(The In Nomine core rulebook is available here)
The 2009 Phantom Corsair
Primal Spirit
Corporeal Forces: 3 Strength: 6 Agility: 6
Ethereal Forces: 2 Intelligence: 4 Perception: 4
Celestial Forces: 2 Will: 4 Perception: 4
Charisma/2
Element: Tech (Vehicles)
Affinities: Speed (Primal)
Skills: Area Knowledge/1 (the Marches), Dodge/6, Dream-Shaping/1, Driving/6, Language (English/3, German/1), Savoir-Faire/2
Songs: Dreams (All/1), Motion (All/2), Draining/1 (Celestial)
Dread: Loss of Mobility/2
Image: This.
Sadly and ironically, Heinz died in a car accident and his dream car died with him. Still, we like to think that when he got to Heaven, God's first words to him were, "Good, you're here. Build me one of those cars." - Cracked, "8 Awesome Cars They Won't Let You Buy"
Well, it sort of happened like that... in the "No, not really: not really at all" sense of the term. What actually happened is that Rust Heinz did spend about twenty post-mortem years designing some exceptionally good-looking cars for Lightning's private use before he decided to climb the Ladder. These cars were reproduced on Earth for Jean's technology suppression services...
OK, let's just get this out of the way. It is a bad idea to let the average person have unshielded fusion generators and inertialess drives, OK? And let's not even get into the matter duplicators. Do you know how close Earth came to having Ecuador conquered in 1964 by a legion of matter-duplicated Atomo-robots? That's right, you don't know; and you don't know because Jean was there to make sure that the Golden Age of Atomic Horror stayed on the silver screen where it belonged. And it's not like the Men in Black were really cruel about it, either: anybody that their leader Mr. Cash (hey, it was a perfect cover) discovered that showed even the slightest aptitude for the work got recruited forthwith... which meant that they got to keep their toys anyway. Just, you know, supervised.
So. The cars were what the MiBs drove, and that's what got remembered. And because they were totally sweet cars, and Americans in particular have a thing for totally sweet cars, from there it was only a short step to belief... and somewhere in the Marches, a factory got set up. And shortly after that, the first Phantom Corsairs came rumbling off of the assembly line. And some time after that, they found a way to manifest on earth.
Generally, Phantom Corsairs like a very, very, very low profile - they want to stay on Earth, and so that means keeping out of the view of celestials. After all, angels generally want to destroy ethereals, and demons will drive them to destruction, because so few of them care about quality machine work. This reticence gives them a not-always justified reputation as being benevolent; the reality is that many of them are just kind of scared to be troublemakers. Their usual operating method is to manifest as being one step away from the junkyard, find a human that's willing to "recondition" them back into proper shape, and generally reveal a highly modified version of their story once he or she is deemed ready to believe it. Given that a Phantom Corsair is a magic talking car, this is easier than it sounds. Once the ethereal has an owner, it will relax enough to indulge itself in its favorite activity: to wit, driving really, really fast on good roads.
Interestingly, there seems to be a quiet thread of thought among the Host that "capturing" these ethereals and putting them to work by "making" them drive really, really fast might be an acceptable way of dealing with their "presumption" of manifesting on the corporeal plane. After all, if it's your prisoner, then it's not staying on the corporeal plane voluntarily, right? ...yeah, the Ofanim mostly handle the flaws in the reasoning by not bringing up the argument in front of either the Seraphim or the Malakim. The other two Choirs return the favor by not asking questions that they probably didn't want to know the answer to anyway.
This is suitable for a beginning player-character.
*beth giggles and giggles and giggles*
Posted by: A. Beth | February 20, 2009 at 12:43 PM