Quick facts
Race: Unknown (a giant brain in a vat) · Affiliation: What Has Science Done Institute · Home: the research station beneath Coghaven’s forge · Status: Dead (C2 Session 78)
Dr. Wheelo was the scientist at the bottom of Coghaven and a member of the What Has Science Done Institute, alongside Dr. Gero and Dr. Briefs. He was a giant brain floating in a vat who ran the experiments that drained living prisoners to power the city’s machines. Masha burned him to ash in his own tank.
History
The party first came across his name in the research station below the forge. Its notes detailed experiments on many subjects, including research on keeping a brain alive after the body dies and implanting it into a new biological body, and one name kept appearing: Dr. Wheelo. A vat labeled “expired” held a shriveled gnome: Goric, Wilbur’s father.
Wheelo’s cowering assistant, Dr. Kochin, tried to bluff the party with a dead man’s switch. Past him, the party freed Masha from one of the vats, then met Wheelo himself. He welcomed them and noted that they had delivered another new power source, boasting that the one he already had, Cabba, had vastly outperformed expectations. Through an open door the party saw seven vats, one holding Cabba.
When the party reached for a pressure valve, Wheelo’s tank rose from the floor on mechanical legs. He blasted the room with a cone of psychic force and tried to compel the party, while his mechanical copy of Cabba, the CabbAutomaton, used Cabba’s own moves to knock Ellery down and nearly kill her. Cabba broke free of his vat and struck the copy just in time. Wilbur loaded salvaged construct parts into the pistol Bulma had given him and slowed Wheelo, which blunted his compulsion. Masha, finally with something to aim twenty years of rage at, told the brain to dodge this and burned it to ash inside its boiling tank. The CabbAutomaton froze mid-punch and toppled.
Afterward, the lab’s security screens showed every droid in Coghaven powered down mid-task. Wheelo had taken personal control of the entire city and stretched himself too thin.
Relationships
- Dr. Kochin: his assistant, a gnome scientist in a lab coat who begged for clemency as “a man of science.” He told the party the Velvet Truffle Company was a trade partner that supplied power sources while Coghaven developed ways to harvest living beings. The party sealed him in Cabba’s old pod.
- Cabba: his prize power source, and the model for the CabbAutomaton.
- Goric: Wilbur’s father, who died in one of his vats.
- Dr. Gero and Dr. Briefs: fellow members of the What Has Science Done Institute.