Nobody knows what to think of him, but becoming an Avatar is as close as two pencils and a big leap of faith.

It’s a little bit of a joke in the Occult Underground. Some people say it’s a cheap fairy tale, and some people think it’s just a throwaway example to describe Archetypes without mentioning any real Archetype. Nonetheless, he’s real, he Ascended, and now others can become an Avatar.

A recent Ascension, the Guy With Pencils Stuck In His Eyes was a variation upon the long-deposed Archetype of the Shaman (representing the Visionary Crippled Outsider). He tapped into a lot of geomantic power, converted a major natural disaster into a power symbolic sacrifice, and conducted a ritual on worldwide television news that almost everyone missed (aside from a few curious footage-collectors who noticed his impressive newscamera sleight of hand). He The G.W.P.S.I.H.E. managed, through sheer personal drive and raw magical overkill, to walk his own personal roadmap to Ascension, despite its very weak and offbeat concept. In some sense, the very ridiculousness of the Archetype lent it strength.

The Guy With Pencils Stuck In His Eyes is a grotesque figure. His disfigurement is omnipresent and impossible to ignore. He’s blind in an obviously violent way, and yet he does not seem to acknowledge the revulsion and confusion he inspires in others. His strange condition (possibly self-inflicted) is made even stranger by his thorough acceptance of it. He turns the human into the inhuman. Other details about him – his personality, his dreams, his appearance, his skills – are barely noticable in the face of his disformity.

The G.W.P.S.I.H.E. exists in the public consciousness as a fear of blindness. The gruesome visual image combined the helplessness of being blind, the physical aspect of the pencil (associated with blindness in Western cultures because of an old tradition of blind people selling pencils from a cup for support), and the threat of incomprehensible violence. A typing seeing person cannot imagine what the world would mean to a blind person, and the horror of that condition puts the G.W.P.S.I.H.E. into the public consciousness.

The rest of his existence becomes invisible by contrast, further dehumanizing him. Everything about him becomes alien.

To say that the G.W.P.S.I.H.E. is mad is an insufficient explanation. The Guy With Pencils Stuck In His Eyes is not insane in any traditional sense. The world is accustomed to people who behave erratically, and react to things with nonsense, who do shocking and dangerous things for attention, or out of a lack of concern for consequences, or destructive self-loathing, or a need for escape from the normal. These people are comprehensible. The Guy With Pencils Stuck In His Eyes is not so simple – he doesn’t respond to things in nonsensical ways. His behavior is, in fact, stark and minimal, punctuated by very rare moments of horrific self-destruction. He is not “wacky” or “unpredictable” at all – he’s alien. He’s blind and tragic and doesn’t even seem to notice.

Attributes: Incomprehensible self-destruction, and vision in blindness. The G.W.P.S.I.H.E. inspires disbelief. His very existence is reduced to his single handicap, which draws obsessive interest. His explanations are calmly ridiculous, blasé and unhelpful.

Taboo: Several taboos apply to this Archetype. First, all Avatars of this Archetype must be male – no female can channel this archetype. Second, the Avatar of this Archetype must be voluntarily blind, in a very visible and overwhelming way. Attempting or gaining another means to see, weakens the connection to this channel. If the Avatar actually puts pencils in his eyes, he also needs to keep them there. This will typically mean that about 10 Wound points of damage go unhealed as well.

Lastly, and possibly most importantly, the Guy With Pencils Stuck In His Eyes must remain incomprehensible. He cannot explain himself, and cannot allow himself to be understood. He can’t say anything about himself that would teach anyone anything. He can talk about his own experiences and life, but only in a way that further alienates him. If his behavior could be dismissed as childish erratic stunts or documentable madness, his connection with the Archetype is weakened.

Suspected Guys With Pencils Stuck In Their Eyes in History: Of course, there are none, but a few tales of blind prophets have been around for a long time.

Symbols: Pencils, of course. Bloodied clothing, cups filled with pencils, blindness, and darkness. The act of destroying anything eye-like carries some resonance – stabbing a poster in the eye, crushing a grape between fingers, or shooting out a camera lens. Writing that has been covered up and obscured to the point of illegibility.

CHANNELS

01-50% The Guy With Pencils Stuck In His Eyes gains other senses to make up for his vision. These senses detect things that cannot be explained to those who do not channel the archetype, in ways that defy logic. Most of what the G.W.P.S.I.H.E. perceives is hazy and not really useful to the scope of a normal narrative, but the composite of it all gives the equivalent of normal sight, with an equivalent Notice skill equal to the Avatar: G.W.P.S.I.H.E. skill. Furthermore, anyone who reads his mind, finds out what he’s looking at, or otherwise taps into these senses must make a Rank-7 Unnatural stress check.

51-70% The Guy With Pencils Stuck In His Eyes can make pronouncements which carry strange weight. By calming and matter-of-factly making a statement which is outside of normal possibility, and making a G.W.P.S.I.H.E. roll, he can impress the audience. Those who have a Mind score less than his roll will be affected. They won’t believe him, but they’ll consider the possibility of what he says. They’ll probably avoid the whole situation, just in case.

71-90% The Guy With Pencils Stuck In His Eyes has such a distracting disability that everything else about him can be concealed. He could be naked, brutally wounded, or carrying a handful of stolen diamonds, and nobody would notice. As long as his disability is the strangest thing about him, nobody will notice anything else about him. He won’t blend in with a crowd, of course, but people will be fascinated and focused on his wounded eyes, noticing nothing else. He can use this effect once per day, for up to an hour, with a successful roll against his Avatar: G.W.P.S.I.H.E. skill.

91-98% By passing through any doorway, The Guy With Pencils Stuck In His Eyes can walk away from this world. Where he goes is unclear – he can’t describe it when he goes, even if he tried. It’s some part of Otherspace that can only be navigated by someone with his own strange senses. Only other Avatars of the G.W.P.S.I.H.E. can follow – others merely pass through the normal doorway – and he can’t bring anything back with him except what he brought, but he can leave things behind and retrieve them later. The G.W.P.S.I.H.E. can return through another doorway at any time; he doesn’t decide what doorway, but it will be a basically safe, unobserved and uninteresting doorway within fifty miles of his original location.

WHAT YOU’VE HEARD

The Guy With Pencils Stuck In His Eyes is actually an Annihilomancer, who took away his sight for power, and is seeking to rid people of the whole ridiculous notion of the Invisible Clergy.

The Guy With Pencils Stuck In His Eyes is actually an Archetype of the Fool. Or the Outsider. Or the Grotesque Libertine. Or the Two-Faced Man.

The Guy With Pencils Stuck In His Eyes is a Cliomantic invention, spread by the Sleeprs, through a variant of Gnostic Gossip, to make people more uneasy and careful about how dangerous and embarassing their magic might become. He’s an example, created by clever advertising, to keep people from going off the deep end.

The Guy With Pencils Stuck In His Eyes lost his vision in a violent fight, and got into the Occult Underground when he bought new sight from the Bad Man in exchange for his real name. He acts as the Bad Man’s travelling reporting, getting a general idea of the landscape and scouting out new customers and contacts.

The Guy With Pencils Stuck In His Eyes is a misinterpreation of an Archetype from the last iteration of the world that was deposed and replaced. In the last world, it represented a simple, elegant, compellingt concept about the human condition that’s completely alien to us now. The closest way it can be represented in this world is as a man with pencils jabbed in his eyes, but even that isn’t really very accurate.

The Guy With Pencils Stuck In His Eyes is the logo and image of a cabal from World War II who fought against fascism with incomprehensible Dada. They were all gunned down, but one of them was called back as a demon, and today he returns to the world, jabs pencils into the eyes of whatever body he’s borrowing, and wanders the land with it, preaching his meaningless message with the ruthless tenacity of the dead.

The Guy With Pencils Stuck In His Eyes is an Entropomancer who lost a bet with an unknown power, and who refuses to admit defeat.

The Guy With Pencils Stuck In His Eyes is a plucky yet completely deluded nutcase who’s collecting disability checks and living with his retired parents. He doesn’t even have pencils stuck in his eyes, he just says he does. He’s charming, in his own pathetic way, and he always buys the drinks, so the Occult Underground regulars he seems to follow around have sort of elevated him into a celebrated running gag, and when they talk about him to the outside world, they perpetuate the joke by building him up with a lot of hype.

The Guy With Pencils Stuck In His Eyes is the last Archetype of the Judge, now fallen. He represented merciful but firm judgement. When his aspect was replaced by the notion of a paper-pushing bureaucrat, he fell through the House of Renunciation and became an inane paradox, unfairly made blind by the pencil, an instrument of the bureaucracy that toppled him.

The Guy With Pencils Stuck In His Eyes wasn’t always such a bizarre and pathetic figure. He was, at one point, the Godwalker of the Gorgon, until a fairly murderous bastard travelled through Otherspace and back in time to kill him by stabbing him in both of his petrifying eyes. The resulting headache-inducing paradoxical causality loops in reality and the universe led him to become trapped in the modern day, alternating between his own life and the life of his killer, who doesn’t even remember killing the Gorgon and has no idea of the missing time he spends as the Guy With Pencils Stuck In His Eyes. Actually, the rumor goes that you did it.