Blank Badges
Howdy! Ready to see the next place?
It's a townhouse-style set up, but I've finagled one of the units at the end of the row as an option for you, so you'll only need to share a wall with one other unit. Two stories tall, half bathroom downstairs, full bathroom and two bedrooms upstairs. Classic layout for a lucky college grad with a good first job, a small family or a home-based business. The rent for this place is lower than some of the others on the list, but there's a reason for that. The residents in this block tend to be business professionals of one sort or another, and with the economy in the state it's in, that means they'll circulate from one job to the next, roughly every eight to sixteen months or so. It's hard to build up any kind of community here; most of these folks are trying to make a living and tend to see raising a family or paying much attention to their neighbors as a distraction.
I'll let you in on a little secret. I'm not sure about the other Orders, but I do know that the Silver Ladder is paying attention to this sort of thing. I mean, it's against our principles to just ride in and save the day, but we've also got a responsibility to use our advantages for the betterment of all, y'know? So we're tossing a few ideas around for building up community spirit: block parties, parades, free concerts in the park two streets over, that kind of thing. We'll see...
Anyway, you should also know that one of the residents is also a willworker. This will probably shock you at least a little, but I don't know exactly who it is. My best guess, based on the resonance building up around here, as well as a few curious incidents in the vicinity over the past year or so, is that your unidentified neighbor is a Blank Badge.
They don't have an Atlantean glyph for a couple of reasons. One is that they've only existed as a Legacy for a little over thirty years, give or take. The other is that, like most of the rest of the Free Council, they don't have a lot of respect for Atlantean history, tradition, glyphs and that sort of thing. Frankly, the Free Council is the only Order who would ever condone the activities of this Legacy. The Guardians of the Veil have standing orders to put any known members on a permanent watch list. The Adamantine Arrow considers them even more unruly than most of the Council but will generally leave them to their own devices... IF the Blank Badges don't stir up too much trouble in a magical context. The Mysterium finds them disturbing, since their operating paradigm seems to be "Learn the rules, then break them". And, of course, we in the Silver Ladder wish that they would focus their efforts into channels with greater potential payoffs and with less risk of Paradox.
Part of what makes the Blank Badges, also known as the Invisible Company or similar, so irritating is how hard it can be to pick one out of a crowd, even if they're the only willworkers in said crowd. You may have seen people at various offices who would be candidates for joining the Legacy: flouting the company dress code, listening to bizarre music... I believe that some would call it "freaking the mundanes", except that they like it best when they can do it in places where no one would expect it. Yes, it's likely that the punk-rock band that rolls out of a van during lunch hour and throws an impromptu concert in a public square is part of a Nameless stunt... much more so if no one can remember precisely what they looked like, the police cars sent to clear them out for 'performing without a permit' get stuck in traffic and every identifying detail in every photograph of the band is blurred, no matter how many different people took the pictures. They tend to be from the Acanthus path, you see, so lucky little breaks like that happen a lot. But they're just as likely to be the perfectly ordinary employee of a major insurance company who not only leaks vital non-customer-friendly policies to the press but inspires office prank wars. And not just the "wrap the guy's office in toilet paper" sort of pranks, but the ones where an entire cubicle is suspended upside down from acoustic ceilings... and everything still works perfectly.
The good part about having a Blank Badge for a neighbor is that they tend to make life more interesting. Not necessarily in a good way, though I will admit that the Silver Ladder has taken advantage of a few funny kinks in Fate's threads lately. Musicians, especially ones working on "experimental" music or all the different flavors of rock, get a little extra boost to their sales, and small-press book and 'zine publishers the same. At least, unless and until they sign up with a major corporate network, naturally.
The bad part... well, it's hard to describe it in terms that make sense. You're in town because of your friends in the local Concilium, but the full-fledged Sleepers in the area tend to find that more and more of their jobs come from less and less formal channels, to smaller and smaller organizations that are still offering a living wage. If they're used to working for monolithic corporations, it may feel rather precarious, but in its own way, it's a step in the right direction.
What do you think of the place?
It's a townhouse-style set up, but I've finagled one of the units at the end of the row as an option for you, so you'll only need to share a wall with one other unit. Two stories tall, half bathroom downstairs, full bathroom and two bedrooms upstairs. Classic layout for a lucky college grad with a good first job, a small family or a home-based business. The rent for this place is lower than some of the others on the list, but there's a reason for that. The residents in this block tend to be business professionals of one sort or another, and with the economy in the state it's in, that means they'll circulate from one job to the next, roughly every eight to sixteen months or so. It's hard to build up any kind of community here; most of these folks are trying to make a living and tend to see raising a family or paying much attention to their neighbors as a distraction.
I'll let you in on a little secret. I'm not sure about the other Orders, but I do know that the Silver Ladder is paying attention to this sort of thing. I mean, it's against our principles to just ride in and save the day, but we've also got a responsibility to use our advantages for the betterment of all, y'know? So we're tossing a few ideas around for building up community spirit: block parties, parades, free concerts in the park two streets over, that kind of thing. We'll see...
Anyway, you should also know that one of the residents is also a willworker. This will probably shock you at least a little, but I don't know exactly who it is. My best guess, based on the resonance building up around here, as well as a few curious incidents in the vicinity over the past year or so, is that your unidentified neighbor is a Blank Badge.
They don't have an Atlantean glyph for a couple of reasons. One is that they've only existed as a Legacy for a little over thirty years, give or take. The other is that, like most of the rest of the Free Council, they don't have a lot of respect for Atlantean history, tradition, glyphs and that sort of thing. Frankly, the Free Council is the only Order who would ever condone the activities of this Legacy. The Guardians of the Veil have standing orders to put any known members on a permanent watch list. The Adamantine Arrow considers them even more unruly than most of the Council but will generally leave them to their own devices... IF the Blank Badges don't stir up too much trouble in a magical context. The Mysterium finds them disturbing, since their operating paradigm seems to be "Learn the rules, then break them". And, of course, we in the Silver Ladder wish that they would focus their efforts into channels with greater potential payoffs and with less risk of Paradox.
Part of what makes the Blank Badges, also known as the Invisible Company or similar, so irritating is how hard it can be to pick one out of a crowd, even if they're the only willworkers in said crowd. You may have seen people at various offices who would be candidates for joining the Legacy: flouting the company dress code, listening to bizarre music... I believe that some would call it "freaking the mundanes", except that they like it best when they can do it in places where no one would expect it. Yes, it's likely that the punk-rock band that rolls out of a van during lunch hour and throws an impromptu concert in a public square is part of a Nameless stunt... much more so if no one can remember precisely what they looked like, the police cars sent to clear them out for 'performing without a permit' get stuck in traffic and every identifying detail in every photograph of the band is blurred, no matter how many different people took the pictures. They tend to be from the Acanthus path, you see, so lucky little breaks like that happen a lot. But they're just as likely to be the perfectly ordinary employee of a major insurance company who not only leaks vital non-customer-friendly policies to the press but inspires office prank wars. And not just the "wrap the guy's office in toilet paper" sort of pranks, but the ones where an entire cubicle is suspended upside down from acoustic ceilings... and everything still works perfectly.
The good part about having a Blank Badge for a neighbor is that they tend to make life more interesting. Not necessarily in a good way, though I will admit that the Silver Ladder has taken advantage of a few funny kinks in Fate's threads lately. Musicians, especially ones working on "experimental" music or all the different flavors of rock, get a little extra boost to their sales, and small-press book and 'zine publishers the same. At least, unless and until they sign up with a major corporate network, naturally.
The bad part... well, it's hard to describe it in terms that make sense. You're in town because of your friends in the local Concilium, but the full-fledged Sleepers in the area tend to find that more and more of their jobs come from less and less formal channels, to smaller and smaller organizations that are still offering a living wage. If they're used to working for monolithic corporations, it may feel rather precarious, but in its own way, it's a step in the right direction.
What do you think of the place?