046 - Julian Funk, Futureshocked Plutomancer

GMC: Julian Funk, Futureshocked Plutomancer

You know that mathematical example they use to teach kids about compounding interest in school? The “would you rather have a million dollars or a penny that doubles every day for 30 days?” and the kicker is that if you picked the penny you’d have over $5 million at the end of the month. To Julian Funk it was the Archimedean lever that he would move the Earth with, he just needed a way to skip to the end.

In 1961, at the age of 38, the millionaire plastics magnate built himself a financial golem: an air-tight network of trusts that would manage his money over a period of decades and grow exponentially in value. While others would have to take the long way to this expression of human power he would have time do the work for him. The last of his personal fortune was liquidated and used to send him forward: the services of a dying cryptomancer, a major charge and an underground bunker like a pharaoh's tomb. Julian launched himself 50 years into the future. He cast off from society during the golden age of futurism, expecting to come back to a world where moon colonies and flying cars were commonplace and his wealth would make him a king. On his 2011 return he was bitterly disappointed.

The future has a lot of things that impress him, we’ve got the wristwatch televisions of comic books in smartphones, the instant communication of the internet and robot warehouses provide all manner of modern consumer contrivances. We also gave up on space, our crystal towers aren’t nearly as nice as advertised and more and more people have less and less. The possible utopia - which should have been created by all that money - had been cast aside.

Half of this dismay is that Julian did not come back to as much as he’d intended. The $9.1 million that welcomed him was barely double what he had left with and in comparative purchasing power less than a quarter of his original fortune. Mismanagement and the recession had not been kind (if he’d popped up pre-2009/10 he would’ve been quite comfortably in major charge territory). Having been kicked down a notch Julian suddenly felt like 'little people' despite all this money and he didn't like that at all.

The other half is that the nature of business has changed in Julian’s eyes. Impersonal communication, corporations that exist only to buy and gut others and a cut-throat culture in which people don’t work for themselves or someone else but are a slave to something intangible. This has always been true but Julian's rarefied circumstances had made his concept of money’s ineffable power about hierarchy and the human element of commerce. The acceleration of the present looks to him like others had created their own financial golems in his absence, only to be devoured by them.

Re-establishing himself has not been easy, many of Julian’s ideas are hideously outdated and it took time for him to acclimate to 50 years of technological and cultural change but he is still a consummate businessman. Today he has recouped his lost value and more across a slew of companies. Outside of this he operates as something of a venture capitalist and economic saboteur. His specific interest is in disruption of established businesses, the bigger the better. Organising unionisation across a whole region of Wal-Marts so they’ll close their branches rather than cave, then providing funding for the ex-employees to open co-ops in return for a cut? He’s done it, twice. It hasn’t worked well, poking the bear of more monied interests has earned him quite a few enemies but it has also drawn allies from unexpected quarters.

He’s no Alex Abel but Julian has a half-dozen occult underground malcontents who owe him favours. He’s hesitant to use them for anything illegal but most of them don’t share his scruples. His failure to make progress on his ultimate goal has made him paranoid that he has drawn the attention of the ‘beasts of finance’ that he is attempting to yoke and that they might crush him if he is not careful. It would only take one misconstrued directive or badly timed escalation to set a magickal-mundane commerce brush war ablaze.

STATS
Personality: Julian asserts himself through a gruff stoicism that reminds most people of their grandpa or great-grandpa. His obsession makes him dawdlingly egalitarian, he’s all about using his means to prop up others as a way to restore balance provided he also benefits. Secretly he’s narcissistically ashamed for abandoning the world, he feels like Mickey Mouse in The Sorcerer's Apprentice.
Rage: Squalid modernity. Julian hates the waste people have made of the future. He's a big fan of Elon Musk.
Noble: Selling bootstraps. Julian wants to push money towards being an expression of human power rather than something faceless. Just make sure you pay him back, with interest.
Fear: Time. There’s never enough of it, everything you spend it on closes off other possibilities and if you let it slip away there’s no telling what might happen (Helplessness).
Obsession: Transform money into something people - preferably he - can own and act with rather than the other way around.
Wound Threshold: 50.

Plutomancer 65%* (Adept, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Old-fashioned Millionaire 65% (Substitutes for Status, Protects Helplessness, Unique: Gobs of Money.)
Know Things Old, Once New 45% (Substitutes for Secrecy, Substitutes for Knowledge, Unique: “I know that place/artifact/secret society (or their grandparents)”.)

Shock Gauges

Notches	Violence	Unnatural	Helplessness	Isolation	Self
Hardened	1	6	2	4	2
Failed	0	1	2	2	0