Alvin Esker
Tramrunner | Would-Be Inventor | Accidental Artificer | Chatterbold | Spaz-Basket
Alvinheim Lockwilde Esker (a.k.a. Alvin)
Archivist's Excerpt from: A Chiming Town Indeed: A Painstaking History of Pendulum & its People, Vol. I, CVI 42.5
Alvin Esker is the youngest child of Hugo Esker & Elise Esker, a Tramrunner Third Class and part-time Lectral Engineer temporarily on loan to the LIT Corps.. Alvin is curious, bright, and never shuts up. Though the intellectual inferior of his late elder sister, Agnes Esker and the mechanical inferior of his elder brother, Alphonse Esker, Alvin ... well, he's got a good vocabulary, so that's something.
Alvin is often torn between two natures, the bookish one that would just as soon sit beside a fireplace of an evening with some tale of far-off places, and the wishful one that would go to such places and build fireplaces to sit beside.
Neither one ever seems to win.
Alvin always had a particularly keen interest in flight, and has even attempted to get Orphan's first Aviator's Club off the ground. Ha ... "off the ground." See, because ... nevermind. It didn't go, seeing as Orphan Heights is set beneath a dome and all, but while Alvin's fearful sense of stay-at-homed-ness keeps him firmly grounded, his wandering mind still wonders if, one day, he might live to see man make way into the skies.
A particular oddity of Alvin's is how he overcame a struggle with his own memory ... or rather his total lack of a one, which made his studies rather difficult. Alvin could hardly be relied upon to recall his trousers of a morning, which his father became accustomed to, his mother, not so much. His elder sister once taught him to imagine the top half of his head at if it were an observatory, with a tiny "him" living inside it, peering out at the wider world, and all his memories cast upon the nebulae and planets of the cosmos.
This worked so well for Alvin that he ended not up not only having the best memory in the family, but nearly in the whole of Orphan Heights, rivaling even that of Hiram Lorecroft, though nobody's ever told either of them that.
Physical Description
Apparel & Accessories
Specialized Equipment
Spyglass Telescope
Purse Satchel Adventurer's Bag
Personality Characteristics
Personality Quirks
Alvin fidgets, a lot, and has an unfortunate tendency to scratch various parts of himself when nervous, especially when in the company of the fairer sex. Again, unfortunate.
Taps his temple when thinking
Social
Religious Views
Alvin has long been caught between the more secular world of Orphan Heights and its quietly-bleak outlook on the universe and the more traditional, softly-religious beliefs of his family. The working classes of Orphan are generally seen as simply ignorant, clinging to old ways, but the events of cemented in Alvin's mind the reality that the world is bigger than he thought, stranger than he imagined, and the discovery of the Metarcanum made him realize that the universe he inhabits must, itself, have a grand Author.
Speech
Nervous talker, loquacious, tendency to prattle and sometimes stammer.
Relationships
"...and the like."
"...and no mistake."
"Bollocks!"
Comments