Sometimes you control the magick and sometimes the magick controls you.

As far as Entropomancy goes, it’s fairly common nowadays for more people to be taught by another Entropomancer than to break into it spontaneously. Not that people don’t figure it out on their own, it’s just that there’s a lot of teachers out there willing to risk a lot of time and effort with a student instead of making a rep for themselves or policing their backyards. Which is what makes the whole thing work.

Quincy Maxwell was the proverbial Average Joe. He had a wife, two kids (one boy and one girl) a dog, a nice house, a generic office job, and a mortgage hanging over his head. Then, as he was going out to his car after work one Wednesday evening, a stranger walked up to him and asked him, without any explaination or context, “How would you like to be able to bend the curve of statistics to your will?”

Quincy, perhaps more out of surprise than anything else, said that while it sounded good, he didn’t see how it could be done. The stranger shrugged and said that most people didn’t, and gave him a peice of paper with an address on it. The stranger was aging Bodybag Josh Bishop, then pushing fifty, and he had asked the same question to about fifty people in all that day. Only ten of them gave him an even slightly open-minded response, so he’d only passed out ten of his slips of paper. And as it turns out, only one of those ten ever checked out the address on the paper: Quincy.

At first, Quincy didn’t understand exactly what this mysterious man, who never introduced himself, wanted. Then he saw the man throw a deck of cards into the air and watched the cards land in a perfect house.

Six freaking times.

Thus began Quincy’s training in chaos magick. He didn’t quit his day job; he studied with Bishop a few hours each Saturday. When his wife started asking questions, he said he’d joined a gym. Which was a half-truth, since a lot of Bishop’s training exercises were physically strenous and draining.

As luck or fate or whatever would have it, Quincy fell into the typical trap of the adept: As he started thinking more and more about what he was being taught in his normal life, that same normal life started to fall apart. His job performance started to slide. The kids were often ignored. The dog never got fed. Quincy’s wife, wondering if it was drugs, an affair, or even an affair with drugs involved somehow, hired a private investigator. This hapless P.I. trailed Quincy to Bishop’s training grounds easily, but found it harder to accept what he saw happening before his eyes. This impaired his reasoning, and he foolishly barged right up to the two men and demanded to know exactly what was going on.

Quincy had been taught early on that magick had to be kept under wraps, or some scary mofos called the Sleepers would put any flashy mages down in gruesome and creative ways. Letting this man walk away with what he already knew, and possibly whatever else he might learn, would be, in short, very bad. On the other hand, if they kept him prisoner or killed him outright, people might start looking. Legal trouble might ensue. Possibly prison time or the death sentence (at least in Quincy’s panicked mind, this was a very real possibility). This was also bad.

It was a lot like asking a man to choose two identical pills, one a placebo and one a deadly poison, while holding him at gun point — which was how Bishop’s mentor taught him Entropomancy. Quincy made the logical short circuit to understanding magick, grabbed a conveniently available lead pipe, and beat Private Eye Caleb Anderson to a bloody pulp.

While Bishop was helping move the body for disposal, he had a heart attack; he skipped taking his prescribed heart medicine as a way to get significant charges, and his luck had run out. With two bodies on his hands, one of them his friend and teacher, Quincy freaked out. He doesn’t remember the next two weeks, but when he “snapped out” of whatever it was, he was on the other side of the country, huddled behind a dumpster, with nothing but the clothes on his back… and an imperfect understanding of how to bend statistically random events to his will.

That was a few years ago. Now, Quincy’s skill has improved… but not his mental state. Knowing how the tiniest change in a system can cause huge, catastrophic results, he’s become compulsively suspicious of minor details most people, even other dukes, would overlook or shrug off. His clothes now are rugged outdoor wear, as opposed to a suit and tie for a white collar job, and he walks from town to town, sometimes hitching and sometimes getting arrested for vagrancy. Among those who know about him, he’s called The Aimless One, unique among bodybags for just letting chaos happen instead of actively pursuing it. At the moment, he’s hunting for a significant vessel for a Dipsomancer, just to keep busy.

He thinks about his family a lot. Probably a lot more than most people in the underground think about theirs… unless they have some sort of ritual planned that involves blood relatives, which doesn’t count. His kids would probably be almost out of high school. He often wonders if his wife has started seeing somebody else, and he really wants to call her. But that’s a risk he’s not ready for… yet.

Name: Quincy Adam Maxwell

Personality: Lonely, more than anything else. A man of few words.

Obsession: (Entropomancy) What actually defines the difference between intentional actions and seemingly random natural events.

Wound Points: 45

Rage Passion: People who take reckless chances with the lives of others, from positions of relative safety.

Fear Passion: (Helplessness) Law enforcement tracking him down.

Noble Passion: Like his own mentor before him, Quincy would like to pass down his knowledge of chaos magick to somebody.

Body 45 (Office Worker)
General Athletics 30%, Knife Tricks (Struggle) 40%, Work Late 15%

Speed 55 (Well Balanced)
Dodge 20%, Drive 20%, Initiative 50%, Throw 20%

Mind 60 (Book Smart)
General Education 35%, See Slightest Detail (Notice) 50%

Soul 80 (Hidden Strengths)
Charm 15%, Lie 20%, Pretend to Work When the Boss is Looking 45%, Magick: Entropomancy 40%, Avatar: Masterless Man 45%

Madness Meters:

Violence: 1H/1F
Unnatural: 2H/3F
Helplessness: 1H/3F
Isolation: 2H/2F
Self: 3H/1F

Notes: Quincy does not know he’s channeling the Masterless Man; avatars are totally unknown to him.

Quincy knows all the standard Minor Entropomancy Formula Spells, but none of the significant ones. He only generates minor charges reliably for the time being. He has a large pill bottle of aspirin filled half with sugar pills and half with pills that induce vomiting (they contain a substance similar to Syrup of Ipecac, but in pill form).

Possessions: Butterfly Knife (+3), Bottle O’ Pills, Canteen, Digital Watch, Clothes on his back.

Quincy tends to take a pill from the bottle once every three or so days, sometimes more often (like before or during a fight) if more charges are needed. He’ll usually have anywhere up to three or four, but he could also have none at all if things have been hectic recently.