Personality: To the untrained view, Ashcroft is quite the unassuming, silent, ignorant character, and he mostly prefers to appear so. In addition, his chronic memory failure also makes him something of a joke at times.
However, he can surprise on occasion with his own personal brand of smart talk, which is one of two things about him that is in any way notable, and only within the Special Investigations Department.
The second would be that despite being reputed to be a top-class Investigator, he's still stuck at rank B+, and worse, he does not seem to care very much, passing it off with "I'm not very powerful, I'm just smart, that's all. Anyway, if I have no chance of passing, then there's no point going to take an A level test."
This is disturbing to some of his superiors, as they mostly concur that it's not a matter of his lack of talent for his job that's stopping him.
History: Ashcroft, before becoming an Investigator, put his intelligence to use in the field of software and hardware engineering, and developed a couple of improvements to some respective TSAB parts.
Due to his extremely low-key style, his dealings with characters within the TSAB were never known very well, except that he did not mind hanging out with anyone who could either give him a nice intellectual chat over a coffee, and that he would never pass off a game of chess, at which he proved to be, according to his future superior, Acous "unpredictable".
For the same reasons, his reasons for the sudden change in career options from are not well known, but as he proven himself a fine Investigator, it has mostly been assumed that he has done so to avail himself of an opportunity to take on an intellectual challenge.
General Fighting and Magic Style: As an Investigator, Ashcroft is a hot hand in both projectile as well as hand to hand combat, and is comfortable with not using his device when necessary. Notably enough, he uses a variant of Ninjutsu and good-ol' fashioned boxing in combat.
He uses illusion magic, or rather, he uses illusions on others via magic, and is also capable of using basic shooting spells on others.
His illusions, unlike most, are able to affect others who are not in his line of sight. However, if Ashcroft suffers a major shock, or the person(s) affected by the illusion suffer a shock to the mind greater than that which is created by Ashcroft's illusion, then the illusion will be dispelled.
Also, he cannot do too many things at once: any amount of magic he expends doing something else (such as defending or shooting) while keeping the illusion up reduces the amount of time he can do either of the two by very prohibitive amounts, and as with many male mages, his magic reserves are not that great, so he has to use his resources wisely, especially in situations where he would be likely to use both abilities simultaneously.
This form of magic can, and has resulted in certain hilarious if rather traumatic events.
Ashcroft's Armed Device: Enigma/Colossus is a Armed Device that can take the form of either a pair of crystal mirrors, or a large number of crystal blades.
It speaks a variant of Greek, because of an unfortunate pun that Ashcroft made, which led to a whim, and so on...
Barrier Jacket: To suit his more casual purposes, it takes the form of a casual blazer, tie, shirt and pants.
Views on Canon Characters/Things:
The Three Aces: Sun Tsu, thou should'st be living at this hour, we hath need of thee!
The Wolkenritter: Like pieces on a chessboard, except even more rigid.
Chrono: Boring. Too little hot blood.
Acous Verossa: I find him... *checks for spy cameras, and for any hidden dark green things* let's talk about this later shall we?
The Nakajima Sisters: *eyebrows up* Hot Blood Radar is ONLINE. *blip...blip...blip...* You two hath need of...(well, me!
)
He didn't make the effort to know any other Canon Characters.
Design Notes:
Ashcroft's surname was taken from a scenario in Half-Life 2, which I was playing just a week or two before creating him. His name is actually another surname, except that I thought it would do okay as a name, too.
His Device is named after an opposing pair of actual, albeit now obsolete devices. Enigma was a German encryption device used in World War II, while Colossus was a decryption "supercomputer" used to crack and intercept Enigma.
I love illusions, and in the spirit of my love, actually learned some magic tricks based on visual illusions in the past. I'm not a big fan of the Uchiha clan, though.