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XP Log

Backgrounds:

• Legacy: 3
  
• Allies: 1
  
  • Willow-In-The-Wind
    
• Resources: 3
  
• Paragon: 2
  
• Pacts: 2
  
  • Stacy DiMarco
    
  • Miles Daniels
    
• Status (Starke Council): 3
  

Merits:

• Concentration: You have the ability to focus your mind and shut out any distractions or annoyances. Characters with this Merit are unaffected by any penalties stemming from distracting circumstances (e.g., loud noises, strobe lights, or hanging upside down). (1pt.)
  
• Determined: You're one tenacious bastard, determined to go your own way. It can be really difficult for people to persuade you otherwise. Gain two dice in any resisted roll in which someone tries to persuade you do to something. (2pt.)
  
• Eidetic Memory: You remember, with perfect detail, things you see and hear. Documents, photographs, conversations, etc., can be committed to memory with only minor concentration. Under stressful conditions involving numerous distractions, you must make a Perception + Alertness roll (difficulty 6) to summon enough concentration to absorb what your senses detect. (2pt.)
  
• Healthy Skepticism: You are good at separating truth from fiction, and someone has to be up pretty damn early to catch you off guard. You rarely take what people say at face value, until you're able to check the details yourself. This Merit also allows you to reduce the difficulty of any roll to perceive a lie by two. It should be roleplayed as much as possible. (1pt.)
  
• Introspection: You have keen insight into the ulterior motives of all your actions. Through this nightly exercise, you also have incredible insight into the underlying motives of others’ actions. Add two dice to your Perception dice pool when you must take an action against someone with the same Nature or Demeanor as you. (1pt.)
  
• Language: First Tongue (1 pt.)
  
• Language: Stone Scripture (1 pt.)
  
• Master Craftsman: When designing, building, or repairing something, the difficulty of your rolls is reduced by two. Additionally, you require three fewer successes on any extended rolls required when working on large or complex projects. (3 pt.)
  
• True Love (Patricia Byrne): You have discovered, perhaps too late, a true love. He or she is the center of your existence, and inspires you to keep going in a world of darkness and despair. Whenever you suffer, the thought of your true love gives you the strength to persevere. This Merit grants you one automatic success on all Willpower rolls, which can be negated only by a botch die. This can be a great gift but also a hindrance, for your true love may require protection and occasionally rescue. (4pt.)
• Unflappable: You are a naturally placid person and take most things in stride. You were almost hit by a car? That was close. Your wife has left you? Ah, well. Although you have emotions as others do, you don't let them affect you to the same degree. You gain two extra dice on any Willpower roll that involves staying calm or not overreacting to mundane experiences. (3pt.)
  

Flaws:

• Chronic Pessimist: You think the glass is half-empty, that the water in the glass is contaminated, and that the glass will probably tip over any second. Others practice pessimism out of habit. For you, it's an art form. Nothing can ever go right, especially plans that others propose. You are the implacable voice of gloom and doom, always ready to point out a potential problem no matter how remote a chance it has of coming to pass. Add two to the difficulty of you Leadership rolls. (1pt.)
  
• Ghoulish Sense of Humor: You find humor in situations that make most people uncomfortable or even nauseated. Your questionable taste doesn't make you particularly resistant to the horror of gruesome sights. Your defense mechanism is simply to belittle the situation or those involved in an inappropriate way. When confronted with a horribly gory scene or otherwise uncomfortable situation such as people trying to console each other, you tend to crack jokes and sling insults. The difficulty of any Social roll you make under such circumstances is increased by two. (1pt.)
  

Ranged Weapons

§: -2 Difficulty to use.
§§: If this weapon is used, the user needs to land at least one killing blow before the end of the scene, or they take one rank of unsoakable lethal damage.

Armour

Disk of Healing
This relic takes the form of a polished, smooth stone disk with a diameter of approximately twelve centimeters. It has gold lining and inlays, showing symbols of healing and recovery.
System: Roll seven dice. The relic can heal all of a target’s bashing damage or one health level of lethal or aggravated damage per success. The relic must be placed against a wound to heal it. It can be used once per scene.
Sacrifice: The Disk of Healing desires blood. If it is used to heal a bleeding wound, it will content itself with the blood leaking from it. If this is not the case it will extract blood from the target, causing one point of unsoakable lethal damage in the process. The user can prevent this by cutting themselves to feed the Disk, taking the damage onto themselves instead.
Resonance: When the Disk of Healing is used, everyone in the vicinity will start to feel better. Small aches vanish and weariness lessens. This effect is noticeable, but doesn't provide any mechanical benefit.

Mirror of Metamorphosis
This silver-plated mirror with intricate decorations has a hidden hatch on the backside, which covers a slot underneath. If the user places the portrait of a person (a photograph or drawing will work well) in this slot and closes the hatch over it, the mirror will transform whoever gazes into it into the likeness of this portrait.
System: Roll 11 dice. For every success the mirror will transform one feature (hair, lips, eyes, skin tone, etc.) into the likeness of the portrait used as a template. It can only produce cosmetic changes, changing someone's height or gender is beyond the scope of the relic. However, it is a true transformation, not an illusion. The user reverts to their usual appearance at the end of the scene, or after several hours in non-dramatic time.

Low-Torment Abilities:
Dead Reckoning
Enhanced Perception
Improved Initiative
Flashing Fingers

High-Torment Abilities:
Pass Without Trace
Alter Size
Mirage
Relentless

In Zuriel's apocalyptic form, her skin and hair gains the colour and texture of fresh limestone, with a network of dark veins that seem to form a complex pattern. Her eyes turn into crystals of bluish-white anhydrite, her voice gains an echo and a pair of wings made from grey dolomite rise from her shoulders.

The demon is a fallen artificer angel named Zuriel. Her main job during the creation of Earth was building karst systems. Since karst is an intersection of the lithosphere and the hydrosphere, this means she had to work a lot with the angels of the deep. A side effect of this is that she is less skittish around other houses. She still prefers the company of her own house, but she is more open to cooperation than many of her peers (this doesn’t mean she’s any good at social interactions, though). Her main reason to join Lucifer’s rebellion was that she perceived God’s orders as contradictory. How can you claim to love somebody, when you are willing to stand aside and let them wallow in mediocrity? In her mind, all angels were already breaking Gods order to love Adam and Eve by obeying his order of non-interference. And she would rather be guilty of loving too much than too little. Zuriel was one of the few malefactors who joined the Alabaster legion. Her reasons for that were two-fold: 1) With humanity being cursed with mortality, every human would spent most of eternity being dead. So it was likely that humans would only be able to grasp their full potential after death. 2) The angels of the fundament know everything about the physical world, but very little about the spiritual side, so this was a unique opportunity to learn and broaden her horizons. Since the Alabaster legion was the least popular choice for malefactors, Zuriel spent most of the war building or crafting, first at Kâsdejâ, later for the Haven project. She didn’t know about Schatenkoji’s experiments until after the fact, but she found his results very interesting (she didn’t say that out loud, though).

The human half of the equation is Sarah Gray, a woman in her early thirties. She’s the second child of a middle-class couple and grew up in New England. She moved to Starke a few years ago to be close to her father after her mother died from a stroke (her parents decided to spent their retirement in Florida). She’s a geologist by trade and works for an engineering company. Sarah suffers from social anxiety, which makes her rather withdrawn. She is often more comfortable in the company of rocks than humans. Subsequently she is not in a relationship, was never married and has no children. Her friends tend to be people with a high tolerance for monologues (Sarah is intellectually aware that people have different interests, but somehow this doesn’t translate into “not everyone enjoys a two-hour lecture about sequence stratigraphy” in her mind). A few months ago she finally set some time aside for a vacation and decided to travel around for a bit. One of her stops were the Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico. One of Zuriel’s earlier works, but she always liked how the big room turned out. Sarah knew the geologist in charge of the cave system from college and managed to get permission to explore the areas of the cave that are normally not open to visitors and not completely secured. She was just inspecting some very pretty speleothems, when a rock came tumbling down and shattered her spine. And that would have been the end of Sarah Gray (and in many ways it was), but in this precise moment, Zuriel was desperately fighting against the pull of the Abyss, searching for some grip, a connection – and found a woman who loved the wonders her house had made, who had just died admiring her work.

Zuriel always was a perfectionist at heart. She is almost incapable of seeing something without thinking “There is still room for improvement.” Subsequently, in her opinion the greatest problem with creation are small-minded incompetents (God and others) who deny people the time and resources they need to do their work properly. Of course, this perfectionism is not only directed to the outside: She’s just as critical of herself and always seeks to learn and improve.
Zuriel prefers to use a methodical and analytical approach. Not that she is without passion, but she tends to be uncomfortable in situations she cannot predict. This makes her sometimes awkward when dealing with her new life.
Sarah was a much more passionate an spontaneous person, who uprooted her life without a second thought and moved to a climate that really didn’t agree with her, just to be there for her father; who sometimes decided on Friday evening to go on a short camping trip for the weekend; who tended to ramble aimlessly for hours about things she found interesting. Being stuck in Sarah’s psyche means Zuriel now has these urges as well, and she’s not quite sure how to deal with it.

- Zuriel's first thrall is actually a co-worker of Sarah, an accountant by the name of Stacy DiMarco. A somewhat conceited but surprisingly pious woman in he forties. Zuriel managed to overhear that she was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour, and decided to that she could help both Stacy and herself. She appeared before her one night in her apocalyptic form (Lore of Paths is really useful if you need to get somewhere you’re not supposed to be) and told Stacy that, because she was such a good Christian, heaven had decided to grant her reprieve from death, in exchange for a few ‘holy quests’ at an unspecified future time. Zuriel made sure to wear a heavy veil at the time, therefore Stacy has no idea that “the nice girl who does the surveys” has anything to do with her guardian angel.
(Faith Potential 2, one point used to heal the cancerous growth in her brain)

- Thrall number two is an oddball: His name is Miles Daniels, and he doesn’t believe in angels and demons, he believes in aliens. He’s not obsessive enough to let it rule is life, but he wholeheartedly believes in secret government conspiracies and Men in Black.
Zuriel once again used her apocalyptic form and told him she was an alien from the planet Praterix IV, whose inhabitants had visited Earth in ages past (hence the appearance of winged humanoids in human mythology). She then spun him a yarn about how the US government had secretly allied with their ancient enemies, the people of Amphitura II.
He agreed to become her ‘terran agent’ in exchange for a special therapy (Zuriel waved a futuristic looking do-dad made from scrap metal and a few LEDs around for a bit) and an injection with nanites (a harmless saline solution) that would protect him from Amphituran mind control rays.
(Faith Potential 2, one point used to give him immunity to mental manipulation)