You can’t get time back once you’ve spent it. To the men and woman of the Autumn Court this was the impetus behind pursuing wealth and professional success, spending their time judiciously to outpace the value accrued by others. Having achieved their dreams and materially wanting for little they’ve run back up against this tireless axiom, no matter their wealth they can’t buy back the time they’ve spent amassing their fortunes. At least, that would be the case if it weren’t for magick.
The Autumn Court are doing what they’ve done best for their entire lives: extracting time from others in an uneven exchange that leaves them ahead in the bargain. Greased with three different flavours of magick the increasingly alien cabalmates work together to perfect their methods and act as an insurance against outside predations and individual failure. How far this mutual support will go under fire has yet to be put to the test.
The Autumn Court has the following concerns:
- Build a centralised magickal vault to store their harvested time in, safe from the vagaries and scavenging of lesser cabals (their current weighty objective is at 39%, they’ve just had false planning approved as a cover for what their construction crew will be really building). This is as much an exercise in solidarity as cementing their power.
- Clark is being blackmailed by a private detective in the employ of his son with video of his hobbies and wants to deal with it quietly. His son just wants money for drugs.
- Susan is stuck playing cat-and-mouse with a dogged FDA inspector who has come perilously close to discovering the secret ingredient in her cosmetics. With Clark distracted by his own problems she has approached Miguel for help.
Clark Bailey is a chronophage (a time focused adept who gains power by wasting the time of others but loses it if he wastes his own) who takes a surprisingly hands on role in administering the internship programs of his accountancy firms. What is taken as a twilight years taste for mentorship is really a front for his occult activities. Taking a page from his childhood terror at the bedtime fairytales his grandmother would tell him of fay bargains and lifetimes spent trapped in strange realms, he has styled himself (and the cabal’s name) after those creatures. Making contracts for people’s time in return for the promise of intangible experience he deliberately wastes it while providing nothing of value in return and harvests charges in the process.
Stopping barely short of the banishment rooms designed to punish employees with meaningless work until they become disheartened and quit, Clark has tailored his process carefully. The upfront appearance of legitimacy keeps applicants keen for just long enough before the bait and switch robs them of the opportunity to take up other offers. Selective use and magickal cover ups keeps complaints from being taken seriously and the Kafkaesque weave of contractual obligation paired with institutional ties to several colleges keeps things quiet. The primary bottleneck for Clark’s process is the number of applicants he can abuse at a time, but performed correctly it’s rich in charges.
A man of advancing years whose adept obsession has estranged him from his family, at home Clark holds imaginary conversations with his missing spouse and children. Over time this has muddled with his fairy motif and a fancy for 18th century fashion, on the staff’s days off he struts the rooms of his home in aged finery and powdered wigs twisted to take on gossamer and ephemeral qualities while talking to himself. It’s a secret pastime he is ashamed of and would do a lot to protect.
Miguel Chandler made his fortune on payday loans and holds a particular disdain for his customer base for needing his services while simultaneously maintaining a belief that they do so with no coercing factors. Acknowledging that would infringe on his self-image and sense of superiority and fairness. As an avatar of the salesman he’s made deals most of his life, it’s only with the formation of the cabal that he’s been ambitious enough to industrialise it. Tutoring would-be franchisees on the avatar path he now heads a growing pyramid scheme of merchants who owe him a fraction of the special deals he has taught them to make with clients who are especially vulnerable.
The vivacious bleached-blonde, tanned golfer moves across the green with vigor of a man 30 years his 68 year old junior while cutting deals and indulging in social jockeying with upper crust of his home city - the same people who would’ve felt about him as he feels about his customer base in his youth (and still do in snide whispers). The subtle humiliations and one upmanship he visits on them shelter an ego as precarious as his empire. I mean, what if his protege-employees unionised?
Susan Reese has fought damned hard to get to where she is as head of the largest cosmetics manufacturer in five states. Even in an industry focused on women she had to contend with the glass ceiling, only bypassing it by shrewd and ruthless political acumen. As someone who has been described as “dowdy” she knows all too well how focused people are on physical appearance and apparent youth. She counts on it for her immortality.
The secret ingredient in her formulations is a type of mummy brown (a special pigment made from mummified corpses) mixed with her own blood, the recipe allegedly originating with Countess and serial killer Elizabeth Bathory. Added to products which provide short term alleviation of the ravages of time it gives them an added kick of magickal oomph in return for vampirically draining the internal health of her customers. By consuming the leftover skulls of the powdered mummies Susan remains timelessly young on the inside, even as she appears to continue ageing.
It would be a perfect, if grisly and inhumane, plan to live forever if the ritual didn’t require authentic ancient Egyptian mummies. Between difficulty in indulging in Hobby Lobby-style smuggling and a dwindling supply Susan is keen to find a different method without exposing her potential obsolescence to her cabalmates.
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