For most mages, the Avatar remains a mysterious figure, goading them from the sidelines and appearing primarily within a Seeking or during other moments of intense stress. For you, however, the Avatar is a vibrant presence in your life, as real to you as anyone else. Essentially a character in its own right, this manifested Avatar interacts with you on an almost daily basis. In certain situations, it might interact with other people, as manifestly real as any other person in your world.

The Manifest Avatar Merit embodies the Avatar as a full character under the Storyteller’s control. On its own, this Merit reflects that Avatar as a person who only the associated mage can see, hear, and interact with on a physical level; in conjunction with the Background: Allies, however, the Avatar becomes a character that everyone can see, hear, and feel. In both cases, the Avatar may come and go as it pleases, bound only by the physical laws with which it chooses to be bound. The physical Avatar’s shell can be injured or killed, but that in itself does not kill the Avatar – merely its body. For obvious reasons, that solid Avatar should have a guise that won’t be too vulgar or bizarre for the Consensus to endure – a cloaked, whispering figure, perhaps, but not a screeching, tentacled monstrosity. The manifested Avatar’s Traits depend upon the value of the Allies Background, as well as the physical form of that incarnation. An equine or lupine Avatar, for instance, will have different Traits than an Avatar that manifests as a crow, shadow, mirror, or child.

Your Avatar does not hang a sign around her neck that proclaims Avatar. In the first edition Cult of Ecstasy Tradition Book, for example, Cassie deals with a manifested Avatar named Aria who never reveals herself to be anything other than a wild child who looks disturbingly like an alternate-reality version of Cassie and knows things no one else should know about Cassie’s past, present, future, and inner self. (For details, see that book, pp. 5-45.) Unless either the mage or the Avatar announces its true identity, other characters don’t usually think that your manifested Avatar is anything other than what it appears to be. Mages or Night-Folk who can see auras or souls might catch on, but most other folks remain clueless.

An Avatar manifesting only for the mage can affect the material world only when no other characters or devices can see that entity, although it might appear to others as an online presence, a ghostly figure, as odd sounds, or through other phe­ nomena. An Allies-based Avatar remains as solid as it wants to be, lacking the powers of a human mage but possessed (literally) of the power to fade in and blink out as it desires. Again, the Manifested Avatar is a Storyteller character, with agendas and behavioral quirks that confound both the mage and his player. Although that Avatar has its mage’s best interests at heart, it might play the role of a rival, lover, best friend, or nemesis… quite possibly all of them at once.