212 - Inflatable Turnkey

Unnatural Entity: Inflatable Turnkey

Once upon a time there was an adept who inherited his grandfather’s extensive collection of antique inflatable sex dolls. An ordinary human being would have disposed of the collection quietly or at least discreetly inquired about selling them to another collector. Sheila Carmody was anything but ordinary, the sole practitioner of a school dedicated to squalid nobility she instead turned them into servants to fill her court.

An inflatable turnkey starts life in a deflated heap of plastic with a little battery-powered air pump for rapid inflation and marked with the Elder Sign (H.P. Lovecraft’s original version that looks like a tree branch, not the five pointed star with an eye in the middle). Included is a uniform related to some kind of service occupation, you can switch it out with another one the first time but it has to be tailored to fit the doll. Inflated and dressed the turnkey is activated by the user daubing a four letter word of their choosing (hereafter the name the turnkey will respond to) on to its forehead and giving it an order.

The order must be related to the profession the doll is dressed like. A maid uniform is good for cleaning up your apartment but not bodyguarding you and a buddy and a driver is good to chauffeur you around but couldn’t appraise jewelry for you. This order forms a seed of their behaviour, which then is clumsily adapted over time and additional instructions to shape it into a tool that serves a very particular purpose. They learn to fill a very particular role in the same way that a roomba learns the layout of someone’s home.

But Shiela forgot to carry a two somewhere because once a turnkey starts learning into its role it doesn’t stop. Entire baroque philosophies are constructed around the act of making breakfast or piloting a boat. Over time these micro-philosophies usurp the original programming and the turnkey begins to behave erratically. Most of them are put down, some disappear, presumed runaways.

There are rumours that groups of runaway turnkeys have formed underground societies. That a city sanitation worker might one day open a door into a disused service tunnel and find a dried out cistern turned into an amphitheatre. Rows of vinyl faces drawn into surprised, open-mouthed rictuses in a myriad of uniforms turning towards them in unison in the glare of their flashlight. That they might get a vague impression of a gestalt formed of all these pieces working together and relying on each other in unison like a microcosm of how society is supposed to function. Depending on the collective temperament he might have a chance to escape before they set on him, pressing him into motley and forcing him to help continue refining their brains. In that case he’d best be served by finding a way to appease the collective philosophies of “mowing lawns” and “tending bar” before they try to reshape his brain to get better leadership out of him.

As they aren’t human, turnkey’s can’t use magick but they’ll know it when the see it.

Inflatable Turnkey, One-Use Factotum
Wound Threshold: 20. Damage from firearms does regular melee damage, damage from piercing weapons continues to do 1 point per turn unless patched. An active air pump can stave off this damage or restore it once repaired.
Purpose 66%: This is the identity that the turnkey uses for actions relating to its shaped purpose. It may be 10% to 20% worse or better than this, depending on the condition of their uniform and whether the development of their personality has begun to deviate from their programming.
Winging It 20%: Turnkey’s are terrible at everything outside of their single area of expertise. Use this for that.