Plum Polson Purchas is a former student at Brakebills and the unofficial leader and founder of The League. She was also part of the heist group in The Magician's Land.
Appearance
To be added
Personality
Plum, while in Brakebills, pranked a student called Wharton for futile reasons, showing immaturity or overall boredom with her life. However, she was organized enough to create The League, and shown to be a great leader and manipulator at the same time. She is a strategist by nature and was looked by her fellow partners as more clever. Plum tended to complicate too much her plans, unnecessarily.
History
Plum Purchas was a student at Brakebills before the events of The Magician's Land. She was raised around magic and is one of the last known descendants of the Chatwin Family. After a prank gone wrong, Plum had a brief run in with Alice Quinn, then a Niffin, and is quickly saved by one of her Professors, Quentin Coldwater. Henry Fogg fires Quentin from his job at Brakebills after he refused, or otherwise neglected, to impose the Incursion Protocols for dealing with the possible threat Niffin Alice posed to the school and allows Plum to finish the semester, before enforcing her expulsion.
Sometime later, she responds to an advertisement for Magicians, learning that the job she was being hired for was a heist, of sorts. She discovers that Quentin, now working freelance jobs, responded to the advertisement too and attempts to reconcile over their brief stint at Brakebills, but he politely told her it wouldn't benefit either party if their group discovered they had a relationship previously. The man who sent out the job offer is revealed to be a Talking Raven and is also accompanied by a man named Lionel.
The Raven informs them that the group will be tested on their abilities, stating that they would have to beat Lionel, a specialist in Probability Magic, in a game of Push. Quentin was the first to play Lionel, as the others watched. After he successfully beat him, the rest of the group proceeded with their turns. Those that didn't make it were paid for their discretion and allowed to leave.
With the group thinned down to only six people, including Plum and Quentin, the bird told them what their job would be: stealing an old case that belonged to Rupert Chatwin, Plum's great-grandfather on her mother's side. The group later discovered that the case was secured under the effects of an Incorporate Bond, and that Plum and Quentin were the ones tasked with breaking the Bond.
During their research, it was decided that neither of them knew very much about the Bond, except that it was powerful and supposedly unbreakable. Eventually, Quentin suggested that they go speak to the greatest magician he knew, Mischa Mayakovsky, down at Brakebills South in Antarctica. They spent about a week traveling to the continent, spending most of their time as blue whales while they swam from the bottom of South Africa, followed by flying there, much like Quentin did on his first trip, as birds.
Mayakovsky had been expecting them, as he'd been aware of their presence as they drew closer to the facility. There, they learned that to break an Incorporate Bond, they would need a surmountable sum of power, as the spell would take "a hundred Quentins" or "fifty Plums" to successfully fuel the magical requirement of the procedure. While there, Quentin deduced that Mayakovsky himself was under an Incorporate Bond, and stated that Alice was indirectly Mayakovsky's fault, something he filled Plum in on later. After the two magicians reconciled, Mayakovsky bestowed upon them three magical coins, collectively holding the amount of power they required to break the Bond, which Mayakovsky had planned on doing to himself.
Afterwards, Plum and Quentin devised a ritual that would break the Bond, but they never had a chance to test it's mechanics when they were informed that the heist would be conducted earlier than planned.
After arriving at the house in which the case was secured, the group silently entered, but was nearly compromised after Quentin ventured too far ahead of their protection device and was momentarily subdued by an Illusion trap. As Plum and Quentin began to unravel the Bond on the case, they were ambushed by members of The Order of The Neitherlands, members of The Library, who were after the case themselves.
After subduing Plum's group, the Order members fled quickly, with the heist group in hot pursuit. A battle ensued as they flew above the nearby forest, in which members of The Order were shot down by The Couple, the man and woman whom Plum's group were hired to steal the case from. After the case was dropped by one of the Order members, Plum, Quentin, Asmodeus, Lionel, and Stoppard nosedived after it, crashing into the forest ground.
Asmodeus forced Plum to open it, aware of her status as a Chatwin, and quickly retrieved a God-Killing Knife from it, having sought after a weapon that could slay Reynard the Fox after the events of The Magician King, telling Quentin to let Julia know she'd be going 'fox hunting'.
Afterwards, Lionel, realizing that the case had been opened, produced a magically enhanced assault rifle, then attempted to slay Stoppard with it. Asmodeus, however, quickly deflected the attack with the blade, proceeding to sever Lionel's head from his shoulders. When no blood was spilled, she stated that Lionel had been a Golem all along. After she fled, Plum and Quentin quickly retreated back to New York, hiding out at a house Plum had purchased with her magician funds. Quickly erecting wards around the house, she and Quentin decided to make it their safehouse from the Bird.
Magic and Abilities
Magic
- Magician: Plum is a magician who studied at Brakebills, though she did not graduate, due to being expelled. She still showed amazing spellcasting proficiency, as she broke Quentin's wards that blocked the entrance to the secret room next to the teacher's lounge. She was also able to turn herself into a whale, create a draft about how to break an incorporate bond, and was even complimented by Professor Mayakovsky, the most powerful magician on Earth, though he was likely just schmoozing. While on the lamb from Ember's Raven, Plum and Quentin successfully created a pocket world, though the composition of the world was tampered with by Niffin Alice. She also displayed an understanding of structural magic, as seen when she was able to restore the foundation of her house and shift the entire structure.
- Camouflage: Plum's discipline allows her to manipulate images to look different. In the robbery, after Asmodeus knocked out the guards, she used leaves to create a replica of the guards that could slightly turn their heads but were incapable of any other movement.
Abilities
- Gifted Intellect: Plum is able to grasp the full comprehension of magical theory as taught at Brakebills. As is the standard for all Magicians, she possesses at least an Above Average level of intelligence that enables her to grasp the concept of magic and apply it in the physical world.
- Multilingual: Plum, as well as every other Magician, is able to speak and read in a multitude of languages, as it is a basic requirement for spell casting.
- Tactician: Plum was known in The League to be very strategic, capable of creating intrinsically complex plans, and shows the same aptitude for planning when inside The Library, trying to find a way to save Fillory.
