Ideology is a prison. Hans believes this with all his heart and it is the thing that appals and drives him. He well understands the irony of adopting the belief of ‘no beliefs’, but his crusade is born of scarring personal experience more than principle.
Hans grew up normal. Middle-class suburban family, average parents, an older sister, a few friends, middling-to-good grades and a modicum of artistic talent and drive which he channelled into a leap into art school (to his father’s dismay). He probably would have continued as relatively normal if it wasn’t for one particular experience.
Take a solution of LSD, add a dash of mercury distillate from corderoite, then pulp at least three religious texts and one work of outright fiction and turn the mush into blotter paper before drying the whole arrangement under specific arrangement of crystal prisms. To someone with the right magickal and mental attunement you’ve just produced a window to higher consciousness and awareness of the universe. So it makes sense that some asshole decided to hand them out to drunk strangers at a college party.
Hans didn’t get the worst of it - there are two others still catatonic - but what he experienced was transformative. For a brief, brilliant instant that stretched on forever his mind touched the statosphere.
Hans dropped out of college, he quit his part-time job and he fell out of touch with his friends. His family panicked and lamented at his falling apart and tried repeatedly to intervene before lapsing into quiet disappointment and estrangement (his parents don’t talk about him anymore, his sister still checks in to make sure he’s eating right). He’d seen a skewed truth of the world, the vast and formless entities of the cosmic substrate orchestrating the coincidences of our lives and feeding from the energies of our beliefs and behaviours. The Invisible Clergy terrifies and repulses him.
Nine years later Hans lives as an affectedly homeless street artist and vandal with a tiny following of both disaffected anarchists and art scene patrons. He has an ambivalent relationship with both, eschewing anything that might turn into a stifling cult of personality or bind him with financial obligation while recognising the usefulness of both to his goals. Hans wants to use his art to tear down what he sees as the imposed barriers of perception created by the Invisible Clergy so that they can no longer feed off humanity.
Hans’s work doesn’t stick to one medium, the only commonality is disruption. He’ll gladly shut down a busy city intersection for an entire morning if it means getting a hold of people’s perception. Shake up their lives and get their attention with a shocking, flashy stunt or pull their heartstrings with an impassioned display and pull the rug out from under them in a way that, he hopes, leaves them questioning or curious. The effectiveness varies highly, depending mostly on his current fixation and the audience. He is as likely to decry consumerism as he is environmentalism, which earns him few friends outside of his niche.
Hans is partially aware of the occult underground. He has dallied with a couple of motumancers in the past but views the school, and entrenched magickal practices as a whole, as a honeypot for the Invisible Clergy. Plus they don’t tend to get on too well with just about anybody. After a few bad experiences he stays on the periphery, occasionally trading favours and cash for the components that he uses to weave gutter magick into his work.
STATS
Personality: Hans swings between being either on the verge of triumph or in a depressive funk, in either state he’s prone to being very vocal about his beliefs. He’s a technically proficient artist but his ambition outstrips his talent.
Rage: Ideology. Hans batters himself against the cage of human perception.
Noble: Truth-seeking. Curious and open-minded inquest is something to be encouraged.
Fear: Avatars. They’re the eyes of the cosmic grease trap that is the Invisible Clergy and Hans won’t have anything to do with them (Unnatural).
Obsession: The only free meaning is no meaning.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Culture Jammer 70%* (Substitutes for Secrecy, Coerce Helplessness, Coerce Self)
Outsider/Artist 50% (Substitutes for Connect, Use Gutter Magick, Evaluate Unnatural)
Shock Gauges
Notches
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Violence
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Unnatural
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Helplessness
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Isolation
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Self
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Hardened
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2
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4
|
2
|
2
|
2
|
Failed
|
0
|
5
|
1
|
1
|
0
|
Disorder: Obsession - Method Artist. Hans lives his work while taking on new projects. His view is that the only way to judge whether a particular piece will break down the doors of perception is to trial it on himself. This leads to a lot of odd, damaging behaviours: imposing sensory deprivation on himself, only eating one type of food for months, amateur scarification. The only rhyme or reason behind it is what he currently considering doing to others.
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