Spurious correlation of spurious correlation is Jolina’s bread and butter. She started out as a behavioural economist who by a confluence of restricted opportunity and coincidence took up the study of the perception of causal relationships where none exist. It didn’t do much to help her problems with being taken seriously as an academic but it did allow her to carve out a niche studying the ways in which people would behave superstitiously with their money.
It appalled her family, they’d expected something far more prestigious for their daughter and her rebuff of lucrative offers from private sector jobs they sent her way added insult to injury. Resentful of their stifling interference she moved further and further away from her parents influence the harder they tried to exert control over her life. Feeling cornered and exasperated she did something she knew would be the last straw: she founded the Chainletter Research Society.
It was practically a gag endeavour, something she could use to embarrass her way out of association with them. Studying the influence of chainletters and emails over the fortunes of the people who participated in them seemed like the kind of idiocy she could artfully walk back by turning it into an examination of how the same psychological factors could be used to predict how groups of people could be influenced to behave.
Examining dozens of factors Jolina came to a bizarre conclusion, the results weren’t conclusive but there did seem to be a weak statistical correlation. At least for those at the top. The closer she looked the more certain it seemed. By examining the collective wills of hordes of people bent to singular purpose and isolating for factors like participation and intent she was building the first ever database of gutter magick worked at an industrial-scale.
Not that Jolina feels comfortable calling it that, even now when the evidence seems incontrovertible she prefers to call her discovery Ripple Theory as though there is some hidden science she just needs to find so that it will all make sense. Her own experiments have been effective enough that the results she has would be legitimately publishable if she could ever find a journal that would take her seriously. Instead she has used her discovery for personal enrichment, it's not as though her career prospects are great anymore or like anyone could convict her of insider trading with magick.
A TNI-compromised SEC agent sniffing around her activities intends to make a go of charging her with something assuming the spooks tasked by information coming out of FLEX ECHO don't get to her first. Even then Mak Attax have gotten a hold of a file one of them shouldn't have left in a coffee shop and the Sleepers are tracking strange fluctuations in the way magickal energies are aligning themselves.
The ripples of Jolina Henriksson's actions have lit a beacon to anyone with an interest in magick and they're all curious just what's making all the noise.
STATS
Personality: Earnest, curious, brilliant, suspicious of people’s motives and absolutely in love with jazz. Dr. Henriksson wants to use her work in service of the broad aim of ‘helping people’ but between not nailing down what that means and fear of it being stolen from her struggles to make headway.
Rage: Being talked over. Jolina has taken a lot of mistreatment but hates not being taken seriously the most.
Noble: Freedom. People shouldn’t be tied down by others.
Fear: The ocean. Jolina never learned to swim after seeing of Jaws (Helplessness).
Obsession: The hidden ripples we miss in the noise of our everyday lives.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Black Sheep 40% (Substitutes for Status, Protects Isolation, Coerces Isolation.)
Earnest Academic 50% (Substitutes for Knowledge, Substitutes for Connect, Protects Unnatural.)
Ripple Theory 55%* (Vague Information, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick. Jolina can reroll an undesired result by putting a petty milestone’s worth of effort into sending out new chainletters to her curated mailing list.)
Shock Gauges
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