Marston Charros

**Marston** is a rogue artificer last seen on the Arena. He has a massive ego and absolutely no sense of ethics.

## Background

Marston was born on Dominaria, and grew up in the shadow of Urza's brilliance, like most Dominarians. While Marston was a very gifted youth, his application to the Tolarian Academy was rejected due to him being seen as having "insufficient creativity." Marston, while talented, largely focused on one upping other inventors rather than creating his own novel ideas. If someone built a robot, he'd try to build a bigger and meaner robot. If someone built a portal, he'd make one that took half as much energy to power.

And if someone built a time machine with an obvious limitation, Marston would do everything in his power to one up that shite, Urza Planeswalker, by building a time machine without that limitation.

In some ways, Marston succeeded. At the age of 30, Marston built a time machine that could move biological material forward through time. Unfortunately, his arrogance caused him to test it on himself, and he realized very quickly an acute problem: he hadn't designed it to go back.

The first activation launched him a thousand years into the future, and forced him to witness a world he was never prepared to face. The Tolarian Academy, and the lands around it, had been burned to ashes by Barrin's final spell. His hometown had been decimated by Phyrexian invaders. Everyone he had ever known was dead, and so were their children, and their children's children, and so on for 40 generations.

And worst of all, Marston now finally lived in a world free of Urza's brilliance.

Marston's spark ignited, and he left Dominaria, traveling for decades before he was able to finally return, and attempt to rebuild his time machine. He did so near the remnants of the Academy, wanting to have it always in sight, as a constant reminder for what was to come. Marston finished it, and did a simple test, sending a squirrel back in time two weeks. Satisfied with his success, he once more stood in the time machine and activated it.

Unfortunately, Marston failed to account for the temporal distortions present around the Tolarian Academy as a result of Urza's own time machine related failure. He'd calibrated it to only do a short hop, thankfully, which meant he didn't fling himself a thousand years into the future. Only 200. Marston's time machine deposited him in 4524 AR before finally, and politely, exploding, leaving him to sort out the rest of his future.

Somehow, he made his way to the Arena, and made a deal with Saia Evigal: if he delivered her conclusive research about temporal anomalies associated with a certain young girl, she would be able to help him return to the past. And so, Marston attempted to dissect Karina Oblay.

## Capabilities

Marston is a genius when it comes to inventing. He can quickly create objects out of mana, or use mana to warp the forms of objects. He was able to turn a simple bauble into a towering colossus with minimal effort. He also is a very good researcher, and is capable of quickly finding flaws in the designs of most things that he didn't build. He has no notable hand to hand combat skills, and knows very little magic that can let him brawl his way to victory. Additionally, while he's very smart in a lot of ways, he's incredibly stupid in several others. He has a sizeable ego, which makes him fairly easy to trick or manipulate. He's not great at thinking outside the box, and tends to focus on iteration and one-upsmanship rather than original creations.