Lawrence Bristow

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   <default>Lawrence Bristow</default>
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Lawrence Bristow is a Practitioner in the Ontario area who serves as a landlord to unusual tenants.

Personality

He admits that he is greedy and enjoys wealth.<ref>Outgoing Call</ref>He comes across as easily distracted, both in the short-term (rambling on unrelated topics) and the long-term (getting caught up in new projects and ideas constantly.)<ref name=":0">“What’s up?” Raquel asked. “You guys smell like blood, you know.”

“Maybe eat, nap and shower,” Lucy murmured to Verona.

Avery talked while walking backward, “I wanted to ask, you’re a magic item collector, right?”

“I got some training.”

“Was that training with Bristow? Or was Kass’s?”

“Uhh… yeah? I awoke at ten, spent a year with family, got training with him for a year after. Families as big as mine find it useful to have at least one person with the know-how for magic item handling in-house. Why?”

“Trying to figure out how things connect here,” Avery said. “How was it?”

“He rambles, but he’s a good guy. Knows his stuff. If you end up studying with him, either as an apprentice or as a student in classes here, be prepared for him to get distracted for chunks of time. When I was apprenticing, it was new tech, errands, passion projects. Try to keep asking what you should be working on next, so you’re ready if he forgets about you for a bit.” - Excerpt from Cutting Class 6.1</ref> He pretends to be a harmless long-winded blowhard, but is actually quite cunning and ruthless when you scratch the surface.<ref name=":1"/>He tries to keep it low-key that he's originally a Collector,<ref name="6.3 a">“And of course, a certain school founder hears about it and collects her,” Verona said, glancing at the table.

“Funny you say ‘collects’,” Raquel said. “It’s not something he advertises a lot, that he’s a Collector. Why do you know so much about him?” - Excerpt from Cutting Class 6.3</ref> although he's been known to tutor his allies in the practice.<ref name=":0" />He has a habit of collecting titles, both petty and major.<ref name=":1"/>

Relationships

Alexander Belanger is his deadly enemy after Alexander stole the Blue Heron Institute from him and ruined his attempt to set up another school.He worked with Charles Abrams in the past, who disliked him.<ref name=":1">“And get away from Lawrence. I knew him a long time ago.” Charles managed to both growl his words and make an expression like someone had just put a daub of dog crap on the tip of his nose, and he couldn’t do anything but move his face.

“It feels like you’re all connected.”

“Not commenting on that. But I knew the man back before the mustache and tweed. Before he collected people. He was always an asshole who thought clever and pretty words hid the repulsive parts. Always bullish, always ambitious. Because he wants to collect titles. Landlord, professor, lawyer, other ones.”
[...]
“You knew the faculty of the Blue Heron?”

“I wasn’t part of their inner circle, but I worked with most now and then. I did custom work for custom jobs.” - Excerpt from Back Away 5.5</ref>He tutored Raquel and Kass in Collecting. Raquel likes and respects him, despite his distractibility.<ref name=":0" /> He has also tutored several children in spellbinding, the binding of human beings, many of whom attended BHI in the summer of 2020.

Reputation

• He's considered a world-class practitioner at the same level as Rad Ray Sunshine and Marie Durocher.<ref>Cutting Class 6.3</ref>

Appearance

Red-faced, mustachioed and dressed in tweed.

Abilities and Art

Bristow is a practitioner with a wide breadth of experience. He has advanced knowledge when it comes to many levels of Bindings, has a working knowledge of Law magic and there for Karma,<ref>Edited to add: Because of the heavy lean on 'establishment', you may draw comparisons to collectors or one certain 'collector' from Pale (establishing a collection - kind of like what Verity arranged), and to the pillars of humanity: Death, Fate, etc (which may fall closer to Theobald). It'd be okay to have a Law Mage touch on that sort of stuff. - Trying to write law magic, tips appreciated</ref> but chiefly he considers himself a Collector.<ref name="6.3 a"/>

While he claims to be a collector of titles among other things, his threat in the story stems from his collecting of people, specifically Aware.<ref name=":0" /> He has the ability to arrange his tenants so that they balance or compliment each other; making their stay in his apartments easier, or making them synergize to devastating effect on missions. His tenants have such strong connections to him, reinforced through deals and agreements, that he is confident they can never leave his control.^{[citation needed]} To this end, he has arranged his Sargent Ave Hall apartment complex as a massive diagram filled with a collection of Aware Tenants and feeding power into his Demesne.<ref>“He keeps strange tenants. Some are complicated. A gilded lily, who stumbles on magic items by accident on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. Many are cursed. Someone who saw something so bent and broken it drove him around the bend. A child of a witch hunter who survived the rest of her family, who knows something is afoot in the shadows of this world. The pattern of that family seeks to wrap her up in its flows.”

“Why does he do it?” Lucy asked.

“To the best of my knowledge, the entire building is laid out as a diagram,” Alexander said. “The people draw power into and through it.”
[...]
“It’s like that. He moves people between rooms to balance the diagram out. Maybe restructures the building to add or remove rooms. He feeds it into his demesne, so that’s one thing.” - Excerpt from Leaving a Mark 4.8</ref> He uses the complex not only as a source of power, but also a storage place for Aware agents who obey him in exchange for cuts on the rent, and hopeless cases he takes care of for his wide network of contacts.<ref>“He does errands for his landlord in exchange for a cut on rent. One of a few that do.”

“So is that his strength?” Verona asked. “A bunch of people that run errands, and then the rest are just there, pumping power into his place of power?”

“There are other things. He buys interesting items from the Gilded Lily, who runs an online store. He maintains relationships with powerful practitioners and problem solvers. With Witch Hunters, with secret societies of non-practitioners, who use him and his facilities as a trash receptacle for human problems they don’t know how to deal with. He holds out-of-season holidays at his apartment complex, and uses these days as rituals to bring tenants closer together, stir the pot, lets them ping pong off one another or allows problems to flare up, and then uses the power to make big moves. Often opening doors.” - Excerpt from Leaving a Mark 4.8</ref><ref>Some stuff on innocence</ref> These agents will return to him after missions thanks to the long-established pattern of doing errands and other missions for him.

Sight

His Sight shows him things in terms of symbols and diagrams, with people appearing as silhouettes filled with text explaining them (background, abilities, financial situation) and backed by halo-like diagrams. The role people fall into in his Collector diagrams, their relative importance to him, and his claim and bindings on them are specially called out.<ref>Bonus Material: Borrowed Eyes Comic</ref>The location of his Demense is unknown at this time.

Spells, Rituals, and other Feats

• Was part of the team that bound the blue heron god
• When he was much younger he already had an item in his collection that could facilitate time travel

References

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