George Murray Gammell - Redux

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IamLEAM1983
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George Murray Gammell - Redux

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Name: George Murray Gammell
Age: 142 years old
Gender: male
Species: Abomination

Strengths: dubbed “The Toymaker” with good reason, George is a mechanical maverick of high occult capability, one of the few individuals living today who could look at the complexity of a Clank's assembly and consider it to be fairly approachable. He has developed a unique expertise in the wreathing and melding of Gilded Age-technology with not only via, but also what we'd consider to be principles or concepts, more than concrete energies. He has, simply enough, adapted his initial expertise with the absorption and distribution of pain and agony in order to make it compatible with other effects.

Concretely, this means he can create anything from healing shrapnel grenades to mechanized lockboxes holding literal Sleep in their midst, like soporific Jack-in-the-Boxes. In some cases, his creations can reveal themselves to be so complex as to have been impossible to assemble using conventional means. In this case, his ability to exist in multiple perspectives becomes useful. George can shrink himself to the point where a grain of sand will tower above him, or diffuse his molecules in the air. His initial state of being was thoroughly non-Euclidian, but the Architect, upon redeeming him, allowed him to slide in and out of our sphere of existence and general awareness.

To put it simply, he serves as the best possible leader for the Promethean Order – a band of rejected and reformed Abominations seeking better lives for themselves and an end to the Void Weavers' depredations. Being able to be virtually everywhere and nowhere at the same time, he could give Allan Winston quite a run for his money. The hippo, for instance, can't show up as twins of himself, or generate more instances of himself in order to hold down a quarrelsome opponent.

On the whole, Gammell is a far better inventor and weapons purveyor than he is an actual fighter. Give him a problem, and chances are he'll have devised a fittingly Victorian-looking solution within the week. If the going gets tough, however, the ability of this fairly average fighter to show up as a one-man army to a gunfight means that he can corner certain foes rather effectively. Others, he needs a bit of time in order to figure out where they're going, in order to actually be there once they've arrived.

You might have an easy time shooting or crushing one of him, but if dozens more Toymakers suddenly show up, winning that fight would be trickier.

By far, however, George is notorious for his Pain Boxes, signature items he tends to find ways to deliver to the deserving no matter how well they've hidden themselves. An adaptation of his initial Amaxi-mandated need to cause suffering in order to survive, the average Pain Box is essentially a complex puzzle box carrying the most wicked of payloads – literal and independent pain.

While some mages tend to store their own kinetic energy for later uses, George uses small trinkets to absorb both his occasional moments of personal discomfort as well as the small bothers of everyone he'd happen to meet. Being in his proximity means that whatever sprained muscle or small paper cut you'd be stuck with suddenly hurts less. Not because he's healing you, but because he's hoarding the pain away in small glass cylinders.

Over a single day, the average human body can go through no pain at all, or sudden annoying flashes. Nothing to write home about. Build this sensory leeching up for weeks at a time, however, and you end up with a literal sensory tsunami. Couple the everyday pains of basic living with the occasional and rare instances of actual injury, and you end up with a basis with which to tune George's Pain Boxes into any sort of discomfort level imaginable. He's tortured Void Weaver cultists with months of low-riding and constant pain, or isolated the truly monstrous servitors he could reach fairly easily and torn their minds apart with unimaginable agony.

While he can care enough to refuse to ever think about harming an innocent or even a common criminal, the sadistic streak the Others seeded him with is alive and well, something which no amount of friendship and care could wholly dull. Considering, he takes to his enemies in order to sate his more deviant needs.
Weaknesses: if he hasn't replicated himself several times in the same general spacetime instance, you're generally confronted to a Steampunk nerd doubled with a slightly creepy erudite scholar; not a well-trained warrior or even a particularly accurate gunman. He only makes the guns and the explosives, he never actually uses them.

Being a construct born out of the Others' combined will, Gammell was never intended to live long, or even to live a particularly fruitful life. The Architect has done what could be done in order to redress his anatomy's most glaring deficiencies, but no amount of work would prevent the Toymaker from potentially succumbing from a grievous infection, if ever actually physically harmed. Certain common diseases seem to be a little harder for him to kick off than for most of everyone, and he tends to have a harder time sticking to our common perception of homeostasis. You'll find him shivering in the middle of June or sweating in February, with his metabolism being in a constant struggle to keep going. Odd allergies or intolerances can surge forward at the drop of the hat and then fade away, never to be seen or heard from again.

He, simply enough, isn't entirely “in tune” with the concept of being corporeal or of existing in the Here and Now. As with Aldergard, trying to land a marksman's shot would be largely useless against him: you'd be better off going for a gut shot and hoping for the resulting infection to finish the job.

To make things worse, while he'll at least try and fix or medicate himself as needed, his residual sadism makes him appreciate his own fevers and chills. There's something about his pain that strikes him as being exquisite or precious, and it's always with a slight pang of regret that he makes the transition into general well-being, no matter how short his states of equilibrium tend to be. He used to flirt with sado-masochism as part of his services rendered to Amaxi and the Prelacy, but now generally tends to wait for the proverbial dice to fall on the “Robitussin Week” box on their own.

Oddly enough, or perhaps out of his old sadism, he's generally more productive when wracked with a good caffeine deficiency-triggering migraine or a non-seasonal cold, than he is when allowed to enjoy the benefits of health.

Appearance: there's a good reason as to why the thralls of the Void Weavers, assembled ex nihilo from atoms lashed together with evil intent and insane religious devotion, are called Abominations. Most of them are fleshly attack dogs with poor survival instincts, sacks of flesh and meat cobbled together and thrown at opponents without any regard or consideration. Most live short, ungrateful and horribly violent existences.

On occasion, however, a Void Weaver gets a plan, and conferring with the Others reveals that the Squid himself can't hope to see it through. One of the dead gods has to attune a sack of flesh to its own nature and turn it into an instrument of its will. These intermediaries are also called Abominations, but they lead marginally better lives. George is one of those. Or, to be clearer, he was one of those.

From afar, you'd see him as a pallid and somewhat gangly man of almost six feet, packing a fairly thin nature and a little bulge at the midsection – something that speaks of a tranquil life and a few regular indulgences. As soon as he'd step into the light, however, you'd realize his skin is bone-white, whiter than a Guildmate's, even – and that he has no face. What he does have, however, is a mouth.

Gammell's head looks a bit like a featureless white sock if you stuffed and shaped it to the point where a human neck could be recognizable. The back of his head almost fits, what with his general lack of external ears; then everything tapers away into a long beak-like structure that does have some solidity, except for where the tips droop down. In-between the two flaps of skin that should be standard jaws, you'll find hundreds of small and barb-like teeth, implanted irregularly and sometimes interrupted by what looks like abortive molars and canines. Those strangely ragged and floppy lips don't seem to bother him in the least, even if they do look fairly nightmarish. Similarly, his complete lack of eyes doesn't seem to be too much of a bother. He's the first to claim to actually be able to see if interrogated on the subject, but no X-Rays or scans would show internal structures allowing for any kind of sight-like sense. If anything, his “eyesight” seems to have a definitively supernatural origin.

Dating back to a failed Void Weaver incursion in Victorian England, he's stuck to the period's general sartorial ethos, which only adds to the Creep factor. Tones of black, charcoal, red or blue tend to make up his wardrobe, balanced out with conservative touches of white. He insists on wearing a cravat as opposed to a necktie, and still favors the high-neck and starched shirts of yesteryear. His fob watch is deceptively modern, however, in that it really is a small hands-free smartphone coming complete with a haptic and holographic interface.

Not being called the Toymaker for nothing, you'll still frequently catch him with his morning coat on a coat-hanger, his sleeves rolled and a heavy-duty leather watchmaker's apron having been shucked on. Wary eyes would recognize that a few of the ordinary, if fairly ancient tools in these pouches have the potential to serve as decent last-ditch weapons, but they're mostly used to do things everyone between Clanks or classic Swiss watchmakers would recognize. Furthering the impression that he still does somehow see as we do, he'll frequently throw on a green visor cap in order to block out a small slit's worth of ambient light. His eyes don't really need it, so much as the sometimes light-sensitive devices he assembles.

As explained earlier, he does have a tendency to catch bugs in unseasonal periods. Another common sight would involve the same basic clothes, but with a heavy charcoal bed robe thrown on. These difficult periods can also include the sight of feet warmers, indoors gloves or even the odd night cap. Obviously, he doesn't really put this on just for show, and does tend to look fairly miserable when stuck working against a fever.

On the whole, Gammell feels like the nicest man alive, if you stuck him in the kind of mortal coil designed to haunt your dreams until your dying day. His very voice seems like it would be the sort of thing to ooze out exquisitely worded threats and schemes, when all he really wants to do is know how your day's been.
Behavior: considering what's been said above, Gammell likes to think of himself as a sheep in wolves' clothing. It takes some effort for most people who initially meet him to work past everything their guts and personal experiences tell them. This is a man who can't help himself but to sound like every word he speaks is a lie, or to look like every smile he pulls out looks like a nightmarish chainsaw about to start shredding you to pieces while laughing maniacally. He has some villain-worthy preciousness about him, he has the walk and he certainly has the talk – having more or less appropriated the vocal cords of an ancestor of Michael Wincott's – but none of that is intentional.

Work past your initial suspicion, and you'll realize that if anything, George Murray Gammell is a man who is plainly and simply starved for a sense of belonging, of mattering. He's found a community of like-minded fighters and that does help to an extent, yes, but he'd very much like to matter to the larger world. As he can't quite step out into the open as of yet, however, he settles with making sure he matters to the world one person at a time. The best way he knows how to do that is through conversation.

Hope has its share of old-fashioned gentlemen. Archie is the Dashing Aristocrat, Coach is the Humble Protector, Earl Grey is the Oblivious Eccentric – while most of the local dragons pack some variation on the poise and inherent nobility their advanced age grants them. George, on the other hand, feels like he'd almost fit in a Jane Austen novel, the Considerate Tea Time Companion requisite of the storyline. He never overtly tries to wow the crowds, never swoops in to save the day with a boy-scout salute, and he certainly never blankets himself in sunny denial. He also doesn't seem to carry anything like the varying shades of wisdom Cordatus and Aldergard respectively display. In a sense, he's still quite young, even if he's lived far more than most mortals.

What he does show, particularly, is restraint. Not so much out of shame or self-loathing, but because he tends to deploy the same amount of focus with people as he does with his toys and contraptions. He listens when you talk to him, a quality that so few people can recognize today, in the age of cell phones and personal news feeds in need of being mothered incessantly. Everything he says feels measured, tailored to suit what you need to hear. Not to lie to you, but typically in order to project consideration forward – to show that he cares. That same poise even applies to his enemies, as he knows to especially pay attention when he finds himself surrounded by people who have either been brainwashed into working with Squids, or who are following their orders unawares.

On the whole, the result is that those few people who do know of him could state that he's a total sweetheart. Those who couldn't, however, would be those deserving of what's perhaps at the root of that confusing basso in his voice, or in the way even his most casual of chuckles sound like they carry some Machiavellian undertones.

That's because sometimes – just sometimes, and only if you've deserved those chuckles – they do.

Meris of the Orcades really is the single person who could claim to know George as a friend, and she'd know exactly when that profound, almost sepulchral voice takes a turn for the sordid. A Pain Box is making its way to its rightful owner, when those specific chuckles sound – and that coiled pain has been deserved tenfold by its future recipient.

Unsurprisingly, however, George would be delighted if others came to share in his confidences with Meris. He loves to poke and prod others with his words; sometimes to test their moral center, and at other times to taste their core of goodness. He finds pleasure out of knowing what makes someone else justifiably angry – not because he wants to tweak that aspect, but because seeing someone at their most naked and raw allows him to see what he needs to support. He'd say he really is an old monster, and the only way he knows to get to know someone's heart is to claw his way to it with his words. Once he knows where his new acquaintances sit, he makes it quite clear that he intends to protect what he's just challenged.

He might not be wise enough not to mix his personal enjoyment of the Void Weavers' suffering with his endeavors, but he'd recognize wiser minds if they told him they know what he's trying to do. Some people say you don't know someone until you fight them; and the Toymaker holds that you don't know someone until you've seen them angry. Once you know what they're willing to protect, you can help them do just that.

Past that, Meris could testify that he just loves his small talk. His real business is so sordid, he holds, that he enjoys re-centering himself through the production of old-fashioned wind-up toys and music boxes. Similarly, the kind of talk that's part of Serious Business does tend to wear him out over time. He isn't very likely to offer his direct assistance in a fight, but will always be ready for the pre-game and post-game periods of introspection.

It helps, too, that he can be out on the field with a few of his babies while still being in his workshop or in Holden Hall, apparently nursing a tea cup without a care in the world.

Goals: as the founder of the Promethean Order and their code-named “Everywhere Man”, he tends to exist as the main liaison between recently freed sentient Abominations seeking a new lease on life. He pools donated money together and redistributes it amongst the needy and does everything he can in order to put these sometimes shocked creatures in touch with people who can help them integrate society.

A speech therapist here, a Veils-specialized mage there, a linguist or a sensory prosthetics specialist – he's consistently trying to offer a complete set of prosthetics to the average defecting creation, either physical ones or knowledge-based ones. If he can't do it himself, he finds someone who can.

For the most part, the Order is mostly oriented toward relief efforts for victims of the Weavers. He doesn't directly handle any intelligence Meris might bring to him, but he does coordinate with a small network of spies that have elected to remain embedded in Dalarath's social tissue. Existing below the Prelacy and slaves alike, most created Animates are systematically disregarded. The sunken city's very own Shadow People, they're among the best-suited infiltrators, at least for Dalarath's specific environment.

History: the late nineteenth and early twentieth century consisted of a few decades that were rife with political and supernatural intrigue, and especially rich in secret societies of various persuasions. Between the Masonic Order, the Illuminati and countless others, most bored Gilded Age socialites found everything they needed in order to wax philosophical with like-minded individuals while indulging their period-appropriate flair for the dramatic. Unsurprisingly, this would prove to be the perfect cover for a Void Weaver cult.

The Order of Cosmic Machinists was founded by Warren Ogilvie, a Squid of British extraction, in 1881. Publicly, it existed as a more esoteric alternative to the already fairly Eldritch Freemasons. Its tenets involved the guidance of Mankind toward a zealously celebrated depiction of order and lawful conduct, typically represented as the Grand Design. Where Masonic lodges tended to approach the Design as an ideal and were sober enough to discourage repression, the Machinists had no such restraints. Freedoms were apparently in need of extinction and whole swaths of the world's geopolitical scene were deserving of swift annihilation. The Machinists, inasmuch as they could organize their insane ramblings coherently, were made to believe that with the intercession of the Engineer, they'd be able to design machines able to influence the thought patterns of others, if not the very movements of their souls. At long last, Man would know true Order.

The Squids could absolutely be trusted to behave fairly as the surface world's new masters. Obviously so – considering how they'd be equally generous in the tortures they planned to subject the defeated races to... Only Ogilvie knew this all-too important fact, of course, but he'd made the terrible mistake of allowing the Machinists to bubble forth into the public consciousness.

Gammell's life begins in 1883, at the heart of a complex ceremony in which a mildly fraudulent toymaker was offered as a sacrifice to the true face behind the Grand Design's purported nature – Amaxi Herself. She, in return, created a new soul to store in this thoroughly desecrated coil, and lashed its primitive man-flesh in ways She deemed pleasing. Nothing remained of the thin and mousey man that had been laid to waste on a blood-smeared altar underneath London, as She had taken its face and destroyed it utterly. George's life began in dark libations, as he came to sentience in the full glory of the Engineer they'd awaited with bated breath.

At first, he didn't know enough to question his life or intended purpose. He skulked in the shadows underneath Ogilvie's manufacture and worked tirelessly on implements of physical and spiritual pain. For a few years, he honestly did revel in his dark nature and thoroughly existed as the monstrous watchmaker Amaxi had brought forth. What chipped away at his wickedness was small, barely five years old, and freezing in the December snowfalls, in 1886. Even today, George couldn't tell you what compelled him to part with his morning coat and drape it on the little boy's shoulders, or to try and bring him closer to his meagre coals to keep him warm. He didn't speak to the boy for days, but he did part with some food. Every morning, the boy would disappear further into the bowels of the manufacture. The simplest explanation was that he was an orphan Ogilvie had hired cheaply, perhaps in the full knowledge that the mite was liable to die crushed by the gears of an active newspaper press.

These days turned to weeks, and George tentatively exchanged with the child. Supposedly called Liam, he didn't know his birth parents and frequently escaped the nearby orphanage in order to find some work. The Engineer didn't allow himself to show much sensitivity to his plight, but the pensive glances he sent in the youth's direction when he'd fallen asleep were indication enough.

Dissent had taken root in his heart.

Working up the evil relish the Order expected became harder and harder as time went on, with the effects of his work growing increasingly despicable to him. By 1890, he was as much a prisoner of the Order as the sacrifices they regularly brought in from Whitechapel. George kept doing what he was required to do, furthering the conceptualization and building of various pieces of the Grand Design.

One night, after a particularly difficult fever spell, he felt his mind drift away. His underground workshop faded and Liam's cries for help went on unanswered. Uncharitable sorts would say he simply hallucinated after hitting a critical temperature level, while he'd say he was – elevated, somehow. He felt himself being pulled away from Creation, and not in order to leave it. Someone of great power and limited resources wanted to show him something.

At the height of his fever and close to the point of death, he saw not the Grand Design, but the very Architect the supposedly feeble Freemasons worshipped so pragmatically. He saw a creature germane in its purpose to the Creator, a dissatisfied former kinsman of the Others. Without being able to grasp what it was exactly that he did see, he saw a creature – a concept of the highest Order. Pure in its benevolence but rendered impotent because of this very same fact, it was a weak, if well-meaning deity, an It that had seen its own Work torn apart by angry and jealous hands long before the beginning of Time. It was old, too, and it had seen the need to pass the energies of Creation to a new principality. The Creator, the White God, received the fundamental powers, and was allowed to reshape what Was as He saw fit. The Architect would remain near, whispering words of guidance to the infant power, shepherding it away from the craven ploys of the dead ones in their midst.

The Architect, George learned, couldn't personally intercede against the dead gods' misshapen creatures. This Creation wasn't his, and the White God was too young and too volatile to be able to understand how to single-handedly push these offenders back. Furthermore, any direct intervention would be harmful to the world as George knew it. As benevolent as it was, the Architect remained as fundamentally alien to the fabric of Reality as the Others Themselves happened to be.

The only thing it could do involved taking him under his wing. Over time, the Architect promised, they would find wicked souls upon which his deviant urges could be slaked, and noble spirits with which to nourish what had begun as a small flaw in the Engineer's creation, a minuscule speck of goodness that had been allowed to grow and snuff out the evil within.

If anything, George could start by freeing both himself and Liam from the sad fates that awaited them – and by assisting a seal-woman that would enter their lives.

Gammell awoke in the grimy waters of the Thames river, kept afloat by a panicking young boy. Even as his body and throat were on fire, he felt the urge to laugh and celebrate his unexpected deliverance. Working through the diminishing fever, he told everything he'd seen to Liam, who had earned a fairly sad dose of street-wise scepticism, since then. The boy wasn't used to hearing his misshapen caretaker express genuine hope, much less to find himself hugged by soggy arms weighed down by a soaked bed robe.

Looking at the Order's calendar, the Engineer realized he had one chance to make this work. He had a few weeks to scour Britain through scrying devices he feverishly assembled, and to find this seal-woman, this selkie, ahead of time. At the same time, he was being asked to prepare other devices for another possession ritual. Ogilvie had taken notice of his personal monster's sudden lack of enthusiasm, and rather ruthlessly sought to request a replacement. George knew that if he didn't find and reach Meris in time, they'd never be able to escape.

He'd never been much of a religious man, but soon found himself praying for assistance two days away from his deadline. As if the Architect had needed to gather his strength before interceding, another sudden fever spell showed him blueprints of an inhuman, insane, if strangely beautiful nature. The Architect's designs tested his mind not because they stood as evil or malevolent, but because they were entirely alien to his still fairly human frames of reference, in their complete difference in terms of basic Physics.

It took everything he had, but he soon assembled what he took to calling the All-Seeing Eye, a strangely nonspecific mechanism that was small enough to fit in a standard fob watch while leaving room for the mundane assemblies. Wearing it placed him in what he tends to consider as the “Center”, a kind of quantum intersection of all possible locations he could possibly occupy at any moment in the general present time. He felt himself – telegraphing a duplicate of his own body and mind to Meris of the Orcades even as she fortuitously slipped her blade in Warren Ogilvie's throat. Not being too good at displaying shock, he perhaps appreared oddly casual to the roane, as he sat down in his old master's favorite chair and explained the reasons behind his presence. Realizing that his work and Meris' seemed to have the same supernatural patron, he took a few days in order to better guarantee Liam's safety, and then returned to her with a partnership. He'd do what he could to free those who had suffered as he'd suffered while purveying her, along with Lulroth's family and the White Brotherhood, with whatever weapons or tools he could possibly devise.

It took some time for Meris to agree, a few years in which George was able to disappear in the eyes of most of London's cultists and relocate Liam and himself in America. Liam Gammell would soon become his most convenient proxy and his first adoptive child, the first of the many public faces of Gammell's Toybox. The store sold wind-up and clockwork-based amusements, along with a selection of simple automated figurines, and did indeed allow him to repurpose his mechanical abilities toward a goal that would bring him joy, rather than doubt or further regret. Maybe it was something in the hands that he controlled, in the way they'd once belonged to a toymaker, but designing little bits and bobs of congealed mechanical fun felt easy and rewarding.

Much to his surprise, Meris located him and didn't simply elect to kill him where he stood. Liam was now a solidly-built young man on the way to obtaining a family of his own, and the usurped toymaker's name was about to spawn a small lineage of sorts. The Gammell of Gammell's Toybox was sometimes a man, sometimes a woman, and they handled the finances and Public Relations while the former Abomination stuck to his loft and workshop. Maybe it was in how his human proxies weren't insane and kept to their secret the way other families still did to their undead great-grandfather's proclivities, but she did honestly believe in his ability to work for the cause of Good.

Today, George Murray Gammell is a doctored photograph in the Toybox's front lobby, the supposedly human and suitably Victorian ancestor of the family. Only the elected few know of the toymaker's true nature and share in the little family's kept secret. Meris is one of those, and the toymaker has been keeping an interested eye on the local legally authorized vigilantes...
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