Tuesday 26 November 2019

210 - Miles Pilner, Boring Beyond Words & Changeless

GMC: Miles Pilner, Boring Beyond Words

7 AM, alarm, shower and shave, get dressed, breakfast (two pieces of toast and an apple), brush teeth and leave the house at exactly 7:45. Commute takes 1 hour and 3 minutes, he arrives at 8:48 and is at his desk by 8:55. Miles’ day passes uneventfully, as it does every day for him working as a low-level accountant in a small office with one, tiny window set high in the wall. Every day is exactly the same for Miles, as it has been for the past 34 years, and he hardly notices.

Miles isn’t just stuck in a rut. At some point the grinding, endless monotony of his life slipped a gear and Miles won the lottery of banality, he’s stuck in an endless loop of his own making. Time still passes but thanks to his perfect, unchanging routine it might as well be standing still. This stability extends to things that facilitate his existence: the company he works at has weathered several financial crises without missing a beat but so long as Miles works there it will never expand. The apartment building he lives in will never charge more for rent than it did when he moved in and it will never be renovated. The tiny independent grocery store down the block barely stays in business off a trickle of Miles’ radiating immotility.

Most people don’t notice this, the ones that do tend to be quite odd. The kind that wonder just what they can do with a man who acts as a walking universal constant. A small handful of them live in his orbit like remora fish, feeding off the stability and cheap rent that are boons to people with the kind of chaotic lives that typify the occult underground. Most drift away eventually, the obsessions that cause their problems proving too tempting and incompatible with the lifestyle. The ones that stay get institutionalized and territorial, they don’t take kindly to interlopers especially if they try to mess with their meal ticket.

For his part Miles doesn’t notice and so long as nothing infringes on his routine he probably never will.

STATS
Personality:
Bland. He slides right out of your mind as soon as you stop interacting with him, that part’s not magickal he just doesn’t leave much of an impression. Miles like it that way and would find the attentions of a bunch of occult weirdos highly distressing.
Rage: People who use violence to get their way. He can take being yelled at but don’t put your hands on him.
Noble: Little details. Miles likes getting everything just right.
Fear: Miles is secretly afraid that he’ll never have kids (Isolation).
Obsession: Predictably, Miles has no obsession.
Wound Threshold: 50.

Accountant 60% (Substitutes for Notice, Substitutes for Knowledge, Unique - Can cook books and parse byzantine records.)
Nebbish 50% (Substitutes for Secrecy, Protects Isolation, Evaluates Isolation.)
Changeless 99% (Vague Protection, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick. See below for more details.)

Shock Gauges

Notches
Violence
Unnatural
Helplessness
Isolation
Self
Hardened
1
1
1
4
2
Failed
0
1
0
1
1


Supernatural Identity: Changeless

Miles still ages (slowly), can get sick and injured or suffer trauma but he’s partially protected from many of life’s hazards. For starters everything that tries to harm Miles is at a -20% shift, -10% if its value is higher than his identity. If some random event threatens to disrupt the routine a successful roll rearranges synchronicity to put things back to normal. More direct action takes a toll on his ability.

Objectives that threaten Miles routine lose the tens dice of a successful roll (sum on a matched success) from progress on reaching milestones. This only applies to local or very specific global objectives. The same amount of damage applies to Miles’ changeless identity, although it can be increased again by normal advancement.

This identity can also be damaged by moving Miles out of his routine directly. This is potentially dangerous since its protective abilities oppose rolls made against the routine, but every day in which he can’t fulfill it the identity takes a -10% cumulative shift which lasts until he returns to its familiar embrace. An easier method of disruption might involve preying on Miles’ passions, if he makes the choice to depart from his routine of his own will then the penalty accrues at the same rate but no one has to deal with magickal bad luck trying to crash their car as they drive away with him stuffed in the trunk.

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