MERCH!

Saturday, January 2, 2016

Meredith Shaw

Concept: Executive/Corporate Streamliner/ HBIC

AKA:None

Desc: Long blonde hair,normally worn up and off her slender neck. Blue eyes. Natural hauteur. A certain frosty elegance set off by a seemingly easy grace (Which took some time at finishing school to develop.) Smart eyes. Reading glasses which she’s a little vain about. An expensive smile. a scar where she had her sorority tramp stamp removed. flawless taste in clothes. Never wears jewelry. Just doesn’t like the feel of it.

History: From an old money family, raised all her life to a certain amount of privilege. Meredith is the sort of girl who was groomed to a certain amount of control over her destiny.
Just...not as much as she would have liked. She discovered fairly early, that she’d rather be the spanker rather than the spankee, and once she got over her desire to date bassists, she discovered that while she was able to find men of affluence who desired a woman who could take control...She found that she couldn’t respect most of them once she’d “Conquered” them.  Hard cheese really.
    Meredith found that she actually had a talent for numbers and a decent knowledge of how business worked and so she went out and got herself an MBA. Picked out a prestigious firm to take her internship at, and once she’d served her time, had the head-hunting firm call her at work and talked with them at length about options. The firm pulled her in and offered her a major jump-up and a fast track to a corner office. These things were never in any actual doubt.  One of the partners in the firm was a distant uncle and a meteoric rise was expected of her.  She’d never been feckless, unambitious, or lazy in her life.
Well. A girl like that is going to come under scrutiny by someone with actual power.  And that creature...liked what he saw.
   So. Here is the shape of what she does now: Weyland Diversification acquires another corporation, usually through a hostile takeover. Often the company puts down a token amount of their own money but then runs to the BIG banks for massive loans to purchase the shares (or buy off the companies management with lucrative bonuses. They’re usually floundering companies with still decent cash flow. Then they send Meredith. Meredith then determines how best to cut every single micron of fat off the company. The problem is, that whatever the massive loan was needed to acquire the company, The company is now on the hook to repay that loan.
So let’s say that Weyland put down 5% on a 200 million dollar loan to acquire a company that makes baked goods. And they’re able to acquire the company, now that company’s bottom line is untenable almost immediately. The INTEREST on the loan is enough to make you start firing people immediately in order to get costs back under control. Fortunately, Weyland has a bright girl like Meredith there to tell you who to fire, and for this useful service, they’ll charge the company a management fee of about a couple million dollars a year. And you know that money isn’t going to come from the board or it’s chairman. It’s going to come out of the bennies and payroll of the workforce.
  And let’s say that the company slashes its workforce and benefits and manages to pay off some of the debt from both sources, Then that just leaves it in a vulnerable state for being re-sold at enormous markup.  Or they can go bankrupt and shutter themselves, but the vultures at Weyland will still be able to get most of their assets liquid before that happens.  It’s a bust out scheme really.  And it’s destroyed more than one factory town.

Meredith makes a lot of money. And all the people that get fucked by this system...Well. They all chose to be poor and smoke the crack or whatever.  Each new assignment excites her a little because she goes to the companies, and usually figures out the most alpha male employed by the company, seduces him, ties him up and works him over for hours without ever really letting him come, and then, as soon as is humanly possible sees to it that he gets fired first.
Yeah. she likes it like that.  Her “master” taught her that game.

Attitude: “Look. I’m not saying that our company is necessarily all about positive changes in the business world. Capitalism isn’t a moral philosophy. it has no moral compass. But we do what we do, and we protect our shareholders. If it were a problem, the market would correct it.  You can’t blame us for that”.

Skills: High intelligence and high manipulation are a must. Ivy league education with a specialization in business. Recent events have given her cause to purchase a handgun and run a couple hundred shells through it every other week. She’ll have dots in firearms, but probably no style merits.  She has dots of Mentor, and that mentor will have told her what to be on the lookout for when dealing with other supernatural creatures.  So she’ll likely have at least 1 dot of occult and possibly an Unseen Sense or two. (Standing orders are that if she runs into something like that, to call home immediately.) She’ll be likely to be loaded up on socials skills and computer. She’s also a seasoned Equestrian and is like to have some dots of Animal Ken. She tends to treat animals the same way she treats humans.

Gear: Top of the line Laptop, with a top of the line laptop bag. A LOADED smart-phone. Her sig-sauer, which her Mentor suggested she carry Glaser slugs in, and an extra clip in her purse. On company business, she'll take one of the armored Lincoln town cars with one of the company drivers skilled in defensive driving.   Her own vehicle is a cherry red Maserati. Most cop cars can’t catch it.

Home: Meredith has a few places to hang her hat should there be a need. When traveling for the company she’ll take the best suite in a Residence Inn, or failing that, the largest suite in the Radisson nearest to where the job is.  Here at home, she has a cozy little brownstone in a neighborhood where no one takes home less than a million a year after taxes.  She also can go home and stay in her old room in the Shaw family manse, she’s had a decorator in and it no longer looks like she just left for prep school

Circle: Her family and her few friends, They love her but even they have to admit that Meredith has ice water in her veins. Most of her peer group at work consider her spooky bright and a little scary. Not to mention that while a lot of those guys are complete sexual jackals, Meredith makes it clear that if a co-worker and she have some sort of sexual issue, THEY will be the one leaving the company, not her. As a result, most of those dudes give her respectful distance. They saw what happened to Tripp.
No. If Meredith has any love at all in that heart of hers, It all belongs to Uncle Josiah. He was the one who saw her and truly understood her for what she was for the first time in her life. He elevated her.  He made her more than she was. More than just some rich girl.  More than just some human digging in the dirt.

Story Uses:
“Me? I’m just the tip of the iceberg. The iceberg that’s going to fall on you.”
She not a pawn by any stretch. She’s likely to be more of a Bishop to extend the metaphor. But she’ll be the human face of the corporate monolith that is crushing your company.
Some people take exception to that sort of thing. She’s been shot at more than once, and on some occasions, the security measures that Weyland have adopted have made a serious difference.

“I’m not interested. 98.4% percent of all men at these sorts of functions bore me to tears.”
The other pathway that one might encounter Ms. Shaw is via some desire to enter high society. She’s not easily impressed nor is she likely to show any emotion at all. These gatherings are expected in her social circles. But she’s not making money doing it, so unless she can network it’s mostly a waste of time. Most of the men at these things are duller than dog shit. and vanilla to boot.

Connections:
*The Shaw family is a long-time pillar family of The Vermillion House. Those functions are a bit different from other social occasions that she's forced into.  Normally, she's allowed to wander around with a mask on and a riding crop in her hand and whack anything thrust out at her. This alone puts it head and shoulders above most parties she attends. Uncle Josiah is NOT a member of the inner circle, but he is considered a staunch ally of the House.
*At one of those functions, she met Schuyler Lavey but finds him utterly tiresome. He's constantly trying to prove he's more domme than she. Uncle Josiah may be looking a way to use him, though, so for now, he gets to keep his genitals.
*Through the House she also knows Reverend Mike Plumber. She wonders if he knows that his eldest son enjoys being pegged as much as he does.
*Has done some business with Holmes, Gillis, Baker, Savage, North, and Dean but hasn't really bumped uglies with anyone there. They are, after all, "The Help"
*Met Dmitri Garrett at the gun range, and after a bit of gun talk, got his card. She's kicked some business in his direction involving companies that got clever at hiding assets.
*Knows Lillian Penobscot. In fact, calls her "Aunt Lilly" One of the few people she actually likes a bit. Aunt Lilly seems weirdly glamorous to Meredith and seems to know plenty about the shadowy world to boot.
*Officer Honus Brightwater swears he's going to catch that hot bitch in the Maserati someday and then he's going to jam it in every hole she's got. It is almost certainly the worst decision he's ever made.


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