Trick

A young, red-headed Hedger that sells himself for magic.

Tropes

 * Timmy the Terrific: Deep in Trick’s heart he started out wanting to be able to wow an audience with his magical abilities. At first it was based on a desire to get the approval of his grandparents and their friends. Later, when he was growing up, it was to redirect the laughter of his classmates. He wanted them to laugh and cheer at his magic, not at his misfortune. After a while, he just wanted them to stop laughing.
 * Presto he aint: Though he may want to have phenomenal cosmic power, his knowledge of magic, the occult, the arcane (etc.) is limited to a small ‘bag of tricks’. He doesn’t do stage magic - the idea of getting up in front of a crowd isn’t something that he’d be willing to do unless there was a gun pointed at him and even then he’d try and wriggle out of it. His magic isn’t subtle. His magic is big, bright, flashy, vulgar, violent and final.
 * Flick’em Bicus: It may seem like a simple enough effect for the reality-benders out there, but the ability to conjure, produce or otherwise create flame with a word, a glance or a gesture is something that he’s wanted most of his young life. It may be little more than a cigarette lighter worth of fire but it’s his. He can control it, summon it, and, in time, inflict it.
 * Rigid Ritualist: There’s something about the elements of rituals that fascinates him. He likes drawing out the circles, the sigils, placing the candles and the skulls in just the right place and making sure everything is precise and accurate. This may have come from the spirit that was ‘helping’ him learn.
 * Can Talk to Fire: Some wizards can talk to snakes. Others have whole conversations with their familiars and things over afternoon tea. Trick, however, talks to fire. Or rather, he talks to whatever lives within the fire. He’s not quite sure what it is but the first ritual he performed was how to create a ‘sacred flame’. He did and, like the ritual explained, the fire turned blue. Uncertain if it was the odd combination of materials that might have chemically altered the fire he decided to ask it a question, just like the ritual said he could. It answered.
 * Mirror Mirror: Light a candle, look into the flame. See who blinks first. Old little party trick, right? Now set the candle in front of a mirror and repeat. Who blinks first now? Trick learned that if he can hold his concentration long enough, the face opposite to him will change. Eventually that new face will even whisper back. He learned that this is how he can talk to ghosts - giving them the borrowed face in the mirror as a conduit to answer.
 * Scrapyard Sanctum: His dabblings with magic hasn’t gotten him incredible amounts of power but he’s well on his way. Without a house or a place that he could claim as his own, he’s had to make accommodations. He’s created a small altar in an old basement of a forgotten building in a neighborhood that’s been erased from memory. The altar was made from wooden shipping crates, a dirty, red blanket as a cloth, candles and a black-handled knife he uses for some of his ritual work. Everything can fit in a gym bag and he can move the boxes back in place when needed.
 * Hexer: Trick’s concept of magic actually has a light and a dark side. In his mind, magic done to benefit himself or others is ‘light’ and those to harm others is dark. Rather simplistic when you get down to it but he’s gotten really good at the ‘harming others’ side. At first it was just hexing them to send more and more bad luck towards them. Their cars would break down. Their bank account cards would stop working. Power would go out in their apartment and the heat would be accidentally turned off. Not exactly summoning down the fires of hell but was a start.
 * Tomes and Texts: Not everyone can have a library stacked with ancient tomes but not every secret needs to be bound in goat skin. Composition journals and spiral notebooks are more his speed. Most of the occult stuff out in the world is absolute crap worthless but but he’s started collecting those few things that seem to work. His books of rituals look like a gothling took a class in scrapbooking; full of pages torn from books, handwritten scrawl, diagrams in marker, cheap photocopies, etc.
 * Birefall!: Possibly as an elaboration of his Flick’em Biccus trope, this would allow him to produce an apple-sized ball of fire in his hand and throw it at a target. He wouldn’t be harmed by the fire that he’s conjured and it’s entirely possible that it wouldn’t even look natural, but the stuff would burn the bejeebus out of whatever it hit and catch light to anything flammable. The problem is that he still has to throw the ball at the target - and he was never really good at throwing.

Background
It all started when Timothy was twelve years old and he was spending a summer break with his grandparents in Ohio. That was the summer that his grandfather bought him a ‘Magic Shop’ boxed gift full of little magic tricks that he could learn to perform for his friends and family. It turned out that his grandfather was an amateur magician back in his youth and had met his wife when he was on a small tour of the area. She even became his assistant for a time but it was just a fun little hobby for the two of them. He loved the looks of shock and surprise on his grandparents faces when he would produce their card or levitate a ball in front of them. He was hooked. The entire summer he practiced and practiced his skills and performed for his grandparents and their friend every weekend. He wanted a cool stage name like his grandpa; Marvin the Marvelous. But “Timmy the Trickster” was a bit too long to say. By the time he went back he had been given a new nickname by his small group of fans; “Trick”.

He was too young to realize why he was sent to visit his grandparents that summer; probably even too young to care. But he was sent away for a while so his parents could sort some things out. That’s what his grandmother told him when he thought to ask. His dad was an electrician who drank and his mother was a sanctimonious homemaker who was very involved with her church. Though his first name was ‘Patrick’, no one called him that because it was also the name of his father. So he generally went by his middle name, ‘Timothy’.‘Timmy’ was a tool that one parent often tried to use against the other. The two parents eventually succeeded at driving wedges between tim and the other but in the end all they did was isolate him from everyone. His only real connections was to his grandparents.

Over the years, he would spend his summers with his grandparents and learned about stage magic, perfecting his marginal magical skills but then his world changed when one summer before he turned sixteen he had to stay home because his grandfather was ill. He had suffered a mild heart attack and the parents didn’t think it was a good idea to put another burden on the grandmother while she was taking care of her husband. Normally he would have been gone for maybe two months over the summer; out of the house and away form his parents but that summer he was stuck in the house and growing more and more isolated. It was that summer that he ran into Rob Melton, a kid in his high school who liked magic and other such topics that he wasn’t allowed to discuss in the house.

Rob was a year older in school with a dark and somewhat broodish look about him but he laughed at Trick’s card illusions and things. They hung out after school often, crawling all over Pigeon Hill. Then one night while they were both enjoying a shared bottle of beer, Rob looked at Trick and asked, “Hey...if you could learn to do -real- magic, would you do it? What would you -give- to be able to do it all for real?” And, without thinking about it much, Trick answered honestly. “I’d give anything.” It was a week later that Rob introduced Tim to a man who would change his life forever.

Hedger Life
While in a coven lead by Richard Skinner, Rob and Trick became really close friends and on one drunken night it actually became physically intimate to their mutual surprise. Rob seemed to take the moment in stride, as nothing really ever seemed to affect him, but Trick was curious. He had avoided his parents long and well enough that they had no reason to suspect his involvement with the cult. His grades were good, he wasn’t getting into trouble so he wasn’t a problem for them. But this, this was something that Trick worried about. The one night happened again and then another time. Rob would come over to Tim’s house when his parents were away. But then one time his dad came home from work early and caught them.

Patrick Robbins beat Rob out of his home with a broom handle because the broom snapped the first time he whacked the two of them with it. Rob took off out of the back door, barefoot and half dressed while Trick tried to dress and run away. Patrick caught his son and threw him back into his room so they could ‘discuss’ things. The only saving grace was that he exchanged the broom handle for his belt. It wasn’t too long before his mother got home and Trick hoped that she would calm his dad down or at least stop him from hurting him. When his mom found out, she was livid. She must have called down God at least three times in her prayers asking that Tim seek forgiveness for his hideous sin. The two parents seemed to feed off of each other’s hatred for what they found and by the end of the night, Tim was thrown out with whatever he could stuff into his satchel and put on his back.

Thrown Out
That was back in March. He couch-surfed with friends for a week trying to figure out what he should do. Rob’s family was contacted by his own but they didn’t throw him out - he just ran away. The two of them turned to the only form of support they had and asked Mr. Skinner for some help. The principle wasn’t able to do much for them but he had a rental house that he had recently acquired in Pigeon Hill that he let them stay in. It wasn’t much but it was a roof over their heads.

After the first few nights, other cult members showed up regularly as the were turning the basement into a ritual space. Trick stayed there with the others as a sort of ‘club house’ through the rest of the spring with only the occasional financial help from his grandparents. The grandfather had died shortly after the heart attack and the grandmother was on a fixed income. She had heard what had happened from his parents but didn’t seem to care. He managed to keep going with school and had even graduated, though many of the other high school kids seemed to drop out and spend most of their time studying or working on their rituals at the club house. He even got accepted to the local university but the application had been sent in before the blow up with his parents.

College Student
His first fall at the university was a strange mix of classes, recruiting for the cult and rituals. He and Rob kept their relationship on the down-low at the club house because they didn’t want anyone to give them crap about it. When Halloween rolled around, Mr. Skinner told them that the group was going to be preparing for the next few weeks for a majorly complicated and powerful ritual that would give each of them additional power. It was scheduled for the Winter’s solstice and would involve a ritual sacrifice but not the few local strays that they had all done before. It would involve a summoning of an ‘Arch-Spirit’ (though they didn’t know what that really meant) and the sacrifice of a living person. This was a big step for all of them and Mr. Skinner worked each one of them up so that they were ok with it.

The Fall
The night of the ritual came and the cult gathered in the basement of the club house. They had the altar prepared and Trick wondered where Rob was since they normally walk down together. He asked around and some of the older, more senior members, said that he was getting the ‘gift’ for the ritual. The ‘gift’ was what they were all calling the sacrifice since they didn’t want to let on if they were nervous about killing someone. The members gathered, the candles were lit and when it came time for the gift to be presented, Trick saw the figure in red being lead down in something of a stupor. He knew that they were going to drug the person so that they would be easier to manage but he didn’t know who they had grabbed. That was for more senior members of the cult. They laid the gift on the altar and opened the white robes to expose his heart. The gift was naked but wearing a plain white mask to cover his face. They all decided to add the white masks for the ritual as means of hiding their face from any ghost that might be created. Trick, however, didn’t need to see the figure’s face to know that it was Rob on that altar.

He was panicked, uncertain what he could do to stop what was happening. He felt the ritual circle snap into place around him and knew that the members would be focused on the summoning. He couldn’t jump out of the protective circle to grab rob or he might be grabbed by whatever thing that was being called. If he ran, Rob would be killed. The sacrifice had to be properly timed to appease the thing that they were summoning or it would start grabbing anyone nearby to satisfy its hunger - or so they were told. So Trick came up with a plan and decided that he would try and interrupt the ritual at the right time, grab Rob and run up the stairs and lock the rest of them in the basement so that they could escape. Unfortunately only part of that plan worked. When he tried to disrupt the ritual, the hungry thing grabbed the one thing that was practically gift-wrapped for him; Rob. Trick turned and ran as soon as the chaos started and was up the stairs in a flash. He blocked the basement door to prevent them from breaking their way out while he grabbed what he could and ran. He seemed to always be stuffing things in a bag in the middle of the night and running for his life.

Recovery
After that night he’s been staying at a local motel that thankfully takes cash and doesn’t ask many questions. He even found a bit of a job there since the manager has an ear for sob stories. He gives him a discounted room rate and Tick does whatever he needs him to do at the time. As far as he knows the cult ‘blew up’ on the solstice and everyone who got out has either gotten out of magic or, so far, hasn’t come looking for him. But he knows Skinner survived.