Here is the last entry in this subseries. Levi was originally going to be my PC in an All-Mart campaign that never got past the dreaded scheduling phase.
As mentioned a couple weeks ago, I will be shelving weekly StatSat entries for the time being. I have a 4e D&D campaign starting soon and want to focus my RPG writing time on prepping for that. There will probably be more posts relating to that soon. And even if I'm not writing it down weekly, the UA brainworms will never leave me in peace, you can rest assured.
The Mad Leading the Mad, Part 5
Levi Oster, known in occult circles by his own tongue-in-cheek title, “Evil, Vile Levi,” has a relationship to his heritage that lies between “complicated” and “tortured.”
He was born into a Brooklyn Ashkenazi Jewish community, assigned female, and raised to become a loyal housewife and faithful mother. He always chafed at the strictures of his orthodox upbringing, wanting to be given the respect shown to his brothers and male cousins: a modicum of freedom, a listening ear to his ideas, a future that he might make his own. His father was a respected gematriast – not of the anagram variety, mind you, but of the ancient Jewish tradition. Premodern mysticism, the kabbalah and the like, held a dignified place in his community. Levi always hovered as close to the edges of those mysteries as a “girl” could get.
By his early teens, Levi knew he was actually a boy. He also had the wherewithal to keep that fact to himself if he wanted to continue to have a roof over his head. Sometimes, in the wee hours, he would stay up to complain with the neighborhood girls about the unfairness of their lot in comparison to the boys. But he always had to hold back what he really wanted to say. In the end, he had to repress it as a survival instinct.
A stranger attended his Bat Mitzvah. He was an old man with a long, white beard, the very image of a sagacious elder, and the sort of man Levi had been raised to listen to carefully, and with great respect. The stranger kept his distance, not just from Levi, but apparently everyone else there, to some degree. And nobody seemed to know him either.
As things wound down, with the other kids and the women released to play, study, or clean, and the men talking in clusters, Levi approached him. The man’s name, he said, was Moshe, and he knew Levi’s name. This seemed pretty in keeping with expectation until he said that name. He called him Levi, not his deadname. For that one instant, everything fell away around them, as Levi accessed mystic truth unfettered for the first time.
Until he turned eighteen, Levi and Moshe – whose surname was never revealed – met regularly under the guise that the latter was a rabbi from Israel whose son he might wish to marry off to Levi (which delighted his parents). Moshe was every bit as erudite, pious, and wealthy as he needed to be to support this claim. When Levi left home, Moshe told him that he had convinced his parents it was to plan the wedding. Levi continues to feel conflicted about his disappearance from their lives, but has never considered going back.
Moshe had known Levi’s name through means he never explained, and because of that, had known Levi was male, even when he had all but forgotten that fact himself. But as he started to build himself a new life, he questioned everything. And in the end, he turned his back on Moshe, too. Partly, it was out of spite at his restrictive upbringing - at having his identity denied, and at the fate of all the girls and women he’d known. Partly, he saw the contradictions within Jewish traditions, and between Judaism and other religions. He had a lot of questions and unresolved frustration, and Moshe expected him to be a Nice Jewish Boy. Years later, he’d mature to the point that he wanted to try and make up with the old man, but by then Moshe had faded away, whether succumbing to age or illness, or something more primordial, Levi never found out.
What was left to Levi of their bond was, in truth, not particularly Jewish. But it was magick: the magick of names. True names are something that the trans community Levi has found as an adult tends to balk at, and understandably so. Who decides what is “true” about them? Why does one person only get the one name? Levi doesn’t know. He doesn’t make the rules. But he can do magick with them.
In essence, he practices anagram gematria (Break Today, p. 91), but only with people’s names. He believes it only works with a person’s true name, and that those are granted from some ineffable force on high. It’s quite likely he’s mistaken there, and that if he had his horizons broadened he could do the full gamut of anagram gematria, with any word or phrase.
Generally, when Levi meets someone, he tries to come up with spells for their name. For example, his boss at the All-Mart where he works is named Oliver Anderson, and he has found success casting “I Order Venal Son” on him to manipulate him with bribery, even in ways that don’t make sense, like giving him a raise. For about one in ten people, Levis’ magick doesn’t work, in which case he assumes their true name is not their legal name, or the name they go by. Usually, this means he just can’t affect them, but once in a while he digs up a childhood nickname or occult underground moniker, and then he can ensorcell them just fine.
Try as he might to move on, he keeps being drawn back to Orthodox Judaism. He always studies the Torah and kabbalah in his free time, and he’s gone as far as to try and join a couple synagogues in recent years, now he can reliably pass. There’s inevitable friction when he does, and he ends up burnt out on his faith and resentful for months at a time, but he can never quite shake the belief that was instilled in him so young. Worst of all, the misogyny he internalized as a child has only festered in him as he’s purged himself of femininity. Sometimes, it comes out in ugly ways.
Someday, he wants to use anagram gematria to commune with Yahweh. He’s sunk a lot of hours and taken many risks to try and figure out the name he would need to use, having tried Hebrew, English, Spanish, and a half-dozen other languages he’s barely familiar with. To be sure, he’s arrogant to even try, and it will probably burn him eventually, even though his choice of higher power to believe in is misguided in the World of Our Desires.
In the meantime, he works nights stocking at All-Mart, occasionally smuggling out a piece of exostock, always carrying on his person a notebook or two of true names and associated spells.
“Evil, Vile” Levi Oster, Anagram Gematriast Heretic
Obsession: True names. They are the essence of a person, and they hold great power.
Rage passion: The adulteration of faith by the institutions of orthodox religion.
Fear passion: (Helplessness) Being reduced back to womanhood.
Noble passion: I’m going to learn the true name of God someday, and finally get some answers.
Helplessness: Hardened: 5 / Failed: 2
Isolation: Hardened: 4 / Failed: 0
Self: Hardened: 4 / Failed: 0
Unnatural: Hardened: 3 / Failed: 1
Violence: Hardened: 1 / Failed:
Anagram Gematriast 60%:* Casts Rituals, Casts Gutter Magick
Night Shift Stock Boy 20%: Substitutes for Fitness, Protects Isolation, Evaluates Helplessness
Conflicted Agnostic 40%: Substitutes for Secrecy, Evaluates Unnatural, Evaluates Self
As a bonus, here are some of Levi's spells using his own "true name":
LEVI OSTER = RESOLVE IT: All-purpose minor boost to actions taken to proactively resolve a problem.
LEVI OSTER = EVER TOILS: +20% to Fitness checks that take place over at least a half hour.
LEVI OSTER = IS REVOLT: +10% to Struggle against authority figures and systemic power.
LEVI OSTER = ISLE TROVE: +20% to Status when referencing his "off-shore accounts" and/or playing into "Jew Gold" stereotypes.
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