Name: Mei Landau
Gender: Female
Age: 10
Mage Rank: AAA
Magic Type: Midchilda
Magic Colour: Light pink
Specialty: Binds, Teleportation
Device: Gemini, Storage Device
Build: Small, adorable, to the point of saccharine cuteness.
Hair: Red, short.
Eyes: Green.
Clothing:
Usual - Bright colourful dresses, almost garishly so. Usually also with a slightly ragged large black pointy witch's hat, and a cheap-looking but incredibly durable star-tipped wand.
Barrier Jacket - Whatever she happens to be wearing at the time, plus a black cloak fastened with a silver brooch. Also, the hat and wand.
Personality:
Mei's infectiously cheerful personality owes a great deal to Fate Testarossa-Harlaown's kindness and love for her ward. Her style of combat owes a great deal to her near-obsession with magical girl shows.
In effect, Mei is living her dream of being a real-life magical girl, and one who is no slouch powers-wise either. She uses and adapts ideas from the shows she watches in her missions, with scarily effective results. Nobody quite knows whether this is because Mei has a gift for improvisational tactics based on the seed inspiration from the shows, or if magical girl shows really do have some tactical value.
Mei's overriding personality trait would be her curiosity: she loves to learn new things, and picks up new concepts at a startling pace. She doesn't always remember all that she's learned, but the process of learning seems to give her a thrill. This sometimes leads to her taking unnecessary risks in order to find out what's behind the next locked door.
No matter how many setbacks she receives, Mei never lets anything get her down. There's an occasional brittleness to her laughter, especially when the subject of family comes up, but it comes and goes so quickly that one may well have been imagining it.
Tactically, Mei is well aware that she's being put in all sorts of dangerous situations, and is perfectly willing to use her opponent's surprise at facing a little girl against them. She usually plays it safe, preferring to let her assigned partner do the actual fighting while she lends support however she can. Her biggest weakness, which has been exploited several times, is that she's easily distracted by the merest chance to learn something new and satisfy her boundless curiosity.
Background:
The earliest record in existence about Mei was a police report two years prior about an incident involving a dimensional criminal (who did not survive said incident). Several lives were lost during that time, including (according to that report) Mei's parents. All efforts to contact her living relatives, if she even had any, turned up no leads, and so Mei was passed from orphanage to government institution to the TSAB, especially when they discovered her magical talents.
Mei had already become known as a strangely withdrawn and silent child by the time Fate decided to take her on as a ward. In her inimitable style, Fate managed to coax the little girl out of her shell, and carefully teach her how to use her powers for good. This turned out to be useful when Mei signed up to be a TSAB contract mage (which would be a long story in itself), under special dispensation. Fate still worries about her, but accepted that this was Mei's decision, and is somewhat reassured that Mei never goes out into the field solo.
Curiously enough, discreet inquiries were made regarding Mei's past, and while there had indeed been a couple named Landau who perished in the dimensional criminal incident, no records of Mei's birth existed in any hospital in the area, and no birth certificates had ever been filed. Fate is personally reluctant to proceed further, preferring that past mysteries remain unopened, but the investigation is ongoing.
Armament:
Most people who first encounter Mei in action think that the Device named Gemini is the wand she carries around, from which almost all her power effects appear to originate. In fact, the wand is just a prop: a well-made collector's edition prop that is more expensive than it looks, but a prop nonetheless. Gemini is in fact Mei's hat, which has a persistent magical effect placed on it to make it seem less obvious than it should. Mei tries to keep up the charade as much as possible, but she is, after all, only ten years old, making it something like an open secret by now.
Mei claims to have found Gemini (the hat, plus the decoy wand) in the attic of the house where she used to live. The trail ends there, since nobody has ever heard of a Device anything like it. Mei is extremely protective of her hat, and refuses to let anyone examine it... at least, not yet.
Powers:
While there is technically nothing limiting Mei physiologically from using standard energy blasts, she is incapable of doing so, possibly due to a psychological barrier. In addition, while there is technically no actual requirement for her to act like a magical girl when she's in the field, she has to do so anyway for any of her spells to work.
Offensive:
See Support.
Defensive:
- No Touching: Mei projects a barrier which repels magical and physical contact. She can't maintain it for longer than a few seconds, but when it's activated, it can block S ranked attacks.
- I Mean It, No Touching: Mei's barrier violently repels any contact, with enough force to send anything in the way flying. Mei hasn't figured out the offensive possibilities of this yet.
Support:
- Stay Right There: With a twirl of her wand, Mei traps her opponent with an AAA ranked bind.
- Sleepyhead: Mei sends forth a great deal of magical sleep-inducing dust. When inhaled, it makes the victim lethargic and tired. Mei herself is immune to its effects, but she cannot selectively exclude anyone in the area. The dust cloud spreads with the air currents to a maximum of a two-hundred meter radius (if Mei gives it her all and with optimum spread conditions), and dissipates in around an hour's time. One may escape its effects by not breathing it in, whether through a self-contained oxygen source or just not breathing.
- Hey, Watch This: Mei opens a small portal in space, one meter (and always one meter) in diameter. The other end of the portal may be placed in somewhere she's very familiar with (her room, for example), or within one hundred meters of line of sight. She can hold it open with some concentration (enough to make putting up barriers very difficult), and if she accidentally closes the portal before an object goes through, the object snaps back to its original position. (If its original position cannot easily be determined to be at one side of the portal, then it can end up on either location at random.)
- I've Got Something In My Hat: Mei reached into her hat, and pulls an object out. The object must be able to fit through a half-meter diameter hole (the hat stretches to accomodate that much), and Mei must be able to hold it (ie nothing a young child cannot carry). The object may be longer than the hat, as long as it can pass through the hole. Mei can conjure any non-living non-magical material that she knows from it; the objects are made of mana-into-matter, and dissipate after ten minutes or so. One of her favourite tricks is to pull out party poppers and lob them at enemies, making for a bit of distraction. Mei can also put stuff back into the hat if she wishes, using it as a handy storage device. (Pun unintended.)
- Now You See Me: Mei can teleport within line of sight. There appears to be no distance limit other than that, although multiple teleports is very draining. In between teleports, Mei hovers in mid-air if necessary. She can't move very quickly while hovering, making it more or less a safety cushion for teleporting across chasms or such. Mei can also teleport one other person of adult mass with her, at a greater rate of mana drain.
Trivia:
- Mei studies in a TSAB-sponsored elementary school on Midchilda, and has already made many friends. The hat and wand, which she refuses to part with in defiance of school uniform regulations, are surefire conversation starters.
- Mei treats Fate as her idol and role model, which is a large part of why she chose to be a TSAB contract mage.
- No known limit to Gemini's storage capacity has been found, not least of which is because Mei has never really tested it. She's managed to put in the equivalent of forty kilograms of items inside without difficulty, though. The hat's mass and volume remain unchanged.