Lillie is trusted because she’s proven herself untrustworthy. Her appetites are a known quantity and at this point she’s been put through the wringer so thoroughly that there’s no deeper layers to any deception she could muster. As far as a front-person for less than legal activities, you could ask for worse. Technically.
She started out in the financial/health services field. A childhood delinquent and shoplifter with a sweet tooth for lucre, Lillie had plotted the ascendancy of her career from college. She was going to embezzle with the best of them. It was in the middle of a particularly sophisticated insurance fraud scheme using the identities of dead people (who had yet to register as dead in certain key systems owing to curious bureaucratic inefficiencies between state organisations) that one of Alex Abel’s flunkies caught her out.
It wasn’t her fault, like a lot of well-planned crimes it boiled down to bad timing and chance. Abel had just acquired the insurance company and thought he’d trial run a recently acquired adept by tasking them with a supernatural audit. You can’t really plan for divination when covering your tracks.
On the other hand what she had done showed real artistry plus Alex now had a bunch of nicely packaged blackmail material on her and a present need for someone who could move money around anonymously for his burgeoning occult organisation. So instead of a federal indictment she got a job offer: handle the money, cover the tracks and think about what kind of people who make these offers might do if you decide to rob them or tattle. So TNI had a cover for their payroll and money laundering and all was well.
There were a few hiccups, Lillie wasn’t trusted and got to learn the hard way that she had people watching to keep her in line. Her nephew eventually recovered from his “skiing accident” but never spoke to her again. When the Whisper War kicked off it took her a week before she realized no one was coming to kill her, so she looted what she could and bolted. It took six years for masked goons to drag her back from Belize and across the Carribean by speedboat. Alex was practical enough to think that he would have done the same in her shoes and needed her pilfering acumen, but this time he wasn’t taking chances. Dr. Atsui really did a number on new-TNI’s financial frontwoman.
Most of Lillie’s personal history from before this point is a mystery to her. She recognizes some of what’s already been mentioned - the early career and the threatened nephew - but these things seem distant and unreal. They’re minor details that could have just as easily happened to someone else. There are hints of an existence that went further than simple financial kleptomania but she can’t dredge the details from her memory for the life of her and doesn’t dare to go investigating. Who was she? Was there some other motivation behind her crimes? Did she have a family? A life? The only story Lillie really knows about herself is the one she’s been told and it is lacking.
There’s something else. It could be a clue to some hidden origin or a twisted fascination that has grown in the absence of identity like mold. The money speaks to her, it’s acquisition is a koan that dictates the flow of power like the tide. Her nascent plutomancy is something she struggles to understand even as it drives her, but was it there all along? Alternatively, if TNI has inadvertently discovered a way to create adepts isn’t that more terrifying?
STATS
Personality: Twitchy, in small but obvious ways, and otherwise forgettable. Lillie always tried to deliberately maintain a nondescript persona in her work, now her mousy demeanour is as much neurotic insecurity as act.
Rage: Being outsmarted. Lillie’s confidence depends on her mastery of monetary fraud, she can’t stand anything that puts that in jeopardy.
Noble: Anonymous charity. It was never about the money as much as the acquisition, giving it away to the deserving always felt like the easiest thing to do. Now Lillie’s charity is something she exercises experimentally, trying to see if she can jar anything loose.
Fear: Who am I? Thanks to the thorough brain-rinse, huge chunks of Lillie’s personal history are missing from her memory. It’s what keeps her up at night (Self).
Obsession: Money has a movement to it. Learn the movement, control the money. Control the money, control everything.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Plutomancer 20%* (Adept, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Psych-Salad Survivor 45% (Substitutes for Lie, Protects Violence, Evaluates Self.)
White Collar Criminal 75% (Substitutes for Status, Substitutes for Secrecy, Protects Self.)
Shock Gauges
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