Name: Conrad Steinmetz.

Nickname: (For those who happen to be in the know) Grendel.

Age: Just over a hundred years old.

Abnormality: Wendigo

Weakness: He hasn't told anyone. He appears to be susceptible to conventional weapons although he recovers from injury with the expected uncanny speed of a supernatural being (at the cost of his human masque being shredded and torn, revealing what's underneath) and no-one's yet done anything sufficiently supernatural to him to reveal whether or not a cannibal spirit of winter can be (further) cursed.

Affiliation: Independent, well except for his having kept up his membership of the I.W.W. and the C.P.U.S.A.

Theme song: The International

Physical Description: A large, broad-shouldered working man of dark-haired German descent by way of the Pennsylvania Deutch, Conrad is square-featured and somewhat ham-handed after the fashion you'd expect of a mine or steel worker and usually dressed in slacks, braces and white shirts with a jacket and a hat because (it's easier than trying to keep changing your wardrobe every few years to keep up with the kids). He still has something of an accent even after all these years but by this point it's been softened by his long tenure in the south, unlike his eyes which are as starkly ice-blue as a glacier in winter and every bit as endlessly hungry as winter itself. Still, at least he usually smells of sandalwood and vanilla, which beats all hell out of the alternatives, right?

Distinguishing Features: None that are especially obvious under most circumstances, although his stocky build and Germanic accent are distinctive in their own right. When wounded, hungry or enraged however his skin has a tendency to slough off and reveal rubbery black flesh and exposed bone below it, which y'know, sticks in the memory some.

Personality Description: He's calmed down a lot over the years and has left behind a lot of the firebrand behaviour of his youth while looking for ways to handle his hungers. He's lost more or less any natural empathy he once had, but his ideological sense of liberty, equality and fraternity has served in its place for decades now.

Likes & Dislikes: Conrad is extremely unfond of untrammelled capitalism, mainly because he's a communist who grew up during the early days of the labour movement. He's also violently opposed to sexism, racism and nationalism, because he's of the opinion - not without personal experience to back it up - that they're foistered on the poor to divide them by people with fancy houses. He likes people who work for a living, small businesses, all-you-can-eat buffets and freaky Goth girls (not that he's had much to do with them, but they're easy to keep on-staff and they don't ask too many questions).

Other Information: Conrad's solution to his regular need to consume human flesh has been to take up a job in the death industry, operating a crematorium with the public contract to dispose of unclaimed and pauper bodies (located at the Majestic Mortuary Services location on St Andrew Street). This provides him with a steady supply of meat which he uses to stave off his hunger (it would not be wise for most people to ask to try his Cajun long pork jerky).

History: Conrad's parents are long dead but his father was a Pennsylvania Deutch factory worker around Pittsburgh at the turn of the century and the family was heavily persecuted by the wave of anti-German hatred that swept the country in the wake of the sinking of the Lusitania during the Great War. This ill-will led Conrad to run to New York and lie about his age in order to join the 77th Infantry Division under Major Whittlesey. Posted to the Argonne in France, it was during the October 18th offensive that he first tasted human flesh as one of the hundred and ninety four survivors of the Lost Battalion and it was in those shell-torn woods that he first felt the touch of the Wendigo in his soul. Returning to America after the Great War greatly disillusioned by the whole affair - and quite unable to face his parents - he became an active part of the nascent labour movement in the mines of West Virginia and, as part of the unionising effort fought in the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921, first with a rifle and then - as the mine owners and state authorities turned to bombing runs with high explosive and poison gas - unleashing his hunger and stalking the night, completing his transformation into a true monster before grimly relenting when federal forces arrived - being, like most of the miners unwilling to fight men in the same uniform many of them wore mere years before. Fleeing the state ahead of the government reprisals, Conrad went to New York where he once more threw himself into the rising labour movement, sadly at a time when it was falling further and further under the dominance of the rising tide of criminality spawned by the Volstead Act. During this period he sustained himself as something of a problem-solver for various mobs, earning himself the name 'Grendel' by a few of the more mythologically-minded sorts for his trademark tactic of turning up in someones home at night and leaving little but bloodstains in his wake. Fortunately, before long the eager embrace of prohibition by the KKK and the uptake of African American rights by the C.P.U.S.A. saw him venturing South where he spent a great deal of the forties hunting and eating people who called for lynchings, organised cross-burnings or who disappeared civil rights workers. This carried on until the early 70's when the combination of improving race relations and better policing made it necessary for him to find alternate employment - which is when he invested some of his fairly significant professional savings in starting his crematorium, settling in for a nice, long stretch of trying out different hobbies and quietly going out of his goddamn' mind with boredom.

Alternative Theme Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oskbV6RDoW4&list=PLs7s7YCW40wJAIbra0RcDEGL0HhKc5no2&index=9