content warning: child abuse

* born sometime in the 20?0s, to father francois kasel (military officer and medical doctor) and mother pritti chaupal (sociologist and linguist), on the planet aesara (previously known as trappist-1g)

* did not really know his father, who was obsessed with trying to advance his military career; his mother was kind but somewhat neglectful due to her disinterest in parenting

* when he was 8 years old, his father came back into their lives to whisk them away on the second expedition of the earth mission - a long-term observation and intelligence mission to observe earth and non-magic humans, document changes in culture and geopolitical situations, asses their potential threat to mages/witches, etc



* settled on the mars base, where francois' resentment of having to play at being a family man slowly developed into abuse. pritti was disengaged and happy to ignore it and focus on her work, and so the abuse was concentrated on ira

* ira began doing everything in his power to escape his father, eventually becoming adept at sneaking onto spaceships meant to orbit earth. he was eventually mentored by a co of one of the ships, and became heavily influenced by this person (who does not have much of an identity yet... Someday, ocs are hard enough w/o the npcs as well, fml)

* essentially spent most of his life between bases and spaceships and, in time, excursions to earth itself, where he met earth mage alan ash and began to fall into the conspiracy vortex of "did the [mage] government knowingly abandon magic users, who are now in a very bad way being persecuted x-men style"

* after his mother met with an unfortunate (suspicious) fall that ended her life, ira killed his father and made it look like an accident. his mentor captain aided him in covering it up.

* when the mission began to collapse due to various influences (people defecting to the earth mage cause out of disgust for their own govt, human infiltration, lack of proper supply and intel support from home, etc), ira became instrumental in getting survivors home via engineering a way to jump ships through portals without the traditional gate power.

* his mentor died among many others, but he managed to successfully forge a fake identity for alan, and smuggled him along back to aesara.



* back on aesara, he struggled to adjust to normal life but REPRESSED IT he's Fine, Thanks

* certified his military-adjacent education and was granted an equivalent degree after testing, then promptly hired to teach theoretical alchemy, riding high on his magic spaceship jump achievement

* is told by the government that everything that happened on earth mission itself is strictly classified and that disseminating anything he's learned - such as that there are mages living on earth still, or that the non-magic humans have developed space travel - will be treason. he is designated as an intelligence asset to consult with on alchemical and magiscience engineering topics, and to keep an eye on him

* meanwhile pretending his friend is not an earth mage.

* his handler with the ? secret witch service ? eventually reveals himself to be a double agent who's also involved with an organization dedicated to trying to uncover the same mysteries that plague ira (did the govt knowingly abandon mages on earth? are they really not going to do anything about the potential threat? etc), and pulls him into similarly covert operations

* here we are, in rpland

* a focus item, or magic focus, is an item that magic users employ to help (surprise) focus their magic. it helps prevent spells going haywire, literal aiming, and can be used to transfer or imbue or etc. a focus can be any item, and can be replaced at will over a mage's life.

* earth mission blah blah
- the first expedition took place 5 years before ira and his family went, and they were there to establish and build a safe base of operations on mars and covertly infiltrate the earth's own moon base
- the second expedition was much larger and full of military personnel and other specialists and their families

* injured his eyes via magic space radiation when fleeing the collapsing earth mission; they sometimes go milky, and he sees colors on spectrums he shouldn't. he wears red lens glasses to help his brain from exploding

* has an ability that allows him to speak and understand any verbal language if he's exposed to it enough, attained via performing illegal psychic surgery on himself; it was an attempt to prevent his mind from being read, and does help with that, though it's a work in progress