Signor Niccolo Davelli

In previous writing about Davelli, the character is universally attributed to "an adaptation of H.G. Wells 'War of the Worlds." Oddly this is not the case, and in fact the actual source is mentioned in a letter from Walker to Dolores Cooke which is in Cooke's papers and has been noted by researchers. Walker was romantically involved with Cooke during the time he was writing Clarence, and after several tempestuous rounds of courtship, they were married in 1919, only to divorce in 1925. It was not his divorce, but Marsden's engagement to Dolores Cooke in 1930 that (along with alcoholism, drug addiction, and financial ruin) provoked Walker's best known suicide attempt.

Nearly the whole source for the character is an 1892 novel "The Germ Growers," which may have served as an inspiration to Wells also. It was penned by an Australian clergyman of Irish origin, named Robert Potter, and is described as "the first serious attempt at portraying the alien invasion of Earth, being published six years before Wells."

The novel concerns a group of Martains who have the ability to change shape, and are led by...if you haven't already guessed "Signor Niccolo Davelli." They are attempting to create new forms of plague in order to conquer the world, and this well night forgotten work is also a very early portrayal of germ warfare.

With this in mind, it is easy to see almost the entirety of the Davelli sheet. In fact Walker does a neat job of integrating the "shapeshifting" of "The Germ Growers," by use of the bipedal feeder creatures referred to in the Wells novel, and really presents a somewhat more plausible picture. The Wells work was major canon for the game, and it's possible that nobody other than Walker had read "The Germ Growers."

It is worth noting that where Walker excerpts Wells, he credits it. His writing is high strung, and has some of the same tone of hysteria as Bucher, but his characters have more than one mental dimension - both "Sturm" and "Dang" to borrow the earlier example.

Alas, Davelli is a near unplayable character. He has one goal - to unleash an attack that fundamentally must fail.

He is the holder of the proverbial "battleship." It is a piece of standard LARP doctrine that players should never be given a battleship in the presumption that they will not use it, because of course they will. Obviously Walker does not intend Davelli to use the War Machine. He is to become obsessed with Carmilla, and pursue her, and probably fall victim to the Venusian spy (we could use some idea how their mental abilities should work against each other, but get none - there are suggestions that such decisions were made in runtime, and were often acrimoniouis).

In practice, Davelli more often than not unleashed his War Machine, bringing the game to a stop, as frantic GMs struggled to find legitimate ways to combat it. The Elephant is never available, and it is clearly superior to both Sky Courser and Astronef. The regimen of deus ex machina required to oppose the War Machine is impressive.

There is some thought that Walker actually intended the War Machine to be a "spanner in the works" of the vast military plottings of King and Bucher. In that case, it succeeds too well, and threatens to overturn the game. The march of the War Machine and the destruction of the human race is a major element in Clarence but is seldom resolved with grace and alacrity.

Signor Niccolo Davelli

Warm. It is too warm. A nightmare of heat. You live in a fever, seeing images which excite your vast cold mind.

You were born to the cold of a dying world. Not far wrong is the Italian Astronomer who studied the world of your birth. Great canals conduct the ice of the dead seas across the surface. Deserts there, but not the hot deserts of earth. Instead they are cold and arid steppes, where rest the remains of the crumbled civilizations that followed the dying waters.

Your natural form is, to the people of this vital world, terrible to behold. Tentacles, mouth, and simple and elegant internal organs. Mr. H. G. Wells described well how you must appear to the peoples of this primitive world:

" They were huge round bodies--or, rather, heads--about four feet in diameter, each body having in front of it a face. This face had no nostrils--indeed, the Martians do not seem to have had any sense of smell, but it had a pair of very large dark-coloured eyes, and just beneath this a kind of fleshy beak. In the back of this head or body--I scarcely know how to speak of it--was the single tight tympanic surface, since known to be anatomically an ear, though it must have been almost useless in our dense air. In a group round the mouth were sixteen slender, almost whiplike tentacles, arranged in two bunches of eight each. These bunches have since been named rather aptly, by that distinguished anatomist, Professor Howes, the HANDS. Even as I saw these Martians for the first time they seemed to be endeavouring to raise themselves on these hands, but of course, with the increased weight of terrestrial conditions, this was impossible. There is reason to suppose that on Mars they may have progressed upon them with some facility.

The internal anatomy, I may remark here, as dissection has since shown, was almost equally simple. The greater part of the structure was the brain, sending enormous nerves to the eyes, ear, and tactile tentacles. Besides this were the bulky lungs, into which the mouth opened, and the heart and its vessels. The pulmonary distress caused by the denser atmosphere and greater gravitational attraction was only too evident in the convulsive movements of the outer skin.

And this was the sum of the Martian organs. Strange as it may seem to a human being, all the complex apparatus of digestion, which makes up the bulk of our bodies, did not exist in the Martians. They were heads--merely heads. Entrails they had none. They did not eat, much less digest. Instead, they took the fresh, living blood of other creatures, and INJECTED it into their own veins. I have myself seen this being done, as I shall mention in its place. But, squeamish as I may seem, I cannot bring myself to describe what I could not endure even to continue watching. Let it suffice to say, blood obtained from a still living animal, in most cases from a human being, was run directly by means of a little pipette into the recipient canal. . . .
The bare idea of this is no doubt horribly repulsive to us, but at the same time I think that we should remember how repulsive our carnivorous habits would seem to an intelligent rabbit.

The physiological advantages of the practice of injection are undeniable, if one thinks of the tremendous waste of human time and energy occasioned by eating and the digestive process. Our bodies are half made up of glands and tubes and organs, occupied in turning heterogeneous food into blood. The digestive processes and their reaction upon the nervous system sap our strength and colour our minds. Men go happy or miserable as they have healthy or unhealthy livers, or sound gastric glands. But the Martians were lifted above all these organic fluctuations of mood and emotion.

Their undeniable preference for men as their source of nourishment is partly explained by the nature of the remains of the victims they had brought with them as provisions from Mars. These creatures, to judge from the shrivelled remains that have fallen into human hands, were bipeds with flimsy, silicious skeletons (almost like those of the silicious sponges) and feeble musculature, standing about six feet high and having round, erect heads, and large eyes in flinty sockets. Two or three of these seem to have been brought in each cylinder, and all were killed before earth was reached. It was just as well for them, for the mere attempt to stand upright upon our planet would have broken every bone in their bodies.

And while I am engaged in this description, I may add in this place certain further details which, although they were not all evident to us at the time, will enable the reader who is unacquainted with them to form a clearer picture of these offensive creatures.

In three other points their physiology differed strangely from ours. Their organisms did not sleep, any more than the heart of man sleeps. Since they had no extensive muscular mechanism to recuperate, that periodical extinction was unknown to them. They had little or no sense of fatigue, it would seem. On earth they could never have moved without effort, yet even to the last they kept in action. In twenty- four hours they did twenty-four hours of work, as even on earth is perhaps the case with the ants.

In the next place, wonderful as it seems in a sexual world, the Martians were absolutely without sex, and therefore without any of the tumultuous emotions that arise from that difference among men. A young Martian, there can now be no dispute, was really born upon earth during the war, and it was found attached to its parent, partially BUDDED off, just as young lilybulbs bud off, or like the young animals in the fresh-water polyp.

In man, in all the higher terrestrial animals, such a method of increase has disappeared; but even on this earth it was certainly the primitive method. Among the lower animals, up even to those first cousins of the vertebrated animals, the Tunicates, the two processes occur side by side, but finally the sexual method superseded its competitor altogether. On Mars, however, just the reverse has apparently been the case."

Intelligent rabbits. Yes!
Such they are.

It was a miscalculation to send the first projectiles perhaps. But if they did not go, and report, how were you to learn of the weaknesses of Earth. And it's strengths. Germs. Yes, long dispersed on your world, only the most ancient of records concerned such things.

For of course reports were sent. That no projectiles rose from Earth is of no consequence. Even now the people of Earth send such signals daily across the English Channel for a fee, and who among them has not read of the experiments of Marconi aboard the Philadelphia - and the signals sent from St. John's to the British Isles. Far greater distances are spanned by your clever machinery. And the impulse of pure thought is transmitted.

Thought!

It was the work of months to adapt the form of the docile biped of Mars to a form physically identical to the biped herd animal of earth. To situate your brain in such a body was of course distasteful, the moreso because there can be no practical reversal - your own body is by now drained and given to fertilizer (for on Mars nothing may be wasted). But it is not possible for you to think emotionally, and so your debasement and death, serving as it does the higher cause is to you as reasonable as it is to an Englishman to join the Navy.

You are driven by neither pride, nor arrogance, nor passion. Your icy intellect sees only food and survival for your dying race. Indeed there are those who question why the race should survive, having outlived joy and artistry. But there is an imperative, a base thing of biology though it be, and cold though the faculties that analyze it be.

Earth shall fall first. Then soft Venus.

But disturbance courses through your troubled orb.

In order to manipulate the body in which you travel, ganglions of the biped were attached to your own nerves. Long it took you to learn to manipulate it's clumsy limbs and feeble hands.

And could it not be that in doing so, some contamination was received. That encased in the spongy bone of its brain-case, your own magnificent globe is affected? That something of its bestial passions, fears, hatreds and emotions has somehow affected you.

It must be the heat! The heat of earth is great, living world! It has driven you to fever in which the brain, unbalanced, generates fantasy.

You are touched by a hesitation you can think of only as...name it not. FEAR!

You are touched by somewhat of pity for these bipeds you must destroy. Too you hold them in contempt. You see how they act towards each other. The pale ones holding in contempt the dark, and calling them epithets that provoke ill emotion. HAH! They are more equal than they know for their blood nourishes equally. That they have contempt for each other when such as you walk among them who are to them as they are to the deer of the forest or the rabbits of the field. Yet.

Yet... finally you are touched by some strange longing that you cannot describe. DARE not describe, for the one known as Carmilla.

You have watched and learned much of her. She is not a mere biped herd rabbit like the others. She preys upon them drinking pure blood, even as you do. And her mind! You can feel great power there, as if she could send thoughts as you do.

You have reported well on this world, and must soon commence your final work. But somehow you yearn for a union with her, a union such as your kind has never known. And deep within your vast and logical mind, you are troubled by such unnaturalness.

You must find the spy. The soft creatures of Venus - more like unto Earthmen than your own race, though winged - have sent a vessel here. Your astronomers observed it though the men of Earth would not have seen sign of it. One of them walks among these folk, and may bring warnings and tidings, even secrets!

And when chaos comes, you must unleash your War Machine upon them and bring about the end of their days. No mere rays of death or clouds of ink do you bring. But germs! A return gift. From deep within the arctic ices were pulled cadavers a thousand centuries dead. And they bear the germs of your world. To them you have for millennia been immune. But even so, ere they perished of your race's vast science, they were mightier than any mere disease of bipeds on this world. They shall lay waste!!!

But not all shall die, and you shall need to make war upon them in order to throw them into complete chaos. Then you shall send your signal, and the new rain of projectiles will fall!

If only you were not troubled by these feverish longings. Unnatural sentiment, begone!