Magick isn’t worth it. That’s the big reveal, sorry. Anything worthwhile you can do with it is better done through mundane means and the things you can’t do through mundane means aren’t worth the sacrifice. It’s a narcotic, it’ll feel wonderful and secret and powerful and suck you into a spiral of addiction and self-destruction if you don’t turn away. It’s a curse.
People still do it, Angela Demoss is one of them as much as she laments the fact. She serves her local community from her musty walk-up apartment in much the same way as village witches, tribal shamans and wise men have done for centuries. A disenfranchised group left behind in a society where it isn’t profitable enough to cater to them still needs medicine, hope and opportunity. If she doesn’t do her magick they’ll try to reach for it themselves, or worse, do without. To her it’s better that she occupy that space and make the sacrifice for all of them.
The experience didn’t break her but it did make her weary. Rather than completely retreat she now shoulders the burden of magick for as many of the underprivileged as possible. Where possible she’ll dress mundane solutions up as magick, it’s less complicated and the placebo effect of some herbs and ground up viagra is a better cure for marital difficulties than any fertility charm she knows. When she doesn’t have a choice she’ll pull out the big guns: a pair of ex-Sleepers who took her for a charlatan are locked in perpetual nightmares for trying to turn her corner of the city into their personal fiefdom. A detente with the rest has earned her enough respect from the underground that now she can pull the same wizard-of-oz shtick on the clued-in folks too.
Getting on in years Angela has taken on an apprentice, a teenager who came to her begging for a solution to the violence at home. She sees the same hungry desire to change the world of her youth in her protege and to her student’s chagrin her lessons are often cautionary tales, hard work and study, like a magickal Mr. Miyagi. Moretails - her rat-king spirit guide - pshaws this approach as unnecessary hardship. More than one late-night debate between them has centred on the trope of mastery coming full circle and her response that she might just as well take its disdain as an indication she is on the right path. To its credit Moretails hasn’t yet brought up that the looped garoo is still out there, that the wards she wove to lock it away won’t last forever. That if she doesn’t face her past then who will?
STATS
Personality: Enigmatic but practical. Angela will put on the act and woo the rubes because half of her magick is selling people on her reputation to peddle mundane solutions as magickal. The other half is knowing when to actually use her power to push back the darkness.
Rage: Magickal abuse. It’s all the more insidious because ordinary people can’t see or do anything about it.
Noble: Equality through unequal means. Putting her thumb on the scale in favour of people at a disadvantage is Angela’s bread and butter.
Fear: Calling up something she cannot put down (Unnatural).
Obsession: Magick is a horses ass, people could get what they want without the danger if they weren’t so fixated on the quick-fix.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Wearily Insightful 50% (Substitutes for Notice, Substitutes for Knowledge, Therapeutic.)
Practical Witch 55%* (Substitutes for Lie, Medical, Coerces Unnatural.)
Avatar: The Shaman 80% (Avatar, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Shock Gauges
People still do it, Angela Demoss is one of them as much as she laments the fact. She serves her local community from her musty walk-up apartment in much the same way as village witches, tribal shamans and wise men have done for centuries. A disenfranchised group left behind in a society where it isn’t profitable enough to cater to them still needs medicine, hope and opportunity. If she doesn’t do her magick they’ll try to reach for it themselves, or worse, do without. To her it’s better that she occupy that space and make the sacrifice for all of them.
When she started on her path 40 years ago it was an entirely different story. Angela was headstrong and wilful, diving into a secret world that would grant her knowledge and mastery over the universe. She and her friends were going to change the world, one spell at a time. She couldn’t have been more wrong. It took two of them getting killed by the third - possessed by a thing calling itself “the looped garoo” - in the bowels of a shattered shopping mall to prove it to her and the sleepless nights won’t let her forget it.
The experience didn’t break her but it did make her weary. Rather than completely retreat she now shoulders the burden of magick for as many of the underprivileged as possible. Where possible she’ll dress mundane solutions up as magick, it’s less complicated and the placebo effect of some herbs and ground up viagra is a better cure for marital difficulties than any fertility charm she knows. When she doesn’t have a choice she’ll pull out the big guns: a pair of ex-Sleepers who took her for a charlatan are locked in perpetual nightmares for trying to turn her corner of the city into their personal fiefdom. A detente with the rest has earned her enough respect from the underground that now she can pull the same wizard-of-oz shtick on the clued-in folks too.
Getting on in years Angela has taken on an apprentice, a teenager who came to her begging for a solution to the violence at home. She sees the same hungry desire to change the world of her youth in her protege and to her student’s chagrin her lessons are often cautionary tales, hard work and study, like a magickal Mr. Miyagi. Moretails - her rat-king spirit guide - pshaws this approach as unnecessary hardship. More than one late-night debate between them has centred on the trope of mastery coming full circle and her response that she might just as well take its disdain as an indication she is on the right path. To its credit Moretails hasn’t yet brought up that the looped garoo is still out there, that the wards she wove to lock it away won’t last forever. That if she doesn’t face her past then who will?
STATS
Personality: Enigmatic but practical. Angela will put on the act and woo the rubes because half of her magick is selling people on her reputation to peddle mundane solutions as magickal. The other half is knowing when to actually use her power to push back the darkness.
Rage: Magickal abuse. It’s all the more insidious because ordinary people can’t see or do anything about it.
Noble: Equality through unequal means. Putting her thumb on the scale in favour of people at a disadvantage is Angela’s bread and butter.
Fear: Calling up something she cannot put down (Unnatural).
Obsession: Magick is a horses ass, people could get what they want without the danger if they weren’t so fixated on the quick-fix.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Wearily Insightful 50% (Substitutes for Notice, Substitutes for Knowledge, Therapeutic.)
Practical Witch 55%* (Substitutes for Lie, Medical, Coerces Unnatural.)
Avatar: The Shaman 80% (Avatar, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Shock Gauges
Notches
|
Violence
|
Unnatural
|
Helplessness
|
Isolation
|
Self
|
Hardened
|
3
|
6
|
2
|
1
|
4
|
Failed
|
0
|
1
|
2
|
1
|
1
|
No comments:
Post a Comment