Kendra "Kenny" Costa-James

First impressions make Kenny out as a mousy, shy kind of girl. She often trails off and gets flustered around strangers. It’s very easy to make her cheeks turn a blotchy red. She’ll however, try and be friendly more often than not. As one gets to know Kenny, her sense of humor starts to come out. She’ll playfully tease folks and at times even seem like she’s flirting. The later part is (mostly) unintentional. It’s part of her nature to be somewhat fussy and maternal, and she’ll jump to help or comfort those around her, though it tends to come off as slightly awkward and stiff.

Getting to know Kenny further, though, is hard. She doesn’t like to let people get too close and she’ll start to seem almost icy after a while.  If it feels like someone is encroaching too much on her space, she’ll nudge them away and shut down. This especially doubles for when she’s in a bad mood.

Bad moods aren’t uncommon for Kenny. She tends to have long bouts of melancholy and the only remedy she can find for those is to obsessively drown herself in work. There are times when she barely eats or sleeps, trying to feel like she’s doing something meaningful. It’s not something she’s particularly proud of and tends to do her best to act jovial in public.

Growing up rich and privileged, Kenny can be both spoilt and naïve a good amount of the time. She mostly has good intentions, but that doesn’t stop her from screwing up or trying too hard to be useful and being the opposite.

Perhaps one of Kenny’s defining characteristics is her not quite well hidden stubborn and prideful streak. She’ll insist on doing everything for herself and will refuse to ask for help. She’d much rather fail completely than admit when something is beyond her. And her temper will flare when someone tries to call her out on this.

Kenny’s central motivation is her obsessive need to be useful and good. She has what one ex colorfully defined as a ‘moral boner.’ Doing anything that she considers selfish or self centered horrifies Kenny almost as much as being useless. Her point of view tends to have an odd sort of moral black-and-white-ness to it. Things are either good or bad. At the same time, she believes people are inherently good and therefore is willing to excuse their personality faults and view them through rose colored glasses. Another word to describe that would be ‘confused.’

Background

Kenny was born in Paris, France on December 12, 1993 to Vincenzo Costa and Clarice James. Clarice was the CEO of a video game company and often too busy for her daughter. Vincenzo was a computer programmer, who, while more attentive to his daughter also often found himself too busy. Not too long after Kenny was born, Clarice and Vincenzo began to have marital troubles and divorced when Kenny was ten. After that, Vincenzo and Kenny began to rarely interact, and by the time she entered college, their interactions were limited to a yearly birthday phone call.

Kenny’s early education was unconventional. By the time the girl was twelve, her family moved cities a total of eight times and countries three times. In order to prevent Kenny from having to deal with constantly being the new kid in class, among other issues that came with the frequent moving, Clarice had her daughter home schooled. Clarice also had high expectations for her daughter, and so she also hired piano, violin, ballet and swimming tutors. (Kenny was able to talk her mother into letting her quit all but the ballet.) Clarice was also a harsh critic and rarely showed affection, so she and Kenny had a strained relationship.

It wasn’t until Kenny was twelve and her family finally settled down in New York City that the girl had any consistent interaction with people her own age. Her mother decided that, since they were staying in the city, Kenny could go to a public high school. To keep Kenny from having too much of a culture shock when starting high school, Clarice enrolled Kenny in public ballet lessons so she could get used to group settings while still being home schooled. There, Kenny made her first friend, a girl named Sanjana Rao.

At thirteen, Kenny’s life suddenly changed. One morning she woke up and everything around her room was levitating. Not long after, a woman calling herself the Madam Sorceress was in Kenny’s bedroom telling Kenny that Kenny was a Witch, one of a thousand people in the world chosen by the universe to help protect the balance between man, magic and nature. It took a long explanation for Kenny to begin to understand the situation, which involved politics between varieties of magical beings. What bother and confused Kenny was the most was the rule that witches were not to use their powers unless universal balance was threatened, not even to protect lives. In short ‘no heroics.’ The reasoning was that an over use of magic could expose magic to humanity and humanity was not ready for that. But, to Kenny, this seemed unfair.

In a move that served to make Madam Sorceress, the leader of the witches, rather angry, Kenny decided that she would use her powers to help people. Which, pretty much meant Kenny playing ‘superhero’ in the New York night streets. This lead to quite a few near death experiences and a lot of sneaking out of the house at night. This served to humble Kenny and for the time being, she stopped being so reckless and just did her witch’s duty.

At fourteen, Kenny began high school, the same one as her dance friend, Sanjana. Sanjana was quite the overachiever, in more clubs and after school activities than Kenny cared to count. Sanjana even managed to drag Kenny into joining the cheerleading squad.

Meanwhile, Kenny’s lack of doing anything really ‘useful’ with her powers was nagging at her. She started to volunteer in local charity organizations and activist groups just to feel like she was doing something. Her career goal became ‘doctor’ so that she could do more to help others (though math and science happened to be her weakest subjects). It was safe to say that Kenny didn’t sleep much during her high school years. Though, thanks to Sanjana being a social butterfly, Kenny did manage to have some semblance of a social life. Sometimes, she forgot the whole witch thing, until a local magical politics conflict happened and she had to deal with it.

At the end of high school, she got accepted to a fairly good university as a biology major. However, her feelings that she just wasn’t doing enough and her feelings the witches’ politics of no meddling and dealing with other magical beings were wrong led Kenny back to doing the superhero thing.

Abilities

Magic: Kenny is a relatively new Witch and her powers are still developing. She currently posses telekinesis and healing magic. Her telekinesis is able to lift, at most, 250 pounds (twice her weight) in a ten meter radius. Though she can only hold that much for a minute at most before passing out. She can, however, indefinitely levitate small objects like pencils. Her healing magic is able to heal small cuts, temporarily keep heavy gashes from bleeding, cure small sprains and make large sprains less painful. Bones and illness are beyond her. Healing is much more difficult than telekinesis for her and anything beyond simple healing cuts will tire her out fast. Once she is tired out, Kenny can no longer do magic for a few hours, unless she wishes to tap into her own life force for power. This however is a horrible and potentially idea and Kenny has yet to be in a situation where this is necessary.

Fighting Skills: Kenny has very basic self-defense skills and is rather athletic after years of dance and cheer. However, without her magic, she is very easy to take down. Even with her magic, she must be clever to

First Aid: Kenny knows simple, emergency first aid and with her magic can keep a person with serious injuries stable for an hour or so, depending on the injury.

Witches

To understand Witches, one must understand Creatures. When humans first came to be, there was already magic in the world and different sorts of magical beings. Most of them have since then died out, but some, such Vampires, Werewolves and Fairies remain to this day.

But, what humans brought into the world through off the balance between magic and nature. With humans, came cities and with cities came a big change to the way the world’s resources and power structures worked. So, the universe created Creatures, monsters to keep the human’s from expanding too far. However, Creatures proved to be too powerful and nearly drove human kind to extinction. So Witches came to be to enforce the balance between man, nature and magic. This involved keeping the creatures at bay and hidden from humans.

At any given time there are only about a thousand Witches and when one dies a new one is chosen by the universe to replace them. Their organization includes a leader, who in English is called the Madam Sorceress or Sir Sorcerer and The Council of Five members. Together the leader and the Council make decisions on how the witches should operate. The leader and each Council member chooses their own successor.

When a new witch is chosen, the leader and the Council know immediately and are able to sense their location. The nearest one uses magic to quickly reach the newly made witch and explain to them their role in the world/put them in contact with the rest of the Witches.

Witches have a variety of different powers, though most Witches only have two powers in their first twenty years of being a Witch.  A Witch only becomes truly powerful after about thirty years of experience. A lone witch is not very formidable, but combing the power of multiple Witches increases abilities exponentially. This is what gives Witches as a group so much authority in the magical community.

Someone may become a Witch at any age, though on average a new Witch is between 12 and 28. The youngest new Witch in recorded history was 7 and the oldest was 69.

Note: Witch is a unisex term.