Mordecai Eidel

Mordecai Abraham Eidel b. March 30, 1319, is a character in the web serial Tin Soldier. He lives in Hyacinth’s boarding house in Room 102. He is a red-skinned innate magic-user, and Erik’s unofficial adoptive Uncle. For money, he plays music on street-corners, although he ceased to do this for a few months due to Erik’s injury. He is quick-witted, sharp tongued, perceptive and experienced, and he knows it. This has resulted in a certain amount of arrogance, but also a great feeling of responsibility. He is generally the one in the household screaming at people to stop or slow down or do it a better way. His tendency to worry and stress about things occasionally overwhelms him, at which times he does little more than hide and cry. He has a vitriolic relationship with Hyacinth, whom he has known longer than anyone in the house save Barnaby, and he unashamedly adores Erik. Despite being an innate magic user, Mordecai has a very low capacity and little ability. He is incapable of calling or holding a god. Mainly he does substitutions, which he would tell you are very weak magic and only good for cooking. He has gotten rather good at using them for cooking, engaging in what might be considered magic-assisted molecular gastronomy. He is often press-ganged into making meals for the household because no one else wants to or can. The only other magic his manages regularly is to do with music. He is able to add voices, other instruments and other sounds to his playing, which is entertaining for street-corners but not too terribly impressive or unusual otherwise.

He has gold metalwork shoring up his lungs, which were damaged by gas during the Siege of San Rosille. Gold is not an ideal material for lungs and his do not work very well.

Description
Mordecai is a smallish person, 5’ 8” and slightly built. He favors three piece suits in gray herringbone fabric, with dark ties in solid colors or subtle patterns. In even slightly chilly weather he will add a old, soldier’s greatcoat on top of this. The fabric is faded and the brass buttons have been replaced with mismatched non-metal ones. He wears wing-tipped shoes and argyle socks. He buys all of his things second hand, so it’s all a bit worn, but he tries to be sure everything matches. He will strip down to vest and tie and shirtsleeves for practical reasons, but if you see him in less than that, then something has gone terribly wrong. He has dark red skin of a rusty shade and brown eyes. He wears his white hair just long enough to comb it back properly, and it is not receding in any way. He keeps his nails filed short, which serves the dual purpose of keeping them clean for cooking and baking and making it possible to work the strings.

Mordecai could be described as a melancholic. He’s sensitive, he worries a lot, he prefers to recharge away from people and sometimes he collapses into a puddle of guilt and stress. He does not manufacture fears like Milo, everything he’s worried about is grounded in reality; he just knows a lot more – or thinks he does – about the worrying stuff due to his life experiences. Everything about the way he relates to people comes down to wanting to avoid being hurt, whether he’s snapping at them or smiling and helping, he is trying to box them up and push them away. Erik is the only one he lets his guard down around entirely, and thus Erik is capable of hurting him a great deal.

Mordecai’s fondest wish is for everything to be fair. He knows this is not achievable, and sometimes that makes him very upset, but the important thing is to keep striving for it.

Mordecai has a dual nature, like that quarter he sometimes carries. If you need help, he is the sweetest, most helpful person in the world. Anything you need. Step on him, use him emotionally, crumple him up and throw him away, it’s all fine. He’ll smile and come back for more. If you do not need help, if you should happen to annoy him in any way, he will unload both barrels of vicious sarcasm at you, kick you in the shins... and then smile and come back for more. Erik tends to see the former side of him the most, Hyacinth the latter.

Sometimes, Mordecai ceases to function entirely, even at the level that is normal for him. This is his own intellect attempting to kill him. Hyacinth eventually comes to characterize it as an alligator. Mordecai has a lot of risk factors for depression – what with the mental trauma and the stress and the chronic lung problem – and the author is making an attempt to portray it realistically. It doesn’t just go away after a little cheering up or a grand gesture or a concrete solution. It gets worse and better and sometimes it doesn’t make any sense and in any case it needs to be dealt with on a daily basis.

Because of the depression and the cautious nature, Mordecai tends to be a bit of a buzzkill. He has a complicated relationship with the various substances that help him switch of his brain and have a good time, mainly drugs and alcohol. On the one hand, he needs to be in charge of everything and responsible and reliable and the one that fixes the problems – on the other hand, he really likes/desperately needs to be incapable of doing so sometimes. He used to drink absinthe when he was younger and he got drunk almost every night during the siege. Currently, he confines his drinking to when people request truly hideous songs of him, but he considers that necessary to play them. He has locked himself in responsible mode because that is what he believes Erik requires of him.

Mordecai’s musical tastes run a narrow spectrum of classic rock. The Beatles, certainly, but not Wings or The Plastic Ono Band. The Who, The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin are also acceptable. Anything much beyond that is either cloying, stupid or sedation. ABBA is right out.

Early Life
Mordecai grew up in a series of substandard housing situations in San Rosille, from furnished rooms to tenement apartments, with his mother and father, two brothers, and a younger sister who did not survive past childhood. His mother played piano and his father the ‘cello. Mordecai learned to play the ‘cello, and got a job doing voice from music for silent films. He married fairly young and his parents did not approve of the girl, after which point he pretty much lost contact with his family.

Marriage
The marriage lasted about six months. The girl’s name was Cathy and she was purple. They were compatible physically and not in any other way. They screamed at each other and threw things and she even hit him a few times. They had the marriage annulled, as they lacked the money for a divorce. She wanted to be married to someone else and he wanted to be in a band.

The Cut-Flag Revolt
The band went longer than the marriage, but it got out of hand. They got involved in a sympathetic political movement that wanted to eliminate poverty and eat the rich. There was a lot of absinthe consumed. At some point, someone suggested uniforms and a flag. Riots, street-fighting and barricades resulted soon thereafter. They accomplished none of their goals or any change in government policy, but a lot of people died. Mordecai was twenty-four at the time. He is ashamed of his participation and does not like to talk about it.

Chocolate Cake
Having spent the interim years playing ‘cello in movie theaters, Mordecai was abruptly removed from this sedate existence by a group of young, desperate soldiers in the early part of the Siege of San Rosille. They came running into the theater where he was playing one night, during shelling, and requested someone who could make a chocolate cake. The chocolate cake was a required offering for a god, Solange, who was capable of finding safe places to hole up in the city where no one would die for an evening. Solange was currently occupying the body of eighteen-year-old Alba Weitz. Mordecai volunteered his services as a baker, and was able to complete an acceptable cake with very few resources, lacking an oven, a cake pan or any eggs or butter. Solange found them a place to stay, and the entire movie theater went along as well. They took the projector and Mordecai took his ‘cello and they had movies on a white-painted brick wall.

Alba spent most of the evening sick, as Solange had used her to consume an entire chocolate cake. Mordecai felt responsible, having made the cake, and also because of Alba’s young age, and because he feels responsible for everything. He tried to be kind and take care of her. In the morning, she asked him to come back with her and keep making chocolate cake. He did.

In this way, Mordecai fell into being a handler during the Siege of San Rosille. Mainly, he took care of Alba and did supply runs with her (He called the young soldiers he went out with his ‘kids.’), but because he was clever and responsible and willing to take responsibility for a lot of things, he became a de facto leader, even though he had no military rank or experience. He did a lot of cooking and he learned a lot about gods and what they like and what they do to people and how to cope with it. He also learned how to hypnotize people, to help them cope with the mental trauma of being ridden by gods. He uses a quarter.

During this time, he took a few bad doses of chlorine gas, one almost lethal, which damaged his lungs and resulted in a chronic, bloody cough. He abandoned his ‘cello and taught himself to play violin, as that was smaller and easier to take with him. Also, Alba gifted him with a locket that had a couple embarrassing photos of them in it.

Alba’s Pregnancy
Alba took a bad bullet wound defending the wall and called Beauty to deal with it quickly. It is likely her pregnancy resulted from one of two intimate encounters Beauty had that night, as gods do not care about contraceptives.

She was determined to keep the child and it is not wise to argue with a lady who can easily call a god that is capable of vaporizing you. It was also over a year into the siege and they were all a bit crazy by then. A new life seemed like a hopeful thing with so many people dying. Mordecai and his kids swore they’d take care of the child, as well as many of the handlers and the others who called gods. Cousin Violet told them it was going to be a boy.

Alba took Mordecai aside and had a serious conversation, knowing she was in a dangerous line of work and she might not live through the siege, and made him promise in particular to take care of the child in the event of any disaster – even if that meant abandoning her.

She told him on multiple occasions she wanted to name the boy after that handsome guy in the movie posters, Erik Rudolph.

The Yellow Brick Road
The Gray Wall came down on November 16, 1368. Starcatching ceased and supplies began to run out soon after. With no chocolate, Alba could not call Solange, and they had to rely upon Cousin Violet to find them safe places to hide during supply runs. Violet directed them to an abandoned hotel with a flooded basement that was safe from bombs and gas but lousy with a deadly contagious respiratory disease, anathema. The hotel was called The Yellow Brick Road. Alba and two other soldiers fell ill. Mordecai was also coughing up blood, although he tended to do that anyway, and he wanted to stay with Alba. It did not take much convincing to get the others to leave him there. The two soldiers died quickly but Alba hung on, for an incredible amount of time. Mordecai took care of her in the hotel for nearly a month, growing steadily weaker and less sane, until she was able to birth her child. She died shortly thereafter, and Mordecai left the hotel, intending only to find someone to take care of Erik before he succumbed to (what he believed was) anathema himself.

Hyacinth found them in a snowbank, correctly diagnosed Mordecai’s problem as a combination of damage from chlorine gas, cold and exhaustion, and did a quick repair on Mordecai’s lungs with the cheap gold locket he had hanging around his neck. She dragged them both home and saved their lives.

After the Siege
Mordecai remained at Hyacinth’s house, with Erik, and made no attempt to go back to the wall. He felt he had been abandoned, not only by his friends, but by the gods as well. He had promised to take care of Erik, and that meant keeping him away from the worst of the fighting, too. The siege ended in January, 1369, with San Rosille becoming occupied territory, and Marsellia surrendered entirely two and a half years later. Mordecai rode out several cycles of weird boarders, including a man named Gary who kept a goat in Room 103. He replaced the violin he had left with Alba at the hotel with a ‘cello, and began playing on street-corners – Cinephone having made voice from music obsolete in movie theaters.

Seth Zusman is the only acquaintance from the siege that Mordecai has any kind of relationship with, and that is because Seth ran into him and made a concerted effort to apologize. Even so, it is a tenuous association and they each have their own reasons for not wanting to really be friends with each other.

Canburry Square Riot
While Mordecai was playing ‘cello in Canburry Square, downtown, Erik managed to get away from him for just long enough to take some serious damage from a group of horses. Two young men discovered Erik lying bloody in the street and instead of doing anything to help him, they began laughing and kicking him. Mordecai attacked these men with the only thing he had on him at the time, the ‘cello. In his extremity, he performed a deconstruction and a merger, resulting in an explosion and possibly a fire. It also began a riot, which Mordecai did not much notice as he was running for home with a bleeding, semi-conscious Erik wrapped in his coat at the time. He did seven miles from downtown to Hyacinth’s house, broke some of the gold repair work in his lungs, and rifled the trash cans for some good metal for Hyacinth to repair Erik with along the way. Hyacinth was able to make an alloy of tin, copper and antimony to patch Erik’s shattered skull and stop the bleeding. This was not a good material, but better than allowing him to bleed out on the kitchen table.

Mordecai was required to lie down and heal from his broken/newly-repaired lungs for most of the riot, while Hyacinth dealt with the fallout. She had to give him a large amount of liquor to keep him in bed and he made his way down to the basement to be with Erik as soon as possible.

“I promised her I’d take care of him.” – Mordecai

Mordecai quickly tumbled to the fact that not only was Erik gravely injured and healing from brain damage, the gods were also interfering with him. He was unable to help Erik with the injury or the gods, he could only watch it happening. He began to sink into despair.

Arrested
Mordecai lost his fraying composure and ran out of the house after the gods began talking to Erik during his first attempt to eat at the kitchen table. Milo ran after him, but managed only to upset him enough that he began screaming and attracted police attention. A wanted poster had been issued due to the explosion in Canburry Square, seeking a red man in connection with a possible terrorist attack. Mordecai was arrested. Milo managed to alert Hyacinth, and she and the General went down to the police station to bail him out – only to discover that bail would not be set until a day later and he was refusing to give the police his name. The two young men that he injured with the ‘cello were brought in to identify him, but they refused to do so, largely due to the insistence of John Green-Tara, who appeared to be feeling guilty over his callous treatment of Erik. Mordecai was returned home in somewhat damaged condition, having been vigorously ‘questioned’ at the police station. He told Erik he fell down some stairs.

Unstable
Sanaam returned home in early winter to find Erik injured and Mordecai so depressed that he was barely coming out of his room. Sanaam took matters into his own hands and recruited Magnificent to demand Mordecai teach her about substitutions and tell her what he did during the war. This was marginally successful, and Mordecai told a few stories and produced a few meals, some cookies and a chocolate cake, though under duress.

After Sanaam’s departure, Mordecai engaged in a daily and sometimes hourly struggle to remain strong and take care of Erik. He suffered frequent failures and contemplated suicide on at least one occasion. Not knowing the extent or the nature of his difficulty, Hyacinth applied anger and guilt in an attempt to get him to straighten up and act normal, but she became frustrated enough with him to allow him to remain in his room much of the time. He spent all of Erik’s birthday hiding in bed, but was able to come out and cook dinners for a few days of Yule.

Sick
In early February, Hyacinth entered Mordecai’s bedroom to drag him out and found him curled up in bed with a high fever and double pneumonia. Knowing that they would not take a magic-user with a high fever at the hospital, regardless of his lack of ability, Hyacinth moved him into the kitchen where it was warmer and attempted to treat him herself. This was not terribly successful.

Key Posts

 * The Man, The Boy and The House – First appearance.
 * Cornflakes and Blue Serge – Arrested.
 * Peter and the Wolf, Mordecai and the Locket – Tells Erik the story of the locket Hyacinth used to repair his lungs.


 * Flour Power – Maggie drags him out of his room and makes him cook and tell stories.
 * Happiness is a Penny-Farthing – Strugging with emotional health and briefly suicidal.
 * Sick – Falls ill.