Frankenstein-818
Frankenstein-818 was a Mark IX Clockwork Cherub and the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids' resident, self-proclaimed Mad Scientist. Though reckless and dangerous, he was not actually malevolent, and was a valued member of the Crew rather than an outcast.
Description
Personality
Frankenstein was genuinely driven by a wish to help his fellow Copper-Colored Cupids, although he was also prone to taking unadvisable risks or shortcuts, and couldn't stop himself from various Mad Scientist-esque behaviours from monologuing about how everybody called him mad (even if nobody had in fact done so), to compulsively building dangerous settings into all his machinery. (PROSE: The Ghosts and the Machine)
Powers & abilities
Having studied under the original Frankenstein, Frankenstein-818 was a capable Mad Scientist, whose résumé included a wide variety of engineering feats. He demonstrated a great ability to work under pressure and in limited time-frames, once building multiple variations of his original Spirit Realm Gateway over the course of a single day. (PROSE: The Ghosts and the Machine)
Biography
Early inventions
Frankenstein-818 took his name and his Mad Scientist lifestyle from a version of Baron Frankenstein whom he met, and briefly apprenticed under, in one Prime-adjacent universe.
His inventions leading up to October 2019 included the Automatic Shark Generator and the Lightning-Powered Turbo-Toaster (which, in spite of Igor-1612's claim that it was flawless, “turned all of the toast into mutant toast monstrosities”). By 2019, he lived in a “large, gothic castle” whose interior was “infamously dangerous and booby-trapped”. Some years before, he had also invented the Spirit Realm Gateway with the help of Technophile-963, who curbed Frankenstein's more destructive instincts, removing the settings that would have allowed ghosts to cross into the Homeworld and not just vice-versa, and even yielded a 50% chance of turning living users into ghosts when they passed through. (PROSE: The Ghosts and the Machine)
Halloween 2019
By Halloween 2019, it had become tradition in the Cupid Homeworld that every year, the Spirit Realm Gateway would be activated at the height of the Halloween celebrations, allowing a fleet of Fog Ships to pass into the Spirit Realm of the Prime Universe and romanticise spirits before returning safely home. When Frankenstein made to switch it on, however, for some reason, it malfunctioned. Frankenstein insisted on fixing it himself, removing a number of parts indiscriminately and trying to fake success via a holographic ghost-projector. Instead, the Gateway collapsed in on itself into a true, two-way dimensional rift which allowed the Great Ghost's legion into the Homeworld. The Cupid Prime pressed the Emergency Transport Button, and, when Lord Thymon brought them back to the Homeworld shortly after, the Cupids found that the ghosts had gone, stealing a number of Fog Ships and setting out across the Multiverse to find vessels to possess.
Frankenstein set out to work creating a One-Way Forced Spirit Realm Gateway which would send everyone in a certain radius of it to the Spirit Realm once it was activated, whether they had a physical form or not. Before the Cupids could even begin to wonder how they would track down the ghosts to use it on them, this was rendered moot when the ghostly legion returned and, finding that the Department of Rifts had closed the rift, decided to abduct Frankenstein to force him to build a Reverse Spirit Realm Gateway through which the Great Ghost could summon even more of his followers. However, with the help of his assistant Igor-1612, who had been told how to activate the One-Way Forced Spirit Realm Gateway, and of Madame Tarsa, whose ire had been drawn by the ghosts when they stole her marionettes to use them as vessels, the Department of Problem-Solving and Technophile-963 were able to track down the ghosts to an abandoned theatre in the Prime Universe where Frankenstein had indeed built the new Gateway.
Throwing a huge marble at the stage, Tarsa initiated a swordfight with the Great Ghost (still in the Queen of the Black Market's body) while the Cupids split up, trying to take advantage of the commotion to disable the machine and recover Frankenstein. As Tarsa transformed them all into useless things, the spirits left their possessed bodies and tried to help their master in their true forms; this gave the Cupids the chance to throw the One-Way Forced Spirit Realm Gateway at the swarm of spirits and send them all, save for the still-embodied Great Ghost, back to the Spirit Realm, though they broke the One-Way Gateway in the process. The possessed Queen managed to distract Tarsa long enough to activate Frankenstein's new Reverse Spirit Realm Gateway, but it turned out to transform all the spirits into clockwork toys even as they pour out (because it was a wholly reversed version of Frankenstein's original Gateway, including with the functionality that turned Clockwork Cherubs into spirits; Frankenstein noted that he had not consciously realised this fortunate fact until now). A delighted Tarsa scooped up the toys to use them as part of her Halloween line, and used a magic hat and wand she'd been working on to separate the Queen from the Great Ghost, sending the latter to parts unknown. She departed, leaving the Cupids to ponder what the Great Ghost meant when he implied that his ghosts were themselves fleeing something terrible in the Spirit Realm, and to return to their party.
After being returned to the Cupid Homeworld, Frankenstein immediately set about creating yet another machine, and, before the party was over, unveiled a gateway to the Demon Realm, to rather mixed reactions from the other Cupids. (PROSE: The Ghosts and the Machine)
