Last week, I started this subseries on especially weird adepts. The specialest of special snowflakes. The following GMC is very, very loosely based on an uncle of mine, as perhaps all the best UA characters are.
Stay tuned for a bookworm and a death mage in the coming weeks.
The Mad Leading the Mad, Part 2
Now, sociomancy is a very broad school of magick. You can engage with it by membership in literally any subculture. So what makes Bucket List Bill uniquely strange? Well, to understand that, you have to understand his origins.
If you ask him what got him involved in extreme sports, Bill will tell you about his diagnosis: cancer, and not the kind you have any hope of getting rid of. The thing is, he doesn’t have cancer. That’s just the lie he’s learned requires the least elaboration. The truth is a lot more mundane and, in some ways, a lot sadder.
Bill learned sociomancy from the love of his life – sort of. Bill never had much luck with women. At the time he and Roselle Varano met, he was already 43, and they were both huge country music fans. He kept seeing her at concerts, and she looked about the same age. Eventually, he worked up the nerve to start a conversation. She was really interested to learn he was an amateur singer-songwriter himself.
They were married within the year. But what Bill didn’t know is that Roselle was only in it for the major charge. Worse, his musical career never took off as they’d both hoped (for very different reasons). She moved on to obsessing over college-level Esports and divorced him as fast as it had all started.
In trying to understand what had happened, Bill met Roselle’s sociomantic mentor. Barry Patrick was a sad man who used his magickal tutelage as a lure for attractive young women into whatever his current subculture was. He’d met Roselle through swing dancing. They’d had a relationship that ended in a mess, perhaps setting Roselle on the heartless path through which she met and abandoned Bill.
To his credit, Bill thought Barry was a swine. Barry was getting on in years by the time they met, and although he’d slowed down his charging, he still remembered Roselle with a mixture of reverie and bitterness. This predisposed him to passing on what he could to Bill. Their arrangement was awkward, made worse by the fact that they joined a men’s gospel choir together and received no small amount of judgment for their perceived “excessive closeness.” Once Bill felt he’d learned enough, he disappeared in the night and moved to another continent, hoping to never see Barry again. So far, he’s gotten his wish.
Bill had another motive for moving to England, though; he’d heard Roselle was there, serving on the staff of a Tory MP. He managed to track her down while worming his way into the Labour party scene; he confronted her in the height of election season, blowing both their shots at some heavy charging. He wanted her to take him back; she refused.
A sociomancer who’s lost the will to live is a sad sight to behold. Bill spent the next few years throwing himself completely into increasingly sad subcultures. While working toward a major charge with a model railroad club, he found himself laying on the tracks in front of a very real train, wanting to end it all.
You might be hoping for some kind of happy turnabout in the story here, but you’d be disappointed. Bill learned the hard way that suicide advocacy as a subculture was great for charging, but only until you got a hefty prison sentence. He jumped ship to the Dangerous Sports Club at Oxford. He’s been careful to separate each one out for the purpose of maximizing his time (and charging) with each. He’s gotten what he could out of extreme skiing, paintball, and hang gliding. Right now he’s focused on the Egregore of free climbing. Beneath his immersion into occult power-seeking, he always hopes that he’ll screw up fatally at some point.
Just recently, on an outing in the Andes, somebody saw through Bill’s “cancer bucket list” story for the first time. It was scary to him how quickly the man could see through to his core, the way his crippled self-worth and magickal obsession intertwined. This man was in much the same boat. This man was an entropomancer. And hours after he explained what that meant to Bill, he plummeted to his death.
Since that fateful encounter, Bill’s obsession has begun to warp. Who knows what might have happened, what he might have become, if he'd learned all this a few decades earlier. As it is, perhaps he’s about to make the shift and become a bodybag. Perhaps his dark impulses will morph into some unholy hybrid or a new school altogether. Or perhaps, one day when he sees his aging face in the mirror, the lines around his eyes that remind him uncomfortably of Barry Patrick, he’ll stop taking chances, commit to something for once in his life, and blow his own brains out.
He's been stockpiling major charges for a rainy day since he joined up with the Club. Now he's got a half dozen of them. Whatever fate he suffers in the end, something dark is bound to come of that.
Bucket List Bill, Daredevil Sociomancer
Obsession: Throwing himself into a subculture to escape his inner mire of regrets.
Rage passion: Happy couples, especially those closer to his own age.
Fear passion: (Violence) The epideromancer who botched his major charge was not the first person Bill saw meet a graphic end over the course of his time in extreme sports subcultures. But what’s worse is when they survive their accidents. He doesn’t want to end up a living vegetable.
Noble passion: Turning himself off in service to an adrenaline rush, and to his current Egregore.
Helplessness: Hardened: 3 / Failed: 1
Isolation: Hardened: 7 / Failed: 4
Self: Hardened: 6 / Failed: 4
Unnatural: Hardened: 4 / Failed: 1
Violence: Hardened: 3 / Failed: 3
Sociomancer 70%*: Casts rituals, casts gutter magick
Extreme Athlete 55%: Substitutes for Fitness, Subtitutes for Pursuit, Substitutes for Dodge
Cool Old Dude 40%: Substitutes for Status, Substitutes for Connect, Protects Helplessness
Death Wish 30%: Substitutes for Secrecy, Substitutes for Lie, Evaluates Isolation
