Bestiary

You know how you sometimes wish you could just make annoying people disappear? The universe knows that feeling, too. So when certain mages go bit too far, demanding that the universe fits their immediate demands, Swipe sometimes appears to remind such people that the universe is not their bitch.

According to Umbrood lore, the entity now known as Swipe has been around for centuries. In the old days, this spirit manifested as a strong wind that would blow offending mages far away from where they’d been standing moments before. Just before the mage in question found himself in some distant, unexpected location, a heavy sigh of wind — occasionally heard to be muttering to itself in a decidedly feminine voice about the annoying inconvenience of Awakened humanity — would gust around the mage, ruffle his hair and clothing, and then whisk him off to a rather inconvenient

place: a mountaintop, a deep woodland, a faraway crossroad, a distant city, that sort of thing. Most often, the trip would simply inconvenience the mage in question; an especially annoying or dangerous mage, however, might find himself facing a sudden threat — an onrushing train, a hungry lion, a fall from several hundred feet in the air — from which his magick might not save him in time.

In the age of smartphones and social media, Swipe refined its approach. Now manifesting as an attractive member of the mage’s preferred gender, Swipe appears, holds up a cell phone, scowls or grins at the mage, and “swipes left,” erasing that mage from view. Seconds later, the offender pops back into existence elsewhere… usually inconvenienced, occasionally imperiled. Swipe, meanwhile, disappears back to wherever it came from, leaving the mage’s companions (assuming the mage had companions) wondering where their friend went.

In rare instances, the spirit not only removes the mage from his physical location, but also swipes the memory of that mage’s presence from the people who were nearby when he disappeared. (“What? Bob was here? I don’t remember him being here…”) Those memories return in time, generally within about an hour; until that point, though, no one in the mage’s immediate location will recall his presence after he departs. They’ll remember he exists, if they knew him before the spirit appeared… they just won’t remember that he was with them until he abruptly vanished from view.

A mage who finds himself whisked away by Swipe generally winds up somewhere within 10 miles or so of his original location. Where he winds up, and under what circumstances, is a judgment call on the Storyteller’s part. Wherever he appears, the mage finds himself too disoriented to use magic effectively. The strain of being erased from one location and dropped into another adds +5 to the difficulty of any task he attempts. (Maximum difficulty of 10.) This penalty drops by 1 difficulty per turn, giving that mage a +4 difficulty on the second turn after his arrival, +3 on the third turn, and so on. Until his scrambled senses realign themselves (in game terms, after the penalty has faded, six turns after his transference), all of that mage’s magickal attempts are considered to be vulgar with witnesses, even if he’s alone in his new location. Combined with the increased difficulty modifier, this situation makes it difficult, though not impossible, to employ magick… and inflicts additional Paradox on the mage if he tries to do it anyway. Thus, the stranded mage is well-advised to rely upon his wits and physical abilities to get him out of trouble in his new location. If that mage is unfortunate enough to invoke another Paradox backlash while trying to escape, Swipe will appear and send him somewhere else where the cycle starts all over again.

How did an entity who’s essentially a wind spirit get hip to cell phones and social media? Some researchers theorize that Swipe is a manifestation of cosmic code, as described in the paradigm “Everything is Data” (Mage 20, pg. 570). What people

used to consider “hearing voices on the wind” actually involved the passing of information in the pre-virtual age. Now, with so many people attuned to the virtual world at their fingertips, Swipe asserts its true form as an agent of data-transference, shifting a mage “out of sight, out of mind” by rearranging the data associated with his existence. That’s the theory, anyhow. As is so often the case, this Paradox spirit isn’t talking — just making folks who disrupt its dominion disappear.

Willpower 6, Rage 4, Gnosis 8, Essence 20

Charms: Materialize, Shift Other (teleport vs. target’s Willpower; three Essence), Spirit Away

Materialized Attributes: Strength 2, Dexterity 5, Stamina 4; use Gnosis for Social and Mental Traits

Abilities: Alertness 5, Brawl 2, Technology 5

Materialized Health Levels: OK, OK, ‒1, ‒2, ‒5, dispersed

Image: An attractive human with a smartphone and an exaggerated grin or scowl.

Roleplaying Notes: Like its original form as a wind spirit, Swipe is often flighty and distracted. Once a mage is “swiped,” it often finds a new target, forgetting the target entirely unless its attention gets drawn back to the mage.