Chad Kroeger, the Dark Pawn of Music

Chad Kroeger is one in a long line of Belphegor's ill-fated Powers of Music.  Because the Estate (not originally one of Belphegor's, the result of a contract forged with its original owner) wars with its master, Belphegor selected Chad as his weapon against the estate, to force it into submission.  As Chad had always wanted to be a rockstar, he gladly sold his soul away for a chance to live his dream, including his very own band and a beautiful, rock-and-roll wife.  Belphegor granted him all he wanted, including the beautiful Avril Lavigne as his wife, so long as Chad would wage Belphegor's war on music, which Chad was happy enough to take up.

Chad has Nickleback, the 604 Records label, and Avril Lavigne as his anchors.

His flowers are Chamomile (Something Romantic) and the Star of Bethlehem (the Key of Something Changed)

Estate of Music

-Music is Sound made Art (2)
-Music is seductive and alluring (1)
-Music inspires passions and soothes worries (1)
-Music makes you want to move (1)
-Music is subjective and divisive (1)
-Music sets the mood (1)

1. Domain Miracles of Music

   1. Summon up whatever song you want on the radio. Summon a boy band out of thin air (they’re ultimately not very impactful), or summon a crowd of fans that will dissipate shortly.
      
   2. Know what song is coming up next on the radio. Know who wrote a song, what its position on the top ten chart is, etc. Have a conversation with the lyrics of a song to pull out hidden meaning.
      
   3. Increase a song’s popularity, or the success of a band. Make sure a song gets stuck in someone’s head. Improve a song’s mood-changing quality so that you can control someone’s emotions, lull them to sleep, or force them to dance to the song. Make someone gets a song stuck in their head.
      
   4. Create a song out of nothing, or summon a meaningful musician, band or fan.
      
   5. Ruin a song, so that it is quickly forgotten or disgraced. Force a band to break up via scandal or death. Know who is listening to music, or what is occurring in any place where a specific song that you’re currently listening to is playing or has played or will play.
      
   6. Change the importance of a song, (“Enter the Sandman is the best wedding song!”), or rewrite its history to a limited degree, such as changing which band wrote it, or its country of origin, or how it was or will be received. Change a band’s fate of destiny in some specif or limited way (“After Evanescence breaks up, Amy Lee finally gets together with Seether. Their children are beautiful”). Ensure that a song is never forgotten, becoming embedded into a nation’s very sense of self-identity (“And now playing our National Anthem, American Idiot”). Make a music so compelling that someone dances to death to it, or everyone who hears a song falls madly in love with its musician. Curse someone with an eternal ear-worm.
      
   7. Create an entire genre of music from nothing. Create musical instruments with magical power (like the pipe of Hamelin, or the Ocarina of Time). Create a new angelic song worthy of Heaven itself. Create a legendary musician, such as Robert Johnson, ex nibilo.
      
   8. Destroy a song so completely that is it never existed (“One of the Six Forbidden Songs, “Raise your Glass”).
      
   9. Change a song’s fundamental impact on all of history, so that it is always present at certain events (“All Star, by Smash Mouth, is also know as the Suicide Song for all of the death its haunting strains have inspired”). Change what impact a song has had in the past or will have in the future, allowing a song to inspire revolution or to tear a society apart with controversy.
      

   Persona Miracles of Music

1. Make someone a little sexier, a little more controversial, a little more rock-and-roll.
   
2. Whenever someone listens to a song, the Power of Music listens right back.
   
3. Make yourself seductive and alluring. Set the mood to whatever you wish. Inspire others while also soothing their worries.
   
4. Make someone subjective (thus vulnerable to the opinions of others) and divisive, such as a bad boy that’s beloved by young women but despised by their mothers. Make every sound someone utters artistic. Curse someone so people around them wish to move away to the beat of that person’s life. Turn someone into a physical song, capturing their patten onto sheet music, or trapping them in the lyrics of a song on the radio.
   
5. Strip someone of their sexiness and appeal. Slow those in the room around you, stilling movement. Remove someone’s ability to move, freezing them like the flash of a strobe light.. Strip someone’s passion and fill them with frantic worry. Remove any artistic quality from a song. A song no longer counts as a song, but as noise.
   
6. Ensure that someone becomes a rockstar, or strip them of their rockstar quality. Become seductive enough to seduce an excrucian. Gain the capability to control the movements of those around you. Gain the ability slice through things, or cut apart friendships (“Divisive”)
   
7. Trap a city into a song, so that every citizens pattern is displayed in a complex sheet music or a dramatic and long concert piece, or that they only exist when the backside of a particular album is played. Make someone so subjective that other’s opinions literally shape them.
   
8. Curse a city so that they may never enjoy any music again. Strip a nation of its ability to move except when a particular song is playing. Reduce an entire genre to noise (Death Metal).
   
9. Grant someone magical musical powers (such as the Pied Piper of Hamelin). Bind someone eternally to a song, so that as long as the song exists and is playing someone, that person cannot die.
   

<==========================Spoilers start here===========================>

Belphegor acquired the Estate of Music from another, and his relationship with it has been a difficult one. His powers, from Robert Johnson to John Lennon, someone had been hunting and slaying his Powers. The last, Curt Kobaine, was assassinated by the Dread Angel Courtney Love, and so Belphegor tried a different approach.

Belphegor hunted for someone that he could use to whip the Estate of Music into submission. He found a young Canadian who dreamed of being a rockstar. Belphegor offered him everything he wanted: A rock and roll career, a cool band, wealth, a big black jet with a bedroom in it, and a sexy, hip-hop wife. In return, Belphegor demanded that Chad help him undermine the very music that Chad so enjoyed, and force it to submit to his reincarnation engine. Chad signed away his soul and got everything he asked for.

Belphegor forged a band and a perfect wife, Avril Lavigne, from the Reincarnation Engine. The Society of the Elect ensured that Chad rose to be the face of American music, and power and wealth showered him. Nonetheless, the Estate of Music rejected him. It stripped his music of all artistic merit, and ensured that no matter how popular he grew, he ultimately didn’t matter. Chad seethed! He had the power and wealth and prestige of celebrity, but none of the true dharma of stardom. At first, he accepted this, but when the Estate of Music stole away his beautiful and beloved wife with the temptations of independence and true musical authenticity and artistic merit, he’d had enough. The Estate of Music had triggered a way with its master, and he finally accepted his fate as his weapon for breaking the Estate to his will, and that of his demonic master. Even so, beneath his hatred, he still harbors a love of music, and part of him wonders if a better path is to join his estranged wife and abandon his contract and master and find the true nature of his estate.

Chad is a Magister of the Dark, as he and his music undermine all of humanity, slowly driving them to their death and destruction. Every bad review Chad gets just makes him smile as he knows that each of his spectacularly popular songs drive another nail into the coffin of everyone who hates his music. Chad represents the lie of celebrity, as he is everything everyone wants to be, but that which everyone despises.

Aspect 2 (Pulp Hero)
Domain 0 (Pawn)
Persona 2
Treasure 2
Gifts:

• Bardic Strains (2): As Bardic Music, but it requires a Hard (2) Miracle. Chad can play heart-breakingly powerful music, enough to make the wind dance or an excrucian to fall in love, but it costs him 2 miracle points.
  
• Slayer of Songs (1): As a normal Miracle (0), Chad can remove a song from his domain. It no longer counts as art, but as pointless corporate crap at best and noise at worst.

Miracle Points: 5

Passions and Skills

Passion: I want to write a truly new song: -1
Passion: Damn I look good: 3
Skill: Music: 0
Skill: Village Idiot -1
Skill: Business 2
Skill: Cool 3 (1 free)
Skill: Shine 3 (2 free)

Bonds and Afflictions

Bond: My marriage to Avril Lavigne is just perfect (1)
Bond: By my Record Label, ye may know me (2)
Bond: Belphegor owns my Soul (4)
Bond: I hate my band (1)
Affliction: My music all sounds the same (1)
Affliction: Music hates me! (4)

Nickleback

Belphegor created Nickleback from the damned souls and ruined beauty of masterpieces using his Reincarnation engine, thus they are Mannequins. They exhibit supernatural strength and supernatural musical playing capabilities and have an almost automaton-like durability (See “The Reincarnation Engine” for more on Mannequins).
The tension between Chad and Nickleback is one of seething hatred. They remind him of his every failing with the Estate of Music, but he needs them. His hatred drives his bond with them, and allows him to possess them and use them as his agents in his war against music.
In addition to being Mannequins, Every member of Nickleback has:
-Bond: Serve the will of Chad Kroeger (4)
-Immutable
-Durant
Mannequins aren't human, so may have superior skills and passions. Those of Chad's band have:

• Superior Quality: Mannequin Music +1
  
• Superior Quality: Mannequin Strength +1
  

Mannequins

Created by Belphagor by mingling the principles of his Empty Suits and his Toys, Mannequins seem to resemble people, but are in fact empty and soulless. All Mannequins are Immutable and Durant and usually have Superior Qualities associated with their chosen skill and their superhuman strength. If pulled apart and perceived from within the Border Mythic, they will seem to have strange, black-iron gears and metaphysical machinery in place of human organs.
Properties of a Mannequin:

• Mannequins resemble people (1)
  
• Mannequins aren't really people (2)
  
• Mannequins have no heart (1)
  
• Mannequins contain a soul of the damned and a ruined masterpiece (3)
  

Avril Lavigne (Ascended Mannequin)

Avril Lavigne is a mannequin created to fulfill Chad's demand for the perfect bride. Like all mannequins built by the Reincarnation engine, she contains the soul of one of Belphegor’s damned, and the heartbreaking beauty of a ruined work of art. This contribute to a rebellious nature that made her push against her bondage-love of Chad.
Meeting Aquapunk changed her. It infused her with purpose. It showed her a new way. She seeks independence and authenticity, to be something true and new and original, and ultimately, to understand herself. 

When she first fled, Belphegor’s agents casually recaptured her, but she managed to break free of her bonds and to see the Reincarnation Engine. She knows what she is, and she’s horrified. She’s loose in the world now, seeking to understand her true nature, and how many mannequins are loose in the world and just how deep Belphegor’s conspiracy runs.

Aspect 1 (Touched up), 3 miracle points

Gifts: Immutable (1), Durant (1),

Bond: Find my own path (4)
Affliction: Is an ascended Mannequin (2)
Affliction: Hipster (2)

Inhuman Passions and Skills

• Passion: I am my own woman +1
  
• Passion: I want to create my own song -1
  
• Skill: Skater-Girl +2
  
• Skill: Pop-star Queen +2
  
• Cool 3
  
• Superior Quality: Mannequin Music +1
  
• Superior Quality: Mannequin Strength +2
  
• Superior Quality: Beauty +2
  

604 Records

As with Magnus Carter and Belphegor, Chad’s power is bound up with a powerful and occult symbol, that of his record label. It, and his music, appears to announce his impending arrival. And where his mark is, so too is Chad, able to see the world, and even influence it, through the power of his Label.