Know Your Kindred – Gerard Rafin

Name:  Gerard Rafin, aka Uncle Smelly
Clan: Nosferatu
Generation: 9th
Embrace: 1899

The Nosferatu called Uncle Smelly is something of a Johnny Appleseed among the Kindred. Using New York as his base of operations, he wanders from city to city and coast to coast, to find the Nosferatu of Canada and America and link them into the SchreckNET.

A French tinkerer who was on the verge of starving among the thronging immigrants on the Lower East Side at the turn of the century, Rafin was instead Embraced and thoroughly Americanized by the Nosferatu of New York.

Rafin grew obsessed with two things: technology and the legends of the Nictuku. It was he who came up with the notion of turning New York into a fortress against the other childer of the Antediluvian, he who kick-started the SchreckNET itself and he who came up with the Uncle Smelly persona as a way to spread the gospel. Now he hits the road for eight months out of the year with a sack full of boards and wires, returning to home base with a batch of new stories he didn’t trust to go out online with and, inevitably, news of new links for the SchreckNET.

Uncle Smelly himself is something of a legend among the Camarilla vampires of North America. Everyone knows who he is and nobody bothers him for two simple reasons: One, he’s reputed far and wide to be harmless; two, he’s kicked the asses of the last half-dozen sheriffs who’ve tried to mess with him. That combination usually ensures Uncle Smelly entrance into any city he pleases, where he can tell stories and dirty jokes, bend the ear of the local prince a bit and coincidentally maintain the system that houses the local SchreckNET node.

Uncle Smelly has ears that are large enough to cast distinct shadows, mismatched with an oddly shrunken head and no chin to speak of. He does have a straggly goatee and a few odd wisps of hair on his head, but the warts outnumber the hairs by about three to one. Rafin likes to affect a “dirty old man” pose, complete with a spattered trench coat and a battered fedora. He even keeps some candy in his pockets for little girls, just to keep up appearances.

Source:  A World of Darkness (2nd Ed.), pg 12-13