Professor Henry Slogar
From Changeling Venue
| Seeming | Darkling Antiquarian |
|---|---|
| Court | Winter Court •• |
| Freehold | The Freehold of Edinburgh |
| Player | Frost |
Contents |
Overview:
Alias(es): None (yet)
Real Name: Professor Henry Slogar
Age: Believed to be 136 (born in 1872, taken by the Fae in 1896); Actually 53 (born in 1955, taken by the Fae in 1987)
Concept: Out-of-time Victorian inventor
Entitlement: None
Appearence: Short and quite skinny, Henry Slogar looks physically rather frail. He keeps his blonde hair tied back and is usually seen wearing a white lab coat and dark glasses. He walks with slow, cautious movements, as if terrified of accidentally offending someone. Although he is not of any Court, and was at first unaware of what the Courts actually entailed, it is clear that his nature endears him towards the Winter Court. An icy breeze seems to follow his every movement, and his eyes are pale, icy blue in colour. When he is in a heightened emotional state, occassional flurries of snow appear to form around him.
Character Information:
Known History
Henry Slogar only wandered out of the hedge and into the city of Edinburgh on the night of November 24th, 2007. From what the other Changelings of the Court asked him, it is clear that he remembers that prior to being taken he worked as an assistant and compatriot to the noted electrical engineer and scientist Nikola Tesla, and that he caught the attention of the Fae while working to construct a radio transmission tower in London in 1896. Since being taken, Henry also remembers a period of achingly tedious labour as a scribe and laboratory assistant in the Black University, a sprawling Arcadian fortress of ebon granite ruled over by a scholarly vivisectionist of the dreaded Gentry. He apparantly found his way back into the mortal world after being sent to retrieve some documents from the depths of his Keeper's library, and becoming lost in the labarynthine passages.
The Truth
(note: this history is pretty much unknown, even to Henry Slogar himself)
Like all of those creatures which refer to themselves as “Changelings”, Henry Slogar was born on this earthly realm. Specifically, he was born in London in the freezing winter of 1955, the only child of a middle-class family who had high hopes for their son. From an early age he showed a deep interest in the physical sciences, and a love of discovering how and why things worked. He read the accounts of the great mavericks of science; Isaac Newton, whose work laid the foundations for the theory of gravitation and countless other advances in physics; Charles Darwin, who revolutionised the way that the natural world was perceived and studied; Albert Einstein, the father of relativity, and Nikola Tesla, the genius who broadcast trans-Atlantic radio waves and sought to master the principles of radiant energy. Henry’s parents did what they could to encourage his wonderment, even as fortune seemed to show ever-increasing hostility as the years passed. When Henry reached eighteen, he applied to study for his Bachelor’s Degree at Cambridge University. Being from what was by Oxbridge standards a poor background, his first application was rejected outright. That same year, his father fell deeply ill and was forced to quit his job in the city. With only his mother able to support the family and no welfare state to speak of, the Slogar household found its fortunes rapidly dwindling. Henry was well aware that putting him through university at all may be enough to bankrupt the family, but he was entirely unwilling to give up his studies. Realising the grim reality of his situation, Henry took a low-paid job as a laboratory technician in a London hospital, while sending repeated applications to study at Cambridge. In 1973, four years after graduating from Grammar School, Henry Slogar received what he had dreamed of: an interview to study for a BSc in Physics, under scholarship at Cambridge University. This time around he was successful, and in September 1973 he took up his place in the Physics department of the university’s School of Sciences. Although he had been somewhat out of practice for a while, Henry soon found himself enthralled by his studies, and threw himself into academia with all of the intellectual vigour he could muster. Three years later, he graduated with a first class degree in Theoretical and Applied Physics. He looked forward to a career in research, his dreams of making some grand discovery and joining the ranks of the scientific elite burning more brightly in his mind than ever before.
For a while, things seemed to be going well. He found himself a job in an independent research institute in London, during which time he began to study for his PhD. From 1977 to 1985 were the happiest days of the young scientist’s life, for he passed his doctorate with flying colours and went on to conduct a successful post-doc project before going full-time at his research institute. During those eight years he conducted extensive studies into the theoretical properties of electricity, though a good number of his peers found Henry’s work to be somewhat archaic in its approach. Like his childhood hero Tesla, Henry Slogar found himself becoming slowly obsessed with the concept of ambient energy and the ability to harness radiation. In 1982 he discovered a tattered scientific journal seemingly hidden away in the institute’s library. Over the next five years the articles within would grow to take over the young man’s life. In secret, he began to work on studies and projects which defied the laws of physics as he previously understood them. He learned how to harness forces in ways which should otherwise have been impossible, and four years into this increasingly obsessive personal project, he resigned his job as a researcher and sequestered himself away in his home, determined to complete his masterwork: to harness the impossible principles of ambient electricity. By 1986 Henry Slogar had ceased to be a physicist in any true sense of the word, instead devoting himself to the insane and discredited science of Galvanics. What he had not realised was that the “journal” which had inspired most of his work was the last legacy of a Changeling scientist whose mind had been irrevocably warped by his time in Arcadia. Unknowingly, Henry Slogar had set himself on a path which would lead him into Hell; the ambient energy tower which he was building was the deceased Changeling’s last attempt to create a device which could shield the world from the influences of Arcadia and its monstrous Gentry, by manipulating the fabric of reality through direct control of sub-atomic particles. Having decided that the original designs in the journal were flawed, Henry’s revolutionary new Tesla Coil was in fact destined to briefly tear reality asunder, though the ambitious Galvanist had no idea what his demented invention would achieve. When the activated the infernal machine in January 1987, a localised rip in space-time consumed the machine and its inventor, drawing them both through the boundaries between worlds and hurling him into the enrapturing chaos of Arcadia.
Henry’s earliest moments in the realm of the Fae were overwhelming for him. At first he believed that some accident had left him in a coma, and that what he saw and heard and felt was nothing more than feverish hallucinations. He wandered aimlessly, searching for any way out of his predicament. He had no idea how he had arrived in this alien landscape of menacing forests and towering hills that seemed oddly alive. Everywhere he went he could feel the world itself watching him, knowing that he was foreign to this place. He soon began to feel as though he was little more than a specimen beneath a microscope; an oddity at the mercy of this horrific, living realm. In bits and pieces, the world around him began to make sense. Sitting amidst gnarled trees which whispered to one another and observed the scientist with casual disinterest, Henry found himself assigning new rules and theories to the inexplicable nature of Arcadia, categorising the lunacy in which he now resided. Of course, his “theories” of Arcadian physics were nothing more than madness; Henry sat for days in that twisted forest, uncomprehending of the time that was passing, his mind slowly splintering under the weight of his new world. Eventually, he found that he was no longer alone.
The Changeling scientist whose work had inadvertently brought Henry to this place had, like all Changelings, once served a Keeper. That Keeper had sensed the use of its former servant’s technological genius even from across the Hedge, and had come to investigate the source of this dimensional intrusion. Flanked by hulking Ogre bodyguards, the black-robed form of Arimech the Mad, scholarly vivisectionist of the Fae, rode into the clearing upon a snarling hybrid steed composed of reptilian flesh and steam-belching iron mechanisms. Henry’s reaction was one of predictable terror; his feeble attempts to flee the place only resulted in the mocking laughter of the great vivisectionist, and in short order Henry found himself being dragged in living chains to the Black University, a sprawling Arcadian fortress of ebon stone, its pointed towers clawing their way into the sky over Arimech’s demesne. The next twenty years of Henry’s life are all but lost to his memory, along with any true recollections of his existence before now. He was put to work in the labyrinthine passageways of the University, constantly retrieving archaic tomes from the vast library, and transcribing the results of his Keeper’s horrid experiments. On numerous occasions, the former professor found himself the subject of Arimech’s monstrous curiosity, and he has since lost count of how many times he lay, paralysed but conscious upon the dissection table as the Fae scholar dismantled him joint-by-joint and then rebuilt him so that he could continue to serve. After several years Arimech felt that his slave was beginning to age to much as the stresses of his servile existence took their toll. In order to combat this, the Keeper removed Henry’s temporal lobe, preventing him from perceiving the passage of time. Since a being in Arcadia only ages so far as one believes one should, this horrid surgical procedure served its purpose admirably. To this day, Henry Slogar constantly has to be reminded what the time is, for he has no internal clock by which to regulate his routine. It is likely that Henry would have remained in this state of slavery indefinitely, were it not for the actions of an Ogre privateer working on behalf of a Fae who was a rival to Arimech the Mad. Henry had been sent to retrieve a stack of his Keeper’s research papers from the Black University library, when he spied the other Changeling breaking in and stealing a particular tome. Terrified of what Arimech would do to him if it discovered that Henry had been unable to prevent the theft of precious knowledge, the scientist-slave gave chase. Unwilling to face an agent of Arimech within the confines of the University, the unknown Ogre fled the building and followed the paths that it knew into the Hedge, for its Keeper had also assigned it other business to conduct on Earth. It did not occur to Henry Slogar to give up the chase; he charged into the Hedge after the Ogre, following it doggedly until eventually loosing it in the passages of the infamous Edinburgh Maze. Henry had no idea how he had ended up in Arcadia in the first place, and even now he had no idea how he was going to get back…and yet, somehow he knew that this was the place he was meant to be, that an end to his life of servility was so close that he could taste it. He was closer to Earth now than he had been in the last two decades, and his instincts led him inexorably towards the glaring electric lights of the city of Edinburgh. In November 2007 the Winter Queen was being crowned, and the Darkling Professor Henry Slogar wandered into the gathering of his own kind, following the lure of other Changelings. Upon entering the Court of Queen Aline, he asked the nearest Changeling what corner of Arcadia he had stumbled into which felt so much like Earth…the answer he received marked the beginning of his life among the Lost.
Current Activities
Henry is currently trying to settle himself back into the mortal world. This is proving to be a difficult task, as upon entering the Freehold of Edinburgh he was entirely unaware that any significant time had passed on Earth since he was taken to the Fae realm over a century ago. He did make a number of friends among the local Changelings, however, and has expressed a particular interest in learning how to fashion a safe Hollow from the Hedge. In fact, Henry Slogar has expressed a dangerous interest in many aspects of life as a free Changeling, and his is the sort of insatiable curiosity which could get an inexperienced Lost killed. While he is doing his best to come to terms with his newfound freedom (and the changes the mortal world has undergone in the last 111 years), the social conventions of Changeling society are proving difficult for him to grasp. In particular, the promiscuous behaviours displayed by certain Changelings run counterpoint to his rather prudish Victorian nature, and he shows a tendancy to overcompensate any task he is given, apparently out of sheer terror of reprisals.
Motley
none
Allies
Enemies
none...yet
Quotes
- "You mean to say that if I make a mistake, you won't slice off my limbs and sew them back on?" - Henry Slogar, when speaking to the Winter Queen of Edinburgh
- "I am sure he will make a fine addition to the court, and I wish him the best of luck finding himself. After all, we were all Lost once." - Aleksander Sokol
Rumors
- Henry Slogar is not as new to Lost society as he first claims, and secretly he is still working for his Keeper.
- Henry was not randomly taken to Arcadia by the Fae, but was rather offered up in sacrifice by the eccentric Nikola Tesla, who sent him from New York to London in the knowledge that one of the Gentry would be waiting for him there.
- Henry's memories have actually been completely scrambled by his time in Arcadia, and what he "remembers" is really what someone has implanted there...
Also Plays:
Requiem
Alexander Gideon, Khaibit of the Circle of the Crone, Guardian of Newcastle 
Forsaken
Eric Gervais, Ghost Wolf Ithaeur 
Mortals
August Williams, Science-fiction writer 
