Orchid Dreams

//characters

Otto "Crazy" McGee

Full Name: Otto McGee
Culture: Breefolk
Desc:
A strange man stands before you.

He is strange for several reasons that are immediately visible. First of all, he has a beard. This may not be anything special in itself, but this beard is long and bushy, and often sheltering a small selection of the insect population. His hair is the same, and hangs in ratty strands down to his shoulders. Torn are the garments that hang on the lithe frame. By lithe, I mean of course that this man is skin and bones, and the clothes are suited to someone that eats a meal every night. On his hands are gloves without fingers, and this leaves his own fingers- brown, swollen and with chipped and black fingernails to wriggle like something from a terrible nightmare. His toes, too, stick through the ends of his boots. On colder days, a large, shaggy, dirty cloak drapes over his entire body, giving him the image of some bear, or bird-man.

What little can be seen of his face consists of a large, bulbous nose- obviously broken in several places and never mended. Set within the skull also, are brown eyes of average proportion. Nothing can be read from those eyes- except perhaps some distant and hollow anger. There is dirt so in ground into his forehead that he appears to be tanned. Occasionally he carries a shovel, or a small pouch around his neck.

History.
The youngest of 8 children to Harry and Mary McGee, his parents both succumbed to disease when he was six. (Or, so they say. Others speculate that Harry rubbed shoulders with the wrong foreigners and was into gambling, and one night… well, let’s just say, he made a mistake.).

So Otto Mcgee, (now Otto “Crazy” Mcgee) was sent to live with his Aunt Linda and Uncle Benjamin with two of his brothers and one sister. The rest of his siblings lived with their grandparents. Many rumours circulate about this part of Otto’s young and impressionable childhood. One tells that Otto witnessed his two eldest brothers fighting- one eventually beating the other with a plank of wood and sending him into a coma. When he woke, he was a vegetable- incapable of speech or movement, and so is now looked after by his Grandfather. Throughout his childhood, Otto’s siblings took great delight in telling the slow-witted boy horror stories about the world, and this could well explain his contemporary behaviour.

Benjamin was a renowned drunk, and often beat on young Otto for not having done a satisfactory cleaning job, or not having finished his chores, or for speaking back, or whatever outlandish reason he could think of. Kept as a slave (basically), Otto was forced to live in the cellar as his brothers and sister had the spare bedrooms, and he survived on scraps.

One night after a heavy bout of drinking, Benjamin received what was coming to him. Leaving the Prancing Pony, he became disorientated trying to reach a friend’s house in Combe to continue drinking, and he stumbled through the Chetwood and was never seen again. It’s said he wandered into the Marshes, and who wants to imagine what fates he encountered there?!

Of course, this meant Otto was released from his captivity, and, having no house, money, job, or friends, begged his sister living in Bree Proper as a waitress, to let him live with her. Her husband had built a small hovel beside the house, and so she allowed him to stay there. (Very Frankenstein-esque, wouldn’t you say?).

Now, Otto “Crazy” McGee lives down the end of the lane, and is the subject of many horror stories told to young children. They, of course, try and taunt him, and he will chase them with his shovel. Often he is seen wandering around the market speaking in tongues, or yelling to himself. Mothers scold him for turning their children wicked, but he never takes any notice. Often he is seen digging soft patches of earth—people say he is searching for his father’s teeth, and other times, he is cautious of bushes, among other things.

Graphics created from scratch using Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, personal photographs and some brushes created by nice people. If you wish to know which brushes I used specifically, feel free to send a nice e-mail my way.

---> Layout obtained from Appassionato