Microstory 1146: Orabela Vinci

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Orabela Vinci was one of the source mages on early Durus, and considered to be the most beautiful. Even as a child, people would rave about her physical appearance, and make claims that she would be a heartbreaker. They believed their remarks to be harmless and innocuous, but they were unproductive and irrelevant. They were ignoring her more important qualities, like the fact that she was a beautiful person. She saw the beauty in the world, even a lowly insect, and the good in others, including those who probably didn’t deserve it. As terrible of a leader as Smith was, he always recognized her potential as a contributing member of society, and completely ignored her physical characteristics. She knew that he wasn’t just born evil, but he saw the world they were trapped in for the dangerous powder-keg it was—monsters or no—and while he went about it in the worst ways, he legitimately wanted to protect his people. She was not much for leadership herself, and left those decisions to the other source mages after Smith disappeared. However, in retrospect, they probably would have benefited from a little more of her insight. She was relegated to being the face of the source mage movement; like a mascot with more agency. It was astonishing how much easier it was to get people to listen to them when their words were coming from Orabela’s aesthetically pleasing visage. When the group decided to seek the proverters, who had the power to make them grow up at an alarmingly fast rate, Orabela was the most vocal against it. She was already treated differently because of how she looked, and that was when she was only twelve years old. If the monsters made her look twenty-three, now people were going to be having inappropriate feelings for her, and that would make things worse. They wanted to age themselves up, so people would take them more seriously, but it would most likely have the opposite effect on her, and it would be artificial either way. The proverters were capable of manipulating the age of a target’s body, but could have no impact on their mind. So whether they accepted it or not, the source mages were all still twelve-year-old children, or even younger, in Valda’s case. Natural born protector, Ecrin Cabral had a huge problem with forcing people to do things they didn’t want to do, so she guarded Orabela from the others, and the proverters. She was able to escape this fate while the rest of her friends were magically turned into adults. Sure, this limited her influence on the society they were building, but she was still one of the source mages, and no one could take that away from her. She awarded her older friend, Ecrin with agelessness, as a gift for her bravery and loyalty. Ecrin was thusly one of the first humans to be granted temporal powers on Durus, and she didn’t even have to compete in the mage games to earn it. Of course, this would come with its own consequences, as she would forever be underestimated for her own young appearance, but she would still go on to do great things for the Mage Protectorate, and beyond. Orabela, meanwhile, remained grounded as their civilization grew. She continued to focus on its citizenry, and largely ignored her status among the elite. She would come to be cherished for her accessibility, even after the world fell into the phallocracy, and most women were treated as unequals.