Dread Witch

* Dread Witch
* Maggie Shen

### Powers

Void Magic, Technological Savant, Limited Flight, Heightened Senses, Strength, Agility & Toughness; Limited Need For Sleep

## Biographical information

### Relatives

Michael Shen (father),
Yue Shen (mother),
Vivian Shen (aunt)

### Place of birth

Void Serpent's Crater, Neo-Halcyon Quarantine Zone

## Physical description

### Eye color

Eternal Swirling Void

> "*Oh heck im gay*"
> ― Maggie Shen
>
>

## Appearance

Maggie Shen is a short Chinese-American girl with long, generally tied in a bun black hair. She wears formal, old-fashioned clothing - blouses, pencil skirts, dress pants and blazers - and the occasional lab coat.

She displays no outwards signs of her powers other than her eyes, which are a perpetually swirling void occasionally leaking purple energy. These don't attract too much attention beyond the initial doubletake - in Neo-Halcyon, minor powers are fairly common, and Maggie claims her eyes are an expression of hers - a reduced need for sleep.

In costume, Dread Witch cuts an imposing figure. The Dread Suit is a state-of-the-art set of magitech armoured robes, deep red response armour-fabric covered in lacquered armour plating with gold details, along with a full-face helmet with a feathered crest and a purple gem in the middle. Nothing of the person inside is visible, though when worn by Maggie the void in her eyes is visible in the glass of the helmet.

## Powers

Maggie has a pocket of the Void fused into her brain. It's inert and benign, as far as she's aware, and she normally can't access it. It's only when given a conduit - like the magitech gems she produces at her internship at OmegaCorp - that she can wield it, shape it, and direct it towards her targets.

Her powers are intense but destructive. She has a decent amount of control, but it can be hard to subdue and not hurt with a power that has a tendency to disintegrate matter. It allows for limited flight.

Her more mundane powers include a limited need for sleep - she needs only two to three hours per night - and general increased physical capabilities, such as senses and strength, as well as a great talent for magitech engineering.

## Background

Maggie's parents, Michael and Yue Shen, are executives at OmegaCorp, a large and powerful magitech corporation. Due to their jobs - both publicly as employees and secretly as the supervillains Fear and Agony - they were heavily involved in the incident with the Void Serpent and its entry into Neo-Halcyon.

As such, the couple spent a lot of time at the crater in the quarantined zone after the Serpent's demise, inspecting the site and overseeing efforts to salvage materials and figure out what went wrong. During this time, Yue was pregnant with Maggie, and the slain Serpent's essence leaked into the developing child.

This wouldn't be clear for years. The infant Maggie's eyes were written off as a quirk of both parents' minor powers intersecting in the child, and though she grew up gifted, this wasn't that unusual in her family.

It wasn't until Maggie was 16 that she found out about her powers. Working late one night at her internship at OmegaCorp R&D, she touched an amethyst-based magitech conduit she had just grown and was surprised to find that it allowed her to blast void energy from her fingertips.

The project she was working on was surprised too.

She subsequently used the materials and machines she had access to at said internship to build the components of the Dread Suit, and enlisted the help of her aunt Vivian to turn it into a costume.

Since then, she's been balancing her busy life - school, various extracurrical activities, her internship and all the expectations forced onto her by her parents - with a second life as the Dread Witch.

## Relationships

    Sigil knew you from their civilian life first. Maggie and Sophia are childhood friends, and at least in Maggie's case, BFFs. They haven't been able to see each other as often as they used to since Sophia moved in with Magus Riot, but they still regularly have sleepovers. Maggie nurtures a long-running crush on Soph. They have matching snake tattoos.
Nohemi is a... distant friend, perhaps? Maggie looks up to her. She is unaware that Wraith is Nohemi, and while Wraith has asked Dread Witch who she is, she did not answer.

She's fairly close to Spunky, and shows them around at school, helping them with daily life as a person.