Elrand BeanerG_RICHA1@HUSKY1.STMARYS.CA
Abilities
(The name 'Elrand Beaner', his description, and the names surrounding his junkyard were taken from the comic series 'Invaders from Home' by John Blair Moore, published through Piranha Press. Everything else is my own mistake ;>) Appearance: Elrand Beaner is an older guy, in his early forties, with shoulder-length grey hair and a full grey beard that ends in a point. He wears a pair of ancient-looking wire-rimmed glasses which he really doesn't need, but look cool. He commonly dresses in a non-descript green shirt and a pair of brown corduroy trousers. When it's cold, as it usually is in the Maritimes, he wears a thigh-length brown leather coat with big pockets. Background: First of all, call him Beaner. His first name is Elrand, but he prefers the Japanese custom of using someone's family name as the first name of reference. He says it's a statement about a person who can come to the realization that they are created by their environment, and that the individual is ultimately a creation of all that surrounds them. This should tell you something about his outlook on society. He was born in the fifties in New York, and was raised in relative prosperity. His family was the typical middle-class family, although they were a little wierd (they named him Elrand for one thing..) - his father was a psychotherapist, and his mother held the family together. He went through school, made a lot of friends, and eventually made it to college. He recieved a scholarship to go to Stanford, where he studied sociology. This was around the time that the sociological upheavels of the sixties were starting to turn around, and the hippies were starting to buy condos. Elrand was going for his Masters degree and decided to do his thesis on the results of the sixties. He learned that a large number of people moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia to form a rather large buddhist community, mostly comprised of the youth that formed the movement. This might just end up to be a bastion of the movement - a place where the hippies could go and grow old, while still holding on to their beliefs. This was the perfect place to study them! So Elrand moved there and began to study them. Now about this time, Robert Pirsig published Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Like the rest of the country, Elrand bought it, read it and loved it. What struck him the most was the concept that objectivity isn't all it's cracked up to be, and that to truly study a culture, you have to immerse yourself in it. So Elrand did just that. He had learned that a lot of the people in the buddhist community - the real hard-core hippies - lived in a commune in Amherst, Nova Scotia. He went there and asked to join it to see what insights he could glean from their existance. Big suprise, the Cultists loved that sentence and let him in. From there, Elrand slowly assimilated himself into the Cultist culture. He experimented with every chemical known to mankind, which was supplied in great abundance, gave up all his material possessions, got laid several times a day, the whole shebang. The cultists liked the fact that he knew so much about other cultures, and he became known for his storytelling of the myths and legends of virtually every culture on the planet; in particular, how those myths and legends changed as they were told and re-told through the passage of time. The cultists REALLY liked that part. Eventually, you guessed it, he awakened. His assimilation into the culture of the cultists had gone to the point that he soon began to take on the mage's outlook on reality. He had assimilated so much with the mages that he passed the point of no return and truly became a mage. As a mage, and a Cultist, he sought to find the barriers that keep mankind bound up. His method of doing this draws from his background as a sociologist, and from that insight he gleaned from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. He assimilates himself into the culture, almost to the point of no return, so he can glean insights about their nature and structure, to learn exactly WHAT their boundaries are. This knowledge he publishes to the rest of the Cultists, who then work on overcoming those boundaries, while he goes off into seclusion to regain his composition before he moves on to the next culture. Over the years, he has drifted from one subculture to the next, acting as an 'advance force' for the cultists. He goes in, finds out what is holding them back, and reports back to the cultists, who then go to work helping them transcend these boundaries. He owns a junkyard, where he lives. Don't let him hear you call it a junkyard, though. To him, it's a collection of 'Cultural Artifacts'. In fact, the name of the place is 'Elrand Beaner Ltd. Purveyor of Forgotten Necessities'. Over the years, he's gathered a little bit of everything. Eventually, he started noticing funny things about his collection. It seems that as a result of this mish-mash of culture, a strange kind of force has resulted from the conflicting resonances of his collection. As a result of these conflicting resonances, a sanctum of sorts has been created. In his junkyard, almost nothing is considered taboo. Anything goes. When you walk into his junkyard(Ahem..), the pressures that society places upon you seem to be lifted from your shoulders. There are also little treasures to be found, if you look. This is how tass manifests itself. You find something of value to the culture that it originated from, and you can draw insights from the added perspective of that culture. In this way, Beaner actually encouraged Quintessence thieves. Whenever you use his tass, you grow a little bit as a person. Style and Paradigm: Beaner's magickal style draws heavily from his sociological background. He's almost a technomancer in that respect, in that there is nothing wierd or bizarre about his magickal style. He doesn't modify reality - reality modifies him, and he gleans insights about it which he can use to get what he needs. He views reality from a sociological point of view, which is relatively correct, as Paradox manifests as a result of the collective fears of the culture into which he is immersed. This gives him a bit of an edge when it comes to paradox - he knows enough about the culture that spawned the fears to avoid conflicting with it. After all, how can you assimilate yourself into a culture if you violate it's rites and taboos(paradox)?
Foci: Mind: Culture is purely a construct of the Mind. There are many levels to culture - internal and external. It's been said that no man is an island, but each person has an individual streak to them that both affects and is affected by society. The first step in studying a culture is to study the individual - what makes them tick, their behaviours, how they affect the culture. As well, culture affects the individual in a similar way, and this has the most powerful effect of all. Walking down a city street wearing black hip-hop clothes will generate fear in some, and comraderie in others. Doing the same in the Australian outback will probably generate confusion. Knowing how culture affects the mind is a very powerful tool. As well, knowing where you stand, and what your cultural taboos are can be powerful as well. Prime: Some things have a certain value that cannot be expressed in monetary terms. These objects have a cultural resonance - they are more important to a culture because of what they represent. At higher levels, this resonance can be utilized to insights into almost any situation. But all things have a limit to how flexible they are, and after an insight is gleaned from an artifact, it's flexibility is lessened. However, in gaining that insight, you have expanded your perceptions slightly in allowing yourself to be affected by an experience outside your normal sphere of influence. Spirit: Similar to Prime, certain cultural resonances are based in the spirituality of a culture. Each society has it's own religious structure, whether they recognize it as a religion or not - the Church of reason being a very good example of such. By utilizing these spiritual constructs, you can gather insights into the inhabitants of a culture, as well as the area in which a culture habitates - the culture has an effect on it's environment. At higher levels, the spirituality of an area can be modified by putting several of these variables together. For example, introducing a spiritual insight to a culture can affect the area in which the culture inhabits, lowering the gauntlet. Things that exist on a purely spiritual level - the pure concepts of a culture and it's trappings, can be affected as well. An object with has invested in it a lot of cultural significance exists on multiple levels of existance. By using these cultural oddities, one can affect what happens on a spiritual level. Lastly, very important concepts in a society can be thought as entities unto themsevles. The myths and legends of a society can tell you a great amount about what lies beyond the barrier of an area. In a large commercial area, there may exist entities created from the mannerisms of the inhabitants, and exemplify what the inhabitants of the area do. These entities could be utilized to gain insights into the businessmen of the area - who's hot and who's not. These entities would know a great deal about commerce and finance. Even being in their presence could make an individual knowledgeable about business. Time: Cultures change over time. Culture could be thought of as a living history of all aspects of the culture. The old coot on the hill would know things about an area than even the most educated historian would be ignorant about. The myths and legends of an area almost have a basis in truth, and insights about the history of an area, or even about where the area is going, can be gleaned from listening to them in different contexts. Also, the concern a culture has over time can give you insights as to the nature of how time is considered in the area. Teatime in England is so deeply routed in the psyche of the culture you could set a clock by it. The same is true for your average worker in the modern age. Time is money, and schedules are adhered to like their existance depends on following it to the letter. |
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