Fear is a form of power. It is a gene-deep engine which strips away the dull cow conditioning of a soft society to reveal the animal underneath. It protects, it warns, it compels. It is a hungry energy that kept us safe from predators and starvation in our species’ infancy. Today it pushes us to compete and analyse against falling behind in a hyper-individualistic society. Romana can no longer feel her fear, she sought after it too much and burned herself out.
But she can take yours.
Romana was the awkward, smelly kid growing up so she didn't have a lot of positive social reinforcement. She also essentially raised herself and her younger brothers, her parents too busy working or too exhausted and disinterested to do the job themselves. Like some in her situation she developed poor coping mechanisms for the kind of pressure and uncertainty that a child really shouldn’t have to shoulder. Self-harm, acting-out, the works. Their reaction wasn’t exactly ideal either, so she learned to hide it instead. She adopted a psychological form of self-harm, one that involved subjecting herself to her greatest fears.
Predictably Romana’s life hasn’t been all roses, without other outlets her coping mechanism bloomed into a full-blown, romanticised obsession. It led her to the dark corners and depths that polite society pretends don’t exist. Eventually she broke through her ability to feel fear or much of anything to her regret. Robbed of the emotional highs of danger and self-destruction she tried to find another way.
She won’t tell anyone where she got her ability (why create competition?) but her travels had taken her around the edge of the occult underground before, so she wasn’t a stranger to the weirder things in life. Romana can take your fear from you (for a while) and keep it for herself. It’s not an easy thing to do, she has to draw it out of you first. For that reason she figured she’d need help and/or protection, that’s why she’s in Mak Attax.
To her credit she’s reliable so long as she gets what she wants. Romana works night shift without complaint, handles the most disgusting bathroom messes without pause and has twice been robbed at gunpoint and not missed a step. She has no social life outside of work or her cabal and sleeps her days away in her poorly kept trailer.
Speaking of her cabal, Romana mostly grudgingly tolerates them. Even the more jaded members seem like excitable puppies to her, just waiting to get themselves slapped down. In turn they see her as a mystical, take-no-shit badass who they can point at any problem and watch it crumple. On an organisational basis Romana gets visits from Mak Attax members from other branches who want some emotional shielding when they’re expecting trouble. She’s careful not to seem too eager on the boards but makes her ability well known to take advantage of this.
The fears she takes from people lose their power over her too quickly for her liking but she can still feel them jostling around in her head. A mountain of terror, the panicked power of multitudes. She’s building something inside of her, she just doesn’t know what it is yet.
STATS
Personality: Stoic and sleepy-eyed, people regard Romana as either unflappable or a psychopath. She’s neither, she’s just beyond the threshold of what most people would consider normal tolerance. The only thing she has any intensity about is her obsession, everything else is done with implacable, mechanical duty. Romana behaves fearlessly, even when she’s terrified.
Rage: People who look down on her.
Noble: Sharing what she has with the people who need it most.
Fear: Too many to count at this point. If Romana ever recovers from her burned out state she is unlikely to remain functional for long.
NOTE: In her current state Romana cannot use any of her passions to flip or reroll. She is burned out, having accumulated 30 hardened notches. Her Fear Eater identity allows her to partially overcome this.
Obsession: Gain more “power” by consuming more of other people’s fears.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Fear Eater 60%* (Unique - Steal Fear Passion, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick. See below for more details.)
Creepy Fast-Food Worker 60% (Substitutes for Secrecy, Coerces Helplessness, Reads Fear.)
Shock Gauges
Notches
|
Violence
|
Unnatural
|
Helplessness
|
Isolation
|
Self
|
Hardened
|
6
|
5
|
6
|
7
|
6
|
Failed
|
2
|
2
|
2
|
2
|
5
|
Disorder: Addictive Behavior - Experiencing consumed fears. Given a chance to use a fresh stolen fear passion Romana must take it. If she does not it sinks beneath the surface of her accumulated trauma and she loses access to it, like her other passions.
Supernatural Identity: Fear Eater
In order to consume someone’s fear you have to tease it out of them first. The target must experience a stress check related to their fear passion. The result doesn’t matter so long as they aren’t too hardened to have to roll. While the frisson is being processed a successful Fear Eater roll scoops out the emotional impetus of their terror and gobbles it down. For a number of days afterwards equal to the tens place of the roll (or the sum of the roll on a matched success, 20 days on a crit) the target effectively has no fear passion, no rerolls or flip-flopping and they can’t be coerced with it. They don’t have to make stress checks for anything related to it either, even things that would scare an ordinary person. Eventually the form of their personality reasserts itself and the passion reemerges.
You gain that fear passion permanently, along with everything that entails. In Romana's case she can use it despite being burned out until her disorder paves over it.
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