Donald Kroff

*"I told you to get off my goddamn property!"*

**Name:** Donald Kroff
**Geist:** The Decrepit Machine
**Age:** 79
**Appearance:** Old, white hair, walks with a cane, tends to look grumpy
**Threshold:** Forgotten
**Archetype:** Necromancer
**Keys:** Industrial, Stillness, Phantasmal
**Flaw:** Lame

Donald (lots of people call him Don, and he doesn't like it) is a crotchety old man. In some ways, he always has been. He has told kids to get off his lawn without irony. When he was *25.*

Donald sometimes tells strangers (particularly inquisitive young punks) that he needs his well-worn cane because of an injury he took in the Korean War. This is a lie, and a somewhat selfish one at that. The real reason he needs it is because he is afflicted with rheumatism. While most people would not be surprised to see an old man with rheumatism, he has had to use a cane like this since he was 16. He has had to deal with a share of old age's indignities since before most young men even reach their prime. His knees pain him, his ankles pain him, even his elbows pain him. Sometimes it seems that the only joints in his body that don't pain him are his fingers. He has always been very clever with his fingers, and he put this to work in clockwork. He makes his living repairing clocks, watches, and the like. This earned him a steadily decreasing life of comfort with him, his wife, and their 0 children. (Not that he ever wanted kids, or so he will mutter grumpily.)

His life remained fairly constant, with the small distraction of zombie movies, until the day he died: January 12th, 2010. It was a stupid death, really. He was driving down an unfamiliar road one day when he drove over a large pothole. Something in his radio broke, and instead of the dulcet tones of Rush Limbaugh, it began emitting loud static. He leaned over and started pushing random buttons on the radio, hoping to fix it, leading him to miss seeing the partially obstructed stop sign. He glanced back up just in time to see the turning UPS van run its grill right into his windshield.

In the endless fading moments of his life, he was approached by a figure made of rusting metal and creaking wood. It offered him a chance to return to life, to earn an end more dignified than a stupid accident. Donald had always been stubborn; he could have qualified for a wheelchair 20 years before, but dammit he was going to keep walking up those damn stairs. To him, it was barely even a question. So he returned to the land of the living, strapped to an EMT's wheeled cot, holding an old broken pocket watch that he had never seen before.

Donald soon became somewhat used to the little voice in the back of his head, the one that urged him to take a clock that ran slow and make it run fast instead of run perfectly. The voice that wondered what would happen if the refrigerator broke down, if the city's power went out, if a bird flew into the airplane's engine. Problems with his work aside, he also became fascinated with the power he now possessed. His mind had always been a scientific one, concerned with the smooth, predictable interactions of cogs and springs, and he now strives to fit this new magic in with the rest of his studiously organized world.

On December 29th, 2011, Donald's wife died of cancer. He had shared everything with her, and his newfound interaction with the dead was no exception. As she lay on the hospital bed, she told him that she did not plan on sticking around afterwards; she wanted to go on to her final reward, not get stuck as a pathetic specter. She asked him to go out and interact with others like him. She was certain that they existed, and she didn't think she could rest until he found someone to share his strange new life with in her place.

Donald's geist identifies itself as the Decrepit Machine. It embodies the deaths that machines suffer, and the larger consequences they have on the living. **OOC:**[It does not have much memory of its time as a human, but in life he was a factory worker in the early 1900's. His life was defined by the clock and the shift bell, and he died by it, too. His one prized possession was his pocket watch, and he made a point of relying on it. So when it broke, he did not realize it until hours later, when he was late for his shift. This led to him being stuck on the night shift, sweeping sawdust from the factory floor until dawn. Or rather, until one sleepily forgotten pile, accumulated behind the heating, caught fire, burning the place to the ground.]

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