Carpenter

## Canon Information

In life, he was **Dennis "The Carpenter" Maxwell**, small-time hood for the Chicago mob. Near the end of his afterlife, he became *Carpenter169*, one of the most controversial posters on hunter-net.org.

He earned his nickname working for the Sforza famiglia, from his favorite tongue-loosening technique: nailing people's hands to tables. Ultimately, he was sold out by his girlfriend, the don's daughter Annabelle, and shot down right in front of her. His death didn't even make the front page.

In death, he learned the ins and outs of life as one of the Restless Dead, and also learned of his girlfriend's connection to the Giovanni clan of vampires.

In 1999, Maxwell was one of the wraiths blasted through the Shroud by the Sixth Great Maelstrom. Like a lot of them, he found himself involuntarily possessing a host body. Unlike most of them, he soon found the Heralds directing him to hunter-net.

He used his old nickname as his hunter-net handle and introduced himself ambiguously enough that he *could* have been a fellow Chosen. He proceeded to freely dispense information on the nature of the walking dead and ways of fighting them. A lot of people didn't quite trust him, and he spent a lot of time reacting with injured innocence. People got even madder at Carpenter when Gardener67, attempting to settle a pissing contest with Carpenter, returned to a haunted house he'd visited once before and wound up dying in it.

Soon after that, Witness1 received a visit from the ghost of a childhood classmate, who managed to get a message through to him: "Carpenter is one of the dead. He is known here, feared here. He is evil!!!" Around the same time, Cabbie22, based out of Chicago, was doing research on another matter entirely and discovered the career of Dennis Maxwell, and his similarities to Carpenter (records of Maxwell's testimony in assault cases displayed a similar verbal style to Carpenter's posts). Maxwell admitted his identity, but insisted that was the only thing he'd misled them about. He hinted at the nature of the catastrophe that had struck the lands of the dead, and at the connection of the Imbued to that catastrophe: "You're the fucking janitor — or more appropriately, his mop, bucket and broom!"

A little later, soon after Azrael256's encounter with something disturbing in Chinatown, Carpenter was finally online at the same time as the other monster on the list, the vampire known as Ichmail . Maxwell informed the list that Ichmail wasn't the kind of vampire they thought he was, and issued a warning to the other: "I know where the thousand embers are dispersed, and the name of the path that you walk. I even know your name, Hideo Masaka, and your mother's ghost tells me what you did to her." He'd just promised to tell Ichmail/Masaka's secrets to the entire world when Annabelle Sforza died. The loss of a link to the land of the living threw Carpenter into a Harrowing, from which he delivered a prophecy before plummeting into the Labyrinth.

A story featuring Cabbie22 in the *Inherit the Earth* short story collection touched upon Carpenter's return from his Harrowing. The Year of the Scarab fiction trilogy explored Carpenter's continued precarious existence as one of the Risen and his attempts to remain permanently in the lands of the living. In the course of these efforts, he crossed paths with hunters, vampires, and mummies. At the conclusion of the trilogy, Carpenter's physical form was destroyed, sending him into another Harrowing.

### Carpenter's Prophecy

Immediately prior to returning to the underworld, Maxwell (posting as Carpenter169) issued a prophecy on hunter-net. Originally articulated in several languages such as Latin, Portuguese, Italian, and German, bookworm55 translated it as:

"The hour of flame comes and the Emporer of Hell manifests. The twin-souled children of Jade have risen from their graves and await the hour that will sweep away those whose souls are not divided. The storm heralds the hour of destruction and its winds shall fan the flames even higher. Heaven's step children wander, blind into the kingdoms of death, but their sight is keen. Rotten blood and rotten souls gather under the horns of blood. Fire shall not cleanse us, and our bones will be as sand."