Quino

Quino is a character in The BATTLE of the CENTURY.

Description:
Quino is a design of moderate complexity, too intricate to take in the entire thing in a glance or two but not so ludicrous that it cannot be drawn from memory by human hands. As is typical of magical sigils, most if not all of his constituent symbols will be recognisable to experienced magicians; in particular, his name is written near the centre of his design albeit in a language which has not been much used these last 300 years.

Quino is the design itself, not a particular instance of it. Whether he is drawn in ballpoint pen on a notepad, carved on a wall by a piece of sharp rock, or even shaped out of gold wire and worn as a brooch, he will be present and in full control of his powers.

Biography:
A little more than a millenium ago, a freshly minted wizard by the name of Dyra Vicster started work, just to see if it could be done, on a sigil that would be able to create other sigils. Quino was his first success: a sigil that had the ability to draw and cast a copy of itself.

As magical items tend to do, Quino was born with a basic capacity for sentience and intelligence, which has refined itself to roughly human levels over the years. Also as magical items tend to do, Quino escaped from his master's control, and when Dyra was found dead two months later his cause of death was (correctly) reported as "Meddling in forces beyond his ken".

In the time since, Quino has been around the world, adopted as a gang symbol, been the centre of three short-lived cults, stuck at the bottom of the ocean in a waterproof chest for two hundred years, and has collected tidbits of knowledge from the arcane to the forbidden to the absolutely worthless.

For the last few decades, his last surviving copy has been written in nonmagical ink on nonmagical paper, clamped between two lead sheets and placed in a chest with seven locks on it (only one of which is visible to the unaided eye), itself in a section of a magical library specifically designed for containing dangerous but not especially powerful entities, again surrounded with a large number of general-purpose wards to prevent anything from escaping. The chest itself is marked with a pretty standard warning against opening it lest you value your life.

When some foolhardy wizard (coincidentally a descendant of Dyra Vicster) eventually opens the chest and removes the lead clamps, he will find that the paper has mysteriously vanished. The library's keeper will be briefly puzzled, but he will know from experience not to investigate magical oddities too closely, and the chest will eventually be used to store a sword that sucks out people's souls.

Items/Abilities:
Whatever medium Quino is currently written in, he can read and manipulate that medium within a short range. If he is printed in a book, he can alter the words in the book, or erase them, or write new ones on nearby blank pages. The main use of this ability is to move himself around or copy himself, though it can also be used to communicate with others and to self-destruct any instances of himself that he no longer needs.

The most ominous and dangerous use of this ability is this: if anyone examines Quino in such detail and at such length that they memorise his entire design, then Quino exists in their mind. He can then theoretically manipulate his victim's mind as he wishes. This takes some time, not least because everyone's mind is different and Quino always has to learn how to orient himself within a new mind, or he could turn his victim into a gibbering vegetable when all he wanted to do was say "hello" (and vice-versa). Quino usually transfers himself from one medium to another by getting one of these victims to transcribe him. At any time, he can choose to destroy an instance of himself he no longer needs, freeing his victim from his control. Obviously, this ability has made it impossible for anyone to study him or his powers in any detail.

Quino's powers and intelligence diminish rapidly the more instances of him there are at once (which is why he usually prefers to maintain as few separate instances as he can manage), and the further apart these instances are. All his instances share a single mind, so he can be used to send messages if he is so inclined. He can perceive light and sound from any of his instances, so you can talk to him.

He's spent a long time locked in a box and never really understood the existence of different dialects, so his vocabulary is something of a medley of styles from the last few centuries.