Dawn Aquila

**Dawn Aquila** is an afflicted magical girl who was previously enrolled at Founder's Blessing.

## Powers

Dawn is a gifted healer, able to empower other people with a healing aura that also acts as a shield. The aura emanates from her staff and can only target one person at a time, however as long as Dawn maintains uninterrupted focus on that one person, they remain essentially invincible, their wounds quickly closing up. She can also use this ability on herself to heal her own wounds, or occasionally put some distance between herself and a foe through the shield. This power is so potent it is able to revive the dead, a fact that was made explicitly clear to Dawn by the Woman in White during her Dream.

While her magic is extremely potent, much like her thematic partner Lyra LaBelle Dawn has little in the way of defenses, and her magic requires a significant amount of mental focus to use for long periods of time. As such, she needs to be protected or even babysat during battle while her magic is in effect, usually by the person she's empowering.

Dawn is an Afflicted magical girl, which means her magic is augmented by the presence of a permanent contact wound. In particular, Dawn is able to spread her Affliction to her targets as a form of control, a power she made ample use of during her time as the Black Cancer.

## Personality

Dawn is sweet and outgoing, consistently making an effort to befriend anyone she considers in good standing. However, there are a fairly large amount of people who are in less than good standing with Dawn, such as Sally Cimmeria who has in the past bullied both Lyra and her teammate Maryam Eashoa. She also has a tendency to hold grudges to the point of forgetting why she formed the grudge in the first place, but she's working on that. Her tastes in romantic partners are as simple as "girls" and it is quite easy to embarrass or fluster her with flirting, especially as she grows older.

Dawn's main interests include fashion and gardening. Rather than dressing with floof or showiness, she enjoys putting together simple wardrobes made up of pieces that blend in on their own, but combine to form something more noticeable. She has a great deal of empathy for life and has a green thumb, which encouraged her to take up gardening as a hobby; her bedroom window is covered with greenery. It's possible that her ability to keep plants alive is enhanced by her life-restoration magic, even during times when she is unable to consciously channel it (such as before she had the Dream). She is deeply religious and considers the Founder to be an ideal role model, to the point of being one of the only girls who explicitly requested to go to Founder's Blessing rather than having been sent there either by devout family or reformatory programs.

## Background

Dawn is the daughter of Tsukiko and Lucius Aquila; Tsukiko is a former magical girl, while Lucius is a boy that Tsukiko saved in a breach near the end of her career. They were the ones who raised Dawn as a devout Foundationalist. However, the two of them were killed in a barrier breach when Dawn was nine, leading to her being adopted by the LaBelle family for the rest of her childhood.

Dawn had the Dream on the same morning as her adoptive sister, Lyra. When the two enrolled at Founder's Blessing, she discovered that her magic had the ability to revive the dead, which Dawn considered sinful through a rather literal interpretation of the Foundationalist holy texts. This led to her escaping campus and eventually going missing.

The first person to find Dawn on the streets was Liu Xiangfeng, a member of the Cult of Cleanser. He, along with his boyfriend Taylor and his friend Hugo, Dawn was kidnapped and turned into the Black Cancer, a magical girl foretold by followers of the Cleanser to shatter the Outer Barrier.

## Trivia

* Dawn's sigil is the symbol of the zodiac sign of Cancer. Cancer is a Water Sign associated with the Moon, hence Dawn's association with darkness and the Moon (while her thematic twin Lyra is associated with light and the Sun).
* Dawn's favorite book is *Forest of the Wild Realms: Code of the Orcs*, the second book in the series. She was super excited to read *Forest of the Wild Realms: The Elven Curse*, the third book in the series, but was indoctrinated into the Cult before its release.
* Dawn was formerly an adapted Homestuck OC, hence the 4/6 letter scheme in her name. Her magic (healing and reviving the dead) were chosen based off of her old classpect, Thief of Doom. Somewhat humorously, the current iteration of Dawn would be horrified to be called a thief.