Agata “Money Is Like a Sixth Sense – and You Can't Make Use of the Other
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A Drop of Rain / February 2011 Agata (Lauren Chai) / Character Sheet Agata “Money is like a sixth sense – and you can’t make use of the other five without it.” – William Somerset Maugham “Give me a nickel, brother can you spare a dime Money can drive some people out of their minds.” – For the Love of Money, O’Jays Growing up on the mean streets can be tough on a girl. It is even tougher if you remember the alternative, if you know that it doesn’t have to be this way. You remember your parents, what it was like having parents. Maybe they were a bit overprotective, but home was always safe and warm and happy and. home. That was before it all went wrong. One day, you were only eight years old, your mother received a note. It must have been important, given the inherent difficulty and expense of sending mail in Liberec. Your mother seemed so scared. Even though she tried to hide her fear from you, you could tell. Your mother had no one to turn to, as your father was off dealing with a rampant overgrowth problem across town in Port Vianden. You know, Plant Mage stuff. He just took months at a time to deal with any Plant problem instead of a few weeks like your mother (an Animal Mage). Maybe Plant problems just take longer to deal with than stampedes or spooked horses. Not long after, your entire household (your mother Ivy, brother Danny and yourself) picked up everything and moved to Mons. Your father did not come with you. Shortly thereafter, Danny ran away and Andi was born. You kept telling your mother that if only you had waited in Port Vianden for him to come home before moving, the entire family might still be together. She didn’t seem to care, nor did she seem to care that The Mages’ Council hadn’t approved the move. Your mother kept getting notes; she kept spending the evenings after getting the notes crying. It occurred to you that maybe your family originally moved to Mons to get away from something, or someone. You don’t know what. Maybe your mother was being blackmailed, because she started leaving the house a lot, leaving you and Andi on your own. After a few times leaving, she didn’t come back home again. There was nothing for you to do, no way for you to protect yourself and Andi (your only family left) from the ravaging Liberec weather, no way for you to make money or find food, no way to continue living. In addition, whoever had been threatening your mother might come for you next, you and poor little Andi, only a year old. You took the last of your family’s money and bought passage with the Mons delegation to the Bazaar for yourself and Andi and left everything else behind, hoping for a better life. You even changed both of your names, hoping to avoid your mother’s blackmailer and protect Andi from mental probes, to truly start life over afresh. You abandoned being Greta and named yourself Agata; you renamed baby Andi to Andrea. She was too young to remember, so you never even told her about her given name, or yours for that matter. You never told her about the blackmail, or your father’s disappearance, or your brother’s running away, or your mother’s abandonment of you and your sister. It was just safer. If she doesn’t know about these things, the blackmailer cannot find her. On the other hand, if she knew, she might get curious and go searching. Andrea’s a smart kid, she would find out the reason behind the blackmail eventually. This is worrisome; you know in your heart that anyone who goes looking becomes a target. Losing Andrea, the last remaining member of your family. you wouldn’t be able to deal with that. Running away to Wiltz was a good decision, although of course, you didn’t find a better life there. It was protected from the weather, sure, and it’s easier to steal food when your closest neighbor is sleeping on the cold street a few feet away instead of miles away, but opportunities for making money were few and far between. Agata 1 Not Transferable A Drop of Rain / February 2011 Agata (Lauren Chai) / Character Sheet When you were thirteen, little Andrea (a whole three years old at the time) dragged in an orphan boy, barely older than herself, off the streets.1 She came in claiming that he, little Zdenko, was her new little brother. Oh boy, an extra mouth to feed. Still, you’ve always had a soft heart when it comes to Andrea. You allowed her to adopt Zdenko as a brother, and you let each day deal with procuring food independently of any other. About a year after the number of mouths to feed went from 2 to 3, you became tired of not having food or a place to live, a place to shelter your two, now, little siblings. You went out searching for work. When you got home to the alley, you announced that you’d found a source of income and that no one was to disturb your plants that you’d hidden behind a boulder at the end of the dirt alley you called home. Making drugs wasn’t all that bad of a career, anyway. The police would never disturb you, they generally didn’t bother with the Wiltz street rats and slums, and you were one living in the other. The money was decent, especially around Bazaar time when all of the little doe-eyed Mage Candidates are frantic for anything, legal or not, which will increase their learning capacity and their chance of getting hired. Thanks to your parents’ Mage talent and your ample use of your own plants, you were talent-spotted at the age of 16 and someone you’d never met before suddenly sponsored you to be a Mage Candidate in the middle of the Bazaar. Sure, you’d been tagging along on some of the magic-learning shadowruns, but that was mostly to learn a shade of Plant Magic to aid in your gardening in the back of the old alley. Before you knew it, you were the most talented Mage Candidate that year for Plant Magic and you got apprenticed by Bertrand, a high-profile Plant Mage in Wiltz. While apprenticed, Andrea, 10 years old at the time brought home a friend, Theodore who stayed with your little family for a number of years, after being alone in Wiltz. Though he appears to be gay, he fits right into your interesting little family. A few years ago, when you were twenty-three, you were called away for two years in a Mage redistribution to serve in Oldenburg. It was in the middle of nowhere and you couldn’t send any money back to Andrea and Zdenko. It was the most frustrating thing you’ve ever experienced. While in Oldenburg, you met a man, Urshenko, a Mundane. You fell madly in love and married him only six weeks after first meeting him. Unfortunately, his charms only stayed as long as his ring wasn’t on your finger. He became angry and abusive more and more, giving into his fearsome temper. He died (of a heart attack caused by his excess rage, no less) a few months after you married him. He left you no money, no love, few good memories, and only more debts. When you finally returned last year, you were shocked and disappointed to discover that Andrea had resorted to prostitution to support herself and Zdenko during your absence. In addition, she had failed to get hired at her Bazaar (at least she gets a second chance this year). Things had completely fallen apart without you; thank goodness those idiots on the Council had finally heard your pleas to be redistributed back to Wiltz, back to your family, back to your career as an herbalist and drug dealer. This year, you are on The Mages’ Council, and you will fight for the right of all of the Mages and Mage Candidates to stay in the region with their families if they so choose. You’ve been growing and dealing drugs and other herbs on the black market for so many years that you’ve basically ousted any competition from Wiltz. However, it seems as if some others are starting to move in on your territory. You must find a way of ensuring your continued monopoly in Wiltz, if not in all of Liberec. Kusel has even better drugs than you provide, some whisper. They are difficult to get but worth it. Since only Port Vianden does any substantial trading with Kusel, this has only minimally cut into your income. However, if you are to expand to further reaches of Liberec, you’ll need to prevent Kusel from cutting into your profits. You’ve gotten involved with the Isolationists towards furthering this goal. It might be a pity to include the denizens of Port Vianden in the affect radius, but it is unavoidable. You’re willing to allow Port Vianden to be destroyed to get your monopoly. Why? You’ve thought about it deeply. You need this monopoly, this way to make as much money as possible, and you need it now. In another year when your 1Later you discovered that the orphan boy, despite impressive precociousness, had been lying about his age and was barely more than a year old Agata 2 Not Transferable A Drop of Rain / February 2011 Agata (Lauren Chai) / Character Sheet ability to do magic fades, you will no longer be able to use your Plant Magic to help grow your herbs, and your business will falter and fail.