Kreuz

Character age:

23 at death, a bit older than that now

Character gender:

Male

Offsite roleplay:

This doll's character is not available for offsite roleplay.

An automaton created to hunt magic users, but then accidently fell in love with one.

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Kreuz watched the man in the shabby coat fumble with a handful of coins in his pocket, and decided he was just a spendthrift, not an elaborate con.

He was trying to haggle down the price of a cup of tea for christssakes. Kreuz glanced at the cup dispassionately as the man began heaping sugar into it. It turned from vaguely brown water to vaguely brown sludge.

No, the only person getting conned here was the shabby man himself.

The man took a sip and smiled in the depths of his hood. Kreuz's teeth ached, despite the fact that he hadn't had sugar, or, indeed, teeth, for years now.

He refocused on the market.

It was a fairly typical day: not necessarily bustling, but busy. Cloudcast. It was the kind of day one struggled to describe for all it's mundanity. A child giggled sharply. Across the square, a horse snuffled. Kreuz exhaled out of habit.

There was a shout to clear the way, and both Kreuz and the shabby man looked up at the newfangled steamcarriage slowly creaking across the plaza on the rails embedded into the cobblestone. Well, Kreuz looked up from his navel gazing, and then down to the market square below.

His position on the roof of the palace afforded him a vantage literally out of reach of his human colleagues. It was out of sight, too, as his pallor made him resemble one of the many gargoyles more than anything man shaped lurking on the roofline. He rubbed at his left eye. The glass lens that allowed him to focus so finely was scratched. It wasn't enough to hinder him, but it was enough to be annoying. He'd have to get it fixed the next time a telescopist came to court.

The horse whinnied. The car backfired. The child screamed.

Kreuz was a hundred meters away and twice that in the air. He couldn't do anything even if he wanted to. He had to make himself want to.

The horse screamed as it skittered away from it's rider, knocking the cart it was dragging sideways and sending it careening at the child, who shrieked in terror. Kreuz reached his hand out like he could do anything by the gesture.

A human wouldn't have caught it. Despite his focus on the child, Kreuz saw the shabby man's fingers twitch. The child stumbled back, and the cart clipped the edge of her skirt.

Her wail erupted into a scream as her mother snatched her off the ground and bundled her into her arms, cooing comforting nonsense. Her husband began screaming at the owner of the cart, who shouted abuse back, in between jabbing his thick finger at the car. The passengers peered out of the thick glass windows, muttering amongst themselves in relief.

Kreuz ignored all of them, and scrambled down the wall as quickly as he could. The shabby man stood in the midst of the chaos, and drained his tea, leaving the cup on the table. Kreuz cussed, and dropped. He hit the ground badly, and could hear his right knee blow out. He ignored it, and sprinted for the marketplace.

The shabby man was gone by the time he got there, but Kreuz could smell the slick smell of sugar leading into one of the alleys. He ducked into the ratmaze of old construction. His nose pricked with the stink of confined bodies, of the biological existence of too many humans in too small an area.

Blood, too. It surrounded him, but he could pick out the distinct threads of stale tea and spellery.

Kreuz followed the trail until he rounded a corner and spotted the shabby man.

He was leaning heavily against the brick wall, smearing another layer of grime over his filthy coat. His fingers were gaudily bejewelled, and vanished into his hood to press on his eye. Kreuz smelled fresh blood.

He was fairly average, but it was the sort of average that he tried to disguise through eccentricity. His unfashionable long hair spilled out of his hood onto his chest. His shirt was stained and torn. It hurt Kreuz's eyes to look at it. The collar of his shirt fell open at the neck: no cravat or tie either.

He glanced up, and met Kreuz's gaze with the glint of a pale eye. The other was swollen shut.

"Oh hello," he said airily. "Sorry, is this your corner? I'll only be a moment."

Kreuz pulled his ironlock out of its sheath and leveled it at the man.

"Ah." He slowly pulled his coat open, displaying the torn lining, and a small handful of moth holes in his shirt. "If you're trying to rob me I'm afraid you'll be sorely disappointed. I just spent my last tencent on some tea."

It had been syrup, but that was semantics.

"Hands by your ears." Kreuz said. His voice buzzed with an almost imperceptible metallic tinge.

"I really don't have anything." The man insisted, raising his hands over his head.

There was a certain familiarity about him, perhaps his stance or his bearing, that made Kreuz suspect he was either an estranged member of some noble lineage, or a bastard of the same.

"Turn around."

The shabby man complied, but not before twitching his hand. Kreuz felt the familiar tug of spellery, but resisted the irresistible urge to move.

The man gasped in pain, his already injured eye screwing even more tightly shut.

"You're only making things worse for yourself." Kreuz informed him, digging the flintlock into his back with one hand, and pulling his hands down into a set of manacles with the other.

"Ah." The man said, when Kreuz's hand closed around his wrist. "You're one of those mechanical men, aren't you?"

Kreuz didn't respond. The man was taller than he was, but Kreuz was unnaturally strong, and had no trouble manipulating him.

"I saw Von Kempelen's Automaton Turk in Vienna a few years ago." The man continued. "Really masterful work. They shooed me away when I kept heckling the plays."

"There was a grandmaster hidden inside the table. Walk."

"Really?" The shabby man twisted his head 'round, trying to look at Kreuz. "I never would have guessed."

Something in Kreuz felt a little silly. Here he was, leading the type of man who shouted over chess by the cuffs, on suspicion of spellery. The more sensible part of him ignored it. He wasn't like a human, to mistake things he saw. The man had performed a spell, ostensibly to save a child, but even evil men were capable of occasionally kindness.

"Keep moving."

Kreuz led the man through the brick maze. They were about to emerge into daylight when Kreuz felt the tug of failed spellery. The shabby man gasped in pain and stumbled on his step.

"Get up, you—"

Kreuz didn't manage to finish his sentence before half the wall fell on him. His instincts from a lifetime of being a frail human had his arms up over his head before the first brick hit, but even his reactions couldn't clear him in time. He took the blows, and ended up half buried in the rubble.

"Sorry about that," the shabby man managed, one hand cupping his bleeding nose. He sagged against the adjacent wall. "But I really can't have you arresting me."

Kreuz's eyes blazed.

Death had deadened his emotions. He couldn't remember the last time he had felt joy, although satisfaction and pride weren't unfamiliar yet. Similarly, frustration was a common friend. Rage on the other hand…

"I'll kill you," he hissed through gritted teeth. "I'll kill you!"

The man tilted his head at Kreuz, an eyebrow cocked. "Well."

"You bastard!" He howled. It was like a burst damn. Perhaps the spellery had done something, or perhaps it was simply the result of years of staring dead eyed at the Baron Commissioner and his officers and pretending to care about their petty intrapersonal politics. Whatever it was, in that moment, all Kreuz wanted to do was to wringe the shabby man's neck until it snapped under his hands.

He yanked, felt something break, but his arm came loose and he barely bothered aiming before he emptied his shot at the man.

He could hear the man's eye pop and bleed under his eyelid, and he barely managed to bite back a gasp of pain, but the bullet slowed, until the shabby man caught it in his palm like it was a gentle toss.

His hand shook badly enough that the bullet rattled out of his hand and clattered to the brick.

"Ah," he managed, but his voice was thick.

Kreuz couldn't untangle his own dull emotions enough to decide if he felt guilty or rapturous.

"How rude." A dribble of blood leaked from under the shadow of his cloak. Kreuz watched it trail down the shabby man's cheek until it landed next to the bullet with a fat plop. "I never did anything to you."

"Bastard," Kreuz spat. "Bitch."

The shabby man managed a weak smile, and kicked a brick Kreuz's way. It landed on the top of the pile with a clatter.

"Well." He said again, visibility wincing as he shrugged.

The shabby man was long gone by the time Kreuz managed to dig himself out of the rubble. His right arm dangled from it's socket, and he could tell even without looking that the complex series of gears that allowed him to move were all but destroyed. The arm aside, he was largely undamaged. The ivory that made up the majority of his body was slightly chipped, but otherwise unharmed, and the exposed metal that made up the rest of him looked new.

Kreuz pushed himself to his feet, feeling more like a pocket watch, or the mechanical bird His Majesty kept, than a man.

He flexed his fingers, watching them move without really feeling it.

Then he shook his head, and returned to the palace.

Kreuz

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