We live in a world of police drones and robot pets. We have become a world of toymakers whether we realize it or not. Someone said, "if this game has a Toymaker..." and that got me to thinking. I don't remember one (but if there is one, just ignore me).

The Toymaker

The Toymaker hates the materialism of the modern world. She is a Luddite at heart (the historic ones, not the CoV ones), despising computers and smart phones and all the other gadgets the modern world depends on. Perhaps she was born out of time.

The Toymaker's father was a famous local industrialist (help me out here, story crew, who's an industry magnate we haven't seen yet?). His factories produced consumer goods for the global market. If you had it in your house, they made a version of it with their own unique twist. Sometimes it was just better materials, sometimes it was truly innovative. Their greatest achievement was a line of unique, highly interactive toys for special needs children based on decades of research. The toys were both instructional and enjoyable, helping develop both fine motor skills and perception while entertaining developing minds most of us simply cannot comprehend. Thanks in large part to this special line of toys, tens of thousands of children around the world who a generation earlier would have been locked away behind closed doors were able to develop the skills necessary to function and thrive in the modern world. For all his compassion for the special needs children of the world, he seldom spent time with his own daughter. He was not there for her school plays in elementary school, her piano recitals in junior high, or her basketball games in high school. He was not there for the Father-Daughter Dance her Senior Year, nor was he there to remind her date to bring her home on time after her Senior Prom. His absence in her life when he had so much time for children she despised ate at her like a cancer.

In university the Toymaker studied robotics, computer science, mechanical engineering, and drafting. If she could not win her father's affections by being the perfect daughter, perhaps she could win them by being the perfect scientist. She did not socialize much during her time at university. The Toymaker preferred to spend her evenings and weekends mastering the complexities of magnetic rotational cup joints, fine-tuning her own Turing engine, or drawing up elaborate variations on common household pots and pans. One weekend she designed a transparent, six-dimensional ceramic oven pan that could bake a perfect lasagna just as easily as it could boil water for tea, and with just as little clean-up afterwards. Three visible dimensions made it easy to use while three imperceptible dimensions kept it clean. Burnt food and bacteria both cannot adhere to a surface they cannot touch.

Unfortunately, fate is seldom kind. During her graduate studies, just as she about to begin the process of applying to work at her father's company, he died during a business trip to Hong Kong. The exact circumstances of his death remained shrouded in mystery. Police could not locate the woman he spent the evening with, could not find anyone who had seen him after he left his hotel to have dinner at a nearby restaurant, and could not even locate the restaurant where he told the desk clerk he was going. They found his badly mutilated body lying in the street in front of the hotel in the morning, but no one had seen it dropped there. The Toymaker's mother sold the house and the cars and the stake in the company she received as her inheritance and moved to Paris, although the Toymaker herself had no idea why her mother would want to live in Paris. The Toymaker also received a stake in her father's company as the entirety of her inheritance. The stock dividends provided a solid income, but the company refused to consider hiring her and she could not imagine working anywhere else. After school she drifted from city to city all along the Eastern Seaboard while trying to bury herself in alcohol and drugs. She finally wound up back in Titan City after a drunken binge that began in Miami on a Wednesday and ended with her waking up on a park bench beneath the Titan City Phoenix five days later with no idea how she had gotten there or when she had left Florida. But she was back home now, and that gave her an inspiration.

Her life of crime began with a drone. A simple quad-pod drone with a camera and a gun. She used it to assassinate the current CEO of her father's company. He had been appointed almost the very moment her father had died. She couldn't be certain he was involved in her father's death, but his ascension to the top seat in the company after an unremarkable and undistinguished career in robotic design seemed far too convenient to be coincidence. The assassination went off without a hitch. No one connected the drone back to her. This inspired her to keep trying. She designed small robotics and mechanical dolls that carried bombs into government buildings, causing much havoc and ending many lives. Her drones began appearing all over the city, angering the airborne Aether Pirates as much as the city authorities. Numerous Aether Pirate Captains offered rank and rewards to anyone who could identify her, or better yet, take her out. She didn't like that much, so she designed a fleet of drones to attack Aether Pirate Airships along with a special robotic pigeon to spy on them and track their activities. Anywhere a person finds Aether Pirates they are likely to find one of her drones and several of her pigeons.

It is not known where she has her headquarters. Wherever it is, the complex is certainly large enough to handle the vast amounts of data collected by her pigeons and drones. Somewhere in the city she must have a hidden factory producing the robotics and mechanical dolls that attack government buildings. As far as anyone can determine, she is the only human in her vast network. Everything else is mechanical, digital, and easily disguised as an ordinary household item. Your toaster might not be trying to kill you, but it might be serving as the Toymaker's eyes and ears.

The Toymaker, using the modern world's own gadgetry against it.