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08:00, 1st May 2024 (GMT+0)

Michael Samuels

Name: Michael Samuels
Age: 45
Age Apparent: Early 30’s
Race: Warlock
Years as a Warlock: 38 (including years in training), 9 (out of formal training)

Appearance: At an even six feet in shoes and a lean 155, 160 pounds Michael stood out on the crowded Shanghai streets.  In New Orleans it’s less his height and frame that attract notice and rather the way he seems to exude a confidence that might actually be deserved.

His blue eyes are always bright and alive and tend to shift between an almost innocent wonder at the world and an intense focus on the smallest details, the corner of a smile, the slope of a bare shoulder, the cut of a black dress.  It can be a bit judgmental, those eyes, when they find something amiss, but his smile is forgiving, the contrast sometimes making it hard to tell which is his true feeling.

He has a particular taste for clothes, designer, tailored, fitted.  That’s not to say he doesn’t own jeans and t-shirts, only that they are selected for a specific fit and feel and he seems to know what to wear when, from formal wear to business casual, from business formal to gym wear, none of it worn out or ill fitting, unless that’s exactly the style he wanted.

In contrast to his precision with clothing, he tends to let his hair be as it wishes.  That usually means there’s a bit flaring on the sides, dropping towards his eyes or sticking up in the wind.  Still, like most other things about him, it seems to suit him.

Area of Expertise: Apophenia Synchronicity

Primary Applications: Pre, Post and Concurrent Cognition through pattern recognition.


In all three cases, the abilities vary in range and effectiveness depending on the level of effort put behind them.  While predicting where a spot will open up in a parking lot is simple and comes quite naturally, predicting which stocks will be going up in the morning requires concentration, focus and research.  While finding a lost sock wallet requires a few questions and maybe a bit of hypnotism, finding where Jimmy Hoffa was buried would require a pretty decent sacrifice.  While he might naturally know when to cross the street in a bad part of town, it’d be tattooing runes on his walls for months to be able to dodge bullets like in The Matrix.

In general, the cost gets larger and larger the more difficult the goal, as is the way of magic and the law of conservation of energy, so he tends to moderate his efforts to the most practical and/or low cost outings.  The pro to that has been he’s gotten quite good at noticing simple patterns and can often make predictions with little to know magical influence.  The con is that his skill and ability with the ‘grand bargains’ is limited and he’s not sure how to extend his powers as far as they could really go.

Animal Familiar: He’s also learned the ability to channel his unwanted energy to an animal familiar and/or drawing energy out of them.  He mostly uses this to focus when ‘working’, so he can clear himself of distractions, but isn’t above using it for personal reasons, when he might be depressed, tired, angry or wanting a different sort of mood.

Secondary Skills: Michael is a fairly well rounded Warlock.  While his talent and specialty is in predictive magic he also knows a fairly broad base of magical concepts.  While he doesn’t practice most of the other methods, he’s aware of them.  He also knows quite a bit about Chinese Alchemy and Herbalism, though that tends more towards science than magic.  This includes acupuncture, moxibustion, Tui Na and Qigong.

He also knows a fair about Chán Buddhism and meditates regularly.  He also has an MBA from the China Europe International Business School.

He’s a decent dancer, but has zero musical talent, is a surprisingly good cook, as long as it’s Chinese, Asian Fusion or French cuisine, but he’s been known to explode things in the microwave.  He was taught how to drive, but hasn’t for nearly two decades.  He has an unhealthy interest in the fashion industry and a near encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture and history, religious and academic trivia and minutia.  He's also fairly creative and paints and draws, though he usually destroys or disposes of the results, not out of embarrassment, but rather, a desire to keep his place clean and free of visual distractions.

Profession: ‘Consultant’  - For the last twenty years Michael has mostly worked as a financial consultant helping individuals and corporations grow increasingly wealthy.  He’s also served as a political consultant and has helped a fair number of politicians get elected.  Or more accurately, he’s helped the money men and political parties pick candidates that could and would win.  After all, there’s it’s easier to predict the future than it is to alter it.  All his work has been through his mentor’s company and its various shells and subsidiaries, with Michael very rarely ever meeting a client directly or at least, not with their knowing.  Most of his work is done in isolation, picking up information from television screens and internet pages or when appropriate, the buzz on the street.  As a result, he’s worked in the shadows, secretly for the most part, though now, he’ll likely be stepping into the light to take the reins himself.

Personality:  Michael is confident in the sort of way that seems more reassuring than arrogant.  He generally seems to believe the things he says, careful with his choice of words, the only conflicts coming when his eyes and smile disagree.  He’s clever and enjoys clever people, but doesn’t particularly like rudeness.  He likes things certain ways and isn’t afraid to make it known.  He tends to reward those people and places he likes and avoid or cut off those he doesn’t.

He prefers extremes to stability.  He’s more comfortable in quiet meditation or in a noisy club while he would be quick to start tearing his hair out at a boring party or doing mundane tasks.  Likewise, he tends to be either very precise and exact in his actions or tends to cut loose with total abandon, though usually the former over the latter.  In fact, he tends towards control in general, the world outside his skin chaotic enough already.  When he does let loose it tends to be explosive and he’s been known to go on a few benders, disappear for a few days or otherwise wake up finding himself unsure of the adventure he’d just had.  Fortunately, such ‘Lost Weekends’ tend to be rarer now that he’s found more manageable outlets for his pent up energy, most of his more primal urges passed down to his cat, much to her constant annoyance.  He’s also begun ‘experimenting’ with using her as a means of mood altering, drawing or transferring emotional energy to alter his own.

Background:  He came through the door, the phone held to his ear, plastic bags filled with wax paper cartons in the other.

“A half hour in traffic,” he said, which was to say a half hour, there was always traffic, the streets of Shanghai always crowded.

“An hour,” he added, thinking of how long it would take him to wrap things up.  He wouldn’t need much at first, a suitcase would do.  He could send for the rest of his things, have them shipped and really, other than clothes, there wasn’t much in the apartment that needed to go.

“Make it two total,” he said, to be sure he covered the spread, which would be about the time they’d need to deal with paperwork and refuel anyway.

“Zàijiàn,” he said, the Mandarin coming more naturally than English in that regard, the girl on the other end of the line understanding it and a dozen other languages to the best of his knowledge.

And his knowledge was pretty extensive.  He was in the business of knowing things.  That was why he was so surprised that he’d been surprised by the call.

'So I finally get to meet the Old Man?' she wondered from where she was lounging on the bed, watching him with her sharp grey green eyes.

“In about twenty four hours,” he told her, rounding up a little.  Math was never her strong suit and she got bored when he obsessed over little details like an hour or two.  Then again, Heaven forbid he was late for dinner.  Then the world was measured in minutes, if not seconds with Hell to pay as a price.  Fortunately though, he was early tonight, having headed home the moment he’d heard the first bit of news, stopping only to grab some fried noodles for himself and something for her.

'Will they have decent food there?' she asked, a bit of worry and annoyance in her tone as he poured her a small glass of Baijiu.

“As I recall,” he promised her, starting to unpack dinner.  It had been decades since he’d been back, but he could recall the smells and the spices.

“I think you’ll actually like crawfish.  They aren’t as fast, but they’ve got a bite, so should be a nice challenge for you,” he teased, opening the box and picking the little mouse out by the tail.  He set it down on the ground where it looked around for a moment before making a line for the wall and along the baseboard looking for somewhere to hide.

'I’ll expect you to fly these in special if I don’t,' she told him in a bit of a huff, getting up, her tail swishing as she dropped from the bed and casually began to stalk the mouse as it looked for a way out of the room.

“Of course,” he said simply, opening his own wax carton and picking up the chopsticks, lifting the noodles out and tilting his head to get underneath and gather them up in his mouth.

~O~

It was a small place and didn’t take long to pack up.  He had almost no furniture, no art work, no books.  All those things were stimulation and while he’d learned to shut things out when necessary, it was unpleasant and his home was his refuge from all that.  He didn’t even like having a television, clock or phone, at least not on display, but he had both, a clock on the wall with nearly a half dozen time zones displayed and a television at the foot of his bed.  He usually used that when he needed quick information or when he wanted to dream, letting the noise drive his unconsciousness while he slept.

Sometimes, he just stepped outside to work.  Like a child on Adderall, overstimulation could sometimes get him into a state where things became clearer.  A billboard here, a magazine cover there, a comment over heard and a song on the radio and suddenly he knew what investments were going to pay off, who the next celebrity was going into rehab, who was winning the World Cup or what the weather was going to be like later that day.  Normally though, he was paid to know something more specific.  For that he had an office, a wall of television screens and computer monitors that he could control, to follow breadcrumbs and rabbit holes wherever he needed to go to find out what was coming next.

That was his specialty, knowing things people shouldn’t normally know.  It made him and the Old Man very wealthy and very in demand as a consultant to everyone from political leaders to CEOs.  He kept a low profile though, he didn’t like the spotlight.  In fact, the only time he ever even met clients was when he got stuck and needed that personal connection to move things along.  Oh sure, he showed up at all the best parties, always had a table at the best restaurants and clubs, knew who to call if he needed anything done, but he kept things mundane.  He shied away from criminal cases, as well as most human interest stories.  Those were the sort of things that got people television shows or at least mentioned on television shows and he was very clearly told to keep quiet until he was called.

It had always bothered him, looking the other way in those cases, letting people disappear, get hit by cars, go to jail innocent or never get the closure or justice they deserved.  But he trusted the Old Man, he had to really, it was part of the deal, trust, faith, an understanding that there was a reason and that one day it would be explained.

That was one of the ironies of the whole thing, how he could connect so many dots, yet couldn’t easily connect his own.  That was something the Old Man promised him help with as part of the whole 'inevitable transition'.  Unfortunately though, he had the distinct impression, that was on hold, since the Old Boy was just going to sleep, Katrina finally catching up to him.  Truth be told, it was impressive he'd lasted so long.

~O~

He thought about the road behind him on the flight home.  He’d been born the same day Apollo 8 approached lunar sunrise and the astronauts onboard read from the Book of Genesis, Christmas Eve, 1968.  He wasn’t sure if that was remotely significant or not.  It certainly wasn’t auspicious at the time, his mother a prostitute who rather than give him up for adoption thought to raise him herself.

She gave up on that plan six years later, something Michael found ironic, given the sixth year was supposed to be about home, family, responsibility.  Like most things in life, there was a yin and a yang to that.  While he lost his birth mother and childhood home, he gained the person that would ostensibly become his father.  It was more of a Batman and his Ward Dick Grayson kind of thing, but it was close enough.  The Old Man gave him all the things his mother couldn’t, a nice house to live in, warm clothes to wear, good food to eat and the best education money could buy.  And as it turned out, money could buy an impressive education.

Expectations for him were high growing up.  He was expected to learn quickly, to be better than good and to be dedicated more than obedient.  In fact, if anything, he was too obedient, too quick to try and impress and please the Old Man and he rarely strayed too far off the path set out for him.  That path included more than reading, writing and arithmetic.  It included the physical and the artistic, the sacred and the profane, the mundane and the mystical.

He’d always known there was something different about his benefactor and mentor.  At first his imagination made up lots of stories.  The Old Man was really his father.  He really was Batman, sneaking away to the basement (i.e. cave) every night.  He was really a secret agent working for the government and was training Michael to be the same.

The truth was every bit as fantastic.  The Old Man was a Warlock and quite a powerful one.  He’d trained more than a few others over the course of two lifetimes and was readying his last.  Why he’d picked Michael was unclear.  Maybe he really was the boy’s father, maybe he’d sensed the ability in the child, maybe it was an auspicious birth after all, maybe it was just convenient, a struggling mother willing to give up her child for a stack of cash and no questions asked.

Either way, his magical training began before his tenth birthday and by his 18th he was travelling to ‘friends’, to study under others, finally finding himself under the tutelage of a Chinese Master living in a tiny herb shop on one of the most narrow streets he’d ever seen in his life.

It had been almost a decade since he’d stopped studying with Master Liú and had been confirmed free to study on his own.  That had actually been the last time he’d seen the Old Man too, his ‘father’ having taken a rare trip away from Louisiana to visit Shanghai for the celebration.

He’d been surprised when rather than bringing him home, he’d set Michael up in a beautiful apartment on the edge of the city.  He’d said he’d explain everything when the time was right, but until then Michael should keep working, studying and staying ‘hidden in the shadows’.  That was one of his favorite phrases, ‘stay hidden in the shadows’.  Certainly Michael understood the need for discretion.  He knew enough of the supernatural world to know he shouldn’t be levitating down the street or throwing orgies with vampires and werewolves, but he wasn’t quite sure why he needed to stay in Shanghai or why he had so little contact with the Old Man.

In fact, he only talked with him a few times a year, most of his communications through Sabine, the Old Man’s personal secretary or through email from Franklin, the intermediary between Michael and the various shell corporations, subsidiaries and other companies that benefitted from his work.

Hurricane Katrina hit not long after the Old Man’s visit and by Michael’s own account would have been far worse had someone or something metaphysical not interceded.  Whether that was the Old Man or someone, something else, he wasn’t sure.  Even so, the devastation was severe and Michael was forced to watch from the sidelines, his offers to return, to help, all met with the same response, ‘stay’.  In the end, the only way he’s been able to help at all was through money, his own sizable bank account and his ability to grow the accounts of others used to invest in the rebuilding of the city, so that now, Michael, the Old Man and a few associated companies now owned a good chunk of the real estate in the city and state.

Still, he was glad to be going home, but nervous too, assuming since the Old Man was going to sleep it meant he’d have to step up and take over the firm and run the thing from the top, something he’d been training for, but hadn’t expected for at least a few more decades to come.

'People' of Relevance: