111 - Sciamachy

Supernatural Identity: Sciamachy

Professional fighting is a rough game, economically speaking. Sure you’ve got megastar athletes earning millions of dollars on high-end fights but as with most lucrative careers there’s a vast number of people just getting by. Average yearly earnings for a professional boxer are around $35K and expenses like travel, training and management fees come out of that. Most have a second job while trying to make it big. Most, by the competitive nature of the sport, do not make it big.

Superstition in boxing is about as common as it is in sailors and gamblers. Sports are already a motley of arcane rules around pursuit of a goal, so adding a little psychic grist to placebo an athlete into a better mental state isn’t just tolerated, it’s celebrated. Lucky charms, pre-fight rituals, omens: they’re all part of the pageant.

These two factors set the stage for David Sousa to fall ass backwards into magick through a combination of desperation to succeed and receptiveness to superstition. A hard luck case who had once been the archetypal up-and-comer it was a personal problems and poor judgement that led to his inability to get off the ground. His no-good scam artist of a brother constantly dragging him into trouble and his sister’s bad taste in men creating the same, he struggled to balance familial responsibility, his own ambitions and his vices. Ultimately it soured his career with a string of losses and some resulting trouble with the law put him away for a while.

Of all the things to come back out with, a thorough schooling in magick courtesy of his entropomancer cellmate is probably the last thing anyone expected. While not a chaos mage himself, Sousa has developed an arcane practice that many attribute to unimpeded training while he was inside. David has taken his inner demons and harnessed his futile battles against them to psychically dominate his opponents. He’s finally making some headway and people are starting to pay attention. Hopefully not the wrong kind of people.

Sciamachy, shadow boxing, is a Specific Harm supernatural identity with the following caveats. David makes a roll on this identity before a match (he could theoretically do it in a real fight too, but he’d need a moment or two to psyche himself up first): if he has more total hardened and total failed notches on his gauges than his opponent he gets a +20% shift, if he only beats them in one category the roll is at base value. On the other hand if his opponent is carrying more damage than he is then the results of his roll are automatically downgraded a step, matched success becomes success, success becomes failure, etc. Any results play out during the fight.

The effects are subtle but telling, sudden fatigue and critical missteps by his opponents as they are overwhelmed by his projected problems and discontent. Of course, unfortunately, being able to psyche out your opponent by being more messed up than they are doesn’t exactly incentivise taking good care of yourself.