Silicon
"Silvester 'Si' Glass," Knight of the Periodic Table, Nerd, Hacker, Consultant, Entrepreneur, and Angel

played and written by Jim Burrows

Glass appears to be a thin, pale, dark-haired, blue-eyed, bespectacled man. He is a well dressed version of a stereotypical nerd, generally wearing a blue blazer, an open-necked white Oxford shirt and pocket protector. Glass is a moderately well-known name in Silicon Valley and the high tech world, though few could tell you exactly what he has accomplished.

In reality, Glass is a Knight of the Periodic Table. His mission on earth is to encourage technical development in "the right direction" as determined by his bosses, the Principalities. He does this in two ways. First, he acts as a part-time consultant, "polishing" designs and making helpful and guiding suggestions. The substantial majority of companies he consults for become dramatically successful. A few get stuck in the mire, and tumble into obscurity. These latter are a select group of endeavors going in the "wrong" direction, which he sabotages, both to discourage those developments and to make his track record more believable. Second, he acts as an "angel", providing initial funding to selected start-ups.

Glass is nerdy ("a square, a drip, need I say more?"), obsessive, curious, vain, and emotionally brittle. He cannot pass a mirror without checking himself out in it. Anyone who catches his reflection while he is doing so will for the first couple of seconds see him as he does, much stronger, and rather more handsome and commanding. He's a creature of habit. He will always introduce himself as "Glass, Silvester Glass—you can call me Si or just Glass", and will go on a tear if he is called anything else like "Sil", Silly", or "Thylvethter".

He is a gadgeteer, and always carries his spectacle case, with two sets of glasses (indistinguishable, but he always has a strong opinion as to which one is the "right" one), with a set of clip-on swing down loupes and jeweler's loupes, his myPhone (not an "iPhone" or a "SiliPhone", or anything else—"It's myPhone. The iPhone is a cheap knock-off, missing several important features."), and a well worn moleskin journal, in which he records cryptic details of inventions he is working on, investment prospects, and progress of ongoing investments. His clothing is always the same, both because it is an illusion and because his closet is full of identical sets. He dresses in slacks and a blue blazer over a white open-necked Oxford shirt with pocket protector—the traditional garb of hardware engineers of a few decades past. The blazer's lines are spoiled by pockets filled with glasses case, journal, myPhone and whatever gadgets he has accumulated since he last teleported.

Colors: sky blue, (sandy) yellow, near ultraviolet.
Valence: 4.

Traits

Trait Initial
Level     
Sign
Mad Electronics: 90% myPhone
Mad Optic Magic: 50% Spectacles and Mirror fixation
Entrepreneur/Angel:       40% Extensive Moleskin Journal
Temporal Magic: 20% Watches and clock collection

Mad Electronics — Glass is a mad scientist specializing in high tech, especially focusing on digital circuitry and fiber optics. While he does work in software, he specializes in hardware implementations of algorithms and processes such as this data driven processor, which he helped to inspire.

Recharge via: Jacobs ladders, Tesla coils and Van de Graff generators

Mad Optic Magic — (Rusty Spectacle/Looking Glass magic) Glass can read data out of chips by looking at them through the right set of filters. (Crosses with Mad Electronics.)

Regenerate via: Extended gazing at himself in a mirror.

Entrepreneur/Angel — In addition to the techie stuff we expect, Glass also promotes various talented glass-blowers and stained-glass-window artists.

Temporal Magic — (Rusty Hour Glass Magic magic) Glass can do retrocognition for events taking place on sand. Glass still has one full-length mirror, in a freestanding frame, that reflects the room as it was yesterday. There's a keyhole in it. The key that fits it is made of glass, of course, and takes a lot of psi to charge up.

Regenerate via: [TBD]

Thin, pale, dark-haired, blue-eyed, bespectacled man, 0 kg (but looks like 65 kg), 154 cm (5'9"), strength: 140 kg (300 lbs)

Languages: English, French, Russian, Italian, Japanese (Rusty lanuages: Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, Mandarin, Hindi)

Effort Pts: 7__________________________________________
x1= 7   x2= 14   x3= 21   x4= 28   x5= 35

Focus Pts: 13__________________________________________
x1= 13  x2= 26   x3= 39   x4= 52   x5= 65

Psi Pts: 10 __________________________________________
x1= 10  x2= 20   x3= 30   x4= 40

Entanglements

Location 1: Google's lobby board
Location 2: Glass's own Silicon Valley office
Location 3: The Bell in Lloyd's of London
Location 4: ________________

Possession 1: myPhone
Possession 2: Spectacle set
Possession 3: Journal
Possession 4: Stop Watch

Atom 1: Window, on the roof of Lloyd's in London.
Atom 2: Lamp, somewhere techie in Japan
Atom 3: Ancient mirror at home in Silicon Valley
Atom 4: The Dome at MIT / Nevil's phone

Prized Possessions

Glass has five prized possessions, four of which are entangled, so that he always has them with him. Three are devices embodying (and acting as signs of) his mad science and magic traits. The fourth, while non-magical, is a sign of his mundane Entrepreneur/Angel trait.

myPhone — Mad Electronics device (and sign of his Mad Electronics trait)

The myPhone is everything that an iPhone is and should be, and often acts as something of a conduit or familiar as he manipulates the silicon in the chips and fiber optics of the Internet and connected electronics.

The myPhone can itself be shrunk or enlarged using the same two fingered pinch gestures that are used to zoom its display, but with the fingers applied to the case rather than screen. It has dual zoom-able high resolution cameras, front and back, so that it can be used as a camera or a video phone. It has nearly arbitrary CPU and memory capacity, enough to run all the "daemons" or "active agents", that he needs to search and filter the vast amounts of data that he can route to the phone.

It is user programmable in an obscure graphical language that to date no one but Glass has been able to master or even understand more than briefly. It's as if the symbols always mean just what Glass wants them to mean, and often extremely complex operations are represented in a single symbol that you thought meant something else last time you saw it.

Spectacle set — Mad Optic Magic device (and sign of his Mad Optic Magic trait)

The set consists of an antique case housing two identical pairs of glasses along with snap-on swing down and jewelers loupes. Patterned, optical magic provides the following functions:

The various functions are bound to snap-on swing down and jeweler's style loupes as well as the glasses themselves. At present, the Remote myPhone Console and Opacity functions are bound to the base glasses and are activated by tapping the right and left hinges respectively. All other functions require snap on loupes.

Journal — Non-magical sign of his Entrepreneur/Angel trait

Glass has been using these tres chic notebooks long before they became des rigeur among the Silicon Valley cognoscenti. In fact he suspects that it was his use of the original Tours notebooks that inspired the trend, if he does say so himself. He is, after all, a trend setter.

His journal is filled with notes on mad clever new ideas and promising start-ups and inventors, and he never goes anywhere without the most recent one. When one fills, he scans through it, copying the most important bits into the beginning pages of the next so as to always have a useful book entangled.

Stop Watch — Temporal Magic device (and sign of his Temporal Magic trait)

The Stop Watch looks like a rather bulky and feature-rich wrist chronometer. It can:

The cost for operating the Stop Watch is 1 psi with a normal Temporal Magic roll or a 3 psi at +40%. The roll is susceptible to boosting with Focus points

Home Computer — Mad Electronics device (Sentient? A sidekick!)

Glass's home computer is the main base from which he manipulates chips and fiber optics throughout the Internet. It looks like a very large High Definition futuristic iMac, but it runs an operating system of Glass's own devising. Its defining features are its massively parallel, dynamically configured specialized hardware processors and numerous active agents. Glass "programs" by creating highly specialized hardware implementations of various algorithms and then running myriads of active agents.


Past Lives

Isaac "Izzy" Glass (Speciality: Eye Glasses)

After a thousand years or so, Glass again regenerated, this time as Isaac Glass, specializing in optics and Mad Optic magic, with spectacles, telescopes, jewelers loupes, opera glasses, piz-nez and the multiple flip-down lens "ocular device" you saw in National Treasure.

Alistair "Al" Glass (Speciality: Looking Glasses)

After a few more centuries, Glass returned to the Looking Glass magic, with magic mirrors of many flavors, showing inner realities, far seeing, alternate time-line viewing, paired communications, teleportation and line-hopping portals.

Oran Glass (Speciality: Hourglasses)

In the waning years of the Roman Empire, Glass regenerated in Alexandria and specialized in temporal magic, mediated by hourglasses. He created hourglasses that could stop and slow time and the like. Eventually, he became known as "Oran Glass" or "Orannus Virtrius.

Glass (Speciality: Looking Glasses)

During the Roman Era, Glass shifted his specialty to mirrors.

"Sand" (Speciality: Sand)

Glass's original human manifestation specialized in Sand magic, dating back to the time when the Sahara receded and then spread across Northern Africa. He's still a bit sensitive about being blamed for the Sahara spreading. Okay, actually, he's touchy as all Hell.