Erik Weitz

Erik Rudolph Weitz b. December 26, 1368, is a character in the web serial Tin Soldier. He lives in Hyacinth’s boarding house with his Uncle Mordecai in room 102. He is a green-skinned innate magic user. 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. He is a sweet person, careful, intuitive, and he tries very hard. He 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. He worships Maggie and envies her self-sufficiency and he adores his Uncle.

Erik has a large magical capacity, but at the moment it is untrained. 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 surfaces 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 or hear them in this way, 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.

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 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 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 that 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 mean time, 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 person. 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 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
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.

Injured
In the summer if his sixth year, Erik successfully slipped away from his Uncle and and got up right next to some real horses. It did not go well. While he was lying broken and bloody in the street, two young men began kicking him. That did not go too well for them, either.

Erik regained consciousness in the basement of the house on Violena. He was in terrible pain from the injury and the repair and the radio wouldn’t stop talking to him. This was, in fact, the first god to speak to him, but he didn’t know that – or much of anything – at the time. He remained pretty well scrambled for a few months, during which time he struggled to communicate and to make any kind of sense out of what was happening to him.

Meddling Gods
Erik had a lot of visitors in the basement. Hyacinth, Maggie and Mordecai were real people who lived in the house and cared for him. Everyone else was invisible, and just passing through when they took an interest in the sick little boy who could see them. From Erik’s behavior it became quickly obvious to the people taking care of him that the gods were messing with him, although not in what ways. From what Erik is able to remember/understand, they mainly talked to him and poked him, but they may have been making some alterations.

As he improved and he became more aware of his difficulty with words, and he started to realize no one else was seeing the other people, he stopped talking to them and he stopped seeing them. They did not go away and they continued to gift him with random information on various matters, each according to their own whims. While Erik was still very sick, he was the least able to filter and subsume this information, and he tended to say things without understanding or even remembering what he said. It was usually unimportant or nonsensical but occasionally upsetting and it came to a head when Mordecai ran out of the house and got himself arrested. Erik was not enlightened as to his Uncle’s brush with the law, by either the gods or the household, but he did manage to get a story about how his mother gifted his Uncle with a locket.

Once Erik was able to walk around without incapacitating pain, but while he was still too weak to put up much of a fight, the gods began bothering him in a new way – taking control of his body without permission and trying to use him to get what they wanted. This happened when he was tired and unfocused, which was frequently. It was pretty upsetting for everyone in the house, but particularly his Uncle, who knew exactly what was happening and could even identify the gods.

Who Are You People?
Erik required reintroduction to the household multiple times, as he was having difficulty with memory in the first place, and later just difficulty assigning words to things and names to people. He sorted out his Uncle and Maggie and Hyacinth pretty quickly. Sanaam arrived home while Erik was still really screwed up, and he hadn’t been back since before Erik was hurt, and he was weird-looking and he was freaked out about Erik being hurt and not remembering him, which made him a lot harder to deal with. He was friendly and he knew a lot about monsters and he was willing to draw them, so Erik warmed up to him pretty fast during his visit, even if he didn’t remember much about him beyond the friendliness and the monsters after he left.

Ann and Milo took some time to get the hang of, since they’re the same person in different clothes and also because they stayed Milo most of the time while he was working on Erik’s replacement eye. Both Ann and Milo put in an appearance for Erik’s seventh birthday, and he was doing quite a bit better by then, but even after he could differentiate between them, he still tended to switch their names. They didn’t mind. Ann and Milo gave him a pocket watch with pictures relating to what things Erik needed to be doing at which times, which helped him be a little more independent about taking care of himself. Sanaam reluctantly left him a gift of tin soldiers, which he had purchased before knowing about Erik’s injury or that Erik had been repaired with tin. Erik liked them anyway. Mordecai was not coping well with Erik’s birthday, and Erik shared a cupcake with him in an attempt to cheer him up and get him to eat something. It didn’t help very much.

Barnaby and the unknown occupant of Room 101 came up while Erik was attempting to get Maggie to label the entire household with crayons. Maggie got Erik to ask the gods to give him information about Room 101, as an experiment, and they did seem to be willing to do that, but he was unable to remember what they told him – due to some magic that prevents people from knowing things about Room 101. Hyacinth was willing to give an assist in explaining Barnaby, although it still didn’t make a lot of sense. Barnaby contributed by identifying the mouse in striped trousers that Erik had drawn as an evil omen and asking him to draw over it.

A New Eye
By the time Milo and Hyacinth finished Erik’s mechanical eye, Erik was recovered enough to begin learning how to use it. This required a long period of adjustment, during which the eye often wandered off to look at whatever it wanted and screwed with his ability to see anything properly. Hyacinth told him a few stories about David Valentine, who had a golden nose, to make him feel a little better about having a golden eye.

As he got better at using the eye, he began to see the gods again, but only when he had the eye in. He asked Hyacinth about it, not wanting to tell his Uncle for fear of upsetting him. Hyacinth confirmed that Erik was probably seeing gods and not just crazy, and that it probably wasn’t the eye that was causing it, and she agreed that he shouldn’t tell his Uncle, or anyone else in case the gods happened to notice. She advised Erik to go back to ignoring them, as that seemed to get them to quit paying so much attention to him before. It worked reasonably well, but Lame Anthony and Cousin Violet are often around the house and they both know he can see them.

The First Time
Erik’s Uncle fell gravely ill with double pneumonia in late winter. The voice from the radio made a persistent reappearance, suggesting he call a god to save his Uncle. Erik eventually resolved to do so – behind everybody’s back with Maggie’s assistance. He came back with Auntie Enora, a healer who thrives on cigarettes and coffee and nothing else. Erik was willing to agree to no food and no sleep and essentially to being run into the ground, after which point he lost all control of what his body was doing.

Key Posts

 * The Man, The Boy and The House – First appearance.
 * Pink Dress and Bad Reception – Hearing voices from the radio.
 * In the Room, the People Come and Go – Sick and seeing gods in the basement.
 * Table Talk – Meets Sanaam again.
 * Edge of Seven – His seventh birthday.
 * Whaddya Get When You Cross Bowie, Brahe and Mercury? - Gets his new eye.
 * The Visibles – Seeing gods again.
 * Sick – Discovers his Uncle is very ill.
 * Crisis\Opportunity – Calls Auntie Enora