Plurk: lightbirbs 
Name/Alias: Rowan
Personal Journal: N/A
Email: lightbirbs [at] gmail.com
I am 18+ years old
Do you have other characters in game? Leela of the Sevateem |  
May we post and/or link your application for others to see as an example in the future? Yes

Character Information

Character Name: Dr. Helen Magnus
Canon: Sanctuary
Canon Point: Post-S4 - Sanctuary for None – Part II - With abnormals outed as a reality to the rest of the world, Helen Magnus launches her final plan.  She is coming from the end of the series finale after showing Will the massive underground Sanctuary with all of its new challenges as a new era begins. 
Character Journal:  
Appearance: At five feet nine inches, Helen Magnus seems to be in her late thirties, to early forties, though she is two hundred and seventy four years old.  With long, naturally curly, dark brown hair (which is actually dyed; she used to be blonde) and bright blue eyes, she is extremely attractive.  She's incredibly fit, able to do some serious ass kicking - martial arts, jujitsu,etc - and holds herself with a confidence that comes with five lifetimes of experience.

One
Two
Three
Four


Age: 274
History: Wikia link
Personality: Helen Magnus is a formidable woman, fluent in many languages (Norwegian, Zulu, Italian, French, and Cambodian to name a few), scientist, and a doctor in the Victorian age where women doctors were far and few between.  She is someone who pushes the limits of science and has an incredible curiosity about pretty much any puzzle put in her path.  Helen has a need to see harmony between the human and abnormal world, something that she would give her life to accomplish - and has nearly done so on many occasions.  She's British to the core, clinging to her accent, her use of phrases come from a Victorian age as well as many quirks and habits that have been described as 'not of this century'.  Despite living in the United States for a very long time, she finds comfort in these customs, though she has taken up swearing. Theses mannerisms and attitudes remind her of who she is through the long five lifetimes she has lived as much as anything really does.  Forever the sort of person who refuses to accept a world that denies her progress, Helen stubbornly rams herself through anything and sometimes anyone in her path.  She takes her job as Sanctuary Global Network head extremely seriously, so much so that she takes a vacation for about three or four days every seven years.  She is devoted, sometimes to her own detriment, to her responsibilities and it falls to members of her inner circle to draw her out once more when she pulls away from them and the world.

Helen, as a scientist who holds six degrees from medicine to teratology (it depends on the patient, as she tells Will Zimmerman in the first episode), is fascinated by the abnormal world.  After injecting herself with the Source Blood in Victorian London she is given the gift of longevity, eternal youth, and a higher IQ (one which even exceeded her current high IQ at the time of injection).  After coming into contact with a vast array of abnormals, she used her father's own designs to put in place a system of Sanctuaries, where any abnormal may come to her and her associates for shelter and aid or to come to terms with their own powers. She also helps protect those species that are too harmful or fragile for public life.  With her team, Henry Foss, Will Zimmerman, Kate Freelander, the Big Guy (Bigfoot) and, occasionally Nikola Tesla (and more so by the end of the series), as well as other Sanctuary Heads and teams, she helps keep the peace between worlds as best she can.  

She is usually calm and collected, but in a warm sort of way, though she can be incredibly impatient when things aren't going plan, to the point where she snaps and lashes out in some pretty awful ways.  Case in point, she nearly shot Kate Freelander after Ashley's disappearance when she was taken by the Cabal. Kate said she didn't know where her daughter was and Helen very nearly shot her in the leg.  If it hadn't be for Will, there is a great likelihood she might have killed the woman.  Helen is a chronic micromanager who doesn't do well at all when that control is taken from her and has a deep seated need to be in control of every aspect of her life from her relationships to her work (see Big Bertha/Kali and the plague she nearly unleashed upon the world as two points) and her biggest points of stress remain with her family and John Druitt.  She has shown that she's quite adaptive in dire situations which have nearly resulted in her death, thought out of sheer stubbornness she must be coaxed into not driving herself to death (being cared for, she says, makes her teeth itch), and incredibly resilient as she spent 113 years preparing for the time when they faced an abnormal invasion that showed the world the existence of abnormals world wide.

Secrets and guilt are a heavy weight that she works through, giving little quarter to rest for herself.  She is plagued with guilt over the Ripper affair as Montague John Druitt began murdering prostitutes possibly even before he asked for her hand in marriage, driven insane by an energy entity that had latched onto when he used his own powers of teleportation.  He was her first Sanctuary patient and after she found that he had murdered many women and accused him of it, he went even madder, threatening her life though he was unable to actually bring himself to murder her.  Helen had a daughter with Druitt, who she preserved as an embryo, until she could no longer stand the loneliness of a life by herself.  Ashley stood by her mother for many years, even after she found out who her father was, until she was turned into a powerful weapon for the Cabal, an organization that opposed the Sanctuary.  At the last moment, she was able to find herself, save her mother and her Sanctuary.  This loss hit Helen hard to the point where she insisted her daughter was trapped in the electromagnetic shield that protected them from John and had to lean on her protege, Dr. Will Zimmerman, to be her emotional and sometimes moral compass when she grew too lost.  That is something he continues to be so that she doesn't completely go off the rails in situations like her daughter's death, or deciding how to handle a new abnormal.  She needs that, shall we say, human touch.  Longevity is as much a curse as a gift.  Without the proteges she has trained in the years that she has been serving as the head of the Sanctuary Network, she might have lost her humanity altogether.  

In the case of protecting a powerful abnormal named Big Bertha (or Kali), she told the entire heads of the other sanctuaries across the globe that she had disposed of the giant spider like creature only to have that lie exposed many years later when control of the creature fell into the wrong hands.  Four times during the series she is stripped of her powers as the leader of the Sanctuary.  Once for Kali, reinstated when she proved that with the help of Will, keeping her alive was for the good of the world as she had powerful ties to the planet itself and her loss would result in global destruction, once when she used a red listed (highly dangerous) abnormal to induce a paranoid/highly confused state, fake brain scans, the 'death' of her best friend (Biggie/Bigfoot), in order to catch a telepathic spy who intended to steal Kali, reinstated after the capture of said spy, and another by the government after an incursion by Hollow Earth (see History link) abnormals that dissolved the Surface Network itself and gave way to the new Hollow Earth Sanctuary/Sanctuaries being built. In effect, she was reinstated and regrouped with the other major sanctuaries worldwide below the surface.

There is a part of her that longs for death, for a way that will let her live a normal lifespace.  It's that very need, in the months following her daughter's death that brought her to a Mayan tomb, and nearly unleashed a zombie-like plague that would have made Humans very much extinct.  Her arrogance and desperation, her blindness, selfishness, and secret keeping plunged the world into as small as a 1% and dwindling population.  In the end, she found that that reality was only an offshoot, a might have been had she taken a container out of the tomb or opened it -- Helen had been patient zero and due to the Source Blood within her, simply became a carrier and remained unaffected.   

In all of these cases, she has never once blamed someone else for what she has done, and takes full responsibility for any ill that comes of it - Kali's tidal wave killed a great many people, almost her own, for example.  The zombie-like plague would have killed the whole world.  Only when she acknowledged that this action would come about by her hand was she able to exit the strange alternate reality the tomb's guardian had let her experience.  She may be ambitious, thirsty for knowledge, sometimes horrified by her longevity, and she makes mistakes, sometimes horrible ones, but she owns her mistakes.

To touch more upon secrets, in her 113 years of seclusion after time traveling to stop Adam Worth (known to the present day as Jekyll and Hyde) from altering the past by curing his daughter of a rare form of leukemia (an act that could change the timeline forever).  After this, not only did she have to avoid herself and most of the people she cares for, she had to help coordinate the building of a massive underground Sanctuary in Hollow Earth that would be able to hold the entire surface world's population of abnormals (see above). Sometimes, she even pretended to be herself, dining with Nikola Tesla, getting him to help with operations and discoveries meant to get her ahead of the curve and work with the Hollow Earth abnormals and the governing Praxian officials.  There are so many secrets to Helen, some are good secrets, and some are life altering, dangerous, and reckless things.

By far, her strangest relationships are to the men who, with her, took the Source Blood.  The Five (Helen, John Druitt - Jack the Ripper, James Watson - Sherlock Holmes, Nikola Tesla - a genius, inventor, and vampire with electricity control, and Nigel Griffin - The Invisible Man), as they called themselves, were as much part of her as her own blood related family.

John and Helen have a long past, and there will always be some part of her that loves the man he used to be.  It's deep, complex, and utterly tragic.  At one point, when he compels her to kill him, she shocks him back to life.  Helen can't bear to let go of any of them, not even the man who would dare to hurt her or her daughter in the beginning of the series, a man who has killed thousands.  She loves him and has never truly lost faith or hope that one day he will be cured.  In the end, she loses him after he reveals he betrayed everything so that adam Worth would let him go back in time with him in order to make sure Helen never took the Source Blood so that he could have her to himself as he wished.  This wounds Helen deeply, once again hitting her heart hard.  After she explains that his changing the past to bed her in a different time isn't love at all, he finally redeems himself at least as much as possible, to allow her to go after Worth.

Nigel Griffin and Helen had a somewhat brotherly relationship, playful, filled with jokes and laughter.  He was the first loss the Five suffered, having gone through such events as World War II with them and helping the Allies turn the tide against Nazi Germany.  He lived a long time, long enough to have a daughter and a granddaughter who helped instrumentally in finding a cure for a frightening and deadly abnormal disease.  

James Watson was and will always be Helen's best friend, a former lover, and a man she has the utmost respect for as a scientist and as a man.  He was a knight in shining armor, a quick wit matched to her own, and much like Will Zimmerman, her friend and protege, he was a great moral and emotional compass.  He was the head of the UK Sanctuary until his death shortly after obtaining the last of Source Blood that would enable them to find a cure for a terrible abnormal disease.  His loss is an incredible strain to bear, and was the second of the Five to die.  There is and never will be a moment that goes by when she will long to see the face of her dearest friend.  As with Helen, their relationship consisted of many, many layers as time reforged them.

Not the least of her friends and companions is Nikola Tesla, the man who thrust himself upon the world as the Master of Electricity and radio waves.  It goes without saying that Nikola is an incredibly brilliant inventor with a magnetic presence, and whose mind Helen can keep up with at any given moment.  They are friendly rivals who constantly challenge each other no matter when they meet up in two years or sixty.  There has always been a pull between them, even when he was a self-absorbed, obnoxious ass intent upon resurrecting his vampire species. Without him in her life to truly understand her and make her laugh, it would be too long a life to live.  Nikola's the last tie to a world she's outlived and as she comes to see in the last episode of the series, he'll be the last remaining of the Five to live on, immortal as a vampire, with her.  Even Will is mortal.  Even if he's sometimes hell bent on world domination and needs someone to slap him to his senses, he truly loves her and she, which honestly surprises herself, loves him.  He has stood the test of time, knows her mind as she knows him, and the way they challenge each other keeps them both alive.

Helen has buried many lovers over the years, many friends and family from her dear friend Bigfoot to the rest of the Five save Nikola.  Each loss tears at a little piece of her soul and deep beneath her many layers, the many faces she puts up, she is incredibly lonely even when she surrounds herself with a new addition to her family.  Helen is the mother figure to her Sanctuary, fierce, loyal to a fault, and ready to fight at the cost of her own health and safety for any one of them.

Her relationships to any of the these men, and indeed that to her protege, forensic psychiatrist, Will Zimmerman is incredibly multilayered, built on trust, secrets, lies, good-will, ambition, arrogance, but above all faith in their better natures - in her own better nature.  Helen feels deeply about those she does let into her life, who she really lets in.  James, Nikola, and Will have been the closest, and she had thought John as well. It can be said that she is a massive hypocrite, since she has, many times, called behaviors in others that she exhibits herself into question.  As expected, five lifetimes of existence makes her many layered, and incredibly complex, and jaded, but her spirit of adventure and the joy of discovery in many disciplines always seems to win out in the end.  That and her humanity, which she clings to like her cups of tea, her sometimes antiquated use of the Queen's English, and the ties of family that are nurtured in the mother/son relationship she has with her adopted son Henry Foss, and the mentor/protege relationship she has with Will.


Powers/Special Abilities: Longevity, eternal youth, Higher IQ from an injection of pure, untainted Sanguine Vampiris blood (Source Blood)
River Power: Shifter; White pigeon/Black Fox

Reason for Character Choice: Helen is exactly the type of character who appeals to me; brave, loyal, a headstrong, someone who ever ever gives up, who doesn't let go easily.  She's complex and that makes her incredibly fun to play.


Additional Information: N/A


Writing Samples

First-Person Transmission Sample: 

Bloody hell, if I'd wanted go for a swim, I wouldn't have picked a river. [ Shaking off excess water from her jacket, before attempting to wring out her hair, she takes a moment to look around.]  As much as I'd like to say this is incredibly ridiculous, I suppose I've been through worse.  Henry, Will?  I don't suppose you're monitoring this frequency?  [She closes her eyes for a moment and there's the faintest of smiles.]  Nikola?  I'd not be surprised if you were, either.

[She waits for a moment longer and then looks settled, determined.]

Well, I suppose to the Residences it is.  At the very least, this will be interesting. 

Third-Person Log Sample:

 Magnus stood, bracing herself against the night air, feeling it catch her hair as she overlooked the city lights she should have known well.  There were differences, of course, subtle but there, that said this was a wholly different universe than the one she had left.  No Sanctuary, really, no network.  None of her family were here, though it seemed a strong possibility that they could arrive the same way she did.  Her fingers closed around her tea cup and she shook her head at it all.

Scientifically, this was absolutely fascinating.  Alternative dimensions, other universes with very different rules, powers, lives.  It held her attention far more than the fact that she was alone.  Burying herself into research was the best she could do, and it worked for the most part.  Books and computers, the daily routine of martial arts to help her with frustration, tea - so much tea.  There would be other distractions in a life that had always been full of them.  Perhaps she had no money in this time, not yet, but she would do what she must, carve her way into the world as she had done once upon a time.  Like her father had told her long, long ago, she had to have faith, to keep it alive.

Setting her tea down, she opened a journal and began writing:

Day One

Today, this world became infinitely more complex as it seems I have arrived, through no means I can interpret, in an alternate universe.  My friends and family are nowhere to be found, though I cannot give up hope that I may see them once again.  It is a different adventure, one I'm sure Nikola, James, John, and Nigel, would find endlessly fascinating.  So far, I have learned that the abnormals from this world are called the Evolved, and those who come from the river are Drifters.  There is much about this that is familiar.

Perhaps there is need for a Sanctuary in this place after all.

I suppose it's time to begin my work anew.