Apathy, Cynicism and Sarcasm will help you out — if there’s nothing good on TV.

Mr. Clean, Advocate of Apathy

Annihilomancy is fairly evenly split between those who learn it on their own and those who find a mentor. However, those who teach themselves, when they start to burn away the miscellanous parts of their lives, are already fed up with those parts. It’s unusual for someone to destroy something because they still like it. Which makes Daniel Leidman unusual by association.

A dedicated conspiracy theorist, Daniel spent a lot of time digging into old files and searching stuff on the internet from his room in his parents basement. Stuff on the High Altitude Atmospheric Research Project, stuff on the Philidelphia Experiment, stuff on germ warfare being used by the government on its own citizens; pretty much everything that people have ranted about on street corners and weblogs since time immemorial. While nobody could say for sure if they were/are actually true, Dan treated them that way. He beleived them all, even the ones that contradicted each other.

It might have never progressed beyond that, if it wasn’t for a minor dispomancer who lived in the area. Keith Anderson had managed to drink his way to enough minor mojo to make his 94 Honda levitate above his head for a couple seconds. While that would have been a neat trick, he opted to try for a more impressive feat — drive all the way home in his condition without killing himself or anyone else.

Technically, he failed. Nobody died, but the Honda hit a fire hydrant, rolled three times and knocked a power pole a little askew. The car was impounded, and even though the police knew it was his, they were not able to pursue the matter further; he’d crawled away from the crash, woke up sixty miles away on the interstate, and by all accounts hitched rides down into Southern Mexico.

The power surges that ran through the grid after the crash, while noticed by everyone in that part of town, were shrugged off as “one of those things” by all but one person. Daniel was suspicious instantly, and for the next couple of weeks, his suspicions were fanned into a blazing pyre of paranoia.

(In reality, one power line got snagged on a branch, so when they got the damaged pole fixed up, the cable snapped and sent sparks everywhere. And when they were working on that, Ted “Butterfingers” Butters dropped a hammer on another line, causing even more shorts and sparks, this time getting into the phone network. And when they were working on that… well, you get the idea.)

Daniel, after about a month of this apparent electronic monitering, was almost totally out of his head, sure that he was going to be killed in his sleep with untraceable poison, or his family kidnapped and tortured, or both. He didn’t get a lot of sleep and he didn’t eat much, as results. Eventually, he came to the conclusion that if he totally disappeared, he could evade the secret police for a while, and if he destroyed his home and killed his family and pets, they could not be used as leverage against him. Heck, he’d be doing the living creatures a favor.

One evening, he surprised everyone by making the family dinner. They were so surprised, in fact, they didn’t even notice he ate nothing. Soon after, they were too tired to care. And shortly after that, all vital signs stopped. The pets also succumbed to the sleeping pill overdose.

Daniel cried a long time after that. He’s changed a lot in the three years since then, but he still starts to tear up if he starts thinking about it too long. After he got himself under control, he got out the gasoline and set the house ablaze. He took his dad’s car, drove it out into the sticks until the tank was half empty, got out, and stuffed a time-delay explosive into the tank.

That was when he started on a poorly thought out, rambling journey into the Occult Underground. Destroying his life, while painful, was also something else. It gave him a sort of power, power he spent a year and a half learning to control. The extreme change from comfortable life to barren drifting wasn’t pleasant, but like the aches from a good workout, indicated improvement. While he didn’t exactly thrive, he certainly adapted well. He shaved his head to simplify things and the numerous fights he kept getting into helped his muscle mass develop, until he resembled the cartoonish brand character for a certain cleaning product. This resulted in his nickname.

In his never-ending search for Truth, he stepped on a few toes, and some of those toes were connected to feet that vowed to plant themselves so far up Mr. Clean’s ass, he’d have to cough to get them out. But before those feet could act, Randy Factor the Entropomancer and the Reverend Dude showed up to settle Mr. Clean’s hash for unrelated reasons. In the end, the big smack-down they were planning took a slight turn for the surreal.

Nowadays, Mr. Clean would like to pretend that he needs nothing and nobody, and that nothing matters to him. It’s all a lie; the key to his power is that he cares a lot, maybe too much. He breaks taboo a lot trying to keep his friendships with the other two tolerable, and he tends to live a bipolar existence; flushed with power from destroying something and feeling invincible, or drained and worried something will happen to the Reverend Dude or Randy. It’s not a healthy way to live, but it’s living regardless.

Name: Daniel Seymour Leidman

Personality: Paranoid, but very laid back otherwise. Seems almost totally burned out.

Obsession: (Annihilomancy) The power that comes from destroying what we want to protect.

Wound Points: 65

Rage Passion: People who rely on scare tactics and manipulation. His development of magick has given him, he beleives, an edge against those who rely on brute force, and what he used to fear, he now seeks to destroy.

Fear Passion: (Self) Daniel is afraid of mind control, both technological and magickal. Specifically, he fears that he’s already been manipulated and that’s why he actually destroyed his old life.

Noble Passion: Protecting the masses. Mr. Clean can’t enlighten the masses as to what’s going on because he doesn’t know that himself… but defense is almost as good.

Body 65 (Buff)
General Athletics 40%, Swing Those Fists 55%

Speed 60 (Flee!)
Dodge 55%, Drive 15%, Initiative 50%, Handguns 30%

Mind 55 (Conspiracy Encylopedia)
Conspiracy Theory Lore 50%, Notice Threats 50%, Street Smarts 30%

Soul 60 (A Morass of Conflicting Feelings)
Charm 15%, Lie to Police 35%, Magick: Annihilomancy 40%

Madness Meters

Violence: 3H/4F
Unnatural: 2H/1F
Helplessness: 2H/2F
Isolation: 3H/1F
Self: 2H/4F

Possessions: Mr. Clean is a Sterno, so possessions aren’t much of a concern. He has clothes on his back and some footwear, and that’s it. From time to time, he’ll carry a cigarrette lighter or book of matches.

Notes: Mr. Clean used to be insane, constantly in the grip of paranoid delusions. After talking to the Reverend Dude for a while, he’s now just constantly holding back his paranoia so it can’t latch on his neck and consume him utterly. An improvement, but only in relative terms.

Mr. Clean knows all the standard formula spells for his school, and usually has around five minor charges.

Randy Factor, Speaker of Sarcasm

The first thing people usually say when Randy introduces herself is “That sounds like a porn star name.” Sometimes she laughs, sometimes she shrugs, and on rare occasions, she punches the unfortunate person who said that phrase right in the head. But that’s only when she’s brooding over all she left behind when she traded in her old body for the new one.

Years ago, “Quick” Rick Wright was half the mystic muscle for a cabal called Firewall, the other half being Stephanie Gregors, Bibliomancer par excellence. The cabal carried a lot of clout from Ottawa to Minneapolis. Quick Rick’s run with Firewall ended when a ritual hunter named Bantam (like the chicken) started searching for somebody in the Underground willing to do something called the Ritual of Union (or Fusion, or whatever) with her. Being an enthusiastic risk-taker, joining this lady in a ritual he had no knowledge or understanding of beat the hell out of anything else he could do that day. In retrospect, he probably should have told someone in the cabal what he was going to do.

Quick Rick met Bantam in a nice, secluded spot, and after some painful work with a pair of pliers (to remove the teeth with dental fillings), they completed the ritual. Rick lost… or so it seemed to the rest of the world. For the two souls fighting for dominance, the situation was the exact opposite. Rick won, but even after all these years, he’s not sure what he won. Both in the sense of a contest, and in the sense of reward.

He’s not sure exactly why he chose to take the woman’s body, even though he remembers being faced with the decision. He also remembers a lot of stuff he could not possibly have been alive to see, such as World War II… and the War of 1812… and the Hundred Years War. As near as he could figure out, Bantam was using the Ritual over and over again as a form of immortality, then started abusing it as a way to crush her enemies, and take what she wanted from their talents and abilities. Assuming that “she” is the right pronoun — it’s possible Bantam switched genders a lot.

When “he” woke up in a woman’s body, Rick was a bit confused. The rest of Firewall, on the other hand, was very aggressive. Nothing she could say or do could convince them, at least nothing that could be done in a firefight… which is all Firewall was interested in. Eventually, Rick got tired of trying to fight a losing battle, and got the hell out of town. Taking a new name, she decided to carve out her own little spot in the Underground, far away from her old stomping grounds.

She met the Reverend Dude in a bar in one of the bad parts of town, when she forget which restroom to use. After some arguements and a truly hilarious fistfight (to Randy), they decided to team up. Two heads being better than one and all.

Psychologically, Randy has gotten totally used to some parts of being female, and not so used to others. There are times in the morning after a long night “drinking with the boys” when she’s so hung over that she forgets the female body was not designed to urinate while standing, for example. Luckily for her, the center of her personality revolves around risk-taking, and that was virtually untouched by the ritual and all absorbed memories, so she’s taking it all in stride. She can be quite funny and very harsh at the same time, which is a defense mechanism from long, long ago, before Rick even learned Entropomancy. Deep down, she wants some peace and quiet, a moment in time where she’s accepted as she is now, and where she doesn’t have to say anything at all to anyone.

But she knows exactly how bad the odds of that happening are.

Name: Randy Factor

Personality: If there’s an exact opposite to cautious and conservative, Randy is it. “Let’s let dogs vote!” seems perfectly reasonable to her.

Obsession: (Entropomancy) Adrenaline Rush. In dangerous situations, the body is pumped with chemicals that make it faster and stronger. Randy wants to find the Perfect Rush; a sort of alchemical hormone mix that will turn her body superhuman under the right circumstances.

Wound Points: 45

Rage Passion: Templar, Arch Nemesis. Back when Rick was still figuring out minor formula spells, he ran afoul of a wannabe alchemist who called himself the Templar. She doesn’t like to talk about what exactly happened, but she implies he’s still alive and kicking, and will happily regale people with her opinions on Templar’s ancestry and personal habits. None are very flattering. Some involve sheep.

Fear Passion: (Helplessness) Vegetative State. Randy doesn’t like the idea of being kept alive by machinery in a hospital, aware of her surroundings but unable to do anything.

Noble Passion: Spreading the Good Luck. Randy will sometimes cast Double or Nothing on people who are in a tight scrape or down on their luck. If she knew about Mak Attax, she might join. Or she might not.

Body 45 (Hot Stuff)
Gymnastics 35%, Slap Em Silly 40%, Quite the Looker 30%

Speed 60 (Gymnast)
Dodge 50%, Drive 25%, Initiative 35%, Throw 40%

Mind 60 (Sure is Crowded In Here)
Statistics 40%, Notice 25%, Handy(wo)man 25%, Memories of Bantam 35%, Greco-Roman Architecture 20%, Miscellanious Gematria Fragments 10%, Play Mandolin 20%

Soul 65 (Party Girl)
Charm 35%, Lie 30%, Magick: Entropomancy 40%, Avatar: Mystic Hermaphrodite 7%

Madness Meters

Violence: 3H/1F
Unnatural: 3H/3F
Helplessness: 1H/1F
Isolation: 1H/0F
Self: 6H/3F

Possessions: Randy carries a deck of playing cards at all times. She also has an incomplete deck of cards, made of flat sharpened steel. She used to have a full deck as Rick, but wasn’t able to make it out of Minnesota with it, as the other Firewallers had claimed and/or stolen back all of “Rick’s” personal effects before she came out of the coma. She usually makes additional cards when a risk has gone sour and she’s laid up for a while. She usually wears a denim jacket, blue jeans, and a baseball cap.

Randy usually has from three to six minor charges, depending on how her luck has been lately. Sig charges are less common; one every three weeks is the average.

The Reverend Dude, Cynical Clergyman

Mainstream religion and magick typically don’t get along well, especially Christianity. When someone from the mundane clergy enters the Occult Underground, it’s sometimes out of a misguided attempt to “save” a particular person who’s found something — anything — different from the church. These people either back out really fast and start looking up exorcism techniques (or call the Order of St. Cecil), or decide to go ahead anyway and get their heads handed to them by people who are perfectly happy riding the highway to hell, as it were. The Reverend Dude kind of fell between the cracks.

Orville Thompson was born too late to experience the highs and lows and whoas of the sixties in America, but he still managed to get his head all turned around in the nature for truth, and in the search for it. In other words, he rejected the old time religions and started searching the others, trying to find a clue as to what was really going on. He’s read more holy texts than most people know exist, some from religions that have long since lost all known followers. He tried atheism and found it boring. Solipsism was fun but pointless. He settled on Bhuddism for a while, then decided to look into Christianity again to see if he missed something before… much to his parents’ relief.

He eventually decided to get on the inside, wondering if perhaps there was something they taught the religious leaders they didn’t tell the common man. Through considerable memorization of scripture and concealment of his own, unusual worldview, he eventually became a preist within the Anglican Communion. He found no secret information, but he did find himself getting used to the role he had adopted. Then some distraught woman called his office late at night and said her husband was possessed. Suspecting that the man was having a seizure or some sort of reaction, Orville told her to call 911 and he’d be right over.

He beat the ambulance by about five minutes, which was time enough to see the house in total shambles, the woman near death, and an out-of-shape man with a beer belly pick up a sofa and toss it out the big bay windows right at him. That was the night when Orville discovered there’s more to demons than in any holy text he knows of. It’s also the night he got his first concussion.

The woman was in the hospital for three weeks, while Orville was out in three days. Nobody knew where the crazy fat man had run off to, and even though the police had cordoned off a pretty good-sized area, nobody was optomistic about finding the guy. That day he got out of the hospital was the day he bought his first gun.

The chase for the demon was short and messy, and Orville is not proud of what he did to stop the bloodshed. For months afterward he’d stare at the ceiling at night wondering if there was a better way… hell, if there was any other way at all. This eventually drove him to dig into the Occult Underground. He discovered that some people could consume demons, some people could control them, some people could dance in patterns that would cause the stock market to fall, some people could go ten minutes without needing to breathe. All sorts of fascinating discoveries that would have any other priest charging in with holy water or charging out yelling for backup.

Orville was different. Some people poked fun at his collar and his job, and he, as they say, turned the other cheek. When things got violent, though, he was unexpectedly competent at smiting sinners. He didn’t start trouble, he didn’t want trouble, and he didn’t try to push his views; he just wanted to talk. In a lot of mystic hang outs, he became… tolerated. Kept away the riff-raff, in a way.

Eventually, he was accosted in a parking lot by an extremely intoxicated gang of normal mundane men, most with knives and clubs, one with a gun. All planning to just have some fun out on the town. As luck (or God, or at least a god) would have it, none of them could swing or shoot straight and basically fell into a heap. Some passerby (possibly stoned) yelled out a sort of encouraging quip, to the tune of “Way to kick some ass, Reverend Dude!”

The nickname stuck.

The Reverend Dude, being the non-adept in the group, is generally the most responsible one in the cabal, providing guidance to the other two. He also has a larger life experience than either one, despite both Randy and Mr. Clean having huge life changes, and only a few years difference in age between all three (Mr. clean is 25, Randy 27, and The Reverend Dude 31). He’s seen a lot, and it has him almost totally convinced that there is no hope, no chance for things to get better… but he tries anyway. And hey, sometimes it pays off.

Religiously, he’s managed to do what most religious leaders refuse; place the motive before the means. His personal viewpoint tends to assume sin multiplies instead of adding up, so a whole lot of small things (like a life of drunken debauchery) can total more than a single big thing (like murdering another human being). There’s a lot of complicated factors involved, but he thinks it’s possible, if difficult, to be a bastard for a good cause and still avoid hell… getting out of Samsara (the Bhuddist cycle of death and rebirth) that way is not so easy, though. Similar rules apply to twisting reality to get your way.

Name: Orville Thompson

Personality: Not much of a talker, but he loves to listen. Often pessimistic, but secretly overjoyed when proven wrong.

Obsession: Consuming and destroying Sin.

Wound Points: 55

Rage Passion: People who think they know it all. That’s God/Fate/The Universe’s gig, and anyone with the hubris to try to muscle in on it is asking for trouble.

Fear Passion: (Unnatural) The Reverend Dude has spent a lot of time searching for truth, and he’s slowly suspecting that when he finds it, it’s going to bite his head off.

Noble Passion: Easing psychological and Spiritual burdens.

Body 55 (Exercises Regularly)
General Athletics 40%, Taekwondo 45%, Hold My Breath 30%

Speed 50 (Careful)
Dodge 30%, Drive 30%, Initiative 25%, Revolvers 40%, Play Piano 5%

Mind 55 (Good Student)
Pan-Religious Education 45%, Notice 30%, Automotive Repair 15%

Soul 80 (Lean Mean Empathizing Machine)
Charm 30%, Lie 15%, Acting 15%, Avatar: The Confessor 65%

Madness Meters

Violence: 1H/1F
Unnatural: 4H/3F
Helplessness: 2H/1F
Isolation: 1H/0F
Self: 0H/1F

Possessions: The Reverend Dude left the preisthood and now is working out something in the private sector as a guidance counselor. He has little in the way of material possessions, but his apartment is large enough for Randy and Mr. Clean to crash there if needed. A while back, he bought a piano and has started trying to teach himself to play. This has kept potential crashers to a minimum. The Reverend Dude also has a cheap junker car that looks and runs like it was taken from a junkyard.

Notes: The Reverend Dude can use the first two channels of the Confessor Archetype.

Trinity in Unity

When Randy met the Reverend Dude in the men’s room at Nick’s Bar, they exchanged some unfriendly words. The Reverend Dude had a point about it being the wrong restroom, but Randy wanted to split hairs a bit (and anger the guy enough to come to blows and charge up). The argument itself didn’t make any sense to anyone else, and came to blows when Randy got angry at the other guy for not getting violent, and tried to tackle him.

There resulted a complicated exchange of insults, punches, kicks, and door-slamming, with Randy laughing all the time. Rumor has it they drew quite a crowd, and bets were placed. Regardless, the fight eventually stopped when Randy limped off in high, drunken spirits. She commented that they should do that again sometime.

Sometime later, The Reverend Dude heard of a guy who destroyed everything around him in blazes of fire with no visible source. Brave but not stupid, he tracked down the woman who proved to be such a competent scrap fighter. She was insanely enthusiastic about going up against someone who could light fires at will.

When Randy and The Reverend Dude finally confronted Mr. Clean, both mages tried to get off a significant blast at the same time. They both screwed up in a big way, and a street sign nearby melted in a blaze of unnatural phenomena. The puddle of metal still retained its warning that “Left Lane Must Turn Left” and seeing this brought out an inexplicable case of the giggles in Randy.

This was enough to give Mr. Clean pause. He was used to his opponents doing many things during a fight, but pointing at something other than him and giggling… that wasn’t one of them. He was just confused enough to not lash out when the Reverend Dude suggested they go to a bar and discuss this whole mess over a drink or two.

Thanks to the Reverend’s Confessor Channels, he was able to get Mr. Clean to open up and talk about his destroying his old life out of some twisted combination of fear and love. The Reverend Dude was then able to get Mr. Clean to just hang precariously on the edge of sanity instead of plummet into Madness Canyon like Wile E. Coyote. Over some choice drinks (Scotch for Mr. Clean, vodka and orange juice for Randy, and ginger ale for The Reverend Dude), they made an incoherent but very emotional vow to stick by each other through Hell, high water, and the possibility of both at once.

This broke Mr. Clean’s Annihilomancy taboo, but by then he was too drunk to notice. Or care.

Present Day

Mostly the three just hang out together. The Reverend Dude goes to his job, Randy and Mr. Clean go grab some charges, and in the evening, they go bar-hopping or clubbing. Sometimes they’ll help out dukes in need, but this is rare; most dukes just want backup for when they want to mess up some punk as revenge for said punk messing them up, which they did because the original duke messed with the aforementioned punk. Classic eye-for-eye behavior; zero plus zero equals zero. Helping out mundanes who got thrown headfirst into the Unnatural has a better chance of rousing them.