Vaxildan Vessar

## Personality

Vaxildan, or Vax, as he tells everyone to call him, is a broody kind of guy. He’s had a shitty kind of life, and yeah, fine, fuck that, it’s cool. He could deal. Until his pompous asshole of a father just fucked everything all to hell. Now he’s an ocean away from his twin sister, who he’s never been apart from in his life, and he’s being forced to attend some fancy boarding school in the States.

All because he has fucking awesome powers. (Yeah. He’s awesome. He’ll tell you that.)

On the other hand, when Vax isn’t brooding, he’s downright playful, and loves to play pranks or just do wild and crazy shit. He’s the guy who leaps before he looks and fuck giving anyone a heads up about it.

In the end, though, Vax is sensitive, loyal, and passionate about pretty much everything he does.

## Powers

**Umbrakinesis** – Vax is capable of manipulating shadows and darkness and using it in several ways.

* *Shadow Travel* – Vax can use shadows as a way of transportation, traveling through them with a form of invisibility and increased speed rather than actual teleportation. Sometimes he can seem to teleport from shadow to shadow, but this requires a lot of energy, and it is easier to travel continuously through heavier darkness. Trips that take too long can exhaust him completely, though, especially if he is attempting to take someone with him.
* *Invisibility* – The same way he can shadow travel, he can hide himself within a shadow’s umbra, completely merging with the shadow itself.
* *Darkvision* – Since Vax uses shadows both to travel and hide himself, he’s uniquely capable of seeing in the dark.
* *Shadow Manipulation* – Vax can take shadow and make it a tangible object for short periods of time, such as creating daggers from it to fling at foes.
* *Flight* – Just as he can make daggers, he’s learned to give himself wings of darkness; large, black, feathery wings that allow him flight of up to one hour. This is hugely taxing, however, and afterward, he must recharge within an area of deep shadow before being able to call them up again.

All of these abilities require darkness, however, which means it’s possible that his power gains energy from the edges of the visible spectrum of electromagnetic radiation. He’s still learning, and gets exhausted fairly quickly, and due to his power, he has started to avoid direct sunlight just out of principle. It doesn’t harm him, but he just feels that it leaves him helpless and defenseless.

## Talents

Life on the streets taught Vax all kinds of skills, but most of them aren’t the kind you bring to polite society. From lock picking and picking pockets to knife fighting and games of chance, Vax has learned a lot about survival – no matter how he made it happen. Oddly enough, he does have a few odd skills that come from his time with his street friends – including hair-braiding and storytelling.

## Interests

He has a wide range of interests, from football (soccer), to puzzle games and pranking his friends. He also hoards all kinds of crazy shit, from the shiny and new to luxurious and odd to things that just may one day prove useful. Finally, he always makes sure that his interests align with those of the people that he cares about, especially protecting them, both physically and emotionally.

## History

Vax grew up as Vax’ildan Byroden, an oddly named little boy living with his mother and twin sister in a small town north of London. Vax and his sister Vex’ahlia were inseparable from the start, and Vax and Vex loved their mother fiercely, despite the impoverished conditions they found themselves in. In fact, they had ten years of a sort of maybe kind of not horrible existence with her before the world came crashing down around their ears.

One day, while the twins were at school, ‘faulty wiring’ started a fire in the block of flats where they lived. The inferno took three lives, including that of their mother. Honestly, the investigators never could ascertain whether it was ever actually the wiring at all, or whether it was arson, but the landlord, Mr. Thordak, sure did clean up from the insurance payout.

The twins, on the other hand, found themselves in an impossible situation. They knew their father’s last name, but that was all, because he’d only ever had a fling with their mom to begin with. He’d left her with two kids to take care of and disappeared, and any other relatives were long dead. They were shuffled and filed from one care facility to the next until they were lost in the system completely. And, one day, decided to run away.

Life on the streets was a lot less glamorous in reality than in their grandiose plans. Vax even found himself running errands for a street gang at one point, though it didn’t last long.

Between Vex’s smarts and charm and Vax’s skill, they made it work together, and eventually teamed up with several other kids their age, calling themselves Vox Machina! and bunking down in an old abandoned warehouse that they playfully called Castle Greyskull. And life was great. I mean, as great as it could get on the street. Especially, that is, when Vax realized that he had superpowers. Then things got really interesting.

Until one day, Vax got cocky. Really cocky. He pushed his powers so hard that exhaustion overtook him faster than he could think, and before he knew it, he was sitting on his ass in an interrogation room at the constabulary, staring across at a man that he hated with all of his being.

Apparently, Syldor Vessar, his father, had finally gotten up off of his ass to do something about the situation. Fuck knows where they found him. No, wait, pretty much everyone in London knew because he was the fucking French ambassador. And that was that. The next day, he and Vex were shuffled off to the fancy French ambassador's residence at Kensington Palace and introduced to their step-mother and little half-sister, Velora.

Pretty much the only part they liked about that was Velora. She was adorable, and she didn’t care that the twins cursed, or that Vax put his boots up on the table, or that Vex tried to adopt her own bear from the zoo. (She very nearly did it too – the girl could charm the hat off of a palace guard.) Velora loved their stories, even if their step-mother, Devana, cringed and sat very straight and stared them down.

But there was a lot of talk going around. Vax could do things. Scary things. Dangerous things. Vax needed to be taught how to control himself. He needed to learn manners. And maybe it was time that the twins spent some time apart. When they learned about a boarding school in the States that was perfect for Vax’s…*special* situation, he was packed and in the airport before he had a chance to flee.

He probably would have fled even then, but there was Vex, with Velora, holding her close and staring at him with those angry eyes not to let Syldor win. And he knew. He fucking knew. If he ever wanted to see his sister again, he had to do it. He had to get on the fucking plane and go to the fucking school, and call her every chance he got.