Bestiary

Every face in the crowd is a hero in disguise. Such people might lack the powers of Sphere magick, but their identities and dreams are no less valid than those of wizards and man-machines. Does that lack of magick, though, make them lesser beings? Vampires and werebeasts won’t bother to ask such questions — the answers are obvious. For a mage, however, the power of “sleeping humanity” is a practical matter as well as a philosophical one.

Despite their overall lack of martial finesse, “just plain folks” exist in all corners of a mage’s world. They’re your family, your friends, your Wards (as per that Flaw) and Retainers (as per the Background of that name). These are the folks right next to a mage at the gym, working in her office, tending to her car, walking her dogs, attending her poli-sci class, and usually teaching it, too. When your mage hits the clubs, most folks she meets there are everyday people; if she has a cult or congregation, fan club or manor house, almost everyone there is this sort of character. A so-called Sleeper doesn’t need powers in order to play a major role in your chronicle. Hell, before her Awakening, your character was one of them as well.

Porter Pryce

The world looks different when you’re in a wheelchair. Counters and tables are set at the wrong height, doors are too narrow, and your leverage is all wrong. Curbs too rarely feature cuts and ramps, and those damn stairwells are everywhere. Perhaps worst of all, people insist upon defining a person in a wheelchair by that wheelchair, as if a mobility tool was the be-all-end-all feature of the person using it. For many folks, that wheelchair is the only feature another person sees.

Porter Pryce has been in wheelchairs since age 16, when a driver who’d always sworn “I drive better when I’m drunk” plowed into Porter’s mother’s car, leaving Pryce paralyzed from the waist down. The driver, by that time, had burnt through every decent insurance company and was riding on the grace of a fly-by-night company that offered the Pryce family a set­ tlement that wouldn’t feed the family dog. After dragging the

case through the courts for five years, the insurance company went out of business, leaving Porter’s family with ruinous legal and medical bills. An avid hiker and aspiring ecologist, Porter needed to reassess almost every aspect of his life.

Porter was never good at playing the victim, much less the beatific handicapped inspirational icon, and his justified bitterness at the situation alienated many parties who might have helped (a little bit) if only he’d quietly assumed the role assigned to him by society. As things are, he’s not interested in being anybody’s poster boy. Now in his early 30s, Porter is heavily tattooed, aggressively self-reliant, and driven by sheer attitude through the many obstacles of his life.

After working a boring series of data-entry jobs and at­ tempting and failing to learn programming, Porter combined his interest in political and cultural history with his anger regarding the treatment of physically impaired people. What began as a series of social-media posts about obnoxious custom­ er-service reps, wheelchair access and lack thereof, predatory insurance companies, and the tendency of people to park in handicapped-only parking spaces (and then throw fits at people whose mobility actually is limited) became first a viral sensation, then a paid activist gig. Porter’s frustrations echo a common theme in a world where the Americans with Disabilities Act

is at best a polite (and typically ignored) suggestion and many nations have no such provisions at all. Porter has turned his ecological interests toward sociological ones, and his penchant for sardonic outrage has begun to generate a trickle of income — not enough to live on but more than he was making before.

These days, Porter and his friends Rachel Morse, Teal McClean, and Regina Washington maintain ANVIL (Advocacy, Normalization & Vigilance for Impaired Lifestyles): a virtual network with related blogs and YouTube channels that criticize cultural preconceptions about physically impaired people and their conditions, demand protections and provisions for folks with such conditions, and expose abuses perpetrated against people (physically able and otherwise) who are being abandoned and exploited by outside parties. Inspired by the symbols for the Greek blacksmith god Hephaestus — often dismissed for his “deformities” among the physical perfections of Olympian gods — ANVIL employs the logo of a golden anvil and two hammers against a fire-red background. Teal’s in the process of turning that logo into a line of clothing specifically designed for people with bodies of unconventional size, shape, and function; Regina’s organizing a legal and lobbying team for ANVIL; and Rachel’s providing moral, media, and logistical support for the team. It’s Porter, though, whose sharp words and fierce attitude keep ANVIL in an ever-growing spotlight, and whose blog kicked the entire process off. Despite his bitterness regarding the path his life has taken, he enjoys a grim satisfaction about the way things have begun to turn out for them all.

A thin Anglo-Franco man with long, bushy brown hair, a thick beard, intense green eyes, and a wealth of heavy metal and cartoon character tattoos, Porter has the powerful shoul­ ders and atrophied legs of someone who’s spent half his life unable to walk. Pervasive poverty keeps him gaunt and angry, and that hungry state galvanizes his activism. If he likes you, you’ll find the sweet-hearted, animal-loving kid Porter was before that drunk driver changed his life. For obvious reason, though, he doesn’t let many people get that close. Porter’s small apartment features two cats (Rocky and Baryshnikov) and a rosy boa snake named Charmer. His girlfriend Clary Simonson spends most of her time there, but Pryce remains convinced that “she’d dump my ass if she had to deal with my shit 24/7.” He still does freelance data-entry and other stay-at-home gigs, but such jobs are thin pickings in a dog-eat-dog economy. It’s enough to keep the lights on and the electric wheelchair working, but not much more than that. Not yet, anyway.

Recently, ANVIL fielded offers from Petersson Therapeutics, a medical research facility covertly tied to Iteration X. That facility offered to provide “experimental” cybernetic augmentation for Porter and his similarly impaired partners. ANVIL thanked them but refused. Although the network accepts advertising from PT on their websites, Porter asserted, “I’m not broken, and I don’t need anyone to fix me.” The world might look different from his perspective, but as Porter told the PT rep, “This is still my world.”