Crucible:Horus

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Horus

Real Name	Harold "Harry" Piffle
Identity	Public
Former Identities	Wonderos, Magicker
Affiliation	Watchstar
Former Affiliations	Supernova Squadron, Corsairs, Watchstar Academy
Base of Operations	New York City
Place of Origin	Pacific City
Era	Bronze Age / Modern Age
Status	Active
First Appearance	HERO HIGH #1 (as Harry Piffle); WATCHSTAR #297 (as Horus)
Creator	Steve Mancuso

“Magic is not mysterious because it has no rules. It is mysterious because there are far too many of them.”
— Horus

Horus is the current heroic identity of Harold "Harry" Piffle, one of Earth's foremost sorcerers and the resident magical specialist of Watchstar. Active as a superhero since adolescence, Harry has operated under several identities and with several teams, gradually developing from an awkward teenage wizard into an accomplished scholar and veteran supernatural adventurer.

As Wonderos, Teenage Wizard, he fought alongside the young heroes of the Supernova Squadron. As Magicker, he briefly served with the Corsairs. He later became a charter member of Watchstar Academy before graduating, in effect, to Watchstar itself.

Background

Magical forces have swirled around Harry Piffle his entire life.

So has trouble.

Harry grew up in Pacific City, an intelligent, bookish and painfully awkward boy who preferred libraries to athletics and ancient history to school dances. At Nathaniel Nova High School, his nervous manner, lack of athletic ability and unfortunate surname made him an easy target for bullies.

Harry responded by retreating into books.

History led to mythology, folklore, comparative religion, dead languages, ceremonial magic and increasingly obscure works of occult scholarship.

Most teenagers who read books about magic eventually discover that magic does not exist.

Harry discovered the opposite.

His earliest experiences were subtle enough to dismiss as coincidence. Objects moved when he was frightened. Symbols appeared in dreams and later surfaced in books he had never read. Words spoken aloud occasionally produced effects that words were not supposed to produce.

Eventually Harry began experimenting deliberately.

His early spells were improvised from folklore, fragmentary manuscripts and half-understood rituals, but Harry possessed an extraordinary intuitive sense for separating genuine magical principles from centuries of embellishment and nonsense.

They worked.

Frequently rather better than expected.

Wonderos, Teenage Wizard

As Wonderos, Teenage Wizard, Harry discovered that he could be someone very different from the timid boy his classmates knew.

Behind a costume and a flamboyant superhero name, he was clever, resourceful, brave and increasingly powerful.

File:Wonderos (teen).jpg

Harry in his teenaged Wonderos identity.

Wonderos soon joined other young Pacific City heroes in the Supernova Squadron. For Harry, the Squadron was transformative. It was the first place where being strange was not merely tolerated but useful.

When demons appeared in a chemistry laboratory or an ancient curse escaped from a museum exhibit, suddenly the kid who had spent his lunch periods studying medieval grimoires was exactly the person everyone needed.

Over time, the distinction between Harry Piffle and Wonderos began to disappear.

The confidence had always been Harry's.

He simply had to discover it.

Student of Magic

Harry's teenage adventures also taught him that magical talent and magical knowledge were very different things.

Wonderos possessed enormous raw ability, but his education was chaotic. He could accomplish feats that experienced magicians found difficult while remaining ignorant of principles they considered elementary.

That combination nearly killed him more than once.

As he grew older, Harry became a serious occult scholar. He traveled, studied ancient and forgotten languages, corresponded with magical authorities, investigated supernatural sites and accumulated a formidable library of his own.

He gradually came to understand magic not as a collection of spells, but as a vast and often contradictory body of knowledge governed by innumerable rules, traditions and exceptions.

Harry once compared magical scholarship to owning every book in the world's largest library without possessing a card catalog.

The information is there.

Finding the correct piece before something eats you is another matter.

Magicker and the Corsairs

As a young adult, Harry retired the Wonderos identity and became Magicker.

During this period he joined the Corsairs, a national superhero strike force whose members included his former Supernova Squadron teammate Banzai.

The affiliation did not last.

Harry increasingly objected to the Corsairs' methods and particularly their tendency to treat overwhelming force as an acceptable solution to complicated problems. His magical experience had taught him otherwise. A monstrous creature might be bound rather than malevolent. Destroying a cursed object might release whatever it imprisoned. Defeating a supernatural enemy physically could sometimes make the situation considerably worse.

Harry argued his case often enough.

Eventually, he stopped arguing and left.

Horus and the Falcon Staff

Harry subsequently spent several years as an independent hero and occult investigator.

During this period he acquired the Falcon Staff, the magical focus that became inseparable from his later career. Harry has never provided a particularly reliable account of how the staff came into his possession, and its complete history remains unclear.

The staff did not give Harry his powers. What it gave him was focus.

Magic may require the simultaneous manipulation of language, symbolism, visualization, geometry, will and magical energy. The Falcon Staff allows Harry to organize and channel those elements rapidly, making complex workings practical in the middle of a crisis.

With it, Harry can sometimes accomplish in seconds what would otherwise require a prepared ritual.

He eventually adopted the identity Horus, reflecting both his deeper engagement with ancient magical traditions and the falcon symbolism of his staff.

It also marked a change in how Harry regarded himself.

Wonderos had been a gifted boy experimenting with magic.

Horus was a sorcerer.

Watchstar Academy

Horus became a charter member of Watchstar Academy, the program founded by Kodiak to train the next generation of superheroes.

Kodiak's Academy was never intended simply to teach young heroes how to fight. Its emphasis was judgment, teamwork, restraint, fieldcraft and the responsibility that accompanied extraordinary ability.

Harry already possessed extensive superhero experience by the time he joined, but the Academy provided something his years of solitary magical study could not: structured training alongside other heroes under the guidance of experienced professionals.

Among his fellow Academy members was Scarlet, an old classmate from Nathaniel Nova High School.

The reunion provided a peculiar measure of how much Harry had changed. The awkward boy who once tried to disappear into the background had become one of the most formidable young magical practitioners of his generation.

Kodiak took particular pride in Harry's development. He was impressed less by Harry's raw power than by his growing judgment and willingness to learn how and when to use it.

Watchstar

Horus's path to full Watchstar membership began during the team's pursuit of Madam Winter, which ultimately brought the conflict to Pacific City.

When demonic marauders attacked Harry's hometown, he joined Watchstar in its defense. While the team's heavy hitters battled the invaders directly, Horus recognized the magical structure behind the assault and became instrumental in stopping it at its source.

The encounter demonstrated exactly what he could bring to the team: not simply magical firepower, but the ability to identify and understand supernatural threats before attempting to destroy them.

Horus was subsequently selected for the Watchstar mission team alongside his former high school classmate and fellow Academy member Scarlet.

Kodiak could hardly have been prouder. The Academy had been created precisely to prepare promising younger heroes for this moment, and two of its charter members had now earned places among Watchstar's active ranks.

For Harry, the appointment represented something more than another team affiliation.

He was no longer one of the younger heroes preparing for the job.

He had arrived.

Role in Watchstar

Horus serves as Watchstar's principal supernatural specialist as well as a powerful frontline combatant.

When a mission involves possession, curses, magical artifacts, extradimensional beings, mystical incursions or reality behaving in ways that conventional science cannot readily explain, Harry is usually the teammate everyone looks toward.

Sometimes he has an answer.

Sometimes he has seven possible answers, three of which contradict one another.

His teammates have learned that this is normal.

Horus's greatest value is not simply that he can wield enormous magical power. He understands that supernatural problems frequently become worse when attacked without understanding them first.

His instinct is therefore to determine what something is, what rules govern it and what will happen if those rules are broken.

When investigation fails, he remains capable of bringing a formidable amount of magical force to bear.

Powers

Horus is one of the most powerful practicing sorcerers on Earth.

His magic is unusually flexible. Rather than possessing a fixed repertoire of supernatural abilities, he can manipulate magical forces to create an extraordinary range of effects, limited principally by his knowledge, concentration, available power and the conditions governing the magic involved.

His demonstrated abilities include:

• Energy Projection – Magical bolts, blasts and other offensive effects
• Protective Wards – Defenses against physical, magical, psychic and extradimensional threats
• Flight – Magical levitation and sustained flight
• Teleportation – Movement across considerable distances under suitable conditions
• Dimensional Manipulation – Opening, closing and stabilizing passages between dimensions
• Binding and Banishing – Containing or expelling supernatural entities
• Illusion – Creating convincing sensory phenomena
• Transformation – Temporarily altering objects, environments and living beings
• Divination – Detecting magical forces and tracing supernatural events
• Countermagic – Disrupting spells and dismantling enchantments
• Summoning – Calling entities, objects or forces under controlled circumstances

His versatility can give the impression that Horus can simply produce any effect he wishes.

He cannot.

Magic has rules, and ignorance of them can be considerably more dangerous than insufficient power.

The Falcon Staff

The Falcon Staff is Horus's principal magical focus.

It does not create his powers, and Harry remains an accomplished sorcerer without it. The staff instead allows him to channel and organize magical forces with far greater speed and precision.

It can also store or conduct magical energy independently of Harry, although its complete capabilities remain unknown.

Harry has made no particular effort to correct that situation.

Limitations

Horus's greatest limitation is the complexity of magic itself.

Names matter. Places matter. Symbols matter. Intent matters. Timing occasionally matters.

Sometimes pronunciation matters.

A spell effective against one entity may fail completely against another superficially similar creature. Some workings require preparation, materials, particular locations or information Harry does not possess.

His breadth of knowledge allows him to negotiate these problems better than most practitioners, but even Harry can make mistakes.

Magic punishes mistakes with unusual enthusiasm.

Skills

Harry's scholarship is nearly as important as his supernatural power.

• Expert in occult history and magical traditions
• Extensive knowledge of mythology, folklore and comparative religion
• Fluent or literate in numerous modern and ancient languages
• Skilled researcher and archivist
• Experienced investigator of supernatural phenomena
• Considerable knowledge of archaeology and ancient history
• Expert in magical artifacts and their identification
• Veteran superhero with decades of field experience

Harry has a particular talent for recognizing obscure connections between apparently unrelated phenomena.

This is useful professionally and occasionally exhausting conversationally.

Personality

Harry Piffle never entirely stopped being the awkward boy from Nathaniel Nova High School.

He simply stopped being embarrassed about it.

Harry remains scholarly, enthusiastic, occasionally absent-minded and prone to explaining obscure subjects long after everyone else has understood as much as they intend to.

His humor tends toward dry understatement, particularly in situations involving supernatural horrors that his teammates find considerably less amusing.

Years of experience have given him genuine confidence without convincing him that he knows everything. In fact, the more Harry has learned about magic, the more skeptical he has become of anyone claiming to understand it completely.

He has encountered too many things that were confidently declared impossible.

Personal Life

Harry is romantically involved with fellow Watchstar member Booster.

The pairing is less unlikely than it may initially appear. Both are exceptionally intelligent people whose minds tend to move several steps ahead of ordinary conversation, although they approach the world from very different directions: Booster through technology and engineering, Harry through history, symbolism and magic.

Their contrasting specialties have made them effective partners in the field as well as outside it. Booster is one of the relatively few people capable of interrupting one of Harry's lengthy occult explanations with an equally complicated technical argument.

Harry appears to enjoy this considerably more than everyone else in the room.

Reputation

To much of the superhero community, Horus is the person to call when the impossible becomes inexplicable.

Among occult practitioners, opinions are more divided.

Some regard him as a brilliant scholar. Others consider him reckless or dangerously eclectic, willing to draw from magical traditions that more conservative practitioners prefer to keep separate.

A few regard Harold Piffle as one of the most dangerous human sorcerers alive.

Harry knows.

He has books to read.

Legacy

Harry Piffle's career spans several generations of superhero history.

He began as Wonderos, an awkward teenager discovering both magic and his own courage. He became Magicker, a young hero trying to decide what sort of career he wanted. Watchstar Academy gave him the disciplined training to match his formidable knowledge and power.

As Horus, he finally became one of Earth's foremost defenders against supernatural threats.

The names changed.

Harry did not.

He is still the curious boy who opened a book because he desperately wanted to know what was inside.

The difference is that now, occasionally, something inside opens the book back.

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