Magick powers do not make for a happy family.
History:
Charles and Virgil Donovan didn’t have an ideal childhood. Their mother had run off when Virgil was three and Charles was one, and their father was Quincy Donovan, a fair-to-middlin’ Plutomancer. The connection between the two facts doesn’t require a lot of explaining.
While Quincy was stingy, paranoid, and ill-tempered, he wasn’t totally uncaring. He did provide his offspring with food, shelter, clothing and education. The latter was both mundane and supernatural; he was able to at least get Charles to follow the path of Plutomancy.
Virgil was not so receptive. While Charles barely remembered his mother, Virgil had been around long enough to identify and recognize certain qualities about her and make comparisons with the qualities of his father. Namely, his mother gave affection and care freely, while his father treated everything like a loan that he expected to be paid back on.
By the time Charles was ten, he was an extraordinarily talented Plutomancer, a true prodigy of money-magick. Quincy, for what it was worth, was quite proud. Virgil, on the other hand, had run away. Quincy, for reasons he took to his grave, never bothered to inform the police; when the staff of the school asked, he said that the boy had gone to live with his mother a few states away.
Fast forward about five years. Charles is a fairly wealthy young man, with a plethora of jobs allowing him to seriously rake in the cash and the charges. He’s insanely popular among the families in his neighborhood because he really does the best job he can and gives them their money’s worth. His father begins to set in motion a complicated plan to get Charles to reimburse him for the money it took to raise him up to that point.
Enter a very ragged looking and twitchy Virgil, with a manic gleam in his eye. He visits his estranged father and leaves a corpse behind when he goes — the police get involved after Charles discovers the body, but no signs of foul play are discovered. Eventually the coroner shrugs and chalks it up to a heart attack after seeing his estranged son come back.
The truth is rather more complicated. Virgil has spent a lot of time on the streets and in the criminal underworld. His own life experiences have twisted with his career choice, and he has become a spontaneous Kleptomancer. Rather than kill his father with magick, he shot the man using a blow-gun, the ammo being an ice-dart coated with high concentrations of nicotine. The chemical is to blame for the cardiac troubles that killed the father.
And in the commotion that followed, nobody noticed that several thousand dollars were taken from Quincy’s secret hoard.
Present Day:
Virgil and Charles are both in their mid-twenties now, and have a personal war that rivals the intensity of any large scale conflict known in the Occult Underground. Part of it, of course, is the differing styles of magick; each one’s philosophy makes a liar of the other’s. The biggest factor, of course, is that Charles was close to Quincy and Virgil despised him.
The Underground is too hectic and chaotic for them to just be trading blows twenty-four hours a day, of course. Charles has inherited his father’s place and turned it into the center of a few business enterprises that he runs, mostly over the internet. The building is by now very heavily protected both by normal security systems and metaphysical countermeasures. Virgil is not tied down the same way; he’ll show up all over the continental United States.
When Virgil’s back in town, he usually tries to juke and jive past his brother’s security and spells without using magick, so he can gain charges along with the rolls of bills. This is not always succesful, but if pushed to the wall, he’ll just try to grab the cash and split. Tied down as he is by his business connections and his dedication to making money, Charles doesn’t have the option of chasing down his brother, even if Virgil is wounded and not going to move very fast. It’s become an endless cycle.
Virgil Donovan
“What’s yours is mine, and what’s mine used to be yours.”
Personality: Been there, done that, and stole the T-shirt. And the wallet of the T-shirt salesman.
Obsession: (Kleptomancy) Breaking the rules, be they the laws of property and possession or the laws of physics.
Wound Points: 55
Rage Passion: Police. Virgil considers all cops as little more than hired dogs, and has no qualms about putting them down.
Fear Passion: (Helplessness) Prison. Virgil does not want to be the wife of some giant guy named Bubba. No way.
Noble Passion: Share the wealth. He’s no Robin of Loxley, but he’ll hand over some of his ill-gotten gains to the homeless from time to time.
Body 55 (Scarecrow Lookin’ Dude)
Climb (General Athletics) 45%, Silent Takedown 30%, Unusually Flexible 10%
Speed 70 (Sneaky Sneaky)
Dodge 30%, Drive 15%, Initiative 35%, Silent Step 55%
Mind 55 (Criminal Cunning)
General Education 15%, Street Smarts 20%, Case The Joint (Notice) 35%, Hide 35%
Soul 60 (Seen A Lot)
Charm 15%, Bluff 50%, Magick: Kleptomancy 40%
Madness Meters
Violence: 2H/1F
Unnatural: 2H/2F
Helplessness: 0H/1F
Isolation: 1H/0F
Self: 0H/0F
Notes:
Unusually Flexible: Virgil doesn’t practice Yoga, but he’s still learned, by necessity, how to make his body bend and flex enough to get into and out of tight spaces.
Bluff: Sort of a combination of Lying and Acting. Covers everything from getting out of parking tickets to getting dumb punks to put their guns down.
Possessions: Thrift Store Wardrobe in dark colors, a couple thousand dollars squirreled away, home-made lockpick set, taser, collapsible baton (+3 Heavy), Disguise Kit.
Goal: Find his mother.
Allies: Virgil met Spike Weiler, another Kleptomancer, “way back in the day” as he offhandedly describes it. They aren’t exactly beer buddies, but they did decide to trade spells. Virgil taught Spike his custom spell “Casing the Joint”, which lets the caster visualize the layout of a given building perfectly for one significant charge per floor, even if they’ve never even seen the building before, let alone stepped inside it. Spike’s contribution is the spell “No Honor Among Theives”, which for four significant charges, will end or counteract any trade-related metaphysical obligations that shackle the caster, from Merchant contracts to Plutomancy’s “Devil’s Deal” spell. They aren’t friends, but they aren’t enemies by a long shot either.
Charles Donovan
“You get what you pay for; else the center does not hold.”
Personality: All business. Charles knows what customer service is, and has decided he can make more money in fields that don’t involve it.
Obsession: (Plutomancy) Fair Trade. Charles is fixated on the balance of the work=reward equation.
Wound Points: 50
Rage Passion: Debtors. Charles hates being cheated.
Fear Passion: (Self) Destitution. Money is what makes life possible in the modern world. Therefore, lack of money equals death.
Noble Passion: Honesty. Charles may not be personable, but he will never cheat his customers and clients.
Body 50 (Desk Job)
General Athletics 25%, Jiu Jitsu 40%, Work Late 15%
Speed 50 (No Rush)
Dodge 20%, Drive 30%, Initiative 35%, Handguns 40%
Mind 70 (Brilliant)
Business Degree (General Education) 50%, Notice 25%, Conceal Cash 35%
Soul 70 (Intense)
Charm 20%, Lie 30%, Magick: Plutomancy 55%
Madness Meters
Violence: 1F/2H
Unnatural: 2H/2F
Helplessness: 1H/0F
Isolation: 0H/0F
Self: 0H/1F
Possessions: Some nice suits, a good compact car, a house with huge layers of mundane and occult defenses, oodles of cash, .38 revolver, capacity 5, max damage 45.
Goals: Make his brother pay for all the trouble he’s caused.
Allies: Charles has two enforcers in the OU who owe him favors. Of course, once those favors are called in, it’s not likely that those involved are going to want to hang around Charles and have beers on Friday or anything like that.