I still have the thanatomancer planned for this subseries, and I will be adding an anagram gematriast as well. After that, I think I might take a break from StatSat for a while so I have time to develop my non-UA posts a bit more. But that's a couple weeks out. We shall see.
Oh, and a disclaimer: I have not actually read any airport thrillers. I am willing to do research for these posts, but not a whole book I expect I will not enjoy. So take this post as the GMC in question's view of the genre (?) rather than my own.
The Mad Leading the Mad, Part 3
Gwen Paylik hates “airport thrillers” – “ghostwritten, paint-by-numbers dreck with the literary merit and attitude toward women of a Republican politician’s drunken Twitter screed,” as she once described them. Unfortunately, she is under the (mistaken) impression that they have unique mystical potency, and she owns a minimum of two copies of every single one of them: a hardcover and a paperback.
Typically, bibliomancy revolves around the knowledge one derives from the written word. Not exactly so for Gwen, who can, and often does, earnestly attest she has learned nothing of value from any book in her collection. In her mind, the books are all completely interchangeable, except for the signed copies, which are the only ones valuable enough to be usable for a traveling library (which is essential in her line of work).
Something about the stream of capital revolving around these books, combined with her abject loathing of them, has drawn her along a path in which she embodies their stereotypical heroes, defying logic and expectation in perilous work just as they do. By day she’s a stay-at-home mom of two, by night a private investigator, burglar, and occasional assassin.
Gwen had no magickal mentor, just an ex-husband obsessed with these books and an inability to ever shut up. She rid herself of him eventually, but the brainworms had taken root. Though she has since crossed paths with other chargers and checkers a number of times, she still has an incomplete understanding of adept magick, hence her… Specialization.
She had the benefit of a sizeable starting collection, having finagled her ex’s hoard in the divorce. He thought it was purely out of spite, but in fairness he had rarely bothered to ask her what she wanted, let alone why she wanted it. And she wasn’t about to explain to him that she could become a real-life action-thriller badass from the books so polarizing in their relationship that they wound up being the final straw that got her to contact a lawyer. Plus, she gets decent alimony payments.
As of right now, her library contains about 5,000 total books across two adjacent storage units. This would make her something of a powerhouse if she understood she could derive significant and major charges from higher quantities. That said, she would also need to know more spells, or understand how to use random magick to its fullest.
She casts “Book Learning” (see UA2 core book, p. 119) about a dozen times for every other use of a minor charge. Those are usually random magick castings that have more to do with her hatred of her library’s contents than the specifics of the books. For example, she can amplify the misogynistic attitudes of men she encounters, getting them to mansplain for literal hours while she cases a joint or roots around for evidence. Another favorite is to prevent witnesses from remembering anything more distinct about her than her hair color or breast size to report to authorities.
The other bibliomancers in her area are (so far) intimidated by her ruthlessness, and to be honest, her physical fitness, to the point of refraining from stealing from her, even though she’s pretty careless with her library’s security. But they have arranged a conspiracy of silence to keep her in the dark about the full truth of their school.
Jaded Gwen might be, but not stupid. She is aware that other wizards exist, even being peripheral to the occult underground, and she correctly assumes there is more power she could learn to access. She’s encountered a few avatars, who she tends to view through the lens of stereotypical fiction character types, but sooner or later she’ll run across an avatar of the Naked Goddess, the Mother, or some other archetype that is impossible to square with a view that all magick is tied to her least favorite genre of fiction.
For the half-decade since her divorce and descent into bibliomantic wetwork, she has chosen to protect her tweenage boys by staying at arm’s length rather than diving into magick. She has some inkling of getting more involved once they’re both in college.
Maybe it’s a blessing in disguise that engaging with bibliomancy is such an unpleasant experience for her. Nonetheless, she is obsessed like any other adept, and it’s probably only a matter of time before her curiosity wins out, or worse: a past target gets set on revenge, or decides she knows too much. It’s not really in keeping with convention for the woman to have her sons “fridged” as opposed to the other way around, but the contradiction of her femme fatale alter ego and her magick’s source (or at the very least, her view of it) is probably one of the mystical tensions that made her an adept in the first place.
Gwen Paylik, Bibliomancer of Action
Obsession: Airport thrillers are so popular, but so bad, (and remind her of her ex-husband so much) that they are uniquely deserving of her obsessive hatred.
Rage passion: The success and popularity of some of the worst writing ever penned by human hand.
Fear passion: (Isolation) Her sons preferring their washed-up bore of a father to her, and/or cutting her off after they leave for college.
Noble passion: Doing it all as a strong, independent woman – raising kids, hoarding objects of magick power, and stalking the streets with a paperback in one hand and a silenced pistol in the other.
Helplessness: Hardened: 2 / Failed: 0
Isolation: Hardened: 5 / Failed: 2
Self: Hardened: 3 / Failed: 2
Unnatural: Hardened: 2 / Failed: 0
Violence: Hardened: 3 / Failed: 0
Bibliomancer 40%:* Casts Rituals, Casts Gutter Magick
Single Mom 55%: Substitutes for Connect, Protects Self, Protects Isolation
Secret Badass 35%: Substitutes for Secrecy, Substitutes for Dodge, Protects Violence
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