Everything has a rational explanation, if we haven’t figured it out yet that’s only because we don’t have enough information. Ghosts, psychic abilities, alien visitors, it’s all bunk. Campfire stories spun up to chase away the ever present fear of the unknown and take advantage of the vulnerable. Just as often it’s the innocent result of bad pattern recognition and a need to cope with life’s perils and uncertainties, but if anything that provides camouflage to the insidious bad actors.
Alex Tremblay, ‘Rational Alex’ on half a dozen social media and content sharing platforms, makes her living on this basis as a professional skeptic. Author of two books (Go Ahead, Read My Mind and El Chupacabra Ate My Homework), producer of several weekly crowd-supported videos and occasional TV news expert, she’s succeeded better than anyone could reasonably hope off such a one-note shtick. Part of the secret to her success is that she’s not doing it for the money, she’s doing it to punish everyone that peddles superstitious claptrap regardless of their motivation. If you hold any “dangerous” beliefs, you are the enemy and if she can’t convert you she needs to protect people from you.
So far she’s been savvy enough to steer clear of anyone with a big enough following to give her real trouble, sly enough not to target anyone that’ll land her significant social backlash (although there was that close call with the weeping statue that got broken) and lucky enough to avoid any of the freakshows who would be more than happy to prove to her just how wrong she is. She can thank the local Sleepers for that last one. Only a handful of them that follow her content closely, but the consensus is that she’s doing their job for them and that’s worth some protection. Anyone slinging curses in Rational Alex’s direction has found their mojo frustrated.
Of course, internet fandoms sometimes attract irrational obsessives and there aren’t any obsessives more irrational than adepts. Sleeper and cryptomancer Reggie Blanco has taken a creepy parasocial shine to the unwitting Alex, admiring her open and public destruction of people’s beliefs which is something he only does from a position of anonymity. Rationalising his behaviour as protective, he keeps remote vigil over her for magickal attacks (to make matters worse, there have been a couple). Guilt over doing this has led him to fantasize about letting her in on the occult underground. If he does there’s no telling which way she’ll turn, which is the only thing keeping it hypothetical for now. He doesn’t want to break her.
Alex’s potential reaction to Blanco’s reveal depends on the social acumen of a man who bathes once a week and whose only outlets are occasional Sleeper meetings and daily visits to the local bowling alley where he is barely tolerated. It’s a potentially explosive situation laden with unspoken expectations that will probably do no favours to her mental health. The unlikely worst case scenario is that she decides she likes it.
STATS
Personality: Black and white morality wrapped in a sophists tongue, Alex is an intellectual bully. She says she can’t stand the harm people do to themselves by holding superstitious beliefs, pointing to things like the anti-vaxxer movement. In reality she can’t stand that some people think differently to her and will do anything to undermine those who don’t. While it hasn’t been tested yet there is no line she won’t cross to get her way, if she can keep her hands clean.
Rage: Being contradicted by idiots.
Noble: A job worth doing is worth doing right.
Fear: Loss of credibility (Isolation).
Obsession: Put every unexplained phenomenon into neat little boxes.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Know It All Skeptic 70%* (Substitutes for Knowledge, Substitutes for Notice, Protects Unnatural.)
E-celeb 50% (Substitutes for Status, Coerces Isolation, Unique - Has an established audience.)
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
|
2
|
2
|
2
|
3
|
Failed
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0
|
1
|
0
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0
|
1
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