In Nomine statistics (basic)
Corporeal Forces: 1
Strength: 3
Agility: 2
Ethereal Forces: 1
Intelligence: 3
Precision: 2
Celestial Forces: 4
Will: 6
Perception: 10
Attunements: (eventually) Purity of Purpose, Divine Mediation
Relic: (eventually) Pocket Bible
Skills: Teaching and Theology are her main skills -- she's a nun that works
with kids in her area, including teaching Sunday School. From childhood,
she still remembers a bit about Lockpicking; she actually keeps Fast-Talk
and Move Silently at decent levels. She also has the usual human skills:
driving, knowledge of her area, how to get along in rougher neighborhoods.
GURPS statistics (Not a straight conversion from the above. The system,
not unsurprisingly for such an odd human, broke a bit.)
ST 9
DX 8
IQ 12
HT 9
Advantages: Natural Soldier package (with Celestial Power Investiture +1
instead of Corporeal); (Attunements may come later) Purity of Purpose;
Divine Mediation; Strong Will +3; Alertness +6; Clerical Investment.
Disadvantages: Reduced Hit Points -1; Imaginative.
Quirks: wants to find elder brother Roger; energetic about expressing her
opinion; smoker (about once a month, but fairly expensive cigars).
Skills: See above for the same general notes.
Equipment: (eventually) Pocket Bible(relic); standard accoutrements of a
middle-aged nun in a major city.
It happened in the sixth grade. Imogene Herdman went Mary-crazy.
The Christmas pageant was what started it, of course. She got a
picture of Mary and started carrying it around, and after that nobody could
say anything bad about the Holy Family around her. Horace Reiner said that
Joseph seemed pretty out of it most of the time, and Imogene thought he was
saying Joseph was stupid or high or something and gave him a shiner for it.
His mom was so mad that she actually went up to Sproul Hill to see the
Herdmans about it, and came back with the same eye blacked and her purse
missing. Nobody thought it was really fair, either, because anytime
someone said something like that and Imogene had given them what-for, she
always went down to the church and asked the same questions.
Father Morrison was good about answering them, too. Imogene could ask
the kind of questions that made you think very carefully about the answer,
like what God used His bow for before He made it a rainbow -- did He shoot
things with it? But Father Morrison always had an answer that seemed to
satisfy her. He told her Bible stories, the kind he thought a Herdman
would like, which might have been a mistake, because he told her about the
burning of Sodom and Gomorrah just before the annual pot-luck dinner, and
Imogene had asked that Sunday in front of all the middle-school kids how
anyone was sure that Lot's wife wasn't in the salt shakers.
That one bothered us, a lot. How did you know, really? So we stopped
eating salty foods -- even Eugene, the fat kid -- like potato chips and
french fries. The Tasti-Lunch Diner was hit so hard that whole week that
they asked a man from the salt company to come out and give a talk, and he
explained about where they got salt from (they dig it up from a mine, would
you believe it) in Texas, and nowhere near Sodom, which was over in the
Middle East. He took the kids down to the Tasti-Lunch Diner and ordered
fries for everyone, and Imogene made sure to watch him eat some before she
stole pocketfuls herself to take home for dinner. But the adults said that
he had paid for the fries already, and it was for anybody that wanted
some. Besides, they said, they hadn't ever seen their kids eating as
healthy as they had that week, so everyone (except maybe the Tasti-Lunch
people) was happy with it in the end.
Eventually some of the kids starting hanging out at church after
school in the back pews to hear Imogene (sometimes with her siblings
tagging along) ask strange questions of Father Morrison. (It was always
Father Morrison, and I learned a long time later that he figured out when
Imogene would be coming in the afternoons and made sure he was putting
music in the choir's places, and not in the confessional or something, so
he could be seen.) It was like catechism, but a lot more interesting.
Alice Wendleken, who was in the same grade with me and Imogene, was one of
those that stayed and watched, because (she said) she liked to hear Father
Morrison defeating the infidel. She was like us, though -- waiting for
Father Morrison to get around to Hell.
He had avoided the subject for a long time, talking about Heaven(where
you went if you were good), and Purgatory(where you went if you were bad
but sorry for it), and staying off of Hell for a while. But he got around
to it one day, and we all watched. And he didn't beat around the bush or
anything once he got started. He explained about eternal torment, and how
you got there (you were bad, and you weren't at all sorry for it), but good
Catholics didn't have to worry about it. We all held our breath and looked
at Imogene.
Imogene rubbed her ankle for a second, and turned to look at her
brothers and sister. "Figures," said Alice. "She'd never think she'd be
the one going. She was never sorry for anything she did." I was sorry,
though. You couldn't do something bad, knowing it was bad, and then claim
you were sorry later, because you wouldn't truly be. But right that
moment, I was truly sorry that it would be un-Christian to slap Alice
Wendleken.
Because if you'd ever seen Imogene with her shoes off, you'd know that
she'd burned her ankle when the Herdmans lit Leroy's (stolen) chemistry set
on fire and burned down an old building. And she was looking at Gladys,
the youngest, and I saw her face. To me, she looked afraid. Not for
herself -- Imogene Herdman would die before she showed fear for herself --
but for Gladys and the rest of them. I think I was right, too, because she
turned back to Father Morrison, and with a stare that you could use to ring
the bells and a voice that could have been them, asked, "Where do you sign
up to be a Catholic?"
And that was pretty much the turning point. Alice fainted dead away,
and I don't think she was ever quite the same again. She even helped the
Herdmans learn their catechism, though I think she partially wanted to show
off too. The Herdmans weren't the best of students -- they still didn't go
to school unless they were bored -- but they learned it eventually, and
Gladys and Ollie went through Confirmation and everything.
Except for Roger, the Herdmans all eventually graduated high school --
sort of. The high school teachers weren't any happier about having two
Herdmans in the same class as the elementary school teachers had been.
Some of them might have been able to stomach it, but Imogene and Gladys at
least started pulling passing grades, and the boys were terrors enough that
they moved on. Roger probably would have graduated if he had stayed, but
he had never caught on to church, and he hopped a railroad car at 16 and
left town. Some people said Imogene couldn't threaten him hard enough
because he was bigger than she was, which I think was maybe true. Anyway,
he took the cat, which relieved a lot of people.
The boys that stayed got jobs doing stuff around town, and Gladys left
for the city and got married. Imogene had other plans, though. She never
really stopped asking questions, and finally Father Morrison decided the
only thing to do for it was to send her off to become an expert. The next
time I saw Imogene, I had been invited to a dinner with her at a place near
her convent because I was moving to the same city.
I knew her instantly. There she was, sitting at a table, comfortable
as ever, wearing her habit and smoking a really expensive cigar. If I had
ever thought I'd see a nun smoking a cigar and public and not at all
ashamed about it, it... well, no, it probably wouldn't have been Sister
Imogene Mary Herdman, because I never would have pictured her in a convent
in the first place. But there was still something right about it.
Something that was very much Imogene and nobody else.
She was looking at a list of names, which I guessed were the kids she
worked with. I saw "Laurence" and "Christopher" circled as she put the
list in her pocket and greeted me. I didn't know who they were, or why she
was interested in them -- but I grinned as I hugged Imogene and thought:
whoever they were, boy were they in for it.
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