Age:

Role:

Psychic:

Skills/Abilities of Note:

Willpower:

Fear:

Background:

Previous Encounter/s:

Resources:

Odds of Survival:


*these numbers are tentative and due to change at the GM/Co-GM's discretion. My main goal is to imply that Oz is fairly weak willed, but not a pushover and can be easily scared, but won't run from every fight.

Romeo Rodriguez



Physical Description: Romeo is an older Latino man whose face is gaunt and weather beaten. His dark, long and straigght hair is interrupted intermittently with a series of thick mats and knots which he seemed to pay little mind to. His facial hair is mottled and wispy as he prefers to use his razors to slice suspect stills out of roles of Kubrick films than he does apply them to his face. The bags under his eyes betray the years it has been since he has gotten more than 4 hours of sleep a night, owing partly to his obsessive quest for and torturous knowledge of The Truth, and partly to a low grade amphetamine addiction meant to enhance the former. In small town Iowa he had become a local eccentric, a strange sight for visitors but a kind of comforting mystery to the locals who became used to his presence, handing out mimeographed summations of his “explosive findings” outside the supermarket.

Age: 38

Role: Believer

Psychic: Yes

Skills/Abilities of Note: Incredible work ethic bordering on obsessive, excellent aptitude for research and collation/organisation of information, strong knowledge of the occult, history and parapsychological subjects

Willpower:

Background: Romeo had always loved patterns. As a child he loved to watch the clouds roll by in small, pastoral Iowa town which was his birthplace. He’d puzzle out their shapes and assign identities to them, making up little stories about each as it rolled its way across the sky. As a child he loved detective stories, from Sherlock Holmes to Phillip Marlowe. They seemed to see things no one else ever could, picking out the extraordinary realities that hid behind the mundane appearance of everyday objects, able to spill simple things into an expose of shocking truths. It was this which led him to head to college to study English literature.

It was in a Renaissance literature class that something cracked in Romeo for the first time. He was listening to his Professor dryly explaining the history of connections between Renaissance art and the esoteric history of magical orders and secret societies. Hidden codes in poetry and paintings uncovered an secretive group of intellectuals emerged in a world of occluded signs and mystic spells. He sat shocked as he saw the rest of his class staring at the projected words slack jawed ad bored. To him this was a hidden and mystical reality exposed in centuries old tomes...how could anyone be bored by it? He finished out his degree programme in relatively successful normality, all the while secretly affixed by the notion of hidden signs and codes in literature. He pored over the texts accredited to ancient occultist Hermes Trismegistus and held onto a dog-earred and scribbled on copy of The Catcher in the Rye from which he hoped to glean some secret into the creation of Manchurian candidates.
Following college, and sensing little else to do with a literature degree, he settled into life as a junior reporter at his small town newspaper in Iowa. He hoped to use his position to uncover some of the conspiracies and occult rituals he increasingly saw pulling the strings beneath the veil of reality. To his disappointment he found himself mostly inhabiting a hum-drum world of photographing Quinceañeras and writing page 18 pieces on beef prices. However Romeo’s restless mind would soon lead him to a real conspiracy. Romeo discovered a plot by the local mayors office to dump nuclear waste from a near-by plant in an unregistered lot near local Latino community. He came to his editor with a folder full of hastily compiled evidence and requested he be allowed to pursue the story. For his trouble he got fired and so the current phase of his life began.

Romeo is now a transient, living out of his janky Winnebago RV which is plastered with newspaper cutouts and blurry pictures of UFOs harvested from bbs boards.He maintains an irregular blog tracking an ever expanding conspiracy of occult happenings and political manoeuvrerings that seemingly no one else can see.

Since unseen forces of darkness began to brush up against reality and especially since his own encounter (elaborated below) Romeo has manifested a minor psychic ability he refers to as his ‘radio bursts’. On rare occasions Romeo will experience a dull headache accompanied by a sound like static in his ears, occasionally interrupted by disjointed lines of dialogue or just indecipherable groans. Romeo is unaware that these are moments of minor and random telepathy and from time to time seem strongly related to his hunt for the unusual

Previous Encounter/s: Yes

Encounter Summary:
The cassette arrived in a nondescript manilla envelope. It had taken him months of Ebay trawling and forum cross-referencing but Romeo had finally found it. The cover of the VHS was blank and white, with only 3 little words scrawled across its front in Sharpie: “Stairway to Nowhere”. This was a missing element of a series of television reports by French journalist Jean-Teddy Filippe investigating unexplainable events and made in the 1990s. The series, entitled Les Documents Interdits, aired on German television and ran (supposedly) for twelve episodes depicting a variety of unexplained phenomena and strange footage. Since its airing many had been proven hoaxes but rumours persisted of a separate, unaired segment that had since gone missing since its first airing. The segment, which Romeo now held in his hands, had been spoken about on paranormal forums for years, owing to its apparently extremely unsettling nature. When Romeo opened the clamshell he found a napkin with an odd insignia (that Romeo would later discover originated in a hotel in Marseille) with a series of instructions scrawled on it. It began “Go to the location”.

The location was provided by the tape itself, which appeared to consist of five minutes of static followed by approximately 9 minutes and 37 seconds of a single still image of a set of disconnected stairs standing in a clearing. Romeo soon reasoned that a series of ‘cigarette burn’ flashes at the end of the footage were in fact morse code and provided him with a series of geographic co-ordinates located in New England. From there it wasn’t much of a thing to make a road trip there from Iowa. Strangely, throughout the journey, Romeo never once felt the urge to watch the strange tape again, although ordinarily he would go though repeat viewings of such a thing with a fine tooth comb. He escape the final that the single still image had moved and changed in subtle ways throughout and that an additional viewing might expose him to whatever lurked in that stillness.

The additional instructions once he came to the forest in New England were clear, simple and strange. He walked fifty steps blindfolded. He knocked on a specific birch tree and said “bring out your dead to the emptiness”. He crossed a small stream, splashing up to his shins, hopping only on his left leg. And then he came upon it, alone and silent. The stone grew moss and the ornate carvings on the sections of wood panelling seemed to hold no historical meaning he could discern. Romeo gingerly set one foot on the staircase and his breath caught in his throat as he noticed, right up at the top, the final stair had begun to bubble. Before he could breath again the final stone step extruded, fleshy and whispering, another step higher into the void. Romeo gathered all his strength and set his foot on the next step up. Again, another fleshy protrusion of a mysterious step. Then all of a sudden an overwhelming feeling of being watched. He ran lightning quick as his heart race and his breath stopped until he got back to his RV. As he hightailed it out of New England, to wherever his new destination would be, he swore he saw the delicate geometry of the stairs burned ghostly into his little CRT monitor.

Resources: Access to an online world of fellow conspiracy theorists and occultists all around the US and the world, his beat up old Winnebago that runs like a workhorse and heaves with documents and blurry photographs and screeds, a .22 rifle he’s not quite sure of how to use but he keeps around for the day he’s sure the New World Order is going to take over

Odds of Survival: 1