Ruse
Shadow Name: Ruse
Real Name: Max D'Alessio
Concept: Thief and Gambler turned Antiquities Dealer
Virtue: Justice
Vice: Wrath
Order: Guardians of the Veil
Path: Acanthus
Legacy: The Awakened Gambit
ATTRIBUTES
Intelligence 2, Wits 4, Resolve 3
Strength 2, Dexterity 4, Stamina 2
Presence 1, Manipulation 4, Composure 3
SKILLS
Academics 2 (Literature), Investigation 2, Occult 2 (Magic), Politics 1
Athletics 2, Brawl 2, Drive 1, Firearms 2, Larceny 4 (Slight-of-hand), Stealth 3
Empathy 2, Persuasion 2 (Brokering a Deal, Short Cons), Socialize 2, Streetwise 3, Subterfuge 1
ARCANA
Fate 4 (Favored), Time 3, Mind 2, Prime 1
WILLPOWER 6
WISDOM 5
GNOSIS 4
MANA 5
SIZE 5
HEALTH 7
DEFENSE 4
INIT MOD 7
SPEED 11
ROTES (6xp spent on rotes):
"Indra's Net" (Interconnections): Fate 1
"Four Leaf Clover" (Lucky Coin): Fate 3
"Scales of Thought" (Third Eye): Mind 1
"Donning the Inner Mask" (Alter Aura): Mind 2
"Forever Stranger" (Incognito Presence): Mind 2
"Artifact Hunt" (Analyze Enchanted Item): Prime 1
"Unweaving the Flaw" (Dispel Magic): Prime 1
"Gazing Through Sands" (Postcognition): Time 2
"Divination" (Speak The Name of Tomorrow): Time 3
MERITS (4xp on merits):
High Speech, Order Status 2 (Guardians of the Veil), Consilium Status 2 (Houston), Destiny 3, Resources 3, Barfly 1, Danger Sense 1, Contacts 3 (Antiquities Trade), Language 1 (Latin), Language 2 (French)
MAGICAL TOOLS
Dedicated Tool: A Silver Double Headed Coin. It is intricately designed and shows George Washington on both sides, the pentacle being subtly hidden in the design. Ruse tends to run it along his knuckles and pull other tricks with it when he is agitated. He received this from his first mortal mentor before going off to college, it is perhaps his most valued possession.
Arcana Tools:
Fate: A marked pack of cards. He's been carrying them for years, always on the look out for someone who hasn't learnt not to gamble with him.
Time: A gold clockwork pocket watch, something he keeps as an affectation as much as a tool.
STYLE AND NIMBUS
Ruse tends to vary in his approach, moving between highly planned actions to totally spontaneous reactions. What they share is that everything he does tends to possess a degree of risk. He likes to walk the knifes edge and this is keenly shown in whatever Ruse is up to.
His nimbus tends to take the form of the sound of a decks of cards being shuffled and light breezes. At greater expenditure more casino sounds follow, the largest being the spin of the roulette wheel, the slowly bouncing ball creating crashes that sound like cymbals and gale force winds.
APPEARANCE
Ruse is a fairly handsome man in his early thirties, standing at about 5 foot eleven inches tall and slim wiry build. He has brown eyes and short dark-brown hair along with an immaculately groomed mustache and short beard. He is often seen in reading glasses with large silver frames.
He often dresses in suits composed of a tailored white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, a grey waistcoat and grey fitted trousers. If he bothers to wear a jacket in the Texas winter, he tends to wear a surprisingly tatty green-grey coat. He commonly carries a deck of cards and a gold pocket watch, along with a Silver engraved lighter and a packet of cheap cigarettes inside the suits pockets.
EARLY LIFE
Born in Las Vegas, young Max spent a lot of his youngest years playing backstage in many of the various shows in Vegas. His father, a croupier at various casinos during his youth taught him his first few card tricks, aiming to prevent his son ever getting conned by the duplicitous punters he saw everyday. His mother a Cajun, had moved to Vegas from New Orleans with hope of being a singer of some some renown but ended up singing in the various shows, normally assisting more major acts as vocalist.
His youth came to an end, when his father suffered a stroke and in the years that followed poverty plagued the family. Determined to support his parents, when not in school, Max started picking pockets and using the little tricks his father taught him to scam tourists. By fifteen he was one of the better known short conmen on the strip. His mother disapproved and his father, well he never really recovered from the stroke, he dying three weeks before Max's fifteenth birthday. Max was always lucky in his cons, rarely taking anything folks would miss and avoiding police attention despite his reputation. This was due at least in part to the fact that he didn't 'work' with any regularity, trying to keep his grades up in school while earning a living. It was surprising then when he stole an odd silver coin from a old man just off the Strip, when he did get caught. The cops would of thrown his arse in jail had the man chosen not to prosecute, instead taking the boy under his wing in an attempt to straighten him out.
This was how Max got started in the antiques business, the trade this Albert Spengler was in. At first he resented the honest work, seeing it in some twisted way as a betrayal of the skills of his father. As time passed though he grew to love it, the age and history of it all, the little mysteries of the past left behind in the items. He began to view Albert as a second father figure, their for him in his adolescence in a way his own father had been too sick to do. Even his mother grew close to Albert, eventually the to married and as much as Max liked working in the store, they pressured him to go to college and learn more of the world.
Initially studying History, Max soon changed his major to Literature, finding a love of classic novels. Turning some of the tricks he'd learnt under Albert he started hunting down down rare novels, at first just to read and possess them but later capitalizing on the idea of adding rare novels to the business he so enjoyed working in. Graduating he tried to set up his own shop back in Vegas but nearly went bankrupt after a year. Partnering with Albert was all that saved him from bankruptcy, taking fairly specialist clients as his reputation grew. It was this that led to his Awakening.
AWAKENING
On graduating from College, Albert had given Max the coin he had attempted to steal all those years ago, a double-headed silver dollar. The coin was the reason Max ended up meeting his biggest client, a wealthy bibliophile Mikhail Geortsky. Having wandered into the shop one day, the Los Angeles, Mikhail ended up loosing money to a bored Max, while he browse what trivial books Max had kept visible. When realizing how he'd been tricked the man was at first angry, till in the argument he noticed the books Max didn't keep out.
The man provided a wealth of opportunities to pursue Max's passion. Through working with Mikhail, Max ended up working with various anonymous clients, the people Mikhail had been representing. This was little issue to Max until he was sent to retrieve a copy of a Latin manuscript called De Umbra Regni Quinque Portis. To cut a long story short, acquiring the manuscript lead him through hell and back, embroiling him in a plot with murder, suicide and a crazy cult. It also cost him his remaining family, as Albert was killed as a warning and his mother to this day won't speak with him.
He tried to finish the job by presenting it to his obfuscated employer at his lavish Orange County Estate, who turned out to be Mikhail himself. This turned into a total nightmare, when Mikhail tried to kill him for it and the cult stormed the compound. Fleeing into the botanical greenhouses, Max stumbled into Arcadia. Stumbling his way to the tower he say ahead, knowing he was being pursued by something, he scrambled to the top leaving the manuscript he clutched to himself there, as he used the double-headed coin to scratch his name into his watchtower.
Shortly afterwards, in the cleanup of one of their Labyrinth's going totally off the rails, he was found in the greenhouse by the Guardian's of the Veil.
HOUSTON
Having been in Houston for nearly seven years, Max again runs an Antiques and Rare Books Shop, under the name Jonathan Russo, some ten years later now based in Houston under the Shadow Name Ruse. The shop acts as a cover for removing certain objects that come through from circulation and into either the local censorium or if they aren't dangerous into the hands of other responsible local mages.
He is an active member of the Consilium and his order has recently retired from being a retrieval specialist for the Guardians when he picked up too much heat after a botched heist from the local Free Council Member. Whatever he is doing for them now is kept quiet and few outside the local branch of the organization could even guess at it. His cabal suspect many things, but Ruse is nothing if not close mouthed about the topic.
