Carlos was a trust-fund poseur who never really meant the things he said or did. He played at being a subversive graffiti artist but it was really just a way for him to gain social cachet as rebellious and disaffected. Despite his desperation tourism he always had a future waiting for him beyond his expensive art school degree and, more importantly, family connections. At most his experience influenced the choice to pivot the section of the large advertising agency he was eventually put in charge of towards obnoxious, sometimes questionably legal, guerilla marketing stunts.
Then along came a mid-life crisis and Carlos found himself trying to relive and find meaning in the lost patterns of his youth. Nightly forays, taking greater risks than he ever had as a teenager. All for the adrenaline rush and nostalgic frisson of sticking it to the system that he blamed for making him old and bald and fat. It wasn’t true though, so the feeling didn’t last and when it gave out and he chased it harder his genuine desperation gave way to an understanding that his juvenile indolence could never have given him. He saw the symbols he’d spent his whole life working with as what they really were, independently of him but a part of him.
Carlos is a Logomancer by night - tagging his way across the city and trying to unravel its sea of symbols - and a mid-level advertising executive by day - creating the commercial flotsam that dominates his nightly work. His dayjob routinely causes taboo and he implicitly understands he could technically circumvent the problem by incorporating his advertising work into his mark but it feels wrong. Defacing train cars with a spray can was what gave his life new meaning and turning his back on it now would feel like giving up half the puzzle.
An interesting side effect of this conflict is the relationship Carlos has developed with a local Tagger swarm (see pages 85-86 of Book 3: Reveal). The interplay between his control over the symbols that impact the collective expression of his city and the insight he gets from studying what the swarm leaves behind forms a recursive pattern. Wound tightly enough this arrangement could see business rivals beaten down by spray-can wielding youths for getting in the way of his ideas even while the swarm hides symbols contrary to the collective expression from his magick. As the ouroboros chokes down its tail it’ll be harder to see where he begins and the symbols end.
STATS
Personality: An exceedingly spunky middle-aged man, an incongruous image that he plays up to dazzle clients and uses to terrorize his co-workers and underlings. Sometimes his behaviour verges on manic, which he manages by self-medicating with alcohol. He’s a talkative drunk.
Rage: People who stop kids from being kids.
Noble: Truth in advertising. Stretch the truth all you want but never outright lie.
Fear: Becoming irrelevant (Isolation).
Obsession: What separates people from their symbols?
Wound Threshold: 50.
Advertising Executive 50% (Substitutes for Status, Substitutes for Lie, Evaluates Isolation.)
Middle-Aged Grafitti Artist 40% (Substitutes for Secrecy, Provides Initiative, Evaluates Self.)
Logomancer 30%* (Adept, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Shock Gauges
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