Former doctoral student at NYU, former small-town news presenter, former host of Unreal Encounters (a ghost hunting reality show). Jennifer has been a lot of things, she worked hard and took every opportunity available to her. Okay so she lost her university enrolment over academic misconduct and the reporter gig was a lucky fallback. Sure, the reality show host position was an opportunity fearfully seized after one too many tries to move from up from local news reporting were rebuffed. Regardless of her mistakes Jennifer was hellbent on making something of herself. Anything to avoid slipping into the desperate, clutching poverty she grew up with, to avoid having the world roll over her just like it did to her parents.
Then someone died on set and the show was cancelled. It wasn’t ghosts or foul play, someone didn’t tighten a bolt properly and one of the crew was killed by a piece of scaffolding. The network didn’t like the fallout and the show got cancelled. You can still find episodes on YouTube, along with conspiracy theories about it getting canned. Unfortunately for Jennifer the move had burned important bridges and she was out of any kind of work. She got a few spots on radio shows and a TV interview over the next year, but they were only interested in sensationalising what she saw as the downfall of her career. She knew she needed to do something different.
One of the pieces she’d covered with the show was the Ghostbusters ruling, in which a now famous New York house had been legally declared haunted by matter of reputation and the sale of the house rescinded as the property was stigmatised. The thing that really got her attention was that the home had most recently sold for greater than half again the amount of other homes in the same area. Given her areas of expertise she smelled a gold mine.
Jennifer’s modus operandi is to research the history of an area, identify a property in her range that fits an appropriate heritage, buy it, establish a reputation for ghosts and flip it for a higher value to her carefully curated list of crackpot buyers. She fixes the places up a bit but the bulk of her efforts go into pulling a deniable Scooby Doo to satisfy their tastes. It took a few years to get the ball rolling but she's got the machinery in place and the know-how down to a point that she was comfortably pulling in six figures a year.
Except now it looks like history is repeating itself. A contractor she had working on a large, decaying mansion she bought died mysteriously. Soon after it happened to another and the rest quit the jobsite and wouldn’t return or give reason why. No one will candidly admit it, but the old place has preemptively developed a reputation for haunting. One that’s backed up by the pedigree of historical gravitas that had her salivating in the first place. One that’s bad enough that she can’t get it fixed or move it. Jennifer has a lot tied up here, is considerably leveraged and needs a solution fast.
Worse, it looks like someone is trying to beat her at her own game. At least that’s what she told herself after a silhouetted figure at the top of the foyer staircase drove her away screaming one night with promises of ‘the slick, red bliss’ it had ‘given the other two’. The police didn't find sign of anyone afterwards. As an avowed sceptic Jennifer doesn’t believe in any of the things she sells people but maybe this time she’s bitten into something that bites back.
STATS
Personality: Ambitious, driven and smart. Jennifer’s downfall is that she’s willing to take just about any shortcut she can in the name of getting a leg up on the competition, no matter how risky.
Rage: Meddlers. Anyone who interferes with her goals, whether maliciously or by doing their job, earns Jennifer’s ire.
Noble: Historical preservation. Back when she still had dreams of becoming an academic establishing a model for its economic value was her thesis subject.
Fear: Poverty. Jennifer grew up dirt poor and will do anything to make sure she never goes back to that (Helplessness).
Obsession: Gotta get mine.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Former TV Host 65% (Substitutes for Status, Substitutes for Lie, Protects Isolation)
Ghost Expert 55%* (Substitutes for Knowledge, Evaluates Unnatural, Coerces 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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1
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2
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3
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2
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4
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Failed
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0
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1
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1
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0
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1
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