George Pickingill

* Anime
* Novel

**George Pickingill** (ジョージ・ピッキンギル, *Jōji Pikkingiru*?) is a character introduced in *Shinyaku Toaru Majutsu no Index*.

## Appearance

Pickingill appears as a beautiful young man of medium height with short blonde hair and emerald-colored eyes. He wears a violet suit matching his long-sleeve coat, pants, shoes, a yellow button shirt inside, and a white cravat around his neck.

## Personality

George Pickingill is an incredibly twisted and sinister individual with a very suave and casual personality. He is shown to be rather calm and calculating, rarely ever displaying signs of panic or distress and usually has entire scenarios planned out far in advance. While he often behaves cheerful, playful, and even charming, Pickingill is a manipulative, sarcastic, ruthless and deeply egotistical sociopath who is entirely devoid of any compassion or conscience and will stop at nothing to further his own ambitions regardless of who is harmed. He can also be extremely cruel and petty at times, often taking great satisfaction and amusement at the expense of others.

While Pickingill is normally uncaring and aloof when it comes to things that disinterest him, he's very talkative when it comes to himself or his own interests. He has a habit of going on long monologues and enjoys drawing out small talk without anyone, even his enemies. This can vary from casually educating someone on the state of the world or ruthlessly taunting his opponents. Pickingill's demeanor is often optimistic and well-spoken, but it carries an aura of condescension, which often infuriates those he is talking to, even his allies. He is also quite charismatic and persuasive, using his charisma to get anything he desires whilst truly being a heartless man looking to present himself as one to show "benefits to humanity." Overall, while he displays a facáde of charm and friendliness, Pickingill is actually an extremely dangerous person and not one to be messed around with.

Due to his solitary upbringing, Pickingill has developed numerous antisocial tendencies; if someone annoyed him, he would frequently go out of his way to do something vicious to them. An example of this was when he made hot coffee fall onto a newspaper salesman's face simply for telling him to stop loitering. He displays an utter lack of remorse for his actions, being proud of them to the point of extreme pride at the misery and pain he causes others. Moreover, Pickingill is also unapologetically arrogant due to having skills to back it up. This empowers him to carry his aura of superiority into most dangerous situations. He will attack or severely injure someone while casually explaining his ideals, goals, or abilities as if he is educating them. Even when faced against Aleister Crowley, Pickingill still made jokes as if Aleister didn't confront him with the intention to kill.

Additionally, Pickingill is a highly intelligent and duplicitous man who is easily able to manipulate and outthink others. He is quite observant and meticulous, going as far as to stab Touma in the shoulder because he didn't like Touma's gaze and correctly concluded that Touma was trying to deceive him. He specializes in careful and stealthy manipulation of others, which he usually utilizes to drive his schemes forwards, or gather minions to enact them. Pickingill is also shown to put the lives of innocent people in great danger to get what he wants.

Pickingill doesn't intentionally try to intimidate anyone or control people through fear to get them to serve his interests. Instead, he cleverly manipulates them by using his charisma to convince them they share a common goal. While Pickingill's manipulative tactics don't rely on fear-mongering, they don't rely on loyalty or respectful leadership either. Pickingill simply knows how to play people and use their desires for his own ends. In addition to this, he is extremely deceptive and selfish in his own desires, to the degree that he is willing to manipulate people and let them die in his service, all while justifying this as a necessary sacrifice for the "greater good".

Furthermore, Pickingill's self-centered tendencies are driven by his boundless curiosity and ambition. Like most magicians, Pickingill is utterly devoted to the study of magic and its capabilities. His main objective is to utilize the Phantom Beryl's immense magical power and revolutionize the whole of magic in the form of a perpetual motion machine. Through this, he aims to establish an Orwellian kind of peace in the world and usher in a new golden era, placing himself at the forefront of society and secure global authority. Pickingill also muses about the riches and the power he could secure by exploiting the beryl's power. Because of his ambition and greed, Pickingill is so emotionally inclined towards his goals that he is either dismissive or manipulative towards all else, seeing people as pawns to manipulate for his own gain with little to no regard for them unless it affects him or what he desires. He believes he can achieve these many goals by creating uncontrollable chaos.

## Abilities

George Pickingill is a highly skilled and powerful sorcerer who has mastery over various forms of magic being able to conjure a great number of magical effects, seemingly infinitely. He has claimed to be a magician of the fourth degree, however, Pickingill is able to cast spells that exceed this level of magic. His magical prowess is capable of rivaling magicians like Aleister Crowley or Merlin, two of the most powerful mages in all of history.

With this, Pickingill can become intangible, animate objects or transmute a feather into a knife. Pickingill mainly uses his magic to manipulate souls. Using this, Pickingill is able to alter their life, spirit, abilities, personality, and appearance. He can even manipulate the souls that reside in anything, allowing him to control their movement or even alter its physical characteristics. Pickingill can also use Golden-style Magic to project a powerful magic sigil that he claims is powerful enough to kill a god. He can even influence emotions and thoughts of others.

### Marble Phantasm

Pickingill's primary magic is known as **Marble Phantasm** (空想具現化（マーブル・ファンタズム）, *Kūsō Gugenka (Māburu Fantazumu)*?, lit. "Fantasy Manifestation"), which he describes as the power to manifest "miracles" upon himself by connecting his will to the Sephiroth. This magic works according to the "clustering illusion" theory of probability. With it, he can materialize a tangible illusion and reconstruct the world through his imagination. Much like a mathematical metaphor that invloves drawing a white marble from a bag of black marbles with a one percent chance, Marble Phantasm can alter the probability and raise that chance to one hundred percent and definitely pick the white one amongst all of the black ones. Pickingill also suggests that the more improbable that a certain event is, the more likely Marble Phantasm can make said event a reality. Therefore, Pickingill can create any phenomena so long as it's within his own imagination and the scope of nature, as the same cannot be done with things that exist independently of the world, such as humans or animals. Pickingill states that Marble Phantasm is purely the unique ability to freely transform one's own surroundings to bring forth miracles into his line of vision.

By Pickingill's own accounts, conventional miracles are just the result of impossible or nigh-impossible events happening when they are needed the most. Because of this fact, whenever Pickingill appears to be up against nigh-impossible odds (e.g. in battle), Marble Phantasm allows him to succeed anyway regardless of his normal chances. Using this, he can alter probability as he likes to give himself any preferred outcomes. For example, if there was "a kingdom that will triumph, then be defeated", it would be possible to change the order of events, and thus the conclusion, to "a kingdom that will be defeated, then triumph". He can also manipulate the result of "being defeated" into "not being defeated". Pickingill claims that he could even survive a nuclear explosion without so much as a single scratch on him. If his foes attempt to hide from him, he'll find them immediately.

In addition to this, Pickingill can cause unlikely events to happen, such as objects randomly self-destructing, spontaneous combustion, or multiple meteorites falling from the sky. These occurrences involve redirecting any environmental factors towards the target in a harmful manner, such as a raindrop hitting with the same force of a bullet, a lightbulb exploding in someone's vicinity or a falling leaf slicing off a person's hand. Some events may be caused by Pickingill himself, like throwing a pebble to trigger a chain reaction of disasters to befall his opponents. Pickingill also gains extreme luck and becomes basically invincible, with most attacks missing him entirely. He can even make any one of his own attacks hit their target with immense precision.

He can also use his own force of will to impose the image of immaterial objects onto reality, allowing him to materialize an ethereal sword capable of slaying mythical beasts or a small village in the mountains. He can even transform the layers of the atmosphere within a corridor into a vacuum that eviscerates his enemies.

### Other abilities

**Gifted Intellect**: The ability that makes Pickingill so dangerous, is unmistakably his very high intellect. He is an extraordinarily clever and devious criminal mastermind, due to his great knowledge of magical phenomena and his talent for manipulation and tactical forecasting. He is extremely attentive and calculative, always being two steps ahead of both his enemies and allies, which allows him to devise deadly traps and strategies to dispatch his foes without being forced to personally cross weapons with them. Pickingill also has been mentioned to be able to memorize a location's layout and geography by simply being there once. One should also mention his warlike mentality–depending on his target's threat level, Pickingill isn't afraid of causing collateral damage. In one attempt to kill Kamijou Touma, he sent a rogue carriage zooming down the streets of Academy City, killing tens of innocents. In a following attempt on Touma's life, he set a pub ablaze, killing innocents once again.

* **Master Tactician**: Pickingill is a highly skilled tactician with excellent analytical abilities. He can formulate flawless plans even in combat to exploit his opponent's weaknesses to the fullest. His intuition is matched by his logical thinking and meticulous preparations. Pickingill is capable of estimating the likelihood of a number of possible scenarios, although he is prone to overthinking. He not only excels at planning ahead of time, but also at picking apart enemy strategies, compiling all the available information, and coming up with multiple hypotheses in mere seconds and in the heat of battle, as well as rapidly adapting to new developments. Moreover, Pickingill is also an extremely cunning manipulator, able to manipulate various people and groups to achieve his objectives. He accounts for the personalities and usual mannerisms of both allies and enemies alike and never takes anything for granted. Notably, he considers Touma a high-priority threat simply because he knows little about his capabilities. He is also a quick thinker, for when his plans do not go well, and is capable of improvising and figuring out alternate solutions to problems.