#daniel elsen

Honestly same, and so does he!

(these posts will make this one make more sense so if you haven’t already seen them, read them first!)

He’s like the normal elsens’ big goopy dad, and basically just stands around in the Room all day and makes tiny elsens for the zone guardians to populate their lands with.  He seems content to remain in this state, and only rarely makes requests to visit other places. Elsen doesn’t consciously generate the smaller elsen, his body just does that.  It’s his purpose to make them, and he’s never really tried not making them.  No one is sure if the process is painful or not, since Elsen himself doesn’t have much reference to go off of for being in any other state.  Having the legless lower portion of his body constantly melting, solidifying into human body parts, falling off, and reforming endlessly certainly looks unpleasant.

Being a result of strange circumstances, Elsen doesn’t need to eat to fulfill his purpose (that doesn’t stop the people in the Room from occasionally bringing him a snack, though).  It’s unknown exactly how powerful he is compared to the zone guardians, but his size alone makes him a force to be reckoned with.  The zone guardians themselves try and be polite to him; Elsen rarely tries to influence anything, but nobody wants to be on the bad side of the man keeping the zones populated.

Why did they even make him if he’s potentially dangerous?  To put it simply: they needed to save on resources.  Cloning machines allow for more controlled environments with less mistakes, but the amount of space needed for enough machines to maintain a stable population would be ridiculous, and that’s not even getting into the amounts of materials needed to keep all those clones alive and nourished throughout the whole process.  Every error would be much, much more costly. They had to make Elsen big and powerful so he’d be able to generate human lives indefinitely with no fuel.  The scientists in the Room even had to ask for help from Hugo’s and the Queen’s powers in order to bend the laws of nature so it could work.  Elsen takes up a lot of space, but he still takes up less than enough machines to replace him would take up.  His powers rival those of the guardians because he needs that kind of energy to carry out his purpose.

Fortunately for everyone, Elsen tends to be a very calm and predictable man who rarely gets upset.

However, Elsen’s creation process isn’t perfect.  A noteworthy percentage of the people he creates are disposed of by the Room’s staff for being “defective”.  Some for being shambling masses of limbs and organs, others for being unable to learn how to read.  Newly-created people are quickly carried away from Elsen and put through a number of examinations and simple tests to determine if they’re “fit” for the zones. Of course, some odd and quirky ones pass through, but the system is still quite picky.  Excuses like “efficiency” and “keeping the public calm” are used to excuse the secret eugenicist goings-on in the laboratories of the Room’s underlevels.  It’s wasteful, but destroying Elsen’s mistakes uses less resources than making “perfect” people almost every time with lots of machines would, so they stick with it.

Of course... they don’t tell Elsen they do that stuff, either.

He doesn’t show it in his face (because he isn’t very expressive), but Elsen cares a lot about his creations.  They’re a lot like children to him, and he’s a lot more accepting of their flaws than the Room’s staff.  Besides it being his purpose, he lets his creations be taken away before they even have a chance to see his face because he wants them to live out rich and fulfilling lives in the zones. Everyone who knows of him and of the Room’s highly selective sorting methods worries that somehow Elsen might know about it.  He’s almost never left his spot in “chapter 3”, but with the full extents of his abilities being unknown, no one knows if he can somehow sense that they’re up to no good and are mistreating his creations; that he’d call them out on it and retaliate if provoked.

Thus, the Room’s staff and the zone guardians try to be polite to Elsen, and generally avoid lying to his face (instead going for omitting details and changing conversation topics).  Occasionally, Elsen will ask to take a sort of “vacation” from his duties and visit one of the zones to see how the people are faring, and he gets talked down from it every time.  None of the zone guardians want him wandering around unchecked, and none of them want him to do anything rash if the thinks his creations are doing poorly under the guardians’ care.  They have to talk him down, since he’s so huge that he could just crawl away if he wanted to and no one would be able to stop him.

There are several other reasons people don’t want him leaving the Room:

It’s easier to keep track of and capture the people he makes when he’s remaining in one place.

He’s simply too large to safely move through most civilized areas-- he'd nearly take up the width of a whole street.

They don’t want his mystery goo getting into liquid plastic and meat supplies, or being licked up by cattle and ghouls.  The side effects of such a situation are largely unstudied, and no one wants to risk anything weird happening as a result.

Someone as conspicuous as Elsen wandering around could bring a lot of unwanted questions from civilians.

If Elsen were wandering the zones unmonitored, he’d leave freshly-made people on the ground wherever he went, in addition to long trail of slime.  Having an unknown number of untested and potentially malformed people scattered through a zone would be a disaster for the Room to deal with, so they try to avoid the situation altogether by keeping Elsen cooped up. Not all the goop that Elsen generates turns into people, with plenty of it getting on the floor where he stands and having to be cleaned up (to get an idea of what the people-goo feels like, just stick your fingers into a big ol’ pot of warm garlic-parmesan cheese sauce).  When elsen crawls around using his hands, his body generates another more-transparent slime so he can slide over the ground more easily and not be damaged by friction.