"shopping carl" eicken

"shopping carl" eicken: Carl "Shopping Carl" Eicken is a strange old homeless man who wanders the City with his eponymous shopping cart full of discarded goods, old newspapers and aluminum cans. He's an older man, pushing sixty, but the grime and soot staining his lined skin and frazzled white beard make him look much older. Still, he has that demonic gleam in his eye of a man not quite ready to give up. In fact, Carl is nearly ready to retire. He's a Plutomancer, and a multi-millionaire.
Carl was heir to the Eicken Skin Care family fortune, a company founded in the mid-1800's that sold petroleum-based skin creams and balms to cultured women in New York. Carl took over the company when he was too young to handle the responsibility, and his greedy and reckless nature soon brought the company to the brink of bankruptcy after his newest product was found to contain cancer-causing agents. Using his business saavy, sheer force of will and exceptional luck, Carl managed to save the company -- though it would never regain its domination of the marketplace. Ashamed and broken by this pyrrhic victory, Carl left Eicekn's Skin Care and drifted out of society like a newspaper carried on the wind.
: Through unknown means, Carl stumbled into the Occult Underground and would often be found roaming the streets at night, questing for treasure in the back alley dumpsters of the City. Having mastered (some say developed) the ability to sniff out the value of garbage and cast-offs, he amassed quite a fortune in strange artifacts and unknowingly valuable antiques. At times he will barter his wares for services, asking an associate to buy or sell something at auction that Carl sniffed out. The whereabouts of Carl's stash is unknown, but rumor has it that whenever he acquires a substantial amount of money, he pays off an associate to buy some expensive jewelry and cache it in a safety deposit box somewhere in the City. There are those that say that Carl has between ten and twenty of these jewelry caches, totalling a net worth of over seven to fifteen million dollars.
Of course, there are also rumors that Carl fed the safety deposit box keys to a pet alligator he keeps in the sewers...but that can't be true.
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