Elias Thorne
The Slum Aristocrat
- Health
- 32
- Stamina
- 8
- Age
- 70looks 62
"He measures human life in liters of filtered runoff. Cross his enforcers, and you dry out in the dirt."
Passive
After your first successful block each round, your opponent's attacks have -1 Damage for the rest of the round.
Loadout
Who they are
Forty-six years inside under automated medicine, and twenty-four more behind the clean water and rationed protein of his own cisterns, have left Elias the best-preserved man in the wastes, a fact he considers proof of his method. At seventy he looks barely past sixty. He still stands 188 cm, thinned to 78 kg, and holds his rigid aristocratic spine as straight as ever, though in private he now leans, slightly, on the dark ebony walking cane that was once an affectation. His pale ivory skin, still shielded from the rain, has thinned over the sharp jawline and high cheekbones, and fine lines fan from his cold, calculating bright blue eyes. His hair has gone entirely silver-white, still glossy and swept back into a sharp widow's peak, and his pencil van dyke goatee is silver-white and as impeccably groomed as ever. The razor-thin dueling scar along his left jaw has faded to a thread. He bears no tattoos. The polished gold-rimmed monocle still hangs over his right ear on its braided steel chain, and he never removes his deep velvet-green gloves with silver cuff-snaps, the old black ones long since replaced. He has traded the old charcoal for a deep petrol-blue executive tech-overcoat with magnetic closures, its collar edged in pine green and its inside lined in deep velvet green over the concealed Kevlar, worn over a dark bottle-green high-neck tunic, charcoal technical trousers, and polished black leather field boots with pine-green heel counters and welts, with twin custom blued-steel .44 Magnum revolvers beneath the coat. In an inner pocket of the coat he keeps a transcranial pulse emitter, a pre-collapse neural disruptor that, pressed to a fighter's temple, makes the body forget the move it was making.
He rules the Syndicate Water Cisterns from its gantries, rationing water by ledger, but the rumors of Silas's ghost have hollowed his composure into sleepless paranoia. He fights to keep his monopoly, which he believes is the only thing standing between the Exiles and slaughter, and to hunt down the masked raider bleeding his convoys before the slums learn that the Syndicate can be beaten.
The years before
Year0
The Rounding Error
"I signed the cuts that drowned the sewer hands, and kept the count. My co-signers answered to me after that; the eviction lists carried my name. I told everyone it was a rounding error. But everyone knows the system makes no mistakes."
Elias Thorne
Year1
The Cisterns
"In the wastes, water is dominion. I led an armed squad into the Sector 4 depot and took the tanks. From that day the slums drank by my ledger, and nobody has killed anybody for a cup of it since. They call it tyranny. I call it arithmetic."
Elias Thorne
Year1
The Proposal
"Without order the exiles would have butchered each other in weeks. I offered Lyra Vance a joint rule: my logistics under her father's banner. She spat in my face and threw my messenger out. So I bought Tomas Varek instead."
Elias Thorne
Year9
The Container Block
"A copper valve went missing from my lines, so I shut the water to the container block over it. Nadia Chen copied the figures into my book that night. When I entered the count of the dead beside them, she put down her pen for good."
Elias Thorne
Year24
The Dry Taps
"I stopped sending assassins into the passes. I turned the wheel, shut the water to the grey-rot shelters Nadia feeds, and had it read at every dry tap: the water for the traitor, in person. She will know the act. I wait on the catwalks."
Elias Thorne
Year24
The Ghost on the Spur
"Since the spring a masked raider has bled my water convoys and gone down into the drains every time. I know those strikes, frame-perfect, Silas Locke's. Silas is dead. The drains belong to Roach. So Roach is hiding the ghost."
Elias Thorne
Year24
The One-Armed Girl
"I waited on the catwalks above the Valve Station for Roach. He sent me a one-armed girl with a ceramic knife. A sluice opened by force would be learned at every dry tap in the slums by morning. She will not reach the wheel."
Elias Thorne
Year24
The Overflow
"I did not send enforcers into tunnels Roach has ruled for twenty-four years. I turned the wheel that spills the overflow into his drains and sent my terms down with the last of it: the ghost, delivered here, and the water runs again."
Elias Thorne
Pack 5 · Soren Croft vs Elias Thorne
All five packs