Profile

Charity Carpenter was born July 20, 1969, the younger daughter of a wealthy family. They were normal and respectable, and expected Charity to be the same.

Charity had some magical talent, which first manifested just before she turned sixteen. Since Charity's magic involved mental and emotional powers rather than fireballs and cyclones, her parents perceived their daughter's sudden transformation as emotional disturbance coupled with drug addiction/hallucinogenic flashbacks. They sent her to a series of schools--and mental hospitals disguised as schools. Eventually, Charity ran away and struck out on her own.

She fell in with a coven led by a charismatic young man named Gregor. It might be called a cult, in fact, for Gregor and his followers combined religion, mysticism and philosophy into a dangerous attitude toward magic.

One day after Gregor had been attempting some summoning spells, a Warden visited the coven, warning Gregor and interviewing and evaluating his followers. He told the kids the Laws of Magic, warning them to obey the Laws if they wanted to keep their heads on their shoulders.

Gregor didn't like being told what to do. He began practicing magic that was, at best, tap-dancing on the borders of the Laws, and he got his followers, including Charity, to do the same.

And then the others began to disappear. Slowly, one at a time, without any explanation. Charity eventually realized that Gregor was sacrificing his followers, trading each life for more and more power. Gregor saw her face when she figured it out, and decided that she would be the next to go.

Charity decided to run before Gregor had a chance to capture her. Unfortunately, Gregor knew much more magic than she did; Charity's magic tends more toward visions, clairaudience and psychometry rather than brewing potions, evocation and transmogrification. She was no match for her warlock mentor.

Then, as she was fleeing Gregor and growing more certain every moment that he must be using a tracking spell to follow and eventually catch her, she stumbled on a bookstore which was open very late and slipped in for a moment to rest and catch her breath.

And she ended up at a bar that was a nexus of universes.

Appearance and Personality: At seventeen-going-on-eighteen, Charity's about six feet tall with blonde hair and blue eyes and has broad shoulders for a woman. She doesn't have the toned and muscular arms that she'll later acquire from years of blacksmithing and swordfighting, but it's likely that anyone who knows her adult self or who knows her yet-to-be-born daughter Molly would see the resemblance.

She is honorable, brave, scrupulously fair and honest. Unfortunately, she's also stubborn to the point of pigheadedness when she feels she's right and, thanks to her parents' conviction that she's an emotionally disturbed addict, not nearly as trusting as she might be. She's likewise not proud of all the curses, hexes and black magic that she's learned from Gregor--which makes her a bit defensive.

***

Disclaimer: Charity Carpenter and the characters, setting and backstory herein listed are from The Dresden Files book series. (Her backstory is taken--some of it verbatim--from Jim Butcher's book Proven Guilty.) She is the property of Jim Butcher, ROC Books, New American Library, and Penguin Group. She appears here solely for the purpose of role-playing for fun in milliways_bar, from which no profit whatsoever is being made.

On entering the bar, Charity will not be using her real name. Not only is she an underage fugitive from a mental hospital--and she has to assume that the police would haul her back there if they caught her--but names also have a great deal of power in her universe. Letting strangers have free access to her full name, especially if they could pronounce it properly, would be very, very dangerous.

Since Charity's not married yet and since her maiden name hasn't been revealed, I'll be using the surname of another wealthy family in the series--Astor--who, a generation later, also had a runaway daughter named for a virtue (Faith).

Her magical abilities are not well-honed at this point, as she hasn't spent much time training them; she has only been with the coven for about six months or so, though she was living on the street for some time before that. Consequently, she doesn't have very much control and doesn't always understand how to interpret her magic when it does happen.

In her universe, soulgazes take place when a wizard meets the eyes of anyone with a soul for more than a few seconds. Things you need to know about this:

1) You can only soulgaze a person once. If you and Charity soulgaze, you can meet her eyes without fear after that; it will never happen again.

2) A soulgaze works both ways. If Charity sees your soul, you'll see hers as well.

3) This will NOT happen in the bar without my consent AND the consent of the other person.

If you want this to happen, IM or email me so that we can plan what they'll both see before it happens. I don't want this canonical and completely involuntary ability to interfere with anyone's characterization.