148 - Moneygrub

Unnatural Entity: Moneygrub

A lot of people have trouble managing their money. Consumer debt continues to rise even as wages stagnate against the tide of inflation, people pushed to despair sacrifice an uncertain tomorrow for temporary comfort today. Scarcity pushes poor financial habits more than abundance and with far graver consequences. Entire businesses are built around capitalizing on it. People unable to trust their own impulses sometimes resort to shortcuts around building a discipline that persistent pressure has prevented or excused them from affording. Cutting up credit cards, surrendering power of attorney to a more responsible family member, growing arcane parasites that literally prevent them from spending money.

A plutomancer with compulsive spending habits is a sorry creature, pathologically fixated on acquiring the one thing they can’t get rid of fast enough. At best it’s a situation of dizzying highs and lows, more often it’s a teeth grinding side dish to persistent poverty. Desperation and power make for extreme solutions and so a plutomancer money launderer fallen on hard times whipped up one of these, swallowed the thumbnail-sized, white egg and shed her frivolous relationship with what had once been easy money. All it cost her was the jagged, articulated bundle of credit card shards nestling up against her amygdala. She could feel it rustle when agitated and would hear its whistling cooing in her sleep.

Every time she risked breaching taboo the moneygrub would take over. It doesn’t matter what you choose to spend if something pulls a string in your head and yanks your hand away whenever you reach for that credit card. It doesn't alter your choices, just hijacks your flesh. This is a rank 6 Helplessness check, but eventually the reaction shapes behaviour and people either become inured to sharing their autonomy or go crazy.

The problem is that the moneygrub was mistakenly built with a lifecycle and its growing restrictions can become fatally inconvenient. Following the quarters of the financial year it starts out at just shy of $2,000 - a plutomancer’s taboo - slicing in half by the end of the first quarter. This isn’t too bad but by the end of the second this plummets to a roof of $50 on transactions and coming into the final quarter it prevents you from spending at all, actively or passively. If you survive this the effect ends and the grub purges itself from you painfully but non-fatally when you get your next tax return (if you don't file taxes it just sits in your head, inert).

Their creator did not survive, she had a catatonic breakdown and starved. Found dead in her bedsit surrounded by money the thing in her head would not let her touch, it had burrowed its way out of her neck and built a nest of bloodstained lucre on her bed. Lifeless and shattered atop a mound of small, white ovals. Today they’re trafficked in the occult underground as anything from weapons to financially poison your enemies to the tapeworm-egg equivalent of monetary diet pills.

Moneygrub, There Is An IRS Agent Inside All Our Heads
Wound Threshold: 1-10. Moneygrubs are tiny, even at their largest. The real trick is getting to something that’s wrapped around a person's brain stem without killing the host.
Credit Limit 99%: If you try to exceed the transaction threshold the moneygrub is currently guarding against it will automatically hijack your body, controlling you like a helpless puppet, to prevent the action. This extends to passive dodges, if you set up a regular electronic payment exceeding its tolerance or give your card to a friend so they can spend for you it will act to rectify the situation. Sometimes violently.

Moneygrub's perceptions aren’t perfect, clever and complex obfuscation can evade censure. Give a -20% shift to rolls on this identity for every layer of a deception it hasn’t seen before. It can’t understand anything you say or do that isn’t spending money so feel free to openly discuss and plot with co-conspirators.