Back when she was Maria Wood, Jack knew that the world didn’t feel right. That heady childhood bloom of newness faded as she got older only to be replaced by a droning, surreal monotony that wouldn’t let her sleep. What might have been diagnosed and treated as a rare case of childhood depersonalization if her parents paid more attention was instead wallpapered over by something that promised a hazily similar shine to those nostalgic memories: the magic of brands.
In an earlier era this wouldn’t have worked. Advertising is an old game and older generations were, if anything, more susceptible to it than they are today. But they didn’t have the same instant global exposure, the same hypertrophic stimulus battling fatigued apathy, the same grip on the culturally impoverished’s sense of self and worth. Brands weren’t religions.
So Maria used them as a proxy for feeling like she was real, a shifting collage of traits gathered from products and marketing in place of a real personality. It was an unhealthy adaption but it worked enough to survive as she made her mad way through the world. Well enough that she became an adept without even realising what she was, a sociomancer by second nature. She was received with curiousity by the occult underground but barely noticed them beyond the fact it was easier to avoid taboo without having to deal with the awkward shunning of creeped out normal people.
Her imperfect suit of mental armour worked right up until her brother showed up, their father had passed and the estate was stuck in probate. There were taxes and insurances and paperworks to be gone over with lawyers and they needed her. That history, a life so prosaic and achingly tedious it made a mockery of who she really was. Maria broke down completely and fled.
Her intended self destruction, hiding in the demolition of a local photocopier manufacturer’s last plant isn’t something she remembers. Nor does she recall the ensuing months hitchhiking across the country as the tweedy mascot she’d once admired. She has completely reshaped herself in dying corporate images a half a dozen times since. Risking death alongside them she subsumes herself to these falling minor gods in return for the major charge she gains with risking death. Spending it, she walks away wearing what they were.
This is only temporary. Maria’s sense of self has the same fragility that has dogged her all her life. As it starts to get the better of her, the current skin she wears begins to itch. Tracking dying brands all over the country she is always trying to stay ahead of her real identity. For now she wears the face of an almost cartoonish cowboy, lasoo, boots and all, cribbed from a shuttered cheese manufacturer. Each new mask resets her Self gauge, if she ever reaches five failed notches the facade will disintegrate and leave her exposed in convulsing catatonia.
STATS
Personality: A little too big and a little too bright to be believable. Monterey Jack is currently a slow talking, hyper-masculine parody of a cowboy that Maria hermit-crabbed off a cheese factory. In a few months she could be something else and something else again a year later. Either that or her facade will slip and she’ll wind up catatonic in a hospital.
Rage: Banal reality.
Noble: Aspirational glamour.
Fear: What am I underneath this? (Self).
Obsession: Cloaking herself in the shells of cast off brands.
Wound Threshold: 65.
Sociomancer 55%* (Adept, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Magickal Facade 65% (Substitutes for Fitness, Protects Self, Provides Wound Threshold.)
Shock Gauges
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