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In years past, I've written up Christmas in a couple different game systems ~ Santa Claus as a memeweapon against pseudo-Catholic fascism in the moons of Jupiter in Eclipse Phase and a superhero team known as the Flurry in Mutants & Masterminds. This year, I bring you a Mage: the Ascension cabal inspired by, but not limited to, Christmas! I'll be posting it in a tight series of posts, one after the other each day.
Pieter Lyndon Kuroi was born into privilege. His father a wealthy and powerful Japanese businessman and his mother had deep and old roots in the United States political overclass. The Kennedys consider him a distant cousin, but a recognizable cousin nonetheless. This privilege opened the doors of Yale to him, and those doors then opened the doors of the Yale School of Management after he graduated.
More important than either of those sets of doors, however, turned out to be the doors in between them. In his senior year of his undergrad, Pieter was tapped to join the Skull and Bones secret society. He turned out to be rather a perfect Skullsman, buried in a web of connections that shaped the economy of more than one nation, schmoozing and negotiating and wheeling and dealing and drinking. Lots of drinking, and also drugs, and business decisions lubricated by their influence. And always the imagery of death spicing the parties.
That spice became nourishing, the garnish traking the place of the main dish, when a heady cocktail of dozens of drugs, half of which lacked street names and a couple of which lacked any sort of name, pulled the luridly woven rug of reality out from Poeter's feet near the end of his second gradschool term. The divisions ~ no, the distinctions ~ between other people and himself faded into the background. Abstract math overflowed from a brain that had lost track of the physical world before settling into a web of desires met and unmet, stated and unstated, all negotiating themselves in a web, the nexuses of which were called "people". The silver diaphany of the threads began to bulge as urge and want and joyous hunger moved within, causing Pieter to sweep his eyes down their length to one side. Pumping a pounding beat that sounded suspiciously like the song that had been playing as Pieter OD'd, the Karmic Engine there pushed desire through the hoses and pipes the web had now become. Black smoke seeped from the engine's exhaust, making Pieter cough.
This polluting soot gathered and formed into the shape of a woman, indistinct and gaseous at first but becoming more solid and real as Pieter watched. She was beautiful and Japanese and wore the skirt and jacket of the most expensive sort of business suit, though she wore only these and Pieter could see much that was usually hidden by such things as a blouse. She reached out a hand; he took it. She spoke in his father's tongue, though with a wealthy Bostonian accent, and asked if he wanted to go inside again. Pieter could feel his brow, which was caught in a state between ectoplasm and orgone, furrowing in confusion before she clarified with an elegant motion of her hand. She meant the Karmic Engine.
Pieter approached it with the strange non-motion of a dream. He looked across its automotive bulk to the silvery web, noticing something he hadn't before. Scattered here and there throughout the web of silvery hoses, holes had worn themselves into the expanse. Those that appeared at the nexuses, under which dangled the bodies of people he recognized, were the worst holes of all, but from every one of these tears streamed Desire, Want, Lust, Hunger, Need. Liquid Technicolor, they settled in the sky above as the blurry image of the Skull and Bones party he dimly realized he was still at. The image's blur lessened as he watched. Observing the process, Pieter began to notice patterns of color and shape and number and movement. His mind raced, correlating these patterns with the parts of the image they made clearer, unlocking the secret desires of his friends and other partygoers.
An urgency filled his breast, so he looked back at the Engine and found an intake. Interposing his hand, he blocked the flow of fuel in, redirecting that Desire into the sky to hasten the sharpening of the real world. The Engine, trying to run without fuel, exploded and the sudden burst of light revealed a horrid form to replace the beautiful and graceful one of the woman who had asked him whether he wanted to stay or go. That sentiment was echoed in the sound of an old song playing over the Skull and Bones's speakers. She was now a rotting form of flesh with maggots and foul creatures running over her ravaged body.
Pieter's first breath as the hunky Yale School of Medicine student brought him back to life was for this reason a scream. Waving off further medical help and especially an ambulance, he sat up and looked in the eyes of the muscular man who'd saved him. For a moment, it seemed like tubes and hoses extended from the man's head, and colors streamed from a tear above it. He spoke the colors, his body shaping its posture to fit, and miraculously the man offered to pay his hospital bills. "I don't want to go to the hospital, though," Pieter said.
"I'll give you the money anyway," the med student replied, a gleeful glint in his eye meeting a confused muddle in Pieter's.
Not long thereafter, an Ivy League Headhunter for the Syndicate found the newly Awakened MBA student. Promising a clear, logical, and scientific explanation for the strange things happening around Pieter, the man began a series of interviews dressed up as morning-after coffeeshop soberings. After a couple of months, Pieter was a Provider being groomed by Syndicate bosses while maintaining his collegiate life. Both his real life partying and the half-hearted show of schoolwork that enabled the parties. The combination of a seemingly psychicly perfect knowledge of other's desires and a mastery of the whims of luck gave the cruel man more than one opportunity to turn the massive amounts of money flowing through him to settle a score or two. He was soon promoted to the head division, and the Syndicate-NWO amalgam pushing its weight on the Ivy League as a lever to affect the Consensus began to teach him hypereconomics and other Enlightened Sciences.
Everything went well for the rest of the year. Pieter had finally found a subject of study as exciting as partying, and he delved into it. On the anniversary of his Epiphany, however, a cabal of Tradition mages found Pieter at one of the constant parties he graced with his presence, clued in by allies within the Ivy League Greek system. A Cultist of Ecstasy among their number approached the nascent Syndicate member on his level. Talk of drugs became trying new (magickal) drugs became philosophical talking. The Cultist used these moments both to milk Pieter for information about his amalgam, but also to offer him bits of the Klubwerks way.
It mostly worked. One of the Tradition mages of the cabal, a Lhaksmist member of the Pomegranate Deme by the name of Rupert Knight, struck from the shadows at the mage who was mentoring Pieter. After all, all Euthantoi receive some combat and assassination training. This one had perhaps not received enough. Pieter was given the old Arnie line ~ "Come with me, if you want to live!" ~ and his defection from the Technocracy in the midst of his training was a fait accompli.
Pieter began studying with the Ecstatic mage who'd first approached him. As is common enough, Diksham (the mentor/student relationship) led to sexual connection, burning his new lessons into Pieter's mind with the luminescent force of every orgasm. Intimacy and trust are fertile soil for love, especially in the cycle of fear, opening, focusing, and attuning that is Ecstatic education, and Pieter felt the pangs of that hideous joy for the first time in his life. It was, as Beltznickle confessed, his first time, too.
One of the key lessons of this new stage of Pieter's education was how to approach and hear his Avatar. The Technocracy had buried it under managerial psychological doublespeak, reducing the splendid image of a porn-fantasy Izanami to a daily journaling practice. Now Beltznickle taught him ways to get back to that place, that complicated web of hoses through which the Karmic Engine pumped Desire, how to talk with her. Every time, the conversation ended with an explosion of light and the revelation of his Avatar's dual form.
Beltznickle's explanations about the use of mental and symbolic shock in Tantra were unsatisfying. This had to be more than just a jump scare, surely. It was Rupert who pointed Pieter in the direction of answers, speaking of Diksha as a literal death and rebirth, Pieter's overdose bringing him both momentary death and eyes opened to the true nature of Reality.
Beltznickle's heart broke when Pieter followed those answers. To be fair, he had shit timing. He and Beltznickle were only days Stateside after visiting the K'an Lu in China when Pieter unceremoniously killed his heart into the Euthanatos. Broke the cabal, too, which doesn't exist anymore. Pieter's third and final apprenticeship was short (by Thanatoic standards, anyway,) as he built upon his earlier studies to understand the Niyama and the Entropic Arts. He spent some years acting the very stereotype of the Thanatoic action hero, sliding over the hood of his expensive car at every opportunity.
Still young, the muscular mage has grown quiet over time. His favorite pose is to lean against that pricey car, arms crossed and smugly smiling. Colder and crueler than many of his fellows would prefer, with that edge of jockish mockery still sharpening his personality, Pieter has started to make more political moves within the Traditions, trying to advance his position. Rumors that Pieter is touched by Jhor notwithstanding, his newest plan is born of a hope he doesn't show the world. Everyone says the Technocracy won the Ascension War, that it's over and done, but Pieter sees his own position as putting the lie to that. If he can find the truth of the Traditional path, then why can't the world itself.
He only needed to find a face, someone more likable than he who could be the enactor of the plan. Someone who inspired the wonder Pieter felt in other people. And, of course, that Syndicate foundation to Pieter's thinking insisted that it be someone whose need would allow Pieter to control them with his vast oceans of money. The Afro-Caribbean Etherite Doctor Rodolfo René seemed perfect for the job.
Pieter Lyndon Kuroi, wealthy former frat boy & almost Technocrat
Manager of the Karmic Cycle, Shravaka of Primal Utility & the Illusion of Fixed Time, Provider of Manas
Acarya: Henry C. C. Livingston (Syndicate), Beltznickle (Sahajiya), Rupert Knight (Euthanatos) / Muse: Izanami as a sexy businesswoman
Tradition: Cult of Ecstasy/Euthanatos syncretist with Syndicate influences / Faction: Joybringers (philosophically), K'an Lu (philosophically), Lhaksmists, and the Financiers (might-have-been)
Eidolon: Dynamic / Enlightenment ❇❇❇▢▢▢▢▢▢▢ / Nature/Demeanor: Tycoon/Bon Vivant
Paradigm: Might makes right in this divine order that creates an illusion that you only think makes sense of this earthly chaos
The world is governed by interpersonal, cosmic processes by which karma moves Desire through an interconnected world, and these processes can be understood and mapped with the peoper mathematics. Desire is the seed of ideation, as it brings with it daydreams of the future and plans to achieve the object of one's Desires; these ideas originate not from the system as a whole but from individual nodes therein. As such, they do not intermesh smoothly, but battle to become real in a chaotic marketplace of ideas. Desire moves people, then, to impose meaning upon this teeming mass of incomprehensibility and then to infuse this meaning with belief and Will. This is what transmutes the potential into the actual, which is to say the false into the real. The superior person sees through this con game and recognizes that it is fueled by Desire, that the meaningless and incoherent illusion is what drives all the dynamics of the system. It's an amateurishly designed feedback loop, easily hacked if you blow open the doors of inhibition and fear. Anyone who doesn't realize this is essentially volunteering as pawns and servants of those who do. Truth is just a way to manipulate Desire, and morality is for weaker beings who see no way to force or trick their ideas into existence. Time and inhibitions only block Desire, and are shed by the elite as they enter flux states.
Pieter smoothly blends elements of and vocabulary from the three paradigms that shaped him, discussing the ways in which kundalini (the potential for siddhi, or magic) reaches out to make adjustments (coincidental magick) to the Bottom Line (reality.) The Bottom Line isn't stable but pulses with the Lakashim, the constant ebb and flow of the Nine Passions of Karma (Joy/Wonder, Empathy/Sympathy, Lust/Ambition, Grief/Sadness, Fear, Jealousy/Envy, Hate, and Rage) which can be measured by the hypermath of Primal Utility (the union of desire and reality physics). Primal Utility predicts moments of perfect sync between an individual's dharma and the Lakashim; these moments of ananda (bliss) are the steps on the path to Ascension. Sadly, sometimes Chakradharma (duty to the Lakashim) requires us to default (assassinate) people who disturb the smoothness of the rhythm and causes the math to incohere. Hopefully, the market of ideas that undergirds seemingly physical reality doesn't correct itself (Paradox).
Practices: Chaos magick, hypereconomics, reality hacking
The sociomathematics of desire undergirds all of Pieter's magick. Carefully calculating the interaction of want and value, karma and dharma, he can choose how unpredictable potentials manifest into reality. In less fancy terms, he bends people and existence to his own Will by turning people's wants and needs to his own advantage. Few ever realize that their lives are being changed by these subtle calculations. Pieter's relentless pursuit of self-perfection in every realm marshals both social influence and economic wizardry to his service in a chaotic, high-octane magickal practice. Thumbing his nose at traditional practices that serve only to convince the Will to accept the illusion of the world, he relies instead on his own powers of intuition, a dedication to extreme experiences, a refusal to be limited by any system, and the subversion of pop-culture symbols. Action movies and other forms of performative masculinity are his favorite, but any vessel for Desire is up for grabs as Pieter remixes and re-contextualizes reality to serve his Will.
Instruments: Drugs and poison, eye contact, sex and sensuality, social domination, thought forms, vehicles (personal for Primal Utility, significant, unique for the Karmic Cycle), weapons
Pieter makes use of a broad and eclectically individual set of instruments to reify his Desire. One of his favorites, his pride and joy, is his car. A white-trimmed cherry-red 1957 Rolls Royce Silver Cloud souped-up as far as Pieter could, it's a significant personal unique instrument attuned to Primal Utility and the Karmic Cycle, but he has been known to cast all sorts of spells through it. It's flashy and showy in all the best ways, inspiring the tiniest of microexpressions in those who see Pieter leaning against it, as but one example. Reading these tiniest scraps of physicalized emotion gives Pieter insight into the contents of their minds. In fact, leaning against his car is one of Pieter's favorite poses, as the cruel curve of his slight grin while does so emphasizes his place as a superior man. He was originally trained by the Syndicate, don't forget, and so is well-practiced at establishing dominance and control in any situation. Leveraging this control allows him to push the Karmic Cycle ahead, guide the Manas of others, and maximize the Primal Utility of every venture in which he engages. Pieter looms over any social situation, though he often places himself as a secondary focus, as if to emphasize that he is the power behind the throne. He also makes a habit of moving as little as possible, underscoring his hegemonic lack of a need to do things for himself; in this stillness, he has trained his eyes to be expressive beyond understanding. Much of his magick requires merely a tiny glance to enact as he projects his Muse through his gaze to affect the world. The Rolls Royce was also central to Pieter's brief foray into high-octane Euthanatos action, often in conjunction with his gun. In those days, his favorite pose was sliding across the hood of the Rolls Royce, gun (or any of a wide variety of other weapons, honestly) in the air, the Karmic Cycle spinning and Manas witnessing that spin better than ever. And then there are the drugs. Well, drugs and poisons, really, the difference being a simple matter of dosage. Pieter likes to have fun, and he likes to invite those around him to have fun, too. If those people are working on some venture of his, well, a different set of drugs come out to maximize their efficiency so they can get to the fun bit. Drugs, in all their many manifestations and effects, wipe the Manas clean so the Karmic Cycle can be perceived without reflection or interpretation (or the Illusion of Fixed Time). He is careful which his matching of drug to effect, using the substance to call forth the divine attributes he wishes himself or his subject to possess. If someone needs to be defaulted, that's easy enough to accomplish by the same means. Pieter makes it a habit to ingest sublethal doses of many poisons, not to acclimate himself to their effects, but to give himself a visceral reminder that everything is dying at the same time everything is living. It should be noted that Pieter's wealth and history often gives him access to boutique intoxicants that might count as significant instruments. Sex and related experiences loom large in Pieter's work, leveraging a contradiction in how the mage views them. On the one hand, sex shows the lie of separation and identity, laying bare that all the world is dharma and utility; on the other, all the world is simply the creation of value by means of one person giving another person what that person Desires and getting what they Desire in exchange. Sex is one of the greatest Desires, and can easily be traded to others for almost any return. Pieter often uses it to maximize the Primal Utility of his ventures, lead Manas to see what it must see, and, of course, reveal that Fixed Time is as much an Illusion as separation. Underlying all of this is Pieter's extensive use of thought forms, as he draws upon visualization of Desire, the sigil workings of chaos magick, skillful manipulations and uses of pop-culture imagery, and the extensive library of meditative imagery he inherited from both of the Traditions which trained him.
Strength ❇❇❇ / Charisma ❇❇❇ / Intelligence ❇❇
Dexterity ❇❇ / Manipulation ❇❇❇ / Perception ❇
Stamina ❇❇❇ / Appearance ❇❇❇❇ Movie Star Looks / Wits ❇❇❇
Willpower ❇❇❇❇❇▢▢▢▢▢
Alertness / Crafts / Academics
Art / Drive ❇❇ / Computer ❇
Athletics ❇❇ Football / Etiquette / Subdimensions
Awareness / Firearms ❇ Handguns / Enigmas
Brawl ❇❇ / Martial Arts / Esoterica
Empathy / Meditation / Investigation
Expression / Melee / Law
Intimidation ❇ / Research / Medicine
Leadership / Stealth / Occult
Streetwise / Survival / Politics
Subterfuge / Technology / Science
Carousing ❇❇❇ / Seduction ❇ / Negotiation ❇❇
Style ❇❇ / Gambling ❇ / Networking ❇
Finance ❇❇❇ / Media ❇ / Power-Brokering ❇❇
Vice ❇❇
Quintessence ❇▢▢▢▢▢▢▢▢▢ / ▢▢▢▢▢▢▢▢▢▢ Paradox
Resonance: Jolly ❇ / Synergy: Entropic ~ Privileged ❇
Karmic Cycle (Entropy) ❇❇❇
Karma demands that all things break down and eventually die and return as fuel for the endlessly cycling engine of creation, captive by mortality. Yet that dissolution paves the way for innovation. This eternal breakdown of creation can be accelerated or restricted, can be used either to liberate people and objects from their karmic prisons or to weigh them down and cause them to return to the cycle prematurely, but it can never be cheated. The machinery of the universe runs on, its gears crushing everything between them.
Manas (Mind) ❇
Manas is the part of divine nature that interacts with the Bottom Line, making sense of the Karmic Cycle, learning its lessons and taking them along to new births. It is the organ that distills self from the all-encompassing, unitary flow of Desire. Without consciousness, the Muse is truly Asleep, unable to understand the obligations to which it must adhere as an emergent property of Desire. Then, the illusion of the self is seen as the tool that it is, and the cosmic punchline is revealed. Because the mage is a part of everyone, he has power over everyone.
Primal Utility ❇❇
Hypereconomic theories model an energy field generated by Homo economicus: the ambitiously conscious human being who acts to further his or her self-interest. This Ojas energy rises from human interest and activity and is the building block of the universe. It exists in all things in varying degrees of utility and abundance. People literally invest themselves in such ventures, and although they might not see the energy they create through such transactions, they can feel it, hence the sensations involved in feeling valued or worthless. Pulsing, dancing, changing, and retaining power within the universe, Primal Utility flows through investing and withdrawing energetic currency through Ventures that manipulate the metaphysical economies of human value. These concentrations of power can be found in everything. Every object has centers of concentration. The human body has them. The earth has them. The universe itself has them. These Ventures are places of power, of untapped potential. By accessing Creation’s credit rating by means of kundalini (the coiled serpent), the hypereconomist controls that currency, investing it where it does the most good for him. Like Lakashim, it is tension, rhythm and pulse. Perhaps the greatest edge granted to those who understand Primal Utility comes from the aforementioned Ventures, where where the illusion breaks down and pure possibility breaks through. By investing in a Venture, the hypereconomist can draw Ojas from a mundane business. Attuned to the effects of market correction and the perpetual exchange of energies conducted through human intercourse (sexual and otherwise), he can spot value – or the lack of it – in the least obvious situations, and he knows how to get the most for his investments in whatever form they might manifest.
The Illusion of Fixed Time (Time) ❇❇
Magic is a series of barriers that must be broken. Space, properties of matter, probability: these are all variables that can be manipulated by breaking barriers. Time, though, that is the secret to break all barriers. Consider that, given infinite time, anything is possible. All things are dynamic, and all things change. This is not a property of the Karmic Cycle; this is a property of Time. Without Time, there could be no Karmic Cycle. Without Time, there is total stasis. No change. No flux. No chance to surpass what has gone before, because nothing has gone before. Nothing improves. Nothing is gained or lost. Time is, therefore, the key to the Bottom Line itself and its secrets. Even the gods are subject to Time. Durga defeats the Asuras through countless Kalpas; the Maruts destroy all impediments to the Final Days again and again. This having been said, how to use Time to further one's goals? The most obvious way to used is for divination. Interestingly enough, Time is a very dangerous art that requires subtle use, relying on the still, perfect nature of one's Muse to provide an anchor.
Genius ❇
Resources ❇❇❇❇❇❇
Conniver (1 pt. Flaw)
Probationary Member (Traditions) (4 pt. Flaw)
Sect Enmity (Klubwerks in the Cult of Ecstasy) (1 pt. Flaw)
(Technocracy) Sympathizer (1 pt. Flaw)
