• Lack of Social Graces. Hero has a zero willpower when interacting with people in any other way than trying to intimidate them.
• Dependants: Murphy helps support his mother and five siblings. Periodically one of the kids will show up in DC to learn to be a superhero like big brother Padraig, to serve as a hostage, etc. The expense of supporting these children means that Murphy is pretty broke all the time. For example, he' the only member of Mystery Inc. without his own car.
• Professional: Murphy supports himself as a private eye. If he refuses to take a case, he's dead broke until the next case comes along. This is a really good way to drag the players into adventures.

Murphy is the oldest of four brothers and two sisters. His father deserted the family when Murphy was six. None of the other men in his mother's life stayed around, and life has been hard. Murphy joined the Marines at 17. His MOS was military intelligence. He was trained to infiltrate far into enemy territory, the most dangerous type of military intelligence gathering. While in training, he realized that he had the power to "hex" people and machines.

In the service, he met his best friend, "Mother." "Mother" was an electronics whiz, no inventor but able to fix anything electrical.  His lifelong fascination with surveillance devices was encouraged. Murphy met him at a demonstration of night vision equipment, and the two have remained friends despite "Mother's" obsession with conspiracy theories that verges on paranoia.

When he was discharged, he decided to put his training and abilities to work as a private detective. However, there wasn't much call for an elint specialist in the world of private detectives, so Murphy has been supporting himself bounty hunting. He sees Mystery Inc. as a chance to gain some publicity for himself and his detective agency.

What Murphy doesn't know is that he is not a mutant. His absent father is one of the Dragon Lords of Elfland, who fathered Murphy to fulfill an ancient promise to his bloodline. His strange abilities come from his half- human heritage. Someday his father will return to him, and instruct him to his duties to the Elflands.

Of course, Murphy may have other ideas...

• Blind while wearing suit: However, she sees through her Halo (see powers below).
• Hunted: When the narrator's card is a five or less of Doom, some bad guys have heard of the price BBI (Bonk Business International) is paying for Halo's suit, and they've come to collect.
• Lawful: Halo will not break the law. A real pain when everyone else wants to do a little B & E to look for evidence.
• Triggered powerless: Pulling Halo through her ring removes the suit, the source of all her powers. Her Agility and Strength then both drop to 2.

While hiking in the Rockies, Jennifer DuPree fell into a deep crevasse. She was saved from a slow death at the bottom by her discovery of a glowing ring. When she touched it, it slowly moved up her arm, coating it with a strange costume as it went. When it covered her eyes, she realized the she was seeing from the perspective of the ring. She flew home, and ever since has defended the law as Halo and in her capacity as a prosecutor.

BBI tried to convince Halo that her suit was stolen property and rightfully belonged to them. However, she has recently learned that her suit may have come from the alien Zzrulian empire. There may or my not be a connection between them and Bonk Business Inc.

John Brown knew the doctor had told him he was hypersensitive to caffeine, and should stay away from it. But being a insurance actuary was so boring, he desperately needed something to stay awake.  The first coffee tasted good. REAL good. Now, they won't let him work more than five hours a week. He makes everyone else look bad.

Now he had superpowers! He could be a superhero! That would be a lot more interesting than calculating insurance risks!

She doesn't remember anything before three years ago. Her first memories are of throwing around some guys who tried to push around an old lady. Eventually she went to work as a bouncer at a nightclub. A manager of one of the acts thought that her strange but cute appearance would make her a hit if she could only sing. She could, and she's on her way to stardom.

The rusted chains of prison moons
Are shattered by the sun.
I walk a road, horizons change
The tournament's begun.
The purple piper plays his tune,
The choir softly sing;
Three lullabies in an ancient tongue
For the court of the crimson king.

The keeper of the city keys
Put shutters on the dreams.
I wait outside the pilgrim's door
With insufficient schemes.
The black queen chants the funeral march,
The cracked brass bell will ring;
To summon back the fire witch
To the court of the crimson king.

The gardener plants an evergreen
Whilst trampling on a flower.
I chase the wind of a prism ship
To taste the sweet and sour.
The pattern juggler lifts his hand;
The orchestra begin.
As slowly turns the grinding wheel
In the court of the crimson king.

On soft gray mornings widows cry,
The wise men share a joke;
I run to grasp divining signs
To satisfy the hoax.
The yellow jester does not play
But gently pulls the strings
And smiles as the puppets dance
In the court of the crimson king.


The Strange Origin of the Pattern Juggler

Peter Sinfield was artistically sensitive from childhood, and frequently off in worlds of his own. His family lived in Richmond and he showed great promise to become an illustrator, with all the vivid pictures he continuously produced and then left lying about.

At age 14 he was immobilized with a fever that gave him delirious visions for about a week. He was a juggler in a fantastic medieval court, a place of unbelievable magic, dazzling wonders, Byzantine intrigues, and terrifying barbarity. He had the power to manipulate small illusions, and desperately hoped to distract the courtiers and nobles from their other amusements of torturing prisoners and terrorizing commoners. The dream seemed to last for months, and included the haunting vision of the "Moonchild" playing hide and seek with the ghosts of dawn, as well as the terrible Crimson King he had to serve, and the heart-stopping Fire Witch and other intense surreal characters. Working at the court was a painful compromise which afforded luxury and the possibility of tempering the royal madness, but meant condoning all manner of atrocities.

He finally resolved to flee the court when he determined he could not reform or distract them any further. It was like talking to the wind. He crawled the cracked and broken path, crept along the wall on which the prophets wrote, and was noticed sneaking out the iron gates of fate and an alarm went up- when he returned to the waking world drenched in sweat and no longer sure what was real.

This sense of ambivalence stayed with him through adolescence, as he continued to see images from dreams as he walked down the street in broad daylight, and had a nagging sense that the Crimson Court and its nightmare empire were still out there waiting for him, even though he'd resigned in no uncertain terms.

Richmond is a rough place, and one day Peter was mugged on his way home from school. Instinctively, he manifested illusion copies of the mugger's knife tumbling through the air all around them, and his attacker fled. This demonstration of actual abilities was not really shocking, but rather a confirmation of Peter's worst fears. With power comes responsibility. He wouldn't be preyed upon, and he couldn't let these predators go after others.

Peter breezed through a commercial art curriculum at VCU. He could generate picture perfect illusions (especially of patterns and textures) and draw, paint or photoprint them directly. There was so much crime in Richmond which he felt obliged to fight that he'd begun wearing a disguise when he went out at night to scare off the dealers and muggers. He told himself this vigilante behavior had nothing to do with the dream life, and soon he would graduate, move away, and settle down anonymously. He eventually moved to Alexandria.

Taking a job in Alexandria was an attempt to run away from this part of his life, but it only came back again. He began to have dreams of Crimson Guards pursuing him, of the Black Queen chanting her terrible song, of the iron-clawed Neurosurgeon screaming at his door which he'd covered with the paranoid poisons. Soon the black ships would dock on the Potomac and siege engines would roll up King Street, blasting innocents with medieval napalm... No! The Fire Witch...

Going out as The Pattern Juggler and fighting crime seemed to be the only way to appease his subconscious and sense of duty, and keep the dreams at bay (if they were dreams). And it became necessary to construct a suit of scraps of patterned cloth, in a harlequin diamond format, in order to have enough samples from which to project.

His dream self has given him a superior sense of balance, coordination, and poise; as well as abilities in tumbling, juggling, physical manipulation, and a touch of mesmerism. He can "make the puppets dance" for brief periods with spirals or seductive patterns of light and movement. All this comes with a price of uncertainty about the underpinnings of reality, and some trouble with moral quandaries. So far he has not been caught between the Scylla and Charebdis of humanity and desperation, and will not deal well with such a crisis when it comes. So far he has never had to deal with any illusions other than his own, and may be as susceptible or even more than the average person.

Peter Sinfield lives in Old Town Alexandria and does freelance commercial art and video effects for a number of clients in the greater DC area, sometimes Baltimore. This gives him the freedom of movement of not punching a daily clock, as long as he keeps up with the work. Forming an alliance with other heroes seems to be a necessary good, as he is physically vulnerable and limited in his scope as an individual.

He generally likes his quirky companions, especially Halo and Mr. Coffee. They make a good support group for what used to be a lonely and difficult vocation.

• Alien:   Traveller is largely unfamiliar with aspects of 20th century culture.
• Guilt ridden:   All abilities drop to zero if he allows the timestream to be damaged.

Traveller has at various times claimed to be an immortal roaming the earth in search of adventure and a time traveler sent back to protect his future. Evidence has been found that he is neither of those, but just some nut that found a suit with powers. You be the judge.

Carter Braxton is heir to one of the wealthier families in Virginia. He is a famous political columnist and a McLaughlin Group regular. He joins Mystery Inc. in the field only occasionally, preferring to remain behind the scenes as a financier, researcher, and occasionally, tactician. The rest of the group is beginning to realize that he is not as altruistic as he seemed.