Pahl Ebersol

Handle: Quibby
== Description ==
Age: 24
Height: 5'10"
Weight: 130 lbs.
Hair: None
Eyes: Green
Primary Weapon: Spring-loaded double-bladed quarterstaff (when it works; see below)
Secondary Weapon: Spring-loaded bolt gun (short-ranged iron bolt, when it works; see previous)
Tertiary Weapon: a turn of speed and good cardiovascular health
Division: Other (Engineer)
Pahl Ebersol is the walking stereotype of a tinkerer. He stands at 5’10” and weighs just over 130 lbs, mostly skin and bone. He has a bit of strength for somebody who seems on the wrong side of scrawny. Pahl’s skin is a light tan color, but covered in small, pink burn scars. More often than not, he has only one eyebrow, and he keeps his head shaved for that very reason. Most often, he can be seen wearing leather protective clothing, similar to a blacksmith’s. His weapons are hand-made to his design, and he handled their assembly. The bladed quarterstaff presented some issues, and still does. Though the basic overall design works in theory, in practice, there are still bugs to be worked out. Most often, pressing the catch button fires the two spring-loaded blades through the holes designed for them, where the catching mechanisms shear off and send the blades flying into the walls on either side of him. Or they don’t catch, rendering them useless in combat. Or they don’t release, leaving Pahl with a weapon more useful as a club, but with the added bonus of potentially impaling its wielder when the weapon does release. The bolt gun that Pahl designed uses an extremely heavy spring to launch a short, sharp iron bolt with enough force to punch through plate armor at point-blank range. The downside is that reloading requires a big rock and a good lean, often resulting in the spring or the catch breaking, rendering the whole weapon useless. Or, there's the added potential for the operator to introduce the weapon to his innards, if loading the weapon does not go well.
Both weapons are works in progress.
For these reasons, Pahl Ebersol has become an extremely proficient runner.
== History ==
Everybody knows a Pahl Ebersol. He’s that boy that used to put butter knives into light sockets and then hit the switch to see what would happen. He’s the boy who mixed up all the cleaning chemicals in the house in order to make a super-cleaner, resulting in a mad dash for the door to escape the Green Fog of Doom (but rendering the mixing bowl spotless and exterminating all the insects from the house at the same time). Basically, Pahl Ebersol is possessed of a perverse curiosity to tinker with the universe around him.
This trait was seen at an early age by his parents, specifically his father. Having a craftsy child was a bonus to him, as he was a clockmaker. More specifically, he was a good clockmaker. Pahl’s father built clocks that were accurate to the point where they would lose less than a minute in a month, as long as they were kept properly wound. With a son like Pahl, maybe he could become the first man to make the perfect clock!
Pahl responded to this doting by his father by making clockwork toys at an early age. By the age of 6, he was able to disassemble and resassemble a clock without help. By the age of 9, he was causing problems. An arrogant customer had demanded his money back after Pahl’s clock had been delivered. It worked perfectly, but the hands ran… well, counter-clockwise. This really didn’t seem like an issue to Pahl, as he’d placed the numbers in the right place for the way the clock ran. Another customer demanded a fix after Pahl had rigged the cuckoo in his clock to be replaced with a functioning catapult, which would fire a single dried pea across the room at 3 o‘clock in the afternoon. When Pahl’s father had opened the clock, he had been amazed to find an ammo dump consisting of nearly 150 peas that dropped neatly into the catapult, which was wound up by a special cog attached to the pendulum.
Pahl was then sent to the blacksmith to have the foolishness sweated out of him. Then he was sent to the cooper when the clockwork bellows he made in his spare time was left unattended for an hour, resulting in the forge becoming so hot that the anvil glowed. Then he was sent to the thatcher when his idea for a “seamless barrel hoop” burnt an expensive batch of barrels. A few years later, he was sent back to his father after some of the first houses he thatched proved to be so watertight that the thatcher had worked himself out of business.
Pahl’s father hoped that he would grow out of this fascination with tinkering, but he had no sooner walked in the door than he was designing strange devices. He began to, for lack of a better term, overclock the clocks, causing the hands to eat days in a matter of minutes. On occasion, he would come out of his makeshift workshop with some new and dangerous-looking device for his bewildered and worried parents to try. Some, like the strange wire device that, when one turned the handle, spun a pair of wire whisks to mix things, were a success. Others, like the strange device that, when one turned the handle, spun a pair of small blades to rapidly shave one’s face, were hidden from view and smashed when they thought that Pahl was not looking.
The last straw came at the age of 23, while Pahl was still living with his parents. He began to bring various liquids into the house, and the smell that they put up was, at best, noxious. Fearing for their health, Pahl’s parents told him that he was no longer welcome to keep poking the universe with a stick while under their roof, because the universe was one day bound to poke him back, and they did not want to be anywhere in the area when it happened. Pahl took this in stride, apologizing to his parents and promising to be out within a day. There was no need, he felt, to make the parting an unhappy one. The next day, his belongings loaded onto a two-wheeled cart behind a short, stout horse, Pahl bid his farewells, promising to write from wherever he settled. There were rumors of an army marching to the south, and he was off to join them.
Within a week, he was penniless and destitute. And rather naked. The bandits had taken one look at Pahl on the road by himself and decided that he was a godsend. In the next village, the locals were shocked to see a man in nothing more than what he’d been born wearing stagger into town. The villagers, a kind-hearted lot, clothed and fed him, and Pahl set to work immediately to regain some semblance of self-sustenance. He began to build various mechanisms to help around the village with little things that nobody minded doing themselves anyway, but bought out of a sense of curiosity. In his spare time, Pahl began designing some other things. His helplessness on the road would never be repeated again, and this would be ensured by a pair of weapons unlike any that had ever been seen before.
Now, to design weapons like the ones that Pahl was designing, one has to have a certain lack of education about weapons in general. If he would have gone to a blacksmith to ask for advice on the designs, or an archer, or a siege engineer, he would have been laughed out of the room. Instead, he only asked for the parts he needed, and assembled the pieces himself.
Preliminary tests of the two devices got Pahl banished from the village.
The results were that, while they would work as designed, the weapons were more likely to not work at all, or to work in a way disastrous to the weapon or anything around it. However, he now had some modicum of protection, and thus he continued on his search to find the army that he had set out to find originally.
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