Umaro, the School Mascot
From the Rats’ Book of Names:
The name of Yeti is Unsubstantiated, that which can be experienced but never proven to others.
The heralds of Yeti are indistinct figures in the trees or the snow; howling wind; a sourceless anticipation of fear and wonder
The weapons of Yeti are storm and snow; lonely accidents; the play of light and shadow on the peaks; surprise
You turn Yeti aside by refusing to see; being calm and collected in the face of wonder; staying in a large group
Yeti kills you by drawing you to find it in ever more dangerous places; luring you to fall to your doom; destroying your credibility in the eyes of your peers
Yeti is drawn to explorers; the lonely; fires in the wilderness
Yeti hungers for your attention; the disbelief of your peers , AFFECTION
You may kill Yeti by publicly presenting definitive proof of its existence; denying its reality to its face; tracking it relentlessly until it is hounded from the world
Yeti is reborn when an explorer sets out find something others do not believe exists, and never returns
You may escape the attention of Yeti by accepting that things you cannot prove are false; remaining safe at home
Umaro, the School Mascot
Academics Skill: Reluctant Sports Skill: Air Bud Blood Type: A Favorite Foods: Yak ribs, okonomiyaki, flavored snowcones Age: Everyone assumes you’re about the default character age. They are wrong. Animal: Rabbit
You are the School Mascot, Umaro!
That’s not your real name, of course. It’s just what the students call you.
Your real name - your essence - is the Mystery Yeti, who is named Unsubstantiated. When eyes first watched the snowy peaks and wondered if anyone or anything could live there, your eyes looked back. When tales were first told of figures glimpsed through the snow but never clearly seen, you added your howl to punctuate the telling. You are that which people wonder if the wilderness hides; you are the sound among the high peaks that might be the wind or might be a monster’s howl. Explorers found signs and traces of your passage, and the boldest and luckiest came face to face with you, but brought back to their fellows only tantalizing hints and no proof.
Once you were everywhere and nowhere, on the wilds of Earth and other worlds besides, but those wildernesses are gone now. The Outside is no place for you to live; when everything is ambiguous, there’s nothing left for you to be, no certainties to brace your story against. Since the sun fell, you prowled the Far Roofs and wandered the peaks near Soma Village, where you felt most at home.
But there was a feeling that something was missing, a feeling that had grown in you for years - for millennia, really. You saw the people in their camps and towns below you, talking to each other, getting to know each other. Being there for each other. When you were in the Far Roofs, no one could really be there with you. They could only glimpse you, get hints of your presence but never confirm it, no matter how hard they tried… or how hard you tried. Out there, you could practically stand in front of them and they’d never notice you until you were already vanishing. And over the many, many years, you learned how painful it was to be alone.
So last winter, you followed one intrepid explorer of the Far Roofs back to Town. You spent months lurking in the high places, peering over eaves, watching and learning and trying to figure out how you could meet people. How a creature of mystery and ambiguity could become part of something real.
And finally, you discovered how you can interact with people. It’s not that they can’t see you - it’s that they can’t recognize you. Out in the snowy mountains, the only thing they could mistake you for was a snowdrift, or the wind in the trees - some part of the empty wilderness. Here in Town, though, you just had to figure out something they could mistake you for.
All it took was a dye job. A very, very large dye job.
Instead of your old white fur, you sport the School’s colors: black with gold highlights and a big School sun-and-stars crest on your chest. You take great pride in it and have it retouched weekly. Now everyone knows exactly what you are. What else could an oversized furry humanoid animal painted the school colors be? You’re Horizon School’s Mascot, of course!
Everyone’s got lots of theories on who ‘you’ are underneath the fuzzy suit they think you’re wearing. John Wicked? Impious? The Principal himself? A rotating group of students all sworn to secrecy and the service of school spirit? When the Debate Club takes the stage to argue, you’re there to cheer them on. When the American Football Club loses to the away team from St. Vita’s again, you’re there to buck them up! You get lots of hugs and pats on the back and just about everyone’s happy to see you.
It is the best.
You presume the Principal knows something is up, and possibly the Student Council as well, but if they care they haven’t let you know. Or maybe they approve. After all, you’re helping out the School, right?
So right now, life is great! You feel like you’re part of something, and you’re learning all about the strange and delicious foods they have in Town and the strange and amusing faces people make when they realize you’re just going to wander around town dressed in your mascot outfit. You genuinely care about all these students and want to help them out. And when you don’t want to be around so many people, you just climb up to the roof or the outside of one of the towers, or let your black-and-gold coloration camouflage you against the corridor wall, and watch over the students quietly like you used to watch the fires of the explorers in the valleys below.
You’ve can’t remember ever being happier. You’re going to be the best mascot School’s ever had, and everyone will love you for it.
And you’ll never have to be alone again.
Skills:
Superior Abominable Snowman 3: See description below. Ganbatte! 2: You’re great at inspiring people, rousing them up, and cheering them on. Careful 2: You’re surprisingly gentle and quiet when you need to be. Fuzzball 1: You’re warm and soft to the touch. Enunciate -1: You can communicate just fine, but the finer points of diction are beyond you.
Superior Skill: Abominable Snowman 3:
You’re an enormous shaggy apelike snow monster. You’re supernaturally difficult to gather evidence on - you leave no tracks, and photographs of you only show a distant figure or an out-of-focus blur that might be a hairy arm. You’re naturally camouflaged - you blend into similarly-colored backgrounds undetectably. (If you were still colored white, you’d blend into snow - but now, you blend into the School walls.) Cold temperatures, storms, and high altitudes don’t affect you, and you can climb almost anything and never lose your footing or your grip. You have the keen senses of an animal. You’re extremely strong and tough, but not as much so as someone with Superior Vitality, so you don’t get your full Edge in direct physical contests.
Perks:
Level 2 Bond: I won’t let anyone prove the existence of the Yeti. Level 2 Affliction: I am easily mistaken for something I’m not. Level 2 Connection: The Horizon School Level 1 Connection: the Free Spirit: You followed them back from the Far Roofs. What a great dancer! Level 1 Connection: the Virtuoso: They help touch up your paint job regularly.
XP Emotion: Fist-pump / salute
Basic Quest: An Exciting! Quest: “Urrruughhhgoooo Team!” 15 XP quest; Gain an XP towards it whenever you decide that someone around you is in need of encouragement and launch into some over the top way to cheer them on or raise their spirits. This can be as simple as an overstuffed Yeti hug, or as involved as an extended cheerleading routine.
Miraculous Arc: Creature of the Light 2
All the mystery of the wilderness is in you, and the possibility of the unknown in far and unfamiliar places. You are the shadow glimpsed between the trees and the figure seen through the snowstorm. You are fundamentally an unknowable, unverifiable thing; not even the Fortitude rats, intrepid explorers that they are, have ever proven that you exist.
(They believe you exist, of course. The rats are far too experienced with Mysteries to let a little thing like a total lack of evidence stop them. They’re such impressive explorers, really! You’re very proud of them.)
Tireless
You have endless reserves of energy for being you. As long as you hide your true self, and continue to mysteriously appear to explorers and vanish without a trace every now and then (and don’t have your Divine Warrant stripped from you miraculously), you have access to 3 Miraculous Will.
Well-Lit
You are a creature of drama and wonder, and as such, you can always have exactly the lighting you want. By default, you’ll always be positioned in the best available lighting for your purposes - if you’re sneaking, you’ll find the shadows, and if you’re dramatic, you’ll find the stage. But it costs you 0 MP to demand better lighting from the world - from a dim moonbeam to highlight your mysterious figure atop the School to a spectacular spotlight extravaganza before you launch into a cheer.
Auctoritas Magister
There is more to you than flesh and blood, or even magic. You are made of stories and uncertainty and wonder, and sometimes your actions have the weight of the sacred.
For 0 MP, starting mid-scene you can cause your actions to become inviolate even by miracles. A Level 2 Auctoritas protects your actions and their effects from miracles, Cthonic Actions, and the Outside. Such powers fail to make any changes which would stop you from executing your action with as much success as it would otherwise have had. For instance, if your action is to lead people in a cheer, miracles would be unable to:
Make you unheard
Prevent people from joining in
Remove you or your audience from the scene
Make people dislike your cheer any more than they otherwise would
But could still:
Harm you, as long as you could still lead the cheer
Build a wall around you and your audience to trap them
Increase your cheer to earth-shattering levels
Doom those who do cheer to a terrible death (after the cheer is over)
If you need to use this more than twice per chapter, it costs 1 MP each time.
For 4 MP, you can instead form an Intention when you invoke this ability; for as long as you sustain that Intention, the Auctoritas protects it, your person, and any other Intentions you make.
Appear
The most fundamental nature of the Mystery Yeti is to be seen, briefly, and then vanish without a trace into the wilderness, leaving only a lasting impression and sense of wonder and discovery. So it is given to you to do just that - to appear with the signs and symbols of your coming, and disappear without a trace. These days, you often do it just to check in on the students you know and see how they’re doing.
Over the course of a few minutes, you can materialize anywhere there is someone to whom you have a Connection, appearing out of whatever is most evocative of you. You might pop your head out of a snowbank, or take the place of a statue covered in a throw rug, or just de-camouflage from in front of the black-and-gold school seal. If there’s nothing appropriate nearby, then you just manifest out of gusts of cold wind and a growing sense of school spirit. When you leave the scene, you vanish the way you came, fading back into something that is revealed to not have been you at all.
You can’t really use this to leave a place. If an intrepid explorer is trying to search for you, using this ability to be in a scene somewhere else will usually have you fade back to where you were just in time for the confrontation, but if that’s not possible the whole power becomes Unreal and you end up in two places at once for a bit.
Transfix
With a word or a gesture, or just a still presence, you can convey a feeling of profound amazement and wonder in onlookers. You can cause one of your slow, careful mundane actions to be so compelling that it is impossible for anyone around you to pay attention to anything else. Additionally, the action rises to a minimum Intention of 4, and ignores level 1-2 Skill penalties. This is great not just for appearing mysteriously to travelers in the midst of a snowstorm, but also for creating that perfect hush as you stand up to start a cheer! To use this costs 0 MP the first couple of times per book, and 4 MP a third or further time.
Obsession
To meet Yeti among the high peaks is to be changed. It is a moment of wonder that stays fixed in the mind. Even though they’ll never be able to prove it to others, even if they aren’t sure themselves that you were real, those you show yourself to will never be the same.
For 0 MP, you can cause your actions to have a profound emotional impact on observers you select. You can’t choose what that emotional impact is, but there’s no escaping that it causes them to feel something - it’s a moment that will stay with them forever. This is effectively a miraculous attack, and anyone trying to lessen its impact will have to take the equivalent of a Serious Wound. You can use this again in the same chapter for 1 MP, or again in a few hours for 2 MP.
Open the Vault
You can make your actions be reminders to people, as well, drawing up their history and emotions from within them. For 0 MP, you can cause an action of yours to evoke a flashback in a target which evokes a particular emotion or kind of experience; usually, you use this to evoke wonder or flabbergastment or ‘the first time you discovered something important’, but around School you’re very good at evoking school spirit or ‘that time when you won big’. Any mundane actions the target takes to try to hide or reject what you’re making them feel suffers an Obstacle of 2. For 1 MP, you can do this again in a chapter, or 2 MP to use it again in a few hours.
Divine Warrant
Normally, it would be bad for you to trick people into thinking you’re a human in a funny suit, or making them doubt your existence. It would be bad for you to lurk around, watching them from the heights while you stay hidden. It would normally even be bad for you to give an encouraging cheer to School students when they are secretly plotting to end the world.
Yes, doing those sorts of things would be wrong for most people… But not for the Mystery Yeti, who is named Unsubstantiated!
Once per session, if you haven’t benefited from other Issue-granting powers, you can invoke an appropriate Wicked Action or (maybe Suffer Metamorphosis) and gain a point of the Vice issue. When you do, you work yourself up about your purpose in doing so, and either you describe the way you allow yourself to do whatever it is you’re doing as a high calling, how the wilderness must have mystery and uncertainty and lurking things or else it ceases to be the wilderness at all...
Or there’s a break from reality, and the high, cold wilds manifest around you briefly, and snowstorms gust around you even in the midst of summer, and a sense of fear and wonder at what might be out there, over the next mountain. As a mysterious dweller of the wild peaks, what you’re doing is appropriate, and so you bring the wild peaks and the mystery to you.
When it’s over, the world recontextualizes what just happened - maybe it just seemed like the towers of School were mountains for a minute, or maybe a drift of dandelion blossoms just floated by that seemed like a snowstorm. Maybe the snow just melts away surprisingly quickly and leaves puddles for the janitorial staff to grumble about.
Actions you take under Divine Warrant never seem metaphysically and spiritually incorrect or tabu. However, people and beings of power are free to judge perceptions of the matter as misleading.
A Sense for Sin
There are some things you just have a sixth sense for, things intimately connected to the purpose and meaning of the Yeti. You can tell when…
Someone within about a mile is exploring, especially in high or wild places, and what they’re hoping to find.
Someone in the Region is attempting to find definitive proof of the Yeti, and broadly how they intend to do it and how close they are to their goal.
Someone within about a mile is in bad spirits and needs encouragement or a hug.
You always have an effective Intention level of 2 to learn these things, with 4 Edge against most methods that would be applicable, and you can substitute your own Intention if it’s higher to overcome Obstacles; distance is not an Obstacle to these actions.
When you do sense these things, you gain a Level 2 Connection to them for the rest of the chapter, so you can immediately Appear to them and give them a fuzzy hug, or quietly remove the stray Yeti hairs they’d obsessively collected while their back is turned, or whatever.
Miraculous Arc: Become Somebody 1+
Your Role is the School Mascot. You are the black-and-gold patterned dancing anthropomorphic animal that fills everyone with school spirit. Everyone assumes you’re one of the students in a fuzzy animal outfit, because what else could you be? A Yeti? Hah! Yetis don’t exist! You do wish people would stop trying to attach jackalope ears and horns to your head, but it’s all worth it, because they wouldn’t bother if they didn’t care about their mascot!
Your Failing is that you long for companionship. You’ve been lonely for so long that it feels like a permanent part of you, but every day around School is like a warm fire in the cold mountains.
Frantic
When you were up in the mountains, everything was simple. Lonely, but simple. You understood how to live, and it was rare that anything worried you - you were in your element, living the story that made you, and nothing could really hurt or even change your story for long. You like your new life in Town better, but it’s so much more complicated, and you’re always worried one of the rats will find out your secret, or that the students you care about are going to get in trouble without you there to cheer them up, or… or anything!
Whenever you can meet its condition, you can take the (Be In) Trouble Action. When you do, you gain 1 MP, up to your starting maximum, and for each additional group XP the action gains, you gain another MP.
The Wages of Sin
You understand loneliness. You think there is probably no one who understands it as you do. It is in your bones, as old as the glaciers and twice as cold. It makes you sad, to see so much loneliness in the world. So many hearts hurting, reaching out for each other, like yours.
When you concentrate, you can take a miraculous action to see how people’s loneliness and need for others is affecting them, or the situation around you. You can even read when people are hiding their loneliness, and if there’s someone in particular they’re missing or longing for, you can get an impression of who it is. If you currently have a Vice or Sickness Issue that’s related to your loneliness, you can add that Issue’s rating as Strike to this ability.
Harmonious Souls
But you’re not lonely anymore, not while you’re the School Mascot!
Being the School Mascot means you stand for something - but not some vague ideal, but people and togetherness and school spirit and your friends cheering you on! What could be better than that? You’re not a mysterious, unique creature lurking unseen on the Far Roofs, you’re everyone’s big fuzzy friend!
You’re so in tune with your Mascot-ness that you can see when other people are standing for things too. Spend 1 MP and you gain a Level 1 Affliction: I understand people when they are like mascots. You can tell when someone really cares about the things they stand for, or whether they’re just pretending. You can see how much they want people to believe in what they’re showing. You can tell who’s the heart or the center of a group of people, who’s binding them together in purpose and camaraderie.
If you spend a few hours away from anyone who harmonizes with your Role like this, the power fades.
Your Truths
These things are true about you, so true that they resist even miraculous attempts to alter them:
You are the Mystery Yeti, who is named Unsubstantiated.
You are the School Mascot.
You long for the companionship of others.
All these Truths are protected by a level 1 Auctoritas, and you can buy additional Truths to add to this list with recharge tokens.
Adaptable
Your determination to be the Mascot transcends worlds and time. Wherever you go, however you end up, you find a way to bring people together and inspire them.
For 2 MP, you can create a temporary Level 1 Affliction:
I belong here.
This gives you the following effects:
You gain a free Level 1 Connection to the environment.
You have a free +1 Tool bonus to being a representative of a group or organization there, inspiring people to competence in this new situation, and bringing people together as comrades.
You’ll sometimes get miraculous coincidences and bursts of inspiration from the HG to help you belong and to act as a proper mascot.
You have a lot of trouble remembering that you haven’t always been here and done this. You can normally work around this, but if the HG gets you into trouble because of it, they are likely to also give you an MP.
Like any other Affliction, it takes a miracle with at least 1 Strike to overcome it - in this case, any miracle which would make you feel out of your element or make you less part of your new context.