[Character Profile and Information]

[unfortunatecookie]

Appearance

Lucky "Leo" Major is a 18 year old young man from Woodbury, NJ. Just another normal looking kid from South Jersey. While most people wouldn't say he has an accent, any one from the region would recognize the Southern-Jersey accent with a touch of the Philadelphia area nearby.

Standing at 6'0", Leo is somewhat pale with a few freckles here and there, still a bit more on the lanky side of things, but he looks pretty at ease with himself. With a medium-short length brown style, just long enough to reach his eyebrows in the front and a bit of a curl, Leo tends to fall into that category of 'always a little bit messy' when it comes to his hair that looks like even if he tried, it would still look like he just finger-combed it through. His hazel eyes always have a bit of a smile to them, easy and curious and relaxed. as if nothing could bother him. Some might even say he has a bit of a stoner look to him, on first glance.

It doesn't help that he tends to dress in loose, comfortable clothing - slightly baggy jeans, usually some sort of geeky or band tee-shirt, and a hoodie to complete the outfit in an ever-changing array of the same combination. The only thing that never changes is the presence of earphones - usually tucked into his ears, around his neck if he needs to actually listen to someone - with a cord dangling down to his front pants pocket. It was a Walkman as a young kid, a CD player when he hit his teenage years, and some form of a MP3 player for as long as they've been out ever since.

When around him, it's far from unusual to hear him humming, drumming, singing, or any other form of music. It's clear that it's a deep part of him and what always brings a smile to his lips. Since he's always listening to it, it's rare to find Leo without that smile, bobbing his head in time to whatever's playing.

History

Born in Jersey, raised in Jersey, trying to get out of Jersey. No kid wants to be stuck in Jersey for the rest of their lives, and neither does Leo. He didn't want to be stuck in the 'armpit of the States' for the rest of his life, around the kids with no lives that had bullied him so severely as a kid, and now with college on the way, he has his chance.

Or he did, until his grandfather died.

In the beginning, it was a really nice sort of family. Rachael and Jonathan had a little baby boy, one that she decided she had to name 'Lucky'. She believed that the lucky charm Jonathan had given her to wear around her neck had been the reason that after years of trying, they finally were able to have a baby, hence the name. Things were good for the first few years, those hazy years that are hard to remember at any point in someone's life, but for Lucky he vaguely remembers them as 'good'. He had his mother, his father, and best of all, his grandfather. Benjamin Major was a solid, strong presence in Lucky's life and the person Lucky remembered most of all.

Then, when he was four, things started to go down hill. He never did quite find out the reason, but he was pretty sure it had everything to do with his father's drinking. That would remain a constant throughout Lucky's memories - beer bottles in the beginning, the smell of whiskey later. By the time he was five, he remembered going to school one day, his mother walking him to the bus stop, and by the time he got home that day, she was gone. All of her stuff was gone, the house was empty except for his father passed out on the couch, as if she had never been there.

After that, it was just Lucky, his father, and his grandfather. After Rachael was gone, Ben started to call Lucky 'Leo', saying that he thought Lucky deserved a good, strong name, strong like a lion. They both took care of Jon, Lucky went to school, earned good grades, got bullied. Mostly it was because of his name (Hey, Lucky Charms, get over here! Hey, he's a leprechaun!) but his tiny size didn't help either. The more time went on, the more he came to hate the bullies, wishing he had a way to fight back. Music became his outlet to get away from it all, when his grandfather didn't have him outdoors and involved in something else. He had a natural voice and a gift for playing almost any instrument put into his hands, though he really enjoyed the guitar more than anything else.

All in all, a pretty typical sort of childhood. Not a great one, but not the worst, either. For all of Jon's drinking, the man worked, kept them in house and food, didn't get too violent about things, and did care about his son. Lucky, now trying hard to go by the name Leo and failing, and his father had a close bond. It was an even tighter bond with his grandfather, who taught him all sorts of important things - camping, how to shoot a gun, nature, history. Ben had been a sniper in the Vietnam war, and had seemingly endless stories to tell his grandson about being in it. It brought Lucky into a love of strategy and history, about being outdoors and fishing, hiking, and camping, even if he still hated gym and sports.

Heading towards his 18th birthday, Lucky felt excited because it was also around the time they would be graduating high school. It meant he'd be able to pick a college, get out of Jersey, and be able to make a new name for himself outside of the same place he had always been. He had sent out resumes to places like the College of Liberal & Creative Arts and the University of California, thinking he would love to get out to the West Coast. Unfortunately, for all the excitement happening, he wouldn't get back those letters of acceptance before Ben, at only 67, would suddenly pass away.

Everything had been great the night before. They had gotten Chinese food as a family, Dad hadn't even opened so much as a bottle of beer, they sat around watching the Thursday night game and eating. His dad had tossed him a fortune cookie and Lucky opened it without much thought, ready for the 'in bed' joke to get passed around, but when he read the fortune it was actually a little bit creepy. No fortune about horizons or luck or anything good. Instead, this one had a simple line on it. 'Misfortune will fall upon the one you love most.' After staring at it for several seconds, Lucky had crumpled it out and tossed it, ignore the shiver down his spine. What a damn weird cookie. Probably some guy in a factory somewhere thought it was a great joke.

Lucky doesn't remember much about the following day when he found his grandfather fallen on the floor in his bedroom. It was after he came home from school. He had found Ben on the floor and had gotten ready to call 911 when Ben, surprisingly, stopped him. He told Lucky to go into his closet and pull up the carpet and get the box inside of it. It was everything he needed to know, and that he loved him. Lucky knelt there helplessly as his beloved grandfather passed away before him.

What he would never fully remember was his scream of pain as grief sliced through him as sharp as a knife or the explosion that rippled outward from where he knelt over his grandfather. As it felt like suddenly, he was a thousand miles above himself and able to hear a thousand voices, see a thousand things all at once, all crying and laughing and talking in his head all at once. It was utterly overwhelming, in particular with the anger and grief in his gut, leaving him clutching at his head unable to control any of it until he told them all to just shut the fuck up! Then, like a miracle, there was silence. A brief, clear moment of utter silence.

He would wake up later that evening in the hospital, his father telling him that it would be okay. He remembers asking if it was true that Ben was gone. He remembers telling his father to go away when he cried. He remembers his head hurting because it sounded like he couldn't stop hearing people talking to him, even when he whispered for them to go away and shut up. He remembers his father touching his temples, and there was silence again. The very last thing he remembers is an odd one. It would make sense later in his life, but the one memory stood clear in his mind - a single fortune cookie, unwrapped from any plastic, sitting on the small table beside the hospital bed he had woken up in. By the time he opened his eyes again, it was gone.

It wouldn't be until almost a week later, not thinking about what had happened in the hospital after he had woken up, that Lucky would get the mind to actually do what his grandfather told him. Skipping school, now wearing his grandfather's dog tags under his shirt, the only thing Jon was sure Lucky should have from his grandfather's possessions before they got into the will, he went into his grandfather's room for the first time since the funeral. It hurt, still, to look around the familiar belongings that were still there, as if just waiting for Ben to return to them. It took a few minutes of just standing there in the doorway for him to work up the courage to go into the closet and to his surprise, find under the carpet, under a fake floor he never knew existed, an old chest.

In there he would discover not only a world that he had ever known, but a part of himself that he never knew existed. As he looked through the chest full of unfamiliar symbols, trinkets, photographs of people he had never known, he would find out the truth about not only his grandfather, but his father and himself. There was a journal, one that he sat with for the rest of the day and read in disbelief as it talked about his grandfather as a mage. A magic user. How in the war, the reason he had been such an acclaimed sniper was because he could somehow use his magical powers to guide the bullet to exactly where he wanted it nearly every time. How he tried to keep friends safe by giving them charms of protection which had gotten them home from the war. A list of names of friends who had made it back, a strike through for each one that was now dead (only one, Lucky was shocked to discover). All sorts of impossible things twisted and weaved through otherwise familiar stories he had heard about the war, but now all with some utterly impossible change wrapped in unfamiliar terms. Magic. Arete and forces and mind and enchantment…

The very last note in the journal shook him to his very core. It was directly to him, obviously written many years after the rest.

My Lion,

I've known from the day you were born that you would be something great, just like your father might have been. If you're reading this, know that I love you, and I'll be with you no matter what. You'll have to ask your father about the rest of it, because I know you have questions I'm not there to answer.

Staff Sergeant Benjamin Major

Which led him to taking the journal out to his father and demanding to know what was going on. What was his grandfather talking about? About magic and all of this other crazy stuff. It had resulted in a long sit down discussion with his father who tried to explain as much as he could. About how the world really worked. About how there was a whole world that most people couldn't see, and only those who had their eyes open to it could really see it. That his father, and him, both were mages. How he was a mage, a very newly awakened one. Unfortunately, for all that his father told him that day, he had to admit he was a little out of his league when it came to his son because he wasn't a mind mage at all.

A mind mage? What? What did that even mean?

It would be something he would have to discover on his own, once his father took away the very basic protection he had been able to put up on his son. Even from the start, Lucky would find himself a more powerful mage than his father, though he often wondered about that. It wasn't long until he discovered that a few of his father's 'friends' were really other mages, some that seemed far more powerful than his father. While Lucky didn't ask about it, didn't bring it up, he wondered about it a great deal. It was through their help, even if none of them were mind mages, that Lucky was able to make any progress with these new and somewhat terrifying abilities he found himself with. Progress would be slow, and his father had to return the protection to him when he left the house or he would be unable to close his mental 'ears' to the voices all around him.

Stranger still, on top of all of this, was the fact that he kept finding fortune cookies tucked away in the most random places. He might have never noticed it before, but then they just seemed to be everywhere. At first, he had cracked them open, nibbled on them as he read the fortunes, but even those were weird. There wasn't the typical 'Learn Chinese' on the back so many of them had, just a single black-typed statement on each. At first they were the normal weird, vague fortunes all fortune cookies had, but as time went on they started to get strangely more specific. Like when one said 'You will soon come unto a large sum of money' and later that day, he had received the notice from the family lawyer that informed him of the hefty amount of money his grandfather had left him, enough to comfortably send him to any college he would like and then some. It unnerved him, remembering the one he had the night before his grandfather had died, and after that he had refused to open any of them.

The oddness of the cookies aside, something Lucky was refusing to acknowledge as much as possible, step by step, Lucky would get a grip and degrees of control. He could block the voices out of his mind first, slowly begin to listen to them individually next, and by the time he would be on his way to college, he had figured out his own niche when it came to his abilities. It didn't matter so much whether or not it was right to do; it mattered that he no longer was the picked on, alone, music geek.

No. He figured out in a matter of months that this new ability didn't just let him listen in on people's thoughts but change them. Not completely reverse a thought, but direct the flow. Edge them. Turn it more in his favor. It began with one of his few friends, when they had been deciding where they would go out to eat one night. Lucky had wanted to go to one place, his friend the other. He had been mindlessly humming while his friend talked, a bad habit of his, when he reached out with his fledgling powers. Come on, man, I just want to get tacos. The thought had been innocent, but a moment later, his friend had blinked, looked a bit confused, then looked to Leo. "You know, suddenly, I'm kinda in the mood for tacos." And from there on, he had it in hand. He tried it out dozens of times, trying to understand how it worked, how to make it work for him.

Once he realized it had everything to do with his music, that somehow the beat gave him the ability to control his power enough to be able to actually influence other people's thoughts, it wasn't long before he was using that as much as he could.

And that would bring him to today. A young man, just heading for college, with the confidence and ease of someone who knows they can get what they want. It's odd how quickly he can make friends with people, how people aren't annoyed by his usual humming and tapping, how he can get into any party even if he wasn't invited. The question is - how far will he go? Where will it take him?

Only the future knows. Or maybe, those strange fortune cookies that have followed him right through to college…

Powers

Lucky's powers are two fold and somewhat minor compared to other mages, but put together, they are incredibly powerful. Combined, one could call Lucky a manipulation mage - forever manipulating things to his advantage.

First and foremost, he is a mind mage. The particular area of the mind his powers focus on would be emotional manipulation. While he can't outright change someone's mind by force, he can't force someone to kill themselves or slap themselves, and he can't rip a thought out of their mind, he doesn't really need to do any of that. By listening in on their thoughts, he can use them to nudge their mind towards whatever outcome he's looking towards. A good example would be that on meeting anyone for the first time, Lucky tends to do two things - make it so they believe him to be a cool guy (in whatever definition that person might think) and he is a friend of theirs (or at least that he is innocent and not to mess with him, if he can't manage 'friend') as well as make sure that they don't find his particular choice of manipulation (music) annoying when he uses it around them. He has used this in the past to do things such as stopping someone from mugging him by making them feel so guilty they decided to leave him alone, walking up to parties he never would have been invited to and being allowed inside, or urged cute girls to think he's more attractive than he is.

His other ability, for good or for bad, is luck. Lucky might not be as keen on this power, for as much as he tends to use it, but the irony of it considering his name is almost physically painful. Which luck might not always be enough to save him from every situation, it does allow him to manipulate things to a small degree to work out better for him, or better or worse for another. He isn't beyond making those who have hurt him in the past some bad luck - maybe they bombed their final, missed the bus in the morning, or tripped on their face in gym class. All small sorts of bad luck that could occur to anyone except that Lucky is there making sure that those odds are in his favor. Getting a scholarship in a chance drawing didn't hurt, or influencing the odds that his letter would be accepted by the school he had wanted to go to, or that of all the guys at a party that girl might look towards him… just tiny changes to the unpredictable odds of luck.

There is a catch to his abilities, however. Lucky seems unable to use either of his powers unless he is able to produce some form of music, and the louder and more powerful the music, the stronger the effect. This has, in the past, led him to outright singing in public when faced with one of his constant bullies while leaving school, but it rarely goes that far. More, he can be found humming or singing softly to himself. When stuck, his lowest form of manner to use his magic has been drumming - his fingers, a pencil, whatever is nearby. His powers need a beat to work, and he has yet to figure out why.

Well, almost all of his powers. He isn't sure if he's causing those damn cookies to appear out of no where or not, but either way, they seem to work entirely on their own. Damn cookies.

Personality
In reality, given the strangeness of the mental powers he's still learning to control, Lucky is a pretty normal, if kind of dorky, guy. Outside of mage-related things, he just wants to enjoy life to a good beat. With a generally fairly easy-going and relaxed front to the world, inside, Lucky is the opposite. There is forever a paranoia that someone is going to turn around and reject him, thanks to the heavy bullying that went straight up to the end of high-school, and he believes that without some sort of strength, you'll forever be the world's bitch. It's been 'proven' to him in his mind that people will walk all over you, push you down, unless you purposefully make it so they won't. Now, though, he has the ability to actually do something about it, and like a dog finally released off the chain, he is running with it. Whether this leads him down a terrible path or a better one, it's impossible to say. Lucky stands at the cusp of that division, with no one to show him the way.

That doesn't mean that he tries to actually hurt people - for the most part. All he wants is for everyone to be his friend, even if it means he has to gently manipulate them to be so. Over the last few months though, he's managed to find what he believes is a good balance of things. First, he'll try it without the magic, now that he's out of Jersey and the stigma that's floated around him there. Just showing his nice-guy self, bright smile, easy-going way that's prone to laugh. However, if that doesn't work, his long habitual paranoia will start to kick in against his will until he finds himself using his magic to make sure it goes his way - not always 100% consciously, either.

The bad luck on the bullies? That he wouldn't even hide from himself. He wanted them to get a little hurt, embarrassed, to make up for years of what they did to them. It might be only a matter of time until he discovers that he could accidentally make something much, much worse happen, but nothing has occurred yet to teach him that lesson.

Lucky's first two real loves in his life are without a doubt music and history. He prefers rock over any other style, anything with a good beat that gets into his blood (and in turn, really helps out the control of his magic.) Slower music tends to be right out of his interest all together, and forget easy listening. Rap, country, whatever. As long as it has a great beat, he'll be listening to it. His iPod is constantly full to the brim with all sorts of music that he likes. Really, he doesn't mind too much that people tend to get annoyed with him for always having it playing and having ear buds on - if they get too grumpy about it, he won't hesitate to reach out and soothe that little problem with his magic if he has to. It's something he feels proud to do because before, he had no way to make people stop snapping at him, rolling their eyes at him, or more, ignoring him because of his music. They just don't understand.