Leslie.
- Four days later, Leslie wakes to see Bethrion and the duchess’s husband, Sairaine, by her bedside. Leslie is initially frightened by the boisterous Sairaine (the only of the generally intimidating Salvatores to elicit such a reaction from her), but she is quickly won over by his earnest kindness. The two Salvatores tell her how Marquess Sperado stormed the mansion with knights and hired thugs when the duchess was home alone, and how the duchess single-handedly sent them packing, breaking the marquess’s arm as a warning. Hearing Sairaine call the marquess an idiot, her fear turns into relieved laughter. The man that so terrified her so much her whole life seems like nothing under the Salvatores’ protection.
- After Leslie has recovered, the duchess and her husband discuss getting Leslie clothes that will fit (her current options needing to be partially tied on) and Leslie asks to be allowed to visit the downtown, where she has never been. Bethrion promises to bring her there on his next day off. In the intervening time, Leslie meets Ruenti, the younger Salvatore son, who is upset that a member of the Sperado family has been invited into his home after their many underhanded attacks on the Salvatores. He accidentally loses his temper at her, but when Leslie barely reacts to being yelled at by such a large man, Ruenti realizes that she is resigned to such treatment and finds himself further confused.
- In the middle of the trip downtown with Bethrion and her personal maid, Madel, Leslie is grabbed by Eli Sperado, her blood-related sister, on the way to the clothing store washroom. Eli attempts to insult Leslie and demand she make the duchess fix rumours that are spreading of the marquess's humiliating defeat at the hands of Duchess Salvatore, but Leslie responds with cutting arguments that corner Eli. Eli finally blames Leslie for having been born with white hair and not blond, but she has no response when Leslie asks if she would have been any more willing to share anything with Leslie if she had been blond. Leslie is able to walk away, saying nothing of the confrontation when she returns.
- Later, Leslie pauses in front of a toy shop window, clearly amazed by the sight, but she insists to Bethrion that she only wants to look since toys aren’t a necessity. He makes up a story about not buying anything hurting the Salvatore family’s reputation and, when he pretends to ask a shopkeeper to sell him the entire store’s stock, a panicked Leslie chooses the black stuffed bunny she had been looking at. Bethrion tells her that she no longer needs to hold back, privately wondering what her life must have been like when one toy and hot chocolate and cookies from a café they visit after bring her so much joy. At the café, Leslie playfully floats a snowperson cookie in her hot chocolate as if it is in a little boat, but before she can show Bethrion, the cookie crumbles into a sad-looking mess, and she bursts into tears out of surprise and how depressing an image it makes, leaving her extremely embarrassed for the rest of the day. After she is left in her bed, she shows the bunny to the shadows underneath the bed, telling them that she chose the black toy to match with them. She is pleased that the shadows seems to like the toy and she thinks about how fortunate she is, as well as renewing her vow to bring down the Sperado family.
- At breakfast the next morning, the servants serve a dessert of hot chocolate and cookies to the Salvatore family, including Leslie, to the confusion of the original Salvatores, who never have dessert. It soon becomes clear that the maid Madel told the story of Leslie crying about a cookie melting in the hot chocolate and the servants spent the night developing recipes that will allow the cookie to last long enough for her to show off the upright floating cookie. Everyone praises Leslie for it other than Ruenti, who has no idea what happened to his usually stoic family.
- When Ruenti is assigned to tutor Leslie, he tests her by pretending several senior-year academy books are basic knowledge, believing this child from the Sperado family cannot be trusted. To his shock, Leslie is not only familiar with them and has an equivalent level of understanding as most academy seniors, she is a fan of his favourite unpopular philosopher. He tries to resist his excitement over their shared interests and her intelligence compared to the average twelve-year-old out of resentment for the Sperado family, but he notices signs of the abuse she suffered and, by the end of the lesson, he is warmly welcoming her to his family, asking her to call him Brother Ruenti. However, he's concerned that her body is too frail to contain her recently awoken powers, despite Leslie's insistence that the shadows would never run rampant on her.
- During the lesson, Duchess Salvatore, Bethrion, and the head butler, Jenna, interrogate the servant who leaked the information to the Sperados that lead Leslie here. Before they can get much out of him, he dies, having been poisoned by his employers. While he was leaking information to the Sperado family, they correctly deduce that the mastermind is someone with greater political power than the marquess. Bethrion is assigned to investigate.
- Ruenti tells the duchess that he feels that Leslie is a genius in some subjects, but will need to be taught others that she does not know. He also raises his concerns about Leslie being able to contain her magic and suggests that they bring in a friend of his, Konrad, whose powers can soothe magic that has gone out of control, so the duchess decides to ask him to be Leslie's tutor in theology. When he leaves, the duchess brings Leslie in so she can explain to Leslie about Marquess Sperado's plan to accuse her of kidnapping Leslie in court. Leslie is frightened and upset as the duchess tells her about the lies the marquess is spreading about them to help sway the jury and about the laws that are on the marquess's side. Leslie begins to shake when she thinks of having to return to the Sperado mansion, but Duchess Salvatore sits beside her and soothes her, telling her that she will protect her. When Leslie asks whether she can do anything to help, the duchess asks whether Leslie is willing to give the full story regarding the marquess's attempts to kill her. Through her tears, Leslie tells the duchess about being born to be a sacrifice and being saved by what she believes to be vengeful spirits. After continuing to reassure Leslie that she will protect her, Duchess Salvatore tells her that she doesn't think that Leslie was saved and given her powers for the sake of carrying out the dead children’s revenge. Leslie thinks about the duchess's words all night, but is unable to understand what other reason she might have been saved. As she sleeps this night, she will arrive in Ǣfenglōm.
Leslie’s Backstory
Events of the Story
Personality: Leslie’s most remarked upon trait is her complete sincerity. When she is not trying to hide anything specific, her words and actions are almost painfully earnest and honest. She hates the idea of hurting anyone she doesn’t hate, though, so she hides anything she believes would worry others or she believes is childishly selfish. To such people, she is usually quite polite and reserved, but her true feelings often slip through, especially when she gets excited. However, particularly “childish” or “selfish” outbursts by her own reckoning leave her extremely embarrassed once she calms down, and her sense of appropriate manners has been shaped by her training as a maid and by egotistical tutors who made her bow and scrape to them despite her technical noble status. Most obviously, many note that she tends to curtsy and bow as deeply as a commoner meeting royalty, even though she has technically been a noble all of her life.
This sincerity does not only represent itself in pleasant ways, though, when she interacts with those of whom she has a negative view. After she no longer seeks the Sperado family’s love or approval, she refuses to play along with their attempts to do anything to her, even when it gets her in more trouble than pretending to obey. She talks back even to the marquess, of whom she is afraid and whose temper flares when defied in any way, even when she is supposed to lay low as Duchess Salvatore makes preparations to save her from the danger, and she is not above using force, either social or magical, to stand up for herself. Twice, she even considers using her magic to kill the Sperados outright, though it only happens when she feels completely backed into a corner. She decides against it out of a belief that they deserve a worse punishment.
However, I believe her strongest character trait is her resilience. Her childhood was cruel to the extreme and no one aware of it ever made any attempt to help her or encourage her. Many of the Sperado family’s servants even regularly blamed Leslie for her own abuse by saying she should have been more obedient, and they often expressed sympathy to the abusers instead. And yet, despite knowing that she should be cautious around everyone to avoid being used for her strong powers, she warms up almost immediately to the kindness of everyone she meets in the Salvatore mansion, seeming to have forgotten this concern by her second visit to the mansion. In this loving and safe environment, she soon proves to be a bright and cheerful child. Even after being unexpectedly confronted by her abusive sister, almost as soon as she returns to her caretakers, she is expressing her delight over how comfortable her new boots are. Many characters have expressed surprise at how much joy simple pleasures will bring her.
The trauma of her abusive upbringing do show through despite her resilience, though, especially in the form of a complete lack of self-confidence and of significant anxiety. After being made to feel useless her whole life, she has no confidence in her own abilities. Each of her three new tutors pause to consider a response to Leslie during their first lesson, and Leslie is instantly certain that she is inadequate in some way and has disappointed them. Even when, in the case of her first tutor, she is called a genius for her academic achievements, she only takes it as a sign that she is not inadequate, to her great relief, and is soon worrying again when she does not immediately succeed at a task she is given a matter of minutes later.
Despite her lacking self-confidence, when Leslie is pushed, she displays a very strong will. During her childhood, she was taught to be quiet and obedient, but once she decides to leave, she stands up to the entire Sperado mansion, talking back to people who abused her all her life. She slaps a servant trying to remove her from a carriage (she’s immediately disturbed to have struck another, but she tells herself it was necessary and keeps those feelings from her expression) and lets some of her own hair be pulled out rather than let her mother pull her away by it to punish her. When she is unable to find an opportunity to meet Duchess Salvatore outside her mansion, she waits at the mansion's gate for a full day in the snow without warm clothing. She is even able to power through her anxiety at times when she feels like the action is her only choice to survive.
In a similar vein to her lack of self confidence, she is very inclined to blame herself for things that happen to those she loves. When the Salvatores are brought to a child custody trial, Leslie believes that it is her fault for having asked for their help to free her from an abusive household. This leads to repeated nightmares where she fears the duchess will be executed for helping Leslie, but her first priority when the nightmares wake her up is to try to go back to sleep, thinking people will worry if they notice her sleep deprivation. These nightmares are not unique: she experiences stress-induced nightmares a couple of times during the canon. Due to the extreme fear of fire she develops after the attempted sacrifice, these nightmares are always filled with fire and even a contained fire in a fireplace terrifies her. (The first magic device shown in the story heats Leslie’s room at the Salvatore mansion to avoid this problem.)
The isolation from that childhood restricted to the Sperado mansion also expresses itself in terms of an odd mixture of knowledge and ignorance, often aware of adult or academically advanced concepts, such as contracts and philosophical theory, while not knowing of the existence of more day-to-day matters, like pinky promises and hot chocolate. This extends to her strange mixture of class experiences: she is very used to being starved and is amazed by how tasty the food served at the Salvatore mansion is, but she also is completely used to having servants around, even though she was treated more like one herself most of her life. Her understanding of human behaviours is also skewed, often surprised by kindness but understanding the distinction between regular anger and anger that would lead a person to harm her by just the look in the other’s eye. She seems to split people in her mind between the binary of “good people” and “bad people.”
In the end, what Leslie is looking for is the ability to live what she considers to be a ”normal life,” where she can live for herself rather than others. She wants to eat proper food, read books freely, and start a family with someone she loves. She doesn’t care about wealth or power beyond what is needed for her to accomplish this. As she lives with the Salvatores, though, she comes to also wish to be real family with the Salvatores — which, despite their obvious love and care, she remains unsure if she can hope for or if they are merely being kind to the one with whom they have a contract. She is still learning to accept or expect love from others, though every day she gets closer to realizing it.
Abilities & Skills:
- High intelligence and strong work ethic for her age: Leslie demonstrates understanding of academic concepts at a level above what is expected at her age, with her highly educated adoptive brother estimating her intelligence to be on level with a senior at the academy. (The age range that attends the academy is not given, but it appears to be the empire’s highest educational institute for the nobility and magicians.) This appears to apply to learning practical skills to some extent as well: she masters the first level of a magical exercise many times faster than the average magician, though that might also at least partially be a reflection of her magical ability. Being used to an extremely harsh schedule from unforgiving tutors, she has to be stopped from overworking when she feels she is not meeting expectations, ignoring even the possibility of collapsing from overexertion. When she has practical limits to her work explained to her, however, she can work within those bounds.
- Strong magic powers: Leslie's magic, awakened by the ghosts of previous child sacrifices, is many times stronger than has been typical of the later generations of Sperados, and often impresses those who are deliberately shown it. Her stamina restricts her from being able to use it for long periods of time and her fine control over smaller applications of her power are a work in progress (though, at times of high emotion, she has demonstrated far tighter control), but those who understand it seem confident that she will become extremely powerful one day. Exact boundaries on this power have not been given, but she has demonstrated the ability to interact with physical objects (holding people in place, tripping people, moving furniture), to conceal (plunging large and small spaces into darkness), and to consume (explicitly destroying wooden blocks into all but a handful of splinters, but she has also expressed that she believes she could have the shadows devour the Sperado mansion and everyone in it). This power is also supernaturally difficult to detect, even when in active use on or around others. This will be entirely nerfed in Ǣfenglōm, leaving her pretty much completely defenceless until she learns witch magic, as she still has low stamina and physical strength even for her age. Despite her high intelligence and strong work ethic, it might take some extra work to get the basics down for witch magic due to her very instinctual grasp on her old powers and her canon point including only her first formal magic lesson.
- She's cute: she's cute.
Inventory/Companions: Wearing: a light pink nightgown with ruffles and ribbons (pictured in icon). Likely some period-appropriate underthings, like a shift (not pictured in comic for obvious reasons).
Holding: a black stuffed bunny with violet eyes and ribbon.
Companion: a sentient collective of shadows (though all actions suggesting sentience have been taken as one group and have only split up in response to Leslie’s magic, the translation has Leslie call them “the shadows” in plural, leading me to propose they exist as a kind of collective, so I will be referring to the shadows as “they” but as one actual being when it comes to sentience). In canon, they react to Leslie’s wishes and are able to physically interact with the world, even becoming somewhat three-dimensional by raising mist-like tendrils. Their intelligence is never discussed, as they stay hidden to everyone who does not have the power over darkness, but they are at least aware enough to demonstrate opinions like caring for Leslie’s well-being, and Leslie speaks to them as though they are intelligent. In her world, the shadows are virtually undetectable: even when Marquess Sperado is magically blinded by them before he knows Leslie possesses magic, he seems unaware that anything unnatural occurred.
In Æfenglōm, the mods have discussed some limitations with me in the FAQ. Based on my understanding of their words (feel free to request or suggest any changes):
- The shadows will not instinctively understand her intentions with her magic nerfed, requiring her to communicate this by some other means.
- The shadows’ physical strength has been reduced to the level of carrying small, light objects. Their ability to carry things or hold people in place will be less than Leslie trying to do it physically herself, but I guess they could hold down a piece of paper from being blown away in the wind, for example.
- It will be difficult to hide the shadows from an experienced Coven witch. I am currently taking this to mean the following, though, again, I am happy to make any changes at a mod’s request: when they are in the light, they are visible to anyone looking at them; when they are moving inside ordinary shadows, people with moderate magic sensitivity might notice some fluctuations in the depth of the darkness and people with high magic sensitivity will be aware of them; when holding still inside ordinary shadows, anyone not looking for them might overlook them, but a strong Witch could still find them; and at all times, they will be detectable by divination. If they are later made into a familiar, the shadows will be super obvious to everyone all the time. I plan to typically leave it to player discretion how magically sensitive their character might be.
- The shadows may not split up into more than three parts, nor cover an area larger than, say, about a square metre.
Choice: Witch
Reason: Leslie had great powers by her world's standards and, upon being tutored in the subject, put a lot of work into improving her control. She is also an academic prodigy for her age, with her understanding of the subjects she has been taught at a comparable level to the end of formal education in the empire, which will allow her to make good use of this academically intense magic once she gets used to it.
Sample: Network sample
Action sample