OC MASTERPOST (WITH ART) PART 1

TW: CULTS, SELF-DESTRUCTIVE BEHAVIOR, DEATH, TOXIC RELATIONSHIPS, MENTAL ILLNESS

Heliolatry

molly rush has just escaped her sister angel's tiny cult religion and is determined to make her own way as a vigilante in the city, but the hero community at large is determined to get their hands on a brand new upstart to mentor, each person for their own reasons and they just won't leave her alone. at the same time, lyra floros is being pushed into the media spotlight as a flashy celebrity hero following in her brother orfeas's footsteps while her real passion lies in gritty disaster relief work, and she keeps running into a mysterious, pretty new vigilante on her patrols. amidst government corruption, hero work reforms, and the threads of connection running between every player on the field, can these young heroes find time to heal?

MOLLY: molly is a young vigilante who ran away from her suburban home after her older sister, angel, attempted to ritually give her powers, years after their parents' deaths. it worked but was traumatic and destroyed their relationship. molly is unhealthily self-sufficient, reckless, and attributes her continued, lucky survival to the existence of a higher power of angel’s creation. she wants to help people the way her ex-hero trainee sister used to but she never wants to cooperate with the government that hurt angel while doing it. her reckless but effective methods quickly garnered attention, both positive and negative, from the media and other heroes and vigilantes like lyov and lyra.

ANGEL: angel, a young, prodigious sidekick in training who spent long winter months in the city with the big shots and summers at bible camp with molly, witnessed her parents’ religious double suicide at age 17, and developed a sun-centric religious belief system to deal with her grief. she makes increasingly dangerous mistakes at her internship under her manipulative mentor, aaron, and returns home full of a justified but misdirected anger that she unleashes on molly, darcy, and elise over the next few years, culminating in grievous injury to all of them. she believes herself to be chosen as a divine being and her goals are to get revenge on the ex-mentor who scarred her face and die with molly so they can meet their parents again in the light of the sun.

LYRA: lyra is a career hero following in her brother’s footsteps by day, a masked vigilante doing gritty rescue work by night. she doesn’t want the flashy fights and advertisements of her brother’s career, really, instead she’s drawn to disaster work, holding up fallen buildings, pulling people out of fire, the hands-on help people need. orfeas is all for her dream too, but their parents want her doing magazine spreads and pr interviews, something primarily rescue heroes are notoriously not offered due to the lack of glamour in their work. so she takes things into her own hands in the mean time and does double the work, because anything is worth it for helping real people outside of publicly hunting down individual villains. and as a bonus, there’s something intriguing about molly, the other new girl running the same night time hours.

ORFEAS: orfeas is a career hero who follows in his parents footsteps. a child actor of hero work. he's actually a pretty normal dude who wants to retire early and go to college for med school, but his and lyra's parents are pushing him to wait longer, which he doesn't want to do. he's worried about his fame affecting how people treat him because he doesn't want an advantage. he briefly trained under aaron at the same time as angel but when aaron burned angel's face, he threw his only celebrity fit ever and his parents were so upset with aaron that they severed ties. this fit combined with the burn is actually what got dora and artemiy suspicious about aaron's behavior. orfeas still misses angel. while they were working together, angel scared him because the start of her mental decline was obvious. he was worried and he didn't know what adult to go to, since they didn't seem to be noticing. in another life they could have loved each other.

DARCY: a childhood friend of molly and elise who met the two of them at bible camp. they were split up by elise’s homophobic parents after elise and darcy kissed at a childhood sleepover. darcy spends a lot of time grappling with her sexuality and, later on, gender, partially because of this leading to intrusive thoughts and violent urges. she learned to code in middle school and uses it as a coping mechanism throughout angel’s return home and her violence towards molly and later elise and darcy. after angel pushes both molly and elise too far and molly runs away, darcy leaves as well and takes up residence in the same city as molly, coding for a living and slowly exposing evidence of corruption in the hero industry, inspired by what happened to angel. they work with artemiy, who is unashamed of being a whistleblower, and dora who has long-term hero work experience and has never wavered in her resolve to be moral and good.

ELISE: elise is raised very religiously and her parents isolate her from her friends, molly and darcy, when she kisses darcy at a childhood sleepover. after this she ends up becoming closer to molly at school, away from her parents, and befriends angel as well, as an older sibling figure or mentor. they look up to angel with an incredible reverence and will do almost anything angel asks of them. when molly runs away after being injured, elise is upset but angel drags her back into the charismatic influence of her words. darcy sticks around, hanging further back, until elise is convinced to kill its parents, framing their deaths as suicides to recreate the conditions that “enlightened” angel. elise is unstable and depressed, latching onto angel as a last resort. she intends to die before angel does because she doesn’t want to lose her last friend.

LYOV: old man yaoi. it's them. lyov knew angel fairly well when she was in training because at the time they were working as a hero. since, they've learned of corruption in the industry and separated themselves from it, working alone as a vigilante figure, though lucille helps them with tech behind the scenes. they come from a big family that they don't feel they can talk to after the death of an estranged brother who almost drowned them as a child. they still feel the guilt of tearing the family apart, as they feel their family members took sides after the incident. lyov wants to help molly out because she reminds them of angel who they still worry about as they never found out what happened to her, and of themself. they live with lucille and rowen and their kid and have a sad old man yaoi self-pity desire to date them and help them parent the child.

LUCILLE: lucille is orfeas and lyra's pr manager and does lyov's tech work at nights. she's tragically underpaid. its real dream was fashion and hero design work and it's why orfeas does so much magazine stuff on the side of his hero work. he's like another kid to her or a little brother. her cousin aaron was her primary caretaker as a child and made her want to take in kids of her own to treat them better than he did it. lucille could have been a hero but she decided against it because her real passion lay in design and clothing, but she had to turn to hero management when aaron got her blacklisted from many jobs due to a mental health incident in her youth. the only job it could get was one he advocated for it in. it wants to cut him off and go no contact but risks losing her job which is why rowen, lyov, and orfeas are trying to establish a support network for it.

ROWEN: rowen is a civilian ex-athlete who works as a head manager at a bakery. he is set to inherit it. his injury disables him and he had to deal with the emotions surrounding it for a long time in his youth but he has mostly come to peace with it. he met lyov when he was attacked on his way home after closing and then lucille when she stopped at the bakery. their relationship became dependent and close because all three are dealing with uncomfortable situations. rowen kept getting injured intentionally when he hadn't yet healed mentally and lyov kept coming to save him, while lucille kept coming to the bakery to check if all was well. eventually rowen and lucille fell in love and rowen moved in with lucille and lyov, so the secret of lyov's identity was revealed.

AARON: the worst guy ever. /neg. works for the government and reports back to them. he is the one who leaks information on vigilantism to government officials and gets people arrested. aaron resented lucille for being foisted upon him to care for but he appreciated the opportunity to get an in on the hero industry by getting her to work pr. he was awful to her for most of the time he took care of her. he mentored angel and orfeas when they were teenagers. angel and him had a rapport going but he was toxic and horrible to her, she just missed her parents and was unstable enough to get attached. orfeas was excited to become a hero and missed the signs until things got scary.

DORETTA: veteran type. well-known but not flashy hero who is close to hanging up the cape but wants aaron out of the business first before her and artemiy's son enters it. she knows he reports to the government and doesn't think the government should regulate heroics, but rather the citizens. her and artemiy are known to be advocates for a civilian, active hero, and retiree board of heroic ethics. she is discouraging of heroics as a more common field because of how many people she's seen die in it, both experienced and inexperienced, and she wishes she could save them. she knows she cant stop her son from starting in the business so she teaches him from the best. dora is also exceptionally fond of darcy, the new quiet college student in the apartment next to them, who suspiciously reminds her of her new hacker colleague.

ARTEMIY: government whistleblower who exposed the fact that certain heroes were reporting vigilante activity to the government. afterwards he fell under doretta's protection. while they were living together he fell in love, started calling her dora, and recklessly followed her out into the world of heroism, then dragged her into heroics ethics activism. he's a spy and a snitch and you should not trust him unless he trusts you, but his overall goal is to achieve ethical heroism. so any secrets he needs to drag out to do that? he drags those secrets out. he's the one who connects the dots between darcy and her hacker persona and the one who started working with the hacker persona in the first place. aaron really wants to "team up" but dora and artemiy both know now that it's a ploy to kill him now that aaron is close to being exposed.

Keeper and the Heroes

joasia, thea, and lian are having a nice summer. they're all prepared for their college road trip until joasia's eyes start glowing, and they start calling themself praiesteos, keeper of divine balances. now they have to change all their 5-year plans to include a quest and reroute the college tour a bit to include literal hell, joasia's home country where the king and queen got turned into stone a while back, and also the woods.

KEEPER: praiesteos has no appearence. praiesteos is an old as time divine being who goes by keeper while on earth and in control of a human body. keeper's memories of being a god are shoddy while in human form, usually forcing the friends and family of the possessed person to deal with a long journey and ritual to set the person right again. keeper thinks its fun. as the keeper of divine balances, praiesteos isn't actually a god of balance in general or of justice or anything all that grand, in fact, divine balances with an 's' at the end is a whole separate domain to the deity of divine balance. divine balance keeps track of the whole universe, meanwhile, praiesteos is like a bookkeeper of the gods, recording and keeping balance of minor events. a historian, if you will. unfortunately, praiesteos hates this task and often messes with other gods, making many enemies. this is the main route praiesteos uses to possess people. when a deity praiesteos has sworn hatred towards interacts with a follower of praiesteos, praiesteos can take control of that follower's body to convey a message to them. these messages aren't usually important or lifechanging, just excuses for keeper to be on earth again, walking the ground.

JOASIA: a young self-practicing witchling. she was orphaned at a young age and lives with her adopted parents and siblings. because of this, she had to pick up her family's craft traditions from research, files she requested, and books that were left to her. she's mostly dealt with her parents' deaths but struggles with her identity as a practicing witch about to step into the world of magical colleges without a solid foundation of her family trade. her adopted parents are well meaning with their attempts to push her towards their own family branch of magic but joasia is unhappy with it and wants to find her own way in life. when she gives in and performs a minor sacrifice to her adopted parents' preferred minor deity as a single spell to prove once and for all that she wants to stick with her bloodline magic, she finds out that that minor deity is considered opposed to praiesteos, her birth parents' deity. praiesteos is possessive and petty about praiesteos's followers so praiesteos shows up and possesses her, right before her summer road trip to see magical colleges with her friends.

ELVIRA: elvira grew up around 300 years ago in a rich family. their family was well-off enough to hire an oracle to arrange a marriage for them, but they were unhappy with the idea of getting married so young, even if it was customary for nobility. in the time leading up to the marriage it tried to talk the oracle into not showing its family their plans of escaping the marriage, as she could see the outcome of the wedding. the two ended up becoming close friends (or maybe more) in this time and the oracle agreed to hide elvira's plan to escape, asking elvira to run away with her. when she looked into the future on her own time she saw that elvira and her didn't have a future together, so on the day of the wedding, she broke her promise and revealed that elvira was planning to run away. in its grief elvira prayed to its deity for help and was turned into a tree to save them from the arranged marriage. they were non-sentient for years until thea, a descendent of the oracle elvira knew, chopped the tree down for wood for a set of runestones, at which point elvira's spirit was released from the tree and bound to thea and his runestones. elvira's antlers are actually wood, as are their fingernails and the individual strands of their hair.

THEA: thea comes from a long line of oracles and has a very good grasp on oracle magic but he also deals with psychosis and has to distinguish his prophetic dreams from hallucinations and delusions. he scarred his own face after a series of disturbing prophetic visions when its powers first manifested. his visions interfere with his quality of life and he thinks of them as a curse, despite them being generally viewed as a family blessing. he's planning to skip out on a divination college but its tagging along on the summer roadtrip, just because it doesn't want to stay in the house with its family all summer. he makes himself sets of runestones and other small woodworked carvings to ground himself and plans to open up a merchant stall to keep himself afloat instead of going to school. elvira likes to hang around and listen to its visions and interpret them now that the two of them are connected.

LIAN: lian is a witch on a private apprenticeship preparing for his mentor’s death. he grew up homeschooled and dual enrolled in a small magical college of biosophmutation (transformation magic with a bio philosophy focus). he doesn’t need to go looking for colleges but he wants to visit his mentor’s college of magic, which is considered highly renowned. he’s trying to work out a shift into an animal with a functioning human-like vocal box for his thesis spell but finds himself stuck on inspiration. he’s horribly depressed and kind of on the edge of being a burnout. passing his thesis assessment and graduating college as a witch is his “last chance at life”. little does he know. the transformation is going to be faulty and he’ll be stuck in transformed form, in between forms, and in human form at various points in time. he ends up struggling with his own magic and feeling the consequences of burnout really strongly during this period, and can’t even muster up minor spells, reduced to studying theory. joasia, thea, and elvira are forcing him alive at that time basically.

ADELAIDE: adelaide is queen regent of the witches council, a role she inherited from her parents when they died. their deaths were her fault, the result of a spell gone wrong, turning them to stone. she keeps their crystalized bodies in the castle courtyard. there's no hope of turning them back, which she discovered long ago, but she has no heart to get rid of them. they keep their hearts in a box. adelaide's responsibilities as queen of the council are everything to them. their parents hoped for her to get married and she's been putting it off for years, but the council is pushing for them to take on a co-ruler. she doesn't want to rule with someone though, she wants to carry on her parents legacy alone. she's self-sufficient enough to do it but the stress is getting to her. she punches walls and dislocates her joints when overwhelmed and dodges the council members attempts to set them up with nobility and other nations' rulers to bury themself in work. she never does fall for a noble, but she does end up in a tangled up situationship with harley and vera.

HARLEY: harley is a travelling mechanic and a scam artist who is vaguely wanted by the law. he's been let off the hook a few times because of his web of connections but he's generally disliked by people living by the law of the land. she's running from his family: an older brother who killed their mother and a younger sibling he doesn't want to care for. she travels alone for years and only settles down because of vera, a childhood friend who she reconnects with. vera's role as an oracle with the witches council allows harley to be pardoned and eventually, harley finds himself actually passionate about his craft after settling down and manages to open up a small repairs shop where she's honest about her business now that she no longer has to run. the business is what saves him and allows her to be happy. no longer running, having someone and something to care about, are things she's never felt she could have. eventually, harley's younger sibling finds her too, and she has to learn how to care for someone he never wanted in his life, through no fault of theirs.

VERA: vera is adelaide's court oracle, in charge of the affairs for the witches council. for her entire life vera struggled with weak oracle magic. her family craft, haruspication yielded no results to her, so she was treated harshly by relatives. she ended up travelling in her teens after running away. she would tell fortunes using tarot cards, though she doubted they worked. instead, she looked at the people she saw and guessed at their future. and her guesses would turn out true, again and again. she saw herself as a fraud for her entire life. when she met harley, she was happy to meet another person who was doing the same thing she was to survive, especially someone she used to know, even if it was just scamming people. eventually they passed through the country of the witches council and unknowingly, vera foretold the future of clement, the auxiliary head. her talent never was in sacrifices and entrails, though that family tradition gave her a steady hand and an unwavering ability to kill if necessary, but it was in schematomancy, divination through the study of the human body. the witches council had been looking for an oracle, but oracles are rare, so they tried to hire her as quickly as they could. vera accepted, as long as harley got pardoned and allowed to stay. as the witches council oracle, she's mostly hanging out in the castle on drugs that enhance her abilities and she's payed well too. it's a luxurious job, and important, because she predicts threats, solves disputes, calms problems within the countries infrastructure, and does it high off her ass.