Burning Ember Inn Character Sketch 4: Professor Roderick Unheim

Staring into the Abyss for fun and profit.

The first time Roderick Unheim died, it was something of a surprise. Fortunately, his loyal lab assistant quickly hooked the lightning rod to the electrodes sunk into his chest cavity, and he took good notes on the experience so that the next time went much more smoothly.

Most would have quailed at the thought of dying for an experiment. Not Professor Unheim. There was too much at stake to be deterred by selfish fear, and besides, his theories were most precise. How could they not be, after decades of study in realms both scientific and... well, let's say less conventional? Surely his colleagues at the university would have been scandalized. After all, alchemy was the province of mountebanks and forgers; demonology suppressed by the Church; and the study of other planes of existence scarcely even dreamed of by other—lesser—men.

Not that Professor Unheim's goals were selfish. No one knew better than he the terrible dangers that lurked beyond human imagining, threatening to visit calamity upon the Earth. And if one modest scholar had to sacrifice his sanity to keep the dangers at bay, well, that was just the way life was sometimes.

There were fringe benefits, however. From his experiences, Professor Unheim had developed a pleasingly unsettling sense of humor, and a love of practical jokes, the more trivial the better. The repeated application of electricity to his flesh had rendered his taste buds inert, and eating food had been reduced to a chore of mechanical mastication; but on the other hand, the doors of his perception had been opened wide, so that he could hazily sense the qualities of a person's soul, cloudlike around the physical form. What those sensations meant was beyond him, but he was taking good notes. Perhaps in time he would figure out how to tell when a person was good or evil, brave or cowardly.

Though at times he found himself lonely. Few men, and fewer women, wanted to associate with a man who was no longer entirely of this Earth. At such times he would take the thrice-twisted paths to the Burning Ember Inn, there to enjoy the society of others who would not look askance at his hard-used body and mind.

The trouble was finding a woman brave enough to share in his journeys. Ah well; perhaps Professor Unheim could build one...