Deryk
Human Planeswalker

Backstory: Well, he doesn't really know. He woke up on an unnamed plane with a migraine to split his skull and no memories beyond a searing, stabbing pain all over his body, the feeling of being tied down, a tearing noise, and an impossible color(i.e. his first planeswalk). He had nothing beyond a loose, gray tunic belted around his waist, not even his name. For some reason, though, he knew things-how to speak, how to read and write a language he hasn't found anywhere he's visited, basically all the basic functions. He named himself after he was almost eaten by some sort of plains hunting cat and managed to blast it in the face with lightning. “Deryk” roughly translates to “shock” (in the electrical sense, but it can mean the “surprise” sense though that’s rarer) in the language that he knows. He now travels the Multiverse, attempting to learn his history and whatever else he can along the way. Currently, he’s living on Jakkard trying to reverse engineer the trains after one nearly ran him over..

Physical Description: Deryk stands at 6'1", and appears to be somewhere between twenty and 25. His eyes are a light grey, but the whites turn blue when he gets seriously pissed off. His skin is pale enough that it sometimes worries people, even though he doesn't burn so much as tan hard in the beating sun. His eyebrows are especially thin due to him accidentally shocking himself a few too many times, so he perpetually looks a little startled unless he's really angry. He has a rather scraggly, unkempt proto-beard that he shaves only when he remembers to and has a razor and mirror, which isn't often enough to grow anything out, but not often enough to keep him clean. His hair is black and has a few variable white streaks where the melanin was burnt out by accidental electricity, and a face that looks like someone told him to "sharpen up" and he took it just a little too literally. He's not terribly athletic, but he's remarkably skinny. I don't mean lean or wiry-those imply whipcord muscle. I mean skinny. Guy's a beanpole, enough that he stands out in a crowd. Typically, he wears some sort of travelling cloak over loose, free clothing-he doesn't dress for pretty, he dresses for effective. Don't brush up against him when he's dry, as he'll almost always give you an accidental static shock.

Personality: Deryk is insatiably curious. It started with wanting to know his history, but it evolved from there into almost wanting to build a new history for himself. Due to spending rather a long time alone on that unnamed plane before working up the courage to tear reality open at the seams and leap through, he’s a bit crazy. When confronted with a situation, he lists off what he knows in his head, comes up with a hypothesis, and tests it out. If it doesn't work, he adds what doesn't work to what he knows and tries again later. As you can imagine, this tends not to work too well for dealing with people. However, it's the only method he knows-he lost the others along with his memory. He’s also a bit short-tempered, and the sentence “Fact: This guy is an ****” tends to come up in his mental checklist a lot. He has a weakness for wisecracks; unfortunately, he tends to be particularly bad at making them.

Abilities: Deryk is not so much a “sparkmage” as a “lightning-mage.” His powers are derived from lightning in storm clouds, and if there were ever such a thing as a high-frame video camera in the M:EM, one could see that his own electrical blasts are like lightning, with a leader and then a return strike. With practice, he’s developed the ability to shape his raw bolts into ball lightning, “sprites,” and other forms that we know. What separates him from a particularly skilled sparkmage, however, is the sources he draws from. Almost all mages draw from lands. Deryk draws from the sky. Where most mages pull on their memories of the lands they have visited, Deryk draws on his memory of storms that have passed. He pulls energy from the land’s “memory” of a dazzling lightning strike, a time when ball lightning frolicked in the forest, a furious thundering hurricane ripping the sea to spray. This shows up in his magic-his spells look more natural, as if the sky decided to come down to him, rather than a single blast of electricity. (In reality, he draws from lands where lightning has struck, and takes energy from the patterns formed by lightning in the earth. However, to focus himself, he uses storms. So don't tell him. No, really, don't.)

Used Spells:
Lightning Strike
Counterflux
Shock
Negate
Lightning Storm
Brainstorm
Cyclonic Rift
Electrolyze

EDIT: Fixed his association with Ravinica and his physical description.

THINGS I LIKE:

The aesthetic of his spells is great; I like how you've described them. The notion of pulling mana from the skies is... interesting. I'm not sure whether it works (paging Barinellos, Barinellos come in!) but it intrigues me.

I like linking him to elemental power. I tentatively like his jerkass personality though I think that'll be somewhat dependent on application--I'd like to see how he interacts with others in a narrative. And I like the amnesia plot. Despite it being an old (overused?) device, we've only used it with one other character in all of M:EM.

WHAT NEEDS WORK:

His description seems a little bit generic. Pale skinny dude with dark hair? MMMmmmeh. I dunno, the Multiverse is a bit overstocked with pale dark haired skinny cismen basically. I dig the "sharpen up" description though! That's fun. I just think you could play around with his appearance a bit more, make him a little more unique looking.

I also think the whole "knowledge seeking" thing is almost a little too obvious. Like yeah I get that he's blue but you're already conveying blue/red with the elemental force thing and with the "seeking knowledge of his past" thing. I'm just not sure having him be a scientist and artificer in addition to that is honestly very compelling. You have such an interesting thing with the storm and sky motif... does he also need to be interested in trains?

Which leads logically to:

WHAT I DON'T LIKE

I don't dig how close this character is to Ral Zarek. He's got lightning magic, he's got an interest in artifice and scientific experimentation, he's a skinny dark haired white cisman, he's kind of a tool, and he's associated with the Izzet.

I feel strongly that like half of that stuff should be changed to make him less closely associated with Ral Zarek. In particular, there's loads of planes to choose from that aren't Ravnica, and there's a lot of cool stuff you could do with this character's sky/lightning thing that don't require him to be an experimenter like Zarek.

On the whole, I think you've got a promising start here, he's just cleaving too close to canon characters for comfort. If you can differentiate this character a bit more and pull out what makes him unique, I think he'll be a strong contender for inclusion.

Thanks for the criticism! But I think you missed a few things...

-He's not really a tool, he's just a little...autistic? He's fully grown but has no memories of interacting with anyone. He gets, barely, the basic requirements like "wear clothes" and "don't act completely on base impulses," but the rest he has to relearn, and he's not even close to done with that.

-He isn't really curious about artifice. He just walked to Jakkard by sheer luck, found this weird ladder on the ground, almost got run over by a train, and got a little curious about how those metal monstrosities worked.

-He visited Ravinica because he heard of a mind mage called Jace who he hoped could help him. He walked in, got caught in a Rakdos "street performance," accidentally set a building on fire while spraying lightning, got reported to the Boros/Azorius for arson, and walked out before he got caught. He barely spent a day there.

-I came up with the experimental thing from how I think. I have Aspergers(yes it is diagnosed by a licensed psychologist and not just me), and tried to write his thought patterns like that-logically oriented.

-The physical shape...okay, that I need to fix. T.T

Technically, no.
Aesthetically, yes.

The sky doesn't (really) generate mana, but he can remember lands during storms if that helps his bonding process.


This is very good advice.
I, particularly, think you need to disentangle him from Ravnica, because that place is just overloaded on so many levels, both canon and EM. I know that might be a bummer, but... I don't know how much the Jace name drop really benefits him in the first place.

Okay, I know when I'm beat. It just seemed to me like he'd be hunting any way to get his mind back, and when he heard of a mage whose title was "the Mind Sculptor," he'd see two possibilities. One, that Jace did that to him, which he dismissed as unlikely (why would Jace care?). Two, Jace could help him out. This was his intent. It kinda failed miserably, but even so.

And also, about the memory cliché? It was inflicted on him.

Actually, we might have another 'walker already in our archives that might be of interest to him. In fact, they might be able to help each other out...

And as far as sources of ubw dictatorships go we've potentially got you covered there as well.

I worry a bit about the self-insert nature of this character. Self insert characters tend to be preeeetty hard to do well.

I dig the backstory more and more though, and his mindset does make a bit more sense to me now, although I think it could use some work.

I'm fine with the memory thing. Like Keeper said, we see it a lot throughout literature, but not a ton here, and Magic is a setting that should be able to produce that effect with relative ease.

As for the mana from the skies, I would recommend that his mana doesn't "actually" come from the skies, but perhaps that he believes it does. It will serve as a sort of anchor or focal point for the mana, rather than its actual source. It's a subtle difference, but an important one.

One fairly simple reason to avoid the Jace angle is just because he's a canon character. Now, I know you weren't planning to have Deryk actually interact with Jace, but it's usually best, in my experience, to not tie our characters with canon characters. That said, you have a ton of options for possible "cures" to Deryk's memory problems that you can really invent as you go. I like the angle, but I don't think you need Jace for it.

Okay, I'll go ahead and skip the Jace angle-Deryk's never heard of him now. And about the sky thing, it's actually plot-important to him; when he walks the first time and gets slung out on a random plane, he finds himself on a wide-open field-a plains, one might say. Luckily for him, he can generate a little electricity on his own-low voltage, but high current, meaning that the electricity is only powerful enough to sting. But when a hunting cat is biting you, a shock to the tongue is not what it's expecting. Repeated shocks, even less so. When a thunderstorm hits, he's able to draw enough energy from it(since he has no mana bonds to islands/mountains after his memory wipe) that he can utilize his real lightning for hunting and planeswalking. I could make a little headcanon that fulgurites are literal mana rocks that generate mana? (Look up fulgurites if you don't know what they are. They're pretty cool, actually.) But otherwise, I don't know how he'd get any mana to blast lightning and planeswalk with.

If he has enough to shock then he has enough to lightning bolt.
They sky really doesn't make mana. I mean, this is just basic rules of the multiverse, you can't really bend these. If he has some sort of artifact on him, then it is a convenient work around. (and yes, I know what fulgerite is)

It's not actually Shock. Compare it to a regular person with a gun. Like you said, if you have one bullet or two, you can still shoot. Deryk didn't even have one bullet, he was just pistol whipping.

The mana rock workaround seems viable though honestly he could just instinctively draw mana from the surrounding area potentially without it coming off as too weird, in my opinion.

Kinda would love to see him show up on Valjan...

Valjan? Hmm...*searches the wiki*
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OH DEAR GOD THE OBSIDIAN GOLEMS. That would be awesome. A guy with electric powers in a "civilization" of electromagnetic golems. I can't tell if he'd rule them or get beaten to a bloody pulp by them. Either way, it could be entertaining. On the other hand, the "drawing mana" works, and then he could be messing with fulgurites on Jakkard and seeing how it works out.

You should check out To Call the World to Heel, which features that setting on Valjan and also is just an all around entertaining story written by a rather attractive author

Wow. Much modest. Very humble. Wow. (okay, I'm done.)

Really good story, but I don't think he'll fit in there somehow. He doesn't seem to "go" on a world that resembles the roil except a little more orderly.