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Erik

Here’s a little mood music, folks:

Erik Rudolph Weitz b. December 26, 1368. Erik lives in Hyacinth’s boarding house with his Uncle Mordecai in Room 102. He is a young, green-skinned innate magic user, or colored person. He experienced severe head trauma and brain damage at the age of six. As a result, he is missing his right eye, and the socket and surrounding skull were repaired with an alloy of tin, copper and antimony. He speaks slowly, although it only becomes noticeable when he is excited or upset, and he reverses letters when he writes. His uncle is teaching him how to play the violin and how to call gods. Erik is a sweet person, careful, intuitive, and he tries very hard. He worships Maggie and envies her self-sufficiency and he adores his uncle, who fulfills a parental role in all but name. The rest of the household functions as his auxiliary family, with Milo, Ann and Calliope on the level of siblings, and everyone else an honorary aunt or uncle, even the distant ones — Barnaby and the General — whom he is not fond of.

A people-pleaser by nature and after his uncle’s unintentional example, Erik is most comfortable in a support position, following someone else who has come up with a plan, but under pressure he can come up with ideas and take action on his own. If he’s not amusing himself quietly or getting into trouble, he’s probably dealing with a serious matter that he believes it is his responsibility to fix.

Erik has a large magical capacity, but at the moment it is only marginally trained. The Invisibles may have used his injury as an opportunity to meddle with him somewhat. He is very strong and able to hold a god for a long time, and very accurate in calling who he wants. The gods also talk to him, basically whenever they feel like it, although he can try to initiate a conversation and see if they answer. They can either address him directly, which he hears as voices in his head, or ‘tell’ him things, which surface as memories he didn’t experience and information he didn’t know he knew. This is disorienting, and he often says things aloud that he didn’t mean to say or comments on matters without understanding them. When he is wearing his metal eye, he is able to see the gods, an unheard of ability. If they should happen to be talking to each other or themselves while he can see them, he can also hear them in this way. He has learned to pretend he cannot see them or hear them when they’re not talking to him directly, because they are not always aware he can do that, and they are not always happy about it when they figure out he can. The gods treat him as a curiosity, an annoyance, or a toy, and are not terribly careful about his feelings. In fact, some of them seem to think upsetting him is funny.

Erik wears a mechanical eye in his right socket during waking hours, although he will cover his socket with a patch if he cannot use the eye for some reason. It works reasonably well, and he has concentrated his ability to see gods in it. However, it has a tendency to go off-kilter and start looking at random patterns if his focus wavers or is impaired in some way. The socket and part of his head around it are made of silver metal. He has a gold tattoo on the back of his right hand that reads ‘Tartar Emetic Will Kill Me,’ because of the composition of his repairs and the danger of unwitting physicians.

Description

Erik is a young child, maybe a bit tall for his age. He wears short trousers and stockings and button-down shirts, usually with the top button undone and somewhat disarrayed — although tucked in. He gets his things second hand and he grows fast, so if it fits and it’s in fairly good shape, it’s in. It is particularly difficult to keep him in shoes, but his uncle tends to pick out the kind with laces for him. (This may be a conspiracy to keep him practicing fine motor skills.) All of his shirts have faint yellow oil stains on the pockets, because that’s where he stows his metal eye if he needs to have it out for a moment. His real eye is dark gray. His right eye is made of gold metal, with an inset glass lens that is ringed by an adjustable iris mechanism. At its widest setting, you can peer through the lens and see gears moving inside, and sometimes hear them. The socket, and part of his head visible at the far right edge, is bright silver, fading to dull blue where it is merged to the skin. Part of his right eyebrow is also missing, and there are several fine blue scars around the socket where Hyacinth closed his wounds with metal. His skin is a medium, grayish green, about the shade of a willow leaf. He wears his white hair brushed to one side in an effort to keep it out of his face, but he doesn’t favor a particular side and it seems to lack a natural part. It is usually a bit over his ears and in need of a trim because using a scissors on him makes his uncle nervous.

Being a child and somewhat in flux, Erik was not included in the original spectrum of household temperaments, but he tends towards phlegmatic. If Milo is unavailable to be a mitigating factor (and he frequently is) Erik is right in there trying to help. He has a metaphysical alarm system that tends to inform him when something needs his attention — or when it doesn’t but it would be interesting for him to show up. He is not easily upset, at least not compared to some people in the house, but he hates it when other people are upset, and he often knows more about why and how they are upset than is readily apparent — although he can’t always understand it. He also does not like to upset things, and he has a tendency to sort his toys and surroundings, either putting them back the way they came or coming up with some other pleasing arrangement.

Erik’s fondest wish is for everyone to be happy. He’s at an age where he thinks just about anything is possible, and he’s also pretty sure he can accomplish this by himself. Once he figures it out exactly. In the meantime, he is doing his best. Because he wants everyone to be happy, it is pretty easy to get him to go along or talk him into or out of something. His social flexibility and his life experiences have left him with a willingness to humiliate himself and a non-standard sense of morality, making him an excellent support person. Team him up with Maggie or Soup (or Maggie and Soup) for ideas and direction and watch him blossom into a quick, clever, even devious accomplice. In an emergency, or after much deliberation, he is capable of supplying his own ideas. If he is certain he wants to do something, he becomes incredibly determined, and he will devise and execute multi-stage, rational plans and call in assistance as needed.

Erik’s uncle is the most consistently unhappy person in his life, and also the one he cares about the most. These two things feed into each other and result in a lot of worry on both sides. Erik knows his uncle is sad and worried because of him, and Mordecai knows he knows that, and sometimes when they’re both feeling particularly awful they wind up in a painful, mutually guilty mess. Erik tries to be careful and obedient and not scare the hell out of his uncle (or anyone) but because he is surrounded by conflicting interests and he also has his own ideas of what is necessary or fun and he’s a kid, he doesn’t always manage. He will try to hide things from his uncle or even outright lie to protect him from emotional bruising. Usually he will confide in Maggie and ask her for help, but Hyacinth, Ann, Calliope and even Milo are appropriate for leaning on depending on the situation. Different people are safe to tell different things, and Erik only lets his guard down entirely when he is very hurt or upset. Sometimes he says hurtful or upsetting things without meaning to, though, and that really bothers him.

Erik has picked up some of his uncle’s sarcastic nature and he will sometimes display a bit of an edge, but you have to hit him exactly the right way. More often, it manifests itself as a pointed sense of humor. His first reaction to a novel situation is to make sure no one is hurt, his second reaction is to see if it’s funny. If it is funny, he may see what he can do to make it funnier/worse. If it’s not funny, he may be annoyed, but it’s usually funny. He has a high tolerance for weird and if it gets to the point where he notices it, he will probably be delighted by it.

Erik has a broad and shallow taste in music. If you give him a minute to listen to it, he will probably like it all right, though he’ll only seek out more of the same if he likes it a lot. He likes the Beatles, but that’s because he loves his uncle. He also likes novelty music, with weird noises and funny lyrics, but this is not something his uncle approves of.

History

Destiny’s Child

Erik was born in an abandoned hotel, in the middle of winter, during the Siege of San Rosille, to a very determined and powerful and ill young lady who died shortly thereafter. This left him in the care of a raggedly insane man with a serious lung problem who briefly considered just killing him. Instead, his uncle took him out of the hotel and tried to get someone to adopt him. Hyacinth found them and adopted both of them.

The first thing Erik learned was that you need to scream real loud in order to get anyone to take care of you. He kept up with the screaming — perhaps as a hobby, perhaps as a survival strategy — for about the first eighteen months of his life, after which he began to smooth out into the people-pleaser he now is. In his toddlerhood, he found an arsenic wafer in the pocket of his uncle’s greatcoat and almost ended his existence right there. A little before his third birthday, Maggie disabused him of his belief in Santa Claus, which he was able to accept with an appropriate amount of tears.

From a young age he displayed an affinity for horses, which was ameliorated with toys and picture books and multiple reminders that he must never get anywhere near a real horse. This held up until a too-tempting opportunity presented itself at the age of six, and everything got real weird after that.

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