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Description

NPC Type: Primary

Associated Player Character: Adèle LaFlamme

Name: Ekuwa (rarely used except on official records)

Nicknames: Magalie (what she usually goes by)

Born: 1739

Age: 17 (as of 1891)

Physical Age: 15 (Left the outside world in 1754, Entered the city 1889)

Height: 5’ 8”

Hair: Black

Eyes: Brown

Faction: Insurgent

A former insurgent among her own people, Magalie sees Sybal Heim as similar to her plantation life. Perhaps they aren't being forced into labor, but she and the other citizens have been taken from their homes and are being held against their will. They are not free people. They are captives in the hands of the Organizer and Magalie wants nothing more than to break free.

Despite having lived in Sybal Heim for only two years, heard rumours about dedicated Insurgents and she wants to find and join them, a childish but sincere pipe dream. She keeps a close eye on Adèle’s bookkeeper Étienne Robespierre and believes he’s one of them. She likes to snoop through his desk and his ledgers, so Étienne hides meaningless riddles in his belongings to keep her busy. The girl is nothing if not persistent, though, and will not stop until she burrows her way into the heart of the Insurgency.

Occupation: Painter's Apprentice
An apprentice to master painter Adèle LaFlamme, Magalie serves as her assistant in the studio, helping her stretch canvases, mix paints, as well as actively studying the art of oil painting.

Sybal Form: Saccharum-Occisor (Sugar Cane Killer)

Magalie’s Sybal form is animalistic and resembles both a cane rat, a sugarcane-eating rodent, and a ratel, a small animal with impenetrable skin and fierce enough to tangle with a pride of lions. Both animals hail from her native Ghana. Like the animals, Sybal Magalie has a tough hide that deflects most blows and a devastating pair of rodent-like incisors that can cut through wood and brick. Each of her limbs is tipped with five claws, which are particularly long on her forelimbs. And if that’s not frightening enough, for good measure her back is shielded in a forest of porcupine quills. She can go about either on two legs or four, and her posture is a handy indicator of just how feral she’s feeling at a given moment. Her sybal has a strong instinct to dig and she spends many nights wandering in the stormways, the one place in the city best suited to her fossorial body plan.

Sybal Power: Hand of Destruction

Magalie’s Sybal power manifests itself as two glowing orbs of energy, one clutched in each fist. She can consciously focus this energy to her claws to disintegrate any object she touches. The destructive force also works on living creatures to a lesser degree, causing intense pain and local wound damage. When dialed back, her power can be used to gently etch grooves into objects like walls or tree bark. When used without reservations, touching a small enough object can make it explode. The most practical use of this power is digging, which she's been known to do in the stormways, much to chagrin of many of those who regularly frequent the stormways. Both her aide and her tutor have worked dilligently to discourage her from unsanctioned digging.

The ability to obliterate things makes her potentially very dangerous at night, especially since she’s so young and still has much to learn in mastering her Sybal power. Magalie does not wish to harm others, only to remain free, a desire which can have destructive consequences during feral episodes and the accompanying power incontinence. Adèle believes that her apprentice’s Sybal power stems from the years she spent enslaved and that it’s an expression of Magalie’s subconscious desire to break her people’s chains.

Docile or Feral: Feral

When sunset falls, Magalie’s inner demons come out to play, bringing the worst of her instincts to the surface. Stubborn and willful as she is during the day, Magalie has a tendency not to listen to anyone at night, and is many times more rebellious after dark. Being told what to do makes her very angry, and trying to force her to do something will trigger a loud and often destructive tantrum. The only way you can get the badger to do something at night is to gently request or offer advice, but she will not be told what to do.

Because of the nature of her Sybal power, Adele has requested Magalie avoid the gallery at night, lest she accidentally destroy the paintings that she and her tutor have worked so hard on. Magalie is determined to regain control of herself at night, and is making gradual progress with her mentor Adèle and her detainment aide Ignatius to reform her Sybal. More recently, they've been working together in the studio as Magalie learns to better control herself and her emotions, finding that art more than anything else is the best form of therapy for her.

Personality: Wednesday’s child, according to Ewe tradition, will be mischievous and daring, an instigator who refuses to be told what to do. True to her day of birth, Magalie is a stubborn and independent girl with a keen nose for getting into and out of trouble with careless ease.

She respects only the people she admires, and fortunately for Adèle, Magalie considers her tutor to be among those few. Adèle is one of the few people she will listen to, perhaps because her tutor treats her as an equal, not as a slave the way the Segals did, and makes requests of her and not demands.

Just like she has a keen eye for observing the physical world, Magalie also has a gift for reading people and is unusually talented at spotting falsehoods. She’s very difficult to lie to, and is good at squirming around lies to get down to the truth. She tends to be blunt in conversation and has no qualms about hurling insults, especially when those insults are directed at Adele's bookkeeper Etienne Robespierre.

During her years as a slave, Magalie was forced to keep her emotions in check to hide her feelings to survive the cruelty of her masters and the duplicity of fellow slaves. Even though she has far more freedom in Sybal Heim, she still has a tendency to come off a little aloof and detached. Push her far enough though and you’ll find quite the temper between her subdued exterior, a side of her that’s not pretty for anyone who manages to unearth it.

History: Magalie was born in what is now the modern country of Ghana on a Wednesday. Consequently, she was given the name Ekuwa, which denotes a girl child who was born on the middlemost day of the week.

When she was nine years old, Ekuwa and her older brother Kojo were kidnapped by slave traders and taken by boat on a harrowing trip across the Atlantic Ocean to be sold as slaves on colonial sugar plantations. Though many of the captives died of disease or suicide on the way, Ekuwa and Kojo survived. When the ship landed in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, the modern nation of Haiti, they were sold to a French sugar baron named Segal.

While Kojo was sent to work in the fields, Ekuwa, a bright and attractive young girl was chosen to be a house slave for the Segal family. It was a position she did not take well to. Her French mistress, Madame Segal, called her Magalie (the French diminutive of Magdalene) after Mary Magdalene of the Christian Bible for her willful and “devilish” behavior. The name was meant as an insult, but Magalie took pride in it. This biblical Magdalene was a close friend of Christ, a man who Magalie learned from a secretly literate house slave was a rebel during his day.

Plantation life was even tougher for her brother then it was for Magalie, as Kojo was subjected to inhumane hardships of field labor. Saint-Domingue was notorious for its brutal treatment of slaves. Few survived more than a few years after arrival. To escape his harsh fate Kojo fled the plantation to join the Maroons, bands of escaped slaves living on the outskirts of the plantations.

Meanwhile a violent rebellion on was brewing in Saint-Domingue in the 1750s, led by a man named François Mackandal. When Mackandal managed to unite the individual bands of Maroons into a unified guerilla army, Kojo returned to recruit his sister into the rebel ranks as a spy. Using her privileged position as a house slave, Magalie fed information to the rebels, spiriting messages out of the big house and spreading information to the rebel network to be delivered to Mackandal and his bands of Maroons. She also supplied them any helpful tidbits she picked up from listening in on her masters’ dinnertime conversation as she served their meals. And every free moment she got away from prying eyes she practiced her combat skills with the other insurgent slaves in an elaborate form of martial arts disguised as a dance, preparing for the time when they would rise up and destroy their cruel masters.

Things went well for her and the rebellion, until one day she was tasked with poisoning Monsieur Segal, a favorite tactic of Mackandal. She failed after a fellow slave ratted on her and was caught. Realizing that Magalie was in league with the Maroons, Monsieur Segal ordered her to be tortured to find out information about the slave rebellion. When an overseer tried to restrain her with shackles, Magalie broke his knee with a kick, slipping from his grasp and escaping from the house.

As her master and the other overseers chased after her she fled into the sugarcane fields where she suddenly came upon the Traveler’s Forest. Though terrified by the sight of the dark, towering trees, the sound of the master and his aides behind her spurred her forward. She ran into the forest and arrived in Sybal Heim in the year 1879, jumping a century forward.

Her first few weeks in the city did not go well. Having arrived from Saint-Domingue, she was first placed in Heiros which Magalie took strong objection to. She had not come to Saint-Domingue by choice. Her home was in Africa and she wanted to live with other Africans, not with people from the strange land she’d been dragged to against her will. She threw such a fuss in her sybal form on her first night that when she applied for a transfer the following morning, Chaska herself delivered it to Colo, eager to be rid of the prickly little terror.

Magalie proved unstable while in sybal form, prone to frequent feral fits as circumstances aroused her anger. Calm one minute, a certain choice of words or bossy tone of phrase would set her raging the next. Too much attention and intervention by aides only made the tantrums worse. Because of her obstinancy and tendency to distance herself from others, Magalie was assigned to Ignatius Aquina an initiation aide who specialized in dealing with sour-tempered sybals with a loose-leashed touch. With his sybal’s power to lure and lead, his means of management was less direct, keeping an eye on her from a distance, using his power to nudge her out of potential confrontations and towards quieter, safer spaces. Under Ignatius’ guidance Magalie managed to cause less trouble, but the girl remained generally unhappy and her sybal prone to fits when things did not go just so.

Though largely sour at her new life in the city, Magalie found a bright spot in the Zenith. The art captivated her, especially the paintings. Taking note of the girl’s interest, Ignatius, a patron of the painter Adele LaFlamme, knowing the woman was looking to take on an apprentice contacted her in hopes of making a match. Hearing Ignatius’ description of the girl and her interests, Adele was keen to meet her and Ignatius arranged a meeting. Though fascinated with the works of the painter she saw hanging in Kardia’s galleries, when introduced to Adele, Magalie was far less pleased by the woman herself. Adele was European. Worst of all French. She insisted she wanted nothing to do with Adele or an apprenticeship and stormed off, leaving Ignatius to apologize.

That was not the end of things, however. Back in Seele several evenings later, Magalie encountered Adèle again, painting on the street corner, surprised to discover the painter living there. The encounter did not go well. Distracted by angry emotions Magalie accidentally tipped Adele’s easel, knocking her work, the canvas landing in the gutter. When Adele retrieved it, the surface of the painting was covered in mud clinging to the canvas. To Magalie’s surprise, Adele did not get angry. Instead, she seemed concerned. Empathetic. Which was not at all what the girl expected. Confused and frustrated, Magalie ran off, finding a quiet place to think and sulk.

Upon hearing what his assigned initiate had done to Adele’s work, Ignatius was horrified. Patron paid painter a call, profusely apologizing for introducing the pair and consequently sparking the incident, but was surprised to find that Adele was not upset. Instead, after showing him the painting, the mud carefully worked into the oils to create a striking impressionist of the sodden streetscape, Adele instead said if there was any chance the girl would be willing to work with her she’d be keen to have her. Truly sorry for what she’d caused, after talking things over with Ignatius, Magalie was stunned to hear that Adele still extended an offer of employment. After careful thought and some encouragement from her aide, Magalie accepted, and though her relationship with her mentor would get off to a rocky start, things were soon headed uphill.

Though at first Magalie viewed the white French woman with lingering bitterness and distrust, the result of Madame Segal’s cruel treatment of her, she found Adèle to be far different. It took time and effort but Adèle’s persistence and empathetic approach gradually won her over. The two of them shared a mutual love of art, and that passion became the central focus of the relationship, with the mentor enthusiastically training her student to become both the best artist and person she could possibly be. And the more Magalie got to know the quirky, opinionated yet amiable Frenchwoman, the more she grew to like her. The relationship continues to have its bumps and the pair are not above butting heads, but Adele's persistence and openess have earned Magalie's trust bit by bit. As time goes on, the pair continue to grow closer, and if you'd ask Magalie to list the people in the city she trusts most, she will not hesitate to name Adele as one of them.

Additional Info:

  Besides Sybalian, Magalie speaks three other languages, her native Ewe language, French (which she learned as a house slave), and Haitian Creole, a pidgin of both French and West African languages.

  Magalie bears a number of scars on her body, including striped scars on her back from where she was whipped as punishment by her masters, and a round brand on her upper chest, the mark of a slave.

  Magalie is relieved to hear from Adèle and Étienne that slavery was abolished in Saint-Domingue by Maximilien Robespierre and the trans-Atlantic slave trade was outlawed by 1808. She often wonders though what fate befell the slave rebellion, Mackandal, and her brother, though, and has spent much of her free time at the Kardia Archive researching what she can to find out.

  Because of her background as a slave, Magalie refers to Adèle as her professeur particulier, her tutor, and not as her master. It’s something Adèle wholeheartedly encourages her young apprentice to do, wanting Magalie to embrace her freedom to the fullest.

  To save on rent costs, Magalie lives with Adèle, mentor and apprentice sharing an apartment in Seele. Because she doesn’t have to pay for Magalie’s room and board, Adèle instead gives the money saved through this arrangement to Magalie as a monthly stipend to spend on whatever she chooses.

  Adèle is Magalie’s savate teacher, and Magalie also knows a little bit of Maroon dance-fighting similar to capoeira. Martial arts makes up part of their daily routine as morning exercises before the work day begins.

  Magalie has a very keen visual memory, and tends to notice and remember large amounts of detail about anything she’s seen. As a painter’s apprentice, this is useful, as her knack for visual thinking has helped her quickly learn the fundamentals of human anatomy.

  Magalie has has lifelong love of art. She loved helping her mother make painted and beaded baskets as a young girl and during her years as a house slave, she was fascinated by the paintings hanging in her former masters’ plantation home though she much prefers the bright, vivid depictions of life in Mademoiselle LaFlamme’s impressionist paintings to the dark and somber baroque portraits owned by the Segals.

  Although her tutor is aware of Magalie’s Insurgent status and her desire to overthrow the Organizer, Adèle is a principled keeper of secrets and frequently covers for her apprentice to make it seem like she is merely a dissatisfied citizen, not one bent on treason.

Description

NPC Type: Primary

Associated Player Character: Adèle LaFlamme

Name: Ekuwa (rarely used except on official records)

Nicknames: Magalie (what she usually goes by)

Born: 1739

Age: 17 (as of 1891)

Physical Age: 15 (Left the outside world in 1754, Entered the city 1889)

Height: 5’ 8”

Hair: Black

Eyes: Brown

Faction: Insurgent

A former insurgent among her own people, Magalie sees Sybal Heim as similar to her plantation life. Perhaps they aren't being forced into labor, but she and the other citizens have been taken from their homes and are being held against their will. They are not free people. They are captives in the hands of the Organizer and Magalie wants nothing more than to break free.

Despite having lived in Sybal Heim for only two years, heard rumours about dedicated Insurgents and she wants to find and join them, a childish but sincere pipe dream. She keeps a close eye on Adèle’s bookkeeper Étienne Robespierre and believes he’s one of them. She likes to snoop through his desk and his ledgers, so Étienne hides meaningless riddles in his belongings to keep her busy. The girl is nothing if not persistent, though, and will not stop until she burrows her way into the heart of the Insurgency.

Occupation: Painter's Apprentice
An apprentice to master painter Adèle LaFlamme, Magalie serves as her assistant in the studio, helping her stretch canvases, mix paints, as well as actively studying the art of oil painting.

Sybal Form: Saccharum-Occisor (Sugar Cane Killer)

Magalie’s Sybal form is animalistic and resembles both a cane rat, a sugarcane-eating rodent, and a ratel, a small animal with impenetrable skin and fierce enough to tangle with a pride of lions. Both animals hail from her native Ghana. Like the animals, Sybal Magalie has a tough hide that deflects most blows and a devastating pair of rodent-like incisors that can cut through wood and brick. Each of her limbs is tipped with five claws, which are particularly long on her forelimbs. And if that’s not frightening enough, for good measure her back is shielded in a forest of porcupine quills. She can go about either on two legs or four, and her posture is a handy indicator of just how feral she’s feeling at a given moment. Her sybal has a strong instinct to dig and she spends many nights wandering in the stormways, the one place in the city best suited to her fossorial body plan.

Sybal Power: Hand of Destruction

Magalie’s Sybal power manifests itself as two glowing orbs of energy, one clutched in each fist. She can consciously focus this energy to her claws to disintegrate any object she touches. The destructive force also works on living creatures to a lesser degree, causing intense pain and local wound damage. When dialed back, her power can be used to gently etch grooves into objects like walls or tree bark. When used without reservations, touching a small enough object can make it explode. The most practical use of this power is digging, which she's been known to do in the stormways, much to chagrin of many of those who regularly frequent the stormways. Both her aide and her tutor have worked dilligently to discourage her from unsanctioned digging.

The ability to obliterate things makes her potentially very dangerous at night, especially since she’s so young and still has much to learn in mastering her Sybal power. Magalie does not wish to harm others, only to remain free, a desire which can have destructive consequences during feral episodes and the accompanying power incontinence. Adèle believes that her apprentice’s Sybal power stems from the years she spent enslaved and that it’s an expression of Magalie’s subconscious desire to break her people’s chains.

Docile or Feral: Feral

When sunset falls, Magalie’s inner demons come out to play, bringing the worst of her instincts to the surface. Stubborn and willful as she is during the day, Magalie has a tendency not to listen to anyone at night, and is many times more rebellious after dark. Being told what to do makes her very angry, and trying to force her to do something will trigger a loud and often destructive tantrum. The only way you can get the badger to do something at night is to gently request or offer advice, but she will not be told what to do.

Because of the nature of her Sybal power, Adele has requested Magalie avoid the gallery at night, lest she accidentally destroy the paintings that she and her tutor have worked so hard on. Magalie is determined to regain control of herself at night, and is making gradual progress with her mentor Adèle and her detainment aide Ignatius to reform her Sybal. More recently, they've been working together in the studio as Magalie learns to better control herself and her emotions, finding that art more than anything else is the best form of therapy for her.

Personality: Wednesday’s child, according to Ewe tradition, will be mischievous and daring, an instigator who refuses to be told what to do. True to her day of birth, Magalie is a stubborn and independent girl with a keen nose for getting into and out of trouble with careless ease.

She respects only the people she admires, and fortunately for Adèle, Magalie considers her tutor to be among those few. Adèle is one of the few people she will listen to, perhaps because her tutor treats her as an equal, not as a slave the way the Segals did, and makes requests of her and not demands.

Just like she has a keen eye for observing the physical world, Magalie also has a gift for reading people and is unusually talented at spotting falsehoods. She’s very difficult to lie to, and is good at squirming around lies to get down to the truth. She tends to be blunt in conversation and has no qualms about hurling insults, especially when those insults are directed at Adele's bookkeeper Etienne Robespierre.

During her years as a slave, Magalie was forced to keep her emotions in check to hide her feelings to survive the cruelty of her masters and the duplicity of fellow slaves. Even though she has far more freedom in Sybal Heim, she still has a tendency to come off a little aloof and detached. Push her far enough though and you’ll find quite the temper between her subdued exterior, a side of her that’s not pretty for anyone who manages to unearth it.

History: Magalie was born in what is now the modern country of Ghana on a Wednesday. Consequently, she was given the name Ekuwa, which denotes a girl child who was born on the middlemost day of the week.

When she was nine years old, Ekuwa and her older brother Kojo were kidnapped by slave traders and taken by boat on a harrowing trip across the Atlantic Ocean to be sold as slaves on colonial sugar plantations. Though many of the captives died of disease or suicide on the way, Ekuwa and Kojo survived. When the ship landed in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, the modern nation of Haiti, they were sold to a French sugar baron named Segal.

While Kojo was sent to work in the fields, Ekuwa, a bright and attractive young girl was chosen to be a house slave for the Segal family. It was a position she did not take well to. Her French mistress, Madame Segal, called her Magalie (the French diminutive of Magdalene) after Mary Magdalene of the Christian Bible for her willful and “devilish” behavior. The name was meant as an insult, but Magalie took pride in it. This biblical Magdalene was a close friend of Christ, a man who Magalie learned from a secretly literate house slave was a rebel during his day.

Plantation life was even tougher for her brother then it was for Magalie, as Kojo was subjected to inhumane hardships of field labor. Saint-Domingue was notorious for its brutal treatment of slaves. Few survived more than a few years after arrival. To escape his harsh fate Kojo fled the plantation to join the Maroons, bands of escaped slaves living on the outskirts of the plantations.

Meanwhile a violent rebellion on was brewing in Saint-Domingue in the 1750s, led by a man named François Mackandal. When Mackandal managed to unite the individual bands of Maroons into a unified guerilla army, Kojo returned to recruit his sister into the rebel ranks as a spy. Using her privileged position as a house slave, Magalie fed information to the rebels, spiriting messages out of the big house and spreading information to the rebel network to be delivered to Mackandal and his bands of Maroons. She also supplied them any helpful tidbits she picked up from listening in on her masters’ dinnertime conversation as she served their meals. And every free moment she got away from prying eyes she practiced her combat skills with the other insurgent slaves in an elaborate form of martial arts disguised as a dance, preparing for the time when they would rise up and destroy their cruel masters.

Things went well for her and the rebellion, until one day she was tasked with poisoning Monsieur Segal, a favorite tactic of Mackandal. She failed after a fellow slave ratted on her and was caught. Realizing that Magalie was in league with the Maroons, Monsieur Segal ordered her to be tortured to find out information about the slave rebellion. When an overseer tried to restrain her with shackles, Magalie broke his knee with a kick, slipping from his grasp and escaping from the house.

As her master and the other overseers chased after her she fled into the sugarcane fields where she suddenly came upon the Traveler’s Forest. Though terrified by the sight of the dark, towering trees, the sound of the master and his aides behind her spurred her forward. She ran into the forest and arrived in Sybal Heim in the year 1879, jumping a century forward.

Her first few weeks in the city did not go well. Having arrived from Saint-Domingue, she was first placed in Heiros which Magalie took strong objection to. She had not come to Saint-Domingue by choice. Her home was in Africa and she wanted to live with other Africans, not with people from the strange land she’d been dragged to against her will. She threw such a fuss in her sybal form on her first night that when she applied for a transfer the following morning, Chaska herself delivered it to Colo, eager to be rid of the prickly little terror.

Magalie proved unstable while in sybal form, prone to frequent feral fits as circumstances aroused her anger. Calm one minute, a certain choice of words or bossy tone of phrase would set her raging the next. Too much attention and intervention by aides only made the tantrums worse. Because of her obstinancy and tendency to distance herself from others, Magalie was assigned to Ignatius Aquina an initiation aide who specialized in dealing with sour-tempered sybals with a loose-leashed touch. With his sybal’s power to lure and lead, his means of management was less direct, keeping an eye on her from a distance, using his power to nudge her out of potential confrontations and towards quieter, safer spaces. Under Ignatius’ guidance Magalie managed to cause less trouble, but the girl remained generally unhappy and her sybal prone to fits when things did not go just so.

Though largely sour at her new life in the city, Magalie found a bright spot in the Zenith. The art captivated her, especially the paintings. Taking note of the girl’s interest, Ignatius, a patron of the painter Adele LaFlamme, knowing the woman was looking to take on an apprentice contacted her in hopes of making a match. Hearing Ignatius’ description of the girl and her interests, Adele was keen to meet her and Ignatius arranged a meeting. Though fascinated with the works of the painter she saw hanging in Kardia’s galleries, when introduced to Adele, Magalie was far less pleased by the woman herself. Adele was European. Worst of all French. She insisted she wanted nothing to do with Adele or an apprenticeship and stormed off, leaving Ignatius to apologize.

That was not the end of things, however. Back in Seele several evenings later, Magalie encountered Adèle again, painting on the street corner, surprised to discover the painter living there. The encounter did not go well. Distracted by angry emotions Magalie accidentally tipped Adele’s easel, knocking her work, the canvas landing in the gutter. When Adele retrieved it, the surface of the painting was covered in mud clinging to the canvas. To Magalie’s surprise, Adele did not get angry. Instead, she seemed concerned. Empathetic. Which was not at all what the girl expected. Confused and frustrated, Magalie ran off, finding a quiet place to think and sulk.

Upon hearing what his assigned initiate had done to Adele’s work, Ignatius was horrified. Patron paid painter a call, profusely apologizing for introducing the pair and consequently sparking the incident, but was surprised to find that Adele was not upset. Instead, after showing him the painting, the mud carefully worked into the oils to create a striking impressionist of the sodden streetscape, Adele instead said if there was any chance the girl would be willing to work with her she’d be keen to have her. Truly sorry for what she’d caused, after talking things over with Ignatius, Magalie was stunned to hear that Adele still extended an offer of employment. After careful thought and some encouragement from her aide, Magalie accepted, and though her relationship with her mentor would get off to a rocky start, things were soon headed uphill.

Though at first Magalie viewed the white French woman with lingering bitterness and distrust, the result of Madame Segal’s cruel treatment of her, she found Adèle to be far different. It took time and effort but Adèle’s persistence and empathetic approach gradually won her over. The two of them shared a mutual love of art, and that passion became the central focus of the relationship, with the mentor enthusiastically training her student to become both the best artist and person she could possibly be. And the more Magalie got to know the quirky, opinionated yet amiable Frenchwoman, the more she grew to like her. The relationship continues to have its bumps and the pair are not above butting heads, but Adele's persistence and openess have earned Magalie's trust bit by bit. As time goes on, the pair continue to grow closer, and if you'd ask Magalie to list the people in the city she trusts most, she will not hesitate to name Adele as one of them.

Additional Info:

  Besides Sybalian, Magalie speaks three other languages, her native Ewe language, French (which she learned as a house slave), and Haitian Creole, a pidgin of both French and West African languages.

  Magalie bears a number of scars on her body, including striped scars on her back from where she was whipped as punishment by her masters, and a round brand on her upper chest, the mark of a slave.

  Magalie is relieved to hear from Adèle and Étienne that slavery was abolished in Saint-Domingue by Maximilien Robespierre and the trans-Atlantic slave trade was outlawed by 1808. She often wonders though what fate befell the slave rebellion, Mackandal, and her brother, though, and has spent much of her free time at the Kardia Archive researching what she can to find out.

  Because of her background as a slave, Magalie refers to Adèle as her professeur particulier, her tutor, and not as her master. It’s something Adèle wholeheartedly encourages her young apprentice to do, wanting Magalie to embrace her freedom to the fullest.

  To save on rent costs, Magalie lives with Adèle, mentor and apprentice sharing an apartment in Seele. Because she doesn’t have to pay for Magalie’s room and board, Adèle instead gives the money saved through this arrangement to Magalie as a monthly stipend to spend on whatever she chooses.

  Adèle is Magalie’s savate teacher, and Magalie also knows a little bit of Maroon dance-fighting similar to capoeira. Martial arts makes up part of their daily routine as morning exercises before the work day begins.

  Magalie has a very keen visual memory, and tends to notice and remember large amounts of detail about anything she’s seen. As a painter’s apprentice, this is useful, as her knack for visual thinking has helped her quickly learn the fundamentals of human anatomy.

  Magalie has has lifelong love of art. She loved helping her mother make painted and beaded baskets as a young girl and during her years as a house slave, she was fascinated by the paintings hanging in her former masters’ plantation home though she much prefers the bright, vivid depictions of life in Mademoiselle LaFlamme’s impressionist paintings to the dark and somber baroque portraits owned by the Segals.

  Although her tutor is aware of Magalie’s Insurgent status and her desire to overthrow the Organizer, Adèle is a principled keeper of secrets and frequently covers for her apprentice to make it seem like she is merely a dissatisfied citizen, not one bent on treason.