Penny Roberts has an expired Loose End and cannot play in a Contract until its threat is realized.
It's too late to use a Move to resolve these Loose Ends. Now the hammer falls. . .
A 14-Victory Seasoned Contractor played by Iamangelofwar in Maelstrom
Penny Roberts, a product of circumstance. Circumstance that she was killed, circumstance that she lived. She was gifted a second chance, and she didn't waste it at all. She lost her family but created a new one, out of the friends she made along the way of the new life that she was gifted. She was killed, originally by a cruel and uncaring woman that she learned to forgive. She helped to heal and take care of others who would have died otherwise. And this is her legacy, one of kindness, one of family. One of protection and new beginnings. That death allows for new life, and new growth, and a reaper's job is to prune the world so that life can grow from the rot. And we hope that Penny's death and rot fuel the life of those who were close to her, for it is what she would have wanted. So go forth and honor her memory and her name, whisper it on the wind when you walk past her shrine, feel it in your heart when you eat of the milkshake stew served by Bu Fang, feel their magic in your blood when your fingers graze a mask she made. For she is not totally gone from these worlds, as she is still inside the hearts of all she touched.
The following is the last will and testament of Valerie Smith.
- My estate goes to Bu Fang, so long as he supports and cares for The Numbers, Hugo Glasgarden, and Hope Farkus. You're the only one I know who can pay the property taxes on this monstrosity, buddy. Keep them safe for me.
- My wealth shall be cut six ways, and be distributed as the following:
- One portion to Hugo Glasgarden, for the continued care of Hope Farkus.
- One Portion to Mark Collins, since apparently heroism doesn't pay.
- One portion to be gifted anonymously to the Roberts Family of the bay area region of San Francisco.
- The remaining three portions are to be gifted to Hope Farkus when she turns 18.
- To Hope Farkus, I also bestow my lucky Gothic Violin. Have ten help you to play it, and remember me fondly.
- All of my miscellaneous things can be claimed and distributed to my friends and found family. I hope to see you again before your time comes.
She is 23 years old, and often appears as a woman with almost alien beauty, with a caring and motherly expression.
Penny Roberts lives in Maelstrom, a setting where videos of the supernatural go viral every day. Her journal has 12 entries.
2 Alertness
1 Animals
3 Athletics
4 Brawl
1 Crafts
3 Culture
0 Drive
0 Firearms
3 Influence
3 Investigation
4 Medicine
0 Melee
4 Occult
1 Performance
2 Science
2 Stealth
2 Survival
2 Technology
1 Thievery
4 Reaping
This was Valery's first sign that she was special. She had always had an aptitude for knowing way too much about death, but in the hospice she could just... ease them gently into the next world. Those who are effected by this ability can see a form overlapping hers, varying on where their soul will go after they die. For those who told her what she looked like in the hospice, it was usually some sort of angel, but it can also appear as a dark hooded figure, a flaming demon, a loved one who passed before, a being to whom they sold their soul, etc.
Exert your Mind and spend an Action to activate. Select a Living target within 45 feet. This Effect cannot be used unless The target must be close enough to death that using this power would kill or destroy them. If you do not deal enough damage to kill or destroy them, your action is wasted. Roll Intellect + Occult Difficulty 6. The target may contest by rolling Mind, Difficulty 6.
If the contested Outcome is positive, the target takes that much damage plus 3. The target's material Armor is completely ignored.
Taking the Arm and the Eye did not just ease the pain. The socket stoped the bleeding, the eye let me see. The flesh of her forearm let me live, but the muscle let me fight back. Taxidermy more than surgery, but it works just as well.
Exert your Mind and spend ten minutes to activate. Select a Living target within arm's reach. You must use up The same type of body part as what is scarred/damaged, taken from a fresh corpse or surgically removed in order to activate this Effect. Select a Battle Scar on your target to treat.
The treated Battle Scar will heal over the course of the next week.
Those who hunt the dying tend to avoid the fate themselves. Valerie has learned to do just that. Barely sleep, barely breathe, barely age. She still needs to eat and drink, for now at least. Death is patient enough, and doesn’t happen all at once. Death has something to teach us all.
You gain the following benefits at all times.
You may go five times longer than a normal human without sleep and air. You no longer age naturally, and supernatural attempts to age you fail.
Innocent blood spilt, not by your hands, but in them. She was not dangerous, but these contracting murderers did her away anyways, and when you tried to fight this violation, you were punished. So now you shall punish them. Penny left behind a gift, her arm. Now, Frankensteined and in a new world, she seeks to go on these death quests to protect the innocents that may get caught in the crossfire.
The arm is healthy looking, though due to your ethnic differences and amount of outdoor activities, the arm is considerably tanner than your own sickly pale skin, so it is much preferable to wear gloves and long sleeves.
When used as a weapon, the arm sprouts long, thin strands of blood that are harder than steel.
You gain the following benefits at all times.
You gain an additional limb that functions as a standard human arm and hand.
Each additional limb you posses can take one Quick Action per Round without incurring a -2 dice penalty to your main Action. Any Battle Scars that affect or remove your additional limb will heal in a single week.
Your appendage is selectively incorporeal, allowing you to reach through walls or ignore grapples on it.
Your extra appendage is not connected to your nervous or circulatory systems, and you will not take damage if it is hit by an attack or destroyed.
Another job, another life threatening injury. The arm was only a temporary fix. She needed a permanent fix to these scars. So she took a possessed woman’s eye, dark and brown like a bar of chocolate. Luckily it was a good eye even though it was a little beat up. She wouldn’t be using it much more, she had already passed. Maybe it could be used to do some good.
So she has an eye. So what? But it’s not just the eye. She can use any of the freshly dead to help herself heal. Repair what has been destroyed.
Exert your Mind and spend 1 minute to activate. Select a Living target within arm's reach. You must use up One pound of flesh or meat per severity of the injury. in order to activate this Effect. Choose a specific Injury on your target that has not yet been treated with this Effect and roll Intellect + Medicine at Difficulty 8.
If you succeed, the Injury is reduced in Severity by your Outcome. If you reduce its Severity to 0, the Injury is fully healed. Otherwise, it is partially healed and will heal the rest of the way at its natural rate.
This counts as a successful Makeshift Stabilization if the Injury was not already Stabilized; any Battle Scars caused by the Injury will remain.
The flesh starts to painfully flay from Penny’s arm, forming globs of fat and pools of blood and suspending them in the air, forming a mangled shape in the air that is webbed together by strings of muscle. Relative to this, your other powers seem sterile and gothic, but this, this visceral Lovecraftian nightmare, is truly a symptom of your ever declining sanity.
Exert your Mind and spend an Action or Reaction to activate. Make a Trauma roll when you activate this Effect.
You can interact with things that are within 75 feet without needing to physically touch them or be near them. Lasts for the next hour. Any rolls made for Actions taken in this way use a Mental Strength of 4 in place of your Brawn rating, a Mental Agility of 1 in place of your Dexterity, and otherwise use your own Attributes and Abilities.
Telekinetic actions have the following restrictions and behaviors:
Using the same tools on the living and the dead seems to be a good way to die from infection. But Penny knows better. Before this her medical skills were limited to putting on Band-Aids and kissing scraped knees. Now she can weave stitches like the nornir weave fate and transplant organs with her eyes closed, her deathly touch cleaning all infection from wounds and tools alike.
You gain the following benefits at all times.
All Stabilizations you attempt are considered Proper Stabilizations.
You also gain the following effects:
Penny cuts her hand on the surface, and writes an inscription in a language as old as life. Her reflection changes to Valerie, and her soul is shredded into pieces, attaching to every item in the area.
Take a Severity-1 Injury and spend at least two Actions performing the following ritual: she cuts her body and starts to write an incantation on the surface in blood to activate. You must actively and obviously use a surface reflective enough to see your face to activate this Effect. You must maintain Concentration while activating this Effect, and it fails if you are interrupted. Make a Trauma roll when you activate this Effect.
You automatically detect all items imbued with spiritual energy within 1 mile of you for the next ten minutes. You have a clear sense of both the distance and direction towards any detected items. You get details of what each detected item is, as if you've glanced at each object.
Even if there are no items imbued with spiritual energy within 1 mile of you, you become aware of the direction the closest one is in, as well as a rough sense of its distance from you.
After taking on multiple spirts, another reaper, and a physical manifestation of fear and nightmares, Penny’s and Valerie’s mental defenses have proven strong, but only barely strong enough to survive. But their mental fortitude seems to be expanding, growing, as if she was only half awake before. Almost, in an ironic twist, more alive.
You gain the following benefits at all times.
You get +1 dice to any Mind resistance rolls you make. You also gain the following effects:
The blood and bone shift in Valerie’s body to form weapons. Weapons that Penny has begun to train with, to protect herself from things like herself. She realized she needs to hold her own, to protect herself before damage happens.
You gain the following benefits as long as you are engaged in unarmed combat.
Your unarmed attacks deal +2 Bonus Damage (instead of -2). The target's Armor is fully effective against this damage.
You also gain the following effects:
Penny uses the reaper’s eyes to pick apart medical and forensic information such as mold spores, residue and physical injury to determine where they were before and how they died.
Penny always loved murder mystery, and the irony of that fact is not lost on her. Now that she has become the ultimate murder mystery, she realizes that the powers gained from these jobs can use them to fulfill her detective fantasies, buy looking over the patient with the eyes of a doctor and mortician, but with her own superior reasoning skills.
Exert your Mind and spend a minute to activate. Select a Pieces of Bodies within arm's reach. At the end of your investigation, roll Intellect + Medicine at Difficulty 6.
You learn all the following information about your target:
First the face is crafted, stitched onto a backing out of whole or pieces of faces, recombined into new masterpieces. Penny can supply the canvas if you wish to stitch a face to it yourself, but without her expertise there could be some… mishaps. Regardless, once the face is complete and worn for the first time, it becomes immutable, permanent. Whole faces will result in an exact body of the deceased, but working from scratch allows you a bit more… creative freedom.
Once you put it on, you feel the threads work their way into your skin, the backing melting away and the flesh becoming one with yours, which covers your entire body, morphing and molding uncomfortably until you look exactly as the face’s previous wearer looked, or you look like a wondrous new creation of flesh.
Take a Severity-1 Injury and spend a minute to activate. This Effect cannot be used unless someone skilled in surgery must first attach an existing face to the mask, or stitch one together from pieces of faces.
Your appearance changes to the form that matches the face attached to the mask. The disguise lasts until you either activate a new disguise, or choose to end the effect.
You are only able to shift into the one predefined appearance. This new appearance must have a similar sex, age, and race to your own. You cannot significantly change your height and weight. Your disguise cannot directly mimic an existing person. You cannot alter your clothes. You may add inhuman features to your disguise. A disguise cannot affect your Attributes or other stats.
First the face is crafted, stitched onto a backing out of whole or pieces of faces, recombined into new masterpieces. Penny can supply the canvas if you wish to stitch a face to it yourself, but without her expertise there could be some… mishaps. Regardless, once the face is complete and worn for the first time, it becomes immutable, permanent. Whole faces will result in an exact body of the deceased, but working from scratch allows you a bit more… creative freedom.
Once you put it on, you feel the threads work their way into your skin, the backing melting away and the flesh becoming one with yours, which covers your entire body, morphing and molding uncomfortably until you look exactly as the face’s previous wearer looked, or you look like a wondrous new creation of flesh.
Take a Severity-1 Injury and spend a minute to activate. This Effect cannot be used unless someone skilled in surgery must first attach an existing face to the mask, or stitch one together from pieces of faces.
Your appearance changes to the form that matches the face attached to the mask. The disguise lasts until you either activate a new disguise, or choose to end the effect.
You are only able to shift into the one predefined appearance. This new appearance must have a similar sex, age, and race to your own. You cannot significantly change your height and weight. Your disguise cannot directly mimic an existing person. You cannot alter your clothes. You may add inhuman features to your disguise. Your disguise can alter your smell, DNA, and other aspects that are not perceivable via human senses. A disguise cannot affect your Attributes or other stats.
Upon eating said food, the consumer body will start to morph and almost mutate. Slowly bending and bubbling until they gain the mutation. The food itself is stored in these qi bubbles and is then shrunken and compressed. Upon squeezing the bubble, the food slowly expands and become a full bowl/dish of the food. The food generally looks extremely appetizing.
Can only be used on the consumer
Use up this Food based on ingredients , Exert your Mind, and spend eight hours to activate. Select a Living target within arm's reach. The target can easily Resist.
You may add one augmentation to your target. Each augmentation counts as a Battle Scar and can have exactly one of the following Effects:
The augmentations you provide are not outwardly visible nor obvious.
A brown pill that smells oddly fragrant. Upon eating, it's taste ranges from a wide array of food, from bbq to ramen to sushi to cake, depends on the person favorite food.
This pill was made by Bu Fang using a mix of his knife skills and few Chinese medicine knowledge and Qi ability. He uses certain Chinese medicine like specific aged ginseng roots to slowly release the effects and chops the ingredients up then uses Qi to compress it into a pill.
The fragrance changes from person to person based on their favorite food as its ingredients contain a multitude of food variety.
Use up this Brown Pill Ball (unless you succeed on 1d10, Difficulty 7) and spend an Action to activate. Select a target within arm's reach.
For the next 24 hours, your target does not require any food, water, or sleep.
Upon taking a bite of the meatball, the user (beside it tasting really good) will have to throw it as far as possible as it starts hissing from where the bite is. Upon being thrown, the meatball will send out a blast of Qi (sorta like a golden ring of light) around it first like a wave that is blocked by objects in the water before it quickly explodes next round with another burst of Qi.
Think of like when you drop something in water and a ring of wave form. If the cover is big enough, the ring of Qi that spreads out will show this obvious dead air where it doesn't touch before it explodes.
Meatball infused with explosive Qi, upon taking a bite, the pressure in the meatball is slowly released, once enough as been released, it acts like a trigger as the air rapidly reacts with the Qi exploding meatball bits everywhere and a huge wave of qi goes out hitting everything in a radius
Use up this Meatball and spend an Action to activate. Make a Throw attack at a Location within normal attack range. The area within 20 feet of the chosen Location immediately and obviously becomes imminently dangerous. Anyone in the area has 1 Round to attempt to escape. Roll your for your attack as normal. The target may roll to dodge or defend, as normal for Throw attacks. The attack does not deal Damage, but the Effect does.
If the Outcome is positive, your blast hits everything within 20 feet of the chosen Location with Damage equal to your Outcome + 2. Armor is fully effective against this damage.
Track your current equipment here. You may start with anything your Contractor would reasonably have access to.
First the face is crafted, stitched onto a backing out of whole or pieces of faces, recombined into new masterpieces. Penny can supply the canvas if you wish to stitch a face to it yourself, but without her expertise there could be some… mishaps. Regardless, once the face is complete and worn for the first time, it becomes immutable, permanent. Whole faces will result in an exact body of the deceased, but working from scratch allows you a bit more… creative freedom.
Once you put it on, you feel the threads work their way into your skin, the backing melting away and the flesh becoming one with yours, which covers your entire body, morphing and molding uncomfortably until you look exactly as the face’s previous wearer looked, or you look like a wondrous new creation of flesh.
Take a Severity-1 Injury and spend a minute to activate. This Effect cannot be used unless someone skilled in surgery must first attach an existing face to the mask, or stitch one together from pieces of faces.
Your appearance changes to the form that matches the face attached to the mask. The disguise lasts until you either activate a new disguise, or choose to end the effect.
You are only able to shift into the one predefined appearance. This new appearance must have a similar sex, age, and race to your own. You cannot significantly change your height and weight. Your disguise cannot directly mimic an existing person. You cannot alter your clothes. You may add inhuman features to your disguise. Your disguise can alter your smell, DNA, and other aspects that are not perceivable via human senses. A disguise cannot affect your Attributes or other stats.