Info Sheet

[childsized]

ROBERT THE DOLL THE LAST HALLOWEEN PLAYER NAME: Mali JOURNAL: childsized PLURK: malachiical TIMEZONE: GMT-5

OVERVIEW As a monster, Robert came into being in the Shadow Realm upon the birth of a little human boy named Robert Eugene Otto. Since a monster's life is linked to their human, so that the moment their human dies, they will as well... unless they're the one to kill them... Robert swiftly set out to find a way out of the Shadow Realm to find him. And since the border between the human world and the Shadow Realm was closely protected by the Phagocyte, a special monsterless human of immense power who was there specifically to keep monsters from crossing to kill their humans en masse, Robert had to be sneaky about it. He managed to slip through the cracks, unnoticed, and found Robert Eugene Otto on the boy's fourth birthday. However, he did not hate his human. Despite believing getting into the human world to find him was worth any risk, and coveting the life the little human had and Robert never could, Robert liked spending time with Gene, and Gene considered him his closest and dearest friend in return. He even dressed Robert in old clothes of his, and gave him his own first name. And Robert stayed with Gene as his best friend for seventy years... During which time he made Gene's life a hell. As a monster, Robert's purpose in life was to cause suffering and discomfort, and of course to be Gene's personal terror. Not out of maliciousness, but due to jealousy of those Gene would choose to spend time with instead of himself, Robert did his best to drive everyone away from Gene and destroyed the normal life he could have had. And Robert had never actually discarded the idea of killing Gene, either - as a monster, that too was in his nature. When Gene was seventy-four, he asked Robert to kill him. And Robert did. And Robert never forgot Gene - later admitting to thinking of him every day after. At some point over the next forty-three-or-so years, Robert fell in with a group of undead - not monsters, but people who used to be human, or were created by humans, rather than springing into being in the Shadow Realm. By that point, at least, he was lying about what he was, saying that he was a cursed doll given life via Haitian voodoo, created by a human. This gave him some degree of protection from being found by the Phagocyte, though didn't protect him fully; the Phagocyte (or at least one of them, as the Phagocyte might have changed over the course of Robert's life) was secretly killing off as many of the undead as he could, for reasons that are unclear. Robert became friends (or, for the most part, "friends") with a severely emotionally stunted 600+ year old vampire named Ringley, Ringley's "pet" were-possum named Banjo, and an Internet-addicted activist ghoul named Shirley, and started helping out a ghost named Dr. Fugue, usually by stealing bodies for him to raise the dead with (or patch some of his already raised dead up with). And Robert, Ringley, Banjo, and Shirley were graverobbing for Dr. Fugue on the night the Phagocyte was struck down and the world ended. On Halloween Night, with the Phagocyte no longer keeping them in check, monsters swarmed out of the Shadow Realm en masse and basically began to wipe out humanity. A little 10-year-old girl named Mona, pursued (luckily not that actively) by a monster, tried ducking through the cemetary to get to the police station faster, and asked them for help. While Robert was unsuccessful in convincing Shirley to give Mona her phone, he did convince Mona that, despite her misgivings, she would be safer coming with them to ask Dr. Fugue for help, since while she thought they might murder her, he pointed out that the monsters definitely would. Robert caught on quickly that Mona thought they were just kids in costumes, but he didn't say anything about it until they were actually back at Dr. Fugue's house. After she screamed for a very long time, with no one else able to actually get her to stop, Robert finally managed, in part telling her they'd brought her there to help her and would toss her back out if she didn't let them, and in part telling her if she didn't stop screaming they might resort to, uh, drastic murderous measures after all. After Fugue explained all that monster stuff and the things about the Phagocyte, the doctor came to the conclusion that the Phagocyte must have been killed and that they'd need to go and find his son in order to make him the new Phagocyte and save humanity. Fugue also decided that Mona was the one who needed to do it. Despite her protests, he gave her a magic weapon (a sickle that promptly seemed to magically bond with her), recruited the others to go with her (Robert volunteered, noting that someone sane should be there to bring back the pieces when she failed), told them where to find the new Phagocyte's mother, and forced them out the door, refusing to answer any more questions, in large part because he didn't actually know any of the answers. When heading through the woods, Robert "reassured" Mona, while also reminding her that she was in the most danger as a human, and explained that his sole purpose in life was to bring discomfort and suffering to those around him. He enjoyed her horror when they found a recently-killed corpse by a lake, but when she was attacked by a nearby monster and couldn't defend herself, he picked up the sickle and killed the monster for her. Then handed the sickle to her and said that he only ever helped once, and that if she didn't save herself next time, no one else would. When they got to Ringley's house to convince his vampire father to let them borrow their flying car, Robert was the one who explained to Ringley's dad that they were going to save the world (Ringley had forgotten), and his dad ultimately agreed. Robert actually backed Ringley up on the idea that they should split up to search the house for where the car was hidden, since it would be faster that way, and sent a skeleton "scarer" that had been hired by Ringley's dad to go terrify Mona, enjoying her screams from the distance. When he and Shirley bumped into each other after searching their areas of the house, they had some actually friendly conversation, him finding out why she was so distracted by her phone (given the situation and all the deaths and monsters suddenly hopping online, the Internet was exploding, which he conceded sounded exciting). Upon finding Mona again, she was being attacked by another monster, and Robert refused her pleas to help her again, noting that she'd never learn if he kept doing things for her. When she failed at killing the monster and was nearly absorbed into it, he shrugged it off and was about to leave with the others before she fought her way back out of the thing, sort of destroying it, and they all set off together again to take the flying car to the new Phagocyte's house. ...Which turned out to be a basically condemned building, in horrible condition. It was the right place, though, and after finding the Phagocyte's mother, Robert talked her around to telling them the location of her son, so that Dr. Fugue could help him become the next Phagocyte, even though she didn't trust Fugue at all and wasn't sure he knew what he was doing. On the way to the party where the heir was, Shirley realized she might actually know the boy, an Internet friend of hers she was having a fight with over the shitty jokes he made about undead. At that moment, she was sent the link to a video - made by the woman who had taken the Phagocyte out of commission herself, who explained that she was doing this for the undead, that he had been mistreating and killing them and that they were free of him now and could make new lives for themselves. Robert revealed that he knew who the woman was, sort of, a potentially mad undead woman who had worked for the Phagocyte, and revealed further that he had known or at least suspected what was happening before, but hadn't shared that with them because he hadn't been at all invested in the outcome of the "quest" and had believed Mona would die within the first hour. He told her then, however, that he had become invested, and that he was rooting for her, and would continue to help her. When they reached the party, however, they found all the humans there slaughtered, and the monster who murdered them all still in attendance. Mona fought him, alone, with her magic sickle, but he was immortal after killing his human, and even when he was in pieces was fully aware and able to talk. Mona took advantage of this to grill him as to the location of the heir, and found out that he was in the Shadow Realm and likely dead or about to be killed. After confirming with Shirley that he was still alive, since he was trying to text her, she found out that to get to the Shadow Realm, a monster had to take you. The monster she was interrogating, naturally, refused to do so himself, so they were back at square one. Leaving quickly, they took off in the flying car again, only for it to be destroyed by a flying monster. Robert landed some distance away from Mona, near Shirley, and when Mona started screaming he commented to her that at least she was always easy to find. When they found her, however, the monster that had been after Mona from the beginning, who they had assumed was her monster and out to kill her, was holding her, and smacked him away. This seemed to hurt him, but he didn't seem entirely concerned, but more thoughtful. Mona had broken her arm in the fall, and Robert sent Ringley off to go get Dr. Fugue for help - which he admitted to Mona was just to get Ringley out of the way, because Dr. Fugue was trapped haunting that house and couldn't leave, and also wasn't a good doctor and shouldn't be trusted with her arm. He also pointed out that Mona's monster didn't seem to be trying to kill her at all, and noted that some monsters might not want immortality, but only a chance to live, and that it might actually be protecting her from meeting a premature demise. After Shirley set her arm, Mona convinced her monster (after Robert's usual attempts at convincing seemed to be failing) to take them to the Shadow Realm. And her monster took her... But Robert took Shirley's hand and took them both himself. As he explained the dreamlike strangeness of the Shadow Realm, Mona realized something was off about the whole situation, and asked him to tell her again how he'd been made. He admitted to them both for the first time that he was a monster, and told them all about his history with Eugene Otto. He told Mona that it went against all his instincts to help her, that he badly wanted the Phagocyte's bloodline to die out, but that humanity needed the Phagocyte and he believed monsters needed humanity. He also cautioned Mona that no matter how much a human and their monster might want their relationship to work, eventually it wouldn't... but he urged her, too, to name her monster. And judged her a little bit when she named the monster Susannah and her sickle Susan. Upon finding where the heir was being kept, thanks to Shirley being able to track him by his cell phone, Shirley realized that one of the four monsters that had him in his possession was Ba'al, a very powerful monster who called himself a demon. Ba'al had created her, had wanted to use her to end the world himself, and she realized that he also might have found the heir through her as well. Mona volunteered that she and Robert and Susannah would distract Ba'al and his friends so that Shirley could go and rescue the heir, and Shirley warned her that Ba'al was very powerful and they'd probably both be dead soon, and said her farewells. Mona, shaken by that, hugged Robert, which for once he allowed, and asked him to make sure they didn't all fail if she and Shirley really did die. Robert reassured her that she wouldn't die, because Susannah and he were big scary monsters too (or, he amended, scary anyway) and that she wasn't alone. And when Mona tried distracting Ba'al, first with insults, then by attacking him with the sickle... It couldn't kill him, because he was immortal, and he turned to kill her. Robert stepped up, and cautioned Ba'al that he was immortal too, and that he'd "been around long enough to learn to endure most anything." Ba'al promptly revealed that immortals could kill other immortals, picked Robert up, and crushed his head. Things went very badly after that. Shirley and the heir were caught, and one of the monsters, Ōmukade, ripped her body apart and her head off, and though that couldn't immediately kill her, it gave her very limited time. One of the other monsters, Stranger, swarmed Mona and Susannah with a vast amount of ghostly pumpkin monsters that they simply couldn't seem to fight off. Mona, despairing but refusing to give up home, ran over to Robert's body and tried to figure out a way to put him back together again, reasoning that he might still be alive, since he was immortal and could maybe reform. When she touched his hand to her sickle, something seemed to happen. The hand reacted, and the sickle floated, and Mona seemed in pain, and by the end of it Robert's hand was holding onto the sickle loosely and the sickle that had bonded with Mona seemed to have bonded with Robert as well, and was now capable of killing immortal monsters, just as they could kill each other. And so, with Robert's... not exactly living help... Mona was able to kill Stranger, Ignifer, Ba'al, and Ōmukade, rescue the heir, and get him and Shirley's still-alive head back to Dr. Fugue. Robert isn't exactly aware of that last part, though. PERSONALITY Robert can be kind of a dick, but he's not always as bad as all that either, despite getting instinctive enjoyment out of other people's discomfort and suffering. He's capable of making friends, and he recently fell into the role of acting as mentor to a 10 year old girl, and even if he's not always nice about it, sometimes he is. He often plays the role of the straight man/only sane man, when the 10 year old's not doing it. He's well spoken beyond his usually-assumed years and is quite a diplomat, often taking point on talking to and convincing adults. He's also generally pretty unflappable, in a way that implies either incredible power or an intense detachment from situations and from other people, or both, but also winds up invested in Mona's quest, and is kinder to her as he gets more attached. ABILITIES Robert's only real power seems to be his immortality. He can still be badly hurt, but given the capabilities of the murderous monster at the party, he'd be able to talk so long as he still has parts capable of it, and able to move around enough to meld himself back together even if he's ripped to pieces. He also seems to be able to sense and get enjoyment out of other people's suffering, if not actually have any special powers to be able to cause it. Finally, he might be a fair amount stronger than he looks, though not super-strong; he's capable of lifting and swinging a sickle that's about as big as he is, even though he's a (mostly) cloth doll that probably weighs about 10 pounds himself.

INFORMATION CANONPOINT: Right after Page 93 ("The Power Of Hope") AGE: 117+ HEIGHT: 4'6" BUILD: Mostly fabric doll HAIR: Blond EYES: Black, lifeless APPEARANCE: Link OCCUPATION: None RESIDENCE: America PERMISSIONS BACKTAGGING: YES 4TH-WALLING: YES THREADJACKING: YES MIND READING: ASK FIRST FIGHTING: YES ROMANCE: YES INJURY: YES KILLING: ASK FIRST

( efficio )