Character: Dr. Tarsus Beetle
Character Sheet (Dr. Tarsus Beetle)
Combat Value: 3
You are Dr. Tarsus Beetle, and it has been a complex year for you.You were born 58 years ago, the scion of the town of Beetleburg. Your father, a prominent and powerful Spark, ruled the town wisely, with something of an iron fist. He was a prominent man of learning, the founder of Transylvania Polygnostic University, and you were raised in the halls of academia, learning such important topics as History, Robotics, Death Rays, and so on. You always worked hard to please your father, and were a good student.
Your best friend in your youth was Marcus Payne. His family had been prominent merchants decades before, but they had been wiped out by the Heterodynes in the Bad Old Days. Payne's family had wound up going into the service of yours, acting as aides-de-camp and liaisons to other great households in the area. Payne and you were close in age, and you wound up more like brothers than master and servant. He was a minor Spark himself, and the two of you helped each other cope with your breakthroughs. He led the small group of young men that chased down your first rampaging Clank before it destroyed anything your father might notice; you rescued him from angry villagers when one of his illusions went wrong and started a pitchfork-wielding mob.
Your father passed away when you were 20, and you came into control of Beetleburg. You like to believe that you ruled well, with only a few minor battles with nearby villages that refused to submit to Beetleburg's benign influence. TPU continued to grow, gradually becoming the foremost university in this part of Europa. You continued your own studies and research, focusing on the work of the Great Sparks of the past, reasoning that there's no reason to keep reinventing the Flying Toaster -- if you understood the works of the past, you could build on them better. You became the world's foremost authority on the work of Van Rijn (to this day the greatest builder of Clanks), and no small expert on his great rival Amagog (a more mysterious figure, focused on the more esoteric explorations of time and space).
Your first encounter with the Heterodynes came about ten years later, early in the career of Bill and Barry. You were deeply suspicious of them. Oh, yes, you'd heard the stories of the dashing young men going heroing -- saving damsels in distress, defeating villains, promoting peace and so on. But they were Heterodynes, for heaven's sake! Their family had been well-known as the baddest of the bad for centuries, leading their private army of Jaegermonsters in regular raids all over the continent, stealing and killing at their whim. The idea that that family had turned out a pair of great heroes seemed unlikely to you. (And moreso to Payne, whose associations with the Heterodynes were bitter.) So when they first came to your town, you fought them off with a pair of large Clanks -- and you were horrified when, several days later, they ran you out of town!
That started several bad years of back-and-forth battling between you and the Heterodynes, and you must admit it wasn't your best time. (Although you still think the Heterodyne Replica Boys were among your classiest Clanks, even if they didn't last long.) You must admit, you got obsessed with them. Even after you had returned to Beetleburg and taken control again, it stuck in your craw that these upstarts had humiliated you so. It took several years before the three of you sat down and simply talked. Bill and Barry had quite a way with words -- to this day, you're not entirely sure how they managed to calm you down and argue you around, but in the end you wound up friends and allies. Indeed, your closest friends: while Payne accepted that it was your decision to make, he simply couldn't handle an alliance with Heterodynes. He ran off, and wound up forming a Circus, of all things. And your longtime protegee and student, Klaus von Wulfenbach, decided to join up with the Heterodynes on their adventures. So you were suddenly a bit alone.
That said, those were good years, running TPU and occasionally adventuring with Bill, Barry and Klaus. It was fine, innocent fun -- until the Heterodynes disappeared. To this day, you don't know exactly what happened. First, there were the battles against the Other, the mysterious entity that was slowly conquering the land. The Other's weapons were the Slaver Wasps, which could infect anyone and turn them into a shambling Revenant: soulless mockeries that served the Other unquestioningly. You lost a number of good friends and servants in those days. And then, one day, the Other disappeared, and the Heterodynes with it.
You were sure that Bill and Barry had died taking down the Other, until the night, three years later, when Barry showed up on your doorstep late one night. He was cryptic and tense, in a way that they had never been before, but he gave you two things. First, he told you that Klaus was now serving the interests of the Other. And second, he entrusted you with a young child named Agatha -- the daughter of Bill and their old adversary and lover Lucrezia Mongfish -- as well as their loyal Constructs Punch and Judy. He asked you to take care of the three of them, and then vanished off into the night.
The years since have had that night as a constant undertone. Wulfenbach was already becoming the most powerful man in Europa, expanding his Empire rapidly using the Jaegermonster army that he had appropriated from the Heterodynes. You played the part of a loyal vassal, rolling over as soon as he came to Beetleburg, but you have been quietly researching behind the scenes.
Really, you didn't want to believe it. Klaus could be a bit brutal, but he has always been decent to you and your people, often a friend, not the sort of monster that would support the Other. But it was confirmed one day a few months ago, when one of your patrols found a Hive Engine, the device that creates Slaver Wasps. That would be a grim enough find, but it proved worse when you examined it and realized that it was new -- certainly not more than a year old -- which meant that there was a servant of the Other out there, constructing new Engines for the purpose of creating more Revenants. And not only were some of the parts clearly of Wulfenbach manufacture, of Klaus' personal style of manufacture -- the pressure pumps and growth monitors were clearly his work. There seemed no other conclusion: Wulfenbach really was serving the Other.
Meanwhile, you have kept an eye on Punch and Judy, who were raising Agatha as their adopted child. You gave them identities of "Adam and Lilith Clay". He became the town blacksmith and tool-builder: being strong, creative and mute, that suited him well. And Lilith became a music teacher, to foster Agatha's budding musical ability.
The hardest part was poor Agatha. When Barry gave her to you, he made it very clear that she must never take off the locket she wore. For she was her mother's daughter, and you were one of the few who knew that the Other was, in some sense, her mother Lucrezia. You've never entirely understood how -- Lucrezia might have been a tad psychotic, but she had never been as thoroughly evil as the Other was -- but the threat was real. Barry made it clear that Agatha might be subject to the same forces that conquered Lucrezia if she ever came into her own as a Spark. The locket contained some sort of device that would suppress her Spark abilities, leaving her a normal human. But deep down, she was a Spark, and a powerful one. Watching the headaches she would get whenever she was inspired to invent was almost physically painful to you. But you made sure she got into the University, and even made her your own lab assistant so that you could keep an eye on her.
Things remained tense but stable until the day, about four months ago (a couple of weeks after you found the Hive Engine), when it all fell apart. Klaus made an unexpected visit to TPU one afternoon, wanting to look at the progress on his latest device. The whole thing was a complete waste of time -- a long-running test Klaus had set up for his son Gil. (You simply don't understand the relationship between those two. It's clear that Klaus cares for Gil, but he treats him like a stupid child.) You could tell that the experiment was a red herring, so you set two of your non-Spark professors, Dr. Hugo Glassvitch and Dr. Silas Merlot, to build the thing from the faulty plans Klaus had provided.
Unfortunately, Silas has a thing about being manipulated. (He's always been touchy, ever since that incident while writing the Jaeger Cosmogony.) His deep-seated insecurity about Sparks finally made him crack, and the poor fool decided that you had intentionally set him up to look stupid. In a moment of astonishing short-sightedness, he revealed the Hive Engine that you had been examining and experimenting on. Your plan had been to hold it as a weapon to use against Klaus -- given Agatha's relationship to the Other, you hypothesized that she would be able to control the Engine -- but now that was entirely defeated.
You must admit, you were thrown. Not only had your adversarial position been revealed to Klaus, but you had just been told by Agatha that her locket had been stolen -- possibly an even greater disaster, if her Spark talents should come through in an uncontrolled way. So -- well, there is no other way to say it -- you panicked. Klaus was in the midde of your city, and you attacked with everything you had. And he parried you with infuriating ease. Mr. Tock -- your greatest creation, the largest stable Clank ever constructed -- blown away by his flying castle ships. Your personal guard, which had been the state of the art in combat Clanks only a few years ago, destroyed by his new military Clanks and his Jaegermonsters.
And then, the final insult: he informed you that Beetleburg was really his city, and that he considered you a mere administrator. Oh, and that he had "use" for you. You've heard that phrase before. Good friends of yours like Dr. Vapnoodle, told that they would be "useful" -- just before Wulfenbach took them up to his flying castle and experimented on their brains. And then the true horror occurred to you: if Agatha's powers were unlocked, and Wulfenbach got control of her, and he was trying to serve the Other, there would be nothing to stop him. Not only could he create Hive Engines, he could control the resulting Revenants. You would be a mindless shell, destroyed by Wulfenbach's experiments, while he conquered the world and turned everyone into Revenants.
You couldn't let that happen. So you did the only sensible thing: you threw a Beetlebomb at the bunch of them. The idea of killing Agatha pained you, but you knew that her father wouldn't want her following in her mother's footsteps. With her and the Wulfenbachs gone, the world would at least be safe from the threat of the Other. But that child Gil of his was too fast, and batted the bomb right back at you.
You had only one trick left, and it was a risky one. For years you'd been researching the works of Amagog, collecting artifacts when you could fine them. Most had simply been notes, or parts of unknown devices. But one seemed to be intact: the Eye of Amagog, which you can concealed inside one of your brooches. You didn't know exactly what it did: legend simply said that it was for use in the most dire need. As you saw the bomb flying at you, you knew that time had arrived.
The feeling was indescribable. You felt your splitting, stretching. At once, you could feel yourself sizzling and dying, while at the same time it seemed to be happening at a great remove. And then you found yourself inside the Hidden Castle.
It was a moment of triumph, tempering the tragedy of losing your city. Every Spark historian had heard the legends of the Hidden Castle. Two centuries ago, Amagog was at the height of his powers: the stories said that he was creating astonishing creatures, even as he was able to move freely all over the world. But the populace rose against him, and one day he simply vanished -- he and his Castle, which had stood over the countryside, just ceased to be. Some said that it had been destroyed by an experiment; others that he had transported it to a far-distant land. But the most interesting rumors were that it was simply hidden -- still there, but silent and invisible. No one could ever find it, but the legend persisted.
As you explored, you realized that it was all true. You were in his central laboratory, and could see the countryside outside, shimmering strangely. As you began to read what notes you could (most of them were deeply encrypted and unreadable), you discovered that Amagog's knowledge was beyond anything you'd ever seen before. He was not only dealing with time and space, but bending reality itself. The Castle had simply been shifted half-a-step away: almost but not quite in this reality.
Since then, you have been deeply immersed in exploring Amagog's work, alone here in the Castle. After the initial discoveries, the work slowed down. Not only are his notes encrypted, his work was strange: so different from that of any other Spark. You came to realize that the large mirror at the center of his laboratory was central to it all; after a few months, you finally figured out how to control it, using the large crystal at the center of the lab. That allowed you to begin to view the outside world more broadly. Your control was rough -- the Crystal was controlled via music, you found, and your musical talent has never been great -- but you could peek in on a variety of places, some very strange -- indeed, you are sure that some of the places you saw weren't even in this reality at all. Sometimes you managed to home in on exactly what you wanted, and learned bits about what had happened in the larger world. You spied now and then on Wulfenbach, and were shocked when you overheard that they had gone and gotten poor Agatha killed, by driving her out into the Wastelands, where she was attacked by some sort of ravaging Clank. Your feelings about this are distinctly mixed: relief that the world is safe from the threat she presents, but angry at the Wulfenbachs for bringing it to this point. You will get your revenge on them for destroying the last Heterodyne legacy like that.
You are fairly sure that the device can even be used to transport one into these other places, but you haven't precisely figured out how, although you did puzzle out how to bring things to the Lab. And you finally realized that the Eye is closely related to this device: when activated, it bends reality as necessary to transport the bearer back here to the laboratory.
And yet, there is still so much you don't know. As you've explored the Castle, you were sure that someone else was here, always just around the corner. You suspect that this is the legendary "Perfect Construct", supposedly Amagog's greatest creation. Accounts vary about this being, describing it as anything from a terrible monster to a beautiful woman. Many nights you've suppressed a shiver, never knowing whether something was going to come out of the shadows to kill you as you slept. But it hasn't done so yet, so you try to convince yourself that it isn't hostile.
You were so careful as you explored, but a month ago you finally made a mistake. You were fiddling with a device that was clearly active, but whose purpose was unclear. You accidentally caused a gear to slip, and the device simply fell apart in your hands, and again something changed. It took you almost an hour to figure out what: the air outside had ceased to shimmer. After two centuries, the Hidden Castle was no longer hidden.
You knew what would happen next: every adventurer and looter for a hundred miles around would come to try themselves against the Castle. Fortunately, Amagog had plenty of more-mundane defenses, and you activated all of them. That bought you some time to continue exploring. But you knew it was time to reconnect with the wider world.
Among all the devices you had found, perhaps the most useful was the one that Amagog's devices called the "Transformator". It took a while to realize that it could possibly be as simple as it was: you could point it at any living entity, think about another one, pull the trigger, and poof: it would transform for a short time. You began by turning mice into cats, simply for your amusement. Eventually, you steeled your nerve, pointed it at yourself, and transformed into the shape of a common servant who you once had, and you had been studying through the Mirror. Looking in the mirror, it had worked perfectly: you both looked and sounded like him. It appears that you can transform anything living into something else, but you have to know the new form extremely well (or have been studying it quite recently) for it to work. The effect didn't last long, but you can apply it repeatedly as needed. And that meant that you could take the chance of bringing in the one person who could be of most help to you: Silas Merlot.
Yes, Merlot had betrayed you; no, he isn't a Spark. But he is the world's greatest expert on Amagog and his works. While you had spent the years exploring the creations of Van Rijn, and using that knowledge to build bigger and better Clanks, Merlot had been spending his time deeply immersed in everything he could find about Amagog. You have the edge on him in many ways now, and may well have the claim to be Amagog's best successor, but Merlot's knowledge would be useful. If anyone was going to be able to help you understand the devices here quickly, it would be him. So nine days ago you used the Transformator to turn yourself into the likeness of Dr. Hugo Glassvitch (another of the teachers who had worked for you, and a longtime coworker of Merlot's who had left TPU after your "death"), and pulled Merlot in. He was characteristically angry at being kidnapped, but that dissipated once he realized where he was, and he quickly began to study.
All of which would have been fine, save that the Castle's defenses were penetrated even faster than you expected. Oh, there were the expected fatalities, as almost half-a-dozen raiding parties got themselves killed. But a week ago, one group managed to penetrate all the way to the laboratory, forcing you to flee deeper into the Castle to evade detection. To your surprise, they didn't destroy anything -- they were apparently adventurers, just in it for the thrill. But they made off with the control crystal for the Mirror, rendering useless the best tool you had.
And then, two days ago, came the most astonishing moment, as Agatha herself waltzed in. You were taken completely aback, and didn't know what to make of it. You had heard that she was dead, from the mouths of the Wulfenbachs themselves -- you knew that Klaus was trying to grow her a new body, but didn't expect him to have succeeded so quickly. And you had no idea what she knew. All her life, you had hidden her Heterodyne background from her -- as far as she knew, she was plain Agatha Clay, an ordinary girl. With her locket gone, had she come into her Spark talent? And if so, had she followed in her father's good footsteps, or her mother's sinister ones?
All of this was going through your mind, spying on her as she began to fiddle with the devices in the Lab, humming strange music as she did so. You hadn't yet decided what to do yet when the mirror flashed, and you felt it again: that stretching and changing sensation. And suddenly, Agatha was no longer alone: there were now two of her standing there, as well as another girl you didn't know at all. They stared at each other for a moment, and then a huge creature came out of the darkness, snarling and snapping at them. It had a hundred eyes and enormous horns, the most terrifying creature you had ever seen, and you knew that this must be the "Perfect Construct". It chased them out of the Castle while you stood stock-still. And then it came at you.
The next few minutes were sheer blind fear, as the creature chased you around the Castle. You managed to grab the Transformator, and yell to Silas to run; you tried to use the Transformator on the creature, but it had no effect. (Which worries you, now that you think about it -- why not?) The two of you got out of the Castle as fast as you could run, and thanked your stars that it didn't follow you out. And you were left with so many questions, and no real plan of what to do next.
The past two days have been no less chaotic and confusing. You found Agatha in the woods, but she claimed to not be Agatha -- rather, she sais that she was an adventurer named Helen Narbon, a citizen of the British Empire, but serving an unknown Queen named Victoria rather than Elizabeth, Undying Queen of England. She was keeping company with Othar Tryggvassen, a doltish Spark who you have tangled with from time to time. She claims to have particular skill at brain transplants, and had come up with a vague scheme to take control of the Wulfenbach Empire using that. You have no love for the Wulfenbachs by now (and must admit that the idea of watching Tryggvassen cause chaos to their empire warms your heart greatly), so you and Merlot agreed to throw in with them. You'd been thinking about the best way to attack the Wulfenbachs yourself; using a catspaw like this has some appeal, especially if she isn't the real Agatha. You still care about Agatha, but this brain-mingling counterpart of hers appears to not be anyone you really know.
You've been observing around these woods, and were surprised to discover "Master Payne's Circus of Adventure" camped outside of it. You haven't seen Marcus Payne in years, and a part of you would love to contact him -- it has been a lonely several months, made only worse since bringing Merlot here (the man is eternally crabby), and a friendly face would be a delight. But you haven't yet decided whether it is safe to reveal yourself to him.
Somehow associated with the Circus is the most remarkable little device. It's a small Clank, not unlike those that Agatha was always fiddling with when she was working for you. But as you observed it, you were astonished to see it building more such Clanks! Moreover, it wasn't simply replicating itself -- it appears to be creative, and builds other Clanks with real variety! This is astonishing: while self-replicating Clanks have been known occasionally, none have ever possessed genuine inventiveness. If this device is truly capable of making more of its kind, it represents a true advance in the field: the sort of discovery that comes along once in a century. You must find a way to capture it and examine it more closely. You wouldn't hurt it, of course -- you know all too well the way that clumsy examination of Van Rijn's work damaged many of the greatest Clanks of all time. But you do want to see how it ticks. You're thinking of pulling Merlot in, since he is also a student of devices; working together, you ought to be able to come up with some way to subdue and examine it.
You need to figure out what is going on with Agatha. If this Narbon woman isn't her, then where is she? You saw two Agathas in the Castle laboratory briefly, so the other one must have been the real thing. But where has she gone? Apparently not back to the Circus (you sent Helen there in Agatha's place, so they don't get suspicious about her absence), but you find yourself worrying a bit.
And then, there is the woman Zeetha. She is a swordswoman, traveling with the Circus. None of which would be remarkable, if it weren't for her bright green hair. You've heard about that before, and seeing it here in a traveling show is quite extraordinary.
When Lucrezia Mongfish sent Klaus von Wulfenbach away, back when Wulfenbach was merely "the Heterodyne sidekick", the place she sent him was the hidden land of Skifander, in the jungles of northern Africa. Nestled among some mountains, Skifander is nicely cut off from all other civilization, so it was a good place to hide him. Almost no one knew of Skifander's existence: the only people who knew about it were the Heterodynes and Mongfishes, who had had an adventure that took them there several years before. Bill and Barry told you about it, back in the day, but they didn't spread it around too much: they respected Skifander's desire for secrecy, and swore you to not tell the world about it.
He had no idea where he was, but he made something of a home there, falling in love with and marrying the sister of the Queen of Skifander. In his several years there, he had his son Gilgamesh, and was settling in, but he was never entirely happy there: the matriarchal society didn't sit completely well with him, and he missed his old friends. So one day, he resolved to travel back home with Gil, and see how things were doing.
Of course, they were doing terribly: he came back to find a Europa in ruins after the disappearance of the Heterodynes. He knew that he couldn't simply go home to Skifander -- he needed to settle things here first. So he began his great quest to establish peace, and never managed to get back again.
However, several years ago, hugely frustrated by his lack of contact with his wife and having gotten his own lands into some kind of order, he decided it was time to establish proper relations with Skifander. He knew that the Queen of Skifander was skeptical about contact with the outside world, but he hoped he could coax them out, so he sent a formal delegation down there, with one of his grandest ships, to entice them into contact. He never heard from the delegation again. Knowing their warlike ways, and the Queen's dislike of outsiders, he figured that that was a message to him, to leave Skifander alone.
He was disconsolate about the whole matter -- he missed his wife terribly, and had hoped that, even after his long absence, he might still be welcomed there. To be rebuffed so violently was, to say the least, rather depressing. He confided the whole matter to you a couple of years ago, since you were one of the few people who knew of Skifander's existence and location.
But this girl Zeetha is clearly of Skifander. Klaus told you all about how the place is dominated by a warrior matriarchy, and that green hair isn't found anywhere else. If the place was famous, it would be plausible that the Circus would simply be aping them, but there is no profit in imitation of a land no one has ever heard of. So what is a Skifander girl doing here? And traveling with a Circus, no less? You are positively burning with curiosity about the matter. You must find some way to sound the girl out, or it will drive you quite mad.
Meanwhile, you continue to masquerade as Hugo Glassvitch. You know that Merlot would not take it kindly if he knew who you really were, so it is important that he not find out.
Summary
You are Dr. Tarsus Beetle, proper ruler of Beetleburg, one of Europa's greatest Clankmasters. You are rather on the run at the moment, as Baron Klaus von Wulfenbach (the talented but arrogant pup who rules most of Europa these days) is rather unhappy with you. You convinced him about four months ago that you had been killed in a bomb blast, so you are currently masquerading (thanks to a convenient shape-shifting device) as your sometime assistant Dr. Hugo Glassvitch.
Public Info
Personality
You are a confident man, sometimes a bit too much so for your own good. Once set in a course, you tend to be stubbornly devoted to it. Once you decide that someone is a friend or an enemy, you sometimes stick to that after you know deep down that you ought to be changing your mind. You try to be a wise and fair man, but when someone really angers you, you have a bad habit of flying completely off the handle: yelling, making threats, sending giant Clanks after them, and so on.Ultimately, the search for knowledge is the most important thing to you. Knowing how things tick is your principal purpose in life.
Some People You Know (Dr. Tarsus Beetle)
Baron Klaus von Wulfenbach: Ruler of most of Europa. Once a good man, and a student of yours, but you suspect him of being a servant of the Other. An immensely powerful Spark.
Gil von Wulfenbach: Klaus' son, who got you "killed". A Spark, but apparently a bit of a fool from how Klaus treats him.
Dr. Silas Merlot: Your sometime second-in-command at TPU. Vain and insecure, Merlot has always been a bit resentful of Sparks, but he is about as smart as a non-Spark can be. Trustworthy insofar as he can be carefully manipulated by playing on his ego, but dangerously hot-headed sometimes. Expert on the works of Amagog.
Dr. Hugo Glassvitch: Your favorite teacher from TPU. You know that he left on a sabbatical several months ago. You don't know where he went from there, but that doesn't seem to matter much. You are impersonating him. Also a smart non-Spark.
Agatha Heterodyne/Clay: Daughter of the great hero Bill Heterodyne and his untrustworthy wife Lucrezia Mongfish. A Spark of immense talent, who you have kept in the dark about her true heritage and abilities all her life. You are worried about her -- the real Agatha apparently went running off into the forest after the incident in the forest, and you haven't seen her since.
Helen Narbon: As far as you can guess, some sort of counterpart of Agatha's, who claims to be uniquely skilled in brain-swapping. If so, she's every bit as powerful as you've always suspected the real Agatha might be. Of course, you aren't entirely certain that she isn't Agatha and simply somehow confused by the incident in the Castle, so you need to be careful here.
Marcus Payne: Your best friend from childhood, who left to make his fortune by joining the circus. Currently runs Master Payne's Circus of Adventure. A minor Spark.
Zeetha: A warrior woman traveling with Payne's Circus, who is clearly from the Hidden City of Skifander. What in heaven's name is she doing out here?
Dingbot Prime: A small Clank that you have observed around the Circus, who appears to be able to build others of its kind.
Bangladesh DuPree: Klaus von Wulfenbach's personal attack dog. A deadly and gleeful killer. You've met her once or twice, and never enjoyed the experience. There aren't many people who scare you, but DuPree is unnerving.
Othar Tryggvassen: A lunatic adventurer, who is fortunately easily distracted. Tryggvassen has shown up in Beetleburg a couple of times and tried to kill you, but always run off after sparring with you for a bit. You are uneasily allied with him at the moment.
Male Spark (from Comic) (Status: In Game)
Pictures
http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/cgi-bin/gg101.cgi?date=20050420
Plots:
The Brain Transfer (Brain Transfer)
Dingbot Studies (Dingbot Studies)
Plague of Dingbots (Replicators)
Amagog's Legacy (Legacy)
People of the Mirror-World (Mirror-World)
Family History (Family History)
The Suspected Revenant (Suspected Revenant)
Children of Skifander (Children Of Skifander)
Bluesheets:
The Jaeger Cosmogony (Jaeger Cosmogony)
The Castle - Hugo (The Castle - Beetle)
Items
The Transformator (Transformator) -- A small but rather sinister-looking gun. See a GM to use.
The Eye of Amagog (Eye Of Amagog) -- A medium-sized brooch, about three inches across, rather terribly over-decorated in an old-fashioned style. The gem that makes up much of the surface can be pressed in, apparently to click something; see a GM if you want to do this.
Abilities and Disabilities
Intimidation (Intimidation) -- You are a person with a powerful personality. As such, you have the practiced (and sometimes reflexive) ability to command others through intimidation.
To intimidate someone, show them this card and spend one Point. Rant at them with power and fury for at least one minute -- try to scare the hell out of them. You are powerful, and dangerous, and not someone to be crossed. You may then give them orders, which they must follow for at least ten minutes, until their nerves calm down a bit; until then, they are keyed up and scared.
There are limits to this ability. Other strong personalities, as well as certain others, are able to resist Intimidation; it works better on normal people and weak Sparks than it does on, eg, powerful Sparks. And you cannot order someone to do something that is counter to their own basic principles, such as (in most cases) kill someone -- if you try to do so, they may spend one Point to defy you.
You may not use this ability on any given player more than once, nor may you use it overall more than once an hour.
If you have this ability, and someone else tries to use it on you, you may counter by spending a Point and going into Intimidation mode yourself. This should result in a towering argument at top volume, but neither of you winds up scaring the other.
Needs to Use Transformator (Needs Transformator) -- So long as you are trying to keep yourself disguised, you are highly dependent on the Transformator. You must re-use it on yourself every half-hour, or you will revert to your real form. This is very inconvenient, especially as the device is far from quiet.
Historical Background
The following were notes while the character was evolving. They do not necessarily represent the way it came out.
A relatively powerful Spark. Little bits of backstory seem to imply that he was once an adversary of the Heterodynes, but wound up as an ally. Ruler of Beetleburg, and head of TPU?. Referred to as "the Master" by everyone in town. Appears to know exactly what is up with Agatha and her Trilobyte? (based on his reaction on [this page]), but never let on about it. Killed fairly early in Volume 1, blown up by his own bomb.
It is really unclear whether Beetle was a good guy, a bad guy, or something in between. He claimed to be allied with Klaus, but it becomes clear that he never took that seriously. He took Agatha in, and protected her for much of her life, although we don't really know his motives for that. He harbors a slaver wasp nest, which doesn't make him look like a hero. It isn't clear who he was aiming at when he threw the bomb that killed him -- Gil [suspects that] he was throwing it at Agatha. That's an interesting theory: he might have had an agenda to kill Agatha if it looked like her secret was going to be revealed; if he was a Revenant working to bring back the Other, that's plausible.
Despite his nominally peaceful ways, Beetle stocked [a wide variety of lethal devices].
If we really wanted to have him in-game, we could use the "didn't see the body" out. He was completely blown up, which of course leaves room for teleportation. That's really kind of interesting. (LATER: actually, that's incorrect -- there was a fried body there. But we can work with that. See below.)
Beetle knows more about the Muses than anyone else (v5, p49). This might imply that he can read Moxana better than anyone else -- a useful (if dangerous) special ability.
We find out in Volume 6 that [Beetle knew about Agatha], and was planning on using her ability to command slavers for something. If he's in-game, this will have to figure in somehow. We're going to have to make a decision about whether he's a good guy, a bad guy, or something in-between. That same page also makes clear that Beetle and Klaus were friends, but Beetle had reasons not to trust Klaus; again, we may have to invent something.
12/29: Okay, here we go. It sounds like we're leaning towards having Beetle in-game. If that's the case, we have to deal with some hard problems. First, there's the fact that he was fried, not vaporized -- we have to explain away the body, as well as how he survived at all. Second, we have to deal with his isolation: he has no natural allies in the game. Third, we need to give him goals and involvement in the story. Put all of that together, and I find myself concluding that he is the linchpin of the whole thing.
Beetle has always been the master researcher. In particular, he is the greatest student of the Golden Age of Sparks, about 200 years ago. We know from canon that he was a deep student of Van Rijn. So it makes perfectly good sense that he was also one of the few serious students of the works of Amagog. He is one of the very few people in the world to even know what it was that Amagog did, studying the manipulation of reality itself.
For decades, Beetle collected the little hints about Amagog, but it was difficult, since Amagog's castle had vanished centuries before, taking with it most of his works and notes. He picked up trinkets when he could, studying and trying to understand them. And of these, the most intriguing and frustrating was the Eye of Amagog.
The Eye was said to be one of Amagog's earlier works, a small and inoffensive bauble. It was said that Amagog used it to cheat death on more than one occasion. The poem that came with it made reference to using it only in the direct of emergencies, for it would change everything when used. Beetle knew respected that enough to be cautious with it -- his life was a good one, and he didn't especially want it to change. But he also considered it the greatest of all fail-safes, so he placed it inside his own collar locket, embedding it inside one of his own insignia beetles, so that he could use it if desperate need ever came.
That desperate need did come, the day when he was confronted by Klaus and Gil in his laboratory. When he saw his own BombBug flying at him, he knew that he had lost, and that in a mere second he would be dead. So his hand flew to his throat even as the explosion began, and muttering a little prayer to all the Sparks that preceded him, activated the Eye.
He felt things shift and change; he felt himself almost stretching and mutating, and even as he felt himself dying, he also found himself separating. And then he fell out of the Mirror of Amagog, into the great hall of the Hidden Castle. He immediately began exploring the Castle, and was thrilled to realize that he had stumbled upon the greatest gold mine of research the world possessed. He found Amagog's notes, and began the laborious process of trying to understand them.
That was four months ago. Since then, he has read much, and just begun to understand the devices around him. There is much that is still mysterious, though. He knows that the Mirror is at the heart of it all -- a portal that allows one to view this reality, and others as well. He has begun to understand that Amagog's skill with reality manipulation extended to many areas. He could transport beings into and out of this reality, and travels between the realms, and began to surmise that it was one of Amagog's devices that Mongfish used to send the Heterodyne Boys away, all these years ago. He had devices to shift and mutate our own reality in subtle ways: for instance, the Eye would teleport one back to the Castle, plucking and separating one from death if necessary. He found an early device that could change a being's form for a short duration, and notes indicating that he had succeeded in melding that device with flesh.
And yet, there was much he didn't know. He could tell that he was sharing the Castle with someone, who he suspected was Amagog's legendary "Perfect Construct" (which was, of course, Sarah, choosing to keep herself hidden). He still doesn't understand how the various devices work, and only barely understands how to use them yet. And that was why, when he was fiddling with the Castle's "shield" a month ago, he caused it to fail. Suddenly, the Castle was visible again, obvious for the entire world to see. He was exposed, and that meant that his time was limited.
He activated all the Castle's various deathtraps, and that bought him some time. He began to use the shape-shifting device to disguise himself, and go out into the nearby town to find out more about the current state of things. But people began infiltrating the Castle successfully about a week ago. First was Embi, who made off with something (still need to figure out what). At that point, he decided he needed help, so he used the Mirror to grab someone who he might not have liked but thought he could predict, and who he needed -- Silas, the one person who knows Amagog's work even better than himself. Disguising himself as Hugo (who his observations had determined had left TPU months before), he presented this as an opportunity to make something of themselves by understanding this technology better.
And then, to his astonishment, came Agatha, waltzing on in past the various traps and starting to fiddle with things. He wasn't quite sure what to do -- he was surprised to see her alive at all (what rumors he had gotten indicated that she was dead), and didn't know whether to trust her. He watched as she tried something he hadn't dared himself, activating the Mirror.
And then, he felt reality stretch and bend again, not unlike when he had been transported here, but larger and more diffuse. Suddenly, he was staring at two Agathas, as well as a girl he didn't recognize. And then they were attacked by a large creature, who drove them out of the Castle. And then it started coming at him, and he realized that he had only been here at its suffrance. He grabbed the shape-shifter and ran, with Silas following him out.
Since then, two days ago, he has begun making plans. He found Agatha, who claimed to be a woman from another world named Helen, in the company of Othar (who he had tangled with once or twice) and Moloch. Seeing an opportunity here, he joined the group along with Silas. He determined their plan, which has something to do with doing a brain-swap between Othar and Klaus, and decided that it fits in nicely with his desire to control the Wulfenbachs. (He believes the Wulfenbachs are somehow evil -- we need to fill this in more.) He still has the shape-shifting device, and needs to use it frequently to maintain his disguise.
Since Beetle is the one most particularly suspicious of Klaus, he probably has the Wulfenbach map up on the wall in the Hidden Castle -- he has been thinking about the parameters of the Empire, and what it implies.
Darker 2007-01-22: Just reviewed character sheet; looks good - but might it be a good idea to more heavily imply / foreshadow that the Transformator has been going a little wonky lately? It would serve two purposes: 1. If it fails in-game, it'd seem like something foreshadowed rather than arbitrary GM intervention (ie, fair warning); 2. Knowing that the device might be going on the fritz, Beetle could choose the moment of his own revelation - something less likely to happen if he's convinced that he has a foolproof disguise.
History
Note that, on [this page], Silas implies that Beetle was Klaus' mentor at some point.
Amount of Character Potential: Good (Now at the point where he works decently well. Pulled into game, replacing Mell.)