Grimmz
Long before the lights of Hauntmare Expo ever flickered to life, something else awakened in the darkness.
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In a forgotten laboratory filled with humming coils, rusted instruments, and the scent of burning ozone, a towering figure lay motionless on a steel slab. Leather straps bound its wrists and ankles. Wires snaked across green skin mottled with strange patches of blue and pink, as if pieces of different beings had been stitched into one hulking form. Above the table stood the reclusive and unhinged genius known only as Dr. Frantic, a man obsessed with defying the boundary between life and death.
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When the storm came, he was ready.
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Massive bolts of lightning were drawn from the heavens, channeled through towering rods and driven straight into the body on the table. The lab shook. Glass shattered. Machines screamed. And then the corpse inhaled.
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Its eyes burst open with a feral, confused awareness.
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The creature tore free of its restraints, scattering metal and sparks across the floor. The doctor tried to speak, to calm his creation, to claim it as his triumph… but whatever words were spoken that night were lost to the thunder. By the time the storm cleared, the laboratory was in ruins and the giant gremlin was gone.
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He came to be known as Grimmz.
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Whispers follow him wherever he wanders. Some say he was not built from nothing, but from what remained of two others: a blue gremlin brother and a pink gremlin sister who vanished under mysterious circumstances. The mismatched patches of his flesh fuel the rumor that parts of them live on within him, though no proof has ever surfaced. Grimmz himself does not know the truth.
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In fact, Grimmz remembers almost nothing at all.
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He does not know who he was before the lightning struck, nor why fragments of unfamiliar emotion surge through him at the sight of certain colors, sounds, or faces in the crowd. All he carries are flashes of half-memories and an aching sense that pieces of his past are missing.
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Drawn by an instinct he cannot explain, Grimmz eventually found his way to Hauntmare Expo.
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Now the 7½-foot gremlin roams the aisles each year like a living legend, looming above the fog and neon lights, scanning every face as if searching for someone he once knew. Some attendees swear he is guarding the event. Others believe he is hunting for clues left behind by the mad doctor who gave him life. A few claim that if you look into his eyes long enough, you can see a storm still raging behind them.
Whether guardian, wanderer, or tragic relic of forbidden science, Grimmz endures.
He walks Hauntmare not to frighten, but to remember.