Morgan Nowicki, wielder of Sacred Light

[Devilpants]

Player Nickname: Devilpants

Name: Morgan Nowicki
Codename: -
Date of Birth: Celebrated on October 30, 2006; real birthdate unknown

Height: 5'10", but her slouch makes her seem shorter
Weight: 130 lbs
Hair Color: Black
Eye Color: Brown
Place of Origin: Minneapolis, Minnesota, US
Nationality/Race: white, unknown heritage
Classification/Origin of Powers: Mutant

Status: Gother than you
Occupation: Student

Personality Profile:
Morgan tries her hardest to fulfill the goth stereotype of being stoic and unfeeling, but fails miserably. She is a total open book and it is extremely easy to tell if she’s lying, excited, or disappointed. Despite her outward appearance, she’s friendly and approachable and tries to keep a positive attitude.

Morgan also has very narrow interests: she only cares about anime, video games (especially visual novels and otome games), internet microcelebrities (specifically vtubers and vtuber drama), and metal music. She lacks much knowledge outside of those interests and finds pretending to be interested difficult.

Morgan also suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder due to the attack on the Nowicki Institute. She suffers from frequent nightmares about the attack and has difficulty falling asleep and staying asleep even without nightmares, she skips meals or doesn’t eat as much as she should, is easily startled by loud noises, and suffers anxiety and panic attacks.

Physical Description:
Morgan is an entity of pure lank. She’s tall and scrawny with a permanent slouch, and she always looks tired. She dresses in a style that’s a mix of goth and techwear, but in cold weather tends to just wear a black hoodie and black pants with a pleated skirt over top. Morgan is also never without makeup, favouring exaggerated black eyeliner in a wingtip and black lipstick. She has naturally jet black hair that has never been touched by dye, which she takes meticulously good care of and usually wears long and straight with no bangs.

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General Power Information: Sacred Light: Morgan is a conduit for a mysterious energy that can be used to both heal and harm. Very little is known about the true nature of this power, but there are similar manifestations from both myth and history.

Ability One:
Healing Light: Morgan can channel sacred light to bolster a living creature’s life force, healing their wounds. This ability is powerful enough that it can even reattach severed limbs, but it cannot regrow them. It’s extremely useful for immediately stabilizing people who are bleeding out. Morgan must be touching the target to use it, and she can use it on herself.

Minor and surface wounds, such as scrapes, shallow cuts, minor bruises, and first-degree burns can be healed in mere seconds and with minimal effort. Moderate or deeper wounds, such as deep cuts, hairline fractures, more serious bruises, and second degree burns – or several minor wounds at once – can take several minutes to heal, while anything worse (such as major fractures, third-degree burns, or several moderate wounds at once) can take even longer, depending on severity.

In addition to being channeled directly into a single target, Morgan can emanate healing light in a 3-4 meter radius to slowly heal everyone around her. It’s much weaker than direct single-target channeling, but can heal multiple people at once and also takes less effort.

Ability Two:
Searing Light: Aside from healing, Sacred Light can also be channeled for destructive purposes. In this form, Morgan can project it from her hands or eyes as rays, with a range limited only by sight range. These rays assault their target with light and heat and act similarly (but not identically) to a high-powered laser by explosively evaporating the surface of whatever it touches, inflicting damage both with burns and explosive force.

Searing Light can be directed as a single strong pulse, or sustained to allow it to burn into and through objects. It can also be diffused over a wider area, or multiple rays fired at once in a shotgun-like cluster, both at reduced efficacy.

Being a product of holy power, Searing Light doesn’t follow the same physical laws as lasers or conventional directed energy weapons. Searing Light assaults the target on both a spiritual level and a molecular level, inflicting excrutiating pain on those with evil hearts while also overloading and destroying the matter comprising their body, allowing it to pierce even heat-resistant defenses and reflective surfaces. A mirror provides no defense against Searing Light.

Drawbacks & Weaknesses:
Endless Energy, Mortal Body: While the source of this energy is unlimited, Morgan’s body can only handle so much of it before she becomes exhausted. This applies to both long-term channeling and overall intensity. Long-term, repeated use of this power is mentally taxing, which causes fatigue, tremors, and irritability, and eventually hypoglycemia.

Holy Nature: This energy is holy by its very nature and is therefore anathema to many creatures of the night or ontologically evil origin, such as fiends and undead. This power cannot be used to heal them, and attempting to do so might cause harm instead, depending on their nature. For example, vampires are harmed by Healing Light as if it were sunlight.

Impossible to Conceal: Because her power generates light, it’s impossible to conceal its use in any meaningful way.

Skills:
Close Quarters Combat: In her time at the Nowicki Institute, Morgan learned a military-inspired fighting style that emphasizes practicality and efficiency over style. She compensates for her low strength with her teenage reflexes and her skill in joint locks and redirecting momentum, and she’s very skilled with staffs.

Combat Medic: Morgan supplements her healing power with medical skill, specifically battlefield medicine and first aid. Once her healing powers were discovered, Jacek Nowicki ensured that conventional medicine would be a focus of study for Morgan, and she continues to pursue this field. Her knowledge in this field greatly enhances her ability to treat injuries both during and after combat.

Cooking: Morgan is a skilled cook with a taste for spicy food. She has a knack for barbecue and a deep understanding of how to bring out the best flavours in meat.

General Smarts: Morgan’s rigorous education at the Nowicki Institute has put her ahead of the curve compared to other students her age, especially in maths and sciences.

Video Games: Morgan is absurdly good at video games, able to pick up a controller and learn a game in no time flat. Her aim and reflexes are good enough that in an FPS, she’s about equal with a controller to a skilled player with a keyboard and mouse.

Weeb Japanese: Morgan has been studying Japanese since she was 12 and is part of an anime fansub and scanlation group. Though she’s capable of conversational Japanese, she talks like an anime character, which can be off-putting to native speakers. Aside from that, the only other language she speaks and writes is English.

Background:
Morgan was found abandoned as a baby in 2006 on the doorsteps of the Nowicki Institute for Gifted Children, a school for mutants in Minneapolis founded in the late 1990s by Jacek Nowicki, philanthropist and father of three mutants. Jacek formally adopted Morgan and raised her as one of his own children, and she spent her life at the school, learning everything she would need to survive as a mutant in a world that hates her. There, she formed lasting bonds with the faculty and other students, growing up alongside her found family. She has no interest in finding her birth family; the only thing they ever gave her was a name.

In August of 2022, the Nowicki Institute was destroyed by a coordinated attack from the powerful enemies that Nowicki and his team had made over the past two decades. Jacek and most of his team were killed and only a handful of students survived the attack. The survivors scattered to different parts of the country, many changed their names, and some hung up their masks and capes for good, but others are still seeking revenge for this vicious attack.

While some relocated to mutant schools in Canada or on the west coast, Morgan gradually made her way to Salem, spending what little of her inheritance from Jacek remained to get there after bouncing between hotels and the couches of sympathetic friends and acquaintances. There, she’d start her entire life over again.

Criminal Record:
None.

Quirks, Extras, Random Character Facts:
Morgan's two best friends in Cobalt are Cayenne (a half-Japanese girl with oni heritage, granting her superhuman strength and durability, and the ability to heal herself by eating meat or drinking blood), and Mia (a psychic skilled at telekinesis who is also learning how to control her biology).

Morgan is trans.