Christopher Runnels Mahoutokoro

Is your character a Broom Racer? NO.
Is your character a Quidditch Player? NO.
Is your character a Duelist? YES.

Sta: 7, Eva: 8, Str: 0, Wis: 8, AP: 10, Acc: 13
+1 Wis from Broom Racing to second year stat pool

Perfectionist

Reducio

Christopher stood in the empty classroom looking straight at the window. His face was screwed up with concentration as he tried to execute the spell he was working on perfectly. Ever since he'd been a child, Christopher had always valued precision. When his father was still alive he would take him hunting on occasion. He'd taught him to shoot a bow and arrow and Christopher had always remembered all the time and attention to detail his father had shown him when he taught him. He taught him that if something was worth learning or doing, it was worth doing correctly, perfectly, every time. He would always say, "If you strive for perfection then you'll always get the same, consistent results." Christopher had taken the lesson to heart. It was something that had stayed with him long after his father died.

He sat there for a moment pensively, now fully immersed in the memory. Step 1: Assume the shooting position - stand at a right angle with your back foot forward and your feet shoulder-width apart. Step 2. Nock the arrow - he remembered his bow had a stone ring to nock his arrow against. Step 3: Draw and anchor the bow - this had always been the hardest part for him. He had a lot of trouble finding and maintaining the proper position at force. Step 4: Aim - Aiming had always come naturally to him. He had very good eyesight and he was always able to acquire his targets easily. This also served him well in his spellcasting. He could always find what he was looking for. Step 5: Release, he always thought release should've been easier but the release was tied in with the follow-through, which was Step 6. His dad had once told him of a muggle sport called golf where the follow-through was also very important. Once he'd gotten the follow-through under control, he was able to shoot consistently. He still occasionally shot when he was home from school, but never at animals. He had no interest in killing anything, he just viewed the continual pursuit of perfection as something worth striving for.

He bore all of these lessons and his practice in mind as he stared at the window in front of him. He practiced the wand movement and repeatedly said the incantation in his head before preparing to properly cast the spell. At last, after all his practice, he pointed his wand at the window, completing the wand movement very carefully, while saying, "Quarzicum." The glass turned to sand and crumbled to the windowsill before his eyes.

Terrible Presence

Reducio

Ever since he had been a small child growing up in New England, there had always just been something about him that people found unsettling. He'd always been very pale as a child and as he kept growing up, his gaunt figure had always been very offputting to people. It just made them uneasy, a few of the kids in his first school were just downright terrified of him. One of his earliest memories was when he was about three years old he'd scared his nanny half to death. He was playing outside in the twilight and as dusk hit, the orange light of the sun hit him in such a way that, well there was no other word for it. He simply looked... well, demonic. His nanny had to stifle a scream and was nearly in tears as she told Christopher's parents about what happened. It was all they could do to get her to stay on and keep looking after Christopher. This, and other incidents that he noticed, had a profound effect on his psyche and personality. At first, when he was very young, he really would go out of his way to at least try to make people feel comfortable. As he got older and this continued, however, it just made him feel isolated and unwanted, and so that's how he started to act. His behavior became more and more unsettling to people.

The pain he suffered on the inside started to build and it caused his own obsession with pain. Not physical pain, but emotional pain. It became his obsession in life to try to master his pain and make him appealing to people again, but it just made it worse. He began using very cryptic phrases when he talked and his voice often sounded harsh and unnatural. Both his word and his speech were simply chilling to many people. As his reputation for being unsettling grew the people he interacted with started to split off into two groups. The first group was by far the biggest. These people could simply not stand the sight of him, let alone talk to him, and they avoided him whenever they could. The second group was much, much smaller. There was a small group of hangers-on - he'd never call them friends - that were intrigued by him and started to revere him and his obsession with pain. He could always be found with him and this simply made the larger group want to avoid him even more. They had no idea what his group saw in him and that just unsettled them.

Spell Spread

Reducio

Practice makes perfect, that's what always had been drilled into Christopher's head as a child. The more time you spent refining your craft, the more likely you were to get a positive result. Well, that was easy enough for them to say, but the actual practice part of practice makes perfect was damn tedious and Christopher was quickly reaching the end of his tether. In his spare time outside of his already busy schedule of studying for his seemingly never-ending classes or preparing for the next task in the Hexiwizard Tournament, Christopher had been reading up on dueling tricks and strategies.

One thing that was of particular interest to him was that some wizards seemed to have the ability to attack multiple targets at once with whatever spell they cast. This caught Christopher's fascination because it struck him as being very useful. Inside of dueling and outside it as well, Christopher knew that if he could occupy multiple enemies in a fight, it could tip the scales in his favor, or even the odds if he was in a handicap match. And so he had started to read everything he could about it. There was sadly very little he could find in books about it. It seemed like it wasn't so much something that was taught but was instead either an innate ability or self-taught through training. And so that is what he had decided to do.

He really had no idea where to start so he tried to run through the problem in his head. What were the logistics? How could he change his own casting to reach his goal? He didn't want to practice on people for two reasons: First, he didn't want people to see him struggling with this new concept, and second, he knew if he wound up hurting people while practicing he'd get in trouble. He honestly didn't so much mind if someone got a nick or bruise on them, but he didn't want the hassle.

To start, he decided he would rip up some parchment and put the pieces on a flat stone surface. They were about a foot apart from each other to start with. His initial goal was to use incendio to set two scraps of paper on fire once, independently of one another. He quickly disregarded his first thought of changing the pronunciation of the spell's incantation slightly after remembering some of the warnings he'd received about pronouncing the incantations clearly so as to avoid unintended consequences. He then settled on the idea of it being something in the wand movement. His movement wasn't so much different as it was expanded slightly with a different aim. He would still aim at his primary target but be a little bit between that and the secondary target. He found that he was a bit more likely to miss altogether when he attempted this, but after a few days of practice, he was able to reliably set two pieces of parchment on fire with one cast. He then started to practice on moving (but non-living) targets whenever he could. It took a few weeks but he steadily became more proficient at it.