Lee Smith

Ability Scores

Personality

Traits: (To be developed)

Ideal: (To be developed)

Bond: (To be developed)

Flaw: Carries the Dreamer's Eye everywhere. Cannot bring himself to destroy it. Cannot bring himself to give it back.

Backstory

Lee Smith is a name that belongs to nobody. That was the point.

His real name died somewhere around his third stint in juvie, lost in intake forms and court transcripts no one ever reread. Baltimore raised him hard — Cherry Hill, mostly. Between his grandmother's apartment and the system. He learned early that the world takes first, and if you want anything back, you take it yourself.

He had quick hands. Quicker instincts.

Teachers told him he was smart. But smart doesn't fill a fridge. By seventeen, he was running packages for corner boys. By twenty, he'd graduated to breaking and entering. Clean jobs. Quiet jobs. The kind where you're gone before anyone knows you were there. He had a gift for it — not just locks and alarms, but places. He could walk into a room and feel where the valuables were, like a dowsing rod for secrets. He never questioned it. Just figured he was good at his job.

Marcus Covington ran Baltimore's Eastside with a velvet glove and an iron reputation. On paper, legitimate — real estate, restaurants, a charitable foundation that built basketball courts in neighborhoods everyone else ignored. The kind of man who shook hands with city councilmen and smiled for the Baltimore Sun. The streets knew better.

Covington moved weight through the port. Laundered money. And dealt in things Lee didn't have words for. Old things. Wrong things. Artifacts that collectors paid obscene sums for and never spoke about.

Lee didn't know any of that when he took the job.

The Covington Job.

A fence named Delroy had a tip: Covington would be in Atlantic City all weekend, the Guilford mansion had a safe, simple smash and grab, twenty percent cut. The mansion was easy. Too easy. The safe cracked in under four minutes. Inside: fifty grand in banded hundreds.

And a box.

The box was wrong. Polished black wood, cold to the touch, silver inlay in symbols Lee didn't recognize. It hummed faintly — a vibration just below hearing. Every instinct screamed at him to leave it.

He took it anyway.

The Dreamer's Eye.

Lee didn't open the box until he was three states away, holed up outside Wilmington.

Inside was an eye. Not glass. Not stone. Something organic, preserved in a way that defied explanation — pale and milky, with an iris that shifted colors when tilted toward the light. When Lee held it, he heard whispers. Not words. Thoughts. Fragments of dreams that weren't his. Emotions that tasted like copper and static.

He closed the box and never opened it again.

The Eye belonged to Marcus Covington. It was his anchor, his focus — through it, he could see dreams, sense sleeping minds, reach across distance and thought. When Lee stole it, Covington didn't rage. He smiled. Because wherever Lee went, Covington could still see.

Eight Months Running.

Baltimore. Philly. Newark. New York. Providence. Boston.

Every time Lee settled, Covington's people got close. Not cops. Worse. Men and women with blank eyes and knowing smiles. Lee learned not to stay anywhere twice. Learned how long a human body could go without rest.

He was so tired.

The Red Saints.

Covington made a call. The Red Saints controlled stretches of Boston's waterfront — smuggling, protection, violence dressed up as business. They didn't need to know why Lee mattered. Just that the bounty was good.

Lee was washing dishes in Dorchester, coming back to a flophouse near the Reserved Channel just after two in the morning, when he didn't notice the car across the street until it was too late.

They chased him across rooftops slick with harbor mist. He burst onto the roof of a warehouse overlooking the water and skidded to a stop. Dead end. The Saints closed in.

Lee backed toward the edge.

He chose the fall.

The Awakening.

Something broke as he tipped backward. Not his body. His mind.

The Eye had been whispering to him for eight months, and he'd been shutting it out. But falling — terrified, choosing his own end — he finally heard it clearly:

"You see what others cannot. You always have. Reach."

Lee reached. Light tore free from his hands. He caught the edge of the roof impossibly far below with one hand and pulled himself back. Twin blades of pale, flickering light bloomed from his fists — not solid, not glowing, just there, like thought given shape.

The Saints froze. The blades didn't cut flesh. They cut certainty. One Saint collapsed screaming. Another staggered, suddenly unsure of where he was or why.

Lee jumped. Into the harbor. On purpose this time.

Spectacle Island.

The harbor swallowed him whole. Cold. Dark. Endless.

Pierre-Jackson Laferrière was already there — dragged down by concrete, dying, fighting. Something vast and patient coiled beneath them both, watching two drowning men refuse to stop. Old Scituate noticed the pattern. One soul claimed. One soul reaching. The tides carried them both.

Lee woke at dawn on the shore of Spectacle Island, coughing brine and bile, next to Pierre-Jackson Laferrière — a stranger who had also refused to die. Two men. Two deaths narrowly refused. Boston had claimed them both.

Class Features & Spells

Subclass: Soulknife
Key Features: Psychic Blades, Psi-Bolstered Knack, Psychic Whispers

Psionic Source: The Dreamer's Eye (functions as focus/amplifier for psychic abilities)

Equipment

• The Dreamer's Eye (stolen artifact — polished black wooden box, silver inlay; the eye within shifts color; whispers)
• Clothes, worn and travel-stained
• Stolen cash (diminishing)
• No fixed address

Connections

Session Notes

Session 01 - The Convergence

• The Diablos Red Saints (hired by Marcus Covington) chased Lee across rooftops and knocked him out with a crowbar
• Woke up chained to Trudy on a pier beside Pierre
• Helped wrap the chain around Diego's leg — all three went over together
• Heard the harbor entity's offer, muffled. Declined. Did not engage.
• Woke on shore of Spectacle Island. Gave the name Everett — not his real name.
• Called Trudy "croissant." Trudy revved angrily. Did not apologize.
• Tried to edge away from the group's headlight on the beach; Trudy spotlighted him: "Would you not shine that right here?"
• "He seems kind of racist." (on Chandler)
• In combat: hid successfully, threw knives at disadvantage (50 feet, prone target) — one hit, one miss
• Lingering injury: Rolled 94 on the d100 Long-Term Madness table → lost the ability to speak entirely. Duration unknown.
• Cannot speak. Has not spoken since the Wail of the Bereaved.

Session 02 - Telephone

• Telepathy unlocked at the start of the session — can push thoughts into up to two people at a time (first used on Pierre and Jacques, loudly, by accident)
• Wrote on Chandler's notepad while mute — was belligerent and racist to Mai Xiong, flipped her off; she flipped him off back; wrote his name as "Everett"
• Committed professional arson on the Blount Fisheries office complex during the Spectacle Island exit — 15 minutes, no smoke while leaving
• Stayed in Jacques's Park Plaza presidential suite during the 10-day downtime
• Ran two hotel heists:
  • Mark 1: Edward Johnson III (Fidelity Investments chairman) + Elizabeth "Lilly" Johnson (MFA trustee) — stole the MFA security key; passed on a $150 initialed pearl necklace
  • Mark 2: unidentified mobster couple with Irish Goomba security detail — stole $200 left as a tip; passed on a $50,000 fanny pack on the bed
• Confronted by the hotel maitre d' on Day 9; gave the name "Campbell" recruited by "Jones"; deception failed; summoned Soulknife blades and laid the maitre d' out clean in a blind-spot hallway
• Burned the stolen bellboy uniform in Jacques's fireplace
• Jacques gave him $100 severance and ejected him from the hotel when police arrived
• Speech returned on Day 10 — visited a sketchy back-alley doctor, who pulled a knife; situation resolved off-screen
• Tailed Chandler home from the diner; bluffed his way into Chandler's apartment building with "Picking Boston Chop Suey" delivery scheme
• At the apartment meeting: manifested knives openly for the first time in front of the full party
• Payday: $5 (tourist pickpocket, nat 20), $100 (Jacques), $200 (mobster tip)
• Items acquired: MFA security key, Fisher Price binoculars ($4)