[4.8 Spoilers] Dossiers

Notes on the Aware

The Aware are human or human enough that they retain their natural Innocence.  Innocence, if not immediately clear from some of these entries, does not necessarily imply good, naive, or free of guilt or wrongdoing.  Rather, it means they are protected from the world of practitioners and Others.  Targeting the Innocent with practice or getting involved with them as Others, if not explicitly or tacitly invited in, can lead to negative karma.  If anything, this Innocence greases the wheels of reality, making it easier to skirt by on consequences or to keep going.

Not typically very strong, the Aware keep one foot in the world of the Other and one foot in the mundane, and can be said to enjoy the benefits of both, though many find that their mundane lives are limited or hampered in some way.  They cannot typically be bound as Others are, though they can in some cases be taken as Familiars.

The Aware are a broad category that cannot be readily summed up, beyond those generalized points above.  The subcategories number in the hundreds.

---

Clementine ‘Clem’ Robertjon
Gilded Lily

Gilded Lilies, or Gilded, are those who frequently intersect with magic items, free of any clear design or any intent on their part or the part of others.  We categorize them as such by these symptoms, not the source, when the source can be fate, bloodline, divine interference, patterns, or curses, among other things.

Clementine is a young woman, 20, independent as a reseller of items on online markets.  She is subsidized by practitioners who keep a close eye on her listings and maintain a relationship with her to get first eyes on anything she thinks of as ‘curious’, though she isn’t fully aware of the degree to which this happens.

Her disposition is kind, if troubled.  She very much enjoys the company of people, but avoids maintaining any long-term relationships.  Many people close to her have died, including her friends and family, or else they’ve suffered worse fates.  She earns a fair income and alternates between periods of seclusion and times spent wandering the city, with a focus on the arts.

Clementine is well aware of the existence of Others and suspects practitioners, but has been kept from full awareness, in part because awakening her or fully revoking her Innocence would tie one to her, and none of the twenty or so practitioners who have directly or indirectly been involved with her are willing to do so when it comes to Clem Robertjon.  Her existence is too fraught with hazard, and her relatively intact survival up to this point may be owed to her Innocence. To take away that safety net while simultaneously lashing their fortunes to hers is not a risk any are willing to take.  She remains quietly and enthusiastically interested, frustrated, and curious and these facts should be minded.

The paper trail and notes associated with Clementine are lengthy, owing in part to her childhood diaries, where some of her misadventures are chronicled.  Many or most of these diaries are mundane things and thoughts, thinking aloud, and a great deal of work went into sifting through them for the relevant information.  At the outset, they can best be described as doodlepads or scratchpads, with sporadic notes, self-affirmations, and moments listed as single sentences with accompanying illustrations.  It appears her first find was at an antique store in Guelph, and that her rate of acquisitions increased steeply after that, before plateauing in high school, but appearances can be deceptive.  She may have found some items in earlier childhood, letting them go without remark, and she may have consistently run into items every two or so weeks since the antique store, but not recognized some as notable.  Locations, when not otherwise stated, are Guelph, Ontario.

Spring 2008 – Clementine finds an incomplete set of VHS tapes, titled ‘Magic Ways’.  These items feature an aged, rumpled stage magician filming in what may be a basement, with a drop cloth nailed to the wall behind him, teaching stage magic.  The audio quality is exceptionally poor, to the point his voice sounds as though it is coming from a well, and the tricks are bad if they can even be called tricks.  Steps are missing, some tricks fail utterly and others produce unexpected results.  Were it not for the extended runtime and the clear amateurish filming (including two very lengthy periods of time where the camera was left running while he departed to go get dinner), it could be interpreted as bad satire.  There were six VHS tapes, but the early diary of Clem Robertjon includes attempts to note down the steps and suggests there are eleven of the two-hour videos, and that rewinding to the beginning can lead to a different video being shown.

Due to a lapse in the journals, an unfortunate recurring beat around the most critical or important moments, we don’t know what transpired, but Clem brought her neighbor, a boy of the same age, to practice the tricks with her, and he disappeared.  She remarks in two short statements in her diary that she later saw him in the videos.  According to her, years later, she remembers him as listless and distracted, introduced alternately as the stage magician’s son and assistant.  She was apparently distressed enough the tapes were taken away.  They haven’t been recovered.

Summer 2009 in the Bay of Biscay – Clem dives and surfaces with a smooth, glasslike stone that turned out to be the eye of a primal power of deep water.  She was afforded three wishes if she agreed to give it the stone.  She wished for her best friend to be with her for the whole summer trip, for her family to have ‘thousands and thousands’ of dollars, and for a dolphin to ride.  The wishes were granted in a typical manner (the friend, for example, was sent to join Clem because her parents wanted to take time to work through marital issues).  Clem’s mother would die before the end of the trip, drowned while trying to find more treasures like the cup the family discovered and gave to a museum for $17,000.

Summer 2010 – Clem discovers a crow pecking at something glinting, and discovers it to be a gold tooth.  The tooth belonged to an Other (thought to be a Dreck Ghoul) that sought to be whole again.  Thought by Clem to be a homeless man, it harassed her and tried to arrange deals, threaten, and use practice to obtain its tooth, upending trash cans and turning the refuse into sendings that could enter the house.  Due to the Other’s communication issues and Clem running in fear from most encounters with it, or else being too scared to look away, she never seemed to discover it was the tooth it wanted.  Due to residual taint in the tooth, her body slowly became more like that of the Other, with patches of her flesh undergoing various changes, including suppurating, drying out, tearing, scarring, and staining with ambient pollutants.  She lost a tooth, several fingernails, and the vision in one eye, which she would never fully regain.  Believing the Other had done it, she lashed out, attacking it, and drove it off, though it would continue to watch from a distance.  In the winter of 2010, in the throes of the tooth, she picked up a dead and rotting bird from the playground and stuffed it into her mouth, chewing and swallowing much of it before faculty were able to stop her, all in view of her classmates.  Distraught and confused, she ended up throwing everything she owned onto the lawn of the backyard, and called out to the ghoul to take anything and everything it wanted.  It did just that, taking everything from toy, mother’s keepsake, and clothing in three trips, along with the ‘black gold tooth’.

Winter 2010 – Clem describes seeing someone run to catch a bus, dropping their bag.  They note a young readers’ fantasy novel, but don’t include it in the things they reclaim.  Clem picks it up.  It is apparently ‘the most thrilling thing’ to ten year old Clementine, but paradoxically puts her to sleep within five to fifteen minutes, leaving her with no clear memory of the events.  The ensuing sleep issues include Clem ducking away to find a hiding place during recess to avoid the bullies teasing her about the bird incident and sleeping through much of the school day, before police find her hiding spot in the back room of the school.  The sleep issues are erroneously linked to the earlier, undiagnosed health issues by her father and doctors and Clem spends several weeks on and off in the hospital.  The unofficial but most widely accepted diagnosis is psychosomatic reactions owing to the recent death of her mother.

Spring 2011 – Clem is walking home from school, taking the scenic route and throwing rocks at other rocks when one splits open, revealing a fossilized bone with bite marks on it.  She keeps it.  Unbeknownst to her, it makes her beloved to all dogs.  Issues arise when the dog of one of her bullies repeatedly escapes its home or yard to find its way to Clem.  It is not the only dog to attempt such, but is the key repeat offender.  The bully and the bully’s father are savaged by their own pet while trying to remove the dog from Clem’s house.

Fall 2011 – Clem sees a ring in her aunt’s collection and asks if she can have it – apparently her aunt found it but never had occasion to wear it.  Clem’s health improves and she finds herself excelling in her physical education classes, and even the scarring from the Black Gold Tooth incident improves, with half of her eyesight returning.  At the same time, her classmates fall victim to a wave of what is thought to be bad flu.  Her teacher passes and two of her classmates are hospitalized.  Given her handling of the ring and some cryptic statements in her diaries, it’s suspected she realized the ring’s link to the incidents.

Winter 2011 – Clem buys a silk scarf from the thrift store, to hide a scar on her neck from the Black Gold Tooth incident.  Effects are slow to build up and initially only affect people in her peripheral vision and people she glimpses in fleeting ways, but intensify over time and eventually affect everyone she looks at, making them seem as though they are dressed in their underwear.  Because of the slow onset and the fact that removal of the scarf only means that the effect dwindles about as slowly as it came on, she doesn’t realize that the scarf is responsible for some time (she is depicted wearing the scarf in pictures from 2014).

Summer 2012, Gatineau (finding) and Guelph (remainder) – A flower that may or may not have been plastic is found at a roadside rest stop after a trip to a lake.  The flower causes life to spring up in various places over the ensuing year, including the move to a new home.  The life that sprung up would include flies, ants, maggots, pantry moths, bedbugs, and intestinal worms afflicting the house and family.  There was reported mold and mushrooms growing in the dark and recessed areas of the kitchen, bathrooms, and laundry rooms, and roots grew into the water line once at each residence.  The family dog birthed two litters despite no apparent inciting incidents with male dogs and a prior spaying, and many store-bought eggs had hatchlings within, including five dead and three alive.  Most dramatic, however, was that Clementine’s stepmother, her fourteen year old brother’s girlfriend, and two students attending her school all fell pregnant within the one year span.

Fall 2012 – A goblin matchbox with a ‘living’ match count that replenishes when unobserved and uncounted is found on the sidewalk, and picked up because of what Clem describes as interesting art on the box.  It produces fires that are very aggressive and vigorous.  Matches also had a tendency to cause other fires to spontaneously erupt nearby when struck.  The matchbox was taken by her brother, which soon led to the family home burning down.

Fall 2012, 2nd Incident – Found while in transition between homes (unknown if it was a hotel stay or a stay at a relative’s), a chipped unicorn figurine prompted dreams of increasing realism and depth every time she slept with it nearby.  By the two week mark, she was spending three days in the dream world for every eight hours spent asleep.  A ‘laughing prince’ on the other side eventually made a pitch, inviting her to stay with it, promising to send a fetch to be her apparent replacement in her life.  In the midst of the blame and upset over being accused as the source of the fire, Clem wrote a great deal about how she was considering the invitation, overlapping the issues and alienation noted in the next logged entry.  She ultimately refused for reasons not consigned to her journals.

Winter 2012 – Clem’s brother bought a used stuffed monkey to sit on the shelf of the nursery in the new house, to sit next to his girlfriend’s love-worn childhood stuffed animal.  It was situated so it could be viewed through the door of Clem’s bedroom.  It apparently whispered of dark secrets and human ugliness, encouraging Clem to blackmail and lash out against those around her.  When she refused, it told her that she was ultimately responsible for the death of her mother and neighbor friend, taunting her with these facts until she stole and buried it.  This is widely believed to be the point she became truly Aware, past the bounds and securities of childhood.

Winter 2012 – The item itself is unknown and not recorded, but it may be a choker bought from the mall prior to a Christmas party.  Toward the end of the year, she met two new friends who quickly became part of her life; one a faerie in disguise, the other a goblin in disguise.  The item appears to give the wearer or user two everpresent, Other ‘partners in crime’, who then encourage delinquent, extreme, and criminal behavior while protecting the wearer from consequences.  Already ostracized since the bird eating incident, Clem fell into their rhythm easily and participated in vandalism and rampant shoplifting.  She discovered their nature when overhearing them discuss the kidnapping of the two babies (Clem’s stepmother and brother’s girlfriend) who were due to be born.  When named (using the dug-up stuffed monkey to glean their Other names) and vanquished, all consequences of the acts Clem and the partners in crime had committed fell on Clem’s shoulders, possibly with added emphasis.

Spring-Winter 2013 – No journal entries are available for this time period.  Later journal entries make mention of long conversations with her mother while detained.

Spring 2014 – Clementine was given a birthday present, a used, handheld game console.  It only booted one game and the game booted ‘wrong’, with distorted or alternate artwork.  Events and dialogue within the game corresponded to recent or imminent events, and successes in the game corresponded to analogous events in real life.  She went on her first dates ever around this time, then ‘got rid’ of the game console.

Spring 2014 , 2nd incident – A thrift store dress, bought for one of the dates on a ‘belated birthday’ shopping trip with her grandmother, made people treat the wearer as adult and respected.  Clementine enjoyed the initial attention and the seriousness with which she was treated, but soon came to loathe the added expectations and responsibilities.

Spring 2014, 3rd incident – Clem, enjoying the freedom to go out at night while wearing the dress, comes across someone hurting a stray dog.  The attacker runs, leaving the dog and the weapon behind.  She finds the dog dead and cold and collects the unusually colored weapon, which turns out to be a knife that kills with even a nick, with a tendency to find flesh through ‘accident’ if not regularly provided with victims.  Clementine’s father gets in an argument with her where he tells her she should be more careful with how she acts, especially so soon after juvenile detention, and confiscates objects she tried to hide, knife included.  He passes away one day later.

Spring 2014, 4th incident – Sometime around her talks with police in her stepmother’s company, a man offers the stepmother a bracelet with a puzzle incorporated into it.  When she refuses, he gives it to Clem, insisting.  Clem takes it with the intent of throwing it away as soon as possible, but immediately gets lost in the police station.  The bracelet, while in one’s possession, appears to shuffle the layout of a building, while adding one room to the arrangement that can’t be found when the rooms are in order.  Clem begins to use the bracelet to store items and keep them out of the way.  She later describes this as a mistake, but isn’t especially clear as to why.  Through inference and the fact that many items are later described as being in the possession of people close to her, with her having to go to great lengths to get them back, we can surmise that the items found their way out of the ‘extra’ room.

Note – At this stage, the progression of ‘finds’ continues to accelerate, monthly rather than seasonal.

July 2014 – The rusty key is described as having a number on it.  She finds it in the dirt, sets it aside and a friend of hers takes it.  The friend, acting on suspicion that the key was for a room at an old and disused motel, lets herself into a room, with Clem following.  The key, according to her diaries, seems to change to a random number on each use.  When used to access a space with a corresponding number, it lets the user into a space with rusty metal and fencing bolted to the walls, ceiling, and floor, and an arrangement of twisted improvised weapons and tools.  The space can be anything from a storage locker in a bus station to a house with a matching number plate.  More than one use in an uncertain span of time corresponds with more attention from goblins.

July 2014, 2nd incident – Found while looking through old boxes of her childhood toys that survived the fire, a bone white mask that seems to disappear like it was never there when put on, included with Halloween stuff.  Somewhat ‘alive’, the item contrived to be put on, relocating to the headboard of her bed and falling onto her face as she lay down to sleep.  She discovered its properties and later wore it while getting the Killing Knife back from her brother.  The white mask protects the user from most harm until the next time they sleep, at which point it pops off.  It renders the wearer mentally and physically numb, among other protections from wounds and dying, but the harm that is diverted is repaid in spades and then some.  Clem was cut by the Killing Knife but didn’t die.  Instead, when she next slept, she spent an indeterminate amount of time (to her, it was possible days, weeks, or months in perceived time) reliving variations of the cut and the ensuing death by heart attack as a loop in dreams.

At this stage Clem retreats from many things in her mundane life, ceases being as regular with the diaries, with periodic statements or pledges to resume keeping track of things, but never doing so for more than a month at a time, and with frequent references to events only she could tell of.

The practitioner community took a hand in events after an event with a piece of currency that ‘drank’ nearby change and loose money to increase its denomination before ‘shitting out’ (to use the assigned practitioner’s vernacular) a sapphire and becoming a penny again.  Once Clem had people to sell the items to and a bit of a listening ear, she found something of an equilibrium.  She was later offered a low-cost apartment at Sargent Ave Hall.

General Notes:  The primary danger posed by Clementine is that she can very easily stir up problems or set off lines of dominoes.  She may have up to five curious items on her which aren’t fully worked out in functionality, and she may stumble on more, particularly in new places or times of stress.

---

Shellie and Daniel Alitzer
Bright Eyed, Glamour Drowned

The Bright Eyed have been exposed to the Faerie, and may even call it their place of origin.  They may be taken as babies, lured in as children, or seduced and lost for a time as in the old tale of Rip Van Winkle.  Sometimes used as ambassadors, sent back and forth, other times their stays are brief or they are encouraged to remember their old selves.  They remain rooted in reality as mortals, but are often Faerie in disposition and outlook.  Creative, hungry for excitement and stimulation, they often have a magnetism that draws people in, and a tendency toward wild behavior that mimics the courts they have spent at least a decade in.  They do not tend to live long due to their risk-seeking behavior.  Despite what one might initially assume, they tend to live a much shorter existence in the mundane than the Glamour Drowned, despite their firmer grip on reality.

The Glamour Drowned are humans who have been exposed to extreme amounts of glamour or the depths of the environment of the Faerie courts and lost their attachments to their old selves, or even their current selves.  Many of the Glamour Drowned were used for a specific function.  In the High Spring court, for example, they may be endless dancers, trained by Faerie to dance as a competitive act, where one Faerie competes against another to see who can elevate a human more.  The Fall courts may turn them into animals to sell to the other courts as pets and accessories, with the ability to turn them human on a whim because it is easier to set aside a place for a human than, for example, a twenty-foot serpent.  The winter court may turn a person into an object, such as a goblet that is asked to tell riddles, or a tapestry that changes to keep track of the days in reailty.  Whether they escape or are released for the amusement of their prior keepers, they cannot easily let go of their prior roles and have nothing to return to if they do.  Expect them to ramble, dance, and stumble, rarely with any quality, until stars align or a moment comes to pass where they find themselves again for a critical moment of dance or whatever else.  Such scenes can leave onlookers breathless.

Shellie, 27, is a Bright-Eyed human woman, caretaker of her brother, a 30 year old Glamour Drowned.  Sold to the Faerie by their own parents as children, they were separated, Shellie sent to the Bright Fall court, and Daniel to the Dark Spring.

Daniel Alitzer was made to bear witness to the death of an immortal queen of the Dark Spring, an event contrived to evoke a sense of tragedy never before seen.  Whether it was successful or not is up for debate, but as a young boy no older than ten, he was changed by the event.  He was bid to stand vigil and sing a lament for the dead queen, working with four other boys of similar age to make the lament endless, one boy joining in with his voice overlapping, taking over so another could sleep, and he did so for seventeen years, on instruction to sound like he meant it with every single note.  That he was mortal and the process thus more fragile and temporary was supposed to add to the drama of the song.

Shellie spent a total of eighteen years among Faerie brokers, thieves, and Fae who traded in faces like money.  Working as a slave, she helped translate and decipher human media, separated true urban legends from references, and spent time in the human world seeking out art to bring back while getting caught up on things enough to do her more mundane duties.

In practice, Daniel found a routine with the other boys where they sang longer shifts and he went without sleep to be able to visit Shellie for brief periods of time.  He told her what he remembered of their old life, family, name, holidays, and other things, and told her to hold onto what she remembered of their old lives, out of hopes it would ‘keep’ better instead of being distorted in the telling and retelling.

Daniel ultimately lost himself to the dirge.  Through a confluence of events that included two of his peers being subjected to Faerie-worked deaths and tortures for indignities such as redundant verses and their voices maturing, the training of new people, and that particular sub-area of the court growing tired of the seventeen-year dirge, Daniel was able to walk away without returning.

Daniel then kept Shellie company for roughly one year before she was able to find a means of escape, injecting poisons into the skin of her face before trading it for another, then leaving the resulting body behind in the study of her slave quarters.

The two of them were homeless for some time before Daniel surfaced for a moment and sang well enough to get practitioner attention.  They were referred to Bristow.  Even with reduced rent, the pair barely scrape by on Shellie’s work at a gas station.  Neither has much enthusiasm or capacity for mundane work, Daniel is addled, and Shellie is quietly angry.

Daniel either keeps Shellie company, tunelessly sings to himself, or both.  He listens to music and experiments with instruments he rarely keeps up with.  When other residents of Sargent Ave Hall are out in the yard or on their balconies, he will sometimes keep them company.  Shellie quietly ensures there are eyes on him at all times, as he can daydream enough to wander into traffic or walk onto a stairwell as if it were flat ground.  He also has violent crying jags and fits of dark depression, sometimes without rhyme or reason, periods of not eating or doing anything because nothing on earth has the quality of life in the Faerie courts, and he can sometimes be struck with the urge to return and throw himself at the mercy of the nearest Fae who might take him back, whatever they might ask, especially when it’s quiet or he can’t find new things to watch or listen to.

Shellie works, sits in a workshop sketching and building tools and weapons, and matches her behavior to whatever Daniel is doing, consoling him, entertaining him, or quietly watching him while looking after her basic human needs.  Her work at the gas station keeps a roof over their heads, but her time in her workshop (the second bedroom in their two bedroom apartment) is where her dark passions come out.  The tools she makes are largely for body modification, as she is keenly restless in her own skin after years of trading it back and forth as part of her currency in the Bright Fall.  Skin is flensed, tattooed, burned, pierced, and grafted with surgical care in an ongoing process, with the most dramatic modifications happening where her clothes can cover her.  The other passion is the weapons she makes.  She knows how Faerie work and she knows how to make them stop working.  Given an opportunity, she tracks them down and hunts them.  Not often asked to run errands for Bristow, as they are unpredictable, chaotic, and easily distracted.  Listed here because those things may be what he seeks.

General Notes:  Both are dangerous, in different ways.  Daniel is Innocent in ways that can be argued to be more dramatic than normal, not less.  Hurting him would incur a cost and there’s a chance he wouldn’t even think to get out of the way of imminent harm.  Shellie, by contrast, is aggressive, adept at disguise, well equipped, and fearless.  It’s been argued that trying to use glamour or subtle practices on them might be more immediately dangerous than it is when trying to do so with a Faerie; the Faerie has an instinct to play the long game, to better inveigle you or inveigle humanity as a whole.  This pair won’t hold back in showing you just how familiar they are with glamour and turning it back on anyone with less than eighteen years experience.

---

Kevin Noone
Maji, Evil Eyed

Those with the evil eye (sometimes called Maji) are capable of bestowing harm with a look.  There are many variants, ranging from the tame to the terminal, with many different forms they can take.  The most conventional will direct spirits of harm or strife to those under the Eye, but others usher in omens of Death, Exile, Heartbreak, Toil, Fear, or Madness.  The eye may be opened by a specific event, it may be open at birth, or it may open and close as circumstances or mood change, or as certain criteria are met.  The evil eye can be trained, but it fits into a difficult niche, where practitioners can easily refute it but careless or wanton use on the Innocent can hurt karma and bring consequences down on the owner of the evil eye.  There are countless superstitions around the world to ward off the evil eye, some so ubiquitous that we think nothing of them, and the Sickness, Doom, Disaster, or Discord that is brought forth will oft turn on the evil eye’s owner if they aren’t careful.  Often accompanied by strange, mismatched, or otherwise deficient eyes.  We say a Maji is Aware if they are conscious of what their eye does.

Kevin Noone opened his eye as a Maji when he was nineteen, on the day of his younger brother’s graduation.  Due to life circumstance, Kevin weathered his senior year while his family was living in a shelter, had no money to spare, and he was expected to work.  They recovered, but his prospects were limited by deficient grades and the habits he picked up to deal with his stress.  His brother, meanwhile, enjoyed a senior year with no responsibilities, a timely gift of a car from his parents, and a minimum of stress.  Friendless, with no girlfriend, no acceptances for post-secondary studies, and no job prospects, Kevin watched his younger brother get announced as a prospective student at an Ivy League school, with a girlfriend to cheer him on and friends to whoop and applaud.  Valedictorian.

Kevin’s eye took hold and he watched with green-tinted vision as his brother made an off-the-cuff joke about writing people’s papers for them, in front of faculty and students.  Without the eye, he might not have made the joke, and without the eye, people might have laughed and treated it as the joke it was.

His brother ended up losing the spot at the Ivy League school and the girlfriend.  Kevin, however, wouldn’t find out what his eye did until his girlfriend announced she was moving to a city with a better job.  He acted supportive, but inside he screamed, frustrated.  He didn’t want to let her go.  He remembered the moment with his brother, reached for the same thing, and by the end of the week, his girlfriend had lost the opportunity.

Kevin Noone hasn’t found success or raised himself up, but he has a weapon and knows how to use it.  He did end up letting his girlfriend go, but only because he found an especially attractive young woman he could bring down to his level and keep there.

The eye can’t be turned off at this stage, as it’s been used too often.  It remains active and anyone successful who holds Kevin’s attention for any length of time finds themselves struggling, or events conspire against them.  This ended up causing him difficulties, as he tends to sabotage his own employers, in-laws, landlords, and people he might otherwise lean on.

He was taken in by Mr. Bristow, and Mr. Bristow elected to allow Kevin Noone’s girlfriend to move in as well, possibly because she became Aware as well, albeit of another subtype.  Kevin now maintains a working relationship with Bristow, a professional malcontent and assassin of characters, as well as a general go-to problem solver.  These jobs are typically paid for in reduced rent and other favors.  He knows what the Practice is, but not the general scope of this world or its Others.

General Notes:  We have every belief that Kevin Noone would shoot someone if he thought he could get away with it, and we do know he has gotten in trouble with the law, only for the officers who were dealing with him to mishandle evidence and run into career trouble.  He is a dangerous, deficient human who carries some personality disorders.  He is greedy, resentful of the world, and indulges in his superiority over others whenever possible.  He was considered for the Belanger circle but was rejected because his eye couldn’t be closed and that complicates many practices we would like someone like him to learn.  There is a benefit to mixing far-seeing with the ability to hurt those one sees, even if this is a narrow skillset, but his personality is too wicked, he would be largely incapable of cooperating with others, and he was deemed to be a better fit for Bristow than for Alexander Belanger, at a time when Bristow and Alexander were friendly.  Many of the notes above come from our investigations and interviews.

If present, expect him to be Bristow’s point man, sent to specific locations or with a specific job.

---

Ted Havens
Worold, World-Weary, World-Wise

There are those who go through a transformational test or event, through practice, pattern, Other, Practitioner, or item.  While these events alter the entire world or the fundamental paradigms of the world around the target subject or victim, they may be the Tested or Wonderings, Aware individuals who are caught in a conflux or strange set of events, that may be occuring in a pocket world or snarl in reality.  These events can be time loops, visits to earths of alternate histories (typically projected within a pocket world and kept there), living life in another person’s body (or many people’s bodies), returning to childhood to relive events, or jumping from childhood to adulthood to experience it.  These events tend to impart a karmic wholeness, as well as (frequently) unusual knowledge or skill, and a deep-seated, soul-shattering existential disquietude over an existence where reality and experience is so fungible.  Or, put in simpler words, the test or the experience makes them (or requires the individual to be) very okay with themselves and where they stand, and also frequently makes them very distant from okay when it comes to a world where such wacky and distressing things can happen. Sometimes these events see the individual’s history or relationships rewritten in the aftermath.

Once an individual is through the test or situation and settles into the world anew, if they retain their old memories and memory of the testing event we call them the Worold, world-weary, or world-wise, with the latter two being dependent on just how they’ve settled in the aftermath.  They often sit apart from everything.  As an example, a reformed misogynist that has the experience of having lived the lives of ten thousand random women across history may have picked up a massive degree of competence and knowledge in countless areas, but while they remain human, they may find it hard to use that knowledge.  The world will resist them getting into politics or doing more than making generous (and ideally anonymous) donations.  The world and circumstance will fight them if they try to uncover ancient treasures or archeological sites or become CEOs with their accumulated skill and ability when it comes to reading people.  The knowledge gained and the transformation in Self are for them and themselves.  This in itself often proves to be something of a test of character.

Depending on one’s choice of definitions, Ted was chosen as a scapegoat or a champion.  When a primeval predator encroached on a sleepy PEI town, a higher power of unknown origin settled on him as its means of dealing with the problem, a boy with no career prospects who sometimes hunted and fished.  He was pointed in the beast’s direction, encouraged, and was summarily devoured.

Ted then, as he tells it, saw a bright light and heard screaming.  He emerged from his mother’s loins and landed in her shit, an unfortunate byproduct of some childbirths that nurses normally attempt to clean up in a timely manner.  He was wet, pink, and lacking in muscle coordination, and lived out thirty-five years of his life as an affable if impatient genius.  The primeval beast emerged, attacked his town, and he was told to fight it.  He drove in the other direction until midnight, blacked out, and saw a bright light as he emerged from his mother’s loins, landing amid her shit.

There is no telling how many times Ted lived out his life, but he became intimately familiar with his town, he eventually found his courage and practiced, and collected weapons with a mind to defeating the reptile from an age before things had form or easy label.  He suffered ego death, found himself again, honed his abilities, traveled the world to learn from the best people possible, and became Aware of many things in the world.

He did eventually become a competent enough warrior to slay the beast, rallying the people in town as allies and armed forces, but the damage was so severe that the town was wiped from the maps and collective consciousness, to minimize questions.

Ted Havens moved west, lacking a sense of purpose now that his great journey was done, at unease with the universe and paranoid that he would be pulled into another great quest that would test him on so deep a level.  He ended up discovering the Sargent Ave Hall apartment complex, and took up residence there, where he remains a resident advice-giver and helping hand.  When Bristow is away or sick, Ted takes over the duties around the place, and many residents prefer it when he does.

General Notes: Alongside the Gilded Lily, one of the most powerful and problematic people in residence at Sargent Ave Hall, albeit for entirely different reasons.  Ted is not only a man who enjoys the benefits of being technically Innocent, but he did enter into mortal combat with a creature larger than his hometown and strong enough to give all but the uppermost gods pause, and drove it off for another few centuries.  The world-weary tend to have exceptional karma, either exceptionally good or bad, but almost always to a level and degree that surpasses what an ordinary person could achieve in a lifetime.  Ted is one of these people, enjoying the karma of literal countless lifetimes well lived.  When he does leave the complex, he does so because he believes it serves the greater good.  This isn’t always or even often the case.

---

Sharon Grigg
Skeptic

The Innocent enjoy protections from Others and practitioners, but Skeptics often turn these protections to weapons.  There are many ways a Skeptic can come about, but these ways can include indoctrination or acclimatization.  The indoctrinated skeptic may be brainwashed or otherwise augmented with doubt as a fundamental facet of who they are.  Some are raised with daily lessons or a worldview and given no room for any other way of thinking, others are given drugs and reshaped, and yet others are starved, torn down to nothing, then rebuilt from the ground up.

The acclimatized take a gentler road.  When Innocents find themselves faced with the practice or with Others, they will instinctively reach for ways to soften the blow.  If there is room for doubt, they often capitalize on that room, then build on that capital.  Excuses are clung to, they question their own memories or accounting of events, and may liberally revise these memories and accountings, until they return to comfortable reality.  With enough repetition, they can form a comfortable bubble around themselves, where anything extraordinary is dismissed.

Skeptics are ignorant and ignorance is dangerous.  Practice struggles to find traction on a Skeptic, and Others suffer a heavy cost to their karma and Selves simply for stepping into the light when the Skeptic is present, even though the Skeptic is often so insulated that the appearance of a god in its full bearing could be dismissed one way or another.  Conversely, when the bubble is popped (again, if it can be), the cost is usually dramatically heavier than usual.  The biggest Skeptics are often dangerous due to their propensity to dampen practice in an area around them and their simultaneous draw to practice; they have a habit of unwinding or bypassing protective wards that are keeping troubling Others locked up, or walking blithely through barriers meant to keep civilians out of a sensitive or dangerous area, often bulldozing the way for other Innocents to pass through.

An acclimatized Skeptic, Sharon developed her initial resistance as the eldest daughter of a family very interested in the occult, though they never became true practitioners.  They entered abandoned places and tried to film ghosts, while she was brought along, typically coaxed with promises of treats or trips to the mall.  As they explored an abandoned building, her brother fell through a stair and injured himself, and as it happened, was partially possessed by a ghost.  The family got the event on video, and began to distribute it online, until certain interest groups with practitioners on staff took notice and countered that distribution, somewhat late.

The family enjoyed some initial fame, and the location saw more interest, which fed the echoes.  To Sharon, however, teenage rebellion and her frustration with the state of things helped to form the armor necessary to become a fledgling Skeptic.  Her rebellion against the family peaked after a comment of hers became a briefly-lived meme, and she spun that off into a separate channel that ‘myth busted’ the very things her family was trying to play up.  Convinced they were charlatans, she fought them tooth and nail until she was eighteen and she was kicked out of the house.

She moved to a desperately poor area and there she began her acclimatization against other echoes and goblins.  Her paltry stream of content was her lifeline, giving her an income stream when her jobs didn’t pan out, and she played into it hard, essentially brainwashing herself.  She hunted down urban legends to discount them, and dampened their power with her presence, making them easier to discount.  A group of young Witch Hunters recognized the effect for what it was and took her under their wing, under the guise of showing her neat things, and she pursued that work for two years, getting some steady money that helped her get on her feet.  She would later depart the group when she heard gunshots and became convinced they were trying to subvert her by pretending there were really trolls.  Her untimely departure led to them being devoured.

Sharon has shifted gears to other content, much of it both conspiracy centered and right-wing, intersecting in the area of the starkly racist.  She periodically returns to her old Skeptical content, which gets ten times the views of her other stuff, but this fact frustrates her more than it anything; the spheres where she seeks to thrive tend to also be misogynist, and her viewership is a hundredth the size of what she feels it should be.  As someone in Bristow’s toolkit, she pursues the work not when he requests it, but whenever she is desperate for the pay bump of two to three hundred dollars that a successful myth-hunt video gets her.  She usually travels with other Aware Bristow sends, matched to the task in question, but gets along with and cooperates with very few other residents.  In brief, her interpersonal skills range from nonexistent to argumentative.  The ones who do tolerate her presence do so because her presence dampens the negative effects of whatever they are dealing with as one of the Aware and because Bristow is giving them a cut on their rent.

General Notes: Sharon is a breaking and entering specialist, very well equipped, and carries a gun.  If present, she isn’t likely to be ‘on point’ in the same way Kevin is.  She doesn’t tend to follow orders or maintain communication in the same way, but she can easily be pointed at a specific target or problem, or redirected to it by the partner Bristow sent with her, or other members of a larger group.  Glamours tend to shatter pre-emptively when she goes to investigate them, echoes dissipate, wards and barriers break, the Sight and alternate modes of Seeing are weakened if attempting to track or analyze her, and the karmic or Other protections of a given Other are weakened.  It should be noted that she is almost always recording, and has a tendency to catch practitioner’s faces in media and then disseminate it wildly to unhinged individuals and her community of hundreds who then dredge up and compile more information and even seek out the individuals.

Sharon maintains loose communications with several other Skeptics and with Witch Hunters.  Sharon is one of three Skeptics in Bristow’s complex (and is friends with one), but he doesn’t send more than one out at a time, as a minimum of one is required to keep the complex in balance, and the effects don’t tend to overlap.  She maintains a self-reinforcing bubble of several hundred followers that feed into and reinforce her mindset, and remains Bristow’s most effective counter-agent to all things Practice or Other.