“If the world go wrong, it was, in some off-hand manner, never meant to go right.”
- Charles Dickens, Bleak House
Obsession dies hard, especially the kind of obsession that drives adepts. Mechanomancers, for example, persisted well past the heyday of the industrial revolution and even manage to eke out an existence in the stultifyingly digital 21st century. Videomancer Marvin Lightner saw the same decline on the horizon for his own magickal practices and in an act of hubris tried to bend the world to preserve them. Ultimately he failed in his ambitions but his efforts birthed the Signal.
There is a weak broadcast signal over a 3 mile area on the edge of a city that can only be picked up by an analog television manufactured before March, 2003. It is sporadic. It only exists from 11:09 to 11:33 each night (sometimes skipping a day) and the exact location of the broadcast area gets a bit wobbly from time to time.
The Signal tells the future. Kind of.
The Signal carries part of a local late-night news program from 24 hours into the future (sometimes 48, in which case it’ll usually skip the next day). Given the timespan it usually misses the majority of the big headlines and the sports segment but the middle part still provides enough information to give someone an inside line on tomorrow. If only it weren’t for the consequences.
Knowledge of the future allows people to change it. Magick cannot make someone choose so the outcome isn’t fixed. People can and have acted on information provided by the Signal to prevent terrible things from happening or to enrich themselves. However magick demands sacrifice and there are no free rides.
Changing something predicted by the Signal causes, by some odd confluence, an equal occurrence to ‘balance the scales’ elsewhere. Equivalent exchange: the shape of the future remains the same only the details change. Occasionally the backlash seems out of proportion but we are talking about altering the future here it’s an uncertain business. Winning the lottery means that somewhere else someone does not, preventing a local bakery from going out of business by flash-mobbing them with customers for a week means someone experiences financial ruin. Or, as college student Annie Ayala discovered, preventing an abduction means someone else goes missing. Sometimes multiple someones.
Cabal: The Four Horsemen
Obsession dies hard, especially the kind of obsession that drives adepts. Mechanomancers, for example, persisted well past the heyday of the industrial revolution and even manage to eke out an existence in the stultifyingly digital 21st century. Videomancer Marvin Lightner saw the same decline on the horizon for his own magickal practices and in an act of hubris tried to bend the world to preserve them. Ultimately he failed in his ambitions but his efforts birthed the Signal.
There is a weak broadcast signal over a 3 mile area on the edge of a city that can only be picked up by an analog television manufactured before March, 2003. It is sporadic. It only exists from 11:09 to 11:33 each night (sometimes skipping a day) and the exact location of the broadcast area gets a bit wobbly from time to time.
The Signal tells the future. Kind of.
The Signal carries part of a local late-night news program from 24 hours into the future (sometimes 48, in which case it’ll usually skip the next day). Given the timespan it usually misses the majority of the big headlines and the sports segment but the middle part still provides enough information to give someone an inside line on tomorrow. If only it weren’t for the consequences.
Knowledge of the future allows people to change it. Magick cannot make someone choose so the outcome isn’t fixed. People can and have acted on information provided by the Signal to prevent terrible things from happening or to enrich themselves. However magick demands sacrifice and there are no free rides.
Changing something predicted by the Signal causes, by some odd confluence, an equal occurrence to ‘balance the scales’ elsewhere. Equivalent exchange: the shape of the future remains the same only the details change. Occasionally the backlash seems out of proportion but we are talking about altering the future here it’s an uncertain business. Winning the lottery means that somewhere else someone does not, preventing a local bakery from going out of business by flash-mobbing them with customers for a week means someone experiences financial ruin. Or, as college student Annie Ayala discovered, preventing an abduction means someone else goes missing. Sometimes multiple someones.
Cabal: The Four Horsemen
It’s a stupid name, everyone in the cabal hates it (except Roscoe because he came up with it). None of them have ever ridden a horse and only one of them is a man. They certainly don’t want to cause or herald the apocalypse, if anything they want to prevent it. Or at least preserve how things are going to turn out in order to keep them from becoming worse which seems to happen every time someone interferes with things predicted by the Signal. No one has or cares to come up with a better name though so the Four Horsemen it is.
Experience has taught the Four Horsemen how dangerous and unpredictable meddling with the Signal can be and how willing people are to ignore that danger while pursuing their desires. Their goals are:
Tall and long-limbed, Annie keeps her blonde hair pulled back in a rubber banded ponytail and tends to squint at people through dirty, black-rimmed glasses. She trusts Debra without question (to begin with it was just the two of them), likes Tammy but doesn’t know how to respond to her strange overtures and thinks of Roscoe as tolerable but unreliable.
Debra Lombardi is the childhood best-friend of Annie and the hardcase of the group. The middle-younger child in a big family she ditched the peacemaker shtick of that role and kept her siblings in line by breaking heads. To an extent this extends to the cabal although she won’t actually smack anyone around (except maybe Roscoe). Short and stocky, Debra has a drawn face which makes her look older than she is and when she isn’t wearing her EMT uniform she favours jeans and tshirts. She thinks of Roscoe as an annoying kid-brother (even though he’s a few years older than her) but has a soft spot for Tammy.
Roscoe Tejeda is a burglar plutophage (an adept who gains power by eating money or objects of value) kept on a tight leash by Annie. Affable and skeevy he acts like he’s everyone’s closest friend and steps on more than a few boundaries while doing so. He wears dirty flannel and jeans, has a very sparse mustache he is unjustifiably proud of and reeks of pot-smoke.
Roscoe’s relationship with the cabal is tenuous, before joining he was caught using information from the Signal to steal big ticket items. Given the choice of being turned in to the cops or helping the cabal he chose the latter. He sees them as allies of convenience but he’s happy to go along for now. He also has a thing for Debra but never grew out of the pulling-on-pigtails phase of letting someone know you like them which makes that awkward.
Tammy Grammer works in the city as a clerk at a bookstore that seems to be having a perpetual closing down sale. Timid and soft-spoken it was seemingly happenstance that she became involved with the cabal through an unlikely set of coincidences that had her show up time and time again whenever they needed help. Tammy is pale, thin and round-faced with a wardrobe that seems to consist solely of pastel sundresses.
Tammy is certain that she is Annie’s older sister, Georgia, reincarnated. She has her memories, knows things about both of them and has all these feelings of deep connection to Annie: it’s how she always knows exactly where to find her. Riddled with anxiety she has no idea of how to confess her secret, sisterly love and for the moment moons around trying to be useful. She likes Debra but finds her too confrontational and thinks that Roscoe is odious.
Experience has taught the Four Horsemen how dangerous and unpredictable meddling with the Signal can be and how willing people are to ignore that danger while pursuing their desires. Their goals are:
- Monitor the Signal.
- Keep the Signal a secret.
- Stop people from interfering with the future.
- Find a way to shut the Signal down (their current objective at a measly 14%).
Annie Ayala was an electrical engineering student who has dropped out to work on Signal-related projects full-time. She supports herself with a side business fixing people’s electronics: cellphones, tablets, and computers while renting her parent’s garage as work/living-space. Annie’s family is distant (even though she lives with them) but supportive, something that has defined her relationship with them ever since her older sister drowned when she was too young to really remember. Growing up independent she comes across as restrained and literal-minded to people who don’t know her which hides a strong social conscience.
Tall and long-limbed, Annie keeps her blonde hair pulled back in a rubber banded ponytail and tends to squint at people through dirty, black-rimmed glasses. She trusts Debra without question (to begin with it was just the two of them), likes Tammy but doesn’t know how to respond to her strange overtures and thinks of Roscoe as tolerable but unreliable.
Debra Lombardi is the childhood best-friend of Annie and the hardcase of the group. The middle-younger child in a big family she ditched the peacemaker shtick of that role and kept her siblings in line by breaking heads. To an extent this extends to the cabal although she won’t actually smack anyone around (except maybe Roscoe). Short and stocky, Debra has a drawn face which makes her look older than she is and when she isn’t wearing her EMT uniform she favours jeans and tshirts. She thinks of Roscoe as an annoying kid-brother (even though he’s a few years older than her) but has a soft spot for Tammy.
Roscoe Tejeda is a burglar plutophage (an adept who gains power by eating money or objects of value) kept on a tight leash by Annie. Affable and skeevy he acts like he’s everyone’s closest friend and steps on more than a few boundaries while doing so. He wears dirty flannel and jeans, has a very sparse mustache he is unjustifiably proud of and reeks of pot-smoke.
Roscoe’s relationship with the cabal is tenuous, before joining he was caught using information from the Signal to steal big ticket items. Given the choice of being turned in to the cops or helping the cabal he chose the latter. He sees them as allies of convenience but he’s happy to go along for now. He also has a thing for Debra but never grew out of the pulling-on-pigtails phase of letting someone know you like them which makes that awkward.
Tammy Grammer works in the city as a clerk at a bookstore that seems to be having a perpetual closing down sale. Timid and soft-spoken it was seemingly happenstance that she became involved with the cabal through an unlikely set of coincidences that had her show up time and time again whenever they needed help. Tammy is pale, thin and round-faced with a wardrobe that seems to consist solely of pastel sundresses.
Tammy is certain that she is Annie’s older sister, Georgia, reincarnated. She has her memories, knows things about both of them and has all these feelings of deep connection to Annie: it’s how she always knows exactly where to find her. Riddled with anxiety she has no idea of how to confess her secret, sisterly love and for the moment moons around trying to be useful. She likes Debra but finds her too confrontational and thinks that Roscoe is odious.
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