Name: Josef Mas Gender: Male Age: 29 Personality: Josef Mas wants world peace. He hates the terrible state of the world at the end of the last thirty years or so, the state of his Fatherland especially. Like many of his countrymen, Josef has a strong desire to change things for the better. Rather than getting involved directly in the politics and paramilitary violence gripping Germany, he feels he's risen above it to take a gamble on a solution to everyone's problems - the Holy Grail.
Josef Mas is a suave, charming, and kind person on the surface and, indeed, deep down too. He genuinely wants to help people, and what people often assume is a gentlemanly front is in fact completely honest, despite his profession as a spy. However, as honest as he is about wanting to help people, it is still a mask for the lengths to which he'll go to do that. He's made backroom deals with some very dangerous people in his home country, and is playing a delicate balancing act between his position in the office of Reichspräsident Paul von Hindenburg and his connections to the NSDAP and their occult allies in the Thule Society. He can play the game of intrigue, and play it well, and is not above lying, stealing, murder, or serious property damage for his goal. After all, he's trying to save the world.
Josef is cynical about the state of the planet, which is why he's looking for divine (or close enough) intervention to fix it. This is due to his experiences in childhood and young adulthood, and his political savvy - he anticipates another destructive war within the next five years, either Germany tearing itself to shreds or something rose - unless something drastic happens. Unable to put his faith in the mankind of the present, he manipulated his way into the Grail War as a last resort.
Josef is cultured and an avid reader and viewer of theater, despite his peasant upbringing - being a spy pays well, and he likes to keep his mind sharp with art while he's not on duty. He's also a particular fan of the philosophy of Nietzche, since the idea of a man who goes outside conventional morality for the necessity of improving humanity appeals to him. He's not a big fan of people who misappropriate or misquote him (or any philosopher), which is the one thing his employers do that causes him to get genuinely irritated (he'll freely admit that Wagner was an anti-Semitic bastard, though, they got that one right.) Josef has several vices besides his for-the-greater-good ruthlessness, most notably an addiction to tobacco in the form of cheap cigarettes and alcohol in whatever form he can get it in, though he has a taste for the finer hard liquors specifically.
Backstory: Born in 1901, Josef Mas grew up as a patriotic and hardworking citizen of the German Reich, in the countryside outside the coal mining town of SaarbrĂĽcken. His parents brought him up to help around the house, and taught him the basics of magecraft - this is how you fix things around the house, this is how you stop bleeding without a bandage, this is why you shouldn't do this in front of Father Karl, these are the people to avoid should you ever go into the big city...
The first time Josef killed anyone was in 1918. He shot two American soldiers who'd gotten lost in the wrong border town dead with his father's hunting rifle. Josef's father and older brother had both been conscripted to fight in the Great War in 1916, and both died shortly thereafter in separate, nameless battles, leaving Josef to protect his home and his mother. Though no one in Germany was going to prosecute Josef for killing two uniformed enemy soldiers, he and his mother fled to Bavaria anyway, ahead of the armistice and the de facto annexation of his hometown by France.
In Germany's southeast, Josef fell on hard times along with the rest of his country. Suffering the consequences of losing a world war, Germany plunged into poverty and upheaval, which in Bavaria primarily meant violent brown-shirted revolutionaries fighting violent red-shirted revolutionaries. After ensuring his mother was at least reasonably able to protect herself, Josef availed himself of the closest thing to a steady job at the time, running and swapping information between the Weimar Republic's government and one of the revolutionary parties, gaining contacts in each and respect for his (secretly magically-enhanced) information gathering capabilities. His talent, intelligence, and ruthless willingness to do anything for the sake of a mission drew the attention of two distinct parties for whom he worked as a double agent - the office of President von Hindenburg, and the splinter group of mages supporting the right-wing parties called the Thule Society.
The gentlemen of that Society charged the fledgling but worldly mage with a task - to go to America and seek victory in the Holy Grail War, granting them the power to put the whole world under the protection of forward-thinking mages. Josef agreed, though he privately defines "forward-thinking mages" as "myself", and the Society granted him materiel, information, and supplies for the mystical side of the Grail War, most importantly a shard of stone from Rome's original wall, covered in unidentified blood. After that, it was hardly a trick to convince the President's office to send him to investigate a strange convergence of British and American interests in an out-of-the-way town in Maine, and supply him with a few weapons, mundane supplies, a cover identity, and a crate of smuggled brandy. Hey, if you're going to kill people in a foreign country, you might as well break a few more laws while you're at it. Josef thus arrives for the War prepared to fight and answering in theory to two masters, both of whom he's ignoring for his own agenda. And booze. He'd kill himself if he had to fight in a dry country.
Degree of magical family heritage: Below average. Josef's family are magical nobodies, with no Crest to speak of and only a bit of antiquated oral-tradition magical knowledge. He's mostly self-educated. Competence as a magus: Weak but skilled. He prefers to and indeed has to use magic smarter, not harder. When you lack the magic circuit capacity to do more than give someone the sniffles without using an eight hour ritual, you learn to use magic to support your other strengths, like gun- and knife-fighting. He is also a quick study, able to easily learn or improvise rituals to channel mana over time and make up for his lack of ability to focus it immediately.
Bonus Element: Blood. Josef is talented at transfiguring and altering blood, and can gain a lot of efficiency in spellcasting by using blood (his own, or others') as the mana storage/transference component. His specialization means that his magic is much weaker at affecting gaseous matter or energy than it is at altering metals or liquids (the more it has in common with blood chemically, the better he can affect it.) Mana Animal: Hawk.
Master of Rider
Gender: Male
Age: 29
Personality: Josef Mas wants world peace. He hates the terrible state of the world at the end of the last thirty years or so, the state of his Fatherland especially. Like many of his countrymen, Josef has a strong desire to change things for the better. Rather than getting involved directly in the politics and paramilitary violence gripping Germany, he feels he's risen above it to take a gamble on a solution to everyone's problems - the Holy Grail.
Josef Mas is a suave, charming, and kind person on the surface and, indeed, deep down too. He genuinely wants to help people, and what people often assume is a gentlemanly front is in fact completely honest, despite his profession as a spy. However, as honest as he is about wanting to help people, it is still a mask for the lengths to which he'll go to do that. He's made backroom deals with some very dangerous people in his home country, and is playing a delicate balancing act between his position in the office of Reichspräsident Paul von Hindenburg and his connections to the NSDAP and their occult allies in the Thule Society. He can play the game of intrigue, and play it well, and is not above lying, stealing, murder, or serious property damage for his goal. After all, he's trying to save the world.
Josef is cynical about the state of the planet, which is why he's looking for divine (or close enough) intervention to fix it. This is due to his experiences in childhood and young adulthood, and his political savvy - he anticipates another destructive war within the next five years, either Germany tearing itself to shreds or something rose - unless something drastic happens. Unable to put his faith in the mankind of the present, he manipulated his way into the Grail War as a last resort.
Josef is cultured and an avid reader and viewer of theater, despite his peasant upbringing - being a spy pays well, and he likes to keep his mind sharp with art while he's not on duty. He's also a particular fan of the philosophy of Nietzche, since the idea of a man who goes outside conventional morality for the necessity of improving humanity appeals to him. He's not a big fan of people who misappropriate or misquote him (or any philosopher), which is the one thing his employers do that causes him to get genuinely irritated (he'll freely admit that Wagner was an anti-Semitic bastard, though, they got that one right.) Josef has several vices besides his for-the-greater-good ruthlessness, most notably an addiction to tobacco in the form of cheap cigarettes and alcohol in whatever form he can get it in, though he has a taste for the finer hard liquors specifically.
Backstory: Born in 1901, Josef Mas grew up as a patriotic and hardworking citizen of the German Reich, in the countryside outside the coal mining town of SaarbrĂĽcken. His parents brought him up to help around the house, and taught him the basics of magecraft - this is how you fix things around the house, this is how you stop bleeding without a bandage, this is why you shouldn't do this in front of Father Karl, these are the people to avoid should you ever go into the big city...
The first time Josef killed anyone was in 1918. He shot two American soldiers who'd gotten lost in the wrong border town dead with his father's hunting rifle. Josef's father and older brother had both been conscripted to fight in the Great War in 1916, and both died shortly thereafter in separate, nameless battles, leaving Josef to protect his home and his mother. Though no one in Germany was going to prosecute Josef for killing two uniformed enemy soldiers, he and his mother fled to Bavaria anyway, ahead of the armistice and the de facto annexation of his hometown by France.
In Germany's southeast, Josef fell on hard times along with the rest of his country. Suffering the consequences of losing a world war, Germany plunged into poverty and upheaval, which in Bavaria primarily meant violent brown-shirted revolutionaries fighting violent red-shirted revolutionaries. After ensuring his mother was at least reasonably able to protect herself, Josef availed himself of the closest thing to a steady job at the time, running and swapping information between the Weimar Republic's government and one of the revolutionary parties, gaining contacts in each and respect for his (secretly magically-enhanced) information gathering capabilities. His talent, intelligence, and ruthless willingness to do anything for the sake of a mission drew the attention of two distinct parties for whom he worked as a double agent - the office of President von Hindenburg, and the splinter group of mages supporting the right-wing parties called the Thule Society.
The gentlemen of that Society charged the fledgling but worldly mage with a task - to go to America and seek victory in the Holy Grail War, granting them the power to put the whole world under the protection of forward-thinking mages. Josef agreed, though he privately defines "forward-thinking mages" as "myself", and the Society granted him materiel, information, and supplies for the mystical side of the Grail War, most importantly a shard of stone from Rome's original wall, covered in unidentified blood. After that, it was hardly a trick to convince the President's office to send him to investigate a strange convergence of British and American interests in an out-of-the-way town in Maine, and supply him with a few weapons, mundane supplies, a cover identity, and a crate of smuggled brandy. Hey, if you're going to kill people in a foreign country, you might as well break a few more laws while you're at it. Josef thus arrives for the War prepared to fight and answering in theory to two masters, both of whom he's ignoring for his own agenda. And booze. He'd kill himself if he had to fight in a dry country.
Degree of magical family heritage: Below average. Josef's family are magical nobodies, with no Crest to speak of and only a bit of antiquated oral-tradition magical knowledge. He's mostly self-educated.
Competence as a magus: Weak but skilled. He prefers to and indeed has to use magic smarter, not harder. When you lack the magic circuit capacity to do more than give someone the sniffles without using an eight hour ritual, you learn to use magic to support your other strengths, like gun- and knife-fighting. He is also a quick study, able to easily learn or improvise rituals to channel mana over time and make up for his lack of ability to focus it immediately.
Bonus
Element: Blood. Josef is talented at transfiguring and altering blood, and can gain a lot of efficiency in spellcasting by using blood (his own, or others') as the mana storage/transference component. His specialization means that his magic is much weaker at affecting gaseous matter or energy than it is at altering metals or liquids (the more it has in common with blood chemically, the better he can affect it.)
Mana Animal: Hawk.