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Alice Erron

Actually three Dukes in one: the titular Alice Erron, a precocious nine-year-old Authentick Thaumaturge, her teacher Bob the Unspeakable Servant, and granddaddy Karl Erron, who watches his descendant from beyond the grave.

Alice Erron in Her Own Words:
Hi! My name is Alice. I’m eight years old, and I live with Bob at my Granddad’s house.
That’s Bob. Don’t let him scare you. He won’t hurt you unless I tell him to. Sometimes, when people come over, Bob pretends to be a person. I guess we don’t need to pretend with you, though.
Bob’s teaching me magic. That’s what Grandad wanted. It’s hard to memorize all the chants and the diagrams and stuff, but it’s fun, too. And Bob’s a good teacher, aren’t you, Bob?
The teacher? She deserved it. Bob says I should Pay Attention In Class, but it’s so boring. It was a lot more fun after she started hiccuping whenever she says “grammar.”
No, I don’t have a lot of friends, I guess. ‘Cept for Bob, of course. The other kids used to pick on me, but they stopped after Bob visited me at recess one day. We had to be careful so the teachers wouldn’t see, but the kids didn’t pick on me after that.
No, he didn’t do anything to ’em. He just showed up and looked scary. I wanted him to beat ’em up a little, but he said that people might start asking questions and then I would have to leave, and I don’t want to leave. So he just made faces at them. Bob’s good at making faces. Some of the faces he makes are funny, and some of them are scary, but they don’t scare me.
You sure have a lot of questions, don’t you, mister?

Personality: Immature and wilful. She wants what she wants and gets mad when something gets in the way. Give her a few years and she might develop some ethics, or she might not.
Obsession: None yet.
Fear Passion: None yet.
Rage Passion: When people get in her way.
Noble Passion: None yet.

Wound Points: 30

BODY: 30 Child
General Athletics 25%, Stay Up Past Her Bedtime 15%, Struggle 20%
SPEED: 50 Normal
Dodge 30%, Initiative 30%, Squirrelly Reflexes 30%
MIND: 75 Prodigal
Conceal 30%, Eidetic Memory 35%, General Education 15%, Magick 30%, Notice 25%
SOUL: 65 Scary
Cute as a Button 30%, Lying 30%, Scary When She’s Angry 50%

Violence 0H 0F
Unnatural 1H 2F
Helplessness 0H 0F
Isolation 1H 0F
Self 0H 0F

Charges: None. Bob taught her Harmonious Alignment as a birthday gift, but there is still another two weeks before she can try it out for the first time.
Memorized Rituals: Harmonious Alignment, Plague of Hiccups, Portal Glyph.
Inventory: Alice generally wears a T-shirt and jeans.
Possessions: Alice has inherited a lot of magickal equipment and hardware, including a library of occult tomes, a large quantity of miscellaneous ingredients and tools for rituals, Bob the Unspeakable Servant, and anything else the GM feels like adding to the mix. In addition to the magick, she also inherited her father’s old ex-farmhouse on the outskirts of Greenfield, Massachusetts, and a small trust fund managed by the First Bank of Greenfield. The fund, which Karl Erron set up using the Lead to Gold ritual, has a principle of $400,000 and pays an interest of $20,000, which is enough to supply her slight needs.
According to the legal documents that can be found at Greenfield, Alice is the daughter of Robert Erron, who is the son of Karl Erron. Her mother is listed as Jane Smith, while Robert Erron’s mother is listed as Jill Smith. Aside from this single oddity, the documents are fully in order. Karl Erron used various magickal rituals, as well as some forgery, to create this legal situation. The truth is that Robert Erron is actually Bob the Unspeakable Servant and Alice is Karl’s own daughter, not his granddaughter.
In addition to the things Alice knows about, Karl buried a locked footlocker under the basement floor containing a pint of his blood, his alchemically-preserved second eye, $10,000 in gold fishing sinkers, and a letter he wrote to Alice. Bob is aware of the locker, and was instructed to tell Alice about it when she reaches sixteen. Karl had no specific reason for including the blood and the eye, but he figured that something as symbolically potent as a warlock’s body parts must have some use.

Bob the Abominable Unspeakable Servant In Its Own Words:
(utter silence).

Personality: Laconic, direct, and simple-not stupid, just uncomplicated. Bob does not have much of a personality besides wanting to shelter and help Alice.
Obsession: Protecting Alice.
Fear Passion: None.
Rage Passion: None.
Noble Passion: None.

Wound Points: 150

BODY: 100 Huge
Kill Enemies 60%, Move Heavy Objects 40%
SPEED: 70 Fast
Shield Alice 70%, Do Two Things at Once 20%
MIND: 70 Cunning
Do Chores 15%, Instruct in the Occult 30%, Lab Assistant 25%
SOUL: 50 Protective
Fake Being Human 20%, Amuse Alice 30%, Sense Danger 50%

Kill Enemies: Bob’s attacks deal martial arts damage. In his natural form, Bob’s tentacles are heavy, bludgeoning weapons, giving a total of +6 to damage.
Shield Alice: This skill allows Bob to interpose itself between Alice and harm. If Bob is within the tens digit of his skill in feet of Alice when someone attacks her, he can block the attack with his body. To do this he must make a successful Shield Alice roll with a minimum roll equal to the attacker’s skill roll. Once interposed, he can block any line-of-sight attack on Alice; melee attacks impact him, while ranged attacks must succeed with a minimum of his Shield Alice skill to hit her. Attacks blocked in these ways impact Bob instead of Alice.
Powers: As an Abominable Unspeakable Servant, Bob can generate minor unnatural phenomena at will, a significant unnatural phenomenon once per hour, and, with a successful Soul check, a major unnatural phenomenon once per year. In addition, any damage dealt to Bob is reduced to one point unless it comes from Alice or Karl, or someone proxied as them.
Seeing Bob for the first time is a rank-8 Unnatural stress check.

Possessions: Bob keeps an alchemically-preserved male human body in the basement. When Robert Erron needs to make an appearance, he puts enough of himself into it to animate it. Unfortunately, Bob is too big to all fit inside the body, so some of him is left hanging out, through the entry area in the right foot.
There is a network of holes drilled in the floorboards of the first and second floors of the house. Bob uses these to conceal the part of him that will not fit inside the body when someone comes over-by keeping his right foot on top of one of the holes, the extra part of him hanging from the bottom can conceal itself under the floor where it cannot be seen. Unfortunately, this does mean he cannot lift that foot without revealing his true nature, nor can he wear shoes or socks. As such, Bob usually positions himself sitting on the couch in the living room or in an analogous position when visitors arrive.
Bob also uses the network of holes to keep an eye on things throughout the house. If Alice has a visitor over and he is not in the room, he hides in the floor and watches through the holes. If he detects a threat, he then boils up through the floor.

Karl Erron In His Own Words:
You stay away from my daughter, y’hear? I may be dead, but I can still pull up a good dose of whammy on you SOBs.
Alice is a real Erron. She takes to the magick like it was in her blood-which it is, of course. Not like your average modern kid, watching TV and playing video games and not making anything of themselves. She’s got discipline. She’s got talent. Someday, she’ll be even better than I was. And you aren’t going to get in the way of that. Not if you know what’s good for you.
Yeah, she calls me Granddad. That’s what all the papers down at City Hall say, and I don’t see any reason to correct her-I’m more of a Granddad than a dad in any event. But she is my daughter. She’s going to succeed me. I’ve given her everything she could ever need to become the greatest witch this world has ever seen. I spent ten years getting ready for her: making gold so she would have enough money, getting together the books she would need for a proper education, cutting my own eye out to make Bob. That’s what she calls it, Bob. When I made it, I called it Ares. To be honest, though, Bob seems to fit it better.
I hang around the house most of the time and keep an eye on things. I still talk to Bob, give him advice on Alice’s education, but mostly I just observe. Once in a while I answer some idiot sorcerer wannabe’s summons if I need a body to do a ritual or some such, but not real often. Alice knows I keep an eye out for her, but I don’t think she realizes yet just how much I’ve done.
No, I ain’t going to tell you how I had a kid at 73.
Now get out of here or I’ll make you wish you’d been aborted!

Personality: Cold, calculating, and utterly ruthless. He was unpleasant when he was alive and being dead has done nothing to change that.
Obsession: Seeing his line prosper in the form of Alice. He cares nothing about Alice-he just cares about his daughter.
Fear Passion: (Unnatural) The Cruel Ones.
Rage Passion: Being thwarted.
Noble Passion: His family lineage.

BODY: 0 Ethereal
General Athletics 15%, Struggle 20%
SPEED: 0 Not There
Dodge 20%, Firearms 20%, Initiative 20%
MIND: 90 Mad Genius
Conceal 25%, Magick 75%, Notice 40%, Philosophy 40%
SOUL: 80 Powerful
Charm 15%, Intimidate 55%, Lying 60%

Violence 4H 2F
Unnatural 10H 3F
Helplessness 3H 2F
Isolation 8H 3F
Self 2H 1F

Charges: Karl Erron has a reserve of four significant charges at any given moment.
Memorized Rituals: Back Monkey, Harmonious Alignment, Lead into Gold, Poison Ward, Spellbreaker, and many, many more. You name the ritual, and there is a good chance he has at least heard of it.

Using the Erron Family:
The most likely way that the PCs will encounter the Erron family is by investigating the teacher Alice mentioned, who found herself subject to an attack of hiccups whenever she said the word “grammar.” The incident made some of the Weird News sites, and the teacher has since gone on medical leave and is in the middle of a nervous breakdown.
Getting whatever the PCs want out of the Errons is going to be difficult. Sleepers or others who just want them to keep quiet will receive a sincere promise from Alice to be good, which she will proceed to ignore when she feels like it. She is not deliberately trying to draw attention to herself, but she is immature, willful, and liable to put a hex on anyone who annoys her sufficiently. And trying to use force is going to lead to major trouble: Alice lacks much in the way of combat strength or sorcerous firepower, but Bob and Karl Erron have more than enough between them to go around. The best solution would probably be to convince Karl that the PCs’ goals coincide with his own-for example, that it would be a good idea to make sure Alice does not cause any more trouble. Threatening him is likely to just get his ire raised, but reason can work.

One thought on “Alice Erron

  1. Unfinishedbusinessman says:

    Awesome idea. I don’t think a demon should have more than one passion. Probably just the Noble Passion for Karl. Well done. I think I’ll use this character the next time I run a game.

    Reply

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