Civilization, like all gods, demands sacrifice. Appeasement through the death of a few is how we safeguard the well being of the many. Road death tolls are lamentable but no one is going to stop driving. People die from industry, coal and tobacco kill more people than they employ, yearly. The consumer electronics you’re reading this on? Chances are they were manufactured in circumstances little better than slave labour, which have driven many to their ends.
To Marilyn this is the hidden truth of the modern world, concealed beneath the cultural lie of individual value. That we allow this thing we’ve built to consume some and in return keep the greater number of us warm, fed and sheltered. She sees herself as above this, she is the leech that drains the power of these sacrifices for herself and is elevated by it.
Marilyn wasn’t in one of the frontline professions exposed to death on a daily basis, but she was in the one that saw how it was dramatised for public consumption. A photojournalist who saw how the sausage was made in industrial accidents, war and crime reporting. She became inured to the human cost, but never to the way it was misrepresented. Predictably this made her difficult to work with, co-workers and friends would point out how much farther see could go professionally if she weren’t so hellbent on alienating her employers for editorialising. So she bounced around the bottom of the industry for a long time, a first-rate talent pulling second and third-rate work.
Then she nearly died - should have died - in a work-chartered light plane crash that killed everyone else aboard. She spent months in hospital and then more learning to walk again (still uses a cane on the bad days). The up close and personal trauma twisted and crystallized something she had always believed into a strange, new obsession. Turning her back on the temporary fame of insipid sympathy she reconciled the need to feed society with death with her resolve to never fall victim to it. Her work ethic has become spotty and her loved ones are worried about her. About the way she travels between hospitals and accident sites, dressed for mourning and smelling of rosewater. Hovering hungrily over those civilization has claimed before they can expire.
Different from other death sorcerers, Marilyn’s personal ritual doesn’t require her to be responsible for the harvested death. In fact, it prohibits it. All the other typical prerequisites are there: ritual purification of the self, observance of proper reverence for the death, subjugation of the victim. In many ways it parallels the adept practice of Cuxinjia, the death must be directly and personally observed and must be in service to civilized living (but not necessarily the result of neglected risk). It’s a quibbling distinction in some respects, except that she also needs to harvest a trophy to keep the captured essence in.
STATS
Personality: Somber, intelligent and self-absorbed. Marilyn speaks so convincingly about her obsession it’s easy to forget just how horrible it is. On just about any other subject she falters and stammers, usually choosing to remain terse.
Rage: Comforting lies.
Noble: Authority and power should be wielded with care.
Fear: Taboo and running out of charges. The idea of being as naked to death as everyone else terrifies Marilyn (Unnatural).
Obsession: Siphoning off the power of our collective sacrifices for herself.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Ghoulish 50% (Substitutes for Secrecy, Protects Violence, Coerces Violence.)
Troublemaking Photojournalist 50% (Substitutes for Notice, Protects Helplessness, Coerces Helplessness.)
Thanatomancer 40%* (Adept, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Shock Gauges
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