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Ellia

Ellia is a relic of a former age, adapted to the new.  A Planeswalker long before the mending, Ellia tore things apart to learn what makes them tick, be they artifacts, living things, families, communities, societies, even entire planes.  Now, while continuing her "research" as best she can, she survives on spare parts she steals.

Ellia as a Character and Device: Ellia is a planeswalker with a long and destructive history.  Undoubtably responsible for multiple plane-wide catastrophies, many of which may have left survivors, Ellia is a good go-to for "Planeswalker did it" weirdness, be it screwing with the mana lines of an entire world, sparking global war, or simply inspiring a spiral into decadence.  She feels her work entirley justified, watching what happens when she introduces elements of destruction or upheval in order to better understand the workings of the multiverse and the people in it.  Ellia is also a completley unrepentant sociopath: nothing matters in her mind except herself, and she doesn't even bother with philosophical justification except the relentless search for knowledge.

Ellia's Assets: Ellia nowadays benefits from massive reserves of knowledge, especially about how to break things down.  She's a master of psychology and social engineering, very capable of manipulating both crowds and individuals, almost always towards destructive ends.
A classic planeswalker, she's a survivor of many magical duels.  In combat, she focus on misdirection and negation: in game terms, she'd be running lots of bounce and counterspells, and creatures with sabetur abilities (for instance, Necrite )
One huge asset Ellia has as a villian is her ability and, in fact, inclination to completley change her appearance.  Ellia is rather unique (at least, among non-shapeshifters) of never looking the same twice.  Thus, she could potentially get the drop on the same characters multiple times as they will be quite incapable of recognizing her -- she could even change out her vocal cords to get a new voice!

Ellia's Flaws: Ellia is a total sociopath, and it shows through.  She can't comprehend altruism or care, and this is likley to "out" her despite her latest look and sound.  She is also very vain, and can't pass up looking striking, which also helps single her out.  Furthermore, if she stays in an area too long, the missing persons and mangeled corpses tend to be a red flag.
In combat, Ellia is a pure spellcaster.  She has no combat skills or training other than her magic, so if that's a no sell or she's forced into a straight fight, she's at a grave disadvantage and will probably be forced to flee, abandoning whatever scheme she has.

The following is the origional entry on Ellia...

Name: Ellia, "The Endbringer"
Race: Human (but see below)
Colors:
Home Plane: "Heh heh heh... well, aren't you the prying type?  If you must know, you are going to be dissapointed.  That old place, even with all its knowledge and power, was never interesting.  I think I may even have forgotten its name!  What's true and what;'s not, you can decide for yourself, dearie." (Whatever plane Ellia is from, if it still exists it's exceedingly old.  She seems to hint that her home may be Equilor, but no sources confirm this.)
Magic Type: "I do a little bit of everything, but how could someone not at my age?  And it's all to one purpose, in the end, so why do the means matter?" (Ellia appears to specialize in magic that breaks things down to their base components: summoned creatures and spells disperse into the aether, artifacts are torn into their component parts, living things... it's best to not think about it.  Since the mending, she has taken her knowledge of the workings of things to putting them back together, specifically branching towards biomancy)
Background: "Now, now, is that what you want to ask?  What I've done, where I've been?  I've had so many homes, so many names that people have given me.  None of that really matters now.  now, there is only time to speak of the present and the future." (Ellia has had a very long life.  Where she goes, she tends to bring ruin with her, having earned the title "The Endbringer" for how often her manipulations have brought people, civilizations, or planes to ruin.  Still, Ellia is not an entirley destructive force: she's used her knowledge to create or heal, on occasion, and sees herself as a scientist)
Philosophy: "All knowledge ultimatley comes from taking things apart.  To obtain the truth of how a thing is made, you must break it.  How do we know that pure light contains all colors?  We break it.  How can you find that a clockwork artifact is turned by gears and springs?  You break it and look inside.  How do we know that blood is pumped by the heart while our brains are the seats of our intellects?  At some point in time, someone broke them very carefully and observed the changes that made.  How do I know how the planes work, how families work, the politics of nations and the minds of men?  I broke them."
Surviving the Mending: "I do what I must.  With a little help from a few... friends, I'm as good as new.  Well, mostly.  My sight is starting to go. [pause] Has anyone ever told you that you have beautiful eyes?"  Physically surviving the event wasn't the problem for Ellia -- she was in no position to die from the removal of her powers.  However, the degredations of time that she had long been immune to began to catch up with her after the event.  Ellia watched herself begin to wither, a freshly mortal body dying all around her.  It was then that Ellia put her knowledge to "good" use... specifically her knowledge of biology and anatomy.  Ellia keeps "herself" young and fair by harvesting from victims.  At this point, only her brain, spinal cord, and some of her bones are origional: everything else has been replaced by various "donors" from across the planes Ellia has traveled.  Her heart, her lungs, even her eyes, skin, jaw -- they all belonged to other people at some point in time, before Ellia stole them to preserve her own life and vanity alike.  The magic that Ellia uses to replace her vital organs (and everything else about her) leaves her looking more like an artist's composite than the patchwork monstrosity she is... partially because she tends to steal whole skins and then reshape her inner workings under them, and partially because Ellia has a significant vain streak and would find a way to look her best: however, the stolen parts tend to fail much quicker than they would have for their origional owners, forcing Ellia to replace any given part of her body every few years for skin and major internal organs, or slightly less frequently for muscles and structural bones.  As a result of her nearly constant harvesting and replacing, Ellia almost never looks quite the same twice, and if she needs to ditch a given look isn't above doing so before she would normally need to.  She has a tendancy to seek out striking features, and has dabbled in blending in nonhuman edges to her look, like elven ears or (briefly) a Kor's skin.

Alright, let me try to work with this... common sense restrictions

Changing her face takes time and resources.  It's not totally impossible that she might manage it within the context of a story, but see below.  Mostly, it means that characters who have encountered her before won't know her on sight.

Alright, so, what does the disguise do for her?  Well, unlike some dopplegangers, I don't think she could realistically pull kill-and-replace shenanigains: she stretches one skin over a different set of bones, picks and chooses muscles and cosmetic features.  If any part of her has to be origional, it would be her brain and spinal cord, dictating both the height of her frame and a good amount of her facial features above the jaw, just from the length of her spine and the structure of her skull.  There's plenty of leeway to play with this, but the one thing she can NEVER be is someone longer established in a community than she's actually been present there.

Changing a face also forces her to change identity, and if she's engaging in social engineering that's something she might not want to do.  If you've worked for a few years to get a ruler's ear, becoming a different person would force you to abandon your schemes and start over, only now the heat's on.  This holds less if the current experiment is more biological or magical in natural than social, though.

This means that if you don't know of Ohma and are up against her, well then a disguise isn't worth much because no one's looking based on sight.  Once someone knows of her and derives she's in the area (Gruesome murders, civil unrest, missing persons coupled with strange sightings, that sort of stuff), she's narrowed down out of the crowd: always female (Quirk of the character), always a new arrival within a certain time frame, USUALLY "young" and in good to peak physical condition.  if you get a close, CLOSE look at her an know well enough you might be able to place her, or at least eliminate obvious wrong choices.

The end result would seem to be that she can hide well -- without other information, it woudl be quite possible to encounter her and not recognize her -- but not perfectly: if someone knows what they're looking for, she could be found... and if they don't know yet, it doesn't matter too much what she looks like.

I understand, though, that reservations may still remail. I hope this helps, though.

This character's name has been changed for two reasons.

1) Encountered an "Ohma" in fiction strong enough to invoke the One Mario Limit
2) With the character's vanity, she would have long ago chosen a "pretty" name as her default.

Mar 18, 2011 -- 5:58PM, KeeperofManyNames wrote:

I have to admit that whenever I looked at her name before I pictured her as a giant five-eyed pill bug... >_>

...Which will make no sense to anyone who hasn't seen Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind.

Still, I like this name. It sounds so pretty and innocent and pure, and so utterly unfitting, which means that it fits perfectly! :D

A character "Ohma" actually appears in the manga (Surprisingly unconnected to the Ohmu)... which is excellent and you should read it.  I just did, hence the name change.